Chapter Text
When a hatchling bird wiggles their head past their shells’ broadening clefts, eyes opening to imprint upon their mothers, their first thoughts are those of filial love and unconditional submission.
When Stelle opened her eyes to the sight of a young wine-doused, foundation-coated, coat-draped bitch , her first thought was to holler for child support.
Rising to her feet, gloves creasing under the wrath of clenched fists; the only plan on Stelle’s concise agenda was to give that smirking legion-daughter of a mother a piece of her incandescent mind.
But before a single word from her bloodthirsty armory of insults could muster up the vitriol to leap up the contours of her tongue, they were washed down with a gulp of saliva. She had run into the first conundrum of her second, second-old life.
How did Stelle know the purple woman was her mother, or at least, a mother figure? And even if she was, for what reason did Stelle have to be so angry about it? And what in the names of the Aeons was a child support?
Dazed by her own confusion, Stelle collapsed onto the ground, the chill of cold steel on flesh shooting up her bare legs. She wasn’t particularly bothered, but she took note of the sensation.
The floor on which she had landed was made from a sleek black metal, rising modestly into lighter grey seams which culminated into four criss-crossed ramps all rising intermittently to accommodate some sort of elevated platform behind her. The elevation must have been slight, as the seam rose barely an inch above the floor.
The ramps all served as frames for long strips of transparent viewing panels that ran between their sides. All she could see through them was sable black, even darker than the steel that framed them, which was probably not how they were supposed to look. The presence of transparent material implied that there was something bright to be seen below the room, something that had gone dark.
To the left of the center ramp, upon which she currently sat, jutted a thin, sleek pane of metal, a shade darker than the floor it rose from, widening into a back-tilted rectangular panel. It was probably a console, judging from the lambent white light coming from what Stelle assumed was its front. A light that shone as brightly and enthusiastically as the mind of a wage slave trudging through his average workday. Stelle had no idea what the purpose of that console was, but now it was nothing more than a blank sheet of plastic-metal.
The air smelled cool and sterile with a hint of artificial fresheners, underlaid by subtle notes of plastic, metal, and ozone. Her ears could pick out the dull, faint hum of some sort of air-conditioner, likely built discreetly into one of the walls.
The purple woman bent low and extended a hand gloved in young wine, slender and arachnidian—a spider weaving a web of fresh blood. She smiled from a mask of lipstick and makeup and contacts, a face full of nothing.
Before she could even consider an alternative, Stelle seized that hand with a firm grip, hoisting herself to her feet before the first warfront of hesitation could make landfall in her mind.
When it inevitably did, it landed far behind schedule. Stelle froze, and the woman leaned in. Wafts of wine-scented perfume hooked wispy tendrils into her nostrils, a scent as comforting as it was familiar, and yet bore a razor edge at its end, just like the woman that wore it.
Something tight and wound-up was unspooling in Stelle’s stomach, and her stoic features had begun to relax in correspondence. She had half a mind to loll on her feet and droop bonelessly onto the woman’s— Kafka’s embrace—somehow she knew it would be given—and relinquish her senses to the blissful mercy of sleep.
This woman was dangerous. She knew it in her bones. To civilizations, to empires, to worlds. To the hearts of men and machines and beasts alike. But not to Stelle. Never to Stelle. The grey-maned girl believed this with a degree of certainty that vied with her faith in gravity.
She was also a bitch. This, Stelle believed more than gravity.
She took this opportunity to size up the woman that aroused such contrasting emotions in her heart, giving her brain a chance to evaluate the validity of her heart’s yearnful song.
Wavy rivers of young wine poured gently down the alabaster folds of a flare-wristed dress shirt, playing host to a pair of rounded sunglasses desperately clinging to its surface like marooned sailors at sea, terminating at the peaked lapels of a spider-patterned coat, draped lightly over lithe shoulders. High-heeled boots rose into mauve stockings sluicing down lattice-strapped shorts covering thigh to belly. A strangely harmonious blend of fancy and rugged, garnished with a light arachnidian note. All in all, a tasteful ensemble, with one exception.
Stelle found it personally insulting that the woman wasn’t actually wearing the damned coat. It just hung off her shoulders, sleeves trailing above her arms like a pair of boneless second limbs.
What in the names of the Aeons is the point in buying a coat if you’re not going to wear them properly? Did the woman want an extra pair of arms to complete the spider motif? If so, why didn’t she just put on two coats so that she’d have eight limbs instead of six? Was she stupid? Was she hiding another pair of sleeves in those shorts?
To the strange spider-coat-woman’s side was a short silver-haired girl, just like Stelle. Her choice in attire was… chaotic to say the least.
The shorty wasn’t wearing much at all, at least not below the chest. The shortest shorts Stelle had—and would probably ever see—flailed precariously from a press-stud howling furiously to be pressed, seatbelted under a low-hanging silver strap bearing what could only be assumed to be four buttons from a game controller. As if those shorts were not short enough, their owner had seemingly converted a sizable portion of their right sleeve into fishnet stockings, while a silken flap flowed down the other, trailing to her ankles.
Her more modest top consisted of a dark and blue fur-collared jacket cropped low so that it failed to reach her navel, held in place by an overworked zipper whose slider halted less than an inch above its bottom stop, creating an illusion of a single loose-hanging pin. Underneath, she wore a white tank top over a black one, each with one strap for her shoulders.
She wore a pair of black fingerless gloves, synthesized of an implacable material whose only tell was its flexibility. A gray, plastic-like choker gripped her throat, bearing a design that seemed to imply some variety of technological efficacy. A pair of large indigo shades, dot-patterned and visor-like, hung from a surviving cluster of messy bangs that hadn’t been tied back into a trailing drill-curl.
Clearly, she was some sort of technological savant with a predilection for video games. Stelle’s mind drifted to the image of a pasty shut-in, only deigning to prowl outside the mildewed walls of their rank dens under the cover of moonless nights, their slovenness surpassed only by the weakness of their bodies. The image was only half right. She knew for a fact that the girl’s room was as messy as a ship galley in a solar storm, and the girl’s choice of dress spoke conclusively of her concerns of order, fashion, and the winter cold.
But she was not weak. Not with those legs corded with runner’s muscles, or that bored, confident face that looked as if it had circled the universe a dozen times over. Not with that shadow’s step as she moved closer to join Kafka, footfalls as silent as the waters of the void. And not with that ribbon on her head, flaps jutting skyward in glorious imitation of the ears of the universe’s greatest things.
Stelle had mistakenly been appraising her fellow gray-hair bottom-to-top, her gaze having only grazed the edge of those sacred vestments toward the end of her examination. The gray-maned girl mentally kicked herself for her choice of order, for those ears utterly recontextualized the girl’s choice of fashion.
Yes, Stelle could see it now. How could she have forgotten? How could she have been so blind? The girl was not a creeping, sloven, miserable den-dweller! She was a creeping, sloven, miserable den-dweller whose heart soared at the thought of rustling plastic and clanking steel. Whose palate craved for pungent odors and all-you-can-eat meals. She was a Trash lover, just like Stelle!
That was something Stelle could have never forgotten. A full stomach in a full bag. An impervious fort in furrowed steel. A host of companions in furry coats. Such was the magnificence of Trash that it provided everything necessary for a proper living. How could she forget something so fundamental?
The girl’s clothes, upon closer examination, were not the chaotic mess that a first glance would suggest. No. They were a purposeful mess, an orderly mess. Sacred vestments bestowed upon her by the Trash Gods themselves. Those beings of chaotic order whose inscrutable plans were ever beyond the comprehension of the human mind. There could be no other explanation for that fashion sense. Nobody would ever dress like that otherwise! This is what Stelle believed.
Like a blind man who had regained his sight, Stelle looked to the girl—her comrade—and gave the gamer her brightest, widest grin, followed by a friendly thumbs up. She hoped this would make a good first impression. Well, a good second first impression. Stelle had a sneaking suspicion that she had been well acquainted with these two strange characters in her past. She knew Kafka’s name on instinct, so that was a dead giveaway.
And she could feel the beginning of the gamer’s name jutting out of the thick haze that had blanketed her mind. Silver… Silver something. Was it a moniker or a translation? Stelle pursed her lips and furrowed her brows as if trying to squeeze the name out of her truculent brain.
All that gave her was a nasty headache. Stelle shook her head fiercely, both to disperse the pain and to vent her frustrations. Whatever, she would just call her Silver Trash for now. It was a very flattering name. Stelle believed that Silver Trash would be honored to receive it. Even if she didn’t like it, it wouldn’t matter. Stelle would learn her name soon enough.
Kafka and Silver Trash were still here, and they didn’t seem to be going anywhere yet. If they knew her, then surely they’d try to catch up.
So Stelle mustered up her courage and addressed the woman that seemed to be in charge: Kafka. No offence to her comrade Silver Trash, of course. Whether a Trash Can chooses to open or to be opened, the silver of its lid gleams radiant all the same.
“H-hey Kafka.” Stelle greeted airily, beads of cold sweat skidding down her hair. For some indiscernible reason, she was nervous.
Something glinted under Kafka’s murky contacts. The conservative swell of her lips bent up just a smidgen. Was… was she happy Stelle recognized her?
Stelle felt her heart melt like cheese on a pan, and a tight knot she barely knew was there unwound easefully in her stomach. A sudden surge of heat shot up her chest—then her face, and Stelle had to twist her head away to hide the deepening red on her cheeks.
“Great. So you remember me.” Kafka replied flippantly. But that gossamer-thin smile never deserted her lips.
SilverTrash made a noise between a gasp and a chuckle, shifting her flat gaze away from Stelle in an obvious attempt to avoid eye contact.
So the girl cared. Nice. She could work with that.
But before Stelle could get too comfortable with the two women, Kafka pressed forward.
“Listen.”
She had annunciated the word no differently than any other, her tone anything but authoritative. But in that moment, Stelle felt as if her life’s purpose had solidified into twin spikes and shived through her ears. With that singular word, the girl’s world collapsed as easily as a deck of cards to a gust, its remains being salvaged for a new, greater construction, webbed into place on lifts of gossamer.
Listen. Listen. Listen. What more was there to life than to listen? Why move when you can listen? Why speak when you can listen? Why think when you can listen? Why indulge in such redundancies when you can just listen?
A creeping sense of dysphoria spidered across Stelle’s synapses, and when that skittering messenger halted in its course, she came to the most horrific epiphany.
Five . Her senses had been split into five . Like a tree whose trunk had been splintered by stray lightning. Like some kind of twisted, unnatural candelabra of redundancy and inefficiency. Why was there five, when one would suffice?
How had Stelle never realized just how pointless they all were; those four parasites—those worthless, impotent scroungers on her bloated body. Even now they mooched at her attention like the gross piles of waste they were.
Two balls of fat and slime flooded with streams of meaningless drivel. Two gaping landfills choked with obfuscating smog. An excrescence-coated worm undulated in its rank pond. An overstimulating, worthless prison, bombarded with little nothings.
How could they, in their superfluity, have been allowed to distract her from the only sense that was necessary? What joke of the Aeons was this? Why had she been born this way? How could she have been content to live this way? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Stelle couldn’t breathe. It was as if she was juggling five boulders with a single finger. She had to listen. She had to. That was her purpose, the meaning of her life. So how could it be that her redundant faculties outnumbered her ears four to one? How could they, in combination, be more intense, more vivid than her hearing? Why had her life’s purpose been diluted by these monsters? Betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. Betrayal of the highest order. Her body had betrayed her soul. She had to listen—had to devote everything to that task. But her body was content to remain distracted, to forsake its sole duty. It was a traitor. It was an enemy. It was indefensible. It was wrong.
Before she knew it, Stelle’s finger had drifted to the far edge of the smallest and most immediate of her body’s redundancies. With that worthless sense she had once called touch, she felt the scrape of glove against lens. It didn’t hurt—rather, it hadn’t begun to hurt. But there was a certain wrongness to the act that sent cold shivers down her back.
As if she had been splashed with ice water, the grey-maned girl snapped out of her trance with an unheard boom. Her world, transient and mirage-like, finally snapped back into its rightful, rigid place.
What? Stelle thought with newfound lucidity. What the hells was I about to do? She examined her glove, glistening with unshed tears, and all of her thoughts for the past few seconds came rushing back to her in a single, tempestuous wave. In her mind’s eyes, a thousand strands of spiderwebs burned to ash, a mutilated psyche reconstituting itself back to its true and proper shape.
Stelle was gasping now, sweat dripping from the front of her bangs. Panting like a dog, she wiped a strand of snot from her now runny nose and gulped back a mouthful of bile.
She remembered right. This woman was dangerous. Not because of what she had just done, but in the way she had done it.
Nervous golds met regretful amethysts. Kafka’s face, no longer tranquil, was twisted in an expression Stelle could only interpret as apologetic. To her side, Silver Trash scowled, glaring daggers into Kafka’s scalp.
“Sorry, Stelle. I forgot that you’re not used to it anymore.”
That hadn't been intended as an attack, or even as an attempt at manipulation. The singular word that reshaped Stelle’s entire mindscape, that had nearly made her commit the unthinkable—had been meant as a conversation starter. A Gods-damned introduction. A how-do-you-do. There was no malice behind it, no; it was almost friendly. It probably was friendly. And what could be more terrifying than that?
At that moment, Stelle realized that she stood before an unfathomable monster. A great and terrible spider whose webs could trap the stars themselves. And she had once been an associate of that monster. What the hells did that make her? Just what kind of life did she live to have been raised by such a woman? What did this coat-draped siren, who was somehow simultaneously her mother, her friend, and the most dangerous being she had ever known, want from her?
Stelle didn’t know what to think anymore. She’d still bet her life on the assumption that the two women bore no malice against her. But a gaping chasm a galaxy wide had opened between them, shaking Stelle to her core. She suddenly felt so very small, like a flea that had somehow found itself caught in a spider’s web, conversing with its captor as if they were equals. How conceited. How arrogant. How utterly naive. Of course, this flea was in no danger of being eaten, but even a creature of such little knowledge knew better than to mistake safety for freedom.
“What do you want from me?” Stelle asked, though it sounded more like a repurposed gasp, or even a whimper. She couldn’t meet Kafka’s eyes anymore, her own golds darting to and fro like some skittish cornered animal.
“Great,” deadpanned Silver Trash. “You scared her, Kafka.” The short woman sighed, still glaring harshly at her companion. Kafka scratched her cheek in embarrassment as if she had just misplaced the family cutlery. “That said, Stelle wasn’t this weak before. We sure she’s gonna be okay?” Silver Trash glanced at Stele worriedly.
“Yes, she’s just… not as used to my power as she once was. She’s always had the mental fortitude to take it. It’s just that my power is always more potent on those unprepared to withstand its… effects .” Kafka shot Stelle an apologetic smile. “Stelle is just as strong as she ever was.”
Silver Trash huffed and turned away, rolling her eyes with exasperation, though Stelle didn’t miss the short woman’s final worried peek to her eyes. A bolt of warmth lanced through her heart.
“Then get this over with. It’s already been”—a holographic panel opened in front of her, she glanced at the top—”Two minutes and twelve seconds since we’ve revived her. We don’t have much time left, slowpoke.”
Kafka chuckled. “Alright, alright, Wolfy. I’ll make this short. We’ll be out of here before the minute’s done.”
Silver Trash scowled. “I swear to the Aeons if you’re talking about this conversation —”
“—Out of this space station, Wolfy,” Kafka placated, rolling her eyes in good humor.
So they were in a space station. Neat. Or maybe not. These two didn’t really act like they were invited. If the locals found Stelle and lump her in with them… Fuck. There wasn’t an ‘out’ out here unless she wanted to spend the rest of eternity drifting in open space as the universe’s most badass icicle. If they didn’t take her with them then she would have to hide here indefinitely… hide indefinitely on a space station that, for all she knew, was packed with sensors and cameras up the wazoo in every room and around every corner. Fuck.
Also, Silver Trash’s name had a “Wolfy” in it somewhere. So Silver Trash Wolfy. Nice to know.
“Now, where were we?” Kafka refocused her attention on her. “Stelle. I know that you must be in a daze right now. You don’t know who you are, why you’re here, or what you should do next. I look familiar, and… you know my name, but you’re not sure you should trust me.
“None of that matters. All you need to know is that we’re leaving, and you’ll be left alone on this space station. From now on, don’t think about your past. Don’t doubt yourself. In the near future, you’ll encounter all kinds of peril and hardship, but you’ll also experience many wonderful things. You’ll meet companions who will treat you like family, and embark on surreal adventures with them. At the end of your journey, all of your questions will be resolved.” Kafka’s gaze softened. “This is your future that Elio has foreseen. Do you like it?” A hopeful bias gilded the last sentence.
Stelle didn’t dignify that with an answer. If Kafka wanted her to commit to liking something, then she’d have to describe what this “future” would entail with a little more detail than what sounded like the outline of a middling fantasy novel at a crummy bookstore. And Elio… who the hells was that? Some kind of prophet or seer, Stelle guessed, but she couldn’t remember that name for the death of her.
Having no response for Kafka, Stelle changed the subject.
“Where are you going now? And how do you know I’ll be fine after you leave me here? You know the locals or something?” She crossed her arms in displeasure.
“It’s like weaving brocade—you and I can only add one gold thread at a time, but eventually, we will make a gorgeous pattern.”
What the fuck are you talking about? Stelle fumed. She had half a mind to ram something sharp through Kafka’s ears—they must have been clogged to shit—but she was running out of time. Better stick to the point.
“I’m asking you if the people on this space station will kill me on sight because they think I’m associated with you,” Stelle grilled sternly.
A pause. The two women exchanged unreadable glances.
“Nah.” Silver Trash Wolfy denied tersely. “Anyways, Kafka. We’re out of time. Astral Express is almost here.”
Well that settles it… I hope. She could probably trust her Trash buddy, right? Right? She had no idea what this “Astral Express” was—it sounded like a cheap amusement park ride—but it seemed to cast an impending shadow over the two. Was it the name of an enemy organization?
“I know, I know.” Kafka brushed Wolfy off again, but she was moving faster and sharper even as she flapped her wrist about. “ Listen: ”
Stelle tensed. Here it was again. Stelle could sense something light and spectral spidering over the contours of her mind, probing for a breach. This time, she gave it none. The intruder didn’t back down; it redoubled its efforts. Stelle felt something catch in some loosely-defended corner of her psyche. Again, she wanted to listen.
But this time it was just a slight, miniscule urge, like a craving for a good burger. Nothing that chiseled at her cornerstone. Stelle grinned a challenger’s grin, confidence soaring like a rocket. Not so weak now, am I?
Kafka smiled proudly, and Wolfy nodded in approval.
“I have to leave now. Someone will come and find you soon. They’ll be friendly. Just go with them. Trust them.” The wind-doused woman spun on her heels, coat sleeves brought about half-swinging-half-billowing. “When you have a chance to make a choice, make one you know you won’t regret.”
Again. No details, no identification. Who were the people Stelle would be able to trust? How would she be able to identify these people when she had no idea what they would look like? What if the wrong people got to her first and she assumed they were the ones Kafka was talking about? She was about to tear her hair out. Just because she trusted Kafka didn’t mean she could stake her life on these vagueries.
Stelle was about to bark out a stinging retort; her frustration had built up so high that she felt that it would surely be the sharpest, driest, most scathing retort ever told.
But when Stelle opened her mouth to unleash a torrent of distilled vitriol, she found herself talking to a steel wall. A literal steel wall. What? Where was Kafka? Where was Wolfy? How dare they escape her righteous tongue-lashing?
The metal of the wall felt cool and refreshing against Stelle’s nose—the perfect temperature for a napping spot. Four massive prints stained the wall, though they might have looked so big because her eyes were only inches away from them. Of those prints, two lashed forward like giant tongues while the other two, square-like, rested contentedly in perfect symmetry.
Huh. That was funny. They were almost her own bootprints. Almost like the wall wasn’t a wall at all, but—
A pair of thousand-ton clips bit into her eyelids, dragging them down to a close like primitive portcullises. Stelle, for the life of her, couldn’t open them again. And to her surprise, she realized she didn’t want to. Finally, she realized what had happened to her—what had been done to her, but it was already too late.
Kafka’s dull contacts leered down from above, emitting a tyrannical arrogance that only a monster like her could bring to bear. The spider tired of the flea, and wheeled about for larger, juicer prey.
Shit. I underestimated her. Kafka didn’t even need words to crush her. And here she was, getting all giddy over taking the last one head on. Stelle lost control of her limbs, her body ragdolling to the floor. The beginnings of a sweet, blissful dream tugged coyly at the edges of her mind, and she couldn’t think up a reason to resist.
Somehow, someway, Stelle knew she wouldn’t be able to pry a single word out of that immaculately caked-up mouth if she had a crowbar forged by Qliphoth Themselves. There was nothing she could do to make that woman spill anything she wanted dammed up. Better to give up for now and wait until their next meeting. Judging by the way those two were talking, there would definitely be a next meeting.
See you later, Kafka, Wolfy. Next time… let’s catch up a bit.
Before darkness took her, Stelle felt a viscous trail of drool trail down her lips. Oh great, they were going to find her like this. Should she wipe it? No… too… tired.
The next time Stelle’s eyes slammed shut, not even mighty Qliphoth could muster the strength to pry them open again.
*****
“Weren’t their coordinates sent out from the space station…?”
From the depths of a deep, dark bog, Stelle heard a young man’s cool voice, lightly flavored with an accent that, for some Gods-damned reason, reminded her of stale blood and spider lilies in bloom.
It turns out that the “blissful dream” had catfished her. There was no dream. Only darkness. A deep lethargy that, while not completely sedating her, reduced the statuses of moving, blinking, and even breathing to those of redundant chores.
Kafka did a real number on her. Stelle’s lazy heart and slacking lungs only bothered to do their jobs once a minute. She was like a bear with a raisin brain, hibernating out in the open woods. Anybody could slip a knife through her ribs and she’d be powerless to stop them.
She hoped this guy didn’t have a knife. She really, really hoped this guy didn’t have a knife.
The clank of a metal against metal echoed across the room: a dull, crass ring. Unless this guy was so incompetent he dropped his sword, that was the sound of a polearm’s butt. Qliphoth’s pits! Well, “at least he doesn’t have a knife”. Right, Me? You jinx!
“Who cares?” Huffed the voice of a chipper young woman, rapid and unaccented. “They’re here and alive. Do they look like a mannequin to you? Just look at all that drool! Could a mannequin leak that much drool?”
Stelle didn’t know if she should curse or cheer—not that she was capable of either at this moment. The presence of this woman surprised her; she had only heard one set of footsteps. One of these two weirdos would make a decent assassin.
So Kafka sent them to help her. They were probably the people she was yapping about. The guy looked skeptical. Not good. But the girl clearly wasn’t thinking that hard and probably just wanted to help the poor woman she saw passed out on the floor. Good, maybe. Stelle wasn’t sure if she could take these two yet. She had to be careful. Note to self: if I regain control of my body at any point, I should telegraph my movements. Slow and rounded, as passive as possible. Don’t wanna excite any twitchy fingers.
Two warm fingers on her wrist and a soft ear on her chest. Surprisingly, Stelle didn’t flinch.
“Weak heartbeat and pulse,” diagnosed the man, placid voice raising in alarm. He’s worried. Good.
The ear craned away from her chest; the fingers slipped off her wrist, and Stelle heard the swishing and crinkling of fabric in rapid motion. Something synthetic, a mix of silk and tulle. No footsteps.
“March, you better do CPR.”
“Huh?!” A series of wild squealings of rubber on steel, growing louder with every step. Clearly, she wasn’t the one with the silent feet. “Hehe… I-I’ve never done it before! Dan Heng, you do it!” She stammered.
