Azure: Gunner

Chapter 7-8

The city of Lost Angels is divided into nine districts. Districts one through four are the oldest, built within the original city walls. They are collectively known as the Inner City or Old Town, and might well be considered a different world from the Outer City that surrounds them. The following sections contain a brief history of each district.

District One, better known as ‘Central’, is the premier real estate of the entire region. Located in the southwest portion of the Inner City, it is the furthest from the dangers of the QZ and the LA River, which flows to the east of Lost Angels. While largely symbolic, the perceived safety is why this district was selected from the beginning as the seat of government and the home of the wealthiest families.

To this day, Central remains the most expensive and desirable place to live in all of Lost Angels. The mansions of the rich and powerful make up the majority of the district. Together with the Capital, this seat of power also has the lowest population density within the city.

- Fodorick’s Lonely Traveler – Guide to Lost Angels

The next morning we gathered in the square, the stench of dried blood still thick in the air. The bodies had been burned, but there was no way to clean up all the blood. In the light, the carnage was even more dramatic than the night before. Then Thompson stunned us all with her announcement.

“I have no choice but to order the school closed temporarily. The dorms need significant repairs, as do many of the other buildings. Our guard force is depleted now when they’ll be needed most to keep away scavengers and the monsters that prey on them. In addition, a great deal of our stored food was destroyed.

“However, the deciding factor was the escape of the matriarch. I believe the creature was Tiering – that is, it had reached the peak of Level 39, and needed to defeat a strong opponent of its own Tier to break through to Level 40. It sought, and I believe found, that opponent here. There is still no sign of instructor Hargrave, and one witness confirmed that they saw the monster… consume him.

“That means the matriarch is likely now Level 40, and will be even more powerful than before once its injuries heal. We will need a high-Tier force to hunt down and eliminate it. Thankfully one of the instructors used a tracking Skill on it before it fled, so we have an idea of where to look.

“Until the school is repaired and our guard replenished, we will be returning you to Lost Angels. Gather your belongings now, if you have any remaining, and assemble back here in thirty minutes. We’ll distribute supplies and move out immediately. Dismissed!”

The shock among the students was palpable. We found ourselves accompanying Arlo back to his room, which was intact except for broken windows, where he retrieved his things. He also had most of the spare ammunition in his room, since he had more space than any of us, and we distributed that among the team. Jayce wanted to take one more look at her room, so we followed her there, but it was a near total loss. Only a few of Tara’s assortment of training weapons had survived, being piled in the corner.

We were a frustrated group as we returned to the assembly area. We still hadn’t seen Wolf, and I had to assume he’d been one of those badly injured. I tried to slip away from the team to check on him, but everyone followed along behind me. The pair of exhausted-looking guards at the door turned us away, though, saying the patients were not to be disturbed. At least they confirmed that Wolf was one of them.

As we organized into a ragged column, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. The Academy had only been home for a few months – we were just short of half-way through the semester – but post-Yuri my time here had been the best of my life. For the first time since the Tutorial, I found myself uncertain of what lay ahead.

We marched out of the gates well before 0900. From the rumors swirling around the students, it would only take about two days of hard marching to reach LA. Fifty miles total, and I would be in a real city for the first time in my life. The only silver lining to the whole situation was my excitement at being able to see the kids again, far sooner than I’d ever expected to.

The instructors set a fast pace, nearly a jog, and were visibly more alert than usual. I wondered if any of them had slept since the attack. The remaining guards had stayed behind, along with Thompson and Trite, so JJ seemed to be in charge of the column. When we passed through Backhorn less than an hour later, I was relieved to see the town seemed to be intact. There were a few damaged buildings in the main square, but clearly nothing as dangerous as the matriarch had come here.

Behind the students trailed a single wagon that had been recovered from the stables, pulled by a pair of tri-horns I’d never realized lived there. Do they really share a building with Trite? Or does Thompon keep her pet somewhere else, like in the administration building with her?

The road led us south-west of Backhorn, cutting west of the nearby hills, and then continued on. The terrain wasn’t that different from the area around Sunland, though it was a bit greener. Mostly that just meant bigger cacti and slightly healthier-looking shrubs though. If there were any monsters nearby, they stayed away from our heavily-armed column. That, or one of the instructors eliminated them before we could even see them.

We passed through another small town a bit larger than Sunland in the late afternoon. The guards there watched us warily as we trudged through, but made no move to stop us. When we were finally allowed to camp for the night, I was utterly exhausted. Between the fight, the cleaning up, and the shitty sleep I’d had in the training hall, I nearly passed out as soon as I’d eaten and made an approximation of a bedroll out of my little-used cloak and the spare blankets I’d been given.

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We were up early and moving again the next morning. There was another town just a couple hours away, and another a couple hours beyond that. It seemed that everything was closer together here near the city. The farms surrounding one town nearly merged into those of the next. I didn’t recognize many of the crops, either, and there were more farm animals than I was used to seeing. I wondered what the food in LA would be like, and if I could afford any of it.

