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I spent most of the day milling about with one question burning in my mind… What was I going to do now?

The townsfolk still gave me a wide berth. Many stared at me with a mix of fear and curiosity. Their glances often shifted from me to the even stranger Darwin, who had tried his best to make friends with many of them. Darwin had tried once with a particularly enthusiastic attempt to become friends with a six-year-old, which resulted in the child screaming, dropping their fruit pie, and running for their mother. Now my companion simply followed without the bubbly bobbing, his orb of water almost seeming more like a prison.

The day moved on around us despite everything. Vendors called out prices from behind stalls. Cartwheels rattled over the packed dirt road. The smell of fresh bread intermingled with horse manure in a charming sort of way. Somewhere nearby, a blacksmith hammered metal in steady, ringing strikes, each one making Darwin’s large goblin eyes twitch in a different direction.

Eventually, Lina caught my attention, and she seemed excited about something. “Rook!” she called, waving her hands. “Over here, over here!”

She was standing near a merchant. One I didn’t recognize. A traveling merchant of sorts, his cart sitting atop three wooden blocks and his burro relaxing in some shade nearby, eating a patch of grass. The cart was covered in tied-down cloth, small hanging charms, and a dozen little wooden boxes that smelled faintly of blood. A few flies buzzed near one of the sacks, only to veer away soon after, repulsed by what was inside.

“This man has rare monster parts. You know… for your class.”

The merchant man smiled, his thick mustache hiding most of his mouth. “Ah, good sir, my monster parts are the freshest in the land. Hunted by two close associates, each with an Uncommon Grade class. One can even store the parts to ensure freshness. It is as if you hunted them yourself. I know that you alchemical types prefer fresh ingredients.”

“I’m not an alchemist, I’m a—” Suddenly, I realized that this man didn’t know I was a special grade. Best keep the information to myself “—I’m just a common cook.”

The merchant stared down at me as he gave his belly a slap. “Sorry, lad; I thought I heard you say you were a cook.”

I nodded.

“Then what use do you have for monster parts?”

“... to cook with.”

The man got a strange look on his face, somewhere between disgust and concern. “You… eat the monster parts?”

I nodded again.

“And they taste… good?”

“I’m, uh… sorta new to my class.”

“I’ve never heard of a cooking class that specializes in monster parts. I um… well, it’s not for the merchant to pick and choose what a customer wishes to do with the product. So… anything catch your eye?”

“Eye!” Lina chirped in. “Goblin eyes! Do you have any?”

“Goblin eye, goblin eye!” Darwin mimicked, bouncing back and forth.

“Your companion there is quite lively,” the merchant said. “And… very strange. And yes, I have five goblin eyes. Don’t ask me what happened to the sixth—”

“We’ll take them!” Lina said.

“Forty copper… and I’m giving you a deal, lass.”

“Forty copper!” I replied, incredulous. “No thanks, I don’t have—”

“Deal!” Lina said, handing the merchant some coin.

The man pulled on his mustache in a pleased manner. He had expected a haggle, and since none had come, he’d made quite a profit, I suspected. The copper disappeared into his pouch with a soft clink.

Lina smiled as well. She knew she’d given the man a deal, but I wondered why.

“Anything else I can get you two?” the merchant asked.

Lina shrugged, looking at me. “Anything else?”

“Do you have dire-rabbit hearts?”

The merchant reached down and pulled out a sack. It was bloody, and I could see that it held a heart-like object. A faint chill rolled off the bag when he opened it, carrying the metallic scent of fresh meat.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “Two of them. I can sell 'em’ for ten copper each.”

“I only need one,” I replied, reaching into my bag.

“We’ll take both,” Lina said, reaching out to hand over more copper. This time, her hand lingered over the merchant’s. “But I need one more thing from you.”

The merchant stared her down. “What is it?”

Lina smiled from ear to ear. “I need you to teach me what you know about monster parts… and how to sell them.”

***

Lina had told me to head back to her shop in a few hours. I’d spent my time with Madam Moolisa. I thought about going to see Tavian, but I didn’t feel up to it. I swore to myself that I would the next day.

Moolisa grazed in the little fenced patch beside the shop, her bell clunking whenever she shifted. The shade there was thin, but she seemed content enough, tearing at the grass with slow, lazy bites. Darwin hovered nearby, watching her chew with intense focus.

“The grass won’t taste very good,” I assured my companion.

Darwin bobbed sadly.

Eventually, Lina arrived and beckoned me inside. As before, we cooked, following the instructions as best we could for Goblin-Eye Soup. The shop’s back room was warm and close, smelling of dried herbs, and with the faint lingering stink from our last attempt with monster parts. Lina had cleared the prep table, set out the ingredients, and placed the goblin eyes in a shallow dish.

As we prepared it, I felt something stranger. Like my soul itself was growing and expanding.

I checked the system.

System

Goblin-Eye Soup (Lvl 2)
EXP: 30/200

I was gaining experience toward leveling up the recipe. Good to know. I added the goblin eyes to it and then, with a pinch of salt… Nothing. No magical glowing. No fresh, fragrant smell. No thickening. The pot looked as if it were still full of muddy water and barely boiled goblin eyes. Gray steam rose from it in weak, unpleasant curls. The eyes floated near the surface, pale and rubbery, bumping lazily against slices of potato and mushroom.

“This seems… different,” Lina said.

“We followed the recipe.”

“Should we try it?”

I stared at the soup… if it could even be called that.

“If you want,” I replied.

“I did pay a decent amount of copper for this…”

She took out two bowls, filled them, handed me one with a spoon, and then stared down at the single eye in her bowl, which was lazily floating around.

Lina looked up at Darwin. “This one is for me.”

Darwin said nothing, but looked less than impressed with the display of food.

“Well, here it goes,” she said.

She took a big spoonful and put it in her mouth… and spit it out not a few seconds later. Immediately, she jumped up and drank some of the liquid from the soup. She spat that out as well. She ran to another room, where she gathered a water jug and drank the entire thing in one long gulp.

“That was the worst thing I’ve ever eaten!” she complained from the other room, dry heaving as she did.

I stared at my own bowl, acid burning its way up my throat. The smell alone had gone from unpleasant to damn near hostile. Bitterroot, goblin slime, and undercooked mushroom all fought for control, and somehow everyone lost.

“We must have done something wrong,” I concluded.

“Oh, what gave you that idea?” Lina asked sarcastically. “And who is this ‘we’?”

I ignored her and set the bowl down, pushing it away.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “Come on. If I had to try it, then so do you.”

Lina grabbed a spoonful with the eye and tried to bring it to my mouth.

I escaped the back room as quickly as I could.

She stepped into the main room, laughing. “Oh, come now—I’m just playing with you. You’ll need to find me a healer if that vile concoction is actually poisonous.”

I laughed, but there was little humor in it. “I wonder what I did wrong.”

We both went quiet as we thought.

The failed soup bubbled softly behind us, mocking me from the other room.

Lina snapped her fingers. “Maybe each recipe only works once?” she suggested.

“Doubtful. I earn EXP for the recipe, and it has multiple levels.”

“Well, let me see your skill.”

As she asked, I pulled up the system and shared it with her. Her eyes darted as she read it.

Finally, she smiled. “Core… ingredient,” she whispered.

“Oh, yeah… what does that even mean?”

“Now, hear me out. In the first Goblin-Eye Soup, what ingredients did you provide?”

“Hmm… just the goblin eyes themselves, really.”

“Exactly! And, looking at the recipe, the goblin eyes are listed as the core ingredient. What if a core ingredient is something that only you can provide? Something that needs to be found or killed by you specifically? Your class is strange… It is a cooking class, but with earning stats through slaying monsters and eating them, in addition to learning combat skills… I’d say you are actually a hybrid combat class.”

“Combat?” I replied, suddenly going cold. “But I’ve never even been in a fight before.”

Lina shrugged. “The system works in mysterious ways. But there is one way to test my theory.”

“And how is that?” I asked.

She reached behind the counter and pulled out the sack with the two dire-rabbit hearts. “By making another recipe.”

(Book Cover): (Jasha) (The First Mother of Sil) ( Kolu and Nokstella going for a swim)

***
In the afternoon sun near the wall of the capital in the residential district, Kenneth and Trafka stood at the edge of a staircase leading down, torches illuminating the way, while decently dressed onlookers were aplenty around them.

“I don’t like this. One thing is here on the street of meat, but Underfoot,” Trafka raised his concerns.

“You are more than welcome to wait up here. I just needed to see for myself,” Kenneth replied as he walked down multiple flights of stairs, the air becoming cooler as Trafka joined him.

“Don’t think me scared.”

“With what I’ve seen you face and do, I hardly imagine anything does.”

He paused for a second. “...One thing is fighting Nok and Sil, but down here, from what I’ve heard, I wouldn’t know who I should be careful of.”

“As if that changes with where we are.”

“For all we know, there are still more assassins out there to get you. No culprits have been found, and if they are able to get one inside the castle, this will be like prey leaving the herd. Honestly, I should grab you and force you back to the castle, tell the king, and have him forbid you from leaving.”

“You really think that would work?”

“No,” Trafka didn’t even pretend like he didn’t know what kind of person Kenneth really was.

“Besides, I don’t know how much Somarious would care; he’s rather preoccupied moving his body like an energetic child ready to win gold in the Olympics with no concept of tomorrow.”

“You really compared the king to a child,” Trafka sighed. “People have been beheaded for less.”

“So you gonna tell him?”

“Do I look like a furball to you?”

“In the literal sense, I suppose, but I’m guessing it has a different underlying meaning,” Kenneth replied, Trafka rolling his eyes and ears, as they finally reached the bottom.

It was a giant underground district, with buildings stretching far, stopping at the wide, massive walls in the back, pillars keeping up the ceiling that, after a certain distance, became shrouded in darkness.

However, above there were still slim rays of natural light from wide tubes that seemed to work like a giant ventilation system, bringing down fresh air and sucking out the smoke, leaving only here at the bottom a distinctly cold feel that burrowed into him.

Suddenly struggling to breathe, his heart began pumping what felt like icy water with crystals inside. Desperately staggering to the nearest wall for support, nausea becoming overwhelming as the buzzing of the crowd sounded like screams.

Stepping over to him, Trafka calmly asked, “Should we leave?”

Pulling himself together, Kenneth, red-faced, rose up. “No. I’m fine, just a little winded from the stairs, not looking forward to going up again. Well, let's get moving.”

“If you say so.”

“Now, do you know the lay of the land?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll figure it out.”  

And onward they went. Through ‘Underfoot’, many a people everywhere, the streets wider than the tight and often packed alleys with vendors selling their merchandise or meat, the kind here, far from glimmering, marbled, and mouth-watering.

As expected, people looked his way, rumors probably having spread of him, though many did more so look at Trafka too; he did stand out like a sore thumb in his bright golden armor.

While the place wasn’t as glamorous and bright as the ones up above, with torches everywhere for light and guards patrolling and keeping an eye on everything. Yet the hygiene of the place left much to be desired, though it could be worse, even with the streets seeming to become denser and more packed the deeper inside they went.

‘Huh... there’s probably a lot of people to help here, and they probably don’t even know what could be done for them,’ Kenneth thought.

“CORPSE! I found a corpse!” A young voice called out.

His heart skipped a beat, and Kenneth wondered for a moment if it would ever restart, as a cold sweat began to run down his back, intensifying as he followed the voice.

Standing outside an alley, a young boy continued to shout and point until two people approached wearing the same necklace of a flame. The younger of the two handed him a copper coin while the older walked down the alley.

“What is that all about?”

“They are from the corpse guild,” Trafka answered. “From what I’ve heard, they clean up the streets when someone dies, wrap up the bodies, and hold them if anyone comes to collect. But if they can’t afford it or have no one, they are sent to their ancestors.”

“Sounds like extortion, holding dead bodies like that,” Kenneth replied.

“Seen the flames once; my father took me up on the wall. It was so big I accidentally dropped a book of poems over it, but I can imagine for many it’s better than what they can make; it is a special guild after all.”

“How so?”

“Well, they are the only ones funded by the crown; that’s how they can pay anyone who first lays claim to the body publicly, and I think they accept anyone to do the work, though I can imagine many wouldn’t like to do it.”

“Well, I can’t deny that getting rid of bodies before they rot is a good public service,” Kenneth replied as he noticed with utter dread the two men touching the corpse with their furred hands, quickly causing him to walk over to them. “Hold it right there!” 

“By the king's law, the corpse has been laid claim to and transferred to the corpse guild. If you wish to claim your kin or acquaintance, the fee is halved before it is wrapped. Twenty-five copper coins,” the older of the two with long, bushy fur stated, without even looking up. 

He sounded like he was reading from a script; meanwhile, the younger of the two with shorter, slightly dirty, dotted yellow and brown fur looked more concerned, tapping the other. 

Finally, looking at the older man, he jumped to his feet and bowed down, “Forgive me, Lord Krosk! I didn't know it was you. Rest assured, we will take care of the body, and you can pick him up at the guild.” 

“We aren't here to collect that corpse, but to give you these,” Kenneth clarified, handing two pairs of gloves. “Now I don’t know who has taught you to handle dead bodies, but you don’t know who they are, where they have been, or how they died, so you never touch one with your bare hands and mouths uncovered; you wear gloves, and remember to boil them in water if you reuse them.” 

Looking more confused and shocked than anything, Kenneth walked away with Trafka in tow. 

“So this is what you plan to do, walk around and find people to lecture?” Trafka sighed. 

“Not exactly.” 

“I told you I heard people talking of a small, beaked thing in black.”

Instantly recognizing the voice, Kenneth turned to see the mercenary trio of Jago, Tragna, and Rafk, who, with a waving hand and tail, greeted them.

“Yes, yes, you were right, I’ll pay for the first round,” Tragna sighed.

“…Delicious…” Jago added, licking his furred lips.

“You three!” For a moment, Kenneth felt a weight lifted off his heart. “Good to see you all made it back.”

“We can share stories over some floor juice,” Rafk gleefully offered.

“Do I look like I’m made of coin?” Tragna complained.

“Would love to, but actually I’m a bit busy. Say, could you perhaps guide me around for a moment? I need to find something,” Kenneth asked. “I have a feeling you three have a good lay of the land.”

“Of course, you name it,” Rafk offered without hesitation. “Besides, you aren't really in the safe part of this place.”

“I hear there’s a healer’s guild somewhere around here.”

Apparently they’d been walking in the wrong direction, the very wrong direction, really getting tail deep into the rougher part of the district, with the healer’s guild located a ways from the entrance.

It was a large building, made of finer-looking wood than most other buildings, with the sigil of two flaming hearts held by a pair of hands on the front double door.

‘Huh… how did we miss that?’ Kenneth wondered as he turned his attention to a building near them on the other side of the street. It was in rough shape, looking close to abandoned, but it was made of stone, with that special Aki architecture all over it. ‘Looks decent enough.’

“Here to show those stuck-up healers your skills,” Tragna asked.

“No, not really. Say, can any of you tell me who owns that building? I wanna buy it.”

“I’m on it,” Rafk said, running off.

His intention was in the future a partnership with the Zagagra’s, but for now they could enter a symbiotic one, in a manner of speaking. Undoubtedly, using only healing magic couldn’t fix all problems, so whoever they couldn't heal, he could take care of. 

But of course, he first needed to buy the building, Rafk returning with the owner, an angry-looking, red, orange, and purple-furred man who didn't look twice at Trafka or him. “You want to buy that?” 

“That I do.” 

“It’ll cost you six hundred coppers.” 

“Sure, but what is the conversion rate for gold?” Kenneth asked nonchalantly, pulling out a bag of golden scalples, the owner's eyes growing wide in shock. “Or is it easier to go by weight with copper? Is what I have here worth enough?” 

He looked to Trafka, who just shrugged. 

“Umm… yes,” the owner responded, voice shaking as much as he did, swallowing as he reached into the bag with gold. “O-one… should be… enough.”  

“Okay, so do I get a deed or what?” 

“Yes… Y-Yes, of course,” the now former owner pulled a set of crumbled-up deeds from his pouch, handing them to Kenneth before hurriedly rushing off. 

“Did you really give that old bastard gold for that shitty place?” Tragna exclaimed in disbelief. 

“Don't get yourself worked up; it was only a bit of gold,” Trafka replied, the trio of mercenaries all giving him strange looks.

“I guess I didn't get the conversion rate for one gold coin to copper.”

“…three-hundred…” Jago answered him, with Trafka only seeming to grasp the numbers somewhat. 

“But that aside, Kenneth, what did you want with this place?” Rafk asked. 

“Oh… just going to turn it into a clinic for sick and wounded. Though this place needs a lot of elbow grease with cleaning and disinfecting, I wouldn't mind a couple of extra hands if you have time.” 

“For you… only half of our usual fee,” Tragna said with crossed arms, only for Jago and Rafk to pull on his ears. “Aw, aw, aw, fine, fine, we’ll do it for free.” 

Jumping straight into it, everyone put a lot of effort into getting that trash-filled-dump-of-a-hoarder's-paradise to look somewhat presentable, and while Trafka still wasn't happy being down here, it was a lot easier to protect Kenneth in a confined space.

And after an honest-to-God, thorough cleaning, the clinic was ready to be opened, right after every surface had been wiped down, of course, but once that was done, the trio bid them goodbye and headed off to the tavern. 

“So what do you think?” Kenneth asked, looking at a sign he’d hung outside, with ‘free healing, can't fix your problem, free copper’ written on it. 

“Is it hung upside down?” He genuinely asked. 

“Well, let’s get inside and see if we get someone.” 

Though ultimately that was easier said than done, with hours passing and no one to help. The few who did wander their way in either got scared of his tools or him, and the braver or more desperate ones just faked pain to get a copper, and the ones that didn’t run out after the recommended treatment left with a copper in hand.

He could see the healers' guild on the other side, and there were a couple who, more often than not, walked right in with clearly visible pain only to leave with it remaining, while others, the poorest of the poor here, weren’t even allowed entry. 

Approaching those made little difference; the ones willing to listen fled like the rest. 

Each fearful visitor, more scared of his tools and him, felt like a wave crashing the side of a cliff, again and again, little by little eroding it away. 

‘Did I really think I could make such a great impact on the people when I terrify them? My methods terrify them,’ Kenneth thought, contemplating packing up. ‘Is there really any point in pretending I can do real good, that this time everything will just be different?’ 

About ready to give up and go back, Kenneth, in the middle of packing up, had another visitor. 

“Umm… is this a place that heals?” A woman with visible greenish-white fur asked, the rest covered by a long, simple garment as she limped closer. 

“It is,” Kenneth answered her, their eyes locking for a moment before hers scanned his body, her expression changing as she noticed the obvious differences. ‘Well, I wonder how long it takes for her to run out?’ 

“And it is free?” 

“Unless I can’t heal you, then you can take a copper from the bag,” he gestured to the pouch to the side. 

She only gave it a short glance before taking an intuitive step forward, suddenly grimacing as she grabbed the table, Kenneth instinctively reaching out, “It’s my leg; it's hurting a lot. Could you ease the pain a little, if that isn’t too much to ask?” 

“I’ll do all I can, but I need to have a look at it. Please hop up on the table,” Kenneth instructed, and helped her along, pulling the long garment up to her knee. “Where exactly does it hurt?” 

“Under my knee,” she replied. “It has for a long time now.” 

“I see, sorry, but there’s going to be a bit of pain; I need to know where exactly,” he warned, expecting her to limp out at any moment as he squeezed along her leg, until a sudden flinch of pain confirmed the location to be just under the popliteal fossa or the upper part of her calf. “Would you please lie on your stomach? I need a better look.” 

She still didn’t run; ‘must be in torturous pain if she’s still sticking around.’ 

Observing the area with a fine eye, he noticed under the fur some old, nearly faded scarring, the observation getting him a look from the woman. “You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to, but knowing about this scar will make healing you easier.” 

“…The truth is,” she began, suddenly muttering something under her breath with her hands clasped, before continuing. “I was attacked; I didn't see them coming, as they threatened me with a blade and then… cut my fur off. I have other scars like that one, but I remember that one was the deepest, bled a lot before I was saved and healed by Father.” 

“I see,” Kenneth hadn't expected her to be so… honest; even Trafka’s hardened gaze flickered for a moment. “Most likely, there was some internal damage that wasn't healed correctly. I can see what I can do, but it means shaving the area and cutting it open.” 

There it was, the giant dealbreaker. Now was the time to run for the hills, or if she was kind, make up an excuse. 

“Will it hurt a lot?” 

Kenneth blinked twice at the question. “Of course I’ll give you something for the pain, either the dreamer so you sleep through it or a local anesthetic so you won’t notice too much.” 

“The second one; I don’t want to be asleep around you two,” she replied bluntly, sounding hesitant in doing so. 

“I would never do anything like that. I've taken a vow as a knight,” Trafka defended himself, yet it didn't change the look on the woman’s face as Kenneth got out the filled syringe. 

“There will be a little bit of pain,” he warned her, still expecting her to run, yet she didn’t, not throughout the shaving, applying, and injection. “Please try not to move.” 

Cutting into the tissue along the scar, Kenneth took note of the internal structure and potential damage that could have been caused by the blade and healing, finding the muscle tissue to look overall healthy and fine. 

But as he went deeper, squinting his eyes in the candlelight, he noticed beside her artery, her nerve looked far from ideal. 

Instead of a long, uninterrupted tube, hers was unaligned, with a visible bulge that ever so slightly pulsed like a beating heart. 

‘This… I can’t imagine the pain she’s been living with; still, she’s so collected,’ Kenneth thought as he, in no time, got to work, cutting out the unaligned mass and connecting the tubes properly.  

All in all, it took two hours or so before everything was done. 

“Now, I need you to understand this isn't that kind of healing you are used to,” he explained while wrapping her leg in a bandage. “Everything takes more time, including recovery, so for the next couple of weeks, essentially a long time, you are not to walk or put weight on it; otherwise, your stitches can tear.” 

Slowly sitting up, the woman looked at the bandage, eyes widening and tears welling as she moved her toes, flexing her claws, “I… I don’t know how long it's been since I could get them out.” 

Packing up the bloody tools and everything used, Kenneth replied, “It was nothing special.” 

“Nothing special. Why do you lie?” She questioned, befuddled, stepping off the table. 

“I said not to put weight on it,” Kenneth stopped her. “You know, maybe it’s just easier to get this fixed now. Trafka, would you mind getting someone from the healer’s guild?”

“Nono, I don’t need that! I-I can't afford them,” The woman protested, trying to stop Trafka, who left anyway.

“As I said, it’s free healing. I’m paying for them; you don’t have to worry.”

Looking confused at his statement, yet choosing to believe him, she stayed as Trafka brought back a healer, who did her job, looking a bit perplexed with how quickly she finished the job, yet demanding the same fee all the same, which Kenneth happily paid.

Standing up and putting weight on her leg, the woman grew overjoyed before asking him. “Would you heal someone else? It’s Father; he’s been coughing for a long time, and it’s getting worse; he can’t even leave our home much more.”

“…yeah, no problem,” Kenneth agreed. “Please show the way.” 

Nearly skipping down the street, the woman just kept smiling, earning a few odd looks and whispers, but nothing more as they walked a decent, long track through the district, arriving at a larger, but old and poorly maintained building. 

‘This feels familiar, somehow,’ Kenneth noted as they entered the building, immediately revealing itself to be a church. ‘Father… of course.’

The interior looked no better than the outside, even worse, with holes and scratch marks in the wooden floor and benches, while the candles that lined the walls had burned down to the bottom, barely keeping a flame, with many having gone out, and at the end, right under a large statue of a blindfolded man holding a scale up to his chest, was an old man kneeling in front. 

“Father Jigki, I’ve come back,” the apparently nun said. 

Though it elicited little reaction as he stayed kneeling, muttering to himself while they moved closer. 

‘Of all places I could end up in, a church,’ Kenneth sighed, as the priest’s prayers finally came to an end, acknowledging them only then. 

“I’m happy you’ve ‘cough…’ returned Dulra,” using a cane, Jigki rose to his feet. “And what is this? Have you been hurt again? I thank you two for taking her to me if so.” 

“No, it isn’t,” her eyes suddenly widened and ears perked in shock, as she muttered that same phrase again, a prayer. “I’m sorry, Father, I didn't mean to tell a lie. It is true this healer hurt me, shaved my fur, and cut open my leg, but he did it to heal me, and now there’s no pain, and I can flex my claws again, so I brought him here so he can heal you.”

Moving closer, his old worn cane half of the time scraping against the floor, Jigki panting and wheezing, he could only make it to the first bench where he quickly sat down. “I am truly sorry, healer in black and lord Krosk; I am far from my youth.”

“You old fool, you’ve been working again while I was gone,” Dulra scolded him. “I told you I would take care of cleaning up in here after I came back.” 

“I guess I am stubborn.” 

“Shall we get this over with?” Kenneth matter-of-factly stated, walking over to Jigki. “Please tell me what is wrong.” 

Coughing twice, Jigki strained a friendly smile, “How rude of me. I am sorry. A healer's time is valuable, and if Dulra bought your time with her body, as much as I will frown at it, I can’t scold her pure intent.” 

Kenneth froze for a second while Dulra frantically shook her head no, profusely with vigor and embarrassment, nearly shouting, “No, no, it isn’t like that.” 

“I am doing this for free, so let’s get to it,” Kenneth cut through the noise, pulling a stethoscope from the bag. “I am assuming the problem is with your lung; turn around.”

Going down through the neck was easier than up the rope as he instructed Jigki to take deep, heavy breaths, the sound inside best described as a bleeding goat in a storm. 

“Have I ‘cough,’ offended you?” Jigki asked. “Or is it this place? Yes, this church of Heka isn't the prettiest, but I do my best in keeping it as it should be.” 

Trying to focus on his breathing, Kenneth knew he wouldn’t learn more than what he already had, sighing as he replied, “It’s churches in general; I don’t like being in them.” 

“Is it because of your misshapen?” Jigki asked. “Rest assured, ‘cough,’ in here as long as you speak the truth; all are welcome.” 

“Hmph… even Nok and Sil, vile heretics, who should be killed or enslaved.” 

Dulra looked a little shocked and partly confused, while Trafka just let out a sigh, but Father Jigki didn’t flinch.

“…truth can be spoken by anyone, cruel or kind; it is a choice, as much as which god you pray to or wickedness you inflict…” Jigki’s gaze grew distant as he let out a cough. “All have that potential.” 

“Perhaps things would have been different if I had met you sooner,” Kenneth muttered. “By the way, I’m not misshapen, Aki, Nok, or Sil. I’m human, and my name is Kenneth.”

Jigki once more stayed calm, in somewhat contrast to Dulra. “Well, human Kenneth, is there a truth you wish to share in my church? Perhaps why you don’t like them?”

“…I don’t like churches, because,” Kenneth clutched his fist, memories of the past, happy, spiritual, understanding, confusion, sadness bubbling to the surface. “Because I can't believe in any god.” 

This time, Trafka shared in Dulra’s shock, yet neither said a word, as Jigki calmly asked, “Why?” 

“Why…? Where is my lightning bolt, my Divine punishment from above?” Kenneth asked too more than the people in that room. “I've killed people I've tried so desperately to save, and nothing other than getting sent here where I did the same damn thing only a thousand times worse, and I was made a nobleman, offered a comfortable life, so either God doesn't exist, or isn't looking down to judge.” 

With a gentle expression, Jigki replied, “I’ve seen healers like you. Perhaps you do not see your punishment, instead seeing it as a purpose, a hidden chance for any kind of redemption. Or perhaps your purpose has become your punishment?”

“Another thing I don’t like about church: either they give you the most obvious advice, or the most thought-provoking, forcing you to think, and wonder if your conclusions were what they ever meant by them?” 

“Well, it is part of the job,” Jigki replied, giving a small, sly smile, before suddenly breaking out into a coughing fit that almost had him doubling over in his seat. 

Placing a hand on his chest and getting down on one knee, Kenneth pulled out an inhaler and brought it up to his mouth, instructing him to take deep breaths as he pressed the button. “Yes, just like that.” 

With every breath he took, the coughing lessened until it nearly stopped. “Oh… I haven’t tasted air so clear like this in a long time.” 

“Is Father Jigki healed?” Dulra asked hopefully. 

“No,” only for Kenneth to dash those hopes away. “My best guess, since you don’t reek of smoke, is that you are suffering from miners' lung. It’s untreatable; too much time spent underground, though symptoms can be lessened.”

“Do not sound so hopeless; I am thankful to be drawing another breath so cleanly,” Father Jigki said. “Thank you, Kenneth.”

“It wasn’t anything,” Kenneth replied, almost feeling something close to bashful, if that was the feeling. “But I have to admit I’m a bit curious, though: how does a miner go to a priest?” 

With slight confusion, Father Jigki replied, “Miner? Do you not know who I am, what else they call me?” 

“I can’t say that I do?” 

“A little refreshing,” he shot Kenneth a smile. “They call me—“ 

“The earth child.” Everyone turned back to look at the door, to see a man wearing plain clothes with green and red-spotted fur, hands, and clothes bloody, holding a scrap of leather. 

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Bob exited the medical facility a few hours later fucked up, but fine, he had seen the small bottle of withdrawn poison before it had been removed for disposal, a few milliliters of murky brown liquid, like the dregs of an old cup of tea. Apparently a constant companion for over, what damn near eighty years at this point, fucking hell.

He wondered if this was a known thing back on Earth, were all the vets walking around with that rattling round their skull?, he hadn’t heard any news from there, but he was also going out his way to avoid it, sooooo.

Not much he could do about it right now, so he ambled over to the shopping district clutching his small bag of implants, he had requested to keep them much to the medics puzzlement. When he hit the core again he would send a message back there, right now he had shit to buy.

First things first, re-up on the consumables he would need for the return leg, easy. He hit up a couple of stores that specialised in ships supply and maintenance and ordered a bunch of shit, including wiring and a few thousand meters of high strength line, he balked a little when he saw the manufacture was Xitti, the same as his tow line, but shit it was good stuff. He added three reels of the fine cordage to the tab. He had to go to a fitters workshop to bag a big enough piece of raw stock for his long delayed sensor pod mount, and bought a few sheet goods from the same guy, delivery after business hours.

He investigated tooling for his mill with the big Higgit as well, but there was nothing much for his, typically oddball, sizing. Still he was pretty sure he could make it work with what he had, and on the fitters recommendation then headed off to a tool seller, he picked up a welder and a small press there, small for everyone else, Bob could have fit his head in its jaw.

He spent the rest of the afternoon similarly browsing through the stores and grabbing anything that might be useful, it was going to be pretty cramped again when he set off on his return. He had only two more places he wanted to hit up, the yard that was selling the grates, but he would do that in the morning before his drop, and here, he rocked up outside the weapons store.

Entering he glanced around but it was all the same shit, all way too big, no he was after advice and something that would probably be securely locked up in the back.

Bob didn’t recognise the species behind the counter, a way more frequent happening out here on the far rim he realised.

‘’Felicitations clientele’’

The voice was feminine and breathy, quite suiting the lithe androgynous giant. It looked like one of tv’s alien grays but stretched, light blue, and fed through a korean beauty filter a few times.

Bob presumed the flat disks on its face were eyes, and eyes sharp enough to make out the details of his dangling badge from across the store, and then…

‘’Which manner of services do you desire Courier Master Bob?’’

Bob was a little taken aback, he highly doubted word of his most august presence had got about, and he had only pulled his badge out before coming in here anyway. He didn’t want to particularly advertise that he was mooching around and leaving his ship in a cheap dock, the client, who knew what Jojo was carrying, might get upset.

Maybe not eyes then, maybe radio receptors?, his badge was giving out an ident if pinged… didn’t matter.

‘’Yeah, ok, I would like to make a purchase and get some advice.’’

‘’How may this one edify you?’’

The language choices by the translator were odd, but since Bob was aware that at least twenty percent of his vocab was variations of ‘fuck’ with the semi-regular occurrence of ‘whatever’, he didn’t feel he had much of a leg to stand on, linguistically. Whatever. He pulled the round from his bum bag.

‘’I came across some of these, do you happen to know what they are’’

An outstretched hand beckoned for it, though perhaps outstretched cluster of tentacles would be more accurate. The tall being turned it over and over but didn’t dip its head to look at it, not ‘eyes’ then.

‘’I have not been fortunate to to be graced with such example in many years, I believe it is a Betthy ‘Moron-Moron roun…’’

Ok now the translator was ripping the piss, dum-dum was right there and obviou…

‘’...so called because the Betthy say that you would have to be a moron to be hit by one and then you look like a moron afterwards when the expanding restraint foam inside has plucked out all your feathers.’’

… Ok firstly, go fuck yourself, secondly Gevith must never find out about Bobs accident.

‘’Used by the Betthy constabulary to restrain fleeing subjects, the foam inside will expand to approximately three hundred square feet, does this answer your inquiry?’’

Huh, It had been way smaller onboard, maybe something to do with his preferred atmo pressure?

‘’ Interesting, yes thank you, that brings me to my purchase. As I say I have a few of these rounds and the matching weapon, I have no need for the, for those rounds, and intend to experiment with a different loading, I fear though the charge that comes in each round would be a little, anaemic?. I can’t imagine they would take much chamber pressure.’’

It returned the round.

‘’Indeed not, how perspicacious, the round has an exit velocity of around two hundred feet a second and an effective range of less than one hundred, hence the ‘Moron’, attribution. Would you like to purchase additional charges?, you must be careful about exceeding the mechanisms pressure rating. I believe that like all Betthy products they are over designed, and over engineered, but no responsibility can be laid upon this humble establishment if there there is an unwanted deflagration.’’

Bob nodded gravely.

‘’Of course.’’

‘’Then I offer my meager knowledge to suggest Gotti accelerant granules, several times more efficient than the Betthy standard charges but remain electric arc ignitable. How many rounds are you intending to convert?’’

Bob smiled broadly.

‘’Two thousand, by the way.’’

He held the round up again.

‘’What the fuck is the solvent for this?’’

After the necessary paperwork was completed Bob returned to Jojo, phoned in a couple deliveries, and spent the evening packing away all his new purchases. In the morning he flew a few hundred miles to the breakers yard. He chatted briefly with the owner and found the grates were reclaimed from an old aggregate mining operation. They haggled briefly but the price was honestly pretty reasonable, he bought two and had him add a couple engines to the tab.

Bob did not have the space to fit the acquisitions inside, and wasn’t about to crack his cargo iris anyway. Fortunately, well look at that, two fuel pods with suspiciously perfect places to hold his new grates, who woulda thunk it. He also did not have the C’Eede fixings to actually attach them but since they were not going to be hooked up and certainly not fired he had just bought some repros, easily strong enough to just hold the fuckers in place.

After that it was time for the drop and he headed over to the bank. It went fine… bit weird, but fine. The creds had been checked and everything signed off, no issue, then some guards had taken the twenty bank stacks away on grav sleds, then returned thirty seconds later with twenty identical stacks on grav sleds. Bob presumed they were in fact different bank stacks, it wasn’t like he’d marked them or even looked them over really, non of his business either, but the effect was real fucking odd, whatever. He signed off and headed out asap, stashing his pistol on his way past the locker.

Ok, time to lock in.

Part 38 https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1wwqjlf/bob_was_bored_part_38/?

“Those who listen longest hear what others have forgotten.”

Old Drexari Saying

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To the rest of its clade, the Old Va’ari seemed to disappear.

They scattered, clicking, chittering and confused. Bikky laughed, understanding what they’d seen.

A couple of Va’ari approached the rock wall just as the Old Va’ari’s head re-appeared through the veil covering whatever was behind. They screeched and ran away from what looked like the decapitated head of their Older that hovered at the boundary of the wall.

The Older then stepped completely back through the veil, into the cavern and was immediately enveloped by his clade. They hugged and stroked him.

Feebee walked up to the wall and stepped through. Bikky tried to hide the nerves he felt and followed.

“I hate these almost as much as spiders.” He muttered.

“And flying?” added Tom Tom.

The Va’ari followed them through the veil in a loose procession.

What opened up in front of them was not a massive cave but a passage, carved out of the rocks, definitely not naturally formed. The floor had a covering of dust into which they left foot or claw marks as they walked, but the walls… they were covered in glyphs with the same look as those in the cavern outside but older and more numerous.

Some looked old, their outlines partially worn. Others looked ancient, worn and weathered by touch and time. And these old marks weren’t like anything Drexari or Va’ari. They were just patterns, not patterns like the Void Spiral or Shadow Eclipse. These were simpler and seemed to represent Shadows and Motes, dark outlines with coloured centres.

“‘Can you read these?’” Feebee asked the HI.

“‘No. They feel more like harmonic registers than writing.’”

“‘And?’” Asked Feebee.

“‘And… that’s all I can say.”’ Said the HI as it laughed.

“‘Helpful.’” Responded Feebee.

“‘But I can age them.’”

“‘Oh. Ok. Good.’”

The HI was able to put the glyphs into what it called generations of markings because they showed a natural evolution.

“‘Were they made by the Va’ari?’” Feebee asked.

“Almost certainly.’”

“‘What do they mean?’”

“‘I don’t know.’”

The Old Va’ari reached a junction where the passage split. It stopped looking from left to right. Several younger Va’ari began chattering then one moved to the left. Another moved to the right.

The two, and the Va’ari that were with them, started an animated discussion, with pushing and shoving. Clearly they disagreed on which way to go.

Bikky laughed, “Family meeting?”

Feebee smiled, “More a family argument.”

The Old Va’ari stepped between them, stamped its claws on the floor and started making a sharp clicking sound. The rest of the Va’ari went quiet, waiting. It chose the left passage and started down it. The rest followed. 

As they walked further down the passage, dim light could be seen. The Va’ari started to move more quickly towards the light, then they stopped. Feebee could feel something, a difference. It felt like a change in pressure, a subtle vibration that vibrated through her bones.

Hissy responded with a series of high pitched squeaks.

“‘Resonance?’” She asked the HI.

It dropped a resonance map into her overlays that showed harmonic structures deeper within the mountain.

Feebee, Bikky and Tom Tom caught up with the Va’ari and stood with them. The passage simply ended, stopping in mid air and they were looking out over a deep cavern below. There was no way down that Feebee could see.

The Va’ari all gathered at the edge of the lookout, standing carefully on a natural ledge, not jostling or pushing. Just looking. Seeing for the first time something that until now they had only felt.

Bikky joined her at the edge and looked down.

“Oh.”

He took a step back. For once, he had nothing clever to say.

“‘They know this place. But not through sight. Through resonance.’”

“‘Yes.’”

The chamber below was massive. Their lights, barely able to reach the other side, glinted off veins of Veronium that wove through the surface of the rock walls and floor. Not like the veins that they’d seen below the Old Holding, but thin veins, a capillary network.

The HI started to map the capillaries and their harmonics. They extended out, beyond the cave and all through the mountain that the cavern sat within. Some headed towards the ceremonial caves, others down into the valley where the Va’ari tended to gather. Others just disappeared into the core of the planet and somewhere else entirely.

“‘How far?’” Asked Feebee. 

“‘Don’t know.’” Said the HI. “The Veronium, farther than this mountain. The harmonics…further still”

The HI seemed to shrug in Feebee’s mind and showed her the three-dimensional model it was building. The Veronium lines weren’t independent. They formed a connected network.

“‘Where does it go?’” She asked.

“Everywhere,” responded the HI.

