Our feet carried us off to the closest ladder, and further away from the coffee shop towards the boutique. Under the rain, we spotted a tall parapet, part of what used to be an old chapel, with a four-window overlook over the district, the boutique, and the Satine. An ideal place for TARN to watch the world.
Within about two minutes, we had quickly set up the place for him with nobody the wiser to our presence. In the brief glimpses I had of the streets below, HCOM officers were instructing their people back into their houses calmly. A curfew, my memory recalled from Javol’s sitrep of the district, but one that would be enforced quietly in the grand scheme of things. Sudden panic over the Nightstalker’s appearance would cause unfathomable amounts of chaos. That, we agreed on.
A green light appeared in my field of view. TARN was ready to ascend. I sent him back the same colour, gesturing to him. Alone with my thoughts and the hasty clanking of my companion’s star-steel, I headed closer towards Messala, alert and ready for the Nightstalker or the other mercenaries.
About a minute of jogging had passed when I spotted someone moving quickly in the dark three roofs away. That someone turned into three, and then five more. They looked too jittery to be our rival mercenaries. My bet hedged on them being ‘roofcrawlers’- district residents too poor to buy living space, but with enough merkuri to afford the city council’s charity. Still, my rifle was raised as I activated my night-vision for a brief second. The lights of the city wouldn’t blind me here and being cautious always saved my skin.
My bet was proven right. Bright lanterns revealed them to be hurried roofcrawlers, packing their belongings and gesturing to each other wildly. They seemed to have caught up on the evacuation notice quite late, but such was their life; barely noticeable by the law, stuck in crime and dead-end jobs. At least them hiding would mean less chances of collateral damage. With Messala not too far away, I decided to make my perch here and watched them until they had all gone dark.
Suddenly, TARN shared with me his feed, precluded only by a triple tone of orange. Four buildings away from the boutique, five armed men, wearing heavy body armour, emerged from a dimly lit rooftop exit, wearing heavy armour and hidden behind full face masks and helmets. They moved readily and cautiously in the dark, their flanks covered and at a steady pace, carrying some large cases that he easily identified as weapon crates. I pressed the side of my helmet and sent TARN an orange light before moving out; a warning light. Who they were, neither Javol nor us knew. A short text crossed my view soon after.
Scanning individuals; advise heavy caution.
In the meantime, I needed to follow them, an impromptu insurance policy in case they tried anything funny with us around. Shortly after crossing an unsteady bridge that threatened to give way under my weight, a full report from TARN came; in there was their affiliation, their names, and a whole range of previous activities and bounties that had been pulled from his database- a gargantuan list of dangerous individuals, including us, he had constructed over a single weekend. Amidst all of them, the only relevant piece of info was their affiliation, a pair of words that made me tense up and frown.
Deadlock Solutions. They were local arms dealers whose brand of self-promotion were contracts disguised as field tests, their weapons and designs sourced from a dangerous, volatile HyperCore just like their own men. A few bullet wounds and some dead friends were the first things I immediately remembered about them. Their presence here did not puzzle me. After all, what better way to advertise a new product than by taking the head of a roving monstrosity? With that in mind, I tailed them slowly and followed the path TARN promptly sent out for me in advance.
We both knew that a single wrong step under this night would get these men to light me up. This time, they wouldn’t run into any issues with the Guild over friendly fire. Deadlock suits were crafty bastards, more than willing to use something like the Nightstalker as an excuse for ‘excessive, dangerous’ force. Knowing them, the buzzards they were, we were better off ignoring them. My heart knew they would screw us over at first sight. The question was, could we bag the target before they could?
My thoughts went back to the matron, hoping that she and her quaint shop wouldn’t be caught in the inevitable crossfire. There were many others I hoped to keep away from the inevitable- she was just the first one in my mind.
Another report from TARN appeared, showing pictures of Tahsa’s own men patrolling the streets, with the same set of information extracted next to their faces. Despite keeping herself to her fortress, it seemed that Tahsa Mengdi wasn’t satisfied with keeping herself limited there. TARN noted his observations as such.
The client refused to listen, how predictable. HCOM only agreed to help if she and her men stayed within their boundaries. Estimating civil discourse percentage: 75 percent probability.
Make that a guarantee, old friend. TARN had already said it himself about her position in all of this, that she didn’t listen only showed me that this client– this once composed mercenary– had been utterly stricken by desperation to save herself. The matron’s words came back to me on the wind, as if to tell me that she was right about Mengdi’s new demeanour. I didn’t stick around too long dwelling in my thoughts when something caught my sight.
