Descend- First Steps

by David Burke

  The were-wolf crossed the space between them in a flash but Jay responded with equal speed, thrusting his spear forward. It pierced the wolf-man and drove straight through his shoulder. The fool seemed shocked that it had pierced him and howled in a combination of rage and pain all the while trying to reach just a little closer so he could claw Jay’s eyes out with those wicked-looking nails.

  Jay leaned in and strained to keep his foe at bay. He must have thanked Huong a dozen times in his mind for providing him with this spear as the other one would have been so much kindling wood by now. Clearly Brent had been thinking the same thing as he now shifted to trying to bite and claw at the shaft.

  Before doing anything, Jay tried to take stock of the fight. It was all happening so fast but in some ways it felt like he was outside of his body and able to assess everything in slow motion. Based on the speed of the wolf-man’s charge, Jay judged him to be slightly faster than his own passive speed but far slower if he maxed it out. Likewise he judged him to be stronger maybe almost as strong as his max strength but while he was regenerating pretty fast, his skin clearly wasn’t as durable as Jay if he went all out.

  Content with his assessment, Jay lowered his center of gravity, pushed a burst of stamina and then lifted Brent up, impaled on the spear and slammed him into the ground over his shoulder. The motion served to free the spear and even as it pulled free, Jay could see the wound starting to close. Note to self, this guy’s regen factor is off the charts.

  This time when the were-wolf charged he was able to spin around the spear thrust and slash extended claws across Jay’s back. They ripped right through the leather armor but were slowed enough so that they only barely broke the skin. Cursing himself Jay realized that the spear was a hard weapon to use once his opponent got inside its reach, especially with his limited expertise.

  Jay shoved the spear butt between wolfie’s legs and brought it up as hard as he could against the family jewels. Apparently even wolf men are sensitive down there because he yelped like a kicked dog before managing a couple more slashes that finished ripping Jay’s armor to shreds.

  After that Jay dropped the spear and pulled out his dagger while dodging slash after slash from the claws. By using double speed boost he was able to stay just ahead of each attack and pivot or duck and weave as needed. He felt the rush of being one step ahead of his opponent and then began to kick himself again.

  Suddenly, Brent became much faster as he too must have boosted his speed. In the next half dozen seconds Jay was cut on both arms and across his chest three times. Jay was able to throw out a hard kick that pushed his enemy back and even though all of his knife attacks had missed he still got the breathing room that he needed.

  Apparently knife fighting was much harder than the movies made it look. Then though he wanted to kick himself again as he realized that he had been failing to use one of his most important skills. He wanted to hold back on his speed so that if he went all out it would be a surprise to the two asshats that were causing all of this, but he could activate his precognition without any risk of them discovering that skill.

  Jay laughed as the werewolf rebounded from the kick he had taken. The laugh must have thrown off Brent’s confidence because he asked in a guttural voice, “What’s so funny. You must realize you can’t hurt me for long now and you aren’t fast enough to avoid being cut into ribbons.”

  With another boisterous laugh, perhaps even louder than he felt, Jay said, “I’m laughing because I’m not left handed.”

  Brent just stared at him dumbly for a moment before snarling and leaping in. This time though Jay activated his precognitive ability at maximum while keeping his speed doubled. It wasn’t that the attacks were suddenly slower, it was just that Jay knew exactly where each strike would go before it landed and while Brent was faster in this current form he wasn’t so much faster that Jay couldn’t compensate.

  Time and again Brent howled in frustration as his claws just barely missed Jay, who was always moving into exactly the right position to avoid the strikes. More than that he always moved into place to deliver a counter strike. Soon it was Brent who was sliced up and panting as he expended so much more effort than Jay.

  Jay realized that he still wasn’t fast enough to get a truly clean stab off and thought that if he could he might be able to deliver a fatal blow. Still his plan called for him to hide his speed but he thought of another option. No more fooling around.

  He focused his mind and pushed as hard as he could with a maximum kinetic dampening field around Brent for the shortest time he could possibly manage it. He immediately shifted all of his energy into strength while maintaining his speed and as the werewolf stutter stepped as his motion was disrupted, Jay got the perfect opening. He uppercut thrusted his dagger with its 12-inch blade right up under the elongated jaw and angled at its base so that his blade went up into the head.

  As soon as the metal drove through his brain, no amount of regeneration was able to keep Brent moving and he collapsed instantly. Jay had no problem holding the limp body up but was a bit disgusted as blood ran down the blade onto his hand and even more so as the wolf form receded and Brent reverted back to his normal human form.

  He was still very much dead with a dagger driven up through his skull but Jay was savvy enough to realize that Kenley and Tyson would be watching him for any sign of weakness. He needed to act like he reveled in this and let out a triumphant shout.

  “Welcome to the winning side,” Tyson said.

  Kenley followed up with, “To the victor go the spoils. You can pick two of the women from your cluster to keep and two to have fun with until we dispose of them. Oh and don’t worry if they aren’t into it, that is the best part of being on top. As long as you listen to me and Tyson, no one will mess with you.”

