1530 HOURS
ALPHEIM
HELHEIM VENTILATION DUCTS.
HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE CONCLUSION OF THE SECOND EXAMINATION.
"Siegfried? Siegfried!"
"Guh...my head hurts. And I can't feel my arm..." Siegfried moaned. Toby and Ilise rushed to readjust themselves, so that Siegfried's stirring body wouldn't fall out of their grasp and plummet to its doom. He rubbed his eyes blearily.
"Ilise? I can see your panties." Siegfried murmured.
"WHAT?!"
Everyone except Siegfried and Roza winced from the echo of Ilise's shout.
"Not now, big guy." Toby said through gritted teeth. "You'll have to wait till we get out of here to flirt or whatever it is you freaks have been up to."
"Is it nighttime? Why is it so dark?"
"We're in a ventilation duct, Siegfried." Ilise said as calmly as she could. Her voice didn't let on the fact that her heart was pounding and she was repressing her claustrophobia. That, and her face was redder than the wound Siegfried had sustained from the burning ball of metal. She was proud of how she sounded perfectly nonchalant, even though they were currently crawling through ancient and extremely unstable pipes. And Siegfried apparently had a view of her panties. Her heart thudded in her chest.
Put one hand ahead and move your knee up, she thought to herself. Rinse and repeat. It's as easy as that.
Tiny Anchoring glyphs popped up wherever she moved. She just needed that extra reinforcement - to make sure she was going at the right pace and wouldn't cave in the entire duct. Besides, the glyphs kept her knees from trembling too much. Ilise would've liked to take some deep breaths too, but air supply in these pipes was limited. Had Roza and Siegfried not been unconscious for the first stretch of their journey, they would've suffocated a while back.
"We're... in a what now?" Siegfried's brain was still incapable of piecing things together, as evidenced by his blatant lack of a filter.
"A ventilation pipe." Toby repeated, his voice loud and clear.
"God. Now I really really need to hurl..." Toby and Ilise winced as they heard him retch over their shoulders. He dry-heaved some more, before projectile-vomiting the orange juice he'd shared with Ilise two hours ago.
"Great. The air's stale AND stinky." Toby grumbled. "Maybe I should just knock myself out, eh?"
"I wouldn't recommend that, Tobias. All of us are carrying enough as it is. I don't think we can afford to take three people up a vertical incline, Anchoring glyphs or not." Rei said from the front of their vent-crawling conga line.
"Gee, loosen up. We're all cramped back here. No need to tense yourself even more, Rei."
"Actually, we should all tense up. We're headed straight for a vertical climb. Ilise is the only one here who can perform an Anchoring spell, and we need her to conserve mana. Otherwise, making a ninety-degree climb like that with two loads will result in disaster."
A blast rattled the section of pipe they were in. Ilise nearly shrieked. She felt her breakfast come up.
"Oh god. I need to puke."
"Not you too..."
"ENOUGH!" Rei shouted, clearly exasperated by all their complaining. "If you lot can't tolerate crawling through a vent, you're unfit to be a Mistilteinn student. You've been through so much more. We just fought off an Einherjar and a Valkyrja."
"Yeah, with all five people present." Toby quipped back, irritated.
"Guys, please stop arguing. We're wasting oxygen." Ilise piped up. She was helpless in a situation like this. She was claustrophobic, stuck in a vent carrying someone who was probably two times her own body weight, breathing in orange-vomit scented air and powerless to do anything about it.
Well, she could do something about it, but this was infinitely preferable to the other option.
"Halt. The climb begins here."
"Can't we just bust a hole in the pipes from here and climb back out? I'm pretty sure all the Einherjar and Valkyrja have gone off to deal with the monolith. The stairwells ought to be clear." Toby mumbled.
