Those empty, soulless black eyes seem to stare at me from every crevice and shadow as we travel on, the dark-haired girl in front nearly sprinting. I have to work hard to catch up with her. Alex has no such problem - she is a track star, after all.
I almost fall over some particulary unsteady junk, but catch myself with my staff just in time. I am silently thankful for the gift Alex and Tara had given me - it seems almost customized for my use.
But Tara...
She was a traitor. She had lied to us, letting us believe she was just an ordinary tech thief. She was an assassin after all.
Her presence had doomed Patch.
But she... had been reluctant to kill us. No, not us. Me. She couldn't bring herself to kill me.
Not for the first time, I stop for two seconds to catch my breath, also mulling over that thought in my mind. Why could she not kill me? I had seen her coldly dispatch other men to their deaths... but she couldn't kill me.
Well, I had spared her life, unintentionally or no, by diving in the way of a bullet that would have killed her.
Anger seethes through my mind. I shouldn't have saved her. She was a spy and assassin. Lies. All lies. Her name probably wasn't even Tara. Lies, every one of them, and I had fallen for them; hook, line, and sinker.
No.
She had remained true to us, after a fashion. At the end, she had defended all our lives with her own, duelling with that damned Imperial mage and flinging around more magic than I had ever seen (Which wasn't much, but was still damned impressive).
But I had let her grow closer to me. She probably didn't even like me, she did it to gain our trust, sink into the tight-knit little triangle that was the only Rebel force that particular world had left. She was nothing more than someone who was willing to whore herself to do her job.
And for that, I hated her.
Rage hissed like a wave of boiling hot foam that threatened to spill over. Concentrating hard, I managed to push it to the back of my head as I did with all unwanted emotion. It dimmed, weakened, but not forgotten.
The anger left me, and in its place was me, pure, distilled, weak, hollowed and beaten.
Nothing more than an animate object. Nothing more.
f i n a l f a n t a s y : r e a l i t y
FINAL FANTASY REALITY
an angelhawk studios production
original concept by redshadow
written by chaosrayne
disk two: 2wo: 4n1mat3 0bject5
"Come on, hurry." The girl laughed as Alex struggled to keep up with her breakneck pace. "The snow will start soon, and we don't want to be caught out here in the Waste forever."
Alex nodded, panting for breath and watching Rain use his staff to vault up to their position. "...what's your name again? ...Didn't... didn't catch it the first time."
The girl laughed again, a musical sound. "I didn't give it." Athletic form barely disguising rippling muscle beneath the feminine shape, she was every inch the brash individual. "The name's Ky. Short for Kyrina, although I hate that name."
"...Yeah..." Alex muttered. "What were... those... things that attacked us?"
Ky chuckled. "Oh, they're just the Anima."
"The what?"
"Anima. Explain later - the bastards come out mostly at night. We'd better get back to the tribe." She sped off again, nearly vanishing into the darkness.
Rain pulled himself up. "Find out anything?"
Alex mopped sweat from her brow. "Not much. I can see this much, though." She gestured to the form of Ky slipping through the shadows. "She moves like a pro."
"You got that right." Rain slicked sweat-damp black hair from his brow. "Knows how to use a plasma pistol, as well."
"What were those... things?" Alex shuddered involuntarily at the mere memory of those shapeless, formless beasts that had attacked us, all cold precision, no emotion.
"No idea." Rain did not comment on the fact that the way the things had fought reminded him of himself. "Maybe you should ask her."
Alex sighed, and took off after the female form, skulking noiselessly in the shadows. "Take your time."
Rain swore as the other two were soon yards ahead of him. "Dammit." He slung his spear over his back and followed the girls, just as silently but at a slower pace. Then he started moving faster when he realised it was snowing.
Snowing.
Not just little dinky useless snowflakes that were just enough to cover the ground once. It was falling thick and fast in a flurry of clumps, coating the landscape in a ghostly, pastel white.
The teen zipped up his combat jacket to his neck and hurried on, leaving crunching footprints in the snow.
It wasn't long before Alex, following the nondistinct impressions left in the snow by the girl before her, caught a glimpse of lights, glowing brightly in the relative darkness. Cold as it was, the blonde SFMA cadet thought that throwing herself into the fire before her would be too unrestrained. So she hugged herself, moving as close as she could to the flickering yellow flames as she could without getting torched.
Rain struggled over a last dune of assorted junk and piled snow, and looked at the pitiful collection of humanity huddled around the fires, sheltered by the collapsed remains of what could have once been a skyscraper.
This, then, was Tribe Omega, the last sizeable population on Earth. This Earth, anyways.
