The Transcenders

Chapter 96 - The Fifth Layer (5)

It was seven in the morning. Everyone had woken up early. On one side of the concrete wall stood the two Seats' army. Sanguine's red glow shone on their backs from far away. On the other side stood the allied armies: many werewolves, humans, and vampires had gathered in Torque.

"We're in," declared Luo into his earpiece's microphone. Jenna, he and many other mages had crawled out of a school's secret basement to be met with the smell of rotten food on the cafeteria's counter. Arriving at the cafeteria's wide window, they examined the city below.

The school was on a hill next to a university and a hospital. At the bottom, Skullard exposed all its unique shades of grey. Sanguine's southern neighbour was old and dusty. Surveying the deteriorated asphalt roads, Luo and Jenna noticed only a few pedestrians navigating the mossy, garbage-infested sidewalks. There wasn't a single vehicle in sight.

On the horizon, many smaller apartments and condos were in ruins. Like every location in the Fifth Layer, Skullard didn't have a single graveyard, as it didn't keep the dead quiet for long.

...

Ejiro's fingers emitted light as his division of mages walked inside a wide concrete tunnel. After climbing up a slope for hours, they had finally caught a break and were on flat ground.

The vampire halted.

"Why did you stop?" Adia approached Ejiro at the front.

Bryan and Victor followed her. There was a dead end.

Ejiro slid his hand across the concrete wall that blocked their path. "I hope we didn't walk all this way for nothing. What does the map say?"

Bryan Moon looked at his mobile tablet in confusion. "This doesn't make sense. We're at the exit."

"So now what? Should we just go back?" Adia frowned. She was angry and tired after having walked for hours without a break. "Was it all for nothing?"

Victor shook his head. "We could try breaking this wall."

He pulled two handguns from under his long black coat and connected them to form a double-barrel, explosive shotgun.

"Go on, then." Ejiro nodded.

-BOOM!

Parts of the wall came out, but there wasn't anything behind. Bryan put his ear on the concrete material and knocked on it. He sighed and shook his head.

"Dammit!" Ejiro struck the metallic floor with his boot.

-Clank!

"Huh?"

Everyone aimed their flashlights on the spot his boot had fallen upon: he was standing on a metal trapdoor, the exit.

"Alright, get back." Relieved, Ejiro gripped his Dragonsword, pushed it inside the trapdoor's crevice and, pushing on his handmade lever, forced it open.

The three hundred mages descended into a roofscrapper, a building which touched the Obscure Guild's ceiling. By the stairs, Ejiro and Adia looked outside from a window.

"This is Mash City," Victor told them.

Mash looked a lot like Skullard. However, being just North of Sanguine and on the way to the Inner Layer, it was more populated. There weren't many roofscrappers, but countless single houses stretched into the horizon. Along with advertising banners, floating tramways completed the ashy city with red, green and blue hues.

Ejiro Sani hit his earpiece. "We've arrived."

...

"We're waiting for the signal," Rack responded from an underground parking lot. Having taken the third hidden passage, over a thousand mages had scattered around Sanguine, waiting patiently to run into the streets and keep anyone from leaving or entering the city.