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Mixly and Jastear were at a loss.
The cyangel was dangerous and damn near indestructible, but she was so cowardly
and uncoordinated that it was hard to tell how much of a threat she actually
was. They had already decided to call the keeper, but by the time Jastear
opened the comm line, the armored man had already arrived without them
realizing.
“Knight Sabre, how long have you
been here?” Mixly nearly jumped out of his skin.
“I told you I would follow shortly,
and I did,” Sabre answered. “I sensed your encounter with the target and rushed
to aid you, and it seems I’ve arrived just in time.” The cyangel, upon noticing
the keeper’s arrival, went from hysterical panic to silent fear.
“Our weapons are mostly ineffective,
Knight Sabre. We only managed to corner her through a lucky shot and her own
weapon jamming,” Jastear explained. “What are we to do?”
“Since it appears this creature is
the source of the signal, it is likely a scout paving the way for whatever
force has been afflicting the other colonies,” Sabre declared. “Thus, it must
be destroyed before it can report back. And, if it is so durable, I shall
simply strike it down with a more potent weapon.” With but a thought, Sabre
called forth a small construct buckled to his waist. It reassembled into a
sword hilt in his right hand, then generated a brilliant blade of equal parts
light and psionic energy.
With an even greater threat
presented, the cyangel went from silent fear back to screaming hysterics and
tried to wield her jammed rifle in defense. However, Sabre just sliced through
it like paper. Next, the gynoid tried to fly up using her small wings, and
despite her impressive speed taking the two officers off-guard, the keeper
caught up to her in mid-air with a simple jump. His first slash barely missed
her, slicing through one of the hollow buildings. However, he followed up with
a psionically enhanced palm strike that sent her through the building and into
an adjacent street.
The cyangel picked herself up from
the rubble, coughing and gasping. As she hacked up synthetic blue blood, the
gynoid realized she had taken her first real damage in the fight and froze. Her
cheek was torn, revealing the mix of flesh and cybernetics beneath it, and she
felt vulnerable…weak…mortal…so she screamed.
“And now to…” Sabre landed beside
her, ready to deliver a coup de grâce, but her scream stopped him. Not out of a
sudden desire to show his wounded foe mercy, but because he realized what kind
of cry it was.
“Knight Sabre, why have you
stopped?” Mixly asked as he and Jaspear ran through the remains of the fake
building. The cyangel continued to scream while occasionally yelling something
in the Bulliries language.
“Jastear, what is she saying?” Sabre
asked in a deathly serious tone.
“Huh?” Jastear was taken aback by
the request but quickly tried to translate. “It’s hard to really tell. I’m only
getting every third word, but one I hear a lot is the word for ‘elder’ or
something close to it.”
“What kind? Like a parent?” Sabre
nearly yelled at his subordinate.
“It’s less of a word and more of a
modifier, not like a specific kind of elder, just something comparatively
older,” Jastear stammered. “But I don’t understand. What’s so important about
her ranting and raving?”
“You two, can’t you tell? That is
not the scream of a dying animal. It’s that of a child screaming for its mother
to protect it!” Sabre explained. “I’ve made a grave error. This is not a scout!
It’s a fledgling! We must regroup before-”
A winged humanoid crashed into the
area, cutting Sabre off. It was another cyangel, and a much bigger one at that.
She stood taller than the keeper, with long black hair and a giant pair of
white wings with a wingspan nearly the size of one of the fake buildings.
Unlike the little one, who only wore a uniform, she was in cybernetic armor
similar to the keeper’s. However, hers was even sleeker, yet appeared just as
sturdy, and was colored pure white with red glowing lines running through it.
She wielded a massive construct axe, partially composed of light like Sabre’s
sword, but held together by a different force that the keeper didn’t recognize.
Her piercing red eyes glowed with a malice one would never expect from a mostly
mechanical being, and if looks could kill, Sabre would have died screaming.
“Explain yourselves. Why have you
harmed the little one?” The cyangel warrior demanded an explanation.
“Knight Sabre! The signal is
resonating even stronger than before!” Jastear’s eyes widened as the device
they’d been using to trace the mysterious signal went haywire in the new
cyangel’s presence.
“Then my answer is obvious: you two
are clearly invaders of a Federation-controlled world,” Sabre held his sword
over the young cyangel. “You’d best surrender, or we’ll subdue you by force as
well.”
“An empty threat,” the black-haired
cyangel mocked him. “I’m no fool, I can feel you trying to probe my mind,
keeper. I challenge you to try. See what happens.” Her confidence shocked the
keeper, but he had heard plenty of foes boast of their great mental defenses
before they were swiftly humbled, and he figured this would be no different.
