Chương 28: Chapter 27: Shards from the Sky

The deeper they ventured into the heart of Kandal, the larger the architecture became. The pristine white buildings stretched higher, and the glowing Solarvines returned in full, blinding force, wrapping around massive stone pillars and archways until the streets were entirely devoid of shadows. Yet, at the exact center of the city sat a jarring anomaly. It was a massive, sprawling tower constructed of jagged dark stone.

Unlike the warm, sunlight-mimicking pulse of the vines, the tower emitted a sickly, sterile white light that bled into the sky above it. High walls surrounded the complex, guarded by Resonants on standby, their vigilant silhouettes visible atop the battlements.

"What is that?" Elma asked.

"It's the Tide warden Aurethion," Jorm said, not breaking her stride.

"It can't stop the Tide—nothing's ever managed that, but it knows when one's starting to stir. Long before it gets bad. Buys enough time to get people there who can actually do something about it." Elma looked away from the tower, her gaze shifting to the maid.

"How do you know all of this?" Jorm offered a quick, practiced smile.

"My mother knows all about history and basically everything. She would tell me stories every time she got the chance."

"I see. Where are we heading?"

"My house," Jorm said. She pointed a finger toward a heavy, reinforced iron door set into the base of a wide building across the street.

"But we need to go there first." The carved stone sign hanging above the door read: Thorne's Treasury. Elma followed Jorm inside. The interior was cool, quiet, and smelled of polished brass and old parchment. Jorm dropped the massive, bulging canvas bag onto the marble floor with a heavy, unceremonious thud. Behind a grated iron counter, a lanky man in a tailored vest jumped at the noise. He peered through the bars, his eyes widening in recognition.

"Jorm""Cedric." The surprise vanished from his face, replaced by the weary expression of a man who had just spotted trouble walking through the door.

"Your mother is worried sick about you," he said.

"Have you visited her yet?"

"Not yet." Her expression didn't soften. Cedric sighed through his nose.

"Of course not."

"More importantly." Jorm stepped forward and drove her boot into the heavy canvas bag. The muffled thud echoed through the bank. Cedric stared at it for a moment, then slowly pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

"Well," he said with a dry laugh, "what have you brought me this time?" Jorm didn't answer with words. She grabbed the bottom of the sack and hoisted it up, violently dumping its contents directly onto the floor. The silks and gifts Elma had received spilled across the marble. Cedric froze. He stared at the fortune lying on his floor for a full minute, his jaw slightly slack.

"Where... where did you get all of this?"

"A rich friend gave it to me," Jorm stated flatly.

"I don't have time to waste, Cedric. The value of this should easily cover our debt for ten years. But I'm feeling generous. I will settle for four years of debt cleared, four years of taxes paid in advance, and I want the remaining value handed to me in cash right now." Cedric blinked rapidly, recovering his composure. He leaned over the counter, his eyes darting over the silk.

"Well," he started, adjusting his spectacles again, his tone turning professional and condescending.

"You are essentially leaving funds with the bank to cover four years of future tax obligations. I see you didn't take storage fees and fluctuating interest rates into consideration—""I am not leaving funds with the bank," Jorm fired back, stepping right up to the iron grate.

"I am paying in advance. Four years owed, four years ahead. And considering the bank is desperately trying to find the coin to pay the warriors returning from the shore, what you need is liquidity. This is liquidity."

"This isn't liquid."

"You're the Minting Guild, Cedric. If anyone can turn silk into coin, it's you." Cedric's expression tightened. Jorm reached down and grabbed the corner of the canvas bag.

"No problem. I'll take it elsewhere and keep paying monthly. I'm sure your superiors won't mind losing eight years of tax revenue in a single afternoon." Elma stood silently near the doorway, watching the exchange from beneath her dark hood. Elma didn't know Jorm was such a competent negotiator. She also hadn't realized Jorm possessed a working understanding of macroeconomic leverage.

"Walk out of here with that much cash and every thief in the district will smell it before the suns rise," Cedric warned.

"I can protect it just fine," Jorm snapped. A prolonged, bitter argument erupted between them. They traded sharp insults, counter-offers, and threats over valuation percentages and liquidation rates. Finally, after several exhausting minutes of verbal hostilities, the argument ground to a halt. They settled on a compromise that clearly satisfied neither of them.

