The vines wrapped themselves around Aoife’s right arm, and with a sharp yank, Archie pulled her back from the ever-blaring alarm of Sixth Sense

  The sound of faint mechanical whirring and muffled explosions neared, getting louder and louder every passing moment, to the point where they weren’t muffled anymore.

  Just as Aoife’s cybernetic feet crossed the threshold of the semi-collapsed hallway, the ground behind them erupted violently. Something burst through the middle of the floor in the very spot they had just been standing, and atop the cloud of dust it had created.

  Archie stared in shock as a figure hovered above the debris, draped in a torn, darkish-yellow cloak covering the majority of their body except for two large appendages.

  Two large, yellowish-gray feathered wings extended from their back, ruffling slightly as they clicked their tongue in annoyance.

  Without fully turning to face them, the figure barely spared Archie and Aoife a glance before barking, “Oi, kids! Get the fuck out of here!” His voice was distinctly masculine.

  Archie thought before dismissing the thought. Archie thought staring at the giant gun coming out of the man’s arm.

  The cloaked figure flicked his glowing red cybernetic right arm, which released a sharp exhale of steam before collapsing in on itself. In a seamless transformation, it reconfigured into a sleek, jet-black cybernetic limb that pulsated a glowing red. He tapped the side of his neck.

  “Laudine, we got some low-lev sentis up here,” he called out. “What’s the-... You sure? Okay, got it, you’re the boss, bar’s tab on me.”

  As he spoke, his left cybernetic arm shifted, morphing into what looked like an oversized glowing blue pistol.

  Archie barely had time to react before the man unloaded what could only be described as manabolts the size of his whole body into the hole from which he had emerged. Each projectile—if you could even call them manabolts—exploded in rapid succession.

  Archie wasn’t sure when everything became muffled nor how long he stared at the scene of the man unloading countless giant manabolts into the ground, but he was pulled out of his shock by Aoife grabbing his face with her heavily cracked and damaged cybernetic arms and slapping him across the face, bring him back to the present and regaining his hearing.

  “-chie! We have to go!” Aoife shouted at him, making him blink before what had just happened to him caught up with his brain but before he could ask, her arm grabbed his own and dragged him down the hallway.

  “What’s happening!” Archie shouted as both he and Aoife ran down the hallway, away from the man who was unloading giant manabolt after manabolt down the hole he came out of.

  “I don’t know,” Aoife shouted back, making a turn at a fork and rushing down the hallway before coming to a skidding halt in the middle of it.

  Aoife released heavy, uneven breaths, her eyes and hands scanning the wall in front of her, searching for something.

  “…W-What are you looking for?” Archie asked between gasps, watching her growing panic as she muttered under her breath.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she yanked out her twitching, sparking scutum shield, then took a slow step back.

  Without hesitation, she braced herself, covering her body with the shield as a gray mana covered her entire body and shield. Then she charged forward, slamming through the hallway wall and crashing into another corridor just slightly below it and landing in a shield roll.

  SKRRRAAAAK-KKHHHRRRRHHH!

  “What the hell—?” Archie blinked in shock, just as a chitinous screech resounded throughout the temple, shaking the giga temple in its entirety. “Shit!”

  Without wasting another second, he sprinted after her, diving through the hole she had created and into the hallway below.

  Archie thought to himself as he followed Aoife who sprinted down the hall, looking over her shoulder and waving at him to hurry.

  Reactivating Adrenaline Rush

  As Archie was rushing down the hallway his eyes widened as they rushed passed the corpses of insectoids, ones who were missing a few pincers and eyes.

  Archie thought as he jumped over a few corpses and continued to rush down the hall before he came to a skidding halt, stopping just in time before he would have crashed into Aoife and sent them both into the giant hole below them, the one he’d accidentally created.

  “What happened here?” Aoife muttered as she stared wide-eyed at the giant hole. “There was supposed to be a sconce here, and when Master Laer twisted it last time, the wall closed behind us.”

  “Uh, my bad,” Archie said purposely, avoiding her confused gaze and staring up at where he originally fell from. “I fell from the rafters above, and did this,” Archie explained while gesturing with his hands.

  Aoife fell silent, wondering what to do next, their only way to get out of the temple that she knew was broken.

  “We just need to get to the top, right?” Archie asked, getting a silent nod from Aoife as she looked at the walls and sunk her fingers into them, but pulled them out as the walls were too brittle to climb on.

