The city still wore its wounds.
Crumbling buildings leaned like tired giants along either side of the street, their skeletons of rebar and collapsed concrete casting long shadows in the afternoon sun. Glass littered the sidewalks in fractured glints, and distant tower husks loomed like empty watchmen over the territory's broken skyline.
But none of that slowed the group moving through its center.
Jisoo skipped effortlessly across the cracked rooftops, the reinforced plates of her Talaria shoes lighting up in bursts of silver-blue every time she vaulted into a new jump. Yujin, half-shifted into something hawk-like, soared lazily above them in wide spirals, eyes scanning for danger. Joon floated just behind her on his usual circular disk of polarized current, riding it with one knee down like a drifting boarder.
The others walked.