March and Dan Heng . Names that told a story. While Stelle would have preferred to see them in writing so that she could maybe rely on her little mangled scraps of memory to pin down their respective languages, she supposed that beggars couldn’t be choosers.
These two seemed to have come from different planets. “March” was probably a title or a name translated to Universal, while “Dan Heng” consisted of two clipped syllables that were obviously not translated. And he spoke with a slight accent while she didn’t.
Of course, they could have been from the same place; March could have been a seamless polyglot who went by a title she was especially proud of, or was burdened with a name so cumbersome she kept it translated for personal convenience. Still, that was unlikely. The third month of the year wasn’t much of a title, and most people in the universe didn’t like to use gloss translations for something as personal as their name. Safer to go with the different planets theory until proven wrong.
So they were from a diverse organization that (sometimes, often, occasionally?) accepted distress calls from space stations, dispatching their operators in squads of two. Either they were hilariously confident in their operators’ combat prowess, or they were grossly understaffed. For now, Stelle hoped for the latter.
She could still hear the young woman’s feet nervously tapping about a half-meter away. Stelle imagined she was biting her lip.
Strong gloved hands sat her up and eased her delicately against the wall. Tapered, graceful fingers danced across the cusp of her chin, raising it with such care that Stelle hardly felt her head moving at all.
A warm gust of Autumn leaf musk wafted past her nostrils, growing more and more potent. Hot breath blew to her lungs like a summer gale. The man’s face had to be less than an inch away from hers.
CPR. They thought Stelle was on death’s door, so the man was going to administer CPR. CPR. CP—Nanook’s tits, He’s going for my lips! I don’t even know the guy!
Stelle’s eyes shot open, her heart drumming thunderously in panic.
In this crucial moment, Stelle finally, blessedly regained control of her body. She didn’t know how, but she was sure Kafka had timed this to the dot. That skank.
Even though she had already awoken, the young man was still going for her lips. His eyes were closed. Stelle didn’t know if it was out of habit or to protect her decency. But even if he was doing this for the most altruistic, most noble, most chivalrous reason in the universe, his lips were still just centimeters from hers!
She could see his face clearly now. A sleek and intense face tapered into a speartip chin. Long, subtle lashes fanned over sharp eyes. Bangs of ink-black hair, messy and tousled, draped down to the root of his nose. Again, Stelle couldn’t help but be reminded of the harsh odors of stale blood and spider lilies in bloom, even if this man smelled nothing like them.
“Wait, stop it, she’s awake!” Before Stelle could spring away from those horrible, inevitable lips, Dan Heng’s female companion batted his face away, leaning into view.
Sparkling eyes of passionfruit pink and sky blue highlighted a cotton candy smile. Bubblegum locks, wavy and shoulder-length, draped around an oval head like candy waterfalls. She smelled of something sweet and refreshing like ice cream on a hot summer day, a fantasy flavor beyond any attempt at description.
She seemed to be covered in a thin film of some transparent crystalline material—a suit of armor so subtle that Stelle didn’t even know why she thought it was there. The material did not extend to the soles of her shoes, if the earlier noises were anything to go by. Her hair and clothes fluttered and swayed easily with every motion—suggesting that the material was not form-fitting. And she was somehow emitting scent and talking normally. How? Was her whole “suit” pocked with breathing holes?
There was something off about this girl. Something that was hiding behind that bubbly, friendly, airheaded, slightly dumb-looking exterior. But, as if March was some kind of peripheral illusion, the more Stelle looked at her, the less suspicious she became. Whatever. This girl—this anomaly—wasn’t being overtly hostile. In fact, she seemed to be the friendlier of the two. She could keep her secrets; it wasn’t like Stelle didn’t have plenty of her own, even if she couldn’t exactly parse many of them.
Both of them wore golden ticket-looking badges somewhere in their diverse outfits. The girl wore hers near the edge of her skirt, while the man wore his at the hem of his coat. Identification badges for sure.
Alright. Slow movements, round movements. Nothing that’ll alert them. Nothing that’ll imply hostility. Stelle took a moment to rise, palm pushing gently off the ground, her legs taking on the brunt of her weight. Her other hand drifted over to brace on her face, nursing a pounding headache.
She didn’t fake anything. She doubted she could hide anything from Dan Heng anyways; Stelle had never been a good actor and he looked sharp as a razor—not to mention the genuine razor-on-a-stick he had on hand. Whatever Kafka had done had left her with a genuine sense of lethargy, though it was quickly passing. Stelle estimated that she would return to peak capacity in another thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds left of sympathy. More than enough.
Swivelling her neck side to side, Stelle saw that she had been relocated to a hallway leading towards two hexagonal hatches, lined with white, brown, and black construction material. A pair of orange fluorescent lights lined the bottoms of the walls like glowing strings, terminating at the walls beside the exit hatches.
“Are you alright? Can you hear me? Do you remember your name?” March asked slowly and gently, taking special care to fully enunciate each syllable, her voice sopping with concern. Nice .
“I… “ Her throat felt as arid as a desert canyon: so dry she swore it had begun to crack. “I don’t remember much… But my name… my name is Stelle.”
March smiled in relief. Her expectations must have been low to be so happy just for a name. Strange.
“Stelle?” Began her calmer companion. “My name’s Dan Heng, and this is March 7th.” Stelle tilted her head. March VII? March the Seventh? She was royalty, or at least the seventh bearer of a title? Really? She didn’t look the part. “This space station was just attacked by the Antimatter Legion. We came to help with the rescue at the request of Lead Researcher Asta.”
“The Legion?” Stelle grimaced. Of the few scraps of memory she still had to her name, the Antimatter Legion was perhaps the most imposing. The scions of the Mad God Nanook, sweeping across the universe in a grand conflagration of death and destruction. Thousands of worlds have fallen in the wake of their scorched march, trillions of lives snuffed out in the pursuit of the most horrific, most insane ideology ever conceived.
Stelle wasn’t particularly surprised that they were here. The Legion was a prolific bunch, expanding their dark “empire” by the hour, a present and active threat to all life in creation. The only reason that this less-than-metaphorical cosmic wildfire wasn’t simultaneously attacking every inhabited settlement in the universe was due to numeral and astrographical limitations, as well as their choice of priority. Not a single name in time and space could escape the blood-soaked pages of Nanook’s infernal list. But his followers seemed to follow something of a pecking order.
Somehow, despite the gift of unity that could only be given by a universal enemy, universal peace still laid far out of reach. There was an axiom there, a little nugget of universal truth that the philosophers amongst the stars were probably grinding their teeth to dust over, but Stelle had no interest in pursuing it. She was more of a boots-on-the-ground type of girl.
This space station was either close to Legion territory, a strategic target for one of their generals, or both. Stelle had no idea what allies they had besides the Astral Express, nor of any enemies besides the Antimatter Legion. Would there be further reinforcements? Raids by murders of maligned opportunists sniffing for fresh blood in voidwater?
She had no idea how big this place was or what objects of importance it contained. While Stelle knew she could hold her own against a few voidrangers; if the Legion was serious about this operation, well… she doubted that she and her new buddies could escape a Doomsday Beast or anything of the like. There was no way any of them could fend off a planet breaker. Maybe if Kafka was here… Though that was just a wishful fantasy. That inscrutable vixen was probably lightyears away by now. No point in licking up spilt wine.
“So, how invested are they here? Any notable commanders? Any Lord Ravagers?”
“Oh no, no, no! Of course not,” denied March, hand fanning in swift dismissal. “It’s just the goons this time. Just a bunch of voidrangers” She turned to Dan Heng for support. He nodded noncommittally. “We’ll take these invaders out soon. Don’t worry.”
Stelle breathed a visible sigh of relief. Just voidrangers then. Could be worse.
Now that her most pressing concerns had been addressed, Stelle changed subjects from sure enemy to would-be ally.
“This Lead Researcher Asta, who is she?”
“A petite cutie with pink hair. Madam Herta appointed her to be the acting lead researcher,” answered March, not skipping a beat.
Stelle’s eyes shot wide. She gaped at the girl in front of her, who in her mind’s eye had shot up ten feet. So that’s why she has the title of “The Seventh”! But, huh. Wait… that makes no sense!
Dan Heng sighed. “No, March is not Lead Researcher Asta in disguise.” Stelle let out another relieved sigh, wiping a bead of sweat off her brow.
March covered her mouth, eyes shining. “You think I’m a cutie?”
“She believes that you would address yourself as such,” replied Dan Heng without a millisecond of pause, and Stelle had to cover her mouth to muffle a laugh.
“Hey.” March deadpanned. “There are things you don’t say to pretty girls, you know?”
“That was indeed something I’d never say to a pretty girl.”
“Wha—you! Why you!” March blustered, flushing tomato red. She coughed a few times in a failed attempt to reassert control, and turned to address Stelle as if to hide her embarrassment, though the red on her ears remained. “A-Anyways, Lead Researcher Asta was appointed by Madam Herta herself.”
Before Stelle could ask who this “Madam Herta” was, March frowned in consternation. “That girl really needs to step up. I can’t believe her own employee doesn’t even know her name…” She muttered.
Stelle raised an eyebrow. Seriously? They thought she was one of this “Asta”’s employees? Some crummy, emaciated researcher stranded on this deathtrap of a space station? Did they even pause to look at her strange clothes? Her bare legs? Did this place just have a lazy dress code or something? Crazy. Absolutely crazy, and just the teeniest bit offensive.
Well, their loss. Stelle had absolutely no obligation to correct them. Plausible deniability sure was sweet. If they bring this up in the future, well, I never said “yes”.
Now that Stelle’s questions had been answered, it was time to move.
“Where do we go now?” She asked brusquely but airily. Dan Heng glanced at her ponderously, blue-green eyes clouded in thought. At this point he had probably figured out that Stelle was a combatant, considering her nonchalance at the prospect of fighting voidrangers. Probably not good—he still thought she was some kind of researcher after all—but there was nothing she could do about it. She had always been a bad actor. If he found out he found out. Stelle never actually said she worked here.
“Back to the master control zone. Asta and the other researchers have gathered there,” Dan Heng answered dutifully.
March chimed in. “Plus that’s where we parked the Astral Express! Don’t you worry, we’ll protect you from the monsters and clean up this mess!” She declared cheerfully, almost haughty. It would have been comforting if Stelle's list of worries ended at just voidrangers.
“Astral Express…” Stelle muttered in consternation. The Astral Express. The mysterious organization that had managed to intimidate that monster Kafla. They were members of that Astral Express. She had thought that might have been the case, but honestly, it was a bit hard to believe.
Stelle scanned March’s body, swept her eyes up and down, side to side—, repeated, rubbed her eyes, repeated again. “...Are you sure?”
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean!” March began to protest, but before she could say more, Dan Heng cut her off.
“We are both members of the Astral Express crew. We have dealings with Madam Herta, so we visit the space station from time to time.”
“We just so happened to arrive during this invasion,” continued March. “Of course, as a—ahem—crew of heroes, we’re happy to lend a hand.” Dan Heng stood silently, agreeing without a word.
Stelle raised an eyebrow. Maybe you two think this was all just some big tragic coincidence, but I think we’re all hanging off of somebody’s control bar. She didn’t think Kafka and her mysterious prophet had the means to orchestrate a Legion invasion, but they probably predicted it in advance and took advantage of the space station’s strained defences to plant Stelle here, where she would be swept into the waiting train cars of the Astral Express.
Now, Stelle guessed she was supposed to join them, if Kafka was to be believed. A plant, a sleeper agent. A future crewmate, happy, eager, loyal—at least until her memories are returned to her in a moment ripe for a backstabbing. Kafka may have cared about her, but she had no reason to extend that same generosity to these strangers. Stelle sneered. How deftly the puppeteers hid their strings.
Fine. She would play along for now. Let herself get pulled around a good little puppet. But now those thin strings glinted in her eyes as clearly as the rising sun, and she was craving a good pair of scissors.
“What’s the Astral Express?” Stelle asked. An honest question.
“You’ve never heard of it?” March asked, brows furrowed. “The Express comes here once in a while.” Oh right. They still thought she was an employee here.
“It’s a unique train that can travel between the stars with the power of the Trailblaze Aeon,” Dan Heng continued.
“I’ll show you when we’re back to the master control zone~” concluded March airily.
So they follow in the footsteps of a dead Aeon. Interesting. Stelle thought that there were probably some crazy implications to that fact, but her fragmented recollections of viatic principles were too fragmented to comprehend them.
The grey-maned amnesiac hummed in consideration. By now, it was obvious that these two had known each other for quite some time. The way they bantered without restraint, the way they continued each other’s train of thought seamlessly, the way they trusted each other to fight through a space station full of voidrangers. All of this indicated a bond forged over years of companionship. If the Astral Express was a place that could foster such warm connections, maybe their work atmosphere wasn’t so bad.
Well, no point in thinking about it too hard. She was stuck with them for the time being. Might as well make the best of it.
“Let’s go then,” she declared.
Dan Heng nodded. “You and March go back together.” He turned to March. “Arlan from the Security Department lost contact with headquarters in this vicinity. I need to find him first.”
March nodded lightly, not a hint of worry on her face, another airy smile on her lips. “Oh, all right. You stay safe.”
Dan Heng turned on his heels and strode out of the hallway past one of the open hatches.
Stelle looked past him into a room flanked by two rows of stat-plinths: black box-like machines projecting a stat-field from above and below, each suspending some sort tool or artifact whose functions Stelle couldn‘t even begin to guess at. Grey, flat platforms held up the plinths like keystones, connected to the walkway by slight, almost decorative ramps.
A stubby black baseball bat with a gilded grip lied unassumingly atop one of those platforms.
March gestured to the bat intently. “Stelle, maybe you should take that,” She suggested seriously. “The Legion is rampaging through the space station like a pack of wolves—this trip won’t be a walk in the park. It’s better if you have something to protect yourself.” Her stern face quickly blossomed into an easy, cocky grin. “Just a suggestion though. You probably won’t need it as long as you stick with me~!” And she was back to her bubbly, airy self.
Stelle nodded, approaching the pedestal to pick up the makeshift weapon. She was thankful for March’s concern, but a part of her wondered if that girl’s head was screwed on right.
Every combatant in the Antimatter Legion—which meant every member of the Antimatter Legion—armed themselves with some type of Destruction imbued antimatter that melted through all but the most durable materials like butter.
So what in Qliphoth’s sunny pits was Stelle supposed to do with what looked like a normal baseball bat? Swing her balls at them? She didn’t even have any balls!
So no beating, locking, parries, blocks… The moment I put my bat in front of their blades, or arrows, or blasts, or whatever ridiculous powers they have in their arsenal—this thing’s toast. Whatever. I’ll just throw it. Preoccupy them. Buy some time. Still better than nothing, I guess.
Resigning herself to the makeshift weapon, Stelle brusquely gripped the bat’s ornate hilt, bringing it up to her shoulder without even bothering to check its weight or balance. From what little she felt, it was as light as she expected.
Stelle’s golden eyes wheeled to March. She roughly gestured for the girl to move. “Let’s go.”
March chuckled. “Hold on, silly! You can’t beat a voidranger with that . They’ll blast right through it.” The girl held out an open palm.
Stelle raised an eyebrow as sparks began to effuse from March’s hand, twinkling in bright pink-and-blue hues.
“Here, let me wrap that for you. It’ll barely be any heavier,” the shorter girl offered.
“Can you legion-proof it?” Stelle questioned skeptically.
March hummed, and the shimmering sparks in her hand coalesced into a solid, glossy crystal half passionfruit pink half sky blue, merging into a light violet down the middle. The crystal spun leisurely above her palm, giving Stelle a good look at its smooth surfaces along its jagged edges. Interestingly, there was no change in temperature. “Of course it can! My six-phased ice is unbreaka—” she stopped herself, rubbing her head sheepishly, “—well… almost unbreakable.” She strode hurriedly over to Stelle. “But it should do fine against your average voidranger. Now give that here.” She gestured to the bat.
Stelle lowered her new weapon to chest level and examined it. She traced her fingers along the grooves of its gilding, familiarizing herself with the weapon. Now that it was no longer just a cheap disposable, Stelle found herself appreciating its compactness, which allowed for comfortable one-handed use. Though its lack of range was something that she might struggle to overcome.
Wordlessly, she handed the weapon to March, crossing her arms as she watched the shorter woman work.
March held the bat by its hilt, free hand hovering intently above its barrel. A blizzard of pink-and-blue erupted from her palm. A flash of blue, and in an instant, the bat was encased in an inch-thick armor of March’s signature six-phased ice. So this is why she’s March “The Seventh”. Maybe the ice powers are inherited.
Stelle reexamined her upgraded weapon, running her fingers across the coated grip, barely a millimeter thicker. A stark contrast to the barrel, which had thickened by about three inches. The bat was barely any heavier—about a pound or two—and felt a lot more solid.
As Stelle turned the bat to its knob, she came across March’s final and perhaps most questionable addition; she had engraved the image of some kind of bipedal rabbit on the flare. Its ears were absolutely massive, draping over the creature’s back like two thick capes, so long that they trailed down to its knees. But the strangest part of the etching was the comically elongated conductor’s hat that the rabbit thing wore as naturally as its own fur. The damned thing must have been twice the length of its head. The hells is this? A mascot?
Stelle gave March a questioning look.
“Oh, that’s just Pom-Pom,” March replied flippantly, waving off the question like her answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
Stelle just nodded. As much as she wanted to pick March’s brain for answers, and just about everything else—because oh boy this girl’s head must have been an interesting place—this wasn’t the time or the place. “So how fast can you make your ice? How do you fight with it?”
March cupped her chin, ponderous. “I use a bow.” On cue, a bow appeared in her hands in a flash of blue motes. It was of a complex construction, limbs made up of some sort of dull white-grey alloy that looked like plastic but was surely metallic. A jet black stabilizer, long as an arrow, jutted out from the grip. Stelle wondered if the unwieldy thing had ever caught on March’s clothes or an enemy’s weapon. It seemed awkward. The string glowed a transparent sky-blue, and for a moment Stelle thought it was some kind of gratuitous instructional hologram programmed to teach a novice how to string the bow; eye candy for a rich kid’s wall hanger.
Then March pulled it back to half draw, and the bow’s limbs screeched as noisily as a collapsing steel bridge. March held the draw for a full five seconds, hands as still as a surgeon’s. Stelle’s gaze sharpened.
That’s some noise. Draw weight can’t be under five tons. Not the best I’ve seen, probably, but nothing to laugh at. Strange. She doesn’t look that strong. Her gaze drifted to March’s sleeved biceps. Huh. They’re not all the way taut. Her sleeves look too flaccid for that—her muscles should be filling them out. But they’re not loose either—I can see the veins in her wrist popping out. I’d say she’s going 50 or 60 percent.
March gently and gradually released her draw, hands as careful as a mother cradling her babe. This time, the bow didn’t make a single sound. “The string is partially made of my six-phased ice, so I can use my powers to help me draw.” Stelle nodded. That made sense. “I can go heavier, but any more than this will only give diminishing returns.” March held out her palm once more. The sound of ringing crystal filled the room as multicolor motes of ice, as if a band of pixies, congregated above it, coagulating into a glowing half-blue half-pink arrow that floated easily above March’s hand, rotating slowly as if to show Stelle every nook and cranny of its tall, lithe body.
“Looks cool, doesn’t it?” March asked proudly. A pause. Stelle promptly ripped the arrow from its airborne tranquility and tried to break it over her knee without using any technique.
The next thing she knew she was clutching that knee, face split into a grimace, hopping around on one leg to distract herself from the pain. The arrow fell to the ground with a clear crystalline ring, rolling an inch towards March before being stopped by its fletching. Bad idea! Fuck! Bad idea! That’s what she gets for not using a technique.
March chuckled mirthfully. “You know, you’re pretty funny, Stelle.” She reached forward and picked up her arrow, holding it by its neck between two fingers.
“The problem with my weapon is that I can’t optimize the weight and speed of my arrows. Six-phased ice is pretty light, so I don’t get a lot of penetration no matter how much I condense it. Sure, my arrowtips can taper down to about the size of an atom, and I can shoot them a little faster by accelerating my bowstring as I release, but they don’t really have a good track record against heavily armored opponents.” March leisurely craned forward on one leg, tossing her arrow ahead with her fingers and wrist. The arrow tumbled awkwardly through the air, landing awkwardly on its fletching. But this time, Stelle heard no ring.
Instead, the arrow collapsed on impact like a snow sculpture, flattening and spreading across the floor as a creeping patch of pink-blue ice.
“Immobilization.” March said. “That’s my go-to. My arrows collapse on impact, expanding into a sheet of frost that covers my opponents in six-phased ice. They don’t freeze or suffocate, they’re just frozen in a state of suspended animation. Dan Heng tells me it feels like a sleepless dream.”
So you froze him? Stelle shivered. Taking a deep breath, she nodded, “What else can you do?”
“I can also make armor for us, if you’d like,” March suggested. Stelle perked in interest, nodding excitedly.
March held out her arms towards Stelle, fingers splayed as far as they could go. A wave of ice began to envelop Stelle toe-to-head, creeping up her body much like how March’s arrow had coated the floor. The amnesiac didn’t panic. It wasn’t that she trusted the ice girl—though she was beginning to—it was just that the benefits were worth the risk.
In about two seconds, a fist-thick layer of ice covered her from head to toe. In the final ticks of the final millisecond, the ice creeped over her nose and mouth, cutting off her airflow.
But before Stelle could begin to suffocate, the ice began to recede, detach, even fold into itself, shifting into a series of angled, interconnected plates of varying thickness and impossible lightness, tailor-fitted to Stelle’s proportions.
Stelle stared out at March from the claustrophobic prison of a sallet helm. The visor opening was a little thin for her liking, and breathing felt like being smothered by a dozen quilts. A dozen frozen quilts. Hot breath deflected off Stelle’s new faceplate, rushing up her face and tickling her nose. She promptly lifted the visor.
Amber eyes raced down icy plate, hunting for weakness from pauldron to greave. Stelle pounded her cuirass with a gauntleted hand, ears honed for a defective hum or an unsteady vibration. There was none. She nodded. I’ll give that visor a second chance.
Sliding the visor back down, Stelle leapt into a series of fifty jumping jacks followed by twenty push-ups, a five-second cartwheel, and a series of ten continuous triple-backflips.
Helmet skull: 2mm.
Visor: 2.5 mm.
Breastplate: 2mm.
Backplate: 1.5mm.
Upper vambraces: 1.3mm.
Lower vambraces: 1.5mm.
Front greaves: 1.3mm.
Back greaves: 1.1mm.
Total weight: 5kg.
Nanook’s tits, my breath stinks like rat piss. The armor’s fine—feels like a second skin, but I can’t breathe through this damned helmet. Can barely see either. It’s gotta go.
Stelle tried to wrench the sallet off her head, only to frown in frustration as it refused to budge.
“Oh.” March frowned. “You don’t like the helmet?”
“I need more vision and breathability. You don’t need to worry about my face. Just give me something that covers the rest of my head. And condense your ice more. Nothing under a hundred kilograms will hinder me,” Stelle answered.
March nodded and got to work. Ten more seconds, and Stelle got her new armor and helmet—still a sallet, but open-faced—now weighing a total of 60 kilograms. If that’s her limit, then she’ll have to work on it. But not bad on short notice.
“What about you?” Stelle gestured to March’s unarmored form.
To that, March gave a toothy grin, and tapped the “head” of her transparent armor. Her knuckle rang against a crystalline surface a few inches away from her face. A globe helmet. I see. That explains how her hair can move.
