by M. J Kreyzer
Ranjak’s face was purple. “I promise, if there wasn’t a stabilizer here then-“
Hendrick kicked Ranjak across the face. A group of Dark citizens rushed forward and pushed him off of Ranjak who shot to his feet, shoved through the people and grabbed Hendrick by the scruff of his shirt and railed Hendrick across the head with his club. Hendrick took the brutal strike, turned his head back towards Ranjak with a large gash across the side of his head and laughed. “There you go!”
Hendrick broke Ranjak’s grip on his shirt, grabbed Ranjak by the back of his head and started slugging him. The crowd began to riot. They pushed and shoved to try and get a piece of Luke and the Ditrinity. The soldiers were jumping into action and the Ditrinity fought back, holding the outside circle while Trey turned to Luke, aimed his rifle at his chains and shattered them with one round. Luke burst free and went to a huddled mass of people who tore and kicked brutally at something on the ground. Luke went over and a column of flame shot up from the middle of the group. The people screamed and fled back, revealing a bruised and bleeding Hendrick who had his Blazer raised and aimed it around in a circle.
“WHICH OF YOU BASTARDS WANTS TO TRY THAT AGAIN!”
The Ditrinity still scuffled with the soldiers. Morlo was dealing with over twenty screaming people, Vyvyr and Trey kept pressure on the soldiers near the gate and Sable was on the ground getting beat bloody by a group of Darks who found every open space on her body to kick her. There was a scream of agony as two of the soldiers around her collapsed to the ground with legs that were completely broken backwards. Both Ranjak and Thompson had returned to each other’s sides and were about to go after Luke. Luke saw them coming, grabbed his heavy metal shackles and began to swing them and took several starting strides towards them.
There was a gunshot and the crowd went quiet. An armored assault vehicle had pulled into the outer perimeter of the crowd. Half his body visible out of the top of the front hatch was Alighieri with an assault rifle aimed into the air.
“Let them go now!” He yelled.
The Darks stood to attention wherever they were. Pontious transformed back from a wolf, people fell off of Morlo and Hendrick took his hands off of a dazed soldier and let him collapse to the ground. Towards the back of the group, on her hands and knees, Sable coughed up blood put her hand over the four broken ribs she had and climbed shakily to her feet. Luke looked back and saw several cuts on her face with both eyes blackened and a fat lip. Luke’s anger worsened.
“Ditrinity, you will stand down right now!” Alighieri said, getting another wind to yell once more. “As for you Luke, get out of here! You have your sentence now go!”
“Real smart, Sam!” Hendrick replied with harsh intonation. “Real smart. At least we treated you like a friend.”
Alighieri ignored him and continued. “Do what I’m telling you now, Nate, or every single one of you is going to get put in prison or killed. And Luke, if you care about the well-being of your friends at all then you’re going to tell them to stand down.”
“Shaddup!” Morlo yelled. “Try and take us!”
“Stand down…” Said Luke. The Ditrinity complied immediately. Ranjak laughed at Hendrick.
“Just like a dog.” He said.
“No worries, Ranjak.” Hendrick came back. “I’ll make you my bitch.” He looked to Luke. “We got your stuff. Grab it and lets go.”
After shoving through dozens of soldiers and citizens Morlo took a bag off of his shoulders and handed it to Luke. Taking it gratefully, Luke thought about leaving. All around him the Ditrinity stood ready, ready to endure every kind of pain that was thrust on them all for the sake of preserving loyalty. But there was no winning this battle. Not without killing. Hendrick was heavily bruised, possibly concussed, Morlo had several cannons aimed at him, Sable was just barely healing from the massive injuries she took, Pontious was severely outsized and outnumbered and Dark soldiers had formed up on the top of the wall and aimed rifles down at them. All it took was a command before they’d all be turned to bloody mush on the pavement. As if reading the minds of all the Ditrinity Alighieri spoke once more.
“And if any one of you tries to go with Luke I’ll see to it that you’re shot at the first chance we get, I promise you.”
Hendrick gave a defiant laugh. “Bite me!”
