CHAPTER MTB5 PROLOGUE (3)

As Nokomi fell, she used her wings to guide her descent. She juked between birds, each one darting through the sky faster than most Delvers in her level range could move. Most of the birds had a grade higher than her own level of ten, so that was no real surprise, but despite their focus on speed, Nokomi still vastly outpaced the monsters. She wondered if that would still be the case once they noticed her. For now, her stealth and invisibility were still working in her favor. Lipol had drawn the attention of the avians up above, and Nokomi had continued on her mission before they’d realized the diviner had a nearby partner.

The city had its own defensive cannons, set atop recently constructed towers that rose above most of the surrounding buildings. The closest fired on a group of birds near Nokomi, and she had to duck an orb of ice, then weave through a spray of frozen shards when it exploded in the midst of the cannon’s target. The avians either died or had their wings clipped by the ice, but Nokomi was untouched.

She dove to try and get below the level of the cannons, unwilling to test herself at avoiding both the avians and the projectiles, trying to clear them out. She plummeted, accelerating well beyond terminal velocity in the two hundred feet to the ground, then beat her wings and halted herself just before contact. Magic fueled most of Nokomi’s flight, but she’d had wings her entire life, and it was difficult to avoid the baked-in muscle memory. They still gave a minor boost to maneuvering and managing her momentum, but beating her wings wasn’t the best for stealth, especially when it was completely unnecessary.

Fortunately, the small gust of wind she’d produced went unnoticed in the chaos. Even if her movements hadn’t been muffled by her auras, she could have hit the ground full force and failed to make enough noise to rise above the ambient sound of death and destruction. Even so, Nokomi admonished herself. She dispelled her nerves, then avoided the ground completely, hovering and dashing into the shadows of a nearby house.

As she moved, several spots on the walls behind her exploded into a rain of shrapnel, pelting the streets below. Nokomi glanced back to see clouds of condensed mana pouring out from the walls. She knew enough about Krimsim’s defenses to recognize a mana sink exploding, and she tasted the air’s ambient levels, finding them much too high to be healthy for a normal person. Soon enough, it might become lethal.

Nokomi’s target, Ulia, was in the southwest quarter, which meant she wasn’t far. Nokomi was already as far south as she could get, and simply needed to make her way an eighth of a turn around the city to reach the academy. Now she just needed to do it even faster than she’d planned. The count’s daughter was preparing for her Creation Delve, but until she was actually a Delver, Ulia was as susceptible to mana toxicity as any other mundane person.

Nokomi studied the sound waves bouncing around her, mapping the area and determining each building’s structure and occupants. Hundreds of bright, azure beams criss-crossed the sky far above her as she did so, cutting through birds as they travelled northward from where the Alpha was engaged. Nokomi ignored the spectacle and began phasing through walls, then heard the clatter and thud of debris and corpses landing against the roof.

Nokomi wanted to move without drawing the attention of a lethal flock, so she forced herself into a cautious, yet frustrating pace. While Nokomi liked her odds against a small group of the birds, it wouldn’t take many more than that for her to become overwhelmed. She passed through a house filled with blood stains and broken furniture, but no people, then another that was half collapsed when a destroyed cannon had fallen into it and on top of its occupants.

Nokomi moved through walls like a ghost with precise applications of phasing, avoiding avians and sheltering humanoids alike. She toggled her invisibility off when hidden within the buildings to conserve mana, only reactivating it when she needed to cross within sight of the enemy.

She had to push down the temptation to go to those people she sensed from a distance. They weren’t her mission. Krimsim was built with monster waves in mind, and many of the people she passed were in personal below-ground shelters, which the birds seemed to be ignoring for the moment. Between the cannons and Delvers overhead, the birds had plenty of other targets. Regardless, the creatures would find these people in time if left unchecked.