It wasn’t until the afternoon that the city came into view in the distance. We were still a dozen miles away, with another town between us and the city, but I could make out the outline of a few tall, slender buildings towering over the wide expanse of the walls. The land was covered in densely packed farms – except for a wide, barren area with a wide slice of blue running through the middle.

I learned from Arlo that the blue was the LA River, and that the reason there were no farms close to it was because of the frequent attacks by giant sea monsters that would swim up the river from the ocean. Farmers had to dig small canals – too small for the most dangerous aquatic monsters – to bring the water to their farms. It was forbidden to live or farm within a mile of the river.

The road cut through the REZ, as Arlo called it – it stood for River Exclusion Zone. As we got closer, I started to take in the real size of the river, which was nearly a thousand feet across. The road didn’t approach the river directly. Instead, it led us up a large, artificial-looking hill that rose a couple hundred feet above the surrounding terrain.

Atop the hill was a small, heavily fortified structure. It had walls easily another fifty feet high, and I discovered they were over twenty feet thick when we passed through the gates and beneath them. Within the walls was another defensible structure, which had its own large gate through which the road passed at a sharp downwards angle. We followed along with the rest of the students into a sloped tunnel that spiraled down into the ground.

It was wide, at least thirty feet, and almost twice as tall as even the orcs. There were a few mana lights, perhaps every hundred yards, but most of the illumination came from Light, which everyone had cast as we started to descend. We followed the road down and down until finally the floor leveled out and the spiral straightened.

A light breeze pushed fresh air through the tunnel as we marched under the river, my mind boggling at the scale of the construction. I turned to Arlo, who was walking next to me.

“Is the river really that dangerous that they had to build this tunnel under it?” I asked.

He laughed lightly. The sound would have echoed from the walls if not for being drowned out by the sound of everyone’s boots on the hard stone.

“Oh yes, the tunnel is much safer than anything else. There were attempts to build bridges in the past, but they were always destroyed by the sea monsters. The only reason the tunnel survives is because they can’t tell it's there. From what I’ve heard, monsters as large as the matriarch like to explore the river and wreak havoc. And there are much bigger ones that stay in the ocean,” he told me seriously.

I felt a chill run down my spine at the thought of monsters even larger than the matriarch living out in the deep waters. I could barely imagine what the ocean even looked like. Until today, the most water I’d ever seen in one place had been in the dungeon.

It felt like we were underground for a long time, though it was only a bit over a mile of flat tunnel before we reached the other side and it started to spiral its way back up to the surface. We emerged in the bowels of another small fortress, exiting this time on the west side. As we passed under the wall and into the open, I got my first close-up look at the city.

Lost Angels was truly enormous, on a scale that was hard for me to understand. Five hundred thousand people lived there! The walls stretched for literal miles, and while they weren’t as formidable as Fort Alpha’s, they were still at least fifty feet tall, with a wide dry moat in front of them. From the bottom of the moat, it would be a hundred feet or more to the top of the battlements.

Standing on top of the hill guarding the tunnel exit, we could see down into the city. Most of the buildings near the walls were hidden behind their stone bulk, but deeper in I could see them rising up, packed together almost on top of each other. The ones I could see were several stories tall, made of the same boring stone as everything in Sunland. Further still were the city’s inner walls, considerably taller than the outer ones.

Behind those were a few tall, slender spires reaching for the sky. I knew that they were tiny compared to the Remnant, yet they were still far, far taller than anything man-made I’d ever seen before. Some of them had to be three times the height of the inner walls! The sun, low in the horizon, illuminated them from behind, and I imagined them casting shadows across entire blocks like miniature mountains.

There were four of the huge buildings that I could see, each completely different from each other. The one that looked the tallest to me was a circular pillar of gleaming pale grey stone. Neat rows of windows wrapped around it. At the top, the edges of the building rose in sharply-angled spikes. It looks like it’s wearing a crown, I decided.

The second tallest was a shimmering white turned orange by the setting sun. It looked like a child had piled cube-shaped blocks on top of each other, not bothering to turn all of them so the sides lined up. Each cube had three darker bands wrapped around it, which I assumed were windows. That one looks like it could fall over at any second… I don’t think I’d want to live or work in there!

The third seemed to be made of glass and was oddly organic in shape, as if it had grown up from the earth naturally. The top ended in a smooth dome. Compared to the boring squared-off, thick-walled, squat stone buildings I was used to seeing, it stood out the most to me. I wanted to see it up close, maybe even go inside it. Are all the rooms inside also weird shapes?

Last, there was one that got smaller as it went up. It seemed to be built in sections, each one a bit narrower and taller than the one below it. I couldn’t decide if it was more or less boring in design than the circular pillar. It was painted an interesting green color, though.

I didn’t realize I’d stopped in my tracks, staring, until I heard people grumbling behind me and started moving again, drinking in the astonishing sight before me. I felt more out of place heading towards the immense collection of people ahead of me than I had in the dungeon or the Tutorial.

Shit, am I weird? I think I’m weird.