Day was dawning cold and gray, with just a little hint of sunlight peeking over the horizon, the highest the sun would rise this time of year in Arctika. It was unusual for Olivia to voluntarily be awake at this hour, but after her father so coldly and inexplicably rebuked her the day before, she'd lain awake all night wondering exactly what she'd done wrong. She'd disobeyed him, yes, but if she hadn't, the Grandmaster would've bled to death. Shouldn't saving him have trumped his ire for her disobedience? Perhaps, she reasoned throughout the long hours of the night, he wasn't truly angry, but rather, his anger was a mask for something else entirely. Maybe he was scared, she thought. Maybe he was scared just knowing that Olivia wasn't safe anymore with Reiko on the loose. Or maybe he was just humiliated that he didn't just lose a fight to the General, but got his ass royally handed to him. The possibilities tortured her all night long.
Finally, after tossing and turning in her bed a hundred times, Olivia saw the faint glimmer of daybreak cut through the night. With a heavy, frustrated sigh, she kicked off her blankets and crawled out of bed, dreading another day spent on very little sleep. She dressed in her plain black training robes, pulled her hair into a messy half-bun, and carried her precious dragon egg in one arm from her room. Since the Crown Prince had showed her that it was merely dormant, not dead, the tiny creature trapped inside had also weighed heavily on her mind. Jiayi was right; letting the dragon live its life in stasis was cruel, and with nothing better to do at the moment, now was as good a time as any to rectify the problem.
Yawning, Olivia set the fragile egg on the floor of the coat room at the rear of the Temple before she straightened, stretched out her stiff back, and then pulled on her long, fur-trimmed coat. As she knelt down to find her thick snow boots in the mess of boots lined against the wall, a voice behind her suddenly said, "Would you like some company?"
It was almost comical the way she yowled like a cat drenched in water and leaped at least three feet in the air. With heart pounding, she panted and whirled around furiously. There stood Prince Jiayi, his face an expressionless mask. Only his eyes glinted in amusement.
"Are you stalking me?" she snarled at him, breathing hard. Her heart raced a thousand miles a minute.
He calmly raised a dark eyebrow. "Don't be absurd," he replied. "I am always awake by dawn."
She frowned in disbelief. "Good God, why?" she asked as she now knelt on the floor and found her boots. She quickly began pulling them on, lacing them up tightly.
"To practice my neijia and to pray," he answered matter-of-factly. She finished tying her boots and he offered her a hand to lift her up. "It helps to ready my mind for the day ahead," he stated when she was on her feet again. "I never have a day of rest. I have too many responsibilities. Such is the life of a prince, I suppose."
"Uh-huh," she replied, not particularly inclined to feel sorry for him. And her head was still trying to wrap itself around the concept of waking up early on purpose. Logically, she knew such people existed. But for the life of her, she never understood why anyone would want to wake up every day at dawn.
"I have just finished my prayers, Olivia," he continued. "I saw you walking with your egg and assumed you were taking my advice."
"Only because I can't stand the thought of any living creature needlessly suffering," she replied. "If what you say is true and this dragon is alive, then I feel horrible for keeping it in an egg on my desk all this time. But that has nothing to do with you."
Jiayi now cracked a faint smile. "You really don't like me," he deduced.
"It's like I told you yesterday," she replied. "I don't like people who discriminate against me just because they don't understand or agree with what I am. The Cryomancers are all like that."
He raised his eyebrow again. "If what you say is true, then you are prejudiced as well, Olivia," he pointedly told her.
"What is that supposed to mean?" she demanded to know. "I'm not prejudiced."
"Aren't you?" he challenged. "You made a gross generalization about my people. Your people. You automatically assume that every Cryomancer hates you merely because of your Hydromancer lineage. That is a prejudice." Now he crossed his arms. "But listen well, Olivia. I can assure you that not every Cryomancer feels that way about you. Most Cryomancers don't even have an opinion of you one way or another because you matter little to their lives. We worry about the problems of Outworld, not about the ethnicity of a woman in Earthrealm." He chuffed. "To be perfectly blunt, if I think anything of you, it's that you are conceited."
Olivia's mouth fell open at his declaration. "I am not conceited!" she protested.
Jiayi shrugged. "Perhaps not," he said. "But in every encounter I've had with you thus far, you've been very self-centered." He paused and leaned forward, his eyes still twinkling in amusement. "Not everything is about you, you know."
