A curious steampunk bike was cycling across the sky. As its wheels were spinning, the vents attached to their sides pumped steam that blew at umbrella-like chutes hanging atop the wheels, allowing the bike to hover. Cycling this curious vehicle was a towering man in a colorful poncho tied over his shoulders and long, flowing dark hair. Wrapped around his forehead was a headband with the Land of the Sky symbol on it. A handful of large feathers were sticking out stuffed under the headband, making it appear more like a crown.
The bicycle of the Sky Country cyclist landed on solid ground–an island that first appeared to the bulky Sky Warrior when he brought his bicycle lower down to bring himself beneath the murky layer of thick rain clouds. This being the first patch of land that came into view ever since the cyclist left Land of the Sky, he decided to land here and rest, ask some people about what they might have known about the most powerful and dominant species of birds or other winged beasts around those parts.
Ever since the wheels of his bike touched the pudgy mud floor of the gloomy and colorless island, the Sky Warrior stepped off his gliding vehicle to examine the boring, gray, empty architecture of cement and industrial buildings. Half the buildings seemed either abandoned or half blown up. The towering man felt curious stares from lurkers perched atop the roofs or blown-out buildings, hiding behind the walls and in the alleyways.
With a distant look, devoid of emotion, the Sky Warrior cracked his knuckle with his other hand and rolled his head around, warming himself up for a brawl, since one seemed inevitable. These lurkers must have either wanted him dead simply for being not from around those parts, or they wanted his flying bicycle. The Sky Warrior didn't feel very excited about parting with either his life or his only means of transportation during his Sky Walk. Thus, combat was the only answer to this predicament in his mind.
However, before the boldest of the lurking thieves and marauders could stick their noses out and take a knife in the eye, torchlights lit up and crossed on the musclebound giant, making him cover himself up from the light. Immediately after lighting up, the torchlights began scanning the place, as if whoever was operating these wasn't looking for him, but for someone or something else. The Sky Warrior's first instinct was that these torchlights were meant to stun him so that the muggers could do their dirty deeds, but these two appeared to be unrelated.
Bald, crooked, and starved men who looked more like cavern crawlers than human beings, dressed in rags and hissing like animals, fled from the light. The Sky Warrior's eye followed the lurkers who were so interested in him and his vehicle as they fled in terror of the light. Realizing that his bicycle wasn't safe on this island if left unattended and still having some business on this island, making leaving it a waste of time and effort that landing on it in the first place took, the broad-shouldered warrior walked on toward the light.
Masked men wearing thick steel helmets with glowing blue eyes dashed past him, completely ignoring the Sky Warrior and holding some kind of gadgets in their hands that had barrels on which to hold them, almost like crossbows. These curious pipe-like weapons reminded the Sky Warrior of the weaponry used in Sky Country, dispensing kunai and shuriken with the power of steam, but these appeared different if the Sky Warrior would have guessed–much less advanced. They smelled of gunpowder and reeked of the grime and muck that's been infesting this gloomy location, as did the military uniform style leather coats reek of leather that's been soaked and then shut in the drawer for weeks.
It intrigued the Sky Warrior how come these leather-clad, helmet-wearing human drones with weapons didn't seem nearly as interested in him or his steam bicycle as those ghoulish lurkers infesting this town. Almost like he was a wraith, an unseen observer in a three-dimensional theater play playing out around him, the man followed the coated warriors as they scanned the town's ruins, flashing their glowing lights and pointing their guns at all the different alleyways, planting explosive tags and blowing out building walls and warehouse entrances, then flushing inside and sifting through the abandoned buildings.
More of these leather-clad men rolled around giant torchlights, beaming intense light that could have permanently blinded a lesser man than the Sky Warrior. With troubled looks, the Sky Warrior observed the faceless drone soldiers thrashing and kicking the lurkers that hardly reminded of people anymore out of their homes, throwing them out into the streets, or kicking them out of the underground warehouses. And yet, displacing them wasn't the reason they came here. They kept on filtering through the buildings as if they were looking for something more.
