As the downpour of rain faded into a distant memory, the water dispersing clouds fluttered off in the opposite direction of the laboratory escapees, getting a few appreciative hoots from some owls that could finally leave their homes without getting soaked.

  With the pitter-patter of the water-coated road under his feet, Zalto zipped down the windy hillside road, moving with a mostly opaque gale of compressed wind around himself and Naiana that had acted like a portable shelter from the rain.

  Since the rain had mostly passed, Zalto dispelled the wind, clearing his once-blocked view and making any future near crashes an impossibility, hopefully.

  Naiana silently sat in the embrace of Zalto's arms, finding it hard to believe how he was moving so fast without using his arms for counterbalance, or whatever that exercise book she read said. But, mid-pondering, her eyes drifted, settling on the pair of hands carrying her, somehow holding onto her with just the right amount of pressure to not be uncomfortably firm or too loose to cause someone to fear being dropped.

  "Haha! Seems my eye mask wasn't fastened on properly after all. Had I noticed, I would've held back a little more," Zalto announced playfully while a ticked off Naiana fiddled with the eye mask's strap and properly tied it behind the guy's head with a six-piece bowtie. With the eye mask on his face properly, his hands were once again bare of any abnormalities; those simulated living veins existing no longer on the guy's hands, like they never existed in the first place.

  Naiana wasn't sure how to feel about the prior sight; she'd seen many types of Memoria Marks before, like all the other kids' ones at the facility. In all her time there, she'd only ever seen cyan or golden ones, but never an amethyst one. Left to ruminate in her mind, she wondered if the different colours were more than just a visual thing like someone's eye or hair colour.

  But if such a thing were true, Naiana knew those scientists would've unintentionally mentioned something along those lines at some point, maybe it simply wasn't a part of what they were testing.

  Whatever the goal of their testing even was, Naiana certainly couldn't figure that out, at least not now that she wasn't there anymore.

  "So?" Zalto asked teasingly, breaking through Naiana's concentration and forcing her to unexpectantly lose her train of thought; well, the conclusion she didn't know the researcher's logic at the very least, "So, what do you wanna do now that you're outside, Little Lady?"

  Mulling over her newfound freedom, Naiana placed a palm to her chin as she muttered aloud, "So... can we figure out where to get some food?"

  Zalto almost lost his footing against the slippery road, having not expected such a mundane desire but still finding it amusing. "Yeah... It's a shame the time right before third dinner is when the security guards are at their most lenient."

  As Zalto continued to run, Naiana sent her focus forward, only to see something that caught her eye and her concern.

  "Um, Zalto?"

  "Yeah?"

  Raising a hand and pointing far ahead of the two's path, Naiana nervously asked, "Is it me, or is that bridge, well, not bridging?"

  Looking onward and having to hunch his head slightly forward, Zalto eventually spotted the bridge ahead, or more like the two remaining ends of a stone bridge and the obnoxious absence of its bridging middle.

  "You think I can make that?"

  Naiana let out an audible gasp, bewildered to the point of concern that Zalto had even asked such a question and making her worry Zalto wasn't sure he could make it.

  "What's with that look? Obviously, I'd use a superpower to get over the gap."

  Naiana frowned, mostly at herself for overlooking the obvious, but also getting mildly annoyed that Zalto pointed it out. Huffing and crossing her arms, she grumbled, "Oh, and I take it you're going to ice bridge across?"

  "And potentially turn you into a steamed ham? My, how daring of you, Little Lady."

  The little lady, his mood weathered from the repeated reminders of her age and noticeable petite stature, dismissively huffed at the guy, having half a mind to call him a tall musclehead dummy boy. However, she refrained from doing so, citing to herself that her nickname wasn't as concise as Zalto's and wouldn't have the resulting impact she wanted.

  Hearing Naiana's lack of response and the sight of the broken bridge approaching, Zalto braced himself.

  Wagging his head with the ferocious, bubbly intensity of a golden retriever wagging their tail, he tested to make sure his mask was on securely, which he expected to be the case since Naiana had been the one to tie it this time around.

  Out of the corner of her eyes, Naiana was reintroduced to the presence of those vein-like tattoos, still pulsing with stolen life from how lifelike the amethyst colouration moved. The sight still made the girl feel uneasy, even if the marks only reached over and claimed Zalto's fingertips this time.

  With sparks of cyan lightning sparking off his body, Zalto's movements shot higher than his already speedy pace, his legs slightly blurring into a black blur. The air itself crackled softly against the generated lightning of Zalto, intensifying as he stomped his foot at the very edge of the broken bridge and leaping at the very last second.

  The pair swooshed over the gap without the accompanying swooshing noise from the wind, catching Naiana by surprise as she had expected to be struck in the ears by a strong booming sound.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The duo easily cleared the gap left by the bridge.

  Zalto's landing went just as smoothly and swifly as his take off, without the slightest hint of impact or recoil hitting either himself or Naiana other than a light jostle.

  "That went... surprisingly smoothly. Wait, why aren't you stopping? Zalto?"

  Darting her head around, something became abundantly clear to Naiana: the wooshing of the passing trees covered in the fall of past raindrops and Zalto swerving around obstacles instead of slowing down, making it all the more clear.

  Zalto wasn't stopping, more precisely or more accurately, he couldn't, even if he thought of trying to.

  "Hard to stop when you don't have zero traction on an already slippery road."