"I know what I've seen," she retorted.
"Do you really?" he condescendingly asked.
"Yeah, I do," she snapped, tilting her chin up proudly. "My fears are legitimate."
"Your fears are unfounded," he shot back.
"You don't get to tell me that," she argued. "You don't even know me."
They stood there for a long moment, their eyes deadlocked, neither one moving. Finally, though, Jiayi blinked and pointed at the egg on the floor. "Let us continue this discussion outside," he told her.
"I'll go by myself, thank you very much," she haughtily replied.
"Have you ever hatched an ice dragon egg before?" he wanted to know, now smirking.
Olivia swallowed hard, thinking about it. She looked from him to the egg and back again. "Well, no," she admitted.
"Then perhaps you should stop being so stubborn and allow someone who has to show you how," he replied. As soon as he said it, he squeezed past her and scooped it into his arms before marching outside into the cold Arctic morning.
"Hey!" she yelped, running after him. "That's mine!"
He refused to give it back and held it high above her head when she tried to snatch it back. "Ice dragons are ferocious creatures when they're adults," he began to explain as he marched away from the Temple towards the sea. "But they're quite vulnerable when they're hatchlings. Infant dragons have many natural predators."
"In Outworld," she argued, still jumping and batting at the egg.
"I am certain that Earthrealm is replete with animals that would gladly feast upon a helpless reptile," he replied. "Ergo, we must use our powers to protect it."
Olivia chased after him, quickly growing winded from trekking through the deep drifts. He was much taller than she was and his long legs almost effortlessly glided through the snow. "Slow down," she panted. "I can't go as fast as you."
Jiayi turned and looked at her. "You are a Cryomancer," he said. "You were borne of ice and snow. Neither of those things should slow you down."
"You'd think that," she breathed, "but you'd be wrong." Now she looked back to the Temple, which was easily a half a mile back. "Why can't we just bury this egg in a snow drift closer to my home?" she wondered.
"The first ice dragons were drawn forth from the icy depths of the Bīng yang," the prince explained. "Water is their life blood. The sound of the sea crashing against the shore is the magical song that will wake this little one from his slumber and coax him from his shell." He pointed north towards the Arctic Ocean. "Last night, I busied myself studying maps of Arctika and of Earthrealm. I know the sea is close by. It is the best place to hatch your egg."
Jiayi began walking again towards the water, but now his pace was slower and she could keep up with him. They said nothing as they trudged another mile to the shore, and she gave up trying to steal back her egg. The sea this far north was not blue, she mused as they approached. It was always gray and, at this time of year, pitch black with shadow. The icy water froze into thin sheets as waves broke upon the rocky beach. It was high tide, Olivia knew.
"There," the prince said as he pointed to a shallow cave carved from a nearby outcropping of black basalt. "That will do nicely."
"Why is that?" she wondered as they trekked across the black sand and around boulders to get to the cave.
"It will stay cold enough to rouse the dragon inside," he explained, "but it will also shelter him from the other elements so that he has a fighting chance to live."
"It's not going to keep it safe from predators, though," she skeptically scoffed. "Sea lions like to rest here from time to time. And there are birds-"
"That is where we come in," he smirked as he looked back over his shoulder at her. He took her hand to help her climb over a particularly large and jagged rock, and after that, the path to the cave was easy. "In nature, ice dragons are protected from predators by their mother. But in her absence, we must improvise."
"How?" she asked.
"Watch," he said as he nestled the egg in the sand on the cave floor. He then flexed his fingers as his cryogenic power surged through them only a moment before a pulsating energy wave flowed from them. In seconds, a small dome of pristine, clear ice stretched and grew several feet around the egg forming what looked like-
"An igloo?" she asked. "I could've done that, Your Highness."
"You'll have to check the egg every day," he told her. "If the dragon hatches, it'll be trapped in there without food."
Olivia now knelt in the gravel before it. "What do they eat?" she wondered as she gently touched the icy shell.
"Meat," Jiayi told her. "Any kind will do, but the are partial to fish. When it's big enough, it'll start hunting for whales in the ocean."
"I wonder what this little guy will look like," she murmured, more to herself than anything.
"He will grow big," the prince said, but now he thoughtfully touched the ice as well. "But this egg was on the small side. If I had to wager a guess, Olivia, he's the runt of the litter. That is probably why Tsai Bing assumed he was dead. So when he hatches, he'll be much smaller than most others of his kind."
