Among the canyons where Bulgarl was erected, the hidanna drilled a hole. It came to be the most valuable mine they had found to date, abundant not only in medan, but also in far more pricey kinds of metal and stone. As they dug deeper and deeper, a single person took control over the mine, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men of their world. His legacy was to be passed down to someone of his choosing, but another decided they were far better suited for the role than anyone appointed by some old fool. With nothing but guns and some audacity, this man took everything from said old fool – his company, his money, his mine - and thus Mabaya Industries welcomed their latest CEO, Mr. Kioo, and his many armed and dangerous friends, clinging onto favours and infinite riches.
Branching from the main road that linked Bulgarl to the mine, several other roads were built on its giddy edges, not only to help vehicles navigate it, but also as a gleaming invitation to its many caves; and access was denied to everyone without the proper license. It was puzzling for most and bananas for the rest - apparently hidannas have the same construction rules humans do. Hearing the peasant’s claims, the person of highest authority in Rujad, a ten-year-old bearing an ancient sword symbolizing his leadership, pleaded for the real authority to allow passage into the miners’ village. Feeling bored and not in the mood to go against the wishes of the kid with the weapon capable of turning an entire city to dust, Mr. Kioo accepted the motion, and a new cave was built with the sole propose of allowing the fair citizens of Bulgarl to go inside the miners’ village and royally screw everything in there as well. In a couple of months, the miners’ village had grown beyond recognition and renamed Chini Dunia, and it housed the most discreet, vile and intelligent businesses of Rujad.
“A ten year old with a sword?”
“Why do they have someone unfit to rule?
“How is this related to the people we were following so far?”
“I wouldn’t start rambling about something if it wasn’t related. I’m not a college professor as far as I can tell.”
Of course, the only reason Yana even agreed to follow Jack inside the cave was because she didn’t have any idea of the sort of people that populated it. And even if he knew exactly what he was dealing with, it didn’t bother him in the slightest, and there was no other place where they could try to get a passage into the country of Kilma.
An elevator waited for them in the back of the cave, a simple platform linked to the walls by two massive wheels, making Sofia wonder aloud if it would support them at all. It held its place during the silent descent into a town shaded in the penumbra of the deep underground. Lights flickered from abundant lampposts over the streets, empty, save from distant humming and echoing footsteps. Beckoning Ricardo to join her, Sofia scanned the open windows and doors that Yana showed them for something interesting, other than the housewives busily staring outside and sighing to the beyond, tired of life without the sun’s grace or the touch of any genuine breeze.
In a hurried step, Jack and Yana crossed almost the entire main street before plunging into its ramifications. He briefly stopped in front of several houses and skimmed the plates next to the doors for more information, marching on to the next.
While they looked, David finally returned from the office and sat back down on the sofa. He had finally gotten the phone call he was expecting, and took great lengths to explain what was happening, getting his father to agree to at least catch a flight to join his children in the tail of Europe.
“What did I miss?” he asked, letting his plump body settle on the tacky, but cosy sofa.
“Not much,” Sofia said with a shrug. “They’re still looking for the embassy, I think.”
“Here,” Jack finally said, entering a white house, nowhere different from the ones surrounding it except for a golden plate engraved with foreign gibberish and a flag bearing a sun and an even cross. Inside they found a small lobby, decorated with paintings of wild western plateaus, a simple dark wood counter and a man in a red coat, proper of a fancy restaurant.
“May I help you, sir?” asked the clerk.
“I need a pass for Kilma, two people.”
“I am afraid that is not possible, sir. Would you like to hear about our Anti-Anarchic Policy?” the clerk continued, keeping a perfect posture.
“I have something valuable, that I’d like to bring into your country for cultural proposes,” Jack said, lowering his voice and approaching the clerk. He merely raised an eyebrow.
“You would like to smuggle an item into our country as a means to cross the border?”
“Yes, that’s exactly I wanted,” he answered standing straight and raising his voice to normal levels.
“Splendid. If you don’t leave right away, I will call security.”
“It’s a diosol.”
The clerk stopped reaching for whatever was behind the counter and straightened up, staring at them incredulously.
“A diosol, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see it.”
Having already prepared his spare weapon for the task, Jack readily changed it to the golden scythe. The clerk stared at it incredulously for a second, knowing he had just scored a fortune, but quickly remembered he had a posture to maintain.
