Marroo hurled himself from the burning rooftop while the soldier he’d stopped for shrieked amidst the blaze. An aircab rose from below as he leapt and Marroo slammed into it’s side with a grunt, barely managing to snatch its roof before he dropped to the cement fifty yards beneath them.

Faces stared out at Marroo as he clung to its side while they rose into the air. With a yank he flipped onto the roof as more aircabs shot by to either side, and he leapt, pushing off of a passing aircab to land on an industrial silo just across the street from the burning building.

An infused bullet tore into the aircab he’d just vacated and sent it spinning through the street vomiting wreckage and human body parts from its interior before it slammed into the ground.

A beam lashed at Marroo on top of the silo but he was already headed for the ground before the stricken cab landed. He felt the four flames of its passengers’ spirits wink out as they died and the infusion pressed into he machinery dissipate as the cabs guts spread themselves across the pavement.

Marroo hit the ground as the corrupted adept gained the top of the burning building well behind him, then threw himself into the maze of narrow alleyways in this part of the city.

Balconies jut out from either side of the alley he sprinted down. They cut out all but the thinnest sliver of light from the core. That sliver of orange light ran like a lightning bolt down the throat of the alleyway, zigging and zagging with back and forth of the balconies. What meagre light penetrated the alley illuminated drains along the center half clogged with the trash and litter washed into them by the Dregs’ infrequent rainstorms. Doors opened off the alleyway into apartments filled with rooms even smaller than the one he and Dhret shared closer to the Iblanie tower. Marroo could hear their occupants snoring, screaming, or shouting as he shot past the doors, aware, at every moment, of the corrupted aura moving swiftly behind him.

A door opened in front of Marroo and he leapt it without pausing. A prowling band of teenagers spotted him and spread out to intercept him but he pressed himself to one side wall and let momentum hurl him past.

Shouts chased him as he leapt a drunk then hurtled past a couple that ducked out of his way as he flew past.

One alleyway came to an end and four more split off where five buildings that should never have been built so close together were squeezed onto the same street. A fence blocked off the one directly in front of him and he leapt it without a second thought to hurtle further into the darkening maze.

He felt the adept leap hundreds of yards behind him to throw himself after Marroo across the rooftops, not bothering to lose himself as Marroo had done in the maze.

Machines groaned and screamed in the buildings to either side as Marroo passed by manufactories as crowded as the tenements he’d just escaped. Corruption leaked from the street around him like a manifestation of the adept behind him. The alleyway split again at another fence Marroo cleared as easily as he’d cleared the first, then again not fifty yards further on where Marroo doubled back in the hopes of losing the adept that followed from above.

There was no losing the adept.

There was no running from him.

With each time Marroo turned in an effort to lose the adept chasing after him, he felt the aura of the man above him turn with him, following the scent of Marroo’s spirit as unerringly as Marroo tracked him through the intervening layers of cement and steel. Thanks to the clutter and convoluted nature of the alleys Marroo was forced to follow instead of the open air, his pursuer was gaining on him.

A surge of poison announced when the adept finally caught him. It washed through the balconies overhead as though they were made of nothing but air and Marroo threw himself away from the deadly spiritual power in a sudden leap. Rot bloomed across the ceiling like pooling water as Marroo scrambled backwards and a second wave of the poison cascaded through the building just behind him.

Marroo’s Icon didn’t come with the kind of long range technique the adept above him was using to hurl death through the solid structure of the building in between them, at least not any his father had ever demonstrated. His father had been able to manifest his aura of swirling knives some thirty or forty yards away, but Marroo, in those few instances when he’d noted the range of the powers he didn’t want in the first place, had only ever manifested them at twenty yards, but that was only when they were unarmed.

Marroo scrambled in the patch of trash in front of him as bits of building crumbled around him in the spreading corruption. He came up with a three foot long length of twisted steel bar and twisted his spirit around it. It was nothing like a sword, but when Marroo pressed his spirit into the steel the round edges of the bar gained a power in the physical world it could never have possessed regardless of the hours spent pounding it flat and sharpening it into a sword’s physical imitation.

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He threw it.

He never saw the adept above him. His improvised projectile punched through floors, ceilings, and structural supports with all the force Marroo could put into the throw through his open meridians. The corrupted aura recoiled as the bar hurtled by but Marrroo didn’t wait to see if he’d struck his target. He threw himself through the pooling venom of the breath that still lingered from the waves of his pursuer’s techniques and plummeted down the mouth of a nearby alley. He was already turning down the next intersection by the time the pursuing adept collected himself and sprinted after him.

Blades manifested around Marroo as he ran. They churned the trash and scarred the passing walls as he lost control of his icon in the rush to get away.

