The voices sharpened as they closed in, no longer just muffled syllables but full words exchanged between three separate people. The hall opened into a small bay where the carpet stopped, replaced by a scuffed stretch of tile lined with reinforced doors.
Joren's eyes tracked the numbers stenciled in black above each frame until his gaze snagged on the one with three people sitting at a table in the center playing cards.
A chair scraped faintly against the floor, followed by a familiar voice. "You could at least give me a hand of cards. What's a holding room without a game?"
Gus breathed out through his nose, almost a laugh, whispering to the other two. "That's her."
The three guards at the table paused mid-hand. One's eyes flicked to Joren's uniform, then to the the other two in civilian clothing. Chairs scraped. Cards slapped the tabletop.
"Woah, who the hell are you guys? I haven't seen you three around these parts before!"
The tallest guard scraped his chair back hard enough to bump the wall, boots heavy on the floor as he started down the aisle. The others followed, closing in one step at a time. Their shoulders brushed the chairs on either side, each movement narrowing the space.
Gus didn't stop walking. His eyes tracked the lead man, calm but locked in. Joren and Bart walked by his side, readying themselves for a beatdown.
The second guard cracked his knuckles, while the third slid a hand inside his coat. A flash of a knife caught the ceiling light for just a heartbeat.
They kept coming.
So did the trio.
The air between them felt like a game of chicken, and the first to move would lose.
The guards moved away from the table as they approached, boots echoing against the stone floor. The sound carried in the emptiness, sharp and deliberate, until they stopped just short. The air felt still, dust hanging where the pale light cut across the hall.
"You picked the wrong hall to wander into," the man in the center said, his voice carrying in the hollow space.
One lunged first. Gus stepped into him, elbow burying into the man's ribs before he could raise his weapon. The guard's breath left in a pained wheeze. Gus followed with a blur of rapid-fire punches, each one snapping the man's head or body in a new direction until he looked like a battered training dummy.
From the left, another guard came swinging. Joren dipped under the arc of the punch, boots skidding against the stone. He rose fast, a gravity-enhanced fist pulling towards the man's chin just as he did with Thunderclap. As it connected, the impact sent him airborne in a perfect, slow-motion arc before he smashed into a table down the hall, cards and splinters bursting into the air like confetti.
Bart broke into a sprint with a manic yell, launching himself like a human javelin into the last man. Both of the two remaining guards were sent flying by the semi-experienced fighters Gus and Bart, both bodies tumbling into the wreckage of the first. In a final, ridiculous heap, the guards lay sprawled, legs tangled, clearly knocked out.
Willow leaned in toward the bars, the cold metal pressing faintly against her cheek as her forearms slipped through. She began to clap, the sound sharp in the still air, and grinned wide enough to show teeth.
"Bravo! Bravo! That was beautiful," she said, voice pitched just high enough to carry to them. "Messy, but beautiful. I'm giving it a solid nine out of ten. I'm only docking points for the mess you made out of the cards, because I wanted to play a hand."
Gus's head snapped toward her voice first, his expression caught halfway between relief and disbelief. Bartholomew followed a second later, his grin breaking through the sweat on his brow.
"Willow?" Gus asked, stepping closer to the cell.
"In the flesh." she replied, wiggling her arms through the bars as if to prove it. "Now, what's the plan, gentlemen? Are we doing a daring prison break, or am I just going to keep enjoying the view?"
Bart glanced past her toward the cell door, already scanning for locks and hinges. "Plan's easy," he said, voice low but upbeat. "You wait there, we make the door not there."
Willow's grin widened. "Music to my ears. Thing is, I already unlocked it."
Gus blinked, thrown off. "You… unlocked it?"
Willow leaned her weight against the bars, clearly enjoying herself. "I can shapeshift parts of my body, remember?" She wiggled her index finger, now in the shape of a key.
She gave the cell door a push. The hinges let out a low groan, and the iron swung inward without resistance.
"You could've just walked out?" Gus said, bewildered.
"Well, I could've," Willow agreed, stepping into the corridor, "but then I'd miss the part where you three show up thinking you're my heroes. Figured I'd let you have your moment. Besides, I didn't trust my odds three on one."
They had barely made it halfway down the hall before the first shout rang out.
"Over there!"
The sound of boots hitting the floor in unison made Joren's pulse spike. Around the far bend, three guards appeared. Then five more. More shapes began to pour into view behind them, a ripple of motion growing into a wave.
Gus muttered, "So much for quick and quiet."
Shadows leapt along the corridor walls as pursuit closed in. Joren caught the blur of blueish-grey shoulders in his peripheral vision every time they turned another corner, the shouts of "Stop!" and "Cut them off!" bouncing off the sterile walls.
They skidded right at the first hall they saw. Right into a dead end.
"Back!" Gus barked, spinning on his heel as the guards rounded the bend. Shouts rose in pitch as the chase renewed.
They took another corner, this one plunging them into a narrow hall lined with locked supply rooms. The overhead lights flickered, casting their shadows in a jittering strobe across the walls. Willow darted ahead, spotting a side passage.
