Chapter 2
It was already dark, but the streetlights made my road home none too much of a hassle. Alex's house was, thankfully, in a familiar section of the neighborhood – a convenient fact, given that I've completely forgotten to ask for directions from…well, Alex wasn't an option, judging by his mood, but the lady who saved me from him would have done well.
And there it was, my house. I wondered how surprised my family would be when I got…
…
…home…
They were crowding around my house – pseudo-humans engulfed in an indigo suit of armor complete with an alien-like mask. Blackwatch. One by one – my parents, my sister – dragged out like rag dolls. The youngest one, my sister, and in my opinion the idiot, began to bawl.
"You did this to big brother too, didn't you? And now you're doing this to us. What have we done? We are good, law-abiding citizens, we've-"
BAM. Screams.
BAM. Feminine scream.
BAM. Nothingness.
A muffled thud, and the last one of them – my mother – fell, her forehead replaced by a blatant, spewing hole. One of the Blackwatch troopers kicked lightly at her motionless body. "If Checkmate asks, resisting arrest and disrupting public order," he joked sickly, inspiring an eruption of guffawing from his comrades.
"They'll always try to protect us, those dunderheads, even when some of us might not like their ways."
Those words decided to come to me at this unfortunate occasion – are they mocking something?
Suddenly I forgot the art of walking, and my feet danced numbly backwards…into a trash can. Clang.
The men paused and spun round, an electric blue pulse of light flashing from their mask where the right eye would be. "There, MIA'd tango, get him," ordered one who appeared to be the leader. Crap. I ran – or rather I tried to – and before I could launch myself a single step away from them a surging force swept at me from behind, and my chest hit the floor, the metallic knees of a soldier immobilizing me completely. Footsteps around me hastened then ceased, and the leader of the group delivered a brutal kick to the side of my stomach. "Radio in for a chopper," he barked, "get this one to GENTEK and see if there's a match." Another trooper puffed mockingly, and dabbed the back of my skull with the barrel of his gun. "Looks like him alright, sarge," he jested, "I'd put a round in right now." I winced with that remark.
So this is how I die…?
A sickening splatter, and the weight on me was instantly gone. A flurry of masculine squalls, and as I forced my head around, every one of those burly gunmen that previously surrounded me decayed into heaps of blood and flesh, some split from the torso up. I felt nauseous, until a pair trousered legs planted themselves before my eyes. Alex.
But something's wrong – odd, unusual. His entire arm was a lumpy, bloated black, and what used to be his fingers were ghastily elongated, their tips razor sharp.
Like…claws.
Another team of soldiers took aim from afar, but before they could attack, a silhouette leaped through the window of a shop, its arms resembling bulky scimitars; and with shrewd slashes, those men met a similar, gory end. Alex spoke none, only pointing at me for a moment, cuing for the other figure to leap towards us with amazing speed and dexterity. It was the woman who prevented me from being pounded by Alex. Somehow she could read the man's fuzzy sign language, and with a sweep of her arms I was over her shoulder, feeling the coursing wind once more as she sprinted away like lightning; her stamina and velocity baffled me until much later. And as we made off, I could see it – incredible it was – with his pseudo-claws, Alex furiously ripped at the soldiers, tearing one apart with each swipe, and the bullets ejected from the men's guns seemed only to succeed at creating glaring sparks on Alex's skin.
It was incredible, and more importantly, Alex was right.
Something was going wrong.
Sabrina – as the lady called herself – polished at my bruises after she put me down in the same house I've curtly exited less than an hour ago. The other half a dozen people who congregated in the room before sat quietly on the armchairs, until Sabrina finished up with my wounds, and Alex coincidentally marched in, his hands back to normal. The latter man stood in front of me, his expression frigid as ever. "You can go back out there again, kid," he commented hollowly, "I'm not expecting anything here."
Perhaps it was the anger of losing my family – no, that was minor, somehow; it must have been the wave of emotions I've got when I thought that out there, Blackwatch was doing this to so many other innocent civilians; and more importantly, Alex was right – the absurd stories of conspiracy he showed me – they're all true. This time, without a thought, I blurted it out.
"Alex, I'm joining you."
Expectedly, his face was still stiff as steel. "Now that's a surprise," he said, his look showing nothing of that, "you might want to say it again, Ryutsuri." The adrenalin persisted, and I stood up, looking right into Alex's beady eyes I repeated it. "I want to join you, Alex." He sniffed. "Very well." His hand swelled suddenly; an army of dark, thread-like entities wormed out of his pores, engulfing his limb with the same glossy black I've seen previously on the streets. The threads branched up his fingers, narrowing them, stretching them until they became the very claws he had used to slay the Blackwatch men. "This might hurt," he smirked, brandishing his claws, and before I could react the sharp ends of his strange weapon were buried in my chest. Pain.
Yet, it wasn't that bad – not as much as one would expect for a stab wound in the heart. But there was something more, like a river of energy coursing into me, its sheer amount rendering my legs jelly. I blenched on my knees, hissing to those queer, conflicting sensations, my eyes endeavoring to make sense of what might be happening. "From now on," his voice rang faintly in my ear over the agonizing sea in my mind, "I am your teacher, Ryutsuri Kanter."