“How come mine looks so different?” Stelle asked.
“Oh.” March scratched the back of her globe sheepishly. “Well, my own armor takes a lot more effort to keep active. Every time I bend my limbs, I have to manipulate the parts of the armor that’s covering them. It’s easy to sync that up with my own movements, but if I can’t really do that with someone else. I can’t predict when you’ll run or jump or duck or swing, so I can only give you something that’s rigid.”
“And the thickness disparity?”
“There shouldn’t be much of a difference in terms of durability. It takes active attention, but I can manipulate parts of my armor to harden on impact. That’s actually how I close my breathing holes—I have a bunch of those scattered all across this thing. It does take a bit of my attention though.” March replied.
Stelle nodded in understanding. “Got it. Let’s go,” she requested, though it sounded more like an order in her flat, detached tone.
March nodded, walking in front. Stelle frowned but didn’t object. She still had no idea how strong she was—even more so compared to her new icy comrade. March, on the other hand, had been a bouncy ball of confidence this whole time. It seemed prudent to let her take the lead.
Then March started humming , and whatever doubt Stelle had disintegrated on the spot. She almost snorted. Looks like I’m in safe hands.
The amnesiac and the adventurer moved to the last row of stat-plinques, where a descending set of industrial-black stairs opened wide, leading to a closed hexagonal hatch. To the side of the hatch stood a tilted, bright orange console extending from a jet-black pole rising from the ground. The console displayed a pair of closed side-pointing chevrons. A lock.
Without a word, March strode to the console and put her palm to its panel. The console brightened to a light green and the chevrons separated into two distinct shapes. The console lightened again to a milky white, and the hatch opened without delay. A biometric lock, huh? Would’ve been a pain to do this without her.
Stelle and March stepped past the hatch into a snaking hall enclosed by greyish white walls. Short plants were planted in its corners, growing from platforms of elevated soil. I guess anyone would go crazy without something natural to look at.
They took a right, where they saw the corridor split in three at a distant intersection. At the center of the intersection floated a menacing, spinning ball of viatic energy the size of Stelle’s head, shielded by triangular pieces of distorted whitish-grey metal. It spun and spun in its stationary reverie, more high-tech toy than living being, like some abstract art piece in a fancy hotel foyer.
A memory came to her.
Baryon:
Low intelligence.
Low strength.
Low durability.
Low agility.
Low RPM.
Medium Lethality.
Small Fry.
For a moment, Stelle wanted to test March’s ice armor against that beam. She decided against it. It was probably a bad idea to gamble her life on the powers of a girl she just met, no matter how confident she was.
Stelle lifted her bat and prepared to charge, shooting March a questioning look. The archer was her guide here, so it was better for her to take the lead. Better not to question the chain of command at the beginning of combat.
“It’s the Antimatter Legion! So those crazy jerks made it all the way here!” March exclaimed, like the Baryon hadn’t noticed her.
It had, and it swiftly halted the movement of its metal coverings. Its dark and sinister core smouldered, compressed, condensed. The Legion war machine was charging an antiparticle beam, and it had zeroed in on the guide.
In that second between seconds, Stelle shot March another look, more frantic this time. No response.
Left with no other option, Stelle engaged, charging at the baryon with reckless abandon. Caution was a luxury she could no longer afford. She couldn’t bet March’s life on her confidence. If the girl overestimated herself and got herself killed here, what would she tell Dan Heng? “Sorry I stood by and watched your friend die. I thought she could handle it?” Stelle couldn’t take that risk. She wouldn’t.
An ice arrow zipped past her left side like a screeching missile, its mach cone raking over her body, tousling her hair and starting an annoying itch on her neck. The amnesiac dashed to the right on instinct, redirecting her momentum sideways, sending her a dozen meters to the side. Now she wouldn’t be able to reach her target on time.
The arrow missed, screeching ferociously but harmlessly beside the baryon. It collapsed into a sheet of ice that blanketed the far end of the intersection.
Stelle sighed in relief. There was no need to worry anymore. March could handle herself. She missed, but it was clear that she chose to miss. A dedicated archer who couldn’t hit a stationary target the size of a table? Who would believe that?
Heh. Showoff. Stelle smiled, mocking herself for underestimating her guide. She flipped her bat butt-forward, turned to March, and waved carelessly at the baryon. All yours, March. Show me what you’ve got.
The war machine fired. An incandescent beam of navy blue shot from its volatile core, shrouded in snaking streaks of lightning. The blast of sheer Destruction lunged at March at near light speed, devouring twenty meters’ distance in a fraction of a microsecond.
At the end of those twenty meters, however, stood a prepared and confident March, face soft and relaxed in a heavy-lidded smile. She held an ice arrow forward, the short length of its neck the only distance between the archer and certain death.
Light met tip, and arrow met mark. The cryogenic construct shrieked a crystalline shriek, rushing forward in a wave like the gaping maw of some ice world predator. It propagated, spreading wider and wider, crystalline sheets surging past raging heat. It surrounded and trapped the beam of Destruction, coating the exotic energy like the caramel of a candied apple. As the ice reached the baryon itself, it crept outward in all directions once more to accommodate its new target, wrapping around the Legion construct. An unbreakable shackle.
The baryon tilted forward uncomfortably, a pillar of ice sprouting from its front. The six-phased ice ringed sharply as it crashed against the industrial floor, unflinching, unbreaking, looking like the stick on a table-sized lollipop.
The war machine hummed so loudly and furiously that its voice could be mistaken for a growl. Its raging core contracted, spinning up and turning around so that it could attack its enemies with an unhindered face. It began to charge up another blast.
This time, March gave it no such chance. Stelle’s chair and coat fluttered in the wake of another mach cone, dragged along by an arrow with an atom-wide tip. This time, the arrow struck the baryon directly at its core. This time, it penetrated. And like last time, it expanded.
The Legion war machine didn’t have a chance to sound another growl of defiance. A nova of six-phased ice erupted from its core, a thousand jagged icicles impaling it from it from the inside out.
The baryon collapsed unceremoniously into what appeared to be a tiny singularity, devouring the war machine until there was nothing left. All that was left was March’s ice cylinder, collapsed and rolling around like the pillar of some newly-demolished ice sculpture.
Stelle didn’t know if she should whistle or clap, so she just did both, ice gauntlets ringing musically. March grinned and flashed her a peace sign, gesturing for the amnesiac to follow once more. Stelle nodded and followed behind.
The pair took a left at the intersection, where the hallway expanded into a massive barrel-shaped courtyard. Circular platforms were strewn about the strange architecture, connected by faint, translucent repulsion bridges t and a wide crescent platform that lined the side of the walls and hallway openings. One of these platforms laid snugly at the room’s center, holding four sharp pylons that served as the rails of an elevator. A disgusting mass of black tendrils clung onto the front left pylon. Volatile orange energy glowed ominous from within the pitch-black constructs like the cinders of burning firewood.
March stopped and pointed to the elevator. “We’ll take that elevator on the central platform to go down to the master control zone. Do you know the way?”
How in Nanook’s infinite mercy and compassion would I know the way? Stelle wished she could retort, but she remembered that March still thought she worked here. The amnesiac was starting to regret letting the misunderstanding continue. “I-”
March’s voice took an uncertain tone. “Um, I notice you’re not wearing the space station staff uniform. Do you really work here?”
Stelle just looked at her. Stared at her. Closed her eyes. Stared some more. So this place issues uniforms? Really? They issue… How the hells did you think I worked here then!
“I lost my memories, remember? Probably not,” Stelle said as evenly as she could, not lying, but not giving the whole truth.
“Your memory loss is worse than we thought.” March’s voice softened into something sympathetic. The topic of amnesia seemed to tug at her heartstrings. Interesting. “You must have been injured pretty badly.” She paused. “Hey, what happ—” The pinkette looked down and shook her head. “Never mind. I won’t ask if you don’t wanna talk about it.” She gestured again for Stelle to follow. Her voice regained her signature cheer. “Let’s go. I’ll take you to the safe zone~”
The two saw a platform to the right whose repulsion bridge connected to the elevator platform. But the moment they left their hallway and stepped onto the crescent bridge leading to that platform, they met their second enemy of the day. Rather, their second group of enemies.
Six visors snapped to them with blistering speed. Five reavers and one distorter—all voidrangers.
The reavers, ever the common foot soldier, were nothing of note to the likes of March 7th. Though the lithe and agile creatures seemed intimidating in their sleek ebon armor, their hunting blades glowering, indigo-flams raging atop their manes, their horrible bulbs of volatile particles glaring through ebon slits, their jet-black armor empty of flesh and bone, their numbers high and their morale infinite; they were still little more than rank and file. Terrifying on the first meeting. Horrible on the second. Still gave shivers on the third. But on the hundreth? The thousandth? Appetisers at best.
Eventually, the sleek, ugly things started to look stupid, as one’s eyes caught on to their cute little helmet wings and comical bevor—sharp and thick like a ship’s bow. Their needlessly long high heels made them more fit for a runway than a battlefield. And their bulimic midsections, held together by a thin slab of backplate, made them seem as weak as toothpicks. In the end, one would realize that they were simply mundane.
Distorters on the other hand, were anything but. In the strange rank system of the Antimatter legion, they filled the roles of lieutenant and captain, commanding from dozens to hundreds of reavers, baryons, and antibaryons. Though they were supposedly egoless, they carried themselves with the pomp and arrogance of a battle mage.
Shrouded in a visorless suit of light gray armor, this lieutenant-equivalent hovered off the ground, four twisted silver pyramids orbiting its body like tiny satellites around a dying star.
The distorter pointed to one of its few soldiers, snarling out a command in a harsh, jarring language that could only be understood by its own demented kind. The chosen voidranger roared into the sky like the screech of steel on steel, its plume of flame blazing furiously as if doused in oil.
Without further instructions, the other four voidrangers fanned out at breakneck speed. One dashed up a wall, heels digging into the construction material for traction. Another leapt off the platform, likely to reengage from below. The final two took the left and right of the crescent bridge, giving each other a meter of room for movement.
The battle had begun.
This time, Stelle didn’t have to wait for instructions.
“Can you take those four?” March asked sincerely, ready to fill in if Stelle’s abilities were beneath her expectations. Stelle wasn’t sure when March had sized her up—was it when she was testing the armor?—but she was happy her guide thought highly enough of her to assign four targets for her first evaluation. It was time to see if she could meet the challenge.
Stelle didn’t respond. There was no need. March’s question would have become an order if Stelle answered, so why not skip the dialogue? She readied her bat in her left hand and kicked off the ground like a cannon. In a flash of pink and blue, the amnesiac blurred between the two reavers on the bridge, the tortured air churning into burning ozone in her wake. She aimed a thrust at the head of the left reaver, stepping towards it with her right foot.
It looks like their head is their only vital. All of their glowing “stuff” looks like its concentrated there. And their neck plate is disproportionately thick. There has to be a reason for that. The more obvious choice is the belly, but that’s probably not a vital, judging from the lack of glowing “stuff” there. I can probably cripple its legs if I snap that thin back plate though, so it should still be a major target. Still, I’m not liking how “vulnerable” it looks there. It might be a trap. I should just stick to headshots.
The reaver tried to parry with the inside of its right blade, left blade thrusting towards Stelle’s heart, taking full advantage of its dual weapons. Meanwhile, its companion aimed two simultaneous thrusts as well; one to the back of her head and one at her lower spine.
But for all its preparation, the leftmost reaver never received the thrust it was readying itself for. A feint. Stelle pulled her arm back from the thrust, stepping around the reaver with her left foot. She now stood to her enemy’s right—a blind spot. Four hunter’s blades thrusted forward uselessly, parrying and striking at nothing but empty air.
Stelle widened her feet and bent low, shooting forward like a missile. She grabbed her reaver by its waist and right thigh, lifting it into the air where it flailed furiously. It unleashed a barrage of back-kicks with its left leg, targeting everything from Stelle’s chest to her groin. She couldn’t even feel it through her armor.
Its companion leapt forth at near supersonic speed, vanishing into a burst of aureate streaks. It reengaged a meter away from her in a burst of blinding energy, armor glowing with aureate radiance, shadowed by streaks and cubes of imaginary particles. It spun forward like a humanoid hurricane, hunter’s blades accelerating, the imaginary weapons blurring into a halo of ruin.
The lifted voidranger, seeing in its mad mind that its kicks had no effect, bent low and forward in its enemy’s grasp, closing the distance between its arms and the woman’s body. It slashed down, aiming for Stelle’s head.
The grey-maned woman resisted the urge to smirk. She threw the reaver forward the obvious and indiscriminate attack of its comrade, her grip loosening slightly around the creature’s thigh so that it would be able to shoot forward, closing again around its ankle. She did not let go.
Faced with its companion’s unstoppable charge, the footsoldier tried to bend down on its knee, using its captured ankle as leverage. It ducked under the lethal hurricane with the deftness of an acrobat, cleverly avoiding the cruel death its enemy had planned for it.
Stelle was unbothered by this. She dropped to her knees and arched her back like she was playing a game of Limbo, going under the spinning blades. The armored woman slid forward on her knees, bat lunging for the voidranger’s leg. A counter that the reaver was more than prepared to destroy. Just as the warriors of the cosmos adapted to the Legion, so did the Legion adapt to them.
The ebon soldier halted the movement of its blades, using its ample momentum to charge a spinning back kick to Stelle’s chestplate. The woman’s eyes shot wide as the kick came, heralded by the telltale crack of shattered sound. She winced as the reaver’s heel crashed into her like a falling meteor, sending her sliding back ten meters. Her chestplate was spotless—not even the slightest dent on the engraving of the rabbit-like conductor adorning its center. Besides the torture to her poor ears, Stelle didn’t feel a thing. She thanked March in her mind. That girl’s no joke if she can make something like this.
Her arm jerked and twisted as the other captured reaver tried to spin out of her grasp. Oh for f—
Stelle cut her losses. She pulled the ankle hard like a fishing line, bringing the reaver’s foot to her waist. Now Stelle had access to its whole leg. Her other hand came down in a devastating hammerfist, bolstered by the butt of her bat, shattering the voidranger’s right kneecap with a thunderous crack .
Golden ichor gushed from reaver’s wound, hissing and howling against the open air. Its lower leg dangled limply from its thigh, useless. The reaver, to its credit, wasted no time on worthless expressions of pain. It leapt back deftly, armor glowing a volatile aureate. Then, the voidranger vanished as if it had never existed.
Imaginary space!
With a microsecond’s delay, the reaver burst into reality five meters away on the crescent bridge, sliding back behind the safety of its partner, having conserved its momentum through its strange ability, leaving a trail of aureate streaks and cubes in its wake.
Stelle snorted. To these omnicidal maniacs, religion, philosophy, and combat doctrine were one and the same. They burned the word “defense” out of their collective vocabulary centuries ago. Not out of some pervasive sense of aesthetics, but because their own god wanted them dead—the last line of names on his charred, bloody list. So the Legion ended up putting all their skill points in strength and agility.
Based on Stelle’s brief knowledge of physics, the reavers were probably using short “leaps” into imaginary space, converting their bodies into imaginary numbers to access the extradimensional space. A gadget with the same function would cost a million credits on the universal market. But for the reavers, it was standard issue. The perks of “working” for a God, I guess.
But apparently they couldn’t jump when subdued, and those jumps had a cooldown. If Stelle remembered correctly, it was somewhere between one to three seconds depending on the quality of the reaver. For her two victims, that timer had just started.
The uninjured reaver stomped forward, right blade thrusting to her heart while its left cut low to her right thigh. Its companion righted itself, trying to leap around her on its good leg. It was slower now, forced into brief hops in fear of losing control of its momentum. Braking on one foot was no easy task.
Stelle pivoted back around her right leg, evading the heart thrust, facing the reaver with her shoulder. She stepped in, past the cutting blade’s range. The reaver’s arm, arriving before its own blade due to the very design of the weapon, slapped uselessly at Stelle’s cuisses. Its companion had made it behind her, but now had to commit to another hop to reach its target.
Now unthreatened, the grey-maned woman wrapped her right arm around the back of the reaver’s helmet. She bent low, stepped through her enemy's crotch with her right leg and slightly rose, pushing it up, and yanked its head down as hard as she could. At the same time, she thrust in with her frozen bat, aiming for the top of the black “mask” of the voidranger’s helm.
In that instant between instances, that eternity before death, the voidranger tried desperately to slash at its would-be killer. Useless , Stelle had closed the distance. It lifted its legs and tried to grapple. Useless , Stelle held its head in a vice grip. Despite all its effort, all its struggle—Destruction came all the same.
A catastrophic crack like a hundred crashing trains echoed across the courtyard as Stelle’s bat shattered the reaver’s mask, plunging into the chaotic clump of particles and antiparticles that made up its miserable head. The reaver’s limbs went limp, all the formless energy and golden flux within its armor surging up through its new orifice like a jet of flame, filling the room with the smell of ozone and sulfur. It was unmistakably, irreversibly dead.
Wasting no time, Stelle threw the volatile corpse towards its comrade in a dramatic reversal of her earlier plan. This time, she let go.
A microsecond before it reached its target, the reaver’s mutilated corpse imploded, collapsing into a weak singularity much like the baryon March had fought before. Destructive to the last.
The gravitational phenomenon swallowed the deceased voidranger like the gaping maw of a true sting, leaving not an atom behind. Its emergent-yet-temporary density pulled Stelle and the living, crippled reaver towards each other. The reaver had no means to ground itself, so it leaped forward instead, adding the pull of its deceased comrade to its own momentum. An eulogy to their short-lived partnership. It lunged at its enemy, blades wide and outstretched like the claws of a feral world predator. Now it could cross a thousand meters in a heartbeat.
Stelle did not allow herself to be pulled by the voidranger’s death. She dug her icy heels into the ground with two stomps. A sharp creak echoed across the courtyard as the construction material deformed into pits under her feet. She swung her bat from left to right, allowing it to slip forward in her hand. Its butt met her index finger and thumb at the apex of the arc, where it was pointed squarely at her enemy’s forehead. She was preparing a throw.
The airborne reaver responded mid-leap, bringing up its right blade to cover its face in anticipation.
But Stelle didn’t let go. The bat kept swinging until it was an inch from her waist before she whirled it around to the top of her head, keeping all its momentum. Now Stelle swung from left to right. This time, she threw.
The bat flew out of its mistress’ hand with a violent boom, the pull of the dead reaver accelerating it to even greater speeds. It rammed, screeching, towards its target’s good knee.
The voidranger, fortunate enough to have left its left blade on reserve, quickly brought it down to block the frozen missile. But a reaver’s armor was not immune to its own hunter’s blades. The bat crashed into the flat of the imaginary blade, forcing it back toward the reaver’s knee. The soulless soldier pushed back against the missile until its arm nearly exploded, volatile particles surging into the tortured vambrace as the ebon armor bulged, creaked, and burned red hot with the strain of destructive power far beyond what its fragile form could contain, deforming it.
The reaver was only able to stop the bat a milimeter away from its poleyn, pushing its aureate blade into the dark metal. The metal hissed and screamed as if agonized, now engraved with a blade-shaped trench across its front plate. The voidranger had put every ounce of its strength into resisting the force of Stelle’s throw, and while its vambrace now bulged and steamed with self-inflicted damage—barely operational—it had succeeded.
Then Stelle launched her last missile, and all hope was lost.
She was fast. Faster than a plane. Faster than a bullet. So fast that the curls of her grey hair straightened from her sheer velocity. Stelle had thrown herself as the reaver was contending with her bat, using the pull of its fallen partner as a boost.
The icy missile hurtled into the reaver at blistering speeds, almost faster than it could respond. The ebon soldier tried nevertheless. It brought its right blade down in a diagonal, back-handed slash. The only move it could make to strike at its enemy before she struck it. Just as Stelle had planned.
Stelle had launched herself in a streamlined position, head forward and arms back. The reaver’s attack began a moment before Stelle’s head entered its range, the air screaming in the wake of the imaginary blade.
Stelle pulled her head back in the nick of time, straightening herself vertically, helm so close to aureate death that she could smell the ozone it had reaped from the air.
The reaver, undeterred, pulled back its blade before the imaginary weapon could complete its deathly arc, chambering it at rib-level before launching it again as a punching thrust. It tried to close its left arm in a reaping cut from the waist, vambrace shaking and sputtering with sparks. A futile attempt. It would be too slow to matter.
Yeah. That’s right. That’s the only thing you could have done. Go ahead, voidranger. Make my day.
As the thrust came, Stelle leaned back, left arm hooking around the hunting blade to grasp the wrist behind it, stopping its momentum before it could reach maximum speed. At the same time, she kicked down with her right leg, stomping her enemy’s left wrist, stopping it before it could even begin to pick up speed. Stelle pulled herself in with her left, coming so close to the halted hunting blade that she stopped only a centimeter from the edge.
With both of its weapons locked down, the voidranger could only attempt a desperate headbutt—a final, hopeless act of defiance.
Stelle stopped the strike with a brutal right elbow, thrown with all the strength her upper body could muster. The mighty blow caught the reaver on its lower mask, enhanced with the force of Stelle’s leap, the deceased voidranger’s pull, and the reaver’s own headbutt.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Stelle didn’t stop at a single blow. She hammered the reaver with a storm of elbows, each strike a thunderbolt that roared its fury across the courtyard. They were falling now, their respective momentums meeting and canceling out. Neither paid this any mind. Both knew the battle would be over before either met the ground.
The reaver’s helmet was a ruin of crumbled ebon shards barely clinging onto their original shape through sheer grit and viatic sorcery. The bulb behind it flared and condensed, searing and roaring. It shot forward, burning its own lifeblood as fuel, erupting from its two helmet slits like twin tongues of flame.
Woah. They can do that?
Stelle had seen the signs. She threw her arm wide and tilted her head to the side, evading a strike that could have never reached her. The indigo flames made three inches of distance before fizzling out. More of a lightshow than an attack. A failed improvisation.
Unimpeded once more, the grey-maned woman reached for the midsection of the crumbling, ruined helmet, the part that afforded the most coverage. With a screech of shearing steel, she ripped the crumbling plate clean off, revealing the faceless, bulbous head beneath.
The reaver finally slipped its right blade past Stelle’s sabaton, arm closing once more. The soldier imbued all the power it could into that arm once more, all to throw one final slash to its opponent’s waist. Stelle could see its head receding and shrinking as the power within that bulb surged into the tortured limb. A final act of desperation that put all of its predecessors to shame.
But it was one move too many. The voidranger’s vambrace, already cracked and warped by its previous surge of power, finally gave in to vaunted Destruction. The reaver’s arm exploded from shoulder to wrist, erupting into a fountain of gold, thousands of ebon shards fanning and scattering like refugees from a shattered planet. Its hunting blade sputtered and died, reduced to aureate sparks scattering in the wind. There was no more hope. No more resistance. There was only Destruction. And in what little remained of its tortured, reanimated mind, it thought that good.
Stelle chambered a right cross, throwing the punch with such force that her gauntlet plunged right into the reaver’s head, scattering it violently like a swarm of fireflies. She could feel the back of the voidranger’s helm denting, taking on the shape of her fist. The chaos of particles felt hot to the touch, even through her ice gauntlets, but not so much so that she had to pull her hand away. Stelle did so anyway, if only to chamber another punch. This time, her fist shot through the back of the reaver’s helmet, wetting her gauntlet in golden blood. Reducing certain death to gratuitous overkill.
