Guardians of Vesturon 2 - Resurrection

by Hargrove, A. M.

  “Your life will change, Maddie. You will be a changed female. You do realize they will torture you as part of your training. You understand this?”

  “Yes. I’ve been there and done that. I am willing to do whatever it takes. Please!”

  “Rayn is going to have my head for this. They will beat you and test your endurance, and they will want to know how much torture you can endure before they break you. Do you understand what I am saying? Rayn will be out of his head over this.”

  “He will want to have your head, but he won’t actually take it. That is why I came to you. Plus, he won’t be out of his head if he doesn’t know.”

  “Clever female! But do not say I did not warn you. I will make the arrangements.”

  Maddie jumped in his arms, nearly knocking him down.

  “Thank you! Thank you!”

  “You will not be thanking me for long, my dear. Maddie, one thing: it will not be a shameful thing if you get there and decide otherwise.”

  “My lord, I am not a quitter, and remember, not a word to Rayn or the rest of the family. I don’t want them to know.”

  Chapter 3

  Maddie’s entrance into the Guardian Academy came with a rigorous training requirement. She would have to become a master at hand-to-hand combat, weaponry, and targeting.

  She had already become highly skilled at the Vesturion form of martial arts. Her leg strength was phenomenal, and her accuracy in her kicks often left her opponents unconscious or disabled at the very least.

  After her first month of training, she found herself dragging herself to her quarters, exhausted from the intense work out. She could barely keep her head from sagging, but she did not allow herself to show any kind of weakness to her fellow students.

  When she reached her quarters, one of her fellow female students was barring her entrance. This female had dogged Maddie all day, and she was ruthlessly attempting to sabotage everything she did.

  “What do you want now, Ondine?” Maddie sighed with aggravation.

  “You think you are special, don’t you? You have squirmed your way in with the right people. You have all the right connections through your grandparents, and you think just because you were born on Earth that you deserve special treatment. Well, I just want to warn you that my friends and I are on to you, and we will do everything we can to prevent you from succeeding here. You got that?”

  Maddie was exhausted, but she knew she could take Ondine down with an accurately placed kick to the side of her head. She knew if she did that, she would have hell to pay.

  Instead, she reached out, grabbed Ondine’s keikogi near her neck, leaned in, and growled, “You can try to threaten me all you want, but let me be clear: I will always win. I will beat you at hand to hand. I will beat you in targeting. I will beat you at weaponry and swording. I will also beat you at telekinesis, and I’ll beat all your friends too. You think you can prevent me from succeeding? Let me be clear again: I will have you removed from the Academy for your inefficiency and lack of ability to become a skilled Guardian. I will be watching everything you do, Ondine, so you better watch your back.” When Maddie finished, she had pulled a throwing knife from her sleeve and had it resting against Ondine’s throat. “Do we understand each other, Ondine?”

  Ondine was visibly shaken and could barely speak.

  “I asked you a question. Do we understand each other?”

  Ondine nodded, and when Maddie stepped away from her, she took off running down the hall.

  Well, I guess I have made enemy #1. From that point on, Maddie would have to watch her back. She realized she would have to be tougher than anyone else in her class in order to earn their respect, but she didn’t think she would become a target so quickly.

  She barely made it into her quarters before collapsing into an exhausted sleep.

  ********

  Maddie’s skills continued to expand. The trainees were outfitted with the best and most advanced of all of Vesturon’s weapons. However, they still demanded that the students become adept at fighting with more primitive weapons, such as hand weapons, throwing knives, and swords.

  Probably due to her foot skills on the soccer field, Maddie’s finesse at sword fighting was exquisite. Her feet would quickly dance across the floor and confuse her opponent so much that Maddie would have them on their backs before they even knew what happened. She was so skilled in this that she gained the notice of all the instructors and quickly became the student everyone wanted to compare himself or herself to.

  This secretly thrilled Maddie. She couldn’t believe how adept she was when there was a time she couldn’t walk across the room without tripping and falling. This truly baffled her.

  She asked several of her instructors why they thought this to be, but it was Julian who came up with the answer.

  He paid Maddie a visit one day in order to assess her health. It was a follow up exam from her injuries, but he also wanted to start treating her so that her muscles and bones would be better able to adapt to Vesturon.

  When he completed his scans, he was surprised at how much her bone and muscle mass had increased in density. After thinking about it a moment, he surmised that it was because her Vesturion genetic background was adapting to the gravitational force of Vesturon on its own accord.

  Maddie told Julian of her skill levels. She was proud of how she had excelled in areas she previously thought would have been an impossibility in her former life.

  Then she added, “I used to feel clumsy all the time, almost like my feet were too big or something. It was like one part of me wanted to do one thing and the other part wanted to do something different.”

  “Maddie, I think what has happened is your Vesturion DNA has finally taken over. It may have been at odds with your human DNA, trying to fight it, which, in turn, may have lead to your clumsiness. But once you came to Vesturon, your Vesturion DNA became stronger and is now subduing your human DNA.”

  “Do you think it will revert back if I return to Earth?”