"I found him!" a soldier reported in a machine-like voice emanating from a mechanical voicebox and spreading through the speakers in the helmets of the other soldiers, who all promptly flushed toward the location of the drone reporting their discovery. So did the Sky Warrior, curious about what he'd see next in this bleak and nightmarish town.
To be honest, he still kept a sliver of hope of finding an opportunity to get a bite of something to eat and replenish his strength after cycling through an entire ocean to get to this Archipelago in the Land of Water. Either that, or he still had faith in the tiniest chance of witnessing a miracle–the appearance of a black dragon–a Heilong, or a green dragon–a Chenlong. Thick, gloomy clouds stuck to a high tier of the atmosphere, like here on this island, was a perfect domicile for either of those atmosphere-dwellers.
Needless to say, for a Sky Warrior on his Sky Walk, finding a Heilong or a Chenlong instead of some exotic bird to model their bird suit out from would have been perfect. Only a legendary Sky Warrior, one destined for the position of a chieftain, could have modeled their bird-suit after a dragon.
The soldiers had a slender, short, red-haired girl cornered. One of them kicked the poor, almost completely naked thing down on the ground and stomped down on her while pointing their dispensers at her as a warning not to move. She was wrapped in criss-crossed layers of bandages around her chest, arms, and thighs, yet, other than that, she looked a lot cleaner and healthier than the haunting and gaunt lurkers that would have stripped the Sky Warrior's flesh for food and his bicycle for scrap parts.
The Sky Warrior exclaimed an unintelligible grunt of surprise upon seeing the unbelievable, as the soldiers pinned the girl to the ground, making her struggle to keep her head out of the mud and cough as more and more of it made its way up her airways, he saw on the girl's back an incredible tattoo of wings. Simplistic, like a caveman's doodle, yet it seemed like it was carved into her flesh with something like a chisel and burnt into it with something hot. A permanent marker of manmade origin.
With a flick of his hand, the Sky Warrior flung long and thin, feather-shaped knives to imbed in the backs of some soldiers before rushing forward and grabbing one by their weapon and one by the back of their coat, raising them into the air while swinging them around, slamming them against one another then tossing them aside. The soldiers turned toward him and opened fire, but the Sky Warrior vanished, leaving only his poncho behind to be riddled with senbon that dispensed in whizzing, blinding series from the firing dispensers.
Taking it to the air, the Sky Warrior flung more flurries of knives, pinning the unfortunate drones to the floor, breaking their weapons or putting some into their eyes, cracking through their glowing helmet eyes. Vaulting over his front in the air, the man performed a dive similar to a condor's plunge, throwing heaps of knives decorating the belts all over his chest, his thighs, or his arms before slamming down on a particularly unfortunate soldier and crushing him into a bloody paste. In the moment of his landing, the Sky Warrior flung a halo of blades, dispatching of three dozen of soldiers around him in a single blink and leaving him alone with this strange, red-haired young lady.
"Calm down, young one, I am not here to hurt you," the Sky Warrior said as the teen girl crawled away from the oppression of the soldiers only to be met by the sight of this murderous behemoth who carved and butchered his way past these soldiers with unheard of might and ruthlessness. Unlike with those soldiers, who would have brought the girl back underground from where she escaped, this brutish beefcake would surely cut her to pieces like one of those savage lurkers. "I've only fended off these warriors from capturing you because these scars on your back intrigue me."
The girl stopped crawling away, shivering in terror and cold as the never-ending rain danced across her pale and terrified face. The Sky Warrior offered his hand. Mercy and restraint were two things entirely absent on this island. And so, the girl jumped at the Sky Warrior, wrapping her arms and legs around his chest and face and pressing herself against him. A tad baffled by this show of affection, the Sky Warrior pulled her away, holding her shaking and frail body in his hands before sitting her on his shoulder. Even a teenage girl could comfortably perch or sit on this man's shoulder like a little parrot.
