Isaac’s Bracer of the Westward Wind worked similarly to a battery. While at rest, Rddhi naturally flowed into it, filling it, serving as a bank of energy to use later. Faced with a whip of barbed wire and all of its jagged points and edges, Isaac called upon the Bracer, which glowed on his wrist as Rddhi flowed back into his fist. A Zhanghai character - Isaac never got around to translating it - appeared on the bracer as Isaac reared his fist back and struck the barb wire approaching him.
Thanks to the extra energy, he deflected the wire, sending it spiraling away and smashing through a nearby catwalk railing. The recoil from the blow sent Isaac tumbling backwards through the air in the opposite direction - right into the path of a rising skeleton soldier. Isaac raised his fists, but a beam of Rddhi knocked the skeleton away before he could strike. Demetrius somersaulted through the air, shooting off thin beams of energy like a lightshow.
Isaac reached out for a catwalk railing, hoping to secure himself, but the whip of barbed wire came again. Isaac pushed himself back into open air; the wire smashed the railing where he had been just a moment ago. The skeleton called Currahee gazed at him with empty eye sockets beneath his goggles. He was a couple of floors up, using his two barbed wire ropes as ropes to propel himself around. As metal creaked, Currahee launched himself into the air, then swung a strip of barbed wire downward.
Using more energy from his Bracer, Isaac backfisted it away, but Currahee had already sent his second whip towards him. Isaac simply didn’t expect the second one to strike him so fast. It caught him in the opposite shoulder, shredding muscle and tendon with sharpened edges of metal. His blood bubbled and floated upwards as the attack sent Isaac rocketing into a wall. He groaned when his back struck metal; he could barely move his left arm, let alone deflect the next attack. The barbed wire closed in on him, but then something unexpected happened - another rope swung across the chamber to meet it. This thin rope smacked the barbed wire out of the way, a series of hisses ringing out upon contact.
Oksana made a rope out of her snakes?
The small woman swung herself upwards, snakes coiled tightly around her palms. These weren’t a series of snakes tied to one another to form a makeshift rope - with wide jaws, each snake spat out the next one from within itself until they reached Currahee. When they wrapped themselves around one of his tree trunks of a leg, Currahee swung downward, slicing the rope into two. Isaac expected to see a lot of snake blood and cries, but instead, the snakes melted away. Disconnected from their host Oksana, those disintegrating snakes turned into dust and ash that slowly drifted upwards.
Are Oksana’s snakes not real?
Before he had time to ponder that, a skeleton soldier came to dispatch the floating Isaac, but Dan Turner spun around and whacked the skeleton straight through the neck bones with his staff. Dan was in complete control of himself in the anti-gravity chamber, propelling himself with his wind that seemed to scream with each movement. He sent a blast that knocked out a trio of skeletons, then twirled himself below incoming barbed wire. Demetrius was below him; they clasped hands, and then Dan swung him upwards. Demetrius cocked his arm back and fired off a large beam that hit Currahee in the chest. The big skeleton soldier crashed through a catwalk, and then Demetrius grabbed hold of Oksana’s snake rope, who spun him around and sent him toward the impact crater. Currahee pushed himself off the wall just before Demetrius’s next beam struck him.
This brought Currahee in the path of Reed, who used her magnetism to fling skeleton corpses (are those what they're called?) at him. While Currahee whipped them away, Reed sent out a sound wave, the guitar noise screeching, aiming right for his neck. Currahee bent forward, taking the sound wave right in the helmet rather than the neck; the attack sent him tumbling downwards, but he used a barbed wire rope to keep a wind blast from Dan Turner at bay while the other barbed wire rope wrapped itself around a pipe running along the wall.
With his left arm recovered enough - combined with the rush of adrenaline - to just being an annoying stinging sensation, Isaac used the distraction to dispatch the remaining skeleton soldiers, sending electric charges or fists through their necks. Floating piles of bones and metal swirled around the anti-gravity chamber, the empty eye sockets of fallen skeletons gazing upon Isaac as he caught hold of Oksana’s snake rope. Floating up above in the middle of the chamber, Currahee looked down upon his opponents and studied them.
Twirling through the chamber, Demetrius punched the air and sent a beam rocketing toward Currahee. The skeleton swung himself away using a rope - this brought him right into the path of Reed’s sound wave. He swung the second rope onto another pipe to pull himself away - this brought him right into the path of Dan’s screaming wind. Currahee blocked it with his rope and was knocked backward, head-over-heels - right into the path of Oksana’s snake rope, the snakes spewing out more snakes from their mouths, Isaac holding on for the ride.
Currahee sent his two ropes toward Isaac, but a magnetic wave stalled one while a beam blasted away the other. The snake wave crashed towards the skeleton and Isaac emptied all the energy from his bracer into his right fist. He looked into Currahee’s eyes, but a skeleton can only make the one facial expression. With his defenses out of the picture, Currahee could only slowly float upwards as the snakes arrived and Isaac arrived and his glowing fist arrived, making a special delivery straight to Currahee’s cervical vertebrae.
The big skeleton made a popping noise as Isaac forcibly detached his helmeted skull from the rest of the body. And with that, the weight in the room shifted once again - the gravity turned back on, and now Isaac was free-falling. Oksana caught herself by tying one of her snake ropes around a railing and using the other to catch Isaac mid-air; he sighed in relief at the prospect of not being turned into paste upon reaching the ground. Dan glided himself down to safety and used a gust of wind to cushion Demetrius’s fall; the big man landed on his feet. Reed magnetized herself so she’d fall right into Demetrius’s waiting arms.
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For a few moments, the chamber rattled as all the bones and shards of metal crashed onto the ground floor. And then all fell silent once more.
