While the Potirangi flew over Tragnil’s skyline, the people looking overboard saw a procession of several dozen monsters moving along the main thoroughfare towards the castle on a flotilla of flagstones. Salazar growled. “Think I should start taking potshots up here?”
The streets definitely seemed to be almost completely deserted at this point. Normally, a group that size consisting of such diminutive monsters would be nigh-invisible in normal Tragnil foot traffic. Waia grunted. “I’m down. But Mark would probably say something about ‘muh, element of surprise’ or something. It’s never helped me before, I say it’s better when they know full well that they’re going up against me. Lets the dread sink in.” She cackled to herself while cracking her knuckles.
She noticed Salazar staring. “Sorry. Pre-fight hype. Gets me going a tad far. When she’s with me, Ivy usually changes the subject so that I don’t say things like… yeah, like that.” She stretched her arms out in front of her. “Hey, you got any pre-fight stretches?”
“N-Uh, no. Fights aren’t really something I, like, schedule, or anything.” Salazar started mimicking her movement. “I do curls in the morning to make sure I don’t pull anything, but that’s just routine.”
“Meh, not judging.” Waia looked out at the shrinking distance between them and the castle. “Looks like I’ll be up soon. If any of the others start acting weird while I’m away, try to ignore it. They’ve all got this counterbalance in one of the others, it resolves itself pretty quick.”
“...Good to know.”
Waia stifled a laugh. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just really amped up. Just kinda coming up with things to talk about can be hard like this.” She gripped the rim of the deck as the Potirangi started to rise. “But I guess we don’t really need to at this point, huh?”
She fished out her phone and headphones, popped them in and brought up her playlist. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around, then. Hope your part of the fight goes good.”
Mark called out from the command room. “Waia! Insertion in T minus thirty seconds!”
Salazar gave her a high five. “See you on the other side.”
Waia smirked. “Depending on how you look at it, we’re already there.” She shifted into her true form. “And by the way, you didn’t let me finish my cool one liner from earlier.”
“I didn’t?”
“Yup. Like I said, there’s a saying the other Hawaiians have about me.”
The Potirangi glided over the top of the castle and, as expected, there was a convenient hole in the labyrinth of branching hallways and rooms. Once they were directly above the opening, Waia turned on her music, stuffed her phone in her jacket pocket, and threw up the horns at Salazar. “‘Waia never loses’.” She dove off the side of the Potirangi.
-
Yang leaned back in her swivel chair, watching the Locus through the protective glass window with her legs up on the dashboard. Her head tilted to the side as she saw the pile of glyphs the King had given her light up and begin to float. She brought her legs down and scooted close just as a picture of the King appeared.
Yang cleared her throat. “What’ve you got for me?” The King couldn’t hear her, the communication was one-way, but acting like someone was actually there with her helped. Yang wasn’t sure what it helped with, but she definitely felt better.
“We spotted a Potirangi flying overhead, straight over the castle. Missing one fin, lines up with one that was stolen from a dock half an hour ago. It’s them.” The glyphs fell to the floor.
Yang slid back over to the dashboard, with all its hypnotic blinking lights and buttons. Yang checked the manual that she had propped up against the window, then started pushing the appropriate buttons. The faint rumble of the room assured her that the buttons were doing their job. Good, considering the fact that she was relishing operating them a bit too much.
After a moment, the silence overwhelmed her and she opened up the funnel next to her. “Hey, lightning guy. Do a flash if you can understand what I’m saying.”
The Locus did not respond at all.
Yang snapped into the funnel and an arc of electricity streaked across the room, scorching a C-shape into the ground next to the entrance to Yang’s command room. “Okay, so you can at least hear me. That’s better than talking into some floating rocks, at least. So, you’d be surprised by how much you can learn from being around a con artist, especially one with a propensity for teaching. One thing that Normal Cat Yang picked up when I was running with that crowd was this trick called the Kansas City Shuffle.”
-
The Potirangi came to a stop outside the guest bedroom, in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. On the other side of the window, the room appeared to be arranged in a modernist architect’s idea of a child’s treehouse. Numerous platforms connected by circular staircases formed a series of concentric rings leading up to the ceiling, creating space for several beds and end tables. No sign of Yang, however.
Quet cracked her knuckles, placed a glyph on the window and stepped back. “Step one: Utilize thaumatological know-how to override external defenses.” She pulled out a second glyph, shut her eyes and tapped it.
The window exploded inwards, covering the entire room on a carpet of miniscule glass shards. Quet pocketed the second glyph. “Defenses overridden. Done and done. By the way, what’s step two?”
