“Karla!”
Karla didn’t respond. Her eyes drifted over the mirror she found herself in front of. A teenage girl was reflected, toothbrush in hand. She almost didn’t recognize herself. She was twenty six a second ago, and now she saw her sixteen-year-old face staring back, a drop of white toothpaste dripped onto her shirt.
“Karla! Are you alright?” her mother shouted from downstairs. “Answer me!”
“Y-yes!” she said. She spat and wiped off her face, pausing at the mirror once again. She didn’t know what to think. Up until a moment ago, she lived in an apartment in City West, she had a strong power that had kept her safe, and she had been terribly alone. Perhaps it was a fear of what she had done, that perhaps she would do it again. But now, she was here. Before it all. She didn’t feel the cursed power that had taken her parents life, she was still normal. Still just Karla.
“Karla!”
She dropped the toothbrush bolted for the stairs. The house seemed familiar still, despite not seeing it for over twenty years. The long, thin hallway, the ugly carpet, the stairs that creaked under every step. Still she didn’t quite believe it till she faced the woman who had been shouting at her this entire time. Karla came to a halt just outside the kitchen, staring at another face she hadn’t seen in so many years. Dark skin, hair dyed into dark red curls, and wearing a large apron with a hand-embroidered apple over her plump frame. Her mother, Diana, exactly as Karla remembered her.
“Haah, don’t scare me like that! First an earthquake and then all of that racket outside. Enough to give me a heart attack.” Her mother shook her head and focused her attention back onto a sheet of dough she had been rolling out on the counter. “Don’t be late now. Get some actual clothes on and head to school, I’ll be making some things for the potluck tonight so get back early, I’ll need your help carrying things.”
“Mom…”
“Hmmm?” Her mother didn’t look up for a moment. “Karla, what—” She finally looked up and saw her daughter’s face. “Sweetie? Are you okay?” She set down the rolling pin and stepped over. “Ah, I have flour on me, one second—”
Karla cut her off with a hug. She buried her face in her mother’s chest and squeezed.
“Karla! Oh honey. Are you crying? What is a girl your age crying over an earthquake? We used to have them all the time down in California. First time I’ve felt one this big up in Seattle, but it wasn’t too bad. You’d be surprised at a real big one.”
Another rumble shook the building. Karla and her mother tensed as the shaking tapered off. A spark erupted in her chest, a familiar feeling, if a bit stunted or incomplete. The power that had been with her for what felt like a lifetime was suddenly back, flowing into her like a bonfire erupting into life. She could feel the world, sense the very air. The entire house was within her grasp, as well as the earth beneath their feet.
She pushed her senses down into the soil her home and found them. Holes in the earth, growing as she embraced her mother in the kitchen above. A nest of ants had always been by the driveway of her home. Little, annoying red bastards that seemed to live only to bite her when she played in the grass as a child. She had always hated these creatures and today, they were gaining large, ugly siblings. She could feel the creatures dig and scratch at the dirt as they grew, forced to head upwards, to the surface. A long, red leg broke out of the driveway, digging through the soil and pulling up the large beast.
“It’s just an aftershock sweetie!” Diana hugged her and laughed. “Just relax, it’ll be over soon enough.”
The ant pulled itself up, breaking through the asphalt and then…
Karla reached out to crush the insect with the walls of its own tunnel. A quick death, and something that was easy for her. She focused, she squeezed, and nothing happened. The ant dragged itself up, nipping at the undercarriage of her father’s Saab as it tried to pull itself through. She tried to push the asphalt inwards, to break and smash it with the crumbling black material. Nothing.
“Man oh man,” said her father Thomas as he stomped down the stairs. He was a tall blond man in a suit, a large bandage on his cheek marked where the earthquake had interrupted his shaving. “I haven’t nicked myself with the razor like that in a while.”
Her mother huffed. “Why do you keep using that? Just use an electric shaver like everyone else!”
He chuckled as he rubbed his wounded face. “Nothing gets as close of a shave as a razor.”
“Ha! Close! You’ll take your nose off one of these days.”
Karla stared at the two. This conversation, she had heard it before. Once, a long time ago just before the worst day of her life happened. They spoke the same, and acted the same, but they felt… off. She looked over the house, it looked off, too.
She pushed her focus outside, the sound of her parent’s morning bickering faded as she concentrated. She tried to force the ground to move, to slowly, powerfully move. She should be able to control solid objects as if she was a piece of construction equipment. As she focused, the earth merely cracked and broke under the ant’s attempts to remove itself from under the rear of the car. She could sense everything, but no matter what she did, the world remained as it was. Unchanged, unaffected by the powers she had awoken today.