  “No, because now your bone and muscle density is that of a Vesturion, so it will control your activity now. The only negative is that you may experience some temporary headaches occasionally. In time, those will completely disappear.”

  “That is excellent news!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to feel uncoordinated like that again. I like my new strength much better. One last thing, Julian, you must not say anything to Rayn if you happen to speak with him. He is unaware that I am in the Academy, and he would kill me if he knew.”

  “I am sworn to secrecy, Maddie. Good luck with your endeavors!” he said as he left.

  ********

  While the activity part of her training came easy for her, the educational part was extremely difficult. She had to study twice as hard as she had twice as much to learn. Maddie had always been academically gifted, so it was simply a matter of having to spend more time on this area than the other students.

  The Guardians paired her with a telekinesis master who taught her how to concentrate and focus her energy to harness her gift, enabling her to take her powers to the maximum level. She was incredibly strong, and it was nothing for her to move gargantuan objects. Her master even had her move a Star Fighter, which she did with ease.

  To some of the other trainees, it appeared as if everything came easy to her, but in truth, Maddie was working extremely hard. Every night, she would fall into bed, overcome with fatigue.

  Chapter 4

  Maddie was out on a training mission. She had been assigned to a position in the D quadrant of the Unforgiving Forest. It was really named The Forest of Hills, but the Guardian trainees had dubbed it The Unforgiving Forest years ago. They named it such because the missions there proved to be difficult and sometimes life threatening, not to mention the place was relatively uninhabitable.

  The forest was complicated to navigate, with massively twisted trees, vines, and giant thorny brambles, making navigation extremely tricky and dangerous. It was also the home of b
rutally unfriendly and vicious wildlife. The forest itself was surrounded by a barrier that made preternatural powers relatively useless. Telepathy worked within the forest itself, but it didn’t work from within it to outside of it. Telekinetic powers were greatly diminished within its boundaries. The best you could accomplish was perhaps moving a small rock.

  The trainees were expected to live off the land for days on end, yet water and edible food was impossibly difficult to find and nearly non-existent. The temperatures were extreme, ranging from below freezing at night to well over 100 degrees during the day. Many trainees found themselves in the hospital, after they had been evacuated for health reasons from this miserable place.

  Maddie had her work cut out for her. Her job was to find and confiscate her enemy’s cache of weapons and communicators. She was working alone. They had given her a primitive navigator, to help her find her way, a container for water, and a purifier to keep her from contracting a deadly water-borne disease. She was not given any modern equipment other than that. She had no weapons, but she had slipped her dagger into her boot before she left. She had no fire stick, so she would be in total darkness at night.

  Maddie wasn’t worried about anything, except for getting caught by her enemy. If she was captured, she would receive negative points, and that would set her further away from graduating.

  She had acquired excellent survival skills. As long as she had a good water source, she could go for days without eating. She should have no problems locating some awanhi, which was a plant that provided basic nourishment by sucking the gel out of the leaves. Most people didn’t realize that the plant was abundant in The Unforgiving Forest. One simply had to know where to look.

  Maddie also didn’t fear the creatures that lived here. She knew where to seek shelter safely away from anything that could harm her. She knew to go up, high in a tree, and take shelter above the ground. It afforded the best chance of survival.

  Luckily for Maddie, when they came to her quarters before dawn to “grab” her, she was wearing cargo pants and a sensored long sleeved shirt. Normally, the trainers would arrive at your quarters without warning and offer you no chance to prepare yourself. You would be taken in whatever you had on at the time, which is one reason why Maddie never wore her jammies. She had also learned to sleep in rubber-soled boots; she never went anywhere without her boots.

  Since she always slept in a sensored shirt—the fabric was woven with hundreds of tiny sensors that kept you in your comfort zone—she wouldn’t have the discomfort of being hot or cold.

  Her trainers had told her repeatedly to always be prepared no matter what. She took everything they said to heart. This even extended to her very quick daily showers that lasted two minutes at the most. She had learned to live with dirty hair, and she never washed her hair when she showered. She always did it separately, at different times. It took too long to do both, and she didn’t want to chance being thrown out in the cold with a dripping mass of tangled curls. She carefully timed her shampooing, usually at the expense of a dinner.

  For her current mission, she had been forced to bail off a speedster—a type of vehicle that was similar to a motorcycle minus the wheels. The speedster could travel at high speeds, hovering over the ground. The driver had been kind enough to slow down a bit so that when she exited from the vehicle, she only ended up with some major scrapes and bruises. She was lucky. Sometimes when you leaped off of speedsters in The Unforgiving Forest, you ended up in a tangle of vines and thorns with deep lacerations and a broken limb or two. That could severely impact your chances of having a successful mission.

  She quickly stood, brushed herself off and started jogging. The first order of the day was to travel undercover, avoiding any open spaces. That would not be a problem in this location; it was a rarity to find any open spaces in The Unforgiving Forest. Next, she needed to find a water source in order to fill her water container and try to locate some awanhi along the way. An hour later, she was in luck. She found a small spring, and right afterwards, she located her food. She stuffed her pockets full of the leaves and pulled out her navigator. Now, it was time to go to work.

