Chapter One

I was walking in the dark ever since.

When I was young my father was an alcoholic. He always hit and kicked me, especially when Mom wasn't at home. When she asked us what happened, he would always lie. It was always something similar to, "He fell downstairs." When I would try to tell her the truth, he threatened to beat me even harder.

I was weak and I didn't like that fact.

I was always bullied in school by the bigger and older kids, but one day I had enough. I started training myself by doing sit-ups and push-ups. Eventually I learned that it wasn't enough. Technique was just as important as strength.

I begged Mom to pay for self defense lessons, and because I was still her little honey, she did it. Dad wasn't very happy about that. Even though he was her husband, she was still the person who ruled the house. If she was mad, there wouldn't be any sex. So, when she started going on longer trips he started drinking again.

My mother had a job that required a lot of traveling. Dad just stayed at home because he was too lazy to get a job and always told lies to Mom. His employers didn't like him or some shit like that. All in all he was a bastard and an asshole.

Fortune smiled upon me one day.

He was drunk again and tried to beat me up, but I didn't let him. I tried to strike back at first, but I still thought there was a nice person inside him. As I ran away, he followed me out of the house. I was fifteen.

I ran over the street and he followed me just several meters behind, but he was to slow and it was his time. I don't remember much about what happened next, just the screaming of car breaks, a bump sound, and blood. It was an accident. The driver hadn't seen him until it was too late and Dad hadn't seen him at all. Mom was very upset over his death. She cried a lot because she only knew of his nice side.

Everyone has a dark side, deep inside themselves.

I tried to be sad too, but inside myself, my subconscious, I knew I was happy. It was like a demon in my life had just disappeared. I was free! I tried my best for my mom though. I pinched so hard into my arm that I started bleeding and I was able to cry in pain. I did it for her. She needed me this time and the best thing I could do was cry too.

Today, I still have the small scar on my arm and every time I look at it I manage a smile.

Mom still had a job to do and after the break caused by Dad's death, she started travelling again. She wanted to hire an overseer, someone to take care of me, but I convinced her that I was old and strong enough to keep an eye on myself.

When I got back to school, the bullying started up again, and this time I showed no mercy. After I had finished them, I held a chair in my hands and my three victims were lying on the ground, crying in pain and bleeding.

I stayed at the school, mainly because they just couldn't throw me out without telling Mom, and when it happened she wasn't there. When she finally came back she argued to the head teacher of my school that I had caught a hard time and somehow those kids deserved what happened to them. She told him that I had told her that these guys were making fun of my father's death and that this was the reason behind my revenge. She lied for me. She was the light in my darkness.

But, that wasn't the reason. To me, it was just payback for all the things they did to me in the past.
The other students were frightened of me and avoided me. I never had friends because of my former weakness and now I had no friends because of my strength. This fact confused me, but in the end I learned not to care.

Time passed until the final year of school arrived. I had prepared myself in anticipation of making my mother proud, but fortune threw a wrench in the gears of fate. Mom's plane crashed when she was coming back from a journey. They flew through a storm and crash landed into the ocean. On this day the light died and I was walking in the darkness once more.

I had lost my target and now I was alone. I failed the exam. The thought of suicide crossed my mind more than a few times, but I always managed to say to myself, "Fuck you, fortune. You won't get me down. I'll always stand again and laugh in your face." I had no other options.

My marks were too bad to get a well paid job. So I had to get another one. The only option was the military. And so I did.

The training was hard and some of my instructors reminded me of my dad, but if I had attacked those assholes I would have wasted my last option and then the only thing I would have left to do would have been to give up and pull the trigger. So I pulled myself through that and ended up in a special swat unit.

Now I was strong, but it was too late. We had to do several things in my occupation—assassination, anti-terrorist operations—all that kind of stuff.
I made friends in my squad. Well, kind of. They just didn't give me a reason to hate them. I was a normal guy back then. I had muscles, but it wasn't overdone, and every week there was another.

One day everything changed again.

One of our expedition teams sent us a message. They flew deep into space to look for minerals or other intelligent races like us humans. They had contact. But the message isn't always a good thing.

The message said that they were under attack and then the video contact was interrupted by a bright light. They were dead. The Earthen military sent a whole armada into that sector to avenge the death of their men and to give the attackers a sign.

I was close to the command bridge when we arrived. I was posted at the gate on guard duty with someone else. Before the fight started, something happened that had me confused for the next few years. We got a message from the attackers, which I listened to carefully. They somehow talked our language and greeted us like friends and wanted to exchange wisdom and basic materials. Does someone who just killed some of our people treat us like that?

The captain answered, but not in a way they expected. All of our ships opened unwarned the fire on the other fleet and destroyed all of them.

And this was how the war started.

Their answer came fast. They started invasions and bombardments on our colonies. We didn't know how they could have found us that fast, but somehow they did.

Our people started to hate these attackers, which called themselves Lylatians. They were different to us, anthropomorphic you could say. They looked like animals with the bodies of humans. That's the only thing we compare, I thought at that time.

After months of fighting we managed to find one of their colonies. It was the only one in a single system, but we took our chance.

