"A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents."
~ Brother Lawrention of Old Earth
Chapter 8
The Boy Who Would Be King
0951 hours, 6th Axial Rotation of Joo'Lie, Valean Time
#2-01 Azalea Condominium, Western Sector, Vale
In the beginning, incandescent muzzle flash and the hot yellow crack of lightning weaponry had filled the room with a stinking, choking deluge of ozone. Then came the thunderclap of shattering masonry and the snap of breaking bones. At last came the screams, and then an all-encompassing silence. Perhaps a choking moan or two could be heard from time to time.
The boy stalked soundlessly into Cynthia's room. It was empty at first glance, and the room appeared to be intact. It hadn't been broken into, and it had been silent for the most part during the ordeal, except for its sole occupant's speeding heart. He looked under the bed, and a pale sweaty face stared back.
+ I trust that this is ample evidence not to blindly trust your visions? + half-questioned the woman as she crept out from underneath the bed.
The primarch sighed. It was a startlingly human gesture to behold.
+ I felt something different. Something interfered. Seconds before the door exploded, it had felt as though that thread of fate had disappeared completely. It had a different feel to it, which meant that it was the correct one. +
Even now, his bloodstained body scarred by a host of wounds each fatal to the mortal form, he seemed divine, almost beyond apology or mortal contradiction.
+ Is that very common? +
+ Not at all. It has never happened before, + replied the boy.
+ Odd. So is it safe to talk? In a physical sense, I mean. +
+ Definitely not. I haven't checked their bodies for listening devices. + came the reply as the boy helped Cynthia to her feet. + One of them yet lives. She's probably unarmed, but just to be sure, I'll go out first and you'll come out on my signal. +
The boy emerged from the room, the fingers of his right hand lacing the longsword's hilt. He approached the fallen huntress, eyeing her impassively. She backed up against the wall as he got closer, her eyes glinting feverishly with a maddened rage. He squatted down and reached a hand towards her mouth, and her eyes widened in alarm.
She glared indignantly at the boy's ink-black eyes, refusing, defiant until the end, and the primarch sighed.
+ OPEN. +
Her jaws obeyed immediately. A wave of uncontrolled psychic pressure swept over the room, cracking glass, and sending papers flying. Her jaws snapped open, displaying a full set of milk-white teeth and a tongue that flailed helplessly within. She tried to swallow, but the muscles in her paralyzed mouth wouldn't obey.
The boy reached his fingers within and probed under her lips and her flaccid tongue, searching every nook and cranny. Then, he at last found the thing he'd been searching for.
The boy held it up triumphantly. It was no larger than a fingernail, and he clutched the hard-plastic ellipsoid between two fingers before pocketing it. He closed the huntress' jaws and let out a sigh.
+ In retrospect, I reasoned that if you had one, you would have used it by now. But I did not consider the possibility that you were afraid of death. +
To the primarch's far-spectrum vision, the devices embedded within the huntress' bodysuit stuck out like a sore thumb. Blue shapes in a sea of orange and solar yellow. It was obvious to the degree of hilarity. He fell silent. The boy stretched two fingers towards a point on her chest and pressed them together, crushing a fold of tight black fabric between. Electricity arced and clockwork sputtered. Glass shattered.
Trying to stop him, the huntress kicked out at him feebly with a leg, but the boy caught it with his left hand and crushed her knee with obscene ease. Cynthia clapped her hands over her ears as the huntress screamed like a banshee, spittle flying from her mouth. The huntress screamed some more, and then even more, drowning the apartment in a sea of wails that gushed out of her mouth in an ear-splitting torrent.
+ I was going to do that anyways, but you were asking for it, + whispered the boy at the pale, crying face of the huntress. + You should never have dared this. +
"We did not know," she hissed.
The boy blinked slowly.
+ What did you say? +
"I said, 'we did not know'. All they ever told us was the name of this apartment's owner. They never told us that she lived with a monster," snarled the huntress.
The boy paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts.
+ How much did they pay you? +
"The White Fang?" The woman snickered, and spat onto the floor. "Ten grand upfront. We thought it was too good to be true for a single civilian, but since this was an Atlesian, we didn't really think it through. Then again, we were Atlesians as well. Now look where that brought us. We should have never trusted those damn faunus."
+ I understand now, + he said, staring through the huntress. He wasn't talking to her. + It's safe to come out now. +
Cynthia emerged from her bedroom and stepped within her destroyed living room. She glanced at the fallen huntress slumped against her fridge, and the huntress looked back, her eyes filled with shock that turned to hatred.
"T-Traitor," she hissed. Cynthia wanted to say something, but ignored her instead, her gaze flickering towards the pile of weapons that the boy had gathered on the table.
+ Take a suitable bag and dump everything inside. I won't be taking their clothing as they're oversized and undersized. They contain what appears to be trackers.+
+ And the bodies? + asked Cynthia, staring at the boy as he walked over to the huntsman's head. He bent down and balled his fist. Cynthia closed her eyes and the boy's fist came down and the man's head exploded into a swirl of red and chips of bone with black hair still attached to them. For a moment, the huntress lost her tough façade. Her eyes widened to the size of dinnerplates, and she closed them instinctively in abject disgust at the act.
The boy scooped up a puddle of gore with his fingers and downed it quickly. The acidic environment in his mouth caused an immediate degradation of the macromolecular structure of Esteban's brain matter, and his esoteric physiology absorbed its remnants through a sublingual membrane. Proteomic machinery converted the genetic monomers into a neurotransmitter signal that synapsed with gene-forged nerve bundles and was delivered straight to his brain with no delay.
Esteban's life was laid bare, privy to the primarch's mind. It was delivered in pict-flashes of hallucinogenic clarity and hyperactive instincts, the boy's sword-arm itching to try out the new techniques under the school of swordsmanship the Atlesian had been educated in. The primarch's mind analyzed every important moment in the huntsman's life, down to his sixteenth birthday, in a fraction of a second.
