The first explosion came from somewhere in the crowd.
BOOM!
The sound tore through the Flower Promenade.
Elias flinched.
A heartbeat later, another explosion followed.
BOOM!
The explosions didn't come from the ground; it blossomed from the rooftops in a synchronized chain of concussive blasts that tore through the bright summer air of Aethelberg.
BOOM!
Thick clouds of fine, obsidian-tinted dust billowed outward from the detonating charges, catching the warm breeze and raining down over the sprawling, festive crowds like a localized eclipse of black snowflakes. The substance was Black Dandy—a notorious, volatile accelerant refined for chaos.
Elias coughed sharply as a cloud of the dark powder settled over him. He inhaled before he could stop himself. It tasted metallic on his tongue and his body registered a momentary, burning tickle in the back of his throat. His body reacted—a cough, a spasm—but then, nothing else happened to him.
The people around him were not so lucky.
A woman beside him suddenly threw her hands into the air.
"YES!"
She laughed. Then screamed. Then began shoving the people around her, slwoly undressing as she did. Another man stumbled past Elias with bloodshot eyes.
"You stole my girl you bastard!"
He grabbed another civilian by the collar.
"What are you doing?!"
"They've always been lying!"
"CLENCH YOUR TEETH!"
The man struck him. The other man struck back. Within seconds, a fight had erupted.
Elias stared.
"What the hell?"
The powder continued spreading. The Flower Promenade transformed before his eyes.
The joyful festival-goers, moments ago smiling and dancing in their pristine white garments, were instantly driven into a state of feral, fanatical euphoria. Eyes glazed over with manic intensity, screams of primal ecstasy tore from throats. They screamed, laughed, wept—all at once. Some began attacking each other. Others charged toward the royal procession with wild, reckless abandon.
"What the bloody hell is going on?" Elias muttered, his eyes darting across the screaming masses as the orderly celebration collapsed into a nightmare.
Before he could process the full scope of the pandemonium, a burly man wearing a tattered patchwork tunic and a crudely painted grin charged straight at Elias, swinging a heavy iron pipe with murderous intent.
His eyes were wild.
"You!"
Elias blinked.
"Me?" He dodged and took a couple of steps back.
The man pointed at him.
"You're his son!"
"Whose son?"
"Alaric Dukker!"
More revolutionists emerged from the fracturing crowd, their eyes locked onto Elias with venomous hatred. The man's expression twisted.
"Look! It's the son of the traitorous Lord Alaric!" he shrieked, pointing a finger.
"Make him pay for his father's crimes against the common folk!" The man lunged.
Elias didn't hesitate. With a flick of his wrist and a precise calculation of local air density, he manipulated the parameters of his immediate environment, generating a concentrated shockwave of high-pressure wind.
CRACK.
The gust struck the charging man dead-center, sending him flying backward through the air to crash hard against a food vendor's cart ten paces away.
Elias frowned. They were few in number—perhaps a dozen—but their call to action had attracted the attention of others. Civilians, their minds twisted by the Black Powder, turned toward him with predatory intent.
"Great," Elias muttered. "Just great."
He then frowned as he observed his surroundings. His attackers were few in number—perhaps a dozen—but their call to action had attracted the attention of others. Civilians, their minds twisted by the Black Powder, deeply resentful of the societal hierarchy or simply their own miserable lives. They turned toward him with predatory intent. More crazed onlookers joined the rush, eager to tear him apart.
As an acolyte, Elias possessed physical and spiritual conditioning far beyond ordinary mortals. Furthermore, his chosen application of his trait—the manipulation of wind via precise parameter adjustment—made it nearly impossible for a disorganized mob to overwhelm him in close quarters.
'Pulls of compassion? Forget them,' Elias thought coldly, pushing all lingering hesitation out of his mind.
'This is the real world. Hesitation gets you killed.'
Still, taking into account that the civilians attacking him were mere puppets of a chemical agent rather than hardened killers, he held back his lethal options. Instead of slicing wind-blades, he cupped his hands and conjured rapid-fire balls of heavily compressed air, firing them like non-lethal cannonballs.
Elias raised both hands and the wind changed just as one attacker charged.
Elias compressed the air around his fist and struck. The concentrated burst of wind launched the man backward.
Another came from the side.
Elias twisted and sent a gust that slammed into him knocking him out.
A third tried to tackle him from behind. Elias jumped, wind carried him upward. He turned in midair and compressed sphere of air formed in his palm aiming then fired.
BOOM.
The projectile struck the man's chest and sent him rolling across the street.
Not dead, just unconscious.
Elias landed. Another person attacked immediately his feet touched the ground.He swept his hand sideways and the wind caught her and she flew into a wall.
Elias breathed heavily, his heart was pounding. He heard footsteps behinf him and deftly sidestepping a frantic lunge from a woman wielding a broken bottle, Elias twisted his parameters, catching a powerful updraft of wind beneath his boots. With a sharp burst of atmospheric pressure, he launched himself straight upward, soaring twelve meters into the air and landing squarely on the flat stone rooftop nearby.
From his elevated vantage point, Elias surveyed the devastation below. The situation was deteriorating at an exponential rate.
Flower petals floated through clouds of black powder.
White costumes were stained with mud.
Music had become screaming.
The royal procession was surrounded.
Even the Royal Knights, trained to handle civil unrest, were buckling under the influence of the Black Dandy dust settling thickly over the streets. Some guards were frantically trying to maintain formation, while others were swinging their weapons at phantom enemies or joining the chaotic melee.
