Author's Note: I'd like to thank anyone reading for their patience with this chapter. It looks like I just had to take a break and write random short fic before continuing with this one. If you're still with me, thanks for continuing to read along.
Part of this chapter involves the adage, 'Find a sphere and the fiends appear', referring to the way fiends are drawn to spheres.
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One knife and a replacement pair of laces later, we break camp.
Paine's efficiency is something I, for once, do not thank. She was done with her errand and gone before I could even make a start on the mess Gippal had made of my shoes. Trying to hold a serious conversation with our recorder while physically attached to our equipment didn't strike me as the best way about it, and I was lucky enough that she did not notice me there.
We move towards the early evening and the sun follows us on our trek west. The sands simmer with the heat they soaked from the noon, and I can feel it baking the leather of my boots to cracking. The ends of my borrowed laces keep flapping as I walk. They are too long and were never trimmed down. This does not surprise me; they were Gippal's spare set. I dug them out of his pack in revenge for my ruined ones.
Time stretches out in the caramel manner of afternoons, when you only stay alive because you are waiting for the world itself to wake back up again and return to you, yawning. The Teams are lulled into the spell. Talking takes too much energy, so many trudge in silence, acquaintanced with their companions and needing no further discourse. Even the recorders are lazy. They will get marked down for it later but a number of them rebel in passivity now.
Ours is. Paine is walking with the machina down rather than wasting the sphere on hours of repeating desert. Playback loops could be the story of our lives with recycled footage when they feature us later in reports tailored to appeal to the masses. Join the Crusaders. Get sand in places you really did not want it.
The silence of this march is the exact backdrop that I think I would like featured for my dramatic fatal wound when they sandwich my profile after Nooj, but before Gippal, who would steal all the attention anyway. Come to think of it, I would have no luck coming after the Deathseeker either. They should save him for a special highlight feature.
We would still all be casualties of propaganda, which is why I am careful about approaching Paine now. She does not expect me. I read her displeasure in the arc of her head turning up to spy me, and then the pause at its apex before it returns to glaring at the ground.
"Listen..." I start, too late to keep myself from dying.
That is my first understanding of what happened when I am finally able to breathe again. The impact that shook the ground repeats, playing it as deftly as a Macalania drummer. I am on my stomach in the dirt and my lungs are trying to cough it out, or they would like to once they remember how to work. Whatever hit me doesn't feel like it left a wound. I'm not certain. Nerves all over my body report back only blank tingles, so I will my head to turn to the side and I see Paine.
She is also on the ground. The recording machina in her hand had struck and bounced hard enough to activate, and the lens is pointed directly at my eye. It is unnerving to see a sphere scripting down my life from only a few millimeters away, so instead of thinking about how this is the wrong angle entirely to be remembered at, I urge the numbed fingers of one hand forward by rote and shove it away.
Gunfire erupts. Machina bullets spit through the air above us and the ground repeats its protest by shivering as a frightened babe might tremble. It is only when I hear the screech of throats inhuman that I understand what has happened. Fiends.
Paine is as disoriented as I am by the look of it. She starts to lift her head to get a better look and I reach over, push her down with a hand on the tufts of her hair. Resistance to my palm is her answer to me for the indignity, but I ignore it. Paine can glare at me later. From what my mind is piecing together haphazard, we must have been caught in a tremor started by them when they attacked the caravan line, walked over some bolthole they'd been lurking in. The teams must have been attractive prey. We'd have drawn them to us simply by walking en masse in this wasteland.
"They're after the spheres! Get the recorders back here, now!"
Or not.
The officer who shouted the first order is busy rattling off more. I cannot catch them all in the tempest of firepower, so instead I pay more attention to the machina nestled between myself and Paine like an unwanted babe. There is little chance that the guards will cease their counterattack just for the two of us.
Ferverently, I hope that there are no sand worms coming in attendance to this, or Paine and I will only know they have arrived when we are swallowed into the earth.
