Arthur did not hesitate. If the sector was populated by an assembly of nobles and high-ranking guests, roaming the open gantries in his tactical leathers was suicide. He had to pivot.
Gliding backward on silent heels, Arthur retraced his path along the walkway until the acoustic bleed of the violins thinned to a distant thread. He slipped into a shadowed recess between two jutting basalt buttresses, shielded entirely from both the upper vents and the thoroughfare's sightlines.
Working quickly in the near darkness, his hands moved with practiced efficiency. He reached into his coat and drew out the folded, lifelike membrane of Ms. Noctiliene's face mask. Smoothing the synthetic skin against his brow and cheekbones, he let the contouring mesh meld seamlessly across his jawline.
Next, he retrieved the silver hairpiece.
Just as his fingers lifted the shimmering strands toward his brow, an uneven clatter broke the silence from the gantry ahead.
"What are you doing over there?"
The voice was thick, heavy with liquor, drifting loosely out of the dark.
Arthur's muscles locked for a single fraction of a second. He did not call out, nor did he freeze to bargain. Dropping the silver wig back into the deep folds of his coat, he shoved off the stone in an explosive sprint. Aura surged instantly through his circulatory pathways, flooding his legs with violent, kinetic power.
As long as I'm not caught, I can do this another night.
His boots hammered the diamond plating in a blur of soundless speed, tearing down the wide bridge away from the voice. Ten paces. Fifteen. Twenty.
Behind him, there was no scuffle of pursuit. No pounding boots, no clinking scabbards, not even the displacement of rushing air.
Then, right at his shoulder, the drunken voice drawled again.
"Hoh... if you're running away that desperately, you must definitely be doing something wrong."
The words struck so close Arthur felt the warmth of the speaker's breath glance off the nape of his neck.
Arthur whipped his head around mid-stride to measure the distance.
A man was trailing him less than a meter away.
He was not running. He stood completely upright, his posture loose and languid, one shoulder drooping with lazy, drunken relaxation. Beneath his polished boots, a wafer-thin sheet of crystalline ice coated the steel bridge, crackling with raw mana as it surged forward, carrying him across the diamond plates like a skater coasting effortlessly over a frozen lake.
Even draped in the disarray of a reveler, his features arrested the senses. His hair was long, black like the midnight sea, intentionally styled with sweeping, immaculate discipline around a face of striking, almost ethereal beauty. But it was his gaze that chilled the blood: two brilliant, mismatched eyes fixed steadily upon Arthur—one an incandescent, predatory yellow, the other a deep, bottomless sapphire blue.
"As a saint," the man murmured, slurring the words through a faint, pleasant smile, "I must then stop you..."
Arthur's breath caught at the stranger's sheer, disarming grace, but the instinct died instantly as the man raised his right arm.
A magic circle flared in front of his open palm.
There was no chant. Within the space of a single second, an intricate geometric wheel of blinding white mana etched itself into the air, saturated to critical density, and discharged.
Lightning.
A savage arc of white electricity tore through the one-meter gap, hurtling toward Arthur's chest at terrifying, blinding velocity. Arthur had only the barest fraction of an eye-blink to react. Flings of instinct overrode thought; he threw his torso sideways in mid-air, the electric lance shearing past his collar so close the ozone scorched the lining of his cowl and singed his jaw.
So fast! Arthur's mind screamed as he hit the deck, rolling and springing back to his feet without losing momentum. Is he Saint-rank?
Steel hissed against linen. Arthur ripped his sword from his spine, the bare metal singing as he enveloped the blade in a violent shroud of Deathly-black aura.
The stranger didn't lose his balance on the ice for an instant. His smile remained, though his heterochromatic eyes narrowed with sharper intent. Raising his hand once more, he cast again—this time, taking deliberate aim.
Another blinding white wheel ignited. The lightning cracked out with thunderous fury, illuminating the basalt ribbing of the vault in stark, skeletal relief.
Arthur met the strike head-on.
He swung his blade into the path of the bolt, angling the flat to deflect the blast. The collision detonated with concussive force. Violent kinetic shock shuddered through the Arcanite, screaming up his arms and rattling his bones. Even wrapped in the suffocating weight of his Deathly aura, the sheer density of the stranger's mana threatened to shatter his guard, the electrical backlash scorching the air around him.
Arthur gritted his teeth, his boots sliding back three feet across the plates before he managed to ground the arc into the iron frame of the bridge.
No, the realization hammered into him, cold and absolute. He's King-rank. I can't fight him.
Ahead, through the blinding glare of residual sparks, Arthur's peripheral vision locked onto a familiar shadow overhead: the recessed iron intake hatch he had dropped from minutes earlier.
He pivoted and ran.
Pumping every drop of aura into his stride, Arthur extended his left hand backward. In his palm, an intermediate water magic circle shimmered to life. He slammed the projection downward, channeling the spell into the bridge behind him.
A jagged shelf of ice, a foot high and thick as masonry, instantly ruptured upward across the diamond plates, directly bisecting the path of the pursuer's frozen wake.
The gliding sheet struck the obstruction with an explosive crack, shattering the smooth friction-free momentum that carried the drunkard forward.
Arthur didn't look back to watch. Coiling his legs beneath him, he unleashed the full force of his aura into a desperate leap. He launched upward, catching the iron rim of the open ceiling chute.
Behind him, a third electric arc hissed through the air. The white bolt ripped upward into the shaft, blistering the stone beside Arthur's ear before chewing a crater into the granite masonry—missing his skull by mere inches.
It was a clean shot, but the angle had drifted wide. The man had pulled it intentionally.
Arthur hoisted himself through the gap, slammed the lead-lined grate into place, and vanished into the freezing night above.
Below on the catwalk, the man stood amidst the shards of broken ice. He lowered his smoking hand, watching the closed hatch with an amused, lazy tilt of his head.
"That's too bad," he muttered to the empty vault.
Shrugging off the cold, he turned his back on the escape route and sauntered slowly down the platform, drifting back toward the distant chime of the violins.