Editing City Series:Volume6a Prologue (section)

===Part 1===

The cold and powerful wind of the night never ceased blowing so far up in the sky.

Nothing was immune to that wind’s force, so the thick clouds were held down from above, blocking off the light of the sky. It was a moonless night that left everything dark and indistinct.

With the dark sky above and the pitch black ground below, only the sound of the blowing wind filled the space between those two shadowy expanses.

The wind did not make just one sort of noise. The blowing, sweeping, and crashing winds all produced different noises that joined together in a deep harmony. The sky had air currents much like the currents of the ocean, giving mass to the air that caused it to rumble deeper the heavier that part of the air was.

Without warning, a new sound joined the orchestra of roaring and soaring winds.

It was the high-pitched and monotone blare of a siren.

That note of warning brought tension as a single beam of light shot out from a point in the sky to illuminate the clouds.

That was a searchlight.

The highly directional beam came from what looked like a long, flat surface located just below the clouds.

The light reflected back off the clouds just barely illuminated the crude boxy design of a metal aerial ship.

There was nothing to judge its size by in the empty night sky, but the noise it made was enough to tell just how large it was.

The crash of the wind against its metal hull was a deafening roar and it never was shaken as it soared through wave after wave of windy air. Its bow remained perfectly on course while it scattered the sound of the wind all around itself.

The enormous ship was more than 200 yards long.

Instead of one of the carrier ships developed after World War One, this was an old-style aerial warship loaded with main cannons.

It was from the previous war, except the identification markers had been removed from its old-fashioned flat armored hull and – with the exception of the main cannons and secondary cannons on its deck – all weaponry had been removed and the holes sealed up with steel panels.

The armor of the main cannons and secondary cannons did not quite match the color of the rest, so it must have been reequipped after the ship was disarmed thanks to the Treaty of Versailles.

The steel warship was fulfilling its original purpose – it was fighting.

But instead of the 3 mains cannons on its deck, it was firing into the clouds behind it using the three sets of triple 2-inch secondary cannons lined up next to the bridge.

The firing angle was low and the bullets launched into the clouds drew the light of tracer rounds behind them.

Something was in the clouds behind the aerial warship and that something was pursuing it.

But that was not all.

The number of searchlights increased. Dozens of them now shined up from the ship to illuminate a few points in the clouds.

Similarly, the alarm blaring from the ship grew clearer and louder.

Faint light gathered in the outdated (and thus very large) main engine at the rear of the ship. The same happened to the 5 sub-engines on either side of it. That ceremony would provide the ship with more speed, so the engines brightened their lights all together.

The bottom of the clouds was illuminated by the light of the engines, creating a dark red ceiling above.

The dark of the night had been broken as the ship accelerated while also making a turn.

It veered left with a roar. The front starboard engines and the rear port engines revved up to make the turn.

It was trying to escape while also securing a good angle of fire.

It sped up below the heavy canopy of clouds, leaving the roar of the trembling wind behind.

Speed was prioritized above all else as it continued through the night where the passage of time was hard to track.

But ''the pursuer'' did not wait for the warship to reach max speed.

The light shining on the clouds revealed the truth.

The searchlights suddenly moved as the round disk of their lights drew a large arc along the surface of the clouds and circled in front of the aerial warship.

Whatever was in the clouds had outdone the warship’s acceleration to move out ahead of it.

A moment later, ''the pursuer'' burst from the clouds.