A short while later, Mikayla and Keldryn had arrived outside the gates of Cliffwatch. These were tall and imposing edifices of wrought iron, built to withstand strikes from a Kaiju. Flanking them was a pair of men clad in identical armour woven from yellow light, stately like a Roman centurion but also crude and blocky, with spears and shields that seemed to be fused into their hands. Keldryn had mentioned this when she’d probed him about what other Armour Cores were like; these were Amber Sentinels, the mass-produced Armour Cores made for the rank-and-file, lowest-level members of the Goliath Guard.

  Channeling everything she’d learned from Cat about talking to strangers, Mikayla put on her brightest, fakest smile and approached one of the two guards, who were regarding them with suspicion. “Hi! I’m Mikayla, and -“

  “What do you want?” the guard talked over her.

  “Let me handle this,” Keldryn neatly stepped in front of her, holding the badge on his lapel to the light. “Keldryn Thorntail, Goliath Guard Junior Ranger, back from patrol and with a plus one,”

  “Why are you here?” The Sentinel demanded, looking down on him.

  Thrown by the question, the foxkin’s ears twitched. “Um. I live here?”

  “Cliffwatch is closed. Go away,” the Sentinel insisted.

  Keldeyn’s ears dropped even further as his eyes narrowed. “That’s against the Goliath Guard charter. You can’t turn people away into the wilderness, not unless a town is under quarantine. Is Cliffwatch under quarantine?”

  For the first time, the man hesitated. “Um,”

  “Look, are you new here? I don’t recognise you,” Keldryn questioned.

  “I’m asking the questions here, boy,” the Sentinel growled.

  “Okay, okay. Look, just go get Branch Head Lahlee. She knows me. And she knows the rules, too. We’ll wait,”

  The guard hesitated, glancing at his companion.

  “I’ll alert the Branch Head,” the other Sentinel decided. “Keep an eye on them, ring for help if they cause any trouble. You two, stay here and don’t try anything,”

  “If I can sit down, I’m not getting back up until tomorrow. I’ve done way too much walking in the past two weeks,” Mikayla promised, collapsing into the dirt. Keldryn just rolled his eyes.

  <=====}—o

  Branch Master Lahlee of the Goliath Guard outpost at Cliffwatch was having a string of bad days.

  They should have been gone from here by now. They’d been holding the spy, Anza - or whoever she really was - for more than a week. Any day now Wujing would decide she’d been out of contact for too long and send more people to investigate.

  She’d wanted to be long gone, but her partners from the Regressors were refusing to cooperate. They didn’t understand the disaster they were courting, how heavily outmatched they were if the Goliath Guard came down on them in force. They just kept tinkering away at the bottom of that ungodly pit they’d dug, whiling away the days with their artifices that apparently could not be moved to another location.

  She was sick of it, and if it continued for much longer, she’d just leave without them.

  That was the lie Lahlee told herself to soothe her wounded pride, despite knowing that she had no choice, nowhere else to go if she betrayed the Regressors, that her former colleagues in the Goliath Guard would become her jailers if - no, when - they found out about her misdemeanours.

  So she counted the days until either the Regressors were ready to leave, or her doom came knocking.

  When her secretary came in and announced that there was a Guardsman at the gates asking to see her, she was almost relieved.

  “Alright, who is it?” Her eyes raked across the dossiers she kept on Wujing’s closest confidants. Would it be the Mariner? The Shrine Maiden? The Bronze Wings? So long as it wasn’t the Monarch of the Rainbow Forest. Anyone else, she could handle, perhaps even defeat if her allies joined her, but the Monarch would ruin her.

  “He says his name’s Keldryn Thorntail, ma’am,”

  That was unexpected. “That little cub survived?”

  Lahlee remembered that boy, alright. He’d shown up in Cliffwatch one day, armed with a Core Controller and some Cores he claimed he’d inherited from his dead parents. She’d suspected him of stealing them, but checked ‘Skyward Grasscutter’ against the service records, and it had indeed last belonged to one Bardate Thorntail.

  More record-checking had informed her that, after Keldryn had miraculously survived the Cityvore’s destruction of Farmshadow, he’d been shuffled off to a foster family in Rootway and lived with them for the past nine years. After his eighteenth birthday, he’d disappeared. Which she supposed had led to him washing up on her doorstep and begging to be made a Guardsman.

  She’d barely spared him the time of day. It was one thing for him to be untrained, but his Level was too low. The cramped confines of Rootshadow had done him few favours, he’d been only level 16.

  Of course, that had been around the same time when the Regressors had come knocking and found her to be a sympathetic ear. Kicking up a fuss about an underleveled teenager might have drawn attention that she really couldn’t afford. And, having learned the kid’s past, she surmised that he was most likely just looking for an irresponsible adult who would let him go and get himself killed in some pathetic attempt to destroy the Cityvore.

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  She wasn’t proud of it, but after a couple of months of watching him draw attention, she had ultimately decided that he was a problem which would solve itself if she just allowed it.

  So she’d picked the most dangerous patrol route she had and told him to survey the region and do some Level grinding if he thought it was safe. It was a route that not only passed through at least one known Burrow Zone but also weaved through the ruins of old Balmwind and came within spitting distance of a Hegemon-damned anthill. She gave it better than even odds that he would abandon the assignment and go chase down the Cityvore, but even if he did stay on task and was smart enough not to challenge anything too strong for him, it should have been nigh impossible for him to make it back alone.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution, since the most sympathetic of her Guardsmen, Chesham, had taken Keldryn out on a few Kaiju hunting missions to help him make up his Levels. Chesham had gotten fond of the kid and, once he was gone, started kicking up a fuss about what had happened to him. But she’d known that she would need to get rid of him anyway, so it was only a minor inconvenience to move up her schedule and purge the elements of Cliffwatch that weren’t loyal enough to her.

