Chapter 65: The Siege of Genesis (4)

The blond haired boy reacted instantly. His spear-staff flared violet, and he slammed the haft into the ground. Mana burst outward in a half-circle and knocked the Warg off balance long enough for Kylo’s arrow to bury itself in its skull.

"Nice call," Kylo muttered from above.

Misha did not bother answering.

His arrows cut paths through chaos and her blades filled the gaps. When he shouted right, she moved right. When she ducked, his arrow passed exactly above her.

When a Goblin Chieftain tried to flank him along the roofline, she drew a dagger and threw it up without thinking, and the beast dropped before it could reach him.

Kylo looked down at her in disbelief.

Misha glared back while stabbing another goblin through the jaw. "Don’t make that face. You still owe me for breathing."

He snorted once. "You’re very loud for someone ankle-deep in corpses."

"Then stop making more!"

"That sounds like a you-problem."

A Warg leaped for her throat.

Kylo’s arrow hit its open mouth midair. The beast dropped at her feet, twitching.

Misha looked up just in time to see him reload.

"You’re welcome." He smirked.

"I wasn’t thanking you."

"I could hear it in your silence."

She would have answered, but another rush came through the breach.

As bodies collided, stone shifted underfoot. A defender slipped on blood and got trampled before he could rise again. Some of the academy students still standing had begun to look less like students and more like people the battlefield had chewed on already. Their breathing turned ragged and their swings grew heavier. Still, some of them stayed.

As for the three students that caught her attention? They killed two more Chieftains, three Hobgoblins, and a pair of Wargs that came snarling through the gap low and fast. They were better. Far better.

Misha lost track of how many goblins she herself had cut down. Only the little EXP notices flashing and vanishing told her the count was still rising.

The breach became narrower somehow as more corpses piled there. Goblins climbed over their own dead, humans stepped on both sides alike because there was no room left for morals in a place like this.

Then the Goblin King moved again.

Misha did not see it at first, she only felt the battlefield change.

A shout rose from somewhere farther down the wall. Then another.

"INCOMING!!!"

She looked up too late.

Something enormous slammed into the battlements above and behind them. The explosion of stone and force hit like a giant’s fist.

The wall shook so violently that the world jumped sideways. Misha’s footing vanished.

For one awful instant, there was only white dust, flying rock, and the sense of the city itself coming apart.

Someone hit her, or debris did, or maybe both.

Pain flashed across the side of her head. The sound around her warped into a long, distant ringing. Her rapier slipped from her fingers and the last thing she saw clearly before the impact took her was Kylo on the roofline above, his head snapping toward her with something that looked dangerously close to alarm.

Then everything went dark.

****

It happened at the book cafe near campus. Not a big one. Just a cramped little secondhand place squeezed between a laundromat and a stationary shop, the kind with narrow aisles, uneven stacks, and a bell above the door that always sounded more tired than cheerful.

Misha liked it because it smelled like old paper and rain even when it hadn’t rained. Caleb liked it because he could pull random books off the shelf, read one page and then start speaking like he had become an expert through spiritual contact. As for Mateo? He liked it because it was quiet, which meant he could sit in the corner with a coffee and pretend he was alone.

That afternoon, the three of them had ended up there by accident.

Or, more accurately, Caleb had shown up at Misha’s campus, claimed he was ’in the area’, which was a lie because his school was nowhere near hers, and Mateo had joined them later because Caleb sent him a message that simply read:

< She looks tired. Bring food. >

Misha only found that out afterward.

At the time, she was too busy glaring at Caleb over the top of a paperback.

"You’re not even reading that," she said.

"I’m absorbing it."

"You opened it upside down."

"That’s only your perspective."

Mateo, seated in the corner armchair with a coffee in one hand and a bag of bread from the bakery beside him, didn’t even look up when he said, "He’s been like this for 20 minutes."

"That’s because you encourage him."

"I don’t," Mateo said.

"You finance him." She huffed.

"That is different."

Caleb dropped into the chair opposite Mateo and stretched his legs out too far, nearly kicking a stack of discounted magazines. "I’m being misunderstood by both of you."

"That’s because you’re easy to misunderstand on purpose," Misha said, rolling her eyes.

It was a small day. That was all, they were just there.

Misha sat cross-legged on the floor in the history section because the cool wooden shelf against her shoulder felt nice after a long day. The owner’s cat wandered through the aisle after a while and settled beside her like it had made a personal choice.

