Chapter Fifty-One: Peacekeeping

It took me several hours of hard flying to reach the Land of Thunder and Dwarves, Cass's planet. I almost had tunnel vision as I shot through the empty darkness of the outer space that existed between planets; Cass's planet was the only thing I had eyes for.

The Land of Thunder and Dwarves was, true to the first part of its name, largely covered with greenish thunderclouds. I could see flashes of lightning, visible to the naked eye even from underneath the veil of storm clouds. Unlike the Land of Rain and Rivers, Cass's planet was not completely wreathed in storms, but there still weren't a whole lot of areas that were having sunny weather. There were also hundreds, maybe thousands of what looked like large, floating islands scattered all over the sky, above the storm clouds. Some of them had multicolored forests and small mountains on their surfaces, while others were merely barren rock.

As I started to enter the stormy planet's atmosphere, I folded my wings close to my body, shooting straight down into the storm clouds at a steep angle. I kept this up as long as I could, but it was difficult—I was being tossed about like a ragdoll by all the conflicting wind currents. After a few seconds of this abuse, the eagle part of my mind shoved me aside and took over. I felt myself spread my wings and bank right, following the direction of the wind.

Lightning was flashing all around me, blinding me from several directions at once. I was being constantly pelted by rain. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was dark green haze. I was in the middle of the storm clouds; I couldn't see anything else. It might have been disorienting if I'd been flying through the clouds on my own, but now…well, I was part bird, after all. The skies felt like home.

I could somehow sense an updraft in front of me, so I stopped beating my wings, angling them so that I was able to simply glide right through the updraft of warm air. Beyond the updraft, though, was the corresponding downdraft. That was what I wanted—I rode the downdraft all the way to the bottom of the storm system, finally emerging from the thick, greenish storm clouds. I shivered a couple times, glad to be free of the chilly precipitation within the clouds.

I soared across the landscape, taking in the Land of Thunder and Dwarves as it rushed past below. The surface of the planet comprised largely of rolling hills and tall, golden-yellow grass. There were mountains made of a deep red stone scattered irregularly throughout the environment, and I could just barely spot what appeared to be the edge of a massive canyon complex off in the far distance.

Even though Skaia was obscured by the storm clouds, LOTAD still almost appeared to be having a bright day—a result of the landscape existing largely in warm colors. Red mountains, yellow grass, canyons of orange and golden stone… I leveled out, deciding to head in the direction of the nearest mountain range.

I didn't make it quite that far, though. Out of the corner of my eye—and my eyesight was freakin' godlike, ever since I'd been merged with an eagle—I was able to spot a number of dark shapes flying low to the ground, off in the horizon. Underlings.

I let out a high-pitched screech and banked left, heading away from the mountains in pursuit of those flying underlings. I could fly much faster than the underlings, and I wasn't even feeling tired—I'd catch up to them within ten minutes. As I flew further and further north—don't ask how I knew what direction was what—the hills began to steepen into ridges and valleys. The red mountains grew less frequent, but the few that existed in the more rugged terrain were much larger in size and height. But then, as I started to close the gap between me and those underlings, I spotted another mountain in the distance…by far the largest I'd seen so far, made of a rock that was violet in color, rather than the much more common red.

And on a ledge partway up one of the violet mountain's sheer slopes, I could faintly make out a familiar shape. It was Cass's house. Sure, it was incredibly warped—copied and pasted with the Sburb server application, transforming it into a mind-numbing, tower-shaped mishmash of houses stacked on top of each other. But I could still recognize it as Cass's house.

And when I saw Cass…

She was on her rooftop, crouched down on a knee, her M16 assault rifle tucked to her shoulder. Right now, her house was surrounded by a swarm of winged basilisks; they were circling around her rooftop, taking their turns dive-bombing her. She was firing in short, controlled bursts; each time she opened fire, a basilisk would fall from the sky.

