An ominous, inky sky loomed overhead, with green luminescence pervading the thick, unmoving clouds. The warmth of the afternoon sun was swiftly swallowed up by an otherworldly chill as day plunged into night. There was a faint, haunting howling in the distance, unidentifiable as either human or beast and the only sound in the piercing silence within the van.
"From one graveyard to another," Rowen sighed.
"Let's hope this one stays as quiet as the last," Sage remarked, his arms crossed as he watched the crumbling landscape roll by outside.
Shifting forward in his seat, Ryo caught glimpse of Mia and came to a halt. Her hands were clenched around the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles had blanched white. Her shoulders were tense, flexed up close to her neck, and her sea green eyes were dark and tumultuous.
"Hey," Ryo said gently, "are you okay?" When silence responded, he reached past the car seat to rest his hands on her arms, feeling their tension ease only slightly. "Mia?"
"I haven't been back to the lab since," her voice trailed off, and he saw her fingers twitch to clutch the wheel.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Sage queried.
"Of course." Her reply was firm now, and she straightened up in her seat as if reassuring herself of her answer. "This is important. I'll be fine."
Sage glanced over his shoulder to meet Ryo's gaze, receiving only a concerned frown in return. Mia's eyes remained steadfast out the windshield, her jaw now clenched tightly shut and her head erect. They knew she would never admit the full extent of her discomfort, and pushing any further would be futile. Wildfire eased back into his seat quietly and shifted his gaze out the window.
The smooth asphalt of the highway gave way to craterous, broken gravel. The once-lush campus of the university had long withered and died; trees lining the roadway now slumped over, their branches gnarled and flecked with black, crumbling leaves. Hedges and grass were twisted and grey. The warriors straightened up to watch through the windows, cautious eyes scanning the grounds.
"Oh no," Mia sighed as the van rolled up to the entrance. Dark windows glared back, cracked glass and broken shards jutting from the aluminum frames.
"This doesn't look good," Rowen remarked as he drew the van's sliding door open and hopped to the ground.
"The generator must have finally given out," the woman lamented.
"All your grandfather's notes were on his computer, weren't they?" Ryo's voice carried the tiniest hint of discouragement.
"So we've hit a dead end," Sage stated, circling around the van to join at her side.
"Not exactly," Mia confessed. "My grandfather kept hardcopies of all of his notes, in case the worst happened."
"The end of the world," Rowen noted.
"Power grid failure, electrical disruption," Mia added. "Anything that could compromise the files." She started toward the university entrance and tugged on the doors to find them bent and obstructed. Huffing a bit, she took a step back and scanned the building for another entrance.
Ryo strolled up to the entryway, lifting his leg to drive his foot into the doors and unceremoniously break them apart. Loud, metallic screeching echoed through the dark, empty corridors as they dragged across the floor and slammed into the walls on either side with ear-splitting booms. Looking back over his shoulder, he found Mia's utterly unimpressed glare and crossed arms.
"It's not like we have to be quiet," he offered.
"You could have at least tried to minimize the damage," she chastised. "This is still a school, you know!"
"They're going to have to rebuild the place anyway!" He turned back and stepped over the threshold into the darkened hall, "now come on, we need to get moving."
"Ryo's right," Sage agreed, "the less time we're here, the better." With that, he followed behind the man. Rowen trailed on his heels, stopping before the door and motioning for Mia to proceed first.
"So all we have to do is find Dr. Koji's notes and we're out of here?" Rowen inquired.
"About that." Even at its low volume, the wince was audible in Mia's voice. She squeezed past Ryo to lead the path up the stairs. The door at the second-floor landing creaked open slowly as she pushed against it and peered around the emptiness.
"I don't like the sound of that," Halo declared.
The men followed closely behind her, filtering into the second-floor corridor. It was stifling and still, the air stagnant from months of abandonment. Dust particles swirled in the hazy light that filtered through the broken windows lining the hall, and a distinct smell of mildew clung to their noses. Shattered glass crunched under the woman's feet as she led the way down the empty hallway, leaving the warriors to peer in the rooms as they passed. Desks had been overturned in the final moments of chaos, papers and pens strewn about like garbage. The silence was more unsettling now and piqued their attention to every creak and groan of the damaged building.
Mia turned into an open doorway at the end of the corridor, Ryo, Sage, and Rowen following suit. Ryo recognized this place now, the office where her grandfather took his last breaths, and he could not ignore the stiffness in her stance as she stood in its emptiness.
