The scream came first.
A thin, infant scream—raw, hoarse, furious.
"MAMA!"
It ripped down the alley, reverberating outward. The immediate surrounding area clearly heard the shout.
People who didn't immediately notice turned toward Ezra's direction.
A small silhouette shot out of the alley and into the street. Ezra's feet slapped stone, too fast to count.
He ran like something that had never learned what fear was supposed to look like.
Behind him, a woman in black dropped from the roofline. Her silhouette formed a cutout behind the wall, like a woman-shaped hole.
Catalyna paused to regain her footing. She rebounded hard, boots skidding on pavement, and for a second her eyes locked on the fleeing Ezra. Her expression soured—then turned sharp with alarm.
Guards—already scattered through the district from the lockdown—had been sprinting toward the noise.
As they reached the alley mouth just in time to see it. They involuntarily paused, eyes widening in shock.
It was a baby running faster than a horse and a black-clad woman, hair pinned tight, pursuing him with the focused calm of a predator.
For a moment, the guards simply… stopped.
Somewhere behind them, a man's voice cracked, incredulous.
"Why's that babe outrunning my mare last spring—?"
Mouths opened wide, hanging.
Catalyna dove, nipping at his heels but Ezra leapt just in time to avoid Catalyna's hand.
She missed but she surged after him again, closing distance with long strides. Strain had begun showing on her face as her objective had changed from escape to retrieval. She needed to get Ezra back.
Ezra bolted across a street corner, tiny legs pumping at a speed his soft body should not have been able to survive. His breath came in sharp little hitches, limbs feeling heavy weighing down every stride like he'd been running for hours.
AMP's golden lines burned into the background of his sight filling his vision with a thin overlay of angles and shifting vectors.
It made the world predictable—even legible.
As Catalyna was closing the distance between her and Ezra the guards recovered from their stupor.
"After them!" someone roared.
Captains roared orders, a different pattern from the one before. They now had a different objective: retrieve the heir.
"Get distance between Lord Ezra and the woman!" another Captain roared.
Platoons split information as one squad sprinted ahead to block Ezra's line.
They raised shields and lowered spears, forming a barrier instead of a kill line.
Another squad cut hard toward Catalyna, trying to get between her and the boy.
"Don't throw!" someone shouted. "Not while he's close!"
Spells, javelins and arrows stayed.
Everything became about one thing: separate them.
Ezra was the objective now. Everything else shifted to match.
Previously, they wanted to contain Catalyna, but now everything had changed.
This wasn't an entrapment anymore; it was a retrieval operation.
Instead of closing on Catalyna, they began to angle toward Ezra—cutting streets, anticipating where the tiny blur would go next.
Catalyna's speed had slowed; spells flew toward her direction, but angled away from Ezra. She had trouble catching him. Too many things were justhappening at once.
A platoon sprinted ahead, aiming for rooftops and intersections.
Spears went to the front. And captains had gone to the rooftops again to assess the situation.
"Don't aim that [Earth Wall] there!" a captain shouted. "If you time it wrong, you are going to flatten the heir."
Captains on the ground started barking over each other.
"Get the boy!"
"No—cut the woman off!"
"Hold fire!"
"Not yet—she's too close!"
No one could judge the distance. Catalyna kept closing, and Ezra kept slipping away by inches.
She watched the way their hands flexed and didn't cast. Watched the way their eyes kept snapping to Ezra's tiny body, as if the act of aiming itself had become exhausting.
She lunged as Ezra cut left, darting between a stack of crates and a wall, shoulders brushing wood.
His tiny lungs gasped for air; another pang of exhaustion hit his senses legs wobbling for a moment but snapped back to submission.
Five minutes, he thought, panicked.
It's been five minutes since I started pushing AMP like this.
His body's fatigue wasn't normal fatigue; each step was a debt his body had to bear, but Ezra just drove mana to drown it.
His body demanded sleep; his eyelids ran on mana and sheer willpower just to keep them open.
"MAMA!" he screamed again, voice booming and bouncing off the walls of the houses.
Up above—on the rooftops—two Knight captains continued to track the chase from a higher line.
They moved faster than the street guards, armor clinking in a controlled rhythm, bodies reinforced by constant internal reinforcement.
Their gaze flicked between Catalyna and Ezra.
They had the same problem as everyone else:
If they attacked Catalyna hard, Ezra might get caught in it.
If they held back, Catalyna might catch him.
One of them lifted a hand, fingers twitching.
A [Stone Bullet] formed and launched toward Catalyna.
Catalyna didn't even look at it.
Her foot hit the ground and stomped.
The bullet shattered against an invisible barrier of motion—whether by brute strength or fire spell, or reinforcement, Ezra couldn't tell.
Fragments sprayed everywhere.
Ezra flinched instinctively.
AMP screamed the numbers at him.
Too many.
Too fast.
He forced it back down to Speed.
Keep it simple.
Live.
"Try to get as much distance between them as possible!" a voice boomed from above.
One of the rooftop Knight figures barked orders to the guards below, pointing sharply.
"If we separate them by one hundred yards, we can use third circle spells and restrain the woman."
"How strong is she?" a soldier who was pursuing Catalyna asked the man beside him, he was supposed to be a tracker.