“Stay here, Nate.” Luke said. It surprised Hendrick.
“Wha- When you said that I thought you were just trying to be unselfish.”
“I need you to stay here and protect Tess.” Luke said, thinking more about Ranjak than he was the First Legionnaire. “She’s not going anywhere and I’m not about to let those two be the best protection she has.” Luke took a quick moment to look around at the crowd. “If the First Legionnaire finds out about us getting rid of the majority of this city’s defenses then they’ll need all the help they can get in protecting this place.”
“They aren’t going to attack, man, they’re going to Styne.”
“On whatever intelligence those assumptions are based, I want you to stay here as a precautionary measure. I want Tess safe and you’re the person I trust most with that. After I’m gone I don’t know what’s going to happen. But it’s just like it’s always been. I’m gone and you have control over the Ditrinity. You know how it goes. And if Tess does go on that mission that Pontious told me about then I need you to go after them and make sure she doesn’t get hurt.”
Disappointed, Hendrick nodded. “It’s no problem.” He said. He put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and grinned. “Might be a long time before we see ya again. Going at the pace we have been you’ll be due for a visit in a couple years.”
Seeing Luke and Hendrick discuss, the rest of the Ditrinity realized that they wouldn’t be going with him. Slowly they grouped up around him and hung on his every word, waiting for direction.
“We’ve fought together for two decades now.” Luke said. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You know what to do.”
There was a quiet across the group. Nobody connected eyes, at least for long.
“So…” Sable said close to a whisper. “Where are you going to go?”
“Don’t know.” Luke said. “I’ll go wherever the closest Legionnaire encampment is and work outward from there.”
Morlo gave a sharp laugh. “Doing a bit of hunting?”
“Right now the Darks are just a minor prick in the Legionnaire’s side. I’m going to change that.”
“What you going to do?” Sable asked.
There was a pause, and with this new availability of unbridled freedom, it was clear that Luke had a number of possibilities on his mind. But as he felt the weight of the Razorback pendant in the pocket of his long coat, Luke pulled it out and looked it over. Upon seeing the shape, feeling the cool metal, and associating those things with the countless treasured memories they were tied to, a tide of rage grew within his gut and his objective became perfectly clear. After placing the pendant back into his coat, Luke turned to her and looked her square in the eyes.
“Slaughter them.” He muttered. “Every one of them. The First Legionnaire is feared by every enemy it has and the Darks are petrified of them. You’ll never see a single Dark fighting a single Legionnaire. The Darks are afraid of the First Legionnaire and the Legionnaire knows it. I’m going to go out there and make the feeling mutual.” Luke looked back through the gate and took a long breath through his nose as though taking a breath of fresh air. “I’ll make them fear the Darks. They’ll be terrified of the Darks, and every night when they lay down to sleep and the dark sets in on them they won’t be able to think straight because they know that we’re the monsters and demons that hide in their corners and under their beds and in their closets. They’ll hear stories of other Legionnaires, mutilated, gutted, skinned, and know exactly who did it. They deserve no mercy. They slaughtered millions of Durants, women, children, and now it’s time they pay for it. They put me in prison and sliced me open and tortured me and stole my family away from me and they’r
e going to hang from the trees by their own intestines and hang there til the birds pick them dry or their guts rot through for what they did to me. There is no black and white anymore. I was ethical before and the Legionnaire was fearless. I’m going to see how they react when they see what I’ll do now.”
The Ditrinity said nothing. Luke slung his bag over his shoulder and walked past them and through the gate. He strode across the green meadow beyond the gate, pulling gear from his bag and throwing it on. They spread out until they were standing side by side, looking on as he approached the tall, thick tree line. Bloodied, bruised, and beaten, they watched until Luke was fully armed and clad in his white long coat and battle armor and was no more than a white dot against the trees. They were quiet until Trey looked to Hendrick as the gates began to close.
“He gonna be okay?” He asked. Hendrick said nothing.
“It’s Luke Semprys.” Pontious replied, feeling no need to say more.
