by Katie Vack
"What's wrong with your own soldiers?"
"They're amateurs. If they went up against the Peacekeepers without the element of surprise they had last time, they wouldn't stand a chance. That's why we need you."
She was right about that, he decided. The Peacekeepers, however mediocre they might be individually, derived their power from their teamwork and cohesion. Any rookie going up against a full squad wouldn't have a clue how to overcome them, and they'd be dead in seconds. He felt like he had somehow been forced into something, and it stung. But he no longer had a choice. "Heal me."
Her face lit up with hope and gratitude. "Thank you, Grayson, thank you. You've saved us-"
"Shut up," he cut her off abruptly, "I'm not doing this for your sake. First you lie to me, and then you force me into a situation where I might have to face one of the most powerful military forces in the world. If your rebellion goes too far, and they send the army your way, I'll be a dead man. Don't expect me to thank you for that."
"Of course," her face fell, "I'm sorry. I don't expect you to forgive us for that. We never meant it to turn out this way, but we still shouldn't have done it. Once this is over, you'll never have to see us again."
"Good. Then let's get this over with."
"As you wish." She beckoned him over. "Kneel."
He walked over to the throne, dropping to one knee and lowering his head. This was ridiculous. It was like he was being forced to swear allegiance to some pretender queen.
He felt the warmth of her hand as she placed her palm over his head, and then a warm, golden light began to suffuse the room. He felt the warmth of her life as it spread through him, a comforting numbing sensation which spread from his head, masking his headache and dispelling his sickness, down through his body to his hands and feet. The light began to glow brighter, overcoming the shadows within the room and bathing it in an atmosphere of tranquillity.
In all the experience Grayson had had with lumin healers, he had never felt this kind of power. If she had this kind of effect without actually exerting herself then she might even be nearing rank six. That was a worrying thought; that Mahi might be on a level with Scarlett. Whether or not she was a fighter, she was definitely a major threat.
He felt the familiar but strange sensation of his body re-knitting itself over the course of a few minutes. There was never any pain, the lumin energy was a natural anaesthetic, but it was incredibly unnerving. He could feel every millimetre that his bones moved as they came back into alignment, every nanometre that they grew as the broken pieces fused back together again. He felt his new skin gradually growing, crawling along his hands and feet as the dried blood fell away to dust. He felt the minute splinters of glass and wood as they wormed their way out of his flesh, forced out as it closed up behind them. Then the glow faded, and the room darkened once more, and that feeling was gone. He rose to his feet, cracking his knuckles with satisfaction. He felt whole again. Even the near-invisible scars on his face had faded away. For the first time since his encounter with Blue and Green, all that time ago, he felt whole.
He cracked his neck contentedly. Sure, he had been forced into someone else's fight, but at least now he was in a condition to make a difference. He could finally do something. He was finally free from his crippling injuries. A new thought suddenly occurred to him. It was a risk, but then so was everything in this business.
"Give me your power." It was a command, not a question, but there was no malice in it, only an immense sense of conviction.
"What?" Mahi looked up at him questioningly.
"Your power. You want me to fight for you. Very well, but I want your power to fight with."
"Oh. Of course." She didn't question his request but simply held out her hand to him, blazing with light. Maybe she didn't know what absorbing lumin energy did to casters. He clasped it in his own, drawing upon his roiling anger at the way he had been used, at the way his group had treated him, at his half forgotten memories of his father. Little shadows began to quiver around his hand, quickly extinguished by the blazing light. He gritted his teeth and the shadows fluttered back into life, growing in strength and conviction. Grayson's eyes hardened as he forced them to bow to his will. They roiled around the joined hands, finally overpowering the golden energy, and suddenly the barrier was broken.
The energy began to flow through his arm, up and around his body. He screamed out in agony, blinded by the power that was the bane of his kind as it tore through his body. His body seemed to be ripping itself apart from the inside out, his two converging bloodlines fighting a desperate battle for survival. His mind shut off completely and he lost consciousness for a second, unable to cope with the pressure.
After an amount of time he couldn't even begin to guess at, his mind crawled back from the bring. He opened his eyes and they began to change colour, wavering between caramel and lilac. A sense of immense power flooded through him as he brought his thoughts to bear upon the power which was life to his one half and death to the other. It was even greater than what he had siphoned from Scarlett, but it was completely different. The energy of undeath had been purely destructive, boiling within him and attempting to break free and kill. This was different. It was as though all the malice of the dead energy had been inverted, converted into an overwhelming sense of assurance, assurance and quiet strength.
His emotions danced through his mind, asking his permission to leave. He let them fade, with the exception of his anger, which he'd have to hold on to. He felt oddly at peace. At peace, and indestructible. He'd gambled on his lumin half shining through, and it had worked- any full caster to try it would have burned themselves to a crisp.
