Chapter 266: Divide and Conquer Pt.2

Jace Brontarion

After dropping Mira off, I raced toward the test isle.

The storm howled around me, its freezing winds and violent lightning intimidating even someone like me. As we pushed through the chaos, ice began to form across my cloud.

I hated not being in control, but I couldn’t afford to care about that now. Sora was what mattered. If anything happened to her, I would never forgive myself.

I pushed my speed even further, racing toward the test isle. By the time I arrived, chaos had taken over. Small fires blazed across the grass, and the geodesic tents flickered in and out of existence. Some were even tipping over from the force of the raging winds.

Please be safe.

Immediately, I sectioned off four pieces of my cloud, commanding them to put out the fires. I was surprised they could still stay lit despite all the precipitation. When I looked closer, it seemed like the rain was actually feeding it.

What are these clouds?

As my cloud pieces tended to the fires, I looked for my sister's pod.

With it so dark, except for the flashes of lightning, it was hard to spot. I focused on her cosmic energy instead. I knew her signature like the back of my hand.

It didn’t take much to hone in on it, and I immediately nose-dived toward her tent.

As I fell, several cosmic energy signatures caught my attention. They didn’t hum like the students’ signatures. Instead, they flickered in and out in rapid bursts. From what I could sense, there were at least eight.

With lightning charged in my hands, I created a wide cage of electricity around my cluster’s tent, then turned my attention to finding the odd sources of cosmic energy that I assumed were the academy’s attackers.

I zipped around on my cloud searching for the attackers, but I couldn’t see them at all, and their cosmic energy kept blinking in and out.

My cloud sparked as I picked up the pace.

Where are they?

Right when I turned the corner and looped around a tent, one of the tents on the far end of the isle was torn to shreds.

My eyes darted to the sky, hoping that it was just lightning.

It wasn’t.

No ionized channels had reached the floating isle in the last couple of minutes.

That meant that it had to come from the surface, and from the attackers.

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Realizing I wouldn’t find them at this rate, I condensed an orb of lightning in my hands and shaped it into a wide net across the area where all the tents were stationed.

It was the same technique I used during the totem games. Using it effectively required intense concentration and a lot of cosmic energy. I still hadn’t mastered it well enough to use it on the move.

Nothing like on-the-fly training.

With my net spread across the isle, I could sense the electrical impulses of every body within its reach. Active or passive, each body produced impulses at its own intervals, leaving a distinct pattern for me to detect.

They could hide their bodies and mask their cosmic signatures, but they couldn’t hide the biology beneath them.

Now it was time for me to go on the offensive.

I let my body ease, transforming into a vaporous cloud, then followed the ionized channels on the surface I created with my net. I raced toward my first target.

Moments later, I materialized behind the intruder and unleashed a bolt of lightning at his back.

The instant it struck, his armor flickered. The technology struggled to hold its form before completely destabilizing, exposing the man beneath it.

He wore an all-black combat suit, lightly covered in matte-black plating, and a broken, glossy-black helmet.

I punched through the helmet, revealing a hysterical man staring at me in terror. For a moment, I was ready to deliver judgment right then and there.

But I stopped myself. It wasn’t my job to decide his fate. Instead, I paralyzed him and moved on to the remaining intruders.

I tore through the isle, blitzing through the next five attackers in the blink of an eye. But then I realized I could no longer sense the electrical impulses of the last two attackers.

Where did they go?

I focused harder on my electrical net, and still couldn’t find the other two.

My heart raced, and my cloud lashed out at its surroundings.

Then I heard it.

Hissing sounds from above.

Looking up, I saw dozens of projectiles falling from the sky, heading straight for all of the tents.

Damn it.

I pulled together every cloud I could muster from the atmosphere, forming a thick blanket overhead while blasting as many projectiles out of the air as I could.

But as soon as I fired my last bolt, something caught my eye. Two men stood atop separate gliders, drones, swirling around them.

I took a deep breath, charged my body with lightning and cosmic energy, and streaked higher into the sky.

I flew straight through one of the drones' wings, then zapped it with a bolt of lightning, all while maintaining the cloud blanket's firm composition.

“Who are you? Why are you attacking the academy?” I shouted over the storm’s deep, rumbling roar.

The guys just stared, even smiling in my face.

“It doesn’t matter who we are. But I can’t tell you enough just how much I relished the idea of killing a Brontarion heir." A man dressed in all black said, tapping his foot on his glider's panel and releasing a larger volley of projectiles.

Some targeted me, while others hurtled towards the cloud blanket.

I dropped from my cloud, using it as a shield to block the incoming attacks, then hurtled back to the surface to try to intercept the others.

I shot a wide arc of lightning from my hands, but a sudden burning sensation flared across my back, diminishing my cosmic energy layer of protection.

Still in free fall, I twisted to look over my shoulder. Dozens of lasers tracked my movements, punching through my defenses and searing my back. Each impact sent me plummeting faster, tearing through the cloud as the test isle's surface rushed toward me.