Chương 254: Chapter 253 - Dead Air

Alexander tore through the streets of Baton Rouge, buildings blurring past on either side. Behind him, three more signatures bloomed into existence inside the guild compound. The five signatures already inside shifted, several moving rapidly toward the new arrivals. No fighting broke out. Good enough. They'd handle it. The gateway loomed ahead of him. Through it, he could see the other side.

A simple trodden path leading away from the threshold, a forest pressing in from the left, and mountains rising in the distance to the right. The light was warm. The colors were soft. It looked almost idyllic. He didn't slow down. The suppression hit him as he crossed. A familiar pressure against his powers, the gateway pushing back against everything he was. It felt weaker than the Beastworld crossing, or he'd grown past the point where it mattered.

His Core cycled once, powers flowing through the resistance, and then he was through. The idyllic scene vanished. The path, the forest, the distant mountains. Gone between one heartbeat and the next, replaced by strange walls and dead air. His HUD's atmospheric readouts spiked. Alexander hit the ground at full speed. Droney hit it beside him, hovertech whining and producing no lift. They bounced together. Alexander's shoulder clipped something heavy and soft that spun away from the impact. A body.

He rolled through a scatter of debris, metal rods and loose objects skittering across the floor, before a second body caught his legs and sent him tumbling sideways. Droney careened toward the far wall. Metallokinesis pulsed. One wave caught Droney before it hit the wall. Another arrested Alexander's momentum and spun him back to his feet as he slid to a stop. Then his powers exploded outward. Technopathy found nothing. Not a whisper. Not a hum. Not a single circuit or system or signal in any direction.

The absence was so total it felt like a sense going deaf. Metallokinesis swept the space and found metal everywhere. In the walls, the floor, the fixtures, the structural supports running through the ceiling above. Nothing moving. Electrokinesis reached for life. Found none. But it caught something else. A low, pervasive hum radiating from hundreds of sources throughout the structure. Light fixtures mounted along the walls. Panels set into doorframes. Strips embedded in the high ceiling. Things further in.

Each one buzzed faintly against his senses, registering as something but carrying no information he could parse. It was like hearing static through a wall. Hyperawareness registered no threats. There was nothing moving around him, other than what he'd plowed through when he hit the ground. Alexander pulled Droney through the air and held it beside his shoulder with Metallokinesis. The drone's visor slit was bright blue. Its systems were running, but the hover emitters hummed uselessly. He tried to lift off.

Metallokinesis engaged. He felt the pulse against the metal of the suit, the same force that had carried him over cities and through combat. The floor dropped away by an inch. Then stopped. He pushed harder. Nothing. The power was there, responding and functioning. He could feel every plate of the OACS, every element in Droney's frame, every piece of metal in the surrounding walls. But the moment he tried to apply sustained lift to himself, the force bled away into nothing.

He let himself settle back to the ground and looked around. He was standing in a courtyard, enclosed on all four sides by walls that rose three stories. The architecture was unmistakably that of a castle. Towers at the corners. A gatehouse to his left, its portcullis raised. Walkways along the upper levels with arched openings that overlooked the gateway. The layout was medieval. The bones of a knight's fortress, built for defense and intimidation, though all of it turned inward, aimed at the gateway.

The materials were something else entirely. The walls were a smooth, dense alloy that Metallokinesis read as steel-adjacent but not quite. Stronger. More uniform. Manufactured with a precision that suggested industrial capability far beyond anything a medieval society would possess. The light fixtures running along the walls looked almost like LED strips, except the glow they produced flickered with an organic quality that no diode could replicate.

The doors set into the walls at ground level resembled automatic sliding doors, recessed into their frames with visible tracks and guide rails. But there were no motors. No sensors. No power lines feeding them. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Magic. All of it. A civilization that had replaced every technological function with a magical equivalent and still achieved the same results. The bodies told a different story.

There were at least twenty of them scattered across the courtyard. All wore the same uniform: blue fabric trimmed with golden stars at the chest and hems. Wizards, though none of them would cast again. Some had died from blunt trauma, their bodies crumpled against walls or sprawled across the ground in positions that spoke of tremendous force. Others had been cut cleanly in half. Several had heads that had simply burst, the remains painting the ground around them in patterns Alexander forced himself to look past.

