The A-Ranked, named and titled monster appeared two more times. Both times, it watched us, almost daring us to attack it.

The first time was a block down the street.

A flaming wall of wood, concrete rubble, and portal metal blocked the road. The wind had whipped the fire into the nearby buildings, ripping through them like a chainsaw, but only in one direction. I pointed at the other side, where a door hung open. "Let's go there! Get out of the wind!"

Ellen nodded and followed me.

As we ducked inside, I kept my eyes open. Every one of the cinderblock and wood frame buildings was, from the outside, a chance to find survivors—including Jeff's friends. Every one of them was a chance to learn what was going on here. The city was under siege. A Hurricane Paragon was involved. The God of Thunder probably knew what was going on, or at least who it was. I thought about asking Eugene for help.

Instead, the insectlike eyes and gray-black armor of Tathrix locked on me. It stared at us from a wide, open space; the whole building was completely empty on the inside. No furniture. No walls to separate rooms. Nothing but an unfinished waferboard floor and exposed frames.

"This city is a deception." Tathrix stood, unarmed, less than twenty feet from us. "Less than a thousand beings. Less than two hundred fighters—most of them weak. How did it resist the Queen Mother's will for so long? It's unbelievable. Thunder God's Pet, if you have answers, the Queen Mother will grant you a swift death in exchange."

I didn't say anything. I just glared back, Tallas's Dueling Sword in my hand. It crackled with energy, and my Stormsteel armor was in position. As I stared at the opponent in front of me, I mentally cursed; I hadn't built another piece at C-Rank.

"I'll take that as a no," Tathrix said. Then it vanished.

The wind shifted outside. Within seconds, the door and wall we'd entered from were ablaze. And a pair of monsters smashed through the far wall. They weren't dressed in robes so much as their lack of black armor exposed layers of…hanging, soft-looking bone over their semi-skeletal frames. It was hard to describe; they looked melted? Decayed? Like something was wrong with them on a fundamental level.

Defiled Hurricane Windcaller: B-Rank

"Casters!" Ellen called. She dropped a Shadow Boxing across one of them, and I felt her Mana drop in my core as she did it. Jeff's shield came up, and he rushed the one Ellen had attacked. His feet pounded the waferboard floor like a drum. The signal was obvious.

The last one was mine, for better or worse.

I had a leftover Wind Charge—no Lightning or Rainfall Charges, though. To deal with a caster, I needed a Rainfall. And the best way to get one was—

The Windcaller started casting. A blade of air whipped toward me; when I dodged, it slammed into the fire behind me, spreading ashes and embers across my back and cracking the cinderblock frame around the door. I closed the gap toward the monster. It backpedaled, retreating as quickly as I could move forward.

More wind blades flew past me, arcing magical strikes that exploded against the blazing wall. I burned my Wind Charge for Gustrunner and closed in even faster, then lashed out. The lightning blade sliced into the hanging bone material. It was soft. It parted like butter. And then it hardened around my sword, and the effort to wrench it free jarred my elbow.

"Don't get tangled up!" I said.

A wind blade crashed across my breastplate. I ignored it. Instead, I lunged. And this time, when the Windcaller backpedaled, I kept the lunge going until I made contact with a solid part of its body.

It screamed. A spell started. Waves of air pushed out from the monster as an aura snapped into place like a brick wall. I pushed forward. It was like swimming in Jell-O. Ariette's Zephyrs appeared in my off-hand. Five of them.

I threw the first one. The wind-wall grabbed it and tossed it aside.

Same with the rest of my handful. I'd been right. I needed to close the gap.

So I did. I pushed into the wall of wind—it reminded me of the Cyclone Forms skill merge. But as I got closer, the Windcaller seemed to panic.

And then I was there. I stabbed out and used Saltspray. The dueling blade cut into the monster's chest. It wasn't deep; its disgusting liquid chitin hardened even as I made contact. But the spell stopped. And I was in melee with a caster.

And no one was around.

I cast Thunder Wave. Tendrils of electricity reached out all around me. Dozens of them connected with the caster even as its Health tried to patch its wounds. Then the tendrils overloaded, and power surged into my enemy.

