Shockwaves

"So what's the fastest way to get up there?" John asked, glancing up the side of the plateau. Now that they had come to a halt so close to the landform, it was actually quite an imposing height – several hundred feet of air stood between them and the top of the thing.

"You haven't bothered to learn any spells to help you get up there?" Killjoy asked, quirking an eyebrow. "Gonna be a long climb for you, then. I'll see you at the top."

"Wait a second, aren't I paying you to be a guide?" John grumbled. As soon as she'd spoken, Killjoy had started forward, and she didn't even bother to look over her shoulder toward John before she lifted one foot, planted it on the wall, and began to walk straight up it, as if gravity had ceased to exist – or rather, as if it had shifted directions for her.

"A guide shows the way – that's what I'm doing," she said in a voice that could've been mocking, if it weren't so deadpan. "Besides, you paid me to keep you safe, not to carry you. Get moving."

John narrowed his eyes, growing more and more annoyed that he didn't have an actual copy of their agreement. Had Himiko planned on making this trip as frustrating for him as possible? Given that Himiko had instructed her personal guard to seduce him, choosing a woman who was so deliberately unfriendly seemed like a strange choice. John would've thought it was her background, but Killjoy herself insisted she had no relevant knowledge of the collapsed city... did Himiko know something John didn't, or was Killjoy only hired for her strength alone?

Whatever the case was, he had to get up this wall... and the most obvious solution was to summon Sophia and have her carry him and Layla to the top of the wall, but that solution was out of reach for now. Killjoy's mention of a bounty on his head was jarring enough. Telling him bluntly that the only reason the mercenaries hadn't trekked to Springfield was that the tales of his abilities seemed too far-fetched... well, there was already one overwhelming **** hell-bent on destruction headed for Springfield. No sense in adding an array of mercenaries seeking his head to the mixture...

That left a long and likely annoying climb. Not a difficult one, though – John had spent enough time playing with the Nekos in the mountains to know that he could handle it.

"Layla, would you rather climb up with us, or stay here and watch over Arista?" John asked, casting his glance back to the collared mercenary lordess.

"I'll stay by your side," Layla said with no uncertainty in her voice, nodding firmly as she cast her gaze toward the top of the plateau.

"Alright... let's get climbing then," John said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. "Arista, you are to wait here until we return."

"Of course," Arista said, averting her eyes as her collar glowed, likely suppressing some antagonistic remark John had grown tired of enough to restrict. He paid no mind to the unappeased woman as he stepped closer to the stone wall, eyeing it up.

A brief moment of contemplation came across John, one of those rare appreciative seconds he got between the horrors of the Abyss to really reflect on how far he'd come. It wasn't much more than a year ago that the very idea of climbing a manmade rock wall in a gym somewhere would've been a challenging and exhilarating task... Here he was, staring at a cliff face that bordered on sheer at multiple points, clad in full armor and with a blade at his side, not even the slightest bit worried about his ability to climb it. Hell, even if he wasn't sure of himself... why would he be afraid of falling?

He'd survived worse.

Abandoning his reminiscing, John took the last step separating him from the plateau's massive rise. He planted both hands on slight extrusions of the wall, barely enough to sit a single knuckle upon, and began to heave himself upwards. Despite the tiny area John had to grip, his grasp and pull threw him farther up the cliffside than most would expect – more than he himself would have expected, were it not for so many long nights spent clambering along the cliffsides of his private world with the Nekos.

A single pull threw John a dozen feet into the air above where he'd grabbed, his body effortlessly defying gravity as he soared over the steep rock face. His momentum came to a halt just in time to reach up and grab another slight outcropping and repeat the motion once more. His feet never even touched on the rocks; instead, his climb was propelled purely by momentum and upper body strength. And so John ascended hand-over-hand like that, one pull after another. The motions were relatively smooth, at least to John's untrained eyes – he'd had hours of practice spent with the Nekos climbing the boulders and cliffsides of his new world in their playful afternoons.

That wasn't to say that John's performance was flawless, or that he had a perfect ascent. None of the mountains he had erected in his new world were as tall or as sheer as the wall he was now scaling, and John was hardly an expert mountaineer even then. But where skill failed him, strength and will found their mark. Around a third of the way up, John's fingers failed to find theirs – he had come upon a depression in the wall, and his fingers found air where they expected rock. John felt his body begin to tilt backward, away from the rockface, his grasping fingers sliding slowly away from the wall and his body slowly reversing its upward momentum.