But the much larger, winged, snake-like underlings that I'd followed here… Wyrms, they were called. I hadn't encountered any of them on the Land of Rain and Rivers, but somehow I still knew exactly what they were. They would pose much more of a problem. But I didn't give a shit about them. The moment I saw Cass, I… I started to see red. From my perspective, it'd only been hours since I'd been ripped from my dream bubble, and seeing Cass started to make all the crazy come howling back to the surface.

I heard myself screech again, streaking forward into a dive of my own, my talons outstretched… When I think back on it, I honestly don't know what I was trying to accomplish. I kind of just…lost it. I'd spent the entire flight from my planet to this one calming myself down after my traumatic revival and subsequent meltdown with Adam. I'd been able to achieve a very tentative, fragile sense of ease—trying to find some small measure of balance between the eagle's consciousness and my own.

And now, all that bullshit just went up in smoke. I started getting bombarded with Adam's memories—so many things that made me who I was, things that I'd never actually done… Feelings for Cass I'd never personally felt, working up the courage that I never had to ask her out on a date I'd never asked her out on... I honestly don't know if I was actually trying to kill Cass in that moment, and I suppose I'll never find out. I had no idea what I was going to do; rational thought had just gone out the window. I was swooping down on Cass from behind, baring my teeth in a savage snarl, about to strike…

…but then my right side suddenly exploded with pain. The wyrms…I'd dive-bombed Cass and, as a result of my lapse in rational thought, opened myself up to attack from the underlings I'd just blown past. I could smell the acrid odor of burnt flesh and feathers. Of what happened next, I can only remember random flashes—I wasn't unconscious, or anything, but…

I think the eagle had taken control of me. My consciousness was blinded and shocked by the pain of getting blasted by a ball of fire, so the eagle's instincts stepped in to fill the vacancy and kept me going even when otherwise I would have collapsed.

I could feel my body moving as if on autopilot, could feel myself ripping through one of the wyrms with nothing but my talon-like fingers. I did things I never would have done if I'd been in control of myself… Well, I suppose I should say the eagle did things I never would have done. I tore through many of the underlings with my bare hands and talons…and at one point, I think I may have even torn the throat out of a wyrm with my teeth. My mouth tasted like blood, and I could feel it dripping down my chin. The eagle really did not shy away from fighting gory.

Unfortunately for me, the eagle fought as fierce as fucking Ares…but it was much less careful than I would have been. Its fighting style would have worked if it was still a bird, but it now had a much bigger, much more vulnerable body than what it was used to. Its aggressive rampage through the underlings inadvertently opened me up to many attacks, and I could feel myself getting torn up by basilisk claws. But the eagle's raw impulses and instincts were able to keep the pain at bay.

Cass was fighting hard, too. I could see her in my outer peripheries, calmly moving from position to position, dropping underlings left and right with well-aimed bursts. Sometimes a basilisk would come in close and she would get swiped—then she'd have to beat the creatures off with the butt of her rifle. Her M16 would clack empty once every other minute, and then she'd have to retrieve a fresh magazine from her sylladex, somehow always managing to reload the assault rifle before the underlings could get the upper hand.

The eagle was getting me cut up pretty bad, but Cass and I were still holding down the fort pretty well. If we could keep at it for another minute… But then, the eagle directed my gaze outwards from the fight. I was able to spot a second, much larger swarm emerging from the storm clouds, comprising entirely of the larger, more powerful wyrms. They were less than a mile distant and would be all over us within a minute.

When I spotted the oncoming wyrms, my turbulent thoughts suddenly grew calm and still. I could always fly away and escape the wyrms…but I could do these things because I was a sprite, and because I was part eagle. Cass was neither. I had to get us the hell out of here, or she was dead meat.

My face contorted in a deep, determined grimace as I retook control of myself from the eagle and starting moving of my own accord. I sent a fistful of fire straight through the upper body of the wyrm immediately attacking me, burning right through its chest cavity. Without a moment's hesitation, before another underling had the chance to step in, I whipped around and grabbed Cass, pulling her close and wrapping my arms around her.

