"Sofi's a South Faction cat-"

"-was a south Faction cat," Levi corrected, tone challenging.

Tags didn't take the bait. It was clear she'd been trying to avoid an argument with this cat for some time. "Sofi was a South Faction cat an' the daughter of one of Alpha's advisors, so she had a fairly high standing among faction cats. She learned of Alpha's plans a couple months back an' planned to reveal this information to the general public, but the war came on faster than expected, an' some officials had caught wind of her plan, so she figured she had to get out of the South District to avoid execution. Y'know, with the treason n' all," she began explaining as they continued forward at a brisk pace, "Alpha, of course, is the leader-"

"Is the leader of the South District, yes. I'm aware," Hero replied, trying to focus on where he was putting his paws so as to avoid patches of glass or rough stone. He suspected his paw pads had grown even more torn and bloody, but he couldn't summon the courage to stop and examine. He hadn't been able to feel them for a while now, anyway, so it didn't make sense to hold up such an important expedition.

"Not every cat in the South Faction supports what Alpha's doing," Sofi added, her voice quiet as she trotted up beside Hero, "Most of them don't even known. They're just blindly fighting to protect their home, and they believe that following Alpha is the only way to do that. If we can reach camp and tell them what's going on, they'll turn on him. With Alpha gone we can negotiate a ceasefire."

They passed under a flickering street lamp, the last source of dwindling light along that street, and before long they were plunged into darkness. Tags signaled for them to slow to a walk while she figured out what direction to lead them in, and Sofi and Hero continued walking side by side.

"How do you know this will work?" Hero asked, and Sofi's brown eyes clouded with something that Hero, despite his particular talents, couldn't quite decipher.

"I know where you come from it's all meadows and sunshine, Timekeeper, but the faction cats don't exactly have the same privileges as you Clan cats. You don't have a choice in the life you will lead, it's chosen for you. Kittens are sent out into battle as early as five months of age, since the start of this war we've deployed cats as young as four. The longer this goes on, the more lives are risked," Sofi murmured, and the other cats nodded and grunted in assent. When Sofi spoke next, her voice was nearly a whisper. "Nobody wants a war, Hero. Sometimes they just don't realize it until it's too late."

Tags cut in from of them, and Hero stopped suddenly to avoid being trampled. "We're here," she informed them simply, and Hero squinted to try and figure out what he was supposed to be looking at. 

Without warning, lightning sliced across the night sky, swathed in clouds that bore no rain. It illuminated the bleak city with glowing contours and flashes, and for a moment spectacle took Hero's breath away. 

Then the moment ended.

The cats stood on a chunk of cement that had risen from the street during the quakes, and Hero had walked up the gradual slope without having noticed. Where the street should have continued there was nothing but empty space, and only a few paces in front of him the cement disappeared into what he estimated was a hundred foot drop.

The cityscape that lay before him was crumbling and decrepit, the skyline melded with the darkness and the stars hidden by vast amounts of cloud. The bridge could clearly be seen from here, the water beneath it choppy and grey, churned into big white whorls by the wind that whistled past the wires and cords strung between the stone spires that stood atop the bridge. But amidst the chaos and destruction, oblivious to the disaster that threatened to reduce their city to dust, fought hundreds of armor-clad cats. A writhing mass of fur and claws and teeth and stone.

"We should have left this place while we had the chance," Kilter swallowed, fighting to keep the stutter out of his voice, "If it weren't for this war, maybe we could have escaped the earthquake. We could have saved everyone."

"They never would have left the city," Tags sighed resolutely, and Hero wondered why Tags had excluded herself from her judgements about the Faction cats. "But the sooner we get down there, the less blood will have to be shed.

More nods spread among the cats, and Tags veered to the right, having identified a safe path to the battlefield below and ahead of them.

"Woah, woah, wait," Hero interrupting, dashing in front of the spotted she-cat with a frown etched into his features, "You're going down there?"

Tags narrowed her eyes. "Sofi knows the enemy, she'll be a helpful asset to infiltrating the enemy camp."

"Sofi does't just know the enemy, she knows the South Faction camp inside and out," Hero pointed out, as the other cats came to a stop before him, forming a half-circle, "Sofi said that the enemy Factions' allegiances are unsteady; if we killed Alpha, the allegiance would break, and we could stop the battle entirely instead of trying to fight our way through. No more North and South Faction cats would have to die."

"They're the enemy," Tags retorted.

"They've got families, just like yours. They're fighting to save themselves and their home, same as us. Why should they have to die for that?"

Another moment passed, and as Tags opened her mouth, the other cats looked up at her expectantly.

"He's right," Dodge agreed, tilting her head slightly.