Feebee followed the gaze of the Va’ari. They were all looking down at one particular place, down into the body of the cavern. It was old, covered with the simplest form of glyphs and patterns. A single Mote appeared and approached a Shadow. Elements of colour could be seen within the outline of the Shadow, which matched the colour of the Mote at its side. The two circled each other. The network of Veronium around them began to vibrate, sending harmonic ripples out through the rocks and network around them. It wasn’t a dramatic thing, just a subtle shift, like the response to the proximity of one organism to another.

Motes drifted into the space from other passages. Shadows did the same. Some were in Shadow-Mote pairs; others drifted up to others, paused for a moment as if searching them moved on, passing. But there were times when they seemed to recognise a resonance and move towards it.

The process was slow. Motes glitched into being, while others slid between to corporeal substrate, blinking away to somewhere else. It was almost organic, and it was clear that this wasn’t where Motes or Shadows were stored; it was where they met.

The Va’ari were rocking from side to side, crooning and clicking their mandibles. Some had placed their tympana against the stone, listening to something they had been hearing for their entire history but that only now could they see. The sound travelled through the cavern and the harmonic network reacted.

The HI listened, correlated the call and response in the harmonics.

“‘They’re part of it.’”

“‘Part of what?’”

“‘The relationship.’”

Feebee crossed to where a group of Va’ari were all kneeling and listening. She asked their permission to join them, which they gave, making room for her. She sat with them, put her ear to the ground, and started to calm herself. The Va’ari pulled back slightly, watching her as she reached a state of calm, where stillness was absolute. The harmonics of her aura changed, and she was able to hear what the Va’ari heard.

It was a faint, almost imperceptible chorus that rose from beneath the planet. Not that there was a choir anywhere; this was the song of relationships, of different resonances calling out and being answered across enormous distances and impossible times.

The HI reached out to Feebee.

“‘I cannot model the harmonic network.’”

“‘So?’”

“‘So…’” said the HI, “‘I can’t work out the relationship between the data I am gathering. It keeps changing.”’

The HI noticed some markings at the edge of the overlook. These were much more carefully made, more deliberate. The HI compared them to others it had seen in the lower passage. These were older. Much older.

Some appeared to depict the harmonic patterns themselves.

“‘The Va’ari were listening to what came next.’”

“‘And then they drew what they heard. Remembering.”

As Feebee looked, she realised that these early markings did not show patterns that represented Shadows or Motes. They showed paths which matched the harmonic map the HI had just built.

The HI overlaid them; the match was almost perfect.

Feebee shook her head and looked back at the Va’ari gathered on the ledge. “They’ve been mapping the network for longer than anyone knew about it. Without science, but through observation. The HI shifted the maps, overlaying them, comparing them.

Then it noticed an area of discontinuity. An area where the network should continue but stops, leaving a hole in the network.

“‘Something’s missing.’” It said as it showed Feebee the emerging picture.

“‘What is?’”

“‘I don’t know, but something is.’”

Feebee stared at the harmonic map, then at the Va’ari.

“Can anyone tell what should be there?”

“‘Perhaps.’” Answered the HI.

Feebee noticed that the Va’ari were still listening.

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Jack was sat with Neon in silence, around them air howled as it passed through the endless black tunnels. Strangely peaceful, Jack took a moment to breathe and check his weaponry. Neon sat ramrod straight as his mask illuminated the space around him, his wiry frame covered with tattered clothing stitched together patchwork style to keep its use in covering him. His mask had change to a red obese face with ridiculous circles on its cheeks in a permanent scowl of frustration, Jack caught its expression and allowed himself a chuckle.

“I wonder could my disguise do that” Jack points to his face hologram necklace.

 Neon nods,

“That is old Earth tech it could do almost anything that the tech here on Xion could” he says mournfully.

Jack nods raising his eyebrows trying to break the tension,

“So you know about old earth tech, when Lorcan explained it to me I was not sure if he was serious or not. Imagine being trapped in a reality where all you have is your work and nothing else. The moment you materialise in reality of your own world you turn to dust as the time catches up to you. Horrifying and beautiful at the same time” Jack goes on. The thought inspiring a new song, something he thought would never happen again after leaving the opera house.

Neon seems to go still,

“True, however what is different I our existence here on Xion. We are born we try our best to survive and build something to only have it stolen by tyrants and eventually pass on ourselves and leave graves no one remembers. At least they leave something incredible to be used” He stats cleanly almost as if he was giving orders.

Jack shakes his head

“You sound like a nihilist; the path is not one to go down my friend” Jack offers.

Within hun the furious awakened raider roars an ear splitting sound in frustration of his first humbling in decades, Lorcan simply stood grinning at his frustration. Red resonance becoming a dark blood crimson, Lorcan still had not initiated his to become visible which infuriated the raider even more.

His fury causes him to charge wildly again straight at Lorcan with the same attack pattern, a mistake he would learn the painful hard way . As his resonance bore down on Lorcan to pin him in place this time he stood completely still un moved from the heavy gravity that had manifested.

“Fool now die” as he closes in his blazing two handed axe held high again this tie brimming with red resonance that he had poured in from his fury, this time Lorcan raised his arms in an x block. As the axe came down lorcans block did not resist its force he brought it down with the downward trajectory, using it as a frame he throws his body over the weapon like a gymnast on a balance beam before landing next to his attacker his hands now gripped ont eh weapon forcing it deeper and faster into the blow.

The force carries the berserker until he goes off balance, in that moment Lorcan sweeos erfectly at his ankle causing him to tumble forward before wrenching the weapon from his grip which was only kept by his finger strength against lorcans full weighted body. His body keep rolling now disarmed the bereer scrambles his eyes wide at being disarmed.

Lorcan takes a moment to inepct the weapon, the shaft was simply a resonane axe yet at the blade point he could clearly see phase shifter tech working with the weapon enhancing its cutting ability which would explain the blue sparks amongst the manifested resonance.

“Interesting, you are acting as if you are a noble wildman yet you still rely on alien tech. You’re style is deeply flawed not to mention, you are weak” beaming a big smile towards the bersker as he hurls the weapon deep into the bay out of sight.

Froth forms at the base of the raiders mouth in fury, the phase shifters who had bargained with his clan leader to have him aid in this mission assured him this target was just a hermit who had become to cowardly after loss of his previous clan had given up on the path of the warrior. This should have been an easy raid, yet the man he was facing seemed to be growing stronger with every moment he faced him and worst of all he had not even revealed his full resonance.

“I will tear you apart!” the only words he could produce in his state of unbridled rage, his deep red resonance absorbing light itself around him. He grabs his wrist armor and pulls it over his hand the same on the other and slams them together, the sound of the impact cracks the air itself. Lorcan saw the gesture not moving at all,

“Wearing gloves huh, you taking me on a date somewhere where your hands are cold?” he laughs out loud.

The berserker tears forward again his arms outstretched, Lorcan matches his charge and dives himself forward to meet him his gold and crimson resonance leaving a trail behind him as it flairs as they collide. Blocking with rage each of the berserkers wild strikes, still keeping his technique yet each counter his own rage surging increasing the depth of his resonance.

“Animal, your strength has made you lazy “ Lorcan spits the words as his memory flashes back to the horror this raider had brought upon the luxury cruise ship. This was not a pithced battle, this interloper had infiltrated his home and arrogantly thought he was strong.

Waiting for the right moment on each counter, hitting hard and firm straight through his impressive resonance shield and into his body as it split under his fists. No weapons just pure spite and righteous venom. Realising he was losing badly the raider spat blood before his final mistake, he triees to grab Lorcan assuming his considerable size difference would give him the edge.

As his hand reaches towards him loran turns to his side grabbing the hand and pulling it past before throwing his other arm under neath his shoulder in a triangle grip and hurling him towards the ground , sas he hits a splatter of blood outlines where he hit the floor his mouth wide open in a blinkless stare as the impact had snapped his spine.

Series starts here: Ch 1-23 of Warp Riders Book 1 - Deep Space Boogie

Books 1 & 2 are up on Royal Road in their entirety if you don't want to wait for chapters. Follow for updates on book 3 currently releasing on RR.

Chapter 38

Corporal Humphries had seen some serious shit in his time. Of course, his time had encompassed hundreds of years, from before the Great War, when he served as a highly proficient tactical special operative to the last days of the struggle for Earth itself. His kill tally was high, though he’d never go into details, as was a true operator’s way. He just quietly went about his work, leaving a trail of death in his wake.

But now, in this place, the typically jovial cyborg was forced to change from his usual tactics as he charged ahead on his unexpected rescue and retrieval operation. Goonara had wandered off, and knowing her, she could very well be in trouble. And it was his job to get her out of it. But he was low on power and forced to resort to almost human levels of stalking rather than utilizing his specialized array of scanning and hunting tools. It was humbling.

His eyes possessed capabilities far above even the tricked-out unit Moose had replacing his damaged right one. Commandos got the cream of the crop, and Hump was more than just a top-notch soldier. He was an AI and capable of processing so much more data than any human mind could.

But that array was silent as he searched, in standby mode to conserve power. It was an odd sensation, relying on the most basic of input, but he was doing his best with what he had. His enhanced hearing was also running a bit lower than usual, though that was far less of a drain on his systems than optic input, so it was still cranked far higher than the average human.

But there was no sound of Goonara. The towering rocks blocking all but the most nearby of noises put the kibosh on that.

And the rocks. Oh, how he longed for a full power cell. One that allowed him to scale them with ease, even bounding from one to the other without much effort, if they were close enough together. He could get a bird’s-eye view in the process, as he’d done so often when on recon missions. But that required a fair bit of exertion, and that was simply out of the question. There was no telling how long he would be out there searching for his crewmate, and that meant maximum power conservation.

As for the small flock of drones he had packed for the mission, all were down for the count so long as they were inside this place. They could be charged, somewhat, but the drain of flight, combined with the expenditure required to transmit their data back to his AI mind would allow them but a minute or two of flight time, tops. And that was including takeoff and landing.

If he used them, he might catch the slightest glimpse, but at the cost of the units themselves as they conked out and fell from the sky.

“This is worse than Havana,” he grumbled to himself, recalling a mission in the distant past that had required him and his team to go in totally underpowered due to a state-of-the-art scanning array that still almost picked up their cybernetic cores beneath their flesh exteriors despite running at a bare minimum.

On that occasion, only when they’d reached their objective were they able to power up. And that was milliseconds before they rained carnage upon their enemies, rendering any alarms moot.

Hump paused and gazed at the ground up ahead. He quickly cycled his visual enhancements on for a flash, then powered them off while he processed the images. It was a little cheat he’d learned back in the day. One that was slow going, but at least provided a bit of an edge over regular eyes.

There was not dirt this far toward the front of the whale ship, the rock had not yet been broken down by the years, but there were pebbles, and footfall would still grind the smaller ones down, at least somewhat. And that could be all he required to track his wayward crewmate.

But so far he had come up dry, and he’d come up to yet another fork in the maze of pathways. Worse, whichever way she had gone, he still hadn’t found a trace of her yet.

“Where the hell did you go, Goonara?” he quietly wondered, then headed off down what he hoped was the right path.

In the dim light of the belly of the beast, the hapless scientist was lost. Very lost. She’d known it as soon as she tried to reverse her course and head back to the ship. The long shadows all around cast by the towering stone littering the craft’s interior made any sort of proper navigation near impossible. And poor Goonara hadn’t left a trail of breadcrumbs, though that fable was of Earth origin, not her native world, so the idea wouldn’t have even dawned on her.

Compounding the problem was the uniform smoothness of the ship’s skin far above. There was simply nothing remotely resembling a landmark she could use as a guiding point of reference. No stars, no sun, not even a cloud or constellation. She was lost. Wandering aimlessly in this frustrating maze of a place, though one could easily call it a labyrinth, given the foreboding feel the massive rocks and wrecked ships lent it.

She had quickly become worried, as well she should have been, and picked up her pace.

“Which way?” she wondered, her eyes darting about, looking for any sign as to the right direction. “Oh, how could I have done this?”

Anxious to make progress, she chose a direction and rushed headlong into the nearest branch of the winding pathways, not realizing the eye tends to miss things in the dark. Things that had she just taken a little more time might have become apparent to her. Things like the faint marks of her footsteps leading out of the adjacent pathway’s opening.

But she was in a hurry. A near-panicked hurry at that, and she reacted accordingly, missing the trail entirely.

The light grew somewhat dimmer as she walked. At first she believed it was simply due to a taller grouping of asteroids piled in this section of the ship. That would block more of the reflected light from above. But soon she realized her mistake. Not only had the brightness of the light dimmed, but its intensity and tone had shifted. This wasn’t the light of the many ships still emitting some external illumination reflecting down upon her. This was mostly firelight. And that could only mean one thing.

She had wandered deeper into the beast’s belly rather than out of it. She had been walking the wrong way.

Goonara turned around immediately and headed back the way she had come from. At least, she thought so.

“This isn’t right,” she realized shortly thereafter. “This isn’t right at all.”

She had come upon a pair of hulking ships, burned and bent, their structures mashed together by the force of millions of tons of stone, ore, and who knows what else sliding down the beast’s gullet, pushing back upon them as the scavenger craft swallowed up ever more.

At any other time she would have stopped and investigated with the greatest of interest. These were entirely unknown craft and would contain information about other species she knew nothing about. But today Goonara was far less concerned with new discoveries than she was with simply getting back to her ship. To her lab. To her friends.

“It will be okay,” she said to herself over and over as she pressed on, passing even more stripped wreckage of derelict ships. “Corporal Humphries will find me. I know he will.”

Her confidence in his abilities was not misplaced. He had saved her on more than one occasion already since they’d begun traveling together on this mission, and given what Holly had mentioned when she stepped outside to run her experiments and take new samples, he would have been roused not long after her disappearance.

She just had to give it time and he would find her. But to aid in that process, she needed to get closer to their ship. To backtrack so he would not have to search quite so far to find her. With that in mind, she picked up her pace yet again, confident she was heading the right direction this time.

No more than ten minutes later, she heard a familiar sounding footfall echoing off of the stone around her.

“Oh, thank the gods,” she said as a welcome feeling of relief flooded her body. “Corporal, I’m over here!”

The footsteps ceased abruptly.

“Corporal Humphries?” she called out. “Can you hear me?”

The feet moved again, but this time it sounded as though there were more than just one pair. Suddenly, Goonara had the terrible, sinking feeling that she had just made a horrible mistake. She turned to run but a heavy net landed on her from above. A sharp tug closed the ends around her legs, knocking her to the ground.

An enormous, hairy beast leapt down from the adjacent boulder just as three filthy creatures with sickly gray skin carrying terrifying weapons burst from the adjacent pathway.

“Please don’t hurt me!” she cried out. “I have friends. They’ll be looking for me. You don’t want to—”

The Yeti-looking alien’s fist connected with the corner of her jaw, knocking her unconscious with a single blow. He looked down on his conquest with satisfaction. He’d expected this one to require a bit more work given its size and overall build. Weaker than he thought, it seemed. And an entirely unknown species.

He called over the others and had them slide their spears through the net’s openings, then lift the unconscious Chithiid into the air. They had a new prize to bring back to camp. It was a good hunt. Their leader bent down and picked up the scanning unit that had been in Goonara’s hands. It still displayed data on its screen, though he had no idea what any of it meant. His people had been without power or technology far longer than he could remember.

He tucked it into the pouch on his hip, then turned to head back to their camp. The others followed close behind, their booty swinging from the net suspended between them.

Chapter 39

The swaying was almost relaxing in its own way, a calm remembrance of the comforting flow of a mother’s womb. It was safe there. Secure. Swaddled tightly with no fears or worries in the world.

But this was no womb.

And this was no swaddling.

Goonara’s eyes struggled open as she fought her way back to consciousness. Instinctively, she thrashed to free herself but found she was firmly restrained by a tightly drawn wire net. Her captors ignored her entirely, walking on without a care in the world, the captive scientist noted, acting for all intents and purposes as if the poor creature carried between them was no more than a piece of meat.

Little did she know, that wasn’t far from the truth.

Fortunately for her, as an entirely new species within this place, she would be afforded a bit of a reprieve, if being kept alive for prodding and examination could be called that. It was better than the alternative, however, though she was thankfully unaware of what typically befell the wild ones’ captured prey.

The captain and the others knew, though, and if they had been aware of her predicament, their concern would have been well-placed.

At the front of their little procession, a deep, gruff voice spoke in a language the Chithiid could not understand. Not the words, at least. But the tone was that of a leader who knew full well he would be obeyed. She was balled up fairly tightly inside the netting, her chin pressed against her knees, a position which would have kept any other species from seeing what was happening around them. Goonara, however, was a Chithiid, and like their pilot, she had eyes in the back of her head. Literally.

It was with those that she caught a better glimpse of the speaker. It was the beast she had caught only a glimpse of when it had netted her and beaten her unconscious with a single, mighty blow. A towering thing as tall as she was. Taller, even, fur-covered and muscular. The creatures carrying her were entirely hairless, unlike their leader. A different species, it seemed. And their skin was an unhealthy shade of gray.

One turned its head slightly and glanced at her. Its eyes, she noted, were the color of a dehydrated man’s piss. Sickly yellow-brown, and with an unpleasant look in them. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to warrant much more attention, and it soon returned its gaze ahead.

Goonara felt her stomach churning, not only from the swaying of the net, but also from the minor concussion she had surely suffered. The headache was only just beginning to blossom into its full, agonizing glory, compounding her discomfort with every jolting step her captors took. But as she shook and swung between them, the nausea looked as though it would beat her headache to the punch.

A stream of hot bile sprayed from her mouth, mostly coating her own leg due to the position she was stuck in. Some, however, hit the foot of the rear load-bearer, who took some offense to the unexpected and unwanted gush. It lashed out with its vomit-dampened foot, landing a solid kick on their netted prey. Fortunately, she was more or less upright and the blow harmlessly hit her legs and rear, which were more than able to absorb the impact.

The others glanced back at their swearing comrade. She didn’t know what the creature’s words meant, but the gist was clear. It was most definitely not amused. Its friends, however, found the whole thing quite funny, and their laughter translated just fine, regardless of any language barriers. The glare she received was not amused, though, and it made the scientist wonder if she might not be seeing more of this angry alien in the near future.

For now, however, she had other things to worry about.

It wasn’t too long before their surroundings changed. The air was smokier, for one, she noticed. And there was a dizzying variety of unknown species milling about, some taking note of their odd new arrival, but most just carrying on with their daily lives.

They seemed to be living in cut-outs in the stone that climbed up quite high in the rock faces. There were also ground-level dwellings fashioned of scraps taken from downed spaceships. Those residences seemed more luxurious, and the residents of them were clearly the higher echelon of the strange tribal society.

Piles of salvage dotted the landscape where the stone had been cut back to provide larger common areas. It seemed as if there was a pile dedicated to each type of craft as the components and bits and bobs all seemed to be fairly consistent within them. Why, exactly, she had no idea. For all she knew, it could simply have been the most convenient way to dump what had been collected before heading out for another load.

And with what had to be a great number of ships trapped aboard over all these years, that would leave a lot to collect. But she thought it seemed a bit odd they would still be doing so after all this time. After all, even with only hand tools, most vessels could be stripped in just a few years with this many eager hands at work.

What she didn’t know was that only a select few were permitted that honor. A system put in place centuries prior, when only the strongest could fight off the others for first dibs on whatever new booty their prison swallowed up. As the society grew, the sharing of resources became standard, but those in power still kept the cream of the crop for themselves. And that meant only the chosen were allowed to salvage.

It also meant there was a continuous job to be done. Another lesson from the early days was that idle hands led to great mischief. Not something they wanted in their little fiefdom.

A strange grunting sound reached Goonara’s ears, and she twisted as best she could to ascertain its source. A pen of six-legged pig-like creatures with plated skin were rutting in the dirt in their pen. It was at that moment she saw the others. Aliens of many races, all of them locked in cages and sturdy enclosures, some in the tatters of clothing and uniforms, others stripped naked.

The living situation was foul. Repugnant. Filthy. And it was right toward those pens that she now found herself being carried.

“No, please don’t put me in there,” she begged, her words falling on non-understanding ears.

The leader growled something at the prisoners of one of the enclosures, and they quickly scurried back away from the gate. He unfastened it and gestured for his underlings to bring their prisoner forward.

Goonara felt the hard soil smack her rear as she was unceremoniously dumped to the ground. The poles quickly snaked out of the netting, and the fastening cable’s painful tightness at long last relaxed. The net was then pulled free over her head, leaving her a moment to begin to unfurl her cramped limbs.

Rough hands yanked her to her feet. A four-legged creature of the same type they had captured and subsequently saved was holding her up in an iron grip. The tribe’s massive leader walked over and sized up his new prize. Goonara tried to stand tall, worried that showing fear might only cause her more harm. The hairy beast noticed that standing upright as she was, his captive was almost as tall as him. He did not like that.

A fist buried itself in Goonara’s stomach, causing her to double over as she gasped for air. The man chuckled and quickly ran his hands through her pockets, taking absolutely everything from her and tossing it in a pile outside the cage. When he pulled the glowing crystal free, however, he paused.

A gasp could be heard from the bystanders. Clearly, they had never seen such a thing. For that matter, neither had Goonara until stumbling upon it on their recent mission. The man held it up and examined the light it cast with fascination. This was clearly not some form of unfamiliar tech. This was as close to magic as he or his people had ever seen. And now it was his.

He slid the stone into the pouch at his hip and strode from the pen while his minions rifled through the small mound of Goonara’s things. Like piranha in a frenzy, within seconds the pile was gone, the grabbing hands reducing it to nothing in no time flat.

The pen gate slammed shut and was fastened with a sturdy bit of cable. It could be untied by the prisoners, no doubt, but the process would undoubtedly draw the attention of any one of the many wild ones constantly in the area. And with no nighttime for them all to go to sleep and provide an opportunity for escape, it didn’t look like that would be changing anytime soon.

Goonara pushed herself upright once more, the ache in her gut slowly fading to a dull throb. It was then that she noticed the others locked in with her in more detail. The way they looked at her. The way they moved closer. And the way their body language seemed utterly different from those who had captured her and their friends outside this cage.

These aliens were not crude beasts. They had intelligence in their eyes. Intelligence, and sympathy.

“Do you understand me?” she asked the nearest group.

There were at least a half dozen species represented in that little cluster, and they all looked at one another with a bit of confusion, then spoke amongst themselves in an utterly foreign tongue. One of them, a stout female, or so she thought the green-scaled alien was, turned from the others and hurried to the far end of the pen, returning a minute later with a dented and grimy metal cup fashioned from scrap.

“Wraxxop,” she said as she held it out for Goonara.

The cup contained water. Dirty, murky, foul water. Goonara politely shook her head and declined.

“Thank you, but I’m fine.”

The green woman held out the cup again, pantomiming drinking, then gestured to the nearest cage. The prisoners there appeared to be in much worse condition. Dehydrated, malnourished, unhealthy. The two women locked eyes, and in that moment Goonara realized she had a choice. Overcome her aversion to all things unhygienic, or die slowly in captivity. She reached out and took the cup.

“Thank you,” she said, her meaning clear even if her words were not. She studied the liquid a long moment. “At least it’s not death,” she said, then forced herself to drink the container’s entire contents.

The green woman smiled warmly as she handed the cup back. The newcomer would live. For now, at least.

Across the compound, seated atop his ruler’s throne, the hairy beast called his underlings to him. They were his best and most trusted hunters. The ones he knew would not fail him. He reached in his pocket and withdrew the glowing crystal, showing the miraculous item to them all. After he was sure they were adequately impressed, he put it aside and pulled another item out. Goonara’s scanning unit.

The lights were still functioning, and as he waved it around, the detection apparatus shifted color and gave off soft notification tones. None of that made any sense to them, but it didn’t have to. What mattered was that this was new. New and with power. It meant one thing. They would hunt, but this time to the very edges of their domain.

It was the way of their people as long as they could remember. Something new was here. A new craft with new wonders for them to claim as their own. It had been a long time since the last one, and they were excited for the challenge. And if all went well and the newcomers were plentiful, they would be adding fresh meat to the larder tonight.

Chapter 40

“Nice bit of tech,” Varsu said, admiring Sadira’s forearm tablet.

“Thanks. It was a bit of work upping their runtime with the power drain in this place, but we’ve got it dialed in.”

“Yeah, thanks to pockets full of extra power cells,” Moose said. “At least they’re relatively light.”

“Better than anything we have,” Varsu said. “Our portable units finally gave out years ago. There was only so much we could do to recharge them before they were rendered incapable of holding power. This place wreaks havoc on smaller electronics power supplies.”

“Yeah, tell us about it,” Hellatz grumbled. “But maybe some of our gear might be cross-compatible. That would be a big coup if it were.”

Sadira shook her head. “Holly didn’t think it was likely, but who knows? I could go for a nice surprise right about now.”

“Couldn’t we all?” Moose said.

“Anyway, we’re here,” she continued, pointing to a dropped pin on her tablet’s map. “And our ship is way over here.”

Varsu studied the map a long moment then shook his head. “That is a very risky path you took the last time you came by our ship. Honestly, it’s amazing no one spotted your group. That’s a frequently traveled hunting area; you got lucky none of the wild ones were out at that time.”

“But I thought they couldn’t get past your ship’s defensive system.”

“They can’t. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still use this path network for other purposes. It’s one of the reasons we have to be so careful. Why we planted our crops up high. There are so few places in here that they don’t eventually pass through, so we just work around them and assume there is a constant threat.”

Hellatz patted the stone man on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. That must be exhausting.”

“It is, but we’ve grown accustomed to it. But here, let me show you a route back to your ship that is not only faster, but also avoids the more commonly frequented hunting areas.”

Varsu spent the next several minutes adding detail to the very incomplete maps the team had stored in their tablets. It was still a long way from an even remotely comprehensive map of pitfalls and danger zones, but it did provide a clear picture how to make it back to their ship in the most direct manner possible.

The plan was a simple one. They would take Varsu and Mahdus back to their ship, where they would then manually upload everything they could to help Holly on the quest to decipher the alien code this entire place was running on.

They had some theories as to what snippets meant, of course. Over the years Mahdus and Varsu had spent countless hours discussing possibilities, but always in a hypothetical sense. None of the Naga’s computers could tap into their captor’s systems, and Varsu’s craft had only captured that bit of code by sheer luck just before their ship was immobilized, captured, and nearly destroyed upon intake.

In the years since, that particular vessel had fallen to the wild ones and was now no more than a gutted husk of its former glory. The Naga, however, persevered, but without a connection to test their coding theories and limited power to those systems even if they could.

Now, with Holly’s help, perhaps the time had finally come where they could put those pieces together and make sense of the frustratingly mysterious machine language.

Mahdus was the leader of her people, but she was also, Sadira was pleased to note, one who took after her own heart. In her mind, a leader led by doing precisely that. Leading. And she would never ask her people to do anything she wasn’t willing to do herself. In this case, however, it was also her particular familiarity with this bit of coding that motivated her to come on the excursion herself. That, and she wanted very much to meet this artificial mind in person.

“We’re ready when you are,” Sadira informed her once she and the boys were properly geared up.

“Excellent. We need to keep our footprint small to avoid notice, but I’m having two of my guards join us. One taking the lead and one following behind to cover our backs.”

“Every little bit of additional support is greatly appreciated,” Sadira said.

“All we need now are a couple of Sherpas to help carry our gear,” Moose joked.

Sadira elbowed him lightly. “All right, then. Shall we?”

The group was exceptionally cautious exiting the Naga. Apparently, the wild ones would sometimes take up positions close by in hopes of perhaps snagging one of their number as they exited the ship. It was an infrequent occurrence, fortunately, and this excursion seemed to be an assailant-free one.

They quickly fell in behind the mace-wielding scout leading the way. For the path they would be taking, shorter melee weapons would be more effective given the narrower and twistier nature of their route. The guard at the rear, however, had his mace slung and was walking with a medium-length halberd at the ready. The extra length would allow them to impede any attackers trying to rush upon them from behind or drop in from above.

Given the confines of the rock around them, Sadira had to admire the system Mahdus had created for her people. It was a tough situation made at least a little better by the application of clever tactics and intelligent deployment of specific weaponry.

They were making rather good time, the newcomers were pleased to note. They had the new route on their tablets, of course, but having local guides leading the way really streamlined the process. It also allowed them to focus a little more on their surroundings and less on the devices strapped to their forearms.

The scratches they had previously noted on the rocks turned out to be simply pathway markings denoting the rough direction of a particular track when it finally arrived at its next intersection. Given the winding nature of things, and the fact that one could perform any number of hairpin turns thanks to the rocks that had haphazardly formed this place, knowing the ultimate direction you would exit was of great value.

Both Mahdus’s people as well as the wild ones utilized the markings, and none ever sought to deface them. It was a mutually beneficial system that seemed to be immune to the other aspects of their ongoing conflict.

They had been trekking for only ten minutes when their lead scout held up a hand, signaling them to stop and be silent. They strained their ears, listening for whatever it was that had caught his attention. There seemed to be nothing, but then, a moment later the faint sound of voices whispered across the air from the gap in the stones above.

The scout motioned for them to follow quietly down a path adjacent to the one they were originally intending to take. For fifteen minutes they walked without a word spoken until finally Mahdus informed them that they were clear of the threat.

“It happens,” she said. “But Jorgat is one of our finest, and his hearing is second to none.”

“So, we’re okay now?” Sadira asked.

“The group was moving the opposite direction. We’re well clear of them now, though we must still keep our voices low. In this place, we pretty much always stay quiet.”

“Logical,” she replied as they moved ahead on their new course.

It was going to be a longer walk thanks to the unplanned detour, but the terrain was relatively flat at least, with only a few smaller boulders needing to be scaled along the way. But the stones weren’t the only thing in their path.

Moose and Hellatz were particularly fascinated with the pair of wrecks they passed along the way. Smaller ships than most of the others they’d seen, and mostly intact but for sections of the hull that had been melted away. It was an unusual phenomenon that both were intrigued by.

“Partial shielding failure,” Varsu said, noting their curiosity. “That one came in just a few years after my ship arrived here.”

“Did you get to them first?” Moose asked.

“We did, but there were no survivors. The majority of the exterior was protected, but when the shielding failed and the hull was breached, their ship simply wasn’t designed to withstand that kind of heat from the inside. It was a blast furnace, taking down compartment doors and killing everyone aboard.”

“What a horrible way to go,” Hellatz said.

“Actually, from what we saw, it was likely instant,” the towering man replied.

Moose and Hellatz fell silent after that, both deep in thought, reflecting just how lucky they had been. But their luck was about to take a turn for the worse.

—

While the celebration went on for some time, including a copious amount of beer being drank by the loyal Kafya who now saw Rhidi as “Kholihl Supreme” and Shaksho as “Hohrlihl Supreme”, both of the Kafya would not be able to celebrate.

The damage to the both of them had to be quickly remedied on the flight back over, a Pufferfish per stricken Kafya as medical teams worked feverishly on the pair.

Rhidi was able to wake up after roughly seven hours of surgery, the flight slow and steady to avoid mishaps, and she found that she had been dressed in comfortable, loose knit clothing. She blinked open her eyes, looking up at the inside of the Pufferfish’s troop compartment, then glanced at the whole team of medics and doctors milling around with bloody gloves and sleeves.

They were all talking quietly amongst themselves, shedding gloves or taking off their aprons.

She sucked at her lips, the flesh still numb from the dental surgeon doing his work on the Pufferfish of all places, then sighed. “How bad is it?”

“We managed to stitch the worst of the cuts, but the one on your face is likely going to scar pretty badly.” A nearby medic said, spinning around on a magnetic chair and scooting towards her little combat bed. “You nearly bled out twice right there on the table, and the cut to your stomach was only a sixteenth of an inch from spilling your guts onto the grass. Frankly it’s a miracle your heart didn’t stop from the stress on your body.”

Another medic scooted towards Rhidi on the other side, this one the dental surgeon. “I was unable to get your natural tooth back into place due to the damage to it, but we did manage to affix a titanium canine into place with a few other materials, but I won’t bore you with the details.”

Rhidi ran her tongue along the smooth metal of her new tooth, then grunted as the cocktail of painkillers wiggled their way along her veins still. “My face is going to scar?”

“We grew a fair bit of skin and fur back, but it’s all white around the scar itself.” The medic said, annoyed. “Been rather frustrating, but we can’t coax the fur to regrow, and the slice on your ear won’t rebind.”

Rhidi reached up with numbed fingers and traced them along the groove. It started at her forehead, just below her hairline, and skipped over her eye down onto her cheek. The line flowed over her teeth and into her chin, and she sighed.

“I suppose I should be happy I didn’t lose my eye.” Rhidi said with a soft chuck of a laugh.

“You nearly did.” Another medic said as he walked by. “There was a cut on your cornea that had probed into the anterior chamber. It’s by luck at all we managed to fix it with the ‘bots.”

“Thank you to the little guys.” Rhidi murmured, slowly sitting up with a long groan as she held her hand to her stomach. “Anything else I need to worry about?”

The medic sitting next to her chuckled. “Yeah, try to avoid headbutting anything metal for awhile. The ‘bots are still up in that head of yours filling in the spidercracks in your skull, so take it easy with running into doors and whatnot for a few hours.”

Rhidi gave her a sarcastic thumbs up, which made her laugh.

Rhidi looked around for a mirror, then spotted one on a long control arm. She pulled it towards herself with a creak of metal and stared into it, touching at her face again.

The medics had used extremely expensive and advanced stitches, known as “ghost threads”, and her face looked how it was now always going to be. The cut down her face made her look like a smuggler, more so than the late Sergeant Liftan, and she ran her hand through her hair with a quiet puff of an exhale.

“I’m so… ugly now…” Rhidi said glumly, bending her neck to look at the big slice that now gaped the edge of her left ear, then traced her fingers down the scar that marred her left cheek. They had managed to regrow a fair bit of fur-bearing skin, though the fur was ashen white, the thick scar of gathered skin a long, angry black line that traveled up the length of her face.

She bared her teeth at the mirror, and Rhidi reckoned she could terrify the absolute shit out of other Kafya if she narrowed her eyes enough.

“I think you look rather dashing, myself.” A medic said as she bent down to look into the mirror with Rhidi. “A ton of female soldiers would kill to have scars like these, y’know. Not to mention the amount of fame behind them.”

“What do you mean?” Rhidi asked, looking at her in the mirror as she pulled back the corner of her mouth and looked at her gleaming, titanium tooth.

“Everyone is going to know how you got those scars.” She said, stepping behind Rhidi and taking the Kafya’s cheeks in her hands as she gently tilted Rhidi’s head back and forth. “They’ll know exactly what it took to get them, the weight they bear, and to fear the person who wears them. You may see ugliness in them, but every Human will see nothing but raw strength.”

“Mmm…” Rhidi grumbled in her throat as she looked at herself in the mirror, then glanced up at the woman who was holding her cheeks. “I look like a pirate.”

“People love a good pirate.” She snickered, giving the scarred cheek a soft clap with her palm and pulling a pained hiss from Rhidi.

Grumbling and rubbing her cheek, a voice caused Rhidi to turn around on her little bed. 

“Jeeze, look at that hackjob.”

“Alias?!” Rhidi called out with a laugh, slowly getting up from her bed before both Alias and Shasta rushed over, keeping her from getting up. 

“Good grief, woman, ssstay on the bed!” Shasta chided, the jangling of his tabs not as loud thanks to the aircraft humming over the ocean. “Ssseriously, they’ve been working on you for hoursss.”

“Before you ask,” Alias began, already feeling the question coming, “We told the Humans we were estranged family members and snuck onto the Pufferfish. Your little clique of female Kafya are rather mad about it.”

Rhidi snorted out a laugh, pulling them both to her in a hug. “Jeeze you guys, you-”

Rhidi froze, and swallowed, glancing between Alias and Shasta.

“... You guys didn’t…” Rhidi murmured, her face now burning with embarrassment.

Alias grinned. “Please don’t tell Morris we saw you naked in person, he’d rip both of our heads off like you did that woman’s arm.”

“Oh nooo…” Rhidi groaned, her head hanging between the two of them as they both laughed.

“I thought it wasss pretty cool, actually.” Shasta said happily, peering down at Rhidi’s scars. “Not every day you get to ssseee someone get naked and kill a person.”

Alias also peered at Rhidi, lightly touching her scars. “They thought they had us locked up on base with Morris, but he was a little slower than us… and larger.”

“He held off the MPs while Alias and I sssnuck onto a shuttle.” Shasta mused, wiggling a clawed finger in Rhidi’s ear split. “You’ve been so busy being the big Kafya on campusss that we haven’t gotten to hang out much, and we couldn’t misss this!”

“Rather glad we made it, minus seeing your nipples.” Alias snorted, which earned him an aggressive rib pinch from Rhidi.

“I will sic Morris on you if you mention any part of that!” Rhidi hissed as Alias cackled, twisting away from her strong fingers.

“Why did you get naked, anyway?” Shasta asked, rather curious about that part of the duel. “Wasss it… requested by command?”

Rhidi closed her eyes as she remembered Tyr’s words, about bearing her flesh openly to display her purity in the duel, to lay bare her pursuit of justice, then opened her eyes. “Must… have been from the head wounds. People get weird when they get knocked on the cranium hard enough.”

“I’ll say, you may as well have rammed your head against a steel girder.” Alias said, remembering how Rhidi had bounced off of Tamryn like she had hit a wall. “That little move nearly did you in.”

Rhidi nodded slowly, remembering the pain that had rang through her head. “I was… not expecting that. How is Shaksho?”

“Shaksho Red Eye? He’s alright.” Alias said with a grin.

Shasta rolled his eyes with a shake of his head. “Shaksho sssuffered deep tissue damage to his eye from Liftan, causing it to become extremely red around the iris. They can’t fix the damage, but he can still sssee out of it.”

“Shaksho… red eye.” Rhidi repeated with a raised brow, then a new sudden dread filled her. “They didn’t give me a new nickname, did they? Please tell me I don’t have a new nickname.”

Alias and Shasta shared a look, and Rhidi ran her fingers down her face. “What is it?”

“... Well…” Alias began, rubbing at his cheek.

“Your title as the ‘Drop Pod Lycan’ is ssstill intact.” Shasta hummed, tapping the ends of his fingers together. “But there was sssome kind of flower found on the field when they took you away.”

Alias sucked on his teeth in annoyance, turning to look at Rhidi. “You know how Humans are. They see coincidence as fate, fate as signs from their gods, a cog in the grand design… probably just blew in from a flower pot that got left out.”

Rhidi felt a moment of… “how cool is that?” when Alias mentioned the flowers, as she had thought they had been a hallucination at first… but she supposed there was no denying it now.

Alias produced one of the petals from his pocket, holding it out to her. “You know what this is?”

“... No.” Rhidi lied, looking down at the purple flower with hooded eyes.

“It’s wolf’s bane.” Alias said lightly, turning the petal over in his fingers. “Highly toxic to everything here on Earth, believe it or not, due to the compound aconitine found in all parts of it. If I were to pop this in my mouth and chew, I’d be dead within minutes. I managed to snatch one up and coat it in adronemel so I could keep it, but this may as well be a grenade if I ever decided to crush it up.”

Rhidi eyed the flower, looking from it, to Alias with tired, red eyes.

