novelraw Chapter 362: Untitled
Chapter 362: Untitled
Standing in the sky above several buildings, Leon's eyes moved fast across the area below, a bright light cutting through them like he was looking through the city rather than at it.
Above him, the city lord and several transcendent beings watched him in silence.
Some had been rattled by the explosion earlier, still recalibrating. Others had arrived after the fact, drawn by the noise and the sonic booms, here for no reason more dignified than curiosity. But almost all of them kept their mouths shut.
Nobody wanted to be the one who said something.
Leon's companion had been kidnapped in broad daylight, under the nose of the city lord's people, and the city lord himself had unknowingly created the opening that let the kidnapper disappear. If anyone said the wrong thing right now, there was a real chance Leon simply redirected. And there was nothing worse than becoming a target for something you had nothing to do with.
So they watched. And they stayed quiet.
"Sigh."
Of everyone present, the city lord felt it most. He stood there in the sky with his hands behind his back and the particular stillness of someone who has made an error they can't walk back and knows it. He hadn't known what was happening until it was already over. One moment he had felt the spike of a transcendent level presence doing something aggressive in the market district, and by the time he arrived and reached out, Ember was already gone.
He was an old monster by any reasonable measure. But he wasn't evil, and he wasn't shameless.
What kind of explanation did he have for this?
Below them, Leon moved. He dropped from one rooftop to the next in quick bursts, eyes scanning as he landed, not pausing long enough to actually search anything thoroughly. Just moving. Covering ground. Doing something with the energy that had nowhere useful to go.
He was looking for Ember.
"Should we stop him?" one of the transcendent beings asked quietly, directed at no one in particular. "It's futile, isn't it?"
The city of dogs had over a million residences. Shacks built against alley walls, merchant manors behind layered gates, underground bunkers dug beneath old districts that didn't appear on any official map. If Leon intended to go through all of them one by one he would still be searching a week from now.
"I suppose…." The city lord exhaled.
He raised his hand to call out.
Before he could, Leon blasted sideways through the wall of a building at street level, entering through one side and exiting through the other in a single motion, the structure collapsing inward behind him in a cascade of stone and timber. He didn't slow down. He hit the ground on the far side, found the outline of what he was looking for beneath the rubble and the earth, and started pulling.
An underground bunker. Hidden beneath the collapsed building, the entrance buried under debris.
He tore at it with both hands and everything behind them, the ground cracking outward from the force, chunks of reinforced earth spinning away as the structure beneath began to give.
The transcendent beings above watched in silence.
The bunker was not a small thing. Whoever had built it had done so with permanence in mind, the walls thick and layered, the kind of construction that was meant to survive a significant amount of punishment from above.
Leon disagreed with it.
He kept pulling. The cracks spread further. A section of the outer wall buckled and then gave entirely, the whole structure beginning to fold inward on itself as the supports lost their integrity one after another.
Several minutes passed.
The dust began to settle.
Leon walked out of the wreckage.
Ember was in his arms, still unconscious, her head resting against his shoulder, breathing.
He had found her.
He stood at the edge of the collapsed site for a moment, the dust still drifting around him, and then his eyes came up.
They moved across the faces of the transcendent beings still gathered in the sky above. Slow. Deliberate. Moving from one to the next without hurrying, taking in each one before moving to the next.
The look behind his eyes was full of malice.
Not directed at any one of them specifically. Just present. Sitting there in his expression like something that had been there for a while and hadn't finished yet.
Nobody spoke.
Leon held the look for a moment longer. Then he turned and walked, moving away from the wreckage without another word, Ember still in his arms, his back to all of them.
The city lord watched him go.
After a moment, something shifted in the old man's expression. The helplessness from earlier receded slightly, replaced by something quieter. A kind of recognition.
He had found her.
In a city of a million residences, with no map and no information and no time, he had torn through the city and found her. The city lord wasn't entirely sure whether that was instinct, ability, or something else entirely. Probably some combination of all three.
He raised his hand in a slow wave and the other transcendent beings began to disperse, one after another, filtering away from the scene without conversation, moving back toward whatever they had been doing before the explosions started.
The city lord stayed a moment longer.
"Interesting young man," he murmured.
Leon's back was already fading into the distance below, growing smaller between the buildings until the streets swallowed him entirely.
The city lord stood there alone in the sky above the collapsed site, the dust still settling beneath him, and said nothing else
Leon had a problem and solved it all by himself, could he blame the young man for that? How many so called talents would go crying if faced with such a situation.
To him there was no greater evidence of Leon's competence than what had just transpired.
It was a shame the city had to suffer for it.
"Actually" the old man smirked an idea sprouting in his mind
.
.
.
.
.