Siren pushed the boy Tristan had been towing aside. He started to give chase, but Siren was too slow. Naively, he had constructed his suit of armor, expecting a fight. Tristan's fleeing had not been expected. With three hundred pounds of material weighing him down, there was no way he could give chase.
Cohesion was a great force. The stone he made with it absorbed impacts like rubber while being only half the weight. Twice the armor made his total mass exceed a thousand pounds while only marching around with seven hundred weighing him down. It failed in the art of pursuit.
Siren looked up at the sky where he could make out a person standing on the air. He lacked the correct kern to feel exactly what was going on. Regardless, essence weighed down upon him. It was like a branding iron and the man who held it viewed them all as cattle.
For a moment Siren considered running. He knew he could not win, but he had also sworn to protect his homeland with his dying breath. Pushing the cowardice aside he started to put together a plan. He needed to regroup with his warriors, he needed to find Blacklake, poison might work, and he needed…
All those people had been at the party. All those people were burning alive. He stood watching the steel fall for a moment, burning the fiery death into his memory. No one was alive, it was far too hot for that, and their blood was on Tristan’s hands.
The city was full of the elderly and parents who wanted to keep their children away from the drunken masses outside the walls. If he couldn’t fight, then he would evacuate. If that was even possible. With one last glance back at the floating man Siren started moving. Eventually, the man would start throwing heavenly fire, he wanted to be long gone by then.
Most people with children would be in the residential district. The plentiful food source from the lake allowed the residents to take some of the income needed for food and put it towards housing. This was extra apparent when a family had a child old enough to fish, while their parents worked. The homes were built of wood, with shutters, and a hinged door.
Hinged doors that Siren tore off the homes. He did not have time to congenially pick locks or knock and hope people answered. Four houses and four doors later, Siren found someone, a young woman in a rocking chair nursing a baby. She screamed when he tore the door off but became confused when she recognized who did it.
“Evacuate now, the warriors are dead, follow me if you want to live,” Siren moved on to the next house before the woman could respond.
A few moments later she caught up, the baby in a sling and a toddler in her arms, “What’s going on, I need to get my husband he’s at the celebration.”
Siren grimaced, “He’s dead then, everybody who was there was killed.”
The woman followed mutely, glancing back towards the city wall. Three more women with children joined him. Two young men who were on probation and an old man and his wife. All of them seemed shocked at Sirens’ call for evacuation. He hadn’t considered how silent the steel flakes and flames had been. After the yelling about Vulcan had ceased and the screams had died down, the fire had spread silently through the city.
“Who did it?” The first woman asked. Her voice was cold with anger, several others nodded also wanting the information.
Siren pointed up. They all followed his finger to see a red armored man with his feet planted on the air a quarter mile up. He had not noticed them, which was a good thing, they were easily within his sensory range.
“Promise me you will kill him,” The woman said.
Siren opened his mouth to make the promise, but stopped, “I can’t, if it was within my power I would have done it already.”
The two dozen people behind him started muttering unhappily. Siren looked down the street. There were dozens more streets and hundreds of homes he had yet to check. Unfortunately, he had not cultivated a reputation of absolute trust with these strangers, this was likely the largest group he could save before infighting slowed them. The enemy would not stay in the sky forever.
He just had one more stop. The medical artifacts had been moved into the city, to the hospital wing of the local school. Confused muttering followed him when he failed to lead them toward a wall. He did not care, there should be artifacts for staving off infection and healing burns. Those could be the difference between life and death.
The school was a two story building. All the valuables were in the dean’s office behind a vault door disguised as a painting of the Lake Caldera’s seal. This office was on the second floor, in one of the few rooms with no windows. Normally it would have taken a person a significant amount of time to get the vault’s contents out. Siren took a shortcut.
“Stay back, I need to get some items from the school,” Siren had helped move many of the artifacts from the stash Tristan and Luke had taken from the battle in Alcahall.
The students who researched them had found some interesting things that Siren hoped to take advantage of. Essence marbles could be used to power natural artifacts. It meant that Siren would be able to use the artifacts in the vault.
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Getting into a running stance, he made sure he had good footing. A thousand pounds of mass put a lot of pressure on what he pushed off of. The cobblestone street cracked as he bolted towards the wall. It was solid stone, but Siren was a human wrecking ball. He went straight through the brick exterior of the school, then into and through the load bearing wall holding the vault up.
A student wearing large rimmed glasses squawked as she was almost run over. She jumped out of the way as the ceiling creaked, and the vault started cracking the two remaining walls beneath it. In a rain of splinters and broken wood, the metal box fell to the ground.
Siren removed his tier two woodcutting maul. The artifact’s indestructibility had been stressed against the Lord of the Underworld, but it was up to the task of crushing the lock off the vault. Hinges groaned as Siren pounded them off the door. Then the several hundred pound metal disk fell to the ground, exposing the rattled interiors.
Turning to the student Siren pointed, “Get me any healing artifacts and any devices to activate them.”