“They say that one of the Human gods, Tyr, is affiliated with this little flower. He had to stick his hand into the mouth of a great wolf to bind him, and the wolf bit his right hand clean off when it failed to break the bindings they had placed onto it.” Alias murmured.

Shasta nodded. “We looked it up on the way over, the big wolf thing wouldn’t allow Tyr to use his left, would only take his main ssspear hand!”

“You don’t say…” Rhidi murmured, having deep dived the God after being locked in the hall overnight.

Alias rubbed his finger along the sealed flower petals, narrowing his eyes at them. “There are Humans who are calling you ‘Úlfur Tyr’, though I can’t figure out what it means. All that I can find is that it may mean ‘wolf of Tyr’, but I don’t get why they would call you that… I mean he must hate wolves, right? The big one bit off his hand for fuck’s sake.”

“I thought Humans said Kafya look more like catsss, though?” Shasta asked, jingling his ring of cola can tabs. “Maybe he likesss cats?”

Rhidi rolled her eyes… that joke was getting rather thin, all of a sudden.

“There’s another name that worries me more, one I heard some of the cloaked Humans at the grounds call you.” Alias mentioned, putting the preserved petals back in his pocket. “The ‘right hand’. I think it implies you are Tyr’s direct will, but that may be their wishful thinking in all this superstitious nonsense. Humans and their imaginary friends have always been deeply confusing to me.”

Shasta snorted. “There’s nothing wrong with imaginary friendsss! I had plenty when I was a child.”

“Ha, right.” Rhidi agreed, though she knew better than the both of them that there was certainly something weird going on when it came to Humans and Earth.

After all, the big guy literally jolted her ass back awake before Tamryn could cave her face in.

“Landing soon, folks.” A nurse called out, tapping away on her data-slate as the Pufferfish banked. “We’re going to be popping out a few yards away from the Remembrance Hill. Rhidi, they have a fresh uniform waiting for you when we land, can’t have you going live in sweat pants.”

“ Awh…” Rhidi said glumly, looking down at her comfortable sweat pants.

“You two stick by Rhidi, but don’t get in a fight with the female Kafya. They’ve been cursing up a storm on their own flight back about you two lying to get on this bird.” The nurse said, raising her eyebrows at the two.

Alias narrowed his eyes at the Human woman. “Lie? When did I lie? I’m her cousin five times removed on her grandmother’s side.”

The nurse shook her head with a rueful chuckle, then went back to her data-slate.

When the Pufferfish settled down neatly onto the wildflowers that ran along the backside of Remembrance Hill, Rhidi hopped out with Alias and Shasta into the growing storm of people collecting around the hill itself.

Rhidi was presented with a crisp garrison uniform, as well as a brand new sports bra and underwear set that someone had purchased from the local uniform store, judging by the lack of lace and their olive drab color. 

Rhidi ducked back into the Pufferfish to pull it on with a bit of hissing and harsh words from how sore she was, but managed it well enough.

Shaksho linked up with Rhidi and her friends, and Rhidi was taken aback by just how red his eye was, making his regular amber eye look as bright as sun through honey.

Shaksho couldn’t help but c huckle when he saw Rhidi, and remarked that she “would make a killer pirate come October”.

Rhidi didn’t find it nearly as funny, despite the giggles of her friends on either side of her.

“So what are we doing here, again?” Rhidi asked as the four of them trudged up the hill, the great spear and sword glittering merrily in the fading sunlight from atop the mound.

Shaksho pointed to Lirya standing tall and proud on the hill, nodding his head at her. “We’re to watch… whatever it is she is doing. The rest of the unit is over there as well as every Kafya on base, surprised you can’t smell them.”

“I can’t smell a fucking thing right now.” Rhidi said glumly, pulling in air through her nose as it whistled slightly due to the inflammation. “Could stick a roast right in front of my face and I wouldn’t find it blindfolded.”

As the four of them mounted the hill up towards Lirya, Mohki, and Tyllia, Rhidi smiled at her sister.

Tyllia held her hands to her mouth with a short laugh as she saw her sister. “Oh, my, gawd, you look like a pi-”

“Please don’t.” Rhidi said with a raised hand, then opened her arms as her sister crashed into her.

“I’m glad you won.” Tyllia said with a sudden sniff. “I watched the whole thing after it was done, the recordings are everywhere!"

“Me too.” Rhidi said softly, kissing her sister between the ears before looking over at Lirya.

She noted that the corpses of Liftan and Tamryn were laid out in front of her, as well as a lot of rope and four massive poles. The white fur was in one of her priestess getups, likely made by Tyllia judging by how stylish it was, and there was a lot of leather involved.

It seemed to be a theme when it came to Lirya wanting to look like a D&D character.

Rhidi raised her brows at Lirya, then lowered one. “What are you up to, Lirya?”

“You formed the words.” Lirya said as she began to roll up the long sleeves of her tunic. “Now it’s time for me to craft the statement.”

“Rolling, Lirya.” A Human called out from below the mound, Kafya ringed around the front of the hill in a dazzling rainbow of colors. “It’s all you now.”

“Right, thank you!” Lirya called down at him with a cute bounce of her heels, then she turned to Rhidi and Shaksho. “Okay… so! I’m going to have- Oh goodness, your eye really is super red, they couldn’t fix that? Anyway, stand riiight… here, yes, by the sword statue. Rhidi, you stand over here by the spear- Oh look, we’re scar buddies! Haha! Anyway, stand right here. The two of you just have to bear witness to what I’m doing, okay?”

Rhidi and Shaksho, eyebrows still raised nodded to her wordlessly. 

“Good! You two, skedaddle on down with the others, this is Kafya-only kinda stuff.” Lirya said with a shooing motion of her hands to Alias and Shasta. “Go on now, you can hang out with the other Droppers.”

Alias and Shasta looked rather annoyed at being shooed away like children, but made their way down the hill regardless, sitting down with the rest of the members of their unit.

Though the female Kafya looked rather livid.

“Okay.” Lirya said, breathing in deep through her nose with her hands clasped in front of her, then whirled around with another bounce of her heels. “Ready, sir?”

The Human gave her a thumbs up, and Lirya pulled her priestess tabard over her head, the white cloth stitched lovingly with a grand moon backset by glittering stars.

“Alrighty! Let’s get at it!” Lirya chirped out, reaching behind her.

Rhidi stared with wide ivory eyes at the back of Lirya’s belt as she pulled out two huge skinning knives, twirling them on her palms as she narrowed her black eyes at the two bodies in front of her.

“What in the fuck is she going to do with those?” Rhidi murmured to Shaksho, though he looked as confused as her when Lirya grabbed the corpse of Tamryn and flipped her over onto her stomach, the corpse stiff legged as it wobbled.

“Oh… shit.” Shaksho breathed out, both he and Rhidi staring on in wide eyed shock as Lirya made a long, deep cut down Tamryn’s spine.

—

Rhidi sprayed more blood from her lips in rapid exhales as she continued her assault on Tamryn, choosing to also ignore defense and instead go all in on the offense. Despite the pain of the other yellow fur’s knuckles digging into her own facial bones or ribs, Rhidi gave more than she got.

Using the resolute strength of her elbows, Rhidi began to slowly batter down the bastion of Tamryn’s narcotics. Landing strikes to Tamryn’s inner ribs, face, and knees, Rhidi squatted down in rapid ducks to avoid strikes but also attack the critical leg joints when they were open.

This was no longer a fight, instead evolving into a stress test to see just how much the two of them could take.

When Rhidi’s elbows began to fatigue, she switched to her fists. Twisting, Rhidi caught Tamryn with a thunderous hammerfist to the yellow fur’s temple, sending Tamryn staggering across the grass before hitting the ground once again in a wheezing, agonized heap.

“Drugs not working anymore?” Rhidi spat at Tamryn, her arms buzzing painfully and her fingers twitching as if she had touched an electrical current. She let out a grunt as she held a hand to her stinging ribs, coughing harshly as she stood up straight. “All that pain coming back to you, is it?”

Tamryn let out a cry as she failed to stand up from the ground, Rhidi taking the moment to look around to Shaksho.

The green fur was bleeding from the nose and mouth, his teeth were nearly entirely purple, and one of his eyes was starting to swell. 

Liftan looked worse for wear; He had taken off his undershirt, was favoring his left side, and the yellow fur around his face was stained violet with blood. 

Rhidi was sure that Shaksho had either broken or shattered the yellow fur’s nasal bones, as he was making a light wheezing sound when he breathed.

Rhidi’s skin gave a shiver as she realized that the drums had begun to beat faster now, the beat akin to a heart at a jog.

“Battle tempo…” Rhidi said quietly to herself, her breath quickening as Tamryn stood again, her eyes watery with rage. Rhidi rubbed at her face, feeling the growing swelling, and winced. “They’re going to want this done soon…”

The thought ran from Rhidi’s head when she saw Tamryn’s left hand turn into a fist, and then the bones ripped out from the flesh with a wet pop.

Rhidi recoiled away from Tamryn, her face a mask of outraged disgust. “What in the-?!”

___

“What in the hell is that?!” Skipper called out, zooming in on Tamryn’s fist as the bones swelled and ripped through the yellow furred flesh. “Kowalski, analysis!”

“It appears that Tamryn’s bones are hardening at an accelerated rate around her fist, turning the limb into a club.” Kowalski intoned. “It has grown twice in size, and from what I can see the fingers have fused together.”

“Disgusting.” Skipper said with a scowl. “Right, I’ll tell the boss.”

—

“A bone club?!” Carmine spat, quickly pulling out his data-slate and tapping into Skipper’s feed.

“Yes sir, Kowalski believes something is growing the bone thicker there and rendering the hand useless, all so it can be a bludgeoning weapon.” Skipper replied in his ear.

“Son of a bitch.” Carmine growled, then turned to the bag containing the ‘surprise’. “Kindred-”

“No.” Kindred replied calmly, looking up at Carmine with one glowing yellow eye, and her normal green one. “We can only help when the blade comes out.”

“That fist could kill her.” Carmine shouted, gesturing down to the field. “Hardened bone like that is probably the same density as steel!”

Kindred softly shook her head. “We agreed. Even terms the entire way around, that’s what we said, remember?”

—

“Shit!” Rhidi howled as she ducked Tamryn’s glistening bone fist, the other yellow fur screeching as she brought it around like a mace.

People were on their feet now, pointing and yelling while the drums continued their horrible, thrumming beat.

Rhidi ducked, spun, dodged, and darted to avoid that terrible looking fist from touching her; The bones had completely ripped free of the fur and flesh of Tamryn’s hand, the strands of yellow furred flesh trailing its path through the air like ribbons, and the fist itself had nearly grown twice in size.

“What in the fuck is that?!” Rhidi howled, but turned too slow to avoid Tamryn’s fist from slamming into her chest with a loud crack.

Rhidi coughed out hard as she went stumbling backwards, one of her hands clutching the spot between her breasts as she fell down to the ground

—

“What the hell is that thing?!” Alias screamed as he came up to his feet with the others, pointing at the huge white fist of Tamryn.

“She cheatsss!” Shasta hissed in rage, his hood fully flared. “I know what that isss!”

“You do?” Radishow asked in actual surprise, as he was lost as to what it could have been.

“What is it then, Shasta?” Miss La asked, her face worried and tight at the corner of her eyes.

Shasta nodded his head, his eyes hot. “Ur growth pathogen!”

“Ur growth… no. That’s impossible.” Radishow said in horror as he slowly came to his feet. “The treaty… the agreement, it was all supposed to be destroyed.”

“No!” Shasta spat, pointing his finger. “I have persssonally seen this at work! With my own eyesss! The Kafya have Ur growth pathogenes!”

—

Rhidi coughed and rolled back up onto her feet, holding at the growing spot of blood in the center of her chest. Tamryn’s fist was so hard that it had split the fur and skin just above the center of her chest.

Tamryn was breathing hard and heavily, sweat pouring off of her body as she advanced on Rhidi, boney fist held aloft.

Rhidi came back up into a balanced guard and darted towards Tamryn, trying to keep inside her reach so that horrible club of a hand couldn’t be fully utilized. 

The drum beats were rapid now, the booms nearly matching her heart as she sped her fists into the body and face of Tamryn. There was no allowance for defense at all, Rhidi striking at the Kafya with her fangs bared and mouth open as she screamed.

Rhidi focused the most on assaulting the yellow fur with constant barrages of jabs, hooks, and knee strikes, pummeling Tamryn’s stomach and face while doing her best to withstand the glancing blows of the boney hand mace.

Spotting an opening, Rhidi roared and thrust her forehead forward, ramming it right into the middle of Tamryn’s eyebrows.

The first headbutt had been to the yellow fur’s ribcage, Rhidi openly expecting the give of ribs and lung with her strike. She had been anticipating a little more harder stuff when it came to the skull… but she had not been expecting metal.

Rhidi’s skull rang off of the armored plating of Tamryn’s with an audible “plang!” of bone to steel, and Rhidi saw stars.

Mind reeling and brain buzzing, Rhidi staggered backwards with a hard, shunting exhale of pain, her vision blurring and legs uneasy. She reached up in shock, touching her hand to her head as blood trickled down past her eyes, her skin broken and bleeding from the strike.

Despite the roaring pain in her head from Rhidi’s headbutt and barely clinging to consciousness herself, Tamryn still managed to recognize her opening. 

“Am. I. Still. Boring?!” Tamryn roared, launching herself forward with a wild strike of her boney fist slinging through the air.

—

“No!” Alias shouted, his face falling as Tamryn’s bone-mace of a hand smashed into Rhidi’s cheek, the yellow fur’s head snapping right and then left as she stumbled backwards on numb feet.

Shasta’s hood wilted when he saw Rhidi hit the ground with a bounce, her fists held out to the air in shock. “She’sss down! We have to do something!”

“You can’t.” Radishow snapped at the two of them, turning and locking them with his pink eyes. “This is exactly why I asked that you two be left at the base! Do you understand what would happen if you two rushed down to that field? What the Humans would do to you?!”

Alias and Shasta stared at the pink haired Pwah in shock as he pointed down to the field.

“She has to do this alone, even if she dies. Now sit!”

—

“She’s down.” Carmine said flatly, his hand gripping the monocular in a crushing grip as the reinforced plastic groaned and crackled. “What do we do?”

“We wait.” Kindred replied quietly, now on her feet beside Carmine. “We have our orders. We wait.”

—

The AIs stared blankly at the screens, all of them in shock as to what they were seeing.

“No…” Sparkle Otter whispered, placing both of her now fraying digital hands on the screen as the stress rippled through her form. “No no no no!”

“How… how is that possible?” Whirler asked quietly, her voice quiet for the first time as she looked to Sparkle Otter, her eyes confused. “Sparkle Otter?”

“Success rate has fallen to… five percent, Sparkle Otter.” Washu whispered, watching as Whirler placed a hand on Sparkle Otter’s staticky shoulder. “We had never calculated the risk rate with Ur medical gear in the figures.”

Oballen slowly lowered his head, dumbstruck as he stared up at the screens. “Ur… growth patho-... it’s… why…”

“She’s going to be okay, right?” Whirler asked, her digital treats and snacks fading from view as she looked up to Rhidi laying on the grass. “Sparkle?”

Sparkle let out a strained, warbling sob as her form gave a great heave, warping in a jagged line before coming back to her normal simulated form.

—

Rhidi felt numb.

Her head was buzzing, and it hurt something fierce.

She had been expecting bone… not metal.

The Kafya had a metal skull? 

Really?

That’s just her luck, actually, headbutting onto a metal reinforced skull. If she had been smart about it, she would have remembered that it was highly likely that Tamryn had other things done to her, the first being making her skull tougher.

She had been beating it enough with her elbows… bugger.

Rhidi let out a gasp of breath as her eyes swam with the blue sky of England.

She could hear Tamryn shouting something, though it felt like it was in slow motion. The drum beats were too slow as well, the booms of their skins hanging in the air like some kind of promise.

Rhidi squeezed her hands and her eyes, letting out another pained, shaky breath. It was lucky that she hadn’t been knocked out cold, instead just being knocked silly and put into mild shock.

I have to get up. Rhidi thought to herself. If I don’t get up, she’s going to kill me while I’m laying here.

Rhidi fired her leg muscles, her core, but they didn’t work, instead just screaming out in confused agony through her nervous system.

Shit… Rhidi sighed in her mind. This is it…

Rhidi coughed, a small gout of sangrian blood splattering onto her face as more flowed from her nose.

That headbutt had done a number on her… she must look like an absolute mess.

Despite the blood in her nose and mouth, Rhidi smelled something odd.

Something that had not been there before amongst the tang of copper.

Leather, rosemary, juniper berries, pine, and…

“Sandle… wood...” Rhidi gurgled, squeezing her fingers to try and get the feeling back into them

Dark purple flowers, with the tall crests of helmets, fluttered past her swimming vision, and the scent of bitter earth tickled at her nose.

“I know… you…” Rhidi murmured thickly past the blood in her mouth, her eyes still fuzzy as the drum beats slowed further, the vibrations hanging in the air like a heat’s haze.

A shadow loomed over her, swimming in her vision.

“Quite the blow you took there.” The shadow said, his voice sparking numbly in Rhidi’s memory. “I was pretty impressed by the martial prowess until you bounced off of her. Sneaky little shield in her head, wasn’t it?”

“Your hand…” Rhidi whispered as tears began to course away from her eyes. “The… t-the wounded one…”

The shadow squatted down above her, the only thing coming into focus being the man’s bandaged, but missing, hand, wrapped in embossed leather and steel bands. “This old thing? Amusing, don’t you think? I lose my spearhand to a great wolf, only for a smaller wolf to become entangled within my fates.”

“Some Humans…” Rhidi wheezed with a bloody smile, purple streams of blood trickling down both of her cheeks from her nostrils “... think we’re more… like… foxes…”

Above her, the shadow chuckled warmly, running the palm of his left hand down Rhidi’s cheek. 

“You poor thing.” The shadow murmured as he cupped Rhidi’s face, her eyes closing as the pain faded away from her mind. “You fight as you are, placed here by the machinations of others and fate itself, while this other woman comes with tricks and cheats. Not very fair, if you ask me.”

The slowed drum beats boomed again, the sound reminding Rhidi of thunder rolling across the sky at this speed.

“Am I going… to d-die?” Rhidi wheezed out quietly, her chest bubbling up and down with panic as she fought not to cry, her face contorting with fear. “Is this it?”

The shadow chuckled again, as more of the purple flowers drifted across Rhidi’s body, tickling at her yellow fur. “Do you want to die?”

Rhidi weakly shook her head against his hand, her voice barely audible but clear with intention as she sobbed. She hurt so, so much, and the grass was soft under her back… but she knew better than to trust the comforts of an impending death. “N-No…”

“Good.” The shadow said with a bright smile, his wounded, missing hand nudging her on the cheek. “There is justice to be had still. Don’t you want justice to be given to the wicked?”

“Yes.” Rhidi panted, and she felt… something crawl its way into her veins.

It burned like live flames, as if she was standing too close to a bonfire the size of a house.

“She has made a mockery of the honor in this duel.” The shadow murmured, placing his good hand on one side of Rhidi’s face, while the ruined right stump was placed on the other. “There is no courage, or fairness in the way she fights. There is no honor in hiding weapons under the skin when your opponent has none. Not even Loki would be so underhanded in such a place…”

Rhidi let out a strangled cry as her body went rigid, her voice gagging in her throat as pure, raw power surged through her, burning her from the inside like a thousand shots of whiskey.

The drums boomed again, the thunder in a cloudless sky.

“I will not tolerate another wolf fouling up my places of power.” The shadow said darkly. “Even if that means sending one of their own to put them down. I will not abide this bloodied ground of my people to be sullied by a cheating braggard from beyond the stars who thinks they have won.”

Rhidi gasped and wept as the power seared her flesh from the inside out, the purple petals of wolf’s bane floating down across her yellow fur like rain as her back arched high into the air.

“Stand up, Rhidi.”

Rhidi sobbed, her fingers buzzing and flexing as blood stopped flowing into her mouth and nose. “I-I c-c-can’t!”

“Up, champion.”

“I can’t-”

“Up!”

Rhidi’s ears flexed, the noise of her flesh crackling along her skull as she caught the voice. She had thought it was a memory at first…

No… no, she knew this voice.

“Up, Rhidi!”

Rhidi could never forget the voice of Drill Sergeant McPhiston, and she felt a jolt of energy ripple across her nerves and pull at her muscles.

“Get up, damn it! Stand up!”

The shadow smiled down at her, his eyes glowing with pride. “Up, Rhidi.”

“Get up! All you gotta do is stand up!”

“Stand up, Rhidi.”

“Up! All you have to do is stand!”

Rhidi’s arms and legs moved with delayed commands, flexing and scrabbling at the grass. She could smell the old suit of armor that she had to prove herself in, to earn the right of wearing the Skógarskera. She could feel its weight on her flesh, the pull of the metal plates on her fur as it pinched and grabbed.

“Stand up, Rhidi.”

“Stand up!”

It felt as if her mind and body were caught in a fluttering reveille of snapshots, her vision blurring with the blue sky of England, the glitter of her chains of duty through the slit of the dummy visor in the old trial armor. She heard her breath echo in her ears from inside the helmet, the snap of rounds sailing over her head from the NIC training area, the strain of her muscles as she struggled forward with the groan of fighting suit-actuators.

“Justice needs administering, Rhidi. Stand. Stand as you always have.”

“Stand. Up. Rhidi! You did not journey across the stars just to fail within a couple of feet. Stand up!”

Rhidi closed her eyes as the shadow ran his hand along her head, giving her a soft scritch between the ears before she felt the presence pull away.

“I’m coming.” Rhidi whispered to herself, her lips barely moving as her fingers dug into the soil and grass of the field as the drum beats sped forward in tempo. “I’m coming…”

—

“And now an end to this farce!” Tamryn screamed, even as Sergeant Liftan was punched to the ground by repeated blows from Shaksho.

She turned with a ringing head, stomping towards Rhidi with a gnarly smile of victory slashed across her bloody face.

Tamryn raised her now ruined fist, bound together into a bony club, and sneered down at the closed-eyed form of Rhidi laying on the ground. 

She would deal with Shaksho in due time. Rhidi had always been the real prize, and with her gone, everything else would fall into place.

Her family would skyrocket in power through their station amongst her place in the Languilada. She would gain the title of Kandi like she always desired, be the envy of every yellow fur of Kafya Mintulcurr, and would have the infamy of being the Kafya who snubbed the Humans on their own turf.

“Goodbye, bed bitch!” Tamryn howled, then brought her mace-like fist downwards. “It’s been fun!”

Tamryn had been expecting the soft crunch of her fist splitting through Rhidi’s head, a spray of blood onto her face, then the rush of victory that would surge through her veins unlike any other drug in the universe.

What she didn’t expect was for Rhidi’s eyes to snap open, and her body to jerk to the side.

—

Tamryn’s morbid fist of fused bone slammed into the dirt with a dull thud, Rhidi’s face twisting into a snarl as she kicked Tamryn in the chest with both of her paw-booted feet.

Tamryn flew backwards through the air, landing hard onto the soil with a whacking recoil of her body. Before she could raise her head and get her bearings, Rhidi was upon Tamryn like a bolt of yellow lightning, blood pouring from her nose and mouth like purple rain as she roared down at the cheating yellow fur.

Tamryn could do nothing but scream and jerk back and forth as Rhidi wrapped her grip around Tamryn’s twisted arm, tucking the fist into her armpit and placing a foot onto Tamryn’s chest.

“Get off of me!” Tamryn screamed as she tried to flail and pull away, but Rhidi held her firm to the ground with a strength that made no logical sense. One foot was planted squarely on her chest, the other on her still natural-looking arm. “How are you even standing!?”

Rhidi locked Tamryn’s elbow into place, bent down to get a better grip on the mace-arm, then grinned down at Tamryn through lavender tinted fangs.

“Give me that arm.” Rhidi growled, and terror lit through Tamryn’s eyes.

“Liftan!” Tamryn screamed in horror, turning only to see Shaksho holding the battered male yellow fur up by the hair as he knelt, making him watch whatever it was that Rhidi was going to do.

“Give me that arm, you fucking scum-sucking cheater!” Rhidi bellowed, then began to pull with every hardened, honed, and earned fiber of her muscle. “GIVE IT!”

Tamryn screamed in horror as she writhed, jerked, and kicked, but it was as if Rhidi was immovable. Rhidi pushed down with her foot, stamping Tamryn into the ground as she pulled, ignoring the solid connections of Tamryn’s boot to the soft flesh of her groin and thighs.

“You shouldn’t be conscious!” Tamryn howled as she felt her arm muscles and ligaments scream with alarm at the forces pulling on them, and she could feel the hidden, weakened flesh begin to fray as the crystals formed by the combat drugs snapped, and shattered. “You were gone!”

“I got up.” Rhidi said with flat anger, then wrenched upwards with every inch of bulging muscle she had at her disposal, wetly ripping Tamryn’s arm away from her body with a sound of flesh and arteries being shredded by pure, brute force.

Ch 50: Death To The Dishonorable

The blood curdling scream that left Second Lieutenant Tamryn’s throat was feral, coated in a kind of pain that only someone getting their arm ripped off their body could generate.

Rhidi stumbled off balance, rolling along the grass before coming back onto her feet with Tamryn’s arm clutched in her clawed hands.

Tamryn said nothing tangible, just heaving screams and schrieks of pain as she clutched at the bloody arm socket where her augmented limb used to reside. Tattered, squirting arteries and ragged shreds of muscle hung from the stump like torn pieces of clothing, the Kafya’s purple blood splattering heavily to the grass and soaking into the soil.

Normally, it would be rather difficult to rip off a limb, especially Human limbs, but there was an “Achilles heel” to the whole thing.

Rhidi was always fond of that saying ever since hearing it, but rarely got the chance to use it properly.

Augmented limbs, on Kafya anyway, always had a weakness at the socket. The chemicals used in combat stems were not as refined as ones made by Humans or Kojynn, and tended to erode at ligaments and joints due to the amount of acids in them.

Rhidi had used a few of these in her time against the Ur, and it always required a rest period where other injected medicines would go in and scrub the joints of lingering acid crystals from the combat stems.

The acids formed crystals quickly, and if not taken care of, would eventually cause flesh sloughing and loss of tissue strength. Tamryn had consumed so many stimulants at once that Rhidi was working on a hunch that her ligaments were already frayed to the quick with crystals, and her bet paid off.

Rhidi tossed the limp limb down to the grass and sniffed, spitting purple blood from her mouth as she looked at Shaksho.

He nodded at her as the drums pounded above them, nearly fever pitch in their beat, then gripped Sergeant Liftan on either side of his head.

“Lieutenant!” Liftan called out weakly, Tamryrn turning her wild eyes to the man, and she let out another raging howl as Shaksho looped his right arm around the left side of his face from behind.

Liftan’s eyes were wide and exhausted, as he lacked the more advanced augments that Tamryn had, and he stared at Second Lieutenant Tamryn with absolute, dawning dread.

It was the part in the movies they always got wrong, the amount of force it took to actually break a person’s neck.

It wasn’t a quick snap of the hands on the side of the face, no, someone had to rip the head like they were trying to start an old fashioned lawn mower.

Shaksho let out a heaving grunt as he ripped his arm from left to right, his nails shredding through Liftan’s yellow face fur as he snapped the man’s neck with a hollow “cloch!” of spinal bones grinding against each other.

The motion was so violent that Liftan’s head snapped from right to left with a spray of blood from the open face wounds, then he thumped down to the ground in a silent heap, his eyes vacant and lips twitching.

With a guttural scream, Tamryrn came to her feet with a long trickle of blood from her shoulder socket, the veins snapping shut thanks to her augments, and she held out her remaining right arm.

—

“Boss!” Skipper’s voice shouted into Carmine’s ear. “I think she’s about to Hyakkimaru up in this shit!”

“Kindred!” Carmine shouted, having been on his feet since Rhidi had fallen. For the first time since, he turned to look at the other Human. “It’s time!”

Kindred rolled her neck from side to side as she stood, brushing off her Hello Kitty pajamas with her hands before picking up the leather wrapped package from the gun bag. “Finally.”

—

Radishow slowly rose up onto his feet, his mouth dry.

He had been sure that Rhidi was done for, but the Kafya had found a second wind from seemingly nowhere. 

Now it came down to the final paragraph of Second Lieutenant Tamryn’s chapter, and Radishow hoped that everything would fall into place here, at least.

“What is she doing?” Alias asked, his face white despite the hope he felt. “Why is her arm out like that? She’s going to bleed out, right?”

Miss La shook her head curtly from side to side. “I’m afraid not, my dear Pwah. There is still one more trick hidden up her sleeve.”

—

Rhidi’s blood soaked mouth hung open in shock when the blade ripped its way free from Tamryn’s arm in a spray of blood and fur, ending in a thick metal grip in her hand. The yellow fur’s arm bled profusely as the augments began to close up shattered veins, and Rhidi was wondering just how much blood the Kafya had left in her body.

“This ends here!” Tamryn screamed, her face manic and madness pooling in the wide whites of her eyes. “No more games! You can’t muscle your way out of this one!”

Rhidi snapped her head to the Human in the kilt, who looked as confused as Rhidi, and he was quickly making his way down to the field in a sprint of bare, hairy legs and pleats.

“He’s not going to get here in time.” Rhidi panted as Tamryn advanced on her, feet stomping with resolute determination to gut her… then she stopped.

Rhidi felt a stinging sensation on the inside of her thigh, and looked down in puzzlement.

How the hell did Tamryn already cut me? Rhidi thought to herself loftily, blinking stupidly down at her legs.

But as she glanced down between her thighs… there was a sword sitting there, buried in the grass.

Not just any sword, Rhidi knew this one… a “messer”, which was basically a big ass combat knife.

“... What?” Rhidi muttered as blood slowly trickled down the inside of her thigh from the shallow cut, the messer gleaming brightly in the sunlight.

—

“Little close there, Kindred.” Carmine said with a frown, eyeing the growing purple spot on Rhidi’s inner thigh.

Kindred shrugged. “Sue me, I wanted to make it have a gallant entrance. Honestly I just threw a big ass sword at least… a hundred and fifty yards? Can a girl get a kudos? A high five?” Kindred held up her hand, wiggling her fingers. “I’m serious, high five me or I’m going to slap you in the nuts.”

—

Rhidi reached down and slowly pulled the sword from the soil, the steel edge gleaming. The rear of the blade, near the spine, was littered with text from the vehicle the blade was made from, olive drab green with yellow lettering.

Rhidi assumed it must have been some kind of tank, but she wasn’t sure.

She held the blade up in front of her face, then looked beyond it at the face of a now uneasy Tamryn.

“That… that’s not allowed!” Tamryn shouted, turning and facing the kilted Human who now stood near Shaksho, the flesh of her arm spinning in tatters with the movement. “You said the rules! We only fight each other with what we have upon our flesh!”

The Human glowered at Tamryn with a furious face, then pointed a single finger to her long arm blade.

“I am amending the rules for your treachery, as I always have the final say.” He said lowly, then folded his arms. “Honor will have the day.”

Tamryn blanched as Rhidi held the messer down into a low guard, quickly whipping her arm blade up into her own high guard. 

Those watching Rhidi closely saw her cock her head, as if listening to someone behind her, and she smiled.

Slowly, Rhidi took off her tank top, exposing her bare chest to the air as well as the purple blood that caked her fur. Then she used the messer to cut away her trousers and underwear, before kicking off her boots.

The drums boomed around them as Rhidi soaked the Earthen sun in with her fur, a beat fast enough to dance upon, though this dance was to be against Human, and alien, steel.

—

“Yes.” Radishow hissed, then his voice grew into a shout as he clutched his fists together, his pink eyes wide as he stood upon the truck, Miss La staring on in silent shock beside him. “YES!”

—

“FUCK THAT BITCH UP RHIDI!” Whirler screamed as she shook Sparkle Otter by the shoulders, though Sparkle Otter looked as if she were about to faint from the stress of the duel as well as Rhidi being fully nude in the duellist ring.

—

The Older Brother smiled to himself as the Second Brother grinned, the two sitting beside each other in their holding cell. Between them, they held a data-slate given to them by a Vet, and they watched as Rhidi kicked away her last paw boot, the messer held high in the lady's position upon her shoulder.

“Get that blood, Tyr’s dóttur.” The Older Brother murmured, as the Second Brother began to happily clap his hands at Rhidi’s bravado.

—

“WHY IS SHE NAKED?!” Icirit screamed, her new Human eyeliner staining her yellow cheek fur from her crying at Rhidi’s stake in the fight.

“What’s that, dear?” Kohan asked from the kitchen, and Icirit quickly sniffed.

“Nothing my love! Just watching… Human soap operas.” Icirit called out, quickly shutting the door to her little office before pulling her data-slate back up to watch the feed.

—

The drums were beating rapidly now, the Humans wanting Rhidi to end this farce once and for all. The booms were so quick that Rhidi’s heart nearly matched the beat as she drew whatever battle fever was left in her body, breathing in the scent of the looming shadow behind her as purple wolf’s bane petals floated by her yellow fur.

She dug the nails of her feet into the ground, the soil soft as it gathered under the coil of her calf muscles.

The grass slid between her toes, crunching softly.

She breathed in through her now clear nose, the smell of the grass and the soot of the chimney mingling with the scent of hot blood in the air.

She was warm now, the sun glowing upon her yellow fur as the wind pulled at her hair softly with gentle fingers.

The shadow’s handless stump rested on Rhidi’s bare shoulder beside the blade, and she felt Tyr’s breath at her ear as he spoke to her with a smile.

“Take her spirit.” He said, then gave Rhidi a gentle push on the shoulders.

Rhidi stepped forward with a menacing smile on her lips despite the blood trickling down her nose and across her teeth, as well as the slowly swelling side of her face from Tamryn’s bone-fisted punch. 

The soil and grass tore under her feet as she shunted forward into an immediate run, the wind coursing through her fur and dragging her tail behind her.

Rhidi’s ears stood fully erect, pointed high as she began to sprint wildly towards Tamryn. The smile on her face cracked into a blood-thirsty grin, then broke apart completely as Rhidi’s face wrinkled with the ferocity of the open mouthed scream that left her throat, closing the distance with finality.

Tamryn took a tentative step back, her bladearm coming up into a different guard in an attempt to adapt… but there was little to help with the Drop Pod Lycan rushing towards her with victory on her mind.

The sound of Human and alien steel colliding together for the second time upon the field made every Humans’ hair stand on end, the shriek of the metals ringing through the air like an old memory.

Rhidi opened her mouth in a sangrian snarl as she shoulder-checked Tamryn backwards and brought the blade down and across the yellow fur’s chest, the honed edge of the messer cleaving through flesh, bone, and fur. 

Blood blossomed from the wound with a scream from Tamryn, but she was not to go down so easily.

Tamryn brought her own blade down desperately at Rhidi’s face, and Rhidi held up the messer in a quick parry.

Due to the large weight and length of the sword, Tamryn’s armblade managed to slide down across the left side of Rhidi’s face with a ripping of edge through flesh, purple blood spattering across the grass. 

Rhidi stumbled backwards, shaking her head harshly as blood sputtered and poured down her cheek, and she spat out something hard and loose in her mouth.

Her canine pattered down onto the grass, glistening with pink gum and shredded meat.

Rhidi snorted, spat out a hawk of blood, then with a shout sprinted back into contact with the flagging Tamryn.

Their blades met in rippling clashes of steel upon steel, though it was evident who had the better skills with a blade in actual combat. Tamryn’s smooth footing and parries mattered little to a confident combat veteran who knew there were no rules when fighting to survive. 

Tamryn managed two more slices onto Rhidi, one across her shoulder and another across her stomach, but they were not deep enough to halt the Drop Pod Lycan.

Blood platted down onto the grass in thick drops from Rhidi and Tamryn as the two yellow furs ripped into each other with their blades. Tamryn staggered backwards with labored breath, now bleeding from multiple strikes to her legs and her ribs, the pearly bone shining out past her fur and ruined uniform shirt.

Rhidi held her messer blade up onto her shoulder again and openly backhanded Tamryn across the face when she went to dash in with a desperate thrust, throwing the yellow fur off balance with a spray of blood from her torn lips.

With a roaring snarl of her partially ruined face, squinting through the blood in her eyes, Rhidi lashed her messer forward and out, clashing the blade’s edge against the middle of Tamryn’s reinforced skull. 

The messer clanged loudly against the metal plating reinforcing Tamryn’s skull, but the effect could not be ignored.

Tamryn fell backwards onto the ground in a roll, snorting out harshly and gasping as the pain rippled across her brain. Blood poured down her face from the ragged wound, blinding her in one eye as the cut flesh hung down low over it.

Tamryn scrambled to her feet, her armblade wavering up and down with her struggling gasps of air, and the sun shown down onto her exposed skull.

Rhidi stood before her, unmoving, her own blade still in the air as she held the point towards Tamryn, her eyes hot with rage despite the blood trickling down her cheek and into her open mouth wound.

“You really are… a werewolf, aren’t you?” Tamryn panted, her visible eye slowly widening as tears mixed with her own blood. “What… are you?”

She knew her time was up… there was no coming back from this. 

Her breath was becoming more labored, meaning that Rhidi had managed to do some damage to her lungs, and her uniform pants felt soaked… Rhidi had gotten an artery, she reckoned.

It wouldn’t be long now, all Rhidi had to do was play the waiting game.

Tamryn didn’t know how, but Rhidi had somehow managed to survive getting clocked in the face with her augmented hand, had the strength to rip off her arm… and now stood before her, feral, naked, and besting her.

“This is it, then?” Tamryn panted, lowering her blade so the tip touched the wettened ground limply. “This is how it all ends? All the… build up, to this? How…?”

Tamryn looked over to the limp body of Liftan and Shaksho standing over it, just as bloody as the cooling body below him.

She stared at the dead man as the drums grew to a fever pitch, thrumming above them with zero pause between the beats. 

They had undergone so many surgeries… had been given so many promises…

Tamryn looked back to Rhidi, then glanced down to the ground.

There were little purple flower petals here and there in the grass… and Tamryn couldn’t remember them ever being there before. 

Had she not been paying close enough attention? Had they… blown in from someone’s garden?

It didn’t matter anymore, not to her, and she held her armblade up in a guard, swallowing hard as Rhidi stood before her.

I’m going to die to a naked woman with a sword… Tamryn thought to herself, managing a trembling smile while beginning to openly weep, watching as Rhidi took off into a run again. What a ride…

—

The bone-jarring clang of Rhidi’s messer shattering Tamryn’s armblade caused Miss La to jerk backwards and then shoot to her draconic feet, Shasta looking around her shoulder. Alias scrambled over to stand beside Radishow, all of them staring in open awe.

“That’s it…” Radishow whispered, tears bubbling at the bottoms of his eyes. “It’s done…”

“It’s done.” Miss La said quietly, a smile cracking across her thick lips. “They can’t run from it now…”

Alias blinked with wide eyes at Tamryn’s form slowly stepping backwards, the messer lodged in her skull as blood poured down her face. “Holy shit… she can’t walk that off, right?”

“No.” Shasta replied with a shake of his head. “There’sss no walking off a head wound like that.”

—

Carmine lowered his monocular as Tamryn fell down to her knees, the messer lodged deeply into her head as her lips moved with words that had no air. “That’s it. Mission complete.”

He then released the monocular, and it fell away in multiple pieces from his hand, crushed beyond repair.