Olivia softly chuffed at that. "Just like my sister," she mused.
Jiayi's eyes grew sad at the mention of her sibling. "You're the eldest child?" he asked her, and she nodded.
"Yes," she said.
"It is trying, sometimes, being the eldest."
"I suppose," she shrugged. "It was worse when we were younger. Now, they're not nearly as annoying." She paused and thought about it. "Well, Sam is not nearly as annoying. My brothers still drive me crazy," she amended. "They still act like little children half the time."
He nodded. "Xinyi lives to exasperate me, I think. He is unruly and rebellious."
She frowned. "Is it because your parents are dead?"
"Possibly," he sighed. "Our mother died giving birth to him and our father died when he was still an infant."
"He told me," she said gently.
Jiayi wistfully smiled. "Did he also tell you that Reiko is the one who killed our father?"
Olivia's heart lurched. "No, he didn't," she said. "How?"
The prince swallowed hard and looked away. "I remember that day well," he said. "I was just old enough to fight in battle alongside him and the other Lords of Mòhé. But I was so young. So inexperienced." He scoffed and winced in pain before he looked back at her again. "When Xing betrayed the Cryomancers, Shao Kahn sent Reiko and his army to destroy us. We held them to a stalemate for three days until my father, King Guiren, fought Reiko himself to end it. He fought valiantly, but in the end, Reiko defeated him and took his soul. I watched the whole thing."
"Oh, my God," Olivia breathed, remembering how Reiko had threatened to do the same thing to her father, and very nearly succeeded. "I'm so sorry."
"I remember thinking how in awe I was of Reiko's power," he said. "The Lords of Mòhé have always been powerful men, but his ferociousness on the battlefield, his gift for strategy, his magical skill...his talents are sincerely admirable."
"I don't know that I'd call the man who killed my father admirable," she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "Reiko has very nearly killed my father on more than one occasion, Your Highness, and neither time did I stop to marvel at his cunning."
"Even if he is evil, a good general's tactics should be studied," he argued. "Furthermore, as a prince and the next king of Mòhé, I don't have the luxury of seeing the world in such black and white terms as good versus evil." He sadly scoffed. "When you become the Grandmaster of the Lin Kuei as your father has deigned, you'll soon discover that politics is an unsavory business. You will find that you have to align yourselves with ideas and people you despise. You will, in essence, have to lay down with the Devil."
She cocked her head and frowned, recoiling a bit. "What are you trying to say?" she asked in puzzlement. This sounded suspiciously like a confession.
"My brother…" he trailed off and then swallowed hard. "Xinyi has not learned that he cannot trust everyone he meets. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone. I would protect him from them all, just as I know you would protect your siblings from the fiends of the world. But he is naive. He willfully puts himself in harm's way without even recognizing he is doing it."
"He doesn't seem terribly naive," she replied.
"Then you are naive as well," he answered. He sighed again, the loudest one yet. "The truth is, and I'm sure you know this as well, sometimes siblings have nothing in common but blood...Sometimes you stay awake at night, thinking things that make you feel like a heartless monster, wishing for something different and then feeling sick with guilt because you know what the cost would be...There's a difference between having no siblings and having a broken one."
"Why do you think Xinyi is broken?" she demanded to know, and now he looked her squarely in the eyes, his blue eyes as cold as Arctic ice once more.
"Because he automatically trusts people he has no reason to trust," he replied. "And he needs to be corrected."
"He doesn't need to be anything," she hissed, the anger rising in her heart as she got to her feet. "He can trust me. I'm not the one trying to sabotage his life. You're just bitter and jaded, and a terrible brother." She furiously shook her head. "I'm going back to the Temple."
"Stay away from Xinyi," he replied as she started to leave. "He is not the man for you."
"I don't take orders from you. I'm not one of your subjects. So I'll associate with whomever I please," she retorted and then stormed off.
By the time she had returned home, the Temple was starting to come alive with activity. Incense heavily perfumed the air where the Masters and some of the older students began their morning with meditation. The scent mingled with the aromas of frying bacon, cinnamon rolls, and other tasty breakfast fare. Ordinarily, Olivia would have been drooling in anticipation - cinnamon roll day was her favorite - but her fury with Jiayi quelled her hunger pains. She would have to report her discussion with the prince to her father; it was awfully suspicious, she mused, how highly he spoke of Reiko while simultaneously condemning his own brother. Perhaps it was no coincidence at all that Jiayi had been the one to arrest the General after his failed attack on Mòhé…
"Olivia," Anya called to her as she stepped from the quarters she shared with the Grandmaster. "Come here," she beckoned. Her eyes were dark and sunken as if she hadn't slept at all.
