by Jace Kang
“We’re told the engineering of the human genome came in stages, and our DNA is too many stages behind current technology.”
“I see.”
“But you!” Enthusiasm bubbled in Ken’s chest. He studied the restraints, made of flexible but near-unbreakable Ballistrax, and secured with durastrium. “You’re like us, aren’t you?”
“Yes. At the most fundamental level.”
Most fundamental? What did that mean? “I overheard them saying you are eight hundred years old!”
“Give or take.” Master Ishihara shrugged as much as the restraints would allow.
“And you defeated two shocktroopers with your hands.”
“Well, a little more than just hands.”
Hope rose in Ken’s chest. “If I help you escape, can you teach me?” All he had to do was acquire the keychip to unlock the restraints.
Ryu grinned. “I can escape by myself.”
Impossible. “Then why are you still here?”
“Whatever they hit me with drained me. I needed to replenish my Core with Qi, and wait for my hand to heal.”
Ken’s gaze shifted to Master Ishihara’s hand. Its fingers had been bent at strange angles after its encounter with the minigun, but now it looked normal.
He shook his head. “It’s amazing you’re even conscious after getting hit by six particle beams.”
“Particle beams?” Master Ishihara looked quizzical.
“Yes, they disrupt your bioelectrical connections. At low levels, it’ll slow you down; at higher intensity, it can kill you.”
Master Ishihara let out a long sigh. “What has mankind become?”
With genetic engineering, nanobots, and technology… “Perfection.”
“Hardly. But I do need your help for something.”
Yes! Ken nodded enthusiastically.
“The translator on my ear. Remove it. Take yours off, too.”
“Remove it?” Ken cocked his head. “Why?”
“I don’t want to damage it.”
Damage it? How? Ken removed the dot from Master Ishihara’s ear, then his own.
“San Kyu,” he said, the sounds now matching the movement of his lips. “Stando baku.”
Bobbing his head, Ken backed to the wall.
With a deep breath, Master Ishihara’s chest, arms, and legs expanded. The holo images flickered. All of the restraints snapped.
Closing his gawking mouth, Ken hurried over to pull the transdermal pads free. Maybe if he showed his enthusiasm and assisted the best he could, Master Ishihara would agree to teach him. It worked in the old movies, after all.
“What the—” a voice cursed from the doorway.
Ken turned.
The guard stood there, gawking for a split second before levelling his gun and yelling, “Prisoner has broken out of his restraints, I need backup.”
Ishihara sat up.
The Peacekeeper squeezed the trigger of his weapon. A blue line appeared, passing through where Master Ishihara had been just a split second before and shooting through one of the holo images. Its projector fizzled and popped.
Ken looked left and right.
Master Ishihara stood over the unconscious Peacekeeper. Pointing to his ear, he turned to Ken. “I need ear thing. Translator.”
Right. Ken hurried over and affixed it and his own.
“Thank you. Now, where are my things?”
In Ken’s excitement, he hadn’t bothered to find them. However… “They’re probably on the third level technology labs for examination.”
“What level are we on now?”
“Sublevel five.”
“How do I get to the third level?” Master Ishihara asked.
Ken shook his head. Besides the fact it might as well be a maze… “It’s heavily guarded. I can get you new clothes.”
“I like mine.” Master Ishihara punched toward the doorway, hitting a Peacekeeper as he ran in.
How stubborn could the man be? “You’ll look good in today’s clothes. With a good haircut, you’ll blend right in.”
Master Ishihara shuddered. “I must retrieve something that was in my robes.”
“It can’t be more valuable than your life.”
“It’s even more valuable.”
Excitement stirred in Ken’s chest. “What is it?”
Master Ishihara searched his eyes. “It’s something which will keep my world hidden, and your world safe.”
Ken gawked again. A secret world! Probably with more people like Master Ishihara. Maybe with someone willing to teach a Purebred janitor.