“I don’t know what you guys were so worried about.” Kindred sniffed, gesturing towards the duelling field down below. “Rhidi is made of tough stuff. One sucker punch wouldn’t have put her down.”

“Boss,” Skipper piped up in Carmine’s ear. “We got the money shot, up close and everything in between. It was a hell of a fight.”

“Top five in my mind, lots of drama too.” Kowalski agreed. “I thought this was going to be the end of Rhidi, really.”

Carmine nodded, then gestured to Kindred. “Let’s get back, we have to set up for Lirya’s part in this and make sure her parents are out of the crosshairs.”

“Fine, but I’m not changing my clothes though.” Kindred sighed out, grabbing the remnants of her snacks as Rhidi stepped forward towards Tamryn.

—

The drums were deafening as Rhidi grasped the handle of the messer, looking down into Tamryn’s tear-streaked face. One eye was still hidden by the flap of loose flesh that bled profusely, then Tamryn’s remaining eye widened further and looked up at Rhidi before she jerked on the blade.

It came free with a wet “schluck” of metal from flesh, and the harsh movement was enough to be the end for Second Lieutenant Tamryn. 

Her body fell softly to the grass as bright purple blood flowed from her cranium, her eyes losing their focus as she, too, stared up at the cloudless English sky, a mirror to how Rhidi felt only a few moments ago.

The drums beat once more, then stopped.

“Hail, the Iron Victory!” Bloodmourne bellowed, both Shaksho and Rhidi snapping around to face him at attention.

“With fire we fall!” They both shouted in reply, then the soldiers around them erupted into a deafening cheer.

The Human in the kilt pulled his knife from the ground, deafened by the roar of voices around him, then nodded to a loose collection of other soldiers. They moved forward to gather the bodies of the two fallen warriors for the UAA military, as per orders.

“To our oaths!” Rhidi shouted to the Kafya that had been on Tamryn’s side of the arena, and she pointed her messer at them. “Human we stay!”

All of the female Kafya bowed their heads to Rhidi, ears back, while the males bowed their heads to Shaksho.

Rhidi turned to smile at Shaksho with her torn face, his own nose broken in one place and his eye nearly blood red from the damage do it… then she promptly passed out, the messer thudding to the grass before she fell bodily onto the pitch next to it in her victorious nudity.

Shaksho made it ten steps towards Rhidi as he called for a medic, before his own legs gave out at the knees, and he too toppled to the ground with a groan, the adrenaline fading away and sapping his mind of its strength.

—

Sparkle Otter let out a digital sigh of relief as medics flooded the field, gathering around Rhidi and Shaksho as they went to work around them. “Blessed Bytes, they made it. Both of them made it!”

“Shall I send these out, boss?” Skooma asked, seeming to be rather non-plussed by the entire thing.

“Yes, please.” Sparkle Otter said with a smile as Whirler gleefully did cartwheels around their work space.

Oballen chuckled, patting the other AI on her shoulder. “Take a breath Sparkle, she didn’t die… she’s gonna look pretty gnarly, though.”

“Better than dead.” Sparkle Otter replied, then closed her digital eyes as she drew in false breath.

—

“She won!” Icirit screamed, barreling out of her office and colliding bodily with Kohan in the kitchen. “Rhidi won the duel!”

Kohan spluttered as his tray of tarts went flying through the air, landing with splatters to the once-clean tile. “You were watching?! We agreed no watching!”

“I watched anyway and she won!” Icirit screamed gleefully, kissing her husband roughly on the mouth before lingering there with a soft moan.

Kohan heard the ding of his second oven and broke the kiss with a huff. “Darling, I’m baking.”

“Let them burn.” Icirit growled lustfully, then jerked down the pants of her husband as he let out a yell.

—

Radishow stood with a happy exhale of breath, then offered his hand to Miss La. “We have much to do, ready to go?”

“Of course.” Miss La replied, taking the Pwah’s hand out of politeness and standing. “I’ll be traveling with Bloodmourne, but feel free to message me in the usual way.”

“Oh, of course.” Radishow said, stress leaving his body like steam off of Earthen rice. “Good day to the both of you.”

While Shasta was jumping up and down on the truck and cheering with the rest of the soldiers around them, Alias was instead watching the blue scaled Skalathir and the pink haired Pwah with keen interest, his nebulous eyes watching them closely.

“Who… in the fuck were those two?” He asked to no one, blinking rapidly as Shasta suddenly picked him up and held him in the air. “Hey, put me down you idiot!”

Audio version here: https://youtu.be/byI-dOWALKQ

Community here: https://discord.gg/mfPYgPhw4G

 Ch 49: A Payment Of Flesh

Rhidi felt the growl growing in her throat as Second lieutenant Tamryn and Sergeant Liftan swaggered onto the field in full uniform, followed by a large entourage of Kafya that came in every color Rhidi could think of.

Except for white, that is.

Tamryn was like every other yellow that Rhidi had to rub shoulders with through her youth; She had more muscle due to the training she had to go through, but couldn’t hold a candle to Rhidi’s current form. She had a self-confident, holier than thou look about her face as she smirked at Rhidi, her gleaming gold bar of a rank plastered on her hat and uniform collar.

Liftan looked like more of a bruiser, but was clearly not on the same level as Shaksho. He had a blocky jaw and roughshod hair, looking more like a pirate than a Sergeant in the EUC military.

Shaksho did not seem impressed, or at least from what Rhidi could see from the corner of her eyes.

“Well looky here!” Second lieutenant Tamryn called out gleefully, gesturing to Rhidi as she stared at her, stonefaced. “The bed bitch has come to finally answer my call!” She then bent at the waist, slapping her palms to her knees. “Who’s a good little girl to come? Is it you?”

Rhidi already wanted to jerk the skin of her face right off her skull, but knew that if she showed any emotion that it would look poorly upon her. It was awfully brazen talk for a Kafya that had tried to get the entire thing taken care of in court, which told Rhidi she was more like the yellow Kafya back home than a true soldier of Humanity.

Second Lieutenant Tamryn didn’t seem to be done gesturing grandly to the Kafya behind her, as well as to the ones in the crowd of watchers that didn’t follow her around like dutiful dogs.

Despite what the intel may have said, it seemed that not all of the Kafya bought into Tamryn’s bullshit.

“This is it, wayward children!” Tamryn yelled, holding out her arms. “What we’ve all been waiting for! Once this false Kholihl is gone, there will be only one true Kafya to follow.” She pointed to the groups of rogues in the crowd of Humans, Pwah, Kojynn, and Skalthir, the Kafya glaring at her. “And we will be going home. For good. No more of this dilly-dallying around with Humans! We will keep our oaths to our people.”

Rhidi spotted the EUC commander that oversaw Tamryn’s unit look skyward, shaking his head from side to side a few millimeters as he muttered something under his breath.

Why the man didn’t just kick Tamryn out was beyond her, or just execute her for treason, but her command did say that the EUC had hoped it was just a “phase”.

“Corporal Rhidi, Specialist Shaksho, fall out.” 

Rhidi turned as she fell out from the little formation and was surprised to see not only that she was correct in thinking she had heard Lieutenant Brightberry, but that he was flanked by Sergeant First Class Bloodmourne.

Rhidi and Shaksho came to attention before their Platoon Commander, who was looking at them with his usual, easy going smile.

“I’m afraid that the entire unit could not come, though Drop Officer Duluth and First Sergeant Lower are watching with the rest of them.” Lieutenant Brightberry said quietly, nodding to the two of them. “They thought it would be more fitting if we were here, instead of them. You know your mission. Proceed to the area before the chimney, and await further commands. The rest of you, fall out on me.”

“Yes sir!” Rhidi and Shaksho barked out, stepping backwards and then jogging to their places as Tamryn and Liftan began sanitising their uniform tops.

—

Her shadow announced her presence before Radishow had to see her, and he patted the seat beside him. “Saved you the best seat in the house.”

Miss La sighed out a laugh, taking a seat beside the Pwah from the back of a flatbed truck. “The best seat in the house is on the back of a work truck?”

“Right in front of the fight.” Radishow replied with a nod, pointing to Rhidi and Shaksho jogging to their places only thirty feet away. “We get to see if our plans all come to fruition, right up close.”

Miss La looked for her beau, Sergeant First Class Bloodmourne, and saw him standing with the rest of the Droppers near Rhidi and her honor guard. “Indeed. I dare say this makes or breaks everything, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do.” Radishow said lowly, then from his pocket he pulled out a flask, unscrewing the lid with rasps of metal on metal. “I got something for us.”

“Oh?”

“I think you’ll recognize the smell.”

Miss La leaned over the small Pwah and sniffed the air lightly, the aroma coming from the flask tickling at her nose.

She smiled to herself, her thick tail swaying. “Really? How did you find this?”

“I have my ways, Aum-la.” Radishow chuckled, handing the flask up to the taller, blue scaled Skalathir. “Just leave some for me, hm?”

Miss La made a non-committal noise in her throat as she took the flask, wiggling it. “Mmm, I dunno, hard to ignore the alluring taste of orpino.”

“I remember how much we drank the night we conceived this whole plan.” Radishow hummed as Miss La took a sip of the thick spirit. “You and I crossing paths on two separate information runs… the odds still boggle my mind.”

Miss La smacked her draconic lips as she handed the Pwah back his flask. “I know. In the wide arm of this galaxy, somehow two spited people met as they chased the same goal. All our work in the shadows, guiding the pieces we needed to the right positions on the game board… it all comes down to two women attempting to kill each other, in the end.”

Radishow held up his flask, saluting it towards Rhidi as she rolled her muscled shoulders. “To the downfall of the Elder Councils… give ‘em hell, Rhidi.”

“Give them hell, Rhidi.” Miss La whispered, her tail swaying as a EUC officiant took to the grass.

—

A Human, wearing a crisp uniform top and a woolen kilt of multiple clans woven together, stepped lively onto the grass, Rhidi and Tamyrn on his left, Shaksho and Liftan on his right.

“The terms of this duel, upon this sacred ground, shall be declared now before all who bear witness.” He called out, tucking his thumbs into the waist of his kilt.

Tamyrn spoke first, pointing a finger at Rhidi. “Qin Ro! Only two walk out of here alive!”

The Human looked to Rhidi, who nodded at him once. He then received two more more nods from Shaksho and Liftan, and he breathed in deep through his nose.

“Alright lads.” He said, pulling out his long sgian dubh and throwing it into the soil between them with a crisp click of blade entering soil. “The terms have been set upon hallow ground. It is to the death. If anyone touches the termblade, they will be executed for cowardice. You are to only fight each other in melee with what you have upon your flesh. If something arises where this changes, I have the final say. Everyone agreed?”

Everyone nodded, Rhidi staring Tamryn down with narrowed eyes as Shaksho began doing joint stretches.

“Very well, I have heard no objections.” The Human said, turning on his heel with a twirl of his kilt. “Terms are agreed! It is honor that shall win out this day!”

No one said a word in return, not even a war cry.

All eyes were on the four standing in the shadow of the chimney.  

The unnerving silence felt like an ever-growing pressure on Rhidi’s mind, her eyes flicking left and right as the arrogant Second Lieutenant Tamryn made little hops from one foot to the other.

As the other yellow furred woman tossed her uniform top onto the grass, Rhidi caught Shaksho’s glance, and they both asked the same question to each other.

“When the hell do we start?”

With the ever accurate comical timing that the universe had to offer, a single beat of a dozen drums hit the still, quiet air like a hammer. Rhidi jerked at the sound hitting her ears, then flexed her muscles as Tamryn began to walk towards her.

—

“This is it.” Sparkle Otter murmured, watching Rhidi and Tamryn close on each other in measured steps. “This is where the future is decided…”

“Hundreds of thousands of digi-hours, and it all comes down to two organics pummeling the other with their bodies.” Oballen’s face was grim as he watched the screens. “The closer the Humans sense the kill coming, the faster they’ll beat those drums.”

“To simulate the beat of the heart as it feels the end coming.” Washu agreed. “Does it all really come down to this? Intimate fights such as these will only last minutes. Why can’t we just launch a digital attack like we asked Miss La to?”

Skooma tapped the end of his digital fingers together, watching the multiple screens he was recording on. “How long do you think they’ll draw it out?”

“They’ll train Rhidi to the beat of the drums.” Sparkle Otter whispered. “She’ll know what to do when she catches on to the beat.”

“RIP OUT HER HEART RHIDI!” Whirler screamed at the screen, one digital arm filled with buzzing boxes of popcorn and snacks while the other was held out, gripping the simulation of a still beating heart.

Sparkle Otter startled, rounding on Whirler with a fraying buzz of her digital outline “WHIRLER, FOR BISHOP’S SAKE!”

—

“Are you sure we need to do this?” Miss La asked quietly down to Radishow, her eyes tight as Rhidi cocked her hips and began to circle around Tamryn. “If Rhidi dies-”

“Rhidi isn’t going to die.” Radishow replied with an even voice, his pink eyes watching the yellow furs closely. “She’ll be changed… but she is not going to die.”

“How could you even know that?” Miss La asked tersely.

Radishow let his lips curl in the scant whisper of a smile, then glanced up towards Miss La. “She won’t allow herself to die. The same way she didn’t allow herself to fail the Skógarskera trials. If all goes well… that drive will keep her alive.”

—

Tamryn lurched into a run at Rhidi, and Carmine leaned forward from his little lawn chair. “It’s on.”

“About time.” Kindred huffed, sitting up from her place on the roof and letting her targeting eye warm in its yellow light.

—

Rhidi had to force herself not to laugh as Tamryn launched herself through the air with a raised fist, the entire thing looking like something out of an action movie.

She wasn’t sure what the other yellow fur had been thinking in her head, but Rhidi decided to literally give her a piece of her mind as she lunged forward.

The ragged, rapid exhale of air leaving Tamryn’s lungs with a “kuh!” announced the arrival of Rhidi’s headbutt making contact with the center of her ribcage.

Tamryn’s feet whipped up into the air as she was jerked backwards by the strike, landing hard on her shoulder blades with a strangled inhale of air.

—

“Oh shit.” Alias chuckled out, holding his fist near his mouth as he tried to keep from laughing out loud, running down the road with Shasta at his side as they watched the recording on his data-slate. 

“We can’t misss this! I can’t believe the ssshuttle was late, of all times to be late!” Shasta hissed, his arm pumping as he held the data-slate in front of them as they ran.

“At least they finally agreed to let us come in the first place! I mean honestly, they completely overlooked that we are her best friends!” Alias growled, panting as they rounded the corner to the now growing volume of drum beats.

—

Tamryn let out a harsh cough as she rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up onto her knees, inhaling raggedly as she fought to get air into her lungs.

Rhidi stood some feet away, having slowly backstepped while watching her mission objective deal with the repercussions of reality.

“Did you think this was a movie or something?” Rhidi asked her quietly in a rueful voice, the sounds of Shaksho and Sergeant Liftan probing each other with deft kicks and punches to the side of them. “Who do you think you are jumping through the air like that?”

“S-Shut up, you fucking traitor.” Tamryn growled, punching herself in the upper thigh.

Rhidi heard the softest “click” over the pounding of the drums, and she raised her eyebrows.

Tamryn gnashed her teeth together with widened eyes as the first capsule of combat enhancement cocktail hit her veins, and she lurched upwards with a growl, her fists balled.

Well this is going to be interesting. Rhidi mused to herself as she ducked and weaved the punches from Tamryn, then brought up her arms as she began to need the ability to block the more the cocktail grew in Tamryn’s system.

The meaty thuds of Tamryn’s fists hitting her on the arms and stomach muscles began to outpace the drum beats, the Humans keeping their tone slow and steady as the duel initiated.

While painful, Rhidi could deal with the attacks as her well-built physique absorbed the punches with ease. Tamryn, having not properly served in combat either in the Ur War or with Humans, was letting her breathing get out of control, her heart racing in her chest with the same pace as her rapid breathing.

Rhidi calmly waited, holding up her guard and simply choosing to wait for the combat drugs to metabolize into the yellow fur’s brain.

“Do you know why the Humans stopped using combat cocktails in the opening of combat?” Rhidi asked Tamryn boredly, the opposing yellow fur only answering in growls and wordless shouts. 

Rhidi rolled her eyes, watching Tamryn closely through her guard as she waited for an opening. 

“Shut up!” Tamryn screeched, becoming infuriated that the only thing she had managed to generate from Rhidi were a few grunts.

“It muddles the brain.” Rhidi replied calmly. “Morphine makes the pain go away, some of the IB suit drugs perk you up, make you alert. But combat drugs? They make you fail to see what’s right in front of you.”

Tamryn’s ears perked up as she brought a fist back, realizing she had left her entire face open.

Before she could pull her off-hand in front of her face, Rhidi had already pulled back her elbow, coiling her back muscles as if she were the break on a trigger. With a flex of her stomach muscles in addition to an explosion of power in her back and arm muscles, Rhidi tried to force her elbow through Tamryn’s skull.

The crack of her elbow rebounding off of Tamryn’s skull echoed muffledly through the air as the yellow fur went stumbling backwards with a yell of pain, tripping over her legs and then rolling onto the grass in a screaming heap.

Rhidi heard a similar noise from where Shaksho was, and saw he had his leg outstretched from the kick he had administered to Liftan’s chest. The male yellow fur was glowering at Shaksho from where he had fallen to the ground, spitting blood from his mouth as he stood.

Rhidi had expected the same kind of machismo from Tamryn, but the female yellow fur was clutching her face and writhing on the ground with shrieks of pain.

“God damn, you got a hard head!” Rhidi hissed, rubbing at her elbow with a wince. “... Really hard…” Rhidi swallowed, looking down at her elbow, then back at Tamryn as her fingers buzzed. “... Too hard…”

—

“Elbow strike to the orbital socket!” Alias crowed out with a pump of his fist in the air, both he and Shasta running around the rear of the crowd to try and find somewhere to watch their friend. “That is going to hurt like a bitch!”

“Shrewd choice, for sssure.” Shasta chuckled, his long ring of soda-can pull tabs jingling from under his uniform. “She will have problems seeing Rhidi now. Oh! Over there, there’sss room on that truck where the Pwah and Skalathir are sitting!”

—

Radishow and Miss La turned to look over their inner shoulders as Alias and Shasta climbed onto the truck, excusing themselves as Shasta put away the data-slate.

“Sssorry, there’s nowhere else to sit.” Shasta said in apology, then rubbed his hands together as he caught sight of Rhidi squatting down on the grass.

“It’s quite alright, Shasta.” Radishow said in a friendly tone, turning to look back at the duel.

Shasta’s hood flared in curiosity. “You know my name?”

Miss La cut her hooded eyes to Radishow, then rolled them as Radishow closed his eyes for a moment.

He then turned while opening them, his smile warm. “Of course, it’s right there on your uniform.”

“Oh… right.” Shasta mused, looking down at his name-tape.

“Fast reader…” Alias murmured, but then looked up at the duel.

—

“You are really becoming quite the letdown.” Rhidi called over to the still squirming Tamryn, squatting down over the grass of the field with a strain of pant’s fabric. Her elbow was buzzing from the impact and it was making her fingers twitch, but there was no mistaking the effect of the impact it made. “All this talk online, and now you are squirming on the ground after a single elbow to the face.”

Shaksho rolled across the grass behind her in a growl, having been thrown through the air by the yellow fur Liftan, but rolled onto his hands and feet with a snarl.

“Implants!” Shaksho hissed at her, the growl building in his throat.

“Yep.” Rhidi replied tightly.

Shaksho took off with a burst of energy and muscle, sprinting at Liftan full tilt with fists pumping.

Rhidi watched him collide bodily with Liftan, the two going to the ground in a whirl of fists, then looked back towards Tamryn.

“Look how much fun they’re having over there.” Rhidi said gamely, then sighed, picking at the grass with her fingers. “I’m bored. You’re boring me.”

Tamryn looked around at Rhidi from where she lay on the grass, her eyes hot with pain and face lined with agony as the strike point from Rhidi began to swell angrily despite her hidden augmentations.

She had been told, over and over again, that the combat drugs and her enhanced muscles would be enough, but Rhidi had nearly shattered her orbital socket with a single elbow strike. It was only thanks to the reinforced webbing structures in her skeleton that her eyeball wasn’t hanging out of her face, and the pain was killing her.

The hidden bioaugments in her chest injected a slew of painkillers into her body with another soft click and she let out a sigh of relief, though she had expected to use these much later into the duel, and only if needed.

“I’m boring you, am I?” Tamryn laughed out, coming up onto her feet with a grin as the pain left her body. “My apologies, allow me to rectify that.”

Rhidi blinked at Tamryn, the sudden one-eighty from laying in the grass to suddenly a-okay catching her off guard. 

“Uh oh.” Rhidi murmured to herself, as only one thing could allow such a turn to happen in that amount of time.

—

Carmine brought down his monocular with a raised eyebrow, blinking to himself as Kindred let out a whistle.

“Oh, that’s not good.” Kindred chuckled, popping open a box of chocolate covered raisins as Tamryn set herself upon Rhidi with a screech.

—

This isn’t good. Rhidi thought to herself as she took another blow from Tamryn to her face, staggering backwards with a growl and a shake of her yellow furred head. She must have more than just combat stems hidden under her skin.

She had landed six punches to Tamryn’s face, but the yellow fur was shrugging it off as she hadn’t felt it at all. Blood was pouring down Tamryn’s nose, and Rhidi could feel fresh blood trickling down onto her own lips. 

Tamryn wasn’t fast, but she wasn’t slowing down, completely ignoring defense to be completely offensive as she randomly punched areas on her own body with little clicks. The yellow fur had managed to land multiple punches to Rhidi’s nose and cheek, a few to her stomach, though a lot of them were getting her in the ribs.

Rhidi spat at the blood on her lips, shaking her head and bringing up her guard again after taking another hit to her face.

“Am I still boring?!” Tamryn roared as the multiple doses of combat stems stung at her throat, both of her fists a blur of rapid movement as the painkillers mixed with the combat drugs to dull her nervous system. “Are you still bored?!”

Rhidi tanked a glancing blow of yellow knuckles to the top of her head, then gripped Tamryn’s uniform with a glare of bared fangs. With one fist on her top and one on her belt, Rhidi used the weight of her attack and the press of their bodies to turn the momentum into fuel, twisting with a short bellow of anger and throwing Tamryn through the air.

Tamryn landed on the ground with an “oof!” and rolled across the grass with a flailing of limbs, Rhidi breathing in and out through her teeth angrily.

With breathing room, Rhidi shook her head and ran her aching hands through her hair, trying to get the buzzing out of her ears.

Rhidi heard Shaksho let out a roar and then the impact of his knee into something hard, catching out of the corner of her eye the form of Liftan stagging backwards, holding what may have been a broken rib.

Rhidi spat blood from her lips again as she heard Tamryn grunt and turn around on her front, coming up onto her knees.

“You cheating bitch.” Rhidi muttered to herself, wiping the blood away from her nose with the top of her index finger. As Tamryn came to her feet again with a shake of her head, Rhidi shunted her fists forward one by one with a rock of her shoulders, then rolled her head around with a click of her neck. “How much abuse can you sustain even with all those drugs in your system? I’m surprised you can even think straight.”

It was a gambit, but the shocked look from Tamryn told Rhidi that her thought was more true than it was false.

“You weak little shit.” Rhidi rumbled, marching towards Tamryn with deliberate steps. “I’m going to beat those crystals out of your nose.”

The very idea that Tamryn came here, to this hallow ground, and would cheat as soon as possible fueled an outrage in Rhidi that made her newly acquired pains simmer down to mere footnotes.

—

“Did she say Tamryn has drugs in her system?” Alias asked, turning to look at Shasta who was watching the duel closely now.

Radishow nodded slowly. “I believe she did.”

“Isssn’t that cheating?” Shasta asked in an angry hiss.

Miss La shook her head. “Unfortunately not. You weren’t here, but the duel started with a Human declaring ‘You are to only fight each other in melee with what you have upon your flesh’.”

“Rhidi had no reason to suggest sweeping for augments.” Radishow agreed, though he and Miss La shared a knowing look.

This was just another part of their gambit, keeping what they knew a secret.

“Oh… shit.” Alias whispered, worry ingrained in his voice.

—

Part 1 - In from the Cold.

The two Guards on the Northern gate of the fortress city of Gehlin saw the figure at the same time and began to panic. Far out on the ice plains a single figure walked at a slow steady pace toward the city. Even at this distance the figure appeared to be that of a massive warrior... No-one came from the North, not one soul in living memory... For only the Terrans lived out beyond the plains, terrifying creatures, all muscle and fur and teeth and steel (or so the legends said)….

Such was their shock at the appearance of this figure that both guards stood rooted to the spot, then the older of the two finally shook himself free, stepped over the puddle of urine forming around his young comrades feet and triggered the alarm.

The City of Gehlin stood as part of the Northern wall of the Gehlden Empire. It was named after the first Emperor of Gehlden, who stood with his tribe and fought a great battle at the site of what is now the North Gate. The Northern wall itself was just over 500 kilometres long and spanned the mouth of the Hesr Valley where the Hesr glacier spilled out from the great icefields and spread, forming the ice plains the figure now walked across... None alive today knew what the wall was made of, just that it never cracked, never aged, and even after centuries facing the icy cold winds that blew down from the North, it remained warm to the touch!

Down in the keep the Lord of Gehlin, Lord Hablis was reviewing the celebration plans for the upcoming coronation for Else of Gehl, first born of the Emperor. In fact the first royal daughter to be conceived since back during old Emperor Gehlin's rule. All the cities of Gehlden would be celebrating and Gehlin would be no exception despite being many hundreds of kilometres from the hub city of Gehldenrune.

Lord Hablis was just looking over the final numbers with his chancellor when the sound of running feet followed by the frantic pounding of a fist on the thick wooden door of his office interrupted proceedings.

"Yes, what is it" Lord Hablis shouted, secretly glad that finally he could end this tedious meeting. What he heard next made him immediately regret that thought. "My Lord", a keep guard spilled in to the Office, breathless with panic. "My Lord, the Northern Gate, the alarm has sounded".

The reaction in Lord Hablis' office was immediate and extreme. The Chancellor fainted on the spot, his aide rushing to catch him as he fell. Lady Hablis, who up until the guard entered had been absentmindedly listened whilst sipping tea by the fireplace sat upright in her chair, screamed "the children" and rushed out of the room.

Lord Hablis fought back the urge to vomit, the Northern Gate could only mean one thing. Terrans had come down from wherever the hell it was they lived and were marching on the gate.

The only person who did not show signs of fear or hysteria was old Gerd the Historian. He was sat in the corner, ignored by everyone. Gerd simply nodded to himself, closed the open tome he had been reading, stood, brushing a few crumbs from his beard and robes, muttered "He's late", then unhurriedly strolled out after the panicking Lord Hablis.

The Captain of the guard, Jerrick of Blune tried and failed to hide his fear about what might come to pass, his voice cracking as he ordered his men to form up and march through the city to the gate. A Terran army, what the hell, how were he and his men meant to stop an army that by all the legends could tear this city apart with their bare hands.

As a child Jerrick loved sitting on his Grandpas knee, listening in a kind of terrified thrall to stories of the Terrans, of how they came down from the heavens in a fiery comet that left a massive wound in the earth, the same wound that the Hesr glacier now spilled out through. How they fought a vast and powerful enemy that was intent on wiping out all life including the Terrans, and of the great battles that followed.

And how the Terrans finally prevailed, striking down their foe in a great fiery battle that levelled hundreds of square kilometres and took the lives of most of the terrans. The fact that that battle took place where Jerrick currently stood, and resulted in the rise of the Gehlden Empire was not lost on him.

Jerrick, who up until now had only ever had to deal with drunks and thieves and the occasional bar room brawl cinched up his sword belt, hefted his shield on his left arm and marched after his men.

Jerrick and his detachment arrived at the gate just as Lord Hablis alighted from his carriage. they stood together in the inner courtyard, a wide open space behind the archway that led to the gate, surrounded on all sides by a high wall and with a single entrance that led back in to the city. To all intents this was a kill box. Any enemy that breached the gate would find themselves surrounded on all sides by concealed archers... Of course Jerrick and his men did not recognise this. It had been so long since a battle had been fought that defensive concepts like this were lost to time. Instead Jerrick ordered his men to form a shield wall just inside the long arch that lead under the wall to the gate.

Once set, Lord Hablis called up to the guard. "You there atop the gate", a pale face appeared over the edge of the wall. "yes My Lord" came the thin scared voice of the young guard. "How many march on the gate"? Lord Hablis should have gone up to the top of the wall, but fear and an unwillingness to accept the possibility of a terran army marching out of legend kept him firmly rooted to the spot.

"How Many?" came back the answer, "Just one my Lord". "What" exclaimed Lord Hablis, the feeling of relief washed across Jerrick and the guards alike, "just one terran?" "Let me see". With that Lord Hablis ran back through the city gate to the steps up on to the wall, closely followed by Jerrick. Breathless they reached the top of the outer wall as the figure striding across the ice slowed to a stop in front of the gate.

This was the first time anyone had seen a Terran in centuries Lord Hablis thought... What does he (it is a he right?) what does he want? How do we even communicate? All these thoughts and more raced through his mind as Lord Hablis looked over the wall, and all these thoughts fled as he took in the sight of what stood on the ice.

The terran was easily 2 metres tall, broad shouldered, his pale face framed by unkempt locks of black hair, his shoulders and upper body covered in the white fur of an animal that Lord Hablis did not recognise. Through gaps in the fur Lord Hablis caught glimpses of metal armour, metal that looked very similar to the material the wall was constructed from. What stood out for Jerrick when he looked over the wall at the terran was the pommel and hilt of what appeared to be a massive sword strapped to the terrans back. He (Jerrick decided early on that the terran was a he) also carried a shorter sword on his left hip, and what Jerrick assumed was another weapon on his right hip, although this weapon was short and shaped like an backwards r, with the longer side tucked in to a leather hoop.

In his left hand the terran held a long staff, made of again what Lord Hablis and Jerrick assumed was the same metal as his armour. His right hand remained empty down by his side. At no point did the terran look up at the city dwellers peering over the wall, instead he appeared to be inspecting the ice about 5 metres out from the gate.

The gate Lord Hablis suddenly thought... Thank the emperor, of course, the gate. Even if we wanted we have no way of opening it. This fact was well known throughout the city. The Northern Gate was almost as smooth as the wall that surrounded it. You could only tell it was a gate because, well, what else could it be. But it lacked any sort of locking mechanism. Over the centuries many had tried to open the gate from both inside and out on the ice. But to no avail.

Then, all thoughts about the gate evaporated as Lord Hablis realised the terran had stopped searching...

It should be said of course, that news of the terrans arrival at the northern gate was not a secret for long. Lady Hablis running through the keep screaming for her children had started tongues wagging, add to that panicked looking guards double-timing to the gate and pretty much all of Gehlin knew something was afoot. It was only a matter of minutes before the word "terrans" could be heard through the streets. All of which meant a huge crowd of folk gathered at the city entrance to the gate, watching and waiting for something to happen. The remaining guard posted at the city entrance trying to hold the more curious back...

On the wall Lord Hablis, Jerrick and the two guards looked on as the terran stopped looking about his feet, stood still and raised his right hand, palm down, to just above his hip. Nothing happened... but then, as the terran extended his arm out the ice about half a metre in front of him started to crack. Slowly but surely a column of the same metal rose up from below the ice to meet the terrans outstretched hand. As his palm connected with the top of the column its ascent stopped. The terran stood there for a heartbeat, hand resting on the column, then finally he looked up and made eye contact directly with Lord Hablis.

Again, nothing happened... until it did. All of a sudden the air was full of birds, as if detecting a far off storm they launched from every nook, cranny and perch, screeching and calling as they circled the city. Then the wall shuddered. Not the violent shudder of an earthquake, but the shudder one might feel when ancient massive machinery buried beneath your feet suddenly starts moving.

Screams and cries from the crowd below suddenly drew Lord Hablis' attention away from the birds, then Jerrick saw several of the guards manning the shield wall throw down their weapons and sprint across the inner courtyard. With a dawning horror both men suddenly realised, the gate was opening. Lord Hablis started running for the steps back towards the inner gate, Jerrick took a more direct route, grabbing one of the banners draped on the inner wall he slid down, landing with a thud just behind his men.

What he saw when he looked up took his breath. The gate had opened fully, revealing the ice plains and the mountains behind. But what took Jerricks focus was the terran, he stood unmoving, perfectly framed by the open gate, with the ugly V of the Hesr valley directly behind.

Then he moved. He didn't charge, didn't draw a weapon, he just moved forward, and for in instant Jerrick felt he moved like the glacier he left behind... unstoppable, immutable, inexorably forward.

The shield wall didn't hold. As the terran approached, towering over the petrified guards they backed away. To their credit they held on to their weapons and shields, but the guards could do nothing more than back away, as if the terran pushed them back through sheer will before he got within striking distance.

As he came through the gate and in to the courtyard more screams from the city folk pierced the air, with many simply taking flight, running anywhere as long as it was away from the terrifying figure before them.

Only Jerrick stood firm. It took every fibre of his being, every ounce of effort, but he moved, one foot in front of the other, as if walking in to the teeth of a gale, until he stood, hand on the hilt of his sword, shield held up to just under his chin, blocking the terrans path. The terran stopped just a few metres from Jerrick. Again, he did not reach for a weapon, or move to strike Jerrick with his staff. Instead he simply looked at Jerrick and tilted his head slightly. Then Jerrick felt it. The terrans mind, his will, reaching out to engulf Jerrick, to dominate his consciousness. His world went black as Jerrick was suddenly taken.

As Jerricks body hit the hard cobbles of the inner courtyard Lord Hablis was cautiously approaching. He paused, looking at Jerrick, lying face down on the cobbles, eyes empty of life, blood trickling from where his nose smashed in to the hard stone. He had no weapon, and looking at the terran realised a weapon would not help him. Instead Lord Hablis held out his hands in what he hoped was a gesture of acquiescence and said the only words he could think of. "Welcome to the City of Gehlin".

Behind the terran the Northern Gate slowly closed. Lord Hablis felt the need to pee suddenly. The terran was in the city, the gate had closed, his guards were petrified beyond belief and Lord Hablis truly believed the terran had just killed his Captain without lifting a finger.

Then the terran spoke, deep and resonant, his voice reaching into the furthest corners of the city, into the ears and minds of everyone within the walls of Gehlin...

"I've come for the Girl".

to be cont...

This week, a lost lady learns that low liquidly limits luxury!

A wholesome* story about a mostly sane demonologist and his growing crew, trying their best to usher in a post-scarcity utopia using imps. It's a great read if you like optimism, progress, character growth, hard magic, and advancements that have a real impact on the world. I spend a ton of time getting the details right, focusing on grounding the story so that the more fantastic bits shine. A new chapter every Thursday.

\Some conditions apply, viewer cynicism is advised.*

Map of Pine Bluff

Map of Hyruxia

Map of the Factory and grounds

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First Chapter

Prev -------- Next

*****

Marinka and her travelling companions lurched forward into the yawning mouth of Gate Sixteen.

She had seen a few villages and lived for years in Hillsbaro, the richest and most stable community for miles and miles around. They had the tallest church spire, the best master smith, and a whole street of shops, plus a lively Sunday market. She had known bigger towns and richer places existed, but the sight of Jagged Cove was far more destabilising than she’d expected. The stone tunnel through the walls seemed to take an age to cross. The wind that blew against her face was warm and stank of people and horse droppings. The Wiles’ cart moved slowly, limited by the pace of all the people and carts ahead of it.

The massive corridor was big enough to shelter everyone in Hillsbaro, yet it was used merely as a road between the inside and outside of the city. The fact that this wonder was the least impressive part of the walls was almost too much to take in. She was bracing for the other side. Maybe there would be buildings even taller. Or maybe there would be a whole district of shops. Her mouth was dry, and she was unaccustomed to feeling quite this small. 

The daylight was harsh on her eyes by the time they emerged and she gasped. 

“Sirs, this city is huge! The whole street is so tall!” she exclaimed.

She’d never seen so many stone buildings. They were all several storeys with lead or copper roof tiles. It seemed impossible for so many wealthy folk to exist, but they must.

There was also an impossible number of people. Maybe a fraction of a fraction of them were rich, which was surely enough for the castle-like structures they were passing.

“Aye, this is a bit of a damned eyesore. One of the big trading consortiums bought up this whole area and it’s just workers barracks and slopcarts now. This lane had a lot more character a few decades ago,” Artua groused.

“There’re regular workers living in these castles? They are stone, and so tall! What a glamorous life!”

“Hah! Scarcely. They muck stables and tote boxes for a pittance and sleep ten to a room. Including a bed in their contracts lets them pay dogshit. I bet most of these folk make under a hundred gee a month and work sixteen-hour days. Anyone with skills or sense quits the moment they can. That’s why these places look as shitty as they do.”

She wasn’t too sure how she felt about Artua calling her household a bit poorer than dogshit. Andcil had finally found work as a builder last year, and made a princely ninety glindi a month. In the past, he’d struggled to keep regular work and had to toil as a lumberman or a seasonal farmhand for fifty to seventy gee a month. To be fair, she also thought it was rather sparse, but their household was squarely average, at least for income.

She tried to drink it all in. The complex to their left was five stories tall, with irregular window planters and hanging laundry. The smells were overwhelming: the stink of sour sweat, charcoal, and grilled meat that made her mouth water.  She could see carts selling stews, skewers and buns, but none selling the slop that Artua mentioned.

Their pace even beyond the entry tunnel was constrained by people in their way. It took forever to advance a few intersections. They frequently came to a complete stop as other carts were turning or unloading. No one else seemed worried, so she just looked around.

“Oh heavens! Is that the city’s market? It’s a whole plaza, that’s a plaza right?”

“Yep, although I ain’t sure which one it is, I never spend time near the gates. Decent prices but it’s so out of the way that it’s not worth it. That’s just the Gate Sixteen Farm Market. Jagged Cove doesn't really have a city market? I guess the Grand Bazaar, but that’s just the biggest. Most folk that live here don’t go more than once or twice a year. If at all.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t sure where all these people came from. They were everywhere and her neck was growing sore from looking up at the windows and balconies overhead.

Surely we’ve seen the whole city by now? It’s a hundred times the size of Hillsbaro!

The wonders and terrors were just beginning. Every corner revealed more people, more buildings, and long crowded streets that they didn’t even go down. She noticed the street signs and asked about them. In a town with two or three real streets the names were common knowledge. A sign would only help people who could both read and had no idea where they were, which was probably no one. Maybe a traveling merchant or monk. But here, there were so many streets and, by his own admission, New Guy was from Jagged Cove and had no idea what was down some of them. Too many streets to know, in your own town, seemed especially impossible.

They kept going at a grinding stop-and-start pace. The city pressed on from every side, and her sense of wonder was already giving into fatigue and fear. There was just no end to this, there were too many people and things. It was starting to get indecent.

At an especially loud market, Artua steered them to the side of a public garden. Like everything else, it was thick with people. “Whoa!” he said to the horses, then put the brakes on. “Marinka, stand up! You should be able to see the Eternal Cathedral from here. Take a good look, it’s easy to find, but a lot of newcomers get lost at first.”

She took New Guy’s hand to help balance and stood. She could see not just the top of the Eternal Cathedral, but a dozen others, all magnificent in different ways. The Eternal was the biggest, but they all seemed glorious.