Mark tried not to look down as he jumped the gap into the castle, his shoes crunching on the glass. “Fan out, but stay within earshot. Look for Yang. If we can’t bring her down before the King’s goons arrive, regroup with Waia. Under no circumstances does anyone leave this building, watch out for anyone making use of any exits.”
Omet patted the Potirangi before they followed the rest down. “We’ll come back soon. Hopefully.”
Xiao looked around at the devastated room. “Okay, just getting Yang to leave the city would probably be enough, but maybe we can be a little more delicate in future?”
Salazar patted him on the back. “I shoot bombs out of my hands. That’s not going to happen.”
Xiao sighed. “Wishful thinking.”
-
The dashboard in the command center was more than a little daunting at first glance, but Yang was quickly getting the hang of it. “See, it’s easy to spot a con. Everyone knows the classic card tricks and shell games, and you don’t get approached by someone on the street offering you money if you pick a card without getting more than a little suspicious. And plenty of people like to think of themselves as the smart type. After all, you were able to figure out that this person was able to scam you in two seconds, they must clearly be stupid if they’re that obvious about it. So you figure you’ve got their number, you know their trick. Might as well play along, beat them at their own game. They did offer you money, after all.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
-
Under Mark’s orders, Horan had stayed outside the castle. He floated around the base of the castle, scouting through the inordinate amount of ceiling-height windows. The Leviathan Council must have really not liked having opaque walls. Horan could respect that.
He put his hands up against one window, looking in at an adorably small monster climbing up a staircase. He waved his hand and created a gust of wind that pushed the monster backwards and sent it tumbling back down the stairs.
Horan’s cackling was brought to a close when he saw none other than the King at the top of the stairs, looking him dead in the eye while being carried in an arm throne by two burly, four-armed thugs. Both were carrying paintings in their spare arms.
The monster Horan had pushed got up and looked around in confusion. The King pointed Horan out on the other side of the window. The monster growled and hefted up a crossbow.
Horan decided to fly out of view before any more shots could be fired. But when the crossbow bolt flew through the glass, of course it just had to start glowing and turn in midair to start following Horan. He was getting really sick of magic.
He pushed the bolt down and flew up at once, letting the bolt embed itself in the wall. Wow, for being operable by such tiny hands, that crossbow could fire some huge bolts.
But now that his attention wasn’t on the inside of the castle, Horan realized that there was an unsettling noise echoing around the building. A low hum, slowly building in intensity. Horan looked around, but saw nothing that could be producing such a noise. But wasn’t that one street blocked off before?
-
Yang pulled a lever and the glyphs in the room beyond the window started glowing brighter and brighter, creating more and more flashes of blue within the Locus. The other room began to slide up, at least from Yang’s perspective, and obscured the Locus from her view while the window found a new opening to create a view for. “But for most people, you tend to let your guard down when you think you’re the smartest person in the room. You think you’ve got that two-bit cheat pegged. And that’s the beauty of the Kansas City Shuffle. Because while you think you’re outsmarting the scammer at their own game…”
-
Waia slid down the side of one of the hallways, her fingers raking deep gouges in the wall as the scooped-off stone slid across her arm. This superhero landing was not going the way she had planned, but at least she now had plenty of time to gather enough material for one of her lava suits.
She leapt off the bottom of the hallway and fell onto the top of another, her armored legs cracking the stone beneath her. She didn’t get it. The cake-shaped room was supposed to be at least in this general vicinity, but this hall just led off into empty space.
She took her headphones out and… Wait, what was that? She heard a steadily rising hum from all around her. Wait, no. That was just the acoustics of the weird bowl of rooms and halls around her. She looked up into the opening sky and… Yup. That was it.
The distinctly cake-shaped structure was floating right above her, its tip pointed straight at her and beginning to glow a dim blue. And at the back of the structure, grinning through a window like a maniac, was Yang.
“...They’ve been walking right into the real con this whole time.” Yang snapped.
Waia dove away as a bolt of lightning obliterated the end of the hallway. The shockwave sent her flying off and into another room several dozen feet away, the impact barely cushioned by her armor.
Waia spat gold out of her mouth and looked up at the floating room, which was lowering itself into the open space. “Okay, this might be a little more complicated than would be ideal.”
-
The first sign for the others that something had happened was that the world outside the numerous windows was bathed in light. The second was a loud crack, followed by the entire building rumbling.
Mark pursed his lips. “Guess Waia drew the short straw then.”
