There was no time to offer Aisha a word of praise.
Through the jagged, smoking breach in the wall, the view of the city plaza below was a nightmarish hellscape. Streaking through the bright morning sky were dozens of winged skeletal horrors… trauma-induced monsters born from pure, concentrated rage… circling the Town Hall like a flock of starved vultures. The moment the sound of our firefight reached them, their hollow eyes snapped toward the opening, and a swarm of leathery, membrane-wrapped wings pivoted in unison, diving straight for our position.
If even five of those things breach this corridor at once, we're dead.
With the Death Chant shotgun braced under my left arm, I brought my wrist to my mouth and bit down hard with my vampiric fangs, tearing a deep, agonizing laceration straight across the major veins of my forearm.
RIIIIP!
The sharp, white-hot agony flared like liquid fire… a sensation eerily reminiscent of a suicidal wrist-cut. I immediately triggered Pain Manipulation, dulling the psychological shock and converting the raw physical agony into direct, focused magical control.
Dark, viscous vampire blood erupted from the open gash in a heavy, pressurized torrent. Guided by my Hemomancy, the crimson wave surged toward the high breach in the wall, instantly expanding into a massive, thick barrier across the gap.
"Crystallize!" I hissed through grit teeth.
The blood instantly hardened into an impenetrable, solid wall of dense crimson crystals, completely sealing the open hole shut just as the lead winged monsters slammed violently against the outer surface.
THUM-THUM-THUM!
The crystal structure held firm, dampening the deafening shrieks from outside and blocking out the harsh, scorching sunlight that had been searing my flesh.
I clamped my left thumb over my bleeding wrist, my breathing heavy as my vision briefly swam from the sudden blood loss.
Turning back to the hallway, I saw the team holding the line with newfound desperation. Aisha had completely cast aside her fear; her green eyes burned with raw adrenaline as she held her wooden Tommy Gun with a firm, two-handed grip.
BANG-FSHHH! BANG-FSHHH!
The Fire-attuned submachine gun hummed with blinding heat. The orange projectiles she fired were no longer simple bullets… fed by her expanding mana, they erupted from the barrel like superheated, white-hot plasma beams, burning straight through the calcified chest plates of incoming bone-thralls and incinerating their internal organs on impact.
Beside her, James was delivering steady, lethal wind-bolts into the heads of thralls attempting to push up the stairs.
Having lost his makeshift closet-door shield in the previous clash, Chris grabbed a heavy, solid-oak conference table from an adjacent office. Hoisting the massive slab of wood in front of his chest like a mobile fortress wall, he roared and drove forward, forcefully ramming a cluster of bone-armored zombies backward down the narrow corridor.
"Keep pushing toward the ground floor exit! Don't stop moving."
Chris grunted, his boots skidding briefly against the blood-slicked marble floor before he dug his heels in. Driven by the primal instinct of a father protecting his daughter and the fierce resolve of a leader refusing to let his city fall, he channeled every ounce of his remaining strength into the heavy oak table.
"GET BACK!" Chris roared, driving his entire body weight forward.
The massive wooden slab slammed into the front line of the horde like a runaway battering ram, catching at least ten bone-armored thralls simultaneously. The sheer kinetic momentum swept them off their feet, tumbling them backward down the steep staircase leading into the Debtors' Lobby in a tangled, thrashing mass of limbs and shattered calcified armor.
"Now! Clear the stairwell!" Chris yelled, holding the heavy table wedged across the top of the steps as a temporary blockade.
I surged past him, stepping up to the edge of the stairs. Raising the Death Chant shotgun with my single arm, I racked the slide against my hip and unloaded into the writhing pile below.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The heavy, enchanted slugs tore through the tight choke point, punching straight through the dense, thick skulls of the fallen monsters. Corrupted blood and shattered bone fragments sprayed across the walls. As the dark blood spilled, the passive Lifesteal enchantment tied to my blood curse activated. Streams of red essence drifted from the fallen thralls and soaked into my open skin, instantly knitting together the deep, agonizing laceration I had bitten into my left wrist.
The bleeding stopped, and my strength flooded back into my veins.
James rushed up right behind me, raising his Wind-attuned Tommy Gun to pick off two remaining zombies attempting to scramble back up the railing.
PEW! PEW!
The compressed wind-bolts struck them squarely between the eyes, dropping them cold onto the stairwell.
Further back in the corridor, Aisha stood shaking, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. The repeated heavy recoil of the fire-attuned submachine gun had severely bruised her small shoulders, leaving her gasping for breath and unable to lift the wooden barrel for another burst.
Hugh stepped up silently beside her, his notched arming sword held low and steady. His cold, scarred face remained entirely unbothered as he scanned the blind spots behind us. As a former Citadel serial killer, he served as our ultimate insurance policy… if any rogue thralls managed to breach our flanks while our marksmen recovered, his lethal blade work would slice them down before they could touch Aisha or Lukreia.
Silence fell over the Debtors' Lobby once more.
The high-ceilinged room below was now completely quiet, saved for the soft dripping of blood and the crackle of burning tapestries. The staircase was buried under a gruesome, steaming pile of crushed bone and lifeless infected corpses.
The path to the ground floor was finally open.
