Authors: Greg Fish
Nelson and Dot recoiled while Christine tried to understand why this name caused such a severe reaction.
“You mean...” started Nelson.
“Yeah, my ex-wife,” finished Ace with a grimace.
“Your ex needs anger management classes,” said Christine.
“It’s not that really,” shrugged Ace. “She said something about how we didn’t communicate well.”
“How so?”
“I have no idea. There was also the whole power struggle thing.”
“What happened?”
“She got a bit crazy with power and got kicked out of the High Command after I brought it to their attention. She never forgave me for it and said I was a terrible husband for getting her dismissed from the Command.”
“How long were you guys married?” asked Christine.
“200 some years.”
Ace scratched his head and sighed.
“Ah well, nothing lasts forever,” he added with a sad smile. “Ok, personal discussion is over. Let’s do a damage assessment and send a supply list to the transport network. Let’s go people, let’s go!”
It was still dark as Christine was finishing her part of the assessment. The Nation’s forces were able to minimize the damage and contain a whole army of spawns and alien monsters to just a fifteen by five mile strip. This would be good news for Nelson who was afraid of the media fallout which would be bad enough on its own.
A church congregation turned into killer zombies, an interstellar war taking place in the global capital of planet Earth and more than enough collateral damage for sensationalistic reporters to portray the entire city as a war zone. And God only knows what would happen if the neo-traditionalist pundits found out that Ace’s ex might’ve had a hand in all this mess. The High Council of the Children and the High Command of the Nation immediately issued orders to classify Mai’s involvement.
As Christine compiled the final report on her small, holographic computer, a nagging question buzzed in her mind. Now suppose that Ace saw Mai’s seal appear on the forehead of the giant monster. He was there, she wasn’t and so she would have to trust him. But even if her name was emblazoned across the monster’s forehead in six foot runes, it didn’t mean that Mai had anything to do with this. If Mai set the battle in motion, where was she?
The answer came only a few minutes later as Christine stood in a dark alley between two high rises. Ordinarily, this alley was used for loading and unloading supplies and so the lights were always on. But during the battle, one of the spawns damaged the power lines linking the buildings to the energy grid. As she was about to head back out, a soft whooshing noise caught her attention.
She looked at the street, oblivious to a pair of red eyes and runes that lit up behind her. The soft rustle of clothing prompted her to turn around and she came face to face with Mai. A few inches away from Christine’s throat was the tip of her dark blade.
“So you’re Mai, huh?” asked Christine.
“That’s me,” confirmed Mai. “I’m looking for Ace. Mind giving me a hint where he might be?”
Ace warped into focus right in front of Christine and grabbed the sword pointed at her neck with his bare palm. His face displayed no emotion as he sized up Mai the same way he sized up opponents on a battlefield. Tucked into his sash was his sheathed sword, ready to be drawn at a moment’s notice.
“Leave the human alone,” he commanded.
“Oh so we’re using live bait now?” laughed Mai with a sadistic expression. “How long has it been Ace?”
“Five hundred years. Now get that thing away from Christine’s neck or else.”
“Christine? Who’s that?”
“The human you were trying to run through... You know, if you hold a sword to someone’s throat you could at least ask for a name.”
Christine took a step back, wondering what she wanted to escape more, the bickering or the sword that was aimed for her windpipe only a few moments before.
Mai wasn’t interested in the human anymore. With a flick of her free hand, her formerly human-like fingers morphed into claws very similar to Ace’s. Armed and laser sharp, her talons scraped his stomach, leaving small, thin scratches. Reflexively, she jumped back after the slash and warped out of focus.
Christine lightly touched Ace’s shoulder.
“You ok?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he replied coldly. “She just wanted my attention. I’ll deal with her myself.”
He cracked his knuckles and unsheathed his sword. The aura of the blade danced with a more anxious and urgent motion than usual, echoing its master’s anger. He followed Mai upwards.
