“We should get back to the office, Aliya.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
She followed behind Nadal, but she couldn’t shake that uncanny feeling. It was like the answer was right there on the fringes of her mind. Aliya realized that she could have solved the problem by simply asking for Nadal’s help—for all his quirks, he was quite knowledgeable—but she’d also just as soon have flung herself off the floor of Central Tower they were on. That being the ninth.
Just like a regular museum, the floor opened up to a reception desk, with the elevator and stairs just a short walk away. But Nadal headed for neither.
“See? I told you,” he said, stopping suddenly. “I was right to bring you here.”
The entrance was blocked by a squad of men holding guns, and they were aimed at Nadal. They wore blue and green camouflage, Defense Force uniforms. Their timing couldn’t have been worse.
Outside the window, Aliya saw an amber curtain covering the sky. A portal-keep had materialized. The crystal palace had become visible from the city only recently, and now it was finally here.
Aliya pointed outside. “L-Look! Can’t you see that?!” she shouted. “They’re here! And it’s going to be more than just a skirmish!”
“Then it’s a good thing we got here in time,” a young officer replied coldly. “Once we rescue Devicer Three from you people, they won’t be a problem.”
The man was tall and lean, and his black hair was buzzed short like a proper sportsman. A captain’s badge adorned the collar of his uniform.
“Other-worlders, we are officially taking control. Once you’ve surrendered, we ask for your cooperation in maintaining basic infrastructure around the settlement, and we promise to treat you fairly. So long as you don’t try to call your friends for help.”
There were two groups in the observation lounge, but neither were enjoying the view from Central Tower’s top floor. One consisted of about twenty elves. Every speaker had been taken hostage, a task made easy by the fact that the sages were unarmed by tradition.
The other had the guns. A suicide squad of thirty-five, armed with Type 89s, some of which were trained on the elves who had been rounded up and sat down near one of the glass walls.
“Call who, might I ask?” a speaker said, unafraid of the weapon in his face. “What nation or military have we that comes to our aid?”
“You tell me,” the squad’s leader replied. “There are two portals in western Japan. One in Maizuru, one in the Great Kansai Bay, and both have been on the move around all of Kansai.” His eyes turned sharp like daggers. “Who’s to say they’re not getting a little inside information?”
“As if this bears repeating, but I’ll say it once more. Your claims are groundless,” Raghu El Lapan shot back calmly.
Even for an elf, he was astonishing. An aura of grace permeated his being that marked him among his peers, and it was only accentuated by his flowing, ash blond hair that extended all the way down to his waist. He was something of the council’s spokesperson, and it wasn’t hard to see why the folks in the outer block had nicknamed him “Prince Charming.”
He elegantly displayed his indignation with a brush of his hair behind his ear. An act so utterly sophisticated that such regality simply couldn’t have originated from this planet. It made Sakuma scowl.
Raghu regarded the ruffled captain for a moment. “Consider the following,” he said. “The phantom fortresses and the Chosen Dharva are just as much our enemy as yours, and they have killed our kind as they have your own. We are on the same side.”
“Then where the hell is Devicer Three?!” Sakuma screamed in a sudden burst of rage. “He’s here one moment, and then he’s gone. There’s only one explanation. You’re in league with the archmages, you’re keeping him prisoner, and you’re going to turn him over to the enemy!”
Sakuma was a fearless man, but not an angry man. He always spoke for the military with a level head, and his temper rarely flared, if ever. But he could only take so much. He could only spin his wheels for so many months, running around in an endless maze with no exit like a lab rat searching for cheese that doesn’t exist, before something became the final straw.
Aliya could imagine the stress he must have been under. He wasn’t like her uncle. He couldn’t twiddle his thumbs with a calculated smile while the world burned, like Nadal could. That just wasn’t human.
About half an hour had passed since they’d been taken hostage. The amber aurora was ever-present, and it was only a matter of time before they were attacked.
“Hey,” Aliya whispered to her uncle, “do you think someone fed them all that? About how you apparently plan to sell Devicer Three off to the archmages.”
“I do. An ex-Defense Force agent of mine,” he whispered back. “Well, he didn’t know he was an agent, to be fair. I just told him a few things that might have influenced him into spreading a little information to Sakuma and his comrades.”
“Why can’t you be as eloquent at normal conversation as you are at being a snake?!” Then again, it was his incessant plotting that had landed them in this situation, and the young half-elf wasn’t very comfortable with loaded guns being pointed at her. “Not that I’d call this eloquent. Do you see what you’ve gotten us into?!”
“Drastic times call for drastic measures,” Nadal murmured flatly.
“How does that correlate to this?!” Aliya demanded.
“Not even the great and mighty lion can fight when plagued by parasites. I simply thought it was time to be rid of ours.”
Aliya blinked in surprise. Nadal wasn’t joking like he usually would. He was calm. Calculating. She had forgotten that he, as well as her mother, had come from a world of endemic war and strife. To Nadal, this was yet another battlefield.
Word was that the insurgents had first targeted the Prayer Wheel behind the tower, their source of electricity. Every functioning combat vehicle had charged through the central block’s surveillance network straight for the Ferris wheel-esque generator, and while the security droids were deployed in defense, this had been a feint. The coup’s real goal was the council, and the ensuing chaos had been the perfect smokescreen for the bulk of the force to invade the tower directly.
“B-But what if they kill us?” Aliya stammered quietly.
“They won’t,” Nadal replied assuredly. “We’re sages. Each a genius in our own right, by Earth standards. They know how valuable we are, and that they need us to maintain the settlement’s systems.”
“Well, I’m not a sage!” Aliya decided she liked keeping her fate in her own hands, and that she wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing. She remembered her uncle asking her to use her nanomachines earlier, specifically to send a commlink (which came very much in handy at times like this). She could contact her friends. “Ijuin! Natsuki!”
While Aliya was working stealthily to distract herself from the fear, Nadal glanced to the side in mild shock.
“Well,” he murmured, “this was not as suspected. I had hoped he would make an appearance, but wasn’t counting on it.”
He followed High Priestess Azalin’s gaze. As both an Asura Frame development lead and devout servant to the artificial gods of destruction, as well as a speaker on the council, she too had been taken hostage. This whole time she had been eyeing the barrel aimed at her with worry, but now, she was smiling, hope in her eyes as she stared up into the air. Her watch—the portable computer on her wrist—had booted up on its own, and it projected a three-dimensional hologram of none other than the Mark III, along with various data parameters.
And Rudra’s power output was skyrocketing. Yu had armorized. Against all odds and despite a success rate of barely thirty percent, he had done it.
Azalin rejoiced at the awakening of their Asura of the sky, her smile pleasant and charming. “Well, someone’s feeling better!”