Noah blinked, but everything seemed to be going so slowly. He felt… tired, worn out. Was that why he was lying down? Had he gone to sleep? The floor felt soft enough to sleep on but… why was he on the floor? He vaguely remembered a door breaking into a thousand pieces as it flew at him.
He groaned and tried to push himself up, but found that his arms were like jelly. To move them at all was a painful exercise, to put any kind of strain on them felt impossible.
Again he groaned and tried to look around. He vaguely recognized the soft shapes and the velvety red of the room Rosa had brought him to, but had it always been this dark?
Not only that, but there was more incense than before, the rolling clouds growing so thick that they obscured Noah’s vision. There were shards of stained glass on the ground in front of him, but he could see little detail beyond that in the thick, swirling soup.
The smallest flicker of orange light reflected on the smoke, and suddenly Noah was wide awake. He gasped out, now feeling how his every sense clamored for his attention. His body was being whacked with sharp pain and other warning signals, yet not even that rush of adrenaline could spur his overtaxed muscles to movement.
He could smell it now. The strange yet pleasantly spiced scent of the incense was still there, but a stink Noah knew all too well wrestled it for control.
As if on cue, the room’s fire alarms began to blare their ugly tones, urging everyone to leave so that the suppressants could activate. Noah knew that his life was now in the hands of a rudimentary intelligence; A machine brain would constantly weigh his value against the cost of the spreading fire. The moment the scales tipped against him, the CO2 bottles in the room above would extinguish the flames and his life along with them.
He tried again to push himself off against the floor, but his arms trembled and gave out under him. He sobbed once, then tried again to similar avail.
The heat steadily rose behind him, as did the intensity of the orange glow in the smog. Noah didn’t see it yet, but he knew the fire was rapidly progressing. He wondered if Nicki had felt like this in her final moments. Tears started to well up at the thought of her, tears he quickly wiped away. He didn’t notice that his hand came away from his face a slick red.
A shape stirred in front of him and his heart skipped a beat. He had almost forgotten he was not alone in this room. The silhouette came closer, growing more defined. Nathe stepped from the smoke, clutching one arm. He was limping, bleeding from a dozen cuts. But what shocked Noah the most was how the teen’s face was set in rage, his teeth bared.
An enormous, armored boot slammed down a mere ten centimeters in front of Noah’s face, pounding a shard of glass into dust.
“Back off.” A heavy, mechanical voice rumbled from above him. “We only want the boy.”
Nathe lifted his good arm in surrender, taking a step back. “Alright.” He said. “I’ll–”
What happened next was too quick for Noah to follow. All he saw was how Nathe made a strange movement with his wounded arm and somehow held a pistol in the next instant.
A sharp retort rang out like the crack of a whip, the muzzle flash of a Lux turning the smoke around it ruby for a split second.
A neat, smoking hole the size of Noah’s fist appeared in Nathe’s forehead and the exo dropped on his knees like a sack of potatoes. Before Noah even registered what had happened, Nathe’s head came back up, his eyes refocusing. His arm shot up like a striking serpent and he fired his pistol at the unknown figure standing over Noah, the snap of tungsten-ceramic projectiles being accelerated to supersonic speeds making the boy wince, though the bullets turned to dust against the heavy warskin with no apparent effect. Only distantly did Noah realize that Nathe wasn’t holding a weapon, his hand was the weapon.
Three more stabs of lethal red light followed, each of them punching a hole through Nathe’s torso. Finally, the exo fell silent and slumped over. The armored attacker waited for a short moment, keeping their weapon fixated on the motionless teenager, then grabbed Noah by his collar and pulled him on his feet with seemingly no effort whatsoever.
“Asset secured.” The giant rumbled. “Be advised; contacts are hostile and augmented. Recommend increase to threat level three.”
Noah’s eyes remained fixed on Nathe’s lifeless body. They had been ever since he stepped from the smoke. Everything had happened so quickly, Noah had not gotten the chance to react in any way.
With the shooting over, realization dawned on him, his disbelief making way for a hot and feral anger the likes of which he hadn’t felt in years
“You killed him!” He screamed and tried to turn around, but the hand gripping him wouldn’t budge a millimeter, not even when he threw all his weight into the fight. “You killed Nathe!” He screamed again, the smoke scorching his air ducts when he had to inhale. He didn’t care. He swung his arm behind him and hit the attacker, but he might as well have hit a sheer metal wall. He felt his skin split upon impact, splattering the murderer’s chestplate with his blood.