His stomach tightened.
'This is bad.'
Elias crouched down, reaching out a hand to catch a drift of the falling dark powder. He pinched a small amount between his fingers, bringing it close to his face.
His senses expanded. He didn't literally taste it. But he could feel its composition through his heightened perception through predation.
His expression changed.
"...Black Ooze."
Not pure but a diluted, modified version of the substance. But unmistakably a drug derived from it.
Because he had been afflicted by the Black Oooze the previous year when the Saphire Salamander skewered him. In his unconsciousness he predated the Black Ooze within his body and now his cellular structure had long since synthesized a permanent immunity. His immunity wasn't just resistance, he had already consumed the source so lesser, diluted iterations like Black Dandy were utterly useless against him.
Suddenly, a massive shockwave rattled the paving stones below, nearly throwing him off the roof and drawing his attention to its source.
Sir Damtse Okko was engaged in a desperate battle against the Revolutionary.
The knight commander was a blur of motion, his sword flashing in the morning light. But the Revolutionary moved like smoke, dodging and weaving, his patchwork cloak billowing behind him. His porcelain mask was expressionless, but his movements were fluid, almost playful.
Around them, the other Revolutionists were attacking the royals. Lord Kingsley Amberose had erected a barrier of shimmering energy around the royal family, his face pale with exertion.
Gyan moved with terrifying grace, her hands weaving complex patterns that summoned thick, obsidian-black webs to bind and immobilize the attackers lunging at their perimeter. Yet, the sheer volume of screaming rioters and fanatics kept pressing forward, hacking and clawing at the barrier.
Tamamo's voice entered his thoughts.
"Are you going to help?"
Elias stared at the chaos.
"Me? I'm a kid."
"So?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Something heroic."
"Like what, beat the piñata? Hell no."
Tamamo giggled.
"You really are boring."
It was then he saw Emma gable appear, alongside Layl and her two inquisitor buddies and a woman he had never seen before who, for some reason, looked happy to find herself in such a chaotic situation. He also saw his father exit the barrier and move to take positio near the king.
"Won't you at least help your father," Tamamo urged. "He's in danger."
"He's fine," Elias said flatly. "I'd only get in the way."
"Good."
Elias frowned.
"Good?"
"I was hoping you'd say that."
"...What?"
Tamamo's voice became suspiciously cheerful.
"Look around you."
Elias did. Every major force in the city was moving caught up in the mayhem.
Knights.
Enforcement.
Nobles.
Officials.
Even ordinary citizens were being pulled into the chaos.
Tamamo continued.
"Wouldn't this be the perfect opportunity to visit the palace?"
Elias stared.
"You can't be serious."
"I'm always serious."
"No, you're not."
"Fine. I'm occasionally serious."
Elias sighed.
"I can't just walk into the palace."
"Why not?"
"We don't know what security they have. What if they left enough guards to defend it?"
"Always such a stick in the mud," Tamamo clicked her tongue.
She reached into the void of his spirit domain and materialized the kitsune mask in his hand. The white mask was cool against his fingers and its red markings seemed to glow.
He stared at it and Tamamo chuckled.
"Put it on."
Elias didn't. Instead, he manifested a bit of his Flow as smoke and moulded it to to take on the familiar shape of Agent Orange. The clone then took the mask and wore it before taking a step back off the edge of the rook and into the chaos.
Simultaneously, Elias executed a technique of complete Flow Suppression, draining his energy down to absolute zero so he blended seamlessly into the ambient Flow radiation of the city. He manipulated the air currents to lift himself silently off the roof, and manifested the Batglider artifact he made in the IronForest maintaining a steady, low-altitude glide occasionally touching down softly on a rooftop to preserve his stamina.
He looked back to see a pissed off looking Layl accompanied by her companions going after the clone he had made. As they did, a group he suspected weren't ordinary people followed and spread outin formation to capture the clone.
"Why didn't you wear the mask yourself?"
"I'm snooping."
"And?"
"I'm not walking into a trap blind. I'm simply adding a little extra discord to the soup of pandemonium. Just in case."
As he glided silently his sharp eyes caught a small, suspicious group of individuals moving swiftly on foot toward a reinforced side-gate leading directly into the palace service tunnels.
Elias lowered his altitude slightly, hugging the shadow of a high stone wall. Peering down into the alley, he recognized a familiar face leading the clandestine group.
"Todd?" Elias narrowed his eyes, watching the young woman move with practiced stealth.
"What is she doing?"
"You'll find out soon enough."
Down in a cluttered alcove near a row of overflowing market bins, a man wearing a loose, tattered white jacket was furiously rummaging through a pile of discarded festival trash, frantically searching for leftover food scraps.
The man paused, suddenly freezing mid-motion. He slowly lifted his head, his hollow, bloodshot eyes tracking straight upward through the gaps in the stone architecture.
He had caught a fleeting glimpse of Elias gliding silently overhead.
With trembling, claw-like fingers, the man reached up and aggressively scratched at a tattoo etched crudely onto the side of his neck. A wet, unhinged grin split his pale face.
"Found you," the man rasped hoarsely to himself.
Dropping the trash he was holding, the man abandoned his search for scraps and began sprinting agilely after Elias's shadow along the ground, moving with an unnatural, terrifying speed that completely defied his ragged appearance.
Elias, unaware of the man below, continued toward the palace.
The infiltration had begun.