He stared impassively at Cynthia as she left the room, his gaze blank and aloof, and then the life flickered back into his eyes a moment later.
She hurried into her bedroom and found the largest bag she could find. It was made from a coarse dirt-brown fabric, and a thick braided rope looped through its hems. Cynthia rushed back into the living room and shoved the pile of weapons into the brown bag, but not before taking a pistol for herself.
+ Do you know how to use that? + asked the boy. Cynthia saw that he had assumed a gargoyle's crouch over the huntsman's corpse. He'd been staring at the man's dead fish-eyes the whole time, but somehow knew that Cynthia had taken the gun for herself.
Cynthia sighed. + No, not really. But it's better than nothing, right? +
+ That depends, + said the boy. + It's useful in the event that we run into Grimm, but you should just run if you encounter a hired huntsman or huntress. Without channeling aura into it, you won't leave a scratch on them with it. +
Cynthia sighed again. + I know that. Again, I'm sorry for being such a letdown. +
For a moment, the boy's face betrayed his surprise. He swiveled his head fractionally to look at her.
+ You shouldn't say that. You've been a great help to me. You've given me clothes and several sources of knowledge about this unfamiliar world. Besides, it's not just your possessions that make you valuable to me. You're rather intelligent and I'm sure that you'd make a great advisor in the future. +
+ Pfft, advisor? As if you'd need one. Well, what have you learned about these mercenaries? +
+ I know everything now. These weapons aren't tracked, so it's safe to take them. I know who sent them, but I am still unaware of where they're headquartered. It seems that I have operating under a misapprehension up until this point. They had never intended to capture me. Esteban was merely a fool who lost his composure and placed every card, including his semblance, on the table to try and kill me. This act was rightfully predicted by those who sent me. They were testing me, gauging my abilities. +
+ Atlas? + asked Cynthia.
+ No. I'll explain later. We have to go, quick. +
+ What do we do with her? + asked Cynthia. She averted her gaze at the huntress, who stared back with an envenomed glare.
+ Her name is Colleen Wisteria. She's the team leader. Do you know what this is? I found it in her mouth. +
The boy took something out of his pocket and tossed it to Cynthia. She had the fleeting impression of something small and silvery and caught it nimbly with one hand. Her eyes widened when she opened her palm.
+ It's most likely a kill pill, + said Cynthia.
+ So they still use these, even after all those years, + mused the boy.
+ What? +
+The Great War, of course. + came the reply.
+ Ah, right. It might also be a drug that grants a temporary enhancement effect, but you didn't sense any changes in their strength or speed, did you? + asked Cynthia.
+ No. +
+ Then it's probably a kill pill. + said Cynthia. + I think it's plain obvious to you why they'd keep one, eh? +
+ Yes. Does Aura negate its potency? I'm sure that Aura does not confer resistance to poisons. + asked the boy.
+ You're right, it doesn't. + said Cynthia.
+ We should leave now. I can hear the police coming up the stairs. +
+ What do we do with her? C'mon, answer me! + asked Cynthia. She stared at the shattered, but still-living body of the huntress. The spark of sympathy in her heart dulled within moments as she heard the primarch's next words.
+ What do you think? She is guilty of accepting a contract to kill you in return for ten thousand lien, and she holds no value as a hostage as it would be more efficient for me to stick to the usual means of obtaining information. +
Without a moment to spare, the boy sealed the bag with a tug of his fingers. He could hear the steel-toed boots pounding against the stairs, ascending three at a time, and the metallic clatter of rifles and riot shields, and the thunderous cacophony of the officers' speeding hearts.
"So what, you're just gonna give me to the cops?"
In truth, the boy, who had his back turned to her, did seem as though he was about to leave the apartment with Cynthia.
"No, not at all," came the indifferent reply.
"Then wha—"
The primarch was as quick as a lasbolt. Her brain didn't even register the threat when he spun on one foot to smash her skull into bloody splinters with his heel.
1131 hours, 6th Axial Rotation of Joo'Lie, Valean Time
Atlas Academy
A team of huntsmen slaughtered.
Colleen Wisteria – Cause of death: Cranial blunt force trauma.
Remia Lapis – Cause of death: Exsanguination by penetrating aortic injury.
Esteban Brown – Cause of death: Cerebral ischemia by penetrating neck injury.
Bruce Mahony – Cause of death: Blunt thoracic trauma with cardiac failure.
Even more disconcerting was the fact that they were graduates of Atlas Academy. They weren't nearly elite students, but their team had been ranked number 21 in a graduating class of slightly less than 50. In as cramped a location as the apartment living room, only someone whose skills rivalled or exceeded Qrow's possessed a good chance of prevailing against an entire team of huntsmen of this caliber.
Next, it would have probably associated the attempted assassination with the councils of one of the kingdoms. In all likelihood, the Valean Council would be blamed for the incident, though there was still a chance that it could be traced back to Atlas. The Atlesian Council had not ordered the attack, but James had a feeling that this fact was next to useless.
What next? Retaliation? Would it use the incident as a casus belli for waging a personal, guerrilla war against Atlas? The creature had trashed an entire team of huntsmen, but the number of huntsmen active on Sanus at any given time numbered in the tens of thousands. There was also a tiny, but permanent Atlesian military presence in Vale, the VPD, and Beacon.
And then, there was him.
On all of Remnant, the number of beings who posed a threat to the headmaster of Beacon Academy could be counted with one hand. James doubted that a second would now be needed, even after the latest developments. Ozpin himself had been following the latest developments with unusual eagerness, devouring report after report from James' task force. With him around, Beacon's defence was secured.
Presently, a hurried buzz came from a tiny speaker embedded in the headmaster's desk. Someone was requesting to be let in. An extended screen displayed the faces of his close associates, and Ironwood pushed a black button to the right of the speaker.
The basalt-grey doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing the two figures who stood outside.
"Specialist Winter. Specialist Augustus."
"General Ironwood, Sir."
They saluted, but it was Winter who had addressed him.
