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Avan raced after Yue, and had caught up with her after a few seconds. No matter how fast Yue was, with a level not even in her twenties, she simply didn't have the same stats as Avan, not to mention the extra stats that gave him a big boost. With a loud and startled squeal, he grabbed Yue and swung her around as he ran, placing her on his back and running piggyback.
"Faster, Avan! We have to help them!" Yue shouted desperately into Avan's ear, causing him to grind his teeth painfully to avoid accidentally snapping and reacting inappropriately to the loud shout.
He ran and raced through the trees, his heightened reflexes and stats a huge advantage in dodging obstacles on the ground and in his path.
Where it normally took a good half hour at a normal walking pace to make the walk, Avan made it to the edge of the forest in under ten minutes with Yue on his back, even as he puffed and cursed his lack of stamina. Need. Urgent. Stamina. Exercise! he cursed inwardly and stopped when a black cloud was blown by a stronger gust of wind directly into his panting breath and he inhaled a lungful of soot particles. Coughing, he leaned forward and sent all the mana he could into Akkalon's touch to heal his lungs, which seemed to be burning from the inside out.
A few unbearable seconds later, he finally looked up again and was greeted by an image of destruction, accompanied by fiery orange flames and a plume of black smoke that seemed to hang over the entire city. He glanced sideways at Yue, who stood frozen on the hill to his left, also staring at the city.
Screams rang out from the city and panicked people were fleeing the city, while others tried to save their homes with buckets of water. A drop in the ocean... Avan observed what was happening before his eyes.
There was no trace of the guards normally placed at the eastern gate of the city, and the worst of the chaos and the buildings that had already burned down seemed to be making themselves known on the western side of the city. Squinting his eyes, he tried to see more clearly what was actually happening on the other side of the city, from where he also saw magic bullets of various colors and shapes flashing and partially disappearing into the sky.
A vaguely familiar storm front in the sky over the western part of the city caught his eye, and just as he was watching, a huge bolt of lightning came out of the cloud and in a split second had hit a targeted spot in the city. Elisa's grandfather! The guild master is fighting!
Finally a clue, even if only a vague one, he grabbed Yue again and, with a surprised yelp from her, swung her onto his back once more, ignoring her murmur and already racing down the shallow hill. The city wall seemed normal, and other than the missing guards, nothing seemed to have happened on the eastern side. The buildings on the eastern side, whose facades he now sprinted past, were also all still fire-free and only in the center of the city, further ahead at the marketplace, did the conflagration seem to be just spreading.
Avan dodged confused and panicked people, mothers with crying children in their arms looking for their loved ones, children without parents, people of different ages trying to make sense of the situation. He had just, even if it hurt him in the heart to see all these broken residents, no time to stop and had with a tunnel vision only the goal to get as quickly as possible to the scene of the event. Hopefully I can somehow just help! Was his only thought, as more lightning struck on the horizon, but were apparently so concentrated that they were extremely diluted downward. The thunderclaps that followed, especially from such a short distance, were terrifying, and the rumbling thunder vibrated throughout the ground, the cobbled streets, and Avan could also make out a few fresh cracks here and there in the walls of the houses with his dungeon influence.
"Sir, please be careful. Whatever is happening up ahead is draining an immense amount of mana from the surroundings. Even though it seems like our dungeon is a dome of untouched silent energy, while all around us all mana seems to be flowing in the westward direction!" Horn's voice suddenly sounded from the back of his head, and Avan almost dropped Yue as he tried to adjust to the still unfamiliar situation with his dungeon companion.
Before he could think back a thought, someone else yelled in his ear. "There, Avan! We're almost there!" Yue abruptly blurted out, eliciting a pained groan from Avan accompanied by a suppressed yelp.
A "Sorry..." suddenly sounded much quieter afterwards, as Yue finally became aware of her loud voice.
Yue had pointed with a strongly moving arm back and forth over his left shoulder to the left front, from which a fresh gray cloud of smoke had just poured into the sky, as if a burning house had just collapsed there, accompanied shortly afterwards by another but this time much weaker lightning strike to exactly this spot.
