FIVE YEARS AGO
A servant placed a silver platter in front of Viisi, two feet in diameter and completely covered in every type of food imaginable. Viisi placed his napkin in his lap and grabbed ahold of his utensils right as another plate was placed nearby.
An explosion outside shook the room, causing Viisi’s immense glass of water to ripple. Through a window he could see a missile’s arcing path through the air and hear its loud roar. He turned back to his food and dug in.
He downed a seasoned leg of Teconian red-tailed Inasta, cut into several slices of Neel rib and served himself scoops of fine-grain Ulaten. Several gunshots rang out and a bullet flew through a far wall of the room, but he kept eating.
One by one, he ate five cuts of Bassa-marinated Eren meat before shoveling piles of Illi lentils into his mouth. A soldier fell outside the room, dotting the window with blood. He gulped down a liter of Yta milk and a glass of aged Palo wine.
He ate and ate, ignoring the chaos outside, finishing every item on every plate. With every explosion, every gunshot and yell outside, he downed another item of food, another glass of drink. Finally, after eating an entire long-feathered Maleio bird, he wiped his hands on his napkin and got up from his chair. The servants had already fallen, and he walked past their unmoving bodies on his way outside.
Smoke obscured the sun shining over the battlefield, hundreds of bodies strewn across the charred gravel. Viisi walked into the battle unobstructed, passing by soldiers from his side of the battle. He turned heads with his slender figure and his confident stride, his red-lined coat flapping about in the smoke-filled wind. His allies stopped to stare, showering him with praise, and his enemies turned and ran as far as they could. Viisi stopped and glanced at the ground. Countless pebbles were scattered as far as the eyes could see.
Viisi raised his arms and a couple hundred pebbles rose into the air with them. He scanned the battlefield, eyeing the enemies around. Viisi closed his hands, then opened them.
A loud crack rang out through the air, overshadowing the explosions of war, and every pebble shot towards an enemy with a sonic boom, killing them instantly.
His Val: Calorie Telekinesis—he converted the calories in his body directly into kinetic energy. His name was Viisi, but he was also known as Red Mist for the state he left his opponents in.
And he was fifth in command for the Domain’s champion faction, Keila.
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Viisi sat at another table in a dimly-lit room, surrounded by his fellow Keila officials—excluding Zero, the faction’s leader, they were known as the Big 5. Due to the nature of his Val and his position within Keila, he sat at a lot of tables. The table was rectangular, large and made of metal with a hologram generator in its center. Despite its size, it only sat six, a seat on either end of the table and two along each length.
On his left, at the head of the table, was Keila’s leader, Zero, his shining blue eyes slanted and intimidating. To Zero’s left, across from Viisi, was Einer, whose long, muscular arms had lines of metal built into them. Going clockwise across the table sat Iskay, whose androgynous face had two heterochromic eyes, then long-haired Tria at the other end of the table, then the enormous Tro, hardly fitting in his seat, then Viisi.
Viisi, by far, was the youngest of the group at only 19. He’d seen them all many times before, but it was rare for the six of them to be gathered in one place. The collective power in the room was stifling.
“First,” Zero spoke, grabbing the attention of the group, “I would like to congratulate you all for your fantastic performance at the Tikay Offense. Keila’s place at the top of the Domain has been greatly strengthened, for thanks to you, we have successfully taken the Tikay sector of the galaxy, and with it, 23 planets!”
The table broke into applause. Zero seemed to relish it.
“And now, I want to discuss our next moves. The other factions are reeling from our advance—we must take this opportunity to inflict yet more blows on them and claim as much territory as the opportunity allows. It’s been months since we were all together in one place; tell me what each of you found while battling your assigned faction. What strengths and weaknesses should I know about? Tell me everything.”
It was unspoken, but Einer was invited to speak first. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, inadvertently commanding the attention of the room. He’d been assigned to the faction Vior for the Tikay Offense.
“It came as a surprise to me how similar Vior’s battle strategies are to ours. Their moves were predictable, but they also have a deep understanding of how to construct their armies. Not to mention, they’re already recovering from the Tikay Offense. My army was successful this time, but Vior is too dangerous to be our next target.”
“Good,” Zero said, nodding. “Iskay?”