Then, ignoring Cass's protests, I flared my wings and—like what I'd done with Adam, earlier—put all my strength into a single, powerful flap. I was propelled straight up into the air, carrying Cass right through the first gate. There was a flash of bright violet light, and then we were suddenly crashing down into a clearing of golden tall grass, in the middle of a forest of trees with purplish bark, leaves of orange and light blue.

Sure, I'd just saved our lives, but now I was wishing I'd never taken control back from the eagle. A good part of my right side had been transformed into an ugly burn mark—the solid red energy that my sprite body was made out of simply shriveled and turned a darker shade of red, closer to maroon. In some spots, it had actually gone completely black. That was from the fireball I'd inadvertently protected Cass from. I had also been cut up and lacerated in nearly a dozen places all over my body, and I was just noticing how much I was bleeding.

I guess I was kinda surprised that I was bleeding. Having a body made out of sprite energy, I didn't really think I had blood, anymore. But there it was, leaking from my wounds like it would from any normal person who just got royally fucked up by a bunch of fire-breathing underlings. It wasn't quite red, either; it was a bright, luminous shade of amber. If God ever drank apple juice, it'd probably look something like my blood. It looked crazy…

Without the animalistic consciousness of the eagle drowning out my senses, I was now able to feel, in vibrant detail, every single wound I'd just been dealt. My right side was gripped in a red-hot agony from the burn, a fresh wave of fire throbbing throughout my torso every time I took in a breath. And to top it all off, some of the gashes I'd gotten from the underlings' claws had actually gone kind of deep. Whatever parts of me that weren't affected by the burn sure as hell were feeling the intense, stabbing pain from all the lacerations.

Basically, there was no way I could move without having one wound or another making me feel like complete and utter shit.

I actually tried at one point to surrender voluntarily to the eagle's consciousness to escape my own senses, but this was the one time the eagle actually refused. Maybe this was its way of giving me the middle finger for wresting back control, earlier.

I just lay in the grass, staring up at the stormy sky, watching the lightning, taking careful breaths that were as light and gentle as I could possibly make them. The greenish-gray storm clouds grew blurry as my eyes slowly teared up. My wings were also still spread out—not quite to their full span, but wide enough to make me feel intense discomfort from lying on top of them like that. The wing feathers were twitching in response to the pain. Folding them to make myself more comfortable, however, was absolutely out of the question, at the moment…any kind of movement besides breathing and blinking was out of the question.

I heard Cass getting up to her feet and dusting herself off. She held a hand to her forehead, blinking several times and shaking her head slowly as she got her bearings back. Then she noticed me, hurried over to my side. She crouched over me to get a better look at my wounds—I tried to ignore the look of shock on her face when she saw who and what I was. She hadn't actually seen who I was during the fight on her rooftop; everything had been moving too fast. But now…

I couldn't look her in the eye.

"Adam?" she said my name hesitantly. "Adam, what…what happened to…"

I tried to answer, but all that came out was a raspy mess of syllables that probably made sense only in Icelandic, or some other ridiculous language. Cass laid a hand on my burn, and…and the strangest thing happened. The burning-hot pain began to lessen, as if gently flowing away through Cass's palm.

Then I felt really sleepy. I tried to stay awake, kept trying to speak to Cass, but it was no use.

My eyelids drooped shut and I was out cold within seconds.

The Authority Regulator left his rooftop immediately after he gave the order to send in the crushers. Leaving Commandant Arcturus on the rooftop to oversee the operation, he hurried downstairs and emerged from the building, trading nods with several of the patrolmen who were tasked with securing that particular street.

The Regulator tapped a rhythm on his nightstick as he jogged down the road to the next street, which opened up into Greenflame Plaza, where the crowds of dissenters were threatening to wreak havoc. A line of six large, matte-black armored trucks appeared almost out of thin air, emerging from the alleys they'd been waiting in, roaring down the street into the square beyond. Once they entered the square, the six trucks spaced themselves out—they had barely come to a complete stop before their rear doors were thrown open. The loud engines quieted down and gave way to the sound of heavy footfalls as the mounted units began to disembark. These Enforcers wore body armor that was, like the trucks, all black. They wore thick boots, gloves, and black helmets with tinted plexiglass faceplates, obscuring their faces. Equipment-wise, the crushers wielded large, transparent riot shields and electrified truncheons. They also carried energy pistols strapped to their thighs, in case their truncheons failed them.