This energy wasn't like the normal power he had to deal with- there was no rebellion, no attempt to break free from his grasp, only comfortable and un-coerced compliance. It was his, and would happily do whatever he wanted. He could work with this. If this was how it felt to be a lumin sorcerer, they were lucky people indeed.
He rose to his feet from where he had fallen, looking down at Mahi. She was pale faced and shaking, as though all the colour had been drained from her, but she made no comment other than to thank him again. She directed him through a doorway and he strode through it, proud, powerful, and undisputed. He was the real master here.
* * *
On the other side, he found himself face to face with Green and a human woman. Both had obviously been healed like him, because they had no injuries to speak of and seemed in perfectly good health. Green was garbed in his Alliance robes, presumably because the rebels hadn't had any aetherial armour lying around, but he had his twin longswords sheathed across his back. The woman was dressed in flexible black nanoweave armour, and a helmet with a holographic HUD. She was carrying some kind of light carbine and had a sidearm holstered down by her thigh.
Grayson turned round to face a shakai who had followed him out, and took his proffered crossbow and ring. Evidently, despite their assurances that they were his friends, the rebels still didn't trust him enough to let him carry weapons around Mahi and Aurel.
He looked back at the other two. Green was glaring at him, hatred in his red-rimmed eyes and fury in his words. "You."
"Me."
"I should kill you here and now for what you've done."
"You could. But then you'd be killed too."
The aetherial turned his head away, apparently unable even to look at him anymore. "Just be lucky I won't. This is an amnesty, not a forgiving."
"Cool." He didn't really feel like getting into an argument here.
The woman turned to him, offering her hand, and he shook it. "He's been moping around for hours. What exactly did you do to irritate him like this?"
"Well," Grayson tried to put the previous events into words, "he and his friend- the one that got killed- were throwing their weight around in a tavern. I took them down a notch, and they donated me their money as recompense."
"Ah." A slight smirk twisted her face. "I see. Well then," she turned back to t
he staircase which led to the surface above, "good luck I guess."
"Yeah. You too. Any particular suggestions about how we go about this?"
"Getting up there and tearing them a new asshole springs to mind."
A woman after his heart. He chuckled to himself. "What ranks are you guys?"
"Mid three," replied the woman.
"High three," Green echoed. His voice was still clouded with hatred, but then Grayson hadn't expected any answer so he supposed he should be grateful.
"Fair enough." Normally he would have qualified as a mid level fourth rank, but with this kind of power flowing through him... "Low five." He pretended not to notice or appreciate the incredulous looks they shot him, and glanced up at the trapdoor above. "Shall we?"
Rebel Without a Cause
The trapdoor exploded open before a blast of concentrated air, throwing smoke and chunks of wood across the midnight street. Three backlit figures stepped through the smoke- on the left, the tall winged figure of an aetherial. On the right, the lightly armoured figure of a soldier. In the middle stood Grayson.
It turned out that he'd lost less time than expected. It was the middle of the night, his surroundings cast into deep shadow, but his heightened senses easily accommodated for that. He was still, by the looks of things, in the outskirts of median. Around him stood a clutter of houses of all shapes and sizes, scattered apparently at random; likely because the Secondary government couldn't keep up with all the paperwork, and the people had taken matters into their own hands. There was no cohesion to the place, the intervals between the supposedly inhabited buildings could be a single metre or a dozen, but the first thing Grayson noticed was that the streets were silent. There were no civilians here. Apparently the rebels owned this whole complex.
That would explain his previous surroundings- it would seem that the rebels had connected together all the cellars of these houses, turning them into their literal underground base of operations. A rather poor idea, to go with a rather poor rebellion.
The Alliance forces on site reacted immediately, hurling themselves into cover and bringing weapons to bear. Grayson managed to catch sight of five, six, but that was it. The rest were somewhere out of sight. His trio was surrounded on three sides with a house at their back, but that was okay. They still had plenty of room to react.
The woman hurled herself through a window, shattering it and rolling into a firing position, holographics calculating trajectory, recoil, and environment as she opened fire. Green swung his longswords free of their sheaths, launching himself up into the air to take in the scene from on high. Grayson simply stood there, basking in the moment. Right here, right now, these people didn't have a hope in hell against him. After far too long, he was back on top.
A few split seconds passed, and then bullets finally began to fly his way. He allowed his shadows to unfurl, curling down out of his sleeves like a vipers nest. He dived away, rolling to the side to evade as the building behind him began to shake under the storm of lead, and swung smoothly back up to his feet. He braced himself against the wall, using it as a starting block to kick off from. The energy flowing through him couldn't just be used for attack and defence- it had manifested itself throughout his entire body, supercharging his muscles and granting him an awareness he had never before even come close to.
He kicked off, launching himself into a sprint, and the wall cracked slightly as he shot away like a missile. Two targets acquired, ten metres away, on either side of a wide street. He flew between the two, lightning fast, and they simply couldn't keep up. Their gunfire followed him as he moved, failing utterly to catch him as it stitched the houses behind him on either side. It was laughable, really.