In the corner of my eye, I saw it. A jagged, brutish shadow illuminated by a lonely blue sign for a few seconds, bobbing and weaving between some roofcrawler communities delicately. Its head was decidedly inhuman, two tri-clopen sets of eyes humming and distorting with each step it took. A thick cloud of smoke trailing behind hid its face under the rain. On two legs it ran, covered in rough, jagged armour, constantly shifting and rising in front of a sickly green glimmer just beneath where its skin would be. On its back was the glimmer of bronze and steel extending towards the sky, and on a deformed left arm, a massive metal slab with a familiar set of three, vicious blades attached to it. All that weight, I thought, and it was still as insanely quick as our last few encounters with it.
I did not need to look or think further, no doubt. This was the Nightstalker in the flesh. My helmet, picking up my intentions, announced itself quietly.
Switching to combat mode.
Across rooftops I lept. Above homes, I thumped on with heavy boots. Under the rain, I ran and ran. No matter how hard I pushed this ageing form, the Nightstalker’s shadow, sparingly lit up by the lights above the roofs and highways, seemed to ebb and blur before my very eyes. TARN notified me silently about his readiness. I flashed a yellow signal to him instead, then silently typed out a message for him to contact Mengdi. I hoped she wasn’t tempted enough to come out into the light for a chance to kill her tormentor.
When a few seconds had passed, my axe slung behind my back and my rifle laid firmly on a ventilation box, I got a response. A single blue light, so brief in its existence that I almost instantly forgot Mengdi had sent something to me. The prayer faded into the beating of driving rain, being replaced by crushing disappointment that I shook my head to. A few flashes of her life before and after taking up this damned career appeared in front of me, throwing off my focus on the Nightstalker.
It was not enough that I had personal thoughts in the way of this mission. Knowing that she had chosen this path, that I wasn’t in this entirely for the money, was hindering my performance. There was something still flickering in this old heart of mine for her. I couldn’t forget the face she made when we saw each other again at the Satine. A face that, fond as it was in my sudden presence, was forcing itself to smile underneath sullen eyebags, heavy wrinkles, and a burning long stick of balsam cigar between her dull lips.
We used to be buddies, Mengdi. What made you choose the decadence you hated all your life?
TARN soon shared his video feed with me. He was already primed to fire, seeing the target sprinting its way towards the Satine.. I knew he wouldn’t miss even at this distance. His tool of trade was an energy multi-rifle built into his left arm, imbued with power I was sure had to be from the stars itself. One clean shot, and the Nightstalker’s armour would be nothing but slag and molten flesh. He flashed a green light, and I flashed mine
Suddenly, the Nightstalker stopped and scuttled behind a line of pipes. In front of it, I spotted a stairwell whose rusted, heavy door rumbled and shook. My hand tweaked a dial on the side of my helmet, revealing a set of bright orange signatures with cold shapes in their hands, frantically trying to open the door.
I rapidly tapped the signal to fire where the Nightstalker was last seen, only to notice its shadow tossing something leaking ominous green liquid towards the stairwell. We stayed quiet, then saw a burst of light just as the henchmen breached the door. The men disappeared behind the cover of a miniature thundercloud, their silhouettes freakishly contorting as they were pulled apart by thousands of little green lightning bolts.
The sight would have horrified many. For me, it was an unlocked, yet elusive memory. I had seen this sickly glow before, in front of me and always in my dreams. A sight I have been following since the day it fought us in the ravine.
The sound of ricocheting pellets brought me back to the battle. I refocused my efforts, feeling the recoil of this aged and battered assault rifle against my shoulder. There was leaden death rushing through the air, three at a time, impacting against concrete and metal and the jagged guard of the Nightstalker’s frame. Neither scream or sound escaped its mouth when it was struck, its retaliation becoming increasingly more accurate. Despite the astonishing fireworks above Kuala Isyarat, there was frustratingly little progress in slowing it down. I had to get closer.
Slowly but surely, I made out an unruly set of loud voices approaching me from behind, stopped firing and kept low, waiting to see who it was through my thermals. When it was revealed that they were more of Mengdi’s men, I decided it was time to move. Their untrained gunfire helped cover my sprint towards the next rooftop. My plan here was simple; a two-punch attack from me and TARN, ending with its body skewered by light and its decapitated head rolling on gravel. In between the tailwind, I watched as the Nightstalker leapt and bounded across the roof, shepherded by my brother’s steady fire. The flash of green in my helmet let me know that it was intentional. A mutual agreement– we had to get it away from Mengdi for maximum success.
