Dario grinned from ear to ear as adrenaline coursed through his body. Instead of primly walking down the bridge that connected one floating block of buildings to another with the formal etiquette befitting a man of his stature, he slid down its railing like a teenager drunk on the happiness of summer.
For the first time in his life, he’d just stolen something from another person. Although, perhaps describing the one he’d stolen from as a person would be stretching it a bit; they’d had far too many feline features to be considered human.
He’d spent several days in the city already, and each had been absolutely exhilarating, filled with many firsts.
On the first day, he’d used some of the food in his holding item to barter for some information.
Imagine that! Dario, Lord Commander of the Holy Kingdom, former Captain of the Holy Knights. Bartering! The stories he’d be able to tell his soldiers in the mess hall…
On the second day, he’d used the information gained from his initial barter to track that particular, unfortunate anthropomorphic feline down.
As he ran these errands, he’d realized, quite quickly, just what the hierarchy at play in the city was.
The felines were the city’s ruling class. The more feline they were, the higher up they lived, close to the bottom of the second layer. Those without any feline features lived on the surface of the first layer, or in the case of aquatic life, below it.
Despite the general arid nature of the first layer, there was a surprising amount of water—it was just concentrated in a few large lakes, rivers, and a single, massive ocean that covered much of the first layer
From what he’d heard, the first layer guardian’s base of operations was apparently in the middle of an ocean situated in the center of his territory.
Apparently, they liked fish.
Dario’s eyes drifted from one side of the street to the other, then down. “Alright! This should be the ninth sewer gate in this block.
He glanced behind himself for good measure. Once confident that nobody was keeping an eye on him, he stepped onto the sewer grate and, as quietly as he could… meowed.
The sewer grate under his feet disappeared. He’d expected it, but his arms still flailed as his feet lost footing and he fell through the ground. He looked up and saw that as soon as he’d passed through, the sewer grate had rematerialized.
After falling through the sewage tunnel, he shot out into the open air. After a second of freefall, a gust of wind pushed him to the right just enough that he missed the block of buildings underneath the one he’d started off on.
He zoomed past a few more, then saw his target; a dark hole in the center of the roof of a small, inconspicuous building on the ground level of the first layer.
Dario braced for impact, but it never arrived. Instead, as soon as he passed through the hole in the building’s roof, he felt himself slowing down, as if he’d been caught in a ball of fur.
But there was no fur—only a platform of some sort. Dario tried to look at his surroundings, but a ring of white light blinded him.
“Identification,” a disembodied voice sounded from somewhere in front of Dario.
Stolen story; please report.
Fumbling around the inside of his shirt, Dario pulled out the object he’d stolen from the feline earlier—a stone badge with a single fang imprinted in the center.
“Identification accepted. Exit the door on your left.”
Dario blindly turned left, past the ring of white lights. Once the spots in his vision faded away, he saw a nondescript door in his path.
He opened it and strode through. The only things inside were a chair, a desk with a circular indent in the center, and a tube above it.
There was a door on the other side of the room, presumably the exit.
Dario cautiously approached the chair and after a brief inspection, sat in it.
“High-value prisoners that arrived in the last two months,” Dario prompted.
“Request is too broad,” a disembodied voice responded, echoing from the tube.
“Five highest value prisoners that arrived in the last two months.”
“Level of identification is insufficient for this information.”
Dario cursed under his breath.
“Location of highest security prison.”
Dario waited nervously for the voice to refuse his request. To his surprise, a metal cylinder shot out of the tube, revealing the reason for the desk’s circular indent.
“Nice.”
With an inordinate amount of glee, Dario grabbed the cylinder and tore the lid off. Inside was a simple, circular map, near the center of which was a large “X”.
That did narrow down the location, which was great and all… but the scale of the map was absolutely terrible. The first layer was massive; the map he’d been given was no more than six inches wide.
The X’s location was a bit west of the layer’s center, but with how big it was, and how small the map was, he would probably have to search thousands of square miles worth of land.
When the layer’s verticality was included…
Dario softly smiled. There was no way around it. He was going to conduct a bit more espionage to narrow down the prison’s location. Perhaps he would give bribing another go. After all, he had a fair amount of ice cream in his gauntlet’s holding space, and this was an entire plane of existence that could be converted to become devout followers of the Holy Truth.
He was pulled away from this train of thought by a loud click. Looking up, Dario saw that the door he’d spotted on the other side of the room when he’d entered had swung open.
“The information has been granted. Place the provided information back in the capsule and leave it on the desk. Once you have done so, leave the premises immediately.” The voice came down from the tube.
Dario shrugged and stuffed the map back into the capsule before leaving the room—and the building.
Instead of appearing on the street in the middle of a city block like he’d expected, Dario found himself standing in the middle of what seemed like a factory district.
“How… did I get here?” he wondered out loud.
***
While Dario was having the time of his life pretending to be a spy, Toku was having a bit of a harder time on the second layer.
The second layer was very sparsely populated—when it came to sentient life, at least. Unlike the first layer, which was mostly a dry hellscape, the second layer was teeming with green.
In all sorts of variety, too.
Toku had never seen a jungle before, but he didn’t exactly have time to enjoy exploring the one he was in. Due to some simple misunderstandings, he was currently being chased by several dozen…
Well, he wasn’t quite sure what they were, but his pursuers were smoothly traversing through the jungle’s trees and vines almost as if they were gliding through it. A few were even literally gliding atop a muddy stream that ran through the jungle.
“Just where the hell did these people come from?!” Toku snarled as he grabbed a vine and swung to the left.
As he did so, he swung his sword with his other hand, cleanly slicing off the head of one of his pursuers.
“How many of us need to die before we kill this goddamn samurai!” a voice shouted from gods-knew-where.
“I don't even know what a samurai is!” Toku shouted back. “I’m the proud warrior king of the Kaita Kingdom, so don’t you dare call me anything different!”
He swung around another tree, only to find that he’d, all too abruptly, reached the edge of the jungle.
Without anything to break his fall, Toku roughly fell to the ground and tumbled down a grassy knoll. Thankfully, he was able to stop his momentum halfway and came to a halt on his two feet at the knoll’s base. A quick glance back towards the jungle revealed that his mistake had allowed for all of his pursuers to catch up.
Still, even as his pursuers grouped up and surrounded him, Toku stared each of them in the eyes and flicked what blood remained of his previous kill off his blade.
“Well, I’d wanted to do all this covertly, but it looks like that’s not a choice anymore,” he muttered. “Don’t think I’ll have much peace and quiet after this.”