And in this fight you've started
I'm a moving target
And I'm sick of running
But the pain keeps coming
Sudden Urge – Rise Against
Azra decided to go after Yaviks first, for one main reason: she was easy to find.
"Spider is still digging up dirt on the rest of the Barons," Spark explained to Petra. "We can sniff out Yaviks on our own."
'Literally," Azra said, wrinkling her nose behind her helmet. The Pike exhaust would be noxious. "'Sides, she's foolish."
"You don't need to justify your choices to me," Petra said. "I'm still trying to track down Uldren's whereabouts."
"When you do, give me a call," Azra said.
The Rider – June 06, 2960
Yaviks was almost too easy to kill. She was trivial to draw out- something as simple as taking a spare Pike on a joyride and she'd come screaming for blood. Yaviks, however hotheaded she may have been, was not an idiot. When Azra had shown her hand (a nice volley of rocket fire), the Baron had wizened up and made a sprint back for the safety of her home base. Azra gave chase.
Now they were racing through the tunnels of Yaviks's hideout- the Rider in front, the Hunter tailing close behind. True to Marcus Ren's word, the Scorn Baron was not easy to catch, even with Azra's new suped-up Sparrow. Either Marcus knew Azra's style well or he'd made some lucky guesses. The Sparrow's controls were simple- no automatic gear selection, no fancy ground-based stabilizers- but the bike was powerful and incredibly responsive.
It wasn't the Sparrow that was going to win this fight, Azra reflected as they whipped through the corridors. This wasn't really a race, it was a hunt. Yaviks was a rider first and foremost, a mechanic second, and only thirdly a warrior. Azra was an experienced fighter who also happened to be good on a Sparrow. And there was no finish line here, no rule beyond kill or be killed.
They came to a large room, seemingly a dead end. Yaviks, with nowhere else to go, fishtailed and swung wide, racing back at Azra in a mad charge. Azra sat up in her Sparrow, leaving her feet on the pedals and hanging on with her knees for stability. She pulled the Mythoclast, cool and collected, as Yaviks screamed towards her.
She took a heartbeat just to breathe, to settle herself. Then she pulled the trigger. The spray wasn't that tight- Azra wasn't on stable ground, Yaviks was a bit out of range still, and the Scorn Baron wasn't an easy target. Still, Azra saw a telltale flash of Tainted Ether and something in Yaviks's Pike sparked.
Then Yaviks was close- too close. Azra pushed her right toe down and then twitched it outward. The Sparrow responded immediately, jumping to the left like some pre Golden-Age matador. Yaviks flashed by harmlessly as Azra struggled for her balance.
Then they were off again, this time Azra following a trail of smoke from Yaviks's Pike.
That's why Yaviks wasn't going to win this- her first solution to any problem came on a Pike. If she'd gotten off at the dead end, she might have been able to engineer some advantage for herself, leave Azra further behind. But, predictably, she was still treating this like a race. Unfortunately for her, this situation was a lot more complex than just 'go really fast down this track'. Azra didn't have to beat the Baron to kill her.
It was actually quite the opposite in this instance. Azra stayed tight on the Rider's tail, but not too tight, measuring the distance. There, right there, at the turn just after the cache of scavenged Shanks-
Yaviks careened headlong into the tripmines Azra had set up on her way into the hideout. The explosion tore her Pike to shreds and threw her wide. She landed in a smoking heap.
It was straight out of Cayde's playbook, ironically: chase down your prey, setting some kind of ambush behind you as you went. Let them escape, then drive them right back into the trap you'd set. They'd be too focused on getting away to be on the lookout.
Azra leapt elegantly from her Sparrow, Mythoclast already reloaded and in hand. It was quick after that.
One down. Seven to go.
The Rifleman – June 08, 2960
Yaviks had been the first, but she hadn't been the most important. Sure, she'd been part of Uldren's crew, but she was at best an accessory to Cayde's death. (Not that she was innocent by any definition of the word, but Azra only had the capacity for so much blame in her heart).
No, the one she was really itching about, the one that focused her anger- Pirrha the Rifleman. He'd made the shot that had mortalized Cayde. None of what had happened afterwards would have mattered if Sundance had still been around. Azra found herself actually plotting revenge for once, relishing her preparations instead of taking them as part of the job.
Spark was angry, too- he'd spent a lot more time around Sundance than Azra had, obviously, but they both remembered the red Ghost fondly. She'd been so energetic, so honest, so welcoming. She and Cayde had been perfect for each other: competent, confident, with just enough sass to keep each other in check.
But Sundance was just as dead as Cayde was, with only her Ghost friends left to mourn her.