“He resisted.” The giant stated indifferently. "Remain calm.”
“Sir, there’s another miscreant here.” A distorted female voice sounded from behind. When Noah turned to face it, he saw a second attacker in a gunmetal warskin standing over a lifeless body, one Noah immediately recognized as Rosa. The fire raged behind them, painting them both in sinister, flickering shadows. This attacker, too, held an enormous Lux-weapon which she now brought down and pointed at the unconscious girl.
“Do I execute her?” The woman asked, a sickening eagerness in her modulated voice.
Before the first attacker could respond, Noah roared out as loud as he could and tried to force his way to the scene. At first, the armored gauntlet of the attacker held him in place, the constraints of his clothes digging painfully into his flesh. Then, he broke free with a loud tearing of paper cloth and almost stumbled over as he ran towards the second murderer-to-be.
The woman steeled herself and flicked her weapon to him, moving a tool of destruction Noah probably couldn’t even lift as if it weighed nothing. “Kiara, don’t!” The other attacker shouted sharply. Noah stared right down the barrel, expecting his life to end in a burst of red at any moment now.
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The woman didn’t fire, so Noah grabbed hold of the barrel of her weapon with both hands. He knew that in terms of strength, he couldn’t match the attacker, much less the huge warskin she wore. If she did decide to kill Rosa, she could just swat him aside like an insect and do so anyway.
Instead, Noah pressed his own forehead right up against the cold steel of the barrel and clung on for dear life. If it was to end this way, he would at least do everything he could to hinder her.
“You said you just wanted me, right?” He spat up at her. ”Leave Rosa alone and I’ll come quietly.”
Noah couldn’t see her face, but he knew the woman hesitated by the tilt of her helmet. He stared directly into her visor, hoping to somehow intimidate her. All he saw was his own reflection in the dark armorglass. A reflection which made him look even more frail and weak than he felt.
He realized that he might not even last long enough for the woman to make a decision, the fire crept ever closer, licking at the velvety lining of the room. The heat was unbearable now, and the smoke filled Noah’s lungs. His sweat was starting to sizzle right off of his skin, and the fire alarms reached the apex of their pitch, signaling the imminent purge.
“Stand down, Sergeant.” The male warrior said. He walked up behind Noah, his heavy footsteps crunching more glass and debris into fine powder. He clasped his armored gauntlet around Noah’s face this time, covering not just his mouth and nose, but his eyes as well. The warrior then dropped down into a crouch to do the same to Rosa.
Noah tried to struggle free a second time, but the armored giant had seen it coming and pulled him close, not allowing him to get even the slightest bit of movement.
“Close your eyes.” He rumbled, much to Noah’s confusion. Only when the fire alarms cut out and the all-too-known click of purge valves echoed through the room did Noah understand why.
Rapidly expanding CO2 burst into the room from the ceiling, the inert gas instantly cooling to many degrees below the freezing point of water. Noah could see the white cloud rush towards him like a blizzard on a water world through a gap in the armored fingers, and he squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could through well-conditioned survival instincts.
He gasped as the purge-gas washed over him, feeling his exposed skin burn from the intense cold. The experience fell somewhere between stepping into an ice bath and being stabbed with a thousand needles at once. All that was insignificant next to the knowledge that he had made a fatal mistake, however. Noah had breathed in. The CO2 would burn his lungs and deprive him of the air he still had stored there. That was a veritable death sentence.
Only, the expected agony of his air ducts being flash-frozen never came, nor did he run out of breath. He wasn’t wearing a rebreather mask, though, so…
Noah suddenly remembered that the armored hand still covered the better part of his face, and that that area felt strangely untouched by the icy kiss of the purge gas. It was as if a bubble of warm, breathable air surrounded the hand, protecting his most vulnerable organs from the biting cold.
The initial shock faded quickly, with the gas dispersing and warming up too quickly for the cold to do any meaningful damage to his skin, but Noah knew it still lingered. He tried a small sip of air, now feeling how warm, slightly overpressurized air was dispensed from the palm of the hand on his face, which served as a crude survival mask.
