Chapter 733: Mia’s Strange Behavior [Bonus - ]

Chapter 733: Mia’s Strange Behavior [Bonus Chapter]

"But we need more than the guns and the golem frames, Val," Silas went on. "If we’re building a full defensive perimeter, we need auxiliary hardware."

"Name it!" Valerius beamed, and his golden eyes practically turned into coins. "If it’s in this warehouse, it’s yours!"

"Spare dampener plates, at least twenty heavy slabs." Silas counted them off on his fingers. "Twelve secondary mana conduits for running power lines through stone foundations... Five high-capacity mana battery reservoirs to keep the wards up during core fluctuations... Three crates of precision flux solder and runic engraving chisels for the workshops and wall mounts for the cannons, heavy ones, four of them, one for each gun... I want them bolted into the walls."

"Done, done, done, and done!" Valerius waved his keycard at the warehouse terminal and flagged every item in a blur of blue light.

The order runes blinked green down the screen one after another, and the clerk at the terminal stared at the total, swallowed hard and said nothing.

"Load it all up!"

Solenne was already at the mount rack.

She slid a finger along the pivot brackets, tapped the base plates, listened to the ring of the alloy with her ears swiveling and nodded firmly twice.

Morwenna grabbed one of the mounts for herself, hung her full weight from the pivot bracket with both boots off the floor, and dropped back down unimpressed when it did not so much as creak.

The phoenix on Rika’s collar watched the overhead cranes with deep suspicion while the technicians stopped hovering over Solenne’s shoulder and went to fetch them.

Depot hands hurried down the aisles.

Overhead cranes whined along their brass tracks and hoisted heavy crates of golem parts, dampener plates, conduit coils and mana batteries into a neat staging area in the center of the floor.

The four massive Tier 2 cannons rolled in last on their cradles, with the four wall mounts stacked beside them like iron bookends.

...The pile grew until it looked like a small fortress had been unpacked in the middle of the warehouse.

Silas stepped up to the mountain of hardware.

He didn’t need cargo wagons or draft beasts or a convoy of porters as he held out his right hand and focused on the quiet endless expanse of his spatial storage.

SHRRRRRK!

A soft rippling distortion of mana washed across the floorboards.

In an instant the cannons, the golem joints, the alloy plating, the power conduits and the wall mounts vanished from the warehouse floor and were sucked cleanly into his Lord Inventory without leaving a speck of dust behind.

Behind him the depot hands stood frozen with their clipboards pressed to their chests, staring at the empty floor where a fortress’s worth of hardware had been a heartbeat before.

One of them slowly lowered a crate hook he had forgotten he was holding as it clanked on the concrete and nobody even flinched.

Valerius watched the whole mountain disappear and whistled with a sigh.

"Being a Lord sure is convenient... I can’t imagine being a Lord without an Inventory at least to be honest."

"I get you a lot... It saves on a lot of fees." Silas said dryly, flexing his empty hand with an easy grin.

Valerius opened his mouth to pitch another aisle of heavy artillery, eager to push the sale even further...

BEEP-BEEP! BEEP-BEEP!

A sharp high-pitched electronic chime cut through the warehouse.

Valerius froze.

He raised his left wrist and tapped the bezel of his silver watch as a glowing blue projection flared above the watch face and showed a pulsing family crest beside an urgent priority rune.

His easy expression tightened and a nervous grimace twitched at the corner of his mouth.

"Ah," he muttered, glancing at Silas with an apologetic wince. "That’s my old man... He must have seen the depot inventory update on his terminal. Hold on a second, Silas, let me take this before he has an apoplexy about the cannon count."

He slipped away into a quiet alcove between two massive racks and turned his back to answer the call.

...

Valerius let out a long shuddering breath and tapped the bezel of his watch to end the transmission.

The blue projection dissolved into faint motes of light.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and let his brass-blond bangs fall across his brow while he stared at the concrete between his boots.

The headache behind his temples throbbed with a steady dull sound like an overloaded mana battery.

’Always when things finally pick up,’ he thought, rolling his right shoulder. ’Five minutes after we clear the test range and after I finally figure out how to turn my sword on an opposing wind current...’