"What's up, Mom?" she answered as she obeyed the nurse.
"Have you seen your father at all this morning?"
She shook her head no. "I haven't seen him since yesterday when he yelled at me," she replied. "He wasn't with you?" she now asked, puzzled.
"No," she sighed. "He was...upset with me last night. He decided to sleep in his office. But I just looked there, and he was gone."
Olivia raised her eyebrow at that. That was odd of him, she thought. Even when her parents argued, it seldom was bad enough for them to retreat to separate corners. They had made a pact to never go to sleep angry, she knew. It must've been a terrible argument for him to sleep in his office, away from Anya.
"Well, maybe he just needed some space after everything that happened with Reiko," she offered hopefully, shrugging lightly. "He seemed really on edge after he woke up yesterday."
"You're probably right," Anya agreed, now hugging her and planting a kiss on her temple. "Why don't you go down to breakfast and get something to eat?"
"Aren't you coming too?" she asked.
Her mother shook her head no. "I'm not very hungry. I'm just going to go to the infirmary and start working. If you see your dad, tell him I want to talk to him."
"Okay, Mom. Let me know if you need anything."
"I will, sweetheart," she said before gently pushing Olivia away.
"Why are we not attacking the Lin Kuei directly?" Rain demanded to know as Reiko stood atop an icy ridge overlooking a vast expanse of snow and the Temple beyond. Scattered throughout the snow at varying intervals around them were the bodies of a patrol of Lin Kuei warriors that the General himself had killed so they couldn't alert the rest of them to his army's presence. Blood stained the snow red in stark contrast to the pristine white. Their souls belonged to him now.
"Because, old friend, Himavat chose this spot well when he made his Temple here," Reiko answered him, watching it through a brass telescope. "There is an independent water source running beneath it and only one possible approach. They'll see us and stop us long before we make it to the gate. Furthermore, they have a portal linked to the rest of the Earthrealm Champions, and we don't want them to alert Raiden's ilk to our presence just yet." He looked at Rain. "Be patient, Rain," he told him. "I have a man on the inside. He'll open the doors for us."
"How can you be certain Sub-Zero will do that?" he asked. "I have touched him before, in combat. I know how dear this place is to him. Your blood magik infects him, yes, but is it enough to overcome his love for his home and family?"
"Oh, yes," he replied with a smile. "The man you once knew is my prisoner now - his soul is caged up tightly in a little box inside his heart. I have fashioned him into a golem to serve me obediently and without question. Until I say otherwise, he will be a deadly ally fighting his own people on behalf of my cause, and I am disinclined to set him free anytime soon." Reiko now looked back to the Temple through his telescope. "Sub-Zero will serve me until his dying breath."
There was no feeling in his heart nor memories in his mind as Sub-Zero quietly passed through the Temple, avoiding all people except those guarding the perimeter. Those men and women he'd commanded to stand down, much to their surprise. In all their years serving the Lin Kuei, he'd never once given such an order. It was strange that now, when word had gotten around that Reiko was alive and gunning for Olivia - or so they assumed - he'd order them to abandon their posts. When one of the Elites, a man the Cryomancer dully recognized as Justin, dared to question him about it, he'd punched him for his insubordination and knocked a single tooth from his mouth.
The guards are standing down and the doors are open, he silently reported, to who, he knew not. In response, he felt a deep-seated urge to rip the portal room down brick by brick.
"Nobody can escape," he muttered to himself, quite unaware he'd said anything. "They all must die."
"Grandmaster," the cyber-ninja called Shen greeted as he entered the portal room minutes later. Shen had been manning the controls in here, and when he saw the Cryomancer approach, he got to his feet and pressed his fist to his chest. "Can I help you with anything?"
"Stand down," he commanded, his voice more robotic than his automated underling.
The Master recoiled, startled. "Stand down?" he repeated. "I do not understand-"
"There is nothing for you to understand," he replied, his voice remaining even and cold. "I gave you an order."
"What if someone tries to come through the portal?" the other asked.