“This place is a maze! You’ll never find it without my help.” Was that true? Ken had clearance for the hallways to the medium-security zones, which included the technology lab.
“You should stay here,” Master Ishihara said. “It’s dangerous.”
“Wait.” Ken held up a hand. “Pretend to take me prisoner.”
“I hate to say this, but from what you’ve told me, I don’t think they’ll care.”
No, the Peacekeepers probably wouldn’t. Then again… “They don’t treat us badly. They just sort of ignore us. And they make sure we’re taken care of.”
The master raised an eyebrow. “I guess that is a theory we can test. Let’s go.” He wrapped an arm around Ken’s neck.
Ken’s eyes just about bulged, and he slapped at Master Ishihara’s forearms. No matter how slim the man’s limbs were, they radiated power.
“Oh, sorry. It doesn’t bother the village children.”
So he was no better than a child where Master Ishihara came from.
The master kicked at a table, sending several bent hypodermic needles into the air. He caught one, then hustled Ken out into the hall.
Several Peacekeepers dashed toward them, particle guns in hand.
The needle pressed against Ken’s neck without penetrating.
“Stop,” Master Ishihara said. “Or I will kill this boy.”
The Peacekeepers froze, but still aimed their weapons.
“He’s lying,” a disembodied female voice echoed in the hall. “We heard them plotting it.”
Damn! Of course there’d been visual and audio monitors in the room.
The Peacekeeper sergeant pointed his gun at Ken and shot.
Master Ishihara pushed Ken out of the way. More streams of blue light crisscrossed through the hall. The master zigged and zagged between them, his form little more than a blur. Then he was among the Peacekeepers, sending them flying against the walls and into each other.
A control panel sparked and shot flames. Smoke rose, and the water sprinklers engaged.
By the time Ken staggered to his feet, he was just in time to see a female nurse in a white, high-collared uniform sneaking up behind Master Ishihara with a hypodermic needle in hand.
Ken lunged toward the back of her legs, but she sidestepped, sending him tumbling to the floor yet again.
“Are you all right?” Master Ishihara asked without turning around.
“Yes!” And at the very least, Ken could protect the master’s back. He climbed back to his feet and threw a punch at the nurse.
Setting the needle between her teeth, she stepped closer, blocking his hand with one arm and attacking with the other. Her fist landed in his chest.
Pain flared, and he coughed as he stumbled back.
How foolish to think he could take out an XHuman with one blow, even if she was a head shorter than him. He charged again, this time swinging with a flurry of punches.
With each one, she responded with a simultaneous attack and defense, battering Ken to the point that he wobbled on his feet and would’ve fallen if not for Master Ishihara’s supportive arm.
“Not bad,” Master Ishihara said.
Ken’s cheeks burned. “But I didn’t land a single hit!”
“Oh, I was talking about her.” Master Ishihara stood Ken up, then sidled past to the woman. “I see Krav Maga is still practiced.”
Whatever Krav Maga was, it wasn’
t the fighting style the Peacekeepers used. Ken was about to clear up the misunderstanding, when the nurse launched a quick punching combination, followed by a low kick. Master Ishihara swam through them all.
“My apologies for my inappropriate behavior,” he said, setting an open palm to her chest. Her knees buckled, and she fell. He swept an arm behind her and lowered her to the floor.
Ken had probably gawked more times today than he had in the last year.
A blue particle beam stabbed through the air, and would’ve hit Master Ishihara had he not spun out of the way.
“Ken, step away from Ishihara.”
He craned past the master to see Captain Keiko. She held a pistol in either hand. Behind her stood at least ten of her elite tactical squad in their combat suits, their weapons levelled.
The master nudged him away, and he stumbled to the wall.
“Surrender, Ishihara,” she said. “We’ve blocked this sector off with force fields.”
Ken swallowed hard. He’d only ever heard of internal force fields on spacecraft, used to reinforce hull breaches. Now, they were trapped behind one.