"You attract weird things," Caleb said, crouching down beside her.

"It’s a cat."

"It chose you."

"So?"

"So that means something."

"It means I’m sitting still and the cat simply likes me."

He flipped through three pages of the random fantasy novel he pulled earlier, then sat beside her on the floor. Mateo watched from across the aisle, noticed something, and decided not to interfere.

For a little while, none of them said much.

The place hummed quietly around them, pages turning, the cash register opening once, and someone dragging a step stool over the floorboards near the back.

Then the lights flickered just once. The whole shop dimmed and came back.

Misha looked up automatically.

The old owner muttered, "Again?"

Mateo set down his coffee. "Power issue?"

"Happens when the rain gets bad," the old man said, though there had been no rain yet. "The line outside has been unstable lately."

As if summoned by that sentence, thunder rolled faintly in the distance.

Caleb looked toward the front window. "Hmm..."

Misha didn’t know why, but the flicker made something in her chest pull tight for a second. Maybe because she was tired, or maybe because darkness, even brief darkness always felt larger when it came unexpectedly.

The lights flickered a second time, only this time, it was longer. The place fell almost completely dark before the backup lamps near the register buzzed weakly to life.

The aisles changed shape at once. The corners deepened, the little store felt bigger and stranger, all the harmless shelves suddenly turned into rows of shadows.

Misha stayed still, her hold on the book tightened.

Caleb noticed so he stood up at once, not rushing, just moving like the answer had already decided itself. Then he held a hand out toward her. "Come on."

Misha looked up at him. "It’s just the lights."

"I know."

"Then why are you saying it like that?"

"Because you make that face when you’re about to pretend you’re fine."

She frowned. "I’m fine."

"Sure."

Mateo came around the shelf by then, carrying the bakery bag in one hand and Misha’s tote in the other because apparently neither of them believed she could be trusted with her own belongings during a mildly atmospheric outage.

The lights flickered again and someone near the counter swore while the owner muttered something about old wiring and bad luck.

Caleb was still standing there with his hand out.

When Misha finally took it, he pulled her up lightly and nodded toward the end of the aisle.

"If the lights go out properly, don’t wander around here."

She stared at him, a brow raised. "Why would I wander?"

"You do that thing where you start thinking and forget you have a body."

"That is not a real thing."

"It is to me."

Mateo snorted under his breath.

Misha looked at him. "You too?"

He handed her bag over. "You walked into a glass door last month."

"That was one time."

"It was a memorable time."

Caleb squeezed her hand once before letting go. It was not dramatic and not even especially gentle. It was just enough to make sure she was paying attention.

"If the lights go out," he said, quieter this time, "stay where you are."

Misha blinked a few times as she looked at him.

Then he added, as if it were the most obvious conclusion in the world, "I’ll come get you."

For some reason, that landed harder than it should have.

Misha tried to laugh it off. "You talk like I’m going to get lost between fiction and self-help."

"You absolutely could."

"That’s insulting." She glared at him.

"That’s based on experience."

Mateo took a sip of now-cooling coffee and said, "He’s not entirely wrong."

Then everything went completely dark, her brothers disappeared along with the bookstore.

Instead, a gray window appeared before her.

「 You are invited to climb the Tower.

Accept | Decline 」

「 If left unselected, it will result in automatic acceptance. 」

「 Countdown: 10 seconds 」

「 Countdown: 9 seconds 」

"I-I accept! I accept the invitation!" She hurriedly shouted.

「 Thank you for accepting the Tower’s invitation! 」

「 Overwriting Protocol... 」

「 System Overwrite Successful! 」

「 Summoning begins... 」

****

When Misha opened her eyes again, everything was worse.

She was lying on her back in the middle of broken bodies and shattered stone, staring up at the clear night sky cut through with smoke. For a second, she did not know where she was. Her ears were still ringing, her limbs felt heavy and numb.

A gray window was floating before her eyes.

「 Stay alive... 」

「 Shasha. 」

Caleb... Caleb was there with her, watching her...

Multiple windows appeared but these ones were blue.

「 Constellation Soul within the Capricorn Chamber Requesting Authorization. 」

「 Constellation Soul within the Taurus Chamber Requesting Authorization. 」

「 Constellation Soul within the Aries Chamber Requesting Authorization. 」