The girl flinched but complied. She retrieved several light essence marbles attached to a clamp device. Fortunately, they had a label. These were the tools to activate an artifact of a different element or at a higher level than his kern would permit. Not that he expected a tier six artifact to show up. He was surprised when the girl emerged a second time with the tier five stasis artifact Merrick had been saved by along with a handful of other artifacts.
Siren took them, then nodded to the girl, “Take anything you want and flee the Lake Caldera, it is about to be destroyed.“
Her face paled. Siren turned to leave through the hole he had created when she spoke, “Siren, what is going on?”
Siren did not stop walking, “The army was annihilated, the city is next. I am evacuating as many people as possible.”
He stepped outside, hoping the girl would join them. Blood splattered his face, blinding Siren. His dark sense had not picked up anything, well nothing but a distinct lack of shadows.
“I was told to look for a Siren. Though I was expecting more from Vulcan’s apprentice,” A man in red plate armor smirked, one hand holding a corpse upright from the head he just clenched his fist through.
The old woman screamed, staggering back and tripping over her cane. A bar of white light vaporized a hole through her chest.
“Shut up.” The man said.
“Who are you,” Siren kept his focus on the invader. One person tried to run and was burned to dust before he took two steps. No one moved after that.
“The little main branch prodigy didn’t tell you?” The man sneered, “Is his memory slipping? I am Viral, until a few months ago, the last of house Numitor.”
“Viral,” Siren spoke as clearly as he could. He might be able to send this man after Vulcan and spare the city, “I have never spoken to this Vulcan.”
“Lie!” Viral said, he tapped the other man on probation on the shoulder. He did not scream he just died, floating away in the light breeze as he fell apart into ash.
Siren grit his teeth, that had not been a lie, “Vulcan is a weapon…” Viral sighed, and vaporized another few people, “That was the truth, stop killing people.”
Viral raised an eyebrow, “Why? They’ll all be dead in sixty years anyway. Tier zeros are vermin. Continue your explanation.”
Siren stepped between Viral and the three remaining survivors. The young mom and her two children, “There is a young man with a metal kern that has a soul tool named Vulcan.”
“That's not possible,” Viral said, “Creating a soul tool is only possible with ritual suicide, something a legend eleven tiers higher than you would not do.”
Viral vanished, and the mom screamed. Siren whirled to find Viral behind the woman, where two children used to be. The woman collapsed, trying to scoop the piles of ash back into her arms. She said nothing, simply frantically scrabbling at the ground.
Siren brought his maul down on Viral’s head. The man did not even twitch, all of Siren’s strength could not make Viral rock back on his heels. Two silver eyes landed on him, more amused than angry.
“You know, I have an easy way to get what I want,” Viral said, the maul’s blade still impotently pressing into his neck, “Vulcan is tier fifteen, so if I wipe the mountain off the map with tier fourteen firepower, he should be the only thing left. It is just a hassle to pay reparations to the Silent Saint if any of the fallout hits his little convent of eavesdroppers.”
Siren lacked a metal or fire kern, he could still tell something was happening. The essence in the air seemed to condense and it felt like he was standing in honey. He could move, but it was too hard. It built, the mother screamed as her hands were burned by the rising temperature of the ground.
Then it all stopped, “You won’t do anything that affects the plane’s crust.”
It was not calm that fell. All Siren could tell was that it was a different kind of essence just as oppressive, but dramatically less violent. He looked over Viral’s shoulder to see a man in travel worn clothes. His eyes were milky, almost as if he were blind and his hair was a white silver. Despite the white hair, he looked to be around thirty.
“Go jump in a volcano,” Viral said, “This is my family matter, get lost.”
Siren noted that Viral was not confident in killing this man. Could this be a chance to save what was left of the Caldera? He stepped forward and bowed, he would grovel if he had to.
“Please, save us. We will give you anything you want, just save my people,” Siren begged.
Viral clenched a fist like he wanted to strike Siren. He refrained, proving that this new arrival was in the dominant position. Siren let himself feel hope.
The silver haired man gave Siren a pitying look, “He is right, this is a family matter. While it is distasteful how he is going about it, I will not risk my people to save yours, when Viral is complying with the treaty Teelei set up with him. I am here for the elemental lord with the sound domain.”
Siren couldn’t believe his ears. This man was here to save an undead over the living. The elemental lord who escaped. Siren took a step back and looked down at his bags, then at the mom.
At least he might be able to save her. Stepping back he let the two gods argue about treaties and borders. Kneeling down, he removed the stasis artifact and the most powerful essence marble from his pocket. It was her best chance to survive, he was not sure how absolute the stasis was, just that it was supposed to lock the body to its current state.
The mother looked up at him, tears running down her face. She pushed the proffered artifacts back to Siren, “You live. You kill him.”
She glared at Viral. Siren gritted his teeth. This woman was right, without the caldera, his oath to protect it was meaningless. The least he could do was avenge it.
Clamping the reservoir to the artifact he placed the artifact against his skin, below his armor. He quoted the last phrase of is oath “Until my dying breath, I do so swear.”
The artifact took effect, shutting his body entirely down.