As soon as I touched down closer to the Satine, the unexpected, yet deafening buzzing of high-calibre machine guns dominated the night, flying red tracers burning the air with deadly accuracy. The Deadlock mercenaries had finally made their move. Alongside them was the bright red glare of a massive unmanned turret, tracking the Nightstalker whilst pierced on its three legs. Only a few picoseconds of target acquisition passed before the buzzing was overtaken by the stinging ring of a massive slug-launcher. Talk about overkill.
The Nightstalker managed to use a menagerie of roof hovels to avoid the machine guns, but failed to account for the tracking slug that slammed right into its back. I saw it fly from a cloud of dust, crashing into a greenhouse, used as a hiding place by several terrified roofcrawlers that immediately fled. I watched the mercs move up rapidly, covering each other's backs with hand gestures and bright tracking equipment on their shoulders. I was so engrossed in watching their movement that I almost failed to capture the sight of two Deadlock men staring at something, carrying a massive rectangular weight on their shoulders.
Three flashes of red filled my helmet. The realisation hit me before their rocket hit TARN’s location. The two men instantly dropped dead from two precise shots as the explosion rocked the city. A chain reaction of fear and confusion rippled throughout the streets through shrill voices and shouting. The mere fact that the Deadlocks were that unscrupulous about any sort of help forced me to redirect my attention to them. A few seconds barely passed before the rooftops became a galleria of industrialised death. The machine gun that had forced down the Nightstalker was now trained on me, turning my cover- a ramshackle sheeted slum shelter- into tiny shreds of metal and wood. While I unsheathed my axe, my mind drifted and wondered if TARN had safely fled the tower, having heard nothing from him. He was hard to kill, but someone still needed to pay.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
In my hands laid my measure of retaliation. I reached behind and pulled out a harpoon, slotted it into the axe's barrel, and became one with the falling rain. The gunfire faded, and so did the rest of the world. My hands gripped the axe tightly, a tense chest beating against it. Then, I acted.
For a moment, the Deadlock mercenaries thought they could get the best of a legend. The sound of squelching and a terrible fiery din corrected their overconfidence. The machine gun team was no more from what I could tell alongside their slug-launcher, sending them retreating, with some men heading towards the greenhouse. There was an ominous rising glow from the broken greenhouse that the Nightstalker crashed into, so I carried myself there and hoped that the slug had weakened it enough. Even in their avarice, my rivals had use after all.
The rain turned into a downpour. My helmet adjusted its vision accordingly, inadvertently blinding me when the greenhouse turned into a miniature emerald sun. A heavily processed, harsh roar escaped it, followed by what I swore was the whine of a helicopter’s engine. I ran faster, crossing the Satine’s rooftop, and witnessed a thick miasma forming up ahead. There was hesitation in opening fire, having seen some of the roofcrawlers earlier on. That split second of deciding to check for casualties or to press on was rewarded with a wraith-like shadow emerging from the miasma.
My mind went back. There had been a helmet on its head before, one of admittedly alien design. Now it had been split in half and bent to resemble a reptilian head, turned into a despicable, impossibly sharp maw, gurgling into the night in a scrambled growl. My aim was true for only a shot, watching it bound towards the Deadlock mercenaries on all fours with its tattered cape following behind. Giving chase amidst the sounds of firing, followed by panicked screaming and explosions, the trembling that was in my hands when I saw it again was nothing compared to the churning in my stomach.
Half a man was lifted into the night sky, his entrails flailing as the beast drank his insides. He was still alive, screaming all the while, as my helmet shunted out the noise until the beast jammed its massive claws into his head. The professionalism from the rest of the Deadlock mercs immediately melted. I had no need to contribute to the death of their ranks, hearing the slaughter with a tight chest and trying to figure out what to do. Knowing they were dead men, I fired away, fired on full auto until my gun ran dry. As expected, it provoked the blood=lusted bastard.
I had little time to react before it started bounding towards me. Fortunately, TARN had my back; a blazing light melted through its left arm and cape, stopping it in its tracks. The lights on its snarling helmet, flickering between blood-red and pale blue beneath red spatters, dimmed and a sordid howl emerged from its form. Instead of relief, however, there was sudden disturbance; underneath this howl was the barest hint of a familiar voice. Someone who shouldn’t be here.