We picked our way down the stairwell into the Debtors' Lobby, our boots squelching sickeningly into a mushy slurry of crushed bone, torn muscle, and dark, corrupted blood. Hugh pulled a grimace, stepping delicately around a severed torso with a look of utter disgust.
"Ugh, disgusting... I've cut down plenty of men in my day, but this... this is just foul."
Reaching the floor of the lobby, we paused to scan the wide-open floor. Silence. Not a single infected moved among the overturned desks and scattered financial ledgers.
If there were any thralls left on the first floor directly below us, the sound of point-blank shotgun fire, wind-bolts, and plasma blasts would have drawn them up the central stairs by now, the interior of the Town Hall is clear. But the city outside is a different story. The gunfire will eventually draw the roaming hordes from the surrounding streets straight to the front gates.
I turned around to assess my party's condition, and it wasn't pretty.
Chris was slumped against a stone pillar, gasping for air, his arms trembling from the sheer physical strain of holding back a dozen thralls with an oak table. Beset by his fatigue, he set Lukreia down, her bound frame squirming uselessly against the mops and ropes.
Hugh was panting heavily, leaning on his arming sword, while James and Aisha were both clutching their shoulders with grimaces of pain. The violent, repetitive kinetic recoil from the arcane submachine guns had severely bruised their unconditioned joints.
I walked over to Aisha. She was wincing, her left hand tightly cupping her right shoulder joint.
"I-It stings… It feels like someone smashed a hammer into my collarbone..."
Without a word, I reached out my left hand and gently pressed my palm against her right shoulder. Channeling my Pain Manipulation, I flooded her bruised nerves with an ethereal, numbing sensation… a localized anesthesia that completely cut off the pain signals traveling to her brain.
Aisha blinked, her wide green eyes looking up in astonishment as the throbbing pain vanished instantly.
"Oh... it doesn't hurt anymore! Wow..."
She looked up at my face, her eyes lingering on my features before a faint, puzzled frown crossed her brow.
"Wait... why are you being so nice all of a sudden, Eirene? Are... are we close or something?"
I stifled a nervous cough. If she only knew.
She had no idea that the S-rank bounty hunter standing in front of her was the exact same person as "Zenni Roy"... the slum-born male prodigy at Sisiphon Magic Academy whom she and her friends clung to like a clingy harem. If I casually dropped my shapeshifting disguise right now and admitted I was Zenni, the sheer psychological shock would probably break her brain, and I'd die of absolute embarrassment.
"Because you're a student at Sisiphon Magic Academy, remember?" I said smoothly, keeping my voice cool and professional.
Aisha's eyes went wide as realization struck her.
"Wait! You... you're a Rynd, right? Eirene Rynd! Doesn't that mean you're related to Principal Elicia?!"
"Yes, I'm her little sister."
"Whoa..." Aisha breathed, staring at me with newfound awe.
"Anyways, why on earth are you all the way out here on the coastline of Lulu City, Aisha? Shouldn't you be back at the academy grounds?"
"Oh! We were on our official summer break, my mom and I came down to the coast to visit family for the holidays... we were supposed to take a ship back next week…"
"Oh... okay," I said quickly, cutting off her sentence before the grief over her mother could break through her fragile composure and trigger another panic attack.
"Hey, Eirene… Mind doing that numbing trick for me too? Feels like my arm's about to fall off."
I looked at him, my brow twitching slightly under my hood. James had a face only a mother could love… an oily, unpolished mug that practically radiated "unattractive side-character enforcer." For a woman with high standards, just standing next to him was a mild test of patience.
Still, he had held the line with that Wind-attuned Tommy Gun, so I stepped forward and slapped my palm onto his shoulder, casting Pain Manipulation to deaden his bruised nerves.
"Ahhh... sweet relief," James exhaled, rolling his arm around.
Considering his past as Inmate 100 in the Dodorant Citadel, I decided to pry a little into his background as we caught our breath.
"So, 'James.' How exactly did a guy like you end up locked in the Citadel in the first place?"
"Well, I once pulled off a high-stakes bank robbery, laundered the loot through an underground casino in the capital, and got sloppy on the getaway. Got thrown into the Citadel, where I ended up running tactical details for Hugh. Back then, this punk-ass kid… Inmate 345… joined our circle, only to completely betray the group, beat us bloody in the bathhouse, and wreck the hierarchy. After serving another year or so, I finally got released on parole."
He tossed a thumb back toward Hugh, who was quietly wiping zombie blood off his arming sword.
"Now, Hugh over there? He did stuff way more malicious than bank robbery. He was a notorious serial killer down in the Tata region. Used to hunt down cat beastkins, grind their meat into burger, and feed it to feral dogs. Guy's an absolute hardcore racist."
I stared at James, completely stunned under my hood.
What in the absolute hell...?
My mind spun as I processed the sheer absurdity of what I was hearing. Racism and hate crimes were nothing new back on Earth, but hearing that full-blown, genocidal hatred against beastkins existed right here in Andromeda… and executed with such twisted, serial-killer barbarism… was an absolute mindfuck.
I glanced over at Hugh, whose scarred, expressionless face showed zero remorse.
Note to self, If Hugh steps out of line for even a second, I'm putting a slug straight through his head.