“I am not a sword!” He thought as he ran.

One of the spinning blades in his aura sliced through a cable slung low across the tunnel of the alleyway and it fell in two halves, snapping and spitting sparks behind him.

“I am not my icon! I am myself.”

An alley shot off from his at a right angle and he heard, like the indistinct babble of a stream, the noise of a crowd at some far end of the maze down that corridor. He slammed to a halt and turned abruptly to follow it and felt the adept turn to try and cut him off near its far end before he turned again to move parallel to the noise.

This alley ran straight and clear, light from the core fell unimpeded on a narrow street cleared of the clutter and trash which dominated the maze he’d just emerged from. Open. Open to the rooves the adept traversed behind him.

He closed his eyes as he flew down the street and he pulled at the spiritual aura swirling around his external meridians.

“My spirit is my own.” He thought. “It belongs to me.”

The alleyway was bricked over at the mouth where it should have opened onto a real street. It was bricked all the way to the top and Marroo opened his eyes and raised one arm before he slammed into the wall and cut through it like a sword passing through flesh.

Brickwork crumbled behind Marroo as he stumbled into the plaza beyond. Once that plaza might have been a street. It was wide and spacious, particularly in comparison to the cramped alleyways behind him, now though it was closed in on all sides by buildings that looked thrown together by chance as much as plan or intention. Towering apartment buildings leaned over the plaza’s edge along one side while a factory buzzed with activity at the opposite edge and stalls filled whatever open spaces could be found that didn’t throng with walking people.

Marroo didn’t pause when people turned to stare at the boy who’d just crashed through the facade along one side of the building. He ducked into the crowd and pushed through among the stalls and shouting merchants while he wrestled with breath that wanted to force itself out of his flesh and into his meridians.

He knew when he’d gotten the veil in place. The technique came with a sensation like sinking to the bottom of a blisteringly cold well and staring up at light that winked and undulated on the surface above.

His sense of the spiritual world shrank as though grown suddenly very distant with that surface. He still felt the adept following him like a corrupted sun, but it was a sun occluded by a dense bank of clouds, a light filtered and dampened by the physical reality Marroo had forced his spirit to recognize in forcing it into his own flesh.

The pressure of the sword icon he’d felt since his father taught him to touch it faded likewise until it was no more than a gentle irritation at the edge of his sense of the unreal around him.

Marroo slowed. He let the crowds jostle him while he kept his eyes closed and focused on the veil he’d only practiced a handful of times. When he’d followed them far enough he opened his eyes and backtracked until he found a place where he could hide and watch the hole he’d made in the wall.

A huge facade covered that side of the marketplace. Faded and peeling paint depicted a huge smiling man with purple eyes and an open hand extended as though to offer the crowded marketplace the grimy factory at its far end. A badge for some sect was pinned to the painted man’s chest just above the hole where Marroo had broken through, the wall he’d broken apparently erected a generation before simply so the man depicted could reach across the front of two buildings without interruption.

Marroo didn’t recognize the red springtail painted on the badge from any sect, but judging from the age of the mural and the holes broken into it where occupants of the buildings it crossed wanted windows, neither did the people living and working in the buildings it was painted to commemorate.

A shadow appeared at the top of the mural as Marroo watched and he got his first look at the adept. His was a ragged shadow, ragged, and pale, more like a ghost than the dark skinned people milling in the marketplace beneath him, more like a corpse than Marroo, or the half dozen pale skinned relatives Marroo could see moving among the stalls.

Marroo tucked himself closer to the placard he’d hidden behind as the Adept cast about. He felt, despite the distance his veil imposed, the spirit of the adept ripple as he opened it to look for the telltale spiritual signal Marroo should have left as an adept of the sword. The man held a pistol in one hand, raised beside his ear as though ready to drop and fire at the first sign of his prey.

When he didn’t find Marroo immediately, the adept turned to stalk along the outskirts of the plaza, pistol arquebus at the ready, occasionally wiping at something dark that leaked from his eyes. Marroo kept the placard between them, but the man was joined shortly by a half a dozen soldiers in an aircab that hummed as it dropped to hover over the building from which he surveyed the marketplace.

An argument followed. One which Marroo found difficult to follow thanks to his veil. He still heard bits and pieces, and knew, when the cab rose into the air, that it was to return to whatever base they’d come from somewhere to the South.

The adept did not join them in the cab.

The ragged old man prowled across the rooftops for a few more minutes, scanning the crowd before he finally turned to march away across the rooftops.

Marroo kept his veil active long after the venomous sun faded into the hazy aura of the Dregs.