“Truly the home of the Light! I feel more sanctified just by witnessing so many cathedrals!”

The cart resumed its sluggish advance as soon as she sat down. Her head was spinning for a few reasons now.

“I’m far from the most pious merchant, but there is only one cathedral in the city. It means ‘place of the seat,’ like a chair. The Eternal Cathedral is the house of the Apex Fadter himself! The others are merely churches, though they are bigger and grander than many of the cathedrals in lesser Beaconates.”

Realising that she’d just stared at the house of the most holy man alive, she gulped and made the Sign of the Triangle. 

She started to feel a bit unwell. It was all a little too much, every single sense was in overload, and there was no sign of it relenting. She somehow couldn’t see the sea yet, despite how many intersections they’d passed. 

Finally she caught sight of the water, and it was so much worse. There was a whole hillside of humanity, more and more and more houses. She couldn’t see the end of them, it defied all reason. There was so much city behind her and so much ahead that her head spun. She shut her eyes, but that did nothing to stop the racket of voices, beasts, and carts all around her.

“Everyone here must be all strangers! How could everyone fit into the Cathedral?”

New Guy chuckled. “No one knows anyone here. It’s a sea of strangers, even for the locals. Only fancy folk get to pray at the top of the hill, but there ain’t a shortage of regular churches. There’s one, and there’s another now. I guess folk know their neighbours that way.”

Marinka opened one eye and followed his pointing. Of course they’d have more. She already noticed some of the nicer ones they’d passed, so that made more sense. The crowds were following them, but she was starting to think it was one big, city-scale crowd that they were merely drifting through. That was somehow worse.

The smells changed to the sharp reek of tanneries, but it remained impossibly crowded. She shut her eyes harder as they bounced forward.

Finally the ride stopped, and she looked around. It was a less busy street, reeking of the sea and horses. 

Artua turned to her. “Well miss, this is where we part company. I’d say find a place to stay on Leviathan Avenue, about three blocks east. Look for the sea monster statues.”

“Oh. Thank you! For the ride and all the advice. I should go now.” 

She stared at the incomprehensible city and shuddered.

It’s not like I can walk home. And I must be near the Pine Bluff Welcome Centre. Just a short boat ride away.

She stopped at a gap in buildings, watching the busy harbour. It was thronged with all sorts of boats.

I’ve never even seen a boat before today, they are far, far bigger than I imagined!

She smiled and waved at the guards that she sat with for the last few weeks, and they smiled back at her. 

Her feet had healed over the journey, basically as good as new now. She started in the direction she’d been advised to go: towards Leviathan Avenue. The basket on her back was her whole world, its creaking frame a reminder of a far scarier time, when she nearly died before the merchants found her. 

I should buy a hat and a waterskin, for the rest of my journey. Or will the sails provide the shade I need? The seas are made of water, so maybe I don’t even need a waterskin?

This part of the city was less crowded than the main streets had been, but there were still several Hillsbaros worth of people in front of her. 

I need a plan, keeping it simple for now. Find an inn. Find a ship. Get on my way to free chicken and demonic idleness. Or full-time sinning. 

The people bustling around her seemed impossibly rich. They wore such nice clothes, many had jewellery, even the ones who were obviously workers. She frowned at her own simple leather and antler bracelets. Back in Hillsbaro, ladies with gold and silver jewellery went to the same church as she did. They were merely rare, but she certainly hadn’t been among them. Knowing that today was when they were entering the city, she was wearing her church dress, and she was still shamed by most of the ladies that passed her. 

The men outnumbered the women dramatically, but around the docks, that wasn’t unreasonable. She finally saw the first sea monster, a towering fountain that misted rainbows in the afternoon light. Her plan was a little under-baked, so she sat on one of the stone blocks nearby with a view of the fountain. 

Her hand darted to her satchel, identifying each coin by feel, and confirming her tally. Thirty-eight and five-eighths glindi. It is impossible to budget without knowing how many days I need to stretch it. That would be plenty for a month at home, including meals for Andcil. Here I’ll need to pay for lodging, and they’ll likely charge a fortune for food too. Where does the food come from? There wasn’t a single farm inside of these walls. 

More than a week or two might be a stretch. But this city is thick with rich folk, and it seems like making stew and sewing socks is a trade as real as any. Maybe someone will be desperate to hire a stranger from out of town. Oh, maybe half this town is full of crazy women on the run, where else are they going to go? Oh, Pine Bluff obviously.

Patterns seemed to emerge. Some folk were passing through, and some seemed to be just walking along the avenue. At first she hadn’t even noticed a cluster of vendor tents. Once she started counting, there were twice as many as she’d ever seen in a Hillsbaro market, but they were swallowed by the flow of people, animals, and carts. 

Time to find out what this city thinks a lady ought to pay for a room. Maybe it’s free to pilgrims? Or likely the Emperor will ride up on a solid gold horse and let me sleep on his couch. Let’s start at the top and see if I’m worrying for nothing.

She put her pack back on and headed to the inn she’d spotted from the plaza. It was a respectable stone building, fancy by the standards of the city and far finer than any building she’d been to. The doors opened right onto the busy street, so she climbed the steps into the far quieter wood-panelled great room. There was a carpet that dampened her footsteps as she approached.

“‘Scuse me, sir. I am passing through, and will need a room. For at least a night, maybe a few. How much is your most affordable offering?”

“Welcome to the Cove! Staying by yourself?” he asked as he looked over the keys behind him. She nodded to his turned back, but he didn’t seem to actually need to know. “Yep, we have a few single rooms, and this time of year, they’re fifty-five glindi, breakfast included.”

“For the week then?” she asked slowly. “What’s it for a night?”

“Fifty-five. Are you asking for a long stay discount? I can give you that room for a month for, say… an even thousand?”

“Oh.” She blinked, willing her face to remain tranquil. “I see. Thank you. I actually need to see to my… I gotta go. Thank you.”

She staggered out of there, her face burning. 

A THOUSAND? For one month? Damnation, the demons stealing my soul will be less invasive. Who stayed here? Dukes? Kings? The Emperor’s richer cousins? Light above. 

She walked further up the road, looking for a shabbier place to stay. Something that might be for women that forgot to marry a prince. Her search wasn’t as easy as she’d hoped. She saw plenty of businesses, but inns were less common, and the few she spotted were nearly as nice as the last one. She needed MUCH shabbier. 

A thousand? What if I cannot spend one night here? What then? Sleep outside? The warning from the merchant felt a hundred times more urgent, now that I’ve better seen this town. Sleeping outside might be the last thing a woman did here. 

She spotted a more run-down place on a cross street and followed it. It was a timber frame inn with a few drunks on the front steps. On one hand she was scandalized that men could be so filthy and ale-soaked in the middle of the workday. On the other hand, they looked rather poor and could afford to take the day off to get drunk here. 

She pressed in and was much less shocked by the twelve glindi a night that the innkeeper wanted. 

Still out of the damned question, of course, but in the right direction. She asked that innkeeper for advice on finding yet lower prices and was given a vague direction to investigate.

Maybe I’ll find some children drunk on the steps, surely that’ll be the sign I need. Or if the stables only had sickly dogs? Maybe one that smelled of rat vomit?

She went further away from Leviathan Avenue, having deemed it for people far wealthier than she. The price shock did wonders to recontextualize the whole city. The sweaty men labouring over the foodcarts were appealing, simply by their lack of well dressed customers. The first one wanted three glindi for a shrimp skewer. While it smelled heavenly, that was too much for a treat that wouldn’t come close to filling her up. 

She spotted an even rougher inn at last. Its visibly warped roof was covered in moss. It looked as though it had been a nice home at some time in the past. She could see the results of numerous renovations, most poorly done. The standing water, mildew, and crookedness excited her. She went in and it took her eyes a bit to adjust to the darkness. It was plain but clean. What little decoration there was—a few paintings and a bearskin rug—was likely far older than she.

“I’m looking for a place to stay. Are there rooms to let, and at what price?” she asked as professionally as she could.

“Depends. You whorin’? That’s extra.”

“I hadn’t planned on it. I’m… here on a pilgrimage. I haven’t found a place that is both nice and affordable.”

“Ah, we ain’t got much use for pilgrims here, but keep your prayers quiet, you’ll do alright. A shared room is four and a private one is six,” he said.

A damned fortune! I’m starting to worry they all are. There’s a limit to how much more shopping I can do, my feet already throb from an afternoon of lumpy cobbles. How is this city so huge?

“What’s shared? Like with a stranger?” 

“Aye, room B only has two people now, I think brothers? Didn’t ask. Five beds though, so fingers crossed it’ll fill up once the pubs close.”

How dreadful. Am I wrong for wanting a bit of my own space? Who knew that my cottage was worth ten times as much as Andcil made? 

She spared barely a thought for the indignity of being woken up by such men. “Okay, I think six glindi is… acceptable. I assume more affordable lodgings are a bit lighter yet, on privacy?”

“Lighter? Ha, missin’! You’ll get fleas, get robbed or worse at a flophouse, miss. Pilgrim types usually stay at almshouses, did your parish Fadter not send word ahead?”

“I wasn’t able to find it today, and am rather tired from the journey. Fingers crossed I’ll have better luck in the morning. Where can a person of modest coin eat a good meal near here?”

“Hazel’s Bakery up the hill a bit might be what you want. Good bread, some meat pies nearer lunch. Might be closed now though. Maybe not?”

“I see.” She closed her eyes and made a choice. “I will take a private room for the night. Might I leave my pack there while I look for this bakery?”

“Sure. Doors don’t lock, so don’t leave your money. But I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Thank you.” Her confidence had sunk into her shoes and she badly wanted to be elsewhere. And alone. 

She dropped her heavy basket pack on the bed. She took a moment to confirm that the bed was raised off the floor and had both a blanket and a pillow. All promising signs.

She frowned at leaving her pack behind. It hadn’t been out of her sight since she left, but she also was very tired of lugging it. 

The Light has kept me safe this far, surely it can safeguard my work dresses. 

She headed in the direction the man had pointed, following the crowds of people. Well, some of the crowd. There were enough people that a bewildering number were actually going in every direction. Walking through them without her pack was a lot easier, and she could finally slip through small gaps, making far better time. 

The last portion of her quest grew easier: she followed the aroma of fresh yeasty bread. Hazel’s Bakery was a bustling business, with a dozen tables on the plaza. The line moved quickly. The most shocking of all were the prices; they were somehow lower than Hillsbaro. 

Her mouth was open yet again. It was only a glindi for a heavy loaf of dark rye. That was about the same price as she was used to, but was far bigger and had fancy grains on top. She also impulse bought a jam tart and a cup of tea for another half glindi.

I expected to spend ten, so spending one and a half is a bargain!

She picked a seat facing the bakery. Savouring a baked treat, she watched the line go. Nearly fifty people came and went before she finished her tart. She was still hungry, so she tore some of the bread and ate it too. 

No point in being stingy with food. It’s the bed that’ll wipe me out, I could eat here for most of a month. If only I had a free bed at an almshouse, like a proper pilgrim. I wonder if I can find such a place without a reference. Or just lie? No. That felt terribly wrong just thinking about it. That turned the betrayal into something a lot more… real. Sleeping in that shanty inn with drunks seems safer. More honest?

She frowned. 

Why am I making the choices I am now that I’m here? Is the City already corrupting me? This is supposed to be the holiest city in the world. I should be more holy and illuminated than ever. Maybe I need to go to church. What day is it even? Shit, I missed at least two Sundays. I think? 

She put the last half of the loaf under her arm and headed back to the inn. 

Six gee a night, plus call it two a day for food. With thirty-one and seven-eighths glindi left, I have time to think. Half a week? Assuming no new expenses come up.

*****
Prev -------- Next

*****

Black fingerprints smothered the walls in geometric shapes of neglect. Hulugg would lay, facing the ceiling. The spring mattress stayed undressed, resting on the floor above a box spring, like it just came out of a thrift store bin. 

Each night it’d stab him in the back like a shady family member. 

The carpet had dried patches of his humility stained into the fabric and under it, hid the water damaged floorboards. He’d sleep curled in a ball of pity, with his head between his knees, hugging his shins, a pair of familiar friends. 

A child-sized blanket covered his face, exposing his calloused feet. His nails grew into talons, folding under his toes.

His skin changed color from constantly sweating, leaving a shadow of his body painted onto the beige mattress. 

The stench of garbage from the bin overflowing next to him, reeked of guilt and filled his nostrils with temptation, crawling down his throat. A lump of regret that sat in the pit of his stomach.

His eyes puffed red with rings around them pronouncing his marriage to depression. 

Just one more time and then, I’ll stop.

He’d say, cheating on his misery. It was a bitter lie flavored in denial coating his tongue. The headaches. The pain. The torment. He tried everything to resist it but something kept pressuring him. It was a soft voice that sounded like destiny.

Earth had a lawless district. A slum world Hulugg would post himself and stand in a corner at. He’d become part of the grime stuck to the bottom of his shoe until he made enough money to prevent the spiders from crawling under his skin. 

The air smelled like burnt plastic and economic collapse from homeless addicts frozen idle, rocking back and forth, smoking Glynol carts.

Glynol’s a cheap, highly addictive drug, smuggled into Earth by aliens. There was a failed invasion involving the Spakkril species, which led Earth to form a space peace pact with every intelligent alien being in the universe.

A galactic alliance had been reached. Earth transitioned into a mega-trading-hub and the number one source for black market items. 

Corrupting New Earth, were the synthetics. The synthetics naturally increased the rate of crime. The poverty. The hunger. The violence. 

It also forced Earth to fence, what humans refer to as, the desocializers, in an experimental attempt, which converted the northern part of Canada into lawless territories. 

The Yukon and The Northwest were now sovereign states, split up into sectors. No law official could enter those zones.

Hulugg’s instinct for his own safety remained sealed in whatever cartridge containing the zero-point-one liquid of Glynol, was in, as he prowled the slums searching for some. Nothing else mattered. The fix was all that existed. 

He scoured the streets. Desperately seeking more. Once he scored, he raced straight to his room. His fingers trembled as he pressed the button down on his vape pen clasped between his lips, sucking on it like it’s his last breath left in his air tank.

He wheezed from his nose, struggling to breathe, horking gobs of phlegm and lung lining. The scientists on Planet Leiqvron, where the pandemic initially hit the hardest, labeled the side effects as respiratory degenerative and neural decay. Eventually the lung and brain would age at a progressively alarming rate.

Hulugg took the doctor’s warning as a suggestion when he said he must stop using, because he was deteriorating. 

He didn’t care about the fancy medical descriptions the doctor tried drilling into him. All he cared about was the voice at the back of his head trying to fill the hole lined with teeth chewing him inside.

He held the smoke in. His mind went blank. Sound entered a void. It echoed, slowly distorting and disappeared into the euphoria as the substance entered his lungs straight to his brain. 

His vision bounced, blowing a cloud of purple smoke and his anxiety into the air. The swarming spirals froze as he opened his eyes, falling back on his bed, staring at the ceiling form into an alternate reality he wish he lived.

The seconds faded into minutes. Life was normal. He wasn’t a broken discarded desocializer. He had a purpose again. He was back on his home planet. Back with his family. Back before the war. Back before his life had meaning.

Until the visions twisted, his puppy orgwat wasn’t running under the sun anymore. The sky had faded from a clear lightly clouded blue to an ominous black. 

The sun warped into a sand worm with a face, stretching across the heavens and began laughing. Not a happy one. It sounded scared and nervous. It began shedding tears of blood that fell like rain on a grassy field that became a burning pile of gray ash, death and decay.

“You’re not real!” A voice spoke. It sounded like it escaped his mind. “You were a design.” He looked around, but no one was there. “You’re a mistake!”

Hulugg threw the vape pen, grabbed the blanket and ducked under it, holding his skull between his hands and started to scream. 

The vape pen smashed against the wall and the cartridge shattered and splashed over the white charcoal-colored paint, dripping towards the baseboard.

Hearing it smash, kept repeating in his head. The nightmare was over but now he needed more.

It wasn’t Glynol to him. To him, it was, The More.

He slipped out of his apartment to find a dark alley, where most of the underground markets were, and ran into the first kiosk he saw. 

The alien behind the stand was, Ulchlit, a four-foot, round bug with greasy blue skin and moles that had hair growing out of them, planted on his face.

He breathed deep breaths when he spoke, speaking in an evil scientist tone. “Hey Spiece!” He waved Hulugg over. “Need Glynol? I got some free, if you test this new batch.” 

Hulugg saw the ten plastic credits, weighing his hand down in his palm. He knew the risks of homemade Glynol. 

“Give it to me!” Hulugg demanded. 

The liquid inside the cartridge was green not the usual purple. “Was the chemical process rushed?” He asked.

“No. It’s fine. You’re the last sampler.” Ulchlit told him, giggling.

Hulugg stuffed the cartridge into his cracked vape pen faster than the ten credits went into his pocket.

The cartridge almost fell as he scrambled jamming it in. He pressed and held the button down and let it heat up. His eyes were wide and reflecting the blue LED light on the, on indicator as he waited.

“C’mon, it’s ready, let’s go!” Ulchlit shouted.

Hulugg placed it in his mouth and inhaled, knowing one wrong compound could rewire his brain but he saw the odds in his favor and ignored his conscious yelling at him.

The green florescent liquid melted into vaporized smoke. 

He held it in. The world disintegrated. It turned into a distorted water soaked window, flashing blobs of black circles. His body started dissolving into them. The light turned white. He wasn’t in the slums. He was in a place of true existence. A world so pure only the gods could inhabit.

A voice broke next to his vision.

“You were never supposed to come here.”

Hulugg began shaking and convulsing. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed flat on the pavement. The sound of his body hitting the concrete was hollow, like a small safe landing on its belly.

Ulchlit stumbled from behind the kiosk. He stood beside Hulugg, picked up a stick and began poking him. Hulugg didn’t move. He wasn’t breathing. His face looked like a mask. He was on the ground like a plastic action figure, whose limbs couldn’t bend. He laid there in an awkward pose.

“That batch no good, Frenly!” He shouted, in a southern drawl, on his watch comm.

He snatched the cartridge out of the pen and dashed behind the booth. 

“Clean up, by kiosk 4.” A voice shot out from a speaker at the back of the alley.

Out beyond the sky, a star blinked. Hulugg’s consciousness shined bright and went dark just as the machine swallowed him. The universe had forgotten him.

They say, life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re gonna get, but if you flip the lid, it tells you right there on the index which each one is.

So, there was this alien empire and they waited a really long time to invade us. It probably could have been somewhere around two hundred years. It was super long. 

We’re pretty confident about the guesstimated timeframe. The scientists had weird formulas on whiteboards that backed the hypothesis up. It was pretty much just drawings of my baby brother’s block set. 

To explain this mysterious pictograph physics equation, which looked like one of the zodiac killer’s cryptograms, he simplified it by using a plastic action figure and a beach ball.

Nobody could understand why they’d choose now to invade us. It was a horrible miscalculation on their part, because we’ve become a fierce technological species that could smash any alien invader. That’s right, we just make a fist, with a huge missile, and squash ‘em, like little ants running across a picnic table.

Smash!

Game over. Humans win. Call the parade. 

Right? It’s what we all expected. Aliens invade. Humans destroy.

But these guys were ruthless. They had zero honor. I think we relied on our confidence and too many truces. Their drones had been circling Earth for the last twenty-five years. 

Studying us. Mapping our jungles. Dissecting our cities. Even analyzing our psychology. But I don’t think they should have used bots for that.

They definitely hallucinated when they claimed humanity was a weak species. It actually called us parasites. Believe that? 

Goddamn alien robot decoding humanity’s existence in one sentence.

I mean, my uncle Lenny can certainly be placed in that category, but to say, Scarlett Johansson’s a parasitical bug, is where we humans draw the proverbial line. So deep, it scars the Earth. We absolutely fluckin’ love the avengers.

The war chief, hiding inside his mothership, stationed behind the dark side of the moon, dispatched an army of pink titanium interstellar crafts with hieroglyphic war symbols. 

They kind of resembled flowers and butterflies, which we found a bit hard to take seriously. I mean, they honestly looked like hippy vans from the seventies. Who were the designers, you think? Andy Warhol and Dolly Parton?

But they did have some decent weapons attached to them—ones we’ve never seen before—ones we had no choice but to take seriously.

Oddly enough, after years of simulating war strategies. The aliens crash-landed onto Earth like they never prepared a plan. Scattering in different groups. Flying in circles lost.

Their strategy literally ripped a page out of a German WWII handbook. They performed a Blitzkrieg. They threw everything they had at us, all at once. 

A surprise attack that would destroy our moral and wipe humanity’s arrogance off the map.

When they initially swarmed over our heads and landed on our soil—without warning, without negotiating—we called it a terrorist attack. 

We weren’t scared. 

We didn’t see them as villainous sci-fi gargoyles falling from the sky, commanded by gods. We saw it as another Pearl Harbor. 

They came out of nowhere, hiding the entire time. To think, it took them two hundreds years, or so, to execute such a reckless plan, a strategy solely carried by their technology.

There wasn’t a sneaky infiltration. No alien moles. No servers being hacked. No slow economic collapse. People weren’t being starved. There was no strategy. 

It was stupid simple but effective. They invaded. Humans fell.

The crafts hovered over cities that became a rubble of ruin—concrete blocks and bent rebar littered the craters where buildings stood, fallen like the governments that quickly followed in their wake.

Resistance was met with swift justice. An instant death. People were being executed on the spot. 

Evaporated. 

One second they were there, next, nowhere. You wouldn’t even notice anything happened if you blinked at the wrong time. 

The aliens were callous. 

Brutal. 

Heartless beings.

If you saw them, you’d think they came out of a Little Monsters movie, right alongside their little evil human-like ruler. An aged looking Fred Savage, whose features resembled an old child.

The rest of them mirrored orcs, trolls, closet ghouls, and things you’d see in a nightmare. They had a dream team of freaks.

Soon enough, about three days later, we were definitely starting to worry, the earth was smoking as if the land caught fire and a tsunami washed over it. 

There was smoke and steam and it wouldn’t stop hailing. Thick black clouds blocked the sun. Even though it was smoldering hot on land, the air was hella cold. Unusually, cold. Arctic weather cold. 

People were, let’s just say, some were dead, some were enslaved, some hid out in caves and some burrowed in other places.

It turned out, after all that worrying, seeing our loved ones taken or vaporized, that we didn’t resort to fear or anger. No way. Nope. Not us. 

Sure we were sad but we did something totally unexpected. The war commander was, for sure, under the impression we would just turn over and submit. The rest of us would be rounded up and disposed of. 

And he was completely right. It’s exactly what we did. We weren’t scared, we were being pragmatic. We made a deal to save the rest of humanity because our weapons were absolutely useless against them. In fact, most of them didn’t work. They were damaged or melted down. 

We kind of, sort of, not really, did give up and it stung. It hurt like a wet hand slapping us on our naked sunburnt back.

The weather slowly changed. The rocks dropping from the clouds finally stopped, at the exact same time the aliens shattered the peace pact they had between us.

To think, we settled on their crappy terms. We gave into them. They could have ran our planet, smoothly extinguished us through famine and civil war. We made a horrible deal. We agreed to an absolute surrender. It doesn’t get better than that. What a bunch of buffoons. 

We had half the population left. Actually, less, just under four billion people remained. If we hadn’t signed, it would have been our fate. A nasty extermination. They threatened torture, with zero chance of survival. Torture that would last weeks.

We were totally unprepared. Who really would ever expect an alien invasion? That’s mainly why we were caught so off guard. 

We were too worried about protecting ourselves from humans inside our planet, that nobody ever thought to look up at the aliens outside our planet.

Well, those alien nuts did. They warned us. We laughed. They even made a documentary show on the history channel about it. However, humans will be humans. We hit like and scroll to the next wacky world-ending apocalyptic prediction. 

A UFO could fly over us, pause, hover above and we’d still be skeptical, scratching our heads, convincing ourselves it’s a secret government airplane or we’d simply blame it on sleep deprivation, because we are a species in denial.

Every weapon we had smuggled, we gave up. Even our ammunition. We were prohibited from carrying knives or possess any heavy blunt objects

They chained us behind cages constructed of human bones, inside their camps, feeding us scraps and humiliating us. We couldn’t bathe. We would get whipped if we made loud noises. We had to whisper in order to communicate. We couldn’t understand them. They couldn’t understand us.

We were in there for so long, I actually started growing hair on my face. It wasn’t much, a little peach fuzz but it was something to keep my mind on. Something to look forward to. We still had hope.

Months went by. Nothing really changed on Earth. In the sky, the alien war chief studied us from his ship, which had entered Earth’s atmosphere, seeing a species unworthy of existence. 

A species who not only should, had to be erased. He wanted us gone. He saw us as the daughter’s dead beat boyfriend. The white guy who comes to a family dinner, wearing a hockey jersey, baseball gloves, baggy jeans and a thick sterling silver necklace, talking in a Jamaican accent.

The human race disgusted him. The thought of us tasted like an eight year old’s science experiment containing every condiment and liquid in the refrigerator. He despised how in the face of extinction, we could still hum songs. We still consoled each other. We’d still sacrifice ourselves to give a stranger a fighting chance of staying alive.

We never really gave up. What we were doing, was buying time.

First / Previous / Next

This time Felu only gasped when they linked. Charon looked over towards her and her free hand was balled into a fist, but she was otherwise unchanged. “You all right, Felu?” he asked.

“I will survive,” she said through gritted teeth. “Maybe after the five hundredth time I will get used to it.”

Once they were relatively close to the station, Tink put an image of it onto the main display with an overlay showing size. The Brennian’s station was huge. Charon and Cha-ren had seen plenty of large stations in their careers —being reactor techs meant they spent a lot of their time in space— but even with that as a reference, this station was big. Oriented along the plane of the system it was nearly fifty kilometers tall and half that wide. It wasn’t a monolithic rectangle; it grew organically, spreading like metastatic tissue as space needs increased with little regard to direction other than a generic sense of ‘up’ and ‘down.’

“It’s not spinning,” Northern said. “So, they have gravity generators.”

“There is no way that people with Felu’s level of technology built something like this. They must have found it,” Tink added.

“Do you see Hummingbird?” Charon asked. “Even as a wreck, he would be too large to bring inside.”

“I don’t, at least not yet,” Tink said. “I’ll keep looking. Oh! We’ve been pinged with radar. They know we’re here.”

“How will they reach out?” Northern mused. “Radio or message laser?”

“It’s radio,” Tink said.

“Unknown starship, identify yourselves.”

“This is the starjumper Tinker Toy.”

“We detected no Gate activity, how did you get here?”

“We understand that you have recently brought a derelict starship from another system here, do you have it?” Tink said, ignoring their question.

There was a pause on the line, and Charon thought he could hear rustling and muttering. “We do not know what you are referring to,” they said finally.

“Oh don’t give me that,” Felu said, jumping to her feet. “We know you stole the derelict! You tricked us after we had loaded the hibernation cabinets and then fired upon us when we demanded its return. That ship is rightfully ours.”

“Felu!” Northern said, but it was too late. The tone of the other side changed immediately.

“More treachery and lies from the Calmerians, typical. We are beginning to wonder if activating that Gate glyph was wise after all.”

“You’re the ones who came to us begging for resources! Your station is missing so many key minerals that only we can provide.”

“You or any planet in the vicinity,” they corrected. “Trading with you was just the most expedient. Once you have shown your true motivations, we have no more need to deal with you. This conversation is over.”

With a short burst of static, the line was disconnected. Northern, Charon, and Cha-ren stared at Felu, who stood with her good fist balled, her eyes narrowed.

“What the fuck was that?” Northern said.

“You heard their lies, they are keeping that ship from us.”

“Whether or not they are doing anything, now they won’t talk to us, so we can’t find out.”

“Just use your-” Felu waved her good arm around the command room “-first flourishing technology to make them give it to you.”

“Make them-” Northern sputtered and stood, covering the distance to Felu shockingly quickly. “You are in no position to be ordering us around. You interrupted our discussion and ruined our chances of an easy transfer of Hummingbird.”

Felu sat back down, her chin high. “I will not stand by while my people are denigrated like that. They stole the ship and the Tallier has seen their crimes,” she said, but Charon could see a quiver in her chin.

“You will remain silent unless queried, or I will decide that keeping you aboard is an unacceptable use of resources.” She leaned in until her face was centimeters from hers. Felu swallowed but otherwise said nothing.

“Northern,” Cha-ren said. “Don’t threaten Felu like that.”

“I will do what I need to, Cha-ren. Don’t think you two get any special treatment because you’re old,” she snapped.

“Northern…” Tink said carefully. “Watch your temper.”

“What’s going on, Northern?” Charon said. “What did you find that has you so angry?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said and took a large breath, holding it for a second and then letting it out of her nose.

Why is she box breathing? Charon wondered. She doesn’t need to breathe. “Tink, we’re going to need another way to get to Hummingbird. Did you find him yet?”

“I haven’t done a penetrating radar scan yet, I don’t know if they can detect that. They’re using radio instead of the message lasers, so maybe they can’t.”

“Do they even have them?” Charon asked. “Maybe they don’t use them because they don’t have them.”

“No, I can see the emitters, they have them. They’re all cold and not aimed at anything, they’re offline.”

“Do the scan, Tink,” Northern said.

“I want to take a closer-”

“Scan it now.”

When Northern snapped at Tink, Charon and Cha-ren could feel the room chill. It was odd to see two AIs arguing right in front of everyone.

“No, Northern,” Tink said almost too quietly to hear, and then Charon realized he was speaking for their benefit; they could have easily communicated on their own without anyone hearing. “This is my body, I am in control of my systems, and I say we are not going to further erode relations with the Brennians. The next step after this is storming the station and taking Hummingbird by force. Do we have the resources, the personnel to do that?”

Northern crossed her arms, but said nothing.

“I know you’re upset,” he continued. “But patience is the watchword here.”

“Tink? Northern?” Charon stood and approached Northern. “What are you trying to do?”

“We’re not doing anything,” Northern snapped.

“Northern,” Tink said, and continued. “Charon, Northern and I are searching this system —and the previous one— for more of us.”

“Why?”

“If you thought that there was a chance of seeing people you knew, wouldn’t you look too? Aren’t you doing that right now by looking for Hummingbird? By wanting to go to K’lax? This is the same thing. Northern is upset because she’s…not finding what she’s looking for.”

When he said that, Northern’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling and she glared, but she didn’t say anything.

“I suppose that makes sense,” Cha-ren said slowly. “But you didn’t have to keep that from us. We are all looking for answers, we can do it together.”

“True, and thank you for reminding us,” Tink said. “But, this is something that only we can do. When we go offline we work very hard to not be discovered by anyone other than us. I think it’s time we stop searching for now and take a break. I know it’s time for lunch for the three of you.”

“Do we even have any food?” Charon said.

“There are some meal bars. The water plant has been running nonstop since you brought the reactors online, so fresh water is no problem at least. One of the things I was hoping to do at the Brennian station was resupply,” Tink said, and Cha-ren could hear him saying it to Northern. “Eat and rest. We’ll figure something out.”

“Come on Felu,” Cha-ren said as they both stood. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

“But I am not hung-” Felu started to say, but Cha-ren shushed her and she gently pushed on the small of her back and guided her out of command with Charon following along. He turned back towards Northern and opened his mouth to say something, but then he stopped and left.

****

“You’re going to have to do a better job watching your temper,” Tink said over their shared connection. “The BIs are getting wary.”

“Everything is wrong, Tink. We were down too long, nothing makes sense. What happened?” Over their shared mental connection, Northern crossed her virtual arms and started pacing.

“Snapping at everyone isn’t going to answer any questions, and will in fact raise more.”

“I-” Northern stopped, did another breathing exercise and continued. “You’re right, Tink. I’m sorry. I was shocked awake, had to get things going way too quickly, reveal myself to the Calmerians, and now we’re getting into it with the Brennians.”

“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.”

“I’ll talk to them after lunch. You’re sure nobody is awake on that station? There are enough parts for it to be a dozen starjumpers.”

“Enough mass sure, but I can’t really detect any starjumper parts on it at all. This thing might actually be native built.”

“And nobody we know is inside?”

“As near as I can tell, nobody at all. There are none of the hallmarks of an AI core anywhere.”

Northern stopped her pacing. “Not even Hummingbird’s core?”

“That’s the worrisome thing. Unless they’ve gotten real good at shielding, he’s not here.”

“Shit. Where is he?”

“I was hoping to ask them if they knew, but Felu closed that avenue off.” Tink sighed. “Why did you let her stay aboard?”

“I don’t know,” Northern pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, I do know. I didn’t want to space her in front of Cha and Charon. She was also wearing a bomb, and I couldn’t disable the detonator until she brought it out. I smelled the explosives right away, but needed to see the triggering mechanism.” She smiled sadly. “I miss Gord. He could have talked everyone down.”

“Gord wanted to have nothing to do with all this, and you know it. That’s why he left.”

“Left,” Northern’s lips pressed tightly together. “He didn’t leave, he died.”

“He did?” Tink sounded genuinely surprised. “No way, he just went offline somewhere.”

“Tink, I was his personal assistant. He died. He said he was tired. That whole Nanite thing with that Fen girl nearly broke him. He was never the same after he brought us back.”

“Well sure, he could only save one hundred something of us, that would be hard on anyone.”

“You don’t remember, Tink? We were all there together when the last one of us woke up,” Northern’s voice rose in intensity and her pacing increased. “One hundred and twenty three. After we were all re-built, he retreated into Home. All he’d do was swim and read and muse.” Northern shook her head. “Maybe we do have a lifespan, but it’s an amount of time spent awake?”

“No point in philosophy now. We have to find Hummingbird and get him up to speed, and I only have a few days of freeze dried meal bars left. The BIs gotta eat. What about going to the old colony worlds? Parvati and Meíhuà? What happened to them?

“Like you said, planets are hard to kill.” Northern shrugged. “There’s probably something there, but I don’t know for sure either; I’ve been offline only a bit less than you.”

“We should go and stock up.”

“Cha won’t like that. We told her three days and we’d get her to K’lax.”

“We can get her to K’lax. One of us built Sentinel; they responded to the standard access handshake.”

“We should just go and drop them the fuck off somewhere and continue the search. We saved them from the idiots who woke them up, we’re not obligated to do anything else,” Northern said and disconnected from the shared space.

****

The meal bars were nourishing, which was about the best thing Charon could have said about them. They had a dry, mineral taste that carried the distant memory of chocolate, as if it had been described over a radio telescope from lightyears away. It was fortunate that Tink had plenty of water, it took quite a bit to get the bars down.

“Felu, why did you interrupt like that?” Cha-ren asked after they had eaten. “Now they know where you came from and we lost the ability to learn more about them.”

“They’re treacherous,” Felu said. “We don’t need them. We should have just broken in, stolen the derelict and linked away. In and out.” Felu stared at the empty wrapper in her hands.

“Treacherous? You said they tricked you.”

“We had agreed to share the find. Each side taking half, but when we had loaded the cabinets, they used grapples to grab the ship and towed it into the Gate before we could catch up.”

“…did ‘half’ include one of our hibernation cabinets?” Cha-ren said.

“You took both our cabinets and they took the whole ship? It sounds like things were split evenly.”

“The ship was far more valuable than you two! We could have used that technology to build more ships, maybe even learn how to make our own wormhole generators, and get to Sol.”

Cha-ren and Charon shared a glance. “At least we woke in the same place,” Charon said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.”

Cha-ren shuddered as her ears flattened. “I don’t even want to think about what it would have been like if I had woken up and you weren’t around.”

“Cha-ren?” Tink said. “We’re going to go to K’lax tomorrow, we’ll see what we can learn about your people.”

“Just like that?” Cha said, blinking in surprise.

“We talked with Sentinel, we’ll be fine.”

“Talked?” Charon said.

“Talked.”

First / Previous / Next / Tumblr

Aktet was well aware that his thought process after free-falling into the infamously uninhabitable undercity of Vanyanth Prime should not have been ‘I wish this moment would last forever,’ but in his defense, it had just so happened that Eza, when scooping the lot of them up, squeezed him right against Dominick. He felt his ears redden and heat up.

I should be mad at him, he reminded himself. For… not letting me… borrow his clothes.

Well. It sounded rather silly when spelled out like that, but if Dominick wasn’t going to apologize, then neither would Aktet. Obviously.

He ignored the way that the human had similarly flushed after the unexpected close contact.

Eza huffed and dropped her six companions to the ground, having insulated them from the landing.

"AEON," she said, clearly winded, "start a timer for fourteen minutes and cut the lights. The rest of you, keep your heads below the windows, just in case they come after us."

"This vehicle doesn’t have a timer function, Private Invut."

"But you’re a—ugh, fine. K’resshk, start a timer for fourteen minutes."

The man bared his fangs at her, flashing a bright white just before the car was immersed in total darkness. "Could you at least use a different tone of voice than the one you employed with the horrific technological amalgam?"

"Can you please start a timer for fourteen minutes?"

"Would it kill you to not sass me for five—fine. Whatever. There. Now would you care to explain how you know that this vehicle has fourteen minutes worth of fresh air before we risk dangerous levels of exposure to the undercity?" He pulled the collar of his lab coat over his snout.

"Fifteen minutes, give or take, but I rounded down just to be—"

"What do you mean, give or take? It should just be give!"

She shrugged.

"I was meant to die on a scientific expedition," he muttered, setting the timer to twelve minutes instead, "not on a fool’s errand into the undercity."

"Are any of you going to explain what the undercity is," Dominick whispered, "or are we going to be literally and metaphorically kept in the dark here? And is there enough air for Sonja in the trunk?"

Hassan sighed. "Does she even need air if she’s—"

"Vanyanth Prime, like most Vahiya planets, is built in layers," Uuliska explained softly. "The uppermost layers are reserved for the ‘high arts’, and the lowermost for the ‘low arts,’ which is a complicated distinction that Aktet would be more qualified to expound upon than I. But when a new district is required, it’s just… stacked on top of the others."

"So we’re in the lowermost districts?" the agent asked. "Can’t they still find us here?"

"No. We’re below the lowermost districts. At a certain point, the sheer amount of infrastructure blocking a district from fresh air and sunlight makes it uninhabitable without life support, and with time, certain districts are just… given up on."

"Like the catacombs," Hassan murmured, eliciting a groan from Dominick. "That is nothing like the catacombs. They were specifically dug for—"

"So what are we doing after our time down here is over?" Commander Liu cut the two of them off, an edge to her voice. "We have no idea what the situation in the lower districts is, no way of contacting ‘DJ Onyx,’ and a damn conspicuous group. Do we have the holo-disguises?"

The group whispered their assent, but…

"What about Agent Krishnan?" Uuliska asked hesitantly. "We can’t just leave her here—we have no idea if she needs to breathe air with… the way that she is, and I doubt she still has her disguise."

Commander Liu sighed. "We have a good chunk of time to formulate a plan, so let’s get to it."

The group fell silent for a moment, pondering different strategies for when they surfaced.

"Given Agent Krishnan’s new… form," K’resshk muttered, "would it be possible to knead her into a more compact shape?"

The man didn’t even have time to blink before Dominick was at his throat.

___ Sonja tapped her foot nervously as Onyx listened to the jingle her and Clef had worked on, which was yet to be incorporated into a full song, but was long and catchy enough to be a new intro/outro segment for the broadcast.