Everything I remembered about the fight was the battle shouts of the men on both sides, the screaming of women, and kids and the crying of babies. It was a massacre. They only had a few soldiers down there and so we had an easy time with them. I followed their orders like a puppet without a will.

After everything was over we were ordered to look for survivors and execute them at once. Every one of us checked another ruin or building. I checked a house. When I arrived at the kitchen, I saw that they had just prepared dinner when we arrived. I also saw pictures of the family. The man was a German Sheppard and the woman was a lynx. I thought of what a weird pair they were. They had a child. It also was a female lynx with the fur color of her dad.

I walked through the house. Everything was clear; I just wanted to go. That was, until I heard something drop to the ground. I drew my rifle and went to the source of the noise. It brought me back to a closet I had already checked. I opened it and saw a compartment which I hadn't noticed before. I slowly opened it and I found what I was looking for.

The lynx from the photos sat on the ground, tightly hugging her daughter and both of them were crying.
The mother looked shocked to see me and tears were flowing down her cheeks. And then something happened I would have never expected. I looked into her eyes and everything I saw were the eyes of my mother. She always had something in her eyes like the woman in front of me.

The light started to burn for a while again. I was able to see behind her eyes, into her soul. They weren't much different from us, only on the outside. How was someone like that able to do such a thing as attacking us?

This changed everything in my live and I made a decision.

She and I hadn't said a word, but she begged me to let at least her daughter live. I put my weapon down, smirked, nodded, and made a sign that they should stay silent for now. The last thing I saw, before I closed the hideout, was the thankful face of a mother who was no longer crying in fear, but in thanks for her enemy's mercy. Before I left, I covered the compartment with some clothes, but not with too many, closed the closet door again, and left with my new target clearly in front of me. I went back outside. The picture of the thankful mother was still in my memory. Unfortunately, the others found about ten survivors and forced them to stand in a line.

I saw him.

I was shocked. It was clearly him. It was the Sheppard from the picture and I instantly had a plan to reunite him with his family again, but it was risky.

I walked up to their line and acted like I was randomly picking one of them to have a bit of fun, like beating them up a bit before I ended their lives.

I picked the Sheppard.

I ordered him with the influence of my weapon to go into one of the houses which were farther away so that my plan would be successful. While walking away from the others, I heard one shot after the other, and I hated myself for not doing more to rescue all of them.

When we were inside, I closed the door and brought him into a back room which was a bit discrete. He turned around and stared into my eyes with nothing less than hate and sadness. "What are you waiting for?" He asked me. "End my life so that I can be with my family again." Tears ran down his cheeks.

"Your wife and your daughter are okay," I said with a little smirk.

"What?" He thought I was fooling him.

"It's true. They're hiding inside the closet in your house and I want you to go back to them when we leave."

He just looked at me and his eyes were all I needed to know that he wanted to go back to them, but didn't have a means to. They told me, "How the hell is he going to do this? And why?"

"When I saw your wife protecting her daughter, she showed me a side of you I would have never expected, and I made a decision. I won't continue this meaningless killing. We made a mistake and I didn't do anything to stop them."

"So, what are you planning?" He asked.

"It's not a plan," I said in earnest. "It will give my life new meaning. We were fooled by someone and my new mission is to find the bastards and give them the punishment they deserve. And if it's in my power, to stop this war." The Sheppard was totally overwhelmed by the speech, he didn't say a word, but he also wasn't sure if I was serious about doing it.

"Lay down against the wall," I said, and without asking, he did. We didn't much time until the others would get suspicious.

I showed him just how serious I was.

I drew my knife. The Sheppard closed his eyes, because he thought he knew what would happen next. I took off one of my gloves and cut into my palm. The Sheppard still had his eyes closed. The blood was flooding out of my hand.

That was my plan. I grabbed a club with my bleeding hand and covered one end with it. After there was enough blood on it I laid it on the floor close to the Sheppard. Then, I took my bleeding hand and let it drip my blood onto his head.

He opened his eyes. "What are you doing?" He asked me with a shocked look at the sight of my hand.

"If they still find you, they'll think that you're dead and what helps more than blood?" He nodded slightly and got back in his former position.

When his head was covered in blood and slowly dripped off him I stopped. I ripped a thin table cloth into a long band and wrapped it tightly around the wound as I put my glove on again. "Stay here until we leave. I'll make sure that we go soon." With these last words, I left him.

"Thanks," he said silently, as a stray tear moved down his cheek.

When I came back to the others, the survivors were already executed, and lay with their faces in the dirt. I had to hold myself back just so I wouldn't kill every single human soldier in my way because of the act they just committed.

"The time will come," I thought to myself, sitting in my cabin on the way back to Earth. The others just celebrated in our flagship's mess hall over the massacre they just ended.

I knew talking wouldn't help. They just would have thrown me into prison and called me a traitor. I had to do something else. I had to keep cover, at least until I was able to flee from there and be able to start my research and maybe I'd get to help some people along the way.

My name is Lumen Belwil.

Author notes:

So my second story in here. I don't know when I'll be able to update this. I was in some strange mood and that's the outcome.

Corrected with the help of DarkInSpace