Okay, sorry about the delay folks, school has been hell of late, and I have had a lot of academic bowl stuff to practice for so I haven't been bale to write as much as I would have liked to.
That said, I want tot hank everyone who took time out of their lives to review, and for those of you who haven't reviewed, but have read this story, I thank you and hope I haven't caused any form of mental scarring.
Oh yes, I want to extend my sincerest thanks to CopyCat87, a member of Deviant Art, who has been kind enough to draw some excellent stuff of Kage, which I would really recommend that you check out.
The drawings can be found here.
http/ copycat87. deviantart. com /gallery/
Lawyers: I own nothing save those beings that are products of my own demented mind.
That said, hope you enjoy.
&
An Angel's Wrath, a Demon's Fury: Part One
The large Wastelander leaned out of the tunnel, aiming his assault rifle down at the Marauders that were below him, before opening up with a fully automatic burst of fire. Bullets flew from the barrel, scything through the air, and brining several of the enemy troopers down. However, much to Kleiver's dismay, others were merely wounded by his little rampage, and still others escaped harm altogether as their armor managed to hold up to his shots, the bullet ricocheting harmlessly off of the steel.
He was forced to duck back as retaliatory fire that was ten times what his had been came flying back at him. Lead pinged off of the rock, some of it flying disturbing close to his head, and the burly elf decided that it would perhaps be best if he were to beat a hasty retreat back to the depths of the tunnel and try to hole up with the rest of his comrades in arms.
The attack had started less than an hour ago, and already the situation was starting to look rather bleak. With Valthos gone, there had been no clear leader, which when combined with the strange weaponry (apparently of Precursor origins, if the energy type was what he assumed it was), and a radio jammer of some variety, meant that they had quickly been cut off into small, desperate squads trying to hold out against an enemy that was vastly superior in the numbers department.
Several, his group included, had been able to break free, and they had pretty much congregated themselves in the tunnels that led to the throne room of Spargus, logically thinking that they would be able to easily fortify the area. He had volunteered to try and hold the fort while the others busied themselves with entrenchment.
As he retreated back down the tunnel, he frowned, realizing that this was the sole defensive fortification that they had left under their control, and that anyone else caught outside was going to be in for a really bad time.
The burly Wastelander muttered an oath as he reloaded his assault rifle, wondering how much worse this day was going to get.
Outside of where Kleiver and company were attempting to hole themselves up and buy time for some form of intervention, from where they could really care less, a massive, armor clad elf watched the battle, if it could really be called that anymore, unfold.
Scourge smiled from behind his helmet as he gazed in the direction of the Spargus Monestary, where his troops had broken into early on. As before, they were under specific orders not to harm the monks, as they were of no use to him dead. Anyone else was fair game though, and some of the bodyguards and wounded had been killed already, while the others would either be hauled off to slave away in their own factories, or tortured until their throats got to hoarse to scream anymore, after which they would be dealt with in a more permanent fashion.
A line of prisoners passed him, monks from the Monastery. One in particular stood out, a female that stared at him, her crimson eyes narrowed to slits of fury. For moment, even he, the leader of the Marauders, an elf that had killed more Wastelanders than anyone had bothered to keep track of, was taken aback. There was something there, something in those eyes that spoke of some hidden power, of something that dwelt beneath the surface of this apparently frail looking girl.
There was more to this one that met the eye… he'd have to remember that.
Scourge was brought back to reality by one of his field commanders trotting out towards him. He nodded, and the elf delivered his message.
"We've secured the entire city except for their interior tunnels, my lord." The man replied, his tone upbeat and full of triumph. "What are your orders regarding them?"
"No need to waste any more of our men storming into a vipers' nest." His superior said, crossing his arms and smiling once again. "Leave a guard around all of the entrances; we'll starve them out of their little hole."
"That could take some time, my lord…" The other elf responded, and his leader nodded, before snapping his fingers.
"Then bring a few of the normal prisoners around there, and start torturing them. We'll see how long they stay holed up when they can hear their 'friends' pleading for mercy."
His subordinate smiled in a wicked manner, before proceeding to carry out that order. As for Scourge himself, he turned and headed back to the vehicles that were already starting to leave. He had gotten his victory, and now it was time for him and his men and women to enjoy the spoils of their success.