Cedric aggressively counted out a stack of heavy coins, sliding them under the grate with a deep scowl, while Jorm snatched them up, shoving them into her pockets. With a dismissive, hostile glare, Jorm turned on her heel and marched out the heavy iron door. Cedric simply crossed his arms and looked the other way, his face sour. They left the bank, moving swiftly away from the blinding center of the city. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

As they marched, Elma tracked the drastic environmental shift. The white stones of the inner districts gradually gave way to rotting wood, cramped architecture, and sheer chaos. Here, the Solarvines no longer climbed carefully maintained pillars and archways. They sprawled across entire buildings, bursting through walls and splintering warped wooden boards beneath their glowing roots. Their tangled light mixed with flickering oil lamps and the heavy stench of unwashed bodies and cheap ale.

Elma's biology was failing her. She could no longer feel her lower extremities; her legs were moving purely on autonomous motor reflex. Stopping to rest was not an acceptable option. She was increasingly convinced that if she sat down, her legs would simply refuse to function again for the remainder of the night. Jorm, as expected, seemed entirely unfazed. She continued walking with a wide, relieved smile on her face, clutching the heavy sack of coins tightly against her chest. Elma just wanted to sleep.

Suddenly, the distinct sound of sloshing liquid and a heavy shadow falling directly over her head interrupted her thoughts. A bucket of foul, gray water suddenly poured from an upper-story window, plummeting straight toward them. Elma stopped. The massive cascade of filthy liquid froze in mid-air less than a meter from Elma's face. Elma slowly looked upward. An older, haggard woman was leaning far out of a warped wooden window on the second floor, a rusted, empty bucket still clutched in her hand.

"Watch where you're going!" the woman barked down at them, aggressively waving the empty bucket. The filthy liquid instantly accelerated upward, the entire volume slamming into the woman's face. The woman vanished from the window with a startled, gargled shriek, accompanied by the loud, satisfying crash of a tin bucket hitting the floorboards inside.

"Was that necessary?" Jorm muttered.

"Yes." Suddenly, Jorm came to a halt. Far ahead, at the intersection of the main street, a large group of older children were aggressively kicking an air-filled sphere back and forth through the mud.

"Let's go through here," Jorm whispered, gesturing nervously to a narrow, pitch-black alleyway that branched off to their right. The passage was strangely devoid of Solarvines, as though someone routinely cut them back to preserve the darkness. Any rational person would have preferred the illuminated, crowded path, but Jorm was clearly prioritizing avoiding the chaotic group of children entirely. Elma didn't care.

She followed her into the dark alley without a word, desperate for this miserable excursion to be over as soon as possible. They hadn't taken ten steps into the gloom before heavy boots crunched against the loose gravel. Dark figures materialized from the shadows directly in front of them. Elma immediately turned her head. More figures had silently stepped into the alleyway behind them, cutting off their exit. Thieves. They closed in slowly, the faint glint of cheap steel catching the ambient light.

"We saw you leave the bank," the lead figure rasped, stepping forward. He gestured to Jorm's chest with the tip of a rusted blade.

"You're carrying heavy. Skip the pleasantries and hand it over."

"No," Jorm whispered, her voice trembling as she clutched the bag tighter, taking a terrified step backward. Elma sighed internally. She expanded her Field, letting her senses wash over the ambushers to assess the threat. The feedback was highly disappointing. They were so fundamentally weak that Elma didn't even bother to calculate their TRO. It would have been a waste of cognitive processing.

"Get behind me." Elma raised both her small hands, pointing one palm directly at the group in front of her, and the other at the figures blocking the rear. Sensing the shift, the thieves reacted. Elma could feel the sudden, strained ease in their movements. Basic, low-tier Internal Reinforcement. It must've been.

"Well, princess," the leader sneered.

"Show us what you got."

"Gladly." Fission: Pyroc — Before the fission could fully be realized, shards rained from the night sky with the speed of an artillery barrage. They struck every single attacker simultaneously, cutting through flesh, through bone, through stone. With no drag, no deceleration and no resistance from any material they passed through. They disappeared into the ground below with their velocity entirely unchanged, as if matter had simply offered them nothing to push against.