A gaunt man with a grin that showed both his cheekbones met them as they drew closer, dirty brown dreadlocks crusted with frost. He nodded politely to Kyrina, but didn't even acknowledge the other two, his eyes passing over them quicker than thought. Reaching for a grimy mug where some drops of water that wasn't ice still remained, his eyes flicked greedily over the knife next to Alex's hip and the materia it housed. Or maybe it wasn't the knife he was leering at.
Rain met him with a look of casual indifference, albeit one that was spoiled by the fact that he shivered slightly at the cold. The man kept the smile on his face, wearing a thick, ratty coat that did the job of keeping him warm.
Later, Rain basked in the warmth of the fire, accompanied by an old woman who was halfway toothless and for some reason seemed to take a great interest in his weapon. He had to drive her away some time later for trying to steal the plasma cells from the staff.
The side facing the fire felt like it burned while his back felt like it was freezing. He shook his head, trying to dispel the image of being burned and frozen simultaneouly. Geography still held, and this was Russia in winter. Given that this was another universe where nuclear war had come and gone, this would probably be a nuclear winter.
Alex chatted amiably with Kira, not noticing when the gaunt man from earlier took a seat on her other side.
"How long you been here...?" Alex asked before realising that doing so would have been a breach of privacy and nearly stopped.
Kyrina, for her part, shrugged. "I dunno. About two, three months? Everything's a blur beyond that. Eric here..." She pointed at the thin man, who was still grinning like a loon. "...found me in the Waste. He brought me here. I can't remember anything from before..."
Alex decided to change the subject, as she was anxious to make up from her blunder from earlier. "What were those things that attacked us? I mean, I've never seen anything like it."
Kyrina grinned. "They're the formless essence of a spirit given flesh."
"Say what?"
The other girl sighed and tapped Eric on the shoulder. "She wants to know about the Anima. Tell her."
Alex looked with more than a little trepidation at Eric, with his dreadlocks, teeth on the verge of going rotten, and breath that could wake the dead. "Are you sure...?"
Eric stopped smiling. "The Anima... they're bad business, no doubt about it." He paused for a while, then ejected a wad of spittle as large as a small oyster into the fire, where it sizzled for a while. Alex looked mortified.
"...Oh man, that's gross." She tried. But Kyrina seemed used to this sort of behaviour. The dreadlocked tribe scavenger continued his story.
"Years ago, when we was still strong... there was a big science project goin' on." His eyes misted over as he remembered the time. "Somethin' to do with magic an' stuff. Ya know the Death spell?"
Alex shook her head.
"Well, it crushes the spirit of the person it were cast on. The science dumbasses thought they could mess with the magic, so they could take the soul out of someone and put it somewhere else. You followin'?"
Alex paused. "You mean, like that project to put brains in other people?" She blurted it out before she could help herself, yet again. She almost forgot that Project Blueshift was from another universe.
To her surprise, he answered.
He nodded. "Somethin' like that, yep. But they were messin' with the very lifeforce of people and summat... Long story short, they failed." He took a swig from his dirty glass. "They created a by-product through spare soul energy - the lack o' emotion that we now call the Anima."
For all her mistakes, the SFMA cadet was interested. This was unheard of... but then again, who had ever heard of magic from her home reality, anyway? Offhandedly, she glanced down at the materia in her knife...
...wait a second. Wasn't there an Ice, a Fire, and a Bolt spell there along with the junctioned Cure...
She caught Eric with one hand in his pocket, about to sneak another materia off her knife. Kyrina burst into laughter as Alex grabbed the hand, moved her center of gravity, and threw the greasy scavenger into an nearly flawless double axel.
Eric landed on his back, and cursed as a few small green orbs tumbled from his pockets. The SFMA cadet picked them up and clicked them back into place on her knife. Kyrina looked at the weapon strangely before drawing her own.
"These knives... they look similar." She muttered, resisting the urge to ask why.
The answer came, though. "It's an M41-A Zero-Seven trooper knife." Alex said, unaware that visitors from another universe would not neccessarily be welcome. "Yours looks different, though." She pointed at Kyrina's slightly longer weapon, the grip lengthened, and the carbon-titanium alloy extended nearly three whole inches.
"Modded it." Kyrina replied. "I think it looked like yours... once. I don't know... this seems part of something I used to know..."
There was a beeping noise from Alex's pocket, and she withdrew the handheld computer. Eric crowded greedily over her shoulder.
"Whoa. A palmtop. Ain't seen one of those in bloody years." He grumbled. "And in good condition, too."