[ chapter _ 024 ]
In the scant light of early dawn, two reddish blurs danced across the city’s jagged rooftops, unleashing red spirals of energy at each other. The spirals collided, exploded, bounced off each other and vanished into the air around them as the charged coils cooled into streaks of glowing plasma. They climbed higher and higher as they jumped on the rooftops of angled and twisting skyscrapers that reached miles into the sky. Finally they stopped on the roof of a spire rising in a twisting ladder, resembling the double helix of genetic code at first glance.
Ace’s and Mai’s stances clearly showed that both of them were accomplished killing machines. Their weight on their modified toes, their dark blades held out to their sides for an instant slash in almost any direction at a moment’s notice. They looked at each other with a piercing gaze, thinking five steps ahead.
Mai winked and demonstratively sheathed her sword, assuming the stance of ancient samurais in which a sheathed sword was drawn to carve its way into an opponent in only a fraction of a second. Ace smirked, assuming a sword-draw stance as well. He knew for a fact that her sheath was modified to shoot the sword from its side to accelerate the attack. His own sheath was built to do the same.
“So you learned a neat little trick,” he said. “You still won’t kill me, you know that. Besides, you’re doing it wrong. You’re assuming that I’m going to try and dodge or walk right into the slice instead of shifting my weight and trying to do something completely different.”
“Mind tricks don’t work on me,” shrugged Mai.
“Right, right... You always insist on doing your way.”
“Just like you do.”
“True. I know that I can be a pain the ass. But I don’t turn some poor souls into Shadow Spawns and plant giant monsters on a planet that has nothing to do with this out of spite. You’re either completely off the deep end or you made a deal with the Dark Gods.”
“It’s just a brief marriage convenience. They want you gone just like I do.”
“Mai, you’re killing me...” groaned Ace, shaking his head.
“That’s the plan,” she smirked.
“All right... Here’s an idea. You leave Earth right now, take whatever the Dark Gods paid you, run off and stop interfering. I will pretend this never happened, bury all evidence and you get to live.”
“No deal. I don’t get to rip your head off.”
“I didn’t say it was a perfect plan.”
“You know Ace... I wonder what would the humans say if they found out why you’re so interested in their planet...”
“Ok Mai. Now you’re just asking for it.”
“You wouldn’t hurt me and you know it,” she purred.
“Don’t bet on it,” growled Ace gripping the handle of his sword.
Mai angled her handle downward and froze. She was still for just a few seconds, but those seconds seemed to stretch into minutes. Ace already knew what she was going to do, but he had to wait for her to strike first. Mai didn’t know what she was doing with her katana yet and he would use it against her.
Her sword shot out of the side of its sheath just like he expected, its aura generating a wave aimed precisely at his chest. When the wave was fully formed, he released his sword in the same manner. For only a few milliseconds, the cityscape around him and a haunting image of the fading moon was reflected in the dark blade.
Instead of trying to dodge or turn away, Ace headed right for the energy wave coming at him. His sword sliced through the red hot pulse and generated its own spiraling wave of raw, immolating energy. His sword altered the charge it gave to its devastating blast wave and this new charge attracted much of the wave created by Mai’s sword, sending it back. This maneuver left only one option for Mai. Hope that her sword wouldn’t break when blocking the terrifying red burst.
Her sword held, but the combined attack was so powerful, it threw her off the roof. As she fell, she saw Ace’s sword aiming for her over the now distant ledge and drew her sheath to help block the incoming attack.
Warping into focus above her, Ace delivered a devastating blow with his blade, cutting deep into her sheath and scratching the sword underneath. He punched his blade from above, putting an immense amount of force on what was left of her sheath. The sheath and her sword splintered, falling to the ground in a jumbled mess. They embedded themselves into the skyscraper’s walls and into the streets below. Moments later, Mai smashed into the asphalt between several warped fragments of what used to be her weapon.
Ace landed on his hands and knees right on top of her, trapping her under his body. His sword stabbed into the ground just a few feet away. Sore but conscious, they looked into each other’s eyes. Their faces were just inches away.
