The Fifth Layer (5)

It was seven in the morning. Everyone had woken up early. On one side of the concrete wall stood the two Seats' army. Sanguine's red glow shone on their backs from far away. On the other side stood the allied armies: many werewolves, humans, and vampires had gathered in Torque.

"We're in," declared Luo into his earpiece's microphone. Jenna, he and many other mages had crawled out of a school's secret basement to be met with the smell of rotten food on the cafeteria's counter. Arriving at the cafeteria's wide window, they examined the city below.

The school was on a hill next to a university and a hospital. At the bottom, Skullard exposed all its unique shades of grey. Sanguine's southern neighbour was old and dusty. Surveying the deteriorated asphalt roads, Luo and Jenna noticed only a few pedestrians navigating the mossy, garbage-infested sidewalks. There wasn't a single vehicle in sight.

On the horizon, many smaller apartments and condos were in ruins. Like every location in the Fifth Layer, Skullard didn't have a single graveyard, as it didn't keep the dead quiet for long.

…

Ejiro's fingers emitted light as his division of mages walked inside a wide concrete tunnel. After climbing up a slope for hours, they had finally caught a break and were on flat ground.

The vampire halted.

"Why did you stop?" Adia approached Ejiro at the front.

Bryan and Victor followed her. There was a dead end.

Ejiro slid his hand across the concrete wall that blocked their path. "I hope we didn't walk all this way for nothing. What does the map say?" 

Bryan Moon looked at his mobile tablet in confusion. "This doesn't make sense. We're at the exit."

"So now what? Should we just go back?" Adia frowned. She was angry and tired after having walked for hours without a break. "Was it all for nothing?"

Victor shook his head. "We could try breaking this wall."

He pulled two handguns from under his long black coat and connected them to form a double-barrel, explosive shotgun.

"Go on, then." Ejiro nodded.

-BOOM!

Parts of the wall came out, but there wasn't anything behind. Bryan put his ear on the concrete material and knocked on it. He sighed and shook his head.

"Dammit!" Ejiro struck the metallic floor with his boot.

-Clank!

"Huh?"

Everyone aimed their flashlights on the spot his boot had fallen upon: he was standing on a metal trapdoor, the exit.

"Alright, get back." Relieved, Ejiro gripped his Dragonsword, pushed it inside the trapdoor's crevice and, pushing on his handmade lever, forced it open.

The three hundred mages descended into a roofscrapper, a building which touched the Obscure Guild's ceiling. By the stairs, Ejiro and Adia looked outside from a window.

"This is Mash City," Victor told them.

Mash looked a lot like Skullard. However, being just North of Sanguine and on the way to the Inner Layer, it was more populated. There weren't many roofscrappers, but countless single houses stretched into the horizon. Along with advertising banners, floating tramways completed the ashy city with red, green and blue hues.

Ejiro Sani hit his earpiece. "We've arrived."

…

"We're waiting for the signal," Rack responded from an underground parking lot. Having taken the third hidden passage, over a thousand mages had scattered around Sanguine, waiting patiently to run into the streets and keep anyone from leaving or entering the city.

Stephen's team had hacked into the cameras, allowing Rack to see everything: oversaturated crimson towers and endless pipes, narrow alleyways and hidden markets filled with spices and sweet aromas to pull in carefree people from the streets, and battalions of skeletons on the city's outer edge.

Looking further away, the commander could see the colourful fields and hills leading to the main gate. Over there, two million skeletons dyed the greenery in grey.

…

Seth teleported inside the gate's command building. He looked outside of a window and saw the same sight as Rack. 'Can we defeat such a force?'

The mage walked up the spiral staircase and arrived in the monitoring room without seeing a soul. Someone in a black coat was at the command desk, so Seth approached them silently.

Taking another step, Seth grabbed the operator's shoulder and used his powers to immobilize them.

"Hello?" The stranger's shoulder felt too sturdy, inhumane, under Seth's hand. Something was awry.

Before he could get a better look at his face, the operator's upper body suddenly fell back on his chair without revealing a hint of flesh; it was a lifeless skeleton.

Explosives were wrapped around the body's waist.

'What?!'

Seth jumped back but then remembered he had to access the computer. The old mage in a robe dashed toward the rigged body and hit it with his staff, forming a shadow around the explosives.

-BOOM!

"Just in time." Seth had barely contained the blast. The chair was destroyed, and many buttons on the command desk weren't functioning.

"Are you okay, Seth?" It was Stephen's voice.

"Yeah, I stopped it." The mage took the USB key Stephen had given him and injected it into the computer to get the hackers access to the gate's controls.

However, things took a turn as he spotted wires at his feet. Kneeling under the command desk, he found tens of dark rectangles concealed under its surface. They were explosives.

He turned around and examined: the enemy had hidden bombs across the entire room and possibly the whole building.

It was too late. The room could explode anytime, so Seth teleported hurriedly and arrived inside at a gas station, one of the only other buildings by the gate.

A loud bang followed by bright light and debris marked the explosion. The building was in ruins.

"Never mind, Stephen. The first plan has failed."

The skeleton wizards were laughing, thinking they had killed Seth. However, they hadn't bought as much time as they thought.

Stephen Cure was in Torque with his team, including Scott, Micky and Sophie. They sat around a smooth table and looked at a giant screen on the wall of the secret metal room. It showed different perspectives of the future battlefield.

Stephen cleared his throat and adjusted his headset's microphone in front of his mouth. "Then let's go with plan B. Isaac Tremblay, do your thing."

Isaac stepped closer to the gate as everyone else backed away. A red aura swallowed his body as he levitated in the air, his hair static and his eyes bleedy.

Facing Sanguine's gate, Isaac brought his hands together and centred his thoughts around his arms, condensing red magic in the palm of his hands. His watch started blinking.

[Warning: Significant decrease in mana points detected.

Average speed: 91 points per second.]

He could smell and taste his blood as it dripped from his burning crimson eyes down his face.

Stephen nodded. "Fire."

A gigantic red beam pulled out of his hands and crushed the gate with everything, everyone, behind it. The army's missiles followed almost immediately to make an even wider gap in the wall and profit from the enemy's confusion to kill as many as possible.

Many enemy humans and vampires died. The skeletons fell indiscriminately, including the skeleton wizards near the gate. 

A hundred thousand skeletons had passed in the blink of an eye, and another fifty thousand within the next minute as the wizards couldn't form powerful enough barriers in time. The attack was a success, but the fight was far from over.

There were still over forty skeleton wizards remaining, many vampires who had sided with the Seats, thousands of reptoids, and hundreds of thousands of brainwashed humans fighting alongside the skeletons.

As soon as humans died, wizards reanimated them into skeleton cursed, allowing them to keep fighting.

Further in the fields, at the bottom of a hill, silent, the Bone Mother gazed at the battle.