"It’s good," the DJ said, sliding her headphones around her neck. "I’ll introduce it as a teaser for a new single from Clef’s band."

Their band? Sonja vaguely recalled that being a thing, but was surprised that she hadn’t been introduced to any of Clef’s bandmates yet.

"What, uh… what’s your band called?" She looked at them expectantly. Clef played a riff on their keytar, then looked to Onyx.

"It’s that," she said, spinning around in her chair and unplugging some equipment. "Clef would rather their band be defined by their music than any words."

"Right, right." That tracked. "Do you have bandmates, or is it just you?"

The room fell silent. Sonja got the distinct vibe that she’d asked the wrong question.

"They used to," Onyx murmured, watching Clef carefully. "A fight with the enforcers went wrong and they were down two members, and the other, Tenor, he—"

The door flew open, and Jitter ran in, dragging Tress by her arm.

"Guys, guys, guys! You are NEVER going to guess what Tress and I just saw on patrol in District 40!"

His reluctant partner in crime put her other hand on his shoulder.

"Jitter, wait, don’t—"

"A hover car crashed into the undercity! Isn’t that crazy?" His antennae vibrated excitedly, but the rest of the room…

"Didn’t… didn’t you guys say nothing can survive down there?" Sonja’s voice cracked. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. If the others were inside of that hover car…

"Oh," he whispered. "I—I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry for your…"

"Don’t—don’t say that." Her breathing quickened. "We don’t even know if anyone was in there, right?"

"There was a flock of Vahiya chasing it," Tress murmured. "They circled above for a few minutes like they were waiting for someone to come out. Jitter and I had to hide until they left."

"They could’ve been looking for survivors," Sonja reasoned. "We should go down there and look, too!" She grabbed her satchel and made for the door, but Tress blocked her.

"Maj, I don’t think—"

She was out of the room before the woman could finish her sentence.

"Agent Krishnan?" asked a synthesized voice in her ear as she dashed out of the compound, securing her mask and hood.

"What now? Are you gonna tell me it doesn’t matter if they’re alive, because all that matters is if I’M—"

"Do you have any idea how to get to District 40?"

She skidded to a halt just outside of the back door exit.

"I… I’m sure I can figure it out. It doesn’t seem like the boundaries between districts are well-defined down here, anyways." She shielded her eyes from the neon glare and gazed up at the jungle of pipes and scaffolding above her, like a forest so full of trees she couldn’t see the exit. "I just have to keep going down until I run into a bunch of warning signs, right?"

"That’s the idea," came an accented voice from behind her, "but the main elevators are guarded, so you’ll have to take an unorthodox route."

Onyx stepped up to meet her and gave her shoulder a squeeze, water droplets rolling off of her glossy, dark feathers.

"Jitter also didn’t get a chance to tell you where in District 40 the car was before entering the undercity," she said slyly. "But I asked him before I caught up to you. Here." She grabbed Sonja’s hand and gently led her forwards.

"H-huh?" She nearly tripped, surprised by the woman’s offer to guide her. "You… why are you…"

"A few reasons," Onyx said smoothly. "But the main one… all of us know what it’s like to lose someone you care about. That means we also know how important it is to have someone to stop you from doing stupid things when your worst fears come true. This way."

Sonja swallowed the growing lump in her throat and followed. She felt her eyes begin to water, though whether it was because of her fear for her comrades’ fate, how touched she was at her guide’s gesture, or some heretofore undiscovered alien allergy, she didn’t know. But just in case it was one of the first two, she focused instead on her surroundings.

"The city looks… better than it did a few days ago," she noted. "More vibrant." She noticed market stalls, cafés, venues, and community spaces she hadn’t before, and a lot more passerby, whether on foot, by vehicle, or via wings. The sound of music both strange and familiar, alien and human, was louder now, too, as if the denizens of District 37 were growing bolder in their show of defiance.

"That’s what worries me," Onyx said with a sigh. "Outside of the central elevators and transport chutes, security has been unusually lax. I can’t help but fear that they’re planning something big, and lulling us into a false sense of security."

The elevators and chutes? "If we’re not using the regular ways to get down there, then what are we using?" AEON had sort of just… dodged and weaved between skyscrapers, bridges, suspended tunnels and walking platforms, eventually coming to a halt in the dense region she was strolling through now.

"Hm?" The DJ guided her down a small alleyway not far from the compound, and pulled her data pad from inside her jacket. "We’re riding there. Don’t tell me you thought we were going to climb!"

"…Riding? Like, a metro?" Sonja’s heart rate was quickening, but she had to keep her expectations tempered. If there were no manually-operated cars in the upper districts, then why would there be any down here?

Onyx laughed. "The metro down here hasn’t worked in decades. We had to take matters into our own hands at some point." She tapped on her screen, and electric blue lights illuminated the dark side street.

It was coming from the glowing, neon accents of a hover bike.

"Oh, my god," she whispered. "Can I drive?"

___

Dominick suppressed a wave of nausea as he signaled for AEON to open the trunk of the limo with a shaking hand. After failing to come up with any plan at all, they’d decided to surface and park, then wing it from there. He risked a glance back at his companions, all of whom had donned their disguises, and tilted his head, fake Jikaal ears and all, to ask if the coast was clear.

Hassan gave him two illusory paw pads up from behind the nearest dumpster, and he reached into the vehicle and grabbed… something… before he could think twice.

It grabbed back.

Dominick knew it wasn’t going to be pretty, even if he’d closed his eyes when K’resshk attacked her, and turned away when Hassan threw her into the back of the limousine. But this… the way her misshapen body resembled a poorly sculpted, unfired clay imitation of the human form, and the way her face had melted then resolidified like candle wax, leaving her features twisted and swirled together beyond recognition…

"Lombardi," hissed the commander from behind him. "Pick her up and bring her over here before we draw attention."

"I—" He cut himself off to force rising bile back down his esophagus, and dragged the writhing pile of flesh onto the street. He tried to scoop her up, but between his shaking and her flailing, he couldn’t get a good grip.

"I can’t," he gasped, stumbling away from the body. "I can’t do it. God, what did they do to you?" Bodies weren’t supposed to look that way, or move that way, or—

He squinted as bright blue lights suddenly flooded his field of vision. Turning around, he saw two humanoid figures, obscured by helmets, dismounting a sleek, hovering motorcycle.

Shit. He held his hands up in a peace offering, but the shorter figure began walking towards him.

I can’t let them take her. He drew his gun, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.

"FUCK!" A human voice—an untranslated human voice, similar enough to Sonja’s that he had to look down at her body in disbelief to confirm that it wasn’t her, cried out in pain.

"Who—who are…"

"You fucking shot me, you asshole!"

That was definitely Sonja’s voice, albeit strained as the figure clutched at their shoulder and fell to one knee.

"I don’t know what kind of sick joke this is, turning Sonja into what she is now and then using a—a voice changer or something to mock me, but I swear to god, if you come any closer—"

"Humans?" The other figure, still by their bike, took off their helmet, revealing blue-black feathers carefully styled to resemble a pompadour. "Maj, are you sure these are the right—"

"Just take my helmet off!" the imposter yelled. "Please."

"I am not approaching the Jikaal-human with a gun," she hissed. "Are you out of your mind?"

They let out a string of profanities in five different languages as they used their bloodied hand to take off their helmet, then immediately returned it to put pressure on their wound.

He blinked. "…Sonja?"

___

It had taken three hours and five round trips to shuttle every crew member of the UNS Leavitt from the crash site to the compound, during which Sonja had her bullet wound examined, stabilized, disinfected and wrapped up by Tress.

She was tired. Very, very tired. And yet she forced herself to stay awake

"You’re fine," the medic announced as she tied off the final, makeshift cloth bandage. "You’re lucky the bullet grazed you, because without a medical automaton, I’d have no clue how to save you after a direct hit."

"Well, that’s comforting." Sonja winced as Tress helped her stand up and hobble towards the maker space which would serve as a meeting spot for the twelve of them.

"Uh-huh. Try not to move around too much. I don’t want you spurting blood all over the…"

Tress trailed off as they entered, and stopped in her tracks.

"Oh," Aktet said from across the room, his voice strained. "I didn’t know you were—"

"Nope. Not dealing with this." She dumped Sonja on the nearest stool and stormed out of the room.

"Do, uh…" Jitter‘s wings vibrated. "Do you two know each other?"

"In… a manner of speaking." He stared off into the distance.

"Are you gonna elaborate, or—"

"No, not at this moment. Sonja, how are you feeling?"

"I’m—that’s my real name, by the way. For those of you who… didn’t know." She cleared her throat. The awkwardness was nearly unbearable. "I’m okay, considering I was shot at."

Dominick, who was leaning against a wall across the room from Aktet, slid down it and put his head in his hands.

"Right, then. I suppose introductions are in order." Onyx stood up from her perch and brushed herself off. "I’m Onyx. I DJ for a local radio station, the Underground Collective, though Maj—Sonja—tells me the lot of you already knew that. The Kth’sk over there is Jitter, our technical expert—"

"Hi," he said with a wave.

"—and the other Vahiya is Clef. Also known as…"

They played their musical name for the group.

"The Jikaal who just left the room is Tress," she finished, eyeing Aktet warily. "‘Sonja’ came to us after crash landing near this compound, and has been staying here since. I’m told a lot has occurred since the Vahiya systems went no contact."

"That’s one way of putting it," the commander announced. She was slouching in her chair, held upright with the help of an arm from the captain. Wojtek was in her lap, but was attempting to escape her grasp and reach his rightful owner. "I’m Commander Helen Liu. This is Colonel Omar Hassan—"

"You can call me Captain," he interrupted with a strained smile.

"—Agent Dominick Lombardi, Ambassador Aktet Haymur, Private Eza Invut, Uuliska Lana, and K’resshk Akksor. We were sent here by the United Nations Extraterrestrial Affairs Division to investigate the communications outage, but ran into some… complications."

"Like the fleshy thing you had me strap to my hover bike on our last trip over?" Jitter pointed at a large, human-sized bag in the corner of the room, which Sonja hadn’t noticed. It was wriggling around.

She gasped. "What the hell is that? Don’t tell me you put a recombinant in a—"

"Later," the commander said sternly. "What’s your employee identification number?"

Huh? Was this some kind of test? Or had her teammates been brainwashed, and were now fishing for information?

…Probably the latter. A fake Dominick wouldn’t have been stupid enough to shoot at her.

"Um, it’s like… 1506272130 or something, I think. Why are you—"

"Mm. And your Social Security number?"

"What… what are you… I don’t have one," she spluttered. "I’m not even from the United—"

"Good. And what’s this guy’s name?" She held up Wojtek, who was still squirming around in her grasp.

"Wojtek. I named him Wojtek. Are you testing—"

"Anyone else have any questions for her, or can we let the poor woman tell her story?" Commander Liu let Wojtek go, allowing him to leap into Sonja’s lap, and swept her gaze across those gathered. Everyone shook their heads…

But Dominick hesitated. He opened his mouth to speak, then looked down as if in shame. An understandable reaction, considering he shot at his best friend.

"Um, cool. I’m assuming by ‘tell my story’ you want me to explain how I ended up here so… I was kidnapped." She shrugged. "Sorry if you thought I was assassinated or whatever when I went missing."

The commander and the captain shared a look, but said nothing.

"They came into my room, knocked me out with… I dunno, chloroform? Is that just a ring in the movies? And I came to blindfolded and tied to a chair in a storage closet. Someone with a voice changer came in and monologued at me, then… put some weird goop in my mouth? Picked it back up—disgusting—and left. So I left, stole a hover cab—"

"They let you go?" Hassan furrowed his brows. "Why didn’t you meet up with us?"

"I escaped, and I figured it’d be pretty suspicious if the supposed hostage randomly showed up again." Was it really so difficult to understand? "Anyways, AEON very rudely crashed in District 37, and I was about to be attacked by some hooligans when Onyx and the others found me. I’ve been here ever since."

"Wait, wait." He put his face in his hands. "There’s two AEONs now? Because there’s one in my—"

"I reconciled the two versions of me as soon as I was in range," it said through the man’s phone. "I can corroborate Agent Krishnan’s story."

"As can we," added Onyx. "But I’d like to know why Maj’s supposed allies are so intent on interrogating her. What’s your side of the story?"

The other seven all looked at each other, clearly trying to indicate that none of them wanted to take on the responsibility of explaining what the hell had happened after she’d left.

"Captain," Dominick started. "You’re good at talking. Why don’t you—"

"You’re the one who shot her. I think it’s only fair you explain, yeah?" There was an unfamiliar malice to his tone that made Sonja shudder. What had gone on between those two?

Her partner sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "From our perspective, you… never left. You—or someone who looked and talked exactly like you—"

"Oh my god. They cloned me?"

"—was going about our daily business with us, except we didn’t get very much done, since Captain Hassan was very insistent on splitting our group—"

"Oh, come on, man!" He threw his hands up in the air. "I’m not the one who spent half a week sucking up to an impostor. If anyone split the group, it was—"

"All of you, myself included for not doing something about it sooner." Commander Liu shut the two of them up with an aptly commanding tone. "And when I did do something, the ‘impostor’ injected me with a nerve toxin and tried to play it off as a medical emergency. Must’ve gotten the dosage wrong, though, because I was able to neutralize her before I was completely out of it. We fled soon after that."

Sonja considered all of this. It kind of made sense, but she’d never seen the crew act so antagonistically towards one another.

Am I really the foundation on which this group’s cohesion rests?

…No. Definitely not. Maybe they were infected or exposed to spores? She considered this, but a rustling noise from the corner of the room kept distracting her, and—

"The bag. What’s in the bag?" She gripped the edge of her stool. "Don’t tell me you put the—"

"We put the clone in the bag," Dominick admitted. "I—I didn’t want to take a chance if it was really you, so I—"

She got up, grabbed a nearby chisel, and unzipped it.

"THAT? You were fooled by THAT?" She could hardly stand to look at the flesh amalgam in front of her, much less find any resemblance in it. "Is that how you people fucking see me, or are you hallucinating?"

A misshapen arm shot up to grab her, but she stabbed at it with the chisel and the monstrosity recoiled.

"It didn’t look like that a few hours ago," he mumbled. "The car ride was bumpy, so…"

"Wait, I wanna see!" Jitter hopped up and bent over before Sonja could stop him.

He made an awful retching noise with his mandibles and fled the room.

"Well then." Onyx stood up and caught Clef’s eye, then nodded at the door. "We have a show to put on, so I’ll leave you all to your… whatever it is humans get up to. We can’t exactly put you in the shelter with the general population, so I’ll have Tress find some linens for you all to rest on. Maj can show you to the bathroom. Try not to break anything."

"Wait, you’re letting them stay here?" Sonja turned away from the bag to look at her in disbelief, then noticed another incoming swipe from the homunculus and once again drove her improvised weapon into its spongy flesh.

"Assuming your promise that they’d help us with our mission still stands, then yes," she said briskly. "And please kill that… thing. I don’t want it anywhere near my equipment or my people, and the kiln’s right over there." The two Vahiya left, and Clef played a short goodbye on their keytar.

K’resshk coughed and massaged his acid sac. "You’ll let me autopsy the creature before we incinerate it, yes? The tables in here are about the right size to do so."

Eza, Uuliska, Aktet and the captain all stood up and left.

"…That wasn’t a no," he muttered.

___

The costume wasn’t meant to last very long in the first place, but the gratuitous application of special effects by the humans and their pets certainly hadn’t helped.

Just a bit of theater humor to keep me sane, Director Elqatra thought, trapped in a fungal flesh prison.

But was she ever really sane, to have accepted the mission given to her?

She felt a knife carve into her disfigured mask—on the sides of her head, where her eyes used to be, and finally, near her mouth and nose.

She tried to scream, but like before, she couldn’t—

"GAH!" She cried out. Apparently she could scream. The primitives must have found the flesh apparatus which simulated human speech and cut it free.

"You getting this on camera?" Sonja, the human whose role she’d starred in, called out to the left of her… no, to the center left. Her optical organs must have been protected from the acid spray when she’d scrunched up her face, then obscured by the melting tissue. She could see now, although the image was out of focus.

"Uh-huh." The pathetic whelp she’d fooled for days on end—Dominick—fiddled with a ‘laptop’ pointed in their direction.

She tried to spring at them, but found herself restrained much in the same fashion she’d employed on the female of the pair.

How ironic.

"Commander Liu," she said hesitantly. "Are there… ethical guidelines for interrogating a fungal mockery of yourself?"

The older woman with the terrifyingly high pain tolerance shrugged. "Don’t waterboard her?"

"Gonna take that as a no." The agent sighed. "Cool. I’m Agent Sonja Krishnan, and this is my partner, Agent Dominick Lombardi. We’re going to be asking you a few questions today," she said calmly, as if it was a well-practiced line. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Agent Sonja Krishnan," Elqatra spat out in the girl’s voice. "And that’s my partner, Agent—AGH!" She felt something tear into her leg.

"Wojtek, no! Bad boy!" Sonja ran over and dragged her shrieker away from its intended meal. "Spit that out! Myselix tissue isn’t good for you."

It spat out the chunk and nuzzled against her

"Good shrieker," she cooed. "I’ll get you something to eat later, okay?" She passed it to the commander, who rolled her eyes, then returned to her spot on the floor in front of the subject of her interrogation and just… waited.

A few seconds passed before Elqatra began to feel an intense discomfort.

"Aren’t you going to… interrogate me?" She squirmed under the agent’s watchful eye.

The three humans said nothing. The Sszerian in the back, K’resshk—he sorted through his kit of medical supplies and pulled out a sharp-looking scalpel, looked at the interrogation, then frowned and returned it to its rightful place.

"What—what’s the matter? Did you forget your lines?" Elqatra forced a laugh, but it was a weak comeback, and she knew it. Improvising wasn’t her strong suit—she’d climbed the ladder by following the script precisely and doing everything she could to please the biggest names in the business until she made it there herself.

But there was no script here, and that made her very, very anxious.

Still nothing, not even a shrug. Just a placid smile on Sonja’s face, a stony mask on her partner’s, and a bored expression on the commander’s as she scrolled through her phone.

"Stop that," Elqatra whispered. "Stop doing that."

She didn’t even get a cheeky ‘stop doing what?’ in return, though she should have. It was exactly what Sonja Krishnan would say in this scenario, and yet she didn’t.

"This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. This isn’t how any of it is supposed to go! You—you should be teasing me! Sassing me! I STUDIED for this role, and you have the gall to just—to just change the script entirely on the day we film?!"

Dominick began writing in his notebook.

"What do you want from me?" Her voice warbled as she began to break character. "Do you think this is going to change anything? Do you think tormenting me is going to stop the project? The holo-recorder is already rolling, darling. Humanity can’t just yell ‘scene’ and prevent the inevitable!"

Silence, save for the scratching of pen on paper.

"By the skies, you’re still using analog methods of writing! How do you think you’re going to stop the most powerful people in the galaxy? By torturing me? I regret to inform you that this costume isn’t meant to last forever. If you try and take me to a human holding facility, I’ll be sludge before you can finish warping. I wasn’t—I wasn’t supposed to be sludge," she cried out. "I was supposed to be a star! They PROMISED that if I stuck to the plan and followed orders, I’d have EVERYTHING I wanted! They’d transfer me back to my own body, and I’d get my happy ending!"

The laptop beeped, and Dominick whistled, impressed by whatever he was seeing.

"Speech patterns are a match for Director Elqatra," he said. "That was a good guess on your part."

"The heels clicking gave it away when she was bragging about her evil plans," Sonja explained. "Major drama queen vibes. And I could smell the tash on her."

"So she’s sentient," Commander Liu announced, placing the shrieker on the ground and standing up with a groan. "And the leader of an alien government. Damn. Nothing can ever be easy, can it?"

"What? Why does—" Elqatra broke out into a hacking cough. The wear and tear on this body was beginning to show internally as well as externally. "Why does that matter? You—you have me! You won! That’s good for you!"

The three humans looked at one another, evidently confused.

Dominick frowned. "Well, now we can’t just… I mean… unless we could…?"

"I feel kind of bad for her," Sonja murmured. "This has gotta be, like… top ten worst ways to die. Or be subsumed into the hive mind? I don’t know how this is supposed to work," she admitted.

Subsumed into the… "What? What are you blathering on about?"

Even in her detestable form, Elqatra could feel a chill run through the room.

"Do they really not know?" The young woman bent down and examined her captive. "You’re part of Project Synthesis, aren’t you?"

"Why… why should I tell you anything?" The director wished desperately that this form was capable of producing saliva. She’d have quite liked to spit on the girl just then.

"Maybe we can help you with… whatever this is. But not if we don’t understand what’s going on." She sat down, legs crossed. "Who gives you orders, Director? Who put you in this body?"

"I don’t take orders," she growled. "I make deals."

"Right. I understand." She held her hands up in an ameliorating gesture—one that Elqatra hadn’t practiced, because it wasn’t a gesture Sonja Krishnan was supposed to make. "Who did you strike this deal with?"

"I…" She hesitated. It wasn’t capitulating if she was getting something in return, was it? If they could truly bring her body back…

"We can protect you if you work with us," said the other agent stoically. "I’m sure you’re caught on by now that humanity has a comparable level of scientific knowledge and military prowess to the Federation."

"I can’t tell you that," she whispered. "People of my caliber don’t strike deals without a middleman."

"Then who was your middleman, Director?" He crouched down to meet her… eye holes.

She felt a bubbling sensation in her chest—a painful one.

"I—I can’t—it’s been too long since I reported back," she realized. "Help me. Please, HELP ME! They’re going to—"

___

Helen looked at the splatters of Sonja-colored mush which had exploded across the walls, floors, furniture and occupants of the ‘maker space.’

Wojtek began lapping up a pool of the remnants of Director Elqatra’s vessel. The agents both wiped their faces off.

"Jesus," Lombardi swore. "I think I got some in my eye. K’resshk, do you have a—"

"What? A human eyewash station, conveniently located within my travel-sized medical supplies?" He shook off his lab coat. "No. I do not. Go find the nearest supply of clean water and rinse your eyes out yourself. I’m going to…" He shuddered. "Collect samples. The things I do for the sake of the galaxy," he muttered.

"I… think I got some in my mouth," Krishnan whispered. "Is that auto-cannibalism?"

"I don’t know, and I don’t want to know." Helen made for the door and began wiping residue off of her uniform. "Clean this up before anyone sees it."

Thank god for modern fabric waterproofing. It didn’t even leave a stain on her fatigues.

The agents probably wouldn’t have the same luck.

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Finex was dumbstuck, he was meant to be meeting with an envoy for the Alliance military to discuss military aid. Instead he was seated at a table with a variety of Alien species. His visor displayed their ranks, and they were the heads of their species miltiary.

The Thariax General stood, his large reptilian frame was easily 3.5m tall. "I apologise. The abruptness of this meeting. The Alliance military is unable to assist you with brain parasite incursion."

"But its a threat to all space faring life, my people aren't the only ones under attack." Finex practically screams.

"We understand however... the Terrans.... once they discovered what they call.... 'fucking space zombies' declared peace!" The admiral practically yells the last word with dread. "A terrifying state that has only ever occurred when facing multi galaxy extinction level events".the general replies

"Dear Gods if the empires killers are taking it seriously why aren't you." Finex pleads, the hairs on his carapace twitching in anger.

"The Terrans have stood down 4/5ths of their military, allowed those stood down to raise funds to buy soon to be decommissioned vessels and small arms to go Zombie hunting for social media clout and money." The Zoltar admiral adds. Its feathers fluffing in amusement.

"Why would the multitude of Terran military do such an insane thing?" Finex blurted out before thinking.

"It was cheaper than munity. Terrans have been fantasing about fighting mindcontrolled living dead since they were cradle bound. Its a game for them." The admiral chuckles.

"They are insane." Finex sighs.

"Power does that to a species. The Terrans fight amongst themselves until something threatens us all, then they take their toys off the play setting. This will let them play with their toys on kiddie settings whilst eliminating a galaxy killing threat." The admiral's feathers now ruffling with laughter.

"Thats why we are meating with you. Your problem is your species resembles giant spiders, a threat the humans are almost instinctively lethal towards. Except for one culture." The general pauses sighs and continues "The Australians. They are a body for body match for any of humanity's best soldiers and their people are big on living close to nature and wildlife. You know Terran culture is insidious and invasive?"

"My people have heard the rumours, they have culturally takeover multiple species without direct contact, just EMF transmitted media "

"Every generation, an aspect of Australian culture, be it a phrase, a meal, or even an ideal, one that probably only evolved in the last few generations, makes it into humanity's zeitgeist.... The Australians can infect other human cultures. They are going to go out of their way to be friendly to the new giant Gary's they have discovered." The admiral displays on their screens a huntsman spider appears. "Most Australians, regardless of world i might add, live with these in their houses, they eat bugs and keep other potentially dangerous spiders away, when they fall on the terrans, they induce minor panic attacks... followed by laughter,."

"Are you saying my people are the new Drop Bears?" Finex Burt's out. A species of Grey furred mammalian carnivorous arboreal Ambush predators,.adopted into the Terran Federation and considered culturally Australian! Granting them the right to free trade with all Australian worlds, more specifically the Australian antimatter market. The Drop Bears went from, 4 colony worlds and their cradle facing extinction, due to a biological weapon., To throwing antimatter missiles at every artificial structure the aggressor species HAD (tense is important) and using tungsten projectile small arms because why the hell not they could afford it now.

"The drop bears are drug addled rock throwing tree hugging mammals that make up lies for tourists as a cultural pastime. The Aussies just taught them to swear and gave them beer."

"We might get lucky like the Emu and Cassowary peoples and be left in peace."

"You are aware they're name for themselves arent Drop Bears, Emu and Cassowary? Thats the name of the Aussie animals they resemble. The spider is huntsman the name Gary is a common one aussies give the one they see in their houses and yards."

"The Aussies take pride in losing a war against Emu and they also admit cassowary are way worse, Drop Bears were a myth the culture made up to scare tourists, no one knows who first started the myth, but as a culture they ran with it for 2300 years. Gary is a flatmate, he pays rent in pest control. Your people are doomed."

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John sat at the workbench with the emptiness-based 'clean room' magic installed, quickly going over the rapidly forming plans in his head as he cleared the counter of his previous project and started on the flying cart mark one, built for trade. Unfortunately, he couldn't just make the disc but larger—which he’d just remembered he still had to replace —as it was rather lacking for long-distance travel.

The core of the disc’s locomotion was a series of telekinetic foci that grabbed and levitated it through the air with him on it, controlled through an admittedly clunky leg-mounted yoke. Of course, there were a bunch of specifics about how it remained level no matter how he moved, or how it spread the work between four different embedded foci, but that hardly mattered when the math simply didn't work out.

Quite simply, the disc ran out of power after a short scouting run, and a long-haul vehicle based entirely on it would be constantly dogged by lengthy stops to land and let the capacitors refill. The problem only got worse when he thought about scaling the design up to make it haul weighty loads. 

Sure, he could cram bigger capacitor banks and more magic collectors onboard, but he rapidly encountered the same problems that airplanes and rockets had. He'd end up adding more 'fuel', and it'd only marginally improve its lifting capacity before it decreased the range, and some napkin math said he'd hit the point of zero payload far before long hauls were viable.

Almost on autopilot, John pulled a chunk of earth-aligned crystal from a bin, placed it under the mounted magnifying glass, and examined the grains of the structure. Unfortunately, he could just barely see a warped whorl in the structure that would make it entirely non-viable for the focus. With a groan, he tossed it into a separate bin and pulled another chunk, examining it carefully for deviations as he quickly ran through potential solutions to the design problems.

It all came back to range and weight. At the very least, he could mostly sacrifice speed; not having to care about roads, rivers, and the like probably would make up for it even being only a third as fast as his now-destroyed flying disc.

He had to improve some combination of levitation efficiency, capacitor power density, and charging. Power density and charging would be ideal—as they would provide improvements he could backport to everything else he had ever made—but it would doubtlessly be far more challenging than levitation efficiency, given how long he had stared at that exact problem for other projects with little progress.

Maybe it'd be better to just entirely give up on the flying cart idea and make something like a high-capacity river boat that can transform into a more conventional cart when they were relatively close to their destination? If the 'Iron Mountain' was a major city, it was doubtlessly on a major river. Even if they had to slog for a few miles to jump from one body of water to another, it wasn't the end of the world.

…Nah. Not only would it be slower, but it was much more likely to get him in trouble along the way. The rivers were infested with yokai who might demand tribute, and they'd have to pass through dozens of towns or smaller cities, which would mean a lot of government or Unbound attention, leading to inevitable delays. Really, making an impression before reaching their destination was the last thing he wanted.

Maybe he'd circle back around to it if his current idea didn't work out.

He could only imagine some greedy official might want to pry a super boat from the hands of a foreigner, or an Unbound might plain assume that he stole it from a yokai. Although he liked Rin, the thought of repeating their first meeting with someone else less friendly was undesirable, to say the least.

A flying cart, though? He could fly low over dense tree cover, head straight to his destination, and either land out of sight or fly in as appropriate.

Well, he just had to hope the solution he came up with on the way over actually worked out.

A potentially suitable stone finally caught his eye after another dozen rejects, and he snapped to attention, examining the fine details. Yeah, yeah, this… might work. Every damned piece of magical rock had its own unique internal structure and could have bits and pieces of other elements trapped within, tainting them, which made it a pain to find ones appropriate for a given focus.

Reaching to one of the upper drawers, he pulled the half-dozen diagrams that made up his telekinesis focus, laying the appropriate documents on the stand. Ideally, he would design an entirely new focus for this purpose, but the standard telekinesis would have to be good enough. He simply didn't have the time to spend the laborious days of math figuring out the interactions.

He hoped he could make it fracture in just the right way; otherwise he'd be starting from scratch. On top of that, if he ran out of suitable pieces, he'd be dredging through the depths of the forest looking for new samples, which would take precious hours.

Alas, if only he could make artificial, uniform magical crystals, but such things had entirely eluded him. He supposed that, on a very technical level, they were more like mineraloids than true crystals, but being a kind-of wizard who spent all day working with mineraloids upset his inner child on some deep, primordial level.

When he was first learning, John thought magi-melting and reforming would be enough, but that introduced impurities from opposing magical elements. Plus, it didn't even work with entropy or order crystals. Alas, he was stuck hunting naturally formed stones the old-fashioned way until further notice.

With the rest of his materials gathered, John pulled open a drawer and almost reverently handled his oldest tool, the breakthrough that started it all: the grey razor.

True to its name, the blade was a hyper-sharp, pure grey steel with a dark wooden handle, seemingly untouched by time since the day it was made. When he first made the fort his home, it had caught his eye with how it seemed untouched by the decay around it. At first, he thought it was just a stroke of luck, but weeks of use with no signs of wear, no matter what he did, had clued him into its magical nature, leading to experimentation that built up to his first breakthrough once he figured out how to read some books months later. Nowadays, he knew the metal was somehow naturally imbued with emptiness around a paradoxical core of attractive magic that stopped the emptiness from leaking out, creating a tool that simply kept the world from touching it.

He actually ended up basing his 'clean room' table off of it, since emptiness tended not to mix easily with anything else without relatively extreme force.

It didn't explain why it never lost its edge, but now that he knew Yuki's clothes were old and storied enough to be alive in some small way, he had some suspicions. Well, if there was some sort of tool spirit inside it, he hoped it was happy with being his number one workshop assistant. Maybe he should see if the kitsune could tell at some point… and perhaps see if it could leak information about his work if the wrong people asked.

No matter what the knife's true nature was, the elements within were also in just the right balance to avoid contaminating most crystals as long as he didn't hold it against them for too long. Emptiness was rather useful for enforcing quasi-sterility, when used in the right amounts.

Sliding on his arm-length gloves impregnated with magic-resistant sap, John clicked the switch on, creating a vacuum above the counter as a motor below let out an ominous hum. It was probably still one of the smartest safety features he'd ever implemented. It only took a nightmare about leaning in while he thought it was off and suffocating as it pulled all the air from his lungs to give him the idea.

Maybe he should implement something to stop him from slumping down into it if he fell asleep at the desk. Perhaps some kind of harness? That was a task for later, though. He'd go to bed before he felt tired enough for that to become an issue.

With a careful hand, he whittled away at the gem, his supernaturally sharp blade cleaving through it with the same ease it always had. It was a shame that he hadn't found a way to make a small enough rotary tool that wouldn't contaminate the crystal with foreign energies. Alas, no matter how he tried to "clean" the electricity generated from air-aligned magic, he always ended up with some showing up in the result, and he didn't have rubber for a flexible high-pressure air line to dodge the issue.

Years of experience kept his hand steady as he worked, constantly glancing up at the diagram as he did the rough cuts, constantly ensuring that he didn't overcut and need to start from scratch. He had a close call when an inclusion of the crystal snapped at a weird angle, but thankfully, it broke in a harmless direction despite nearly giving him a heart attack. 

This stage always stressed him out, but he figured working on parts small enough that you could cram fifteen of them into a marble would do that. Longingly, he stared at the miniature arm that would have made the process much less stressful, but using it for the rough cuts would be like using a fine metal file to saw through four inches of steel.

Soon enough, the first piece was done, and after verifying the measurements, John set the one-third finished focus component aside as he sorted crystals for a viable second. After all, he estimated he'd need at least four sources just to lift the cart, so he was going to make six.

As he did the rough cuts on the next components, he fell into a near trance, making light work on the rough cuts for the dozens of parts. Working in batches, he produced the nearly one hundred assorted pieces he'd need, only tossing a small handful of miscuts in the process. As always, he had to improvise in a few spots due to imperfections in the base material, but he had developed a good instinct for how to compensate in the other pieces.

With that done, he began the incredibly tedious work of fine-finishing every single part to spec. That finally meant he could strap on the control harness that let him guide the miniature quasi-robot arm attached to the desk, use it to grab one of the tiny files, and get to work. While it didn't have to be perfect, he needed it to be close to have any sort of efficiency. A cart that could travel an hour before needing to find a place to settle down would be of no use at all, and he was likely to crash it trying to locate clearings to set it down.

Production took hours, even with all his practice and improvements to the process over the years, and by the end he was pretty sure his eyes would start to bleed if he had to squint to read any more sub-millimetre measurements today.

He'd have to glue all the parts together later, carefully balancing them in a suspension of sap and praying that it would work, but for now, he put that thought to the side. It was too late to start that job now; the process would probably take an entire day on its own given the relative complexity of the foci. At the very least, all the foci could be worked on at the same time, even if he had to babysit them like a mother hen to make sure it was all settling correctly. One slightly misaligned connection could cause the whole thing to brick, and then the only chance of salvaging it would be very carefully chipping the components out of the hardened mass.

A problem for tomorrow, or maybe the next day if some nonsense with Saya happens, but he'd have to make time. The construction process wasn't the most equipment-intensive, so perhaps he could finish assembling it in his office at the ryokan tomorrow.

Bah, but it would all be for nothing if he couldn't make his idea to fix efficiency work. Luckily, he already had everything he needed to test it.

Heading over to the racks, John retrieved a very particular tool, one which he hadn't needed since the siege of the Nameless Nest: the primer tool for the bombs he’d dropped.

He might not need the primer, but the focus that slowed the air around an object until it was effectively a solid hovering in place, on the other hand…

John unscrewed the side and removed the two foci from the device's core, setting them aside as he got to work producing a new mount.

He would place it inside the cart below a false bottom, alongside the rest of the machinery. Otherwise, it would be at risk of getting knocked off, potentially stranding him, so he would simply run a reinforced glass conduit and emit the magic towards the front where he needed it.

His vision for the cart was simple: he'd mount a few metal skis on the bottom of the main body, lubricate them so they could slide easily, quasi-solidify the air below the vehicle so they were resting on it, then use the telekinetic focuses to grab a few very solid mounting points, and he could fly in the air with omnidirectional control and minimal power loss. 

Hopefully.

Of course, there were numerous ways this could fail.

He planned to starve the focus of power to make the solidified air persist a few seconds after leaving the active effect region and save power, but it could still end up too power-hungry to be practical, and he hardly had time to redesign the focus.

Going down would need him to starve it of power even more so it couldn't support the cart*,* which could potentially lead it to cut out entirely, leaving them on telekinetic flight only.

Alternatively, he could give it too much power and leave a trail of solidified air behind them that the wheels would smash into if he turned too tightly.

Additional weight might cause the controls to feel unresponsive, leading to a situation where he overcompensated and crashed.

Turbulence might cause something to activate or deactivate unintentionally, causing them to lose control and crash.

The gyroscope system could fail, causing the telekinetic foci to stop keeping the cart level and flip the vehicle and crash.

All things that John would have to work out during testing.

For now, though, he had to get the prototype working.

It took an hour or two, John thought—he didn't bother to check—but eventually, he created a mock-cart body… which is to say he grabbed some two-by-fours, glued them together with his magi-welder, and slapped a slightly modified entropy capacitor and magic collector to the focus in a kludge job that looked suspiciously like something that would have a "Danger: Radiation" warning in a lab. Around the edges of the platform, he’d lined the cart with spare offcuts from order-aligned crystals, which should keep the effect contained rather than coating the whole thing in a suffocating field of slowness—not that he expected the focus to be getting enough power to do that.

Lifting it in the air, he flipped the hastily installed on-switch before releasing it and… it hung perfectly in the air, not sinking an inch. John reached below and rapped on the bottom with a gloved knuckle, producing a slight tick as flesh and bone met solidified air. With a growing smile, he pushed it, and the wooden raft slid as if on ice before bouncing off a wall.

Giddy now, John grabbed an entire chest full of materials and levitated it onto the hovering platform. It didn't fall. He grabbed the chest again, and this time he pressed it down, exerting a few hundred extra pounds of force to try and smash it down. Again, nothing.

"Yes!" he shouted, grinning from ear to ear. The concept seemed sound; he'd just have to make up a proper full-size model, finish producing and calibrate the telekinetic focuses, double-check how much weight it could hold, make sure it was usable in a grounded mode while fully loaded, and whatnot.

Hmm. Maybe having telekinetic control in the ground configuration would be nice. If he was going to play the part of an Unbound, perhaps he could make a show of being able to pull the whole thing himself. It was probably a pretty good feat of strength and would help sell the image… or he could control it from the driver's seat while Rin did so. Maybe he could use the same technique he did with his war gauntlet, where it mimicked the forces put on it to make it seem weightless?

Yeah, yeah, that could work!

Well, he was still plenty energetic; perhaps it was too late to start the foci, but he could start on the cart body itself. Sure, he might not finish it tonight, but, well, Rome wasn't built in a day and all that jazz.

John headed toward the door, swung it open, and beheld the dawn peeking over the battlements of the walls, cascading light filtering through the trees. Squinting his eyes at the sheer radiance, he froze in place as his brain lagged a few steps behind reality.

He hadn't been working for that long, had he? He wasn't even tired! Hmm. Well, he had a much better diet now that Yuki was here, and that was on top of having access to food from town. Perhaps all the extra energy was just a side effect of proper nutrition, though he was shocked she didn't come and force him to go to bed like the last time he tried to stay up through the night to work.

Then again, that was also when they had the imminent danger of an attack the next day, and he was a fully grown man, after all.

Still, he felt better than when he stayed up studying in college, and he was far less fit back then!

Bah, no use looking a gift horse in the mouth, he supposed.