They had spent some time just sitting around their vehicles, reminiscing about times past, until the light of day began to wane and fade into the background, while the stars began to come out and the temperature began to drop.
"Its getting dark, we should be heading back." Sig stated, rising from his seat across from where his old friend was.
Damas merely nodded silently, still pondering about how he would react the next time he saw Jak…the dark elf that he now knew to be his son. It was a puzzle, really, and he didn't know what to make of it in all actuality. Part of him wished nothing more than to embrace the young warrior the next time that he laid eyes upon him, while another part, the irrational fear that always crept up into the minds of people when in a situation such as this, worried and fretted over what the Ascended Channeler would think of him, knowing that he was the man who had sent so many to their deaths, caused so much suffering due to his own shortsightedness. What would be Jak's own reaction? What would he do if and when he found out the truth of the Sand King, that Valthos and Damas were one in the same?
He sighed, and scratched the side of his head still not entirely sure what he should do.
It was then that a far more pressing matter made itself known to him.
"Kleiver, for the love of the Ancients, come in." he heard Sig say, and he turned to face the burly Wastelander. "This isn't funny at all!"
"What's going on?" Damas inquired, cocking his head to one side.
"I can't raise Kleiver, or anyone else for that matter." Sig responded, looking over his shoulder to his old comrade, a frown present on his face.
"You think it could be interference from something? A storm perhaps?" the ruler of Spargus ventured, rubbing his chin and tapping his boot on the sand.
"Sensors didn't pick up any indication of a storm brewing when I checked em before I left to find you." Sig said with a shake of his head. "One could have started up, but I think that our dear quartermaster would have given us the heads up." He frowned once more, his old combat instincts kicking up. "I don't like this one bit."
"Neither do I." Damas muttered, before looking up at his friend. "Let's go."
"One sec, old buddy." Sig told him as he went over to his Gila Stomper and reached into the drivers area, before pulling out a fair sized bag and tossing it to the Sand King.
He caught it with ease, and opened it. Inside were canisters and vials filled with Eco of various kinds.
"Reloads for your belt, courtesy of the Haven City black market, thought you might need some after all this time." The armored elf told him, getting a nod of thanks from his ruler.
Damas paused only to reload his belt, and to secure the bag with the remainder of the vials, before mounting up on his Sidewinder, and tearing off through the desert back to Spargus, with Sig hot on his heels.
Sig and Damas would not be alone in their concern for the Wastelander city, as Jak, Daxter and Keira also had little luck in raising a hailing from Spargus. All of them hardened by years of surviving in Haven City during its darkest time, they also had their sixth senses kicking in and telling them that something was very, very wrong with this situation.
Thus, they stopped their scout bikes at the edge of a rocky ridge that stood between them and the desert city, before dismounting and carefully making their way over the wind sharpened boulders.
They saw the smoke before they saw the town, and the three of them exchanged glances, before picking up the pace to what would almost be considered reckless, considering what it was that they were treading over. It did not take them long to reach the edge of the peak, and as they looked down upon the sandy waste below them, their jaws dropped and their eyes bulged.
Spargus City was burning, smoke rising up above the mountain that the town was built into.
Without wasting a second, both elves turned their visor binoculars to a maximum zoom, magnifying the battleground some thirty times, and they felt fear begin to well up inside of them.
The massive, steel reinforced walls of the Wastelander city had enough holes to make it look like someone had taken a colossal shotgun to them, and the enormous city gates had been blown clean off their running tracks so that they were incapable of being closed. That was about all that they could see from their current position, but they had little doubt that the devastation did not stop there, and that the entire city had been laid to waste.
Anger quickly began to replace that fear, as both Ascended Channelers looked to each other, reaching a mutual decision without even having to speak it. Turning, they bolted back to their Sidewinders, and upon reaching them, made a beeline for Spargus, rage boiling in their blood.
Within the depths of Jak's mind, Kage's eyes flashed a slightly brighter shade of red, and oni bared his fangs menacingly, clenching and unclenching his fists as if he held something within them.
Five minutes was all that it took for them to reach the area before the gates of the city, and as they had drawn close, they had realized that they were not alone. About half a quarter of a mile away, they could see the dust plume generated by another Sidewinder, and the distinctive shape of Sig's dune buggy as they too roared towards the city.
