Phantasia

“What’ve you done to Amanda?” she asked.

“Inducted her,” said a nonchalant Astrid.

“Inducted?”

“She’s one of us now,”

“That’s what you think!”

Astrid tossed her hair back and waltzed back towards her companions. “How else would we have gotten those photographs?” she asked, “She sold her friends out because we’re giving her what they never could. Glorious, isn’t it?”

Lyra slipped out of her oversized robes like a snake shedding its skin, then dived towards Astrid with her fist pulling back to strike hard at the prissy girl’s face. It would have knocked her flat out had Vespa not stepped in to tackle Lyra to the ground. With a twist of her subtle body, Lyra managed to throw out a leg and trip Astrid, knocking her backwards and into a startled Elizabeth.

“Get the feck outta here!” she shouted towards Phoenie, just as the Inquisitors behind her began to move to intervene.

“I can’t believe…” she said to herself, “It’s not true. IT’S NOT TRUE!”

Phoenie stumbled forwards, throwing her robes back to try and distract the Inquisitors for even the briefest of seconds as she jumped over the twisted pile of fighting girls and through another set of doors.

***

Chris couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Awesome! Never realised they had it in them,” he replied, still trying to imagine the ineffective duo of Joel and Elone blowing shit up. He almost wished he’d gone with them. Even the boring attempt by John Smith to try and justify why they couldn’t be destroying the building wasn’t enough to deter Chris’s daydream of a hot red-head shooting up bad guys with dual pistols while everything exploded around her. Joel wasn’t even part of the equation any more.

“Phoenie, I’m—I’m thinking we might have gotten in over our heads.” said John, breaking Chris out of his fantasy. For once, the bespectacled little know-it-all didn’t sound like, well, he knew it all. In fact, he sounded scared.

“John, what is it?” asked Phoenie. Chris leaned forward in his seat, ready for the juicy revelations.

“This isn’t good,” said John.

And then the earpiece began screaming in Chris’s ear, before shutting down a moment later. Frustrated at its ineffectiveness, and the total anticlimax, he ripped the small device out of his ear and tossed it into the shrivelled foliage.

For the next five minutes or so, he returned to his fantasy of an Elone with attitude (but not an attitude that grated against his, as was the case with the real Elone) and wondered how long it would be before plumes of smoke rose from the behind the tall walls. If they were blowing the place up, they’d better do it with style! Chris expected nothing less than to see the half-finished clock tower come tumbling down, bell tolling the death of Godhand as it did.

It wasn’t a plume of destructive smoke that caught his attention, though. He noticed it in his wing mirror and turned on the car’s HUD. With a few swift inputs, he had a rear-view display spread across the windscreen like a movie. The airship was of grandiose design, shaped like the intimidating clawed cross that Godhand used to install fear and obedience in countless weak countries and settlements – much like Torsten. Coloured red and white, with advanced engines and propulsion systems Chris was used to seeing back home in Malkuth, it lowered itself into the manor grounds.

Chapter 19
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