The air around the Vanguard Bureau tower was thick with the scent of ozone and the grit of urban decay. Crystara, her crystalized skin catching the harsh midday light, ran flat out. Strapped tightly to her back, clinging on for dear life, was Revara, while Pulse pounded the pavement beside them, matching her furious pace. Safety was a matter of meters away.
They never made it to the steps.
With the sound of tearing earth, a brutal, featureless wall of rough-hewn cement erupted twenty feet high, slicing their path parallel to the street. Before they could react, the cement began to ripple and soften near the center of the obstruction. A human form, disturbingly outlined against the gray mass, pressed forward. He emerged not by climbing over, but by forcing the material around him to turn liquid, dissolving and then reforming into the shape of a man.
The man's eyes, cold and sharp against his dust-covered face, locked onto Revara.
"The girl comes with me," the man rasped, his voice sounding like stones grinding together. He lunged, a thick hand shooting out to grab Revara from behind Crystara.
Crystara spun, the protective instinct overriding tactics. She slapped his hand away with a resounding, crystal-hard thwack, and immediately followed up, pivoting her shoulder for a heavy punch aimed straight at the wall where Grave's torso had just emerged.
But the earth obeyed the man instantly. The cement before her fist turned slick and viscous, flowing like heavy mud just an instant before impact. The liquid wall swallowed Crystara's entire arm up to the elbow.
It didn't just hold her; it pressed inward, threatening to solidify around the microscopic crystalline structure of her skin. The suction was tremendous, designed to trap and crush. But the fundamental strength gifted by her crystal form was absolute. With a snarl of effort, Crystara fought the terrible pressure, wrenching her arm free, spraying thick, gray slurry onto the pavement.
She had gained fractions of a second, but Grave was escalating.
The entire massive wall behind him began to shudder, pooling and churning. The street groaned as the hundreds of tons of pulverized stone turned into a surging, tidal wave of liquid cement, ready to drown all three of them in a heavy, inescapable tomb.
Crystara pulled Revara tighter, preparing to unleash a desperate, full-power Gem Burst, a massive expenditure of energy that would leave her slightly mentally drained.
"No!" Pulse shouted, stepping forward with impossible speed.
He ignored the collapsing wall and instead slammed his palm directly against the viscous fluid and used his power.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
The man screamed, a high, unnatural sound of pure agony. The liquid cement didn't just stop; it convulsed violently, bubbling and seizing up around Pulse's arm. The scream continued, tearing at the air, as the wall began to fracture and crumble into inert dust, seemingly rejected by some disruptive energy emanating from Pulse.
"Run, Crystara! Now!" Pulse commanded, his face locked in grim concentration as the screaming man writhed within the disintegrating earth.
Crystara did not hesitate this time. Her eyes wide with profound worry for Pulse, she sprinted toward the towering glass façade of the Vanguard Building.
A moment later, as the last of the cement dissipated into harmless rubble and dust, Pulse finally pulled his hand free, rubbing his fingers against his exhausted temple, then immediately dashed after Crystara.
The man slowly rose from the rubble, his clothes shredded and his face a mask of burning fury. The ground beneath him began to churn again, but this time with focused malice. The flowing cement molded and coiled.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Hundreds of rapid, gray tentacles, whips of high-tensile cement sprouted from the ground, lashing out straight toward the Vanguard tower. They bypassed Crystara, knowing their target was the vulnerable cargo on her back: Revara.
Just as the first tentacle cracked the air inches from grabbing Revara's head, the sky tore open.
A figure plummeted from the very summit of the Vanguard Tower, nearly eighty stories up. He dropped like a meteorite, crossing the vertical distance in a terrifying blur, crashing into the street with an ear-splitting impact that shattered the surrounding concrete and sent dust and pavement flying between the man and Pulse, Crystara and Revara.
The cement tentacles froze, halted by the sheer violence of the arrival. The man pulled them back, hesitating.
The figure that had fallen was tall and powerfully built, but he wasn't done changing. The impact zone instantly became a furnace. With a sound like rock splitting under geological pressure, the man transformed.
His skin blackened, hardening into a thick, volcanic hide. Glowing, branching veins of molten lava pulsed beneath the surface like fiery arteries, and steam hissed violently from his shoulders and mouth. His eyes burned with an internal white-hot fire, distorting the air around him with radiating heat waves. He was a towering, humanoid monster of pure magma.
"You better leave now, Grave," the lava monster rumbled, his voice deep and vibrating with heat.
"Pyrault," Grave spat, the name dripping with contempt. "You better give that woman to me. She is a recruit from our bureau, and we have every right to retrieve her from the hands of you pathetic bitches."
Pyrault threw back his head and laughed, a harsh, cracking sound like cooling stone. "You know I couldn't do that, Grave. Celestial Muse gave me enough information on what you're about to do with this girl, and frankly, I'd rather not have a messy internal investigation."
"Oh, shut the fuck up," Grave snarled, molding a heavy, blunt club of cement in his hand. "We all know some of the higher-ups of your Vanguard Bureau will probably fucking do the same to her."
"Don't worry," Pyrault said, molten rock dripping from his fingers, sizzling as it hit the fractured street. "I have ways to protect her from the higher-ups of ours. She'll under my and Muse's wing now."
"I will fucking sink you and the entire building of Vanguard Bureau to the fucking ground," Grave promised, his entire body coalescing into a more monolithic, dangerous form.
"Fucking try it, Grave."
The two titans tensed, one of scorching fire, the other of suffocating stone about to tear the city block apart.
Then, an impossible stillness descended.
Behind Grave, a new voice cut through the tension, a calm, imperious, and utterly authoritative.
"That's enough."
The two words hit Pyrault and Grave not just as sound, but as an incredibly powerful supersonic wave. It rattled their internal organs, forced a deep, painful pressure into their eardrums, and caused every single window in a three-block radius to violently shake or vibrates.
Celestial Muse descended from the sky, floating past the stunned Grave. She was utterly pristine, radiating an aura of polished, terrifying control.
"This is enough, Grave," Celestial Muse said, her voice now pitched normally, yet still carrying bone-deep finality. "Be glad there are still no public casualties, though many are injured, and many property is destroyed. This entire block is a disaster zone... You've crossed the line into blatant terrorism just to grab a single recruit."
She paused, folding her hands neatly before her. "Call the other higher-ups of your bureau in the country immediately, or whatever. Or is the reason why you chose this covert, brutal route on getting Revara precisely because you do not want to reveal something outside your bureau?... Is it her power?"
The question was a precision-guided missile. It struck Grave exactly where he was most vulnerable, his operational secrecy. The powerful man, commanding millions of tons of earth, visibly slumped.
Grave's monolithic form dissolved back into a dust-covered man. He sank slowly into a heap on the ground.
"This is not over," Grave muttered, his voice defeated, looking toward where Crystara had just dragged Revara into the relative cover of the building entrance.
Just then, a sleek, silver blur zipped down the avenue outside the battle zone, pulling up right beside the shattered entrance of the Vanguard Bureau.
Skye slid to a halt, his arms carefully supporting two figures: a middle-aged man and woman, both clearly shaken but physically unharmed. These were Revara's parents.
Seeing her mother and father, the tension that had held Revara together for days finally snapped. She leaped off Crystara's back, ignoring the potential danger, and rushed forward.
"Mom! Dad!"
Revara slammed into them, burying her face into her mother's shoulder as the three collapsed into a desperate, sobbing heap of relief, finally safe amid the ongoing ruins of a battle fought solely for her freedom.