Pride X Familiar ReVamp (Pride X ReVamp Book 1)

by Albert Ruckholdt

  Another holovid kept an eye on the battle between Maya Khayman and a gentleman that looked disturbingly like Kaleb Deneve. It switched to different points-of-view and angles in its effort to keep pace with Maya and her opponent. The security holocams in the library were instructed to follow that encounter but they struggled to keep up, unable to reorient their lenses in time as the two Familiars tore up the library in their efforts to vanquish one other.

  I should send Cassandra Khayman the bill for those damages. After all, it was her daughter Maya destroying almost as much property as that Kaleb Deneve look-alike—and this was after Maya complaining about her precious library being put at risk.

  And then there was the other trio still waiting impatiently at the foot of the stairwell.

  They were a resource I needed to free up but couldn’t.

  That was the only ‘real’ entrance to the vault that we knew of, and I had to keep them there to prevent the final incursion into whatever the vault happened to be.

  I heard a voice off to my right. It came from the computer club’s president, Dalton Bridges.

  “Mr. President, please take a look at this.”

  Mr. President – yes, I definitely like the sound of that.

  Dalton Bridges, you’re a good man.

  I walked over to Dalton and stood behind his chair.

  He called up a holovid and enlarged it. “Mr. President, look at this. When the seventh seal was broken, we followed ‘him’ into the subcommand kernel.”

  “Are you saying, you can see what ‘he’ sees? You have the same access?”

  “I am indeed. We’re still reading the list of available command routines that were locked in that part of the network by the seven seals. However”—he worked his magic on the photon keyboard before him—“we’ve been using the commands we’ve learnt so far to take a look around.”

  The computer club member to his left intoned, “Club President, I’ve got a pretty good map of the network areas we didn’t know existed.”

  I studied the holovid. For all intents and purposes it looked like a map. Perhaps I should describe it as a map that was growing brighter, as though cities were being added to dark terrain with each passing minute.

  I looked at the growing dots of light on the map. “My gods…all of this…all of this was hidden from the rest of the network.”

  Dalton nodded. “Yes. I can only assume the Primogens felt no one would ever look in an academy’s computer network for critical material. It’s almost like hiding everything in the obvious place. Because it’s so obvious, no one in their right mind would believe there’s anything there.”

  “Just like the vault,” I whispered. Even with all this new data available to us, we still didn’t know what the vault was.

  Was it a big giant safe?

  Was it a bombproof warehouse?

  Or was it something else.

  “Sir,” the club member said, “you should see this.”

  “What is it?” Dalton asked.

  “It’s a map of the Academy, but it’s showing thirty percent more structure than our existing map.”

  I swallowed and stared at the holovid displaying the map.

  Tunnels, service ways, sealed off bunkers, and a giant cavern large enough to hold a starship. All of this and more lay under the Academy. But there were also secret passageways leading to these newly revealed tunnels.

  “My gods,” I whispered.

  Dalton said, “There—the door Steiner, Deneve and Desanto are at does indeed lead to the vault. The information the Raynars gave us was correct. But there’s a long tunnel connecting it. In fact, it’s the farthest of the three from the vault.” He looked up at me. “They’ve handed us a red herring.”

  My gaze settled on the location on the map marking the vault’s location.

  There were two more tunnels leading to it.

  “Not quite,” I said, “But it’s got our Familiars cooped in a corner that might not see any action.”

  Another club member called out, “Club President, Mr. President, please look at this. It’s holovid surveillance data from one of those two access tunnels. There’s someone down there.”

  Sure enough, a holovid camera recorded a lone individual walking down a service tunnel large enough for military vehicles to drive through.

  “Who is that?” Dalton asked no one specifically.

  I studied the image. The lone person walked under the camera, and then looked up at it.

  My stomach clenched.

  Dalton whispered, “Could that be…her?”