Silent, the Ditrinity lingered there until the gate closed. The massive bolts on the gates locked them into place and the Dark soldiers surrounded the Ditrinity immediately. Still angry, the mobs began to yell once again. Every soldier in the vicinity surrounded them and pushed them towards another set of armored cars that arrived and parked next to the car that Luke had come in. As they were cuffed they all exchanged glances not of discouragement, but resolve. There were much bigger things that were about to happen and with Luke gone it was up to them to make sure things were okay. Hendrick took deep breath, cracked his neck and walked towards the armored cars followed closely by the rest of the Ditrinity.
“Here we go.”
Chapter 9
Luke was merely a white blur that wisped through the trees. Without any stabilizers he could channel Furo through his legs and cover several hundred miles on foot in a single afternoon. As soon as he disappeared beyond the tree line outside of Praemon he took off. He blazed through the trees, leaping over ravines and using Grav-fields to propel himself through the air when he came to an area of terrain that was particularly rugged or high.
There wasn’t much place for Luke to go. He only had a general idea of where he wanted to go and travelled in that general direction, keeping his vision active and being able to use his sixth senses to see for miles. It was an outpost for the First Legionnaire; whether it was temporary or permanent was unknown to Luke. He had simply caught that fact in a conversation with Alighieri and hoped that is had at least a sliver of accuracy. The thing that made things even more difficult was that, if it wasn’t permanent and the Legionnaire had moved from that area then Luke would miss them entirely and be completely lost. Even having his vision reaching as far as it did Luke wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find them. Praemon was such a spectacularly strategic city for a reason: the surrounding terrain was so rugged that the only way somebody could pass through on foot was to travel the roads and paths that all intersected under the city’s watch. The surrounding range, the Byfayne mountains, were considered by many to be the harshest on the planet, that harshness exceeded only by the Diamide or Sestik mountains which had similar terrain and brimmed with man-eating beasts bigger than a Forge tank.
It had been a week before Luke had picked up any sign of life, much less the Legionnaire. He had travelled several hundred miles and was to the point where the roads would not be passing by Praemon. It was after that period of time that Luke remembered something his father had told him as a boy: If you’re lost, stay where you are and somebody will find you. Of course, Luke wasn’t lost and he wasn’t looking to be found, but the words made him realize that if he set up a kind of base on a cliff overlooking the road then something was bound to pass by. He wasn’t looking to be found. He was the one doing the finding.
There was a perfect place. There was a section of the road that passed through a canyon, the trees on its cliffs being so thick that they appeared to be spilling over its edges. It was at the mouth of the canyon that Luke made his camp. Using small, controlled Decimators Luke made a subterranean cave in only a few hours, blowing through the solid rock and digging the cave deep enough as to make it seven feet from roof to floor and reinforcing the roof of the cave with sections of tree. It was actually quite cozy when he got done with it which, granted, Luke had never really cared for. But he had the time and the resources so making the cave at least relatively comfortable. He constructed a crude bedframe out of bits of hacked oak, made a mattress from bundles of wildflowers and covered it all in a number of animal skins he had collected from the things he’d been killing for food.
The entrance of the cave came up just before the edge of the cliff. Luke had made it so the hole was only big enough for him to get through and, even then, he covered the entrance with a boulder every night to ensure he wouldn’t be waking up in the middle of the night with something gnawing at his femur. And the entrance was done in such a way that by simply crawling out of the hole he was in perfect position to peak through the ferns growing on the edge of the cliff and have an invisible sniper perch with a complete view of the entire canyon . But that fact was irrelevant; when the Legionnaire showed up Luke would be working with his hands.
So Luke sat back and waited. It was seldom that he went beyond those six to seven miles that his vision stretched and even when he did he always returned within thirty minutes. On these excursions away from camp Luke did one of several things: hunted for new food, scouted surrounding territory, and kept an eye out for possible Legionnaire encampments that might make his wait a lot shorter. By looking for white stabilized spots in his vision Luke hoped that he’d be able to more easily pin down where they might be. But there wasn’t a stabilizer as far as he could tell, so Luke continued to build up his reserves and patiently wait.