“Talo was a tough battle, but nothing we can’t handle. Their fighters aren’t as proficient as ours, but Talo’s leader, Spine, proved to be an obstacle. He’s ruthless and charismatic—every battle with him present improved his army threefold. We had to navigate around him for the better part of the Offense.”
Zero nodded quietly. Tro knew it was his turn to speak next—all eyes had skipped over Tria.
“Tymin’s border planets are easy pickin’s. My army and I had no problems with takin’ those,” Tro said simply.
Now it was Viisi’s turn. He swelled with pride at the information he was about to convey.
“Aikajo is on a rapid decline. My army and I were able to take almost half of their planets.”
“Very good. So Aikajo poses no threat to us—we’ll leave them out of our sights for now. Again, let me restate it to you all: it is good to have you back at Keila. Our flagship will arrive at the hub planet by the end of the day. And most of all: well done. Keila thanks you.”
# # #
Viisi walked towards the Keila flagship’s main external window, gazing at the countless stars before him. As a part of Keila, these stars were his. Zero’s stunning leadership and Keila’s staggering strength would eventually conquer the whole galaxy, just like Teo Nora had so many years ago. And Viisi would be a part of that, instrumental in intergalactic power. He would surpass Einer and become Zero’s right hand man—or maybe even the next leader. The leader of the galaxy.
Viisi had everything—strength, power, strategy, and a leader he could count on.
He looked at his hands.
Then why did he feel so empty?
His whole life, Viisi had been taught the way of battle by Zero, the strongest in the galaxy. He’d learned how to kill and how to put all others beneath him, utilizing his Val to its greatest extent. Aside from the rest of Keila’s Big 5, he had no match. So what did he lack?
He’d felt a hole in him growing and growing for the last few years, but he couldn’t place what was wrong. All he knew it could be was that he had to get even stronger. If he was the strongest, there would be nothing to stop him at all—not even himself.
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Viisi patiently waited in his training room, biding the time by practicing kicks on a worn dummy. He looked at the time, catching his breath. Zero was late. He was never late for training.
Viisi heard footsteps from afar, echoing down the hallway to the training room. He stopped and turned. The footsteps grew louder, accompanied by quiet, urgent talking, until Zero’s figure occupied the doorway.
“Viisi, there’s a complication. Tria will take over your training for today,” Zero explained.
Zero left the doorway and was immediately replaced by Tria. Like all of Keila’s Big 5, Viisi hardly saw her, much less interacted with her. She had dark, bluish-purple skin and long yellowish hair, with bright pink eyes that gleamed. Her custom-fitted Keila battle uniform mostly covered up a pendant whose cord around her neck was the only visible feature. She always seemed reserved, her shoulders slightly slumped and her face expressionless, but with Viisi’s limited contact with her, it was hard to tell. All he knew about her aside from her appearance was that he never saw her in battles and she never talked during meetings. Viisi became curious. What battle skills was she going to teach him?
Tria walked into Viisi’s battle room, taking it in and shutting the door behind her. She looked it up and down, scrutinizing it down to the detail, every scratch and bump, until she turned to Viisi.
“Let me begin by saying I might disappoint you,” Tria started, not moving from her spot by the door. “You’ll find that I’m nothing like my brother Zero.”
Viisi’s eyebrow twitched.
“I didn’t know he was your brother,” he said.
“Most don’t. There’s no reason to know. Regardless, I will only be teaching you self-defense today. No fighting.”
Viisi’s posture sank a little. “No fighting?”
“Yes. You’re plenty good at fighting already, I’m sure. But self-defense is important, too. What will you do if an enemy gets close to you, and you’re cornered?”
Viisi couldn’t suppress a snort. Zero had taught him to be respectful to his superiors, which Tria was, but a question as ridiculous as this made no sense.
“Well, obviously, I can send a pebble through their skull. I don’t know if you’ve seen my Val, but I can send objects flying hundreds of times faster than a bullet. Watch me, I can show you now-”
“What if there are no pebbles around?” Tria interrupted.
Viisi frowned. “Then I’ll launch some other object at them. Or, I can even sever one of their limbs and throw that at them. That worked once when I-”
“What if you’re out of energy? Your Val runs on food, right?”