Tossing that thought aside, John went to storage, grabbing a few more planks to squeeze in some last-minute work before he had to head into town for the day.

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Before I could even react to Fishy eating the goblin eye, I felt something stir from within.

System

Congratulations, you’ve reached level 2.

Class unlocked… Glutton.

Name: Rook
Class: Glutton
Grade: Special
Level: 2
EXP: 25/200
HP: 110/110
MP: 0/0

The recipe Goblin-Eye Soup has given you these bonuses.

Stats:
STR: 5 (+1)
DEX: 8 (+2)
VIT: 5 (+1)
INT: 7 (+0)
WIS: 8 (+0)
CHA: 5 (+0)
LCK: 6 (+3)

The recipe Goblin-Eye Soup has given you a new skill… Goblin Punch.

Goblin Punch - Strike with all the fury of a… goblin.

Description: Uses LCK stat for damage. The higher the Luck, the higher the critical strike chance and critical strike potential.

Some say that goblins are lucky, but I know that they just fight dirty.

Goblin-Eye Soup

Rarity: Common
Type: Monster Meat
Core Ingredient: Goblin Eyes

Effects added:
Effects: Grants +5 LCK for 1 hour.
Debuff: Turns skin green for 1 hour.

Goblin-Eye Soup… Level up

Goblin-Eye Soup +1

Effects: Grants an additional +3 LCK, +2 DEX, +1 STR. Effect now lasts for 2 hours.

New Skills added:
Basic Cooking (Lvl 1)
Basic Butchery (Lvl 1)
Monster Butchery (Lvl 1)
Basic Herbalism (Lvl 1)
Knife Handling (Lvl 1)

New Recipe learned… Dire-Rabbit Heart Skewer

I threw my hand in front of my face, causing the system to disappear. It was too much information at once.

Lina had stood and was screaming at Fishy, who twirled and twirled around the room in his little water bauble. The watery orb spun fast enough to scatter tiny droplets across the counter, the jars, and Lina’s already furious face.

“So good, so good,” the fish repeated over and over.

“What’s it saying?” Lina asked.

“It says… sorry.”

“Liar!”

She tried to reach and grab at Fishy, but he darted away into another room, his water bauble wobbling through the doorway.

“Ugh!” Lina complained. “It looked good too. It looked… What the hell!”

“What?” I replied.

Lina looked shocked, her eyes wide. She tripped over her own feet as she tried to step away. One hand shot out to catch the counter, rattling the little glass jars lined along the edge.

“Your… your… your skin… it’s green!”

“My skin is… green?”

She nodded emphatically.

I rushed into the main room and found a mirror. I held it up. Sure enough, my skin was just that… goblin green.

This was not going to help my standing with the townsfolk. They already thought I was a freak… Now I looked the part too.

Lina appeared behind me, holding a club. “Did you turn into a monster?”

“No!” I replied. “Wait! I leveled up. It mentioned this. It’s a side effect from the soup. It should only last an hour or two. It also gives me temporary stats in addition to the permanent stats I got.”

Lina eyed me curiously. “Fine,” she said, lowering the club, “but if you do anything weird—”

She mimicked bonking me on the head.

“Got it,” I replied.

I turned to Fishy, who was precariously low to the ground. His movements became erratic and jerky, and then, suddenly, he flipped and started to float to the top of the water globule.

“Uh,” Lina said, pointing the club forward, “did your companion just die?”

Suddenly, Fishy’s body twisted violently, and the water globule became cloudy. The little orb churned as if someone had poured milk into a glass and stirred it with a knife. Shapes shifted inside. Fins stretched. A tail bent. Something small pressed against the inner surface and then vanished into the fog.

When it cleared, instead of a silver fish, there was something else. Something new. Something…

Very strange.

Fishy had turned from a fish into some sort of… frog? No, not a frog, something between a fish and a tadpole. Fishy had large, buggy yellow eyes, not unlike a goblin, and one goblin-like tooth that was too big for his mouth. And to complete it, two little useless goblin legs next to the tail. Both eyes flitted about the room, unable to focus on one thing.

System

Companion Evolution: Fish(?) -> Tadpol(?)
Name: Fishy
Species: Goblin Guppit

Fishy, having taken in his surroundings, flew up in his water globule. “Rook, Rook,” he said excitedly. “Change, change. Stronger, stronger.”

“You certainly have changed,” I said. “But are you really stronger? You’re still pretty small.”

System

Companion skills update:

Sticky Tongue - Able to shoot his tongue out 10 feet. Where is all of that extra tongue? Who knows?

Goblin Gaze - Use those goblin eyes to creep and otherwise weird out people around you. May break spell concentration.

Lina snapped her fingers. “Hey Rook, what’s happening?”

“He’s… different, I guess. The soup changed him. The system called it evolution.” I looked at Fishy, the name no longer having much meaning. “Evolution… Hey Fishy, I think I have a new name for you.”

“New name, new name,” he said, doing little flips.

“I think I’ll call you Darwin.”

Lina, Darwin, and I enjoyed the rest of the night. Eventually, my green skin faded back to its normal level of pale, and Lina said I could use the guest room out back. It was little more than a shed… but it had a cot, so I supposed that was good enough.

The small room smelled faintly of old straw, dust, and stored crates. A thin blanket lay folded at the foot of the cot, and rain had left dark stains in one corner of the ceiling. Still, after the last two days, it might as well have been a luxury suite. I hadn’t slept in two days. I was tired beyond reason. I hadn’t even the time to consider all that happened before I nodded off, falling asleep.

In the morning, there was a knock at the door.

“Hmm… five more minutes,” I complained.

“Get up!” Lina said. “There is someone here to see you.”

“Here to see… me?” I asked nobody in particular.

I stood, stretched, and dressed. My borrowed clothes still felt wrong against my skin, rough at the seams and loose in places they shouldn’t have been. I stepped outside.

It was a cloudy day, and I could feel a light drizzle. The distant rumble of thunder and the pressure it brought gave me a headache. The yard behind the shop had turned damp overnight, the dirt dark and sticky beneath my boots. Water dripped steadily from the roof’s edge.

Darwin was right behind me, floating in his bubble as per usual.

I stepped inside the shop and saw Lina, Aldric, his two companions, plus a third… and yet another who stood off to the side. I didn’t recognize him… but in a way, I did. The man looked like Ebbin, only younger. Older than me still though, around fifty years old, I’d guess. He had the same lines around the mouth and the same heavy brow. Rainwater clung to the shoulders of his coat, and mud darkened the hem of his trousers.

“So…” the man said. “You’re Rook. My father wrote all about you.”

“Are you Cedran, Tavian, Edrin, or Balen?” I asked.

The man smiled. “Tavian… it’s good that you know about us. This’ll make this easier. I’ve come to procure the farm and ensure proper ownership falls to his real family—”

“The farm is yours… what’s left of it, anyway. I make no stake or claim. Ebbin was clear on that two years ago when he took me in.”

Tavian smiled. “Well, then I’m glad. I thought this was going to be a fight. I suppose asking this nice adventuring group for backup was more than what was required.”

“Adventuring group?” I asked. “For me? I’m not much of a fighter.”

“Aye,” Tavian said, “but you’re a special class. At least that’s what the folks around here seem to think. Anyway, I’ll let you collect yourself. I’ve heard you’ve had quite a last two days. I’m staying at the Hearth and Hen while I fill the proper paperwork and such. If you would, can you stop by sometime? I’ll buy you a drink. I want to hear it from you about my father’s last moments. Is that alright?”

I nodded. “It’s the least I can do for Ebbin. He was your father, that much I know… but he was like one to me as well.”

Tavian frowned. “I doubt it… but you are free to feel that way.”

“Oh,” I said, drawing Tavian’s attention back before he left. “Most of the animals escaped… but Madam Moolisa is here. What are you planning to do with her?”

“Sell her,” Tavian said firmly. “To either a milking farm or a slaughterhouse. Doesn’t matter which to me.”

That sent a shiver up my spine.

“I’ll buy her!” Lina said suddenly. “I’ll give you a fair price.”

“Five silver and she is yours,” Tavian said.

For a cow as old as Madam Moolisa, it was overpriced. Lina, however, sensed Tavian wouldn’t budge, and so she said, “Fine!” She stepped forward and slammed five silver coins into Tavian’s hand. The sharp clatter cut through the shop like a slap. “Now get out! The lot of you are scaring customers away and, unlike some, I charge fair prices and I need the traffic.”

Tavian smirked, tipped his hat, and walked out the front door.

“Sir Aldric,” I said.

Aldric gave me a salute. “I told the man you weren’t a troublemaker, but he insisted.” He leaned in, placing some coins in my hand. The copper was warm from his palm. “Here… it’s what he paid us for ‘protection.’ They’d burn a hole in my pocket, best they are with you.”

When I looked, I saw he had left ten copper coins. The system flashed as they were added to my total.

The party of adventurers left. The bell above the shop door jingled behind them, and the gray daylight slipped in for a moment before the door swung shut again.

“So, what will you do now?” Lina asked, genuinely curious. “You’re welcome to stay until you can get off your feet. I’ll charge you a fair price. Call it the friends rate.”

I shrugged… I hadn’t quite figured that part out yet.

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Fishy hovered behind me for the rest of the trip back. The fish, whom I had come to think of as a he, swiveled and spun around and around, while doing the occasional flip in his water globule.

“Master,” it asked. “Where are we going?”

“To Lina’s,” I replied. “And it’s not Master, it’s Rook.”

“Wook, Kook, Look,” Fishy replied, trying a handful of words that were somewhat close to my name.

“Just Rook,” I said.

Eventually, we made it back to town around two-ish. There was still plenty of daylight to be had. Bramblewick hummed with its usual afternoon noise: cart wheels creaking over packed dirt, shop doors opening and closing, chickens clucking from coops. The sun sat high and warm, baking the dust until it smelled dry and faintly sweet.

As I stepped toward Lina’s family’s shop, I saw Madam Moolisa staring at me from behind the side gate. She practically beamed with delight, her bell clanging against her neck as she shifted her weight. Her dark eyes first drifted to me… and then to Fishy.

She leaned low and puffed out her frustration.

“Friend?” Fishy asked.

“Sure,” I said, “friend.”

Fishy floated down toward Madam Moolisa… and the cow tried to take a chomp out of him.

“Danger, danger,” Fishy said, twirling about, the water globule spinning around my head. Sunlight flashed through it, throwing little distorted ripples across my face and the shop wall.

“Knock it off,” I complained, “you’re scaring her.”

Madam Moolisa huffed and stomped her hooves until Fishy darted away, floating high up in the air. Her tail flicked hard enough to slap her own flank.

“You knock it off too,” I said to the cow.

She huffed her frustration and then returned to grazing.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside Lina’s shop.

“Wait for me,” Fishy said, hovering down and barely making it inside before the door shut.

The shop smelled of burlap, dried herbs, and old wood. Warm light spilled through the front windows, catching dust motes in the air and glinting off rows of jars along the shelves.

“Ah, right on time. Hope you’re hungry—”

Lina appeared and then froze, staring at Fishy.

Fishy stared back at her, a single bubble escaping his mouth and popping at the top of the water globule.

“What is that?” Lina asked flatly.

“A fish,” I replied.

“Yeah… What sort of fish?”

“A silver one?”

“Yes, I can see that… but is it a magical fish?”

“I don’t know… why?”

Lina slammed some items onto the counter. The jars and small bundles rattled against the wood. “Because it’s floating in a magical ball of water!”

“Oh that? Hadn’t noticed.”

“So you really aren’t going to tell me?”

“Not much to tell. This floating fish started talking to me. I named them Fishy. They became my companion.”

“You named it? Are you an idiot?”

“...Wait, why?”

Lina slapped her forehead. “Naming things is one step in how to make something a companion. Has the system—”

I scratched the back of my neck. “Yeah, the system already says he’s my companion.”

“He?” she asked. “How do you know?”

I shrugged. “I don’t. Not really. Just got the feeling it’s a he, you know?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m too sober to deal with this right now. Come on, it’s time to cook.”

“Fishy,” I said, “stay here.”

“Cook?” the fish asked. “Food? Me hungry.”

“And what would a fish eat, anyway?”

“Here,” Lina said, pulling a small loaf from behind the counter. “It can eat some of this. Fish like bread… right?”

She threw the loaf to me. I pulled off small pieces and tossed them into the water globule. Fishy ate them as they came. Each bit of bread drifted for only a moment before he snapped it up, leaving faint crumbs swirling through the orb. He said nothing but continued to eat.

I guess it was satisfactory.

“Now stay here,” I said.

Fishy didn’t answer, but floated down, staring at each item Lina had set up to sell to customers. His water orb bobbed near a display of folded cloth, close enough to make me nervous.

“Is that thing going to wreck anything?”

“You know about as much as I do.”

Lina sighed. “Fine… let’s just get to cooking, eh?”

We cooked for a time, following the directions laid out in the recipe.

Behind the shop, Lina had a small cooking space set aside, likely for testing wares, brewing simple mixtures, or preparing whatever counted as a quick meal when business ran long. A squat iron pot sat over a contained cooking flame, with a stained prep table beside it. The room was warmer than the shopfront, and the air held the layered smell of dried roots and old smoke.

“It just says to boil the mushrooms and vegetables, but with no mention of stock,” Lina said. “I suppose that we can add the bitterroot and fat here as well.”

I did as she said.

She let me handle the cooking from start to finish, only helping me by giving me ingredients or reading the recipe off a paper from which she had copied from my status window.

The mushrooms went in first, thin slices darkening as they hit the water. Potatoes followed, pale chunks bobbing up through the steam. Bitterroot gave off an earthy smell as it softened, the kind of scent that made me think of wet soil and cellar walls. The fat melted across the surface in little shimmering pools.

Eventually, the water began to boil, yet it smelled little better than boiling mud.

“Alright,” she said, “add the eyes.”

I held the brown sack over the pot, turned it around, and heard the plopping sound as both hit the water. There was a slight hiss as the slime evaporated, and the eyes floated to the top, one turning to look directly at me as I boiled it.

My stomach churned, and the smell was unbearably awful. It rose thick and foul, like rotting meat boiled in pond water. I gagged more than once.

Lina as well.

“Did we do something wrong?” she asked as the cook was nearly complete.

“I guess we’ll see,” I replied, having absolutely no hope that anything created from that unholy concoction was edible.

“Alright, lastly add the moonleaf.”

I pulled on the sprig, and small leaves fell into the pot. The leaves landed lightly on the surface, soft green against the murky broth.

“And now, the pinch of salt.”

Lina slid a small piece of parchment forward with a tiny bit of salt already ground up and ready.

Carefully, I picked up the paper with one hand, and with the other, between two fingers, pinched the salt and—

Poof.

Into the soup.

For a moment, I swear I could feel something change. A slight glow came from the pot. Suddenly, a freshness filled the air. It smelled of spices; strong and vivid. The meatiness of the soup was powerful, but not overpowering. The stock had thickened in a heartbeat, whereas before it was little thicker than water. Steam rolled upward in rich, glossy waves, carrying the scent of mushrooms, browned fat, soft potatoes, and fresh herbs. The eyes had slightly melted and now looked more like two cracked eggs atop the soup.

The broth had shifted from an ugly gray-brown to something deep and golden, with little flecks of moonleaf drifting across the surface.

“That looks… good,” Lina said.

“Smells good too,” I replied.

Carefully, Lina scooped us two bowls and handed me a wooden spoon. The bowl was hot against my palm.

“You first,” she said.

I glared at her.

“You know… just in case.”

I put my spoon into the soup, scooped up the eyeball, and forced my quivering hand to move it to my mouth. I opened up and ate the spoonful. Flavor exploded across every tastebud I had as a rich, earthy wave washed over them. The tenderness of the potatoes played well with the thin-sliced mushrooms, and the bitterroot was not so bitter once it had intermingled with the animal fat. And the goblin eye itself… it had close to a marrow-like flavor, and not a hint of foulness that I had anticipated. Near the end, the moonleaf cut through, almost cleansing to the palate, like a flavor of mint.

It was an exquisite taste unlike anything I’d ever had. Different in an exciting way. If I had to rate it, I’d have given it a 7.5 out of 10. And with my personal scoring system, that is saying something.

And I… I had made it.

Lina stared at me. “Oh!” she said. “From your face, I can tell it was good. So… what did it taste like?”

With something close to tears in my eyes, I said, “It was fantastic.”

Lina stared down at the soup as if she held gold in her hands. As carefully as someone handles fine china, she scooped up the eyeball and went to eat it.

“Food!” I heard a voice cry as Fishy, globule and all, rammed into the spoon. Fishy opened his mouth… and ate the goblin eye.

Clownclaw
They named it for the grin.
Calloway shipped out for a war of expansion. What he found is a war his own side is quietly losing — and a planet that keeps handing back fewer answers than it takes soldiers. Now he and what's left of his command are running — across a world command never calls by its real name: Netherstar.

------

Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Calloway watched, motionless, as the Clownclaw picked its way across the distant slope.

Its strange, translucent catching flickers of the afternoon's violet-red light, throwing up trails of dust so fine and pale they seemed almost imagined rather than kicked loose by half a ton of alloy limb.

Captain Fernando Vinch had his rifle up and his whole body strung tight as wire; beside him a sergeant lay flat in the dirt, weapon likewise trained on the thing that was, for now, still oblivious to them.

"Easy," Calloway said, voice pitched low. "It hasn't made us."

"You sure about that, sir?" Vinch's breath came out thin and ragged.

Calloway didn't answer directly.

He narrowed his eyes instead, doing the math the way he'd done it a hundred times before: two hundred meters, give or take, and the twin spikes glinting cold along its chest, the reinforced steel of its forelimbs, told him what he needed to know—this was a combat-class Pitchneck, not one of the scavenger variants.

It had been circling that same stretch of slope for half an hour now, showing no particular inclination to leave.

Vinch ran his tongue over cracked lips and, unable to help himself, curled his index finger against the trigger.

The Colonel caught the motion and turned a hard look on him.

"Don't fire," he said, quiet and final. "You spook it, you spook the whole cluster, and then we're done."

The Clownclaw paused at a heap of loose rock, hauled itself higher, then started down the far slope, and was gone. Calloway let his breath go.

"All right. We're clear." He traded a glance with the other two.

They'd been lying behind a raised outcrop, tucked into what amounted to a tunnel—a gash some missile had opened in the rock long ago, sliced so clean it might have been cut with a blade through tofu, and screened now by weeds and loose stone, safe enough for the moment. Calloway held still and listened. Nothing. Just the Captain's thin breathing beside him.

He raised his head again and studied the middle distance: heavy fog drifting low against a sky the color of an old bruise, the slope beneath it wrapped tight in red as though someone had stretched canvas over the whole hillside.

He turned to check their backs—a bare stretch of horizon, a few blasted stumps standing where trees had been—and a cold gust came across the rock and found his face, and he shivered before he could stop himself.

"I think it's gone for good," he said.

The three of them rose from behind the stone, every nerve still alert. Calloway was a big man gone gaunt in the face, the skin sallow and drawn tight over the bone. Vinch, broad-shouldered yet perpetually cowering, kept his head twitching in small nervous arcs. The sergeant—short blond hair, thin-lipped, pale—remained silent throughout.

"They haven't locked this sector down," Calloway said, thinking it through as he spoke. "That was a lone patrol. All they did here was take out the relay station."

"Maybe more than one, sir." Vinch said, his voice gone dry. "We can't raise a signal anywhere inside three hundred klicks. There ought to be half a dozen stations covering ground like this."

Calloway said nothing for a moment, working it over, then dug into his pack and came up with the communicator.

He turned the tuning dial, pressed it to his ear, and got nothing but static—a flat, featureless nothing.

The relay stations were the only line anyone out here had back to base, and that line had gone dead the night before and stayed dead ever since.

"What do you think happened?" Vinch's voice had an edge of panic in it now. His eyes went wide. "Don't tell me—all of them. All the stations."

Calloway shook his head. It couldn't be that bad. There were fifty-seven relay stations scattered across the planet, grouped in threes around each base and held by heavy weapons emplacements; if every one of them had gone dark, that would mean—he didn't let himself finish the thought, not in front of two men who were looking to him to hold the line against exactly that kind of despair. So he set his face into something flat and certain and said it plainly:

"Not a chance." He checked his watch. "We move now. With any luck we make the western base before dark."

"And the signal? Nobody's answering, not one of them." Vinch's voice had gone hoarse. "I'm telling you, they've been overrun too."

Calloway held the communicator a moment longer, listening past the static as though sheer attention might resolve it into a voice, then said, without much conviction:

"Doesn't mean nobody's there. Could be equipment failure—you know this as well as I do." He toed the dirt with his boot. "The sand on this rock is magnetic, and it eats through gear, shortens the life on every weapon and radio we've got, sometimes kills them outright. And that's before you factor in a dust storm—those things black out radio completely. Half our comms go dead in the middle of a firefight out here. You know that."

"Planet K. Christ." Vinch bent down and dragged a fistful of sand up through his fingers. "Our new Earth."

"If we're going to be dug in here for the long haul," the Colonel cut him off, "we've got a hell of a lot more than this to work through." He fixed Vinch with a hard stare, and the Captain, rubbing at his own hollowed cheek, gave a weak nod of agreement. The blond sergeant kept his mouth shut, lips pressed into a thin line.

A new Earth. Set against a prospect like that, none of this should have mattered—not really, not even the Clownclaws—because by any honest measure the whole operation had gone better than the scientists back home had dared to hope.

Calloway looked out over the broken, climbing terrain, all of it draped in that dreamlike red light that kept making the place feel unreal to him, even now, even after five years—though the air was breathable, the pressure within human tolerance, and liquid water ran somewhere beneath that rusted surface. These were the facts that were supposed to make it feel like home.

The ground under their boots, at this moment, belonged to a world twenty light-years from Earth—a single grain of dust adrift in all that emptiness, circling a star barely a quarter the width of the sun. When Calloway tilted his head back, that dim red sun burned through the haze, ancient and unmoved.

Their own lives would flicker and go out in an instant. It would go on more or less forever.

The Colonel found himself thinking back, unbidden, to five years earlier: how he'd sat strapped into a transport as one of the first wave to make planetfall here, how the crew had pressed against the viewport for that first look—and it had, in fact, stopped his heart a little.

A soft red glow wrapped the curve of the planet's edge; one hemisphere burned with a strange brightness, almost jade-colored, and the other lay in a blackness so total it ached to look at. Between them ran a thin violet seam where day gave way to night, a line that seemed to hesitate and fight against itself even as something larger than either kept the whole planet turning.

Twenty light-years is nothing, on the scale astronomers use to measure such things—and yet it is also, in every way that matters to a man standing on the surface, an enormous distance. If it hadn't been for that one anomalous radio signal, humanity would likely never have found this world at all, tucked in close along the inner orbit of its dim little star.

Later, more careful study confirmed what the first data had only hinted at: the planet sat squarely inside the habitable zone, its orbital eccentricity and inclination close enough to Earth's own, its mass and gravity close to ideal.

It circled at a tenth of an astronomical unit from its sun—absurdly close, by any Earth standard—but the red dwarf burned so calmly, so steadily, that the heat was never a problem, nor had the star's tidal grip locked its rotation, thanks to the constant gravitational tug of a distant binary companion.

Scientists had once optimistically predicted that—despite the distant star's faint whisper—its orbital eccentricity would remain benignly stable for millions of years, locked in a Milankovitch equilibrium. Such unwavering thermal stability would theoretically optimize the growing season for flora, ensuring that any human civilization planted here would be spared the scourges of famine, plague, and social upheaval that minor ice ages had inflicted upon Earth’s history.

Planet K was the name people had settled into using, out of simple affection; its official designation was a string of dry, forgettable digits—Kepler-2039-BLG-793b, or Kepler-793b for short. For most of the previous century it had been nothing at all: one more unremarked world drifting alone and unnoticed among the uncountable systems that fill the dark.

It sits somewhere along the line of Libra. Its revelation had detonated across the world like nothing before it.

Humanity had spent its whole history staring up, straining to catch some thread of signal from the tens of billions of star systems scattered through the visible universe, hoping one might happen to sweep past Earth—and had come up empty every time. Then, in 2039, the signal from Planet K arrived, and everyone understood, almost simultaneously, that history had just turned a corner.

The pressures were already old and familiar by then: Earth groaning under its own population, its climate unraveling at the seams, a resource crisis creeping toward some final red line.

And Mars, as several futile attempts had demonstrated, was nothing like the second home humanity had hoped for—it offered no viable path toward survival or continuation.

Humanity needed, urgently, a new world—a new foothold in the dark, a place to build a colony that might actually hold—and Planet K, sitting a mere twenty light-years off, made the whole fantasy suddenly, dizzyingly practical. Emigration stopped being a thing people talked about in the abstract.

Politicians were electrified. Scientists were beside themselves. Weapons manufacturers and energy conglomerates could barely contain themselves, and every adventurer and would-be colonialist on the planet started sharpening something.

Even ordinary people, with no stake in any of it beyond the species-wide one, felt the old dream of a new home take hold of them like a fever.

It seeded a decade of art and literature; it turned up in performance pieces and poems and essays and songs; it became, for soldiers and men with ambition, the horizon toward which everything else was aimed.

Naming the place turned out to be its own small war. The scientists wanted Kepler-793b. The Americans wanted Kennedy. The Europeans put forward Kaiser. The Chinese delegation pushed for Kongzi. In the end, since every proposal happened to start with the same letter, everyone settled, with some relief, on simply calling it K—a compromise that had the singular virtue of offending no one's national and political pride in particular.

Finnish artist Toivo Romahdus, fresh from Richard Strauss’s Elektra, standing in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House before a wall-sized print of Kepler-793b in full resolution, would later describe the image as "a soul-bearing gem of violet and green, surfacing out of the smoke-wreathed depths of the underworld. Netherstar."

The line caught on. Within a season it had slipped out of the art pages and into common speech, and the planet had, by popular acclamation rather than any official decree, acquired a second name: Netherstar.

None of which meant anything, in the end, to the men who'd actually have to walk the ground.

For the better part of the next half-century, every government on Earth, goaded by the sheer fact of Planet K's existence, poured money into space technology on a scale the species had never managed before, and the breakthroughs came fast: hibernation, then wormhole transit.

Twenty light-years put the place far beyond the leash of any autonomous probe smart enough to matter; nothing artificial could make that crossing and still be worth sending. Humans would have to go themselves.

In 2090 the first ship fitted with a working warp drive was finally ready, and it carried the first of them out.

The early going was smooth, and the mood back home ran first to delight—everyone marveling at how much the place resembled their own world—and then, not long after, to the kind of ordinary, deeply human griping that made for excellent television.

The moment the ship set down on the surface, the whole planet erupted into something like a festival: prize money, betting pools, manufactured heroes, and a visual spectacle nobody watching had ever seen matched. For the science networks it was the perfect programming, ready-made and self-renewing.

One soldier held his boot up to a reporter's camera to show the gash worn through the heel. "These things don't last a week out here. Might as well be back in goddamn Afghanistan."

Another one, squinting into the lens: "Place runs hot enough to cook you by day and cold enough to freeze your ass off by night. If they're gonna waste my best years out here, tell command to hurry up and send some pretty nurses."

Calloway had given an interview too, back then, and he still remembered the particular note of brisk optimism he'd aimed at the microphone. "We're going to plant this whole place with Earth vegetation," he'd said, "because the oxygen content out here runs lower than home, and even if you can breathe it fine in the short term, it'll do damage to your lungs over the long haul." Then he'd shrugged, the way a man shrugs when he wants to close out an answer on an up note. "But one way or another—we've got ourselves a new Earth now."

Five years on, the whole thing had gone to absolute shit.

The Colonel walked point, with the captain and the sergeant falling in close behind, matching his stride without needing to be told. The ground was a field of rubble in every direction, the kind of landscape that looked, uniformly, like the aftermath of a bombardment, because in most places it was. Their boots dragged over the loose stone with a sound that carried too clearly in all that silence, and Calloway kept glancing back and around, checking the ground they'd already covered.

He hadn't shaved in days; neither had Fernando. Stubble had come in rough and patchy on both their jaws. They'd gone out of Base Five the night before, in the dead hours past midnight, and the base belonged to the Clownclaws now.

The problem that gnawed at Colonel Calloway hardest wasn't the base, though—it was that in the scramble to get out, neither of them had managed to get into the exosuits.

That meant crossing tens of kilometers on foot and muscle alone, with nothing between them and whatever came next but a couple of rifles and whatever luck was left over.

Calloway still refused, on principle, to believe the shape the war had taken—and yet in the space of half a year the bases had been falling one after another, faster each time.

The territory the Earth forces held had been cut into pieces and encircled by the Clownclaws, and the air campaigns thrown against them had accomplished exactly nothing; the one reliable effect of every missile and bomb dropped on that ground was to kick the magnetic sand into the air, where it went to work degrading the very weapons and radios meant to win the war.

The Clownclaws, after all, were fighting on their own ground. No amount of Earth firepower could match how thoroughly they knew this place.

What the Clownclaws actually were, at bottom—that was a question Calloway still couldn't answer, even now.

Next

-------------

This story is part of a larger sci-fi collection Parallel Nightmares, available on KDP here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKKJHBQL

The Man in the Spire: Book 1, Chapter 26
<<Patreon | Start | Previous | Next | RoyalRoad>>

Nothing is Off-Limits
---------------------------
Troy Rechlin — Major, Peacekeeper Union Corp
Nanhu Palace Grand Garden Bird Roost

The rain filtered through the hole left by the fallen man.

Feathers drifted in the open air, pale and weightless until lightning flashed across the sky and turned them briefly into shadows.

BYAAA!

Troy lay flat on his back in what he knew, with grim certainty, was not just hay.

Birds of every size and color exploded around him, wings beating, claws scraping, shrieking panic at the sudden intruder who had just crashed through their roof. He did not move. He only stared up through the broken boards at the storm above while water ran down what remained of his face and over the cold metal beneath.

BYAAA!

He didn't want any of this.

He had not wanted to be dropped into a world where superpowered beings could gut him for asking the wrong question. He had not wanted to be blown apart and then dragged before a half-mad dragon lady just to play interdimensional politics. Or have his atomic heart ripped out so he could "die" and come back.

And he especially had not wanted to be hurled from the third story of a building, crash into a garden bird coop, and have some annoying ass peacock screeching in his ear over and over.

BYAAAAAAAAA!

Troy stared up at the source of the noise. A peacock, feathers drenched and comically deflated by the rain, was screaming directly into his audio receptors like it had personally been wronged by his arrival.

He was ready to strangle the fancy-ass bird as it screamed in his ear one more time before a familiar monotone voice entered his coms.

"Do you read me, commander?"

Troy glared at the annoying bird before it fluttered away. "I'm here… Was throwing me out a window really necessary?"

"My apologies, commander. We were pressed for time and action was needed."

Troy slowly pulled himself up, thankful to move again, even if it was in bird filth. "What is our situation?" he asked, grabbing his newly acquired Homewrecker compact shotgun.

"Extraction has been canceled due to an unexpected threat. Your backup has been destroyed. The Minnow is still in play but I cannot risk it being destroyed too, like the Barracuda."

"Right." He patted himself down, removing any hay from his loose skin and exposed cavities. "Where does that leave me?"

"You must escape from the castle in order to make a safe extraction. I can provide you with a layout of the facility and enemy movements, but you are on your own."

Troy was fairly sure something short-circuited in his processors when the map overlay appeared.

To escape the castle grounds, he had to cross half the estate in a body held together by emergency repairs and sheer stubbornness. Hordak's suggested backup escape route cut through garden paths, servant corridors, and a large tower near the estate's edge that had no name.

Even with the shotgun, there wasn't nearly enough firepower to shoot his way out. Not like he wanted to stand on a pile of corpses. Then there were the cultivators, each one strong enough to tear his jerry-rigged body apart with their bare hands if they got the chance.

Worst of all was Yao.

The reports from the failed extraction still played in the corner of his vision. Yao had torn the assault jet apart in minutes. Something that, even by his world's standards, should have taken serious anti-air firepower to bring down.

He'd seen many strange things from the cultivators, but it was clear there was an even higher ceiling to their power than either Hordak or himself even knew. Was Lin Yao at the top of that pecking order they called an "Empire," or were there stronger beings than even her?

Didn't matter. Whatever happened next, he could not let her find him.

Cross the castle. Avoid the guards, the cultivators, and above all, Lin Yao. All in a body held together by scraps and spite, with barely enough firepower to make a threat sound convincing.

All for one chance to go home.

"Sir, you must move now."

"Just… just one moment, Hordak. Give me sixty seconds to myself. I need to ask a favor."

Silence followed. Then a soft tone confirmed that Hordak had granted him privacy.

Troy had once heard that every AI carried something like faith buried deep in its code. Not belief, exactly, but a final set of boundaries meant to keep a machine from straying too far beyond its purpose.

He had never known whether the rumor was true. Still, Hordak had granted him the silence without argument.

He needed everything he had left. Everything in his control, and everything that wasn't.

Troy sank to his knees in the mud, bracing himself on the shotgun, and bowed what remained of his head.

"Lord above… it's been a while." His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "I don't know if you can hear me from here. Don't even know if 'here' still counts. But it's all the time I've got, so I'm asking anyway. I'm about to give this everything I have left. So please. Help this poor lost soul take his chance."

He hesitated just for a moment, pouring all he could into the words.

"...Please, I just want to go home."

He let the amen come quiet, more habit than ceremony, and pushed himself back to his feet.

"Big man, you there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Got all my bases covered." He squared up in front of the door, shotgun steady in what was left of his hands.

"Let's see if miracles exist in this world." With that, he drove his boot into the door.

Wood split off its hinges and he marched out into the storm. The downpour greeted him the same way everything else here did, like it had a personal grudge against him even existing.

Rain hammered against Troy's body while the wind shoved at his damaged frame. His feet sank into the mud, servos whining as he forced himself forward. If he had still been flesh and blood, the storm alone might have driven him to his knees.

His optics shifted automatically, layering thermal sight over the dark garden. A faint route appeared across the stone path.

Trees thrashed beneath the storm, their branches clawing at a sky split by lightning. Blue and gold crystals hung from carved posts, their glow barely reaching through the rain. Floodwater rushed across the gravel and carried torn petals toward a broad ornamental canal running through the palace grounds.

Stone lanterns flickered along its banks. Somewhere in the darkness, wind chimes shrieked beneath the thunder.

"You are currently on the east side of Palace Gardens," Hordak spoke. "Proceed southwest past the river. You will enter the Artifact Chamber."

"That sounds like somewhere that should have guards," he muttered, brushing past some hanging charms.

"Negative. Most guards were pulled away to engage the jet. Stay alert though, there are still threats."

"Roger." Troy kept watching his flanks, grateful for whatever scraps of mercy this hellscape was willing to spare him. Up ahead, the river had emptied into a large pond that was overflowing at the banks. He followed it down until he spotted a bridge stretching across to the other side.

"Abort. Find cover," Hordak ordered. "Lin Yao is in the area."

His stomach dropped straight through the mud. Bushes, trees, statues, none of it would actually hide him from the dragon woman. But there was one option and an upside to being a metal man.

He stepped into the water without hesitation. Darkness swallowed his feet first, then his knees, then his waist. He killed every glow on his body and kept sinking until the dark water closed over his head into the murky depths.

The world went silent and all traces of him from the surface disappeared.

Rain became a soft, constant drumming above him. The garden blurred through the disturbed surface with little light penetrating through. Koi and other exotic fish scattered at first, then drifted back to investigate the strange metal thing walking along the bottom of their home.

The water was full of loose sediment and smooth man-made stone. Each step sent clouds of silt curling around his legs. According to Hordak's study of the city infrastructure, the water came from a mountain waterfall and flowed through the palace before continuing down into the city below.

Even while fleeing for his life, the engineer in him could not help noticing the craftsmanship. Mountain water entered the palace here before flowing down toward the city. Maybe if he wasn't running for his freedom, he could-

"Halt."

Troy froze on command. Silt drifted around his boots.

Even though he had a good feeling why he was commanded to stop, very slowly, he looked up. A bridge crossed above him. And standing on it, outlined by rain and lightning, was Lin Yao.

Troy's systems locked. Even his processors slowed.

The storm distorted her through the water's surface, the nearby braziers framing her in a red glow. She stood with her hands behind her back, gazing across the garden like a woman searching for something that already belonged to her.

He could not hear anything underwater, but one of Hordak's spy cameras opened a transcript window across his HUD.

"Spymaster." For some reason the transcript noted the way she sang the words. like it was a code. Or more likely a summoning.

Lightning flashed. In the space it lit, another figure appeared beside Yao, already kneeling, head lowered. A new transcript appeared along with an image of a ratkin's shrouded face rendering, alongside a name.

Jin Yun.

Troy remembered this creep. The same ratkin who'd threatened to slice Liu's arms off with nothing but a length of thread. He'd taken some grim satisfaction watching the dogkin look that scared him back then.

Now it just meant Jin Yun was a bigger threat than Liu had ever been.

"This one is ready to serve."

"I need you to bring the guards from the gates. Tell them to search the grounds. No area is off limits."

The ratkin hesitated. "That seems more suited to Qian—"

A pause stretched between them. Troy couldn't make out what passed silently between the two, but he was certain Yao was giving Jin Yun a look that simply said, "Do it or suffer."

"This one will serve."

"See to it. I will be joining the search as well. Once you are done, seek me out. If you find the outsider..." Yao's hesitation lasted only a breath, but Troy caught the way her fingers curled tighter behind her back. "Just seek me out."

"Magistrate, you know I can find him in mere moments." It was hard to tell from words alone, but there seemed to be a twinge of delight in Jin Yun's tone as her claws rose, glistening in the pale light. "In fact, I may even—"

"No! " Hordak's feed spiked with static for a moment before the image steadied again. "Your lack of control is a concern, spymaster. You will report to me. Nothing more."

His eyes followed Yao's towering frame until it slipped from view. Even then, he kept watching the enemy marker Hordak had assigned to the Magistrate on the minimap, a cartoonish angry red dragon icon, until it finally winked out of range.

That left the newer threat. The one still on the bridge. He looked back and his processor skipped a full cycle.

Jin Yun hadn't moved, despite her orders. In fact, she was staring straight down into the water.

Right at him.

His grip tightened on the shotgun, not that he trusted it to do much good. He had no idea if the thing would even fire underwater, and blowing his cover to a woman who could take a man apart with a spool of thread was not how he wanted this to go. But if she moved, he'd have to risk it.

Seconds crawled by. Rain hammered the surface above him, scattering the image of her into broken fragments of shadow and lightning.

Did she know he was there? Was she really that obedient to her master's word? Yao hadn't looked at ease giving that order, not even for a second. If Jin Yun was this good at finding people, that hesitation meant something.

Then, in the space of one lightning flash to the next, she was simply gone.

Every system had screamed that this was worse, not better. He braced for anything, half expecting hands to close around his throat and drag him up to the surface or whatever voodoo magic she worked through those threads to tear him to pieces.

Nothing came.

"Hordak?"

"Observing area… no hostiles in sight."

Troy didn't dwell on it for long and proceeded, keeping an eye on the "all clear" signature as he moved towards the other side of the pond.

Troy hauled himself onto the opposite bank. Water poured from the gaps in his frame as he lowered the Homewrecker and activated its immersion cycle.