“Come this way, please. We will have to examine this creature’s condition to see what sort of help we will be able to provide you with,” he said leading them towards one of the doors in the back of the counter. On the hallway at the other side, the clerk held the first door for them to go inside, closing it behind him and booting up the complicated computer system that was set up there, including a monitor the size of a small window and several dark disks arranged in shelves behind them. In the desk with the keyboard and mouse also rested three claws, secured to the desk by a single black arm, and a slight depression with electronic circuits embedded in it, both designed to hold spherical objects.
“If you’d be so kind as to put your weapon here, sir.”
After locking the scythe, Jack placed it on the claw, and with a quick thank you and a mouse click, the clerk cracked the sphere open in four petal shaped segments, revealing dying sparkles inside the weapon’s white casing, composed of many chips and electrical circuits, a miniature constellation fading away into dark metal. It held a copper-coloured sphere inside, no larger than a thumb, which reflected the light of the room as if it was golden instead of the cold grey from the monitor that shone on their faces.
Wasting no time to marvel at the components of the weapon, the clerk minutely removed its core with the aid of a pair of plastic tonsils and placed it on the carved hole on the desk. Automatically the computer displayed a 3D schematic of a bird-like creature, with blue feathers at the tip of its wings, yellow scales covering its body, a round face with no beak or even a visible mouth, only a pair of expressionless red eyes and a trio of small feathers with blue tips rising from the top of its head, and a long scaly tail ending in a red rhombus. The more he watched the picture and the series of information that popped up with it, the more the clerk’s eyes widened until he suddenly cleared his throat.
“Please wait here for a moment,” he said before discreetly leaving the room.
“What does it say?” Yana asked, looking at the various textboxes and linear symbols that filled them. Jack glanced at her a bit quizzically, but translated nonetheless.
“Taiyou Shin, common name diosol. Length and weight, doesn’t really matter, juvenile female, good body condition, treatable bite wound on the left side of the neck. Good flight capabilities, fully functional solaris organ - that’s what they use to concentrate and release sunlight – fully functional ovary and good reproductive capabilities. Don’t you know how to read?” he asked turning towards her.
“Not that language,” she answered pointing at the screen.
“You’re speaking it just fine.”
Raising an eyebrow, Yana looked back at the screen to be sure she wasn’t seeing things.
“Maybe we write things…”
Her voice waned away when she realized Jack wasn’t listening to her anymore, turning his head so that his ear was facing the direction that some other sound was coming from. It took but a few seconds for him to grab the tonsil and pull the core away from the link on the desk.
“What’s going on?”
“They know.”
“Know what? They know about us?” she asked as he put the core back into its casing, and clicked on a green button on the screen, causing the casing to close around it. He nodded, collected the weapon and headed for the door that Yana had opened.
As soon as they existed the empty lobby of Kilma’s embassy, a loud horn echoed across the town, and people started peeking out the doors and windows, wondering whose brilliant idea it was to make such a racket. Although Jack was quick to guide them out of that street, dozens of eyes followed their step, being gradually replaced by a growing mob holding maces and axes, pistols and spears, most of them irradiating the aura that made Yana shiver and turn back around.
“We have to get around them,” she whispered.
“Excellent point. What do you suggest?”
“I don’t know, aren’t you the one with the super hearing? Can’t you find someplace for us to hide?”
Instead of giving her a smug answer, Jack paused for a moment, picking up something impossible for the simple girl to understand, and rushed his step.
“No. But I can find something to keep them busy.”
As they turned the corner towards the main street, he switched his scythe and, warning Yana to shut her eyes, held the crescent moon shaped blade out to the other side and flashed it out for all evil eyes to gaze upon.
For the brief moments the surprised men turned blind, and the two teenagers jolted ahead, entering another side street before their pursuers could make it to the main street and see where they were headed. With a bunch of angry shouts, the mob split between the nearby corners, keeping someone guarding the elevator to stop the trespassers from making it back to surface. Jack had no intention of going there, much to Yana’s disbelief - no matter how much she hissed at him that they had to go the other way, he kept running ahead and ignoring her, forcing her to keep up with him or get caught.