  Jay made a show of looking over the girls who were bound up and by this time starting to beg him not to do this. The looks of terror from people who had thought of him as a protector were almost more than he could handle, but he told himself he needed to stay the course. He had to be cruel now to ultimately be good in the end. Hurt feelings didn’t compare to broken bodies after all.

  When Jay looked over at Jasmine and Daphne, Kenley said, “Oh sorry, other than those two. They talked back and so I have to make an example of them. Heavy is the head that wears the crown isn’t it.”

  Jay wasn’t sure whether he was more disgusted by Kenley or by the women with him who hung on every word he said and laughed along eagerly. Ultimately though these women made the decision that Jay had to make much simpler as Kenley ordered them to prepare Jasmine and Daphne. All twelve of them scurried down and after the one who made the webbing dissolved it many hands started roughly handling the still-unconscious girls, pushing and tugging on their clothing.

  He had certainly wanted to see Jasmine naked and had no complaints about seeing Daphne in the buff either but not like this. These women were obviously too far gone and their actions seemed to scare the other bound girls even more.

  Sick inside, Jay sent out a pulse of maximized kinetic dampening and caused all of the girls to fumble. Then he pushed his speed as fast as he could and moved between them slashing throats and kicking heads so hard as to snap their necks. He had managed to down half of them before Kenley and Tyson were able to react.

  It was only a brief overwhelming sense of danger that allowed Jay to dodge a stream of fire aimed at his back. He tried to once again lose himself in his precognitive sense as he dodged fireballs and various flying objects from knives to sticks to rocks that Tyson sent his way, mostly curving in from the side but still unable to avoid his foresight.

  Vines erupted up from the ground and encircled Tyson who was obviously used to using his hand motions to control the trajectory of his attacks. So while he could still fling things he had no accuracy.

  The girls who Jay had not managed to kill began to come for him, one with ice crystals in her hands, another with foot-long razor-tipped claws where her fingers had b
een, and so on. Each was a nightmare in their own right as they were screaming in frenzied anger at the man who dared to attack their leaders.

  Jay had to decide as he couldn’t avoid all of them and still dodge the incoming streaks of flame. Fortunately Huong was not his only ally and suddenly out of nowhere, which meant that she must have come from under Amelia’s shield, his saving grace appeared. It was a completely naked Meikiyo and while Jay might have admired that another time, it wasn’t her lack of clothing that he marveled at but her flaming form. She was a thing of beauty and power to see and she charged right at Kenley.

  That freed up Jay to do what he had to do, no matter how much he didn’t want to. Again he crippled their motion and stepped in with full speed and strength. His slashes across exposed necks were strong enough to nearly sever heads even without meaning to. In another dozen seconds they were all down and he had the blood of another six women on his hands.

  Later when he thought about this, he just had to keep reminding himself it was him or them. They were broken evil creatures who would have done vile things in the name of self-preservation or out of worship of Kenley and Tyson.

  He turned to see what the two leaders were doing and he saw that Tyson had just bit it with a shadowy black dagger protruding out of his neck. Kenley was lasting a bit longer but apparently he didn’t know what to do with a woman who he couldn’t burn. He kept flinging blast after blast of fire and there was no doubt that he was powerful, but Meikiyo was immune to it.

  When Kenley suddenly switched tactics and pulled a dagger, Jay got worried and prepared to throw his dagger. Even if it hit hilt first he figured that at maximum acceleration it would still be fatal, but he needn’t have worried. Meikiyo caught Kenley’s arm as it descended trying to stab her. With a subtle motion of her hips, her arms fluidly flipped the man away like some kind of aikido master.

  While she seemed unharmed, the same could not be said for Kenley. His arm, face, chest, and even his junk where he had been undoing his pants to violate the prisoners were all seared by contact with the flames that formed Meikiyo. Jay laughed to himself, the man who liked to use fire to control had now gotten a taste of his own power.

  Still not wanting to give him a chance to get up, Jay hurled his dagger and accelerated its speed till it caved in the prone man’s chest. At the same second, roots had reached up from the ground to hold him still and spears of fire and shadow had skewered him.

  Jay was truly proud of his team and how well they worked together. Now though there were a bunch of scared girls who needed to be freed and others who needed to be searched for. It was going to be a long day trying to sort this all out. Their world had suddenly gotten both bigger with the appearance of other humans but also more terrifying. It was bad enough that they had to worry about the environment, but now they had to worry about others of their own kind.

  Chapter 41 - Solace of the Night

  The day had been emotionally draining on so many levels. Their little tribe of people was down to 25 and from what they had learned that meant at the reset tomorrow that the invisible barrier separating them from the nearest cluster would fall and they would have others to deal with. Jay was just glad that he had made it there in time to keep any of their friends from being raped. It didn’t make up for the ones who had died but while it had been a close thing, none of their friends had suffered that indignity.

  Understandably that had everyone on edge a bit. Jasmine had done her best to calm everyone and was again displaying why she was the best leader, even if her emotional power made him a bit uneasy.

