Nothing was ever as simple as the initial plan made it sound. Even so, a group of ten people that included Grandma Tillon, Raz, and Serenity moved cautiously through the streets of Stallet Center four days later.

In some ways, Serenity regretted his impulsive admission that he’d once attended Stallet. At the same time, he was happy to be there for Raz, even if he expected to head back to Takinat soon. He didn’t think Stallet’s wards would accept him. It all depended on how they were set up; the only thing that gave it a chance was the fact that there was apparently some sort of authorized list.

Simple wards depended on an item or spellkey; slightly more advanced wards could be imprinted with people at the time of creation. The next step up from that was adding a list of allowed people, like the Viper’s wards and the Lowpeak House in Zon. That would quickly grow unwieldy for a place like Stallet Academy; most places with a large number of people coming and going relied on either an item or on simple type matching, where people were allowed and monsters weren’t.

There were two more options. The easier one was to give the allowed person an immaterial key; that usually manifested as a spell cast on them. It wasn’t permanent, though if properly cast it could last a long time. The hardest and most expensive, yet easiest to manage later, option was to offload the authorization to the Voice. That was the only option where Serenity might be recognized by the wards. He wasn’t certain if it would be Vengeance’s attendance at Stallet or his Ghost in the System title that let him in, but either one could do it.

He’d find out when they got there.

The streets of Stallet Center were covered in rubble. It was still easy enough to see where the buildings stopped and the streets started, except for a few areas that were so flattened that the buildings covered the streets. They went around those areas.

The buildings were mostly mud-brick, with very little wood used for support. Some of the buildings had supports made from metal, while others actually seemed to have some sort of magically-enhanced pottery, basically a magical skeleton. It was clear that real wood was rare in the area, too rare for everyone to use. The other methods might or might not be better, but in an area with cheap and abundant wood, it would be used for most buildings.

The destruction made it clear that the three types of structures behaved very differently when struck with the sort of explosive attacks that Stallet suffered. The worst damage and the least damage were both to buildings with the magically-enhanced clay pottery skeletons. It looked like they held up extremely well until their structural integrity was exceeded, then they shattered.

The buildings with significant amounts of metal seemed to tend to tear and warp rather than shatter. They were in some ways the second-best buildings to be near because there was little rubble beside them; in other ways, they were the absolute worst because what rubble there was often had sharp bits of metal sticking out of it. Serenity wasn’t too bothered by it, but after the second time they had to stop for the healer (who was apparently named Rindi) to deal with a punctured foot, they avoided the metal-framed buildings.

Wood buildings were sort of in between; they left significant patches of rubble but the rubble was generally not too dangerous. A large portion of the group’s route went near those buildings once they figured that out.

There didn’t seem to be anyone living in the ruins of Stallet Center. Serenity couldn’t really believe that; it was very, very difficult to actually wipe out the population of a city. It was unfortunate that he could say that from both sides of the attempt, but it was still true.

What it probably actually meant was that their group was large enough that survivors heard them coming and hid. Serenity didn’t like what that implied, that they considered groups of people dangerous. Either there were gangs wandering around stealing from survivors or the invaders sometimes left the comparative safety of Stallet Academy. Serenity hoped it was because of gangs; he didn’t want to get caught just because they happened to run into a group of invaders that happened to be searching the city.

Whichever it was, they got within sight of Stallet Academy before they saw anyone. Unfortunately, the person they saw then saw them at almost exactly the same time; they weren’t able to duck behind rubble and avoid a confrontation.

She was small, probably a few inches under five feet tall, dirty, and dressed in rags. She was thin, even for a draykin, and she dragged her left foot with every step she took. She didn’t let it slow her down; it was obvious she saw them before they saw her as she hurried towards them. If Serenity had to guess, she was somewhere in her late teens to early twenties, but that guess could be wildly inaccurate.

She called out to the group as she trudged towards them. “Hey! What’re you doing here? There’s nothing here for you!”

Serenity glanced at the others. No one seemed to really want to deal with her, but no one seemed to want to hide, either. Serenity wasn’t certain what to say, but he was about to say something when Grandma Tillon took the responsibility away from him by speaking up.

“We’re headed towards the Academy, we’re not interested in scavenging anything from the buildings.” Grandma Tillon paused for a moment and frowned. “Wait, were you a student? I thought all the students got out.”

The young draykin snorted and shrugged at the same time. “Oh, I got out. Ran away like a good little sheep, just like we were told to. Only no one came to get us, afterwards. Not like it’s a surprise; we’re good enough to pay money for training, but we’ll never go on to anything more so why should anyone care?”