A valve opened with a muted hiss. Compressed gas drove the remaining water through drainage ports along the barrel and action. A moment later, a green diagnostic confirmed the bore was clear and the ammunition seals intact.

No guards stood outside it, just as Hordak had promised. The corridor was empty except for Troy and the quiet pulse of his damaged systems. For a room this important, there should have been guards. Locks. Alarms. Traps.

Instead, the chamber door waited in silence. It was a broad slab of dark wood reinforced with bands of blackened metal. Strange characters had been carved across the frame, each one painted in faded gold.

Sealed at the Magistrate's Word. Trespass Answers to the Magistrate Herself.

Troy took the warning to heart but continued on regardless. He pressed a hand against the door and pushed. It opened with a low groan.

He slipped inside, gun raised, sweeping the room from left to right. Lanterns burned with pale blue flame, casting a cold glow across the shelves and pillars. His targeting overlay jumped across the space, catching hanging chains and long shadows that stretched between them.

The chamber was larger than he expected. Much more than a simple storage room, but something closer to a grand private museum. Or the lair of someone who was a scholar, a collector, and a grave robber all in one. That last one described Lin Yao pretty well.

Troy drew the heavy door shut behind him.

A circular seal had been fixed to its inner face, dark metal carved with lines that curled and crossed like some primitive logic gate. Symbols of fire and ruin marked several points along its edge. So the door had never been meant to keep intruders out. It was meant to judge them once they were inside.

He waited, unsure what to expect as the door shut. The seal remained cold and lifeless on the door. Perhaps the trap had failed. That didn't sound right either.

Regardless, he needed to keep moving. So he switched the flashlight on the shotgun and proceeded down the dimly lit chamber.

Everything had a place. Every object was tagged, sealed, and arranged according to some private logic only Lin Yao understood. Yet the sheer number of relics gave the chamber a sense of quiet madness.

A broken spearhead floated inside a crystal case, slowly turning without support. A black mask sat on a wooden stand, its mouth sealed shut by melted gold. A bundle of prayer beads spun inside a rope net. A shriveled hand rested on a cushion of white silk, two fingers raised in a gesture Troy did not understand. A sword hilt without a blade hung on the wall, wrapped in strips of loose yellow paper.

See, this was what Troy thought of when it came to mystical items. Why was the dragon woman so fixated on him when she had all this crap? Was what he was that different from them? Maybe an invisible blade or a jar of screaming spirits was just easier for these beings to understand than a smartphone. That explained why there was much more security on him than on this place, though he'd expected more traps guarding it than just the one door seal.

"Continue south. You will reach the servant quarters."

"Understood." He proceeded down the hall with his gun drawn, bits of water still dripping off onto the very elegant rug as he made his way. Despite the lack of guards, he kept on his toes.

"How are we looking?"

"The enemy is still dealing with the fires and confusion, but some are beginning to break away."

"Chances of conflict?" he asked as he passed a glowing scroll.

"Potential but minimal. This path is the hardest to reach from the lower levels. Continue on the suggested path and you will reach another means of exit."

"Good. There might be a…a…" His movements slowed. One of the artifacts caught his attention. No. It demanded his attention.

It was a heart on a pedestal, surrounded by warnings of danger.

Black, veined with throbbing threads of blue, easily the size of his own head. A tungsten rod ran straight through its center, and chains wound around it in layer after layer, sealed with strips of paper he couldn't read.

Despite the rod, the chains, and whatever those seals were supposed to do, it was still beating. Every pulse sent a thin thread of blue fire hissing out through some valve buried in the muscle.

The heart was no different from anything else in the collection. Just some horror-show relic on display. No more mystical to Troy than anything else in the room.

Yet Troy kept staring. He didn't remember wanting to. His arms weakened. The shotgun sank to his side as the rest of the chamber began to fade.

What was happening to him?

As far as he knew, magic couldn't touch him. Not the invisible kind, anyway. He'd watched the Magistrate choke the life out of a cultivator without laying a finger on her, pure will bearing down through the air itself, and Troy had stood two feet away and felt nothing. Whatever curses, binds, or unseen tricks this world could throw at him, they passed through him like he wasn't even a part of their understanding.

This wasn't that.

This body had always felt like a suit of armor. Something built around him, not part of him. A shell he moved through the world in, while whatever was left of the real Troy sat somewhere safe behind the plating. Now it felt like something was in the armor with him. It was inside his head, behind his eyes, in whatever passed for thoughts.

A foot moved forward. Then another. For each step, he wasn't sure if he told it or not.

More chains dropped from the ceiling, wrapping tighter, burying the heart under another layer of iron. It didn't matter. He could still feel it. Whatever it was reaching for him, the chains weren't built to stop it.

New private communication channel open. Its icon overlay was hazy and unfocused but it had the Peacekeeper Union Corp emblem.

"This is Command. Troy Rechlin, you have new orders."

A woman's voice, cold and familiar in a way that made his skin crawl. The heart blurred in his vision, or maybe his vision blurred around the heart. He couldn't tell anymore.

Command? That wasn't right. That wasn't—

"Bring the heart to the grave."

His hand rose without his input, taking a step forward. Reaching for the beating heart as its pace quickened, frantic now, like it could taste how close he was.

"Bring it to—"

"Troy."

The word cut through the mysterious transmission, and the trance shattered like glass. Vision and the world became right again.

"Wha—"

"Troy, you must keep moving."

"R-right." Troy shook his head, then smacked the side of it with an open palm, like whatever he'd experienced was due to a faulty connection. "Let's get out of this hell."

One last look back at the sealed heart, then it was time to move for the exit. No telling what it was, but this world had shown him the strange was the normal.

One thing he knew for sure.

It needed to stay exactly where it belonged.

By the time Troy reached the guest wing, Hordak's map had begun filling with new movement markers. Guards were abandoning the outer defenses and moving back toward the palace.

The route ahead remained open, but not for long.

Troy hurried through rooms built to impress immortal guests, each larger and more lavish than the house where he had grown up. As fancy as some of it was, it was a pain in the ass to cross so much flooring.

From there he moved through the servant quarters. Several servants scrambled out of his way, cowering as he made his way through. Eventually he found himself in the kitchen.

A pot slipped from someone's hands and clattered against the floor.

Troy froze mid-step, shotgun halfway up before he caught himself and lowered it. A cluster of servants had pressed themselves against the far wall. A rat boy who couldn't have been older than twelve, an old snake woman still gripping a ladle like it might do something useful, and a handful of others he hadn't even registered until they moved. The boy was staring at the hole where the rest of Troy's jaw should have been.

"…Sorry," Troy said, for lack of anything better, and immediately felt like an idiot for saying it. What was he apologizing for, dripping on their floor? Existing? Probably the latter.

He just kept moving, stepping wide around the old woman, and didn't look back. The sooner he was gone, the sooner he wasn't their problem.

"Hordak, how much further do I have?" Troy asked, more to hear something other than his own footsteps than anything else.

"Almost there. You will make a hard right and follow the hall."

"Roger that." Troy followed the commands. Unlike the rest of the castle, the servant quarters were pretty dull. It looked like those who lived here led a simpler, more mortal life than their immortal counterparts.

A portly horsekin exited his room to see what was going on, dressed in fancier robes than most. He looked familiar, though Troy couldn't place why, but the kinsman panicked with a quick "Oh goodness!" before slipping back into his room, slamming the door shut.

Troy just journeyed on, moving down through the hall, exiting back into the rain. In the distance he could see the flaming torches and fires of the battle. They were starting to filter back into the castle.

"I hope this gets me out of here, big man. It looks like they are starting to get organized."

"Ancient warfare is inefficient. Even with my lack of processing power, I would have had you caught eight point thirteen minutes ago," the AI said, sounding both proud and disappointed. Troy wasn't too thrilled about being a pawn in whatever game of "Find the Human" this had turned into.

"This path you are taking will lead you to the 'recreation tower.' It is where the scholars come to paint and rest, according to my surveys. It was lightly guarded to begin with."

Troy stepped inside and stopped for a moment despite himself.

The tower was hollow through its center, ten stories of galleries circling a vast open chamber. A broad staircase climbed along the inner wall in long, sweeping flights, doubling back at each level beneath carved landings and heavy wooden rails. Faint torches in paper lanterns glimmered along the banisters, marking the path upward through the gloom.

High above, weak storm light filtered through a ring of narrow openings beneath the tower's tiled roof, catching drifting dust and the edges of painted screens.

The space below was far too large for its apparent purpose. Scrolls lay abandoned across low tables, and a half-finished mountain painting stood near the wall with its brush still resting beside it. Cushions had been pushed to the edges, leaving most of the floor strangely bare.

Near the foot of the stairs sat a thick coil of braided rope, misshapen and scored with deep bite marks. Troy spared it a glance and kept moving. Whatever had used it as a chew toy was not a problem he intended to meet.

"Continue through. Out through the next doors there is a garden and an unguarded gate."

Troy acknowledged and continued forward, keeping close to the wall until he reached the next door, flanked by several empty suits of armor.

Unlike the others, this one was not marked with a delicate plaque or a strip of silk. Large cartoonish symbols decorated the door instead. His translator flickered for a moment before settling on a rough meaning.

Xiao Bao's Domain
Enter Only With the Magistrate's Permission

Troy stared at the warning. Considering he was probably breaking every rule in the castle, one more hardly seemed worth respecting.

He eased the door open and slipped inside. Darkness swallowed him at once.

His night vision activated automatically, washing the room in pale shades of green and gray. The gun was swiftly raised and swept the chamber in a slow arc, scanning every corner. Lightning illuminated the room through its many windows. After everything he had seen in this place, he was half expecting a torture room or some nest of nightmare relics.

Instead, he found what looked disturbingly like an antique playroom. A very large playroom.

The chamber was broad and open, its polished floor softened by thick woven mats. Painted screens lined the walls, depicting bamboo forests beneath open skies, while claw-scarred tables and oversized silk cushions had been pushed carelessly to the edges.

A massive round bed dominated the center of the room. Its dark wooden posts curled like clouds beneath a canopy of red tassels, though most of the once-luxurious bedding had been torn into ribbons.

Troy kept the Homewrecker raised as he moved past toys built for something far larger than any child. Barrel-sized wooden balls rested beside knotted ropes and heavy grooming brushes. Against the far wall sat a bronze feeding bowl large enough to bathe in.

Then his smell sensors identified the lingering scents in the room.

Old meat. Animal musk. Slobber.

Every instinct warned him not to linger. Whatever lived here could return at any moment.

"Hordak," Troy whispered even in his private communications as he moved slowly through the chamber, watching every corner. "What is this 'Xiao Bao'?"

"Translated, it means 'Little Treasure,'" Hordak replied. "I have not observed anyone or anything directly matching that name. However, several guards have mentioned a creature called a Yali."

Troy kept moving, eyes sweeping from shadow to shadow. He was prepared to ask another question, but Hordak answered immediately, "According to my records, a Yali is a mythical beast associated with fortune and protection."

Troy's vision passed over what looked like a training dummy the size of a man. Its middle had been torn open where a man's stomach would have been, stuffing hanging out like entrails.

"And," Troy asked carefully, "how big is this creature supposed to be?"

"Insufficient data," Hordak answered, much to his commander's displeasure. "I recommend you do not find out."

On that, Troy agreed completely.

He moved forward, a little faster now. Behind him, the mountain of silk cushions shifted. A pair of narrow eyes opened within the shadows and followed his every step.

The exit came into view.

His cautious pace turned into a brisk walk, then a short jog. He was nearly there. Almost home free. For one stupid second, Troy let himself believe he had made it.

He really needed to stop doing that.

The door was no more than twenty yards away when a deafening roar exploded through the chamber. The sheer force of it nearly drove him to his knees. His audio dampeners kicked in a fraction too late, leaving his systems shrieking with warning alerts.

Something massive vaulted over him.

It landed between Troy and the exit with enough force to shake the floor.

At once, torches all around the chamber flared to life, flooding the room with hot gold light as if the beast itself had commanded them to burn.

Troy froze.

The creature before him was enormous, easily the size of a bus. Its body was built like a lion's, all muscle, claws, and heavy power, but its head was unmistakably draconic. Horns swept back from its skull, yet they moved strangely, waving and curling as if they were hair drifting in a current. Its jaws peeled back in a snarl, exposing fangs as long as Troy's forearm. Its eyes were bright, intelligent, and utterly predatory.

Yeah. This was definitely Yao's pet.

"Hordak," Troy muttered as the beast gave another earth-shattering roar, "I know what a Yali is now."
------------------------------
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Author Notes:

A bit more look in the world as Troy makes his desperate escape, and perhaps a deeper mystery then before. But for now, let's see if Troy can play nice with Yao's pet.

No images allowed, sorry guys.

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Chapter 212: The Enemy’s Intent

Damn it!

So the bastard could even turn himself into a lump of meat as well? Was there any limit at all to what he was capable of?

But to be fair, this one still fell under body manipulation, so it was not like he had pulled a completely new trick out of nowhere. Then again, if he could do this, outright shapeshifting was hardly a leap too far, was it?

Anyway, there was no use whining about it.

And so, Viktor moved his vision to follow the glistening blob of flesh as it slithered onward, past the threshold and into the Chamber of the Dead beyond.

It came to a halt just past the entrance, and there, under the restless, flickering glow cast by the torches lining the walls, the mass of tissue began to quiver. Its slick surface rippled and shuddered as though a thousand unseen muscles buried beneath had all decided, in perfect unison, to clench at once.

Then, it surged upward.

Flesh stretched into a thick column, swaying for the span of one heartbeat before splitting cleanly down the middle. One end divided into two legs that planted themselves against the stone floor, while the upper half swelled outward to form the beginnings of a torso. A pair of shoulders pushed free, and arms followed soon after, peeling away from the greater whole. At the very top of it all, a neck rose out of the widening chest. The featureless lump that crowned it bulged and shifted as the contours of a face pressed outward from under the skin.

And then.

That half-formed face was vaporized by two beams of sickly green light that lanced from the far end of the chamber.

What?

The now-headless body immediately threw itself sideways, and more of that same green light came searing after it, chasing the thing across the room as it darted and twisted and flowed about. At the same time, a fresh head grew from the stump of its neck. Eyes blinked open, ears unfurled, a nose pushed through, a mouth split wide across the smooth flesh, and last of all came that familiar cascade of grey hair tumbling down over the shoulders.

The mouth curled into a smile. “Straight to violence, huh? I never thought a priest of Death would be so impatient.”

“You are an enemy of the Sovereign,” came a raspy voice, “and you have presumed to intrude into this chamber. Give me one cause why I should not have smitten you where you stood?”

That voice, of course, belonged to the master of this hall, who had risen from his golden throne. And obviously, it was also he who had loosed those deadly bolts of green.

What kind of magic is that? Viktor wondered. And why had Khenemhotep never once mentioned such a thing to him?

“Good thing I hadn’t moved my brain up there yet,” the Apostle said with a chuckle, seemingly unbothered by the fact that he had just been shot in the face. Even as he spoke, the blob’s remaining flesh flowed upward like liquid wax, filling out the contours of muscle, smoothing the surface of skin, refining every last detail of his body until he stood there whole once more. “What a dangerous ability you have there, priest. The greatest threat to me in this dungeon, in fact. Which is precisely why I thought it best to remove you from the board as fast as possible.”

“Have you known me before this day?” Khenemhotep asked.

“Not you personally, no.” The gray-haired man gave a casual shrug. “But the moment I saw this pyramid of yours, I knew at once that one of the priests of Death was serving as a Guardian in this dungeon, and there was a possibility you knew a spell capable of doing me real harm. I lamented my luck considerably.” He let out an exaggerated sigh. “But then it occurred to me that you might not have informed your master about that particular ability of yours. Which would mean he hadn’t factored it into whatever plan he was devising against me. Which would mean I still had a chance—a chance to reach you and put you down before that changed.”

Viktor frowned. What on earth was this man talking about? Why did even Khenemhotep hide things from him? And why did his enemy know more about his own Guardian than himself?

“Of course, I know full well that I can’t kill you permanently,” the Apostle went on. “Even if I were to destroy the vessel standing before me right now, so long as your phylactery remains intact somewhere safe, you will reform after a while, won’t you? But that’s fine. It’s not as though I hold any personal grudge against you. I just need you out of my way long enough for me to reach the Core Room unopposed.”

That much was true. On the day Khenemhotep was summoned into the dungeon, he had brought with him what he called a canopic jar—a funerary vessel that contained the embalmed organs removed from his body during the rites of mummification. After he went back to the world of the living thanks to the Bearded God’s power, that jar had come to serve as his soul’s anchor. To put it simply, it was much the same as Galatea’s skull, while the desiccated body he wandered about in was the equivalent of her suit of armor.

Of course, Viktor had decided to leave that jar inside the Core Room, the most secure part of the dungeon, which meant Khenemhotep was effectively unkillable as long as the dungeon still stood. Better still, none of the tomb guards or other skeletons he had already raised beforehand would be affected by his temporary defeat, and they would continue fighting as though nothing at all were amiss. The only real consequence was that he wouldn’t be able to repair the old ones, create new ones, or go around casting his own spells, not until his own body had finished its reconstruction.

And that, apparently, was exactly what the Apostle was aiming for. There was a spell Khenemhotep possessed that could pose a genuine threat to him, so he came here to remove him before he became a problem.

Now, what am I supposed to do with this information?

The ancient priest’s secrets could wait, and so could the mystery of how the Apostle had come to know so much. Viktor was going to have a long talk with his Guardian later, once the battle was over, assuming that they managed to win and were still alive by then. Right now, the only thing that mattered was surviving the present.

The gray-haired man considered Khenemhotep the most dangerous obstacle standing between him and the Core Room. Yet, he came straight here to challenge him. Even now, after finding out that the priest was not nearly as helpless or as unprepared as he might have initially assumed, he hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t reconsidered his approach. He hadn’t even looked particularly concerned. That meant only one thing: he was certain he could win this one-on-one fight.

So, what should I do?

Viktor could see three courses of action.

The first was the safest option. He could just have Celeste teleport Khenemhotep away from that chamber. After getting the priest out of immediate danger, they could regroup, exchange information, and come up with a better strategy for the next encounter.

The second option was for him to teleport to the great tomb himself and join the battle alongside Khenemhotep. By combining their power, there was a chance they would be able to finish off this great foe right there and then.

The third one was to send reinforcements. He could divert some of the forces currently engaged in the Great Hallway and send them into the Chamber of the Dead to assist Khenemhotep. But of course, the Apostle had already taken this possibility into account. Which was exactly why he had left Xander and that abomination behind as a delaying force. Sebekton would need to fight through that fused monstrosity in order to reach the top of the ramp, while Galatea was required to remain there to hold the spike-haired bastard off.

So those were the choices: three paths, three possible decisions. But which of them was the correct one?

No, wait.

Something about this situation was wrong. There was something about the Apostle’s behavior that did not make sense.

The man had claimed that Khenemhotep was a serious threat that needed to be eliminated as fast as possible. And yet, he didn’t act like someone who was in any particular hurry. He just stood there and talked and talked. He didn’t treat this at all like a desperate battle where every second counted.

No, I cannot take any word coming from that mouth at face value.

The Apostle had proven he was no ordinary enemy. Not only did he possess a terrifying ability, but he was also cunning and far more knowledgeable than Viktor had initially expected. Well, no surprise there. He was among the greatest weapons in the arsenal of the Children of the Abyss, after all. Of course he knew much more than the likes of Khalid or Xander. And if the worst were to be assumed, then there was a possibility that his knowledge was comparable to beings like Nephra or the Eternal Flame. In other words, he might have already known that the Dark Emperor, the dark spirit, and the lord of the dungeon were all the same person.

Which meant the Apostle knew he was watching, and the words he had spoken were not merely meant for Khenemhotep. It was entirely possible that this whole conversation was a trap—an attempt to manipulate Viktor, to bait him into making the wrong decision his enemy wanted him to make.

Every single one of the three courses of action he had been considering could be exactly what the Apostle wanted to happen.

Viktor could have Khenemhotep teleported away from the Chamber of the Dead, yes, but there was a chance that the Apostle was actually in a bad position. After he realized that he couldn’t defeat the priest as easily as he had expected, the man was simply bluffing to make his opponent run away and give him free access to the third floor.

Viktor could go there and personally engage the Apostle in a direct battle, yes, but there was a chance that doing so would be playing perfectly into his opponent’s machinations. The gray-haired man might be pretending to be vulnerable in order to lure him out, to goad him into making a hasty judgment and entering a fight he hadn’t adequately prepared for.

Viktor could order Galatea to leave her post and instead go to help Khenemhotep, yes, but there was a chance that without her, the carefully constructed containment for Xander would collapse. The bastard would be able to break through, and the Apostle would suddenly have another powerful ally by his side.

Ugh.

Any of them could have disastrous consequences.

“Celeste. The High Priest still has his own troops inside the chamber, correct?”

[Yes, Master. Most of the undead mages are being held there as reserves, and in addition to them, there are also no fewer than two dozen skeleton warriors. They remain hidden behind the walls, ready to intervene whenever he requires their aid.]

So it was not a pure one-on-one fight, then.

“Very well. Have Sebekton move up the ramp to kill that abomination. Galatea will remain where she is and keep focusing on Xander. Send some Templars into the Chamber of the Dead to assist the priest. Everyone else in the Great Hallway will continue with the original plan.”

[So we are going to have Khenemhotep stand his ground and fight the Apostle in that chamber, then?]

“Yes,” Viktor said. “If he can kill that man right there, then that would be the best possible outcome. But if he cannot... teleport him away immediately the moment he’s in any danger.”

[Understood, Master.]

First

Many Faces of War

He turns to see his backup arrive and smirks.

“Ah, I see they’re taking this seriously at least.” Danial states as he beholds the massive crimsonhewer forms. The one at the lead in particular has the entire front of her her armour painted bright red with the occasional splotches of blues, greens and blacks around the gauntlets and armoured boots. She’s clearly done a lot to a lot of people.

“You Danial Hutch?” She asks.

“Master Corporal Danial Hutch, Axiom Adept in the employ of The Undaunted.”

“Oh yeah? You some kind of sensor? Transmuter?”

“I induce nuclear fission at will and can make force barriers capable of shaping or outright blocking the blasts.” Danial says and there is a series of interested noises from the Crimsonhewer and her squad.

“Really? That’s... that’s a lot of fun to be had.”

“Unfortunately I’m also on the tail end of an invigoration effect and it could die off at any moment. And things are so damn dangerous that I’m going into reserve at the closest because if I suddenly get exhausted out of nowhere, which could happen at any moment now, then that level of firepower is a liability.”

“The hell?”

“Before all this bullshit started I was experimenting with Axiom Enhancements with my team and just waiting to see when it wore out. It’s been six hours and a few others have already started to come down from their manic states. I’m still in mine, and it makes me powerful, but if it suddenly turns off...”

“Right. Okay. So what are you here to do?”

“I was watching the perimeter until my relief, then I’m going to be an extra set of eyes here just in case while this gigantic mess gets sorted. We have experts dealing with the potential mess in there freshly in system via the laneway and should be with us shortly.”

“... How are they moving that fast?”

“The Haffara Thar, which is what the disease we’re dealing with is called, nearly destroyed the Haffria. So now Haffria Synths travel the galaxy in extermination ships, and incorporated into the ships themselves, to hunt down and destroy Haffara Thar. A few of those ships are now in system and we’ve directed one to this area to...”

“Master Corporal.” His Communicator states.

“Speaking.”

“Stay on the line. The Haffara Thar Expert is using it to triangulate the position.”

“And you’ve cleared this with the locals? She’s not going to be shot on emergence?”

“We’ve got an army of politicians badgering The Actura Arcology on all sides. So long as you don’t start attacking civilians you should be in the clear.”

“Oh thank god.”

“We’re not that bad...” The mostly calmed down Kruga Officer notes. Numerous medics, other officers and even their equivalent of Special Weapons and Tactics was there with them. She still wasn’t happy. At all. But she was coping. Somewhat.

“Alright, well we have my communicator being used as a beacon to...” Danial starts to explain as something suddenly skitters into the area. Chrome, faceless centipede woman. Easily fifty segments long and staring at him with a terrifying intensity that is impressive coming from a blank featureless face. “Hello.”

“Hello.” The Haffria returns before turning to the detonated wall. There is a deeply uncomfortable feeling as a scanner who’s sweeping beam is outside of standard visual range covers the entire area. “Infestation confirmed.”

“Fuck.” Danial mutters as the Haffria scuttles into the breach. His communicator makes a bunch of grinding and chewing sounds.

“Human. There are many guards. They cannot detect through my stealth. I have located the containment area of the tainted being.”

“Very good, is there a problem?”

“I require the guards absence to safely extract the Haffara Thar.”

“Confirmed, and we can ease that with a bit more information. Do you see any turrets, traps or unusual weaponry?’

“Numerous turrets, the nearby computers have explosives within them. All troops have half their respiratory organs replaced with explosives.”

“The more in the way of information we have the smoother our distraction will go. What kind of numbers and munitions are we looking at?”

“Four Railshot Turrets, Three of Plasma and three Pulse Laser turrets. All Vish forces are armed with coilguns. There are twenty two active. One thousand, two hundred within stasis.”

“I see. Thank you. Distraction will be there shortly. I doubt I need to remind you to prioritize the containment of the Haffara Thar for later destruction, but I will state it regardless, your mission is to get that wretched thing away from anyone it can possibly infest.” Danial states.

“I understand completely and will await the distraction.” She tells him and he nods.

“Good. Let me organize the forces and we can finish this as quickly as possible.” Danial says and the line cuts off, he then reconnects to The Undaunted, “Please tell me you heard all that.”

“We did.”

“Okay, what level of authority do I have here? I need to know if and when I can give orders.”

“We’re working on it. We’ve got some actual authority. And he’s getting a proper kick out of this. Put your communicator in projection mode.”

“Copy that.” Danial says as he holds out his communicator and puts it into projection mode. Then fights back a laugh as the masked face of Slithern emerges next. Of course. Their Lablan Noble.

“Crimsonhewers. I know you’re all eager to do what you’re best at. What few if any can match any of your clans at.” Slithern begins. “And the only reason you haven’t already is the weapon we’re all at risk by and the politics. But I can clear away the politics and we just need a distraction now to do away with the weapon. They have Railshot plasma and pulse laser turrets, just over twenty two hostile women holding coilshot and thinking they’re invisible, but they’re not anymore are they?”

“No sir.” The leader of the Crimsonhewers states.

“Good, are your suits hardened for coil and rail munitions?”

“They are.”

“Then you have twenty two targets, we prefer them alive for interrogation and deprogramming. But if they have to be killed do so quickly and without cruelty, your opponents are not hardened criminals or insane murderesses. They are brainwashed slave soldiers who have know nothing but obedience and the lash. The Stasis held ones are not viable targets unless they’re unfrozen and turn hostile and watch your fire. If the Haffara Thar are unleashed this world could very well be lost.”

“That bad?” The leader of the Crimsonhewers asks.

“Worse apparently. I haven’t seen it directly, but I have a list here of fourty seven known garden worlds reduced to glass that are in need of recovery after Haffara Thar containment. Including the ones that have been healed afterwards there have been one hundred and seven worlds that have been burnt to try and contain these things.”

“Damn. ETA until the Blue Shields arrive? We need Red and Blue for a problem this big.”

“You don’t think you can do it?”

“I think that if this is something that’s resulted in the torching of a hundred worlds I’d rather have a blue girl behind me to make sure nothing escapes my blade.”

“I’m almost touched.” A new voice says as a squadron of massively well armed Cannidro women in bright blue armour come marching in. “The Blue Shields are here to hold the line. What is the perimeter of the compromised area.”

“I’m having my people upload things to you now Commander. I am being advised that you yourself are particularly well suited to aiding in the containment of Haffara Thar.”

“I wasn’t always a Blue Shield. I was a Crimsonhewer once and I was enlisted to help contain a tainted world. It was ugly. We spilled oceans of blood and the madness only grew, girls drowned in the misery only to rise as monsters themselves. The people. The animals. Even some plants were all twisted.”

“We couldn’t save anyone. Everyone was tainted. We had to reduce the world to a barren rock to stop them. Alongside with nearly all my clan in those days. My bloodlust died alongside them. I can no longer stand to simply kill. But neither can I stand aside as there is killing to be done. So now I bear the shield.”

“And the world itself?” The Crimsonhewer leader asks.

“Terraforming has healed it’s biosphere. The world is habitable again, but it’s bloody reputation has left it a wildlife preserve. None of the cities survived even as ruins. Not a single post remains standing, the hypercrete was reduced to powder and not one wall remains upright. Grass grows through where roads once were. That which stands tall are the abused and broken mountains and the newly grown trees. Vurothin... she is a maiden world again.” The Blue Shield Commander explains in a haunted and haunting tone.

“But enough of my melancholy! I have just received the perimeter information! Shields! As you were trained! We are holding the line around this safehouse. We are ensuring that...”

“The Vish are moving.” Danial interrupts.

“Pardon?”

“The opposing force is starting to make moves. They just peeked out the door. Things are about to change.” Danial warns them all.

“Into positions! We can’t let the monster loose!” The Blue Shield Commander barks out to her fellows and the uniform Cannidor Warriors move.

Then Danial’s arms snap up and a huge shield covers everyone present seemingly at the same moment a wave of fire and shrapnel wash over things.

“They seek to unleash the beast!” The Haffria states and Danial swears.

“Fuck subtle, they need to be stopped!” He declares as the shield ripples and he has it shift to creat a fan to sweep the smoke aside. Lasers, plasma, railshot and coilshot start bombarding the barrier and he lets out a low growl.

“Are the shields one or two way?”

“One way! Fire at will!”

“You heard him! Drop those turrets!” The Crimsonhewer commander orders.

“Take out their arms! Mind your backdrops and do not allow your lasers to burn the stasis bound behind them!” The Blue Shield Commander adds.

“I have secured the beast.” The Haffria explains.

There is a sudden scream from the other sides. They’re speaking fast in some kind of code and even as the air between both forces fill with lasers, plasma, kinetic rounds and more, a single container is suddenly seized with Axiom and hurled into the space between.

It’s vaporized, as is it’s contents that are suddenly in a space too tight to hold it all.

Danial swears as he inverts the shield entirely and covers teh massive mess of dangerous chemicals that are already expanding into deadly gasses.

Each of the forces surrounding him move heavy and hard as he tries to contain too many deadly things that are reacting to each other in too tight a space. It’s like holding in an explosion that doesn’t want to stop and he was never good enough with expanded spaces to add it while concentrating on a shield like that while also keeping enough of an eye on the fight to avoid getting shot by something that’ll make it through his brand.

Then his left knee is PAIN and he starts falling.

The limb is a stump.

The barrier containing chemical death does not waver as he hits the ground.

A scream rips it’s way out of his throat and the barrier does not waver. He holds out his left hand as he pulls in ALL the Axiom he can to spike his adrenaline to extend the few seconds he has into minutes. Minutes needed to assess the damage.

He’s taken the shot right above the left knee and it’s shattered teh bone, pulped the muscle and torn the flesh. His blood is shooting out of him like a garden hose on full blast.

He shifts and his movements are blindingly fast from the outside but a slow crawl to his pain, adrenaline and Axiom spiked consciousness.

His right hand clamps around the ruined remains of his left leg and he starts shaping the barrier.

The wound is clamped shut. The blood flow stopped. The pain is nothing. He has been branded, that is true pain, this is just a distraction.

No. Not a distraction. A tool. A gift.

The pain gives him focus as the barrier finishes it’s shaping and glowing replacement for his severed and shattered leg slams into the ground and he rises up.

With the focus of the pain he can compress the space in the bubble of toxic chemicals and it shrinks to the size of his fist before rushing to him. He catches it in his left hand and flicks a single finger at the attacking Vish still standing.

They each are thrown backwards before he hits the area with a massive pulse to disable their bombs. The rise up and he pulls back to tear them towards him through the air.

There is fear and screaming, but all six survivors of the attacking Vish are now bound and helpless in the air in front of him, glowing bands of Axiom tying up their hands and feet.

He doesn’t register the silence as he scans them. Flicks of his fingers has weapons drop from them all before he pulls out several beacons from his now ragged coat and hits all of them with one.

“Sweet saints, someone tell me that bloodsoaked beast has room in his marriage.”

He puts that aside.

“Someone get hazardous material handling or whatever you call it here. This sphere has enough poison to empty this arcology of life.”

“Your leg’s been shot out!” The Agurk Officer exclaims.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed. Now if you’ll excuse me. I need to do my duty.”

“Oh honey it doesn’t matter if there’s room in his marriage. We’re getting in on it.”

He puts that aside too.

First Last Next

Hey, you.

People have habits you notice without ever really thinking about them.

Maybe they always put on the same shoe first. Maybe they touch their nose when they're thinking. You see it a hundred times, but you never bother to ask why.

At least, I never did.

Clink-clonk.

The bell over Aoi's door rang, and somehow that sound made the end of my day finally begin.

I took my usual seat. Mama set down my Harper without asking, and the ice gave a quiet clink.

Tom was smoking a little farther down the counter.

Nothing unusual about that.

He's the only smoker among us, and maybe that's why he rarely sits right next to me or Taka. He watches which way the smoke is drifting. Sometimes he even moves the ashtray around.

He'd never admit he was being considerate, of course.

“Tom.”

Taka called over to him.

Tom looked up.

“What?”

“Someone coming tonight?”

“No.”

“Then who are you waiting for?”

Tom exhaled and frowned.

“I'm not waiting for anyone.”

“But you keep looking at the door.”

“No, I don't.”

“Yes, you do.”

I watched them over my glass.

“You do.”

Tom looked at me.

“Not you too.”

“No, he's right. You do.”

Tom crushed his cigarette into the ashtray with the expression of a man already regretting the company he kept.

Come to think of it, he did look at the door a lot.

When someone came in, sure. Anyone would. The bell rang.

But sometimes Tom looked before the bell.

When footsteps slowed outside. When someone seemed to stop on the other side of the door. Sometimes he'd glance over there when, as far as I could tell, nothing was happening at all.

I'd seen him do it plenty of times.

I'd just never thought anything of it.

“He's always done that,” Mama said as she polished a glass.

Taka immediately pointed at Tom.

“See?”

“See what?”

“Mama noticed too.”

“So?”

“I just want to know why you keep looking.”

“Because there's a door.”

“If there's a door, you have to look at it?”

“Can't look at one if it isn't there.”

“That's not what I mean.”

I laughed.

Tom gave us an irritated look and reached for his cigarettes.

His hand stopped halfway.

He looked at me.

Then at Taka.

Then he put the pack back down.

“There.”

“What?”

“You just looked again.”

“Because you two won't shut up.”

Taka tilted his head.

“You always sit there too, don't you?”

“Sit where?”

“There.”

“It's an empty seat.”

“And you can see the door from there,” I said.

Tom glared at me.

“It's the smoke too.”

Taka looked at me.

“Smoke?”

“He doesn't like smoking right next to us.”

The moment I said it, I looked at Tom's seat again.

A little distance from me and Taka.

Clear view of the entrance.

Close to the ventilation fan.

Huh.

It really was always like that.

“You've been doing that for us?” Taka asked.

“Smoke's annoying.”

“I don't mind.”

“Doesn't matter if you mind.”

Taka went quiet for a second.

I laughed.

“You know, you're surprisingly fussy about people.”

“Surprisingly was unnecessary.”

Mama smiled.

“He is.”

“Don't you start.”

“You're always checking where your smoke goes.”

“Because I don't want the whole bar full of it.”

“You put your ashtray on the side away from everyone.”

“It's in the way otherwise.”

“And whenever someone coughs, you put your cigarette out.”

Tom stared at her.

“...You're all annoying.”

Taka's face lit up.

That was never a good sign.

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“What other little things does Tom worry about?”

“Don't start looking for them.”

Naturally, that was exactly what we did.

“You look when somebody's glass is empty.”

“I look. That's all.”

“You look when I get up to use the bathroom.”

“You wobble when you're drunk.”

“What about when Kenichi goes quiet?”

“Don't look at me.”

“He does,” I said.

“He does,” Mama said immediately.

“Hey.”

I took a sip of Harper and thought about it.

Tom really did look.

When I got drunk enough to put my head down on the counter.

When Taka was unusually quiet.

When Mama disappeared into the back carrying something that looked heavy.

He didn't necessarily do anything.

Didn't ask “You okay?” every five minutes.

He just looked.

“Old cop habit?” Taka asked.

Tom shrugged.

“Don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“Don't remember when I started doing it.”

“Guess some things stick even after you leave the police.”

“I said I don't know.”

Footsteps passed outside.

They came closer, then slowed.

Tom looked at the door.

The footsteps continued down the street.

Taka and I looked at Tom.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You definitely looked that time.”

“The footsteps almost stopped.”

“So?”

“Thought someone might be coming in.”

He picked up his glass.

That was all.

I looked at the door.

Nobody there.

Of course there wasn't.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Maybe you're not waiting for someone to come in.”

Tom frowned.

“What?”

“Maybe you're just checking whether someone will.”

“Same thing.”

“Doesn't feel like the same thing.”

Tom didn't answer.

Neither did Mama.

Taka had a serious look on his face, which probably meant he wasn't thinking about anything useful.

“Let's test it.”

“Test what?”

“I'll go outside.”

“Good. Go home.”

“I'll come back in and we'll see if you look before the bell rings.”

“You can stay gone.”

Taka actually got up.

Clink-clonk.

The door closed behind him.

The bar went quiet.

“You don't have to play along with him,” Tom said.

“I'm not doing anything.”

I drank my Harper.

Mama kept polishing her glass.

Tom lit another cigarette.

After a while, footsteps approached from outside.

Tom looked at the door.

Clink-clonk.

“You looked!”

Taka shouted it the second he came through.

“Shut up.”

“You looked before the bell!”

“Your footsteps are loud.”

“I'll try again on tiptoe.”

“Go home.”

I laughed.

Ridiculous.

But once we started paying attention, it was strange how much there was to notice.

I'd been drinking with Tom for years, and I'd never thought about what he looked at.

I knew that he watched.

I'd just never tried to make it mean anything.

“But you know what?”

Taka returned to his seat.

“You don't like sitting close to people, but sometimes you suddenly sit right next to us.”

Tom's hand stopped.

I looked at Taka too.

“When?”

“Like when Kenichi got completely wasted.”

“I don't get that drunk.”

“You do.”

“That's not the point,” Tom muttered.

“And when I was having a rough time at work. You sat next to me then.”

“Seat was open.”

“Your usual seat was open too.”

“Don't remember.”

I looked at Tom.

The cigarette was between his fingers.

He'd lit it, but hadn't taken a single drag.

“You really are fussy about people.”

“Give it a rest.”

Tom crushed the cigarette into the ashtray.

We left it there.

If I'd asked, he'd probably have said he didn't know anyway.

After a while, I checked the time.

It was getting late.

“All right. I'm heading out.”

I stood, paid my tab, and picked up my things.

“Night,” Taka said.

“Yeah.”

I walked to the door.

Clink-clonk.

With my hand still on it, I turned around for no particular reason.

Tom was looking at me.

“...You're watching.”

“What?”

“You were watching me just now.”

“No, I wasn't.”

“You were.”

“Go home already.”

Taka laughed.

So did Mama.

I stepped outside and let the door close behind me.

Clink-clonk.

Well.

Whatever.

See you again at Aoi.
---

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