Elwin leapt from the window on the third storey of the library.

Wings sprouted from his back as Blue morphed to support him. The silver metal spread out, impossibly thin and strong, and flapped once, gracefully sending Elwin to a collapsed rooftop across the street.

The face of the library had been demolished. Several of its large columns had broken apart, causing the entire roof to fall to the ground and spill over the front steps. Elwin saw the people of Sarigold working to clear the rubble away and tend to the wounded.

But there was a more pressing matter. Using his Gift, Elwin could sense the clothing of people trapped in the rubble beneath him.

Unable to ignore someone in need of his help, he pointed to a spot in the ruined house beneath them.

"There's someone below us here." He said.

“In a situation like this, it is most important to stop whoever is causing the damage first,” Blue told him.

“We can’t just leave them here. They’re bleeding.”

“If you insist.” Blue sighed.

“Don’t worry, you two. I’m going to find out what’s going on.” Phee said over their communications network.

Blue morphed the armour into tendrils. Some had cameras and sensors on their ends, searching through the rubble. Others wrapped themselves around pieces of rubble, pulling them safely clear and freeing the people beneath.

"Thank you." A mother and her son. The child was too overwhelmed by the whole situation to say much of anything.

From this vantage point, there were only two other areas of residential housing that had been damaged. The first was the section across the narrow side street, where a significant portion of the street had been reduced to rubble, down to the ground level. The other was an even larger area closer to the main road. Both sides of the alleyway had been demolished. Some members of the public had already begun trying to assist those trapped.

The explosions seemed to have stopped, so Elwin focused on rescuing as many people as possible. He leapt across the sidestreet with Blue’s help. A thick cloud of dust obscured everything. Blue morphed her form to give Elwin a dust-filtering mask so that he could breathe freely and they got to work freeing the people beneath the destroyed street.

It was quick work between the two of them.

But, one of the survivors was an unconscious man bleeding profusely from his head. The others, a man and a woman, watched on anxiously.

“If we leave him like that, he will die. You need to feed him one of the healing potions we got from the Swamp Monolith.” Blue warned.

“I have it right here,” Elwin said, patting a clear glass flask on his bandolier beneath Blue’s form.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Blue shapeshifted subtly, uncorking the flask and siphoning the liquid into herself. She sent a tendril to the unconscious man. The tip of the tendril morphed into a needle that inserted itself onto a vein in the man’s arm. Blue pumped the potion into him and the man was healed. His wound closed and colour returned to his face.

“He will live.” Blue declared.

Elwin gave a sigh of relief. Hastily acknowledging the people’s thanks with a wave, he headed towards the final site.

Stepping into the cloud of dust, a most unusual scene confronted them.

Elwin had expected to see a collapsed building, but instead, he was faced with a collapsed street. That is, the tiling of the street itself had partially collapsed into a hollow, candlelit cavern below. The rest of it hung, frozen, in the process of collapsing. Further beyond, the rest of the collapsed residential district was relatively normal.

Amidst the frozen chaos was an all-too-familiar figure.

"Kari…?" Elwin muttered in confusion.

Why was he here, of all people? And why was everything frozen?

Kari was frozen in the position of being knocked over by a blast. A cloud of razor-sharp ice before him. Left unchecked, the shards would tear his fleshy body to shreds.

Elwin soon deduced what had happened.

Kari’s stasis bracelet had shattered, thus releasing the spirit of stagnation sealed within it. The spirit invisible spirit had frozen anything unprotected by Universal Law in a roughly five-meter radius.

Of all things that could've happened, it seemed that a single shard of icy shrapnel had struck his stasis bracelet before any other piece of debris. If that hadn’t happened, Kari’s body would’ve been completely torn apart.

Was the human just tremendously lucky? Or had the hydrohand subconsciously directed the shrapnel there? It was impossible to know for certain.

Elwin and Blue noted several nasty wounds across Kari’s torso. His eyes were bloodshot, tears streamed involuntarily from the corners of his eyes and his lips were turning a frightening shade of blue.

"He cannot breathe," Blue noted.

“We have to help him.” Said Elwin.

“You may not want to hear this, but based on my analysis, Kari is responsible for all this destruction.”

“I don’t care,” Elwin replied staunchly. “Are you saying that he deserves to die as a result of that?”

Blue was taken aback at his rebuttal.

"If that is how you feel… we don't have much time," warned Blue. “Lucina's Angels are already en route, and if anyone finds out he was the perpetrator, who knows what might happen to him?”

#

Layer by layer, Kari’s body was slowly pushing the air beneath him out of the way by the force of gravity.

The shattered stasis bracelet floated before the dying man in eerie silence, as the frozen air could not transmit energy in the vibrations known as sound.

The Wrights were dead, but at what cost?

A silver angel; The last thing Kari’s blurry eyes could make out before darkness claimed him.

They had come to guide him to the afterlife.

...Or had they?

With a gasp, Kari came to with a twinge in his arm. He tried to lift a hand to his throat reflexively, but he was too weak.

A quiet voice reached Kari’s ears, as if from far away.

“Leave him now, Elwin, we have done enough for this sad human. He is no better now than those who had wronged him.”

"No. I can’t leave him like this…” The kind-hearted Elwin said. “Kari, “

Will all the strength he could muster, Kari somehow managed to open his eyes, just a sliver. But even so, he could not make out more than a blurry, shining silhouette.

"You must use this second chance to be better," Elwin said.

Kari’s mouth flapped open, but his consciousness slipped away once more before he could form a response.

"You just can't help yourself, can you?" Blue said in a mixture of annoyance and... Admiration? If immaturity could be admired.

“Time to go, Now!” Phee hissed, appearing on the edge of a rooftop above them. The Bloodstone spoke with as much sternness as she could muster. The Angels were almost upon them; They could not afford to be caught.

Blue and Elwin obliged. But, before Elwin made to leap to join Phee on the rooftops, Blue spotted something… and quickly sent out a metallic tendril to retrieve it.

“What’s the plan now?” Phee asked as they headed along the rooftops away from the scene.

“We find the last Labyrinth Trial,” Blue replied.