The window sills warped, the crystal cracking and falling inwards against the buffeting of super-heated air. Fire swept upwards, catching on the curtains and beginning to spread through the ceiling.

It had happened so suddenly, Dew had barely the time to throw himself to the floor.

He had only realized something was amiss moments earlier. There had been no movement on the streets since he had passed the arrow to the plant snake. When he happened to glance down to street level, however, he noticed that some of the decorative plants placed at the building’s entrance had been moved. At first, he thought he might have been misremembering their positions. It was not as though he had put much effort into memorizing the appearance of the building’s face. He would have put the feeling down to his imagination, were it not for the fact that just as his gaze began to wander, he caught a slight shimmer of light, and one of the vases suddenly beginning to shift.

He recognized the shimmer for what it was, but it was far from a pleasant realization.

He took the shot immediately after, but it was made painfully obvious that whatever was out there was not alone. He was readying himself to fire again when another figure materialized itself down below and a gout of flame roared his way.

“Shit!” Dew exclaimed as he scuttled away from the fire. “I didn’t see a drone—did you see a drone?”

For its part, the plant snake did not offer a helpful response. The sudden onset of the flames, even now starting to spread inside the building, had put the creature in a panic. It thrashed away from the heat as if in pain, whining pitifully the whole time.

“Yeah, me neither,” Dew answered himself as he propped himself up, trying to peek past the blaze to the streets below. Even with the right angle, all he could see below was ash and smoke. Did no drones mean it was the College? The same kind of thing Pithy had run into the previous day? Or was someone—

The deafening blare of fire alarms drove the thoughts from his head as he reflexively brought his hands up to protect his ears.

The snake’s response was much more violent, and definitely more unexpected. It’s thrashing intensified, until suddenly it burst into a swarm of black butterflies that just about knocked Dew on his back again through the sheer force of volume as they scattered about, most flying past the flames through the open windows.

Dew’s only answer to the bizarre event was to spit In an effort to get the taste of butterfly out of his mouth.

“Okay,” he said, though he could hardly hear himself over the alarm. “You do that.”

Which left him with just himself to sort out. A glance around the room showed no signs of the arrow, and he was not about to try to figure out what had happened to it and the snake with the sirens blasting at his eardrums, so as he pulled himself back to his feet he decided that was no longer his problem.

Pithy had said it would be up to him to figure out what to do and to buy time, but adaptive camouflage and flamethrowers had not exactly been part of the conversation.

All he knew was that Pithy would be heading to the bookstore, and trouble would most likely be following her. Meaning that if he wanted to do something about it, he would have to head in that direction.

That was as far as that thought went when a fresh blast of the alarms interrupted it.

Whatever the case, his sniping spot was getting a little too hot for his liking, so without another thought he slung his rifle and ran for the exit.

[hr]
The muted crackle of Dew’s firearm, followed by the distant blaring of sirens, made Pithy raise her gaze from her work. Confirmation that her plan had deviated from its optimal course.  

Given the way her wards had been triggered, she had all but assumed something was off. Namely, the first ward to be triggered had been within the room she and Dew had stayed the night, and it had only been triggered once, indicating that whoever or whatever had crossed the threshold had done so on their way out. The rest of the wards that triggered suggested a single entity, but the abruptness of its appearance, as though it had manifested already within the building, made her hasten to put her escape plan in motion.

Pithy had used the bracelet she had claimed from Bonesword to transform into a slime creature, taking advantage of her newfound malleability to traverse a trash chute to the lowest floors, from where she took a back exit. From there, she had made her way to the back of the bookstore she had explored the other day.

The interior of the bookstore was not as she had left it, but this was something she had hoped for. After all, before she had left, she had taken pains to find and break the building’s water piping so it would leak through the night. As a result, much of the floor had been flooded. The spacious hall at the entrance, being slightly lower in elevation, had seen the water rise high enough to completely submerge the lowest set of tomes on its bookshelves. 

After a moment, she cast her gaze back down to the crystalline shapes at her feet. The glowing runes on the rapier held in her left hand illuminated her surroundings with a pale light, bathing her surroundings in a chilling cold. A similar foreboding glow bled from within the bandages covering her right arm. She allowed the magic to flow mostly unrestrained, to the point where a fragile coat of ice had formed over the water closest to her.  

It was the sound of breaking glass that shattered her concentration this time, and this time she stopped her work with a mental curse. The noise had come from within the bookstore. 

[i]Already? I thought I would have more time than this.[/i]

She had frozen shut the back exit she had used to enter the store, but rather than force the intruder to use the front entrance as she had hoped, it seemed they had broken in through a window.

Pithy turned towards the rows bookshelves at the back of the hall, blade and magic at the ready. However, the bundle of black butterflies that fluttered into sight was far from what she had expected. She had already raised her rapier, power billowing, when the mass of butterflies shuddered and a familiar shape clinked to the floor below it. 

Pithy’s eyes widened as she recognized the arrow she had but glimpsed after her initial duel with Mountain Dew. The one which, according to Nero, had become a source of power for the rouge members of the College. 

A moment later, the butterflies pressed against each other and the plant creature she had become familiar with plopped down onto the floor, letting out a whine of complaint. Pithy made towards it, kneeling to grab the artifact and to take a closer look at the decidedly smaller snake.

Pithy noted the piece of parchment wrapped around the shaft and quickly unfurled it, scanning through its contents. She took a deep breath.

[i]I know that whatever that power is, it came from the arrow,[/i] Nero’s words echoed in her mind. [i]The only things I can say about the power, though admittedly this is mostly guessing based on what we’ve seen, is that it’s not like any kind of magic I’ve ever seen or heard of, that it’s different per person, and that it comes from within.[/i]

She quickly re-read the note before putting it away. The appearance of an unknown party claiming to be an ally was concerning, but given the strange reactions of her wards and the sounds coming from outside, she was less inclined to dismiss its claims out of hand. Moreover, where in other circumstances she might have believed the arrow to be a poisoned trap laid by the enemy she sought to face, the way the snake had presented itself to her suggested the artifact was likely to be the genuine article.

She imagined Dew must have come across the object as he left the apartment building, and perhaps having similar misgivings as her own, decided to test the veracity of the letter. “That said, I did not expect Dew to use you as a guinea pig,” she noted as she examined the plant creature.

Predictably, the snake offered no intelligible response aside from a sibilant hiss. At the very least, it seemed whatever excitement it had encountered had rendered it more responsive to her words. She decided to press while it still responded to her.

“Did he tell you to deliver this?” The snake bobbed its head in a clear affirmative. “Did he stab himself with it?” The snake flinched away when she brought the arrow closer to ask her question, but nodded a moment after nonetheless. 

“I see. It’s clear what I should do, then.” Pithy nodded to herself, her resolution solidifying. “There is but one thing. I had meant to keep you out of this battle,” she told the snake, “but I fear that is not realistic anymore. So instead, I would ask for your cooperation.”