Three kids and a cripple go to war.
Sounds like the start of a bad joke but it’s her reality, and she’s the cripple! She can walk, she can’t run, which means she can do a whole lot of nothing in combat except use her Reison, which wouldn’t have been a bad option if she had more than six fucking bullets. Ellie of course, does not give a shit, and denying her wouldn’t be very impressive, not likely to make an impression and all that.
Such as it is that they find themselves holed up in an abandoned building within the combat zone. It’s a decent office suite, grey rugs, white walls, and broken windows.
“A group approaching from the south” Takeshi says from beside her as his eyes glow a light yellow. She adjusts herself to point towards the south, rifle glinting in the evening light.
“Alright,” Aki’s voice says in her earpiece, “We hear them, on your mark”
“Do you have the shot?” Takeshi asks.
Alex sighs, “I hope so.”
“Then take it”
Alex grunts as she pulls the trigger.
-
She’s hiding by a knocked over garbage bin, filled with nervous energy ready to be let out as she turns off the safety to her Raptor.
She’s scared, she’s always scared.
There are so many ways to die in a war, most of them instant. So many ways for the complexities of life to just end, no epilogue, no fanfare, just over. Taken to the pit of nothing that all lives go to once they’re forgotten.
She doesn’t want to go to that place.
She doesn’t want to die.
She has to stop being a punk ass bitch and get this over with.
She can hear them in the distance, she can’t tell what they’re saying but she can tell they’re there. She’s about to kill again, that or she’s about to die. There’s no real outcome where one of the two doesn't happen.
She waits and waits as they get closer and closer. Footsteps hitting concrete to the rhythm of their cadence, until, finally, she can hear them.
“Chink, there are so many dudes out there to choose from, why do you stick with the one that takes pleasure in degrading you.” A woman sighs.
“He doesn’t degrade me.” A man whispers, “he just points out my mistakes.”
“And uses it as an opportunity to hurt you,” another voice says, “constructive criticism doesn’t usually involve so much yelling.”
The man sighs, “I know…but he cares guys, he listens and helps me deal with shit once shit comes up. He’s always there for me, even if he has a temper.”
The woman doesn’t really get to respond as a bullet tears a hole through her stomach the size of Sasha’s head. Their eyes go wide and one of them screams.
“Snip-” a bullet from Sasha’s Raptor goes through his head.
One.
They scramble for cover but Sasha manages to hit one in the knee before blowing out his brains.
Two.
Sasha trades shots with the remaining gangers as Aki provides covering fire. Sasha peaks out and pops a ganger in the head.
Three.
She turns as quick as she can and flick shots the ganger a few meters away from her, he falls to the ground screaming and just like that the gunfire’s stopped. Sasha walks over to the bleeding man as he tries to crawl away. He turns to her with crazed eyes pointing a gun that she kicks out of his hands.
“Please-”
Four.
-
They needed to move after that, gunfire is a constant in the combat zone. But it tends to attract unwanted attention when it comes from a place that isn’t an active battlefield. Moving is, of course, Alex’s bane right now. But she pushes through, she’s started to get used to everything hurting all the time.
“Good job everyone,” Takeshi says, “that was clean for our first one, let's hope the rest go the same.”
Everyone gives him weird looks.
“What?” he asks nervously.
“Are you roleplaying as a coach?” Sasha asks.
“What! No!”
“Then why’d you word it like that?” Aki adds.
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
“I was just giving encouragement.” He harrumphs.
“Sounds like something a coach would say,” Sasha teases.
“I’m not a coach!” he yells petulantly.
“Of course, sir Takeshi.”
He lets out a groan, though Alex doesn’t miss the slight twitch of a smile.
-
Chewings a bitch when one of your cheeks is no longer in operation. She’s gonna get that skin grafted as soon as she can, but for now it’s time for war and blood and suffering and all that jazz. She’s honestly getting sick of it, why can’t they just call it quits so the corporations can take their turn and shit can go back to normal? At least they’re getting paid for this. Though they can only cash that in once the war’s over. Helping a Scar behind enemy lines better have gotten her some fat stacks. They also get paid for every day they hunt for patrols, even if they don’t find any, though once they don’t provide proof of the kills for long enough they’ll be kicked off rotation. Right now it’s three-days on and three-days rest as another team takes over. They got given some rations that taste like bland cereal which apparently have a whole day's worth of your daily nutritional needs.
It’s very chewy, meaning she has to keep her neck bent slightly to the left for prolonged periods to avoid the risk of it falling out of her mouth, it is not comfortable.
“Hey Alex?” Sasha asks.
“Hm?” she responds, still chewing.
