Ash landed hard on the cold, oaken floor of the dueling arena, sweat dripping from his forehead and a rivulet of blood trickling from his mouth. He winced at the pounding pain emanating out of his shoulder and through his skull. His suit pulsed and crackled with energy as he pounded an enraged fist into the floor and pushed himself up. He groaned as he stood up on shaky legs to face his opponent, who, with a satisfied grin, rose from an upward strike. Ash let what power remained in his warframe to trickle feebly into the sword, resulting in an even weaker response. He closed his eyes briefly to try and console with the spirit inside the sword, but to no avail. It said nothing, but its anxious, bloodshot eyes bore holes through his spirit entirely.
He raised his sword somewhat reluctantly with slithers of doubt beginning to shadow over his tired mind. The stranger had turned to face him, fingers drumming impatiently on his left hip and his scythe grinding back across to his right. Ash gritted his teeth and crouched, muscles tensed and waiting to strike. His sword sizzled with the same nervous anticipation.
"You aren't as fast as I had expected you to be, Ash. What's the matter? Giving up?" The stranger said, disappointed, as he leaned on the neck of his scythe.
"I'm… fine. Let's continue." Ash rasped with heavy breaths.
"Very well."
No sooner than the words passed the stranger's lips, Ash pounced, sword raised. The stranger looked up in surprise and brought his scythe up in defense. Ash landed right before him and swung his sword upward, clipping a shoulder plate with a small spark. The stranger jumped back and raised his weapon once again, hands clenched. Ash charged with a raised sword, ready to come down with a two-handed cleave. The stranger offered his scythe up for a parry, but Ash had feinted, side-stepped and kicked him in the side with a brutal connection before he even realised. The stranger stumbled and brought his weapon round for another flurry of attacks. Again and again, Ash cleaved and swung at his opponent, again and again, he missed by hair-widths and millimeters.
This one's a challenge.
Upon one of his many inhumanly fast attacks, the stranger stopped the sword with his scythe's handle and parried the strike with savage force. Ash recoiled and flipped backwards, catching himself with a somewhat graceful handspring. He landed on the balls of his feet with a small grunt, the Pangolin sword trembling in his fingers and thrashing about supernaturally. In a bestial rage, it snapped.
You have no control. No discipline. Your bloodstream is filling with carbon dioxide. Continue like this, and you will fall before you draw blood.
After a moment of deliberation, its voice softened but lost none of its sinister edge.
Do not leave me here, Ash. This man has an even more disturbed, twisted mind than you do. He is on the brink of insanity.
Ash felt somehow surprised by this; the sword's spirit had offered him nothing but curses, pain and torment for his brief conversations with it; its voice sounded like it was begging, an apologetic plea for help that didn't seem to be answered for however many forsaken years it had been left in this place. He felt pity for a reason he didn't quite know, but some force urged him on.
The stranger had now managed to steady himself and regain most of his strength, but, under the ghastly white light, he saw that the man before him had suffered lacerations down the abdomen and a few slashes across the arms. Chest heaving, he swung his scythe backward and charged forward.
Ash tried to block the outward strike with his sword, but the force of the charge knocked him down on the ground and punched the air out of his lungs. He tried to stand back up, but this was met with a swift bash in the face with the butt of the scythe's handle. Ash looked up with weary eyes at the stranger, shapes and colors mixing in a viscous pool of grey and white. He saw the faded shape of the scythe raising against the blinding white light of the ceiling, it's crooked end glistening with a single filament that…
Suddenly, his vision went white, then blood-red, veins pounding from the sides of his eyes. He remembered hours of agony on a cold operating table after being struck by the weapon that sang its damned name across the stars themselves. The crooked end, the edge of the blade, the daggers, the bow, the armor; the shattered memories began to fall into place. He finally had relieved the itch that was digging its way into his mind. This was the Firstborn. The Stalker.
"Wait." Ash wheezed, at last.
"You don't look like the type for mercy, Ash." The Stalker lowered his scythe, but only slightly.
"I know…" Ash hesitated.
"Hmm?"
"Who you are…" Ash said as he slowly stood back up, his sword pulsating with newfound energy.
The "stranger" lowered his scythe, eyebrows raised in sudden interest. His eyes narrowed and his scarlet irises shrunk, his lips parting slightly in final realization. This then turned into a cunning smile, one that unsettled Ash with its shark-like features.
"It was about time. I was starting to think that you had lost your edge, brother." The Firstborn chuckled.
