Entering the world while only wearing his regular clothes felt unfamiliar to Caleb. He was used to the way visors would pinch him or cake-y haptic suits to be worn.
This was seamless.
A DM was already waiting for him when he logged on.
[ta1lorath: how does it feel lol]
[weird. like my senses are heightened to levels I didn't know I could experience]
[ta1lorath: u get used to it. anyways. are your deathtraps offline]
[Just about]
With a final crank, the Spire went offline. He couldn't do anything about the Ruinwardens, but that was to be expected.
"Hey what are you doing?" HWARENA flew down faster than Caleb had ever seen her before.
"I'm expecting someone and I'd rather the buildings don't kill on sight them. It also involves you so stay around."
He wasn't going to tell her about Ephemerus unless Lena personally approved her. That was part of the agreement.
"Me?" HWARENA blushed at the thought. "Is it someone you met IRL or in game?"
"Both, somehow" Caleb replied.
"As long as they don't bring another hundred with them I'll welcome them personally."
The Watchtower registered ta1lorath's signature at the outer relay junction.
She moved through The Hollows like she was reading a document she had already memorized. Not fast, but not slow.
The amber light off the forge structures caught her in pieces as she walked. White sleeveless collared top, crisp against the zone's permanent gloom. Tight black lacquered pants with iridescent seams that shifted color when the relay chain's pulse hit them. Green to purple to green again.
A jacket draped over both shoulders, not worn, just resting there like she had thrown it on walking out the door and forgotten it existed. The gloves were mismatched: elbow-length on the right arm, short on the left, both fingers moving in small precise adjustments to an interface only she could see.
A hair clip in her blonde hair caught the Spire's ambient glow and held it.
Beneath the Hollows' low light, her violet eyes were visible as a faint ring at the edge of each iris.
Ta1lorath came to a stop at the plaza's exact middle and did a slow three-sixty.
She read the Iron Bastion Shard's east face, the one Caleb had been avoiding. She read the kill corridor's chain-reflect geometry, the northeast satellite anchor's relay path, the Revenue Node's rhythmic pulse at the plaza's heart.
She finished the rotation and faced Caleb.
"Your perimeter's holding cleaner than I thought it would," she said. "The northwest arc still has a fourteen-second gap, but the calibration drift is stable. Did you close eleven-second window manually?"
Caleb blinked. "You can see that from the outer junction?"
"I can see it from the approach corridor. The Spire's rotation arc is visible from two hundred meters if you know the timing."
Ta1lorath didn't stay still for long, already walking toward the forge station, her mismatched gloves gesturing at the relay chain running north. "The satellite anchor replacement. That was recent, right? The essence signature is brighter than the surrounding contact points. Four days?"
"Yeah," Caleb said.
She smiled knowing her data was on point.
HWARENA finally approached the two. She didn't stand in front of Caleb, but rather planted herself directly in front of ta1lorath.
Meanwhile, ta1lorath averted her eyes from the redhead.
"I've seen enough, we're going with the people I said," ta1lorath said, already turning on her heel.
"Wait, you're saying I failed something I didn't even know I was trying out for?" HWARENA took a step towards ta1lorath, her metallic wings twitching in agitation.
"I said you aren't cut out for the job we're doing. I wouldn't cut a carrot with a fork, would I?" ta1lorath took one step towards HWARENA herself.
"You're calling me a fork, but you don't know everything I'm capable of," HWARENA replied.
The two were now chest to chest, staring each other down. The aggressive posture pushed HWARENA's crop top to its absolute structural limit, while the sleeveless collared shirt of ta1lorath was losing its own battle.
Neither gave an inch, a silent war of stubbornness and deeply competitive aesthetics.
"So," Caleb said, entirely ignored, "What's the move?"
"We need to secure the outer zone relay before we leave," ta1lorath responded, her purple eyes never leaving HWARENA's blue ones.
"We," HWARENA started, her breath ghosting over ta1lorath's face, "aren't going anywhere until you tell me what it is you're actually doing. And don't think you can just take him, he's the one that keeps the buildings alive."
"I kind of already agreed to help her," Caleb interjected.
"Shut up," the two snapped in perfect unison, momentarily turning towards him before snapping back to their aggressive staredown.
HWARENA took altitude.
She went up in a single, violently concussive thrust. Her mechanical wings snapped to full extension, orange circuit panels blazing like miniature suns against the Hollows' skybox. The sudden G-force threw her hair back, her thighs flexing against their tight leather straps as she cleared the ground. Her dual pistols cleared their holsters before she even reached her optimal height.
She was exactly as dangerous from altitude as ta1lorath had calculated.
Ta1lorath was already moving.
She didn't watch HWARENA ascend. She went lateral, the lacquered black latex of her pants squeaking sharply against the ferrocrete as she closed the ground distance in a fluid burst. The twin purple daggers appeared in her hands without a draw animation, glitching into reality as though they had simply decided to be there.
The first superheated pistol round slagged the ferrocrete exactly where ta1lorath had been standing. She was already gone.
The second round tracked her lateral movement, a brilliant streak of lethal orange light. Ta1lorath read the angle mid-stride, planted her left foot, and reversed direction. Her jacket whipped around her, exposing a flash of a dark, intricately strapped shoulder as the round hissed through empty air, close enough to singe the ends of her blonde hair. She was inside the pistol's optimal range band before HWARENA could adjust her aim.
HWARENA pulled higher, her chest heaving from the sudden exertion. She flared her wings to full output, forcing the altitude gap. If ta1lorath wanted to close, she would have to commit to a vertical approach.
