SHADOW || The Catalysts Series, #2

XXIII || Rift

Inessa stops short the moment she feels the rumbling, its vibrations sending jolts right down to her spine.

She hasn't felt this kind of excitement in a while.

Well, the breach in the sky they've subdued a while ago was indeed thrilling, but this? This is a different form of excitement. They aren't dealing with demons; they are dealing with a group of strong ability users.

Turning around, she scans the empty walkway. After the quake, all else is now silent, save for her tiny footsteps she makes on the metal platform in this area. Before, the ground was uneven, unstable. Here, it's sturdy, like the skeleton of some structure—its frames are built with strong metal that aren't easily bent.

Her boots ground the frame, the echoing sound bouncing off the dark. She suppresses a grin and the urge to turn away and head toward the source of the earth-grounding rattle.

No, she tells herself, just as she does every time she's on an important case. You'll have time to wander about later.

However advanced the City, mental disorders are the hardest to treat. It's all behaviourism and psychology. Inessa and her ADHD is no less; she tries to not let it show, but it gets her distracted and. It sometimes pains her that the authorities treat her as a child just because her attention deviates faster than others, just because she can't concentrate like other people. Not that she really cares about what people think—it is often forgotten by her after—but the fact that sometimes she draws special attention or the fact that they issue and repeat their requests or tasks at least twice to her and not to the other S-Class speak for themselves.

An echoing rumble from the previous quake stills her, and she takes a few minutes of resisting herself from ever looking back before moving forward.

Inessa lets other, tiny things distract her: how this part of the underground network is rather slanted, how the surface of the wall is cool to touch. She lets her mind wonder about how this part of this City used to be, what this building used to hold, before it was all abandoned. Andromeda Sector is—was—one of the residential areas. But at this far out and so near the barrier, it may as well be one of the government surveillance centres. She appears in what seems like a giant containment centre, the entrance she's come from suspended mid-level. Everything is made of solid steel; Inessa finds herself now in the middle of a catwalk beam that isn't complete—it is broken in the middle, and the other side dark.

A flick of her watch casts a light toward the area, and she finds the other end of the beam not too far from where the path is broken, the other side slanting downwards completely. She'll have to see how bad the damage is before she can assess if she can use her acrobatics or even her abilities to get across.

Focus. She repeats what they are tasked to do in her mind again: Infiltrate the Shadow Syndicate's rumoured base, obtain whatever it is that they might be hiding, and wipe them out.

Darn Thanatos. He left her, only leaving a mental note to her as he goes without much of an explanation. He told her to continue moving forward, and that she should have a guard up, because he's sensed something ahead. This memory makes her jerk to full attention. She should be aware. Her abilities, unlike Caelus and Thanatos, are not good a ranged type of ability in detecting nearby presences. Hence is why the two are separated; Azrael's enhanced body mechanisms isn't exactly good in scouting either.

But now that Thanatos isn't here, she must have her guard up. She cups her face with her hands and shakes her head hard. Focus.

She stumbles then, feeling an odd searing pain on her back, in between her shoulders. Inessa isn't usually susceptible to pain, but this is different. She grips the railing on the beam, the cool metal rust eating into her skin. Years of training with weapons and becoming a weapon herself has steeled her immunity to pain, and it's only when she feels the cool trickle of blood down her back—causing a weird sensation in her tight fitting—does she realise that one of them is probably locked in battle.