The sliding doors opened to reveal a bus under an overhang. Men and women hurried to toss their bags into the underside before making their way onto the bus itself. For the most part, we did the same.

  Only, the moment the person keeping the underside semi-controlled took a look at my drone, she gestured at it. “Yah canna place that in ‘ere. No room.”

  “Then where do I put it?”

  “Let it fly round for all I care.” She shouted as she shoved out bags into the last of the empty space. “Cargo full! ALL ABOARD!” She ignored the two of us as she closed the doors to the space before making her way to the front of the bus.

  Bert tugged me after her as I worked to get my pad out. With a flick of my fingers, I sent the drone up. It dodged around a few posts and the overhang before vanishing from sight. Here is hoping that my copied follow system was smart enough to keep a set distance while not hitting anything.

  Oh, and I hoped that no one mistook it for some sort of creature. I doubted it could take much in the way of damage, and I worked hard on it, damn it. I didn’t want to see it destroyed before I could finish it.

  The bus smoothly pulled forward, leaving the station just as a gap in the steady stream of traffic opened up enough to let it in. With the sun past the horizon, the city lights started to flicker on. Holographic displays hanging off buildings shifted as the emitters adapted to the changing light levels and source points.

  As we continued moving, I noticed pillars scattered about the place. The only real reason I noticed them was the fact that they stood alone. In fact, they looked completely separate from everything around them. Each stood taller than the shop back home, and they were covered in strips of a metallic stone-like material.

  I tried to keep my eye out for the pillars, but there was just so much to look at. Each was more distracting than the last. A building floated over the street, seemingly carried by massive crystal structures built into its side. A series of small vehicles left little more than a blur of light as they raced across the sky. A group of mages danced in a large gathering as a spell wove and built above them.

  The city was filled with life. More so than back home. It almost seemed too good to be true. There had to be something else here. Something I wasn’t seeing. Something darker. How many times in history has the fact that balance was the way of the universe been proven true? Where good went, evil followed.

  But what did I know? I was only a glorified mechanic who could work with mana. We were a dime a dozen. Throw a wrench in a city like this and you had a good chance of hitting one of us. It was only because of my parents that our shop did all that well. Without them, we wouldn’t have had the money to keep our prices at a place where others could hire us.

  As we continued, the buildings changed. While some grew more ornamental, others lost every bit of humanity in favor of utility. Stark gray towers stood next to massive spires of gold and silver. Buildings with mythical creatures carved in their surface.

  The more we wove our way up the mountain, the more the differences grew until I could no longer take it. In a bid to keep myself from going insane thanks to the utter chaos outside my window, I pulled out my pad and opened up the drone feed.

  Wisps of gray and white filled the screen. Wherever it was, the drone’s cameras were no help to me. Thank god for all the other sensors I managed to pack in. With those, I was able to see that it was doing what I had told it to. Curious, I changed the set altitude.

  The drone shot up. Threads of clouds whisked by as it climbed. Going higher and higher. Even with the machine's speed, it took the drone a good amount of time to reach the new set point. And given how much the speed had started to decrease near the end, it was nearing the highest it could go.

  There, hanging in the sky, the drone looked out at the world. The sun, having set for me, was above the horizon once again as its light caused shadows to stretch toward the horizon.

  Without warning, the screen flashed red as the drone started to dive. In a rush to save the drone from whatever was happening, I switched the device from automatic to full manual. My fingers jammed the throttle button up as I tried to arrest the fall.

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  Nothing happened. In fact, according to the information on the side, the motors were completely shut down. Not frozen. Not out of power. Something had intentionally shut them down.

  Then the drone passed into the low-lying clouds covering the city. It was too late to save the thing. Even if I managed to start the motors, there was no way I could keep the machine from hitting something. Sure, the autopilot systems could handle all the various sensors and use them to see where they were going, but I needed the cameras.

  As fast as it had appeared, the red flashing vanished as the controller switched itself over to automatic flight. Each motor spun up as the drone started to reorient itself. It didn’t orient itself up. It moved into a forty-five-degree angle and allowed the acceleration to curve its flight path.

  Before I found out whether the drone would survive or not, a series of loud sirens filled the air. With them came energy. Every vehicle came to a stop as mana surged through the city and into points all over the place.

  “Class A Grade 6 threat identified.” A voice echoed down the streets. “Please steer clear of the city defenses as they power up.” Chatter filled the bus at those words. Class was the system used to classify the types of monsters and their abilities. And if I remembered right, Class A was any flying monster. Grade 6 threats were ones that could take out whole cities if left to it.

  Static charged the air as I scanned the skies for the creature. Sadly, the cloud cover and time of day worked against me. It didn’t help that the odd pillars had started to shine with bright blue-white light, and tiny flicks of light jumped from strip to strip.

  Suddenly, the various pillars let off a sharp crack as hundreds of mana-laced bolts of lightning raced into the sky. Each lit up the clouds as they charged at whatever the city had detected. A defening boom crashed over the city just before whatever it had hit let out a cry of pain. A moment later, the pillars shot off another series of bolts.

  As they zipped through the clouds, I managed to catch an outline of a massive bird-like creature. Its outline twisted before the light faded. By the time the next set of bolts raced into the clouds, the creature was gone. Having either flown away or vanished.

  Moments later, the sirens cut off, and the world around us returned to normal. A rippling wave washed through the streets as the various vehicles started to move. All while the tiny bolts of lightning jumping across the pillar panels died down and vanished.

  Around us, the bus erupted in noise as people chattered about what they had seen. Bert tried to talk to me, but I ignored him as I tried to parse what I had just seen. The amount of mana needed for each of those attacks was one thing, but that was small potatoes when one thought about the setup itself. After all, creating large amounts of power was easy, but getting it to where it was needed was something else.

  Then there were the pillars themselves. How did they make something that could turn mana into bolts of lightning and direct them at a single target? The coordination and controls needed for something like that was impossibly complex.

  I had a feeling I was going to be constantly asking questions and doing research while I was here. At least this way I had an excuse to give if someone wanted to drag me outside the wall. Something that a certain person I knew would totally try that with me.

  A soft vibration in my hand confused me as I never had my pad out of my pocket unless I needed it for something. There was no reason for it to be out. In fact, the last time I needed it was…MY DRONE!

  Sitting there, on the screen, was the camera feed from my drone. The thing was flying over us. Almost as though it had never left. I was shocked, confused, irked, and a bit angry at the device. Whatever had just happened to it was not something I programmed. Which meant that something was wrong with it. Fucking bugs. The only time in which you can be the detective, the victim, and the murderer all at the same time.

  The worst part of this was that I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I figured out what was going on. It just wouldn’t happen. So, with an annoyed huff, I went to work looking through the various logs.

  I found nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zip. The only pieces of information that was recorded had to do with the status of each system and the power levels. Or, it did up until the screen flashed red, given the time stamp. Multiple systems reported an error or a loss of power, all while the sensor suite reported a high-speed, high-altitude object. One that looked to be bee-lining toward the drone based on the data. Then everything but the camera feed cuts off.

  A minute later, according to the time stamp, the drone started to power back up as various systems started to come back to life. When it does, the drone calculates an optimal escape trajectory and executes it before returning to its assigned position above me.

  Which is fine. That was what the drone had been doing before everything happened. The only difference was the altitude at which it did so. Something that had no record of being changed. It was set to one value before the issue, then another afterward.

  And of course, that had to be the moment that the bus pulled into the academy. Nothing like having your work interrupted when your brain was utterly confused by what you had found. Still, maybe I could ask my advisor to take a look at it before my power test. If they couldn’t figure it out, maybe they would know someone that could.