Lya kicked the door open, the loud bang instantly drawing the attention of the two people who had just entered, who were now exiting the bathrooms. Both their heads immediately whipped around in Lya’s direction.
“FMPD, freeze, and put your hands in the air,” Lya commanded.
“Don’t you think it's a bit bold to barge in here all by yourself?” the woman questioned.
Lya spun her head to see that Saxon had disappeared.
What Lya was unaware of, was that while talking to the bartender, Saxon had taken a picture of the space behind the bar. So when Lya kicked open the door, diverting the intruders’ attention toward her, Saxon took the opportunity to use Schrödinger's cat to disappear behind the bar.
Hidden behind the bar, Saxon used the mythos of King Leonidas to construct a spear in his hand. As his head crept above the bar, he glanced at the two people, and managed to spot a sealed set of documents in the woman’s hand; Saxon reckoned this was the dead drop they had come to pick up.
“What you got there?” Lya asked, signaling toward the sealed file in the woman’s hand.
“Just left something here by accident,” the woman replied. “We just came to pick it up, so we should be leaving now.”
“Don’t think I can let you do that,” Lya responded, having noticed Saxon in her peripheral vision.
As the room stood dead silent, Saxon was the first to break the tension. He rose from behind the bar, and hurled his spear toward the woman’s leg, attempting to incapacitate her.
At the same time, Lya slammed the door shut, and charged toward the man, leading with her shoulder to try and knock him to the ground.
However, as both Saxon’s spear and Lya made their way to their respective targets, the man’s body began to transform. The clothes on his body began to tear, as his back cracked, his chest puffed out, and gray fur crawled all across his skin.
The man’s reaction to the attack was almost instantaneous as if he somehow he knew it was coming beforehand. As Lya came face to face with the man, a long snout laced with razor-sharp teeth protruded from his face. The man bared his newly grown fangs, and lunged at Lya, nearly taking her head off. Luckily, she was able to roll underneath the attack, and past her opponent, who now resembled a wolf more than a man.
Glancing at the man’s now exposed, fur-covered back, Lya noticed a colored wolf’s head tattoo. A wolf’s head was nowhere in Kenji’s report as one of the common tattoos, meaning this person was a high-ranking avatar in the Chimera family.
Meanwhile, as Saxon’s spear was just inches away from its target, the woman, and everything on her, transformed into a black mist, causing the spear to pass right through her. The mist then flew its way over to the door, where the woman then returned to her normal form.
She quickly slid open the peephole, then transformed into mist once again, exiting through the tiny slit in the door.
Instead of immediately taking off after her, Saxon shifted his focus to Lya. A constant flurry of claws and bites was keeping Lya on the defensive. Given what happened when Lya tried to go after Desmond, Saxon felt he couldn’t leave her alone.
Any serious injury to Lya’s feet, and she’d be rendered powerless. Those injuries were all the more likely to occur when fighting at super speed. As it stood the situation was not in Lya’s favor.
Every time she tried to go on the offensive, her opponent always reacted faster than he seemingly should be able to. Lya reckoned her opponent's mythos must be the werewolf. The man’s mythos must have been granting him enhanced senses, which is what allowed him to react to Lya’s superspeed.
In between avoiding attacks, Lya glanced over at Saxon and noticed his indecisiveness. She knew if he helped her now, then there was no catching that woman, and the whole reason they came here would be ruined.
“Go after her,” Lya yelled. “I’ll handle big bad over here.”
Saxon glanced through the slit in the door at the streets outside Artemis’ Arrow.
As he did so, the man turned his attention toward Saxon, but couldn’t keep his eyes on him for long as Lya blitzed forward. The man’s vision was forced to be focused on Lya if he didn’t want to be hit.
With nobody looking his way, Saxon used Schrödinger's cat to teleport outside.
Immediately, surveying the streets, Saxon saw nobody, but when he looked up, he caught a glimpse of the woman from before, now flying through the air.
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Without a moment to spare, Saxon called upon one of the new mythoi he had acquired from an Underworld prisoner. Invoking the mythos of Icarus, wings erupted from Saxon’s back, and he took to the skies.
Icarus’ avatar, Skyban, was a recent addition to the Underworld. Skyban was Fable’s most well-known graffiti artist. He didn’t have a real name. Like Octave, Skyban was an alleyway baby, left to fate, and to fend for himself.
Skyban’s canvas was different from a traditional graffiti artist's. Whereas other artists were stuck to the streets, Skyban’s canvas of choice was the downtown skyline. Skyban used his mythos to fly high into the sky, and paint on the skyscrapers downtown that stood as symbols of Fable’s financial disparity.