As they were halfway towards the edge of town, something jumped from the turn they were crossing and hit Yana to the ground. With a numb right arm, she could barely look up and see that Jack had already engaged in a fight with a man wielding a mace, its ornaments and colour shadowed by the dark aura around. Jack was struggling, as the man gave him no room to step back and change his scythe or even summon one of his hidan, but before she could try and get up someone unhurriedly walked past her, and with one swift motion of the polearm in front of him knocked the mace clean of its wielder’s hands. Before it even landed the tip of the spear was eagerly leaning on the man’s neck.
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“You okay there, alien?” asked Sauti turning his head above his shoulder to smile at her.
“What are you doing here?” asked Jack before she could even nod.
“Now, Jack, is that anyway for you to thank the person who just saved your ass?”
“I was fine!”
“Too bad we’ll never know, right? Unless you want to go again, of course,” Sauti asked to the man on the other side of his spear. He got nothing but spit as a response. The tall Arabic looked down to the floor where it had landed and faced his opponent again, maybe looking for a different kind of response, but swung his spear around and knocked him on the head once he saw there was no such thing to find in him.
“Don’t these people’s parents ever teach them manners? All they can do is spit and shout and- hey! I was the one who beat him, that belongs to me,” Sauti complained once he realized Jack had taken the trouble of retrieving the mace.
“Then why don’t you come and get it?”
“Is that a challenge, Jack? Need I remind you, you two are being followed by a quite an astonishing amount of people, and I am the only way out that you can hope to have?”
“He has a point,” Yana said, stopping any answers from Jack.
“Did you forget who they are?”
“No, but they’re actually helping us,” she answered in the angered tone. “I’d rather go with him that run through whomever is still out there.”
Jack turned back to the mouth of the street and grit his teeth instead of giving her another answer.
“Well said,” Sauti said as she started listening to the voices and the footsteps he had heard first. “Now, if you don’t want to fight them all, I suggest you follow me.”
He hesitated for a moment, but eventually Jack caught up to them.
“What? He’ll just get beaten up again.”
“He wouldn’t go with him unless he was sure no such thing could happen again.”
“And how can he be sure? They tricked him before, they could do it again.”
“To be fair, the circumstances are completely different.”
“And I could just tell you how it all went.”
Fortunately for Yana’s tired legs they didn’t have to run too far before breaking in the back of a small building’s empty kitchen, too big to a house’s but too small to belong to anything other than a small diner on its day off. Once the door was closed, Sauti stopped them from going any further with his spear while reaching for his ear.
“Contact Team Steel Ginta… How’s everything on your end? ...Excellent. Keep it up and report back to me after you’re done,” with the conversation over, Sauti removed the spear and smiled at them. “Good news! The team is dealing with those guys, so we’ll get out of here soon.”
“Where is he?”
“Come now, Jack, I’m big enough to do my own thing, don’t you think so, alien?” Sauti asked Yana.
“Stop calling me that.”
“But isn’t that what you are?”
“You make it sound like you’re making fun of me.”
With a hearty laugh Sauti leaned away from the wall and changed his spear back to a sphere.
“All right, all right. I’m sorry if I offended you, miss, I shall not utter such words in your presence anymore. Now, where do they keep the booze?”
“Why are you helping us, Sauti?” Jack insisted, turning to his old colleague again after taking a good look at the entire kitchen for something that could spell trouble for him. Instead of giving an immediate answer, Sauti opened the cooler and pullet a golden bottle from the ice.
“I just want to talk to you, Jack,” he said removing cap with the edge of the cooler. He took a gulp and a deep, satisfied breath, and turned towards him again. “That was our home too. You had no right to blow it up.”
“Don’t you see what he’s done to the team? He’s a hypocrite! I did you a favour by blowing up the base, now you can start all over. And you can do it without doing the same mistakes he did.”
After he was finished with the laugh and muttering something to himself, shaking his head in disbelief, Sauti’s smile vanished, and he looked back up. “He didn’t do anything to the team, Jack. He did those things to you, because he wanted you to leave.”
A genuinely surprised “what” escaped from his lips, prompting Sauti to continue his explanation.
“You see, they brought you to headquarters this close to dead, and what’s the first thing you do after you wake up? You attacked Mai. And then you attacked the boss. And then you attacked everybody. And you did it again, and again, and again. It was an awesome way of training, really, but the new recruits? They didn’t find it so amusing. I’m not sure if you remember all this, how you rabidly attacked us over and over and the boss got you back to your senses.”