He shoved his hands in his pockets, rolled his shoulders back until his posture snapped into the easy swagger everyone expected of the Sterling heir, and pasted a wide smirk on his face.

The golden light in his eyes had lost some of its earlier fire as he stepped out from between the racks with his boots clicking on the gray floor.

Silas stood near the center of the staging lane in his crisp white shirt with his dark jacket hanging open.

Solenne was on her knees beside him, wiping a microscopic smudge of grease off her calipers. Morwenna leaned on an empty packing crate with her arms crossed.

Mia sat cross-legged on a low wooden pallet, swinging her little boots back and forth and balancing an iron bolt on the tip of her nose.

"Well," Valerius called, spreading his arms with an exaggerated sigh that echoed off the corrugated ceiling. "It seems my leisurely life as a distinguished tour guide has been cut brutally short by higher authorities..."

Silas turned his head and measured Valerius’s face with calm dark blue eyes. "Bad news from the old man?"

"Worse." Valerius groaned and rolled his eyes at the cranes. "I’m needed back on Earth... I have to go to the Sterling Aegis first, and from there straight through to the Human World. My father says it can’t wait."

Silas nodded quietly. "No problem, Val. You don’t have to babysit us... We already got the cannons and the parts."

"Nonsense!" Valerius pressed a hand over his heart in deep dramatic indignation. "What kind of host abandons his guests in the belly of an industrial depot?! A Sterling does not abandon an entourage... I’ll escort you back to the Grand Plaza where we met! Sebas is already bringing the car around to the front portico!"

"Sounds fair," Morwenna grunted. She pushed off the crate and stretched until her spine cracked. "My boots have had enough of your polished floors anyway, blondie... The air down here tastes like molten tin."

"It’s high-grade flux!" Valerius shot back cheerfully. "It’s the scent of progress! Now come along before my father sends a retrieval squad with manacles!"

They rode the private freight elevator back up in near silence.

The brass doors hummed, the counterweights ticked past the floors, and Morwenna stretched her shoulders with a satisfied crackle while Solenne hugged her calipers to her chest and glowed.

Mia, bored, leaned on the wall and tried to catch the reflection of her own pointed ears in the polished steel.

Valerius watched the floor numbers climb and said nothing at all, which for him was rare.

The doors opened on the marble lobby.

They walked past the bowing clerks at the reception rotunda and pushed through the heavy glass doors into the bright highland afternoon.

The heat of Central City washed over them again as Sebas had already pulled the long black automobile up to the white quartz curb.

He stood beside the open passenger doors with his white-gloved hands folded neatly over his waist.

"Everything is prepared, Lord Valerius," he said, with a crisp bow.

"Excellent work, Sebas!" Valerius headed for the open door. "Straight back to the Grand Plaza!"

Silas walked toward the car, but at the running board he stopped. Aeliana had halted several paces back on the wide stone walkway.

She stood tall and poised with the pleated emerald fabric of her skirt rustling in the wind.

Her shortened ears were tilted toward the clear sky, and her silver-green eyes tracked the thermals drifting between the soaring basalt spires of the upper district.

Eluned’s camera hung at her hip, beside her Mia hopped down from a marble fountain ledge and brushed droplets off her ragged gray cloak with an impish grin.

"Lord Sy," Aeliana said, "you and the others can go in the car with Lord Valerius..."

Silas turned and raised an eyebrow. "You’re not riding?"

"Grand-Aunt and I will fly," Aeliana said plainly, with a regal nod. "We will wait for you at the central fountain in the Grand Plaza."

"Oooh, an aerial shortcut!" Mia bounced on her toes, her green eyes flashing. "Let’s fly, Aeli! Let’s see if you can beat the black metal box! If we lose, you have to buy me three sugar plums!"

Valerius poked his head out of the leather-lined cabin and laughed over the roof.

"You’re trying to outrace Sebas through the sky-lanes? Don’t break any speed ordinances, Lady Aeliana! The sky-wardens will fine you..."

"They will not catch us," Aeliana said evenly, with not a trace of humor.

Silas looked at her for a second and then smiled. "Alright. Don’t drop your Grand-Aunt in a chimney."

"I would never drop my elder." said Aeliana.

Solenne scurried into the car and settled onto the cream bench between Morwenna and Rika, her tail giving a quick nervous wag as Silas climbed in after them.