Thomas grabbed a protein bar off the counter and quickly kissed his wife and daughter on the top of their heads, snapping Karla out of her concentration. “I’ll be late if I don’t hurry now.” He took quick steps towards the door, entirely clueless of the beasts that roamed outside.
“Dad, wait!” Karla shouted, unlike how she did in the past, but he kept walking, stumbling a bit as he opened the door, as he stepped onto the wood boards outside.
A sudden surge of pressure lifted the porch, then broke it in half. An ant snapped its mandibles and tore through the wood beams like they were paper. Her father fell backwards, a great wound through his side, nearly cutting him in half. An ant leg pierced the wall with ease, tore into the fish tank, and ended Karla’s pet goldfish Filbert’s life once again. Karla reached out and pushed, harder this time, popping a blood vessel in her nose, and sending a stream of blood down her lips. She had never struggled this much. It just… didn’t happen.
The ant with its leg stuck in the wall thrashed and turned, its mandibles cutting through the wall and front door with ease. “Thomas!” her mother screamed as the ant grabbed him on his waist and pulled.
Karla screamed. In terror, in frustration. Why can’t I do anything differently? Why is it all the same? She watched in horror as her father was dragged out of the living room, still alive, still screaming. She felt the world grow dark.
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“Karla!”
Karla didn’t respond. Her eyes drifted over the mirror she found herself in front of. A teenage girl was reflected, toothbrush in hand. She almost didn’t recognize herself. She was twenty six a second ago, and now she saw her sixteen-year-old face staring back, a drop of white toothpaste dripped onto her shirt.
Again. She saw her face again. Somehow, she felt like this scene had happened over and over.
“Karla! Are you alright?” her mother shouted from downstairs. “Answer me!”
She ran through the memory again, watched her father die again, faded again. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that grew in her chest that something was wrong.
“Karla!” Her mother’s voice drifted up through the old house like an alarm clock
She dropped the toothbrush and stared at her face. Something wasn’t right… she wasn’t sixteen, and she wasn’t in her old house. That house had been destroyed by mutated ants in the first days of the Upheaval. Why? The world shook as if hammered. The calls of her mother stopped, the house stilled. Then another blow shook the world. Karla turned and ran downstairs, only to find her mother missing, to find the living room already destroyed, blood on the carpet but no bodies. Neither the ant, nor her father. She stepped outside, and the world faded to black.
“Karla!” Karla flinched from the sudden voice, the mirror, the toothpaste. She tried to think, but it was so hard. Only emotions were clear. The pain, the urge to run downstairs, to see her parents again. She tried to clear it, only for the memory to reset again. “Karla!”
“This is a memory. Those people, they are long dead.” She whispered.
“Karla!”
Karla screamed and tore at her hair. Trying to remove herself, trying to leave this dream. This nightmare. She turned and ran, away from the stairs, down the hall between bedrooms, and out the second floor window into the backyard. She was hit, hard. But not from the ground, from a rocket to the face.
“She’s hurt! She’s slowing down!” A voice shouted somewhere nearby. The world was all blurs and blending colors. “Get her!”
Karla moved her arm to fend off the voice, and was rewarded with dying screams in several voices. An explosion hammered into her side, permanently damaging the shielding array that protected her six to nine o’clock. Her left arm found the small kite shield from her belt and she held it up just in time to stop several explosive rounds hammering into her side.
Karla blinked as the world slowly came into clarity. There were bodies around her. Many bodies. Some were dressed in black, with a white design repeated frequently across them. Others were dressed in neon colors. They seemed to fight in groups. A group of orange and black clan members rushed forward, long heatblade-spears in their grasps. She automatically flexed a muscle she didn’t know she had, and hundreds of micro-rockets shot out, tearing through the group. In the distance, a pair of dark-clothed women with wide hats flitted in and out of vision. Something was disrupting karla’s vision of them except when they moved or fired. They disappeared for a moment, which can only mean…
A pair of bright white-hot blue bolts fired through the open space between them and Karla. They hit the particle shields and passed right through. The bolts hit the chest armor of her harness, shattering the ceramic plates and slowing, but still moving fast. One bolt lost its plasma coating and was caught on the kevlar backing, the other kept going. Through her torso, through her left lung, and then it finally stopped as it punched through her back.
She tried to scream, but found she couldn’t. She tried to reach up to her face, but couldn’t. She looked down at her hands. What greeted her wasn’t hands, but claws. Mechanical, high-tech, covered with weapons, defensives, and utility elements. She could name each piece and their function, she could order each to activate if she wished, but she couldn’t say where she was, or why she was here.