But falling was not a feeling unfamiliar or particularly threatening to John, not as he was now. Elemental Infusion activated and a gust of wind erupted that, although mundane, was strong enough to catch his falling body and push his limbs back toward the wall. John's eyebrows narrowed at the necessity of it, somewhat annoyed by the unevenness of the rock itself, but otherwise unbothered as he pitched his body forward – and as his fingers sank noisily into the rock. The stone of the plateau shattered and caved away as his flexed fingertips carved their way into the previously undisturbed minerals almost casually, providing him with a firm grip to stabilize himself. John's legs bent forward out of reflex, the tips of his shoes setting gently against the sheer rocks before he was zooming along once more, propelled above with a quick flex of his arms.

”I really need to make a proper movement spell...” John thought to himself as he resumed the trek upwards. His Elemental Infusion was actually powerful enough that he could lift himself up – albeit slowly – to roughly emulate a form of flight... but it was almost impossible to change directions in a reasonable amount of time, and using it like that required him to move so much wind that he wouldn't hear anything short of a jet engine at full thrust.

”It could be a real benefit in combat situations. If nothing else, being able to fly in situations like this where I don't want to expose Sophia would be an extremely useful ability. Perhaps I could make it something more focused on directional movement regardless of being airborne, use it to dodge when there's no traction, or...”

John's mind went into action pondering the implications of dashes, dodge rolls, short-range teleports, acceleration gates, and other assorted movement techniques. By the time his brain had moved on to the possibilities of using Crafting and Enchanting to make gear that could operate off stored mana to achieve those results, he'd finally reached the top of the plateau.

“Long climb?” Killjoy remarked when John finally set his feet down at the top of the rock formation, quirking an eyebrow at him. “Most people would bother to find an easier way up.”

“Waste of resources... climbing isn't a challenge, it's just a speed bump,” John said, ignoring the fact that he himself was a little embarrassed that he'd had to physically scale a wall this mercenary had effortlessly walked up, at a speed even faster than his enhanced body could throw him up the wall. “My prep was all for what we're going to find up here.”

“Then you didn't prepare for anything,” the redhead said with a shrug. “I've been here before, we're not going to find anything but broken down rubble.”

“Save the pessimism for later,” John noted, glancing back over the cliffside. Layla was not far behind him, scaling at a speed equal to his own, just a few seconds behind. By the time John turned his head back to face Killjoy, he could already hear Layla scrambling over the edge.

“By your lead, then,” the beautiful mercenary said, giving John one last skeptical smirk as she crossed her arms and stood stoically.

“Right, let's get moving then. We have a city to...”

John trailed off as, for the first time since ascending the plateau, he actually looked around and focused his gaze beyond his immediate surroundings. What he saw took his breath away as easily as his words, and a sense of awe and somber observance fell over him as his eyes came upon the ruined city of Paix for the first time.

John had thought the few details he knew about the city would prepare him for the scene before him, but actually setting his eyes upon it was an entirely different experience. He'd expected an Abyssal masterpiece fallen to ruins, a barely recognizable utopia, cast to ruins with the engravings of an arcane society still embedded into every brick. Somehow, that would've made it better. The destruction before him would've seemed more foreign, less relatable. Instead, John found himself gazing upon a ruin that looked all too real, all too familiar with the surroundings he was used to back in Springfield.

Though it was distant, the sheer size and height of the fallen buildings – some of which must have once stood over a hundred stories tall – was enough to sink a feeling of loss deep into John's bones even at a casual glance.

Skyscrapers that once brushed clouds now stood on end, pointing at awkward angles with antennae and broken walls pointing jaggedly into the clear blue sky. Walls that must have been intimidating in the distant past now cast gloomy shadows across the rubble of the city they once protected. Even the land itself was forlorn and filled with grief, most of the ground around the buildings either covered in the ruined remnants of what were once bustling roads or otherwise torn up by unfinished construction, now destined to remain eternally incomplete. All of those were literally layered atop one another, piles of steel rebar and concrete that painted a picture which struck John to his core.