  All things considered, she’d been certain no one would ever hear from the kid again, or miss him for that matter.

  “He did, ma’am. And there’s someone with him,”

  Lahlee’s earlier worries came back in full force. Now it made sense. Keldryn had, by some fluke, run into another Guardsman while out on patrol. Some unknown, who’d taken him under their wing, disavowed the lies she’d told him, and come back here to demand she explain herself. Suddenly, everything hinged on the identity of this mysterious benefactor. If they’d been out in the wilderness for the past couple of months, they were out of the loop, and most likely had no idea that there was something strange occurring at Cliffwatch. “Do we know who?”

  “No, ma’am, but she looks about the same age as him, and she has a Core Controller,”

  Lahlee tilted her head, confused. Another rogue trainee? That was improbable. Unless . . unless it was an elf. Elves weren’t native to the Kaiju Coast, and she wouldn’t put it past the goons she had on guard duty to mistake an elf for a young human. With how slowly they aged, an adult elf who’d been accredited as a Guardsman could easily be mistaken for a human teenager. That had to be it. An elf, on the young side, who’d come out here to make a name for herself. She could work with that.

  “I see. Prepare my secondary office, then bring them there once it’s ready,”

  “Very good, ma’am,” her secretary performed a quick salute and strutted away.

  <=====}—o

  After almost an hour of waiting, Mikayla and Keldryn were finally ushered inside.

  Mikayla was awed by the massive enclosed ring sandwiched between the main gates and the entrance to the semi-underground town. “Whoa. What is this, a gladiator arena?”

  “It’s a kill box. They lure Kaijus in here, close the gate on them, and half a dozen Amber Sentinels pin it down with spears and shields until it dies,” Keldryn explained with much less enthusiasm. Which was understandable, he’d seen all this before.

  “Awesome,” Mikayla breathed. “I’m guessing those doors are Kaiju-proof?”

  “Nothing’s ever completely Kaiju-proof, but they did their best,”

  Mikayla waved at their escort. “Do you bring Kaijus in there often? Have they ever gotten through the doors?”

  The guard just grunted and didn’t bother with a response.

  “. . okay, I guess this guy doesn’t want to be social. Fair enough, I won’t bother you then,”

  Keldryn side-eyed her. “That was an option?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,”

  They emerged into the central hall of Cliffwatch, and both travellers were shocked for different reasons.

  Mikayla stared, wide-eyed, at the massive underground hall, the many passageways that led both upwards and downwards, and the second pair of doors within that were emblazoned with the Goliath Guard’s symbol. The yellow shield carrying a red sword, white staff and green daggers was carved out and painted onto a wooden veneer over thick slabs of metal. The walls around them were covered in murals that mimicked the rolling countryside, with a cheerful, glowing false sun and, on a large and uninterrupted stretch of wall, a mural of a Goliath she didn’t recognise defending a village from some kind of knockoff Godzilla.

  Keldryn, by contrast, was surprised by how empty it was. “Where is everyone? No market stalls, no food vendors? Is Cliffwatch on lockdown?” he voiced his concerns. The only people present were the Amber Sentinels, and . . there was at least one by every entrance. That was almost egregious, he couldn’t remember ever seeing the place on such high alert. “Is there a monster on the loose?” he hazarded a guess, already tensing up at the thought.

  “The Branch Head will explain everything,” the guard gruffly insisted.

  They passed through the doors leading into the Goliath Guard’s office, and compared to the main chamber Mikayla was a bit disappointed. It was just a long corridor with bay windows to one side and doors to the other. “Hey, if this whole village is underground, how do we get air circulation down here?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Does it ever get hard to breathe down here?” Mikayla clarified.

  “Nope,”

  “Then there must be some kind of ventilation system or something . . then again, it’s probably magic,” she murmured.

  A moment later, they passed a window where the covering had come loose in one corner, confirming that there was supposed to be a view of what was happening on the other side. Out of curiosity, Mikayla peered through it.

  The room beyond was some kind of gladiator arena, filled with equipment, all large enough for a Goliath at maximum size, except for a small stand for spectators. Strange black puddles of what looked like some kind of dried ooze dotted the walls and floor.

  Shaking her head, she corrected herself; it was much more likely to be a training area than a site for death sports. After all, this was a portal fantasy world, not Ancient Rome. Just because they hadn’t invented electricity didn’t make these people savages.

  She was curious about the stains of black ooze though. It wasn’t as though beastkin and Kaijus didn’t bleed red - was there another race she didn’t know about living here, one with black blood?

  They were ushered through a door into a well-furnished meeting room. The walls were sculpted into smooth lines and given a pale sheen, like a magical stone version of modernist architecture. An oval-shaped table with armchairs around it awaited them.

  “Branch Head Lahlee will see you shortly. Please wait here for her,” the guard ground out, then left and closed the door behind him.

  Mikayla sighed in relief as she sat down, relishing the feeling of a cushion under her rear. “Finally. We made it,” She smiled, glancing at her companion. “Hey, Keldy. I just wanted to say . .” She trailed off, noticing the way he had tensed up. “What’s wrong?”

  “This isn’t Lahlee’s usual office,” he replied, eyes darting around. “Something’s going on here,”

  “Whatever do you mean?” A voice interrupted them, a dulcet that could have been silky smooth if not for the fatigue that it wasn’t quite concealing. Both span to find a hunched-over woman, clad mostly in leather armour that mimicked a suit. She had an unusual-looking Core Controller set into her belt, and an exposed prosthetic metal right arm emerging from the shoulder of her tailored armour.

  “So, you made it back. You look stronger, too. I’m impressed,” Her eyes raked across Mikayla. “And who’s this?”

  I'm sure this will be fine.

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