It wouldn't be enough; an E-Ranked spell couldn't possibly hurt a B-Ranked enemy enough to put it down. But it gave me a window, and I followed up on it. Three stabs to the face, one to the chest, and a vicious kick to the monster's stomach to shove it off the blade.

It died. The room went quiet except for the crackling fire consuming the building and our heavy breathing from exerting ourselves. I looked around.

Jeff was completely tangled in hardened chitin. His hands—both without weapons—were wrapped around the other Windcaller's neck; squares of flesh were missing all across the monster's body. He grunted as he tried to move.

"I told you not to get tangled up," I said.

Ellen snorted.

"Look, Kade, some of us don't have fancy ways to stop casters. I figured this was my best bet. Now help me out."

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"Sure, sure," I said. Then I started cutting Jeff free from his trap. The fire was picking up the pace, burning its way across the floor, and we needed to get moving.

Just outside the building, we found our first corpse.

She was human. Mid-thirties, maybe. C-Rank gear—leather brigandine jacket, a dagger and short sword. Dark hair, a slit throat, and blood that was pooling on the ground below her. Freshly killed, but still killed.

Sophia hit the ground, hand on the woman's neck. Magic flowed in, and a moment later, she shook her head, shivering. "She's gone. Maybe if I was the Spark of Life, but…I can't do anything here."

I stared at the corpse and at Sophia. Then my eyes flicked to Jeff's face. Had he known this person? What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

His jaw locked. He stared at the dead woman. Then at the burning city around us. He shook his head slowly. "None of this is right. This isn't the Carlsbad I remember, and I don't…"

"Did you know her?" Yasmin asked. She put a hand on Jeff's pauldron.

"No. Maybe. I don't think so."

I gritted my teeth. I'd been working under the impression that there were Coyote and Iron Falcon S-Rankers in the city, and that they'd take the fight to anything that made it in, even if they were under a siege they couldn't break. But Carlsbad Fortress's C-Rankers were in the street, dying. That meant…

That meant something bad.

The strike team was outside, though. They could handle the A-Rank portal. We could stabilize this. And to do that…

"Okay, new plan," I said quietly. "We're not after information. All we care about is linking up with any survivors, figuring out where Carlsbad's heavy hitters are, and finding a way out of this place before the 'Queen Mother' hunts us down or sends A-Rank monsters after us."

"You're sure about that?" Jeff asked, an edge of hope punching through the anger.

"No. No, I'm not. We're in over our heads, though. We need to find more firepower."

Ellen nodded. "I'm running low on juice, but I can keep going." She summoned Pepperoni and signaled for her to get some altitude for a scouting mission. But only thirty feet up, the wind was too much, and she had to call the winged serpent back into her shadow. "This sucks."

"Agreed." I kept walking, but as I moved, Jeff took a knee next to the body, rooting through her pockets until he found something. He shoved it into his bag and kept moving.

Tathrix found us for the second time as we kicked a steel door in and stepped inside a building near the center of Carlsbad Fortress. Unlike the others, this one was lined with a thick layer of portal metal.

That alone made it look more serious than the rows of fake houses we'd passed. I hadn't figured out why the city looked the way it did. Why build hundreds of false buildings? Just to look more impressive than they really were? What were the Coyotes and Iron Falcons up to here?

And where were their A and S-Rankers? This shouldn't have gotten this out of control; the portal break that had besieged them never should have happened.

I was too busy with my thoughts, and only noticed Tathrix a moment before it vanished into the street behind us.

"Again?" I asked.

Ellen put a hand on my shoulder. "Is it the boss?"

"No, I don't think Tathrix is the boss. I think it's…there's something going on here that I don't know anything about. The sooner we get somewhere safe, the sooner I can ask Eugene for information. Let's keep moving."

I ignored the A-Rank monster as best I could, even when its aura slammed into me for a moment. Tathrix didn't matter. If it decided to, it could probably kill us all by itself. So our best bet was to pretend it didn't exist and stick to our goal.

Besides, Jeff was already inside.

