Like Swiss Cheese

Plumes of dust rose into the air as the side of the building crumbled into dust. Strangely, screams of shock couldn't be heard at all. Aside from the hunters and their prey, no one else was inside the barrier. Only the frantic patter of footsteps and furious yells behind them echoed throughout the alleyways.

"I said just make a hole in the wall! Like door sized or something. Not bring down the entire house!"

"I made a hole in the building and we escaped. What more do you want?!"

"To not die while the building collapses around us! Using less mana in your spell shouldn't be that hard."

"Well excuse me for saving our butts!"

"This was the third time! Third! How could you not get more control over that spell after the third time?!"

"Both of you SHUT UP and keep running!"

Jacki sighed in frustration. The bickering of those two could easily let their pursuers know where they were. As the light streamed in from the cracks in the sky above, Jacki looked back over her shoulder. The ground trembled as one of the houses collapsed into rubble.

Wind blew the dust plume towards them. Just before it hit, Jacki pulled them into an even smaller alleyway. Barely enough for one-person, wooden boxes and decomposing trash littered the ground. Jacki pushed several boxes together to help her reach a second story window.

After unlocking the shutters, she helped Daren and Aayla climb through before climbing through herself. Jacki knocked the tower over again while climbing up. The shutters were closed tight and Jacki motioned for them to be quiet.

"Aayla, reduce the distance of your artifact's effect! Make it just big enough to surround us so we can disappear into the dust cloud."

Aayla nodded. Beads of sweat dripped down her forehead. She had kept the New Moon Bracelet in check while it devoured the energy over a city block as they ran. Multitasking with magic did not come easy for her. Aayla wouldn't be able to last much longer anyways.

The New Moon Bracelet cried as its range shrunk, but didn't reject the smaller range that Aayla allowed. Jacki led the duo inside the building. With four stories in all, the building was rather tall for this part of town. They snuck onto the third floor to better hide from their pursuers.

A few minutes later, they could hear their pursuers barreling down the narrow streets and alleyways. Aayla had never heard so many interesting curses before in this world.

"Where are they?! Did we lose them?"

"Darn it! We had them in our hands and they just escaped."

"This is all your fault for not getting down the roof fast enough!"

"Bulls**t, I did what I was supposed to. The earth element wizards the one who didn't stop them from blowing up the wall."

"How were we supposed to predict that? Their magic was supposed to have been sealed."

"You IDIOTS just SHUT UP for me!"

Something large smacked into a brick wall several times before the group fell silent.

"Something's wrong with the barrier, but it's still intact. That means they haven't left yet. Split up and search for their trail. They can't have gone far!"

The True Order agents spread out over the area. They turned over every trashcan and knocked down every door. No stone was left unturned. Marc's furious roars turned into deadly hisses as his frustration mounted. He always seemed to hit a wall when trying to capture Daren Forolan.

Patience was definitely not a virtue of the hunters. Their magic became more violent as they directly smashed through the walls to search the rooms. The homes and businesses nearby looked like Swiss cheese after the insurgents swept through. Several of them directly collapsed.

Slowly, the places to hide dwindled. A group of four rebels burst down the door and started to sweep the first floor. Aayla frowned. Judging by the noises below, they even blasted holes into the ceiling. Those idiots might just bring the entire building down.

She looked at Jacki with a questioning face and made a throat cutting gesture. 'Do we take them out?'

Jacki immediately shook her head. 'No.'

If these agents died here, then Marc would soon figure out where they were hiding. They would have to outsmart them instead. Jacki carefully checked outside the window; the dust cloud below had been blown away. Several of the buildings nearby were short and close to their hiding spot.

Regrettably, enemy agents constantly ran about on the alley ways below. Even if they could jump onto a nearby building, those agents had a decent chance of spotting them. The agents below began to sweep the second floor after finishing on the first floor.

Jacki, Daren and Aayla snuck onto the fourth floor. Only a few of the buildings were a safe jumping distance away. Most of them only had two floors with slanted roofs covered in stone slabs or clay shingles. There was no staircase to the rooftop, so this was the last stop.

As the agents moved onto the third floor, there was no more time left. Those fools had blasted nearly every wall in the building. Even the floors and ceilings weren't spared. It could collapse at any minute, yet the agents didn't stop.

The team decided to risk a jump. There was a business right next to their current building. It was only two stories tall, but its elaborate roof was extra tall and the alley in between the buildings was about one foot across. More importantly, that building had already been searched.

By now, the searchers had once again destroyed the most of the ceiling above them, which happened to be the fourth level's floor. In between one of the insurgent's brief periods of calm, the team began to make their move.

They crept passed the holes in the floor to the room with the best angle to jump onto their target. The room below had already been 'searched'. Nearly the entire floor of the fourth level room was gone. Aayla could see all the way down to the foundations of the building.

"What do we do?" Aayla whispered. "We can use magic for this, right?"

"Not unless we want to get all eyes on us again." Jacki warned.

"Those idiots are at the other end of the hallway. Could we go down the staircase then enter the second floor? Jumping from there has many more options."

"They all might be at the other end. I've only been able to isolate three people shuffling around. At least four should have entered. We need to be careful. The other one might be guarding the staircase or something."

Before the searchers could return to the staircase, the team quickly crossed over the treacherous hallway. Now riddled with holes, the floor was becoming more unstable with each passing minute. By some miracle, those explosion happy freaks downstairs had decided to leave the staircase alone.

Jacki went down first. Carefully keeping her back to the wall, she cautiously peaked down onto the next floor. With their pursuers busy on the other end, the team slipped passed the open doorway and reached the second floor.

Aayla heaved a sigh of relief as they once again leapt through a severely damage hallway. Just when they started looking for a decent exit, something went wrong up above. The entire building started to shake after an explosion blasted apart another room.

The searchers must have finally gotten onto the fourth floor. This time, the damage must have reached a critical point. Half of the building started to collapse. Yells and screams came from the fourth floor as the agents realized that something had gone dangerously wrong.

Dust sprinkled down onto Aayla's head as she ran as fast as she could through the building. She threw doors open one by one as they searched for a way out. Aayla began to think that the team should risk separating and leaving the influence of her artifact to speed up the search.

"Over here! I think this one will work!"

At the last-minute Daren found a room with some floor left along the walls. The searchers hadn't been so thorough for once. Without any time to spare, the team carefully walked along the remains of the floor. Aayla barely checked her landing point before jumping out.

She landed with a heavy thud on a roof nearby. Fortunately, it was thatched with a gentle slope. The building itself was two floors tall, which kept the team further away from the insurgents on the streets. Not even a few seconds later, the building began to collapse.

Another large plume of dust was thrown into the air as it collapsed. The world turned a dark greyish tan as dust blocked most of the light. Aayla lifted her collar over her nose and mouth. She could still barely breath, but at least some of the dust was blocked.

Before the dust cleared, Jacki dragged Daren and Aayla off to find a safer hiding spot. Now was the best time to move past enemy lines into the already searched areas. They should be safe there for some time. Then, they could find a way to smash the barrier into smithereens.