  "Just like science or maths exams, ignore friction or wind resistance... or was it assume those things were zero?" Naiana uttered coldly, especially at saying exam, which only softened into a murmur as she confused herself by failing to recall what the actual phrase was. "Wait, why would you jump knowing that power had such a drawback?"

  Zalto shrugged obnoxiously, impishly averting his eyes, which caused Naiana to scream as she demanded he pay attention to where he was going.

  Continuing to glide across the ground like ice skaters in an ice rink, the duo blasted down the road at breakneck speed. Naiana could only cling to Zalto in desperation, hoping they wouldn't crash again.

  Her plea was shortly met by the road disappearing under them, leading Zalto to somersault forward at the speed of a racecar wheel, much to Naiana's chagrin as she was turned into a metaphorical tire rim.

  Tumbling forwards with reckless abandon, the duo spiralled straight into the ambushing sinkhole.

  Breaking their landing, the duo were gracefully caught in the cool, if not chilly, embrace of a fish-filled pond situated in a sinkhole in the middle of the broken road. The shimmering water danced around Naiana, dazzling her like a siren as they reflected the night sky, almost a perfect mirror if it weren't for the ripples created by Zalto's motionless body.

  "Seems the fishes needed to tell us something," Zalto remarked amusedly, his voice mostly muffled and distorted from his head being soaked in the sparkling pond.

  Floating atop the pond's surface, Naiana watched the bubbles of Zalto's speech pop against the dazzled water's surface before sighing in relief as her brief concern turned to that of annoyance at Zalto's cavalier reaction, or lack of, to drowning.

  "I think we should just walk the rest of the way before you put us in another ditch... or worse," Naiana muttered meekly, emotionally deflated that her only article of clothing was already ruined mere minutes after breaking free to the outside world.

  For a while longer, Zalto kept his face submerged in the pond with the frequency of bubbles from his breaths growing increasingly sparse. Only once his bubbling ceased, getting a worried eep from Naiana, Zalto pulled his face free from the clutches of the pond with trickles of water falling down from his hair.

  "Aw, but where's the fun in..."

  Zalto halted his teasing remark as he saw Naiana's solemn expression, hitting him like a perfectly connected boxing jab. With a wave of something that could be a simile for shame or guilt, maybe? Zalto stated, "Actually, never mind, let's do that, Little Lady. But first, let's deal with our war-rope issue."

  "You mean wardrobe?"

  "... ... nooo?"

  After a little trial and error, and some burned down or popsicle-turned trees, Zalto managed to acquire the correct balance of thermal control to efficiently dry the moisture out of their clothes without a singe or frosting blemishing the fabric.

  "There we go, war-rope restored."

  "Hmnn... wardrobe," Naiana grumbled at the guy's inability to say wardrobe of all words: it wasn't even that long of a word or close to those that looked like they're cobbled together with no care for how the word is said, like colonel.

  Back on the hillside road from where the duo escaped, the damaged mecha apparatus remained stationary, like a lifeless husk, as its pilot was busy recovering from the contents of his phone call. His defeated groans faintly transmitted through the mecha's speaker, distorted audio noise fighting the guy for control of the speaker.

  "It's always one thing after another," pilot one grumbled as he overhead his colleague mention an icon that wasn't for their mecha drone/colleagues or the examinees appeared on the tracker with a light beep.

  Almost perfectly timed, a shadowed figure shot up from down the hill, clearing the battered metal guardrail and landing directly in front of the mecha.

  "Step away... from the little... girl?" the teen girl ordered in confusion as spectral, silver flower petals danced around her like moths to a flame, locked in a ritual they wouldn't stop. She looked around, noticing the apparent lack of Naiana in need of rescue. Quivering in dread and clutching at the rim of her hooded cloak, the teen questioned if she had gone to the wrong location despite being repeatedly told what to look out for. "Eulio is going to give me an earful again."

  She leapt back, narrowly missing the speedy punch from the mecha's fist that devastated the road as it punctured it.

  The teen reeled her hands to one side, donning a sword unsheathing stance as she landed on her feet. Clutching at the cool evening air between her fingers, the surrounding spectral pettles shot to her hand and blurred into one another before morphing into the shape of a sword: a katana that has a silver handle with a pink leather handle wrap, a black pummel, and a translucent, iridescent energy blade.

  Without even a breath of exasperation, she delivered a single upward slash, slicing the blade of her katana through the mecha and leaving a glowing, iridescent slash mark in its torso.

  She turned her back on the mecha, swiping her katana to the side and dispersing back into pettles, as the applied mark on mecha's body shimmered.

  The glowing slash mark popped like firecrackers, making a similar crackling noise to the small explosive devices, before exploding with the force of an exploding car that split the mecha into. As the split and decommissioned mecha slammed against the cracked road, the cloaked teen sighed in relief from the mecha being taken care of, along with something else.

  Wiping her forehead to rid herself of her nonexistent sweat, she murmured, "Phew, the explosion wasn't too strong... this time..."

  The teen's words trailed off as she noticed she'd inadvertently stabbed the ground when she had swiped her katana to the side. A storm of cringe and self-directed annoyance was the only way to describe how the teen looked upon her discovery. "Crap basket."

  As Zalto and Naiana trotted on their way down the road, their ears were rudely inundated by a monsterously loud sonic boom of a bang, one strong enough that it caused a strong ringing persisting in their ears despite their distance from the noise's origin. Naiana clasped her palms over her ears, hoping to stifle the ringing even if by a little, as she pouted and side-eyed Zalto.

  "Zalto..."

  "Okay, whatever that was wasn't me... probably."