Then the typical Durandal test pattern appeared on the screen, followed by David's calm voice, which was for some reason abnormally scrambled by static this time.
"zzzkkktssh... Al...ZKKkkkkKK...Alex?"
Alex shook her head. "What've you got?" Ignoring the wide-eyed stare Eric was giving the handheld, she grimaced at the thought of some scavengers ripping the small computer to shreds for components. "Found the woman we're looking for yet?"
"SSSsssssSSSs...." The speakers hissed. "...SKKkkkkks...she's close." The static stopped entirely, and the voice became clear as crystal. "Reading signals from implant less than two feet away from you."
The blonde swung the palmtop in a wide, sweeping arc, the sensor camera on top beeping softly over the crackle of the flames. The beeping became a high-pitched whine as the sensor stopped, pointed straight at 'Kyrina'.
Alex's eyes widened.
Within seconds, Rain was beside her, having being commed through his earpiece, which was miraculously still intact. "She's the woman?"
Alex didn't respond, still looking at Kyrina, who was nonchahalantly downing the contents of a small glass bottle that smelled strongly of alcohol. "She's too young."
"How would you know?" Rain shot back. "You're 17 and can kill several armed people in just as many seconds. She could be this mage after all."
"We haven't seen her use any magic..."
"Well then, Alex. Why don't you throw a fireball at her or something like that? I'm sure she would find some way of retaliating that would prove her a mage."
Alex nearly let rip a violent reply reinforced with muscle, but thought better of it as she recognised the emotion running through Rain's face.
He was jealous.
All he had used so far was the dual-ended plasma staff, that had been lost during his brief stint as captive punching bag, a length of pipe, the short-lived Chaos mech that he had called 'Bob', and now the 'ashandarei'. He had never shown so much as a glimmer of magical capability, and he knew it.
She smiled inwardly. It was good to know the emotionless killer that she knew Rain had inside him had feelings like jealousy that he shared with the rest of the human race. It made him seem more... human.
By way of reply, she reached over to Kyrina's heavily modified M41-A and ran her fingers along one of the grooves designed for placing materia. "Do you know what these are for?"
Kyrina nodded, head spinning from the effects of the drink. "...they're for magic."
Alex nodded. Good gosh, she had only started learning this stuff when Tara had begun teaching her, and that was just before she had been revealed as an Imperial assassin. But now here she was, asking a supposedly incredibly powerful mage about basic spell info.
"You show us any?"
Then all hell broke loose, effectively stopping any further discussion.
The scavenger camp was based mostly on the bottom floors of two collapsed skyscrapers. It wasn't much, but it kept the worst of the wind and snow out without being too much of a beggar 'hole in the ground'.
There wasn't much of 'Tribe Omega', after all. From a quick estimate, about seventy or so people huddled in small scattered groups around the few fires, some chatting, most trying to catch some Z's.
So they were pretty much completely and totally unprepared when a shadow dropped from the ceiling and exploded in a mass of gleaming black blades and ribbonlike razor-sharp pseudopods.
Three humans didn't even have time to scream before they were shredded in a violent spray of blood, one tried to crawl away, yelling for help, but none was given. Her leg caught in a barrage of black shapelessness, the Anima dragged her back and ripped her in half.
"Shit!" The dreadlocked man called Eric muttered, hand reaching for a metal baseball bat. "How the hell did it find us here?"
Alex had already drawn her knife. "We have to stop it! ...Ice!" A spell quickly encased the attacking blob in a large chunk of frozen H2O, but more shadows formed from the walls and slithered, forming their humanoid shapes again.
Women screamed, backing away from the things.
Mumbling about the worst types of situations, I drew my plasma staff, activating the single blade. The blue glow was comforting in the darkness otherwise lit mostly by fires.
"Let's rock." I muttered. I saw Ky stand up and draw her plasma pistol, firing hard as the one nearest me whipped a long, tentacular arm at her.
Blue plasma tore gaping chunks out of the arm. I sidestepped it, allowing it to pass me, then in one smooth motion the edge of my plasma blade severed the offending appendage. The tentacle writhed around for a bit before flopping to the floor uselessly, going back to liquid form.
Alex grinned. "On form?" She ducked under another slash, and parried another. "These things got any weaknesses?"
Kyrina yelped as a series of black darts chewed up the floor. "A hell of a lot of violence... I don't know about magical weaknesses!"
I agreed silently as I watched Eric yell a curse and slam his baseball bat into another menacing black form. It crumpled like a split balloon. Others grabbed burning logs from the fire and swung them in a desperate attempt to ward off the shadows.