  Her navigator would tell her if she was in close proximity of any other form of intelligent life. It could also give her a rudimentary layout of the land, but that was it. She was going to have to use her tracking skills to locate her targets.

  She started walking in the direction of the color-coding her screen was indicating. It appeared there were life forms to the north of where she currently stood.

  She took off on silent feet, snaking her way through the jungle-like growth. She was adept at moving through the forest, nearly undetectable. Her years of backpacking in the mountains of North Carolina had helped her with this skill.

  Maddie tuned into her telepathy, careful to keep her own thoughts blocked. It would only take one tiny slip of her enemy for her to gain valuable knowledge of their hiding place. She had approximately three more hours of daylight. If something didn’t turn up in the next two, she would start hunting a safe place to spend the dark night.

  Maddie stealthily continued in her northerly direction for another hour, when her telepathic powers alerted her to another’s presence nearby. She began picking up tidbits of thoughts allowing her to formulate her next steps.

  Whoever she was tracking was fairly close, indicating Maddie may be closer to their camp than she originally thought. There appeared to be four enemy targets. She needed to locate them so that she could determine where the weapons cache might be. She wanted to be close, yet far enough away to remain undetected. She decided it would be in her best interest to locate a place around her current location to spend the night.

  It didn’t take long for her to find the perfect spot: a giant drundle tree. It closely resembled a live oak except its branches grew much higher off the ground, affording her the necessary protection. Animals generally couldn’t climb drundles, because they couldn’t reach the branches. She would have to find a way up to the first set of limbs. After that, it would just be a matter of going from limb to limb, until she reached an adequate altitude. She looked around and eventually found the perfect thing. It was a thick vine that she could use as a makeshift rope. The vine was small enough that she could pull it up and store it in the tree, keeping other creatures and enemies from following her up.

  She made short work of setting up her shelter. Next, she would patiently wait for her enemy to make their move.

  Picking up bits and pieces of information, she was able to deduce that the weapons were about two miles from her shelter. Maddie decided to get a decent night’s sleep and head over there at first light. She sucked on her awahni leaves, sipped on her water and eventually fell asleep.

  Maddie awakened to the snap of a twig in the predawn hours. Her night vision had steadily improved since she had been on Vesturon. Though Vesturions had excellent night vision, with the ability of their pupils to elongate and dilate extensively, Maddie had enough human blood running through her veins that prevented her from having true night vision, yet she was able to distinctly see what had broken the tiny twig. One of her enemies stood directly beneath her!

  She had two choices. One, she could drop down and take him out, or two, she could wait and follow. She opted for the second option to get the biggest bang for her buck. She wanted to use this one to lead her to the rest of her targets.

  The enemy continued walking, and when he was far enough away, Maddie scrambled out of her perch and shadowed him undetected. This was Maddie’s lucky day! He led her right to the jackpot. Now, all she needed to do was to figure out a way to capture them so that she could retrieve their communicators and weapons.

  Maddie made the decision to take them out one by one. She would need to improvise on how she would keep them imprisoned. She carried no wrist or leg cuffs, nor did she have anything in which to tie them. She knew she would have to render at least one of them unconscious so that she could try to steal some rope from their camp. They were fu
lly equipped with all sorts of gear. She could use their supplies against them.

  She snuck up on the one she had followed and applied a chokehold to his neck. Within seconds, he was out. Now, she would have to work fast.

  She crept to the edge of their camp and listened for activity. They were discussing whether or not their scout would return with any food. Maddie threw a rock to divert their attention. One of the men left to investigate, and Maddie snuck in, intending to incapacitate the other. What she didn’t count on was the other one’s speedy return to camp, and unfortunately for her, he was right behind her.

  Chapter 5

  “I would not do that if I were you,” he warned.

  Maddie mentally kicked herself. She had been so sure of herself that she had let down her guard.

  “Well, then, what would you have me do?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I would highly recommend stepping away.”

  “Is that right?” she asked. She knew she had one chance to get away, and she would need the element of surprise. She also knew to do the opposite of what he expected, and that would be to turn and kick. With that in mind, she dropped to the ground and using her leg strength, which was quite impressive, she shot up from her lowered position and landed two crushing blows on her enemy’s knees. They immediately brought him down.

  Next, she rolled to the right, toward the one she had planned to chokehold, grabbed him, and did just that. She rendered him unconscious in seconds. She knew her time was running out. Either she had to escape or complete her mission, but did she have enough time for completion?

  One thing Maddie excelled at was hand-to-hand combat. She wasn’t as strong as her male counterparts, but she was wily, agile, and fast—extremely fast. Her confidence level was high and she knew she could most likely finagle a way to succeed. She made the decision to go for it.

  She scanned the camp for some rope or a similar item that she could use to bind them. When she found what she needed, she grabbed the two men and bound their ankles and wrists. Then she found some rags and gagged them. She went back to her first victim and found him regaining consciousness. She quickly bound and gagged him as well.