Normal 2

"If we land in the orange zone I’ll get you the other pack." Ryu rationalized while pushing the falling wood of a door.

"Don't worry about it." Karaza shrugged with her head.

They stepped out the other side of the door, on the land of the yellow zone they landed.

“Maybe I should burn the wish here.” Ryu fiddled with the pack. His nose slightly scrunched from the stench of sulfur in the air.

“Hold your horses, you can’t burn it if you don’t know the wisher.” Roxy said, head turning around like a radio wave catcher. She was comfortably moving her neck in inhuman angles now that humans weren’t to be here.

They got startled when a sudden engine noises filled the sky, looking up they saw couple aerostats there. Huge, oval, and awfully quite machines for their size. Masquerading as gloomy clouds due to their grayness.

Roxy summoned her broom instantly.

"Key kids! I will run a quick errand, those aerostats are radioactive, don't touch them. Also Ryuyu, don’t impale those things like you’re a minion of Dracula!”

"You have way too much energy." Karaza sighed.

Roxy flew away while Karaza looked at the other boy he had the empty expression of someone plotting in silence.

"Don't do anything stupid."

He just stared at her.

"I can be a hypocrite sometimes." She felt a need for a defense, any defense.

She felt comfort when those eyes moved away from her, turned into vertical narrow pupils, looking at the aerostats in the sky.

'It's not like I can expand all the way up to there. I could wait until it's directly above me then I morph and impale it...but then I will be a Dracula minion forever. No, don't think like Roxy! There's no time for all of this! The auction is in danger!' He corrected his thoughts, looking at the debris flying in the air.

'If I only can fly...'

He turned into a blob, smaller than usual. Jumped in the air, two small balls grew into what could be best described as deformed wings, wiggling in the air.

One aerostat was at a safe enough distance. The tiny wings flapped higher and higher until he was way above the aerostat. From that altitude he expanded his surface area, morphing into something practical and easy to imagine. A giant glass clipper.

While the clipper was wide open around the aerostat a tiny portion of his body was about to separate from the clipper, like a thick drop of honey falling.

‘I mustn’t get exposed to radioactivity while my main body is attached to the clipper…but if I was too slow my clipper won’t clip…’

“Timing timing.” He sang to himself. Detaching himself just a moment before the clipper pounced on the aerostat. Cutting it in half.

Karaza watched the explosion, distance made it look small in the sky.

‘Yup, he has no bloodlust, otherwise I would have been clipped for my attitude…’

Ryu managed to flip his wings away from the danger zone, the premature wings started failing him nonetheless. Before being dragged by gravity he morphed into a feather, swaying peacefully to the ground.

Then growing them again to fly home.

‘See, not a Dracula minion. Now I have a wisher to find.’

“That was a show.” Karaza admitted.

She looked at the flying aerostats, nostalgic smile on her face.

'I used to take these down whenever I had a bad mood. Aimless weapons of decayed civilization, nothing left for them but to roam around.'

She took her axe out, swinging it lazily. Looking at all the cracks and scratches in it.

And she wasn’t the only one unleashing her powers.

Jumping from the broom into the roof of one aerostat, Roxy stabbed a hole into the metal with a dagger, jumping inside and looking around.

It wasn’t the first time she saw the interior of smooth metal walls, it was normal for the air to be too heavy to breath and with a smell of iron in it. She instinctively looked at the steering wheel in one corner, and at the top hat shaped gem embedded in one of the walls.

She stabbed around the gem, plucking it out of the wall. When it was in her hands she put it on the floor and head toward the steering wheel.

Her nose bled, she placed her hand in the back of the wheel, pulling some wires off and cutting them, uprooting the wheel from its place. A small blue gems up there, in the shape of a music note.

She slid the gems in her pocket. Blood ran out from her ear and nail beds. She lifted the big top hat stone again and looked up the hole, the broom was flying in circles near the entrance.

"Guess the radiation is too much for broomy."

She threw the stone through the hole, it land on the roof, she then jumped and got out as well. She made it look easy, getting the job done without any contemplating.

Unlike her Karaza was still looking at her axe, only snapping out of her inattentiveness as the top hat stone fell next to her. The loud thud stung her eardrum.

"Keep an eye on that for me please!" Roxy said, on her broom before flying toward the aerostats again.

'A squadron of seven, one of them must be a central control unit.' She flew between them, looking around, still bleeding.