"How much does the public know of the latest developments?" asked the General. "Has there been a leak?"
"No, Sir. All data received by the Atlesian Tower has been scanned and cleared. The VPD have done a good job," said Augustus. They approached him respectfully as the doors hissed shut behind them, their boots tap-tapping against the star-patterned floor of the office. "But there is something that you must see."
"What about before the scan? The scan should have begun moments after we received the news from Vale. Accounting for the delay, it should have started minutes after the incident ended, which means that any Valean civilians who were aware of it could have sent information about it to Atlas. That's notwithstanding the time during which it took place. Have you checked for restricted data received during this crucial period?" asked James.
"Yes. That's what we were worried about, at first. Thankfully, there was nobody in Atlas that the Valeans wished to inform of the incident while it happened, according to the scan," said Winter. "The scan is still ongoing, conducted in real time. Any messages containing the keywords your officers specified will not be delivered to any Atlesian recipients, unless they are addressed to you, or anybody on this Task Force."
"Good. What was it that you wanted to show me?" asked the General.
"When the data log was scanned, we detected this," said Augustus, pulling a scroll from his breast-pocket. He set it on the General's table, and a holographic display flickered to life.
"Video files? But it's been locked by a private party. It is because of these situations that the Council has made private encryption illegal in the first place! It's incredibly, incredibly difficult to obtain private encryption in the first place, and there are extremely harsh penalties put in place by the Council. Nevertheless, it has continued to be a recurring problem!" grumbled James.
"Still, what's more intriguing is the CCT address of these two files. They're always changing, as if someone's using an CCT address scrambler to disguise the IP address of their sender," said Winter.
"The Atlesian Tower was specifically designed to prevent this from happening. If I recall correctly, there are countermeasures meant to go off whenever a sender's CCT address changes within a certain duration," said James.
"It matters not, General. We know for certain from whence in Vale it had been sent. After decrypting and reviewing the footage are certain that this contains information from the cameras worn by the huntsmen and huntresses who were killed by the entity," said the Specialist.
James blinked slowly. His heart sped up with an emotion that was not quite excitement. His right hand nudged a button on the back of his desk. The tactile click of a mechanical key was heard, and broad concrete shutters slammed down over his windows.
He gave the command. "Play the first video."
Augustus nodded. His fingers tapped the screen of his scroll, and the file titled ' (COPY)' was opened.
The holograph now took on the image of a long, dark corridor. A pair of arms stretched ahead, terminating in a raven-black, long-snouted pistol, and the crooked iron grille of the door to Cynthia White's apartment grew as the bearer progressed down the dim, cramped hallway. The ebbing of an azure electrocardiogram in one corner caught the General's attention. It read 92 beats per minute.
A single word was inscribed in homebrew green at the bottom of the camera's vision.
Esteban.
Esteban Brown, I remember. Physical altercation. Suspended a week. Disciplinary flogging. Class of 76. Blacklisted by the Academy for suspected involvement in illegal activity.
The bodycams, James recalled. So this is the footage they recorded.
He could not hear any footsteps. However, that was expected. They had been wearing rubber-soled boots, after all.
Presently, an arm flickered out of view, reaching for something in a pocket. Moments later, it returned with a large sphere. Its gunmetal casing shone under the dim overhead fluorescence and embedded within the fist-sized sphere was a gleaming tourmaline bulb that blinked tremulously under the bearer's thumb.
Esteban clenched his fist. A hiss shattered the silence. A black blur whipped through James' vision.
That was the huntsman's arm as he threw the grenade. An emerald light arced in the darkness. Ten meters away, the door of the apartment exploded.
Esteban was already moving, his aura taking the brunt of the bomb's lethal pressure wave. He dashed through the smoke and the debris, into the cold embrace of the darkness of Cynthia White's living room. In a flash, he had brandished a gleaming silver broadsword in his right hand, and in his left, a sleek pistol that shone with gunmetal grey.
101 beats per minute.
Teammates panned out across the room. Dim light from the corridor hollowed out the darkness within and caught sight of a doorway at the right edge of the camera's vision. The brown oak door to Cynthia's bedroom was opened outwards all-the-way and hovered several inches away from the wall. In the gap was something that James, too, had missed.
Where had the attack come from? It could have only come from the adjacent room, not anywhere within the living room. A body was found between the two. The corpse was that of Vera Ming, the one who had her spine stabbed through. Had she been the first to die?
110 beats per minute.
The General could not complete that line of thought. At first, there was a sickening thud and a crack, and then a muffled scream. Something shattered like glass, and then a second scream came from the right. It was an utterly bestial shriek that had torn its maker's vocal cords to shreds. And then there was silence.
Esteban's body whipped to the right, swifter than a thought.
Vera Ming stood facing her allies, a gurgle dying on her lips as her pale fingers laced a meter of shining, bloodstained stee, her body slumped against an invisible barrier.
Ten feet away, the petite form of a pale boy flickered into view, stepping slowly into the light from behind the body of Vera Ming. Blood ran down his arm and speckled the floor at a clockwork beat. It was the creature from the stars, his skin so pale that it was luminous, his face curled in a subtle scowl, his statuesque legs erected in a pool of fresh blood. His shirt had been stained by what appeared to be dried, blackened vitae, bled from a wound that had posed no threat to him in the slightest.
143 beats per minute.
The blade was wrenched from its first victim's corpse. Vera crumpled to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. She stared at nothing; her cheeks bore the perfect expression of surprise; her eyes betrayed her inarticulate horror, and a globe of blood pooled at her lips. Blood speckled the walls as the boy spun his sabre in an elegant flourish.
The footage exploded in sound. Two blurs of black whipped across the screen. Three shots erupted from Esteban's high-calibre pistol.
Three shots that had utterly failed to miss their target, batted aside in one fell swoop by the boy. But something unexpected had happened. Or rather, a mild possibility that Ironwood had considered after the first reports of the incident had arrived at his office. The boy winced in pain, his body shuddering as bright orange sparks danced across the edge of his blade, leaping onto his fingers, and igniting his flesh.
