beyond of point of broke up

flight

Lenalee closed her eyes against the light of Allen's invocation, mildly surprised that he knew a word like that.

"We need to get to the arc," he stated, sounding no happier about his impending freedom than before. Lenalee eyed him quizzically as he headed for the door, but followed him. They quickly broke into a run.

"Can't you just make a gate here?" Lenalee asked. Allen shook his head. He swung his arm, destroying a golem on his left, without slowing down.

"I'm trying… it's not working. A Crow unit did some sort of spell that prevented me from accessing gates on the day I was arrested, I don't know when or if it will wear off. We'll have to use the actual arc."

"Can… Can we do that?" Lenalee asked nervously as they rounded a corner, eyes searching the new hall for potential threats. Allen grimaced.

"I hope so."

Though his words were hardly comforting, Lenalee was relieved that he sounded like he meant them.

Link sprinted down flight after flight of stairs, avoiding the steady stream of people going the other way. Most Crow members were making their way to the cafeteria along with the Exorcists, though they had not been specifically summoned, but Link had his suspicions that he was more needed several floors down. Walker tended to be wherever alarms were going off, and Link very much hoped that the scuffle in the cafeteria had nothing to do with him. He jumped the last step and flew down a corridor, noting the remains of a broken golem as he turned, to be included in what was possibly going to be a very lengthy report. Not for the first time, the thought that they should not have taken him off of Allen Walker's guard crossed Link's mind, though he was not one to question orders. He skidded to a halt in front of an open door, and paused a moment to let the state of the room sink in. Two Crow members, though he couldn't tell which, lay on the ground, presumably unconscious or dead. The door hung to the wall by one hinge, slanted pathetically; it looked like it had been kicked in.

Link did not take the time to curse, instead promptly turning on his heel and running back towards the ark.

The floor seemed to be deserted, and was almost eerily silent. Knowing that this would not be the case farther up, Allen and Lenalee took a moment to stop and squabble over which path would lead them to the ark fastest, while running into the least amount of people.

"This way is quickest," Lenalee argued, gesturing towards the stairs.

"But it goes too close to the cafeteria, we should go straight."

"Not if we don't take the lift— if we take the stairs and then turn right, we should avoid most of the crowd and get there faster."

"There's another path to the cafeteria from the West hall, if people are still going there then chances are it's going to be more crowded than usual," Allen pointed out.

"But we'll have to loop around if we go straight, that gives us a better chance of getting caught! Why not just go this way and take the stairs at the end of the hall?" Lenalee demanded.

"Because that would intersect with the quickest way from the basement to the cafeteria."

"Just how many paths to the cafeteria are there?!"

"Seven, and going straight avoids all of them," Allen stated matter-of-factly. Lenalee sighed, clearly surpassed in this area, and nodded.