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Avan changed his sprint direction slightly to the left and hurried across the marketplace, which seemed to be one big chaos. Merchants of various races were hurriedly packing up their goods, while even in some places strangely masked and familiar figures seemed to be fighting against city guards. All this he perceived only through his dungeon area, while he dashed across the open area and hastily dodged the various people.
He jumped over overturned carts, over half-destroyed market stalls and some stone fragments until he ended up in a street branching off diagonally to the southwest and sprinted into it. A few seconds later, and many escaped collisions, he slowed down his crazy marathon through the city, as it went to the forecourt of the guild building.
A pained cry from Yue and a handshake with her hands in front of her mouth said more than a thousand words. The once magnificent and majestic half-timbered building of the adventurers' guild had definitely seen better days, as Avan finally took a close look at the sheer destruction of the battlefield.
Where the guild's building had once stood, half of the structure was now in ruins, and the upper right half of the building was completely missing, almost as if someone had simply cut off an entire piece of the building with an extremely sharp butter knife. The said cut off part of the building was on top of a former noble building part to the right of it, which had nothing left of the beautiful garden and half of the manor house had collapsed from the massive former roof part of the adventurers guild.
"What the abyss...? Holy crap!" Avan was just starting to curse when, with a quick sideways movement to the left, he dodged what looked suspiciously like a two-handed blade made of blue magic.
In front of the former guild building, he now saw two imposing people facing each other, surrounded by black hooded figures and familiar faces of guild adventurers, all engaged in a more or less even fight.
The formerly white hair of the guild master flew in waves around his head and glowed in a purple crackle with jumbled flashes of static charges as he extended his staff straight toward his opponent. His opponent, a giant of a man, just leapt out of the ground from the remains of cobblestones in which a spell must have catapulted him, swinging a loosely three-meter double-edged sword with one hand and running toward the old man. The blade glowed a dark blue, and the swing, which was actually much too far away to hit, crackled with energy, and a shower of blue leapt out of it in a wide arc as a copy of the gigantic sword raced toward the guildmaster.
The latter, visibly tired and already exhausted, raised his staff just in time, and contrary to every expectation that the wood should have been destroyed in a shower of splinters, he successfully blocked the attack with a brief flash of a purple glowing shield around his staff.
Yue and Avan could only watch spellbound, completely oblivious to the smaller fights and skirmishes in the square, transfixed by the spectacle of these two forces.
The man surrounded by lightning raised his staff and shouted something in a deep, rumbling and thunderous voice as he pointed his staff forward at the blade-wielding opponent. The latter, apparently already aware of what was coming, quickly assumed a trained defensive stance with his blade, while pointing it not forward, as Avan thought, but upward toward the sky.
A few milliseconds later, a huge bolt of lightning struck the sword, pushing the man and his blade into a deep furrow in the ground, while he landed on his knees under the sheer force of the impact, half standing with his blade against it.
The lightning splintered along the blade and rained down in a purple firework around the man, but did not touch him once and sank hissing in black spots on the no longer so paved stones around it.
"ENOUGH!" Heard the cry of the blademaster suddenly as he rose from his pit visibly agitated and angry. Before Avan could even think anything, the hunk of a man suddenly glowed red and disappeared from the scene. Only to reappear a fraction of a second later, directly in front of the guildmaster, who, as if in slow motion for Avan, was again trying to deflect the red glowing sword's blade thrust at him with his staff.
Avan saw, as if in slow motion and powerless, how it was no longer quite enough and the staff scraped along the blade, but this was already protruding from his back again, and Helio Stormcloud impaled on the red flickering sword. Spine and nerves severed, by the sheer size more than only heart and other organs brutally pierced, the body of the dead guild master jerked once briefly and then went limp.
The blade was pulled out of the dead body with a jerk and he fell lifeless to the ground.
Suddenly seeing only red, and having endured enough suffering for several lifetimes, something snapped inside Avan and he was already on the forecourt, charging full of adrenaline toward the panting man, his fists glowing with Akkalon's touch beside him ready to strike.
Having just been sure of a few surprising blows, Avan suddenly found himself a meter above the ground, panting for air as a man nearly two and a half meters tall stared somberly into his face.
"And you must be that other fly responsible for my brother's death!" The man prodded with dangerously glittering eyes, which was followed by an evil grin and a loudly approaching palm towards Avan's left temple.
Avan's vision went black.
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