The faster of the two vehicles drew closer, and the trio saw that it was Valthos upon it, his cloth mask covering his face as it always did. However, even from this distance, they could see the raw hatred that burned in his eyes.
They linked up just before they entered the gates, and formed a roughly triangular formation with the bikes, while Sig came up from the rear, riddling with some controls and placing the massive, machine gun turret upon the top of the Gila Stomper under his control.
The Marauders that had been left behind to lay siege to the last of the beleaguered defenders (and try to lure them out with the screams of their comrades) heard them coming, and to their credit, had quite a welcome wagon ready for the newly found company. However, they hadn't counted on said newcomers to be an elite soldier, a pair of Ascended Channelers, and one very much pissed off Spargian king.
Like a certain quartet of Horsemen, Jak and the others flew around the final corner between themselves and the mainstay of the Marauders that remained. In a flash, weapons were drawn, and the air was filled with gunfire.
The Marauders still had several vehicles present as well, including one of the ones that had been outfitted with a Precursor weapon. None present would have realized that a weapon of this power was meant merely to be a point defense cannon for a Juggernaut, as the firepower of it had reduced several stone buildings to rubble. Thus, when the first shot form this thing was fired, leaving a fifteen foot crater behind it, Valthos was quick to realize the danger that it posed, especially to Sig's slower moving buggy. Thus, he was quick to come up with an ingenious and shocking means of dealing with it.
In one hand, he held his gunblade, and with the other, he dispensed a couple of vials of Red Eco, crushing them and absorbing them into himself. A crimson glow came over him, and heedless of the bullets that were flying at him, he twisted his Sidewinder to where it was about to wipe out and go sliding away from himself. At the same time, he jammed his weapon into the ground, using it as an anchor and nearly ripping his arm right off in the process.
Using his increased strength and the forward momentum of his bike, he tightened his leg's grip upon the seat, and twisted about, bringing the scouting vehicle in a quick three hundred and sixty degree spin.
Centrifugal force picked up at this point, lifting the bike up about a foot off of the ground, and as soon as it was about to face the vehicle with the point defense turret mounted upon it, Valthos released his hold upon the seat. This had the eye popping and jaw dropping result of turning a four hundred pound vehicle into an impromptu missile flying towards the gunner at more than sixty miles per hour.
The Marauder in the gunner's seat felt his eyes widen as he saw what exactly was streaking towards him. In an instinctive action, he pulled the trigger, and a burst of Eco flew from the barrel of his weapon…just as Valthos had planned. The beam hit, and the Sidewinder exploded.
The Marauder who was the target of this attack apparently lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of the laws of physics, as if he had, he would never have fired that shot, and would have let the bike slam into his weapon. As it was, the Sidewinder went up in a blaze of glory some twenty feet away from him, and when something like that explodes, it tends to throw shrapnel in all directions.
He never even had a chance to scream before a rather large chuck of metal whizzed right through his neck, taking his head right off.
The others, while very much amazed by what they had just witnessed, kept their wits about them and didn't stop their assault, with Jak and Keira streaking towards the largest group they could see. Several raised their weapons at the duo, only to find a bizarre combination of Dark Eco lightning and a ray of Light Eco streaking in towards them. They had just enough time to let out screams of surprise and denial, before the attacks hit home, the lightning coursing over about six of them while the explosion from Keira's attack claimed another half dozen.
After that, they were upon the remainder of them, who were far too stunned by what they had just seen to even raise their weapons in defense of themselves. Almost simultaneously, the two Ascended Channelers reached back and drew their weapons from their holsters. Jak leaned over as he sped by a Marauder, lashing out and smiling as Kitetsu gutted him like a fish as he passed by. As for his soul mate, she thrust her naginata forward. Her speed, when combined with the Vibrium edge of Masamune, enabled her to easily impale one of the desert elves right through the heart.
Not pausing for a second (if one didn't count the horizontal spin that Keira used to rid her weapon of the dying elf that was stuck on the end of it) they continued their little rampage.
Behind them, the ground popped and exploded as snipers that had been positioned a little closer to the entrances of the tunnel system took aim and fired at the two of them. However, a moment or so later, they realized they had made a rather fatal error in revealing their location, as Sig, noticing where the shots were coming from, promptly trained the massive machine gun on the top of his buggy at them. Seconds later, the area became clouded with dust as the fifty caliber slugs ripped into their positions…and themselves as well.