There, but for a few weeks’ time, stood the ruins of Springfield... At least, that's what John pictured in his mind when he imagined the decimation left behind in the wake of the Northern Ashes. A tight knot formed in his gut as he considered the ruins for what they were – a sign of the destruction that could easily rain on those he had come to know, those he had cared about. Between the broken buildings and ruined streets John's mind couldn't help but to fill in the desecrated Moon Clan's housing, the Forgotten Legion's burned-out headquarters, and even the Order's hollowed out husk of a manor in the remnants of Springfield's overly-seared corpse...

“Hits home when you realize how much greater the people here were than you... and how they still didn't stand a chance,” Killjoy remarked, breaking John from his silence. “Remember that feeling. The sooner you understand how out of your depth you are, the sooner you stop needing me to remind you.”

John didn't say anything in response to her words. He wasn't sure what he actually could say that wouldn't ring hollow in his own ears. Being faced with an entire civilization that had burned to the ground had shaken John a little, and when he finally began to stride forward, it was on slightly shaky feet. John couldn't suppress the thoughts running through his head, not with the razed city before him. Every time John focused on it for too long, the image of Springfield became overlayed with it, entangled in the horrors he knew might be unleashed upon it when the Northern Ashes came. Would even the mundanes be spared? Some of the others had mentioned consequences with being too obvious or overt with magical abilities, yet they had never specified what they were... could the necromancers from the north simply slaughter the populace, Abyssals and mundanes alike?

Their walk into the outskirts of the city was relatively uneventful at first, though it was rather unsettling. Without Layla and his mercenary guide, the eerie stillness of the city would have been almost suffocating. Every step they made, every rock that was accidentally brushed aside, seemed like a violation – a disturbance on hallowed ground.

But Killjoy showed no signs of any particular annoyance or dismay at their presence, nor any discomfort with the journey. Her eyes were keen, flickering across every stone in spite of the fact that she insisted the place was abandoned. But there were no signs of life in the strange ruins – not even natural life. No birds rested upon the fallen buildings, no lizards or snakes or even insects seemed to crawl among the refuse and slowly decaying infrastructure.

“Why is this place so... untouched?” John asked, glancing over a metallic doorframe covered in scorch marks across its midsection, but otherwise as freshly polished as the day it was erected. “It's like nature can't even reclaim this place.”

“You've never been to a proper Abyssal city before,” Killjoy remarked, not sounding overly surprised. “There was no need to hide the nature of magic in this place. Wards kept away mundanes – they still do, that's why you've never seen a Discovery Channel special about a “lost city” here. The buildings were constructed magically from the ground up, with the intention of standing for centuries or even longer. Every inch of pavement, every scrap of metal, every single splinter we step over was laced with magic to preserve and maintain it. It'll be hundreds of years more before even grass begins to sprout through any of the cracks here.”

“This place must have taken a lot of power to create,” John noted, taking a second look at the rubble around him.

“And even more to destroy,” Killjoy murmured. “Adantia built this city from the ground up. She had a hand in almost every part of its construction, and her mana still sits in every single stone. She was one of the most powerful mages in the Abyss before she was killed – there were whispers that she might become the next member of the Deities. Almost appropriate that taking her down was the feat that ascended Suula to join the Deities... no matter how backhanded it may have been.”

John's feet brushed across an uneven patch of ground and he very obviously stumbled as his mind struggled to process what he'd just heard. He made a swift recovery, but he was sure that Killjoy wouldn't have let such an obvious tell go unnoticed.

”A Deity did this?! Suula destroyed this entire city...? But if that's true, why would Himiko ever send me here? She told me very specifically to avoid associating with them. If I find someone who is supposed to be dead from the very hands of one of the Six Deities and ally myself with them, how is that not asking for trouble? There's something else at hand here. She had to know I'd find out, too... what game is she playing?”

“How close were you with Adantia before the city was destroyed?” John asked, hoping to cover for his misstep.

“I told you, no personal information,” the redhead responded casually.

“Fine, let me rephrase that – what did you know about Adantia while you were living here?” John asked, rolling his eyes.

