Boom!!!
Boom!!!
In the skies above the city of dogs, several silhouettes blasted through the air, leaving sonic booms wherever they passed. The sound rolled across the rooftops in waves, rattling shutters and sending birds scattering in every direction from their perches.
At the transcendent stage, flying was no longer just levitation. Depending on the amount of energy one put into it, a transcendent being could move anywhere between the speed of a bullet and something closer to Mach 5, a fighter cutting through the upper air with the kind of force that left visible disturbances in its wake.
The man in black was particularly good at this. He moved through the city's skyline with a practiced ease, cutting angles and adjusting trajectory without losing speed, Ember still thrown across his back, her body limp and unmoving.
But he wasn't any more skilled than Leon.
Leon was hot on his tail. Eyes fixed. Jaw set. The kind of focus that didn't have room for anything else.
He didn't need anyone to explain what had happened. This was the doing of Linda and the Firestone manor. Obviously. They couldn't even wait one month before making their move. One month. The patience of people like that was truly something to behold.
His hand came up.
Wind gathered at his fingertips in an instant, sharp and dense, and he released a volley of wind arrows that tore through the sky like a flock of angry birds, fast and precise, spread just wide enough to cut off the angles.
"Hehe. Feisty."
The man in black's body faded.
He reappeared outside the line of fire without apparent effort, the smirk still on his face, and for a moment he simply hung in the air looking back at Leon with something close to amusement.
Then his gaze dropped down to the streets below.
The city was busy at this hour. Carriages moving, market stalls packed with people, crowds filling the roads between buildings in every direction. A skewed smile spread across the man's face as he looked at it.
He folded and plummeted.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
He hit the street level like a stone dropped from height and immediately began threading through the crowd, using the density of bodies and structures around him as cover. Carriages shattered as he passed near them, stalls collapsed, a section of a storefront caved inward. People scattered in every direction, screaming, the crowd dissolving into chaos in the space of seconds.
Leon didn't follow him down.
He stayed in the sky, eyes tracking from above, watching the man in black move through the market below like a rat cutting through walls it already knew.
"You'll die like one too."
Leon's voice was quiet. Just for himself.
He pulled wind into his hand again, slower this time, deliberate, and formed an arrow. Long. Dense at the tip. He held it for a moment, reading the movement below, tracking the pattern.
Then he released it.
One arrow after another shot downward from the sky in rapid sequence, each one angled to cut off the next position, grazing the man in black at every turn, close enough to shred the edge of his robe on two passes. The arrows hit the ground and the surrounding structures where they missed, leaving clean gouges in stone and wood.
Leon's magic well was deep. He could pour an amount of energy into each strike that most people at his stage couldn't sustain across a full exchange. The arrows came fast and they hit hard.
But he had to be careful.
Ember was still down there. Still across that man's back. One miscalculation in angle or force and the damage wouldn't land where he intended it to.
He kept his eyes on the target and drew another arrow.
"You again?"
The voice came from beside him.
Leon's focus cracked for just a fraction of a second, an involuntary flinch at the sound of it, before he reasserted. He kept his eyes down. Kept pulling arrows. Kept tracking the movement below.
A magic king had appeared at his side, the energy coming off him substantial and clearly irritated.
Leon ignored him completely.
This, predictably, did not go over well.
The magic king's pride took the silence like a direct insult. Leon could feel the shift in the air beside him without looking, the particular quality of energy that preceded someone deciding they were going to make themselves impossible to ignore.
A hand reached out toward him.
Leon felt it coming.
He didn't think about it. He just reacted. His hand dropped the arrow mid-draw and he released thirty percent of the energy sitting in his magic well in a single uncontrolled burst outward.
Boom!!
The explosion that followed was deafening. A concussive wall of force that cracked the air in every direction from where Leon was standing in the sky, the shockwave rolling outward across the rooftops below in a visible ring.
"What the hell??"
The magic king grabbed his own head with both hands, his equilibrium completely knocked sideways by the blast. He shook it once, twice, trying to reorient, his eyes unfocused for a moment and then struggling back to sharp.
He turned to look at Leon.
Leon wasn't looking at him.
Leon's eyes had already dropped back down to the streets. Scanning. Moving across the wreckage and the scattered crowds, searching for the specific shape of a man in black robes with a body over his shoulder.
The streets were chaos. Smoke rising from where the arrows had hit. People still running. Debris scattered across a three block stretch.
He scanned the whole area.
Nothing.
He dropped lower, eyes cutting through the smoke, checking each gap between buildings, each alley entrance, each cluster of wreckage large enough to provide cover.
Nothing.
The man in black was gone.
Leon held himself in the air above the wreckage for a moment without moving.
There was no sign of nether of them, only the devastation brought about by his Arrows.