Willow tried not to stare at Seunghyo, but everything he had just said made her head spin. It wasn’t just the betrayal of Hana’s trust, but his specific mention of Willow that affected her so.

“The Cha Bell Corporation will not allow it,” he had said.

Back in Seorak, when Seah first made mention of the corporations, Willow had been taken aback. She had done everything she could since entering the Academy to avoid the eye of corporate sponsors who scouted each class.

Completing the hidden quest as a senior student at the Academy has spread her name far and wide, but Willow had avoided meetings and turned down every offer that came her way. In fact, she thought she’d done a great job.

But the fact that Seunghyo knew about her could only mean that his overseers knew about her too. Worse yet, the director’s board at Cha Bell had to know not only who she was, but where she was.

Sunbae, are you out there? We need to talk.

There was no response. More than likely, the dense walls of the structure were preventing their communications from reaching one another. The System worked well above ground, but this far deep, there was no telling whether they’d be able to communicate with each other through the Clan Chat.

Willow’s hands shook. She needed to contact her mother as soon as possible.

She tried to calm herself down with deep breaths. But try as she might, she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. Then she realized her whole body was shaking. No, not her body. The entire structure she was standing in.

It was a tremor. Faint, but unmistakable.

She looked up at Seunghyo who was fully alert to the situation.

His years as a pathfinder taught Seunghyo many lessons, the most important of which was to trust his instincts. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as his mind raced trying to explain the tremor. Within three seconds, his brain had come up with ten causes of the tremor and none of them were good.

The tremor grew stronger until it was an undeniable rumble.

“Do you feel that?” Willow whispered.

“Quet,” Seunghyo hissed.

Willow kept as still as she could. The shaking didn’t grow any stronger, but it also didn’t dissipate at all. “Shouldn’t we move?”

No answer.

“Are we waiting for something?”

The response came quick and curt. “Yes.”

“What are we waiting for?”

Seunghyo turned to face her slowly, but his eyes were darting from side to side. “We are two stories underground in a rusting structure built with Soviet era slave labor. We are waiting to see which direction we have to run in.”

A low hanging light crashed into the ground and shattered. A ceiling panel crashed down immediately, dumping decades of dust into the air.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Shit.

Seunghyo moved swiftly, grabbing Willow by the arm and running for the door.

“Move!”

The shaking turned so violent that Willow was nearly thrown off her feet. The walls bend at awkward angles and the floor beneath her feet shifted from side to side.

Ceiling tiles fell and shattered on the floor as Seunghyo shoved Willow ahead of him and they made for the hallway.

“Where are we going?” Willow called out.

She turned for a second to look behind and had a glimpse of the room they were just in shift down and disappear from view as rubble rained down from above.

“Anywhere, but here!” Seunghyo shouted back.

***

Cyrus’ insistence on accompanying the team to the north was met with a stern look. The kind that he would’ve expected from his grandfather, but Seah’s wasn’t dissimilar. It was unnerving.

But, eventually, she relented on the condition that Seah, herself, and Eunice the technomancer were allowed to accompany him.

The journey had been uneventful and while Cyrus wanted to set up a base further beyond the border, Seah insisted on staying below the traditional border to the north. And while Cyrus attempted to argue with her, even he had to admit that the minefield along the border’s edge presented an unnecessary danger.

Scouts had moved back and forth across the border and reported little to no activity. A smaller team to the west found the train and its operator iced in. The train had made its way north easily enough, but after only a day, the tracks had iced over leaving it stranded.

“Will they be able to get the train out?” Seah asked.

He scanned the report before answering. “The train is already heading back across the border. It didn’t get more than a few miles in, but the tracks leading back have iced over as well. It might take a day, but the operator and train are both fine.”

Seah scanned the horizon. “Good. We only have a handful of operational locomotives left. It’d be a shame to lose another one.”

In moments like these, Cyrus didn’t know what to say to his wife. He’d come to realize that Seah wasn’t being cold, rather it was a distance. Not just from the matters at hand, but from Cyrus himself.

“Sir.”

Behind them a scout stood at attention. He wore a thick winter coat with heavy snow gloves. No doubt he just returned from an outing.

Cyrus turned to face him. “Anything to report?”

The man’s face was clouded with anxiety.

Or is that fear? Cyrus wondered to himself.

“Y-yes, sir. The man stammered. Something had him shaken. “W-we’ve spotted something, sir. You should come see it for yourself.”

There was no shortage of mountains along the borderlands, but Cyrus has chosen this location carefully. The mountainside faced the north with a shallow valley separating them from opposing mountains on the other side of the border.

The scout led the way to a hot air balloon erected not for travel, but to provide an elevated viewpoint. Once they were secured, a spellcaster summoned a flame which elevated them a thousand feet into the sky.

“What’s with all the secrecy?” Seah murmured.

Cyrus nodded. He reminded himself to scold the scout later. Whatever it was, it should’ve been reported before dragging Cyrus and Seah up into the sky.

The scout pointed past the northern peaks to a ruined structure. “There, sir.”

The north had long been abandoned before the barony came into power. From this high up, there was an array of abandoned structures and crumbling outposts.

Cyrus squinted, but he didn’t see anything of interest except a large herd of monsters. “I don’t see anything, scout. What are you-”

His voice cracked when he recognized what he was looking at. What he thought to be a large herd of monsters was a massive sea of people. They walked so slowly that they appeared to be a river or a dust cloud from this distance.

“Hand me a viewfinder,” Seah commanded.

The mage retrieved one and, with shaky hands, handed it to her.

“Oh my god,” she whispered. “How-”

“Sir!” the scout shouted.

The man pointed into the distance, further north. Smoke billowed into the sky. “A fire, sir.”

The reaction rippled through the horde below. Hundreds of heads turned to face the direction of the fire and the sea of people moved towards the stimuli.