“I knew she was powerful, driven, and that before her fall she seemed like one of the most stable forces in the Abyss. That's all I thought I needed to know back then. Needless to say, I've learned plenty since her fall,” Killjoy said, pointedly raising an eyebrow at John as she cast a glance back over her shoulder. “Like how even your best friend can stab y-”

Killjoy stopped her speech and slammed the back of her arm into John's chest, bringing him to a stop as a massive boom rang through the air, like a bolt of lightning had struck from the clear skies above. A building above their heads shifted and rattled for a moment, creaking ominously, before the top half of the multi-story building gave way to a crack in its structure and started to tilt forward. It was still several feet ahead of them, but it was directly in their path, seeming to fall almost in slow motion due to its massive size.

The chunk of building that had broken off impacted with a booming crash that echoed throughout the city, but there was shockingly little effect. Killjoy's words about reinforced buildings and materials must have been spot-on, because the building gave no quarter to the street, and the street yielded nothing to the building – only a few small cracks formed around where the massive structure fell. When the last of the momentum died down and things started to settle, John almost could've been convinced that the marvelously intact structure had been built there, rather than falling down before his eyes.

“That's-”

“-suspicious.”

The words came from John's own mouth and Killjoy's at the same time. The two even glanced at each other, albeit briefly. As the building settled into place and they faced the now blockaded street ahead of them, the two mages eyed each other warily.

“Pretty convenient for a building to collapse like that right as we're passing through. This city hasn’t been touched in how many years?” John asked, glancing over the still-intact windows of the building before them. It appeared that it was some kind of office building, judging by the chairs and desks still slowly settling within.

“And it chooses to fall just now...” the redhead murmured, glancing over the fallen structure before them. “Just as our path leads us this way.”

“When was the last time you came here?” John asked, his voice low and dangerous. “How long has it been since you really searched this city?”

“Sometimes a few mercenaries or rogue mages will settle in outside the plateau,” Killjoy said quietly. “Some of them come up here, but not many. I have wards and scouts out to detect anyone entering, and keep tabs on how long they're here. Everyone who has entered has left, one way or another. Most of them move on, some get killed by other mages, sometimes I have to handle it myself... I usually search the fringes of the city when that happens, just to make sure none of them are trying to ransack whatever they can find in this place. Other than that, I avoid this place as much as I can, since it was first destroyed.”

“That's an awful lot of time for things to change,” John noted. “You sure there's nobody here? No one who could evade your wards, no one who might have set up shop here, with things they don't want us to see?”

“My wards haven't been destroyed. The only way they could set up a base here is if they kept a constant vigil up and kept top-tier enchantments running flawlessly every time they crossed the city limits, or if-”

“-they never left at all.” John's words hung in the air for a long moment, as he stared at the fallen building.

“That's nonsense,” Killjoy said, sighing. “To do that, they'd have had to survive the onslaught here and chose to hide out in the rubble. We searched this place from top to bottom, we excavated the few buildings that had been fully destroyed. The only way someone could still be here was if they didn't want to be found.”

“Maybe they didn’t. What about all those rumors - the mana signatures here, the disappearances? Even if most of them were your work, surely one or two could have been something else. What if they weren’t taken out by ‘other mages’ like you thought? What if someone knows about your wards, and manipulated them?”

“Then they did all that just to keep living in a burned out ruin of a city,” Killjoy growled, annoyance clear in her voice. “There’s nothing left here.”

John glanced around at the city surrounding him, taking in the devastation in a new light.

“True... but the city wasn't exactly torn to the ground,” John said, his eyes glancing over the buildings. “Someone could easily have survived here. Hard to guess why they would bother, but… it could be done.”

All of them bore deep, intense scorch marks. Most had some kind of non-superficial damage, like cracks through walls and ceilings. But overall, the city was no worse off than some moderate natural disasters might cause to a mundane city – enough to cripple a proper society, but not even fully post-apocalyptic. The buildings around them, bereft of moss and overgrowth, wouldn't have been in place in any proper urban wasteland that John had played.

The interiors of the buildings were a bit more varied; sometimes the furniture and decorations were strewn about, damaged, or even incinerated... other buildings looked almost untouched, as if everyone had simply gotten up and left. There were grocery stores still filled with produce - magically grown vegetables and fruits were visible through the windows of many they’d passed, barely spoiled over the years. Even if there were not, surely someone would’ve had time to set up quite the garden since then, even if they didn’t possess such unnatural abilities as John himself to go without sustenance.

“It's insane,” Killjoy said, shaking her head. “Someone living here would have to have deliberately avoided being found by search parties, and then remained here all the same, over all these years. Who would do that? Why would they do that?”