In less than a second, the attackers were clinically compartmentalized. They collapsed into the mud, reduced to minced meat. Elma immediately canceled her Fission, her green eyes snapping upward to track the trajectory of the strike. Hovering high above the alleyway was a boy. Elma blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. His circular spectacles reflected the ambient light, obscuring his eyes. His dark hair hung upward, pulled by a gravity that was entirely his own.

That was what confirmed he wasn't a reflection—he was completely inverted, his head pointed toward the alley floor, his feet planted upward against what appeared to be a massive, floating pane of reflective surface, as if gravity had been entirely renegotiated for his specific mass. Tucked safely under one arm was a snoring little girl in a pink dress. The mirror-like platform smoothly descended into the alleyway, flipping the boy upright just as he reached eye level with Elma and Jorm.

A cocky, relaxed grin was plastered across his face.

"You girls okay?" he asked smoothly, casually passing a free hand through his hair. Elma stared at him, her face completely expressionless.

"We are fine," she stated.

"Thank you," Jorm gasped, still trembling as she pressed herself against the alley wall.

"But you didn't have to kill them." The boy glanced back at the alley, unbothered.

"Trust me." His tone was light, almost cheerful.

"Society's better without them."

"Well—" Jorm straightened, pressing a hand to her chest and dipping into a small bow.

"Thank you for saving us." Elma stepped firmly on her foot.

"Ow." The boy laughed lightly, clearly enjoying the adoration.

"Of course. Anytime." He pointed a finger at Jorm and gave her a dramatic, squinted wink.

"You really shouldn't be taking these alleys alone at night, though. Things might get a little dangerous." The sheer, unfiltered arrogance radiating from him instantly got under Elma's skin. The absolute audacity of this boy, lecturing her about danger while standing over the pulverized remains of a threat she had been a millisecond away from incinerating herself. She wanted to leave immediately, before her annoyance translated into a Stillstorm. A guard's shout split the alley from the far end.

"He's here! He's in the alley!" The boy's bravado evaporated instantly.

"How many times do I have to tell you people—" he shouted, spinning toward the voice, his voice cracking with genuine indignation.

"I'm not him!"

"Then stop and let us verify it!"

"Let you verify it?" he repeated, as if the suggestion were personally offensive.

"You're going to detain me for a week. Never again." The reflective pane accelerated upward with a sharp hum, taking him with it. Within seconds he was gone, swallowed by the dark sky above the rooftops. The thunder of boots immediately followed—guards launching themselves across the rooftops in pursuit, their silhouettes cutting across the ambient glow of the Solarvines above. A single guard remained at the mouth of the alley.

He approached them carefully, his eyes sweeping the bloody mud before landing on Elma and Jorm.

"Are you two alright?"

"Yes, we're fine," Jorm said quickly.

"Why are you chasing him?"

"There's a dangerous individual walking this city." The guard reached into his coat and produced a folded paper, pressing it into Jorm's hands.

"Go home. Both of you. If you see this person, tell the nearest guard immediately and do not approach them." He gave them a firm nod and turned, rejoining the pursuit. Jorm unfolded the paper. Elma looked down at it. Her eyes widened. It was hand-drawn, but precisely—the kind of rendering that came from either a skilled artist or someone who had spent considerable time observing the subject. A boy. Dark hair. The eyes had been filled in with careful, deliberate strokes, annotated in ink at the margin: red.

Could it be— Jorm's eyes went wide a beat after.

"Do you think—" Elma looked at the drawing, then back toward the rooftops where the boy had vanished. His eyes had been grey behind those spectacles. Not red. She didn't understand how the guards had made the mistake—the resemblance wasn't even close, as far as she could tell. Elma took the paper and folded it away before Jorm could finish the sentence. The Other. Typical. Already a criminal. He was never one to work within a civilization—it would have surprised her more if he had arrived quietly.

What could he even be doing out here on his own? Maybe it was better they caught him. He must be hiding somewhere. She exhaled slowly. Then she reached down and took Jorm's wrist.

"We can't stay here."

"Ew, ew, ew! I stepped on some of them!" Jorm squealed in horror, her boots squelching through the bloody mud as Elma aggressively dragged her forward.