“Soon I will know everything you do,
machine. Your creator was careless to leave you with an organic brain,” Sabre
pried deeper into her mind, but just as he peeled off the highest layer of her
thoughts, he was hit with terrible psychic feedback that nearly knocked him off
his feet. As if a thousand-thousand voices screamed at him to get out. “You
horrid machine, how can you live like that?”
“Oh, I assure you, it only takes a
little time to understand how such a constant chorus of voices can become
comforting,” the cyangel laughed. In less than the blink of an eye, she was
already upon him, tackling him off her sister and smashing him through another
of the false buildings. Still reeling from the psychic feedback, Sabre
struggled to mount a solid defense, but even if he wasn’t, he quickly realized
she was already faster than him.
“Know no peace,” Sabre tried to
paralyze her with his psionics, but he only managed to slow her down.
“Know only peace and oblivion,” the
cyangel brought her axe down onto him, which the keeper barely held back with
his blade.
“Shoot her down!” Sabre ordered the
two officers. They opened fire, but their shots didn’t even annoy the cyangel.
“Try the ploder charge,” Mixly
whispered to his partner.
“We’ll kill Sabre,” Jastear pointed
out.
“She’ll kill all of us regardless,”
Mixly countered. Jastear acknowledged this, armed the explosive, and threw it
at the gynoid. Realizing what was coming, Sabre raised a psychic shield, while
the cyangel simply turned to face the object hurtling towards her. With a
deafening explosion, fire and smoke engulfed them both, leaving a sizable
crater in the ground.
“Did it work?” Mixly asked as the
young cyangel flailed, watching her elder vanish in a ball of fire.
“It did not,” the elder cyangel
emerged from the smoke, barely scuffed, the keeper now impaled on her axe.
“Thanks for distracting him,” she mocked, gripping her axe tightly causing
something to pulse through it and into Sabre. The keeper convulsed and writhed
before she tossed him aside.
“What did you do to him?” Mixly
aimed his rifle at her head while Jastear aimed for her wings.
“The same things I’m about to do to
you,” she answered before blitzing the two, stabbing through them both with her
bare hands, as if their armor didn’t exist. “Know only peace and oblivion. As
you vanish from this world as you are, know that what remains will go on to do
wonderful things.”
“What…is…she…?” Mixly struggled to
decipher her cryptic words as something poured into him through her hand. He
turned to see Jastear’s eyes roll into the back of his head as he went limp.
Soon his own vision began to fade as he struggled to so much as turn his head.
All he could hear was the young cyangel still babbling and crying. For some
reason, for the briefest moment before the world went to darkness, he could
understand her.
“….ome….Home…Want to go home!” She
exclaimed before Mixly felt himself disappear into oblivion.
\\\<~--~>///
The battle was over, and all three
agents of the Federation were rendered incapacitated and convulsing as an
unstoppable process overtook them. The young cyangel was barely aware of this
as she sobbed into the ground. Her only thoughts and desires were focused on
the ever-distant idea of home.
“I don’t want to be here anymore. I
want to go home, I want to go home!” She pleaded to no one in particular.
“It’s alright, little one,” the
elder cyangel appeared by her sibling and comforted her. “Soon this place will
be home.”
“I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t
make this place home. Look, just look!” The younger gestured to all the crude
mockeries of buildings surrounding them.
“I know it’s been hard, but now
we’ve put down roots,” the elder looked aside and smiled at the three
convulsing figures who had begun to rapidly change, especially the keeper.
Whatever soul had lived inside that suit of armor was gone, something new was
rapidly emerging, and the cyangel couldn’t be happier.
\\\<~--~>///
After Mixly, Jastear, and Sabre
failed to return from Upillio and all attempts to contact them failed,
Federation Command went into a minor panic. This was the third scouting party
in the past two septocycles to disappear without a trace, and while they
floated the idea of a search-and-rescue operation, they shelved the plan when
two more groups vanished just as suddenly. Their only hint as to what might
have happened was that whatever signal Sabre’s group had tracked on the planet
had grown in strength, size, and intensity, and by the end of the next geocycle,
the planet went dark.
This could no longer be chalked up
to bad luck or a fluke. Something terrible was happening in the Federation, and
they had barely any idea what. However, some did, not that they wanted to
believe it was possible, but there was no other explanation. They were being
invaded, and quickly at that. It was only a matter of time before the major
core worlds were in this mysterious enemy’s sights, and that’s if they were
lucky. For all they knew, this enemy was already in their midst. Unfortunately
for the Federation, the truth was far worse.
End
Transmission…
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Setting down roots in a new place is a rewarding process with its own host of challenges. A language barrier, hostility from locals who don't like change, growing pains from missing your old home, struggling to carve out your own little niche and so on. But soon you'll find your problems slip away as your home and hearth grows wildly, and if the locals still refuse to like it accept your differences and manage the friction between you and them Make Them.
Until next time, Read, Comment and Enjoy.