As for Valthos, he was quick to recover from his little display, and assimilated some Blue Eco into himself, before dashing around the other way from the rest of the group, intending to deal with the Marauders that might be on the other side of town, hopefully in time to meet the others in the rough middle, which would result in a rather nasty hammer and anvil type deal.
Moving like a blur, he came upon a group of five such Marauders, on the ground before them, was a bloody and battered Wastelander, and it didn't take more than a millisecond for the Sand King to put two and two together. Even as a bellow of rage left his throat, catching the attention of the desert elves, he leveled his gunblade and squeezed off a couple of rounds.
The Marauders in question here were not stupid, and had heard the gunfire from a few moments earlier. However, they thought that this meant that the cries of the captured Wastelanders were finally proving to be too much for their holed up comrades, and that their enemies had decided to show themselves. If one wished to get technical that could very well have been the end result of their tactics. However, what they had stirred up was not exactly something that they were prepared to deal with, not to mention that their attacker was not coming from the direction that they had expected, resulting in them being even more ill prepared for the attack.
The two bullets that Valthos fired were dead on target, flying through the visors of a pair of Marauders, and causing their brains to pop like melons as the resulting stress from the slugs literally tore their heads apart. Their corpses fell to the ground, the helmets and the remains of the heads that used to occupy them rolling along the ground.
The others readied their melee weapons, but their attempts to protect themselves were in vain. Valthos' speed fueled by the Blue Eco that he had assimilated into himself and the rage that boiled in his blood, was far greater than anything that they could ever hope to match, and they died quickly.
The ruler of Spargus paused just long enough to see to the Wastelander that they had been busy torturing. Breathing a sigh of relief upon discovering that the man was alive for the moment, and not about to die from his injuries, he sped towards the rallying point.
He met up with a few more small groups of Marauders while rushing towards the others, and dispatched them with the same ease that he had their comrades, regretting only the fact that he couldn't afford to drag their deaths out as long as he would have liked to, considering what they had done to his people.
As he rounded the final bend between him and the others, he came across a scene that reminded him of the retreat from the Metal Head Nest, at least as far as the confusion among the attackers were concerned.
Jak and Keira had both dismounted from their Sidewinders, and were busy using both their weapon skills and Channeling abilities to slaughter the Marauders, who had not exactly counted upon such foes when they had agreed to stay behind. Sig was also busy, his Gila Stomper splitting their forces in two…literally in some cases, and one of their dune buggies that had tried to get in the way to slow the Wastelander down had been given a harsh lesson of why small cars don't pull out and stop in front of big one. The terrified screams of the Marauder that had been behind the wheel (coming from the drivers side area of the grill upon which the smaller vehicle was implanted) were like a morbid music to his ear.
The machine gun turret on top of the large buggy was also busy, as several Marauders found themselves torn to shreds by the high velocity rounds as they ripped through them.
Not wanting to miss out on any of the avenging, the Sand King bolted towards where Jak and Keira were.
As he moved towards them, he watched as another pair of their enemies threw themselves at the husband and wife duo. In a flash, Jak had used Kitetsu and a phantom blade that he had summoned to take the head off of his foe, while Keira planted the butt end of Masamune into her opponent. The Light Eco Crystal penetrated the steel armor that the Marauder wore, and stabbed into his gut. As he recoiled, she deftly reversed her grip upon the naginata, and quickly lashed out, slicing into the lower left area of the Marauder's chest, and exiting out around his right shoulder blade. All but cut in half, the desert elf fell, his body twitching in its death throes.
Within two minutes, it was all over, and the Marauders lay dead, save for three that had been subdued for the purpose of questioning. After that, the quintet (as Daxter had somehow managed to hang onto Jak's shoulder throughout the fight) rushed over to where an injured mass of Wastelanders were, their bodies bruised and bleeding from the maltreatment that they had experienced at their captors hands.
"What do you think, Keir?" Jak inquired of his wife, looking over to her as she bent down over one particularly mangled elf. "Think you might be able to heal them?"
Keira had spent a brief amount of time learning to harness and control her new founded Light Eco abilities, one of which was that she was now able to heal others beside herself. However, she had yet to practice upon a target that truly needed the aid.
