An angry engineer stomped out of the basement elevator, up two flights of stairs to a central office, temporarily repurposed, and threw the door open. It smashed against the wall, startling the one inside. Verox wasn’t in the mood to find it amusing. “Where’s the girl?”
“What are you talking about?” Abellar groused.
“Ivy, the girl. My driver. Don’t be daft. You’re old, not mentally handicapped.”
Old as he was, Abellar reached for the spectacles on his desk and set them at the top of his fat nose. Clasping his fingers and leaning back in his chair, the old badger looked at her with those owlish eyes, quickly putting together the pieces. “You lost her and think I had something to do with it?”
“Why else would she go missing if it wasn’t for you trying to sequester her away from me after I took over care for her.” She slammed the door closed with as much force as she’d thrown it open and crossed the room to lean over his desk, eye level with him. She searched, looking for something, anything, that would tell her she was right… and found nothing. “Shit.”
“And now we’re on the same page.” He stood from his desk and went to a side console, pressed several buttons, and received the two shot glasses with amber liquid that dispensed from the wall. “Cheers.”
“How are you so calm about all of this?” she hissed, gesturing toward the door. “The program relies on the ELS—”
Abellar cut her off. “The ELS? Calm? I’m the farthest thing from, and all you can do is think about your power suit.” He scoffed. “I knew you were devoted to engineering, but I didn’t know you lacked a sense of self-preservation of your own.”
“What—”
“How long do you think until the brother learns of his missing sister?” Abellar interrupted again.
Her mouth dried instantly as she recalled the spectacle that monster given flesh had done so casually. Her mind raced as she pursed her lips. Abellar regarded her with pity as she continued to think herself in circles.
By the time she paused, she needed that drink. Abellar’s waiting hand was a godsend. She gulped the amber liquid down in a single take, gagging at the flavor, then hissing at the residual burn.
Still trying to wrap her head around the absolute mess of a situation they were in, she let go a bittersweet chuckle. At least Abellar wasn’t lording the fact she had claimed the role of supervisor and immediately lost her charge over her head. Yet. “I’ve looked everywhere. Her trackers all went offline at the same time.”
“Then let’s think about what could possibly cause such a thing to occur.”
“It shouldn’t be possible. Not within the tower or all of the Euriste system. We’ve got relay stations setup for anything and everything in-between, up to the highest floors we’ve been to. And even that, it has an internal relay for short distance transmission from higher floors we haven’t established to other relays. There’s nowhere in the tower she could be that I can’t find.” She huffed a frustrated breath. “But she’s gone. Just… poof.”
“Potential malfunction?” Abellar suggested, but his tone suggested great doubt.
“Don’t do this to me right now,” she groaned, falling back into a seat slightly behind her and to the side. “You’ve already figured out. Don’t lead me on.”
“I can’t say I’ve figured it out, exactly. Only that the most probable answer isn’t one that will satisfy the impending calamity we face. Rather than where did she go, we ask who is to be responsible for her going missing? If we’re lucky, we might be able to point him somewhere else…” Abellar’s eyes gleamed with scheming, a vicious and sickly thing.
“Even if we temporarily deflected his ire, look around us,” she said, holding out her arms wide. “Do you think he’ll really forgive us for letting her get snatched up right under our noses? You want to tell him we were so incompetent that we couldn’t stop something from happening to her, which then begs in the question of who did it, Abellar. There’s nobody that isn’t one of us that gets down here, and we both know that.”
“From what I saw, she’s a singularly stubborn creature.” He sighed, likely reminiscing of a time not too long ago. “If she chose to leave our care and go wandering off, how could we stop her? We’ll never have time to determine the responsible parties if we get ourselves obliterated as collateral, will we. The immediate goal is survival. Truth can come later.”
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“And what stops him from nuking our entire compound on his way to chase after a lie? We know nothing about either of them, especially him! For Euriste’s sake, we can’t even call in anybody to stop him. Not a single person, unit, team, group, battalion—nothing will stop him if he wants to leave this floor little more than rubble and ash, but you, you moronic old man, want to lie to him?” Verox threw the glass at Abellar’s head. “Dumbass! To think I even considered trusting you to actually be helpful for even a second!”