She sounded bitter and jaded. Serenity didn’t know where to start with that.

Grandma Tillon, on the other hand, did seem to know what to say. “We? There are more people around here? More students?” She sounded horrified. “I thought we got everyone out.”

That seemed to crack the hard shell of the young draykin girl. Even Serenity could tell that she had to fight to keep the fierce expression on her face. “Yeah, there are more of us. And we’ll stop you if you try to take what we have away.”

“What if we try to get you out of here, to somewhere safer?” Serenity spoke up before Grandma Tillon could. He was pretty sure he could get Ita to portal a single group to Takinat. It was a long way, but her portals were far less constrained by distance than his; she still didn’t have the reach of a true portal mage, such as the ones used by the Messengers’ Guild, but she could manage fairly impressive planetary distances.

Serenity was glad she’d concealed that capability from her owners before he freed her. It would have been much more difficult to fight the Sterath if they had the capability of a portal mage as good as she was working against them, even if all she did was open portals.

The girl’s gaze snapped to Serenity. She gave a low, disbelieving laugh. “If any of us could afford to leave, we would have. Everything we have is here and we don’t have the Etherium for it. If we did, we wouldn’t still be here; the ones who had enough left already.”

Grandma Tillon gave Serenity a quick glare before she turned back to the student with a softer look. “We’ll figure it out. What happened that night? How did you get left behind?”

The girl stopped where she was; she’d made it to about seven feet from Grandma Tillon and seemed to think that was far enough to be safe. Serenity decided not to enlighten her that she was far too close when she was near people several Tiers higher than herself; she seemed to be only Tier Two. Even the lower-Tier members of the group were Tier Four and most of them would be able to catch the girl if they wanted to, even without taking her foot injury into consideration.

“There’s not much to say. We were listening to Teacher Lorinth lecture when something tore the bushes into bits. He told us to run, to get away from the buildings, but the fire and destruction followed us. I took shelter in the basement of a cafe; they’d already left but I wasn’t going to get any farther and I knew they had a basement. When I came out, it was all over.” She shrugged again. “The cafe was our meeting point for the first few months, but there’s no food left there anymore. That’s why we won’t let you take anything.”

“We aren’t going to take anything,” Grandma Tillon reassured the draykin. “We’re headed to the Academy. I’ll make sure someone comes to get you out of here and gets you to somewhere safe. All of you.”

The girl didn’t seem to believe Grandma Tillon; she watched as they left and Serenity noticed her following them through the rubble as they continued towards the Academy. Perhaps he was wrong about her ability to get away; she seemed to move far more easily than most of the group, like she now had a Path related to surviving in a nearly destroyed city and a Skill that allowed her to move more easily through the broken terrain.

She didn’t leave even when they stepped onto the Academy grounds. It was surprisingly easy to tell where they started; despite the damage, the green space around the Academy before the outer wall was still easy to spot. If nothing else, it was the only area without rubble.

“If you have to go back, see if you can get the girl to tell you about the others,” Grandma Tillon instructed Serenity once they crossed into the green space. “They should be better off than she implied; Lorinth taught mundane Skills, but they were Skills that people surviving on their own should find useful. If nothing else, they probably have a small garden area. There hasn’t been much of any fighting here since then, so I doubt anything they’ve built has been destroyed.”

She took a deep breath before she continued. “I can’t explain how we missed them. I know how they were missed initially, they were outside the Wall when the attack happened. Lorinth never taught inside the Wall. None of the greenspace teachers did. But we sent people through the city once things settled down enough to find anyone who was still in Stallet; there weren’t many. How was this group missed?”

Serenity didn’t have a great answer for her. The most likely answer was simply that the world was more than any one person could control, no matter what their Tier was. “A city is big. Who knows where they were when whoever you sent in came by? Did you send enough people to check every building, even the damaged ones?”

Grandma Tillon looked down. “We don’t have enough people for that.”

Serenity nodded. “Finding people who don’t want to be found is tough, especially in a place like this.” He debated stopping there for a moment, but it was probably important to say. “I expect they have a reason to hide, too. She was awfully bitter and seemed worried about us finding her hiding place; that sounds like someone who’s had to fight other people.”

Grandma Tillon’s lips twisted but she didn’t argue. She’d probably noticed the same things.

Lillene

They never did get her name. Admittedly, they never gave theirs, either.