Esteban had electrified the bullets with his semblance. The spare ammunition that the VPD had recovered were cutting-edge, ultra-high velocity armour piercing cartridges that were released just weeks ago, but they were not of the lightning-dust containing variant. As was standard protocol, Esteban's semblance was catalogued by Atlas Academy, and the news of the incident had prompted the institute to gather every last datum of information about its fallen alumni.
Presently, the boy had shrugged off in a heartbeat an injury that would normally be fatal to a mortal unprotected by aura. A fist slammed into the flat of his face the instant he recovered, breaking his nose with a wet crack. A heavy blow to the abdomen sent the aggressor flying ten feet with a sickening crack, shattering his auric field, and blasting him through the room's painted brick wall.
167 beats per minute.
The boy leaped aside, narrowly evading a blow designed to separate his head from the rest of his body. Esteban's pistol barked, spitting incandescent yellow lightning as three more shots were fired. The boy evaded, ducking under the incoming rounds, sliding towards the huntsman. Esteban's right-hand whipped across the screen and pulled his longsword from its scabbard, and the room's innards became a messy blur as he charged.
The blade of Esteban's longsword caught the flicker of a sunlight ray as it scythed at the creature's neck. The boy was faster. A thunderclap rocked the room as he slashed Cynthia's sabre towards the incoming blow, as the silver blades collided with the energy of a bomb blast. Esteban ignored his sword as it was smashed away and struck the boy's snarling face as hard as he could with his fist.
Something snapped in the right side of the creature's face. A spiderweb fracture expanded beneath, across his zygomatic arch, across the flawless bedrock of its gene-forged façade. His brain rattled with the blow, but the boy remained steady, unyielding as steel.
A heavy blow sent Esteban stumbling five paces back. A force that could have broke every bone in his body had been absorbed by his auric field. Twin shots rang like thunder behind the duo and the tungsten-carbide kinetic penetrators fired from Colleen Wisteria's handgun pierced nothing but shadow.
184 beats per minute.
James' eyes widened. The ability to turn intangible was a rare semblance, occurring in less than 0.03 percent of all semblance holders. Yet, the user would still have to react to an incoming attack and activate the semblance afterwards – this fact was the source of James' confusion. He was certain that the bullets had travelled faster than sound – that excluded the possibility of the creature reacting to the sound of the shots. The boy had been facing Esteban when they were fired, so there was no way he could have dodged them based on sight either.
Was the boy expecting to get shot? How could he have known with such accuracy? Was it a third semblance?
With speed that could not be captured by the camera, the boy turned, and hurled the improvised spear at the aggressor's hand. It did not even register as a flash of burnished silver. The crack of displaced air rang out, shaking the room like thunder as the blade trailed heat like an Atlesian jet. The next moment, Colleen had crumpled into a mass that writhed and screamed with clawing agony, her palm pinned resolutely to the wall.
A blur of black clothes whipped across the screen. Esteban drew the pistol that hung from a long black leather strap to his belt and began to fire. Five rounds struck the boy square in the back. Three more pierced his slender form as it turned and charged. They did not slow his advance in the slightest.
196 beats per minute.
Esteban pulled Limbo from its scabbard and slashed it towards the afterimage of someone who was no longer there. Faster than the camera could see, the primarch sidestepped the blow and smashed his fist into the huntsman's chest. The colour of the sun flashed and shattered into a thousand ingots, and the last drops of strength fled Esteban Brown's body.
•
Over the next hour, the remaining files were carefully dissected by Ironwood and his senior officers. The apparent fates of three huntsmen agreed with that which the mortician had suggested.
The situation in Vale was decent. The Valean council had agreed to block all undesired communications by speedily implementing an algorithm that Atlesian military programmers had assembled in the blink of an eye. As the incident had also occurred in a small, underpopulated neighbourhood, few knew about it.
As for who was responsible for the attack, nobody knew for sure. The scrolls of the huntsmen were all missing. No information could be recovered, and location services of the scrolls had been turned off. There was no way to contact the creature either. To maintain good relations with the creature, it was paramount that Atlas cleared itself of blame. But if push came to shove, the Atlesian war machine would have no choice but to take all possible measures to destroy it.
There were two reasons why James felt it was a good idea to establish good relations with it, and by extension, letting it live.
The first and most pressing concern was the implied existence of an advanced civilization and, depending on the type of relationship it had with the creature, undesired repercussions may follow after its destruction.
The second was the possibility that it could be enlisted in the ongoing war against the Grimm. That was the version that Ironwood had told the council, but he believed, deep down, that it had the potential to kill Salem. It remained unclear why the creature had killed the White Fang members, but Ironwood had guessed that it was due to an innate moral code it possessed. If that was the case, then it wouldn't be difficult to sway it to their cause after proving that Atlas was not the perpetrator of the attack.
The plan now was to track down the creature and establish first contact. Meanwhile, the VPD could find whoever had hired the assassins and sentence them to death in a court of law, as was the standard practice in Vale.
1216 hours, 6th Axial Rotation of Joo'Lie, Valean Time
Specialist Firing Range Ten, Atlas Academy
Presently, Augustus White discharged his pistol downrange. Thirty meters away, a salvo of bullets ripped into a gunmetal mannequin, blowing it to smithereens. Those were the last three bullets in his magazine. Sweat speckled the concrete floor as he reloaded. The reassuring notch-click of a loaded magazine echoed across the empty expanse.
Specialist Firing Range Ten measured forty-five meters wide, thirty-five meters long, and ten meters tall. The bare floor was bone-grey and made from steel-reinforced concrete; the walls and the flat ceiling were made from the same material, but they were covered by a lattice of white porcelain tiles, and a shimmering hard-light barrier coated the walls and ceiling downwind of the firing stand. Ten concrete cubicles crenelated the firing stand, each marked by a number from one to ten. Harsh sodium-tinged strip-lights glared down at the expanse twenty-four hours a day, a protocol that was repeated in every classroom and training hall of the academy.
