“Where there is prey to be hunted, nature would make sure that there is a hunter to cull the numbers.” - Old folk saying.

Before the assassination attempt took place, Erycea heard a whisper from her mother – something she could do at a distance through the wind with her magic – to watch out for a certain dwarf a bit to their right. As such, Erycea was keeping an eye on that particular dwarf when the mayhem broke out. She also noticed the dwarf turning to run when her mother took the bolt intended for the Crown Prince.

Erycea was torn for a brief moment, her instincts wanting to go to her fallen mother’s side, while her more rational side practically yelled at her to chase after the escaping assassin. She made her decision when her father went to her mother, knowing that staying around wouldn’t be of any help – she didn’t exactly have medical skills to begin with – and instead chose to do something that could be of use.

The assassin’s escape had gone mostly unnoticed by the groups led by Karenina and Cassie as they were kept busy subduing most of the assassins, and Erycea knew she was the fastest out of the people around. She took off with a bounding leap to chase after the assassin, whistling loudly with her fingers in the hopes that Hannah – who was flying high in the sky above – would hear the signal that she was giving chase.

A return cry from above signaled to Erycea that Hannah would help her keep track of anyone moving suspiciously. Hannah and the rest of the aerial scouts had been on watch everytime the Crown Prince was out and about, as they kept watch from high above. Even at that moment, several of Hannah’s colleagues directed mercenaries in other parts of the city to encircle and catch the assassins attempting to escape.

Erycea saw the crowded street ahead of her with not a few panicking citizens who were running to and fro, most attempting to get away from the fighting. She immediately made the decision to take a different road instead of trying to force her way through the street. As she kept her weapons back in her storage, she leapt up towards the wall of a wooden building and climbed it swiftly, her claws digging into the wood with ease, and leapt onto the rooftop.

From there she was in her element.

Erycea was no stranger to the rooftops of Zephirous. Back when she was still a child, her mother had often taken her for a jog on those very same rooftops, as part of her training and partly for fun. She had always admired how her mother moved swiftly over the rooftops with ease, and had greatly enjoyed those runs together with her.

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Despite a decade of development since the last time she had been in town, a sense of familiarity still returned to her as she saw the nostalgic landscape from the rooftop. Unlike her childhood days, however, she no longer had to run first to be able to leap the distance from one rooftop to another, as she had grown a lot since then.

Erycea dropped to all fours in a seamless move as she ran on the rooftops of Zephirous, leaping from one building’s roof to another’s with ease, at times latching onto the walls of the next building as she climbed up to its roof in short order. It did not take her long to notice the escaping assassin once more, but she refrained from striking as the dwarf kept himself to busy and crowded areas of the street.

Hannah kept watch from the skies, and after a few minutes of chase, signaled to Erycea that the coast looked clear, that there were no hidden ambushers as far as she could tell. Emboldened by the news, Erycea closed the distance between her and her target, while keeping far enough away to not be easily noticeable.

To be fair, she would have been easy to spot if anyone just looked up, as her slender form running on all fours on the rooftops was unmistakable. The thing about most people was that they tend to forget about looking upwards unless trained to do so, however. Her target was also more concerned with keeping up a charade as a “panicking citizen” and trying to get to his destination rather than keeping watch around him, so that helped too.

Finally, her target took a turn into an alley where there were no other people inside. Erycea immediately picked up her pace and caught up with her target in short order. She was only separated from her target by a short distance and the height of the four-story building she was on. Naturally, she leapt off the building without any hesitation, descending on her target like a bird of prey swooping down.

Her target looked up as her shadow – she was silhouetted by the afternoon sun behind her back – crossed his path and had a surprised look on his face. Erycea was in no mood to give him even a chance to resist, however, and a mental command extracted the orb of glass she trained with since childhood from her storage.

That orb of glass dispersed into thousands of razor-sharp shards of glass the next moment, almost like a glimmering curtain around Erycea’s form, and another thought coupled with a push of magic sent them shooting down at the runaway assassin. Many of the shards bounced off the cloth worn by the assassin, but hundreds still found their way onto his – or her, Erycea couldn’t really tell with dwarves – face and embedded themselves all over.

Even as her target recoiled from the searing pain of having so many shards of glass embedded in their face, Erycea landed in the alley, her legs flexing and bending to disperse the impact without injuring herself. She used her left hand to help support herself to avoid a fall from the momentum of the fall, while her other hand brought one of her weapons out of her storage.

Given how disoriented her target was, Erycea could have very easily kill the dwarf with a single swing of her truncheon, but she knew her parents would likely prefer to have them captured alive for later interrogation. As such, Erycea did not swing her weapon. Instead, she delivered a textbook-perfect uppercut at the dwarf’s bearded chin, the protrusions on her weapon’s handguard acting as a brass knuckle, smashing hard into the dwarf’s face with enough force in the blow to tilt his face upwards.

The dwarf dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes from he blow, completely knocked out cold.