Enhanced by Nyxlas’s Augment, Kaldalis’s leap sent him upwards faster than the assassin could anticipate. As prepared as he was to swat Kaldalis down, there was no way for him to do so at this speed.

In the long-term, he suspected that this would lead to trouble. Even if he was just a little speck flying over the city, he was about to be the cause of a few dozen UFO sightings. Considering what the Contender had gotten out of him, it was possible that he would be identified as the culprit, and accused as an evil wizard or whatever for using the ability in town again. It wasn’t going to be any skin off his nose, once he got back to Cotanaku, but he worried that the consequences would come back to him.

Regardless, he was trying to escape an assassin, and needed to physically get across the better part of the city to attend the trial. If he played by the rules, he was going to fail. And if Onirioago got loose on a technicality, her threats were still ringing in his ears even now.

The city spread out beneath him. From his new vantage point hundreds of feet in the air, he was reminded of the cutscene that he’d seen before the tutorial. His vision had flown around over the city, showing him all the landmarks that hadn’t actually mattered, since he had left the city immediately. The rooftops and people were so far beneath him, he felt his eyes drawn exclusively to the larger landmarks. The castle and the cathedral stood out, and so did the larger courtyards and parks that dotted the city. When he turned his head, he found his eyes drawn to the docks behind him, where he could see the Rambutan. His eyes weren’t sharp enough to pick out the people, but he could see figures moving about the docks and swarming over the deck.

He tried to direct his attention ahead, towards where he was going. He had leaped in vaguely the right direction, but he was at nearly a forty-five degree angle off. He was going to land closer to his destination than he’d jumped from, but he was going to need to adjust when he landed.

The real problem was his vertical angle. His top priority had been escape, which meant getting up out of the alleyway. But now he was going to be in the air for nearly half the duration of his Jump cooldown, and only travel horizontally a few hundred yards. The cooldown was precious, and he needed to make it count, but so much of it was going to be gone before he had made any distance at all. It was exacerbated by his weapon; the War Weapon lacked the modification he’d become reliant upon. For so long, he’d been working with having two charges of half-duration Jump. But when this full-length jump cooldown was over, he was going to be walking on his regular stupid feet for two minutes before he could jump again.

As he finally started to descend, he saw a figure rushing over the rooftops. It wasn’t a huge leap of logic to see that it was the assassin. The man was moving at great speed to reach Kaldalis’s landing spot before he got there.

It was too far, though. Kaldalis hit the rooftop hard in a three-point landing when the assassin was still on the next rooftop over.

“Superhero landing,” Kaldalis yelled to the assassin. “It’s really hard on the knees. Totally impractical. We all do it anyway.”

“What the fuck are you-”

Kaldalis didn’t stick around for the assassin’s response. He kicked off again as soon as he could physically make his legs move. This was a more directed jump, and instead of careening almost straight up into the sky, he sailed over a hundred rooftops in the blink of an eye.

He wondered what he looked like from the outside. He wasn’t traveling at supersonic speeds, so he likely wasn’t causing a panic. He could imagine that the people seeing him from the street might think he was just another rooftop-traveling adventurer in a real hurry. But the other figures up above the city would clearly recognize that he was performing an impossible feat. He hoped, as he careened over the city, that few enough folks were paying attention that he might become an urban legend rather than an active manhunt.

Slowfall was ready to use again shortly before the end of Jump, and Kaldalis made sure to get one more good leap in before the end, and then used Slowfall to land safely. As soon as his abilities were spent, he dropped down to the street level. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t know how fast the assassin could chase. Staying on the roofs would make him easier to find. On the streets he could blend into the crowds. In the unlikely event that the assassin caught up, he didn’t want to be an easy mark.

Being on the street slowed him down. The winding route he had to take to get the rest of the way to the courthouse, slowed by the foot traffic of the day, took him nearly three minutes. When he walked in the front door of the building his quest directed him to, he had just over four minutes left.

The interior of the courthouse was very much in the same vein as the administrative meeting hall where he’d met the War Council with Garyung. As he walked in, there was a check-in process that forced him to get in line and wait. There were only a handful of people in front of him, though, and he was confident he could get to the courtroom in time.