This scene was being repeated all throughout Greenflame Plaza as the Lunar Sector's mounted units secured the other street entrances that opened up into the square. The crushers cleared those entrances first, establishing a solid perimeter around the immediate exterior of Greenflame Plaza before beginning to move in—when they started to move up, the conventional foot units securing the outer streets took their place, keeping the perimeter intact. Within ten seconds, several hundred riot enforcement personnel were slowly making their way towards the center of the square.

The crushers were considerably outnumbered by the dissenters, but they were highly disciplined. They had been training for millennia to take on a riot of this scale. And ultimately, if they were unable to subdue the crowds, additional forces could be always be called in from a neighboring district, though that was a worst-case scenario. But the Regulator had every confidence that the crushers would be able to do their job.

His confidence was not unfounded.

The thousands-strong mob of dissenters grew even more violent when they saw the crushers arrive—the Lunar Sector's mounted units were far from loved by the populace. The nickname crushers had not been given to them out of affection. The Regulator had known that their presence alone had the potential to spark off a riot, so he'd avoided sending them in until the riot had already started. Wait for the dissenters to show their hand before he showed his own.

The crushers moved into tight formations and began to advance. They moved forward slowly and carefully—the rioters weren't in any hurry to leave, so the Enforcers saw no reason to hurry themselves. The riot would be dispersed, one way or another.

The Authority Regulator unsheathed his nightstick, giving it a twirl as he watched the angry rioters charge the crushers. Bottles, bricks, rocks, and all sorts of debris were hurled at the armored Enforcers. The crushers anticipated this, elevating their shields and angling them back a bit to protect their heads and upper bodies—bottles shattered against the reinforced polycarbonate shields, bricks and rocks bounced right back off.

While all this happened, the dissenters continued to charge straight at the assembled Enforcers, ready to make them sorry for trying to oppress them. None of the crushers batted an eye, though. They were hardened Enforcers, and nothing would make them retreat short of a direct order from Major Rana, who had direct field command, or from Commandant Arcturus. But that order would never come.

The crushers held position as the tide of oncoming dissenters was about to crash into their shield wall, the forward-most line of Enforcers supported by the ranks behind them. The Authority Regulator could not help but admire the sheer efficiency of the riot enforcement officers; they operated like well-oiled clockwork. When the crushers halted their slow advance, several of their number, located in the rear line, broke ranks. Instead of bearing shields and truncheons, they wielded modified grenade launchers. These Enforcers aimed their weapons upwards and opened fire, sending canisters of tear gas straight into the front of the charging mob.

In those initial moments of confusion when the gas canisters hit the crowds, when the effects of the nerve agent started to take their toll, incapacitating many of the rioters, the crushers struck. The sergeants calmly ordered their squads to advance. No sooner had the canisters hit the crowds than the crushers rushed forward. They maintained their tight formation, but now they moved at least three times faster than their original pace.

The crushers kept their shield wall strong as they pushed into the frenzied crowd. The tear gas had thrown off the momentum of the dissenters' advance; now, they milled about—some of them temporarily blinded, some of them incapacitated by severe coughing fits or vomiting. Any small semblance of organization they might have had before was now gone.

Any of the disabled dissenters who were unlucky enough to cross the crushers' path were immediately shocked into unconsciousness by the Enforcers' stun batons. The slightly more fortunate dissenters who had managed to evade the tear gas tried to stand their ground, but they were subjected to a similar treatment by the crushers—unlike the incapacitated dissenters, who only received a shock from the stun batons to knock them out, any healthy, uninjured dissenter who tried to resist was rewarded for their efforts by having the crushers beat the living tar out of them.