"This way—" she started, before swearing under her breath. The hallway was full of supply crates, making it a tough maneuver. Might stop their pursuers for a few seconds, though.
Willow ducked sideways, slipping between two of the taller stacks before the others could ask where she was going. "Through here!" she called, voice bouncing off the metal walls.
Gus and Bartholomew followed in single file, shoulders scraping the crate edges. Joren brought up the rear, glancing over his shoulder at the guards closing in. The narrow space forced them to slow—good for buying time, bad for breathing room.
A clatter rang out as Bart clipped a low crate, sending a tin of tools tumbling. "Leave it," Gus hissed, shoving him forward.
By the time they burst out the other side, Willow was already halfway down a dim maintenance corridor. It sloped gently downward, pipes hissing overhead. Somewhere deep in the structure, machinery hummed like a steady heartbeat.
"This isn't on the main map," Bart said between breaths.
"Exactly," Willow shot back, already sprinting ahead. "Which means they have the upper hand in this chase! We need to move fast before they can figure that part out."
The corridor widened, lights flaring off of the polished tile. The sound of boots and muffled shouts echoed from the side hall, closing fast. Willow didn't slow as she threw a quick glance over her shoulder.
"Left!" she barked.
Joren and Gus followed without question, Bartholomew huffing as he brought up the rear, a wedge of cheese sitting in his arm. The turn dropped them into a narrower passage, its walls lined with storage cages. Shadows shifted ahead, clearly unaware of what all the commotion was about.
Before the two men could realize what was barreling towards them, Willow closed the gap in record time. shoulder slam took the first into the bars; Gus's elbow hooked into the second's side and sent him sprawling. No time to linger.
A set of reinforced doors loomed ahead. The same ones Willow had seen before she got caught.
"Almost there." Willow hissed.
The problem was that there was no handles or doorknobs to grab. It was a one way door.
Willow skidded to a stop, palm flat against the cold metal. "It's sealed from the other side," she muttered, breath sharp in her throat.
Boots hammered the tile behind them. They were at a dead end with no escape paths to take. No more turns. No open halls.
Joren stepped forward before Willow could curse again. His jaw tightened, eyes flicking toward the floor hoping he could see something beneath it that no one else could.
"Stop!" one barked, but his voice cracked halfway through the word. Another was still fumbling to catch his breath from all of that running.
Willow took a step back from the sealed door, her eyes darting between them and Joren. "I'm guessing they're not here to hand out pamphlets."
One of the guards' hands trembled as he tightened his grip on his sword at his hip, but before anyone could move, the tension shifted. A new set of footsteps and the sound of rolling wheels filled the chamber. The guards parted almost reflexively, their collective panting still prevalent.
From the far end of the hall came a man pushing a tall, yellow-painted filing cabinet, which was on tiny wheels. The guards parted without looking at one another, almost as if their bodies recognized him before their minds caught up.
"Mm-hm, quite the predicament." the man drawled, voice lilting on odd syllables and snapping short on others, like he was reading from an invisible script only he could see.
Tall and as thin as a bamboo pole, he was in an immaculately pressed uniform, his shoulders slightly hunched forward, as though decades of leaning into paperwork had curved them that way. A single monocle dangled from a fine chain hooked around his ear, swinging pendulum-like with every bob of his head. His sleeves were flawlessly starched, but his hands were a battlefield of hundreds of paper cuts, tiny beige bandages scattered across his hands.
Instead of greeting them by name, his sharp, narrow eyes landed on Willow. "Ah… my little Appendix C. Only been in our clutches for a mere three hours, but already escaped. Filed into my purview, yes-indeed-precisely, barring paper-jam calamities... hmm-hm-hmm."
One of the guards swallowed audibly.
The man rolled the cabinet forward until its shadow touched Joren's boots. "Now… wheels must be greased, oh-ho, both literal and metaphorical, my dear petitioners. Neglect the one, and the other will…" His lips thinned into a grin. "…creeeak."
He stopped beside the guards, one hand resting on the cabinet he rolled around with him.
"Mmmm… yes, yes, the air is… thin here, like the pause before a sneeze," he muttered, rolling his words as though they were marbles in his mouth. "Ah—but you wouldn't notice, would you? Your senses are so terribly… filed. I am known as commander Coral, head of the Department of Defense."
The nearest guard shifted uneasily. The man's grin widened.
"I keep everything in here, you know." he tapped the cabinet with a single knuckle, his monocle swinging from the front of his right ear. "Records of the world reside in my dear betty. Records of little indiscretions… reports of sleepless nights… receipts from your second lunch three weeks ago when you thought no one was looking."
His tone pitched upward in a singsong lilt, the words looping back on themselves. "Ohhh, but this," he slid open the top drawer with a hiss "This is for special occasions, hmm-hm-hmm."
From out of a seemingly normal filing folder, he pulled out a sword that could never have fit in such a small drawer. Blades of grass and leaves seemed to fall from it like flower petals, as if it was enchanted by a forest. The realization of what he just pulled out clicked with the four of them.
This was an artifact, one imbued by some sort of nature power.