In the fifth cubicle, Augustus tinkered with his pistol. Using an electronic multi-tool, he tightened a delicate titanium gear and screwed the steel backplate back on. In his graduating class that consisted of more than a dozen teams, there was, perhaps, nobody that invested more in their weapons than he did.
The specialist was no fool. He was not lost on the irony that his strength was only slightly above average, and so he had designed his weapon with only stopping power in mind. Augustus had only ever used the same brand of hollow-point fire dust cartridges, each measuring close to half an inch in diameter. On special occasions, he'd use an exploding variant of the bullet, fitted with a ten-gram fire-dust payload. When charged with aura, each bullet struck its target with muzzle energies approaching a quarter of a megajoule. There were many species of Grimm against which this was overkill, but Augustus was better safe than sorry.
Something drew the specialist's attention. It was hard to describe the sensation of being watched. Every hair on his forearms stood in unison, and goosebumps erupted over his tanned skin. He turned, swifter than a thought, the pistol a silver shimmer in his hands, only to find out that there was no threat at all. He caught sight of a young woman in her twenties, staring down the barrel of his gun, and sighed.
"You've been doing this to me for as long as I can remember. It's time to grow up. Besides, you shouldn't waste your aura just to sneak up on me. I know your semblance drains it rapidly," he said, lowering his gun.
The scientist was thinly dressed, clad in a loose white shirt and a grey skirt that reached her knees. There was a tired expression in her glassy, obsidian-black eyes, whether she wanted it to show or not.
"It's not as though an emergency is going to happen at any time. For example, a full-blown Grimm invasion," chuckled Alice Lockwood.
"I remember you were flogged the last time you tried this on someone else," he said. "A teacher, I recall. My colleagues will not be so merciful."
"I still have some faint scars. Damn military culture," she chuckled. "It did not spare even the elementary schools and the orphanages. Not even you."
The specialist's gaze hardened by a centimeter. "Don't say that. You never know when they're listening."
"See?"
Augustus sighed. "I thought you're supposed to be at work?"
"I am. I just haven't received any assignments from anyone," she replied, strolling towards a collapsible chair beside him. Alice yawned and splayed her limbs wide without a care in the world for her appearance.
"So you're getting paid…to do nothing?"
"No, I'm getting compensated to transfer leadership of expeditionary project K923 to Professor Klaus Schreiber. Remember that new species of arachnid Grimm we discovered in the tundra last month? We'll never get the chance to capture it now, since Klaus wants to go to Argus instead to look for a boring Sea Fei-long subspecies. That species of arachnid Grimm would have migrated to Oum knows where, by the time I get my reins back on the project. Of course, I'd be quite interested in studying the alien, but we were so close to capturing it!" she exclaimed.
"Easy for you to say. Don't you remember that time I nearly got my head chopped off by one of the Grimm's tibiae?" protested Augustus. "And now you say you want to study that thing? Haven't you been paying attention? The general doesn't want to capture it anymore. And even if he wanted to, how are you going to restrain it? That thing took down a huntress in the blink of an eye and slaughtered an entire team in under a minute. It's not just another creature that I can help you capture, you know."
"Those huntsmen clearly didn't know what they were doing. It's obvious that they lacked information about its abilities. I mean, did you see what the report stated? They didn't have any specialized ammunition. One of them even had to improvise using their semblance," said the woman. "Though…I have a feeling that whoever sent them did so to test the waters."
"At first, you'd think that they'd have more information than Atlas given how they're the ones who attacked. They could have beaten us to the punch by observing the fight it had with the goons in that alley, or even earlier, but given their obvious lack of preparation, as evidenced by the total failure of those huntsmen, it became obvious that they couldn't have been deployed to kill it," stated Augustus.
"A failure, you say. I call it a success. Well, at least not for the huntsmen. What if the ones who hired them had become aware of the first incidents in which the creature was engaged in combat and grew impatient from insufficient information? They underestimated it too, dispersing through the room as if sticking together wasn't the first thing they were taught at the Academies. I refer this chain of thought to my previous statements of evidence. It would be unwise to dismiss the possibility that the entity responsible for hiring these agents sent them to their deaths knowingly in order to analyze the abilities of the creature," countered Alice.
"Such an idea presupposes an improbable degree of either idiocy or the self-sacrificial devotion of a Valdorian cultist on the huntsmen's part," challenged Augustus.
Alice counterattacked, having predicted this rebuttal. "And the notion that an entity deployed the huntsmen with the purpose of capturing or neutralizing the creature –knowing that they lacked crucial information on its abilities – is an equally ludicrous one. Your statement presupposes a degree of knowledge of the true target on the agents' part. To presume that things had rested on the opposing end of the dichotomy would be far more logical."
"The true target, you say. You have piqued my interest. Go on, then," invited Augustus.
"You and I are both aware of how easy it is to mislead the hitmen cabals of Mistral. The request was made by someone who knew the address and identity of the occupant of the building – the one rescued by the creature. The existence of the creature could have simply been omitted by the ones who hired those huntsmen. This test would have been disguised as nothing more than a simple hit on your sister," said Alice.
"The possibility of this scenario presupposes the mafia's ignorance of Cynthia's involvement with the creature. They would not have entertained the request had they known of this. After all, why send valuable employees to their deaths?" countered Augustus, aiming his pistol downwind of the range, the muscles in his arm bulging as he tightened his grip. Alice reached out and depressed an opal-yellow button two feet away, on the sandpaper grey concrete wall of the cubicle.
Three massive vents, each eight meters long and spaced three meters apart, opened inwards into the pitch darkness of a collecting chute that fed into a subsection of the central waste collection unit of Atlas Academy. The panels of steel-reinforced concrete that weighed more than a ton each had been rolled inwards with robotic precision by an unseen mechanism that Alice had hypothesized to be not too different from a hydraulic drawbridge.