"I'll give it a shot." The tech head muttered, her voice lacking its usual confidence. "But I can't guarantee that it'll work."
"Better than just leaving them to die." Sig muttered, before gesturing up to the mountain. "You guys work on getting our boys and girls patched up, I'm going scope out the tunnels and the throne room, see how many of our people we still have left."
The burly Wastelander proceeded to do just that, while Keira concentrated on healing the wounded. Jak and Valthos, meanwhile, trotted over to the three captives they had spared. They were not bound by any means, but they were smart enough to realize that if they tried to run they probably wouldn't get farther than twenty feet before Death claimed them.
"Talk if you want to live." Jak growled to one of them, his knuckles turning white as he gripped Kitetsu fiercely, rage boiling throughout his blood.
"Forget it…" One Marauder said.
That was as far as he got before Valthos lashed out and made the masked elf a head shorter than he had been a few seconds ago.
"Bad answer." The Sand King snarled, before turning to face the next captive, who looked considerably less defiant after witnessing what had just happened to his comrade. "Now, what happened here, and what are your people planning to do now?"
The second one, just as suicidal as his comrade, tried lunging at the ruler of Spargus. There was a loud bang a second or so later, and he fell back, a nice sized hole in his head from where the slug had torn through.
Watching the death of his comrades had apparently loosened the tongue of the third, and he promptly began to sing like a canary. From what they were able to gather, the Marauders had attacked the city with vehicles armed with Precursian weapons that had been scrounged up over the past several years. The prisoner also mentioned the captured monks that Jak had been sent to look for and that they were the ones who had (under extreme tortures that made a certain Dark Eco demon all but foam at the mouth) finally told them how to get them working.
That was about as much as Jak caught, as he though it prudent for him to leave, lest he do something rash and cut off their only source of information at the moment. As it was, he went to scope out how his soul mate was coming with healing the others.
As it was, she was doing a rather fine job. She was dealing with a single victim at the moment, carefully placing her hands upon his wounded chest and letting the Light Eco flow from herself and into him. After a few seconds, the wounds began to heal and close, with not even scars left to be seen. However, as they looked at the person that she was healing, Jak and Daxter both stopped short, their jaws agape.
It was Seth.
"I don't believe it." Jak muttered, getting down on one knee and giving the Wastelander a good look.
"Poor guy just can't seem to catch a break." Daxter remarked, shaking his head and 'tsking' slightly.
"I'm just glad they decided to play with me before finishing me off." The lanky warrior said, slowly opening his eyes, his breathing still a little uneven. He gave Keira look, and muttered a quiet thank you, before climbing up to his knees.
"Take it easy, you're healed, but that doesn't mean that you're in tip top shape just yet." Keira admonished him. "You did lose a lot of blood."
"I'll bear that in mind." He said, before trotting off, probably going to salvage what he could.
"You know that guy?" the aqua haired elf asked her husband and friend, looking at them as they jogged over to the next Wastelander.
"Long story." Was the response that she got, to which she merely nodded, before putting her full attention on the Wastelander she was trying to patch up.
Some hours had passed, and all the survivors had been healed and the infantry equipment that was left had been salvaged. The sole surviving Marauder was left tied up in the tunnels, as they'd put off deciding what should be done with him until after they'd solved their more pressing problems, one of which had been trying to stop Sig from going postal once he'd found out about Seem and the other monks, especially considering what had happened to the other captured females. Fortunately, Valthos had been able to calm him down, pointing out that if they blindly rushed their enemy's fortified home, they'd be cut down in an instant. The Sand King had begun to pace back and forth then, muttering under his breath and doubtless trying to come up with a feasible strategy.
"So, have one yet?" Jak inquired a while later, crossing his arms over his chest, an unseen frown upon his face as he mulled over the situation.
"I think so." Valthos replied, a burning rage in his eyes as he looked at the dark elf. "We're going to have to storm the Marauder Fortress, and hit them with their pants down."
"Just how do you propose that we do that?" Daxter grumbled, staring down at the sand. "I seem to recall Seth over there telling us that the place is built in the middle of an oasis, and I don't believe that our vehicles are capable of floating."
"Oh, we've got a little something cooked up that Scourge and his lackeys probably won't see coming." Sig informed them, his voice fully of icy poison, undoubtedly because of the unknown fate of his sister. "Let's see what vehicles we've got left and we'll figure things out from there.
