Powerful Normies under Fire
Celes and the others finally arrived in Destiny and found everything in the city to be on fire. Dead Anomaly, Nexus, and Dragoran soldiers were scattered all throughout the city. Mackie and Kita ran ahead of Celes and Zini to the palace to find the Queen and Andrew II.
Celes and Zini traced the SOS to an underground bunker and found Andrew II with a handful of survivors. He explained to them that the Nightmare attacked with her legion and massacred all the soldiers. They were no match for her. She personally assassinated Queen Miranda. Andrew found his way around the Nightmare and her soldiers, getting the survivors to safety. A short while later, the enemy forces left back to Caprice.
"What about Dragora?" Zina asked.
"No one's responding over radio!" Andrew II panicked.
Returning to the surface, Kita hugged her fiancé tightly and cried, "They killed her!"
Mackie stood there in silence. She was crying but the enraged look on her face told a different story.
While it took days to rebuild Destiny, radio chatter from those who were from Dragora started up. Andrew jumped at the first message coming from someone that lived there.
"Andrew Rayne II," one of the soldiers began over radio. "Dragora is no more!"
"What do you mean?" Andrew's confused tone rang deafening throughout the room.
"The Nightmare blew it to smithereens!" the soldier answered.
"No way!" Andrew's tone turned to disbelief. "She couldn't have been in two places at once!"
"Word has it that she created a clone of herself that did it." the Soldier was in disbelief too of this fact. He further explained, "At ground zero, we found her DNA. It appears she blew herself up to take Dragora out."
"Survivors?" Andrew II asked. "Where's my father?"
"Dead." The soldier answered. "I'm sorry. The city is a crater wide. Not a building remains."
Andrew stood there in silence. Kita stood near him, listening to the entire conversation. The soldier called out to him. Andrew didn't respond. Kita touched his shoulder and he retreated into her arms. He started cry in agony.
"I'll kill that woman!" he yelled angrily.
Zini looked around, noticing that one person was missing.
"Glen!" Zini yelled out. "Glen!" Zini called among the survivors who fled to Destiny from Dragora and among those who hid in Destiny's wooded areas away from the battle. At first, she believed he would've been with the ones who escaped to the woods before the Anomaly attacked.
"Have you seen Glen?" Zini asked one of them. She even asked Maryna who was among this group, and she shook her head.
"No." Maryna answered.
"That mother of ours probably incinerated him personally." Star's morbid joke made Zini angry.
"Don't you dare say that!" Zini snapped back at her.
Suddenly, more Dragoran soldiers came from Dragora. Many of them came before Andrew II, briefing him about the Dragoran people.
"With the Dragoran leadership gone, you're the next in line to lead." the Dragoran Captain noted. "Yet you have long way to go."
His tone angered Andrew. Everyone could see how heated the boy was from that remark. Many knew Andrew to be inexperienced, unyielding, and sometimes one track minded and at times a knucklehead. Some believed he didn't deserve Kita or was too young to make the decision to think about marriage. Even his father believed that.
"But look who shaped society with his inventions!" Andrew often retorted. It was true. Because of the Diamond Forge, the Dragorans and their allies enjoyed improved lives—both on the battlefield and in everyday usage. So, Andrew continued to try gaining the approval of those who once followed his father and the Dragoran Council all his life.
Some of the Dragoran soldiers took a leap of faith and believed Andrew was worthy to becoming the next Grandmaster Reign yet the Dragoran Captain still led the troops. If he didn't believe in Andrew, those under him were forced to publicly fall in line. In this situation, however, the chain of command fell upon the sovereign. As a combined force, the Nexus Royal Family were now leaders of the Dragoran military. Without their Queen, the rulership fell upon the two daughters. Mackie quickly stepped up into the role as she was known to have more battlefield experience than Kita. To the Dragoran Captain's dismay, she trusted Andrew and his "toys". These were the Diamond Forge weapons he made for himself, Kita and Mackie.