"Eeny, meeny, miny. Just kidding! It's the one at the far left corner."
The control aerostat had a different layout, and an open area, almost like a deck of smooth metal, the whole thing didn't have anything resembling a crease or a line of any kind, it was one big slap of metal. Roxy walked in the deck, jumped to the smooth roof to find nothing.

'I didn't encounter this module before. I could make a hole, but I might break the control panel with it. Maybe the entrance isn't here.' She jumped in the air for her broom to catch her and flew beneath the aerostat, investigating the bottom of it. Her bleeding decreased. The disjointed pupils switched colors rapidly, signifying the healing.

'The radiation is way less here.' She thought suspiciously, stabbing a hole with a soft swing of the dagger, she entered.

She coughed some blood. Looking around she tilted her head in confusion, pillows on the floor. Two toothbrushes on a shelf, near a dusty vase. She had to tiptoe over a slimy spot to get to look over the steering wheel. She took the pen attached to the book and wrote. 'Head over to the red zone.' Entering the order to the machine.

She stumbled as the air wagon stopped for a moment, then moved again, clearly in the opposite direction. Uprooting and searching behind the panel she found another music note gem. She couldn’t help but stare at the slimy spot, she put the prize in her blazer pocket. The usual smile was missing from her face. She took the pillow covers out, got on her knees next to the spot and start wiping it. And while the aerostat hid to the red zone, the soaked pillow covers didn’t. They instead had their last trip in a flying broom, back to the ground.

Far from the sky, Roxanne dug the rocky soil with her dagger. Burying the covers while the six aerostats faded into the horizon. The last one however, was a lost cause. It chose the ground as its final destination.

The view wasn't so different from where Karaza stood.

"This will collide into the ground in couple hours, if I ran now I should be fine"
She looked behind her, the direction of the blue zone, nothing in sight but dark half rocky ground. Wind blew her hair and slammed dust into her eyes. The wild was always like that, sometimes you just turn around to a blank, empty, and ever expanding ground. Where was everything and everyone is a question that drifted slowly from the minds, like a fog disassembling at the raise of dawn.

'Will I be fine?'

"Even though I can hear now, it is weirdly quiet now." She chatted to the axe.

Shifting the gaze to the big stone, then to the future disaster above.

"Those two were a delightful distraction, I must admit."

Her hand fumbled in her pocket. Took out what looked like earplugs and placed them in her ears.

True silence swallowed the muffled sounds. Axe started shaking in her grip, and she faced the aerostat.

"This is a delightful distraction too..."

A blast of vehement sound waves tore the air, aftershock crushing the aerostat away, metal crushing. Explosion colors the sky like a lilac fireworks.

Sound came back to her ears, taking the earplugs out while a shield of sound waves surrounded her.

Sitting down in exhaustion. The broom and its owner landed next to her, brown suit covered in mud and blood, Roxy looked at what's left of purple smoke in the sky. Oddly silent.

"Your friend flew to god knows where." Karaza chose to break the silence.

"That rascal!" She chuckled before giving the human a studying glance.

"And this is for you, the other rascal." Roxy added in a semi serious tone, giving her the blue, music note gem.

Karaza’s stoic face covered her thoughts that were neither here nor there. She couldn’t walk a road to reach a conclusion. The parasite’s actions were that undecipherable.

"You will not cash out your good deeds with me." She knew herself decent enough to be sure of that.

"That's fine too."

The human passed out before her brain got the chance to analyze the response. Nonchalantly she was hanged on the broom like a washed dress.

“Well, I guess I have to smuggle her back to the hospital.” Roxy concluded after realizing that walking through the cloaked men’s door meant that she transported physically to here. Even if the men’s dimension was in the mind, their doors had touchable conciseness.

“Hope Ryuyu can get back on his own…Or else I will get a job as a sky chauffeur.” She complained to her broom.

And going back he was, except slowly. His wings weren’t helping much so he took a flying break in the bushes of the dukedom’s castle. Unknown to the knight training in the middle of the night.

The knight tilted the old sword in his hands, looking down on it. The worn out blade faintly reflected the starts’ light, like how the knight’s golden hair did.

“Can this trinket be useful?” The knight talked to himself. At first Ryu listened as a pass of time until he recover his stamina but the self-talk took an interesting direction.

“Well, at least it is better than a wish. Less discoverable than the dark eye bags after wishing. And all the other consequences.”

The brief whispering ended with the knight sealing the sword in its sheath and going his merry way. But for Ryu the image of another blonde male with recent eye bags entered his mind.