"There is good in these cats, I promise you," Sofi added.

Tags exhaled, claws flexing and scratching against the concrete. 

"Have it your way, Timekeeper."

< —————— >

Somewhere along their walk, Sofi had taken lead of the group, much to Tags' disgruntlement. The grey and white she-cat expertly picked her way around fallen debris, and upon noticing her talent of avoiding rough patches and sharp object, the other cats began to place their paws wherever she had placed hers as they followed along.

They natural fell into a single file line behind her, which they would have had to do anyway, as Hero soon found the path beneath his paws becoming narrower. As if nothing had changed, Sofi padded gracefully over the top of a fallen arch that was halfway embedded in the pile of fragmented bricks beneath it, and the other cats carefully ascended it after her. 

"You seem to know what you're doing," Tags commented, her trademark suspicion lacing each word.

"This is the exact route I left the South Faction camp from," she chirped, hopping off the edge of the arch onto solid ground once again, "I've got near perfect photographic memory, and it seems there haven't been any tremors around here recently, so not much has changed."

The cats accepted this, as they were too physically and mentally exhausted to argue.

Almost half an hour has passed since Hero had lost sight of any sort of familiar territory, meaning they were well into the North District, which lay across the bridge from their destination.

After a few more minutes, Sofi brought them to a halt.

"Here we are," she announced.

Tags flicked her ears. "Where is 'here'?"

Sofi smiled in amusement and nodded towards the gaping hole in the wall to the right of her, half blocked by a fallen beam, and Hero's ears pricked to the faint sound of rushing water.

"This pipe runs across the river underneath the treatment plant's maintenance bridge. I promise, it's completely secure."

Hero half expected Tags to say something about how she would rather not enter a pitch black tunnel leading into enemy territory, but instead she bit her tongue and ducked under the beam without another word.

"It's safe," she verified from the depths of the metal tube, "Smells like dead rats though. Wait, no, that's because there's a dead rat.

Sofi rolled her eyes and swished her tail, gesturing for the others to follow as she followed after tags. Hero raised a paw a fraction of an inch, meaning to enter behind Sofi, when Levi shot him a warning glare. Seeming not to notice their companion's hostility, Rhys and Dodge went first, Dodge ushering Kilter along ahead of her. Hero entered last.

The tunnel was pitch black and the freezing metal seemed to sap the warmth from all over Hero's body, making him to cold even to shiver in protest. The spongey material made Hero wince every time it squelched beneath his paws or dripped onto his pelt, but he was glad for the relief it provided from the bitingly frigid metal.

No one spoke as they walked, partly because the sound could travel and alert someone at the other end of the pipe, and partly because there wasn't much to talk about. So instead Hero listened to the distant roar of the river and ringing that reverberated around the enclosure whenever a cat's claws clicked against the bare metal.

Though it was still dark outside, the cats had to blink a few time to adjust their eyes to the light when they emerged from the tunnel. They shared weary glances. "Right," Tags muttered, inhaling and using her foreleg to scrape off some moss behind her ear, "Now we just-"

"Heads up!"

Hero was suddenly torn from the peaceful silence, both literally and figuratively, as something large and heavy slammed into him. He whipped around to see Levi wrestle his attacker to the ground and dispatch him with terrifying swiftness, baring his teeth ferociously before sinking them into the leg of a brown tabby she cat a second later, dragging her off of Rhys's back.

Sofi had recoiled from an abrupt noise and was standing against the wall, and Levi looked up to find the source of the sound, when the she-cat he'd managed to pin to the stone thrust her powerful hind legs into his stomach and scrambled out from under him.

The ambush had lasted less than a minute, and had been performed by only three cats - he suspected all of them were on guard duty near the tunnel and had attacked instead of going for help. 

"I have to go after her," Levi barked, having regained his breath, then turned and dashed off in the same directing the tabby she-cat had gone without waiting for an approval.

"You're not going to stop him?" Hero remarked, but Tags had followed Levi's example and started off in the opposite direction.

"He knows what he's doing. They know we're here now, but if he catches up to the she-cat we can keep Sofi's presence a secret," she elaborated.

Hero stared down at the body of a cat who had attacked Kilter during the ambush, which the other cats pointedly avoided looking at as they doggedly continued to follow after Tags. 

It was a small black tom cat, no more than four moons old. Hero paused to close the tom's eyelids over his bright yellow eyes.

Their pace quickened and Hero's eyes trained on the sky, where the moon was slowly sinking lower in the sky. It couldn't be more than two hours until dawn, but now it felt that time was moving in slow motion. Barely two minutes passed before the came face to face with another peril.