“Are we evil?”
Alex sighs, then swallows.
“Yeah, probably.”
Sasha droops as she looks at the floor, “honestly, I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. Being a naive idiot and all that.”
Alex shrugs, “I’ve killed a lot of people Sasha, I…” She trails off and stares at the horizon, “I see this ghost, sometimes, of that woman I executed way back when. She talked with me, even helped me when my soul was breaking. I don’t know why. Don’t know how much that says about me or her. But every time she looks at me I can see it in her eyes, the face of her killer just before she died. It is not the face of a good person.”
Sasha stares at her then snorts, “so it took a ghost for you to have some introspection?”
“Yeah, something like that.” She says with a small smile.
-
Alex stands in front of a dragon with eyes of nothing, it’s spit maw growling at the girl like a truck engine. It brings its skinless head down to her level and stares at her, the blood of its limbs flowing freely and glowing like a ruby in the sun. It takes a whiff of her, then breathes out a breath that topples Alex over.
POOR. FOOL.
-
Garthamun’derka stares into the void.
It does not stare back, he has long overcome its gaze and become something greater than simply NOTHING. Why then did something of mere flesh manage to stop him? An insolent thing of bone and viscera grabbed his arm, and its grip was impossible, because he did not allow it to touch him.
Yet it did.
This is something…new, he does not know whether it is a good or bad thing.
What he does know is that he won’t ignore it.
-
Uridine flips a coin. It lands on heads.
Coins are antiques in this day and age, this one would easily go for a few million on the open market. Rich collectors are insane like that. This piece of circular scrap metal is virtually useless, and yet it is so very expensive.
He flips the coin again. Tails.
He points his gun at the girl and blows off her head. There is screaming and cursing and begging. Nothing he hasn’t heard before, and nothing he’s really queen on listening too again. It gets tiresome after a while, sometimes he wonders if the rich were all just androids programmed with the same script.
He flips the coin again. Tails.
The woman cries and begs as he brings up his gun and shoots her in the head. Huh, two in a row, this family’s unlucky. Oh well, not really his problem.
He flips the coin again.
-
Violence is a tune Fiona understands very well, it sings its songs with gunsmoke and screams. It is a beauty every time she hears it. Better than any symphony, it is what made her who she is, and she will worship it to the end of her days.
During peace there’s the occasional burst of violence she can participate in, small rehearsals to satiate her desire for a concert. But war? War is a constant string violence tuned to perfection, Fiona refuses to miss a single note.
As she grabs the wolf with six arms, tearing her limb from limb, and beating her friends to death with said limbs, she revels in how much more the tunes can offer.
-
Solomon is staring at the floor.
It’s filled with cracks and scars of those who have come to challenge him for his throne. Over the past two centuries, nobody has proven worthy of his title. It’s a shame really, truly a shame. Perhaps if someone else took the reins things would have been different, someone kinder, someone wiser.
A shame his friend has never challenged him.
Such a curious thing to simply stop in the pursuit of power, to willingly become someone's servant rather than fight for what your soul demands is yours. It is perhaps his only flaw, it is perhaps his greatest virtue.
Solomon is not so kind as to put friendship over power, nor is he so wise as to change the status quo in a way that doesn’t involve bloodshed. Perhaps if someone else sat on the throne.
But there is no one else, just him and his dingy crown.
World is not a perfect place, and his proof is that he is the one that carries the name Solomon.
-
She is floating through the world between, a little butterfly traveling through thorns and thistle of the greater monsters. It takes a while to learn how to travel this space, but once you do it opens so many possibilities. It needs all her focus unfortunately, which means she can’t do it in large portions of time. Only when she’s sleeping, to be safe. Her home is anything but after all.
She likes to examine the curiosities of this place, there is an infinite amount of space for an infinite amount of beings, but so many of them are the same. Half formed and weak. She needs to go to the upper layers to really see the things from beyond.
She can’t look for too long, or they’ll look back, and she doesn’t need the attention of something like what resides here. So she contents herself with the glimpses she can grab as she weaves around their souls. It also helps that the longer she stays in the upper layers, the greater her own being becomes, drinking deep from the surroundings. The risk is great but so are the benefits, it’s what's made her so much stronger than her peers.
As she navigates the realm between realities she sees something curious, something like negative space floats, it is a vortex of the END, a concept she’s never seen before.
She decides it would be best to leave the thing alone.
Then it grabs her.
-
Kite stares at the corpses, remembering the faces of those who have fallen. They are reviled amongst his gang, but he does not care. Everyone who'se lived deserves to be remembered.
He watches the trail where death guides him, and follows as he always does.