I watched it tumble and fall into a puddle, reaching for my axe. TARN shot me a green light for the finishing blow, yet when I held the handle of my weapon, all I felt was a muddled sense of duty and confusion.
Something wasn’t right. Could it be…?
No, I had a contract to fulfil. I set aside my fleeting emotions and gripped my hilt, rushing forward with mighty strides. By Tuah, it will die.
Then, just before I reached the beast, the Nightstalker’s body whined and pulsated. My helmet rippled with amber glow as it began picking up a spike in radiation from the beast. It was intense enough that my armour, merely in its presence for a few seconds, began to heat up. Nonetheless, I pressed on with a leaping swing. The beast, there and then, shot right back up and caught my blade, embers following its now-burning cape, before lunging at me.
I only remember being on the defensive the entire time. Its assault was savage and unrelenting, backed up by the noise of alien transmissions and metallic growls. I could not escape a sense of existential dread creeping up my spine. The way its flurry of attacks seemed to know how I moved, how I behaved, just couldn’t register in my head. Why do I have so much doubt about a beast? Instead of fire in my heart, there was a growing darkness, a raincloud of mine shadowing my valour. Only a moment of carelessness saved me from becoming completely off-tune, rejoining the battle with a fuller force that it wasn’t prepared for.
Match-for-match with the Nightstalker, I broke through its predictable advance and brought down the axe across its chest, through its shotgun and cracked armour. Screeching and reeling in pain, I refused to let myself get routed by mere emotions and quickly moved in for the kill. As it knelt, it stretched its arms wide, glowered once more, and suddenly turned into a blinding blur, much, much faster than any attack it had done.I only had milliseconds to brace myself as we were launched off the building.
It was a long way down. By the time I had registered the fact that we had both crashed through somewhere, the dim red lights of a well-kept bordello room greeted me. I coughed out blood and felt it drip back on my cheeks. When I came to, the Nightstalker’s weight had completely vanished, leaving me alone in a broken space that I immediately recognized.
We were in the Satine. I silently cursed myself and sent TARN a three-tap flash of red. We had to find it now. Luckily, grace in tight spaces wasn’t its forte. I swore my helmet was trying to tell me of a fractured rib cage and a bleeding lung. There was no telling from how badly cracked it was. None of these stopped me from rising out of the room, holding onto my axe with one hand and a harpoon in the other. There were terrified murmurs from behind the walls of this place that hid further in their rooms as they heard my footfalls. Up ahead, a trail of rubble and dust, followed by spreading black ichor, laid out my path. I followed, feeling my suit inject me with stabilisers.
A white light filled my helmet through a shattered bulb as frenetic yelling and gunfire echoed off the walls. I knew it had to be Mengdi. She had holed herself up in a conference room further up in the Satine. A dozen corridors and rooms separated the Nightstalker from its target, with half of them rigged with crude death traps and barricaded by a small army of guards.
By the time I got down to the second floor from the fifth, about twenty or so guards had already been eviscerated into tiny ribbons. The weakened thermal vision in my helmet allowed me to see just how much had been slaughtered- and how many more will be in the next few minutes. My hand shakily locked in place the harpoon into the axe. If I could get a clean shot through the walls into the beast, it should be more than enough to put it down. I just had to make out where it was amidst the chaos.
The radiation alert from before rolled through my head. With that much power, it had to be a volcanic sight through these lenses. Amidst the sea of warm bodies, the cold rain outside, and all manners of thermal blocks, my eyes instantly locked on to a massive red orb about four rooms ahead. I got on my knees, steadied my aim, and prayed.
The harpoons I crafted through hammer and forge were meant to take out the largest monsters from the Warpfall, wrapped in scales and hides thicker than any steel we could create. The Satine, through that comparison, was putting a thin cloth on a man and sending him to face a tank alone. It was a shame that such craftsmanship had to be destroyed for money.
The harpoon shrieked through walls and furniture, utterly obliterating anything in its path and around it. The Nightstalker, having just finished ripping apart a hapless man, turned around and tried to grab the harpoon. For a brief moment, I saw its face, twisted into a semblance of arrogance before it disappeared behind a tremendous blast. The ceiling of the room it had just painted red collapsed, engulfing where I stood in a haze of dust.
Was it finally over? I relaxed my chest and fell over, my body giving way to exhaustion. After a few moments of staring up at the darkened ceiling, a message from Mengdi fizzled into existence on my cracked visor.