Azra let Pirrha bait her through the Tangled Shore. She sorely missed Shiro's company- she always breathed easier on missions knowing he was watching her back. The Shore was full of nooks and crannies, plenty of places to set up sniper positions unseen below. The Rifleman's penchant for leaving decoys left her consistently paranoid. She kept seeing phantom scopes glitter in her peripheral vision.
Sundance had been killed by a specialized bullet. Azra didn't know what would happen if a Guardian was hit by one. She wasn't eager to find out.
It didn't take much. Azra took the bullet in the back. Everything went dim, her breath caught in her throat.
And there, again, in the space between her and her Ghost (wider now, with everything she had seen but he hadn't), something whispered.
Pirrha led her to a cave- an oddly enclosed battleground for a sniper to choose. Why bottle himself up? It made no sense. He should be stalking her from afar, waiting for a golden opportunity.
Maybe this isn't about Pirrha, Spark suggested. Maybe Azra herself was being difficult to pin down. Maybe she wasn't giving him many other options. She was too good a Hunter to make sloppy mistakes. He could have gotten tired waiting for an opportunity that wasn't coming.
Whatever the reason, she proceeded with an abundance of caution. She wouldn't give him the chance to catch her unawares.
The Rifleman played his hand when Azra stepped fully inside of the cave. A barrier lit over the entrance, blocking any escape. A half-second later, a dozen decoys sprang up out of the gloom.
There it was. Azra gritted her teeth and desperately searched for cover. There was nowhere safe. The decoys couldn't hurt her all that much, she'd learned on her hunt through the Shore- they could sting quite a bit, but they didn't pack enough punch to penetrate her armor. Pirrha did, though, and she couldn't pin him down among the shifting figures. All it would take was one bullet from him and she'd be down. Spark would be incredibly vulnerable trying to rez her.
Pirrha's laugh echoed around the room as Azra spun, Adelante at the ready, trying to pick him out. But there were just too many of them, the projections too real for her to tell at first glance. Every instinct screamed at her to run, to hide- but there was nowhere to go. She couldn't take cover if she didn't know where the fire was coming from, and besides the Decoys had distributed themselves so that at least two or three of them had sightlines on any spot she might've picked.
Azra closed her eyes instead, focusing on the Light, the sound reverberating through the room the subtle shifts in gravity as the Shore stretched its moorings and clattered against itself.
She felt it coming. There was no obvious identifier. Later, if she'd tried to pick it out, she wouldn't have been able to name any one thing that had told her. A slightly realer-sounding raking mechanism? A premonition? Pure instinct? Pirrha had successfully gotten the drop on her.
But she was faster.
The horns of a Fallen Captain poked up behind the crate. Before she could process, he spun out from behind cover, raising his weapon.
Azra raised hers too. There was a thrill of electricity in her chest. The urge was just to pull the trigger as fast as possible, but the first shot wouldn't matter if she missed. And only the first shot would matter.
Her focus narrowed to a needlepoint. Just one eye. The scope of the rifle. The form of the Captain. Her right index finger on the trigger-
Two shots fired simultaneously. The Captain fell. Azra heard a bullet whizz over her left shoulder. It chipped the window behind her.
She opened her eyes only out of habit. She knew her shot would be good, knew it in the way the gun fit into her hands, the distribution of her weight on her feet, the electric zing in the nerves of her body.
There was more than one way to shoot a rifle. Azra never was good at the long-range per se- her hands didn't have that ultimate level of precision Cayde's always seemed to, she didn't have the patience to sit happily in a vantage point for hours on end like Shiro did. But there was something good in that pure moment of reflex, of instinct and Light and energy and the rifle came up, resting smoothly against her shoulder, a hundred thousand repetitions of this motion guiding every muscle twitch, and in her finger on the trigger. A fraction of a heartbeat of hesitation as the universe twisted just so, then explosive pressure in her finger and on her shoulder resonating down through her spine, to her ready-tense legs and smoothly into the ground.
The Rifleman died, round still in the chamber, still lining up his shot. It was easy.
Azra found herself a bit… disappointed? She cleared the decoys easily, then approached Pirrha's body. If anyone could be blamed for Cayde's death besides Uldren, it would be the dead Scorn in front of her. She'd been angry. She didn't get angry.
But this confrontation had happened so fast. She hadn't even really seen his face before she'd killed him. She hadn't had time to… what? Savor it? Regret it?
Pirrha was dead. Sundance was avenged. And Azra knew how revenge didn't actually help you process it, but she thought she'd feel… something more. More than this disdain, than this pity for someone who'd been so outclassed at their own game they'd never had a chance.
"Let's just go," Spark offered quietly.
There was a familiar face waiting for her back in Thieves' Landing.
Veera was kitted out for hardcore raiding- armor and explosives and even a Sword. She took off her helmet, revealing a face taut with focus but eyes full of sorrow.