Ta1lorath threw the left dagger.
It planted deep into the ferrocrete wall above HWARENA's current flight path with a heavy chunk. In the exact same millisecond, the air popped. A vacuum of displaced pressure cracked through the plaza.
No arc. No travel. Ta1lorath was simply there, suspended upside down directly above HWARENA, her right dagger already slashing in a vicious, glittering arc.
HWARENA gasped, her eyes going wide as gravity inverted their standoff. She killed her thrusters, dropping five meters in a controlled, stomach-churning stall. Ta1lorath's blade sheared through the space HWARENA's collarbone had just occupied, neatly slicing the very tip of a stray orange curl.
Falling through the air, HWARENA whipped her pistols up, firing a blinding double-tap at the descending spectre.
Ta1lorath contorted her body, throwing her second dagger toward the ground and instantly swapping to it. The air cracked again. She slammed boots-first into the plaza floor, her tight leather pants groaning in protest as she absorbed the impact with a deep crouch.
HWARENA didn't let up. She banked hard, hovering just out of melee reach, her wings painting the kill corridor's chain-reflect seams with a fiery glow. She rained down a suppressive volley.
Ta1lorath danced through the crossfire. Left. Right. Blink. She threw a dagger at a wild angle, bouncing it off a steel pylon, and teleported to the ricochet. The displacement put her directly in HWARENA's blind spot.
Ta1lorath lunged, tackling the airborne gunner mid-hover.
They collided in a tangle of limbs, leather, and hot metal. HWARENA shrieked indignantly as ta1lorath's knee dug awkwardly into her exposed thigh, pinning one of her wings.
HWARENA struggled to aim a pistol while trying to keep her crop top from riding up any further in the grapple.
Ta1lorath meanwhile had her cheek squashed entirely too close to HWARENA's midriff. She desperately tried to wedge a dagger against HWARENA's gun arm.
They plummeted together, a chaotic knot of flailing limbs and frustrated swearing, before HWARENA managed to kick off ta1lorath's chest, blasting her repulsors to blow them apart just before they hit the ground.
They landed on opposite sides of the plaza, skidding on their heels. Ta1lorath breathed heavily, her white shirt clinging to her.
The plaza structures registered the impact exchanges. Searing burn marks from missed pistol rounds scarred the east wall. A clean, perfectly measured slice from a dagger marred the relay junction's outer housing. Without either of them noticing, three small repair cycles ran around the edges of the fight. The Hollows was treating this as a low-level territorial dispute and responding accordingly.
Harlan walked out of the south subway entrance.
He took the stairs one at a time, his knee announcing each step with a sound like a heavy door closing in an empty room. His flask was in his coat pocket. Cap on. He reached the plaza level and stopped walking.
He watched the standoff for three seconds. Then four. Ta1lorath crouched like a coiled spring, a purple blade spinning lazily in her mismatched glove. HWARENA suspended in the air, dual barrels smoking, her wings humming with lethal potential.
Harlan's expression did not change.
He started walking again. Directly through the engagement zone. Neither combatant noticed him until he was ten meters from the forge station, his path taking him straight past Caleb without slowing his limp.
He said, flat, dry, not stopping his walk: "You got girls fighting over you, kid."
The words landed in the middle of the plaza like an anvil dropped into a glass house.
Ta1lorath's dagger slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the pavement.
HWARENA's wings arrested at a sudden, violent forty-degree angle, her forward momentum dying so instantly she nearly tumbled out of the air.
"ARE NOT!" the two screamed, their faces instantly flushing beet red.
The silence that followed was total.
Harlan did not look back. He walked through the far side of the plaza, past the Iron Bastion Shard, past the east relay junction, and disappeared into the northeast service corridor. The sound of his boots faded. The sound of his knee did not.
HWARENA landed.
Her wings folded against her back with a sharp mechanical click. The orange circuit panels dimmed to idle brightness. She holstered her pistols without looking at them, her face very carefully neutral.
Ta1lorath called back her daggers. She adjusted her jacket with both hands, the mismatched gloves smoothing the fabric over her shoulders in a gesture that was either practical or stalling.
Neither of them looked at Caleb.
Neither of them dared to look at each other.
"The Spire drift check needs to be finished," Caleb said, to no one, to the plaza, to the sky. "I think I need to go and do that."
He did not go do that. He stood exactly where he was, because his feet had forgotten how to move.
Ta1lorath cleared her throat. The sound was small and professional and did absolutely nothing to break the tension. She walked to the forge station, pulled up the dossier overlay, and expanded it for both of them.
"The target," Ta1lorath said, her voice flat, "is Ephemerus."
"Oh so I am a knife" HWARENA immediately spoke.
Ta1lorath gave her a glare before continuing.
"The quest chain starts in Pholacder," ta1lorath said. "He knows the full spec already, I'll tell you the rest in transit. For now, just know the name."
HWARENA nodded once.
"In the meantime I need to recalibrate the cameras here. You two should do whatever it is you need to take care of here. You won't be returning for sometime."
Caleb reactivated all of the buildings, before talking with Harlan.
"You heard, huh?" He began.
Harlan didn't answer at first, instead only handing out his flask for Caleb to take a drink.
"The Hollows hasn't seen life like that in years, maybe even before the event" Harlan said.
"I need you acting in my name when I'm gone. Your cousins are self-starters, but if" Caleb tried to say.
"Don't worry about it" Harlan finished the thought.