“Trust is surely a hard thing to come by these days, which is why I’m going to have to ask you to politely stay out of the way for a few days.” Abellar held up a small vial in between two fingers. “Poison is such an odd thing. Even a drop more of this, and it would kill you. Three more drops than that, and it can be used as a component in a cure.”
A heavy haze obscured her vision as she stared at the vial and then the hand that just held the thrown cup. “You… dumbass…”
Her body felt unusually heavy as she started losing feeling in her lips, fingertips, and toes. Then her arms and legs. The last to go was her sight.
As darkness took her, unsure if she’d ever wake again, she could only think one thing.
Dumbass.
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Laril and his former-rivals-turned-conspirators were in the midst of a rowdy celebration and friendly ribbing competition over which of them would be able to take over the ELS program now that the position was mysteriously unclaimed when the entire facility shook.
Being twenty floors deep in the keystone floor 25 generally protected them from even the strongest of conflicts up in the actual floor itself. Whatever had hit must be big.
They spent a few minutes speculating with increasing hilarity on the things it definitely wasn’t, then went back to celebrating without a care in the world.
It was truly ingenious, Laril thought, silently toasting Demron for the idea. It’d taken weeks to set up, a fortune to prepare for, but the execution was oh-so simple and sweet. Find a ship that would be headed far away with one-way passengers, lock it in as the destination, and then wait. Demron’s Escape Anchor only worked once before he’d need to bind a location again, so there was absolutely no way for him to be implicated. All the evidence would be weeks away by now, and all it took was one touch.
And, best of all, he’d never have to look at those smirking, fearless crimson eyes again. Everything about that girl had been so wrong. Really, they’d been doing everyone a favor.
Not like she was being any help to the cause, however much she talked about doing. Good riddance.
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James growled as he activated Arcanic Imbuement again and chose Primal Fury Totem to augment himself for the third time. The explosive fury of elemental power reinforced his body and supercharged everything within him.
The power erupted into the very air itself as one Legendary skill amplified another in ways he never would’ve imagined at first. He couldn’t tell the limits on the combination, but he knew it made him powerful enough to break things.
And he wanted to break a lot of things.
The sky erupted, as did the very earth beneath his feet. His own primal fury, condensed into a single point, let him blast downward, each strike like a high pressure, floor-destroying drill. Relentless, he dug deeper through the layers of this strange floor within a floor, channeling the power of the wind elementals to ease his rapid descent.
He only eased up when he finally reached something reminiscent of an underground compound, though that didn’t mean he spared the roof as he lowered himself in and looked around.
“Not a bad place,” he mused, imagining Ivy having a great time in a place like this. “Too bad I’ll have to destroy it all.”
Eh, it didn’t matter. He could recreate it in the shop for her later.
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Abellar looked down at Verox, sighing. “It didn’t have to be this way, but you’re just as stubborn as the girl.”
The entire compound shook, and he couldn’t help but sigh again before donning a calm, neutral expression. Never in his wildest imagination would he have thought the boy would arrive so quickly. How, Abellar would never know, considering he’d only just learned of the situation from Verox moments ago.
Something didn’t sit right with him, but he didn’t have time to think about reasonable solutions with a monster. Had the situation been one where logic and reason was present, maybe Verox would’ve had a point. Reason with the boy, find the culprits, hope, maybe beg, for mercy.
Now, Abellar could only hope the boy would leave and leave ample time to hide away somewhere. Somewhere Abellar wouldn’t be found. Maybe convene with the other elders and try to subdue the boy, maybe return home for an impromptu sabbatical.
Either way, he put on his kindest, most grandfatherly face he could manage and stepped out of his office, shutting the door behind him, and following the debris. Despite only ever having seen the boy the one time, Abellar had played the video countless times and committed his visage to memory.
Even with the elements raging around him in ways Abellar couldn’t help but contest with, this was most certainly the young newcomer’s brother.
“Greetings, esteemed guest. It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance in person.”
“I’m sure you’ll think otherwise by the time I leave. Now, I’m sure we both know why I’m here, so why don’t you tell me what I want to know. While you do, I might consider leaving something of this place standing when I leave.”
Well, at least there was some hope for Abellar to make it out alive. And if he played his cards right, maybe the boy would eradicate those Expansionist bastards. “So you see, what happened was…”
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