The armored warrior and her dying victim fell to the ground, the unraveling energy within the reaver beginning to collapse. Now free from her engagement, Stelle gave March a quick glance, checking if the other two reavers had made significant headway. They had—at least the wall runner did, only ten meters to the front of its mark, a trail of heel-shaped holes dug into the walls in its wake. It was still hanging up there, twenty meters up, heels dug in. The reaver bent its legs and spread them wide in the likeness of a mantis, blades forward and primed, readying a vicious leap. Its companion couldn’t be too far behind. It had to be lurking under the platform, out of sight but certainly not out of mind.
From the looks of it, March had traded shots with the distorter. The floating lieutenant’s left arm was encased in a thick layer of six-phased ice. Less than useless. A ten-meter section of wall behind March was scorched and twisted and ruined beyond repair, a hole blown clean through, penetrating into the hallway behind. The wall of that hallway had been damaged as well, scorched and cratered as if a small meteor had crashed into it. But it held strong. A testament to the strength of its make. Stelle had a sneaking suspicion—maybe from a forgotten memory—that the projectile would have blown through a dozen buildings in a more primitive place. March must have thrown off the shot by freezing the distorter’s arm.
March had not given much thought to either of the two reavers poised to strike from her sides, not even sparing a glance for the wall runner. If Stelle didn’t know better, she would have thought that the girl was being careless, leaving herself open like that.
But then March gave her the cheekiest wink she had seen yet in this figurative lifetime, magenta eyes sparkling with unbound cheer. And all of Stelle’s doubt was thrown to the wind. A grin was quickly growing on her face, and she was too happy to stop it. The archer’s joy was palpable, infectious. Trust was the most flattering praise of all.
Stelle had implied that she would take all four. March was just holding her to that. If she nocked an arrow for them now—well, that would be stealing, wouldn’t it?
Oh, alright Kafka. I admit it. This Express might not be so bad after all.
Kind, but not not coddling. Confident, but not arrogant. If such was the disposition of the Astral Express, then she would be in good hands.
Stelle slid her hand back through the emptying helmet, gripping the top edge of its mouth plate. She shifted her legs apart, one forward one back, pointing her shoulder at the wall runner. A throwing stance. The instant her feet touched the ground, Stelle sprung forward, hurling the dying voidranger at the wall.
The black missile tumbled awkwardly mid-air, already emitting its post-mortem pull.
The wall runner paused, black helmet twisting around in attention. It folded its right arm across its chest, waiting. Once the corpse of its companion entered its range, the reaver slashed out, bisecting it. But the corpse continued to emit its pull, though the rate of its implosion had been greatly hastened. The wall runner found itself pulled roughly to the side by a force it could not escape through strength alone, putting its plans in serious risk. But then again, there was always that .
Reavers were not ones to save their trump cards for their most desperate moments. The wall runner’s armor glowed a furious, glaring aureate, like it was trying to raze the cosmos with its incandescence. Then, it was gone without a trace, as if some great cosmic eraser had purged it from the universe. If only.
Stelle had bought herself enough time to recover her bat. The grey-maned woman gave the reinforced weapon a cheeky flourish and dashed three steps behind her guide in a single calculated leap. A wide enough distance to fit a whole body. And a push dagger.
If my gut’s not lying to me, then…
Stelle lifted her right foot and loaded her bat behind her head, the weapon tight and coiled in bloody anticipation.
As if ordained by the Aeons themselves, the wall runner reentered reality in a shower of aureate streaks and cubes—exactly two steps behind March, hunting blades darting for her heart and brain. The reaver had no way of knowing that its true enemy was already at its back.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Stelle swung hard, aiming up. Her bat caught the voidranger right on its left helmet wing, smashing it, passing it, and so much more. When Stelle swung, she pictured a baseball flying out of a field—a home run. But if she hit a baseball with that strike, there wouldn’t be a home run; just a thousand pieces of what used to be a ball. And a field.
Or a thousand shards of what used to be a helmet. Stelle’s swing was so clean, so fast, that the reaver was beheaded as if with a greatsword—or blasted open with a cannon. There was no more head. The bulb that formed its core blasted into so many disparate particles that the light seemed to just vanish, scattered into motes so small that they could no longer be seen with the naked eye. A thousand ebon shards peppered the wall the wall runner had clung to in life, embedding themselves as deeply as flechettes from a shotgun. The reaver’s body fell lightly to the right, having only experienced the slightest hint of power from Stelle’s strike from its connection to its head before said head was obliterated.
Stelle promptly kicked it off the platform, where its post-mortem implosion would not affect her.
So reavers will always take the most efficient route and attack the vitals—at least until it gets countered. Good to know. Now. I think there was one more. And it should be right…
Stelle took the same batting stance and stood at the same distance from her guide. She loaded her bat again, looking to repeat her same ambush.
A shiver, cold and fast, shot up her spine. Stelle’s eyes darted to and fro, alert. Something was wrong.
It didn’t take long for Stelle to discover the reason for her unease. The distorter was looking at her, pitching down its vambrace from its position near the ceiling. She couldn’t make out anything behind its visorless helmet, but she swore it was glaring—the kind of look a hunter would give its prey. Not wrathful, just calculating. It was like staring down the barrel of a gun.
March shot an arrow high, trying to punish her opponent for redirecting its attention.
The distorter raised a hand, and without sparing March a glance, produced a blast of indigo energy that detonated together with the arrow, merging into a malformed frost nova that shattered and fell to the ground like hail.
March scowled. Stelle’s eyes shot wide.
If that thing can command the reavers and it’s looking at me, then—
Right on cue, Stelle felt the fabric of spacetime distort behind her, and the sky before her took on that all-too-familiar shade of aureate. She didn’t even consider attacking. The reaver was already moving.
Stelle stepped wide to her right, dodging two thrusts by a hair’s breadth. She pivoted back on her right—back to the wall. The grey-maned woman spared her guide a brief glance. March had resumed her shootout with the distorter, and was clearly winning. One of the distorter’s legs had been frozen solid. Stelle grinned.
Then the reaver’s head twisted to the left, and Stelle’s premature grin left her face faster than she could blink. The voidranger stepped towards March and threw a blistering right cross, hunting blade primed at its target’s heart.
Stelle dashed forward, switching her bat left-to-right, swinging down to intercept the jab.
The reaver anticipated her defense, its blade carving through the air before she even stirred. Before the dark warrior finished its jab, it canceled the movement and twisted its body around, recycling its energy for a spinning back fist to its enemy’s head. A successful feint.
Stelle was left with no choice but to pull back her bat and block the strike with both hands, catching the blade on the taper. March’s ice held, ringing sharply against the blade’s imaginary edge.
The reaver pushed down with all the strength its horrific constitution could muster, the openings in its vambrace and rebrace glowing with Destructive power.
Stelle barely felt it, to her own surprise. Huh. I knew I was stronger than them, but by this much? She was powerful. Undoubtedly so. She didn’t know how or why, only that it had something to do with what Kafka did to her. And she was definitely not complaining.
Still pressing hard with its right blade, the reaver’s left came around for a slash to her waist.
Having a better grasp of her strength, Stelle released her left hand from her bat and loosened her right, letting the occupied blade glance off to the left. She stepped forward in one large stride and reached forward with her left, catching the reaver’s slash by its knuckles, killing its momentum.
They were close enough to hug, the voidranger’s right arm too far forward to make its rigid blade to use. If the hunting blade had been detached like a proper sword, then the reaver could have turned it around and stabbed. But the weapon was grafted to its forearm, and was powerless at close range. A strange design, to put it amicably. Whoever made these things should’ve made themselves a brain first.
Bolstered by her newfound confidence, Stelle swung her bat low, catching the voidranger in the shin, crumpling its greave pancake flat. Ichor gushed as if from a smashed fruit, painting the bat gold.
The reaver, now that both of its arms were useless, tried to hop back on its good leg, hinging its chances on the possibility that Stelle’s hold on its knuckles was too precarious to withstand its velocity.
Correct. But you’re too late.
Stelle swept the reaver’s good ankle with her back foot, unbalancing it and killing its momentum. She slid her hand up from its knuckles to its forearm, gaining complete control of its blade. Her other hand slipped past the voidranger’s armpit and clutched its bow-like bevor from behind. Stelle squeezed hard, crystalline ice pressing up against ebon steel. The reaver’s bevor began to creak, deforming from the union of Stelle’s strength and March’s ice.
Not letting up, Stelle tore and twisted and squeezed on the voidranger’s forearm—and with a screech of tortured metal—crumpled, twisted, and detached it in a single brutal motion. The hunting blade, separated from its power source, sputtered out of existence like a depowered hologram. Stelle tossed away the mutilated hunk of metal, freeing up her hand to grab her enemy by its head.
The voidranger burned with false, soulless rage—head twisting, twirling, cranking with the sharp and desperate motions of a trapped animal. This only served to jostle Stelle’s hand. Worthless. Her grip tightened.
The grey-haired warrior hooked her thumb under the opening that divided the reaver’s helmet and mask, the rest of her fingers split into pairs of two as they clutched the tapered top of her enemy’s helmet. With a savage grin, Stelle twisted her wrist and yanked.
The screech of shearing metal tore across the courtyard once more. The reaver no longer reserved the freedom of movement to move its head. Desperately, it kicked out with its good and bad legs—little love taps that sang out in little melodic rings across Stelle’s armor. It drove the stump of its ruined arm against Stelle’s hand again and again like a child striking a wall with a plastic wrench. Its good arm thrusted and reaped and slashed with wild, senseless abandon, drawing nonsense paintings in the air with its feeble yellowed brush.
In its last moments, the reaver proved itself a child. A screaming, tantruming child that could neither scream nor cry, carving its fury into the ever-shifting air. Stelle pitied it. She truly did.
So, with all her might, she tore off its head and crumpled it in her hand. No sense in prolonging its misery. The ugly black thing burst like a flaming rotten grape, shooting jets of indigo flame into the air, boiling and vaporizing its own ichor to form a screaming golden mist. The same slurry of particles erupted from its neck—as if the lava of a black humanoid volcano—leaving behind a slumped and limp suit of armor that quickly began to implode.
Both head and body—though there was hardly any left of both, were summarily ejected from the platform, where they imploded peacefully and harmlessly mid-fall.
Stelle glanced back at the distorter, only to see what could only be described as the universe’s most gruesome ice sculpture. An ice nova had erupted from the body of the lieutenant-equivalent. A hundred jagged icicles tore out its body from head to toe, drenched gold in ichor like bloody popsicles. In its last moments, the distorter had reached out with its single ruined arm, ruptured by dozens of the icy spikes. A monument to ruin.
Stelle turned to March and raised an eyebrow. The brutality was not entirely unwelcome, but was definitely unexpected.
March didn’t—or pretended not to—notice her silent question, walking to Stelle’s side with her bow gripped tight in her knuckles. “Wow, you’re stronger than I thought.” She pursed her lips, contemplative.
The grey-haired girl shrugged. “Same here.” She paused. “Sorry about that last one, by the way. I let it get too close to you because I underestimated myself. I won’t let it happen again.”
The archer giggled weakly. “Hey, it’s ok. It couldn’t have hurt me anyways. Not through this.” She tapped her globe helmet. “Believe me, I’ve tested it.” The archer stopped mid-movement, frowned, and flattened her lips into a line. “Hey, Stelle… were you holding back?” She asked, voice gentle and subdued so as to be unaccusing.
“Not really.” Stelle answered. “I have amnesia, remember? Wasn’t sure how strong I was, so I fought carefully this time. Didn’t want to take any chances, push myself past my limit. But I’d say I have a pretty good measure of my strength now. The next fight should go a lot smoother.”
“Oh…” March rubbed her globe sheepishly. “And I had a whole speech ready too.”
“Just to convince me to stop holding back?” Stelle raised an eyebrow.
“To convince you to trust me, to be less paranoid” March corrected. “I was worried that you thought I’d be wary of your strength.”
I see. So anything stronger than what I’ve shown so far would be suspiciously above average for this space station. By now, she probably thinks I’m a part of the security—or PMC if they’re that independent—here. They apparently have a relaxed dress code, so they should be easy to identify. Shouldn’t matter too much, but my cover is pretty much blown the moment we see one.
“So a pep talk on the magic of friendship?” Stelle teased. “Didn’t take you for the type,” she said with obvious, lighthearted sarcasm.
March deadpanned, eyes half-lidded in exasperation. “Well, clearly, you didn’t need it.” She gestured to the elevator terminal. “Let’s keep going. We’ll be there in no time.”
“So, obviously I passed. But by how much did I pass? Did I get a S or an EX?” Stelle asked, eyes sparkling expectantantly.
March rolled her eyes and threw an icy tablet over her shoulder like a shuriken. Stelle caught it and began to read. It was a report card—or rather a report tablet—with fancy cursive etched into the ice.
Name: Stelle
Instructor: Ms. March
Athleticism: B
Technique: B+
Tactics: A
Strategy: N/A
Preparation: A
Adaptability: A
Awareness: B
Teamwork: A
Humility: F-
Comments: Stop being a tease!
Stelle grinned and tossed the report card away, where it scattered into motes of bluish light. “Nice to know, March. Now, let’s go.”
Without another word, the cotton candy girl stepped forward, taking the lead once more. Her steps no longer squished, but rang. She had covered the soles of her feet in a sheet of ice. She held her bow with a ready grip, and her eyes swept back and forth like searchlights.
Without question, Stelle followed, loading her bat over her shoulder, ready to swing at a hair’s shift. She strode forth with purpose and controlled power, springlike, golden eyes beaming forward like twin lasers. A silent agreement passed between them, signed in muscle and grit.
No more holding back.
*****
Though Stelle had prepared herself to fight at full capacity, it was becoming abundantly clear that March didn’t intend to let her. As the two companions crossed from bridge to bridge and platform to platform, they encountered another group of voidrangers—a distorter, two reavers, and one baryons—guarding the elevator panel.
Stelle had ground her heels into the ground to prime a leap, but March just nocked four arrows and shot her bow sideways without even coming to a stop, giving their destination a bit of an arctic feel by a generous donation of five immaculate ice sculptures.
Was the girl just eager to make up for her earlier offence, or was she just this strong the whole time? Either ways, Stelle couldn’t help but pity the distorter from their earlier fight. Poor thing probably thought it had a chance.
Without a glance to the sculptures that flanked her, March walked up to the orange-screened control panel with purposeful eyes. She pressed her palm flat against the pair of closed side-pointing chevrons, expectant.
The panel didn’t care. The chevrons remained clamped and latched with mulish grit, and the screen never changed from that aggravating, hostile orange.
March scowled. She raised her hand before slapping it against the panel again with a meaty thwack. It didn’t work. So she did it again, faster and faster until her hand disappeared into a blur of blue and white.
After what must have been the twentieth slap, the archer gave up. “Ah. I knew it…” She acknowledged with no small amount of exasperation.
“You broke it?” Stelle teased.
March was almost flustered at first. “What? How would I even—” Then she caught onto the tease, and pinks and blues stared deadpan into mischievous golds. “ Obviously ,” she emphasized, “the Legion must have broken it.” She sighed. “Too bad Dan Heng’s not here. He’s like a walking encyclopedia… He knows a lot of complicated stuff—maybe even elevator repair…” she trailed off in contemplation.
What is he, your personal handyman? Stelle thought.
Then her eyes shot up, and she held back a self-mocking smile. Speak of Aha and They shall appear.
“I don’t know that one.” A voice pierced the silence, cool and serene like the autumn breeze. A voice that came right behind them.
Stelle turned to March’s companion nodded in acknowledgement. She hadn’t noticed him until he was two meters away from her. In addition to his silent steps, Dan Heng also seemed to have a way of hiding his scent, or else Stelle would have pinned him down the moment he entered the courtyard. He was good. Too good. Was he actually a professional assassin?
While Stelle marveled at Dan Heng’s stealthy sneaking, March flinched outright. “Woah! Why are you here!?” Regaining her bearing, she straightened herself. “And how did you get here before us?”
Dan Heng’s face was as flat as a board. Even as he reunited with his companion, his flat lips did not deviate from their ruler-straight line, and his sharp eyes did not widen or narrow in recognition. The key, then, was to read the light in his eyes like an astrologist to starlight. A light that did seem to brighten as March spoke to him.
If Dan Heng noticed Stelle’s newfound interest in his eyes, he didn’t mention it. “I took another route to the upper level, and I saw you guys from up there.” Yeah, of course. There’s no way this guy would struggle with voidrangers. “Arlan is in the control room. He’s been injured, but not fatally.”
Arlan. Injured. Control room. Probably a high-ranking security office, if they’re mentioning his name. Well, that’s it for my cover, I guess. It was nice while it lasted.
“You found him!” March exclaimed cheerfully. “Will he know what to do about this elevator?”
“I suppose as the head of the Security Department, he would know.” Dan Heng reasoned
Yeah, it’s the end.
“Then let’s go talk to him!” March declared.
Both Stelle and Dan Heng nodded in assent, and that was the end of that. March quickly hovered her hand over her companion and conjured a suit of armor identical to Stelle’s. For a brief moment, Stelle wondered why March hadn’t given Dang Heng the armor earlier, but realized that the man had probably assassinated all of voidrangers he encountered on his solo trip—something impossible to do in the ringing plate that now adorned him.
Now that all members were sufficiently prepared, the three companions turned right and marched towards the control room.
During this little walk, Stelle could clearly see Dan Heng raise an inquisitive eyebrow at March, who responded with a curt but very enthusiastic nod. March was probably vouching for her. She appreciated that.
Dan Heng quickened his pace until he had positioned himself at the front of their little impromptu formation, an action that could only indicate that he was taking charge. Stelle took a quick glance at March and saw that she had no objections. It made sense. She could tell that the spearman had more combat experience than the archer from his steps alone.
It took the party of three mere seconds on their march to spot their next group of enemies, guarding the platform that connected the elevator platform to the Control Room. Six reavers and four baryons led by a distorter whose beak-like helmet whipped around the moment the party entered its line of sight. It lifted its silver finger, and its minions burst into action.
Or at least they would have if March didn’t freeze them all. Though there were eleven targets, March only loosed four arrows, prompting Stelle to raise an eyebrow. But as if to say “ye of little faith”, those arrows converged mid-air, merging into the perfectly modeled head end of a train, one meter wide. The train then split into a thousand-many flock of supersonic palm-sized rabbit-eared conductors, blanketing the Legionaries in a hail of what could only be described as a child’s wintertime reverie.
The reavers, half in motion, toppled to the ground with wasted momentum as they froze mid-leap. The baryons fell down with clear crystalline rings and rolled right off the platform’s edge. The distorter fell forward and downward, arm outstretched and finger pointing forward. For a moment, it managed to pull off a perfect one-fingered plank before gravity inevitably dragged it down to its side.
A pity. Stelle wanted to see how Dan Heng fought. But she supposed this way was faster.
The three walked across a repulsion bridge to the connecting platform and went up the ramp on their right, where they were met with the hatch to the Control Room. With a whir of a dozen unknown mechanisms, the hatch opened, revealing a room full of glowing tablets, panels, and monitors, a little jungle of extra oxygenating plants growing from a soil platform at its back.
At its center stood a brown-skinned man with white hair and gritty pink eyes, though given his height and features, it would have been easy to mistake him as a boy. One look at him, and anyone could tell he was experienced. White, deep scars adorned the bridge of his nose and the front of his exposed right forearm, practically popping off of him due to the contrast with his darker skin. This was probably a good thing, and possibly one of the reasons he let that forearm hang free. Nobody would dare call him a boy with those scars around.
He was draped in a thick beige vest with a loose collar, two pauldrons, and an asymmetric weave—everything below the left side of his ribs was exposed, covered by a black, form-fitting shirt. Blue trousers covered his short legs, ending in a pair of no-nonsense black combat boots. A large hand-sized dial was buckled to a strap wrapped tightly to his chest, secured to his right pauldron. A name tag hung snugly at its lower left, displaying the name “Arlan”, above a mugshot of the eponymous man.
His dominant hand hung limply at his side, likely broken. He leaned heavily on his left leg, implying debilitating damage to the other.
But that wasn’t the end of Arlan’s long list of wounds. Stelle could tell by the obvious stench of burnt meat that he had been slashed by a hunting blade, likely in the back.
Arlan eyed the three of them, his eyes resting on Stelle, not intensely, but not warmly. “Hey… You’re all together?”
“Yep! We’re all from the Astral Express.” March answered.
All? Stelle thought, surprised. Why isn’t she asking him about me? She should believe I work here as security, so how… Stelle’s eyes shot wide. Oh.
Arlan didn’t respond for quite some time. His gaze drifted to Stelle once again, scrutinizing her from head to toe. He frowned, obviously suspicious.
Stelle suppressed a groan. Of course he’d be suspicious. She wasn’t wearing one of the gold badges that served as the Express’ identifiers.
What the hells do I do? Do I make a break for it? No, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. Do I come clean about everything Kafka told me and hope for their charity? No, too risky. Way too risky. Maybe I should just try to pass myself off as an Express Member. I was entertaining the idea of joining them anyways, and that is what Kafka implied she wanted me to do, so it wouldn’t even be a lie. I can just be a… recruit or something. A cadet. A squire. A page. A… whatever these guys call their probationary members.
But before Stelle could say anything, Arlan shifted his gaze to March and continued. “Did Madam Herta send you to help?” Just glossing over Stelle’s glaring lack of badge. But if such was the case, then why not take advantage? So she zipped her lips and stepped behind Dan Heng, who stepped up to March’s side in turn, the furthest corner of their little triangle.
“Just a coincidence.” Dan Heng began. “We came to deliver the rare relic Herta trusted us to find… We didn’t expect to arrive during an invasion.”
This was information to Stelle too. She had expected the Express and Herta’s station to be partners with something like an informal mutual defense pact, not just a bunch of delivery men. If they were so distant, then why had the Express so readily lent their aid? Was it confidence? Were these two warriors so assured in their safety in this Legion-infested ship that they entered it willy-nilly? Or were they a bunch of soft-hearted do-gooders who would put their lives on the line for people they barely knew?
“Why is the Antimatter Legion targeting you guys?” March questioned. ”It seems that they just ignored the planet and came straight to the space station.”
Stelle frowned. That was strange. She would have thought they’d be attacking both. But if they were concentrating their forces on the station, that implied that there was something valuable here to be retrieved or destroyed. And of course, that would mean more voidrangers than usual. Great. Looks like I’ll get a workout on my new first day of life. There’s no justice in the universe.
Arlan paused, rubbing his chin before speaking. The action made him wince from the pain of an unseen wound, and March held out her hand worriedly. The security chief regained his bearings and held out a hand, rejecting her aid. “I… have no idea. The Legion came at a very suspicious time—almost right after the security system suddenly failed. Lady… Lead Researcher Asta immediately began to organize the evacuation. I was supposed to cover everyone as they evacuated, but… I didn’t expect to fail.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Dan Heng comforted. “Your leg and dominant hand were injured. It was a wise decision to lie low to avoid combat with the Legion.”
March continued. “Yeah! Most of the staff have been evacuated safely, so right now our highest priority is to return to the master control zone and plan a counterattack!” She pointed to the elevator platform outside. “So… Do you know how to use the elevator? I couldn’t start it…”
Arlan nodded. “After the evacuation was complete, the elevators were all shut down to keep the Legion away from the master control zone. Since Lady Asta sent you to look for me, I assume she must’ve given you the encryption key for accessing the elevator system?”
March propped her chin on her hand. “Oh. Right. She did give me some sort of card…”
Dan Heng’s eyes dulled in exasperation. “March…”
Stelle deadpanned. Then why were you slapping it with your bare hand? She stared at Dan Heng. He stared back. Their dull eyes were like mirrors of each other. Somehow, they both knew the other was thinking the same thing.
“But where did I put it…” March mused, ignoring them.
“You…” Arlan started weakly, not sure what to make sure of this oversight.
