An hour later, Meg and I were crouched at the edge of the camp's orchard,—the very place I'd crashed into when I fell off my Ourodrakon ride about two days earlier.
Yup, it's only been two days since that attack.
And since that attack, the place was mostly deserted.
From our shedded hiding spot, the administrative part of the camp spread out in front of us.
A bunch of small corporate buildings littered a vast green field giving the place a serene university look.
Among the buildings, there was a small town-hall–looking building close to us—where Hylla and the higher-ups were having their meeting and also where Scuria was supposed to appear anytime soon.
"Sneaking like this around with you is so pathetic." Meg whispered, "It's bad for my popularity."
"I'm literally your only friend in camp." I said
"Nope. I'm your only friend in camp, and it's not vice versa." She picked up a small smooth rock and threw at a squirrel gnawing on a nut on the tree above us. "How long are we going to have to wait here before Scuria shows up for the meeting?"
"I don't know. He should be here for the meeting anytime now. At least that's what Hylla said."
"I hope he at least gets here before it rains" Meg said, looking nervously at the low grey clouds, "The weather is not looking friendly at all."
A storm cloud was actually already brewing across the horizon, blocking the afternoon sun.
"Anyway, since we have nothing to do right now…" Meg said.
"We are literally on a mission right now."
"Don't make it sound so dignified. We are about to kidnap a man and torture him half to death for answers."
"More like interrogating, Meg."
"Suuuuure." She drawled, "Anyway, I was going to say… you saw Hylla and Vektor getting all…smoochy smoochy, right?"
I knew this was coming and I really wanted to avoid it for the rest of my very-possibly-short-life but I really couldn't hide anything from Meg.
"Yeah. I did see them…smooching." Just saying that crushed my heart again and I hated that I felt that way towards someone I never really had anything going on with in the first place.
Meg patted my shoulder knowingly, "You'll be fine. Stuff like this always happens to the best of us."
"Sure."
In her own way, that was her being very concerned about me and I appreciated it.
She wasn't one to be an expert with emotional pep talks anyway.
We remained in our hiding place in silence for another ten minutes, waiting.
The wind picked up, blowing up fallen leaves and rustling the trees.
The sky darkened as the storm cloud covered the sky above camp, now dangerously low.
"Uh, do you think we should probably postpone our abduction? I'd prefer not to be drenched during my first kidnapping attempt." Meg asked.
I also felt an odd unsettling vibe about the storm.
It was almost like…
"You are right. I think we should probably just leav–"
I had barely finished completing my sentence when one slender funnel unraveled from the clouds, thin and tentative, touching down like a probing finger.
Wait.
A second one followed, spiraling lower, tighter.
Then a third.
By the time the fourth descended, the calm was gone. Four narrow funnels twisted in unison, carving their way toward the ground…
"TORNADOES!" Meg gasped.
First of all, I'd never seen an actual tornado in person before. I mean I'd seen them on tv–grainy footages of storm chasers filming from a distance, but even then it just felt unreal to me. Tame.
The closest thing to a tornado I'd seen was a dust devil about ten feet tall that had chased me around the playground in grade four.
But what I was witnessing now was over a hundred feet tall and was capable of lifting cars.
As I watched, fifty feet away from us, a tornado made a beeline for the camp's armory, ripping through the wooden walls like it was made of paper.
"This isn't good!" Meg yelled above the roaring storm. "That place is going to explode. The explosives…"
And then the armoury actually exploded in a thunderous blast, the shockwave knocking us backwards into the trees.
But the destruction didn't spread for long. The tornado snapped back, devouring the flames midair, siphoning them into its spinning core until the funnel burned from within—its inside ablaze, now a raging column of fire and wind.
"Meg, we have to find cover now!"
It was hard to hear myself over the roaring of the winds.
Gusts of wind was blowing up sand from the orchard floor into my face and mouth.
"But Hylla! She's still in her meeting!"