Suddenly, Ace wrapped his right hand around Mai’s throat. Any bystander might assume that he wanted to strangle her, but she didn’t have a windpipe and like all cyborgs, she didn’t need to breathe. He grabbed her throat without any intention to kill her. With a quick yank of his hand, he raised her head closer and kissed her mouth. She protested at first but with minimal effort, quickly relaxing and closing her eyes as she kissed him back.
Removing his lips from hers, Ace opened his mouth and plunged his gleaming fangs into the base of her neck, pumping his toxin deep into her body. Mai groaned and struggled as his fangs sank through a thick layer of armor under the carbon gel but she couldn’t get loose. A few moments later, it was all over as he released his bite.
He stood up, wiping her blood from the corners of his mouth and cracking his neck. She lay paralyzed in the street. The toxin couldn’t kill her but it would burn as it spread through her body, numbing her all over until the nanobots inside her broke down the corrosive mix.
“You’ll be fine in an hour,” he said. “Of course you’re not going to move and you won’t be able to talk until the venom wears off. If I were you, I would take it as a warning. Next time you get in my way, you will die.”
He punctuated the last sentence by flashing his eyes and runes as his fangs still bore traces of her artificial blood. His crew was waiting for him and he walked back to the broken and battered district where a bloody battle raged through the long night, yanking his sword out of the ground as he passed by it. Even though Mai was obviously crazy and letting her live was a mistake, he just didn’t have the heart to kill her. Paralyzing her with poison stirred something cold in his chest, a sensation that a flesh and blood human would call a knot in his heart.
Many light years away, the Reaper’s holographic cube was frozen on the last second of the battle between Ace and Mai. The alien allowed something like a sigh to escape from his mouth, changing the image in his cube to that of Earth in all its altered glory. He compared what he saw in the cube to the images of the blue planet in his mind. Now, after the Nation’s machines allowed humans to do change everything about their world, the Earth looked almost unrecognizable.
“So he didn’t have the heart to do it,” the Reaper remarked to the odd shape that appeared behind him out of the darkness.
Two giant red eyes of a Dark God which emitted a haunting red light, ignited as the creature grumbled something in a low, bellowing tone like distant thunder.
“I wouldn’t take that as a sign of weakness,” the Reaper raised a claw in the air, a gesture he acquired from his dealings with humans.
Another grumble from the Dark God.
“Well humans are strange like that. They don’t like to kill former mates because of an individual emotional attachment. We can’t use that girl against him forever though. If we get him mad enough, he will kill her.”
The Dark God rumbled, clearly displeased.
“I wish I could tell you that I have a perfect weapon of some sort but I really don’t. Mai will still be useful, but I think that next time, I should leave her to her own devices. Humans are conniving creatures that can come up with all kinds of strange schemes.”
A slightly happier grumble came from the Dark God. He paused for a few moments and suggested something in his bizarre, guttural language, his tone taking the intonations of a question.
“Yes, human fighting human would be ideal, but it’s much more complex than that. Their society is very strange and even when the humans are fighting and bickering with each other, they can swallow their pride and overlook their differences to unite against a common enemy. We’ve seen that with the Shadow Nation and in the offshoot they call the Children all the time.”
The Dark God replied with a long grumbling which ended with a sort of chuckle as if the monster was laughing.
“I can’t argue with that. You’re right. Right now, the people influencing media and politics on Earth are a rather petty and jealous breed and they are loud and somewhat influential with many. But the average human doesn’t seem to care about what they say. What Ace is doing, is appealing to those who just want a few basic things to be content with life. Propaganda based on talking points means little to the vast majority of humanity. Ace’s empire gives them what they want. Tangible results. Trying to set up some sort of coalition of politicos on Earth to expel the Nation won’t work. Very few humans take them seriously.”
Silently, the Dark God considered all the options. His intellect, enriched by eons of experience could, easily develop complex plans. But perhaps for the first time in his long life he was completely lost and confused. With a short grumble he consulted the Reaper again.