Authors: Ben Bequer
Ahead, the last remaining manta rider had dismounted and walked towards me, striding over the bloody, muddy ground where I had just fought. He walked up to me and flinched when I fought the chains, trying in vain to rush him.
“Brackshock,” he said, butchering my name.
I figured the killing blow would come any second now. This was how he would become the leader of what remained of his army. Killer of Blackjack, now Lord of the Mist Army. I tried to get another glance at Apogee, but they had carried her off. She was beyond my sight.
The lord tried speaking to me in his weird tongue, but I couldn’t understand him, and before I knew it, I started weeping.
I suppose I should have been brave, stood my ground, spat at him, and taken the killing blow like a man. Like a warrior.
In fact, I had destroyed the Mist Army virtually by myself. What remained was now a threat to no one, a few hundred scattered about here and there. Even the villagers would send them off in defeat with what few warriors they had remaining.
But at that moment, bloodied and beaten, surrounded by my vanquishers, I wasn’t proud of anything.
I had wanted to save Apogee. It was the only reason for any of this, for all of this. To do one decent thing in my life and save the one person in the world that had believed in me, the one person in the world who cared for me.
But even in that, I had failed.
In fact, as I looked back on my life, I realized that I had failed at everything I had ever tried to do. I had ruined my life and now Apogee’s as well, but even before that, I had accomplished nothing, done nothing worth remembering. Sure, I had made some money but what did that mean now?
In fact, I was a failure and a joke.
I was nothing.
Chapter 21
What followed was a blur.
They carried me along, at first trudging on foot, then later on a hover vehicle, and brought me to the remains of their camp.
Their battleship was a smoky hulk, torn asunder by my mighty behemoth, of which there was no sign whatsoever. Around it was a hellish scene, bodies and parts of aliens strewn all over, flames crackling to black caustic smoke, injured soldiers screaming for aid. Surviving soldiers yelled, running every which way, in absolute chaos. Commanders fought to control panicked troops, trying to establish a new pecking order.
As I came amongst them, most stopped what they were doing and watched me, the warrior that had defeated them all. A strange silence came over the camp, where only minutes before the promise of battle was squashed by the charge of a great beast. These soldiers were hungry for a fight, astonished that their hopes for war ended so swiftly. And now, as they carried me into the camp, the face of their enemy became ever clearer.
One of them started it, a maniacal yelping howl, but soon the whole camp joined, rejoicing in their pyrrhic victory as I was led to a huge piece of still smoking, twisted metal and tied to it like an ox yoke. It was heavy, probably weighing a few tons. Unwilling to show weakness, I roared, hefting the whole thing on my shoulders and stood, looking at my captors with a smile.
“Now what?” I yelled, but was rewarded with more of the yelling. They saw a prisoner, a defeated enemy led away in chains, and that was reward enough for a day’s work.
The manta rider approached overhead, landing nearby and ordered me loaded into one of the smaller ships that managed to escape the behemoth’s wrath. The cargo hold of the vehicle they threw me into was dark, the floor wet and slippery, but I slowed my pace, despite the prodding of a few solders tasked with my detention. There was no place to sit, so I stood, carrying my burden without complaint. One of the soldiers was a pigrilla thing I had fought so often today. He watched me with a scowl, beating a club on his free hand as if taunting me to try something.
“So what’s your name, eh?” I asked him, startling and making him jump. It didn’t make him happy to show fear, so he hit me with the club once over the head. In the cargo hold were a dozen of the toughest, meanest fellows I had faced so far. They all closed around me, looking for trouble, taunting me in their strange, wheezing language.
“Any of you guys have a cigarette you can spare?”
I was rewarded with my humor with another thump on the head, and the combined laughter of the soldiers. But there was something in their merriment that I caught.
Was it fear?
“You hit me again, shit-for-brains, I’m going to eat your heart,” I roared, again scaring the soldier, and again getting another blow to the head for my effort.
But I responded.
Two minutes later, roughly, the vehicle landed, and the cargo door opened to a bright landing pad. There were many more warriors, of all manner of species. My friend, the manta rider was there as well, apparently now commander of the whole Mist Army.
They all regarded me with surprise and shock.
I was covered with the blood, bones and brain bits of the warriors tasked to guard me in the cargo hold. Their bodies were strewn about the bay in mangled pieces, or studded into the walls. And the ruined body of the fellow that had hit me lay draped over my metal yoke.
I honestly thought of charging them at that moment. Thundering down the cargo ramp like an out of control bull in Pamplona and mowing them down with my two-ton metal yoke. There was the advantage of surprise, and I would have a head of steam rolling down the ramp, but this bunch looked like the elite of the elite, and there were a lot of them. If there was a chance to escape, this wasn’t it.
The remaining manta rider was now the nominal leader of the army, and all the others were subservient to him. His armor was metallic silver with gold trim, the most intricate etching pattern I had ever seen. It was heavy, yet he looked as agile as his companions. The heavy plates protected him without restricting his movement. This fellow, unlike the two I had faced prior wielded a different weapon, a menacing two-handed axe, easily a foot longer than I was tall, and bladed with the same metallic-blue material as Shivver’s dagger.
He conferred with a wizard-looking fellow, who wore a mixture of robes and armor of white and black lacquer. The wizard’s armor was patterned with colorful sigils and runes and adorned with red gems that pulsed with power. He held a long spear, tipped with an orange glowing blade. A gleaming helm concealed his face, and muffled his strange language, which despite being different than his commander’s.