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He was growing impatient. “Then I’ll snap their neck.”
Then, Tria briskly walked up to Viisi. Unsure of what to do, he remained still. Tria stopped in front of him and then slapped him across the face. Viisi recoiled, stunned at the action, touching his stinging cheek. He turned back to Tria, who was staring him dead in the eyes.
“Then what if it’s someone you don’t want to hurt?”
Viisi was still too shocked to reply. The thought had never occurred to him.
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Through the duration of the training session, Viisi noticed that Tria’s training style was, in fact, wildly different from Zero’s. She had strategy, but didn’t possess anything near Zero’s battle prowess or his infectious leadership. She didn’t have Zero’s palpable sense of power and authority that chilled a room and drew eyes to him. But what she did bring, which was something he’d never seen from Zero, was a sense of personality. When Tria taught him, Viisi didn’t feel like a soldier, but like a person, like the lessons he learned were for him alone. And he made the acute realization that however often he saw his equals, Keila’s five top officers, he’d never actually connected with them. How could you see someone so many times without actually knowing them?
There was something to Tria that Viisi had never seen before. Not in any person he’d ever known in Keila, since the day Zero brought him up and as far back as he could remember. Something he couldn’t yet place.
Was this human connection?
“You’re a lot more patient than Zero,” Viisi noted as they finished the lesson.
“Of course I am. Zero doesn’t actually care about you that much.”
This dig at his leader shocked Viisi.
“Zero? Of course he does,” Viisi said dutifully. “Zero is the supreme leader of Keila. He’s strong in both mind and body and we’re who he cares about the most. We’re his five commanding officers. Why wouldn’t he care about his strongest allies?”
“Because you’re soldiers. Aside from maybe Einer and I, he sees the rest of you as pawns, even the rest of the Big 5. Pawns to be used to his own advantage, not yours.”
It didn’t add up to Viisi. He couldn’t comprehend it. “If he didn’t care about me, why would he raise me to be as strong as I am now? He always trains with me. Zero really, really wants me to be as strong as I can. He never let me down for as long as I can remember.”
Tria looked at him for a moment with genuine sadness, choosing her next words carefully.
“I’m sorry. Right now, you’re trapped. You can’t understand anything outside of Zero’s confines, outside of fighting and killing and war. You don’t have to believe me now, but know that Zero isn’t really on your side. He’s on the side of Keila, not you.”
“But I’m on the side of Keila.”
Tria smiled briefly, then closed her mouth and thought for a moment.
“You don’t always need to be,” she replied.
The two were silent. While Viisi had always been close to Zero, they had never been friends. But Tria, he felt, was a friend. The way she cared about his well being before his strength, his humanity before his power—it seemed to fill the gap, the hunger he had been feeling in himself. Nobody had done that to him before. He didn’t want to lose it.
“Can you train me again?” Viisi asked.
Tria smiled. “One day.”
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There wasn’t ever really a time in the Talo headquarters to escape.
Day and night, watchtowers between and atop the domes scanned the desert, scanning every inch of space, every grain of sand from horizon to horizon. The headquarters was a fortress, a place of refuge for Talo’s allies and a place to fear for those against it. Tonight, for Aurein and Flint, it was a place to fear.
They weren’t betraying Talo—quite to the contrary, as they were going on a mission to help it—but they were betraying direct orders from Talo’s highest chain of command and wouldn’t get away with it easily. They couldn’t just leave; while Talo was of the more hospitable factions, one couldn’t just defect. Instead, they took another assignment as an excuse to get out, and they’d destroy their ship’s Talo transceiver once they were far enough away to avoid giving away their position. From there, their fate was undetermined.
Flint and Aurein traversed Talo’s main hangar as calmly as possible, trying to seem like they weren’t about to break countless rules. Flint took in as much of the hangar he could on the way to the Lucre Main—depending on Talo’s reaction to their escape, it may be the last time he saw it. Destroying Talo’s receiver was essentially mutiny. From there, they may be hunted down by more Talo bounty hunters hoping to capture the most-likely negligible price on their heads. Or, if they were lucky, Talo would forget about them and they’d never be allowed to return.