Any other person would have grown impatient by this point. But Sub-Zero calmly and silently summoned air to his fist, yanked out the moisture, and shoved it at Shen with no real effort. Immediately, a giant shard of ice exploded into existence and impaled the cyber-ninja through the middle, pinning him like a bug to the wall behind the control panel. He gurgled mechanically, his gloved hands weakly wrapping around the ice as if he meant to yank it out. But in seconds, his fingers slipped off the shard and his hands fell to his sides while his helmet slumped with a pathetic exhalation. He was dead.
When Shen was taken care of, Sub-Zero dispassionately slipped by his body dangling from the wall and sat in the chair before the multiple computer screens. On the main one, there was a glowing replica of the portal ring, and at the bottom, a blinking cursor waited for him to input a command. In a dreamlike fog, he quickly typed in his desired command followed by the appropriate codes that only he knew. The words, when they appeared on the screen a moment later, glared at him in bold red font, blaring their alarm:
EXECUTE SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE
"What's troubling you, Lady Olivia?" Xinyi asked kindly as he caught up to her in the hallway. "You seem quite distressed. So much so that you've been avoiding me all morning." He now caught her by the arm and maneuvered her around to look at him.
With a heavy sigh, she met his expectant gaze. "Your brother...he keeps telling me to stay away from you. So I began to wonder if he was right."
"He is not right," he said earnestly. "He means well, but I cannot live the way he wants me to. Therefore, I will decide who I will socialize with and who I can't." He wrapped his hands gently around her biceps. "Don't believe a word he says because he's jaded and misguided, and he listens entirely too much to Tsai Bing. I trust you, Lady Olivia. I know I just met you, but I trust you."
"Thank you," she sadly smiled, casting her eyes down at her feet.
Now he curled a finger under her chin and forced her to meet his gaze again. "Do you trust me?" he asked.
"I...I want to," she stammered, unsure of how she felt. Xinyi seemed caring and compassionate, but she had just met him and, while she liked him quite a lot, she wasn't quite ready to call any of her feelings trust. "I-"
She started to say as much, but he promptly interrupted her statement by pulling her to him and pressing her lips to his. She tensed in surprise for only a moment, but after a long second that lasted an eternity, she relaxed and let the warmth course through her as he softly suckled on her bottom lip. At some point - she couldn't precisely name when - his hands drifted to her hair and buried themselves in her tresses, pulling her even closer. Her body tingled in delight and began to ache in need.
When at last he let her pull away, it took every shred of strength in her to uncross her eyes beneath her eyelids. "What spurred that on?" she wondered.
He smiled and began to answer when suddenly, an explosion rocked the Temple and something fiery blew a huge hole through the nearby wall. Immediately, wood splintered and went up in flame like a candle, and the people who'd been walking by at the moment of impact now lay in parts on the floor. Those who weren't dead were moaning or screaming their pain. Olivia was on the floor with Xinyi as well because he'd yanked her down and sheltered his body with hers, and as more thundering explosions rocked the Temple, she rolled onto her back and saw him grimacing.
"Oh, God, are you okay?" she breathed, knowing somehow that this was Reiko's doing. She started coughing as roiling clouds of smoke began to fill up the hallway and burned her throat and her eyes.
"I'm alive," he strained to say as she sat up at pulled him up with her. A mess of wood shards jutted from his back like porcupine quills.
"We need to get you to the infirmary to my mother," she said, helping him to his feet as the ground rumbled continuously.
"No," he panted. "She'll have her hands full with more serious problems." He allowed her to drape his arm around her shoulders. "I need to find Jiayi. I haven't seen him all morning."
She hadn't either, now that she thought about it. Not since they'd taken the dragon egg to the cave and bickered about Xinyi. It was too big of a coincidence, she quickly decided. He was there when Reiko first attacked Mòhé, and he was there when Reiko broke free and sent Mòhé spiraling into chaos. And now he was here when Arctika was under attack for the first time in its history. He had to be the one who'd betrayed the Cryomancers.
As she hobbled with Xinyi towards the Great Hall where she knew everyone would gather for further instruction, she saw another one of the Elites, a friend of hers named Justin, running in that direction with a cloth pressed against his mouth. "Olivia!" he called, though his voice was muffled. He trotted towards her.
"What the hell is going on?" she yelped, though she doubted he had any answers for her.
"Your father," he panted around a mouth full of blood. His hand slid his cloth away just enough for her to see a missing tooth and a split lip. "He told the guards on the wall to stand down."
She recoiled. "What the hell did he do that for?" she demanded to know. In her entire life, she'd never seen him tell the guards to stand down.