More of the dissenters tried to rally, throwing themselves at the crushers. The Dersite enforcement officers caught the civilians on their riot shields, keeping them at arm's length. Working as a single unit, the crushers thrust their shields forward, throwing the pressing dissenters off-balance, all the while maintaining their forward advance toward the center of the square.

Then the Enforcers retracted their shields and started cracking skulls with their truncheons, sending more dissenters to the ground, convulsing from the energy shocks they received from the powered weapons. All throughout Greenflame Plaza, the mounted units were making progress with the mobs. Dazed dissenters were beginning to break off from the mobs, limping away from the advancing Enforcers and into the small, dark alleyways.

The crushers continued to fire more tear gas into the crowds wherever they gathered in large numbers. The tear gas would disorient them, and then the crushers would go in and break them up. Gradually, bit by bit, the massive mob that had occupied Greenflame Plaza was broken down into several smaller groups. Then those smaller groups were dispersed even further, until the crushers were finally able to break formation and punitively subdue the rioters at will without fear of being overwhelmed by numbers.

All over the square, Enforcers wrestled rioters to the ground, either cuffing them and dragging them to one of the many prisoner transport vehicles that had pulled into the Plaza, or simply clubbing them into unconsciousness and leaving them to be rounded up later.

The Wrathful Veteran had long since vanished. The Authority Regulator muttered under his breath in frustration when he saw that the Veteran had eluded him once again. He looked up to the skies, searching for the Thane's dream self…but, like the Veteran, the Thane had also disappeared.

This did not surprise the Regulator—he knew that the people who'd gathered here were mere civilians. Dissenters, yes; ex-soldiers, yes…but civilians nonetheless. If any of the true dissenters, the ones who kept to the shadows, the ones who'd fought under the Wrathful Veteran and turned the Obsidian Moon into a warzone for several millennia…if any of them had been at this rally, they'd had the good sense to slip away before the crushers rolled on in.

The Authority Regulator wondered to himself how much of this whole debacle the Wrathful Veteran had planned for. The Veteran must have known that appearing at a rally would have inevitably resulted in a massive riot, which in turn would have been suppressed by the hated crushers.

The Regulator recalled his days in the ranks of the Lunar Sector, dealing with the conflict on the Obsidian Moon; the Wrathful Veteran had certainly been able to cause the Enforcers more than enough grief with his small group of dissenters, there was no denying that. The vast majority of the Obsidian Moon's populace, however, had not necessarily agreed with the Veteran. They'd simply wanted to live in peace, far from the Battlefield, and were unfortunately caught in the middle of the conflict. They hated and feared the Black Queen and her Agents, but the Veteran was also responsible for bringing destruction and harsher law enforcement to their doorsteps. As a result, they had been largely neutral during the strife the Obsidian Moon had suffered through.

The violence was winding down. Order had been restored…but the Regulator could only speculate at what the cost would be. Perhaps all that had been accomplished today was a sizable portion of the neutral populace being pushed into the dissenter camp. Perhaps dealing with the Wrathful Veteran and his dissenters had just become more difficult.

The Authority Regulator shook his head, sheathing his nightstick. Those were dangerous thoughts to be thinking, and he decided to put them out of his mind. He openly admitted that he was not very good at seeing the bigger picture. The truth was that he was better at foreseeing the consequences of events than he gave himself credit for—he simply did not like doing it. He did not like having to consider an infinite combination of future possibilities, preferring instead to focus more on the concerns of the present.

A rally had turned violent, rapidly transforming into a riot that threatened to take the entire district by storm. But thanks to some good, solid, efficient enforcement, that riot had been successfully put down, sparing the Long Night District from untold amounts of property damage. And the Enforcers had not suffered any fatalities. A number of officers would have to be pulled from duty for medical treatment for a while, but none had been killed in the violence. The same could not be said, however, for the rioters.

Order had been restored. In the end, order would always be restored. The Regulator only wished that the restoration of order didn't require such a big cleanup.

"Not a bad day…" the Authority Regulator murmured to himself, stepping over the motionless body of an unconscious rioter as he made his way back towards the perimeter.