March patted herself down, exploring every pocket, crevice, and fold on her outfit. After a solid ten seconds of searching, she smiled brightly and exclaimed, “Ah! Here it is!” The archer held out her hand, proudly showing off a blue-screened tablet the size of a small phone.
“I…” Dan Heng facepalmed, sighing. Stelle somehow found a way to deadpan harder.
“...Now that we’ve found the key,” Arlan hurried, “we should get going.” We can use that console over there to unlock the elevator.” He pointed to an orange locked panel at the front of the room that was identical to the one on the elevator platform, closed chevrons and all.
March walked over to the console and held her tablet-key over the chevrons like she was scanning a barcode. She tapped the screen, and the chevrons separated, the panel glowing green for a moment before fading to a dull transparent white.
Outside on the central platform, the elevator moved up, the power of the movement shaking the whole courtyard. Stelle could feel the tremors of their success shooting up her feet.
“Let’s go,” Dan Heng said.
“Hold on,” Arlan objected, “We only activated the elevator on the highest floor. We’ll have to go there to use it.”
“Okay,” Stelle accepted. Safety concerns. Understandable. It was good to be wary of giving the Legion a free ride. She thought higher of Arlan for it. Still, somehow, she didn’t think the Legion would be deterred much by this act of caution. They could probably just climb or float up the walls.
“I’ll have to trouble you to take a bit of a detour… Apologies.” Arlan concluded, rueful.
“Huh? You’re not coming with us?” March asked, genuinely surprised.
“My leg is injured…” Arlan choked out through grit teeth, as if he hated himself for the wound. “I’d only slow you down. I’ll stay here and shut down the elevator once you’ve made it to the master control zone.”
“You won’t slow us down.” Dan Heng refuted. “And you should be able to shut down the elevators from the master control zone, right?”
“Agreed.” March supported. “Stelle and I made it here safely, and now we’ve also got Dan Heng. We’re more than enough to protect you~ Let us worry about the Antimatter Legion. You just follow us and keep yourself alive.”
An escort mission, then. Got it.
Stelle stepped forward and laid a hand on Arlan’s pauldron. “You can use me as a crutch,” she quipped.
“Aren’t you a nice kid!” March smiled approvingly, seeing past the joke and into the kind gesture beneath.
Arlan’s pink eyes met Stelle’s own. “Thank you,” he said. As far as Stelle could tell, he was genuine. Guess he’s not suspicious of me anymore.
After March made Arlan a suit of armor, the team naturally formed a triangle formation—Dan Heng in the front, Stelle on the right, and March on the left. Arlan walked in the middle of the triangle, covered on all sides.
They moved into the storage zone from a door from the control room. As the hatch closed behind them, they found themselves in a cross-shaped intersection. One locked hatch a meter in front, two locked hatches five meters to their sides, elevated atop twin sets of stairs. A baryon near the right hatch was charging up its blast in ambush, but was promptly reduced to an abstract art piece with a thwack of March’s bowstring, rolling down the stairs to Stelle’s feet.
She kicked the ball-shaped thing up into her hands and tried dribbling it. Didn’t work. It was ice. Dan Heng facepalmed.
“Do you know why the Antimatter Legion would invade the station, Arlan?” He asked.
“They must’ve come for Madam Herta’s collection. But as to why, I still…” He trailed off, frowning.
“I heard there’s something called a Stelleron in Madam Herta’s collection,” Dan Heng lead, the implication behind his words clear.
Arlan hesitated. “That’s not the kind of information someone in my position would have access to.” Dan Heng nodded, his face a perfect mask of calm. He was just probing for information. Nothing lost, nothing gained. In that way, Stelle supposed there was nothing for him to be sad about.
The team took a left, entering the only room that wasn’t locked. A lone, one-armed reaver with broken helmet wings and a breastplate that looked like a cracked eggshell—probably the leftovers of some depleted squad—wasted no time to aim its sole remaining blade at his heart.
Dan Heng didn’t even give it a side eye. He slid his spear down his hand and used it like a sword, severing the reaver’s outstretched hand with an upswing with its reverse edge, followed by a straight downward cut that split the creature down to its waist. The spearman had never stopped walking, though he did flick the ichor off his weapon.
Stelle blew a raspberry at the dead, self-destructing thing as she passed it. March deadpanned at her like she was some unruly child. If Arlan noticed any of this, he didn’t make it known.
The room itself was a ruined mess. Every table was cracked, slashed, burned, or vaporized to some degree, and the potted plant in the corners of the room had been bisected by a hunting blade, its mutilated stem bearing the signature burns of those weapons. The room smelled of a disgusting, industrial mix of melted metal, plastic, ozone, and burnt kale. Clearly, there had been a battle in here, and from the lack of human blood and corpses in the room, the voidrangers had not done so well.
Stelle almost whistled. So it’s not just Arlan who can handle himself here. The security in this station is pretty top-notch, huh?
The team continued past the room into another corridor. From there, they cut left into a C-shaped balcony that wrapped back into yet another corridor. After one more ruined room, without the voidrangers this time, they reached the upper level of the courtyard. It couldn’t have take more than three minutes.
Now a transparent bridge, five men wide, was all that stood between the team and their elevator.
“Is that it?” March scoffed. “We’ve reached the elevator already? That wasn’t too many monsters~” She winced. “Oof, probably shouldn't have said that. Might have jinxed us. Sorry.”
“You’ve grown, March,” Dan Heng said, lips curling up a micrometer.
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” March protested, though the grin on her face casted much doubt on those words.
Way to make me feel like a third wheel, guys , Stelle thought jokingly, hiding a smile of her own. But March is right. So far, this has been too easy. I don’t think the voidrangers are targeting us, per say, but something just feels… off.
The arrow came like a storm in the night. A blazing blue bolt of quantum that tore through the air like a needle through the skin of a babe.
Stelle reacted on instinct. Her body knew the arrow was too close to dodge, and put its power and faith in her arms instead. Her right arm brought up her bat at a horizontal angle, hoping to catch the arrow on the upper side so that it would be deflected up. Her left reached up to grasp the weapon at its cap, reinforcing it. Her feet planted themselves in the ground like the roots of a great Asdana oak, legs bending and toes turning counterclockwise to divert every joule of force into the ground. Somehow, she made it in time. Somehow, she didn’t need to.
Dan Heng, for some Godsdamned reason, had decided to jump in front of the arrow, not only proving that he was faster than her, but also that he didn’t trust her to handle herself. The former was very, very annoying. The latter was understandable—he hadn’t seen her fight, after all—but was still annoying.
The spearman swung his weapon at the arrow one handed, batting aside the hidden projectile with a slight grunt of effort. The arrow tore through the wall at Stelle’s left, lancing effortlessly past the room they had just walked through and many walls beyond.
It turns out that either Dan Heng was much stronger than Stelle, or Stelle had overestimated the force behind the arrow. For the sake of her pride, the woman hoped for the latter. Oh, I swear I’ll knock the next one right back to you, whatever you are.
A large, centaur-like creature charged at Dan Heng In a burst of quantum energy, only leaping back once the man tilted his speartip to its direction. The legionary hopped through the air in short and blistering bursts, leaving streaks and cubes of ocean blue in its wake. It stood protectively in front of the elevator entrance, hands crossed against its chest.
Standing at over three meters tall, the intimidating beast was covered in greyish mauve armor from head to toe. Its armor only thinned at its joints, never terminating at any point. One would be pressed to wonder if it was armor at all, and not what passed for skin amongst its kind. It sported two razor-like wings atop its helmet, drawing away from its comparatively small “face”—a tiny slit of black that peeked through a comprehensive jawguard. Its front kneecaps were adorned by light blue crystals, and its front legs tapered into two brutal spikes, as opposed to its more horse-like rear hoofs. Their purpose would soon be made abundantly clear.
March’s fingers tingled and twitched, dancing around the grip of her bow. Her eyes narrowed and sharpened. She was glaring.
Archer duel? Archer duel?! Stelle thought, wide-eyed. Then she grinned. Archer duel! Archer duel! Archer duel! Archer due—
“A Trampler,” Dan Heng identified. “March, protect Arlan. Stelle, back me up if you’re able.” The Legion’s go-to heavy infantry. Not as intelligent as a distorter, but not as single-minded as a reaver. The diverse, durable creatures could serve as both battering ram and arbalest, the speed and power of their quantum bows outstripping most portable cannons.
It was hard for Stelle not to take that as a challenge. She stepped to Dan Heng’s right, pointing her bat at the trampler’s winged head. Wordlessly, Dan Heng pointed to its rear. Both warriors nodded, their targets determined.
Behind them, March grumbled and murmured her complaints into the wind, all while doing what she was asked. The archer shot four arrows into the air. Three nosedived to the ground, forming transparent ice walls around March and Arlan that merged into a triangular structure. The last arrow stayed five meters in the air and expanded, forming a roof. Arlan frowned.
“Don’t worry. I can control the shape of my ice with my arrows and body.” She gestured to the walls, having cheered up significantly. She wasn’t even looking at the trampler anymore, like it wasn’t worth her attention. “I can shoot and walk through them if need be. All you need to do is follow me.” Suddenly, she paused, face pensive. “Huh… Wait a minute…”
Arlan gulped. What was it? What could it be? What oversight had she made for her to make that expression?
“Wow, that rhymed~” March hopped up and clapped her hands, eyes suddenly sparkling. “Say, Arlan. Do you know any poets here? If I could find one, then maybe I could have a shot at this.”
“A-At what?” He asked numbly, not quite comprehending what this girl was saying.
“Jeez, didn’t you hear me? Poetry. You know, I’ve been dabbling in it for a while, but that confirms it. My fifth accidental rhyme of the week! It’s like the Aeons are guiding me~” March explained, though her eyes darted around on occasion.
Arlan’s jaw dropped. He rubbed his eyes, recalled her words, and rubbed them again. “T-There’s an enemy less than twenty meters in front of us and here you are—talking about poetry! March 7th! Your conduct is extremely unprofessional!” Arlan protested, summoning his own weapon for extra comfort—a large, single-edged greatsword that he held in both hands. Both wielder and weapon began to discharge violet tongues of snaking electricity, and the hand on the guard’s dial swung a few indices clockwise. Arlan, injured and in pain, was far from his full combat capacity. But the Legion would not find him wanting.
March raised an eyebrow, staring at the man like he was crazy. Him! Like he was the one who turned his back on the menacing, murderous hostile who wanted to tear them atom from atom. “We did have an enemy to fight, Arlan. But those two—” she gestured to Stelle and Dan Heng—”called dibs. So we’re just…” She rolled her eyes up and waved her hand around, trying to find a good way to describe this. “We’re just waiting on the corpse.”
Right on cue, the all-too familiar scream of voidranger implosion graced Arlan’s ears. This time, however, it sounded deeper by what must have been three orders of magnitude, and the force of its pull was so strong that the transparent bridge creaked under its might. But Arlan’s eyes were not glued to this extreme phenomenon, but the two warriors who caused it.
Stelle and Dan Heng met eyes, and Dang Heng nodded, acknowledging the woman’s strength. Stelle smiled and turned to March and Arlan. She pointed right, drawing their eyes to a wall. A wall that now sported a very familiar hole. Stelle made a swinging motion with her bat, saying all that needed to be said. She batted the arrow this time.
March waved her hand, and all of her ice walls vanished in motes of blue and pink. “See?” She asked, though both of them already had their answers.
The guard could only nod numbly once more, holding up his jaw with his uninjured hand. A trampler could crush, had crushed—Arlan shuddered—multuple squads of security without a scratch, and these two took it down in seconds. Just who were these people? These warriors, to do with so little what took his men so much? Just what was this Astral Express, to brave the Scourge of a Thousand Worlds for a mere “special delivery”? A thousand ran roughshod through Arlan’s laden mind, each one heavier than the last. To his credit, the boyish man quashed them down, and turned the whole of his frayed attention back to his duty—operating the elevator.
But these things didn’t tend to end so simply. March was right. She had jinxed them after all.
A mere second before the end of its implosion, the trampler—helmet wings broken and all legs shattered—roared a mighty roar that shook the very foundations of the courtyard.
And in the wake of that roar, hell surged forth. An eruption of aureate imaginary swept through the courtyard like the flare of a raging supernova.
And when the light faded, and the humans opened their eyes, they found themselves like fish in a furnace, trapped in a new, hellish world. A hostile world.
Stelle began to shake, her fingers white as she gripped her bat like a lifeline. Dan Heng grit his teeth and glared fiercely into the sky. March had to cover her mouth to hold in a scream.
And Arlan? He knelt. He just knelt, falling to his knees like an unstringed puppet. The light drained from his eyes as his sword fell to the ground. He clasped his face in his hands and shook like a child in the night. “T-This is a dream,” he murmured. “This has got to be a dream… Please, this has got to be a dream…”
Hey… Stelle floundered. Hey. Where’s the ceiling? Where are the walls? Why is it all… Why is it all voidrangers ?!
A century of distorters, a hundred strong, had rendered into reality in flashes of ocean blue quantum. They flew on high, three hundred twisted pyramids orbiting in unison. Such was their number that they painted the ceiling grey, the baleful glares of a hundred raptor-like heads converging on a single group of four.
But even this would not be the end of their troubles, for the officers were followed by their men. Twenty-thousand reavers burst into reality in a single flash of gold, painting the walls black with the dark of their armor. Their heels and blades dug into the walls like the chitinous legs of true stings, the primordial horror they wrought every bit as genuine as Propogation’s spawn.
I can’t see the walls, March thought. I can’t see the walls! Panicked and desperate, the archer peered down the bridge into the chasm beneath, if only to assure herself that she had not descended to a brutal, hopeless hell. This time, she couldn’t hold back her scream.
Black. It was all black. Black from top to bottom, from endpoint to endpoint. Reavers covered the walls all the way down. And when their numbers proved too many to contain, the ebon horde spilled into the platforms on the second floor and the flat base below, clinging to the bottoms of those platforms once their surfaces were filled. They blocked every exit. They were everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. There was no safety in sight.
The iron beaks of the hundred distorters snapped to the elevator shaft, their hands rising in unison, each flaring with destructive energy. Dan Heng’s eyes shot wide.
An ambush, Stelle thought. They were waiting for us. All of them. The distorters were watching us the whole time from quantum space. They probably sent the trampler to gauge our strength. Since they’ve revealed themselves, our strength must have fallen under acceptable parameters. And they’re right. Gods damn them, they’re right. We can’t take that many—especially not while defending the elevator.
“March,” Dan Heng called, his cool voice plagued with a slight tremble. But the archer was still peering over the edge, face frozen in horror. “March!” He tried again, shouting this time. March recoiled as if slapped, retreating to Arlan’s side.
“Y-Yeah?”
“Leave Arlan to Stelle. I need you to distract those distorters. You’re the only one who can.” Dan Heng ordered.
“Got it.” Stelle answered for both of them, not giving March a chance to refuse. They were out of time. She quickly dashed to Arlan’s side, bat at the ready.
“Arlan, we’ll get you to the elevator as fast as we can.” He eyed the panel ten meters in front that felt ten miles away. “After you get in, activate it immediately. Don’t look back. Once you make it to the Master Control Zone, request reinforcements from Welt Yang and Murata Himeko.” Arlan nodded. “Stelle. Follow him. There is no reason for you to stay.”
Stelle’s eyes shot wide. She sighed, a wry grin sprouting on her lips . I want to. Trust me. I want to. But how am I supposed to leave you after you’ve said that? “No,” she denied. “I’ll get him there—”she nudged her head at Arlan—”but I won’t leave you.”
March snapped. “Stelle! We don’t want you to get hurt! We’ll be able to hold for a while, but you—”
“There’s no time to argue!” Dan Heng shouted, warily eyeing the distorters, who were slowly lifting their hundred hands in unison. “Stelle, are you absolutely certain?” He asked.
Stelle snorted. “I chose to fight with you. That means something.” she said with an air of finality.
Dan Heng nodded solemnly. “Then go!”
The voidrangers chose that moment to attack. The distorter century unleashed their quantum bolts in unison, sixty for the elevator and ten for each human. Their barrage of bolts damaged the shaft and the elevator, bearing wide dents into them. But there was no penetration. Stelle breathed a sigh of relief. The elevator system must have been built extra sturdy to appease safety regulations. A few million credits well spent.
The twenty-thousand reavers leapt from their walls and platforms in unison. The ones closer to the second floor merely used their agility, while those closer to the first floor used their imaginary leaps. They barraged the transparent bridge like a hail of gold and steel; some burst into reality in flashes of gold, others blurred forth as bullets of black. Three hundred reavers emerged beneath the transparent bridge, heels dug into the glass, thrusting up their blades to pierce their enemies from below.
All four humans burst into action. March formed a pair of extra thick ice sabatons over her already sturdy armor, then shot two arrows to give the same protection to Stelle and Dan Heng, rendering the foot hunters useless.
Arlan, made a noncombatant by his new mission, unsummoned his sword and threw himself at Stelle for easy carry. Stelle slung the small man under her arm head forward like a sack of potatoes. If the security guard objected, he didn’t make it known.
Dan Heng twirled his spear until it vanished, a whirlwind of death draped in autumn jade. Such was his swiftness that he sprouted two heads and eight arms—all empty, fingers dancing deftly around an invisible gale. His body twisted and turned, bent and straightened, shortened and heightened, always translucent. Untouchable. A god of wind howling his thousand-edged rage into the sea of black, his keen edict writ in golden ink.
As the reavers descended like hail and the distorters rained down their fury, Dan Heng dashed to March’s side, a scouring shield circling its ward. Bolts of quantum veered off his spear, scything through hordes of black-armored fiends. Aureate flashes spotted the area within his purview, swept into the whirlwind before their armor could lose its golden sheen. A rain of black splattered into splotches of gold, painting the translucent bridge in Legion’s blood. Though the reavers were relentless and their numbers inexhaustible, not one made it through the howling shield.
The frigid archer, impeded only by the slight pulls of the reavers’ deaths, shot into the air, each arrow breaking into dozens of rabbit-eared conductors—pursuing the distorters without end. The Legion officers flew as far and as fast as they could, shooting down hundreds with their viatic power. Some resorted to more exotic forms of manipulation, condensing waves and cones and beams of quantum. Others shot off like missiles, indigo flames blazing down their sabatons like rocket jets. But all were forced on the defense—they had lost the leeway to target the elevator. March never stopped shooting, her fingers a constant blur.
Stelle blasted forth like a cannon shell, leaving her own sound behind her. She batted away the distorters’ blasts and ignored the rest, trusting March’s armor to endure the relentless barrage of golden blades. Arlan kept his arms to his sides and his legs curled up. He didn’t dare move. Stelle didn’t blame him.
A mere meter before Stelle reached the end of the bridge, a five-man squad of landed reavers dug their blades into its glass-like make. They slashed in unison, timed and measured, each swing ending where the next began. At the other end of the bridge, another five-man squad was doing the same. The bridge, having been built without piers or girders, collapsed without even sounding a death cry, plunging into a swift and inevitable fall to the first floor.
Growling, Stelle sped up faster than ever before, barreling into the five-man squad who had done such an inconvenient thing, splattering them like rotten fruit. Shit! March! Dan Heng! Damn it! She knew the two of them would already be falling by now, fighting without pause.
Wasting no time, the grey-haired amnesiac dashed to the elevator panel and thrust Arlan’s face brusquely into the orange screen, warding off the black hail and aureate flashes all the while. The security officer, to his credit, did not waste a single moment. He tore off his glove with his teeth and slapped his hand on the panel screen, which promptly turned green, then white—closed chevrons separating and fading.
With an industrial hiss, the elevator door opened. A door to sweet, sweet salvation. Stelle hurled Arlan into the elevator by the scruff of his neck and blocked off the entrance with her own body, bat swinging furiously.
“Go!” She ordered, her voice almost drowned out by the roars of a hundred crashes and the stomps of a thousand ebon heels.
The elevator door hissed shut, its panel of buttons glowing tantalizingly blue. But just as Arlan was about to press the up arrow in the elevator, he stopped, eyes shooting up in surprise as a cheerful-yet-authoritative voice spoke from his back pocket.
“Wait for them, Arlan. Reinforcements have arrived.”
*****
In the chasm left by the bridge’s fall, March had quickly conjured a sheet of stairs five men wide, its front steps melded to the elevator platform. The stairs were made ramshackle and flimsy. No engraving adorned their icy surface, and the height of their steps ranged from three feet to five, utterly ununiform. But they were enough.
March and Dan Heng swiftly climbed up the stairs, the former shooting incessantly at the distorters above, the latter accelerating the pace of his massacre. Both made it to the ledge of the elevator platform, dazed but unharmed. March charged forward so Dan Heng could cover her rear, giving the black-armored soldiers no time to distract her.
Although the two had not sustained serious damage—their armor nicked and dented in every piece—they were unable to inflict serious damage in return. Only ten distorters had fallen, and the reavers had thousands to spare. Both Dan Heng and March were pushing their bodies to their limits. Though they would not tire easily; they would start to slow down, grow sloppy. Slowly but surely, they would fall.
Why isn’t this guy going up?! Is he crazy?! Stelle boomed in her mind. But since Arlan was shielded by the elevator door and was thus in no immediate danger; she leapt to March and began to aid Dan Heng, taking over the front hemisphere of his defensive circle. Her legs were sore from dashing and her arms from swinging, and all notions of tests and analysis had been dashed from her mind.
The three of them would hold, for now. But unless Arlan got them reinforcements fast, the poison of fatigue would see the glowing edge of a hunting blade plunged through their backs. But for some Gods-damned reason, the man refused to ascend.
In that moment, as if the Aeons Themselves had witnessed their desperation, relief came for the three weary warriors. A man descended from the heavens like an angel of war, coffee brown hair billowing in the wind. Dressed in a grey dress coat and a black scarf, his legs sheathed in brown khakis. The man seemed something between a professor and an adventurer. But his crimson eyes, framed by a pair of unremarkable glasses, seemed more like the eyes of a god. Floating only a meter above the ruined bridge, he pointed up a contoured-grip cane.
Somehow, he had managed to evade every single reaver hailstone so far, though the wiser distorters snapped to their beaks to him with haste, threatened by a power their lesser brethren could not even perceive.
Their fears were far from unfounded. The man’s cane pulsed and whined as if it was alive, as if begging to be used. Tongues of crimson lightning snaked around the rod, crackling, lashing; beasts thirsting for their enemies’ ruin. They would not thirst for long.
At first, it was nothing but a pinprick in the middle of the flock. A little black mole on the face of reality, hardly any bigger than a grain of rice. But it grew. It grew and grew and grew, gorging itself on the loose, frayed skein of reality. One second, one meter—two seconds, ten. Then it began to groan. A thunderous, ear-shattering noise. The hunger pangs of a voracious beast. The distorters, far too weak and far too slow, were devoured wholesale, their grey frames stretching and contorting as they struggled and died.
The reavers fared no better. The black hailstones flooded into the black hole like raindrops to a drain. The ones in the air had their momentum redirected, the ground no longer the destination gravity would dictate. The ones on the ground were drawn up like lifted babes, twisting and thrashing, hunting blades hacking furiously into the air. But gravity could suffer no harm, and death could suffer no denial. Three hundred reavers died in three seconds. Thousands more would follow.
Yet the man behind this destruction was unaffected by the hunger of his little cosmic monster. His clothes did not flop, and his hair fell prim and proper to his head.