"Brother? Brother?!" Disbelief rushed unwelcome into Ash's voice.
"Why do you act surprised? I am your kin, after all. For what other reason would I be the Firstborn?" The stranger said blankly.
"Firstborn?" He lowered his sword.
"Oh, you don't know?"
"Know what?"
"No wonder your clan wiped you."
"They… what?"
"Oh, this is VERY interesting. I think I know what's going on." The Stalker crowed as he shouldered his scythe, pacing slowly along the wall to Ash, like a tiger stalking a juicy pig with glistening lips.
The bastard is enjoying this.
"Well, allow me to explain. You've been lied to, my friend. You've been lied to a lot. By your supposed 'friends', your leaders, everyone."
"But how…" Ash's mouth hung slightly ajar, barely whispering the words.
"Very simple. They wanted to 'protect' you from your memories, so they wiped you. But you know what? I remember what you saw. Because I was there."
No…
"It wasn't hard. Our people ran, instead of fighting. The few that did, I cut them down with ease. Their blood was weak. I felt it."
Was that a tear, which trickled so painfully slowly down Ash's cheek?
"Yes, Ash, how does it feel? Hmm? That all the people you called kin are dead? At my hand?"
You…
"Do you want to kill me now? I bet you do."
You're insane.
"Come on, then, Venator. Bring your worst."
"You are not worth my worst, you twisted fuck. I can promise you something, though."
"And what is that?" The stranger inquired, scythe now scraping back to his side.
Ash did not answer. He merely reached out to his newfound ally, and told it one thing:
I will kill him.
The sword didn't answer in speech, but more so in itself. Small slithers of smoke began to trail from out of the runes, which had started to shine with a light of their own. A pale grey shimmer ran over the edge of the sword, making small arcs of electricity fire and dance across the surface. Ash looked down at the sword, and back at the Stalker. His eyes narrowed to slits, and he charged, sword poised to strike. Ash slid
The Stalker had blocked his attack with the tip of the scythe, and now the two had locked blades that spat energy at each other under the immense pressure of both the warframes' strength. The Pangolin sword strained under the force, but its spirit buckled and fought with flashes of power from the runes along its groove, not giving one inch.
"Honestly? This was your plan?" The stranger asked through clenched teeth, unimpressed.
With this, he threw himself forward and cut across the sword, leaving it to clatter on the floor next to Ash. Ash tried to reach for it, but this was stopped by a white-hot dagger that imbedded itself right into the floor in front of his hand. He recoiled back and looked up at the Stalker. Those insidious, scarlet eyes piercing his mind were the only things he saw when the scythe came down; the rest was pain and blackness.
As Ash knew, the universe did not afford him such luxuries as dying. He awoke a few seconds after the scythe had come down on some part of him; he couldn't see with through all of the blood spattered across his torso, the blurry shapes that mixed together in his vision and the wracking pain that sent uncontrollable shudders through his body.
He struggled to remember why he had charged in the first place. Surely it was… it was something he saw from outside the window. A small glint. A tiny twinkle of a long, gleaming blade spinning out into eternity, so very slowly. He remembered the augment installed into his gauntlet, but he couldn't quite remember what it was for.
While he lay there, on the cold oaken floor, Ash saw the Firstborn slowly turning round and freeing his scythe from the wound in Ash's body; Ash didn't look down to see, for it would probably remind him of the blinding pain that was only just being withheld with anesthetics.
He knew that he would not have another opportunity to kill the Stalker; he felt the black claws of death already pulling him down. If only he could remember what he was supposed to… The gauntlet, yes, there was something about it. Something that joined him and the Nika…
My Nikana.
So it wasn't lost. He merely needed to call out to it. But how? The Vauban hadn't elaborated on the subject; it wasn't something that he could will for, like his warframe components.
"Warning, heart rate falling far below expected levels." A soft female voice spoke from his earpiece; somehow soothing, considering the dire situation, Ash thought. He thought of letting his body bleed white and leave him to die on this ship, forgotten and cast away. It seemed fitting, that he, the seventh son of Apex, would die alone; he would be the lone hunter, the slayer of the Ares prototype, the lone survivor of the Invictus project. The man who saw Hek's damned face and live. But Ash had no time for legends. His time to die was not now.
He stuck out an open palm toward the shining blade that was tumbling away further and further by the minute. He steadied his shallow, ragged breathing and wiped his wet brow, focusing on activating the gauntlet's energy. He willed for the sword to come, to return to its mortally wounded owner and do him one more deed. He tried to grab it with invisible arms, but it was futile. Nothing seemed to work. Disbelief, frustration, anger and desperation mixed into one vile cocktail in his throat, making Ash splutter blood over his warframe and cough from the nausea in his chest.