This living in the wild was something that Luke had done many times before. However none of these times were quite the same scenario as the one he currently faced. Luke had discarded almost every major survival technique in order to get this kind of a position on the road. His nearest water source was five miles away and the herds of animals that he hunted were even further. But on foot he was able to cover those distances in only a few minutes which, obviously, was well worth the sacrifice.
It was loneliness, though, that became Luke’s only enemy. Lying in bed at night, no matter what things he tried to think about, Luke always found his mind wandering back to Tess and the Ditrinity. There was no way he could possibly know what was going on with the city. The city could be a pile of ash and rubble and Luke would be completely oblivious to the fact. The Legionnaire could’ve already taken the city back from the Darks and Luke would’ve spent all this time searching for them in vain. Hell, the war could be over and Luke would be out here in the wild painted up in mud like an insane savage for absolutely no reason. But the feelings he felt there in his cave were feelings that he was sure he’d purged for good a long time ago. So with these feelings of isolation being so vivid a sensation, Luke often clung to the one source of physical comfort he had which came in the form of a small, silvery pendant in the form of a Razorback.
The cave was quiet; the muffled sounds of the forest were hushed, what little sound made it into the cave reverberated off the rough rocky walls and faded into the dark. Beneath the weight of several animal skins Luke would look at the dark ceiling, around the room, and the sensation of being back in prison was a vivid one while it was a strikingly similar situation. Luke was unable to interact with anybody; everybody he knew was either forced from his association or cheering for his death. It was isolation at its very finest.
It didn’t take long before those idle nighttime moments came within Luke’s control. Examining his own physical characteristics Luke realized that it didn’t take an astrophysicist to gather the fact that he was an extremely tense individual. So, every night before he’d go to sleep Luke would practice various types of relaxation and eventually settled on simple meditation. At first it was hard controlling his mind and emotions to such a degree but Luke knew that he had nev
er really tried to do so. When his thoughts led him to things that intensified his loneliness Luke, subconsciously, wished to feel that way. He despised the feelings he felt when he thought about Tess and the Ditrinity yet he found himself subconsciously thinking about those things and preventing himself from thinking about anything else though his conscious mind warred feebly against it. It took only a night for Luke to change that and only a week for him to gain a moderately well control over his thoughts. Soon he found relaxation in simply listening to the hushed sounds of the forest: the wind rustling the leaves and branches in the trees, the distant howling shrieks of some wild thing or the dull patter of rain as it dropped lazily from the sky. (Luke, of course, had to make certain waterproofing adjustments to his cave after stepping from bed into a foot of water after one nocturnal rainstorm.) Before long even the things that would have driven Luke mad became no more than a passing thought. But it would take an encounter with the Darks or the First Legionnaire to determine how far he had actually come. But the thoughts that came at night came only at night. During the day Luke had no time to think with the only thoughts that came to mind being those related to the impending passage of the First Legionnaire.
Luke had done quite a bit of hunting. He had built up a very adequate supply of dried meat and animal skins, the skins then cut into sections and fashioned into water pouches. When he wasn’t busy stocking his food supply Luke practiced his fighting and further honed abilities he already had. Inside his cave he would sit in the center of the floor and meditate, extending his view as far into the future as he could. The further into the future he tried to peer to more hazy it became. (It started to become hazy after only a few hours and took exponentially more energy the further ahead he looked.) Many people who didn’t understand looking through time were under the impression that looking ahead only a few hours was a simple task. By all facts it wasn’t. When looking ahead in time it isn’t just one particular area that you are looking at. When reading time you’re dealing with every single event that occurs on an entire plane of space-time down to the last hatching beetle. With that many things to consider it proved impossible for most Durants to even look a few seconds into the future which, of course, was common practice for Luke. He had accustomed himself to looking no more than two seconds into the future on a regular basis, most often when he’s in a combat situation. Many people had wondered how it he seemed to know exactly what would happen before it did. More often than not he did. And the best part was, whether it was stabilized or not, Furo read the same either way. Luke could still look ahead in the presence of a stabilizer.