She took only a moment to resolve her nerves before walking to a wide closet running along the office's far side. Drawing it open revealed long bookshelves stacked tightly with books, their spines mostly unmarked or unreadable.
"You're kidding, right?" Rowen asked.
"Afraid not," Mia confessed, giving him a small frown over her shoulder.
"Well," Sage sighed, "let's get on it, I guess." He joined Mia at the bookshelves and started scanning the spines. "Is there anything that might suggest what we should be looking for?"
"It might have some of the armor symbols on it, but I'm really not sure," she replied, thumbing over the spines at her eye level. Ryo and Rowen joined at her other side and each started on a separate shelf, Ryo taking a seat to examine the bottom row of books.
"Man, this must be Dr. Koji's entire lifetime of work," he remarked.
"Yes, that about sums it up," Mia said, the slightest smile touching her lips. "I remember when I was a little girl, I used to look at all of his journals and dream of the day I had published so many." Wildfire flashed a small smirk up at her before looking back down.
"Hey Mia." Sage's voice drew her gaze across the shelf to a faded red spine where his intense eyes were fixed. "There's something strange on this one."
Moving closer to him, she leaned down to examine the tome. There was an odd, jagged etching in gold crawling across the spine and she furrowed her brows. Poking her fingers into the shelf, she slid it out, and doing so exposed a larger etching across its cover, the continuation of that on the spine. She held it out at arm's length to find the image formed a ghastly, abstract fanged skull and a chill crawled down her spine.
"I think we may have found it," she murmured. She carried it to the large desk in the center of the office, carefully bringing it to rest on top. Rowen reached a hand down to tug Ryo to his feet and the two followed Sage to join her.
Drawing the cover open revealed aged, browning pages with diligently written verses. As she combed through them, however, the script gradually became sloppy, more frantic, as if the person who had written it feared running out of time.
"This isn't my grandfather's writing," Mia noted slowly. As her eyes shifted rapidly across the pages, she came to a sudden stop and she pointed to a scrawling line. "There. Drinking strength from immortal fire. That's the start of the legend." Scanning the verses, her brows furrowed. "That's… strange."
"What's that?" Sage inquired.
"That line of verse the Ancient One gave us, about the Oblivion armor." Mia looked up from the page, unnerved. "It isn't in here."
"What does that mean?" Rowen asked, planting both hands on the desk and leaning into them.
"I'm not sure." She turned the page again, sinking into the desk chair quietly. That ghastly skull glared out from the tome now, painted in dark, rusty red. Nine medallions surrounded it, and despite the crudeness of the sketches, they were unmistakable: the emblems of the nine armors.
"There are only nine," Sage noted quietly. Looking up, he found the equally serious eyes of Ryo and Rowen fixed on him.
"Metal pallbearers, cleansed of virtue," Mia read aloud, "staves of spirits nine forge the bridge."
"Pallbearers?" Ryo questioned. "Staves of spirit, just what the hell does that mean?"
"A stave is a plank. The armors don't make the bridge," Rowen deduced. "We do."
"All of us." Sage's intense gaze settled back on the page.
"So what about the Oblivion? Where does it fit in?"
Mia leafed through a few more pages quietly, slowly shaking her head. Skimming the text for mention of a tenth armor, she found nothing. And in a handful of pages emblazoned with the armor emblems, only nine appeared. She tried to quell the dread settling in her chest as confusion tied her stomach in knots.
"I don't understand," she said quietly, "even the Ancient One confirmed the tenth armor's existence. It should be in here."
"Maybe it's in a different book?" Ryo offered. She shook her head with a frown.
"My grandfather was very careful about how he filed his notes. Any information on the Oblivion armor would have been here with the rest of them."
"Unless it didn't belong with the rest of them." Seeing their eyes shift to him, Rowen straightened up. "Hear me out on this." He leaned against the desk, his voice lowered and speech slowing for emphasis. "What if it didn't belong to Talpa?"
"The Ancient One said—"
"Maybe he wasn't telling the whole truth."
"Then who do you think it belonged to?" Sage straightened up and crossed his arms.
"The only other person we know who fought the Dynasty."
Contemplative silence settled on the office and the warriors exchanged uncertain glances. But just as suddenly as the hush fell, their thoughts were interrupted by a low, chilling laughter thundering from the darkness of the corridor.