Perhaps now he could finally go about filing some of the parking citations that had piled up in the Archagent's office. Anything to take his mind off the nightmare of the aftermath of today. All the debris that needed to be cleared away, all the prisoners that needed to be processed before being sent to the dungeons…the only silver lining was that normally the Regulator would have to file an after-action report to the Archagent. Seeing as how he was now nominally acting-Archagent, the Regulator would not have to fill out that report until he saw fit; after all, he would only be filing it to himself.

As the Authority Regulator headed back to meet up with Commandant Arcturus, he started to whistle quietly.

Theo had gotten the hell out of dodge when the riot started to turn ugly. After the shooting of that first protester, the one who'd thrown a bottle and wounded one of the Enforcers, the crowd had exploded. Theo had wisely chosen to abscond.

He retreated to the top of a somewhat nearby clocktower with a good view and watched the riot unfold from a safe distance. The Dersite equivalent of riot police showed up, rumbling into the Plaza with armored trucks. Theo watched them form up and lock shields; their tight formations almost reminded him of the Roman legions. Then they dispersed the rioters with stun batons and tear gas, beating any who resisted into submission.

"Man, these Derse guys are crazy…" Theo murmured.

"Some of us, yes. But not all of us," a voice suddenly spoke up from behind him. Theo whipped around, coming face to face with a shorter Dersite. He had an ugly scar on the lower right side of his face, nubby white teeth, and small, round eyes. He wore a wide-brimmed fedora and a dark gray suit. All in all, he had a very ordinary look to him, apart from the scar. But Theo knew this was not the case, immediately recognizing the stranger.

"You're the one who was talking to all those people down there," Theo said to the Dersite.

"The people call me the Wrathful Veteran. And you're the Thane," the Dersite replied evenly. He stepped forward, moving up alongside Theo, watching as the Enforcers dispersed the last of the resistance in the square, starting the long, laborious process of cleaning up the aftermath of the riot. "Now we know each other."

Thane. Deltasprite had called Theo that. He'd told Theo that it was his title, denoting what his powers were, and what his role in this whole game would be. The Thane of Breath—that's who Theo was, whatever it meant.

"How do you know who I am?" Theo asked the Dersite.

The Wrathful Veteran blinked in surprise. He had anticipated the Thane's arrival at his rally, but he had not expected for him to be ignorant. "Your arrival was foretold millennia ago by the Nobles and their consorts. You are, to us, considered to be figures of mythology. Obviously not so mythological, anymore, however… Did you enjoy the rally?" The Veteran nodded in the direction of the square, his eyes not leaving Theo, gauging his reaction.

Theo watched as Enforcers in the square started loading up the first of the cuffed rioters into prisoner transports. "No," Theo answered. "People died down there."

The Wrathful Veteran exhaled quietly, lowering his head a fraction. "I knew that violence was inevitable, but I had hoped… I had hoped there would be no death. Unfortunately, things that I hope for and things that actually happen are rarely the same."

Theo could find no argument with that. "Was it worth it, then?"

"I believe so, yes." The Wrathful Veteran gave a single nod. "I have now revealed your existence and arrival to virtually the entire Obsidian Moon—there were people from all four districts gathered in the Plaza today. Word will travel fast. I got the Enforcers to show their hand, as well; even if the Black Queen is not directly responsible for their actions, blame will fall on her. The Enforcers will quickly find the Obsidian Moon to be a much less welcoming place. And lastly… I ensured that you witnessed firsthand how the Enforcers operate in a conflict. All around, I would consider this to be something resembling a strategic victory."

"If you say so…" Theo didn't feel the same way as he observed the wreckage in the square. But then, he thought to himself, he really didn't know anything about what was going on. Context was always a good thing to have. Still...he was kind of unnerved by the Veteran's apparent ease with which he handled other people's lives. "So, uh…what were you guys protesting?"

"Walk with me, Thane." The Wrathful Veteran turned away from the view of the square, gesturing for Theo to follow him downstairs. "There's a lot we need to discuss."