  “Then it’s no problem, then,” Archie said before creating a wider-than-normal mana platform than what he was used to creating and jumping atop it. “I’m still pretty new with creating them, so keep in mind to control the strength of your jumps.”

  Aoife blinked away her surprise before nodding and leaping off of the hallway floor and onto the mana platform just above the giant pit below.

  As she landed, small, chipped pieces of her cybernetic arms fell into the dark and seamlessly endless pit below. Looking in front of her, she saw another mana platform Archie created and saw that he was three platforms ahead, rubbing the dried blood out of his ear.

  Landing on the next platform, Aoife hesitantly looked at her cybernetic with worry, lost in her own thoughts and not noticing Archie smash through the middle of the tower.

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  “You, okay?” Archie asked, glancing back at her through the hole he had created. He stood atop the sand, holding out a hand for her to jump to. “It’s getting kinda hard to keep these platforms active all at once.”

  “Yes, Master,” Aoife replied, startled by his voice, completely unaware of the sudden look of shock and confusion that crossed Archie's face.

  Leaping across the mana platforms, she reached the final one before pushing off and grabbing onto Archie’s outstretched hand with her cracked and heavily damaged cybernetic right arm covered in a grey coating of mana.

  Archie pulled her through the hole, out of the temple tower, and quickly shook off his confusion. Now’s not the time for this conversation.

  They needed to get away from the temple and from whatever had made that horrid screeching sound.

  As soon as Aoife was out of the temple's tower and standing on solid ground, Archie turned and bolted across the sand, Aoife right on his heels.

  The ground trembled beneath them with every step, and neither of them dared to stop, glancing over their shoulders at every tremor and pause between the explosions the winged man created with his cybernetic weapons.

  Suddenly, the ground around the Temple of the Handlers erupted in an explosion, hurling Archie, Aoife, and everything within a kilometer-wide radius into the air. They were sent hurling into the air before crashing into the sand and tumbling down a sand dune.

  SKRRRAAAAK-KKHHHRRRRHHH!

  A piercing, chitinous screech tore through the air as Archie and Aoife crashed into the sand before three more tore through the air.

  Shaking his head in confusion, Archie pushed himself up off the ground and the sand off his back, rubbing sand from his eyes and face while letting out a choked cough, spitting out the sand that had gotten into his mouth.

  When his vision cleared, he looked up wide-eyed and his jaw dropped, he stared at the scene unfolding before him.

  Ripping through the temple were three enormous, armored worm-like creatures that burst through different parts of the temple, each snapping toward the cloaked winged man who kept firing at them from above. Each of them had to be at least four kilometers long, and hundreds of meters wide, just from what he could see sticking out of the temple.

  Their dark yellow, chitinous plating gleamed under the bright sun above, through the clouds of dust and sand. Their massive five-flapped maws split open to reveal endless rows of razor-sharp teeth ripping through the temple and shooting toward the group of individuals firing at them from above.

  The desert around them trembled as they tore through the Temple of the Handlers and shot toward the groups that weaved through their coiled forms, releasing hails of both magical and non-magical attacks at them.

  One of the figures, the winged man they met in the temple prior, had swapped back to his minigun and unloaded hails of giant explosions that pierced through the armored hide of the worm-like creatures, all the while weaving in between their attacks.

  The second figure was similarly shrouded in a cloak, raised their hands and staff to the sky before raining down hails of flame that ripped through their armored hides and snaked through their bodies, flying through their attacks with their rocket-like boots.

  The third figure and final figure amongst the two, shrouded in a less tattered cloak, was far above and behind the two, standing atop a glowing mana platform with their arms wide out and pointed at the two other figures, covering them in a shroud of glowing light.

  [Ravenous Dune Worm Lv ???]

  [Ravenous Dune Worm Lv ???]

  [Ravenous Dune Worm Lv ???]

  [Xalvori Lv ???]

  [Human Lv ???]

  [Human Lv ???]

  Archie stared in shock as he took in the sight in front of him. These weren’t D-Grades fighting amongst each other, no, these were far stronger than a D-Grade, he felt it in his bones.

  A groan from beside him snapped him from the scene, turning back he found Aoife almost buried in sand, with her head and her upper torso not completely encased in sand.