  “Yes, it’s her,” I breathed out. “Quickly, get me the best route from Desanto’s position to that second tunnel.”

  “Sir, there’s someone headed down the third tunnel.” The club member looked at me. “Mr. President, what do you wish to do?”

  I looked at the map, and made my decision a heartbeat later.

  I raised the palm-slate in my right hand to my ear. I spoke to the trio waiting anxiously at the foot of the stairwell.

  “Deneve, Desanto, Steiner. Listen to me carefully.”

  Chapter 17.

  (Caelum)

  The map the Student Council President sent me led up the stairs, across the width of the high-school building, then out of the west wing through its northern exit.

  My visor displayed the map.

  All I had to do was follow it at a run.

  The skinsuit boosted my speed across the open ground. I had to be careful not ‘bounce’ too high and land awkwardly.

  Running at this level was really an art form.

  There was a building a hundred meters behind the gymnasium. The map identified it as a storehouse. When I reached it, the automatic door unlocked. That confirmed for me that the Student Council President was monitoring my progress and helping me along the way.

  I pushed the door open, then slammed it shut behind me.

  Darting down aisles of warehouse shelving, I reached the spot on the map where stairs should be. But all I found was open floor space.

  “Great, I guess it’s underground,” I said.

  After an anxious minute looking for something that resembled a handle, I gave up and manifested my Fragment. Surrounded in the thick black mist, the Gauntlet solidified around my right arm. Extending the forward blades, I aimed the Gauntlet at the floor and used an effect-field to blow it downward.

  Sure enough, there was a ladder leading down.

  It was going to be troublesome climbing down with the Gauntlet so I dismissed it, sending it back into its Pocket Space. Again, I had to tolerate the chill and the black mist.

  Once my arm was free again, and the mist had dissipated sufficiently, I switched my headset-visor to night-vision mode, and climbed down the dark service shaft.

  Severin kept me apprised of the situation at the other tunnels.

  Kaleb was heading at a run to the nearest entrance to the third tunnel that led to the mysterious vault.

  Maya was still fighting the spear wielding Crimson Crescent Familiar.

  Rina was keeping to a running battle with cannon girl.

  And Caprice had chosen to wait in the stairwell, though she’d climbed up to the next big landing.

  I must have descended two hundred feet when I finally hit ground. I was surprised to find a hatch of some sort underfoot. Pulling it open, I spied a tunnel running underneath the service shaft.

  “President, I’m at the bottom of the ladder. I can see a tunnel running below me.”

  Severin’s voice sounded slightly scratchy. “Desanto, wait there a moment. Something’s going on. I think the Raynars have people in that tunnel.”

  I decided not to wait.

  “Desanto—!”

  I dropped down through the hatch to the tunnel floor some twenty feet below. Landing in a crouch, I took stock of my surroundings. The tunnel was quite wide, perhaps ten meters across, and rather well lit so I cancelled the night-vision mode on visor-headset. Then I summoned my Gauntlet again for the umpteen
th time today.

  The black mist surrounded my right arm. When it cleared, leaving that damn chill in the air, I looked down at my arm in surprise.

  “What the Heck…?”

  The Gauntlet had manifested as a single black and white blade, around four feet long. The shield panels weren’t present. Instead, an angular shield arrangement grew out from the back of the long blade and was level with my shoulder. It had dashes of crimson, but was mostly black which contrasted with the white of the blade. Unlike the old shield-blade which was attached to the middle of my forearm, this weapon attached closer to my elbow. I also noticed a slender black gauntlet with crimson highlights had replaced the thick gauntlet I was accustomed to wearing.

  I’d never seen this configuration before, and took a few extra moments to study it.

  Testing its weight, I found it almost non-existent. It could have been made out of paper for all its weight mattered.

  Curious, I crouched and swiped at the tunnel floor.

  A solitary furrow ran along the ground in the blade’s wake. The weapon cut through the permacrete as though it were no harder than wet sand, and that was without emanating a piercer-field.