  Now was not the time to think about that. Instead he had plans to make. He had spent the credits to rent all five bungalows and added in everyone else. He had a copious amount of credits after slaying the invaders, which was a good thing as he was excited about the gear upgrades available with the new terminal.

  Access to level two of the dungeon wasn’t quite as exciting, but he also realized that there was little rest to be had. He knew one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt from the voice in his dreams. He needed to descend the dungeon. He needed to grow in power to stop whatever threat the voice was warning him about. He knew he had been neglecting his formation skills and after seeing the werewolf he meant to rectify that immediately. Well maybe not immediately.

  For now though, he was content to relax in a warm bath surrounded by three gorgeous girls that he was willing to trust with his life. It might be their shared experiences but he couldn’t help but feel that he was falling in love with all of them, but whether it was love or simple passion, he was going to be one lucky man tonight.

  Nearly three years later in a timeline that already was and is now changing:

  The three sole survivors sat around a four-foot circle of stone in the throne room of the castle. It was filled with what looked like purple vapor swishing back and forth. The 10th floor of the dungeon had finished off the rest of their former friends, although Jay mused that it had been a long time since he’d had any friends. They were all just her puppets really.

  To think of the way he had been so easily infatuated with her in the beginning brought shame to his mind, but he quickly quashed it. Unexpected emotions always drew her attention. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had always been like she was now or if it was a result of all the trauma they had endured over the last three years.

  People weren’t made to survive stuff like this. Their testers, whoever they were, had a sadistic bent to them. At least that was the way that Jay saw it. By now they had pieced together enough information to realize that their captors were aliens of some kind, but they might as well have been gods, evil tormenting gods. None of the humans that Jay had met here had ever been able to communicate with their wardens any more than he had.

  Even her emotional abilities weren’t able to detect anything from the one observing their struggles. Nothing beyond an emotional flatness and that was significant given how she could zoom in on the smallest emotional flare.

  Learning that their group of one hundred had only been one of a thousand similar clusters had been eye opening. Now though out of 100,000 humans taken to experiment on only three survived. Not even any of the numerous babies who had been born had survived.

  The dungeon was brutal and only got worse as you descended, but far worse had been what they called the great purge. Those two homicidal maniacs who had led attacks against hundreds of the clustered had killed almost as many of their fellow humans as the dungeon. In Jay’s mind they were traitors to humanity. If it hadn’t been for her power creating a rift between the two leaders this might have all gone very differently.

  Idle speculation was pointless though. The present was all that he had and a vague hope that what they were doing here would somehow change things in the past and create a different future for the humans stuck in this experiment. Of course the problem with temporal manipulation of this nature was that Jay as he was now would never exist if it worked.

  With that thought, he told Daphne he was ready to make one last attempt before the dungeon reset around them and they had to fight all over again. She placed her hands on his shoulders and started amplifying his power as Jay manipulated time itself reaching back to an earlier him and trying to pass along power as well as messages. He couldn’t be sure how much was getting through but that was okay because as long as he didn’t know for sure he wouldn’t be lying to Jasmine when he told her that he wasn’t sure if the message she wanted to send got through.

  Epilogue: Forlorn

  Unbeknownst to either present or future Jay there were already variations in the present day timeline that had nothing to do with what future Jay was doing. Hive ship designation X45-C119 was in a flurry of activity or at least as much of a flurry as reanimated bodies could be. The A’snkarnt might consider their form of existence an abomination but the Forlorn scoffed at such feeble thinking, or at least their Overminds did. The average Forlorn had little processing power for stray thoughts.

  No, Overmin
d Caj Decius thought the A’snkarnt were obstacles to the eventual unification of the universe. They were fixated on development by genetic engineering. Once the A’snkarnt had reached a roadblock in their own self-evolution and were not experimenting on what they deemed the lesser races.

  Those experiments had gone on for millions of cycles and their foe had been more fixated on their research than on what the Forlorn were doing. It was typical of the arrogant A’snkarnt.

  Now though in the past few twenty to thirty thousand cycles the war had been tilting ever more towards the inevitable victory of the Forlorn. Forlorn, it was not a name they had given to themselves, but they had embraced it.

  They had been called many things over the cycles of their rise from necromancers to technomancers. Caj Decius thought the Forlorn worked just as well though. His people did not see a difference between life and death, nor between organic and technological. All existence, the universe itself was a mindless machine and they were all tiny cogs in it. Only once total unity was achieved would there be peace.

  Philosophy was a luxury he enjoyed as an overmind. He lost out on feeling the complete unity with his brethren but was still united in their common cause. Recent intel recovered from a captured scientific vessel that they had managed to disable before its A’snkarnt owners could destroy it, had revealed the location of one of the leviathan test sites.

  The leviathans were all but legend and only a few hundred cycles ago were they confirmed to truly exist. They were ships of gigantic proportions akin to small moons and seeded out amongst the galaxy for the experiments of their foe. If Caj’s armada could capture or even destroy one of these leviathans it would be a great blow to the A’snkarnt, for the leviathans were equipped with their latest technology and populated by the brightest minds.

  Soon, he would savor their defeat and eventual unification. Then they would know who was truly forlorn.