Nokomi made her way through the small neighborhood and entered a commercial district surrounding the academy. While her travel was sedate by her own measure, she still rapidly ate the distance between herself and her objective. Homes transitioned to shops mostly devoid of their owners, shuttered windows and locked doors protecting wares the birds had no interest in. She gave one shopkeeper a scare when she appeared inside his walls and dropped her invisibility, but Nokomi had a silencing hand over his mouth before he could scream or shout in alarm. The man’s breathing was heavy, but once he realized Nokomi had on the colors of the imperial army, he gave her a shaky nod, and she released her hold on him.

“Is the army here?” he whispered, a flicker of hope entering his eyes.

Through the shop’s southern window, they both caught sight of the city’s walls being swallowed by a wave of dark power. The ground shook beneath them and distant explosions rattled the room, sending expensive trinkets clattering off their shelves. Haunting whispers filled Nokomi’s mind, nipping at the edges of her thoughts, but were soon gone, along with the wave of death that had narrowly missed them. She looked back at the shopkeeper, who trembled more fiercely than the world had.

“Not enough of it,” Nokomi replied. “Get underground if you can. The birds haven’t made it that far yet.”

With that scant advice, Nokomi left the merchant behind. Perhaps it was cruel, but there were too many to save, and there were other soldiers on a mission to save people like him. Nokomi was here to save one person, and she meant to make that happen. She looked over at the walls to survey the destruction, finding all the cannons along the southwestern side destroyed or disabled. Clouds of mana vented from at least six different points where the mana sinks had failed, and large chunks of the walls sloughed off, crushing the buildings below and shaking the ground once more.

Fortunately, the birds hadn’t been spared. With some of the nearby sky cleared, Nokomi continued, willing to take more risks and picking up her pace until she eventually reached a large thoroughfare. It cut through the market, and dozens of birds lined the street, wings spread and chests pulsing with rapid breaths. The group had apparently found this a safe place to rest, and with a quick scan, Nokomi found that the inner cannon meant to have sight on this area had been destroyed.

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Nokomi needed to make her way across, but flying over the birds would take her too close to the fighting in the air, which was rapidly filling the hole left by the cataclysmic attack. She considered phasing beneath them, but Nokomi only had 400 feet of incorporeal movement per day. She’d used a quarter of that getting this far, and she was reluctant to burn another hundred feet or so to avoid this one group. Nokomi could also manipulate earth and stone, but that wasn’t exactly quiet. Beyond that, she had a teleport, but it also made some noise where she exited. Silent teleports were in the realm of Spiritual Magic, which Nokomi didn’t have the attunement for.

Another wide column of black death darkened the sky, passing too high to strike Krimsim or its walls. The haunting voices barely ticked Nokomi’s thoughts, and the birds all looked up, heads jerking and bobbing as they were momentarily distracted.

Nokomi took a breath to steel herself, then wove a spell ahead of her. Inky darkness spread out from the center of the street to the edges of the buildings on either side, swallowing all light and sound within. As the birds within clawed their way up from their prone positions, Nokomi slid unseen into the dark, her evolutions protecting her from the spell’s deleterious effects.

She wove a second spell as she went, creating a crushing force of gravity that slammed the birds back down onto their bellies. Their beaks opened in caws and screeches, but the dark ate their cries. Their allies outside the spell hopped and strutted around the zone’s dark edges, unwilling to enter and unable to hear the calls of distress. Nokomi spun her kusarigama, the bladed end silently whipping through the air as she built its speed and momentum. When she was at the center of the group, she activated Predation.

Nokomi was an infiltrator, not an assassin, but that hardly made her defenseless. The length of chain attached to her weapon grew in length and sprouted razor-sharp mana. She spun and flipped, pivoting the weapon from above her to below, sweeping it just above the ground. Predation registered the defenseless enemies and sent a thrum of power down her weapon, and with a single spin, the blade and chain carved every bird within the zone of dark in half.

Nokomi never stopped moving and expertly wound the weapon back close to her body as she finished her aerial cartwheel and continued into the building across the street. She phased through its door, and when her Veil of Night ended, the only evidence of her passing was the dead.