“So?”
“And do you remember how we asked you where you had come from and what had happened to you? And you always said you didn’t remember?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did you really think we would let things stay that way? That we wouldn’t try and find who did those things to you so we could make sure they would never do it again? You always said you didn’t remember anything, and we took your word for it, I mean, who would ever remember anything in that state, so we had no choice but to send you out as bait.”
“So that’s all I was to you the whole time? Just a way for you to get your righteous justice on the people I forgot?”
“Are you saying you were unprepared to face them?”
“That’s not the point.”
“The point is we were going to be on your tail the entire time if you hadn’t blown up headquarters on your way out.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault your stupid plan didn’t work out.”
“We wouldn’t even need to have a plan if you had come clean in the first place!” With a deep breath, Sauti took in the silence that followed to calm his voice.
“What do you-?”
“We tracked your bike and your nervous unit, and we found the VDF on the woods a while after you escaped. Pretty messed up from the diosol flock you provoked to shake them off your back. For someone who doesn’t like liars, you sure made a pretty good job of being one yourself.”
“Shut up! Who the fuck do you think you are? I shouldn’t have to remember anything!”
“But you do,” Sauti answered. “You remember everything. And instead of gathering the courage to tell the truth about what you are and what you did, you went and did the exact same things you say you despise. Is it because you know you should have never been such a little coward in the first place?”
A fist flew towards Sauti’s face, getting swiftly caught by a raised hand.
“There’s another, much simpler way to start remedying things that doesn’t involve punching me in the face, Jack. You just have to use two words.”
They started at each other, their hands trembling from the forces on one another, but eventually one of them was eased, and slowly lowered.
“I’m sorry.”
“Good,” Sauti nodded vehemently, reaching for his beer bottle. Since it seemed he was finished for the time being, Yana decided it was her turn to have a little chat with Jack.
“What?”
“I’m not going this right now.”
“You’ll do it eventually. What’s that supposed to mean?” Yana asked turning to Sauti when he started laughing. However, he raised a hand and tapped the other on his ear.
“Called received. Sauti here… Ok, good… What? …Do we know where they are? …Ok. We’ll meet at the sub elevator and leave for the surface in ten,” he brought his hand back down and jumped from the cooler. “Well, it looks like the coast is clear. I’ll get out first, just to be sure, and you can leave in about five minutes, but before I go… What can you tell me about the people behind your project, Jack?”
“It was just Dr. Daking as far as I know. Funded by Kioo.”
“What about a Dr. Jonathan Geni?”
“He vanished. Dunno why, dunno where he might be.”
“I see. Just something you might be interested in, then. The Mabaya Industries Vulcan laboratory was destroyed by two Neal-Hidanna just now.”
“What?”
“It seems both of them started moving just a few hours ago, from halfway across the globe. You better be careful, little alien, they might be after you.”
And with a brief ciao Sauti opened the door outside, leaving them to their devices.
Before the door could even close Jack turned around towards the front of the restaurant, claiming he needed to break the mace he had stolen. At first Yana thought leaving him alone was a bad idea but decided against it when it crossed her mind that he was probably feeling like an idiot after that scolding.
“Hey, Yana. Are you okay?” asked David’s voice a short while after.
“Yeah, my arm’s still a little numb though,” she said rubbing the spot where she had been hit.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to bring Jack here. I mean, I don’t even know if we can.”
“Yeah,” admitted Yana. “I mean, this place sucks, but there’s still things he’s not telling us. Dangerous things.”
“What will even happen to him if he does get here? Is there a chance he can start attacking people like he did with Team Steel?”
“I don’t know…” Yana said, feeling increasingly worse with the fact that she would be one more on the list of backstabbers. “I need some air.”
“We need to know more about-“
With an unannounced thud, the television screen turned black.
***
Now, I could start telling you about being knocked out cold by a pistol handle, getting stuffed into a car and driven to another city, and getting locked in a room until the bad guys decide what to do with you. But let’s see what happened to Jack instead while Yana is being turned into a damsel in distress.
If you believe Jack had taken the mace for recognizing it as Bug due to the attack on Yana, you couldn’t be more wrong. The hidan inside the blue, engraved weapon was a meguio, which is known back in that world as a pretty rare species due to way they evolve. But that’s complicated to explain and not very relevant, so I won’t be going into detail. What you should know is that it looks like a blue spotted deer with transparent horns, as if made out of glass.