"I don't know," he shook his head. "But when I asked him, he knocked my tooth out for my trouble."
"He hit you?" she repeated, her eyes growing large like saucers. That didn't sound like something he'd do, but when Justin nodded that she'd heard correctly, she asked, "Where is he now?"
He shrugged. "He went that way," he pointed down the hall from the direction he'd come. The only thing of importance that way, Olivia knew, was the portal room.
She nodded her understanding and then motioned for him to take her spot holding up Xinyi. "I'll go try to find him and get to the bottom of this," she told him and then looked at the prince. "Justin will take you to get help," she told him.
"I will go with you," he protested, trying hard to pull away from Justin's grip.
"No," she told him. "You're hurt."
"But your father is not acting like himself right now," he argued.
"I'll deal with my dad," she replied. "You find your brother. I've got some questions for him."
Anya was in the infirmary at her desk, weeping occasionally over her fight with Kuai Liang the previous night, wondering why he was so angry right now, when the first explosions began. Around her, the walls began to shake and groan, and distant screams touched her ears. Within seconds, smoke tickled her nostrils, stinging her eyes and forcing her to cough. Immediately, she jumped to her feet to see what in the hell was going on.
And then, there was another explosion. In the back of Anya's mind, she mused how strangely quiet everything became just in that moment. Everything. All of existence, covered in a thick, still blanket of complete silence. The people screaming tires and the loud booms just stopped. And then it happened: the white flash. It was blinding, taking away all definition of the infirmary around her, leaving nothing visible but the awful purity of the white. She flinched. That was all she really had time to do. Then came the deafening roar. It was a guttural thunderous growl, like some great evil had just been released into the world. After that, the ceiling and walls collapsed upon her. But the world had already gone dark.
The portal room trembled when Olivia stumbled into it, and dust and the occasional chunk of ceiling fell onto the ground every time the Temple violently swayed in time to the explosions. The lights in here pulsated red rather than their usual soft white, and the ring itself flashed intermittent alarms. But what immediately drew her attention was the body dangling from the wall behind the computer - the cyber-ninja Shen was dead, having been impaled on a stalactite of ice.
"Warning," an automated male voice said overhead, "the portal will self-destruct in five minutes."
"Oh, my God," she breathed, now running around the control station, squeezing past Shen's body to reach the computers. This was her father's doing. Only he had the necessary access codes to engage the self-destruct sequence. Desperately, she input commands into the computer, but this was a losing proposition. Just as the Grandmaster was the only one who could activate the self-destruct sequence, so too was he the only one who could deactivate it. Still, she tried, and when that didn't work, she tried to establish a distress call to Ft. Albany.
"Arctika to Albany, over?" she called into the speaker, hoping someone in the States was listening. "Arctika to Albany, over?" she repeated, and several more times after that.
"You're going to find it hard to call them with a severed line," a new voice spoke. Olivia looked up and saw her father step from the shadows, holding up a piece of the fiber-optic cable used to communicate with Ft. Albany.
"Dad, what the hell are you doing?" she demanded to know, jumping to her feet. There was something wrong with him, she immediately saw. His eyes were like onyx chips in spite of their blueness, and completely blank. She'd seen that expressionless look before, just once. Takeda had looked the same way right before he attacked her and tried to kill her in the Red Desert. She swallowed hard. "Reiko did stab you with the kamidogu," she now deduced. "You're infected. With blood magik."
He responded with a jet of ice aimed right at her face.
MKDemigodZ-Warrior, I wonder that as well ;)
alwaysdoubted, Subby is going to get much worse before he gets better!
Westcoast Witchdoctor, that is a damn good question! ;)
Daniel Barga, that's what I was trying to express with those scenes. I wanted it to be heartbreaking when you saw how much he loved his kids only to discard them like they meant nothing. It was also a reference to what Smoke and Cyrax did to the Lin Kuei babies years prior when they were automated. I have a feeling you're going to have a love/hate relationship with this new Sub-Zero LOL
Phant0mZ0ne, wow, thanks! That's a lot of reading. To answer your question about Jax's redemption, the thing is that I meant to show that more in depth in my little collection of one-shots in Aftermath. But I kind of lost interest in that project after I was stricken with writer's block, so I glossed Jax's part over in Ascension. But in my mind, it was just like they depicted in MKX - Raiden saved both him, Scorpion, and Noob (rather than Sub-Zero, like it was in the game).