Oksana lowered herself and Isaac to the ground. Her artificial snakes retreated within themselves, back down the line, until the last one retreated inside her sleeve. Oksana the snake remained coiled around her neck, licking a cut on her master’s face. As for Isaac’s cuts - Demetrius handed himself several packets of “Medical Paste” seized from Zhanghai facilities during the nationalization. Arcadia relied on traditional medicine like plasma and blood transfusion and prayer, but Zhanghai Medical Paste could simply be splashed onto the wounds to stop the bleeding and refill any lost blood. It would do the job until Isaac got home.
The group of five surrounded the fallen body of Currahee. Reed had found his skull and kicked it towards the corpse.
“So…this Department of Defense could use skeleton cultivators as its defense force?” Dan surmised. “Only the living can cultivate. Only those with a heart, brain, and dantian.”
Isaac ripped open the chest area of Currahee’s fatigues. Indeed, inside the big rib cage, Currahee had a heart that had, by now, fallen silent. Reed, meanwhile, revved up her sword like a chainsaw again, and after kicking off Currahee’s helmet, cut off the top of the skull. Beneath it, they found a brain.
“And I guess the dantian exists in a sort of metaphysical sense,” Reed supposed. “So these skeletons had all three. They were living and could cultivate.”
Isaac’s stomach roiled at the sights. The heart and the brain looked like patchwork, sewn or seared together, as if someone took the parts of several different bodies and reassembled them with medical precision. He then almost took a step back in shock.
I’ve met a patchwork man before. Back in Patuxet, that State Police officer Ludvig. He should’ve been shot to death, but he survived, and his body looked like it had all been sewn together. Our newest model, the officer Symanski called him.
“These guys are alive,” Isaac said slowly. “But are they, you know…alive alive?”
For once, Reed didn’t make fun of him, instead focusing on the patchwork brain.
“Are you asking if these skeleton cultivators have free will?” Dan asked. “The freedom to make their own decisions, I mean. To live their own lives.” He knelt down next to Currahee’s skeleton. “No, I don’t think so. These skeleton soldiers must’ve been slumbering down here for centuries, only awakening when their facility was breached. These skeletons were machines, custom-built for their owners’ purposes, had they not been alive. But they were alive, so I can only call them slaves.”
“Do you think they knew they were slaves?” Isaac asked. “Did they want to do this?”
Nobody could answer that.
Dan checked his watch. “We gotta be out of here by dawn. Let’s start searching this facility and see if we can find anything of value.”
They split into two groups - Squad 1 searched the upper floors while Squad 3 searched the lower. The ground floor consisted of all that electronic equipment, not to mention the whole host of skeletons in civilian clothes that littered the ground before the soldiers appeared.
“You think the skeleton soldiers killed those guys?” Reed asked, knocking on a skull with her shoe.
Isaac rubbed his chin. “I don’t know who else could’ve. But if the soldiers are slaves, why would they turn on their own people?”
“Not sure,” Reed supposed. “Unless one of their own people ordered it, maybe.”
Lacking answers, they resumed the search. Isaac used a spare piece of paper to draw the region depicted on the glowing map. When he asked Reed if she recognized the landmass, she just shook her head. They traversed the lower floor, only finding offices long-since abandoned. They found a dead set of furnaces that likely burned all the paperwork in the facility. The only other area of interest on the first floor was a large storage filled to the brim with empty shelves and racks. The storage room was split in several sections, one labeled WATER, another VEGETABLES, a third MEAT, and so on.
“Must’ve stored food down here,” Isaac said. But all the shelves were dry, all the crates empty. “They must’ve run out of it though.” He thought of the pile of civilian skeletons in the chamber and wondered.
With nothing to find on this floor, the duo headed up the stairs to regroup with Squad 1. Dan Turner was already another floor up; Demetrius and Oksana were weaving in and out of rooms.
Isaac called out to her. “Hey, Oksana, you find anything-”
She turned around, a rare emotion appeared on her usually stoic face - embarrassment. She wore several gold chains around her neck, rings on her fingers, and watches on her wrist. Isaac tilted her head; she slid a shoe across the ground.
“We only found bedrooms on these floors,” she explained. “The people who worked here must’ve lived here as well. Their bedrooms had…personal effects. Some of them are…quite stylish.”
“And quite valuable,” Reed added, emerging out of a room with a snazzy fur coat and golden bracelets around her wrists.
Demetrius poked his head out of another room with a grim expression. “I don’t condone this. If these people died here, then this is their grave. I don’t wish to defile it.”
Oksana gazed down at her shoes, not able to make eye contact with her comrade, while Reed continued to stuff loot into her greatcoat. Even Oksana the snake slipped on several gold rings. Demetrius shook his head and beckoned for Isaac to join him.
“Not really sure if I want to loot either,” Isaac admitted. The room Demetrius showed him lacked anything valuable - just a bed, couch, and rusted electronic equipment. When they came across the nightstand, Isaac felt an eerie sense of dismay run through him. A photograph, much like the one he had of his own family, was framed and displayed. Isaac picked it up to study it - the photograph featured a man in a black suit and a woman in a white dress. Unlike his own photograph, this one radiated with fine colors - the two were dancing, unaware of a photo being taken, at the side of a lake. The water was a dazzling blue, as was the sky; nearby tables were covered with white cloth. The man and woman looked incredibly happy.
“A wedding,” Isaac realized. “A photograph, in color, of a wedding from before the Unleashing.”
Isaac and Demetrius stared at the ancient photo for a long while, mesmerized by its quality and a time period they could never live in, until Dan called down from the top floor.
“Guys, I think I found what we’re looking for.”