51.

The familiar taste of a healing potion washed down Santi’s throat and he leaned back to rest for a moment as the potion took effect. It was weak, but enough to start having his wounds begin to knit back together and stop the bleeding. Between this and his now increased vitality, he could keep pushing a bit more.

The faint sound of splashing reached his ears after only a moment or two of rest and Santi got to his feet in a hurry. He couldn’t let them catch back up with him if he wanted to recover. He got back in the sticky morass of sewer sludge and started trekking forward again.

Santi pulled a tendril of mana from his exhausted body and used it to wrap [Air Current] tight around him, muffling the sounds of his travel. He thought about the already disintegrated note from Akthyr a moment and knew he would have to think on it longer.

If the administrator of the integration was pulling strings to keep him alive the biggest question was why? Santi didn’t believe for a moment it was because of entertainment reasons. Then after he figured out why, how could Santi take better advantage of it. Would Akthyr help him to the direct detriment of the Apostates?

The black passages of the sewers were impossible to navigate, the only sounds were his muffled breaths, resounding loudly in his own ears. The drawback to using his spell like this was it prevented sound from reaching him. He was truly walking blind and deaf down the passages.

With each step the potion worked more and more of its magic on him. His multitude of wounds closed, though his legs were still weak. He needed the sewers to break the constant press of the enemies who were wearing him down, but he needed to be out of the dark before the Apostate managed to find him. He was still trying to compartmentalize the fact that he had fought an Apostate on fairly equal footing.

Even with the assassin having the element of surprise and allies, Santi had managed to stay alive and ahead of the man’s dagger. He hadn’t won that fight, but he certainly hadn’t lost it. For so long the Apostates had lived in his head, figures larger than life.

They had been the primary drivers of the war, their strength the pillars their cult had built their strength upon. To fight one, let alone six, had been something he had never really considered. His plan had been to build a base of power and then find the other Champions. He would become one himself, but in his heart he knew he couldn’t confront them directly.

That duel had shaken those iron held beliefs. He had stood toe to toe with a magekiller and not died. Santi had to finally admit to himself that what he was doing was great, no, his own personal growth was exemplary. The once much stronger and powerful Apostates were closer to peers than superiors.

Santi kept moving in silence for twelve seconds, the time it took him to travel eight slow steps, before dropping his spell and holding perfectly still. The sound of splashing was further away than it had been. He cloaked himself again and started moving again, following the tunnel lines away from splashing.

He rinsed and repeated, again and again as he went down the tunnels, each time the sounds of pursuit got further away. Santi moved through the sewers for twenty minutes until at last the sound of the splashing was gone. Santi’s wounds had dulled to a dull ache and his mana had recovered enough that he didn’t feel like he was dying every time he drew on it.

It took only a few minutes to find a service ladder and ascend it, pushing the heavy manhole cover off with ease as he climbed free of the sewers. Santi took in his surroundings, having emerged next to an alleyway. Santi crawled free of the sewer, replacing the manhole cover as quietly as possible as he darted into the alley.

With his back to a wall, he finally looked about and took in the surroundings. He was away from the heart of downtown and the towering ruined skyscrapers. The historical district was still part of downtown but near the periphery. The buildings averaged three stories and were made of faded brown brick. The streets were narrow and tight with a large, ugly, concrete parking structure plopped down at the edge like an obtrusive toadstool.

Santi looked about, searching for hints of movement. If he recalled correctly, he was only a block or three away from the stadium that his sister was supposed to be being held in. Santi waited a moment more before slinking out of the alleyway, keeping low to the ground he headed towards the parking structure.

If he cut through the structure he could bypass half a block and have cover. There was always the danger of what could be lairing in the dark structure, but the Primus Alpha was a blessing in disguise. With the head of its opponents decorating his nest, it was apparent that the entire downtown had been pacified by the ape-like monsters.

Each step Santi took, he was bracing for an attack. Either from above by the apes, or from the shadows by the Apostate. It made more sense for them to have regrouped at the stadium, but he couldn’t be sure of that. Some were obviously still hunting for him in the sewers and all it took for him to die was a moment of inattention

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds later he jumped over a low concrete wall and into the cramped levels of the parking garage. The thick walls and low ceiling made the structure feel claustrophobic even if it was primarily deserted by cars. Santi sprinted, staying low to the ground, across the level. He could feel his skin prickling as if eyes were on him, but no attack came. Nothing entered his sphere of air and there was no outward threat. Still, it felt like he was being watched.