THUMP!

Sebas closed the passenger doors with a solid airtight seal.

The black automobile hummed, its tires rolled across the crushed quartz, and it glided out of the courtyard and merged into the busy flow of the basalt avenue.

Aeliana watched it vanish around the sweeping limestone corner then she looked down at the small blond figure beside her boots.

Mia grinned up at her with open delight, her hands planted on her hips and her cloak fluttering like a moth’s wings in the breeze.

Ancient or not, she looked exactly like an eleven-year-old waiting for a carnival ride.

"Well, my Aeli?" she teased, sticking out her chin. "Are you going to carry your venerable elder, or must I turn into a sparrow and ride on your shoulder like a parrot?!"

Aeliana didn’t smile.

She bent her knees slightly and scooped her Grand-Aunt up into her arms, cradling the small elf against her chest with effortless strength.

Mia squealed and threw her arms around Aeliana’s neck as her ears twitched with glee.

HUUUUUUM!

Deep in Aeliana’s meridians, her core ignited.

A violent radiant aura of purplish mana erupted around her frame.

It didn’t flicker like ordinary fire... It rolled off her skin in heavy crackling waves of royal amethyst light and lit the white quartz paving with brilliant luminescence.

The air pressure within ten yards spiked at once, and the ambient dust blew outward in a wide ring of concussive force.

BANG!

Aeliana kicked off the courtyard with explosive power as the ground cracked under her heels with a sharp echoing report and she launched straight up into the sky!

She cleared the lower rooftops in a fraction of a second and rocketed past the fifth, tenth and twentieth stories of the Sterling Enterprises tower in a blinding upward purple streak.

The wind tore at her hair and whipped it across her sharp cheekbones as she crested the highest limestone parapets and shot into the clear open sky of the city.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The wind roared in their ears and the whole panorama of Central City opened beneath them.

The bustling basalt streets shrank to ribbons of dark slate as carriages crawled along them like beetles.

The canals gleamed like polished silver thread and threw the afternoon sun back in dazzling flashes, and far to the south the misty basins rolled out toward the horizon while the snowcapped northern crags pierced the clouds like rows of ivory spears.

A flock of sky-gulls scattered ahead of the purple streak in a squawking storm of white feathers.

Mia’s cloak snapped behind them like a flag, and far below, the black automobile crept along a ribbon of basalt like a beetle on a slate.

Aeliana banked along an invisible thermal and leveled out three hundred feet above the city.

Her purplish mana streamed behind her heels in two translucent ribbons and held her forward speed in a smooth continuous thrust.

The thin cold air whipped over her face, yet her posture stayed upright and perfectly balanced.

In her arms Mia popped her head over Aeliana’s forearm and laughed like a maniac as the wind blew her blond bangs straight back.

"Faster, my Aeli! Faster!" she cackled, pointing at the distant Grand Plaza, where the central marble fountain showed only as a shimmering white speck. "The black metal box has already cleared the second traffic ring... We have to beat them by thirty seconds at least!"

Aeliana did not accelerate.

Instead her silver-green eyes dropped to the cheerful face in her arms.

All afternoon one question had been circling her mind.

It had started in the arena below the city, when Mia screamed across the iron catwalk and hurled a torrent of freezing water to save Lord Valerius, and cried out that she would never see Silas again.

...It had followed her through the high overlooks and the noodle counter, and it hadn’t let go since.

’Grand-Aunt has seen kingdoms rise and fall,’ Aeliana thought, and her fingers tightened on the rough cloth of Mia’s gray cloak. ’She does not cry over anything yet today she acted like a woman guarding her own garden.’

The thought sat heavy in her chest feeling awkward and unfamiliar.

She had watched Silas for a long time.

She had seen the way he moved in a fight, the way he spoke to the people in the Blessed Land, and the way everyone around him seemed to follow without being asked.

...What she felt for him was warm and deep and a little possessive, and she was only beginning to understand it.

’If Grand-Aunt feels the same way about the same man, it will be strange for both of us.’ Her purplish mana hummed in a low and troubled note as they tore through the cloudless sky. ’But Lord Sy is a rare man... If Grand-Aunt has chosen him, who am I to put my pride above her happiness? I can look past it.’