Surrounding them were a series of humanoid warriors, all in the same type of armor and colors, wielding a motley variety of weapons, including pistols, rifles, shields, swords and spears. Within the uniformity of colors, they varied widely, from a rifle wielding few with full heavy armor and gem adorned helms to a lightly armored fellow, holding two machine pistols, his tall helm topped with a high hair crest much like a Spartan helm.
Yet another, obviously a female wore tight fitting armor on the upper body, which was proportioned much like an adult woman’s, with overlapping, plates over the shoulders and arms, but the legs were free, save for knee-guards and heavy boots. There were six of them, probably skirmishers for they wore light pistols and swords.
Towering above us all were two armored stilt-walker creatures of strange design, in similar black and white colors as the rest, but out of place. The main body was a carapace, like that of a tough beetle but metallic, painted white with black trim, standing upright on two rickety legs, each almost ten feet long. Two offset crimson eyes, separately mobile and stereoscopic, watched me closely. They held long, formidable spears, also painted with the heavy white/black lacquered motif, and had a shoulder mounted weapon of some sort, along with multiple antennae jutting from the back of their carapace.
I stepped down into their midst, and they formed a semi-circle around me. I tossed on the floor the heart of the pigrilla warrior that had taunted and beat me aboard the transport.
“Anyone fucks with me, you get the full treatment,” I said as menacing as possible so the meaning wasn’t lost, even if the words might not be understood.
Then I strained at my holds.
Their strategy to hold me wasn’t scientific. They figured to tie me to a large piece of metal, and lasso the strongest metal cable they could find around each of my arms so many times that my skin wasn’t visible below my elbows. But the cables couldn’t hold me, and the big piece of metal groaned under the punishment.
I felt a few pokes with weapons, trying to subdue me, but nothing could stop me now. The metal behind me popped, cracking across the straining back muscles, and the restraints snapped like twigs. Both pieces of metal fell behind me and I freed myself from the cables that remained around my arms. They all readied for a fight, ranged weapons locked, melee weapons poised to strike, but the Lord stood forward and held his arms out to his forces, easing their concerns for a moment.
He spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand his yipping, “S”-heavy language. It seemed like it took him three minutes to say one word, it was so involved.
He motioned to himself and said, “Varshantas.”
“That your name?”
Varshantas repeated it, nodding.
I pointed at myself, “Blackjack.”
“Brackshock,” he said, butchering my name and motioning beyond. He moved away from the platform as if for me to follow.
Only then did I bother looking around.
I stood on a circular landing platform, high above Shard World, with many dozens of shards sailing behind. I couldn’t spot the shard where the village lay from a cursory glance, but I did notice pieces of planets of all sorts, covering the entire color spectrum. Some dead husks, devoid of all life, while others were teeming with it, much like the shard where the village lay.
Where Varshantas meant me to follow was a long platform that led from the landing pad, to an open archway, tall enough for the huge warriors to pass unimpeded.
An archway that led into the Lightbringer’s citadel of silver and gold.
* * *
They led me into the citadel, and quickly my mood turned. It was similar to when I had seen it before, peace filled my heart, all my rage at Apogee’s death, my shame for failing to save her, it was all swept away as if by a cool summer breeze.
Varshantas led the way, his entire entourage following. Even the huge long-legged warriors had no problems with the high vaulted ceilings. The walls and floors were made of the same silvery material, but up close it looked more like hardened gelatinous material, like the sides of a dried jellyfish. Another thing that struck me was how organic everything looked. No two sections looked the same, and everything was rounded, with no sharp corners or angles. It reminded me of a termite mound. The only difference was that the raw materials here were opalescent and glistening.
They lead me to an open courtyard with glowing disks of light on the floor. The wizard stood atop one and it floated upwards to one of the many other platforms. Moments later, another glowing disc appeared in the same spot and Varshantas motioned me to step on. When I did, the disc followed the wizard up. Looking down, I saw he didn’t come along, nor did most of his host save for the two large soldiers.
When I landed on a pad, the wizard was ready, casting a spell on me. Raw magical energies surrounded him, like dancing streaks of power. His incantation was finished before I could react, and in a second, I was paralyzed. The thudding impact of the two huge warriors landing beside me was enough for me to fall over.
They reached down and picked me up, carrying me face down through a hallway towards a dead end.
There, the wizard recited another hex making the wall turn from a hardened jelly to a semi-permeable membrane, a fact I discovered as the two warriors threw me through the slushy material into a small holding cell.
With a wave of his gloved hand, the wizard reverted the “door” back to a wall, and I was fully enclosed, entrapped and helpless.
* * *
But not alone.
The cell was a twenty-foot cube, with hard walls that filtered out most of the light, and it was teeming with life. The first thing I noticed was small insects, like a colony of ants, except these were like army ants on steroids. Each was about three inches long, with massive hooked mandibles. They swarmed me moments after arriving in the cell, and only after stamping out about half the bunch did they slink back to their hiding nooks, leaving me alone.
Other creatures loomed amidst the slimy underfoot, including strange yellow tapeworms, inch-long planarians, and tiny glow worms that were apparently the main food source for the inhabitants of this cage, when I wasn’t around.
A large spider-like creature hung from a haphazard web on one corner. It was white and powdery, with legs as long as my arm, but it seemed content to stay motionless and out of my way.
One green/blue flying insect, looking like a cross between a wasp and a scorpion kept approaching me, making strange hissing sounds, as if trying to communicate, but I batted the sucker away. It danced around my blows easily then settled on a perch near me, watching my every move.
After the ant assault and the wasp/scorpion flyby, things settled down a bit and I managed to lean back on the spongy walls and get some rest. But I couldn’t sleep. Not with those creatures threatening to return.