While forming a battle strategy in striking back at Caprice, reports of an invisible assailant among the human cities circulated. Some Dragoran and Nexus patrols fell prey to this assassin. Whole battalions were slain with knife or sword wounds in them. Survivors say a battalion would be strolling through an area one moment and then dead in the next after experiencing a brisk gust of wind blow their way.
"We'll check it out." Andrew II took the initiative to cracking this mystery. With him were Kita, Mackie, Zini, and Celes.
It didn't take long before reaching the human territories before seeing many humans on the outskirts of these places. They were all fleeing the destruction caused by this invisible assassin. Zini searched through their minds telepathically for clues. One of them was a survivor from Roanoke, an island west of Destiny. The boy remembered seeing a purple humanoid being show up at the gates. Within seconds, the guards fell to the ground, dead before the being's heels. The boy got a good glimpse of the being's face before the massacre began.
"No, it can't be!" Zini said in shock.
"Not quite like her to take an interest in experimenting on humans." Star's amusement of the issue bothered Zini.
"She probably did that to hurt Mackie." Star scoffed.
"But Mackie doesn't reciprocate!" Zini well knew that Mackie didn't like Glen, but the Nightmare didn't care and even if she knew-scratch that. She didn't and Zini knew her mother and father well to know of their apathy and murderous rage against the humans.
They wouldn't take hostages consisting of loved ones of anyone. If they believed Glen and Mackie were in love with each other, Glen's fate would've been death.
The next piece of the puzzle was to find out where Glen was and where he would strike next. Going further into human territory, more dead victims were found. Suddenly, a windstorm approached them.
"Glen!" Zini yelled sternly as she faced the gust.
The whirlwind stopped and the purple-skinned being stood before them. Andrew and the others prepared themselves for a fight. Andrew, Mackie, and Kita were apprehensive about fighting someone who could move as fast as a whirlwind.
"Where I come from, they call people like him speedsters." Celes thought. "But they only exist in fiction."
"I am Zeno Anomaly." the being introduced himself in an assertive tone, more correcting Zini than introducing himself. "Who is this Glen you speak of?!"
"I know what they did to you Glen!" Zini tried to reach him.
"MY NAME IS ZENO!" He yelled and came at Zini at lightning speed. Zini flinched as Star took over. Anticipating Zeno's assault, she created a force field around herself. He painfully shrieked when the field's backlash sent him flying backward. He quickly rebounded.
"So, you're as fast as me, huh?" Zeno believed.
"No, it's wind versus the mind!" Star said chillingly. "The nor-humans have a saying, 'Mind over Matter' and my mind is faster than your matter!" Star then analyzed the wounds on his victims. She knew that his speed allowed him to vibrate his hands at a speed that could be used to cut like a sword.
"You may have stopped me with that bubble of yours, but can you do it to protect your friends?" Zeno turned his attention to the others and attacked but found himself frozen in place.
"This is as far as you go!" Celes said angrily.
Zeno was at the mercy of the Dreamer.
He took a glance at her and yelled, "TRAITOR!"
"You think I'm the queen that betrayed you?" Celes looked shocked. Then again, she knew that the Nightmare was basically her twin. To the untrained eye, one would wrongly conclude that Crystal and Celes were one and the same. Yet noticeably, Celes was darker skinned.
"Wait, you're the one Queen Crystal told me about!" Zeno suddenly got it. "Flocking heck, y'all are a bunch of cheats having her here!"
Zeno sounded defeated as he was carried back to Destiny. On the way, an Anomaly battalion attacked.
"Hey, they have Zeno!" One of them noticed. All of them concentrated their fire on Celes who was near him. The intensity of their attacks weakened the forcefield prison holding Zeno. This situation soon broke Celes' concentration in keeping him trapped. Zeno broke free after the field dissipated. Before he left, Zini knew exactly where he was headed to-her old home in Mamnue.
"I will face him alone!" Zini assertively told the others. Everyone agreed to let her do so.
"We will face him together." Star corrected.