Vault's fake sky broken.
A maze of corridors and rooms was suddenly flooded with fear-stricken survivors. They had heard of another vault being broken in hours ago.
And now another's roof had been shattered.
People's action as a group is always throttled and derailed by mania when confronted with the twisted versions of their dreams.
One of the shared dreams of everyone in the vaults was of freedom. It was of being under the same sky of Ashtrim.
This dream was delivered twice. Both times with enough power hidden behind it that the dreamers called it a nightmare.
Thus the warpath of the hooligan army was the nightmare of the people of the vault.
Several parties had circled around the shattered roof to enter the castle.
Castle guards welcomed them with their swords raised.
"For Ashtrim!"
"For Ashtrim!" ran among the middle.
"For Ashtrim!" The last that crossed reverberated it.
How many spoke these words were only met their enemies faster. Castle guards fought the incoming misguided triage they believed have to be taught.
A bestowment action of the Monarch landed meteors in between. The one who cast it was down.
Exhausted beyond their capability to handle.
Similar to that a few more fell after casting that specific bestowment action, on the walls of the castle.
Guards and hooligans used zwerchhau against each other.
Steel cuts meeting each other in mid-air with intent of death clinging to their edges.
The opening of blood, flash and swords.
Binds were common on the gardens of the castle among the bushes as well as the clashing armies that trampled them.
Who would tend to admire the beauty of a land in between a warpath? A fool may. A wanderer perhaps.
But the only wanderer who had snuck in, was slinging rocks at speeds faster than the swords could swing.
Each sling thrown shot gained momentum mid flight because the wanderer in the brown overcoat had used the action of fire on it.
Whether the rocks exploded into melting stone or throttled forward in a spin. It did not matter.
What was required was to kill as many guards before entering the castle. The main keep's path was well protected.
It told of its importance. And so was the gates of the inner castle kept locked behind barricades of steel and stone.
"These people had expected an attack and still are unprepared for an actual army. How did they conquer more than a third of the continent?" Thoughts of doubts blossomed in the only sane boy in a battlefield, one fitted in a brown overcoat.
Another rock slid into his rope sling. The boy started swinging it around like a rope mace.
He battered a guard's head in two, another hooligan became his collateral. The boy was the partner of the army, only in name.
This army was raised without a leader. Cheal had vanished before anything major went down.
And he had left it all to the boy in the brown overcoat. He was leading the charge from between the fight.
His current rock had gained enough momentum that the boy kept it up as he tapped the rock three times in a row as the rock did a complete revolution per tap.
And let the rock swing out as he whipped it. The rock flew across the battlefield flame ablaze it. Mid trajectory the rock had an explosion and its residue spread over the detonation area. Tens of guards were dead, as well as the wall it was about to hit had holes made in it.
The rock had become lava from the inside out. More importantly, the rock was metallic.
Boy's collection was running short, and he couldn't risk making more actions of earth in his pocket in the middle of a battlefield.
He picked an abandoned longsword and placed it in the empty slot on his sling where the rocks went.
He swung it as fast as the sling allowed, slicing people around him.
Several lost their raised limbs while some had their fingers severed.
As he swung it, he tapped the pommel of the sword by the corner, not the vertical surface as was the case for action of fire. He was going to do the only element in the four elements that has only one effect.
Cold. Freeze. The action of ice.
To do so he let the sword be by his side as he kept revolving it and tapped the pommel on the side thrice.
The sword showed brittle cracks appearing across it.
Swords of the continent were made in one go, and thus the only removable part of them was the cloth handle added over its handle.
An icy effect spread through the sword cracks visibly trying to smash the sword's particles into each other. Whatever the action of ice did, the boy only knew one thing, "it is best to be used with care for what it can do could be terrifying if not used with the four colored rings or placebos."
His four colored rings had been readjusted, more so rotated from its usual position.
Their rotation didn't bring some special effect. It was a placebo effect mechanism used to induce whatever within people is used for the actions of the elements.
And the cold on the sword was seeping into the air, as the sword rotated faster and sharper.
"Move! Move!" He called out to the hooligans and guards. 'They better move if they don't want to die!' He had chosen his target, his brown overcoat rattled in the wind.
But the wind in the castle gardens had picked up a cold, all from one single full intent action of ice.
The blade snuck into the wall on the right, it was further from the keep and inner castle.
It was well stuck up to the handguard, and the boy then dragged it across the wall in an arc.
Boy's forceful arc widened the crack.
The wall of this section of the castle gave in to the effect of the action of ice.
Coldness had seeped into the rope as well as the wall, and out of both only the wall showed effects of contraction and expansion.
Boy wearing brown overcoat had used his memory on how castle walls are made. One big ingredient of it is water that expands on cooling.
The sword expanded it to a threshold that the wall it had snuck into cracked beyond reason.
And boy's force to use it in an arc had only created more of an opening in the wall.
The guards that avoided him because he looked idiotic because of his sword on a sling now realized their grave mistake.
So did the hooligans, they ran toward him.
Both parties with different intents. One to kill the boy, the other to help him.
His target? The inventory wall of the castle. Whether the boy knew it was the inventory is of no consequence to him.
"I! Just! Need! An! In!" He screamed through his teeth. The arc widened.
A guard approaching to cut the sword with a lateral cut was blocked by an uppercut bind by a hooligan.
'Cheal spent quite the time getting some training to these chunks.' His wandering mind still persisted, rattling wrong words in to let him focus on the main task.
A new warpath had begun.
Hooligans protecting and slamming the sword pommels into the thick wall that's been frozen beyond its handling capacity.
The slams only helped while another party shook off the guards that wanted to cut the boy in two. Entire battlefield had changed from an incoming charging army to a driven army protecting their important asset.
A few castle guards were still counting the hooligans that had attacked while they were conflicted with shooting them down. These few saw another wave arriving beyond the hole of the vault.
The wave was collected yet again by Cheal. He was going around collecting armies in the outskirts borough to get them to rile up, assemble and advance to the castle.
For the answers to the crimes of the night.
Leous and her fellow surviving Skyact Guards saw three such war parties walk away from the front of the Rigac Cathedral.
Leous had abandoned her choice of submitting to the rule of the Monarch. She questioned her choices of last night. 'Could I have stopped Rigac?' A thought rumbled under her mind.
Priest Noria had been circling around the cathedral's borough bringing the people safely back to the cathedral. She only had a vocal agreement with a mysterious attacker among the people who had earlier in the week attacked the cathedral.
She didn't know his name. She thought he did tell her of it but couldn't remember it.
"No matter, let's go to the cathedral. Wait it out for next half an hour then we have to leave Rigac on wagons." She explained to the new group she was leading to the cathedral.
Orna was helping in the preparations to escape. He had showcased valiant effort in making wagons using the people who had gathered. He helped them in employing the action of earth with his own bestowment action of opening.
He wished to learn more from the monarch on bestowment actions but he never got to meet him.
'Maybe the wanderer who had completed an opening into the inventory section of the castle will meet him.' Orna thought to himself.
For how he knew of this conjecture was a simple horrifying screech that resonated across Rigac.
"For Ashtrim!"