"I came as soon as I got your message," Veera said. Her voice was gentle. "I was in the Infinite Forest. Are you-"
"No," Azra said frankly. "But there's work to do."
Veera still pulled her into an embrace. Azra squeezed back, half-expecting the tears to start flowing. But her eyes stayed dry. Part of her longed to mourn, but she'd tamped it down with brutal force. There would be time for tears later.
When Veera pulled back, she looked uncertain. A peculiar kind of agony flavored the air with bitter ash.
Azra sighed. She was already tired. But she drew herself together and set her jaw. "The plan right now is to take out these Scorn Barons- Uldren's support crew. They've scattered for the moment, but they're focused on causing chaos and not too much on hiding. I've already tracked a couple of them down."
"Right," Veera said. "Who is next?"
And bless Veera- you could see the concern in her still, the grief (she'd known Cayde too, after all), but she understood. Sitting around crying wouldn't help Azra feel any better. Neither would probing questions. Azra would talk about it when she was ready, and she wasn't going to sit around in the meantime.
The Hangman – June 11, 2960
Azra had never seen a sorrier looking Servitor. It huddled (as much as a metal orb could huddle) in the back of its cage, making distressed beeping noises. The quills marking it as one of Spider's associates were piecemeal and covered with grime. Its eye flickered.
"Should we free it?" Veera asked. She shifted her grip on her gun nervously. They were deep in the Hangman's hideout now. Azra half-expected him to jump out of the shadows herself, even though he reportedly wasn't the subtle type.
"It belongs to Spider," Spark reasoned. "I don't think it's likely to attack us." Azra moved obligingly to study the lock. It was thick and heavy- too heavy for Spark to open. She'd have to do it by hand. Spark materialized a torque wrench and a pick for her.
The Servitor moaned. Azra didn't know if they could be scared or worried, but at the very least it didn't sound happy. It did look pretty beat-up. With all of the dead Servitor shells chained to the ceiling, it wasn't hard to guess how it had gotten that way.
Azra's Warlock companion wasn't happy, either. "He enjoys this," Veera whispered. "Causing pain."
"Not surprising," Azra commented. "What is surprising is that he'd turn on Servitors. They're practically holy to the Fallen."
The Servitor made a sad beep at her as she fumbled with the lock. Azra did her best not to roll her eyes at it. "I am working," she muttered in Eliksni. "Be quiet."
Veera gripped one of the cage bars experimentally. "They need Ether to survive. Destroying a competitor's supply source I can understand. This is just… cruel."
"Cruelty's the name of the game out here," Azra said. Finally, the lock gave under her ministrations. She swung the door wide, making way for the machine to pass.
It did, hesitantly, looking at her. It had no face to make expressions, but it edged along almost reluctantly.
This time, Azra did roll her eyes. "Return to your Spider-Baron," she grumbled. "I am freeing prisoners, not taking them."
The machine didn't move, still, focusing its eye across the room, where two more of Spider's Servitors sat caged.
"We will free them, too," Veera promised. "Azra, could you translate for me? Does it understand English?"
"The other Machine-spawn says we will free your Ketch-kin," Azra said obligingly. "I do not promise your safety if you remain."
That seemed to be enough for the Servitor. It beeped again and began to move back towards the entrance hallway. The two Guardians made their way to the other cages.
"Do you think it cares about them?" Veera asked.
"I don't see how it matters much," Azra said. "Whether there's honor among Servitors or not, doesn't stop them from trying to kill us in combat. Not gonna stay my hand neither."
"They do not deserve to be treated like this," Veera muttered.
"No," Azra agreed. "They don't."
In the silence that followed, Azra heard heavy footsteps. The Servitors shrieked quietly.
"I'm getting readings," Spark warned. "I think The Hangman is onto us."
"Let him come," Veera said. "He enjoyed this suffering? Cayde's suffering as well? Let us see how he enjoys his own."
The Mindbender – June 12, 2960
"There's no way around it," Azra said.
They were sitting in Spider's lair. Azra was installing some better shinguards on her strides; Veera sorted out spare parts on the table beside her. The room was dimly lit and dusty, but it was the only space they'd been afforded. At least it was private.
Azra continued with her reasoning. "Two leads, both time-sensitive, and not a lot of days left on my docket."
"I do not like splitting up," Veera said reluctantly.
"Neither of these guys should be too hard," Azra reassured. They hadn't been difficult the first time around. "This kind of freaky Hive stuff can't hold a candle to Oryx and Hiraks has nothing else up his sleeve. The Bomber's easy to make desperate- then he's just as likely to blow himself up as do any damage to you."
Veera frowned. "But… alone?" They'd stuck together so far, even just for scouting or small-scale patrols.
