The soldiers quickly deemed that there was no further threat to the Black Shield. The perpetrators had indeed halted their assault and returned to blending in with the rest of the organization. The dead were kept in the hangar for momentary storage so that they could be identified and returned to their home settlements for burial. This incident couldn’t have been predicted easily. This was planned, and the culprits must’ve waited for the right time to strike. That meant up to two years of waiting—the duration of time it had been since the Black Shield had been established. The sheer damage caused in such little time meant that only the hands of warriors of elite skill could’ve even hoped to cause it. And certainly not any ordinary human. This automatically ruled out the vast majority of the 180 soldiers. But narrowing down specific suspects could wait just momentarily. The Anbieter was desperate to find what had become of his second-in-command. Walking past the rows of injured soldiers who groaned in agony on the stock room floor, he hoped that he would find his loyal deputy there, and not laying in the hangar with a sheet over his body.
“Hey, Anbi—” a man began, but was interrupted by the violent coughing from his own throat.
“Jay?” the Anbieter exclaimed, hearing a very familiar voice. “Jay!”
He rushed to join the southern man’s side, crouching beside him. He wished to embrace his companion, but that would’ve meant hurting him even more than he’d already been. He’d been shot in the shoulder, miraculously avoiding any life-altering injury.
“Your—your mask!” Jay exclaimed, but his leader patted him, urging him to calm down.
“I didn’t want to take it off… Gareth made me. I pushed him into a corner, so he did the same to me… but never mind that. Did you see anything at all? Anything that’ll help us?”
“I never saw them, they took the lights down before they went on their rampage…” he paused before grimacing, the adrenaline having started to wear out. Only Leon and Detlef’s work gave him any comfort. “But I know there wasn’t just one of them. I heard two guns. One of them was a pistol, a normal one. The other… the other one was a sniper.”
“So there were two of them…” the Anbieter muttered, before asking a soldier near him for a pen and paper. Using his vast trove of memories to scour for the most likely suspects, those that were not only far above average in combat ability. He managed to scribble down five names. The five strongest soldiers that were in the Black Shield that had not been sent on the hunting assignment.
Ivan Hout. Valto Dalgaard. Meinrad Glynn…
Two names remained. Two names that he didn’t want to write down. He didn’t want to write down any, in fact. But only their skill levels could’ve corresponded to such catastrophic desecration.
Vivian Andel. Jayant.
The five soldiers were found and brought to the communal hall for questioning. Three of the five were badly wounded, including Jayant and Meinrad. Vivian had not been injured. Valto Dalgaard received a bullet wound to the hand which had done little more than graze it.
“It’s… it’s gotta be Vivian!” Ivan cried frantically, grimacing as even raising his voice caused a spike in pain. “She’s not hurt at all. Look at the rest of us. Do you think we’d hurt ourselves just to blend in? You can see just how fucked we are…”
“I understand your reasoning,” Valto said calmly. “But at the end of this, you’ll find that neither me nor Ivan did any of those brutal things.”
“Vi,” the Anbieter said to the only soldier who was still masked after all the chaos and commotion. “You must have a good alibi. Tell me what you were doing while everyone else was fighting for their lives.”
Vi got down on one knee before the Titanian as if he were some sort of royalty. “My only loyalty is to you, Master. I bear no allegiance to any man, woman or entity. I do as you tell me, and nothing else. I reap no benefit from serving anyone or anything else.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I forget that she only thinks herself as belonging to me, not to the Black Shield.
“Were you aware that people were being slaughtered left and right?” the Anbieter questioned.
“I could not do anything without your orders, Master.” she said.
Ivan cringed at the young woman’s mechanical way of speech, which coupled with her constant wear of her Black Shield mask made her uncomfortable to be around. Meinrad stared up at the ceiling, his condition too overwhelming for him to react in any meaningful way. Valto subtly shook his head, dismissive of Vi’s lack of concern for her comrades.