We lie like that exposed, hoping that the ground is not about to cave away beneath us both and usher us into darkness. The hand that restrained our recorder before is remaining pressed against the small of her back, feeling the tension in her muscles as she also debates how quickly we will be riddled should we dare to stand.
In the confusion, it is strange to hear the defensive plans ordered aloud mutate into names we recognize. "Baralai! Paine!" It is Nooj's voice. "Get out of there! They've got the flamethrowers!"
He repeats himself twice before the words finally make sense to me. Paine is spitting soft curses into the dirt. She is praying for destruction to visit itself upon Yevon and Bikanel equally, obliterating anything involved with these idiotic tests into ashes of memory. Personally, I am saving my energy for wondering just how Nooj thinks we can escape. None of my cautious glances have shown me anything other than flat ground, and the both of us will be roasted to a crisp five feet over just as easily as if we stayed right here.
Left, my side. Nothing but open terrain. Right, her side. The same. In front of me is only the rise of a dune, and that exposes us to bullets. Then the hint of shadow resolves itself into a vision three-dimensional and I see our escape fifty-three degrees from our recorder's head as north.
"Paine!" I hiss, tightening my fingers on the muscles of her back and ignoring the feel of her vertebrae between. "There!" Just enough of a defensive ridge that I had almost missed it, being colored pale sand amidst paler sand. She understands my intent as soon as she gauges the direction I am looking in. Hands balled at our chests, we elbow-crawl the distance, and Yevon does absolutely nothing to reassure either of us on the way that we are not expecting bullets in the back.
Once we make it to the shallow pit, we shift to a crouch and make better time off the field thanks to the low gorge. No sooner do finish tugging the recording machina along by its strap then the fiends explode over the sides of the dunes; they cannot use the bodies of their fallen as defensive structures, as we can, so instead they choose to pitch themselves ahead in hopes of overwhelming through sheer numbers. Paine and I barely made it clear before the guards crack the safety releases off their machina and strike the ignitions. The sand where we formerly took refuge is bathed in blossoming heat; unable to stop themselves, the most eager fiends find themselves plowing headlong into an inferno. The smell of burning fur gives way to the stench of blackening flesh before the pyreflies break free, seeping forth from wounds like so much ichor or melted fat.
Paine is well-trained. Even while she is swallowing down her nausea, her hands are dutifully sweeping the lens of the machina back and forth, focusing in on the analytical details that would entertain historians in future years for hours.
I am busy listening. One person is screaming over the noise, "Team Four's still back there! Team Four--" again and again as our numbers scurry before the monsters' hunger, the jackal-fiends darting in and around the gouts of flame while the serpentine heads of gucumatz beasts tower back to spit light upon us. Once more my hand touches Paine's back, and this time, she understands. Backpedaling slowly as I help to guide her, the woman continues to fixate on the business of marking time turning into disaster.
Fire rolls forth again in an ocean's red wave. After Nooj's warning I have heard nothing from our own teammates, but everyone is jumbled together by the look of it, some pulling back while others remain at the front line to defend the machina weapons. Distraction would mean that Paine falls, so I place my second hand on her spine, move to hold her hips instead; lockstep-fashion she works, and I keep my thumbs on the small of her back while my eyes hunt out our companions in retreat.
There. Gippal's height and the comb of his hair would be enough to catch my attention, but it is his voice that confirms his identity through the battle. More than that, it is his actions that clue me in. The Al Bhed is pulling someone else with him as he goes. That someone is trying to hit him with a stick.
"Come on man, don't you start this cred again!" Gippal has one hand beneath each of Nooj's arms and is trying to haul him upright against the slickness of the sands. Nooj is growling against him. His teeth are bared in his own frustration with himself, in how he fights against Gippal's good intentions along with the stiffness of his metal limbs. The Deathseeker's cane rises to bludgeon the Al Bhed clumsily on the shoulder again. Gippal shrugs it off.