IS IT DONE?
I passed to her a green light, before taking note of the crackling wood. I rose from where I lay, looking ahead. An inferno was rising in the rooms that had been flattened by the blast. The place where it had fallen- or where I had assumed it had fallen instead of being scattered across the room- became a spiralling bonfire, threatening to spill throughout the building. As the flames roared, I inadvertently surrendered my body to the grip of exhaustion and laid against the wall.
Before I could rest, Mengdi sent me another message. The tone had changed instantly.
I AM NOT SATISFIED.
RUINATION PAID BY RUINATION.
I looked at it once, then waved it away. Here I sat, watching her men scurry about extinguishing flames and rescuing her workers. None of them even knew I was here, not that I needed them to do so, and none of them knew how much more palatable they looked compared to Mengdi’s rage. Despite all that had happened and all that was going through my head about her, it was an entirely human reaction; losing an empire in three months, no matter your form of power would make any monarch go mad with irrationality.
Whatever the Nightstalker’s true goals were in its single-minded path of destruction, it had now left Mengdi saddled with nothing but ashes. Even if the Satine had survived this night, she was doomed to die a lonely death, haunted by superstitions.
I spent slowly waddling towards some kind of seat to support my wounds, feeling pity for our client and imagining her wracked face. When I finally sat down, battle-axe against the wall, I caught sight of something that seemed to instantly change my mind.
Two young girls, purposely dressed in a way that presented their ‘qualities’, scampered in front of me to safety. The flames highlighted an alarming number of scars, whip marks and swelling that couldn’t have been from the chaos from earlier. Their ribs were poking out from beneath their skins, almost too easy to break with a single hit.
The both of them were preoccupied with the notion of escape, but when their looks fell upon me for a split second, their blue and purple irises seemed to light up. I gauged that second with careful musing. That look, in my mind, was that of relief- and of opportunity. They stopped in their tracks, talking with each other in hushed tones, before making a dash for me. To say I wore surprise on my face was an understatement.
Just before they could reach me, the brash tone of one of Mengdi’s enforcers called out to them both. The girls were instantly paralyzed with fear. The voice shouted again, this time more angrily. The gleam in their eyes only grew brighter looking at me. In the end, the both of them left, hanging their heads low in following the voice.
Their silence told me everything, enough to replace my brief pities for Mengdi. All the things I had seen in my pursuit of the Nightstalker had exposed us to all the little, unsavoury bits of her empire, whether she approved of it or not. Tonight only proved where the thing’s motivations ultimately laid– the proof standing right before me.
Despite its brutality and abominable form, the Nightstalker had deliberately avoided civilians. A strange, moral-like calculation was present in its movements, even before arriving in the city– avoiding civilians, the fate of Javol’s team in the sewers being ambiguous, travelling in places even I knew no normal person would try to cross, and keeping its rage contained until the Deadlock mercenaries had pissed it off; even then, it made sure it only targetted them and eventually me. I thought back to my notebook, traced back our steps, recalled the sketches I had done and the interviews TARN had conducted with the survivors of its attacks, all with troubled uncertainty.
When the recollection was done, I nearly wondered aloud; was this contract worth it? Could we’ve settled this on better terms? That earlier sense of personal uncertainty returned with a vengeance. If it was truly the ‘evil’ we believed it to be, then those girls, and everyone else like them, would be nothing but bodies.
The matron’s words echoed in my mind about Mengdi. I nearly stood up from where I sat had it not been for a sharp, piercing pain that simply couldn’t be ignored. My wound had a cruel sense of timing.
In the end, I simply watched them go with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Before I could harbour any other thoughts, TARN sent me another message. He had just entered the Satine, though the message left it vague where he had entered from. His armour was holding up in ‘acceptable’ form, surprisingly intact after Deadlock’s explosive greeting. Knowing him, he probably saved the worst for last. One last line scrolled on my screen to confirm my fears.
Power cell ruptured in attack. Cause of damage: shrapnel and blunt force. Operational capabilities still in acceptable parameters. Do not worry about me.
Had I a clue about where I was exactly in this place, I would’ve already typed out a message for him. As it were, all I passed on was a simple green light, reading another report from him. Constable Javol’s task force was on their way to clear up the area and identify the dead, reporting no civilian casualties. There were wounded here and there, none who had been identified as life-threatening.
So far, so good. I relaxed my head and allowed myself to rest to the hammering of the storm.
Then the whispering started.