He nearly whimpered then, he nearly cried. But Ash immediately pushed away those pathetic emotions and impulses and started to repeat the mantra passed down through the Venatii for whenever they were in peril, disbanded, alone, or even on the verge of death:
"Dominus noster, venator animarum nos protegat. Educ nos una, quia cadamus quando nos separati sunt." He muttered in low, wheezing words. He opened his eyes to the light once more, and looked out; past the Firstborn, who had begun to pace slowly towards the weapons rack by the window, dragging his heavy scythe on the ground behind him as he went; past the huge, tattered curtains that waved and drifted over the twinkling lights of the distant stars; and out towards the light glimmer that spun and spun towards the endless corners of the universe.
It shuddered as he softly spoke the words, and began to slow its tumbling through nothingness… and turn towards him. Yes, it was moving faster, coming and flying directly to him. Now all he needed to do was to…
"Firstborn…" He uttered hoarsely.
"Oh? You're still alive? Would you like a quicker death?" The Stalker got up, somehow not revealing any surprise in his voice at all.
"Hah. Do your worst." Ash spat.
"Oh, but of course. You don't deserve to die of mere blood loss. How about I cut you into pieces, and feed you to the Void Stalkers?" The Stalker asked, as if out of genuine curiosity.
Ash merely rested his head against the wall and looked up at the ceiling, counting the slow, soft steps of the Stalker coming towards him and the ominous, harsh grinding of his scythe; louder and louder. Palm still raised, he repeated the mantra and waited for the crash.
And sure enough, it came. Not as destructive as Ash had hoped, but it sufficed enough to burst through the blast windows in a shower of glass, fly across the room at impossible speed and run straight through the Stalker's body, leaving his chest cavity a shower of murky black blood and broken bone. He stared in horror at the shining sword that sang a single, beautiful note across the high, domed walls of the chamber; it seemed to block out the sound of the rushing air at the window or the blaring sirens that screeched across the ship.
What the Stalker did next, however, was something that Ash both admired and abhorred. The Stalker's expression turned from surprise, disbelief and horror to a small smirk, then a nervous chuckle, then a roaring, insane cackle. He grabbed the blade with both hands, seeming to not care for the immense damage being done to his bare hands, and broke it.
It splintered across the middle, the tip dropping out of his bloody left hand and leaving the rest of the blade a jagged, broken slant.
His sanity, broken as the sword in his chest, left him after that. He collapsed, laughing and hacking up blotches and masses of black liquid and globs of gored flesh. Ash watched this horrifying display of a truly destroyed man die for many minutes, before the Hunter of the Tenno, the Stalker, the Firstborn of the Venatii, fell to the floor, borne a still corpse.
Ash shuddered and stared at the body of the Stalker, not quite believing in the nightmares that his eyes had offered him. He exhaled and swallowed, allowing moisture back into his hoarse, dry throat. His senses seemed to return to him now, for the pounding in his head had begun to intrude upon his thoughts once more, and the same, repetitive, wailing noises that came from the alarms had-
"Shit! The oxygen!" Ash swore.
He jerked his head quickly from one corner of the room to the other, trying to frantically find the failsafe catch. After some time, he found it situated next to a group of lockers with heavy Corpus suits on the other side of the room. He sighed wearily at this and looked for a solution. He spotted an ornate-looking revolver strapped to the arm of the pale corpse not a few meters from him.
He prepared himself to move, clenching his thigh muscles and allowing the last few liters of blood to pump round his body. After some preparation for the worst, he slowly turned and grabbed at the oaken floor. Slowly, but surely, he managed to get within reaching distance. Ash grabbed the leather holster and closed his weak fingers around the grip. The gun itself was incredibly hard to hold straight; whether this was because of his rapidly deteriorating condition, Ash did not know.
He trembled once again and took aim at the flashing button near the lockers. After a few shuddering breaths, he fired. It kicked up high in his hand, striking his forehead with the barrel.
After shaking his head a few times to get rid of the persistent whining in his ears from the loudness of the gunshot, Ash sighed in relief as he saw a large metal screen close over the breached window and hissed shut.
And, as the light from the stars was slowly snuffed out, one by one, Ash's world fell into the same darkness. Perhaps, was his last thought, he wouldn't ever see the dawn again.