Knights of the Grey City

Chapter 40 - ENACT

I faced a horizon of broken buildings, their scaffolds reaching bare into the grey mist. The floor was mainly black asphalt, but took on an orange tint in places, marbling with rough sandstone.

"Are you two ready?" Huang asked. He flew some distance above, his glow muted so that he was barely visible in the fog.

"I'm ready," Katie replied from where she stood some distance from me, also looking toward the broken buildings. If her voice was shaky, I couldn't tell.

"Camilo?" Huang prompted.

"Yeah," I said, scraping the asphalt with my claws. "Let's do this."

It had been a few weeks, and we were as prepared as we were going to get. Though we had done our best to gather all the information we could, with Levithan's help, there were still blank spots in our understanding of what was going on.

The first thing we knew was that the Colossus wasn't just hanging out in No Man's Land waiting for us. We'd gone in several times since the first incident and hadn't encountered it.

The three of us started moving and our surroundings quickly changed to those of the construction zone, all sandstone and destroyed buildings. We encountered opposition almost immediately. A stick insect and a collection of smaller demons emerged from the buildings to attack.

The second thing we knew was that we couldn't get hung up on the demons' ability to respawn. It shouldn't, according to Leviathan, overwhelm us, as long as we kept fighting smart and watched each other's backs.

We didn't even have to speak as the demons converged on us, each of us moving to their own task. Huang stayed in the sky and relayed their movements, occasionally swooping low to chase the demons toward me and Katie. I drew their attention and landed what blows I could while Katie smashed through the last of their defenses in waves of fire.

We didn't take time to relax, but pushed forward. I took the lead, spreading my senses out as far as they would go.

The acidity of the construction zone was dense, denser even than the underground district had been. But I could still sense the gradation, and the further out into No Man's Land I sensed, the more acidic our surroundings became. We'd need to move out of the buildings to find... whatever it was that would let us reclaim the district.

"Everyone holding up okay?" Huang asked.

"Fine," I grunted.

"Yeah, great," Katie added, swooping low beside me. Behind us, the remains of the demons were slowly rising up into the sky, travelling up and out of sight.

"Just follow me," I said.

Soon, our surroundings opened up, leaving us exposed in an endless, flat wasteland. The broken buildings dwindled behind us as the toxicity intensified.

"Company from above," Huang announced. I skidded to a stop and threw my own senses up, finding the shape of a descending demon swarm.

"Guess this one's on us," Katie said to Huang, whirling around to fly alongside him. I started to pace circles on the ground, bouncing on my claws and waiting for something to get close enough for me to hit.

It was a swarm of flies like the one that had bitten me before. I snarled, already on guard, though the Firedrake was making fast work of them. She'd learned a lot since the last time she'd faced demons like this, and she was using controlled bursts of flame to take them out in small groups.

Huang darted around the edges of the swarm, keeping them together so that Katie could take them out. Suddenly, my spatial sense caught unusual movement in the centre of the swarm.