"On your right!" Dodge cried out, and Hero rolled to the side just as the enemy cat's blade swung above his head, and his heart fluttered anxiously. 

Another swing, another miss. Dodge was busy try to defend Kilter, whose eyes only grew wider with each blow that the enemy patrol issued. 

Another strike, and this time the cat's blade wedged itself between two stones. Hero slashed at the opposed appendage, and the cat yanked its foreleg back with a yowl. It backed away and turned to flee without another thought, but Hero didn't give chase.

Beat.

"What, you're just letting 'im go?" Tags scoffed.

Hero's nose twitched. "They know we're here."

The message rang true with the other cats, and when they were met with yet another small patrol, every cat was sent howling back to their camp completely intact.

They were slowly rising higher, and Hero wasn't completely sure what kind of structure they were mounting. It didn't seem like anything that belonged in a city, though the occasional stained glass window reminded him of the East Faction camp. It was by one of these large windows that the group stopped to rest, each observing the wounds they had suffered, though luckily none too bad. Hero couldn't stand still for long, the silence gave him time to think, and at the moment he didn't want to remember anything that had happened that night. He didn't want to think about Swiftstorm or Lilypool or whether Whiteshadow was still alive. He just wanted to curl up in a ball and wait until everything was better.

"What the hell is that?" Dodge exclaimed, staring out the colorfully distorted panel.

"I've got no idea," Rhys replied, though he quickly took an interest in what the she-cat was looking at, as did Hero, who was eager to have something to take his mind off of him friends.

He could clearly see how close to camp they were now; a vast courtyard stretched out in front of them, though it was far below wherever they were now resting, which a partially enclose segment of an almost medieval-looking wall. Situated on top of a particularly high building about a quarter of the way around the courtyard, and seemingly attached to the same wall they were traveling along, was an enormous machine. 

"That thing's huge," Dodge gasped, and Hero moved to the side to make room for Tags, Kilter, and Sofi, whose attention Dodge had drawn.

"Huge is an understatement," Rhys countered, pressing his face against the glass so intently that Hero thought he might fall through, "That thing could house an entirely family of cars."

Before anyone had the chance to guess as to what it might be, the air was filled with a whirring noise, and circuit-like patterns lit up near the center of the machine. The brief orange glow made it a bit easier to see the machine itself, which was a contraption made of metal compartments and tubing and archaic looking gears, but the wonderment was short-lived.

A projectile erupted from the mouth of the machine, soaring in across the courtyard and towards the river beyond the walls, trailed by opalescent fire. Once it reached the height of its arc, the orb exploded into a dozen blazing fragments that fell towards the ground with surprising speed, disrupting the original arc. The cats couldn't hear the resulting screeches, but they winced as several structures on the battlefield went up in flame. 

"They can't..." Dodge stepped away from the windowsill, green eyes mirroring the bright orange spires that rose from the other side of the bridge, "They can't just do that."

Tags grimaced. "They can."

"The faster we get to Alpha, the faster we can deactivate whatever that thing is," Sofi encouraged, looking equally perplexed and determined. She obviously hadn't know about the weapon. Exactly how much was the South Faction hiding form their cats? 

"It'll be too late," Dodge swallowed shakily, ears pinned to her head.

Beat.

"Wait," Rhys piped up, sidling up beside the she-cat in an attempt to calm her trembling, "Wait. We're not giving up that easily. We can disable it."

"We can?" Dodge asked incredulously.

"You sure about this?" Tags inquired skeptically, narrowing her eyes at Rhys, who averted his gaze.

"I've worked with dozens of machines, why should this one be any different?" he reasoned, gently nudging her shoulder in the same way Hero realized Lilypool had used to. Rhys turned to Tags. "So we split up. You, Hero, Sofi and Kilter find Alpha, Dodge and I will take out the machine and rendezvous with Levi. Easy-peasy, right?"

Tags motioned towards Hero, and Hero smiled at Rhys, who quickly returned the gesture. "Easy-peasy," Hero agreed.

The group fell quiet again as they trudged away from the glass windows, where Sofi had sent Rhys and Dodge down another narrow path leading in the direction of the machine. Hero only hoped that they could stop it. Hope was all they had left.

"It's getting darker,"  Kilter mumbled, and Hero noticed that they had entered a stone corridor. His spine prickled, and he saw Sofi tense, though she continued to lead them down the corridor with a confident stride. 

No one replied.

Beat.

"Wait," Tags commanded, padding in front of Sofi once the gray and white she-cat came to a stop. 

Sofi's tail swished uncertainly. "Something wrong?" 

"Isn't it always," Hero muttered, mostly to himself.

