The roof was curved slightly, banking upwards, constructed mainly from a slate-like material, but one which possessed more grip. Some distance ahead, Lan could see the two vast skylights which focused light into the iren. Each must have been twenty feet across.
And there, crawling along the outside of a skylight was something
… some kind of creature. She shifted along the perimeter of the roof to gain a better perspective, being careful not to catch its attention. From behind she could see its body, a brown and leathery skinned beast, twice the length of a human, with four squat legs, a stub of a tail.
Lan’s foot caught a loose tile and she slipped; the creature froze, then turned to face her, an image of surreal horror: there was nothing but a vast mouth, no eyes, nose or ears that she could discern, just layered rows of teeth set in a slobbering maw.
The thing tromped on the spot, rotating its fat body. It snorted thick gloop by its feet. Then with a surprising, lumbering speed it charged towards her. When it was less than a few paces away Lan leapt up hovering in the air. The creature reared up, chomping at the air, but couldn’t stop itself from sliding over the edge of the roof and, moments later, came the sound of its mass slapping against the cobbles below.
Lan lowered herself and looked over the edge of the building. Down below, in a vacant alley, the thing had become a purple aggregation of blood, offal and pulp.
What the hell was that?
Lan scanned the rooftop but could see nothing else. She scurried along the edge of the roof, peering over the side.
At the rear of the iren, a small huddle of figures dressed in dark clothing with scarves across their faces were surrounded by buckets of water. She watched as they placed a hand-sized, dark lump before them, and poured one of the buckets of water over the top. Suddenly the small mass began to lurch and convulse, contorting itself in all directions, and swelling into something altogether larger.
It ballooned into the precise form of the creature that had attacked her moments earlier, then one of the three — now clearly holding a sword for protection — kicked it so it tottered forwards, out of the alley, up a wall and out of sight. The figure returned to the others, who tilted up a sack to empty out one final dark mass, only to repeat the process.
Screams and manic calls for help started to erupt from the inside; she could feel the hysteria through the roof.
Lan took a leap off the edge of the building. She hung in the air — positioning herself — and then she allowed herself to fall at a velocity that wouldn’t be quick enough to injure her, but certainly hurt the three down below. She collapsed into two of them, catching one on the back of the skull, another in the chest, and they both lay still, dead or unconscious. The third figure swung wildly with a sword, but Lan tuned into her powers to funnel out a blast of energy, repelling the weapon and sending it clattering behind. She followed up with two swift punches to the stomach, kicked the figure’s face, and her victim collapsed backwards.
Her left leg ached from the fall, but she ignored it, removing the scarves of the strangers — two men and a woman — and recognized none of them. The female did not fit the description of Shalev at all. They were all still alive, so she heaped their bodies in the corner and ripped the now empty hessian sack into strips. She bound them tightly around their wrists and ankles.
Scooping up the discarded sword she sprinted around to the front of the structure, where citizens were pouring out from the iren’s main entrance and into the wide Maerr Gata. Three of the recently spawned beasts were attacking people as they fled.
Lan drew on her reserves of energy, and projected herself into the air. She made a huge arc and came down on top of one of the beasts, driving her sword through the back of its skulclass="underline" the thing heaved, groaned and shuddered into stillness. As she stumbled around to its front, people lurched away in horror — there was a human leg hanging out of the beast’s jaw, and four corpses lying around in close proximity, each with a limb missing. At least the military was present and they were busy escorting people away to safety, apparently unconcerned with stopping the beasts.
Another beast was dispatched in the same way: a sword to the skull, blood pooling across the cobbles, and this time blood beetles arrived in their droves. Rarely up this many levels of the city, the insects were a glossy black tide devouring chunks of flesh and feasting on blood.
The final beast gave more of a fight. It threw itself at her; Lan jumped, drew up her legs so she was almost horizontal and thrust the sword into the side of its head. It wasn’t quite dead; she hadn’t used enough force. With a gaping wound, the creature hobbled in a circle, unable to control its movements. Spasmodically, it snapped at anyone nearby. Lan skipped up onto its back, fell to one knee and drove the blade through the thick hide on the top of its neck. The thing collapsed with a thunderous wheeze. She faced the front of the iren, this glorious structure of modernity, and she noticed that two black banners were now fluttering down from one of the windows.
How have the anarchists got there, too?
She ran towards the entrance, shoving her way through the crowds and, when it became too congested, stepping up through the air to run above them. She descended to land by the main entrance, by two sets of open double doors.
Lan paused in shock to regard the horror.
The opening event had been turned to carnage. Blood pooled thickly on the ground whilst crossbow bolts showered down from the tiers above, hitting innocents and the ravening monsters alike. There was screaming and chaos as the surreal hellions lunged and surged across the marbled floors, snapping at any pieces of moving flesh, sliding in the blood, and tearing apart whatever they could fit into their maws.
Vuldon was making his presence felt. He was at the far end of the ground floor, a sword swinging in each hand, lashing out at the vile freaks. Tane seemed to be everywhere at once, using his speed and agility to haul people out of the way of certain death, and raking his claws repeatedly through the beasts’ thick hides to render them useless.
The creatures, while vicious, succumbed quite easily; they possessed little awareness or control, nothing in the way of guile. The creatures died, one by one, and very quickly there was just the aftermath, people sobbing, the injured calling for aid and a mass of blood and bone scattered across the once pristine floor. There were around twenty of the monsters, each considerably bigger and broader than Vuldon. He dragged the carcasses into a heap while Tane stood idly, drenched in blood that wasn’t his, contemplating the event with something akin to disbelief on his face. Up above, Emperor Urtica stumbled forward from his military shelter overlooking the blood-soaked scene.
Although some distance away, Lan could tell how horrified the man was. A skylight suddenly shattered. Glass buckled and fell in large shards to disintegrate on the marble surface, while purple light flared in the gap; and down came a solitary figure, a woman with no hair, her dark cloak fluttering as she drifted softly to the floor on a line of light. Shalev.
On his lofty tier, Urtica recoiled into his metal shell and Lan sprinted towards the criminal cultist, desperate to intercept her. Vuldon and Tane were already running to protect the Emperor, yelling ‘Get him the fuck to safety!’ and urging the guards back, whilst snipers fired at Shalev to stop her.
The woman crouched to one knee, drew up a bent arm as if for protection, and then flicked some device with her other hand. The bolts pinged off an invisible field, and pausing on their rebound, as if time was stilled, they fell harmlessly to the side.
Lan darted in front of Shalev, around thirty paces away, the Emperor somewhere above and behind. Shalev stood up and pointed a relic at the protective box of soldiers. Lan tuned into the apparatus installed within her body, the same field that pushed away fire, allowed it to layer and accumulate within her until she felt she would burst, and waited.