  Again, I regarded the blade in awe.

  “I wonder if I powered up without noticing.”

  I decided to mentally refer to it as the Gauntlet, rather than try coming up with a new name for it. I concentrated on having the Gauntlet generate an effect-field around me, and was surprised by how easily the field manifested.

  Shaking my head slowly, I couldn’t help muttering in a whisper, “I really hope this is a good sign.”

  Once certain I could consciously maintain the protective effect-field, I jogged in the direction the map indicated.

  I saw flashes of light ahead and slowed to a fast walk.

  Those flashes were accompanied by the staccato sounds of gunfire, most likely from heavy caliber weapons.

  I could hear loud yelling in the air, turning desperate in seconds.

  Something like a cannon sounded down the tunnel, making the walls vibrate.

  Was it an Enforcer squad? It sounded like they’d run into opposition.

  My heart beat a little faster. It wasn’t from an adrenaline rush. It was out of fear.

  The sounds of gunfire and yelling grew intermittent, then came to a stop.

  An eerie silence filled the tunnel.

  After waiting for a dozen seconds or more, I resumed walking cautiously onwards, keeping a foot’s distance between my left shoulder and the tunnel wall.

  It felt like minutes later when I caught sight of a wrecked vehicle in the middle of the tunnel. I walked closer and saw a second wreck. They resembled armored personnel carriers. They had been shredded like soda cans by a can opener.

  There were Enforcer bodies inside the vehicles.

  More bodies lay on the ground, some of them not whole.

  I swallowed. The smell of blood tugged on my thirst as a Familiar. But the smell of death turned me away from the desire to drink blood.

  Whomever they ran into left none alive. I counted fourteen bodies, with more pieces lying around. I couldn’t bring myself to count the number inside the personnel carriers.

  Taking a deep breath, I concentrated on my Gauntlet and willed the Fragment to generate a stronger effect-field, the kind of barrier-field that could weather a missile hit.

  Then I continued down the tunnel at a fast walk.

  “President, can you hear me?”

  The line was quiet.

  “President? Are you there? Damn it.”

  I was on my own. The map was still working, and my skinsuit’s positioning system was estimating my progress down the tunnel, but I’d lost contact with world above.

  I swallowed, and regulated my breathing. I fell into my training, and slowly my mind cleared and the tension within me eased.

  Clear mind.

  Clear heart.

  A cold-blooded killer.

  I felt I was long way from achieving that.

  For now, I just wanted to survive the encounter and live to see another day on this miserable rock colony.

  The tunnel lighting ahead was rather poor, but I recognized a set of double, reinforced doors that looked more like rock than metal.

  There was someone standing before them.

  From their height and silhouette I guessed it to be woman. She was wearing a long coat, and her entire ensemble was black. In fact, she looked more like a shadow than an actual person.

  When she turned, I saw only two-thirds of her face since she wore a visor over her eyes.

  But my awareness only needed that much to recognize her.

  I held my Gauntlet at the ready, and steadily approached her.

  She remained still, only half turned toward me, but there was no doubt she was watching me from behind her visor.

  I stopped a dozen or so meters away.

  I had to clear my throat twice before I felt confident my voice would hold.

  In the end, she broke the silence first.

  “You’ve grown. You look…a lot stronger.”

  Her voice, just hearing it made my throat tighten. I swallowed again as though I had lump in my throat.

  “…Celica….”

  “Hello, Caelum.”

  I swallowed again. “You were alive…all this time…you were alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were alive…with Crimson Crescent?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  For a moment, I didn’t know what to ask next.

  Her head dipped slightly. “You seem surprised.”

  I released a strangled laugh. “Surprised? How can I not be surprised?” I shook my head slowly. “Why? Why are you with them?”

  “Why? Don’t you know by now? Haven’t they told you the full story yet?”

  I refrained from shaking my head. “They told me something. I don’t know if you can call it the full story.”