“Take that damn thing off!” Ivan cried. “Look us in the eyes and tell us you didn’t do it. The way you talk, the way you act… you’re not a real damn person… there’s nothing that tell us you didn’t do it. Or maybe… the sheep who’s been hiding in a wolf’s skin put you up to it. He did, didn’t he?”
“Me? Kill my own men? Who do you take me for, Ivan?” the Anbieter argued back. “I’ve been doing this for you. For all of you! My heart breaks the most out of everyone’s!”
“Your heart breaks? We find out the man who’s been at the forefront of our organization for its entire existence is another of the alien freaks we’ve been fighting, and you think your heart breaks? Pathetic!” the injured and bereaved Ivan spat out.
“Vi,” the Anbieter sighed. “Take it off. Look at them and tell them you didn’t do it.”
As Vi reached for her mask, a pair of footsteps echoed in the acoustic communal hall, followed by the sounds of shutting doors. Everyone present in the hall turned their heads to see the figure of a teenaged girl emerging from the corridor.
“Anwen,” Valto said, vaguely acquainted with the young girl. “You’ve come back alone?”
“Gareth isn’t coming back,” Anwen announced. “Ever.”
“It’s good to see you safe and sound, Anwen. Would you mind sitting with us?”
The Angel is deflecting, Ivan managed to think as the pain continued surging through his body, but slowly subsiding as a result of Leon’s healing.
Anwen sat on the floor with everyone else in the hall. She immediately recognised that something was not right, but she chalked at least some of it up to the revelation of the Anbieter’s identity. The fallout from that was to be unavoidable.
The Anbieter explained the details of the night to her, starting from when they found the doors to the hangar locked, up to when the Anbieter scribbled names down in an effort to close in on the identity of the culprits.
“I see,” Anwen said. “That explains the bodies up in the hangar.”
“Why do you say that so casually?” Ivan, a man in his late teens with an average build and medium-length, spiky brown protested. “Those were our brothers!”
“I’m sure she has other things weighing heavily on her mind, Ivan.” Valto, a slightly older man closer to his late twenties with a black buzzcut, goatee and stronger build reminded. He wasn’t nearly as good a fighter as Meinrad or Jay, but his tactfulness with emotional intelligence was highly regarded within the Black Shield.
“Anwen…” Jay whispered, finally speaking. “What do you think we should do? To draw out the culprits…?”
The anger and frustration she’d encountered while speaking with Gareth came surging back. The subtle pain in his voice as he explained only the tip of the iceberg of the oppression he faced at the hands of his father’s people echoed in her mind. Looking at the chaos and destruction before her caused by what could’ve only been an agent of the same aliens that caused him so much suffering fueled it.
“A full-on assault,” she said firmly. “The traitors will reveal their true faces.”
Amidst the stress and anxiety that had befallen him, a hypothetical lightbulb flickered on above the Anbieter’s head. When the opportunity had come to him not long ago, he took his chances. He had finally gotten the opportunity to maybe, just maybe, finally strike the Titanians fast and hard. He would’ve waited two months to formulate a complete plan, but time was of the essence. To protect himself, draw out the traitors, and finally see proactive combat against the Angels all in one move, there was one and only one thing he could’ve done.
“We’re on the same wavelength, Miss,” the Anbieter said. “Our only option now is to go to the south. You already know the truth of who I am, so I might as well tell you that I also own expansive property that we can use to our advantage. In a month’s time, we will head there. Our Black Shield shall finally strike first. We can't be so passive anymore... not like when they hit Marius.”
“We’ll send them to hell.” a youth’s coarse voice said as it accompanied slow, heavy footsteps approaching from one of the walls to the centre of the hall where the rest of the occupants were. A shiver ran down Anwen’s spine as a cold aura breezed past her, its source having stopped to stand just inches behind her.
“Stefan, you’re already—”
“We’ll send the Angels to hell,” he said to everyone, ignoring Anwen. His 24 hours of paralysis had ceased and he wanted nothing more than to get back on to his feet.
“The only thing I want to do is see them burn.”