"If you want to destabilise the entire ventilation system and cause this entire facility to cave in on us, be my guest." Rei made an odd motion with his fingers that was reminiiscent of what he did whenever he pushed up his glasses, but those glasses were long gone. "I understand we're all sick and tired and that the air smells like puke, but we've made it this far. Ilise, I know that you're claustrophobic and this makes things even worse for you, but you're the only one who can help us with our climb back up. I need you to stay strong. Do it for the Rossweisse name, if not for the success of this team."
'Do not let down the Rossweisse name, Ilise. I'm counting on you.' Bianca's words earlier this morning came back to her. Sure, Bianca had been kidding then, but Rei was dead serious. The idea that a Rossweisse - the Kaiserin of Motion - had failed an exam simply because she'd gotten stuck inside a ventilation pipe was a thought that she could not tolerate. It would mean letting Bianca down. Letting the family that had so generously taken her in down.
Letting her 'other self' down.
She galvanised her emotions and shoved them in a tiny little closet at the back of her head. And then she set that tiny closet on fire. All in the back of her head, of course.
"Say, Rei, how did you know I was claustrophobic?"
"It's written all over your face, Ilise."
--
"Are you in position?" Rei called out.
"Yep!" Ilise said, unusually chipper for someone who was hanging twenty metres above the ground. Her hands and legs were anchored to the wall by four glyphs. Rei, Toby, Roza and Siegfried had had to go prone so that she could crawl all the way to the front of the line (over their bodies) and get the Anchoring glyphs set up.
"All right. I'm coming up with Roza."
Rei gently wrapped his sister's arms around his back and began to scale Ilise's improvised rock wall. From her position at the top of the climb, she had to weaken and strengthen the Anchoring glyphs accordingly, so that Rei could move and not get stuck to the wall. Toby followed shortly after. Siegfried had regained consciousness, but his arm hurt too much for him to move it.
The going was tough, but they eventually made it up. Ilise's chest heaved as she finally released her control over the Anchoring glyphs. Toby and Rei's shoulders were sore from exertion. Siegfried had drifted in and out of consciousness during their ascent. Roza had yet to fully awaken.
"That blast took a lot out of her. Our sort of magic is powerful, but it draws more from brainpower than stamina or mana reserves, Using too much of it at once will instantly knock you out. Short-circuits the brain, in a way. It's why she acts the way she is. She's not developmentally challenged, quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. But let's just say our parents weren't the best caretakers." Rei explained. "Hopefully, she'll awaken without any severe damage."
"I... could find a way to help her, you know. Bianca has connections." Ilise offered.
Rei shook his head sadly. "Believe me, Yggdrasil has done plenty for the both of us. My sister and I do not wish to burden them anymore."
"You're lying." Ilise said. There was something about her that made her exceptionally receptive to the undertones in people's voices. Right now, Rei's voice carried an air of melancholy to it. He was definitely hiding something. He harboured a secret - one that he and Roza most likely he shared. Ilise understood his wanting to keep it under wraps, she really did, but this involved Yggdrasil. And by extension, her.
"Rei. Please. You don't have to hide anything. Don't look at me as a Rossweisse. Look at me as a friend. As someone who genuinely wants to help." Ilise pleaded.
His voice only hardened.
"You know nothing, Ilise. Siegfried realised something, when we first met. He has yet to fully grasp his revelation. Nonetheless, I assure you, he knows that there is much more at work. Much more than you, at any rate." Rei softened a bit. "I'm not trying to insult you, Ilise. But you have to realise that there are things a Rossweisse could never see from their perch. I am correct in assuming that you have never seen Arc City, yes? Not from your sister's penthouse, or with your own eyes."
"A-Arc City?"
Rei's eyes took on the same melancholic quality as his voice. With that, he said no more.
Ilise was left to stew in her own curiosity. What did Rei mean, when he'd said that Siegfried understood something she didn't? She was on his level when it came to academics, that much was certain. When she thought back to their first encounter with the twins, nothing had seemed out of place. Mindless banter, until Roza had taken things too far.
And just what was Arc City?
--