Living in a faction was dangerous, due to the threat of assassinations and the high odds of dying in battle, but it was nothing compared to the danger of living without a faction. Sure, the five factions were in a constant state of war, but they provided protection. From the elements, starvation, poverty, the dangers of space, from other factions, but most importantly, from other people. The factions were beacons of civilization unifying a galaxy full of outlaws. Without that unifying force, only chaos remained.
And, of course, there was the situation where Flint and Aurein claimed the Terminus successfully, and brought it back to Talo with warm welcome. But such a situation, for an endless number of reasons, was a fantasy.
The reasons not to go on such a mission were many, and the rewards were few. But Flint knew he had no choice. He knew obtaining the Terminus, obtaining real power was worth it—he wouldn’t be able to live—or die—with himself if he didn’t. And Flint knew Aurein wouldn’t be able to either.
Flint sat in his ship’s cockpit and took one last glance around the area, fully aware it may be his last time. Or, maybe not—he was immortal. Maybe he’d have another chance. He turned to Aurein, who nodded, and Flint rolled out of the hangar and launched into the star-filled sky above.
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Occupying the navigational screen was an image of Erista surrounded by a number of vectors and lines—a flight path. After warping through a sizable portion of the galaxy, they had entered the solar system Eloton. The transponder attached to their ship was already in ruins, turned to gold by Aurein.
“Logs say this was an old Keila outpost,” Aurein explained, scrolling through information on his terminal. “Eloton’s a lifeless solar system. Keila stripped it of its natural resources and then left it alone. It’s in Keila’s district, so they technically own it, but there’s no point in upkeeping dead rocks. There shouldn’t be any outposts.”
“Any Keila outposts,” Flint corrected. “Tymin’s probably already here to look for the Terminus.”
“So we’re poking at two factions at once, then.”
“Yes. And without the protection of our own,” Flint added.
Flint steeled himself and looked forward through the darkness at a glowing green planet ahead. It was too far away to be distinguishable, still resembling a star more than a solid object, but orbiting around it was their goal—Erista. Flint’s heart pumped at the prospect of the Terminus being there.
Erista’s host planet, a vibrant greenish ice giant, received little light from its host star. Its beauty seemed muted in this regard, as its vibrancy could never be brought out to its fullest due to the dim light. The host star of the solar system, UINO-92, sat far away, enough to where it mostly blended in among the millions of others within view. After completing several orbits around the host planet, Erista and its desolate rocky surface came into view.
There was almost nothing special about Erista’s appearance. It was cold, barren, and gray, just like the better part of the universe’s countless celestial bodies. One thing did catch Flint’s eye while descending to its surface, however—a large, perfectly circular area on the moon where the ice and stone was inexplicably darker. It resembled a long-hardened lake of lava from Erista’s formative years, but encompassed far too much of its surface to have been a lava lake. It remained as a blemish on Erista’s barren surface, a dark blotch on a cold world. Flint decided to land right in the middle of it.
Also in the center of the dark spot were a collection of facilities, domed and white. They weren’t even trying to hide it—Tymin logos proudly presented themselves on the in-situ buildings.
The two had thoroughly discussed the plan and left it unsaid as Flint prepared to leave the ship. Flint was to go into the facility and steal the Terminus, while Aurein was to remain in the Lucre Main outside, ready to bomb the place if something went wrong. Both Flint and the Terminus would be able to survive the blast. Should something go wrong on Aurein’s end, a flashing red light in Flint’s helmet would alert him.
Flint nearly forgot to put on his spacesuit while getting out of their ship—the many days he spent as a ghost made him lose the habit of protecting his body. He put it on, accustoming himself to the bulky, claustrophobic spacesuit; he couldn’t use his pre-fitted Talo suit within a Tymin science base.
He left his ship and floated down onto the rocky ground. Gravity was low here, lower than most places he’d visited over his time in Talo, and he had a hard time adjusting to it, putting too much power into his movements and overshooting every step.
The mystery of Erista’s dark spot deepened as Flint scraped his glove-covered hands across the ground to uncover a paper-thin layer of black dust. It rested on his fingers and took its time to fall back onto Erista’s surface, the low gravity in no hurry to return the powdery dust to the ground. Underneath the black dust was hard, whitish-gray rock, standard and commonplace for a rocky ice moon like Erista. Was the dark circular area encompassing part of Erista covered entirely in this fine dust?