Getting to the front of the line, though, he found himself not faced with a blue-collar guard taking down information and waving people through, but a bespectacled clerk. There were a pair of guards flanking him, but Kaldalis grimaced at the idea of dealing not with a guy just trying to do his job, but coming face-to-face with yet another honest-to-god bureaucrat. The aggravation only deepened when the clerk took one look at Kaldalis and failed to ask who he was before choking on the words.

“I don’t want to be rude,” Kaldalis said, gesturing meaningfully towards the quest on the side of his vision. “But I’m in a terrible rush. Can we move this along?”

“You’re injured,” the man stammered. “And bleeding!”

Kaldalis looked down as the man pointed at his arm. Somewhere during the fight a blow either broke open a bruise or caused his armor to cut into him. There was a very small trickle of blood dribbling out of the elbow joint of his armor and running down his forearm to drip off the back of his hand. Though he imagined it was possible that consuming a few hundred hit points for Nyxlas’s Augment might manifest as physical damage if he was already battered.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kaldalis said. “Someone was trying to stop me from attending the trial. Very energetically.” He flicked his eyes to the timer, as it ticked down to the final two minutes. “Can I go? I promise I’ll wipe the blood off and chug a healing potion before I get there.”

“I’m sorry, sir, you were in a fight?” the clerk said, looking back at the guards as if to confirm he’d heard right. “Sir, assault is a crime.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kaldalis said quickly, very much not appreciating how this was going. “But if you have a problem with that, take it up with the guy who assaulted me. I’m just trying to get to the trial. You know, the thing that this building is for? Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“I’m afraid you’ll need to answer a few questions, first,” the clerk said, gesturing to the guards. “In private.” One of the guards reached for Kaldalis, and he saw his odds of making it to the trial on time shrinking before his eyes.

Against his better judgment, he had to make a run for it. He twisted out of the guard’s grasp before she could get a proper hold on him, and lunged forward past the checkpoint and into the courthouse.

“Hey!” the guard barked in surprise. “Stop!”

The second guard lunged at Kaldalis, visibly shocked at the sudden resistance. Kaldalis ducked under the grasping hands. There were a handful more guards in the room, and they all stared at him in openmouthed surprise, giving him a few precious seconds to make a run for it.

The entry hall had stairs up to the second floor, and there was an open hallway at the top that led further along into the building. The courtroom Kaldalis was heading to was on the first floor, but it was in that direction. He needed to shake his pursuit first, and he might be able to do that by finding a stairwell down that hall.

There were more ways to break pursuit than that, though. If he could frighten and confuse the guards here, they might have to search the whole building before they could find him. He activated his jump ability and leaped into the air towards the top of the stairs. Landing lightly, he took off at a sprint across the tile floor.

And as soon as he was out of view, he Flickered.

Kaldalis found himself hoping that using Kaia’s Flicker this way would work. Onirioago had used it to nearly evade capture when he’d first uncovered her plans, and using her own trick to ensure that he could bring her to justice felt like a good bookend to the event of her imprisonment. He just had to remember that momentum was preserved between flickers, so he was going to burst out of the Paths Between Paths at a full sprint. As he used the moment in hyperspace to wipe the blood off himself, he tried to keep from twisting around too much, so that he didn’t land on his face.

Despite momentum preservation being on his mind, he noticed something odd that he should have noticed a long time ago.

He was moving.

Obviously, he was moving. Momentum was preserved. In fact, when he caught Onirioago, it was because he had been able to collide with her in the Paths to stop her. But now that he was moving at high speed mid-flicker, he could see that the big marshmallow-like shapes floating in the void in front of him seemed to be growing larger. Not a lot, and not rapidly. But he had a definite sensation of movement. Of closing the distance.

Could he reach them? Obviously, he couldn’t breathe in this void, and he would need a lot more momentum to get there in a single flicker. And more time, unless he was going to carry a jet engine in here. But maybe he could…

Just as he remembered the peculiar effect the Slow debuff had had on his Flicker, he popped back into reality.

Kaldalis found himself running at the back of a group of guards who were charging headlong down the hall, yelling various threats and demands. He’d been in the Paths Between Paths for exactly long enough for the guards to assume he’d gotten way farther down the hall and took off right past where he had flickered.

He slowed down from his sprint as soon as he could, and let the din of running guards in full armor drown out the sound of him finding a stairwell and sneaking towards where he thought Onirioago’s trial would be held.