They'd snooped around the garage, and found, much to the relief of Valthos and Sig, that the Slam Dozer had been left alone, along with a hand full of other buggies, including two of Kleiver's green ones that could jump. This, when combined with the Gila Stomper, the Sidewinders that Jak and Keira had been using, and a few Marauder craft that were functional, brought their total vehicle count up to somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty two.
"Alright, we've got our inventory, what now?" Keira asked, leaning against one of the garage walls.
"The plan's right back here." Sig said, heading back to the back end of the garage, and pressing a seemingly inconspicuous area of the wall.
The wall slid back, revealing a chamber that was fairly deep and tall. Jak and Keira took a step forward, not entirely certain at first how a bunch of wooden beams were going to help them breach one of the most hardened fortresses on the continent. That was, until they saw the strange, plastic barrels that were behind the beams, strapped to them from the looks of it.
"Is that…" Jak ventured, looking over to Valthos.
"While Sig was in Haven City, I arranged for him to make some supply runs back and forth to us." The Sand King responded, a grim smile visible in his eyes. "One of the things that I had him return with was some lumber and other such materials needed for a pontoon bridge."
"You've been planning on taking the Marauders out for a while, haven't you?" Daxter muttered, wide eyed over what appeared to be the keystone of the plan.
"Indeed," the ruler of Spargus remarked, "I just could never figure out when a good time to invade them would be. However, they think that we are broken at the moment, and as such, their guard will likely be down."
"So what's the whole plan calling for?" Jak asked, cocking his head to the side slightly.
"Basically, we use the Slam Dozer to plough the road." Valthos stated, gesturing to the massive desert vehicle. "The stone portion of the Marauder's bridge is wide enough for two vehicles to pass, so that they can deploy their own forces more rapidly." He paused for a second, looking over to the elf that he knew now as his son, pride swelling within him as he realized how cool the boy was, despite the gravity of the situation.
"Once we've gotten close enough, the Slam Dozer's rocket pods will be able to take out the moving parts of the draw bridge, and Kleiver and Seth will swing by us, and jump the gap, towing the pontoon bridges behind them. Once those are secured…"
"We've got ourselves a foot through the door." Keira said a slightly feral tone present in her voice.
"Exactly," Valthos said with a snap of his fingers. "Now, everyone grab whatever gear you can, and let's move out!"
Victory fires burned and his soldiers laughed and feasted, drunk on their triumph over their long hated foes. Scourge himself sat out in the open, smiling behind his steel helmet as he thought of all they had accomplished today. Indeed, it would be a day that his people would never forget. Now, with their greatest rivals out of the way, they would be free to continue to gather more Precursor artifacts and weapons, and with the eventual 'cooperation' of the Spargus monks all but guaranteed, it was feasible that they would become powerful enough to challenge even greater foes. Perhaps, in a year or so, they would even be able to make an assault upon Haven City.
For now though, he allowed his forces to bask in their success, and listen to the screams of the captured as they were used for 'entertainment.' A wicked chuckle escaped his throat, and he looked over to that female monk that they had captured, the one with the strange, crimson eyes. She had been stripped of her armor and her headgear, and her close cropped black hair contrasted rather well with the strange facial tattoos that she wore. Judging from the way that the other captives looked to her, he had to assume that she was very high on the totem pole back in Spargus, perhaps the leader of the order. If that proved to be the case, then he would try to be nice at first, to coerce her cooperation by telling her how much easier that would be for her fellows.
In truth, such cooperation would simply make things much easier for him, as it would get her people to work that much faster, but if that failed, as she appeared to be the stubborn type, then he could resort to torturing her and the others until they fell into line.
As for Seem herself, she felt the gears of her mind whirring, trying to figure out some way in which they might be able to get out of this mess, preferably while leaving a nice causality list behind them. She did not take kindly to watching her comrades and friends be put through unspeakable agonies to satisfy these barbaric people, and she vowed that given the chance, she would rip Scourge's heart right out of his chest. Still, she would have to be patient, as rash action would not help anyone.
An opportunity would present itself soon enough.
It was some hours later when they finally moved over the ridge that was around the Marauder Fortress. They had moved slowly, as they did not wish to risk harm to their only means of getting over to the other side, and that in the cool, quiet night of the desert, that the roar of an engine at full throttle could be heard for quite some distance.