It wasn’t quite so, as nearby there were an alarming number of footsteps visible, each step having disturbed the dust and uncovered the whiter regolith beneath. The majority of the footsteps led to a large facility, domed and built in a manner not unlike the Talo headquarters’ desert domes. It stood much taller than the rest of the buildings scattered around, drawing Flint towards it. If the Terminus was anywhere, it was in there. A sign by the bulky metal entry door read: “Epicenter Research Facility.” The door was unlocked and opened with the push of a small button.
He stepped into the facility to find a bustling environment of spacesuit-donning Tymin scientists and officers, all too busy to notice him. Flint blended himself into the hustle without standing out—taking someone else’s role was something he’d had many decades practicing as a ghost. He knew just how to fit into a crowd, always one with the many, skirting among the undisturbed shadows.
The facility’s layout funneled its rooms and hallways towards a round chamber in the center, roughly the size of a cafeteria. The center chamber was split into two distinct sections. The outside was a ring-shaped floor covered with an astonishing variety of scientific equipment and with photographers taking pictures of the inside, the camera’s flashes filling the room every so often. The inside portion was floorless, sporting only a circular bit of Erista’s dust-coated surface with a few disturbances in the dark powder. The chamber in its whole resembled the exhibit of a museum or the eye-catching centerpiece enclosure of a zoo.
The name “Epicenter Research Facility'' was apt—the untouched portion of Erista’s surface which the facility was built around had undoubtedly held the center of the Erista Flash. The dust around the center was darker and thicker, there were lines emerging from the middle and it was surrounded with tiny ripples as if from a shockwave.
Just standing in the room filled one with a deep existential dread, just laying eyes on the Erista Flash’s center made one feel as if the object once held there was floating above, still ever-present. Even Flint, invulnerable as he was, felt a strong sensation of deep-seated fear at the epicenter’s sight, like the thing once there was threatening his very existence. The sheer residual power left behind in the room could make a weaker man cry. The fear was electric.
Just next to the epicenter where the shockwave lines converged was the unmistakable shadow of a humanoid being. Two boot-shaped imprints were the only areas around the epicenter that weren’t an eerie black, made by the one who had wielded the Terminus when the Erista Flash happened. The only place unaffected by the blast.
So the Erista Flash wasn’t natural. That much was given. But the imprint of the person who had used the Terminus and its infinite power meant that the Terminus wasn’t here anymore. Those bootprints belonged to its new wielder.
Flint turned away from the bootprints, heart racing. He couldn’t bear to be in the epicenter’s presence anymore, and the weight of the knowledge he’d just uncovered threatened to crush him to pieces. The facility wasn’t here to contain the Terminus—it was to track its new whereabouts. To find the person who’d taken it. He had to know more.
He left the chamber and wandered the facility’s halls, hoping to find an information archive somewhere, relieved to his core to be out of the Terminus’s wake. Pulse still high, he walked into a promising-looking room and looked around, unaware of the shouting and orders being given in the hallways nearby looking for an intruder. Unaware of them talking about having captured a golden-eyed man in a ship nearby.
A large array of consoles and screens stood before Flint, currently offline. He pressed the power button and they each clicked to life just as Aurein’s red emergency light began to blink inside of his helmet. Something was undoubtedly wrong. Frantic, he scrambled through login screens and files, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Terminus’s whereabouts, until a flash drive on a nearby dashboard caught his eye. He reached for it, when-
Several suit-clad arms restrained him, pulling Flint away from his objective. He reached for it with all his might, nudging it with a wavering finger, until the Tymin guards who’d restrained him pulled Flint out of the room. He struggled, twisting and turning in the hopes of slipping by his captors, but they were many. At least three Tymin members had captured him and, wearing form-fitting Tymin spacesuits, had dozens of times Flint’s mobility.
He was dragged through the hallways, kicking and screaming, until he was brought outside the Epicenter Research Facility and thrown into a Tymin barge, the soft gravity gently bringing him to the floor alongside his already unconscious friend. The barge door closed.