“How is that natural?”
“Biology is a hard mistress in that world.”
This particular meguio bore a stare void of any emotion, but unlike all the other hidan Jack had released from their weapons, it didn’t try to attack him or even run away. It simply looked at the horizon, as if looking for something that it had long lost. Jack didn’t do anything either, but I’m pretty sure he understood that the meguio knew something was wrong, since, you know, he can read hidan pretty well.
So, when its ears twitched slightly Jack turned to where the sound was coming from and clicked his tongue. In an instant the meguio was flowing inside his scythe and he was breaking through the diner’s back door, finding a man holding an unconscious Yana by his shoulder, a second man walking at his side and three more firing hidan and non-hidan guns at him. The sound of the bullets was enough to make Jack break his step and take refuge behind the diner’s wall, rapidly bringing up Moonlight’s scythe.
A crescent moon blade emerged from behind the wall for a split second before flashing, making the shooters reach for their eyes and yell, if only for a moment before Jack leapt out of his hiding spot and knocked them both down. Also afflicted by blindness, the third shooter took hold of his brown gun with both hands and tried his best to hit the incoming black blur but being a mook always means you aren’t going to beat the main character. Jack grabbed the gun with his glove and broke it before knocking out that final obstacle, jolting to a run when he looked ahead and didn’t see the people that had taken Yana.
Only at the end of the street did he manage to find the two men, already on the elevator and just high enough for Jack not to be able to jump up and hitch a ride. Not being a person to just let things slide, he grit his teeth, turned around and ran all the way to the other side of the main street of the miner’s village. At the end, he turned right twice into a narrow street that he crossed on a fast walk, moving his head from side to side as if trying to see beyond the walls of the samey white and short buildings that sandwiched the corridor, being led by a faint signature in the air he had first felt years ago, but never forgotten. It didn’t take long for him to find what he was looking for, quickly contouring the house in search for a way in. Moonlight emerged from the scythe, and Jack kicked open the door, letting the cat jump inside unimpeded. Shouts came from deep inside the house that soon turned to screams.
Letting her run around as she pleased, Jack crossed through one of the hallways, shouldering his way through fleeing half-naked women and a handful of Summoners that thundered towards the paka, and kicked open a precisely chosen door. Before the dark-skinned man inside could even aim his gun, the sphere on top of the new, blue and white form of Jack’s scythe cast out a jet of water strong enough to knock the gun away from his hand. With the efficiency of a programmed machine, Jack grabbed a yellow and white prod from a bedside table and flicked it towards the man as he tried reaching for his gun again. A lightning jolt surged from the prod and formed a whip that curled around his arm, throwing him away from the gun with a crackling sound.
While his victim gasped for air, Jack broke the prod, releasing a deer nearly identical to the other one he had recently captured, only of a vivid yellow instead of serene blue, that remained as immobile as the first.
“Did you know that the megu are the most intelligent of all the hidan?” Jack asked, analysing the empty gaze of the creature, focused on the man. He then turned towards him, who was struggling to stand properly from the floor, and continued. “They know who you are, they know what you’ve done, and this one will give you the shock of your life when I tell him to.”
“Who the fuck are you?” the man asked, more confused than terrified.
“Five of your men have taken a red-haired girl to the surface four minutes ago. Where are they?”
“Holy shit, you’re that thing that Daking was working on!”
With a whistle, Jack pointed at the man with his head. Several sparkling sounds came from the yellow deer’s antlers as they began to glow, unleashing a lightning bolt that sent the man convulsing. When he managed to re-open his eyes, all he could see was a massive black cat hissing at him, showing a row of reddened, saw-like teeth.
“I won’t ask you again,” the boy’s voice echoed in the background.
“They took her to the main building in Oaris, my company’s building. Yeah, that’s what they did,” the man said raising his arms in a surrendering gesture. Jack swung his scythe at the yellow deer and disappeared into the hallway, with Moonlight quickly trotting behind him.
“Wait, did Jack suddenly turn into a different person?”
“Not really. He had already shown some of this behaviour, but never as extreme.”
“But why?”
“And who was that man? Was he the head of that company that you mentioned before?”
“How did he find him? Through smell?”
“Precisely.”
“Those are some powerful senses.”