One lunged for me, and in a fit of desperation I swiveled, kicked off a wall, and came down in a slash that would have split it into two equal pieces. It did split into two equal pieces - however, they formed two smaller, individual things.
I cursed, twisting in midair to slam a booted foot into one, sending it flying. Eric got the other, blood streaming down his face, yelling like some sort of deranged madman.
"Di-Bolt!" I heard Alex yell, and one that was about to drop on me from above sucked electricity.
Kyrina grinned woozily, still half-drunk. "You call THAT a Bolt spell? Ha!"
Alex's eyebrow twitched, but the only motion she made was to jump sideways out of the path of an attacking black blob and in front of another, shielding two scared children behind her.
Kyrina took what I had come to know as a basic caster's stance, arms outstretched, weapon held forward. She flicked a glittering green orb up in an arc, and adjusted herself so that the single materia clicked itself right into the breech of the plasma pistol she sported as it fell. Twirling the gun around her index finger and catching it in a firing position, she readied a spell. Hairs rose on the back of my neck at the powerful buildup of magic.
"Fierce powers of nature, absolute raw anger of the heavens, unleash destruction upon all infidels! Tri-Bolt!"
Ky literally glowed with crackling blue electricity, hovering a foot or so off the floor. A single hand outstretched, and a massive wave of electrical power pulsed outward, energy frying the few shapeless, twisted black forms unlucky enough to be caught.
Alex fell to the floor in relief as the Anima in front of her sizzled away to nothing and exploded in a spray of black droplets.
"...holy shit." She murmered dazily. She watched as I dispatched the final Anima, sizzling plasma blade engulfing it in a whirlwind of slashes, dicing it up faster than it could reform. "I think she's the one."
Kyrina turned on her. "What?"
Only a universe away...
"Hey, what's bugging you?" Patch couldn't resist asking. "You were never this quiet when the others were around."
Tara didn't answer immediately. Reddish-auburn hair hid her eyes. She slumped, arms hugging her knees, silent and dejected. After a few more seconds of Patch's expectant silence, she answered. "I sold you out from the beginning, you know that?"
Patch grunted.
They had hijacked an Imperial armored truck and had driven it out, the base's defenses still in disarray from when Rain, with Bob and DA-00001, had crashed the party. Not to mention the power was still pretty much cut.
No more mishaps had ended in them driving a few hundred miles before the truck had run out of fuel, still having a combustion engine instead of a plasma drive or even a newfangled mana generator. They had run, and when they couldn't run any more, they walked, and when they couldn't walk, they crawled.
It was a day later when they had arrived near an area populated by trees that offered shade, and more importantly, relative radar safety. The two figures, haggard and weakened, had finally stopped, where Patch had treated Tara's wounds military-style. To her credit, she didn't scream.
Camping open-air next to a small stream running through the forest was the next step, as neither of them was in any shape to travel, much less travel with a world superpower trying to hunt you down and kill you.
"You people took me in as one of your own. I betrayed all of you."
Patch grunted again, trying Tara's patience. He leaned back, using his long gatling gun as an impromptu pillow. "You didn't do it."
"What?" Tara muttered, tonelessly. "I led you all into a trap, I assisted in your capture, I nearly killed Rain..."
"Unless I'm much mistaken," Patch grunted, ignoring the hunger pangs in his stomach. "...your mission was to capture the Key and kill the rogue rebels."
Tara nodded, stabbing small furrows in the soft mossy ground with one of her sai knives.
"...Then you have failed your mission." Patch's face broke into a smile. "An assassin is only an assassin if he does his job."
"...You have no idea." Tara hissed coldly, flinging her sai into the ground with such force that it sunk hilt-deep. "I was the best of the best. Highly paid, professional, so good at doing my job that I had a success rate of 97%. I wasn't supposed to fail!"
Patch turned to face her. "Then why didn't you kill us right away? You had plenty of chances. I was knocked out cold when you first joined us. Alex trusted you. Even Rain, suspicious little brat that he is, trusted you. I'm not sure about Durandal, though."
"I...." Tara bit back a reply, as to divulge that information to Patch would have meant admitting that she was in love with Rain. That little piece of information was something she had only told Shiva, the guardian of ice. "...I couldn't do it. After the way you trusted me."
"...?" Patch asked, a quizzical expression on his face, that picture saying a thousand words.
Tara closed her eyes. "You and the other two offered me something I haven't had in a long, long time."
"What's that?" The big, last remaining member of the O7 asked.
The redhead paused, and her eyelids creaked open, very nearly shedding tears all over again. "...Friendship."