A week passed. Decked out in a new set of light bronze plate armor, Abdul peaked around an alley corner from the dark night streets of Low Monestate. Two owls enjoyed a smoke break over the corpse of a homeless man robbed and beaten to death. What kind of contract called for that? He turned to Isaac the True who stood stoically with a dagger machina in each hand. “There are two enemies. I’m gonna take em out with Primus’s new ability.”
Armored considerably in lustrous scale plate, Isaac wrapped a long multicolored bandana around his forehead to keep his grown-out hair from obscuring his vision. “Don’t you have honor? Let’s challenge them to a duel straight on. We’d win anyway.”
“There’s no chivalry on these streets, friend. The more we can thin their numbers, the easier it will be to crash their sanctum later.”
They took turns harshly whispering at one another until Abdul took Primus and lightly tapped a waist-height iron garbage bin with the edge. “Shut up and watch,” he commanded his partner before uttering to his claymore. “Kite.”
An eerie purple haze consumed and possessed the bin. Abdul raised the whole thing with one-handed ease and tossed it up into the alleyway air. He encouraged the object given flight. “Bullshit, go.”
Isaac blanked out at the absurdity of the object silently floating overhead toward the owls as if it were weightless. There was an ominous air to it. It drifted up above the targets and then rattled against the wall. They looked up. One questioned. “What in The Gods?”
Abdul commanded. “Elephant.”
In the next moment, a metallic crash and meaty splatter sounded out. Abdul avoided looking at the blood spatter and cartoonishly flattened corpses. He gagged and moved on. Even Primus gagged. The sight left Isaac speechless. “After what I’ve witnessed tonight, I’m much more confident in this plan of yours. Do you really think we can get her back? Sasha?”
“Who knows? To be honest, I’m hunting owls for my own reasons, but they’ll eventually lead us to her if she’s alive.”
“But shouldn’t you have more pep in your step? She’s been missing for two weeks.” He found himself reluctant to say the next words loitering in his mouth. “She— might already be gone by now.”
Abdul shrugged. “I get that, but rushing into the belly of the beast without the proper preparation is stupid. If you really want to do that though, then let’s go. In the end, whatever happens to me doesn’t matter anyway.”
Isaac clenched his rune-engraved twin daggers tight. One’s blade was forged from a black material like obsidian. The other, a sleek white metal. “I would have never trained her if I knew she intended to go to war with Rath Ghul.” He thought back to an encounter with her long ago. It was when he questioned her reason to fight. Her words haunted him. Knowing how you are, if I told you, you’d stop giving me these lessons.
His face tensed up. Abdul led Isaac further on for an hour only to find nothing at midnight. Not even an owl. He eventually stopped. “Running into them has gotten rarer and rarer. I think we’ve properly scared them. I say we go down that well and strike Rath Ghul tomorrow.”
“Let’s do it. I can round up the boys too. They all liked Sasha. She was The Colosseum’s little sister. They’d take up arms without a second thought.”
Abdul pondered the thought of more allies then shook his head. “I know they say ‘the more, the merrier’, but fighters without machina will only get in our way. Based on Ignazio’s information, Rath Ghul’s sanctum is tight, dark, and mazelike. Bringing too many isn’t a good idea.”
“Really? It’ll be rough as rare as they are, but I know a few with machina.”
“I could get behind that. We’d have enough masks of the owl to disguise everyone too. I’ve got a collection piling up in my drawers.”
“Ah, like stamps? It’s a deal then. Let’s save the girl.” Isaac extended his hand out to Abdul, who found the gesture odd at first. They exchanged a firm handshake.
Abdul looked at his new partner’s daggers. “You’ve got two machina? Such a thing is rare.”
“You’re mistaken. They’re one soul split into two, each the other side of the coin.” Isaac held them up for him to see closer. Their shy eyes avoided meeting Abdul’s “My father gave them to me. They don’t speak.” Then Isaac encouraged them. “Introduce yourselves, Dio.”
They refused, pretending to fall unconscious like opossums. Abdul found it amusing. “Meek, aren’t they?”
“They are.”
“What do they do?”
Isaac motioned to the white blade. “Light.” Next, the black one. “Shadow. Each blade of Dio covers what the other lacks. Put their abilities together and the capabilities are endless. I barely use the first though.”
“Something wrong with it?”
“It works too well. I like to avoid unnecessary casualties.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Seems much more useful than my machina.”
Primus yammered back, offended. “Hey, I’m trying my best.”
Loud, metallic stomping took to ringing rhythmically in the distance. Both of their heads snapped down the street. Isaac questioned it. “A guard’s patrol at this hour?”
“The royal guard doesn’t step foot in Low Monestate. You know better than that.”
“Who are those soldiers then?”
“Who knows? They sure don’t look like owls.”
A group of seven men approached until stopping meters away. They wore silver mail and plate armor adorned with feathers. Their closed avian helmets reminded the pair of birds. Each soldier held torches, lanterns, and weaponry ranging from spears to war axes. Their tall leader shouted to the others. “Suspected hawks detected. Eliminate them.”
“Yes, Sir!” The others bounced back.
The avian knights rushed forth with animosity. Abdul planted his feet to stand his ground and glared at Isaac. “I’m not running! Are you?”
“Hell no! Not again. I’ve disappointed my ancestors enough!”
Vastly outnumbered, the two met the enemy’s challenge.