“We are Wychhunters. We do not dispense death indiscriminately.” The male warrior rumbled from behind him, the vibrations of his mechanical voice ringing in Noah’s ears.
“If you wished to slaughter those with cybernetic implants, you should have joined the Puritans. We stand above that, despicable as these tainted miscreants may be.”
Noah’s heart skipped a beat as he linked the name and the metal appearance of their warskins to a group he’d only ever seen in newsreels: The Wychhunters, one of Sindrion’s notoriously dangerous military cults.
He tried to turn his head to look at Rosa, but the Wychhunters’s hand still restricted his movement. He jerked his head to the side again, more insistently this time, and his armored captor finally relented.
The cultist still had his hand firmly pressed against Rosa’s face, just as he did Noah’s. He freaked out for a short moment, seeing the frostbite on Rosa’s exposed skin, but then calmed down a little as he saw her chest gently heave. She was alive.
The fire was reduced to nothing more than a lazy smolder, clinging to some of the carpeted walls and floor. With the area considered secure, the room’s fans whirred back into action and slowly cleared the purge-gas. The rudimentary intelligence carefully balanced the airflow so as not to fan the flames, and before long the Wychhunter judged the air to be safe enough to remove his gauntlets. Noah shuddered, now feeling how cold he really was.
The soldier stood up, the movement accompanied by a whirring of hydraulic joints and synthetic muscles. He gently placed Noah down, then drew his weapon from his back and nudged him forwards, reminding him that he was not here to be friends.
“I prevented her death.” The Wychhunter said. “Will you keep your word?”
Noah sighed and looked at Rosa for one last time before giving a small nod. There wasn’t much to be gained for him to resist here. Not when they could still just threaten Rosa. They had already killed Nathe, so perhaps it was good that she had been knocked unconscious by the blast. Noah doubted she’d let him be taken away without putting up a fight, even if that would only have led to her death. He quickly wondered where Roke had gone, the fat man had been the closest to the door when it blew up, yet there was no sign of him now. The Wychhunters weren’t on the lookout for him, either, so perhaps he had escaped? Noah decided to pay it no mind. The worst thing he could do now was to tip his enemies off that one of their targets was missing.
The female Wychhunter, the one called Kiara, turned around and stepped through the hole in the wall where the front door used to be. The hallway which laid beyond seemed to be part of a hotel or a more luxurious housing block of sorts, with dozens of doors lining either wall.
Three more of the Wychhunters stood posted in the hallway, though these weren’t wearing heavy warskins like the two that had broken into the Cradle of Branches. Their skins were much more like Noah’s own, though they looked sleeker and more robust. The Wychhunter’s skins, helmets and weapons were all colored in a blend of grays and blacks, contrasting with the highly conspicuous greens, oranges, and blues of normal workskins.
One of the doors creaked open ever so slightly, and an elderly man dared to poke his head out from the gap. One of the three lighter-armored Wychhunters responded immediately, stepping forwards with their weapon at the ready.
“Nothing to see here, stay inside!” He shouted, kicking against the wall adjacent to the door. The man ignored him, instead shuffling further out to peek down the hallway. Noah made brief eye contact with the man, then cast his eyes down. He didn’t want anyone else to risk anything for his sake.
The cultist now raised his weapon and aimed it at the senior. Noah heard a scream coming from inside, and the older bystander finally retreated, shutting the door behind him. Noah felt relieved that it hadn’t violently escalated, but his heart was still in a vice.
He knew the reputation these Wychhunters had. How merciless and cruel they could be. They hunted down and liquidated anyone they saw fit, then proudly proclaimed they had saved the system from Demonic incursion every time.
When he first heard of them, Noah had sympathized with the cult. Their purpose, at least at first glance, was noble. They were like vigilantes, killing the bad guys who made deals with the supernatural. Even if Noah disliked violence, that kind of motivation appealed to his pious side at the time.
His father had been quick to burst his bubble when he told him about his naive stance on the Wychhunters. He had explained to Noah how the Wychhunters were nothing more than criminal scum acting under the guise of righteousness.
He had shown him stills of some of the atrocities committed by the cult, pictures which made Noah cry, and still did sometimes even after all these years. His dad then made him swear to never involve himself with groups like that.
He had tried to live up to that promise, but then the Wychhunters chose to come to him. Now all Noah could wonder was: Why him?