A low, guttural hum could be heard as massive turbines started churning deep underfoot. Carried upwards by a series of compressive tunnels, a powerful wind ripped across the floor with such speed that the fastest of gales would have seemed sluggish in comparison. It was low lying – if Augustus had stood downrange, he could not have felt it above his knees.
Yet, the wind smashed mercilessly into the remnants of the ruined aluminum mannequins and swept them all into the darkness of the collecting chute.
"That's impossible. Nobody but the White Fang could have known of Cynthia's involvement with the boy," said Alice. The specialist got up to leave. In response, Alice depressed a second button, ruby-red this time, as she followed him out of the cubicle. Klaxons blared from unseen compartments in the ceiling, their locations marked only by pin-thick slits of darkness.
"Or rather, I won't deny the extreme improbability of a scenario in which someone other than the VPD and the one who called them knew about the incident – I shall call this entity an 'uninvited'. Hypothetically, in in the already unlikely possibility that an 'uninvited' exists, there exists four possible descriptors for it: One, that they hold a relationship with the mafia and that compels them to inform the organization of my sister's affiliation with the creature. Two, that they hold no such relationship with the mafia, therefore discounting the possibility that they are an immediate informant. Three, that those of the latter category give up information to the mafia either willingly or unwillingly, becoming a later informant. Four, that those belonging to the latter category do not give up information to the mafia, becoming a non-informant. Appealing to probability, the existence of an informant-uninvited is a possibility no rational mind should entertain," Alice cleared her throat as she finished. She could speak such a mouthful sometimes.
The dialectic had reached its climax. Augustus felt as though there weren't any loose ends unaccounted for. It had been surprisingly rigorous for something created in the span of a few minutes, in a casual conversation no less. In theory, nothing she had said was wrong, but it was not unfalsifiable. He knew that all it took was a snapshot – or better, a video – of a spectator on the side-lines to herald its downfall.
"An implication of this argument is that either the VPD or the White Fang were the ones who called the attack on the creature. You presuppose knowledge of Cynthia's involvement with the creature on the aggressor's part, but such knowledge could only be gained in three ways: First, through directly witnessing the alley incident. Second, by being informed by a witness of the incident. Third, by extrapolating the link between Cynthia and the creature by investigating the scene itself, though only the VPD could have done this," said Augustus.
Having reached the far-left end of the hallway, he stared ahead at a nondescript steel door that barred his way to a chamber that served as a storage room. He swiped his scroll once against its wide-framed electronic handle and pocketed the device. The soft chime that sounded in response heralded a loud mechanical jolt of sliding, hidden bars that slammed out of place and shook the solid steel door like thunder.
"The incident occurred roughly an hour, eight minutes, and forty-seven seconds after the first call to the VPD was made with regards to it. Assuming there was a survivor, could it have communicated with White Fang leadership? Within this period, could they have formulated such a plan? Surely they could have thought of such a simple technique to gauge the creature's abilities?" asked Alice.
She stared impassively at the wide assortment of target dummies that stretched out ahead of them. What appeared to be a small hangar panned out before them. The storage room measured thirty-five meters wide, twenty meters long, and five meters tall. On each side, target dummies of beowolves, boarbatsuks, and ursine monstrosities glared down at the duo. There were human dummies, too – life-sized models of unclothed males and females grouped in tight-knit formation across the ramp's steel plateaus.
The ones that could be picked for free were little more than hollow husks of metal used only for target practice. The most expensive ones were intricately designed bodies of ballistic gelatin, their thoracic cavities fitted with synth-bone ribs and jelly organs filled with pig's blood. Those were kept in a backroom, refrigerated at 15 degrees Celsius, but there were only ten of them in storage.
Most had something in common. All of them stood on glowing lights, round and fitted with shining aluminum at the edges, gleaming soft violet. At the centre was module of burnished steel and hard-light, its core an industrial grav-crystal no larger than the head of a pin.
Embedded within the soles of the mannequins were the same modules. When placed in close proximity, not even the strongest of huntsmen could physically overcome the incredible forces of attraction between two grav-modules.
"Probably. Their tactics in raiding SDC processing plants have been evolving over the years. It would be unwise to underestimate their tactical acumen. We cannot exclude the possibility that they came up with the idea of testing the creature's abilities," said Augustus.
"I don't believe the VPD has ascertained if there were any survivors…have they?"
"There were a few footprints leading out of the crime scene, but they did not match the shoe sizes of Cynthia and the creature. Of course, if they did make any calls to their headquarters – wherever it is – we wouldn't know as the Valean council has repeatedly denied the General's requests to view the Valean CCT's activity logs. As expected of a historical critic of this uniquely Atlesian protocol," remarked Augustus.
They ascended the stairs and walked down the third plateau, passing three steel mannequins, and stopping at the fourth.
"So, we've narrowed it down to the White Fang. Do you think this is rigorous enough?" asked Augustus. He looked down, not quite at the mannequin's feet, but at a small, glassy obsidian-black bar that lay half-sunk into the concrete near them. A faint red light blinked tremulously within. Augustus brandished his scroll and swiped it across the scanner.
The light turned green and blinked once before dying. The violet light faded instantly as the grav-field flickered out of existence, and the target mannequin was free to move once again.
"Perhaps it is, but there is another possibility. Another route this chain of inquiry can take," said Alice.
"What is it?" asked Augustus. With his left hand, he lifted the mannequin by the waist. He did not see the notification on his scroll that indicated a deduction of thirty-nine lien from his bank account.
"Let's pretend that the White Fang was not intent on gauging the creature's abilities, and let's further pretend that a survivor witnessed everything. Let's also pretend that the White Fang was trying to kill it…let's see…if a child performed the same feat as the creature did in the alley incident, and you, the leader of the White Fang, were intent on killing it, would you have—"
"Perhaps. It would require no less than a skilled huntsman to utterly devastate such a large quantity of hardened White Fang gangsters. Some might even have had activated aura," said Augustus. "A team of huntsmen may have been too much, but the report from the VPD stated that close to thirty strong men had been massacred in that alley. What if that was a test, too?"
