Relik zipped through the air, ascending toward the upper decks. He yanked at the chain, trying to loosen the links before he fell into the hands of Salaam's insane Shiear. Sure, the downside of freeing himself was a free-fall of hundreds of feet to his doom, but death felt far better than whatever Vanqis had planned.
The chain bit deeper into his forearm just as a flash of green light bypassed his vision.
Clang.
Logun's blade met the chain with the precision of a surgeon. The metal snapped, the tension recoiling with a whip-like crack. In the same motion, Logun grabbed Relik and continued pursuing the chain's path.
They landed on the highest deck of the building. A single floor, housing only a small room rose above it. Yet they were so high that Salaam's clouds cascaded between them.
Logun landed on the perfectly white floorboard, dropping the boy down next to him.
He scrambled to his feet, heart hammering against his ribs.
The clouds seemed to part on command, exposing a perimeter secured by five clones, standing inside a circle of one length of chain. All but one was focused on their guests, while the other seemed to be confused as to why the clouds dissipate.
"You've already wasted too much of my time Logun," the clones said, the same voice overlapping from five different mouths at once, "Teaching him to swing metal when we could just undo his seals over Shink-Ra territory. He'd wipe everything within, range."
"Do you could read the seals the entire time?" Logun asked his jaw tightening.
"Just a bit of it," a clone stepped forward, its eyes a cold, calculating orange. "If you and your minions left me be I could have understood it fully by now. I could have extract more from his marrow than you would from HIM in a lifetime. He is wasted potential in your hands."
Logun eyes seemed to go dead as he looked past the clones and far past the penthouse He kept his eyes on the horizon, his stance widening as he felt the shift in the air.
"As a Shahari, I thought you would understand exactly what he meant for your people" Logun said, his voice dropping to a dangerous register, "I'm starting to see that you don't hate the system, you just hate that you didn't think of it first."
Vanqis let out a chuckle before stopping to shake his head
"Revolution is for the youthful Logun. It was revolution that brought us the Empire. It was revolution that brought us Haraan. And sadly it was the same thing that birthed Rému."
"You leave my city out of this," Logun warned the leather on his hilt whined as his grip tightened.
"Why? The birth of that community was the death of everything that would have made your life digestible. The Empire traded your future for a dingy canal and a handful of survivors. All so you could be here right now playing nanny to a nuke? Wake up Logun, we are all just tiny specks and our opinion matters little. We must all focus on the footprint we leave behind."
The Shiear turned his attention to Relik, "when we undo his Vesselling I predict a footprint about thirty kilometers wide. Maybe more."
"I'm going to enjoy chopping you down," Logun muttered. Then, without warning, he pivoted.
Before Relik could flinch, Logun's blade flicked out, shallow and fast. A thin red line opened across Relik's palm.
"Hey!" Relik yelped, clutching his hand.
"Focus, kid," Logun barked. He turned his back to Relik just as three clones lunged simultaneously.
The deck became a blur of green and orange. Logun moved with a terrifying economy of motion parrying a palm-strike, ducking a sweep, and counter-slashing an ankle, all while breathing as steadily as if he were at a dinner table.
"I want you to redirect your Iké to your hands," Logun shouted over the ring of steel, "feel it then move it under the cut."
Relik stared at the blood on his palm. He tried to pull at the heat in his core, and carefully he dragged it across to his shoulders.
"Listen to me while I work!" Logun ducked a chain-swing, his blade hissing through the air.
"If your muscles and bones move under your skin, you're a Morph. If the hand vibrates nervously, you're a Booster. If the cut heals, then you're a Gainer. Understood?"
Relik nodded then squeezed his eyes shut, squeezing his Iké down his limbs. The energy resembled a rubbery consistency, as though if he stretched it too thin it would break.
Ignoring the potential consequences he got it to his hand, which immediately initiated the most violent bone-shaking tremor that made even his teeth rattle. Then, the skin surged. The cut on his palm hissed and knit together, leaving behind unscarred flesh.
"It healed!" Relik shouted. "But it's shak-"
There was something else, or more accurately nothing else. Just a vast emptiness, a chasm that resided in himself.
"Stop!" Logun commanded, stepping back to parry a double-strike from two clones at once, "we need you here so focus."
Logun kicked a clone in the chest, sending it skidding toward the edge. "Redistribute it. Small amounts. Limbs, lungs, eyes."
Relik tried. He pushed the heat outward, but it was like trying to fill a hundred tiny cups with a fire-hose. His boots began to groan, the leather expanding and contracting rapidly.
Big, small, tight, loose.