A black hole?! Who is that guy?! Stelle thought, wide-eyed. Her hair “fell” to the top of her helmet’s icy crown pad, and she could feel the rest of her body beginning to follow. Her arms no longer “fell” to her sides, but above her head. She had to force them back down. Her feet felt light and floaty, as if she was walking on a low-gravity planet. He’s controlling the gravity too. We’re feeling the hole, but we’re not getting sucked up like the voidrangers are. No, it’s more than that. Our hair and our arms are experiencing more gravity than our feet. Aeons above, could this guy be an emanator?
Dan Heng and March 7th shouted together, ecstatic, as if to answer her, “Mr. Yang!”
This is Welt Yang?!
“Change of plans!” Dan Heng ordered, turning back into a three-faced blur. “Everyone evacuate!” Stelle nodded without question. March, relieved, laughed a cute, lively laugh as she jumped at her friend, who scooped her at the waist with his arm, carrying her the same way Stelle had carried Arlan.
Both front-liners made a mad dash for the elevator, though from the steel-shattering groans that pounded at their ears, they probably didn’t need to.
Stelle pounded the elevator door so fast her hand blurred. The door hissed open once again, revealing a smiling Arlan waiting within. Stelle and Dan Heng dashed into the small elevator car, kicking up such a storm that Arlan had trouble breathing as the air sliced at him like blades.
Stelle immediately closed the door and lanced her finger into the up button. Then she pressed it again, and again, and again, until her finger seemed to multiply into ten.
“Stelle, pressing the button again won’t make it go any fast—” Dan Heng began, before he was interrupted by the shattering of glass and the crackling of ruined circuitry, saturating the cab with the odor of burning rubber and copper. For a moment, the cab was silent.
Stelle hiked up her visor. She slowly, draggingly turned to face her fellow passengers, profusely rubbing the back of her helm, eyes lowered and shoulders hunched. “Hehe. Oops.”
Arlan, Dan Heng, and March—who was still slung under the spearman’s arm—all facepalmed in unison.
“You’re paying for that,” Arlan said. Stelle paled. Wordlessly, she turned to the Express members for help. Both of them shook their heads in sync, faces perfectly deadpan—as if to say “you did this to yourself.”
The grey-haired amnesiac shuddered. “C-Can I pay in installments?” She asked, eyes doe-like. Everyone sighed. At least Stelle had improved the mood—even if it came at the cost of a few thousand credits.
*****
“Why does it always have to get this exciting?” A woman mused as the industrial hatch to her left hissed open. A loose, white toga, red-lined and neck-strapped, flowed softly down her hourglass curves, leaving a fair, silken leg open and unwrapped—a gift to the world. A black greatcoat hung loosely from her fair, supple shoulders—the dull shell of a lustrous pearl. Golden laurels caressed the woman’s waist, wrapping over and around like ribbons on a satin box. Golden roses adorned the collar of her neck and the side of her long flame-colored curls—a sight that could seize a thousand eyes with its splendor.
The woman turned to the hatch, a smile in her bright, ember eyes. “Anyway, at least you’re back.” She said to the group of four sweaty warriors who entered the room.
“Exciting, huh?” Stelle said, catching the woman’s eye. “You have no idea.”
*****
The newly introduced Astral Express navigator Himeko stood stoically as March and Dan Heng took turns explaining their experience in the lower levels. The experienced woman nodded along and asked clarifying questions, but her brows never raised in surprise, and her lips never parted from her bright, hearth-like smile.
When the two younger Express members finished their explanation, Himeko nodded once more. “March, Dan Heng, you’ve been through a lot.” Lambent embers met gleaming golds. “And you’ve made a new friend.”
“Whew, Himeko~ What took Mr. Yang so long?! That last wave of Legionaries came at us like a swarm of locusts! Have you ever tried shooting locusts with a bow?” March asked, slightly annoyed. Matted strands of hair clung to her skin like a wet dog. Her eyes were dull and her limbs dangled down like listless vines. She looked just about done with the universe and everything in it.
“We did the best we could,” Himeko defended, apologetic. “Welt went down as soon as we realized you were ambushed.” She sighed. “As for me, well… I wouldn’t have made a difference. My orbital cannon could have dealt with them all, but I doubt Herta would appreciate a new airlock on her station.”
Dan Heng nodded and March grumbled a bit, but both of them accepted her reasoning. Stelle didn’t really see a reason to blame her in the first place. That man—Welt— had bailed them out after all. All’s well that ends well.
Himeko turned her attention to the security chief, frowning for the first time—fretful of his injuries. “Are you alright, Arlan? Asta’s been worried about you.”
The dark-skinned man nodded lightly. “I’m fine. A quick patching up will do. Thanks for asking.” I’ll report the situation to lead Researcher Asta immediately. Bye.” He answered, dismissive. He walked past Himeko’s worried eyes and toward the back of the large room, searching for his employer.
Finally, the flame-maned woman directed her attention to Stelle herself. “Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Himeko, navigator of the Astral Express.”
March cut in. “In other words, she’s in charge of where the Express goes.”
“March hasn’t been any trouble for you along the way, has she?” Himeko asked, eyes narrowing.
“Think carefully about how you wanna reply to that.” March threatened, narrowing her eyes as well.
Stelle grinned a reckless grin. “I’ve never met a more reckless girl in my life.”
March panicked. “That’s just my charm! And I didn’t cause any trouble. You just have to get used to me.” She turned to Dan Heng. “Look, Dan Heng agrees, right? Right?”
The spearman made an X with his arms. “I have the right to remain silent.”
“Oh come on!”
Himeko chuckled. “Look at you all. It hasn’t even been an hour and you’ve already gotten so close.”
Stelle’s eyes almost bulged out of her head. An hour?! That felt like a year!
The navigator turned around, gesturing for them to follow. “Come on. Asta has been worried about all of you.”
The Master Control Room was built in the shape of an arrowhead. A second floor was built near the front entrance, while the front of the room had only a large golden astrographical projection, and windows that unveiled the sea of stars. As always, the construction of the station was streamlined and monochromatic—black polymer floors patterned with circles. White plastic-metal walls curved and sleek. Soft blue LEDs streaking across the junctions. And the screens. Oh the screens. They were everywhere. They were everything.
As soon as Stelle entered the room she saw screens. Screens inlaid into the two walls right next to the entrance hatch. Screens next to the exotic sharp-foliaged landscapers whose drooping leaves often ended in pink highlights. Screens for every railing on the balcony and beyond. Screens, all advertising the same damned thing. Herta Space Station. And if that wasn’t enough; in addition to the literal advertisement rails, the room included more old-fashioned TV-adjacent advertisement machines which flooded Stelle’s vision with burgers and sodas and other junk food. All in all, there were a lot of screens.
And yet, in contrast to the sleek and mechanical build of the architecture, the people who dwelled in this room were anything but. A throng of evacuated researchers huddled together like packs of skittish rodents. Their long teal robes and white gloves—the focal point of their apparent dress code—were often stained, torn, and splattered in varying shades of red. Their gloves creased or stretched as they trembled, their anxious eyes darting around and about for any signs of danger. They leaned against the rails and the terminals like vagrants in a slum, crowding the benches and walls and deskchairs and ad machines. The air reeked of a grotesque mix of ventilation, disinfectant, plastic, and blood. The dull, warm hum of the screens and lights provided a poor ambiance for the sobbing. And the sobbing provided a poor ambiance for the wailing.
Evacuees. No…. Survivors.
At the middle of this blood-soaked, juxtaposed mess stood a short, pink-haired girl who couldn’t be past her mid-twenties. The so-called Lead Researcher Asta, the closest thing this place had to a ruler. She really wasn’t hard to spot. Anyone could tell she was in a position of power from her outfit alone. No matter the organization, there weren't many people who had the authority to overrule their own dresscode.
Her collared white shirt exposed her shoulders and back, its ruffled sleeves detached and short. She wrapped a pink-patterned white jacket around her waist that trailed down to her knees, one solitary utility belt hanging to her heels. She wore a short black skirt accented in gold, and a black bowtie hung from her collar. An identification card hung from a lanyard buckled to her bowtie, the only vaguely professional part of her ensemble.
From those clothes alone, Stelle could tell that this Asta was a woman who was more than willing to “bend the rules,” as they say. A quality that she quite appreciated in the current situation. Even without her three new friends at her side vouching for her, she could easily weather the relatively light scrutiny that such leaders would use against her.
“Projectile radar tracking, normal. Telemetry signal frequency unusually high! Maintain at normal speeds!” Asta firmly ordered to what must have been the stellar defenses, eyes glued to the golden projection. “Our measurements predict the Legion will deploy ten continuous waves. Brace yourselves!”
So she takes a strategic role in the defense. Interesting.
“Asta! We’re back!” March announced, breaking the Lead Researcher out of her strategic trance. Stelle raised an eyebrow. They can talk to her like that? I know she’s relaxed, but that relaxed? Or does the Express have so much political clout that one of their members can treat her like an equal?
Asta turned to the group, not offended or annoyed—but relieved. Her face, tight and stern, relaxed the moment she caught sight of March’s bubblegum hair. “Whew. I’m glad you’re all back safe. Arlan just told me about the situation at the storage zone, and about his injury…” She paused, head downcast. “Thank you—for helping him.”
The unlikely leader swept her gaze across the room, her eyes often dwelling on the injured and the broken. “In times of disaster, I realize more and more that the space station’s researchers are its most valuable assets… Alas, we were ill-prepared for such emergencies… we should have built up our security and combat departments.” She shifted her gaze back to the Express crew. “On the other hand, the entire crew of the Astral Express seems to be extraordinarily skilled.”
She’s going to ask for a favor, isn’t she?
Dan Heng, likely coming to the same conclusion, got right to business. “What is the current situation on the space station?”
“The situation is under control for now. The damage to our security system was minor. The intruder only managed to alter a small amount of data, so it was easy to fix.” Asta sighed. “The real problem lies with the researchers. They trusted Madam Herta wholeheartedly and never thought the Legion would be able to breach our defences. A broken spirit is far worse than a broken body. Not that we have a shortage of either.” Asta laughed dejectedly. She sounded double her age.
“Let’s go speak with the researchers.” Himeko suggested. “Right now, the space station can’t afford any more unexpected turns, especially from within. Have you tried contacting Herta.” There was that name again. Herta. Just who was this woman? How could anyone be so busy as to leave their own space station to the Legion? Or was she just a coward, too afraid to defend her own people?
“I sent multiple letters, all met with silence.” Asta shook her head, smiling wryly. “You know her, Himeko. The space station is but a warehouse for followers and rare items. She doesn’t really care about it.”
Oh, I see. Stelle’s fists clenched white. She’s apathetic.
Himeko’s smile mirrored Asta’s own. “I knew it… No matter. I’ll also send a letter to Herta to tell her we’ve brought the rare item she seeks. That might get her attention.” The two women shared a laugh over their shared troubles.
Asta thanked them once last time before bidding them farewell, stating that the Astral Express would always be welcome in the Herta Space Station. She turned back to her golden hologram and started barking orders with renewed vigor.
Himeko turned to the group. “Before we move on, I have a question. Do you have any idea why the ambush down at the storage zone was so… directed? Though voidrangers are known to traverse and hide in imaginary and quantum space, to concentrate so much of their forces at the elevator… It’s unusual.”
Dan Heng nodded. “Indeed. I have fought the Legion before, and I’ve never seen such a large and concentrated ambush. Tens of thousands in a single courtyard… I suspect they were trying to lock down the storage zone, probably to isolate the Stelleron. But I’m uncertain as to why they didn’t move to retrieve it.”
There’s that word again. “Stelleron.” Dan Heng was pretty serious about it earlier. Why are they so sure the Legion’s after it?
March chimed in. “About that—the only storage facility I found was the plinth room—the one on the first floor. Madam Herta was storing all sorts of valuable curios there. There was a gun that rated people, a broken fire sword, and all kinds of goodies.” She paused, thinking. “You told me that the Stelleron was a glowing thing that could float on its own, right?”
Himeko nodded.
What kind of barebones description is that?
“Well, it wasn’t in any of the plinths. From what Arlan told Dan Heng, it’s probably on a whole other level than the normal curios. I’d guess it’s locked away in a vault somewhere down there, like in one of those heist movies.”
Wait. Wait a minute… Isn’t that where I woke up?!
“March…”
“Right, sorry.” March wasn’t the least bit apologetic. “The fact that I couldn’t find it probably means that the Legion couldn't either. You know how those guys work. If they’d found it, they’d probably blow in a hole wherever the vault’s hidden and make a big mess you could see from a mile away. They always do.”
Himeko rubbed her chin. “Still, why didn’t they send their forces to search for it instead of guarding the elevator? The Stelleron should be stored somewhere near that room. Everyone had evacuated, and curios can’t move on their own. It’s not like the Antimatter Legion to plan so defensively.”
March rubbed her globe. “Well… I think they did. Kind of… I found five—maybe ten golden stains near the plinth room.” Stelle raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you didn’t see them Stelle—they weren’t in the rooms we crossed. But I did see some diagonal splatters, as well as a few bullets in one of the walls. I think there might’ve been someone who got there before us.” She eyed Stelle curiously.
The amnesiac shrugged. “I don’t use guns.”
But I know who does…
“A blade and a slugthrower,” Dan Heng guessed. “But that is still insufficient evidence. There could have been stragglers, killed by the security. Judging by the amount of voidrangers that ambushed us, the Legionaries should have sent a much more numerous task force to retrieve the curios.”
“Hey, I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Wait.” Himeko rubbed her chin, her gentle face twisted into a wary frown. “The two of you don’t know this since you haven’t been on the space station for long, but the security here aren’t issued any slugthrowers. The management argued that such ‘primitive weapons’ would stain Herta’s reputation. In theory, there isn’t a single person on this space station who would have access to bullets.”
Both March and Dan Heng’s eyes shot wide.
Dan Heng sighed. “So we can assume that an unidentified third party entered the space station prior to our arrival and engaged numerous voidrangers along their path. Maybe a thief or some other variant of opportunist. However, from this information alone, we cannot conclude that the voidrangers slain were members of this purported Stelleron retrieval force.”
Himeko nodded, accepting his logic. “Then the mystery is still unsolved. Why would the Legion station so many voidrangers near the elevator? Could it be they were unable to reach the Stelleron, and thus resorted to ambushing a curio retrieval team, not knowing that there would be no such thing?” Her embers darted to Stelle, not hostile, but not gentle either, pulling the gazes of the other two express members with it. “I wonder, could there be something we’re not seeing?”
Stelle sighed. Oh boy. Looks like it’s time to come clean. I think… I should tell them everything. At that moment, she was perfectly calm. Stelle had truly begun to trust her new comrades, and a sappy, naive part of her believed they had begun to trust her too. Life-and-death experiences unites people fast. Who would have thought?
“So, in light of everything we’ve been through together, I have something very important to share with all of you.” Stelle paused dramatically. Dan Heng braced. March gulped. Stelle closed her eyes and breathed in long and deep, peeking out to savor their increasingly anxious faces.
Finally, she unleashed the truth in one heavy breath. “I don’t actually work here.”
A stale silence filled the air. One second. Two seconds. Ten.
Huh? Was it really that shocking?
It was not.
“We know,” March and Dan Heng said in unison, words and expressions equally flat.
“Was it the clothes?” Stelle asked jokingly. Their expressions gave her all the answers she needed. Still, though. It was nice of them to play along until now.
“So do you have anything actually important to say?” March asked dryly.
Stelle nodded, serious this time. “You weren’t the first to wake me up. The first time, I was in a weird room that looked like it contained something—something that had already been taken. The people who woke me were two women. One of them could control me with her words. She knocked me out with her powers and dragged me to a place where she knew you’d pick me up—that’s how you found me. The other one… just looks like she really likes video games.” Stelle paused, pursing her hips. “I think I knew them… before I lost my memories.”
March looked confused. She had no idea who these people could have been. Dan Heng on the other hand; a gleam of realization shot through his eyes, and he stepped back from Stelle, looking at her with sharp, wary eyes.
The amnesiac winced. That’s what I was afraid of…
Himeko frowned again. She had come to some kind of realization as well. But her reaction was more subdued. “Stelle. Explain to me exactly what happened in that room. I want to know everything you saw, heard, smelled and felt. I want to know exactly what those women looked like, what they were wearing, what they were saying, and how they were saying it. If either of them so much as breathed in a way you consider to be unusual, you tell me immediately. Do you understand?”
Stelle nodded, feeling as pressured as a chicken in a pressure cooker, and told Himeko everything.
*****
“Stelleron Hunters…” The navigator whispered. “You were acquainted with the Stelleron Hunters.”
Stelle gulped. “How bad is it?” Dan Heng looked away.
“Bad is… an understatement.” Himeko smiled wryly. “The Stelleron Hunters is a notorious band of criminals infamous for destabilizing worlds, depreciating corporate assets, and—well, causing Stelleron-related incidents. They’re wanted throughout the universe by the IPC and various smaller universal organizations.
“All of their bounties are in the billions—high enough to buy entire planets if claimed, dead or alive. But ironically, they’re a taboo subject around most bounty hunters. Most say it’s just not possible. Others say the money isn’t worth the risk.
“They are led by Destiny’s Slave Elio, a prophet whose predictions guide their every move. The Kafka you described fits the description of his second-in-command, a native of New Babylon of Pteruges-V. Her most remarkable ability is the Spirit Whisper, a power that lets her manipulate minds through language. That’s probably what she used on you.
“She was involved in the Pier Point Incursion, the Pier Point Heist, the Trovys Disappearance, and the Stellaron events of Jemorse, Bayjhana, Shilla-39C, Ulmora, 7-Midville, and Loar-51. She’s suspected to have been involved in the Stellaron events of Sich-Lala, Inupeis, Oun-G7, Zukov, Lidovia, Illily, Attouine, and Buhayama.
“The other woman you met was likely Silver Wolf, one of the most notorious hackers in the galaxy. She comes from the planet Punkelorde, the planet of cyberspace—the universal heaven of gamers, inventors, and hackers. She is a constant and persistent security threat to the Genius Society and the IPC, famous for her repeated cyberattacks on Herta Space Station and Planet Screwlum, and for hemorrhaging quintillions of credits’ worth of integrity loss and malware damage to IPC security systems.
“In short, if the IPC and the Genius Society discover that you’re related to these criminals… Well, let’s just say you won’t live an easy life,” Himeko concluded ominously, tone grim.
Stelle’s jaw dropped. A river of ice flooded down her back. Kafka… KAFKA! What the hells did you drag me into? She shot a quick glance to Dan Heng, who still wasn’t meeting her eyes. She gulped.
“So let’s keep it a secret between us, okay?” Himeko winked.
“What?” Stelle’s mind blanked. Exploded.
Dan Heng cut in, his tone heavy. “There is a man amongst the Stelleron Hunters. His skin is a waxen pale, and his eyes are blood red. His hair is dark blue—almost black. He carries a short sword, double edged, deep cracks running down to its tip—almost like it once shattered. Do you think you were acquainted with this man?”
His descriptions were familiar, filling in the colors of a painting that Stelle had once seen, but can’t recall. She thought back to the moment she first met Dan Heng—about that phantom scent that prickled at her nostrils.
“All I remember is blood and spider lilies.”
Dan Heng flinched.
“That’s what he smells like, right?” She asked timidly, fearful of provoking a reaction.
The spearman’s eyes shot wide. His breath deepened and hastened. He grit his teeth and clenched his fists corpse white, his eyes boring a hole through Stelle’s head.
This time, it was Stelle’s turn to flinch. March walked to her friend and grabbed his arm, concerned. Himeko placed a soft, steady hand on his shoulder.
But the spearman didn’t seem to need it. In the midst of his inner turmoil, his eyes suddenly took on a more tender glow. He breathed in deeply, then breathed out. His jaw loosened and his hands relaxed. Slowly but gently, he took a step forward, letting the heel of his shoe clack softly on the ground.
“I… apologize for my reaction, Stelle. Himeko has already accepted you. I won’t contest her decision.” He did not elaborate further.
But why? Are you guys seriously that naive?
“But I am related to them. I don’t like that, but it’s true. Aren’t you worried I’m a spy?”
The Astral Express members shot each other astonished looks, like they weren’t sure what to make of her.
“I consider myself to be good with people,” Himeko said. “You don’t seem like a girl who would be capable of that.”
I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or an insult.
“Yeah!” March chimed in. “Besides, you came back for us in that courtyard. Dan Heng gave you a way out, but you still chose to risk your life to help us. So I don’t think you’re a bad person.”
“What if I’m a sleeper agent?” Stelle asked, not letting up. She wasn’t sure why she was even saying this, why she was digging herself down when she was standing on good ground.
“You know, you’re trying pretty hard to convince us you’re a spy,” Himeko joked.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Hmm…” The navigator rubbed her chin. “Sleeper agents are often victims themselves. Even if you were, we’d still be willing to help you.” Stelle’s jaw dropped. They couldn’t be serious.
“Now, let’s stop talking about your past. We wouldn’t want anyone to overhear.” Himeko held out her hand like she wanted Stelle to take it. March and Dan Heng stepped up to her sides, wearing welcoming faces—trusting faces.
There was no more suspicion, no more hostility. Their camaraderie was like a summer sun, their sunbeams kissing the amnesiac’s skin with motherly tenderness. Stelle wanted to melt in those golden rays, to cease her fruitless thoughts and let herself be embraced by their warmth. She wanted to surrender to them, to take refuge in their words. She wanted to join them.
An organization both powerful and tolerant. Kafka really loaded the dice for me, huh? I didn’t think I’d be such a sappy girl, but you know what? Fuck it. I’m in. There’s no way I’ll find better people than them anytime soon.
She slapped Himeko’s hand, mistaking her gesture for a high five. “Okay, I’m in. Did I give you enough info to piece everything together?”
Himeko smiled and nodded. “Maybe. Now that you’ve mentioned Silver Wolf, March’s conjecture is no longer impossible. The hackers of Punklorde are known for their Aether Editing—a power that lets them manipulate the fabric of reality in all sorts of inexplicable ways. This power has been observed to ‘delete’ entities without leaving a trace. How this works is beyond me, but its effects are well-documented, unquestionable.
“Silver Wolf is perhaps the greatest Aether Editor Punkelorde has ever produced. If there is anyone in the universe who could ‘delete’ a few thousand voidrangers, it’s her.
“Moreover, Kafka is known for using a katana and two submachine guns. This aligns with the ichor streaks and the bullets March discovered.”
March punched the air, giving herself a silent cheer. Dan Heng facepalmed.
“Judging by the Stelleron Hunters’ eponymous obsession with their mark, it is highly likely they took advantage of the Legion’s invasion to stage a Stelleron heist, echoing their methods during the Buhayama heist. They likely broke into the Stelleron’s vault through Silver Wolf’s Aether Editing, where they proceeded to take it for themselves. This would coincide with Stelle’s observations of an empty viatic vault room,” Himeko conjectured.
“And maybe I was with them when they entered,” Stelle continued, frowning. “But that would mean they knocked me out, erased my memories, and left me behind. That doesn’t make sense. By the way they were talking, you’d think I was… reawakened somehow.”
Himeko sighed. “Yes. I’m afraid I have no good guesses on what your purpose in all of this is. We’ll have to investigate later. For now, let’s reconvene to the Legion.
“Their actions can be better understood as a reaction to the presence of the Stelleron Hunters—a rival organization that also sought the Stelleron—likely an expected variable that forced them to improvise. The question of how they planned to breach the vault is now irrelevant. Silver Wolf did their work for them.
“But this was by no means a streak of fortune. They were now on a timer. They had to intercept the Stelleron Hunters before they could escape. To do this, the Legion probably stationed the bulk of their forces at all potential exits, since it’s very easy for a few powerful warriors to bypass their rank and file due to their low durability. This is probably the reason you three only encountered one trampler near the elevator—the rest had all been sent to delay the Stelleron Hunters, along with countless supporting reavers, distorters, and baryons.”
