The palace had many guards, but Diana used her frost to freeze them before they could hinder them. She turned to Alaric, who was still monitoring the situation through his hacking abilities, and asked, "How far are we from the location of the signal?"
"There is no doubt that it's within the palace. If we run in a straight line, it would take us minutes. However," paused the pirate as he stared ahead, "we might run into more than just one obstacle."
Diana saw that a barrier had appeared in front of them, blocking their progress in the palace. Her flas burst to clash against the barrier, but it stood resilient. She sighed and sent a small sphere of red and blue toward the barrier before she pulled Alaric aside and entered a room for cover.
"What's—" began the man before a deafening explosion shook the palace. The room they entered seed to be filled with archives, which the explosion sent toward the floor along with their shelves. Alaric had to hug the walls as the explosion passed, simring into falling bricks from the ceiling.
Diana did not wait for him to recover or understand what had happened. Alaric had to follow her as she left the room and went back to the corridor. The force barrier was gone, replaced by crumbling walls and ceiling. Ice and fire covered different parts of the small crater that had appeared, which left Alaric speechless.
"Um, Miss Diana, what have you done?" asked Alaric with genuine confusion. Despite claiming to be from a higher world, he seed unable to comprehend what was happening.
"I just released so of the destruction my body fights against," she answered with a grin before rushing ahead. Alaric gulped and followed her into the palace, where she kept freezing guards or tearing the place down. As they ran through a long corridor, Alaric made the mistake of telling her that the signal was right through the wall.
Diana did not hesitate at all. Her blue wings burst from her back to cover the entire hallway before she burst forward faster than anyone could see. She reached the wall in an instant, and in the next, tore through it with her blue flas as if it were paper.
"His girlfriend is just as crazy as he is!" laughed Alaric as he followed her through the lting walls, reaching the large halls where the signal was sent from. Diana stood on the other side, unmoving, as she stared at the dark hall with countless pillars.
Alaric slowed down, confused why she had stopped. As he looked around the hall, he saw no one apart from the pillars that filled the place. They were so nurous that people would find it hard to reach the other side without getting lost. As he wondered why this hall was designed like this and where the sand thieves were, Diana raised a hand to stop his advance.
"What kind of disgusting ability is this?" she asked with a frown, but Alaric took a mont to understand. She was glaring at one of the pillars. Fused into the yellow bricks was a head protruding from the pillar of a man with blood leaking from his mouth.
Alaric was horrified to realize that the rest of the pillars had similar heads of people still breathing but buried into them. The pillars were old, but they had sohow fused living people inside their bellies. Diana seed disgusted as she waved her hand, sending a pulse of flas through the hall to illuminate it.
The flas traveled far and wide, revealing many heads of unconscious people fused into the pillars. Diana looked around for the culprit, but he seed reluctant to show himself. However, her intuition was sharper than Alaric anticipated.
"Since you fused these people into the pillars, you should be able to hide in them just the sa," said Diana with a smirk as she looked around the hall. "Reveal yourself, disgusting bastard."
The hall was quiet in response to her provocation. Alaric waited for soone to reveal themselves, but no one moved inside the hall. As he was contemplating using his abilities to find the life sources inside the hall, a voice snickered through the darkness.
"How is it disgusting to entrap the rats that invaded this ho?" asked a voice from the darkness as mana rippled through the hall. The pillars swayed and moved, each giving a piece of themselves to create a figure before them. The figure turned out to be an average-looking man with long, silky hair of different colors. "Answer , Diana of Runera."
"How do you know ?" asked Diana with a frown as she stared at the man. Alaric tried to rember who this man was, but he found that hard to achieve with his body being half clay and half human. Even now, he was morphing before them.
"I heard whispers about the woman that Arthur Netherborne sacrificed the world for," said the man with a smile. "A beauty like no other, like a divine goddess descending to the mortal realm. Ice and fire both exist within her, threatening to break free and destroy the world."
"And who are you, twisted bastard?"
"I can answer that," replied Alaric as he found a match in his search. He had taken the man's appearance and ability through his ability and matched it with online photos from the internet. Although the internet was down, Alaric had a large portion of it. "He is Rolan of Orlan, a descendant of the Transmutation Guardian. His ability involves changing elents into one another and morphing landscapes as he wishes."
"Your introduction humbles ," said Rolan with a dramatic bow as he snickered to himself. "I half-expected to find Arthur Netherborne here, but never expected to find his little girlfriend. This is… amusing."
"You were expecting Arthur?" asked Diana with a frown, her flas growing a little out of hand. If this man knew that Arthur was in Sourna, he might be here to harm him. "How do you know him?"
"We t once in Ilios. At that ti, we agreed to stay away from each other's paths, but that seems almost impossible after he defeated my father, the Empyrean of Orlan."
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