We pressed the said bell without suspecting anything, the first time I pressed it there was no sound, I waited for a few seconds and pressed it again.
AAWWWWooooooohh!!
As soon as I pressed the bell a second time, the howls and growls of various animals were heard.
"That was just a coincidence, having it happen almost at the same time as we rang the bell doesn't mean anything, right?" Baha asks me, his face losing its chocolate hue by the second.
Although I want to say no, it's very likely to be related.
Barely two seconds after the howling started, we heard the sound of metal scraping against metal.
"No!!!" A scream of a female voice echoed through the floor, as a short woman, 1.60 tall, came sliding down the banister surfing a sword.
The woman had short, untidy brown hair, and wore clothes that looked a size too big, full of fuzz and perfectly round glasses that were somewhere between too big and the size that would look right on her.
"Damn I knew something was wrong." The woman speaks after nearly tripping on landing.
"You." She says, pointing at me and Baha and then pauses to catch her breath "Did you guys see if anyone rang that bell?"
Said and done.
"We." I speak, making sure my every mannerism says 'exhausted'.
"What? Why?" I want to ask you, if I wasn't supposed to use it, why was it here?
"No, it doesn't matter now." She starts pacing back and forth mulling over numbers and plans.
"Hhmn, excuse me," Baha asks the woman as he gets in the way of her anxious walk, "Would you mind explaining what's going on?"
"There is a horde of angry beasts coming towards the Tower, because the signal that the bell emits is similar to the resonance that a treasure capable of triggering their evolutionary process." She stops with wide eyes and answers in a monotone voice but with the cadence of a machine gun.
So why the hell is this here?
"Why leave this here?!" Baha asks the obvious.
"I confused the lapis from my personal experiments with the ones from the doorbell maintenance." She responds the same way she explained the situation with the beasts.
"Fuck." I needed a way to vent my frustration.
What a relatively safe place Kaz, it's not over the first day and there's already this kind of shit going on.
"Anyway, since you're also at fault for this, let's go downstairs." she says grabbing our wrists, jumps onto the sword which somehow manages to walk uphill with enough speed that neither of us touches the ground, and just watch the stairs go by in a blur.
We hit the ground floor in seconds, jumping off the rollercoaster railing, with a distinct lack of grace as we stumbled and nearly hit the ground.
I managed to recover my balance and stop the fall in an 'almost' Baha could not stop before hitting the ground.
"Okay, you dragged us here, now what?" With discontent leaking from my lips I ask the 'height in contrast' I was going to call her a mad scientist but it's so obvious and I'm suspicious there's more than one nut job working here.
"Now we're preparing to intercept the beasts before they do too much damage, and we'd also better find a way to isolate them around the Tower, we don't want problems with neighboring cities for letting one of these escape among the common people." She responds with a bit of concern painting the previously monotonous tone of when she spoke.
Baha stands up when she's finished speaking, and she heads towards the entrance without looking to see if we're following her.
Not that a Synchroner is dependent on vision to know what's going on around him.
I think about this as Baha and I follow her.
"Who forgot the security protocols this time?" The slovenly guard asks looking our way.
"Apparently it was me," The woman says "Now Talavar, let's skip the lecture and go straight to the part where we clean up this mess."
"I can agree with that, but my skills aren't good at isolating space, and if I start fighting without considering that, we'll end up with a lot of escaped beasts." Talavar, the slob of the gate speaks.
As soon as he finishes speaking, the beasts start to enter our line of vision, buffalo with the scales of a komodo and the horns of an elk are the front line, followed by gigantic tigers with black plumed wings and two short horns protruding, extending from the black stripes on their heads.
Mixed between the lines of the two creatures, gray wolves with the reptilian eyes, the fangs of a venomous snake and a necklace of scales barely visible under the fur, wandered around waiting for the chance to strike.
"Jill, is there anyone who can quickly put up a decent barrier in the Tower?" Talavar asks for the 'height in contrast' which even the name seems in contrast to her.
"Not that I know of, and the two assistants I dragged here are dantian singular still." Jill, responds every second losing the monotony with which she spoke previously.
"Fuck." Talavar speaks with no effort to hide his dissatisfaction with the situation.
**************
Shortly after sending the brats out of my room, I feel a strange vibration, one that is capable of stimulating the 'Eye of Seth'.
Because of this strangeness, I stop reading and spread my perception to the maximum, as I am not in a situation where I find a filter necessary, I end up using none.
When my sixth sense covers the entire area within a radius of ten kilometers I 'see' the horde of beasts in unbridled march that comes towards the Tower.
What kind of freaks have you been recruiting Hwang?