"Azra, we're Pack," Cayde said. "You're on a Fireteam. I get it. Some jobs are best done solo. And you got all the personal space you want, but you're not meant to be alone. Not when the chips are down like that."
"We can't afford to take our time on this one," Azra said. "Whatever fucked up mind manipulation thing Hirak's got going on, I've seen worse." She finished adjusting the plating on her shins and stood up. "I've got more experience with Hive nests than you. And you like explosions more than I do. It's only reasonable."
"Very well," Veera said reluctantly. "But we should not be afraid to call in help."
The chittering in the air was nerve-grinding. Azra tuned it out. The amplifiers were set to mess with Hive minds, not Human ones. (And besides, Azra was good at ignoring things when she needed to, especially after her trials with the Vex). They were underground now, in the guts of some Tombship that had crash-landed and been integrated into the Shore. There were still Hive breeding inside, though they were sickly, starved things. She fought through them. They at best seemed disoriented, and at worst they were acting… un-Hivelike. Thrall and Acolytes would fight with fury under the direction of higher-ranking Hive, but alone they tended to scatter like cockroaches. These ones attacked with a devotion that startled Azra.
They finally came to a dead end- and there was Hiraks, flanked by Scorn and Hive alike. He looked bigger than the last time Azra had seen him. "There he is," Spark said in relief. "I was beginning to think he'd given us the slip."
"He might still," Azra warned. Hiraks didn't seem to perturbed by being stuck in a room with Azra- and she recognized the architecture behind him.
It was only half a surprise when a Hive Portal sprang to life between the pillars. The Mindbender wasted no time in stepping through it. "Stay on him," Spark warned.
An Arc grenade scattered the combatants enough to give Azra an opportunity. She was supposed to be too smart to go blindly jumping through portals, but she didn't exactly have time to sus this one out. Hiraks had opened it- who knew how long it would stay open? Who knew if she could track him down a third time?
She braced herself and stepped through-
"Oh," Spark whispered.
Everything was silver-gray and echoey. Outside, reality screamed like a tempest. Here, the ground was rough and dusty, a memory of the Tangled Shore's bedrock. It was barren. Gravity was different, the Light was different, the Darkness- all in a strikingly familiar way. She'd expected a chase through the Tombship, maybe through the cracked foundation of the Shore itself. She hadn't expected a trip to the Ascendant plane when she'd gotten up this morning.
"Hiraks actually built his own throne world?" Azra said in shock. There'd been rumors of attempts, but-
"He's here!" Spark warned. The Mindbender had been waiting for them. Here in his own universe, he was unnaturally tall, taller than any Fallen Azra had ever seen. If this was his throne world and he was Ascendant, he'd made a big mistake by letting Azra in here. This was the only place he could be killed- both his biggest strength and his greatest weakness.
Azra had looked Hive Gods in the eye before. This pretender would be nothing.
Azra dodged Hirak's bullets, searching for cover in the sparse shelf the Mindbender had carved for himself. She ducked behind a pillar as his Boomer found its range. The very universe shook from the force of it. Hiraks dictated reality here, and here he'd decided that Boomers could shatter rock.
Azra dove from her pillar to another one, but that too only provided her a moment's respite. Soon she was running again, teeth clenched in a mix of frustration and urgency.
"I wonder how Veera's doing," Spark mused.
"No no bad no bad-" Veera chanted as she ran. The ground shook under her feet, rocks and bombs whizzing through the air.
"Fun, fun!" Kaniks cackled. "A game of catch?"
"No, no catch," Veera said forcefully. "This is not fun." She dove behind a rock, frantically shoving another magazine into her hand cannon. "This is why I do not play sports!"
Kaniks shrieked with laughter. Veera leapt madly from her cover as it was reduced to rubble. She lined up another shot at the Bomber, dancing between the grenades he was lobbing at her (how did he carry so many?).
"This is going well," Ghost said dryly. "I wonder how Azra and Spark are doing."
"There!" Spark yelled.
Azra drew her Bow and spun to face Hiraks. That was backwards- you were supposed to aim the Bow and then draw it. Know your enemy, look death in the eye before you deal it.
Azra knew who the Mindbender was. She knew what she wanted.
The Tether shrieked through the air like an Acolyte shot, the only spot of color in the weird un-gray of the Ascendant Plane. Hiraks screamed.
Azra drew and loosed again. "Death comes for us all," she muttered. "One day, Cayde. The next, you." Hiraks, despite his large stature, looked small now: staggered and gasping.
Azra drew one last time. The Void hissed in her blood- foolish, you think you can deny this, you think you are above this, that you are safe. It wasn't clear whether that wisdom was for Hiraks or for Azra.
But the Mindbender ended, just like everything did.