"I don't know. I can't tell with her aura. I can't feel it. By feats, maybe viscount, third or fourth circle. But it feels like she's just a hole in space. I can't get a read on her." He scrunched his brows as he replied, continuing the pursuit.
"Form up! She has gained some distance from Lord Ezra!" a captain barked.
"Grab her!" a soldier near Catalyna shouted.
Catalyna looked back and smirked; a sizable crowd had formed, nipping at her heels. She withdrew her vision and refocused on the front again.
Three soldiers lunged at her, trying to flank her sides, but she leapt and pushed down the first one trying to tackle her.
She had gained ground, then slowed to tear off her outer garment for no clear reason. The guards closed in, hands almost on her—
Then she burst forward in a sudden flash of speed. Her pursuers were surprised; they couldn't block her or even get close. It's as if the garment was suppressing part of her power.
Catalyna braced and compressed her aura.
That burst erased the distance closing in on Ezra in a heartbeat.
She held her arm out to reach for him. But just as she was about to grab him—
Ezra jumped.
He had concentrated mana to his legs. Ezra felt the sudden wave of aura that Catalyna had when she took off the garment.
He had been anticipating the lunge.
His leap sent him flying five yards high to land on the rooftops. As he landed, a pang of drowsiness ate away at his ebbing consciousness.
A few mouths from the soldiers hung open again.
"What in the—" a guard gasped. "What do highborns feed their children?"
Even Catalyna paused from the shock. She didn't know how Ezra managed to dodge her like he had eyes on the back of his head.
As Ezra landed, he sprinted harder and shouted, "MAMA!" again. Five knights met him, resisting the urge to comment, seeing an infant run as fast as a knight, but they had enough discipline to focus on the objective.
They split. One knight ran beside Ezra.
"I'll cover him," the knight bellowed. "Block the wench."
The other four hopped down to the street to intercept Catalyna.
Catalyna snapped out of her stupor. Ezra was now far from reach.
She couldn't jump toward the roof without the knights blocking her.
Two of them knelt and cast [Earth Shake]. The ground started to rumble.
As this was happening, the other two knights cast [Stone Barrage].
Five stones from each of the casters hands flew toward Catalyna's position in a rapid blitz.
The plan was twofold: disrupt her movement and force her to jump. The projectile spell was aimed above her head, predicting that she would leap in the air and take the hits. To their surprise, she didn't.
The events were so fast, and the plan had been clear in their mind, that they failed to process what happened.
"What happened?" the knight who had cast [Earth Shake] exclaimed, confused.
"Underground!" another knight exclaimed, seeing a hole in the ground where Catalyna had once stood.
"Earth magic? Reports said she was a pyromancer?"
Catalyna had tunneled and shifted her position to their flanks, and kicked a boulder toward the Knight's exposed position.
The knights had reacted in time, just as the boulder formed. They sidestepped, evading the spell, but it hit the two soldiers behind them, leaving them heavily injured.
"Rally!" the knight commanded. "Toward Lord Ezra!"
With the window that had opened for Catalyna, she propelled herself to the rooftops with an [Earth Wall]. It both blocked the pursuers and launched her further away, much nearer to Ezra.
"Captain Rycharde! The wench got free. He's on your end now!"
The knight cast an [Earth Wall] to block her advance, but Catalyna already had [Stone Gauntlets] prepared, and she smashed the [Earth Wall] in front of her with her armored fist.
As she got out of the crumbling spell, she shot her gauntlet at the knight. He didn't have enough time to properly dodge, so he used his shield to block the spell, but the momentum still threw him off the roof, landing farther away in the streets below.
Seeing that Ezra had no more support, she lunged again at Ezra's sprinting figure.
Ezra still held on to part of the void-silk that had wrapped him from before.
His drowsiness seeped in steadily, but he still refused to succumb.
His feet began to slip.
His legs began to wobble, but still he refused to fall.
Ezra had once again anticipated Catalyna's lunge, but this time he didn't use mana to jump. He let go of the cloth abruptly as he sidestepped to the right.
Catalyna stepped on the cloth and made her veer away, slipping. She tried to grab him again, but he had timed a well-placed kick on Catalyna's head just as she lunged. The momentum propelled him farther away from her again, making him gain more distance.
Shit. I can't do that again, or else I am gonna pass out.
He could only buy enough time for Aerwyna to return. He didn't know when, but the longer the pursuit, the higher the chance of her coming to his rescue.
So he ran, but now the steps slowed. The tollman had now come to collect. The maneuver he just did expended his dwindling reserves of consciousness and mana.
Catalyna saw this. She knew now that Ezra was nearing his limits.
Finally, I got you! HA!
"Really?" Catalyna didn't run anymore; she just walked briskly toward the exhausted infant. "You gave me such trouble, tsk."
Ezra's steps finally dwindled.
"Mama," a single word lingered on his infantile lips. Fighting the exhaustion but already succumbing to the drowsiness, he slumped down the stone.
Catalyna was about to grab Ezra, but she suddenly withdrew her arm. A shard of ice flew in between her and the infant.
A woman's eyes bore at Catalyna. It was a gaze that looked as if she were already a decaying carcass.
"You shall feel the wrath of a mother scorned. You will not rest even in death. I will destroy you, and see that your corpse rots."
Killing intent spilled out of her into a miasma of cold that aimed itself at Catalyna alone. A ballet of death was about to begin, with Catalyna and Aerwyna as the principals.