Santi had lived through too much to ignore the feeling, but at the same time he couldn’t abandon his goal. Yessi needed him and whatever they planned on doing with the riftheart had to be stopped immediately.

He got to the edge of the garage and jumped straight up and over the ledge, ignoring the stairs, and rolled across the sidewalk. Nothing came. No attack or visible opponent. The feeling lingered. Santi cursed, mind strained from the events of the last few hours.

“Fuck this, let’s just go get Yesi,’ Santi whispered to himself to help reaffirm his decision. The back of the stadium was visible, the multitude of shops built around it all long abandoned and destroyed. Cars were burnt out wrecks in their parking spots and a trio of police cruisers had been tipped on their side in a makeshift barricade.

Santi jogged past all of it, hardly glancing at them as he started to climb the many gentle ramps that led upwards. He almost missed the first sentinel, sitting in the ruins of a sports apparel store. The man was short and had sat down on a foldout lawn chair while wearing the same clothes the mannequins were wearing. If he hadn’t flinched as Santi came into eyesight, he would have been fine.

Santi spun toward him, closing the distance in one long lunge. The morph blade lengthened into a lance as Santi tried to silence the man before he could speak. A acidic green bubble popped into place around the sentinel as he surged to his feet, grabbing a trumpet that had been sitting next to him.

Santi’s lance broke the shield with only a moment's resistance before impaling the man. Santi’s momentum carried him into the heart of the store, the dying man hoisted up on the lance before being pinned to the wall like an insect. The dying man gasped, blood leaking from his mouth as he gaped at Santi.

Santi looked at the man, but couldn’t place him. His jersey of black and purple was stained dark red, and his face was wide with sagging jowls of a large man who’d lost weight recently. The thinning hair was unkempt and his beard was thick and knotted, his appearance quite distinct.

“Who are you?” Santi asked. The man’s only answer was the ding of a kill confirmation. Santi retracted his morph blade and looked around to see if there had been any alert raised by killing the sentinel. When he saw no one running toward him to confront him he took the moment to check the notification.

Horn-Blower lvl. 28

He had a class that was specifically for horn blowing? Santi frowned as he looked at the dirty brass trumpet discarded on the floor. It could be some type of sentinel class, or sound mage, or, well lots of things. The general vagueness of the System always left plenty to interpretation. The fact he had been sitting here by himself as a watcher likely indicated he was some type of guard.

The class was unique enough that Santi knew he would have remembered seeing the man around though. Not a lot of people really left practicing their band instruments. Santi bent down and checked his pockets quickly, his mind numb to the ghoulish behavior.

The man carried a thin wallet in the back pocket of his cargo shorts and Santi quickly opened it. There was no money in it, but rather cut up pictures of people’s faces. Dozens of them, folded and faded already, but the likeness was distinct. His kids probably, the woman a wife, his parents, maybe a brother. Santi tossed it all to the floor as he pulled man’s drivers license free and looked at his address.

It was from a town hours to the South. He could have been here for business or something and just got caught during the integration, but he wouldn’t have hastily cut out pictures if that was the case. Those pictures looked like the type one would have framed up and around the house. If that was the case, then he had come from the South.

It wasn’t just Abraham’s men who had been recruited by the Apostate. Santi looked up at the stadium and understood in a whole new light. They needed his sister for a mass evolution of followers the Apostate had dragged with him. The riftheart could fuel dozens of basic evolutions. The Pillar of Civilization should be arriving soon and the Apostate was primed to be able to easily take over the community Santi had built.

Nobody knew of their evil. Of their corruption. If he was dead and his close friends and family gone with an apparent perpetrator having fled, the thousands of people would be without a protector. The Apostate wouldn’t even have a fight on his hand as he came and converted everyone Santi had worked so hard protecting to his cause.

“Shit.” Santi left the dead man and peeked out towards the stadium. The entrance was elevated away from the street level, but there was a multitude of bars, shops, and maintenance corridors that wove under the steel and glass building. If he got to the correct service corridor, he could infiltrate that way rather than going through the backdoor. If they had one low level guard, they’d have another waiting for him.

Slipping out of the store, Santi stuck low to the ground, using the multitude of planter boxes to weave his way back down the ramps and toward the passageways marked “Maintenance Staff Only”. The door was still shut and locked. Santi threaded the morph blade into the crack and cut the locks, pulling the door open with ease and heading down the passageways to the bowels of the stadium.

Polished concrete was slick under his feet as he was once again plunged into darkness. At least this time it didn’t stink