The origins of the name Skyban, were from a bounty one of Fable’s elite put on anybody traversing downtown’s skies. As a result, the skies of downtown were empty for weeks, and people referred to the bounty as a ban on Fable’s skies. However, even during those weeks, Skyban was able to continue vandalizing skyscrapers, and if anything, was more active than before.
Skyban was only brought into the Underworld because Mister Malone, Midas’ CEO, managed to locate Skyban’s hideout after Skyban vandalized Midas headquarters, and reported it to the FMPD.
Skyban had to be brought in during the dead of night while he was asleep and unable to react because the mythos of Icarus made him nearly impossible to catch. This is because his mythos had a few special qualities to it.
It enabled Skyban to self-impose a restriction, specifically a time limit, on his flight. On top of that, flight was the sole ability granted by the mythos of Icarus, causing all the mythos’ strength to be channeled into Skyban’s flying abilities. This amplified his flight to unparalleled levels of speed and agility.
This is why Saxon sought out Skyban. Saxon agreed with Skyban’s message and felt he could connect with him well. Moreover, since the copycat mythos only allowed Saxon to copy a mythos at a fraction of its power, he prioritized ones that had more drawbacks and fewer powers.
A mythos with more drawbacks meant the powers it granted were that much stronger, thus when Saxon copied it would still be relatively powerful. Along the same line of thought, since a mythos’ strength is finite--though it can be increased with training and experience--the fewer powers a mythos grants, the stronger those few powers would be.
In this case, Saxon needed to limit his flight time dramatically if he wanted to catch up. He had at most 10 minutes with these wings before they were reduced to nothing, all the while growing slower, and slower. However, he didn’t have many other options for catching somebody soaring through the sky.
Saxon kicked off the ground and began darting toward the woman. Fortunately, it seemed flight wasn’t a primary ability of her mythos, as Saxon seemed to be gaining on her with each passing moment.
Once Saxon got within striking distance for a ranged attack, the woman spun around to face him. Saxon raised his hand exactly as he had when he hurled the spear at her in the bar.
Instinctively, the woman turned to mist to try and avoid the attack, but Saxon had anticipated that. Instead of a spear, lighting began to crackle in Saxon’s hand, as he invoked the mythos of Raijin.
Combining the lighting of Raijin, and the strength of King Leonidas, Saxon launched this bolt of lighting at the cloud of mist. As the lighting bolt impacted, the mist sparked with electricity, and the woman rematerialized, her body now charred and smoking.
Unable to maintain her flight, the woman fell onto one of the rooftops. She pushed herself to her feet, clearly winded from Saxon’s attack.
As Saxon landed on the rooftop opposite her, the woman immediately reached into her jacket pocket. Saxon went on guard but was taken aback when she pulled out a vial of red liquid. Popping open the vial, the woman poured the contents of it into her mouth.
As she did, Saxon managed to catch a glimpse of her tattoo. It was a colored set of fangs, another tattoo not listed in Kenji’s report. The woman swallowed the liquid, and shook her head, disgusted by what she had just ingested.
Saxon watched as the burn marks on the woman slowly began to heal, and her stamina returned to her. That’s when Saxon deduced her mythos. He was fighting a vampire.
An opponent with the mythos of the vampire presented several problems. To begin, Saxon’s wings granted by the mythos of Icarus were about to run out. That meant Saxon was on a strict time limit to take his opponent down--and he also wanted to return to Lya as fast as possible.
However, she came prepared with vials of blood to regenerate herself. So long as she had those, Saxon wouldn’t be able to close out the fight before his wings ran out.
He could attempt to destroy them, but if the lighting bolt, and the fall onto the roof didn’t do it, then the vials were likely sturdy enough to where that wasn’t a viable option.
Trying to steal them wouldn’t work either, as Saxon didn’t see where she pulled the vial from. As a result, he would need to weaken her to the point that she needed to use another one, then once he figured out where they were located, steal them, and then take her down. It was all too much to accomplish with such limited time.
Saxon was also starting to realize why the Chimera family sent the two people they did. Both vampires and werewolves are notorious for being weak to sunlight, and stronger during the night.
If Saxon was correct in his assumption, then both of the avatars he and Lya were fighting had their mythoi heavily weakened in the day. Consequently, such a restriction would cause their mythoi to be heavily enhanced at night.
That increased power allotted to the avatars of the werewolf, and the vampire at night--in exchange for being weakened during the day--would help make up for their lack of experience relative to Saxon and Lya.
The situation at hand was not ideal for the detectives. Saxon was against an opponent with regenerative abilities that would allow her to outlast the timer on his wings. Meanwhile, Lya was having to contend with an avatar who could react to her enhanced speed and outmatched her physically in every other category.
As Saxon, and Lya both squared off to face the avatars of the vampire, and the werewolf, a single question ran through their minds. How do they take down this creature of the night?