The Watchmen pushed aside their cloaks. Whistling Blades hung at their hips—they couldn’t be anything else. They had crescent-shaped crossguards. Slices of coloured glass glimmered between the scabbard and the guard.

The Watchman in the lead held out a hand. “You are under arrest. Do not resist. Raise your hands and turn around.”

Well he couldn’t do that…

Jace gulped. “Sorry, but…I’ve got places to be.”

Resisting arrest? Never thought he’d see the day.

Locara raised a finger and scolded, “Young man! Do as these Watchmen tell you at once!”

The two other Watchmen stomped their feet down and activated a technique card, but they did it so fast that Jace couldn’t see what it was. Strands of inky black shadow leaked out of the air around them and wrapped around their arms in veins, like raindrops streaking down a car window.

He didn’t want to find out what it did. He ducked to the side, then darted between two of the Watchmen. “Sorry, ma’am! Thanks for your help!”

The Watchmen with techniques active reached for Jace, but he turned to the side and passed right between their grasping fingers. Their fists closed behind them fast and hard—it sounded like a gunshot with how powerfully their fingers snapped shut.

They’d used some kind of strengthening technique. What was it called? Fortification?

He needed to get away. He drew his own Whistling Blade in an upward arc, slashing a line of blue light through the air. The Watchmen jumped back, then drew their own swords, but it was too late.

Jace spun toward the railing and faced the library’s central atrium. He fired a pulse of Aes through his core, manifesting his Hyperdash card, and stomped down. When the card appeared, he crushed it and shot forward…

Into the empty air, five storeys off the ground.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit…

As soon as he flashed out of hyperspace ten meters ahead, his stomach rose up to his throat. He was falling.

He swapped his cards and activated the Cleanse card, resetting his cooldowns, then socketed the Hyperdash again. It activated as soon as he socketed it, and this time, he targetted the ground.

A split-second before his legs crunched against the marble floor, he activated the card, looking horizontally. The dash cancelled all his current momentum and carried him forward. He stumbled to a halt in the middle of the floor.

The Watchmen were distant shadows on the fifth level of the archives now, but he could almost hear them cursing.

He smirked.

Everyone around him began to shout and panic. They sprinted away from Jace. A few of them even shouted something about a light Wielder, but he wasn’t sure.

He needed to find Kinfild, and now.

He turned down the hallway at the edge of the main atrium that Kinfild had travelled down, and he ran off in the same direction, weaving through panicking library guests. As he ran, he slotted the Whistling Blade back into its sheath.

The hallway was tall, wide, and empty, save for a few cleaning kyborgs who rolled around on treads, just like Aur-Six. They raised their brooms as Jace sprinted past and nattered angrily.

He turned a corner, feet skittering on the polished marble floors. Light shone through a floor-to-ceiling window, blinding him for a moment, and he crashed right into an armoured man.

Jace slid a few feet along the polished floor before jumping up. Plasma rifles whined, powering up, and armour clattered. Five men stood across the hallway, standing in front of an open blast door whose rigid steel frame seemed entirely out of place in a palace of marble columns and glass chandeliers.

[Level 10 Palace Guard] read the tags above their heads, only visible to Jace. They pointed their plasma rifles—[Plastech 3122 (Ammunition: .303 Plasma-aspect Aes shells)]—at him. Bolt-action, as usual, but without bayonets.

He doubted they were with the Watchmen. Or, at least, they hadn’t heard about the chaos yet. He waved, grimaced, then said, “Sorry! I just need to get…to the other side, right here.”

The guards’ armour was plastic-y and shiny, and it was entirely yellow. There were no ornaments, and they wore no helmets. But their expressions stayed stoic. One finally said, “Apologies, sir. No one is allowed past this point. Please turn back.”

“Kinfild came this way, right?” Jace asked, hoping the name might give him some clout. “Kinfild of the Crimson Table?”

“You are not Kinfild. Please turn back.”

“I’m…” Jace stepped to the side, trying to see if the guards would let him slip around him. They moved back to stop him. “I’m with Kinfild! Just take me to him, and he’ll vouch for me.” He glanced over his shoulder, looking for Watchmen. Nothing yet.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“He’ll find you when the thegn is done with him. Please turn back.”

Jace grimaced, but this guard couldn’t stand in his way—no matter how skilled the Split thought they were. Jace veered to one side, then darted back the other way. His Hyperdash card had come off cooldown, and he activated it. One of the guards slammed a button on the control panel of the blast door, but Jace was through in a flash, and the steel doors had only started closing.

He sprinted down the hallways beyond, shouting, “Kinfild! Kinfild! We need to go!”

Only one guard had made it through the blast doors before they slammed shut, but Jace was faster. He’d grown used to his armour, and he was used to running. After a few corners and another hyperjump, he lost the guard.

The hallways here were emptier. They looked mostly the same, except now, a few branched off into other offices or chambers. Stairs led up to higher levels, and worker kyborgs cleaned the floors. A group of men and women in elegant suits and dressed scoffed as Jace sprinted past, but they made no move to stop him.