He slid to a stop at a level with them, sending a wave of grit further down the street and ripping apart the soles of his boots. The two Peacekeepers turned to face him, but not quickly enough. He lashed out with his shadows, whipping them around to hammer one man into a wall, and the Peacekeeper crashed to the ground comatose. Grayson felt a brief concern, wondering whether he had gone too far, but he was lucky. The man had a broken spine and ribs, and a cracked skull, but he'd live. It would seem, Grayson thought, that he didn't know his own strength.
Grayson turned to face the other man, who had thrown his empty rifle to the ground. The man drew a shortsword, screaming for support and swinging wildly at him. Grayson's shadows wrapped around his clenched fist and he caught the sword in his armoured hand, dragging it down and to the side to leave his target overexposed. He struck the man squarely in the chest with an open palm and he shot away to crash through a window, bones broken and back lacerated.
There were another three targets closing from behind him, moving in fast on his position. A whirring noise. Chain weapon. A crackling noise. Flames. Infernian. Something else too, that he couldn't quite figure out. Either way, there were no firearms. That made his job easier.
He turned to face his attackers, emotions written in the wicked grin across his face. He'd done it. Sure, it had been down to Mahi's influence, but he'd still hit the second stage. He'd done it, and he was in complete control. He took in the incoming Peacekeepers. On the right was a human with a chainaxe. In the middle was an infernian with a pair of blazing swords, rippling with sorcerous fire. On the right was a hellion with a monstrous halberd, the blade superheated to a dazzling white.
Grayson launched his own counter charge, rushing to meet the devil in the centre. The infernian swung his right sword at him and Grayson rolled beneath it, tripping him in the process. The Peacekeeper fell to the ground and Grayson whirled round without pause, launching a hammer fist into the human's stomach and flattening some internal organs. The man collapsed retching blood and Grayson leaped into the air, flipping backwards over the swing of the poleaxe. He kicked the rising infernian in the jaw, an instant knock out, and turned his attention to the hellion.
The reptile launched another slash at him, then another. Grayson neatly sidestepped each, simply toying with his prey, until the poleaxe finally fell down in a vertical motion, swinging downwards like a headman's axe . He stepped away from the axe, letting it fall, and then stamping down on it to hold it in place. The two of them locked eyes, and some sort of recognition was reached. Grayson sprinted forward, running along the half buried halberd, then kicked the hellion in the jaw.
The hellion stumbled backwards, pulling out a short blade and falling into a knife fighting stance. This one was tough, much tougher than the others, but then that was to be expected- nobody this side of the universe was better than a hellion when it came to taking a beating.
Grayson rushed forwards, feinting at a straight right. The Peacekeeper moved to smack it aside with his off hand but Grayson withdrew his fist and struck through the man's breastplate and into his solar plexus. No result. The superheated knife swung his way and he ducked it, striking the hellion in the ribs again and again, arms a blur. The reptile took a step backwards, but that was all. After all, these things were pretty much bred to withstand blunt impacts, and that was without the thick armour to hit through.
This was a problem. His fists were already starting to wear through from the repeated blows against the solid target- under normal circumstances he'd have broken every bone in them. He strained his ears, hearing the noise of more footsteps behind him. He dodged another strike. He didn't have much of a choice here, he had to finish this up fast.
He willed all his shadows into his right fist, barely having to exert any energy. They began to coalesce, bunching around it like some kind of monstrous glove. The footsteps behind him were nearing, almost on top of him. He was running out of time. The final remainder of his shadows found their way to his fist, collecting around his hand and forearm as a gauntlet, a half foot thick. He grinned. Game over.
The footsteps behind him vanished, signifying that his hidden foe was airborne. Grayson leaped upwards into the air, bringing himself perpendicular to the ground and punching out towards the hellion with all the power he had. The t
hick armour cracked and shattered under his blow and the lizard was launched through a wall and out of sight. Acting almost at the same time, Grayson spun around and, working blind, snapped a kick towards his attacker.
There was the tingle of magical force and Grayson brought his head around just in time to catch sight of a blazing glyph inscribed onto the air, a Peacekeeper officer kicking off from it and throwing himself into a backwards somersault, clearing the brutal kick by mere inches. Grayson twisted his body around, landing on his armoured hand and springing back onto his feet. The bluish rune of energy vanished, and the two of them stood there regarding each other, a half dozen metres apart.
The man was garbed in a white officer's greatcoat, trimmed with gold to denote his rank. It contrasted against his black hair and calculating brown eyes. This man was different. Grayson had no idea what a high four was doing in a low level squad like this, but it looked like he'd found a slightly more competent opponent.
His face lit up at the prospect of a real test. "Pretty good reflexes. I would have had you."