Chapter 5:
The Cultivator
R yu studied the hallway. Force fields had been purely theoretical when he’d last walked among the world of men, a futuristic concept seen only in sci-fi movies. But like everything else he’d encountered, a lot could change in eight hundred years.
Whatever else could be said about Captain Oyama—well, besides the fact she was gorgeous, and that he didn’t mind being mostly naked in front of her—she had a good sense of tactics. Unlike the previous group of soldiers who’d shot at him, her unit now aimed their weapons in a spread that covered the width and height of the corridor.
It could be a very big problem, or a very small one.
Testing out his recently-healed hand, he flexed and extended his fingers. His Core might only be at a quarter full.
More than enough.
Using his intention, he projected his Qi toward the control panel between him and the soldiers. A brief shower from the sprinklers had reduced the small fire to a few flickering sparks.
As a Cultivator of the Water Path, the Fire Path was the hardest to learn: training too intensely with flames would damage his Water; careless Cultivation of Water might douse what Fire he had. In eight hundred years, he’d only attained Second Rank on the Fire Path.
As feeble as that might be in the Land of Rivers and Lakes, it was infinitely more powerful than anyone here. Unlike them, he could use Fireshaping to stoke a spark into something bigger with little more than Qi projection.
Rooting his stance to the floor, he flared his fingers out. The control panel erupted into flames. The soldiers’ eyes flicked to it, then back. The tension in their postures tightened.
Then the sprinklers sprang to life, sending streams of water into the hall.
With a sweep of his hand, his Qi shot through the water, congealing it into darts which struck some of the soldiers. Several fired their guns, but enough space opened up that Ryu was able to slip between the beams.
A second barrage started, but he waved his hands out. The sprinkler streams spread and flattened out into a wall. The beams dispersed on its surface.
“Sprinklers off,” Captain Oyama shouted.
Little good that would do; there was already enough water in the corridor. With a flick of his finger, he used Watershaping to send a whip out from the water wall and swept the guns from the men’s grips. With a slash of his hand, he thinned the whip to a monofilament and sliced the weapons in half before they hit the floor.
The soldiers on the other side stared at their hands, but the captain approached the water wall. Eyebrows clashing together, she tapped it with a finger and peered through, her brow furrowing in the cutest way.
Grinning, he bowed.
Her lips squeezed into a tight line, and not for a kiss.
He straightened and turned to Ken. “Is there another way out?”
The boy nodded like a happy dog wagged its tail, pointing toward another door. “We have to go through a nurses’ station, but there’s a service maglift on the other side.”
Maglift, eh? “Will that get us to level three?”
If Ken shook his head any harder, he might give himself a concussion. “It will get us to the ground floor, but then we’ll have to go to the main lift bay.”
“Will we meet with much resistance?”
Ken chewed on his lip. “I don’t know.”
“What about the force fields?”
Wringing his hands, the boy shuffled back and forth on his feet.
Right. Well, they’d think of that as they went. Focusing on the wall of water, Ryu inhaled, using a basic Fire Path technique to draw out the heat. The wall solidified to ice. “Lead the way, Ken-kun.”
The young man’s head bobbed up and down like a seal’s as he took off down the hall.
Did seals still exist? They’d been hunted to near-extinction eight centuries ago. Ryu banished the silly thought and followed, watching as Ken skipped along. If the kid could actually calm down, all that nervous energy could be channeled into Cultivating a Fire Path.
Really, from what he’d sensed before, the boy’s Core gave him nearly unlimited potential to Cultivate, if he worked out the blockages in his meridians. To start, he needed to root himself and focus. “Straighten your spine and square your shoulders,” he called.
Ken looked back, eyes wide like a puppy. When he tried to straighten his spine, it looked as if someone had shoved something somewhere it wasn’t meant to go.
“All non-security personnel,” a disembodied female voice echoed through the hall like a ghost, “shelter in place. Do not, we repeat, do not engage the prisoner.”