Abdul took an exaggerated breath that inflated his chest. He lifted his helm’s visor and blew rolling flames across the streets. More than half of the avian knights caught ablaze and freaked out, some dropping and rolling and others beating their burning comrades. Abdul fell back into a defense stance, parrying and deflecting the downward slashes of two knights wielding halberds at the same time. He looked around for Isaac to find that he’d vanished.
“Coward, you’re not True at all!”
His flames incapacitated two, but Abdul still found himself against five enemies. Flooded with unhinged adrenaline now, he picked up the pace and rose Primus. “Meteor.” The claymore burst through the air and fell upon the nearest skull, causing it to explode within the helmet. Gore spattered out through the holes as a dust cloud kicked from the rumbling ground. The desensitized enemies felt nothing to seeing their ally’s death. They moved to encircle Abdul, entrapping him in the center.
He clashed blades with them all, tanking disorienting blows across his body. “Anvil!” He growled at the spearhead in trajectory to pierce his chest. The spear slammed to the ground with an ear ringing bang, squashing the hands of a knight under its handle. Trapped, he groaned. “My fingers!”
Abdul gasped for air. Three was doable.
A diagonal strike fell outside his line of sight, knocking him in the side of his head. It almost made his helmet twirl around backwards. He stumbled into another denting blow in the back. The third enemy rushed forward only to snag on the ground as if he’d stepped in a beartrap. He shrieked in surprise, falling to his knee. The fight froze as everyone including Abdul stared at him in bewilderment. He continued to yelp and twitch.
A hand armored in scale emerged from the concrete behind him. It sprouted from his shadow, grabbing his ankle. Another arm emerged from the ground too. It held Isaac’s shadow dagger of Dio and stabbed into the unprotected back of the knight’s calf. It cut and carved mercilessly like a butcher to a pig’s carcass.
Abdul took a step back, admittedly freaked out. That was when he realized what he’d witnessed. Isaac hid in his shadow! Is this the power of Dio?
Isaac sunk back into the ground, leaving that knight to bleed out horribly. Before Abdul knew it, he appeared behind him, watching his back in a readied stance. Abdul stood watching the two surprised enemies in front, his guard tight, as he spoke to Isaac. “I didn’t say you could hitch a ride in my shadow.”
“I call this power Holy Diver, but that fire of yours… you can manifest your ki, and so wastefully? Such a capability is rare even among talented.”
“Is that what it is? I have no clue myself. Just woke up with it.”
Isaac’s brow raised in intrigue. His stone-cold expression broke for a moment, showing excitement. “I’ve trained my entire life to no avail and here you are awakening to it naturally.”
“Whatever will help me kill is welcomed.”
The avian knight facing Isaac threw his halberd to the ground and pointed at his commander. “We don’t get paid enough for this shit. They didn’t tell us in the briefing that they were machina wielders and ki artists.” He turned tail and took off running.
The leader of the avian knights yelled at him. “You damned rat!”
Abdul commanded his partner. “Go after him! We can’t let any escape.”
Isaac nodded and took off after the escaped foe.
Without hesitation, Abdul revealed a throwing knife from his sleeve. He flung it at the commander and chanted amid its flight. “Your mother.”
Primus broke out into raging laughter. “The heaviest of them all!”
The knife bore a fist shaped hole into the commander’s chest, embedding half-way through, and launched him onto his back. He grabbed at his chest with both hands, wheezing, unable to speak.
The last enemy dropped his war axe, putting his hands up. “I surrender. I’ll do anything. Just let me live. Want information? I’ve got you. Something a little more suggestive…?” He avoided eye contact. “Maybe that too.” His nasally tone scraped against Abdul’s ears.
Abdul stood still a bit awkward. “We don’t need any more prisoners of war. Mine has already told me everything I need. He even drew a map of your sanctum for us.”
“Bastard.”
The last avian knight was pushed down to his ass by Abdul. He put his hands up even more passively. “I already told you; I surrender! Stop beating my ass! To kill me after the fact would be so unethical. You’re probably breaking a war convention right now!”
Primus sighed. “Human, this is embarrassing. Just kill him already.”
Abdul rose the claymore into the air with an annoyed expression. The knight droned on, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “How would you sleep at night after this? How would you get into The Shallow of Yellen? Where is your honor? Is it that much a burden to have one teensy prisoner of war?”
“To The Deep with ethics. I’m not concerned with where I will go when I die. For all I care, I could sink to the coldest abyss at the very bottom of Yellen. Stop making this so difficult.”
“As it should be! Listen to that little angel on your shoulder!”
Isaac returned covered in blood. Abdul looked at him, looked at the sitting avian knight, and then him again. “Please kill this guy for me. I can’t take the risk of him haunting me. Anybody but him,” he asked with an exhausted tone. His partner agreed and jumped at the man’s throat.
Done with business, the two made their way back to their center of operations. The cellar of Troll’s Treasure. Every now and then, Isaac would look back into the abyssal darkness with an eerie face. Eventually, he placed a firm palm on Abdul’s shoulder strong enough to bring him to a halt.
Abdul addressed him calmly. “What is it?” He couldn’t see whatever Isaac stared at.
Isaac grabbed him by the top of his cuirass’s chest plate, yanking him close enough for their foreheads to touch. “Now he’s haunting me.”
Abdul hummed a hymn Xavier taught him long ago. It was said to offer attached spirits passage to rest. As Isaac stared at him dumbfounded, Primus pitched in. “At least you’ll never be lonely again.”