"I know! But I'm sure she's fine! Let's just–"
Another gust of wind lifted Meg off the ground, tossing her like a ragdoll among debris but she managed to hang on to the edge of a tree branch ten feet above my head.
"AAAAAAAAARGGHHHH!" she screamed, which was a perfectly normal reaction in that situation.
"I'm coming to get you! Hang on!" I yelled up at her.
But I didn't know how I could do that. I could barely find my own footing.
The nearest tornado to us was about a hundred feet away but it was still tugging me hungrily in its direction.
There was something malicious about the storm. I know yes, it's a storm, of course it's malicious, but there was something else.
It felt evil.
I looked up at the swirling storm cloud hovering over the camp and for some reason the rest of the sky was clear blue like it was a normal afternoon.
Was the storm…?
I squinted, trying to ignore the wind blowing into my eyes and peered intently into the storm.
And my heart stopped.
A vaguely formed smoky face was inside the storm.
A ghostlike presence.
You could blink and you'd miss it. But I was absolutely certain of what I was looking at.
The storm was a Harbinger.
I could feel it. That was why the aura felt weirdly familiar.
Because I'd felt it before. Back in the helicopter.
Empty black eye sockets stared down at the camp, vast and uncaring.
I couldn't tell what the face looked like exactly because it was constantly shifting, clouds weaving itself together to form a skull or a ghoulish face.
"AAAAAAAAARGGHHHH ZEEEEPHHHAAAANNNN!" Meg's screamed, cutting me out of my dreadful realization.
"I'm coming up!" I told Meg and started climbing the tree as the wind swayed me in every direction, pummelling me with tree branches. It felt like hanging on to a high speed rollercoaster without a safety seatbelt.
But I finally managed to reach Meg after a thousand vicious slaps from the tree branches. I grabbed her by the jacket and pulled her down with me.
We tumbled down and poor Meg somehow ended up underneath my body making her get a mouthful of rich soil.
"Ptuah!" She spat, "why is there randomly a hurricane going on here?"
"It's not a hurricane. That's a Harbinger." I replied, still pining her beneath me incase she was going to go flying off again.
"But that's not–"
"I know! It's not like the one I saw. But I'm certain it's a Harbinger. They have a similar aura."
"But it's a storm! Are we going to start fighting the literal forces of nature now?"
"I don't know! But–"
"Look! END soldiers!" Meg pointed.
I looked up.
Right in front of the building where the higher-ups meeting was supposed to be going on, about a dozen END soldiers fanned out in a battle formation beneath the centre of the storm.
The higher-ups?
Were they going to fight the Harbinger? Did they somehow spot it too?
As I watched, one of the soldiers launched himself with a concentrated fire blast, pushing himself off the ground at a high speed.
From beneath me, Meg gasped, "That's Captain Korvak!"
Captain Korvak flew fifty feet skywards with so much speed, I worried he'd get a whiplash.
Then he got close enough to the eye of the storm—the literal eye of the Harbinger in the center of the storm—he donated a huge blast of flames from his entire body.
Waves of heat bathed me even from that distance.
The force of the blast momentarily pushed the storm cloud apart, creating a crater of blue sky where the Harbinger's face was supposed to be.
The strong winds dialed down a notch. Two of the tornadoes dissipated and faded into the atmosphere.
"Did he kill it?" Meg asked.
Before I could answer, a horrible hellish howl echoed through the entire camp.
And then the wind started picking up again, as the cloud began gathering together, like a wound healing itself.
Gradually the whole sky darkened, even darker than before and the temperature dropped.
The face of the Harbinger materialized again, now clearer than before.
And not just the face.
A clawed hand, made entirely from clouds, swiped at Captain Korvak like he was a bratty insect, sending him flying out of sight.
The Harbinger descended on the camp, like a genie in a kettle, the lower half of its body remained unformed in the cloud while the top half floated downwards, ready to wipe the camp from the map.