The scene is so absurd that I forget to call the Master Stargazer an old man.
Whatever, I notice the brats leaving along with a fifth stage Synchroner and stop to talk to the slovenly watchman.
Looks like they're going to explain something to the brats.
I narrow the coverage area of my sixth sense until it's just covering the Tower and the four people outside, and filter out reverberation from the air to get an idea of what they're talking about.
Honestly, I've never practiced this much so it always ends up sounding like my ears are full of static, but I still understand what they need: a barrier.
This I can do easily.
Still sitting in front of my desk, I run my fingers along one of the corners that still have dust and gather a little in front of me.
When I gather enough dust to form a small gray circle on the table I can start creating said barrier.
I extend my hand palm down and above the circle of dust and activate my first dantian with all my might.
*************
As soon as Talavar finished cursing our luck we felt a gentle wave spread across the ground, then the dust that the mound of beasts kicked up began to move as if it were alive.
No that's not right, every speck of dust started to move, spreading from right to left until it soon formed a spinning ring around the beasts at first the ring was shallow, barely four feet tall but, the dust kept gathering and rising inch by inch.
One of the snake-featured wolves touched the dust ring with its front paw suspiciously, like a crocodile waiting for prey to fall into its mouth the dust expanded and engulfed the wolf, with a sudden acceleration the dust ring began to grind the wolf until it becomes part of the dust that forms the wall of the ring.
With the death of the first beast the wall seemed to come to life and gave the same fate to all beasts near the misshapen razors that are its borders.
And in the middle of all this, the wall of dust continued to rise faster and faster, seeming to want to cover the sun, in minutes it had already reached five meters in height and in a few more seconds it had already grown another meter.
One of the winged tigers tried to fly above the dust wall and in response the top of the dust ring began to undulate so that certain parts reached higher, in conjunction with the waves of dust, the acceleration that made the wall a gigantic meat grinder also increased to more than twice what it started with.
With this combination the winged tiger was first cut in half by the peak of one of the highest waves, and before the blood could spurt out the other waves came, they engulfed his body in a cycle of slashing and crushing and like the other creatures that touched the wall it was ground to dust and became part of the wall.
"Just what the hell just happened?" Talavar asks no one in particular.
"Kaz." Baha responds for the first time by sounding genuinely shocked at the level of violence he was exposed to.
"And that means what?" Talavar asks this time looking in our direction.
"That someone made the barrier you needed." I answer the sloppy.
"Well I would like more information before I act, but it seems that if I ask more the girl will try to bite me." Have no doubt. "Since the beasts can't run away, I can start the slaughter."
Saying that Talavar draws a sword, a jian to be more specific, however the sword is not where his power resides, it is in the sheath, a beam of silver light comes out of it, which is divided into a thousand points of silver-gray light and the dots then take the shape of a cross, no, swords actually.
Talavar lets the thousand swords of light hang over the beasts for a second, then swings the sword up and down, and as they move the swords of light strike the beasts on their heads, each of the thousand slaying one beast.
He swings the sword in hand again and the ones of light follow his movement, as if he were some kind of master of the blades, and they return to the slaughter.
"Jill." Talavar spoke, or rather demanded that a woman known to Jill do something.
In response Jill grew eight inches, her skin turned pale green and clear, her hair grew until it reached her calves and from brown it changed to a vibrant green, and then it became vines.
Is that why she wears clothes that are a size larger than necessary?
I find myself thinking about this, and how the nickname 'height in contrast' ended up making more sense than I expected.
Despite my daydreams Jill's transformations aren't over yet, the sclera in her eyes have turned golden, her pupil has dimmed, shrouded by a vibrant emerald iris.
Perhaps the most subtle and strange part of the transformation her hands and feet gained a woody tone and doubled in size.
With her feet now out of proportion she kicked the ground, then roots began to leap out of the ground and extend like giant snakes. The roots spread out, trapping the smaller beasts and toppling the larger ones like a game of bloody domino.
And as a bonus terror to the beasts, whenever the roots found a beast with any kind of wound, new or old, they would pierce the wound, penetrate the beast's skin, and then, I can only assume, begin absorbing the water and nutrients from their victims by the near-moribund state which the beasts left before moving on to the next victim.
"What the hell are we doing here anyway?" Baha asks. "Looks like these two can handle this on their own."
"You take the little ones that managed to get past us, just to make it clear we're going to do our best not to let even a beast pass, but if it happens then it's up to you." Jill speaks in a calm, velvety voice.
Despite wanting to make another tongue-in-cheek comment on this change, my mind got stuck on this part here:
So we have to clean up your leftovers.
Crap.