Ryu grinned. That meant fewer obstacles. Indeed, every person they passed pressed their back against the wall and just watched.
Ken might be as helpless as a newborn, but at least he knew his way around. They’d taken a few turns, and for all Cultivation of the Five Paths was worth, it had never given Ryu a good sense of direction.
After a few minutes of encountering no one, Ryu said, “It looks like they aren’t sending anyone to pursue us.”
Shaking his head, Ken pointed to a spot on the wall. “They’re tracking us. Well, you. They’re probably trying to block off paths of escape, and then they’ll close in once they figure out a way to stop you.”
“That’s low-key disturbing.” Ryu scanned the spot, and even with superior eyesight developed through Wood Path Cultivation, he didn’t see anything. He nearly barreled into Ken, who had skidded to a halt.
“Wait.” He turned and gaped. “Low-key? Is that some kind of ranking where you come from?”
“Oh, hah. It’s English slang from when I was a child. Abbreviations, slang, emoticons…they were all a part of how we communicated across all the languages of the world. I guess a lot of terms fell out of use in the last eight centuries.”
Ken resumed his walk, slower now. “There was more than one language back then, wasn’t there?”
“Hundreds,” Ryu said, gesturing for Ken to keep walking. “But there was one country that was stronger than the others, and everyone in the world spoke their language. Some better than others.” His cheeks warmed. He was definitely one of the others in this case.
“We call your era the Age of Greed.”
“Sounds about right.” In its avarice, mankind had almost destroyed the world. Ryu’s poor health had led him to his pilgrimage to the World of Rivers and Lakes early in life. He’d never seen how humans had turned it all around and created…this. Beyond the ripple effect of the Cataclysm, he knew very little of the world of his birth. “How did we keep from going extinct during the Age of Greed?
Still walking, Ken scratched his head. “Our ancestors discovered alien technologies from thousands of years before, some hidden in plain sight. From that, the leaps and bounds in AI helped us find solutions to energy production. If I remember correctly, by 2300
, most humans were genetically engineered. Mankind learned first how to travel faster than light speed, then how to fold space.”
“And then the world was at peace?” Some futurists of his era had predicted as much. “Is that why everyone except you looks the same?”
Ken shook his head. “Sadly, no. The world was so interconnected, and people intermingled like never before. But in this very city, a purity ideology took root, creating the Asiatic Empire. They started a war to ensure their bloodline remained undiluted.”
“What did your ancestors do to cause the Cataclysm?”
Ken slowed a step and looked over his shoulder. “What’s that?”
“When the Heavens rained fire, about four hundred years ago.”
“Oh, the Onslaught.” Shuddering, Ken spoke in a fearful tone. “In our exploration into space, we met friendly races like the Elestrae, Eunanae, and Madaerae. We also encountered the Tivarae. Their galactic
empire had been at war with the Elestrae Confederation for tens of thousands of years, and were worried an Elestrae alliance with humans would alter the balance of power. They devastated every major city on Earth with orbital bombardments.”
So the Cataclysm had been caused by alien weapons, not something humanity had wrought on itself. Now Ryu shuddered. Back then, the effect had rippled across the planes into the World of Rivers and Lakes, ravaging it with earthquakes. If not for the powerful Earth Path sages, both his world and this one might’ve been completely destroyed.
Ken’s eyes brightened. “Something did come of it: nothing brings people together faster than an attack from the outside. People of all races and creeds united and made even greater advances in science. Like the shocktroopers you fought: they’re bigger and stronger, so they could fight the Tivarae hand-to-hand.”
Ryu nodded. Those men had been so physically powerful, yet energetically bereft.
“And the weapons! We now have ones that can knock people unconscious without causing permanent damage. Wait.” Ken halted and spun around. “When they captured you, they hit you with six shots. Just now, there were far more, yet not a single one hit you.”
“A beam did graze me, actually.” Ryu brushed off a spot on his shoulder. “It low-key tickled.”