"We told you you're not gonna die, got it?" the Al Bhed leans down to holler directly in Nooj's ear, and then I lose sight of them both while Gippal's words circulate in the air, mixing with the smoke and pyreflies.
I am in the process of deciding that neither Paine and I acquired anything worse than a few bruises when the patter of flamethrowers belching begins to die off. The machina guns have petered to silence well before; in the humming of overheated air, I had not noticed. My hands remain neatly seated upon Paine's waist. Since there does not look to be need for further retreat, I stop walking and pull her against my stomach, scanning the field over her shoulder while she leans into the living shield I present.
Somehow, I do not think I will tell anyone that the smell of burning bodies is an excellent perfume for Paine.
Her voice is a bedroom murmur when she turns the recording machina again in a patient arc across the field. They must have give her classes for that express purpose alone--retain steady camerawork even when expecting your own arms to be bitten off by the subject you are taping. "It's over," she says, throat sleepy as pillow-mumbles, and I lean my chin against her head.
"Gippal was with Nooj." Verbalized for reassurance. "He'll bring him back alive, even if Nooj is denying it every inch back."
"Good."
The machina have all gone silent. In the oily smoke, none of us can have a clear view. We assume that there are no further fiends because nothing is launching itself out of that artificial fog to bury its fangs in someone's throat. When the desert winds pick up to throw foul air into our faces, I reach up to help cover Paine's nose with one of my sleeves. Her hair is the only filter I need to be able to breathe clean. All I inhale is Luca sea-salt.
None of us say anything as the minutes tick by. The dunes are immobile. There are no human voices calling out to us from the distance to tell us they are all right. No fiend-roars either.
Surveying the trails of smoke stacking themselves into pillars against the whiter clouds above, the instructor in charge folds his hands behind his back. He was unlucky to be overseer of this section of the march when it was attacked; every inch of his body speaks of being jilted, irritated, inconvenienced by this interruption. I remember him from my first interview. Doryal, that had been his name, and he had looked at me as if my presence puckered the air.
"We move on." The command is crisp as new-cut papers. Three words are all the explanation Doryal gives before he turns and begins to slog down the path back to the caravan's fore.
This order does not sit well with all the recruits. Whispers explode, discussions too rapid to be hushed fully; words fly away from the smaller groups to mix into a conversation that resembles a monster. Left to die, it growls, they were left to die what are we going to do we can't just leave them there what if they're hurt what if more fiends attack I don't have enough ammo why don't we all have weapons they didn't have machina by the fayth they were defenseless.
It resolves itself in the act of one man. Propelled on by the ugly hum of resistance around him, the trainee stalks forward to block Doryal's path. When the instructor attempts to blast him into small pieces by virtue of an affronted stare alone, the man reaches out to grab at Doryal's arm.
"What about Team Four?" By the voice, I recognize the unfortunate. Team Six's prime gunner, marksmanship even better than Gippal's. I suspected him of coming from the Djose region because of his habit of wearing a pauldron smelted down into overlapping plates on his bicep. His name started with an M.
I hope I can remember the rest of it before I need to write it down on a death marker.
Doryal, seized, stares down his nose at the trainee. "We retain adequate numbers for the test. Further delay is unacceptable." A tug of his arm is his signal to be released, but the youth does not move, only tries to yank an answer out of him by wrestling with that sleeve. Several guards have already begun to advance upon the unlucky individual before the rest of Team Six appears to pull their companion away by force.
Even as they do, a circle widens around them as other candidates back away; we have all learned from the example of Team Four. Draw the attention of the instructors, and you will be doomed. Six is next on the list by the look of it. Doryal gives an imperious sniff before snapping his fingers; his escort falls into line, and they move away in black-beetle formation, machina bristling as they accompany him to the front of the caravan line.
Their recorder catches the furtive glances of the rest of us, draws his arms protectively around his machina. Then one of the guards detaches to speak quietly to him, and the man is led away.