“Maybe someone who was too attached to leave,” John proposed, glancing over the rubble before them. “Maybe even someone who felt too guilty to show themselves. You said Adantia built this place from the ground up... how hard would it be for her to leave after it was destroyed?”

“John...?”

The response didn't come from Killjoy, who was locked in an intensely stoic staring match with the building that had fallen into their path. Instead it came from Layla, who was standing behind John with a tense look on her face, her eyes occasionally flickering downward.

“What's wrong, Layla?”

“That strange mana signature... it's there again. Under our feet, tunneling through the ground. But this time it’s not alone. There are more, all with the same signature - dozens more, maybe hundreds. I don't know what they are, but they seem to be gathering.”

“That can't be good,” John growled, turning his attention back to their escort. “Hey, we need to move soon. There's something gathering around us. We've got the attention of whoever – or whatever – is left here.”

“Good, I'm glad they're watching. I want them to see this. Because if they're so **** to block our path that they'd do something as obvious as toppling a skyscraper... they're really going to hate it when I do this.”

The movement that Killjoy made to cast her spell was lost on John. It was too fast for him to even catch a blur of the transition. The redheaded mercenary went from standing with her arms at her sides to standing with arms outstretched, her palms facing forward and her wrists nearly touching. She tapped her arms together almost gently, metal bangles around her wrists touching lightly, and the world seemed to break apart.

Stone, metal, glass, wood, plastics... every material that had composed the building and the growing pile of refuse within its fallen section was obliterated in an instant. A massive crimson shockwave travelled the streets faster than John’s eyes could follow, slowly shrinking as it went, eviscerating everything that it touched. The building that had once stood in their way was atomized entirely – the offices and shops around them were torn apart at the edges, their front-facing walls damaged or completely destroyed by the sheer **** of the red tunnel of mana that passed effortlessly through their allegedly reinforced frames.

The charge fizzled out eventually, nearly a thousand yards away from where they stood. It shrank at first, slowly allowing more of the patios and entryways of the businesses around them to survive, until eventually it disappeared entirely over the course of a few dozen feet. But by the time that had happened, when at last the foundations of the city around them ceased their shaking, a new vibration was travelling through the ground. One so powerful John could feel his feet shaking as he stared at the wasted street and newly reopened path before them.

“It… it worked,” Killjoy said, voice honestly sounding surprised.

“Of course it worked, you just annihilated an entire building,” John said, blinking. Such a feat was impressive, moreso when done with such little effort. He didn’t know exactly how resilient those buildings were, but if they had survived a genocide, they clearly weren’t so simple to vaporize.

“Not that. I got their attention. Sorry if this one hurts,” Killjoy said, frowning. John was about to ask what she was referring to, but before the first syllable could leave his mouth, the redheaded mercenary jolted forward and slammed her arm into his abdomen, forcefully pushing him and carrying him along with her momentum down the street – and away from the spot where a two-inch thick metal cable had just emerged from the ground, piercing the spot he’d only just been standing.

“Wh- fuuuuuck,” John managed to **** out as he was carried down the street, carried by his escort’s arm as the lengthy metal cable flailed and thrust itself about in the space he'd been only moments before. By the time that Killjoy came to a halt, with her hand still wrapped around John's waist, the long tendril of metal must have realized it had missed its target. It vanished beneath the sand in an instant.

“Whoever is controlling those things, I can’t sense them,” the redheaded merc said quietly, just as she set down where Layla was. She scooped Layla up almost as effortlessly as she had John, lifting her off the ground and shooting across the sand only a few yards ahead of a mound of raised dirt that erupted with dangerously sharp spikes of steel.

“I thought you kept this place under control?! How could you not notice something like this?!” John growled, trying to regain his equilibrium and right himself as Killjoy’s intense velocity jolted his system.

“Never had anyone get this deep before. Despite what you might think, I actually care about this place enough to keep scumbags from wandering around… if you hadn’t paid me what you did, I would’ve stopped you already,” John’s escort reminded him, practically rolling her eyes with the amount of exasperation in her voice.

“Looks like I was right about Adantia, or at least someone who chose to remain in this hellhole,” John said, not finding the satisfaction to grin given that they were now on the run.

“Looks like it,” Killjoy said, raising an eyebrow at the Gamer’s words.