Kinfild and the thegn couldn’t have made it far. He kept running.

After a few more corners, Jace nearly ran right into them. He stumbled to a halt on the polished floor, his boots barely finding traction. Kinfild and another man walked side-by-side. The other man was a short human in a simple black suit with braided golden sashes wrapped around his body. His face was weathered, and a scar ran down his cheek, but he couldn’t have been any older than fifty—his brown hair only had streaks of gray in it.

A pair of palace guards walked right behind them. They immediately raised their plasma rifles, but Kinfild lifted a hand and said, “Don’t shoot. He’s with me.”

“Kinfild, we need to go,” Jace said.

“We heard you. We came looking for you. What’s the matter?”

“Watchmen.”

“Ah, that would be a problem,” Kinfild muttered. “I regret to inform you, Thegn Yrse, that I am out of counsel—and out of time. Please take what I have told you into consideration.” He glanced at Jace, then motioned back at the thegn. “He has been my friend for a while, and I trust him to make the right decision.”

The thegn bowed. “You have my gratitude, Kinfild, however, there is little I can do. I will launch the Celacor Defense Fleet and alert our ground forces, and if these kobolds come, we will do our best to hold them off until you can bring reinforcements.”

Kinfild grimaced, then nodded. “Politics…”

“Kinfild,” Jace warned. “Time to go back to the ship…”

“The boy is right, Kinfild,” said the thegn. He pointed over his shoulder—down a different hallway. “That will take you back to the library landing plaza. If I see the Watchmen, I will tell them you went the other way.”

Jace delivered a short bow to the thegn—it only felt proper—then ran off in the direction the thegn had pointed.

“Did you get what you needed?” Kinfild asked.

“I…have some ideas of how to destroy the queen-core,” he panted as they ran. “Good news is that I have an aspect that should be effective against it. Bad news is that I don’t have any technique cards that can actually damage it!”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Kinfild said. “We just need to get back to the Wrath!”

They ascended a set of stairs, then took a sharp turn to the left and ran out onto an open-air walkway. It ran around the outside of the palace complex, leading back toward the library, but it afforded them a view of the city. Short sandstone and marble buildings made up the old town around the palace, but glass and steel skyscrapers towered in the distance, under a haze of pollution and sandy dust. Orderly lines of starships and repeller-cars floated in the air, trailing soot from the smokestacks.

This city seemed peaceful. A little bit of…normal, as close as Jace figured he’d get for a long while.

“So this is what we’re protecting…” Jace breathed.

Soon, it’d turn into a battlefield. He’d seen what a plasma rifle could do, and he’d seen the Starrealm warships and their giant batteries. He didn’t want to know what this planet would look like after the kobolds were done with it.

He shut his eyes for a few seconds as he ran, picturing the cities of Earth. He’d longed for them, to live in them, and do something outside of farming. He couldn’t purge the image of kobolds running through them, slaughtering innocent civilians and feasting on them. Of ruining that faint hope.

The stairway led downward. It jutted out along the outside of the library and descended down to the outside plaza where the starships waited. The Watchmen were nowhere to be seen—not yet.

Kinfild and Jace reached the bottom of the stairs and sprinted back to the Luna Wrath. The boarding ramp folded outward, allowing them access. They jumped up inside it. As Jace ran up the ramp, he glanced over his shoulder. The Watchmen sprinted out from the library’s doors.

“Kinfild! Get us in the air!”

“One step ahead of you!” Kinfild yelled back. The Luna Wrath lifted up off the plaza. Jace gripped the boarding ramp’s pistons to stay standing.

The Watchmen pointed and shouted, but it was too late. Jace and Kinfild were already in the air. The boarding ramp whirred up and clunked back into place with a hiss.

Jace ran to the cockpit and dropped down in the copilot’s seat, then pulled his crash harness on. The Luna Wrath shot out over the city, ignoring the traffic lanes. They gained altitude, racing up toward the bubbly clouds and blue sky.

An alarm blared out. It didn’t come from inside the Wrath, though. It vibrated through the ship’s hull plating, only barely audible over the whooshing wind. Something outside was screaming out a rising pitch, like an air-raid siren.

“What’s that?” Jace asked.

Kinfild’s expression was still calm, but that didn’t indicate much. “Look down.”

They passed the edges of the city and shot out over the desert. Amidst the dunes of sand and rock, massive, kilometer-wide hangar doors slid open all across the desert. Starships rose out of the angular holes, chugging soot. Their thrusters shone magenta, and Jace supposed it harnessed a plasma aspect of some kind. Even from so far away, and even without any proper spiritual senses, the strength of their reactors and thousands of rudimentary function cards weighed down on him.

“That’s the Celacor Defense Fleet,” Kinfild said. “Starrealm-operated battleships and crews. It’s a powerful fleet, but I doubt it’ll last long against the Koedor-Terginians without help.”

“Then we have to get help,” Jace said. “We have to go to the capital and get a bigger fleet.”