“But wait! You’re talking about hundreds of tramplers and thousands of reavers. If they’d all been fighting while cramped up in those narrow rooms and corridors—well—there wouldn’t be any rooms and corridors left!” March objected.
Himeko hummed. “Aether Editing, at its highest level of application, can ‘delete’ entire battalions ‘before the first point man draws his sword’, as the saying goes. Yes, there were probably a few stragglers, but you saw what happened to them, right?” She called back to the ichor streaks and the bullet holes.
March paled. “But… But I only saw a few blood streaks. There were only fifty of them. Are you saying only fifty of them got through the Editing?”
“It’s possible. If Silver Wolf could predict their future coordinates, grasp their functions, and implement an aggregator for them, then it’s theoretically possible for her to ‘delete’ these voidrangers in batches. While I’ve never heard of anyone else pulling this off save for a few Punklordian legends, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
March gulped, shuddering. If her face was off-white before, it was bleached now.
“From Asta’s recent station-wide scans, we’ve observed no signs of non-Legion foreign vessels in the storage zone. Even if such a vehicle was equipped with the most cutting-edge camouflage systems—which I doubt could bypass Herta’s surveillance anyway—they would still have to bore a hole in the station to land, as Asta ordered a full lockdown the moment the Legion struck.
“The Legion should know this as well. Their voidrangers have most likely explored every nook and cranny of the storage zone with the exception of the Stelleron vault. They should have been able to deduce that there was no ship.
“Therefore, it’s likely the Stelleron Hunters entered and exited Herta Space Station through ‘teleportation’, a rare and extremely precise application of Aether Editing. There is nothing the Legion could have done to stop them from applying this technique, and it was also unlikely that they would have been able to observe her during the process unless the Stelleron Hunters were uncharacteristically complacent.
“The Legionaries deployed on this mission would have no knowledge of Aether Editing. They’ve had few encounters with Punklordians over the Amber Eras, and are not particularly knowledgeable about their abilities save for a few high-ranking generals. And so, working with all the information they had, they likely deduced that the Stelleron Hunters only had one way out.”
“The elevator.” Stelle slammed her fist into her palm. “They thought the Stelleron Hunters would take the elevator.”
Himeko’s lips curled up playfully. “It looks like your old friends made a little trouble for us, doesn’t it, Stelle?”
This time, it was the amnesiac’s turn to pale.
Himeko laughed. “Well, there’s no use dwelling on it now. Besides, this is good news. If the Legion discovers that Herta Space Station has lost the Stelleron they’ve sacrificed so much to obtain, they just might retreat—run away with their tails between their legs.” She winked at Stelle, beckoning for her to follow. “Now come on. Let’s see how we can help these people defend their home.”
“What are you going to tell them—about me?”
“Nothing much. You can keep your cover as an amnesiac with no past. We’ll tell Arlan that we discovered bullets in the walls and an empty vault—information we used to retrace the happenings of the heist itself, but not its organizers. There are plenty of outlaws in this universe who use guns and can teleport. When this is over and someone goes to check, they’ll only corroborate our story.”
“Yeah, cheer up!” March patted Stelle’s back.
The amnesiac smiled gratefully, the most hopeful she had ever been in this new life. “Okay. I trust you.”
*****
Though the team initially planned to meet up with Arlan, they decided it was better to brief Asta on their findings before all else, heeding the chain of command. Himeko turned on her heels and led the way, bringing them back to the center of the arrow-shaped room.
Asta called out to them from the golden hologram when they reached her. “Back so soon? Have you found something?”
But before Himeko could answer, all hell broke loose. A dozen separate panels of red alarms flooded the projector, overriding the formerly peaceful projection. The boxes brandished an array of exclamation marks, blaring like sirens, booming and screeching, resounding across the walls of the chamber. Shields, weapons, scanners, viatic converters—each of the boxes represented a key component of the station’s systems, and all of those systems were screaming in pain.
Before Asta could react to this catastrophic development, the entire space station began to shake as if subjected to an earthquake. As the tremors shot up her legs, Stelle could feel her teeth grinding against each other and her hair tickling her head.
The researchers screamed, howled, and cried in fear and panic. Some huddled closer to each other, seeking a desperate, final comfort in numbers. Others ran for their lives and pounded at the exit hatches, ignoring the guards who tried to stop them. Some cried out for their parents, others for their children. Their voices were a cacophony of disorder and despair, and only served to exacerbate the dire situation. Arlan was barking out a deluge of orders to the remaining security, pouring his own voice into the brew. In mere seconds, the greatest bastion of order on Herta Space Station had been reduced to a perfect scene of chaos, a ship with a frenzied crew.
But no matter how frenzied a crew may be, a true captain would always keep a cool head. With a wave of her hand, Asta summoned an image from the projector—a holographic screen that identified the source of the quake.
Yet, the sight of the creator was far worse than its creation. The moment the image came online, every eye widened. Every jaw loosened. Every heart froze with dread.
At the bow of the ship, a monster flew on high, thirty meters long and a mauve-tinged grey. Its beastly frame soared, its four wings splayed, its four arms open—two big and two small—two shining with brilliant imaginary, two surging with voidlit quantum. A black orb with an aureate glow pulsed ominously in a cube of twisted metal, floating loosely between the beast’s lesser pair of hands. A reactor. Its head was a smouldering amethyst orb hovering between a four-pronged crown. Its pauldrons were like the branches of a steely tree, tapered to the finest point, glowing ocean blue.
The monster’s reactor floated forward into its greater two hands, its twisted jail beginning to turn at a blistering speed. The orb itself ignited, glowing with energies so fierce the watchers’ eyes burned through the panel. Then it fired. A beam of quantum and imaginary, five meters wide, surged towards the space station’s hull.
A brilliant array of orange hexagons intercepted the eruption of ruin, dispersing the beam across thousands of its shapes. Yet, the beam did not cease, did not falter. It grew in strength, flooding forth with renewed vigor, its width expanding to ten meters. Inevitably, the shield began to flicker and die.
A thousand stars bloomed within the confines of that tortured shield. Lasers streaked hastily through the void. Particles beams unleashed their might. Plasma bolts screeched in their electromagnetic prisons. Torpedoes bolted forth from bellowing barrels.
Every point-defense system from the most redundant laser grid to the most sluggish torpedo interceptor had been called to action—their roars indignant and outraged, their fire thirsting for the blood of their enemy.
The beast snapped to attention, its powerful hands disengaging its reactor, stemming the flow of its beam. It flapped its mighty wings and soared further forward, until it was mere meters away from the shield, weaving through lasers and furious particles all the while. Its orb channeled soft beams of imaginary and quantum into its two greater arms, energizing them.
With its new empowered limbs, the beast clawed left and right, unleashing continuously projected radial waves of blinding gold and ocean blue that expanded for kilometers on end. They clashed with the shield as they met it, and merged behind the beast as they collided, covering front and rear. Then the beast empowered its lesser limbs and did the same. This time, it sent its new waves up and down. A flawless defense.
Lasers frayed. Particles stalled. Torpedoes exploded. Plasma bolts burst. None drew first blood. What was worse is that most detonated near the shield, degrading the very thing they were made to protect—precisely the beast’s strategy.
Asta’s face was corpse pale. Her hands went numb. Her legs shook like sticks. “So that’s a Doomsday Beast,” she murmured. “A planet breaker.” She closed her eyes and made peace with death.
In one the large, blaring panels to her right, a bar with a subtitled percentage waned like the creaking of armor. 99.88%. 99.20%. 98.10%. 96.02%. The shields were eroding near-geometrically, dropping more and more as time went on.
Stelle’s throat stung, her mouth as dry as a scorched desert. For the first time in her new life, she felt like crying. The amnesiac had been fighting ever since she woke up. Her muscles trembled and her legs were sore, dull aches plaguing every joint. She was tiring, but her enemies were only getting stronger and stronger and stronger . Would there be any end to them?
Nanook’s tits. Even I know what that thing can do. It’ll crack that shield like a shell and whisk us like a yoke. What do we do? What the hells do we do?
Both March and Dan Heng had summoned their weapons on instinct. The archer leaned on hers for support as her legs gave out. The spearman gripped his in both hands, his knuckles bone-white. His eyes gaped so wide they bulged, and his teeth clenched so hard they creaked.
Himeko, on the other hand, was perfectly calm; like the sight of the planet breaker currently destroying the place they were standing on was no more troublesome than an unfortunate fly that had made its way into her coffee. Again, Stelle dared to hope.
Asta shouted at them, sweeping her arm around to point at the side exit. “Take the Express and leave! We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”
“But!” March screamed.
“You’ve already helped us once! I won’t have you risk your lives for us again! Go!”
Himeko grit her teeth, nodded, and ran. Stelle followed, grabbing March by the arm and dragging her into a run, forcing her into their rhythm. Dan Heng came up behind them.
It wasn’t as if Stelle didn’t want to help them, but there was genuinely nothing she could do. Doomsday Beasts was rumored to eat planets for breakfast. Stelle was a woman with a bat. A very pretty, very frozen-over woman with a very pretty, very frozen-over bat—but still just a woman with a bat. This wasn’t a difference in weight classes. This was a difference in weight phyla .
So she ran, never looking back to the scared, determined girl barking orders into the projector. Never looking back to the dark-skinned man sprinting with a back full of wounds. Never looking back to the horde of panicked researchers flooding the exit hatches, pursuing them in screaming throngs before the hatch closed and cut them off. Stelle never looked back. But her mind saw what her eyes did not.
The Astral Express crew sprinted past dozens of rooms and corridors, vaulting over tables and launching themselves from well-placed walls. Himeko unlocked panel after panel with her superior key card, bypassing Asta’s lockdown protocol. Dan Heng and Stelle tore through the straggling reavers and baryons that remained in their path, swatting them aside like flies.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the supply zone—less than a kilometer from the space dock. Here, out of guilt or concern, March broke their tentative silence, stopping the group for a short recess.
“Are they going to be okay?” She half-whispered, as if she was asking herself.
Himeko pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Theoretically, anything with Herta’s name on it shouldn’t fall to a single Doomsday Beast. But this space station isn’t nearly as fortified as I thought.”
“It was steadily tearing through the defense shield—and Herta’s not here. Either way, the Legion has the blessing of their Aeon. They came prepared. The station was not.” Dan Heng added, a grimace marring his usual tranquil face.
Himeko sighed. “There’s nothing we can do about it until we get to the Astral Express. Welt will meet us there, and we’ll see if we can turn his cane and my space lasers against that death machine.” She gestured to their surroundings. “This is the supply zone where the maintenance crew works. There’s a path here that leads to the nearest railway platform, where the Astral Express can make its landing. Let’s head over there. Welt will be waiting for us.”
The group kept moving, overriding the lock on yet another hatch that led to a spacious room they needed to cross. The room was fifty meters wide, fifty meters long, and twenty meters high. Four connected mezzanines hugged the walls, connected to the ground by a single ramp, forming a second floor. In the room’s center was a circular platform with three repulsion bridge receivers that led straight to the second-floor exit.
The crew entered the room from the second floor entrance, giving them a straight view of the exit. Without a word, the four of them jumped onto the central platform and sprinted to the end, not bothering to activate any of the bridges. From there, they funneled down a few more lines of corridors and rooms before reaching the dock entrance, the tantalizing orange of the final locked panel lighting their path.
When the hatch opened, their destination was in sight. A series of space piers ran between a pair of long bridges like the rungs of a ladder. Both were built extending into the vacuum of space, much like their aquatic counterparts. The long structures were covered by invisible oxygenating fields, functional-yet-tasteful, allowing the observers a scenic view of a great blue planet below.
The team leapt onto the first rung, eyes scanning between the piers for their ride. But nothing was there. The dock felt silent and disconcerting. Its piers looked like a rack of ribs, bare and skeletal.. Stelle could tell it wasn’t meant to be this way. She could almost hear the chatter on the bridges, see the ships docked between the piers. But the Legion had reduced it to a ghost dock in the span of hours. A testament to their terrible might.
However, while the Astral Express was nowhere to be seen, its strongest member—at least Stelle presumed—was waiting for them on the leftmost bridge, the one that gave the best view of the planet.
As they rushed across the piers, Welt Yang gave them a quick glance before pushing up his black-framed glasses. This time, his eyes were brown instead of that dreadful crimson. Once the team reached the bespeckled man, his eyes scanned them briefly, staying on Stelle a moment longer than the rest.
She couldn’t help but shiver. The fact that he was here, perfectly intact, meant that he had killed over twenty-thousand voidrangers effortlessly. Who wouldn’t shiver from the scrutiny of a man like that?
Once Welt had stopped scanning them, he gave them a brief nod of greeting before immediately getting to business. He must have caught wind of the Doomsday Beast.
Himeko returned the nod and stopped. She frowned, rubbed her chin harshly, and turned her eyes to the empty piers once more. “Something’s wrong. Pom-Pom should be here.” Stelle raised an eyebrow.
Pom-Pom? Another Express member? The conductor?
“Maybe they were intercepted by the Doomsday Beast,” Welt guessed grimly, his voice deep from graceful age. It was softer than Stelle expected.
March’s eyes shot wide. “Oh no! Pom-Pom!”
Dan Heng placed a calming hand on her shoulder. “Pom-Pom has overcome worse. Have faith in them.” March nodded slowly, lips pursed.
Worse things than a Doomsday Beast?! Who is this Pom-Pom?!
“So, what do we do now? Do we wait, or go back inside?” Stelle asked.
Himeko brought her phone to her ear. “Let’s call Pom-Pom before we do anything else. If they don’t answer… Well, that’s an answer in and of itself.”
The navigator’s phone rang and rang, each jarring noise testing the crew’s patience with growing intensity, feeding their darkening imaginations and spiking their anxiety. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Pom-Pom answered. Himeko put her phone on speaker and began to speak.
“Pom-Pom. What delayed you? Are you o—” She didn’t get to finish.
A frantic, child-like voice screamed through the phone, booming through the wide, empty dock. “Run! Hurry! It’s coming for you!”
Himeko smashed the off-button, muttered alien obscenities under her breath, and sprinted for the exit hatch. “Let’s get out of here! Go!”
Stelle’s legs moved faster than her brain. She bolted for the entrance hatch like a cheetah, only a half-meter behind Dan Heng. March, Himeko, and Welt came up behind them. The archer panted and panted, a frantic light in her eyes. They ran as fast as they could. But they were too late. Their enemy was already here.
The Doomsday Beast swooped into view with a thunderous crash, its empowered claws boring into the leftmost bridge. Its amethyst orb blazed with indigo flame. Its four wings splayed wide and menacing. It roared, the sheer volume of its cry creating a mighty downburst that swept through the piers and bridges, blowing the crew off their feet.
Stelle’s face was a ghostly pale. She was numb from head to toe. She looked into that amethyst orb and saw her death smouldering in that horrible flame. We’re dead. We’re all dead. There was no point in running anymore. The fact that the Doomsday Beast made it to the dock meant it had already breached the defense shield.
Even if they retreated inside the station, the colossal voidranger would just tear through it like paper. Ironically, it was better to stay, since the oxygenating fields around the dock were intangible and disconnected from the main reactors, fuelled instead by a small generator built into the dock itself.
Himeko cursed aloud, shouting obscenities into the downburst. “Welt! Can you take that thing down?”
“I’ll have to,” Welt answered, his cane materializing in his hand. He spoke with a degree of courage and certainty that only came from years of experience. “Stay back, but don’t go inside.” The man instructed before launching himself at the creature, tongues of crimson lightning snaking around his staff.
And so the battle began. Both man and dragon soared through the void. Golden yellow and ocean blue met lightless black, shrieking light clashing against groaning darkness. When the Beast clawed for him, Welt dodged. When the Beast splayed its wings and pelted him with arrays of beams, Welt redirected their path with distorted gravity. When the Beast charged its thrumming reactor, twisted cube whirling with ever increasing intensity, Welt conjured a meter-wide black hole, prepared to devour the oncoming beam.
The Doomsday Beast flapped its wings and flew right, trying to flank its enemy—to strike him where his groaning shield could not cover. Without pause, Welt flew to the back of his lightless orb, putting it between them. The Beast tried again and again, its massive frame swooping and soaring, barrel rolling and corkscrewing, its wings strained to the limits of their war-forged make. But Welt did not allow himself to be caught. He dodged out of the Beast’s sight with the deftness of an ace pilot, knowing the Beast’s next move before the monster could even think of it.
Soon, the Beast could hold back no longer. Its reactor’s containment cube was spinning into a blur, so heated that it glowed white hot. Its orb blazed like the light of a star. With no other option, it unleashed its beam, aiming straight at the unseen Welt, who had hidden behind his black hole.
Ivory sword met ebon shield. Smouldering rage met placid calm. Thunderous roar met baritone groans. Reality frayed at its seams, the boundaries between dimensions fractured and corroded. Space-time gasped and screamed and begged for mercy. But neither dragon nor man could spare the change. The Doomsday Beast screamed, the loose flames of its orb combusting into bluish-white. It shot out an indigo beam from its head to merge with its reactor’s attack.
Welt coughed into his hand, staining his glove with splotches of blood. He couldn’t fight much longer. But as he felt the Beast’s terrible beams taper down to nothing, he knew he wouldn’t have to. His shield held fast through the onslaught, absorbing the whole of the attack. All that power was now locked inside the gravity well—a caged beast screaming to be released. Welt saw no reason to object. He clenched his fist and the black hole howled, shrinking and shrinking until it settled at the size of an apple. It shot into his open hand like a pitched baseball, floating gently above his fingers, its unassuming form an obvious lie.
For a moment, the Doomsday Beast stilled, its blazing head whirling like mad. Then it barreled into the distance as fast as its wings could beat, slicing through the dark like a silver arrow. The creature knew it had been put on the back foot. Welt cannoned after it like a missile, forcing it away from the dock. He followed behind his mark with relentless fervor, maintaining a constant hundred-meter range. One second, two kilometers. Two seconds, ten. Far enough.
The wizened man swung his cane in a mighty arc, crimson lightning crackling with glee. Responding to his command, an array of small, human-sized black holes tore into the fabric of reality. Cone-shaped and numerous, they cut off the Beast’s retreat from the front and the sides, forcing it to round the edges of the array.
Welt did not let it. The moment the Doomsday Beast slowed down, he loaded his charged black hole with a pitcher’s technique and hurled it forth like a speeding comet. The “ball” struck the Beast in its right pauldron, the sheer mass invested in the small prison breaking through the root-like blades that protruded from its shoulder. It dug deeper and deeper until it reached past the monster’s armor, where Welt knew it could begin to do real damage. Then, he undid the gravity well, unleashing every iota of the Doomsday Beast’s power inside of its own body.
Power enough to shake a continent erupted from the Beast’s shoulder in a cataclysmic wave of blue-tinged gold. Its armor ruptured and tore, a thousand rays of destruction bursting through the cracks. It screamed in what must have counted for agony amongst its kind. It screamed and screamed and screamed until Welt could feel his eardrums begin to bleed.
When the beams and rays faded and the screams had ceased, it was apparent that the creature had been reduced to a parody of itself. Its armor was cracked and ruined. Golden ichor seeped through every wound. Its claws twitched weakly and without purpose. Its tail drooped flaccidly down its spine. The Doomsday Beast was evidently on its last legs.
But Welt was not in a position to take advantage of this weakness. Not when he was much the same. Wracking coughs spewed thick red globs into a shaking hand, the sounds of pain silent in the apathetic void of space. His limbs weighed him down like sculptures of lead. His vision flickered and blurred. His brain tossed and turned like a ship in a storm. His lungs demanded more air even as he rushed to synthesize it in his throat. His heart beat like raindrops in a downpour, overtaxed and deathly swollen. The void around him filled with beads of ruby.
Welt struggled to recollect himself, to keep his fluttering eyes honed on his enemy. The man could only hope that it was as weak as he was. That he could end their battle here.
He hoped wrong.
While the Beast’s armor was in shambles, its wings were nearly pristine. The creature’s head blazed bluish-white once more, its splayed wings glowing with ocean blue light. In a flash, it was gone, a streaking comet cutting through the void.
Welt bit down a curse with bloodstained teeth. Left with no choice, he followed. He could no longer keep his original pace, but there was nowhere for the Doomsday Beast to hide in the vacuum of space. It remained a silver dot in his line of sight. He would catch up eventually.
And yet, through his flickering vision, he saw a manmade structure in the distance. A space station near an ocean-blue planet. A space station that grew larger the more he chased his enemy. The space station he had tried to leave behind.
Himeko.
That one word shot through his heart like a bolt of ice, then burned like white-hot fire. Stronger than any drug, hotter than any flame. There was no such thing as pain. Weakness was a privilege. There would be no consequences but those of his failure.
Welt Yang’s eyes glowed bloodmoon crimson, his teeth ground to the cracking point. His hair flailed like tendrils of wire. His hands bone-white as he gripped his cane. The wizened man shot through the void with a youth’s reckless vigor, streams of boiling ruby trailing in his wake. Comet chased comet. Wrath hounded wrath.
With that, the race to Herta Space Station had begun.
*****
The crew members left on the dock wasted no time sprinting and leaping to the leftmost bridge, where they stood together with their weapons drawn—more encouraging than practical.
Himeko had contacted Pom-Pom again, hoping for an extraction. But that hope had been crushed when the conductor told them they wouldn’t make it in time. The Doomsday Beast had fried the train’s engines, and it would take hours to start up again. They were stuck here, left at fate’s mercy.
March’s multicolored eyes darted skittishly between the walls and the void. “Please come back up please come back up please come back up please come back up—” Stelle didn’t know if she was talking about Welt Yang, the defense shield. She thought it was probably both.
Dan Heng maintained his stoic expression, but he ground the butt of his spear into the bridge as if it had spited him, making a dent three inches deep. His biceps almost pushed through his sleeves, the thick cloth as tight as a bodysuit. The man was as tense as a drawn bowstring, a roiling ocean under a clear blue sky.
Stelle knew how he felt. She felt the same. They were as powerless as powerless could be, waiting on their asses for destruction on wings or salvation in glasses. Whoever came back from that faraway duel would decide their fates on the spot. And there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it.
Himeko was tapping her feet, thinking—the only thing she could do now. “Why here? Why us? This place is far from the least-armored entrance on the space station. And even if it was, it should have just ignored us and tore through the hull. It has to be targeting us. But why? It should be after the Stelleron, not—” The navigator froze. Her eyes flew open. Her head snapped to Stelle like an autoturret, burnished ambers burning like lasers.
The amnesiac almost jumped back on reflex. “What?” She prodded, not sure what Himeko had seen.
“Not you… ”
Stelle growled, her stomach sinking. A bolt of dread shot through her heart. “What do you mean?”
Himeko spoke frantically, a woman possessed. Her words were induced by fear, and so induced fear in all who heard them. “The Antimatter Legion has a connection to the Stellerons that scholars have yet to identify. But it’s speculated that their more powerful units are forged with the ability to sense Stellerons from an undetermined range. I thought this theory was proven wrong when the Legion didn’t retreat after the Stelleron Hunters snatched their prize right under their nose.” The woman gave a short, insincere laugh. “But what if they never did? What if the Stelleron never left the space station?”
Stelle’s eyes shot wide in dread. “Himeko. Please, don’t tell me—”
But Himeko didn’t pause to answer her question. Her eyes were blank, her ears entranced. She could only hear the voice of her own mind. And what a voice it was. “What if the Stelleron was with us all along? What if it could be subsumed into a person ?”
