Screams that tore at the heart, shouts flung like stones into a storm.
After two blasts rolled through Tideland City Newcaster, fear burst like a dam, and people fled a city that felt cursed.
Against that human flood, Lance’s party pushed upstream, their grip a taut rope against the current.
They stepped past the trampled old and infirm, their wails like wind in broken reeds, forced their eyes ahead, and passed the gate into Newcaster.
“Newcaster, the Window of the Republic, once poured gold like sunlight across this vast land’s fields and forges…” Lance led from the front, voice bright like a guide’s lantern, trying to lift spirits crushed by the ruin before them.
He never finished; refugees on the scarred street lunged at them like a starving pack.
“Save my child, please! I’m begging you, begging!”
“Food—do you have food? Hand it over! Hand it over, now!”
A desperate woman clung to Lance’s thigh like a drowning grip on driftwood, even as he kicked her off again and again.
Hungry men, eyes like wolves in winter, fixed on the handcart piled with goods at their center, swarmed, and fell to cold steel like grass before frost.
Bandits lurked like rats in cracks, watched like vultures on a thermal, greedy eyes flicking between the Celestial Spirits and their wealth, waiting to strike.
Even in that hellscape, Lance kept the same warm cadence. “In this marvelous city, you’ll board your flight home, carry memories etched under an emerald sky, and return to the Heavenly Spirit Empire.”
“Enough. Stop talking.” A Celestial Spirit lowered his head, the words half request, half plea, a leaf wilted under heat.
They crossed the shaking streets and reached the central square, where smoke hung thick as bitter tea.
A squad of gendarmes stood in ranks across the plaza, a steel comb against tangled hair.
They leveled their muskets at kneeling prisoners with blindfolded eyes and bodies mapped by bruises, backs turned like bent saplings.
It was clear the gendarmes were about to execute them, thunder poised above driest grass.
Before fingers tightened, one prisoner shouted, “Long live the Republic’s freedom!”
Others followed, a chorus like sparks in dry straw, and the captain flushed with anger like a struck match.
“Fire! Execute the terrorists who blew up the center and the port!” the captain roared, voice a whip crack.
Bang, bang, bang—bang, bang, bang—
The garrison hoped that thunder would calm the weathered hearts of the city, a hard rain to settle dust.
Under the gaze of citizens trembling like leaves, the gendarmes shot the culprits and let the square fall still as ash.
Yet the chaos didn’t end; the fire smoldered under the crust.
“Long live the Republic’s freedom!”
“For the peace of the Republic!”
“For an independent Mephis!”
A band clearly allied with the dead surged in from all sides, a tide from every alley, striking as the gendarmes fumbled with fresh spellpowder.
Teeth clenched, the gendarmes fought rough and cornered, a boar ringed by hounds; seeing the line buckle, the captain lifted his voice like a trumpet. “Don’t fear! They’re base rioters! The front fights; we in the rear won’t yield. Draw sabers—charge!”
Another storm broke, steel and cries whipping the square, while the citizens watched like stranded fish and drifted away with helpless eyes.
Newcaster’s west district was a place where factions traded fire like summer lightning; the east lay calmer, a bay behind a breakwater.
Lance’s group cut through the shell-torn west and reached the east, where he found a roost for the Celestial Spirits, a patch of dry ground in a flood.
To the Celestial Spirits curled in a restaurant corner, adrift and uneasy like birds before rain, Lance said, “Stay here and don’t move. I’ll bargain with the skippers at the docks and be back soon.”
He seized the shopkeeper by the collar, a hawk’s talon on a rat. “Prepare food and lodgings.”
The shopkeeper grinned oily and thin, a gutter lamp in wind. “Heh, heh, Sir Knight, of course, of course!”
Lance didn’t buy it. With his free hand, quick as a pickpocket wind, he pulled a small glass vial from the man’s pocket—white powder like winter dust.
He held the vial up. “What’s this?”
“That’s—”
Lance didn’t give him the breath. He knew that snow too well, and time was a fleeing horse.
Thud—his fist crushed into the man’s face, bruises blooming like ugly flowers, and the man wailed like a kettle.
“Don’t get crooked ideas, or—”
He pressed the Sirius Sword to the man’s throat, a shard of night against a pulse, and the man dropped to his knees, begging like water on stone.
Lance released him and turned, voice snapping like a standard in wind. “Krick, watch him. Have your men stake their lives and guard these Celestial Spirits.”
“Understood, Sir Knight.” Krick—once a pirate chief, once a soldier of the Republic—snapped a clean salute, a blade-line that made the black-hearted shopkeeper shrink like a slug in salt.
“Yes, sir.” The soldiers’ unreserved respect widened the inn’s other eyes like full moons, and whispers guessed at the identity of the youth who commanded them.
Lance gave the next orders to those at his side, words falling like stones setting a wall.
“Yuna, keep Violet on a short leash. Don’t let her run.”
“Understood, my master.”
“Shelika, watch the rest. If anyone plays foul, your dinner’s settled.”
“This humble one?” Shelika blinked, surprise a flicker of silver.
“Unwilling?” Lance’s tone cut like iced steel.
“No. I’m willing.” The surprise faded like mist.
With everything arranged, Lance stepped out of the restaurant, his shadow long as a spear.
He scattered a pack of refugees eyeing him like jackals, a few hard motions sending them skittering, and walked into Newcaster’s port.
“Newcaster forged the Republic’s wealth thanks to her deep-draft harbor on an inland lake…” He read from a travel booklet, eyes moving from glossy sunlight to the ruin before him like from spring to drought; he tore out the page, crushed it to a dead leaf, and dropped it.
The harbor was fine, but it bore a fatal flaw: an inland lake port that breathed through a single strait, a throat too easy to choke.
“How long to haul these damned rocks choking the strait?” Sailors shouted from the cliff walls, curses like tar, at stone-haulers bent like ants under burden.
Even with most of the channel plugged by fallen rubble, smaller fishing boats still slipped through like minnows in reeds.
Lance pinned his hopes to those boats like a prayer flag to wind. He went into the docks and haggled with the skippers, only to meet a slammed door.
“What, transport Celestial Spirits? We don’t take that job.”