The building was less like a home and more like a bunker or barracks. We had to pass through two more doors—including one that reminded me of a bulkhead door in a ship—before we exited into an open room. Unlike the unfinished buildings outside, though, this one was lined with beds—military-style bunkbeds, their sheets and blankets in disarray. A few pieces of C and B-Rank armor littered the floor, along with weapons.

On the far side, a few rows of cafeteria-style tables sat, with food still on them. I walked over, weapon at the ready, and dipped a finger into the oatmeal. It was cool until the center, and warm there. "This is fresh. The last hour or two."

"So there were survivors then? Where would they go?" Sophia asked.

I shrugged. We didn't have any answers. Then I kept moving to the door on the far side. It unlocked with a click, and I slipped out into the street beyond it.

Then I stopped and held up a hand. "Jeff, you may want to hang back for a minute. Got a lot of bodies here."

Jeff said something. I couldn't hear it, though. My focus was on piecing together the fight.

There'd been at least one team of delvers. Probably B-Rankers. They'd been in the bunker or barracks, and had hit the group of portal monsters from the flank. I counted a dozen of the Iron Falcons and a handful of the Hunters that had killed our truck's driver. Blood covered the street, leading away from the door.

After the initial pile of bodies, almost every monster faced down the street. The delvers had fought a moving retreat, heading for something. I peered down the asphalt road. It was pitted and cracked, but not from time. The cracks were too uniform; a mage or tank had caused them as they'd fought.

"We may have survivors up ahead," I said. "And I haven't found any human bodies. You're clear."

Jeff stepped out the door. A hand clamped down on my shoulder. "Thanks," he said, voice tight.

"No problem, Jeff."

As I kept going, we hit the first big body.

An A-Ranker, judging by the wounds. Its six arms bristled with weapons; two looked like spike launchers, while a sword and shield combo lay nearby—severed from the body. "They killed an A-Rank monster. We're looking at a B-Rank team, then. Unless you think we could take Tathrix."

"Nope," Yasmin said quickly. "We wouldn't have a chance."

"Okay. That's good. It means there's some firepower in the city." I still couldn't figure out where the A and S-Rankers were. There was only one priority more important than keeping the fortress safe, and there'd been no news about the Carlsbad Portal Break acting up—at least, not from what I'd heard.

We turned a corner.

A portal metal tower stood a few hundred feet down the road, six stories high. Something glinted in the window, and I threw myself to the ground. A rod of portal metal crashed into the asphalt. Gravel and half-melted tar clattered against my breastplate and gauntlet.

A second rod followed, impaling itself into the concrete next to my leg. Then a third.

I rolled back behind a false building's wall. "I think he's hostile."

Another rod crashed through the siding. Shattered two-by-four splinters slashed across my face. I brushed blood off my forehead and started running the other direction. We went almost a block, back to the A-Ranked monster's corpse. Then I took a deep breath.

"Mage in the tower. He's got some kind of metal affinity. Those weren't arrows; they were chunks of rebar. And he outranks us, but he's probably not A-Rank," I said quietly.

"How do you figure?" Sophia asked.

"Because you're not desperately trying to fix a dozen impalements."

"Right."

"I'm going to try talking to him," I said after a minute.

"You're sure?" Ellen asked.

"Yes. He's a survivor, and we're trying to find survivors. He's probably B-Rank, so he'd be a ton of help if we could recruit him. And even if he doesn't want to help us, he might be able to give us some information on how to get out of here."

That was the main reason, but there was a second. I'd figured out Carlsbad Fortress. It wasn't a city at all. It was a chessboard. The fake houses were pawns; all they did was take up space inside the walls and force monsters into kill lanes. And the towers were bishops and rooks. Straight-line attackers, right down those lanes.

Which meant that, somewhere, there was a king they were trying to protect. And the only way to get there was through the bishop in front of us. I took a deep breath as I walked back toward the intersection. Then I unsummoned my dueling blade and armor, raised my hands over my head, and stepped out into the street in full view of the mage in the tower.

"Hello! I'm from Phoenix, and I'm here to help."

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