"Quiet down, someone's coming," Tags snapped, her large ears swiveling towards the darkness ahead of him. It was a few more seconds before Hero began to hear the sound as well; a sort of panting, heaving, dragging noise that made his bones ache. He opened his mouth to comment, but Tags didn't give him a chance. "No armor. Either it's not a cat, or it's not an enemy."

Sofi stepped backwards until her fur brushed the wall, eyes narrowing to apprehensive slits.

The ragging breathing only grew louder, accompanied by an unsteady, loping gait. "Please..." the word echoes down the hall, the fur on the back of Hero's neck began to stand up. "You'hv got t o h-help m-e."

A brown and white tom limped out of the shadows, stepping into a shaft of moonlight that had escaped the cover of clouds. He stood, quivering, and sodden with blood. His glassy eyes flicked over each cat.

Beat.

"Who are you?" Tags growled, but her voice wavered when the tom's fearful eyes landed on hers. 

"He's hurt," Kilter pleaded, sympathy lacing his words.

His torn tail dropped behind him as he wearily stepped towards her. "P-please, you have t-o-" 

"Get back," Tags hissed, and he stopped short. Tags and Sofi hung back behind her, exchanging wary glances. Both cats had unsheathed their claws. "Don't come any closer."

The tom hadn't fully emerged from the shadows, and the dark clung to his form. "We can't just leave him there!" Kilter tried.

"Kilter," Tags warned.

"No!" he spat, so audibly that Tags nearly jumped. Hero looked taken aback. "No! I'm not letting anyone else die for this war, not while I can do something about it. This is sick."

Kilter tore past Tags, who had stepped in front of him in attempt to block him from the tom, who had begun to crumble under his own weight. Hero and Sofi were too far back to reach him, and for a split second, as Kilter rushed to the tom's side, Hero felt as if the fate of the world hung in the balance. 

Beat.

A sharp metal twang reverberated in Hero's ears, a flash of metallic silver flew past before the moon was swallowed by the storm outside and the light disappeared. While his eyes acclimated to the new darkness, Tags raced past him, with Sofi running at her heels, determination contorting what little he could see of their faces.

There was a yelp. Not a loud noise, but more of a drowning, dying noise, and then it ceased altogether and there was a thump. Have few other senses to go on, Hero followed the sound. His paws met with something soft, and then almost immediately after, something warm and viscous. 

The swirling clouds gave way to the moon once again, watery light struck the scene inside the hall. Lightning flashed, and Kilter's eyes glinted. The tom lay, collapsed at Hero's paws, with blood streaming out of the corner of his mouth and a serrated metal projectile protruding from his chest.

Beat. 

There were enemy cats to Hero's right, no more than five. Sofi and Tags had nearly incapacitated all of them in a matter of moments, sending a few screeching in the direction from which they had come. 

Hero felt like he was the one dying. Kilter's chest rose, but he emitted no more than a gentle sigh. His eyes remained wide, and when he suddenly jerked, the two she-cats had arrived at his side.

"What do we do?!" Sofi exclaimed, fur bristling.

Tags shook her head, wordless.

Kilter blinked, struggling to make any sort of noise. "I don't want to go," he whispered.

Beat.

"You don't have to go," Hero assured him, relieved that he was speaking, thought the relief was short lived.

"I don't want to go," Kilter stared past them, where the ceiling gave way to elaborate stained glass murals. "Please, p-please don't make me go, not y-yet."

Beat.

Hero swallowed. "Just... just calm down. You're not going anywhere."

"I want to stay."

"You can stay for as long as you'd like."

Beat.

"Kilter," Tags cooed, surprisingly gentle as she bent over to press her face to the tom's cheek. He turned his head ever so slightly. "Kilter, it's alright. You're going to see her again. You're going to go see your mate."

Beat.

"No he isn't," Hero insisted, nudging Kilter's side, "You're staying with us. You're going to be alright, I promise. I promise."

Silence.

Kilter smiled faintly. "I miss her." 

His chest stilled. 

Hero stepped backwards. 

Blood stained Sofi's white forelegs, as she's been trying to cover the projectile wound in hopes of preventing the blood loss. Carefully, she removed her paws, placing them back on the stone. Rivulets of blood flowed through the fractures in the rock, but Hero didn't bother to step back once they reached him. He lifted his head, gazing into the depths of the corridor. 

"Hero?" Sofi murmured softly as he stood up, stepping around Tags with his eyes trained on the darkness ahead. "What are you doing?"

"Deciding how much I'm willing to put up with," Hero responded, and without elaborating, vanished into the shadows.

Here's an extra long chapter with extra character death for you guys! Sorry about jumping around characters so much, but you'll get to see some of the old ones again, I promise.

~Frost