  Archie scrambled over to Aoife, pulling her out of the sand. However, as he did, he realized she wasn’t entirely whole. Her right cybernetic arm—the one with the collapsible shield - had been torn off halfway through the bicep, leaving behind sparking gears and frayed wires.

  “Aoife!” Archie shouted, shaking her shoulders. “Aoife!”

  SKRRRAAAAK-KKHHHRRRRHHH!

  But despite his frantic shouts and the shaking, she didn’t wake up. She was knocked out from the blast, though still alive, judging by the pulse he felt on her neck.

  Archie's mind raced, trying to figure out how they could get out and away from the destruction behind them. His bike was useless on the sand, at most the sawblades could drive across the outskirts of the beach, not to mention the sand would ruin the internals of the bike.

  Rummaging through his spatial storage, Archie found two extra braided cables of molten webs—leftover from building his bike.

  The thing about molten webs was that unless mana was actively channeled through them, they were as cold as regular webs. With that in mind, Archie propped Aoife onto his back, leaning forward. He wrapped their torsos together with the braided cables, holding her cybernetic legs with his arms before sprinting out of the sand dune, fleeing from the destruction behind them.

  Looking over his shoulder, he saw the three figures shrouded in cloaks leading the Ravenous Dune Worms away from the ruined temple and off into the opposite direction as themselves.

  A human male dressed in robes of silken fabric with a sharp goatee and long flowing raven hair sat behind a walnut-colored desk reviewing the countless documents stacked atop his desk with an ink pen in hand.

  As he was filling out a document, a faint cracking sound echoed from his left, causing him to look up from his work in confusion. Swiveling his chair, he turned to face the large bookshelves that decorated the left side of his office.

  On the third shelf, top of the middle of the shelf, lay twelve glowing crystal gems hovering in place above the stand some were of a similar color while others were different. But the third to last crystal on the right, the royal blue colored crystal was no longer hovering, rather it lay cracked and dull.

  The robed man clicked his tongue in annoyance before pushing back the stray raven hairs that fell in front of his eyes, doing so, revealing thin metal plates beside his temples.

  Reaching for a drawer beneath his desk, the man pulled out an Aetherglass from within the drawer and let it hover atop his desk as his fingers glided atop the screen.

  Once the screen displayed a figure kneeling beside many others, the robed man spoke, “My bastard, the one born from the elven whore has died within the Temple of the Handlers by the hand of another. Retrieve what remains of his body and the seal he carried.”

  “Yes, my liege,” a voice answered from behind the Aetherglass screen. “We shall swiftly carry out your orders.”

  “See to it,” Tiff Sirpez spoke before he looked out the window and saw the bright sun above. Doing so revealed the thin cybernetic threading across his chest, nigh invisible to the naked eye to anyone below C-Grade. “Keep the body hidden from the view of others. It would not bode the Dukedom well for the peasants to learn that my blood can be killed without consequence, even if it is a whoreson.”

  “Of course, my liege,” said the figure who kneeled at the forefront.

  Tiff Sirpez gave a dismissive wave to the group before the call ended and another started, staring at another figure who kneeled at the screen in front of him, unintentionally showing another tied to a chair, blind and gagged.

  “Seeth’four,” the robed man spoke, staring at the kneeling figure behind the screen.

  “Yes, m-yy l-liege,” the figure spoke in between stutters. “M-My app-pologi-ies, I w-was in th-he middle of-”

  “I do not care,” the robed figure interrupted, staring at the kneeling figure with annoyance. “Someone or something has killed my bastard…the water mage.”

  “My app-pologies, my liege,” the kneeled figure stuttered, pressing his head deeper into the stone floor. “What-t may I d-do for you?”

  “Track down my bastard’s killer and provide a way for the Hounds to bring them to me,” Tiff Sirpez commanded before closing the call and stepping away from his desk.

  , the robed duke thought as he pushed passed the double door to the left of his office and into his bed chambers. As he walked toward his bed, he saw the maids standing at attention at his bedside, with only one who caught his attention; a long blonde-haired elf, with fair skin and blue eyes who wore a cracked royal blue gem collar on her neck, with tears flowing down her face.

  Walking toward his bed, the duke de-robed himself while grabbing hold of the elf with his telekinesis and throwing her atop the bed. “You’re making me another water mage.” Unconcerned with the tears that continued to flow across her face.

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