One wizard was pinned to the wall ten feet up. A bolt of lightning held him there, still active, still crackling and sparking against the alloy surface. The man's uniform had fused to his body. His eyes were open. Staves and wands littered the ground between the fallen. Some broken, some intact, scattered where they'd dropped. The contents of pouches had spilled everywhere. Gemstones glittered among the debris. Small bones and carved fetishes.

Bundles of dried herbs and colored powders ground into the floor by the violence that had passed through. No spellbooks. Every wizard he'd seen had one floating in front of them. These were all gone. Alexander stood in the center of a massacre, grounded in a reality where his most reliable power produced no lift, surrounded by the infrastructure of a magical civilization his Technopathy couldn't touch. Three sets of footsteps had traced their way through the blood.

Two began in the middle of the courtyard and led into the gateway. The final set came from it, smeared by Alexander's passing, and leading further into the fortress through an open doorway. Flashpoint had definitely been here. But whatever he'd come to do, the people who lived in this castle had already been dead. Killed by two of their own, if he was any judge. A blast of fire splashed against his helmet. Alexander spun, Electrokinesis surging through the suit.

Lightning crackled along both forearms, the ionization generators charging as he raised his palms toward the source. A ripple of light shimmered across the wall to his left and dissolved as a bioelectrical signature registered in his awareness. Behind it, slumped against the wall with a wand raised in a trembling hand, was a young woman in the same blue and gold uniform as the dead. The wand's tip sparked once, then the hand dropped. The wand clattered to the floor. She was gasping.

A hole had been punched through her stomach. Her other hand pressed against the wound, but blood seeped between her fingers in steady pulses. The young woman coughed. Red spattered down her chin.

"Invader..." Alexander released his power. The lightning died. He held up both hands, palms out.

"I can absolutely see how it looks like that. But I didn't do any of this." He glanced at the wound, then at the bodies scattered across the courtyard.

"Right. You already know that, because you were here when it happened." He paused.

"I'm looking for a flaming asshole with a cape who would have come through just before me. That guy is definitely an invader. Did you see him?" The young woman stared at him through heavy eyelids. Blood bubbled at her lips.

"No... just now saw... you..." Alexander reached up to scratch the back of his head. His gauntlet-fingers found the helmet. He grunted. He looked at the open doorway where Flashpoint's bloody footprints led deeper into the fortress. Then back at the gateway. If those two wizards had done all of this, slaughtered over twenty of their own people and walked away clean, then they were far more dangerous than anything he'd assumed when he'd sent his friends to deal with them. He'd still bet on Grimnir.

But Annie, Augustus, and Talia didn't know what they were walking into. He took a step toward the gateway. The young woman coughed again. It was wet. Rattling.

"Help... me..." Alexander turned back.

"I would. I really would. But none of my powers can help with..." He gestured at the wound.

"That." The wizard's bloodied hand lifted from her stomach and pointed at another door set into the courtyard wall.

"Restorium... please..." Alexander looked at the door. Then at the gateway. He tried to contact Talia using the System comms, but the call failed immediately. That was new. One of his mental threads ran the numbers. Time since departure. Distance the wizards had to cover. Flight speed he'd observed. Less than thirty seconds before they reached the guild compound. Augustus and Talia should have the other guild organized by now. Should. At maximum speed, he could reach them in time. Alexander sighed.

He reached into his ring and pulled out a drone. It landed in his hand, and Technopathy flooded its systems, activating the recording function.

"Talia, listen. The two wizards are more dangerous than I thought. They slaughtered dozens of their own kind on this side before they stepped through." He paused.

"It's Auggy's call whether to engage. But do not follow me through the gateway. There's something weird going on over here. I'll be fine. Don't die. That's an order." Alexander wound his arm back and hurled the drone at the gateway. Metallokinesis shoved it forward at the same instant, and Technopathy embedded the command to pulse the message to Talia's tablet the moment it crossed.

The drone shot through the air with a crack and passed through the threshold, lifting into the air and veering toward the guild hall back in the other reality. He turned back to the wizard on the floor.

"Alright. Restorium. Cool name, by the way." Alexander crossed the courtyard, stepping over bodies and scattered debris. He crouched beside the wizard and slid one arm under her shoulders.

"This is going to hurt." The wizard's laugh turned into a cough that painted Alexander's chest plate red.

"Already... hurts..." Alexander lifted her and carried her toward the door.