Chapter 542: Rally Point

Following Hunter’s lead, the group made their way to a building marked with the familiar sigil of the Academy, but with a sword and shield taking the place of the book and candle. "What is this place?" Owyn asked.

"Academy training grounds," Arc panted. She was still sweating, but she seemed to be coming out of her previous state. "It’s also an armory..."

"Glad to see you’re back with us," Owyn replied, squeezing her a little tighter. "What happened back there, Arc?"

"Ribs..." she gasped. "Let me down!"

At her note of panic, Owyn loosened his grip. He’d forgotten how hard he’d worked to resuscitate her, and how Freddi made him push so hard he felt like he might be cracking her ribs. He probably had...

The moment she was on the ground, Arc held herself and shuddered. "Are you alright?" Owyn asked.

"I can still feel them... but we’re farther away now..." she shook. "Breathing hurts..."

"Feel who?" Raven asked.

"Everyone..." she looked at Raven, something else in her gaze that Owyn had never seen before. "Everyone hurts, I just... I’ve pushed it aside. So I can help..."

"You are not fighting," Rose said as Hunter pulled open one half of the double doors. "You’re lucky enough I’m disinclined to call your parents." She flashed her callring, which made Arc shut her mouth with an audible click.

"Come on," Hunter called over. "This place will be a rally point soon, so we need to defend it."

"I should call the Guard, let them know we’re holding it," Rose nodded. "We’ll have the kids do long-distance spells."

"Long distance is not really my specialty," a note of complaint came from Raven.

"I’m not trained in it," Owyn said.

"I figured that," Hunter said, "So let’s grab you some guns."

The training grounds indeed became a rally point as the invasion picked up. Owyn and Raven were given a pair of rifles and positioned at the windows open to the main street, with Hunter supervising. After giving Arc just a bit more healing through song, Rose took to the street, coordinating the guard setting up a perimeter.

It wasn’t long until evacuees were brought to them, those too injured to make it to the gates or too stubborn to separate from their slower family members. Unlike the newer Wards, the oldest ones did not have readily accessible underground shelters without traversing the sewers.

Unfortunately, the more people fled to the training grounds, the more monsters followed.

"Where the hell are they coming from?" Owyn shouted as he charged another shot, striking another eyeless lizard in the chest with a bolt of energy but failing to put it down.

"The Dungeon, of course!" Hunter called back from the other side of the room. "You kids might not know it, but before Veil came down, dungeons sometimes leaked monsters... Guess that still holds true even if it took longer..."

Owyn took another shot, this time striking the same monster in the leg. It went down long enough for someone to run up and stick a sword in its head, stilling it. Over to his right, Steven let out a victorious cry as he managed to strike one of the dog-monkey things that had started prowling the rooftops in gangs. Unlike actual dogs or monkeys, these had thick, leathery lips and purple fur, and their golden, glowy eyes had vertical slits for pupils. The gang fled as the one Steven hit fell sizzling to the street.

At the back of the room, Arc shuddered. She seemed to alternate between bouts of flinching, whimpering, and complete disassociation as she fought her own struggle against the waves of pain she was experiencing. It was easier for her to shut out the monsters, but when people were brought in, she struggled once more.

Owyn turned to check on her to find her with one hand in the air, curled around nothing, as she muttered to herself about strings and pain. He felt bad for her, knowing how she hated the idea of being useless, and as if sensing his thoughts, she looked at him.

"Shit!" Hunter suddenly called. "Big one, coming up the main street!"

What approached the training grounds was a monster so large that Owyn wondered how big the door to the Dungeon had to be to let it through. It walked with feet and knuckles, and its arms seemed to be made of the same blue crystal as the tower. Having grown up near the ocean, Owyn found its body to be seahorse-like, except with a vicious, needle-toothed mouth and a curled tail that lashed out as a Knight tried to circle behind.

The knight was merely tossed, but moments later, his cries of pain and terror split the air as the mucus from the creature’s body ate through armor and flesh alike.

"Fire, dammit!" Hunter shouted as she loosed an arrow that somehow caused vines and branches to entangle the creature. They immediately started sizzling as the acidic mucus ate into them.

Owyn took a shot that landed dead center on its forehead. He felt a victorious thrill before realizing the energy bolt had simply dissipated into the mucus layer without even leaving a mark on its skin. Everyone else seemed to be having similar luck when their bolts made it past the monster’s struggling arms.

"Shit. Magic’s not cutting it," Raven growled. Even though Hunter hadn’t wanted her to participate, since apparently Raven had lost a lot of blood during her rescue, the human had proved stubborn to a fault. And now she was looking much paler than normal, and the sheen of sweat on her skin only highlighted that her body and magic had reached their limits.

Hunter took another shot, with a conventional arrow, but while it managed to pierce the mucus layer, it didn’t go deeply enough to properly wound the monster... But it was more than enough to piss it off.

With a strange bugling screech, it focused its rage in their direction, snapping vines and galloping towards them. The mages gathered on the street had tried to avoid damaging the nearby buildings, but their actions took a desperate turn as a circle of eight ripped a building off its foundations to block the creature.

The building collapsed onto it, but even before the dust rose, Owyn sensed it wasn’t enough. And a moment later, Hunter showed she sensed it too.

"Get out of here!" Hunter shouted as the beast began to stand. She drew a spear from her storage and took a step back before leaping out the window, joining Rose right as the beast burst from the rubble.

Owyn, Raven, and Steven fled into the hall of the octagonal building.

"We should help people evacuate," Raven said.

"Sounds good to me!" Steven agreed.

The moment he left the door, however, Owyn finally noticed...

"Where’s Arc?"

*

Arc leaned against the wall as she made her way towards the armory. She’d first noticed when Hunter was helping the others arm up, a spectral line that felt familiar, but any move she made to arm herself had been argued down. Given her state at the time, she’d been forced to admit she was more likely to shoot an ally in the back than a monster.

But she’d spent the last half hour figuring out how to push the pain out of the front of her thoughts, but there had been no time to inform the others of that once the giant monster attacked.

So the moment Raven announced that magic wasn’t working, she knew exactly what they needed. And in a corner of her memory, she remembered that this was where Smoke was stored. She had little else to go on than that, but somehow she knew that her treasured weapon had to be at the end of that one, familiar line whose endpoint didn’t move at all.

The door had been left open, and the room had been completely raided for its arms, distributed to every able-bodied person for the defense of the building, but Arc knew her Smoke was there. She made sure to close the door behind her.

The line led her to a locker in another part of the armory, one marked with the starry crest of her House. For once, she was happy to see it, since it meant no one messed with her things, but now she had a new problem. One she’d seen around at home.

There was a cipher lock.

It had nine alphanumeric wheels.

In other words, something like a hundred trillion potential combinations.

Only Father is this paranoid about his inventions. Instead of passwords or just numbers, he used entire phrases, sometimes with numbers. Breaking into anything sealed by his cipher locks would have been impossible if Father hadn’t outright told his family that there was always a clue if one flipped the lock on its back. The locks she had been allowed to open also seemed to have passwords related to whatever they were protecting.

Of all her parents, only Rainier, Kordia, Malzkael, and Ferrovia knew him well enough to effectively guess based on so little information.

She flipped up the lock.

On the back was a cube.

"Fuck."

The door to the armory burst open.