Her self-analysis wasn’t without action from her enemies. Bullets rained down over her particle shields, slowly overwhelming the nano-particles as they bunched together to stop the projectiles. Armor and machinery began to crumble and break under the onslaught, yet nothing felt pain besides her chest. She stared at the six legs she now had. Black cloth covered her mechanical body. The clothing was torn and burnt, but she could see it also carried the strange white shapes as the other bodies. Those were her companions. This was an ambush… The others might be here soon… The legs twitched as gunfire raked over their surface, but they were apart from her. Someone else’s problem that she didn’t care about. She was merely a passenger in this freakshow.
On a nearby ridge, a clan in transparent green cloaks had hauled over an anti-tank weapon while she was distracted. They roughly aimed it at her and fired as quickly as they could. It should have been easy to dodge. They had set it up right in front of her for fuck’s sake. There was even a helpful little voice that began blabbering away as she stared dumbly.
[Warning, warning, warning.]
It sent her mental notifications that that was indeed a weapon that could kill her. It was indeed aiming at her. It was indeed firing.
The beam of light that erupted from the weapon was the thickness of a man’s torso. A fat man’s torso. The beam pulled up earth and debris as it passed overhead, tearing a channel all the way up to the monstrosity that still stood awkwardly in the middle of the battlefield. The particle shields evaporated, as did the connection between Karla and the monstrous legs beneath her. She tumbled, her harness releasing her from its tight grasp and allowing her to fall to the earth. She sucked in cold air through her one good lung. It hurt. There was an eerie silence that dropped over the battlefield as the constant stuccato of firearms halted. Even in the distance where battles sounded like they were raging slowed. A cheer rung up through the groups.
“Hell yeah boys!” A man in orange danced, his spear waving in the air. He turned only to find he was the only one of his clan left. His arms slowly lowered.
“We did it!” the group in green cheered over their cannon. “We took it out!”
“You just finished it off!” The pair of snipers shouted back as they walked closer. “We got her good!”
The surviving clan members slowly made their way forward, cautious, but when nothing happened, they inched closer to the remnants of Karla.
“Fuck. Is that all that’s still human?” a voice asked nearby. “Half a torso?”
“She’s a freak,” another answered. “But she’s finally dead, thank god.”
“The Witch is still breathing though… Look, she’s moving!”
Karla lifted her head to look down at the gathered clan members as they scrambled away. How she knew they were clan members, she couldn’t say. How she knew the pair of snipers were holding hypersonic anti-material rifles, she also didn’t know. She tried to speak, but felt no tongue, no lips. All that came out was a painful hiss of air.
“I think— I think she’s done.” A trembling voice said.
“You’re just scared,” an equally nervous sounding man replied.
“But she could have a self-destruct! Right? Shouldn’t we back away?”
Just as the voice said, an option appeared in her mind.
[Functionality: 0.1% Weapons online: 0 Recommended action: Self-Destruct.]
[Activate? Y/N]
She laughed at it. What garbage. She thought of No, and the prompt disappeared, only to reappear once again. She thought No, and again, it came back. She decided to just ignore the mental prompt and look around. The group had backed away from her, they tensed as she lifted her head, but nobody moved to finish her off. She tried to make use of her strange automatic knowledge, but only general concepts came up. Until she glanced at the crumpled legs sitting in a heap a dozen meters away.
[High Mobility Assault Harness - Arachne MK III … Owner: Witch … Status: Non-functional]
For some reason, the name Witch felt familiar. A powerful explosion erupted in the distance, followed by two more.
“The inner circle is detonating! Get back!” an older man in green shouted. The clans moved a distance away, watching her behind cover. Karla laid there.
After some time, and some faint murmuring, a small aircar cut through the sky, folded its wings into landing gear, and settled on the hill with the anti-tank cannon. Karla lifted her head to look, but after the vehicle dipped behind the hill, she dropped her head back onto the muddy ground with a huff.
Should I just do it? She thought as she looked at the gray overcast sky. The prompt to self-destruct hadn’t gone away. It remained there, annoying her to her last breath. She tried to close her eyes and grit her teeth, but found she could do neither. Footsteps brought her out of her thoughts.
Walking down from the hill was a man in what looked to resemble a bomb suit worn by ordinance disposal, but her helpful mind identified it for her.
[Heavy Assault Harness - Toad MK XIII]
As the man drew near, he slowed and walked around Karla. He took small steps closer, and noted her head following him as he approached. He eventually gathered his courage and stepped closer.
“Uh, Miss Witch? If you don’t plan on taking your life like your friends did, would you like to talk?”