"Let's find a warmer place for you," the Sky Warrior said, scooping up his poncho off the ground and handing it to the shivering teen. The red-haired girl wrapped herself in the poncho. Even though her shivering intensified, it was only because her body once again felt the brush of warmth and realized truly how cold it was. As the Sky Warrior walked along, looking for a good place to stop and rest, he returned to his bike. By that time, the girl's shivering slowed down as she became more comfortable being exposed to the elements.
The Sky Warrior and his new acquaintance joined some raggedy homeless people seated around some sort of malfunctioning smelting furnace that spilled molten metal into a broken containment unit, on a broken conveyor belt that no longer went anywhere. These people were so gloomy and resigned to their fates that they would rather stay by their broken industrial source of warmth and risk the grisly fate that a lumbering brute like this could bring them rather than flee into the cold and rainy night and risk running into more lurkers or even worse–soldiers.
Carefully, without removing his poncho that the girl was wrapped in, the Sky Warrior put her down on the broken conveyor belt, letting her bask in the warmth until she felt so warm by the spilling molten metal that she shed the poncho and exposed her bandaged body to the heat, wishing to feel as close to the brush of sunlight as she'd get on this forsaken island in the Land of Water Archipelago.
"That mark!" one of the raggedy and unfortunate dwellers pointed at the teen with more terror than they ever showed a burly foreigner from the Land of Sky, covered in knife belts. "It's the Wings of Smak!"
"The Wings of Smak?" the Sky Warrior turned to the people who were staggering back and still lingering on the decision of whether they should've fled for their lives or if staying and risking capture or death at the hands of the soldiers was preferable to being torn apart by the lurkers or freezing to death. "What is that?"
"It's a tattoo that the people of this island carve into prophesied children," the girl replied. "Smak is the Great Red Dragon that protects the people of this island. It manifests when all five marks are brought together: the legs, the body, the wings, the claws, and the horns…" the girl explained to her savior.
"Yeah right, give me a break! Does this island seem saved to you!?" a silver-haired beardo with crazed eyes frothed from his mouth of rotten teeth. One of his eyes was busted and white. It didn't move, nor did it seem like he could see much from it. "We used to be prosperous and peaceful once, sure, but ever since these Kirigakure goons came, we've not known peace a single day in our lives! Our crop fields razed, our towns leveled and slowly converted into industrial complexes and the chemical waste that's spilling from those complexes tainted our water and our skies!"
"The Kirigakure scum believe in Smak's power and fear it!" another homeless bundle of rags and gray, rotting flesh spat at his less god-dragon-fearing peer. "If they didn't respect Smak's awesome power, why would they kidnap the marked and keep them separate in their facilities?"
"They don't just keep us imprisoned," the girl looked down with depressed and tired eyes that began to fill with tears. "They are cutting us up and trying to see what makes Smak come out, what makes him powerful. They're researching the carriers of the marks, and, when they find out all they want, they remove the marks…"
"Remove the marks? How do you remove a marking like that?" the Sky Warrior wondered, pointing at the gruesome carving of wings on the back of the girl that had been razed into her flesh after being carved with a chisel.
"The simplest possible way…" the girl said before curling into a ball and beginning to weep. "My big brother… My big brother had the Claws of Smak marks on his forearms. He helped me escape and said I reminded him of his little sister whom the lurkers had torn to bits and eaten when they were children. He helped me escape, but they captured him! Only I managed to escape and now they're torturing him because of me!"
"Don't you dare hate your freedom, girl," the Sky Warrior thundered with an imposing tone that made the girl sit and freeze up in fear of her savior rather than succumb to her despair. "It is your freedom that your friend gave his life for. You owe him a debt to live yours to the fullest and experience all your freedom has to offer."
"Heh!" someone amongst the homeless chaff scoffed in disdain. "All that the freedom offers? Don't make me laugh! In this dump, you're free to drown in torrential rainwater when the roof collapses on you, to be burnt in pits of molten metal by the scrappers or torn apart and devoured while you're still alive by the lurkers. That's the extent of your freedom!"