  “Well, I have the full story”—she touched her chest—“right here.”

  I swept my gaze over her, wondering where she kept the Fragment that linked her to her Fragment’s Pocket Space. Having seen the carnage she wrought upon the squads of armor-skin clad Enforcers and their vehicles, I had to wonder what kind of weapon she would summon. Whatever it was had to be incredibly powerful. She was a perfect example of why the Prides feared us Familiars.

  She lowered her hand. “I’m glad it’s you who found me. The one watching over us did us a favor.”

  What did she mean? Wait—Severin sent me here, while sending Kaleb to the other tunnel. Did that mean Severin knew she would be here? Was he putting his trust in a bond between brother and sister to bring this matter to a peaceful resolution, or any kind of resolution?

  That bastard!

  I swallowed hard, and hardened my voice. “Why are you doing this, Celica? Why are you putting so many lives at risk?”

  “They’re just Aventis. What of it.”

  My eyes widened slightly, remembering cannon girl expressing the same sentiment.

  I asked, “You remember Haruka, right? The girl you used to treat like a little sister.”

  Celica nodded faintly.

  I pressed on. “Haruka’s an Aventis now. She’s an Avenir. Does that mean you don’t think anything of her now?”

  “If I did, would I have come this far?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve done a great many terrible things to get here. I’ve killed so many Aventis, I’ve just lost count. I killed when I was an Artemis. I killed afterwards when Crimson Crescent took me in.”

  “You would kill Haruka too?”

  “If she got in my way. I’ll kill anyone foolish enough to oppose me.”

  “Does that include me?”

  She was quiet only for a moment. “Of course.”

  I swallowed, and sensed a piercer-field form over the blade, yet under the barrier-field.

  I shook my head again. “Jeezes, Celica. You’re my sister. I’m your brother. D
oesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  This time she was quiet for a little longer before replying. “Caelum, come with me.”

  “What?”

  “Come with me back to Crimson Crescent. We could use you. You’d be a valuable addition to the cause.”

  I frowned inwardly. The Cause? What Cause? Crescent had never declared its agenda, so what could she mean by ‘cause’?

  She dipped her head at me. “Do you recognize the Artifact you possess? Do you know what it is?”

  I shook my head. The Lanfears didn’t know what it was, so naturally neither did I, though as I’d told the Countess, there were occasions where I dreamt the Artifact’s true form – its completed form.

  Celica snorted softly. “I recognize it.”

  “You—you do? How?”

  Celica raised her chin at me. “My Artifact is called the Regalia. It’s special, and it can sense other Artifacts, whether they be in Fragment form or not.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not all Fragments are pieces of an Artifact. The majority are complete Artifacts that have yet to be fully unlocked and manifested. Such Artifacts are referred to as Fragments, because they are only a fragment of their complete selves.”

  She pointed at me.

  “Caelum, my Regalia recognizes your Artifact as a Kaiser, or specifically the Kaiser’s Blessing.”

  I stared at her while taking in her words, then quickly glanced down at my right Gauntlet. “A Kaiser?”

  “Yes. The Kaiser’s Blessing. A very powerful Artifact that has existed since the War of Supremacy when humanity fought against the Prides more than two centuries ago. When fully manifested—fully unlocked—a Kaiser can significantly exceed the power of a Valkyrie Maiden. Other than a Warlord, there are only a handful of Artifacts that can demonstrate more power than a Kaiser.” Celica grinned at me. “Of course, I’d expected nothing less of my younger brother.”

  I asked cautiously, “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged lightly. “Well, you are my brother so it’s a given you would be gifted with a powerful Artifact.”

  For a moment, I felt a surge of warmth run through me.

  Regardless of her crimes, no matter how much I may disagree with her, she was still my sister, and her praise was something I couldn’t ignore. But given the situation we were in, I couldn’t bask in her praise for more than a heartbeat.