"You see it too, don't you?" asked Alice. "In sending the team of huntsmen, the White Fang was trying to kill two birds with one stone: One, to gauge the creature's abilities. Two, to kill it. If it survived and defeated the four huntsmen, then it would give the White Fang an idea of its strength. If it died, well…it died. Either way, the White Fang would benefit from this."
"Precisely," said Augustus. They stepped within the firing range, where the klaxons were still blaring, and where the flooring transitioned from polished porcelain to coarse concrete.
"Well then, that ties up all the lose ends, doesn't it?" asked Alice.
"I think so," said the specialist.
The Boy Who Would Be King
1014 hours, 6th Axial Rotation of Joo'Lie, Valean Time
The boy's feet barely touched the ground as he ran. He wore a pair of old school- sneakers dug from a cobwebbed cabinet. He was lucky that she belonged to a sentimental sort. Cynthia hurried alongside him, the gears of her mind working lightning fast as she formulated a detour to the house of a friend.
"Should we take a break?" asked the boy. Not that he needed one. Cynthia was struggling to keep up.
"Is that really fine?" came the reply. The boy avoided an oily rainwater puddle, his stride crossing it in an instant as he bounded across the cold concrete.
"They're not going to catch us. They don't even know that we're up here," said the boy, coming to a slow. He stared off the brick ledge. Fifteen meters below, the cracked concrete floor of the alleyway stared back up. Ten minutes ago, he had hauled her up here up the rungs of a rusted ladder that was on the verge of collapse. As far as he could tell, there were no cameras on the roofs.
Cynthia stopped in relief. She gasped for air and massaged her aching knees, all the while dripping sweat that left dark spots on the bone-grey concrete underfoot. Her hair was a messy tangle that had come untied during their escape from the apartment complex. She raked her sweaty hair from her charming features. "His shophouse is a few blocks down that direction. Good thing there aren't any customers most of the time. Most of the orders are done online."
"To be honest with you, I feel kind of bad roping him into this," she continued, staring off into the horizon. A storm was brewing there, a messy bar of black clouds and faint brushstroke arcs of hard azure lightning. The boy measured the drop in barometric pressure with his arcane physiology better than any weather machine could, and his intuition did the rest. It would begin raining in ten minutes.
"Then why would you do it?"
"Because I trust in you that this won't end badly for us. In other words, I believe that you can succeed. Besides, it's not like we're forcing him to help us," said Cynthia.
The boy said nothing. Moments passed before Cynthia regained her stamina and footing.
"Let's get out of here before the rain hits us."
She turned and sprinted off. The boy watched her departing form. He killed the train of contemplation and gave chase, catching up to her in a heartbeat.
Augustus White's pistol barked once. Twenty-nine meters away, the first bullet slammed into the steel mannequin at three times the speed of sound. An outstretched arm exploded into stray bits of metal. Lethal subsonic shrapnel struck the hard-light shields behind and bounced straight off. They did not cause so much as a flicker. The muscles that corded his bones like steel cables bulged and flexed as the specialist resisted the recoil.
But the figure did not stop. It continued to accelerate along the maglev target carrier, grav-engines humming with increasing wattage as the mannequin veered right with a sharp turn.
His arms whipped right, and the pistol barked again. The bullet caught a sodium ray as it roared towards the mannequin's chest. Everything froze. Fifteen meters away, the round hovered a millimeter away from burnished chest-piece, blazing on with infinite slowness. The tungsten penetrator hit the chest-piece, deformed, and struck the ten-gram payload of military grade dust like a ramrod. The projectile's fate was determined in a nanosecond as a chemical cascade bloomed out of control and resulted in the devastating release of energy.
The world exploded in sound. The cartridge detonated with blinding, golden incandescence in the core of the mannequin, reducing it to glowing bits and clumps of stray scrap metal. A score of arms whipped across the duo's faces to shield their eyes from the blinding light.
Ten heartbeats of silence passed before Augustus holstered his pistol. The action burned the faux-leather muzzle-guard, leaving a patch of charred black against coffee brown that had only gotten deeper over the years. Never once had it burned more than now. He'd cranked his pistol up to the highest setting the titanium chassis could endure, and jam-packed it with aura. The muzzle energy of the round alone was well in excess of a quarter of a megajoule, and the ten-gram payload had exploded with close to a hundred kilojoules of energy.
"Thermite? Seriously? I know that it has an extremely high enthalpy of combustion, but couldn't you have made something a little more original?" asked Alice. She stared at the white-hot droplets of iron falling like rainwater from the ruined mannequin, which hung from a charred sliver of twisted metal.
Augustus shrugged. "It works, and it's practically the best combination. The thermite reaction between five grams of aluminum and twenty-nine point fifty-nine grams of ferrous oxide releases approximately one-hundred and fifty-seven point seven kilojoules of energy, and the products burns at roughly one thousand seven-hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. It's cheap and the stoichiometry is easy to understand and manipulate, even for someone like me. Unless you have better ideas, I'm going to stick with this mixture."
Alice remained silent and sighed in submission. She was a knowledgeable and skilled chemist, but it was impossible to argue against such a fundamental paradigm. Still, five grams seemed a little too much. Then again, five grams a bit too much, and even for Augustus' habit of overkill, having both a thermite bomb and a dust grenade in a single bullet seemed outrageous. It was a simple mechanism – the dust explosion provided the heat to ignite the pyrotechnic mixture, causing the second stage of the bullet's action.
"Nothing can survive that," said Augustus, proudly. "At least, nothing that's unprotected by aura."
"Well, except for some species of Grimm. Megoliaths have shrugged off impacts from anti-material rifles with far higher kinetic energies. Alpha Megoliaths have withstood heavy lances with moderate injuries. It's a pistol, after all," said Alice.
