Chapter 600: Chasing Ice
I hugged Fable tight around the neck as he bounded through the city, taking me away from the carnage wrought by their battle. My pocket sagged with the spatial rings I’d taken from the inquisitors, clinking softly between Fable’s muted footfalls. It was impossible to store spatial treasures within each other, and I hadn’t time to riffle through whatever possessions they might have had and transfer them into one ring.
Shockwaves rumbled through the city as the battle continued to move away from the city into the canyon. Streaks of light streamed from the skyship as its mana cannons fired, lighting the sky like lightning on the horizon.
Fable’s paws carried us past ruined home after home, shop after shop, just quickly enough to get my tail twitching but not so fast that the world blurred. Rubble cratered the street, and more than a few times he was forced to leap entire hills of collapsed multistory buildings. The roads were quiet and desolate with no sign of soldiers or inquisitors anywhere.
"Wait," I hissed, gripping Fable’s fur tightly. "There’s...something here."
He pulled up short, leaping atop a nearby inn to get a better look at our environment. I touched my chest, soothing my heart, which beat rapidly as my soul pulsated with mana. I looked around, and frowned, eyes narrowing.
A complex of sprawling warehouses broke the skyline a few streets over. It looked like a meteor had landed in the middle, leveling them with the rubble falling away from the impact. Armored corpses littered the streets nearest the crater, matching the same size and description as the empire’s patrol we encountered before. The entire region glistened with starlight, every corpse, rock, and fragment of window glittering like a mirror.
"Ice?" I muttered, leaning over Fable’s neck, craning to get a better look.
At my urging, Fable leaped from the roof and bounded over to the crater. The clack of his nails changed as we grossed onto the glossy material, turning into the familiar crunch of frost. It didn’t take a second for him to cross the mounds of rubble and stop at the crater’s edge.
I slid from his back and ran forward, tail swishing behind me. The crater was wide and deep, perhaps a few hundred feet in diameter, and filled with jagged crystalline ice formation.