Another flash, another crack, more rumbling. Quet began to jog up a staircase. “Yup. Moving. It’s a plan.”
Omet looked over their shoulder. “Hey, do you think we should take Millie up there? That’s probably a good deal faster than taking the stairs.”
Mark shrugged as he followed Quet up the stairs. “There’s still the King, we need to cover that base or else his guys might take us off guard.”
Omet began to walk backwards while pointing over their shoulder. “Well, there’s not really much I can do on that front. I’ll just go see what I can do with a giant flying sky-cuttlefish-thing. There’s probably something.”
Xiao gave them a thumbs-up. “Cool with me.”
Omet mirrored the thumbs-up and left.
Mark groaned. “I need to start figuring out contingency plans. This is taking up too much time.”
Horan rapped on a nearby window and pushed the latch up from the other side. He pushed the window open and leaned through. “Hey, just a heads-up, there’s some serious stuff going on upstairs. Probably Waia. We should probably deal with that, right?”
Another rumble. A severed room and part of the connecting hallway fell behind Horan. Mark looked the Primus dead in the eye. “I don’t know, Horan. This is the first I’m hearing of this. Do you think it requires our attention?”
Horan’s expression fell. “Also, the King’s guys are, like, on the floor below you.”
Mark groaned. “Okay, uh… Horan, keep scouting. Maybe give us intel on what’s going on with Waia and Omet. Quet, Xiao, Salazar, keep heading up from here. I’ll deal with the King.”
Salazar held up a hand. “I’m staying with you, actually.”
“No, you’re probably the heaviest hitter here, besides Waia. We need all our best fighters at the ready to deal with…” Another rumble. “...That.”
“What, are you gonna stop me?” Salazar folded his arms. “I’d enjoy making sure this works out.”
“Ugh, fine.” Mark pointed up the stairs. “Quet, Xiao, get moving. We’ve got work to do down here.”
-
Omet watched the flashes go off within the tangle of upper rooms while they piloted the Potirangi upward. “Okay, it’s escalated. Guess I should have seen that coming. But you know what, Millie? I… No, I have no idea what I’m even doing anymore. Mark’s got this figured out, I just need to… uh…”
A large branch of the castle was severed from the main body by a blast of lightning, collapsing to the ground in a plume of dust and miscellaneous fluids. Omet looked back up to see the Locus room chasing a small, faintly luminous figure through the thicket of stone and glass. Okay then.
Yang spotted the approaching Potirangi through her window. “Oh, hello. Someone new to shoot at? Don’t mind if I do.”
Omet saw the tip of the room turn to face them and begin glowing blue. “Oh no.” Looking down, they mustered up everything they had and slapped the floor of the command room.
The entire Potirangi split in two half a second before a bolt of lightning sliced through the space it had just been in. Still at the helm, Omet ignored the ringing in their ears and spotty vision, at least for the moment. That was a lot. They looked over at the command room of the other Potirangi and saw their duplicate doing the same. The two exchanged a weak wave and looked back at the Locus room.
“Okay then.” Yang picked the Potirangi on the left and snapped into the funnel again. But by the time the shot was fully charged up, the Potirangi was right on top of her.
The lightning punched a hole straight through the monster, but it still had more than enough momentum to slam into the flying room. Omet dove through the (thankfully glassless) windshield of the command room and landed on top of the Locus room. Kamikaze charge into lightning cannon? Check. Lightning cannon now plummeting into remainder of castle? Also check. Everything was coming up Omet! Except for Omet, who was actually going down with the cannon in question. That was less fun.
A moment before the room landed, the other Omet swooped in and picked them up on the remaining Potirangi’s fin. “Well, that worked. Now what?”
The other Omet’s voice was faint from inside the command room. “Thanks, Omet. I’d be dead without you, Omet.”
The Potirangi flew past the glowing figure, who Omet now recognized as being a heavily-armored Waia. There weren’t many other people it could have been, but it was still nice to see her.
Waia waved at Omet. “That was pretty sweet, how’re you doing now?!”
Omet adjusted their grip on the Potirangi’s fins as they flew past. “Been better, been worse.”
“Cool. Bye.”
Omet waved with one hand before the fin was pulled up and they rolled onto the deck of the Potirangi.
They pulled aside the curtain and caught the other Omet’s attention. “Morning.”
“Morning. Sorry about being mean earlier, there’s a lot going on.”
“True dat.” The two Omets high fived and merged back together. “Now to figure out what to do with my new, unsplittable ride.”