"That mannequin was moving at a hundred and fifty meters per second," said Alice. It had crossed the shooting range in the time it took a mortal to blink. The researcher could follow it just fine with her enhanced reactions – unlocked aura quickened her reflexes tenfold, but hers were the baseline, and Augustus' lightning-fast movements had been a ragged blur of white clothes. "Nothing human shaped can move at such speeds without using aura, but who am I to presume the limits of a civilization exponentially more advanced than this one?"
"Please don't start another speech about how aliens are going to kill us, and how the world is about to end."
"Kill us? No, nothing so boring, I'm afraid. I don't know how you got that impression, but it's definitely not here to kill us. The truth is, it's here for no purpose at all. At least, none whatsoever on the part of those who created it," said Alice.
"You are full of riddles," Augustus said, shaking his head.
"It is not a riddle. I'm being literal. My statements are lucid as can be," came the reply from behind him.
Augustus sighed. He took a few steps and crashed tiredly on the steel chair next to Alice, resting his pistol on his laps. He wiped the oily sweat off his face with a handkerchief and drew in a deep breath. Alice moved slowly, her hair acting as a cushion as she leaned against his shoulder. The specialist's muscles tensed reflexively at the sudden touch, but laxed quickly as mind overrode instinct. She was as soft as a woolen blanket and exuded an oddly alluring odor, despite not having showered in days.
"It's killable. We all saw it get wounded. A well-placed shot to the head with a ten-gram payload, and it's all over. Speed is the key factor here," said Augustus. The scientist nodded with no sign of disagreement.
"There are a few ways by which we can gauge its reflexes. There are many, many things that my colleagues and I have failed to understand of the creature's genome, and plenty others that we're still trying to figure out, so I can't use the biological knowledge we've gathered so far to ascertain an upper-limit of its reaction time," said Alice.
"How complicated is it? The last time I did some research, the institute was able to simulate the mechanism of any organ within a day of sequencing the genome of an organism. It's the same with every organism on the planet, so what's with the big delay?" asked Augustus.
"Well, it's the same thing that happens whenever we find a new species, except amplified exponentially," said Alice. She sucked in a deep breath and began to explain. "Every organism on Remnant descended from a common ancestral population that evolved more than seven billion years in the past. Many proteins belonging to these ancestral organisms are conserved across the rungs of evolution, though the accumulation of mutations renders the amino acid sequences of these orthologous proteins, as my colleagues call them, slightly different from one another. Of course, this makes genome sequencing much easier as the computer algorithms automatically fill in the gaps of highly conserved orthologous sequences where there is a suspected match that is greater than ninety-nine percent. We simply use a catalogued template protein and make some minor adjustments and calculations and then we're all set."
"Let me guess – this creature has no orthologous proteins, as it did not evolve on Remnant, and therefore you have to do it the hard way?" asked Augustus.
"Of course. Simulating an organ from the genome would be so much quicker…if we didn't have to repeat the entire process for the thousands of kilodalton and megadalton protein that don't have a single evolutionary reference," grumbled the researcher. "So, I'm afraid that you have to wait for a week or so before the results are in."
"I have no idea what that means, but I'm assuming it's a unit of either length or mass on the order of thousands and millions, given that prefix you used. Well, I understand. On the topic of gauging the creature's reaction time, do you have an idea of how we can do so during wartime while minimizing casualties?" asked Augustus. The figure seated next to him thought in silence for a few moments before opening her mouth.
"That's simple – you send in troops using firearms and ammunition of varying muzzle velocities. You could even send in a single soldier bearing such devices. The point is to minimize the number of troops sent in while maximizing the range of velocity values covered by the firearms and ammunition used. You could even use a bunch of AK-130's," said Alice. "You should also add in an outlier value to increase the chances of success."
Augustus acknowledged the idea with a grunt. "We're on the same wavelength, but I didn't think of that last bit. I'll keep that in mind and ask for Winter's opinion on it. The general has ordered the war machine of Atlas to stand down for the time being, but I fear that it won't be long before he changes his mind."
"So, what now? You have a few hours to kill before the next briefing. What will you do now?" Her voice was a grating rasp, spoken through thin chapped lips and a dry mouth, the voice of a crone that belied her youthfulness.
She tilted her neck fractionally to stare at him – Augustus was not sure where, bet it his hands, his boots, or his knees, but it wasn't his eyes. Never that. The specialist looked back at her. New details emerged across the form of the person he'd known for a decade, and who he understood more than most siblings did among themselves.
"I think we should get something to eat. It's almost lunchtime," came the reply from the specialist as he rose slowly and began to leave.
His passage ended at the third step, whereupon he walked right into a tall figure he'd completely failed to see.
"Boo!"
His total fright sent him stumbling back into his seat. Alice doubled over in laughter at the rictus of abject horror on the specialist's face. Augustus shot out of his seat in fury and sprinted after her as she began to flee.
"Alice, you bastard!"
AN: Well, that was a light-hearted ending. Something that we won't be seeing much for a while…
Technology, Technobabble, and Technomancy
Technology that simulates a working organ based on an organism's genome borders on technomancy (or perhaps it is). I'm not going to explain it (because I can't). Instead, I'll post my favorite excerpt depicting what happens to every BL author who attempts to write anything that's remotely related to the Adeptus Mechanicus or Imperial technology:
Azuramagelli barked in the negative. 'The calculations are too complex for those not versed in hexamathical logic equations. You could not comprehend the multi-dimensional integer lattices without augmentation or inloaded wetware.'
Moles, Joules, and other Earthling units
It may be presumptuous to do so, but for the sake of simplicity I shall assume that Remnant uses the same units as 21st century Earth on a conceptual level. For additional simplicity, the name of the unit is automatically translated to English.
Miscellaneous
The next chapter will begin immediately with Cynthia and boy-Curze arriving at the shophouse of the former's friend. It will cover the reactions of those who ordered the hit on Cynthia, and I will be revealing a little more on the nature of Alice's semblance, as well as some other fun bits. I hope to release it in two weeks' time.