His visor set to its night vision mode and at the maximum magnification, Jak stood at the top of the ridge, looking down over the fortress. He thought he could see the remains of a victory party of some sort in the central courtyard. However, it had gone quite long ago.
A simple thought was all that was required to change the visor over to its heat sensitive mode of viewing, and the contrasts stood out sharply at this time of the day. He continued to stare, trying to get a good count of the number of guards that were still on patrol.
"I get twenty, what about you?" came the voice of his soul mate, which did not leave the inside of his helmet.
"About the same." he responded, pulling the zoom back and looking over to her.
Her every stance radiated a quiet, predatory anger, and he had little doubt that any Marauder that had the rotten luck to run across her would be in for a world of pain before Death finally came to claim them. No doubt, the destruction of Spargus had hit home with her very much, bringing up memories of Sandover. What he didn't realize was that she recalled not only that, but the strange place that she saw in her dreams, the one that was ripped apart by the vicious Metal Heads.
As had been the case in both of those places, she was incapable of preventing the tragedies, but unlike those two, in this case, she had the opportunity to avenge those that had fallen.
"There could still be some more that haven't fallen asleep yet." Valthos growled as he came up from behind them, his eyes narrowed.
"Then we'll have to do something about those ones before we launch our assault upon them, won't we?" Keira said, rubbing a gauntleted finger along the chin portion of her helmet.
"I'll do it." Jak volunteered immediately.
"That's crazy!" Kleiver hissed quietly, a look of absolute disbelief upon his face.
"You wanna bet, old buddy?" Sig inquired, smirking wickedly as he recalled all the things he knew the dark elf could do.
"Are you sure you can do this?" Valthos said, and he was unable to keep his gaze from softening and letting a note of concern slip into his normally iron hard voice.
The response that he got was for the Ascended Channeler to suddenly begin to become transparent, and in a matter of a couple of seconds, all present watched him become nothing but a slight shimmer, invisible to all but the most trained eye.
"Are you kidding?" he remarked, a humorless laugh in his tone. "They'll never see me coming."
The Sand King nodded in a somber manner, silently praying that the boy didn't get himself in over his head…then he remembered the little split personality that he carried inside of him, and he felt that fear become lessened significantly.
"Hey, Jak!" came the voice of Seth, and the shimmer wavered slightly.
"What?" the Ascended Channeler inquired.
"If you're going to bust up those scumbags, use this." He said, and he suddenly tossed something at the dark elf.
Jak caught it easily, and stared at it intently for a couple of seconds before the 'field' that covered him when he cloaked himself also enveloped it. It appeared to be a simple bit of metal wire, about two feet long, with two wooden handles that were at either end.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Never really thought up a name for it." The lanky Wastelander replied with a shrug. "As for what you do with it. You make a loop with it, then you take it and slip it around the guy's head from behind, get it down around his throat, and then you…" he trailed off, pretending to pull the two handle like parts away from each other, leaving little to the imagination about just what this particular little stealth weapon was supposed to do.
"Thanks." He said, before turning back around. "Don't start your attack until I've already gotten them spooked."
"How will we know when that is?" Valthos inquired.
"I'll contact you through the comms." Jak told him, securing Seth's weapon as he spoke.
"When they attacked," Kleiver said a frown upon his face, "they used some kind of communications disruptor to keep us from talking to each other, suppose they crank it up again?"
"In that case, wait until you know they've found me out." Was the response he received.
"And we will know that how?" the quartermaster asked.
"Cause all fierfeking hell is going to break loose."
'Literally.' Kage remarked, a rare, bloodthirsty smile upon his demonic visage.
With that, the dark elf started towards the fortress.
"Be careful, Jak." Keira said, her voice quiet over the private comm. Channel that they had with each other.
"I will be." He told her, before turning his thoughts to the mission that was at hand.
&
Okay, stopping there, and just to warn you, the next chapter will likely be very, very bloody in a horror/slasher type way, as Jak and Kage are going to go absolutely postal on these guys.
Can't really think of anything else that might be relevant, so I'll just say that if you wish to leave a comment, a constructive criticism, idea (I could use some Light Eco abilities), or even a flame, feel more than free to do so.
Thank you all, and have a great week.