"Damn it!" Relik growled. He kicked the boots off, letting them clatter away across the quartz. Now barefoot on the cold stone, his toes curling against the quartz.
He took a breath and narrowed his world down to a single point.
Limbs.
The sound of metal cutting through bone was still very audible. He shut off his ears.
Lungs.
He could sense the vibrations in his feet as Logun clashed with the clones.
Eyes.
Click.
The world seemed to slow down for Relik, the previously frantic, blurry dance between Logun and the Vanqis clones became readable.
He could see the tension in Logun's calves before he moved. He could see the flicker in the clones' eyes. This was the Booster ability, the world as the elites saw it.
"I see it," Relik whispered.
He gripped his hilt, spotted a clone standing off-center, and launched himself.
He moved like a bolt of lightning. The speed was intoxicating. He was a blur, closing the gap in a heartbeat. But the clone didn't even look panicked. It simply shifted two inches to the left.
Relik overshot. He tried to plant his foot to turn, but his bare skin had no traction against the smooth quartz at that velocity. He went skidding, his foot tearing against the stone, blood smearing the white floor.
He tumbled, slamming back first into a pillar. The pain poignant as he he kept focus on keeping his Boost active.
The aggressors seperated.
"That was his first try?" Vanqis asked curious.
"Uhh... I believe so," Logun confirmed, with a nod.
"Wow, my first try landed me in a box of caltrops."
Logun chuckled, "I couldn't get mine to hold the momentum would just die before I even initiated."
"Good times," one of the clones commented as his head dropped off his shoulders.
"Consider this lesson number three," Logun said, not even looking back as he moved away from the decapitated, "Speed is a straight line. It takes conscious effort to manage all that momentum."
Logun parried the Original Vanqis's direct strike, their blades locked in a shower of sparks. Relik looked on confused, as they seemed to devolve into aggression again with ease.
"You change directions with your mind, not just your feet," Vanqis added through gritted teeth. "You shouldn't try here again, unless you've got a sudden urge to see how hard the ground is a thousand feet down."
Relik stood up, his bare feet gripping the quartz. The world was still slowed around the three of them, but his heart was racing.
He reinforced his resolve and waited.
The moment he found a clone mid-lunge, he released his coiled up energy, vaulting himself through the air.
This time his swing connected, tearing through the abdomen before it turned into dust. Relik adjusted himself mid-air and landed feet first on the guardrail. Doing just enough to regain his balance and keeping him at the top floor.
While doing so he caught a glimpse at something climbing up the sides of the building. He looked closer.
They were clones.
"Logun we're in trouble here."
________________________________________
Veech was humming.
It wasn't a particularly complex tune, just a steady, vibrating rumble that harmonized with the groan of the shifting pipes around him.
He stepped over a fallen support beam that would have required a crane for most men to move. To Veech, it was a trip hazard. He nudged a chunk of reinforced concrete out of his way with the side of his boot, watching it skip across the darkened floor like a pebble.
"I hate basements," he muttered between bars of his tune.
The air down here was thick with to a stifling degree, and required a great deal of effort to take one breath. After the collapse of the floor above, the sub-levels looked like a giant had tried to reorganize it by throwing it down a well.
Twisted rebar hung from the ceiling like weeping willow branches, and half-shattered pipes hissed rhythmically.
Veech didn't mind.
In fact, compared to the sterile, judgmental atmosphere of the upper floors, the chaos of the machine-works felt honest.
He came to a stop at a junction where the ceiling collapsed and tore through a broom closet, creating a thick layer of debris and dust that stretched out into the darkness.
However, what really caught his attention, were wet, frantic prints left in the dust.
A trail.
They weren't the steady, clinical prints of the Shiear. These were uneven, and, most notably, heading deeper into the restricted ventilation sector.
Veech tilted his head, his purple eyes glowing softly in the gloom.
It could very much be the "heartbeat" the sarcastic Alven boy had mentioned earlier.
It appeared that this aspect of the mission was far easier than he had hoped.
If only he was tasked with search and rescue often, maybe then he would love his job more.
"Well," Veech said, his voice echoing off the damp walls. "A farm wouldn't have this much excitement, I suppose."
The Hurc took in a deep breath and adjusted his pace, following the wet trail with the casual curiosity of a man taking a Sunday walk in the woods.
"Step-step-slide," he hummed, matching the rhythm of the footprints. "Someone is in a very big hurry to get nowhere."
As he moved deeper into the dark, the humming continued, a steady, grounded sound that seemed to tell the shadows exactly how little he cared about whatever was lurking within them.