March gasped, eyes darting to Stelle in fear. For who, Stelle couldn’t say. “No. Himeko, you can’t mean that!” Dan Heng’s head snapped to the amnesiac. His eyes shining not with the gleam of hostility, but with the soft light of pity.
Himeko laughed dryly, her visage a portrait of misery. “Stelle. Stelle. Stelleron. Of course. How didn’t I see that? How could I have been so blind? The answer was right in front of me this whole time.” She ranted, trembling in what must have been a mix of anger and dread.
Stelle’s mind went blank. Full static. Her frozen bat dropped to the ground, almost rolling into the void before she could unsummon it. Kafka . Kafka had done this, lured the dragon to her, to her friends. Made her Legion bait for the rest of her life. Why? Why would she do this? Didn’t she say that Stelle would go on an adventure? Didn’t she say she had a choice? What adventure could there be now? What choices could there be now?
Kafka… Kafka. Please, tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me you weren’t lying to me. Tell me that I can trust you. Tell me that you’re on my side. Please… Please…I don’t know to think. I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what I’m supposed to be!
“Stelle!” Himeko slapped her in the face, knocking her out of her stupor—stunned but attentive. “Listen to me. We discovered this information too late. That’s on me. There’s nothing we can do about it now. We still have to wait here for Welt, or at least for the defense shield to recharge. Our course of action is unchanged. Think about this later, when we’ve gotten ourselves out of this mess, alright?”
But Stelle wasn’t listening anymore. She had stopped listening the moment Himeko began to rehash old information. The beginnings of an idea leapt across her burdened neurons. An idea as stupid as it was noble.
So it’s only after me, right? The amnesiac looked at the scared, desperate people around her. Her friends. She saw the glow of March’s polychromatic eyes, how they shone like jewels. They seemed so beautiful to her now—those jewels, so beautiful and familiar. She saw the scarlet eyeliner Dan Heng wore at the corners of his eyes, handsome and adorable. They both looked so good, so right . How wrong it would be if they were gone.
It was funny how fast they had grown on her, but she supposed battle had a way of doing that to people. Stelle thought the world of them now. She could only hope they thought the same of her.
The amnesiac’s lips pressed into a firm line, her golden eyes gleaming with fiery resolve. She backed away from the group, walked ten steps forward on the bridge, and turned. “No. There is something you can do. Leave me here.”
“Are you crazy?!” March screamed, furious that Stelle could want such a thing.
“If the Doomsday Beast wants the Stelleron, then let it have it. The pier’s empty. If it goes down, it goes down. No casualties." She chuckled dryly. “Well, maybe just one.”
“Stelle, you’re panicking. You’re not thinking rationally right now,” Himeko tried. “Nothing good can come out of handing the Antimatter Legion a weapon of mass destruction.”
“So that’s what it is,” Stelle remarked.
“That’s what it
could be
. So don’t be so quick to give up. When Welt gets back—”
“—
If
Welt gets back. I know. If he’s the one who wins their fight then I’ll look like an idiot for saying this. You can give me a couple of whacks if things turn out that way,” Stelle said, voice even. This was the most stressful moment of her life and she couldn’t be more calm. Funny how that happens.
Himeko forced a laugh. “Exactly. So stop entertaining such dangerous thoughts and come back to us. We’ve already accepted you. We can’t leave you to die now.”
Stelle stared into her eyes, that same fire burning in her irises. “Then, can a Stelleron be destroyed?”
Himeko’s eyes went wide. She shook her head. “Not even by the Doomsday Beast, but I can’t say the same about your body.”
Dan Heng slammed his spear into the bridge, cracking it. “Enough,” he said, an order and a plea.
“Stelle, I know you’re hurt because Kafka didn’t tell you about… about what she did to you. I know you must be doubting everything you knew about yourself,” March said, approaching her new friend with an outstretched hand. “But sacrificing yourself isn’t the answer. I mean, we’re all just arguing about hypotheticals here, right? Like Himeko said, we’re not sure Mr. Yang will lose—and I’m sure he won’t, he’s Mr. Yang after all—but even if he did, the defense shield could still come online again, or… or Mr. Yang could buy us enough time for Pom-Pom to rescue us.” March took a deep breath. “So please, come back, Stelle.” Her frightened eyes adopted a new type of fear.
She just rehashed old info… but her eyes are sincere. And so are the rest of them. Damn it… Am I really overthinking this?
Then she saw it. Knife-like wings cutting through the void. An orb of amethyst burning with incandescent flame. A reactor whose containment cube was gyrating to near-transparency, cloaked in a nimbus of molten heat. And the reactor within that ominous structure radiated ever thicker nimbuses of golden yellow and ocean blue. Its armor was cracked and bloodied, its arms trembling and weak. But it was alive. The Doomsday Beast had returned, clawing its way back onto the leftmost bridge, its beam fully charged. Unimpeded by the downed defense shield, it had a clean shot.
Stelle could hear screaming besides her. She could feel her companions’ panicked stomps pulsing through her boots. In the corner of her eye, she saw arrows of blue and pink streaming through the void—useless and immaterial. None of it mattered. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t predict what they were thinking, couldn’t guess at what they were doing. All she knew was that the worst outcome of all had torn itself free from the confines of her imagination. All she knew was that death had arrived.
And she was calm. Calmer than she had ever been. Every scrap of uncertainty holed away in the darkest corners of her mind had been purged by the sight of that horrible four-winged thing. No more fear. No more hesitation. Only resolve. Resolve, and the will to see it through.
The Doomsday Beast held its reactor high, glowing brighter and brighter, spinning faster and faster—and aimed it up at the space station proper, away from the dock. Stelle eyed the future path of that inevitable beam and traced it up to the Master Control Zone. A decapitation strike. She had no doubt that the beam would penetrate all the way through, even past the hundreds of meters of construction material that stood between it and its target.
It was trying to isolate them, trying to isolate her . The Doomsday Beast knew that the forces amassed on the dock was no match for it, so it was perfectly content saving them for last. That was why it had perched so snugly on the bridge where they could reach it; conserving energy was more important than avoiding their attacks.
At this moment, the only threat to the Beast’s mission was the possibility of Asta reactivating the defense shield and the point defense systems. While the monster had made it past the shield itself, it would still have to escape once it retrieved the Stelleron. To that end, it would have to contend with those defenses once more—something it was ill-prepared to do, having accumulated such crippling damage.
The reactor flared up like a newborn star, its surrounding cube accelerating to the point of invisibility. March was screaming something now. A large brown drone flew into the air at rapid speed—but too slow. Probably one of Himeko’s weapons.
Stelle knew what she had to do. She felt it in her gut. The Doomsday Beast can’t destroy the Stelleron, right? She knew there were a thousand ways it could go wrong. Just because the Stelleron was resistant to damage didn’t mean that she had been given the same privilege. Just because the Beast wanted the Stelleron didn’t mean it would hold back. There was no guarantee this would work. She could be throwing away her life for nothing. But she would be dead anyway if that thing won. Why not dedicate the remainder of her life to a final act of defiance?
Stelle didn’t remember running. She didn’t remember shouting. She didn’t remember jumping. She didn’t remember summoning her tiny little bat and trying to smash it down against the volatile reactor with the power to supply a planet for a hundred amber eras. All she remembered was a stalwart back, racked with slashes and burns. All she remembered was a steadfast woman, who shouldered the lives of thousands even as her own legs shook like branches in the wind. All she remembered was faces; frightened faces, hurt faces. Faces twisted in sorrow and despair. All she remembered was that they needed to be saved.
Behind her, she vaguely remembered a voice shouting for her to stop. Perhaps it was her own.
The Doomsday Beast’s attack burst forth without hesitation or mercy, enveloping her in its colors before her weapon could even meet its mark. And then there was light. Nothing but light. March’s ice peeled off her bat inch by inch until it was gone, the weapon itself following in its wake as they merged into the light. The hands that carried it soon followed. Stelle looked for flesh and found only bone.
She saw the little knobs of white at the ends of her distal phalanges, then the little dog-treat-like phalanges that connected them to the metacarpals. She saw the bones of her messy little wrists, arranged in a series of uneven fragments like shattered stone, plugged to two strips of bone that ran up to her humerus. She tried moving them; she tried to wiggle her fingers, flap her arms. But they just drooped down, flaccid.
Stelle wanted to laugh. Everything was so absurd she wanted to laugh. Nothing about this was funny, but she wanted to laugh. She couldn’t hear anything, but she wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry but she wanted to laugh. She looked down, eyes chasing hands. She saw twenty-four bands of white, merging in a thick sheet of bone. She could see through them; she could see there was nothing through them. Nothing behind or beneath. Barebones. Bare bones.
Then Stelle knew she had died.
Funny. I thought it’d hurt.
What little remained of her body faded into the light, and the world went dark. A book burnt before its ink could dry.
*****
‘What are the Gods?’ A question as old as mankind. The nemesis of many a worldbound philosopher. A question every human has asked at least once. A question with many answers, so it would seem.
When the worlds were yet young, man found the first spark of wisdom in tongues of crimson. He built his homes from plentiful mud and roofed them with amble thatch. He quenched his thirst with bountiful rain and sated his hunger with fruit freely offered. He ambled past trilling birds and purring beasts. He cooled under the shade of gently-swaying trees. He lifted his downcast eyes to the glimmering stars and smiled as they winked. The world was alive, and it provided . And by means of extrapolation, he came to his answer. ‘The Gods are They who walk with us.’
As man sowed his seeds. As man built his dwellings in stone. As kings rose and cities grew. As brothers turned to neighbors and neighbors turned to strangers. Man turned his gaze from nature to man. ‘Why do we not kill? Why do we not steal? Why do we not take from those who are not our brothers and neighbors?’ He asked, looking to his ironclad laws and powerful kings. And by means of extrapolation, he came to his answer. ‘The Gods are They who reign over us.’
As man reached for the stars with hands of steel. As he wet his feet with blackwater and gorged his mind with knowledge. He looked to nature and found it weak. He looked to man and found him strong. He looked to the stars and declared them his. And he knew in his heart that he was right, the supreme, the king of all. And by means of extrapolation, he came to his answer. ‘The Gods are They who call themselves Men.’
All of these answers were the results of human bias, human arrogance. The Gods are none of these things. But if man’s logic is flawed, his conclusions biased, then by what means may he understand the nature of the Gods?
The answer was simple. If you want to know someone, you have to meet them face to face.
*****
You must see the end of your story.
Reach the end of it in your own way.
See? They have already noticed you.
*****
Stelle burned. She burned like nothing had burnt before. Golden flames leap from head to toe, lashed from eye to mouth. No part of her was spared from the conflagration, burning, blazing, crackling. So Stelle screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Steaming tears running down blackened cheeks.
But Stelle was not screaming because of the pain. And there was pain. The most agonizing pain she had felt in both of her lifetimes. Her skin weeped and melted. Her muscles cooked and burnt. Her lungs exhaled fire and inhaled flame. Magma surged through her veins and lava through her arteries. Her nervous system conducted nothing but pain. Every organ sizzled, every bone charred. She felt every bit of this. But she did not scream because of the pain.
For Stelle, in the moment, burning felt right. As those flames burnt her, surged through her, scorched her from head to toe, she felt nothing but delight. The smell of roasting meat soothed her like the scent of a homely hearth, heightened by the piquant kick of screeching nerves and high-pitched screams. It felt good to burn. It felt good to die. It felt good to let herself be destroyed. There was no philosophy to reinforce this primal joy. No nihilistic deductions, no misanthropic argumentations. Destruction was right. Destruction was all.
That is why she screamed. That is why she feared. Because this right was far too wrong.
She saw a man through her desiccated eyes. A man who seemed the size of galaxies. A man whose gaze shook the stars. His dust white hair trailed down in waist-length braids. His chiseled body was a muted bronze, covered in gaping wounds weeping golden ichor. A long cut marred his chest. Two slashes severed his arms. But his golden eyes were an ever-simmering calm, his mutilated arms held wide in greeting or challenge. His gaze was neither hard nor soft. He did not blaze with hostility or beam with kindness. In him, there was no anger, no hatred. Only resolve, and the will to see it through. Under a halo of weeping gold, the Aeon of Destruction stood. His eyes fixed on his new specimen.
In that moment, Stelle understood that she stood under the gaze of an Aeon. A gaze that burnt like the death of stars. A gaze that belonged not to a man, but to a God. Not a ‘he’, but a ‘They’. And she understood in that great and terrible moment just what that had meant. The amnesiac rallied the scattered remnants of her will and gripped it with all her might, wrapping it around herself to shield her against the Destruction. Her body still burned, but the flames leapt more conservative heights. Her lungs still blew fire, but could draw in more air. She still hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to before.
Stelle grinned through black teeth, glaring defiantly into the Aeon’s chest, not daring to meet Their eyes. Nanook had done nothing to her. They had just looked . She had been indoctrinated into the path of Destruction by gaze alone.
The flames and the pain did not come from Them, but from her . She had wished them into existence all by herself. Those flames had been nothing but vivid hallucinations born of madness and yearning. That is why her desiccated eyes still saw. That is why her flame-filled lungs still breathed. That is why her blackened skeleton still supported her weight. None of it was real. All of it, illusions. The source of her suffering was her own traitorous mind.
But even as Stelle realized this horrible truth, she still burned. A part of her still yearned for her own destruction, doing its utmost to make it manifest. Her legs began to shake, her teeth began to chatter. If she had anything left in her bowls, she would have emptied them here and now. She closed her eyes and bent down low so that she wouldn’t have any chance of seeing those horrible golden eyes. But it was of no use. Stelle could hear herself roaring, raging. Clamoring for death, demanding her destruction.
It was so much worse than the burning. Pain, she could handle. Adversity, she could overcome. As long as she had the motivation to resist. As long as she knew what she was doing was right. But even her heart was telling her the voices were right. That Destruction was moral, that it was right. How could she fight against her own morality? How could she go against what she knew to be right?
She was crying now, her sobs merging with her screams. She cried out for Kafka, for Silver Wolf. For the Astral Express. For her friends. Her words slurred together in a stew of tears and spit and snot, devoid of logic and meaning. In her desperation, she began to pray to the other Aeons, Qiliphoth, Xipe, Lan—whoever could save her from this hell.
Then, in the midst of her angst, she felt something click into place inside her chest. It was a small thing, a trivial thing. A gentle tug on the edges of her blackened heartstrings. A whisper that snuck deftly past the howling flames.
Would you welcome your own Destruction, if you could offer them salvation?
Stelle did not answer. She did not have to answer. She wanted to deny it, to rebuke it, to find the origin of that whisper and tear the speaker to shreds. But she knew in her heart that her answer was yes .
The figure of Nanook faded into a storm of ash, Their terrible gaze leaving Their new subject’s quailing form. Those golden eyes stayed a moment longer than the rest, as if giving their mark a final warning.
Stelle knew, in that moment, the true shape of the divine. She knew, in that moment, that she knew nothing at all.
The Gods are They who remain forever beyond our understanding.
Stelle closed her eyes, and the world went blissfully dark.
*****
March clenched her teeth to stifle her sobs, trails of tears trailing down her sorrowful eyes. The archer grit her teeth and sent a few more arrows the way of that terrible Doomsday Beast, not that it would be of much use.
The monster had not finished unleashing its beam. It almost felt like it was mocking them. Like it was mocking her. March screamed in rage, her fingers blurring along her bowstring. Hundreds of ice arrows merged into a gargantuan arrow ten meters wide, rocketing into the Beast’s side, only to shatter on its ruined armor, fading into motes of light.
There’s nothing we can do for her, March thought. There is really nothing we can do. She stopped shooting, and turned her gaze to Dan Heng and Himeko, eyes pleading.
The spearman shook his head, his spear thrust into the Beast’s neck as he stood atop its ruined pauldrons. It didn’t even notice. Himeko hid her expression behind her hair, unreadable. Her drone rammed, shot, and blasted into the creature again and again. But the beast ignored her as well. Stelle was still there, right above the Beast’s discharging reactor. The beam was being funneled into her, somehow, as she levitated above the viatic machine. The voidranger either took that as a challenge, or what passed for a brain on its necromantic body had shorted out somehow. Stelle was still there, March hoped.
But her body was gone, atomized the moment the beam hit her. March’s armor had been blasted through. Hadn’t even delayed it for a millisecond. Useless. All that was left of Stelle now was a glowing golden orb, about the size of an apple, shaking as it contended with the attack. None of them had any idea if she was still alive. But judging from what Himeko said before, well—even March knew it would be unlikely.
Useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless— March hurled a barrage of insults at herself. She redirected her aim to the Stelleron, trying to reinforce it with layers of ice armor. Her arrows were all atomized before they could expand. Useless . March could do nothing but pray. Pray to her dead Aeon. Pray to Qliphoth. Pray to anything out there who would listen. Because prayer was all she had left. Then Himeko’s head snapped up, her eyes lighting up with what March desperately, achingly wished was hope. She hoped right. March followed her leader’s eyes, scrunched lips blooming into a hopeful smile.
A tiny brown speck was growing ever bigger in the distance. Two crimson dots adorned that speck, glowing as brightly as any red giant.
“Welt,” Himeko gasped. “He’s back.”
“Himeko!” Dan Heng shouted, bringing their attention back to the Doomsday Beast. What they saw turned their smiles into grins.
The Stelleron glowed brighter and brighter, shining like a newborn star. Around that star, a skeleton began to form. First came the phalanges of the feet, then the metatarsals and the tarsals. Upon those foundations came the fibulas and tibias and femurs. The illum, pubis, and sacrum. Then came the ribs and the sternum and the vertebrae. The humerus, the ulna, and the fingers. Finally came the skull, grinning triumphantly, as if announcing its return to the world. Her return.
Within the skeleton, organs sprouted from nothing. Nerves tendrils crept across mounting muscle. Veins and arteries rooted from a budding heart. At last, a layer of skin, tender and young, covered it all. Atop that skin grew a head of gray. A color March now knew as well as her own. At that moment, the beam tapered out. The Doomsday Beast did not attack further, nor did it try to escape. It just stood there, claws dug into the bridge, the flames receding from its indigo orb. It was almost as if the Beast was malfunctioning.
March breathed a sigh of relief and giggled. Not only did Welt come back in time, but the Stelleron had brought Stelle back to life. Wasn’t this the best case scenario? The archer looked to the navigator once more, trying to gauge what the experienced woman thought about all of this. Then the screams began, and March’s best case scenario fizzled out like a match in the rain.
Light, brilliant gold and ocean blue, surged out from Stelle’s eyes and mouth, shooting into the void as if to paint the darkness in their colors. The woman screamed and screamed and screamed, hands tearing at her bare chest, as if trying to tear herself apart. They were the most visceral, most gut-wrenching screams March had ever heard. Bereft of every ounce of dignity. High-pitched, crackling, and hoarse, as if her sobs had bled into her cries. She would never forget those screams for as long as she lived. It took everything the archer had to resist the urge to cover her ears. Tears seeped out of her eyes without end. She bit her lip till she drew blood, barely keeping herself from sobbing too.
“Himeko,” She begged. “Please tell me there’s something we can do.”
The older woman was biting her lips as well, her nails digging into her palms. “March. I know how you feel, but we have to wait for Welt. He’ll know how to contain the energies that she absorbed. If anything happens to her now, we could destroy her and ourselves.”
Dan Heng leapt off the Doomsday Beast, landing at Himeko’s side. He opened his mouth, likely to ask the same thing. But the navigator just shook her head morosely, and he understood. The spearman pursed his lips and slammed his weapon into the ground, cracking it.
The three of them watched their new comrade, their new friend, with anxious eyes. Pitying eyes. Her screams had reached new heights, her arms and legs spread wide, her digits splayed. She floated in the air like a wraith. Her chest pulsed with golden light. Reality distorted around her like a mirage, the metal of the bridge crumbling beneath her feet. A sense of oppressive power filled the dock, rendering breathing a laborious task. Amidst this overpowering force, they heard something snap. A sound tiny and quiet, creeping under Stelle’s shrill cries like the tides beneath the storm.
Then all hell broke loose. Stelle’s screams reached a crescendo, her chest blazing with cataclysmic might. A cone of light erupted from that blaze, pushing further and further, covering the Doomsday Beast from head to talon. It shot forth at the speed of light, painting the black void gold, bringing day to a forever night. The gargantuan voidranger did not try to escape. Perhaps it had accepted its fate. Or perhaps its mission was complete. It allowed itself to be consumed by Stelle’s strike, fading into the beam like raindrops in the sea. A reversal of their earlier roles.
In seconds, Stelle’s attack tapered out, returning the void to its dark serenity. The bare woman floated gently to the ground, landing on shaky legs. Though her chest was still emitting that golden light, it had calmed, a pyre to a match. March grinned, thinking it was all over. Dan Heng strode forth, rushing to support her.
But Stelle began to scream again, as loud as she was before. The gold in her chest flared up once more, more brilliantly than ever before.
“No. It can’t be! Though she unleashed all the power she absorbed from the beam, containing that much power in the first place must have destabilized the Stelleron! But that’s impossible! It’s just a Doomsday Beast! How can it damage the Stelleron to this degree?!” Himeko cursed, pushing past her disbelief. She screamed into the void, cupping her hands around her mouth, desperate for any way to make her voice heard. “Welt! Welt! We need you here now! If that Stelleron explodes, this entire space station will be destroyed!”
“What?!” March cried. Dan Heng’s eyes widened to their fullest extent. Their hearts stopped. Their faces paled. For what must have been the third time of the day, they felt the cold sickle of death biting into their throats.
Then a brown streak descended from the heavens. Their star had answered their wish. Welt Yang cannoned through the void at lightning speed, decelerating only when he was inches away from his target—Stelle. Before his feet could touch the ground, the bespeckled man thrust forth his contour-gripped cane—pulsing a calm, soft red—into Stelle’s reconstituted forehead. Instantly, the woman’s face grew calm, her chest purged of that golden, world-shattering light. She lost all consciousness. Her eyes rolled back to the back of her head. She fell backwards, her legs no longer instructed to support her weight.
Dan Heng dashed behind his new companion, tossing his spear to the side to cushion Stelle’s fall. Gently, he set her to the ground, keeping her head at rest on his lap. Himeko and March followed, the latter breathing a sigh of relief as Dan Heng secured Stelle’s fall. The archer slid on her knees as she got closer, sliding to a stop at her friend’s side. With a thought, she disengaged all of their armor, knowing that the danger had subsided. With a trembling hand, she caressed her friend’s face. The friend who she felt she had known for a lifetime.
March remembered how that face would lock up when Stelle was on guard. She remembered how its eyebrows would lift an inch when she was confused. She remembered when those lips would curl up a centimeter when she was amused. And she remembered the way that face would slacken, the way those lips would tremble, the way those eyes would moisten—when they had accepted her, like she had been told the best news in the world. The same face that had been so stricken with agony. The same face twisting, breaking, contorting from pain worse than any girl should ever feel. The same face that had been so calm and serene when its owner offered to sacrifice her life for them.
March caressed that face and began to cry, her tears raining down on Stelle’s pallid cheeks like they were the woman’s own. She didn’t care. They fit. Stelle deserved to cry too, for suffering all of this. March cried enough for both of them, for all of them. For being forced to endure all of this. For all the pain and exhaustion and terror and death. She cried for Welt for his wracking coughs and bloodstained hands. She cried for Arlan for his brutalized back. She cried for Asta for the guilt she must have felt. She cried for the researchers and their thousand dead.
She was still crying when the Astral Express screeched into the dock, when Pom-Pom trudged their way to her on their tiny little feet and gave her a furry little hug. She was still crying when Himeko picked her up into a princess carry and tucked her under her covers. Then, it was finally over.