Night fell over Jakarta, and just as tomorrow was about to become today, something stirred in the city streets. They began as mere flickering will-o’-wisps, emerging from nothing and rising up into the sky. There, the sparks of fire grew rapidly, and soon they reached a size large enough to swallow a house whole.
The giant fireballs started to drift through the air above the city, violent flares erupting from the spheres at random. Buildings caught in its range went up in flames. Wooden constructions turned to ash in seconds, while even concrete only took a few minutes to combust. The conflagration was of an unreal intensity.
Four balls of fire occupied Jakarta’s sky, but within minutes, they had changed. And their forms became strikingly human.
“Four ifrits in Jakarta? At the same time?!” Xueli scowled. “There were more?”
“It would seem so,” a refined male sage said. “The Chosen Dharva who masters the portal from this afternoon appears to have left not one devil behind, but five.”
The two stared out the glass that encircled the entirety of the top floor of Al’iksir’s Central Tower. Ten minutes ago, Xueli had been relaxing in her room when the enemy alert message came, and she rushed to the observation desk as fast as she could. Unfortunately, though, not to enjoy the view.
“Then the first one was just bait, while the other four were ticking time bombs, waiting for us to let our guard down,” she surmised, trying in vain to hide her frustration. “The archmages are calculating. They plot out every damned move just to cause as much destruction as possible. It’s infuriating.”
Xueli wished she had some of that cleverness on her side. If only she had a team of staff who were more useful than a bag of bricks.
“Can I expect Klan’s assistance?” she asked the sage.
“I promise I will do what I can,” he replied. “But your compatibility with the Princess of Stars is less than desirable. I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Oh, for the love of... This is a war, not a date!” She had barely scraped by against one of those creatures, and now there were four. Meanwhile, her key to victory was sulking because she was shy. Xueli was beside herself. “Fine. Do what you can,” she said. “Armorize.”
A cloud of nanofactors flowed out of her right hand. A second later, blue nano-armor covered her body, and together with the Asura Frame Mark V, she took off through an emergency exit in the deck’s roof.
The full moon was out, and the waves of the Java Sea shimmered in its light.
“Wait! Klan! Where are you taking me?!”
The Replicant girl pulled Shanti along in silence. Quiet though she was, the stern expression on Klan’s face as they rushed through the halls spoke volumes. She’d shown up at Shanti’s room, grabbed her right hand, and dragged her all the way to the elevator without a single explanation. And now they were hurrying along a corridor on the twentieth floor.
Central Tower was strangely noisy that night. Shanti managed to piece together from tower-wide announcements and the harried voices of passing elves and humans that Anomalies had appeared in Jakarta again. She prayed for the safety of her friends and family.
Klan put her hand to a security device of some kind, opening a door. Inside was a wide open room that resembled a museum. Display cases filled with a diverse collection of items, from swords to instruments to thick books and even jewelry, filled the space.
Shanti whipped her head around at all the exhibits, trying to figure out why the two of them were there. “What is this place?” she asked.
“The Treasury,” Klan answered, almost inaudibly. Shanti couldn’t believe her ears for a moment. She’d actually talked. Her voice was quiet, wispy, but pleasant like an instrument and most certainly cute. “You have to help Varuna and the mean lady.”
“You mean Miss Xueli and the Mark V?” Shanti asked. “Well, I’m, uh...not entirely sure how I’m supposed to do that?”
Klan replied by raising her arm and pointing to something at the back of the room.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Soma,” Klan said. “The eighth Asura.”
She pointed to a suit of armor with a silver sheen. Its anatomy was slightly curvy and somewhat feminine, and even the face of its helmet had a peculiar softness to it. Accented with dashes of black, the suit gleamed like a piece of antique metalwork.
“Wait, wh-what’s going on?!” Shanti shouted suddenly. “What is this?! Cloth?! From where?!”
Her right hand started to glow again. Those particles of light were back, this time forming together to create something. A long strip of purple fabric that resembled a scarf fell into her open palm. The moment it did, Shanti remembered Klan’s song—“O Traveler. Heed me, O Traveler, Wanderer of the realm and distances vast. Rejoice, O Siddha. The awakening has begun.”
“A-Are you,” Shanti stammered, “telling me to put on the Asura Frame?”
“Yes.”
“Astaghfirullah, you can’t be serious!”
Suddenly, they weren’t alone anymore. Two more girls entered the treasury, and Shanti heard one of them sigh.
“Thirteen hours on a plane. I’m exhausted.”
“I rather enjoyed the experience. Though I do wish they’d obliged and let me try my hand at steering it.”
“Somehow I get the feeling you’d steal the pilot’s job, Ein.” The larger elf girl had black hair, and the other looked to still be in middle school. “Just please make sure you practice first before putting any of us on it with you. I refuse to have the name ‘Aliya’ be associated with ‘death by plane crash’!”
“Oh, I’m sure Yu would be there to help you.”
“This is the last kind of talk we need to be having first thing on our important trip. The whole reason we suffered through all those layovers was to start experiments for getting the Mark VIII online, so I say we focus on— Oh. Someone already beat us here.”
“Oh?” The black-haired elf girl with the commanding aura smiled wide. Her eyes fell to the girl at Shanti’s side. “I had heard you were here, but I never expected we would meet so soon. You must be the Queen of Stars, clone of the Earth Bloodline. I recognize your face.”
“Are you the Princess of Wind?” Klan asked.