"That is the folly of the land-crawler," the Sky Warrior's eyes became sullen and sunken in the shade of the light reflected off the drooping molten metal that leaked from the roof of this ruined factory. "The thought process of a prisoner. You only acknowledge those as your only options, that's why you'll never truly be free!"
"And who are you to kick our people while we're down, foreigner?" someone from the crowd of homeless survivors asked.
"My name is Andes, I am a Sky Warrior from the Land of the Sky. I am on my Sky Walk," the Sky Warrior explained.
"A Sky Walk?" the teenage girl with the mark of the Wings of Smak carved into her back exclaimed.
"It is a pilgrimage of my people, of sorts. Sky Warriors leave for Sky Walks for training, when they are in need of more strength or more wisdom. They observe the birds and other winged beasts and learn their ways of sky-walking, when they find what they're looking for, they return to the Land of Sky and use that knowledge. The young leave on their Sky Walk as a rite of passage to find the bird that will inspire their bird suit and let them design their fighting style, but older Sky Warriors perform Sky Walks throughout their life when they are lost or in need of new strength," Andes explained.
"You won't find many birds here…" one of the homeless chaff snorted in mockery of the Sky Warrior. "Only starved and deformed men eating their own kind, scrappers who coat themselves in molten metal hoping to protect themselves from the reality of the rest of their lives, and the tyranny of the Mist that plagues all of the Archipelago!"
"Truth be told, I did not come here in search of a bird," Andes glared at the mocking homeless man with a death-inducing stare that made the frail and shaken man cover his face and hide behind the others in shame. "I came here looking for something larger. Thick clouds lingering as high up as these sometimes host dragons. Dragons live in the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere. Gloomy clouds such as these often host the black dragons - Heilongs, or the green dragons - Chenlongs."
"Sorry, Andes-san… If we ever had any dragons living in the heavens above our island, they've long since fled in terror or shame of the horrors that human hands can inflict on their very own," an old homeless man sheltering with the group in the abandoned factory mumbled out, sinking the entire place in grim silence.
"It does not matter, for the moment I saw those wings carved into the back of this girl, I realized that this island must have another winged creature that is just what I am looking for–the meaning for my Sky Walk!" Andes pointed at the red-haired teenager.
"S-Smak!?" the girl gasped. "You mean to gather all five marks together and release The Great Red Dragon Smak?"
"That is a fool's errand," someone in the group of withered homeless survivors babbled out. "Even if you broke into the facility where all the marked ones are contained and gathered them together, something that's never happened before, the emergence of the Great Red Dragon will surely destroy the marked ones."
"No!" the girl jumped off the conveyor belt and put her shaking, tiny fists up in the stance of a teen determined to oppose the hand she was dealt in life. The fate of having the wings of a Great Red Dragon carved into her back when she was still a baby, the wings that doomed her to a life as a prisoner of the Kirigakure soldiers that oppressed this island and turned it into an industrial complex producing goods for the island of Kirigakure itself with no future of its own. "Even if I am food for the Great Red Dragon, we have to save my big brother! I know that even if Smak devours both of us, he'd rather feed the flame that burns away the darkness and the filth from this island than live as a captive forever!"
"Well said," Andes nodded. "Let's go then, girl. Lead the way to your prison and leave your captors to me."
The confused survivors flocking to broken and burning buildings at night for the source of light that fends off the lurkers parted and made way for a giant, broad-shouldered Sky Warrior, and his little companion to walk past and head straight for the facility where this red-haired girl grew up as a prisoner and a plaything of the soldiers who didn't see her as human, but just as a rodent infesting the island that produced goods and materials for their homeland.
Even if it devours her and burns her to ashes, the girl swore to herself that the Great Red Dragon Smak would rise again and save this island, as it had for centuries in the past! In life or in death, she and the man who accepted her as his little sister when her own family surrendered her to the Kirigakure soldiers in exchange for scraps would be reunited and free!