Nokomi felt a rush of righteous satisfaction at ending the lives of the monsters, but she chided herself for being reckless. She likely could have made her way across without the executions and risking discovery. She gave herself some grace since a dead enemy couldn’t block her way or grapple her in the dark with its claws, even though such a thing had been unlikely. She spent an instant having this internal dialogue while moving through some kind of weaving mill.

Nokomi slunk between hanging fabrics and half-finished dresses while monitoring the birds behind her with echolocation. The survivors cawed and scratched the ground, making a racket that drew down more of the flock to investigate, but none followed her, instead taking off to search for the culprit from above.

Motion caught Nokomi’s attention further into the mill, but she listened and heard the shapes of Littans and a couple of Chovali like herself. They hid and huddled beneath a group of large work tables that had been pushed together into a rudimentary fort. A dark thought crossed Nokomi’s mind about what might have happened if the birds had followed her inside, then another thought argued back, suggesting what would have happened if she hadn’t chased the birds off. She dismissed both as a distraction.

Nokomi avoided the group in hiding and listened to the building’s exterior. The southwestern side of the mill abutted a narrow alleyway close to the city’s walls, and Nokomi could sense several more like it between the further shops in her path. She took the slight detour and began rapidly crossing through walls, avoiding any other wide streets. She came out on the edge of a courtyard on the academy’s outskirts, finding it littered with avian corpses. Above, a storm of birds was assaulting a set of three cannons that defended the institute.

Nokomi decided to dash across the courtyard while relying on her stealth and invisibility to protect her from the occupied birds. However, before she could move, all three cannons stopped firing. Nokomi silently swore as the birds began dismantling the weapons unopposed, then pushed herself forward and flew as fast as she could. Her aura cloaked the sound of her sonic boom, and she was across and phased into the academy before anything had the opportunity to notice her.

She hurried through empty corridors and classrooms, each one showing signs of being abandoned in a hurry. A spilled drink and a stack of tossed papers, a bag left beside a desk, and a few books dropped in the hallway. Thankfully, Nokomi didn’t see any signs of violence. The academy personnel had hopefully managed the evacuation well while the cannons had kept the avians held at bay.

It took only a second for Nokomi to find the crafting building, making another dash across a corpse-strewn courtyard and phasing through its walls. A moment after entering, she knew her target wasn’t inside. Echolocation and motion sense couldn’t find a single person alive or dead within the rooms or workshops.

Nokomi paused to think over her next move, but was interrupted by the sounds of windows shattering on the floor above. The birds began smashing their way inside, no longer harried by the academy’s defenses.

Nokomi bit back a growl of irritation. She had no skill with investigation, and without a living target to follow, she wasn’t specialized for hunting down a specific person. But with her diviner dead, she had to make do. Nokomi swept down the hallway, rapidly scanning for any sign of where the students had fled while the birds rampaged on the floor above. Soon, she could hear them crashing down through the ceiling in distant rooms.

Nokomi’s heart leapt when she finally found something of use. The center of the building was a communal recovery room and had a message board with various announcements posted in flowing academic script. One such message detailed the emergency evacuation route, and Nokomi quickly memorized the simple path and specific emergency shelter the students should have escaped to.

She rushed back down the hall, dodging a bird as it skewered through the ceiling. Several more followed, and Nokomi was forced to use Shortcut to avoid all of the diving creatures. She left behind an illusory copy of herself that incited the birds to tear into it. There was a loud pop from the spell when she reappeared, drawing the attention of other birds as they recovered from drilling between floors.

The walls and ceiling were made of sturdy wood, but the ground beneath Nokomi was stone. She cast Haste, needing the extra speed and reaction time the stamina-hungry technique would grant, then she flew low and cast another Veil of Night to blind the birds and eat the noise of her next skill. She brushed her fingers against the floor and activated Terrakinesis to force the stone to rise and create a wall behind her.

The rumble and scrape of the transforming terrain was absorbed by her Veil, and the impromptu barrier cut the birds off as they began to give chase, crushing one against the ceiling when the rock slammed upwards. It wouldn’t stop the creatures, save for the one it smashed, but it might slow them down enough for her to break away and hide again.

When Nokomi burst out of the building, the sky was on fire.