The next day, Ark went through the motions in a daze. Conditioning went by in a breeze, as did Basic and weapons training. He barely noticed how his bullets strafed away from bulls-eye, resulting in his worse score yet.

Even his afternoon training with Mino was difficult to focus on, despite the urgency to improve. Still lost in that cave, Ark got sliced up by virtual dummies more times than he normally would, leading Mino to stop and look at him with furrowed brows.

“What’s going on?” He said, big eyes boring into Ark.

Ark looked up, lying on the ground after his latest failure, he tried to create a coherent thought. “I—uh…” He failed. All he could think of was the vision of riftwalkers standing in front of the daemon; the sensation of psions filling the air in a way he had never felt them before; the desperation and struggle called to him in a way few things did.

“Ark.” Mino reached down and dragged Ark back on his feet. “Talk to me.”

Shaking his head, Ark took a breath before he answered with closed eyes. “Sorry, I—I discovered something.”

“What?”

Ark felt his chest tighten and the coin burn in his pocket. He had not talked to Mino about it, and even though it felt silly, he did not want to reveal it. Having shared everything for the last couple of years, what did it hurt to withhold this one piece of information?

It’s not the only thing you’re hiding, a voice in the back of his mind whispered. His own guilt made manifest hissed like a snake. Ark buried it deeper within. No point in rehashing that old memory.

Looking up at his friend, Ark squared his shoulders. “You remember Alistor saying he was testing me?”

Mino nodded. He had not asked, but Ark knew he would have taken note of that.

“Well, I think I figured out the solution, but its… Weird.”

“Then you should go talk to him,” Mino said, as calm as a basin of water, a slight smile on his lips.

“You… You don’t want to know what it is?” Ark said, letting out his guilt a little. He did not like keeping secrets, even though he knew he was full of them.

Shrugging his massive shoulders, Mino said, “You’ll tell me if I need to know. We’re not getting any proper training done right now, so you might as well go talk to Alistor.”

Thanking his friend, Ark walked out of the training room and waited out in front of training room 6, where their team were still working. Waiting gave him time to think, trying to piece together the pieces of what he had seen.

What occupied occupied his mind was the daemon. It was the first time he had even seen one, and Alistor’s knowledge of how it worked was still vivid in his mind. The warping crystalline structure, combined with red rock and molten heart, had made it seem like a creature of fire. Growing, shifting, and changing in accordance with its need.

Knowing how one looked, Ark lightly prodded the static entity that resided within his netlink, trying to square the violent creature from his vision with the hexagonal lattice that represented the daemon END had given him. It had felt nothing like the lumbering brute Ark had watched through Alistor’s eyes—instead, it had felt a lot more similar to himself: alone and afraid.

Then again, END had said it had the ‘potential’ to become a daemon, or something else, whatever that meant. Ark would have to parse it out at some point, but his mind was brought back to reality by the ‘whoosh’ of the automated door to the training room.

Rex walked out first, giving him a raised eyebrow, but said nothing. Ark just nodded at her, and she returned the gesture with a slight smile. Jenson ignored him, which suited Ark fine.

Naomi, on the other hand, stopped when she saw Ark, which also meant that Ran stopped, and the two of them looked at Ark.

“What?” Ark said, trying to figure out why they were staring.

“You’ve changed,” Naomi said, her mouth a tight line.

It was such a straight remark that Ark just blinked, unable to think of a response.

She turned and walked down the hall, speaking over her shoulder. “I hope it is for the better. We will see.” Then she was gone, and Ran with her.

Ark had no idea how she had been able to tell that he had changed, but he let the thought go. He needed to prepare himself for what was coming. Alistor walked out, sunglasses obscuring his milky eyes, still dressed in that ridiculous outfit that made it look like he was on vacation.

“Well… Is it me you’re waiting for, Tiny?” Alistor said, smirking.

“Yeah,” Ark squared his shoulders and straightened, “I’ve done as you asked, Instructor.” He held up the coin so that Alistor could see the pulsing crystal of psions. “I saw.”

“Did you, now?” Alistor’s lips parted into a grimace of a smile, “Alright, follow me.” The man turned on his heels and led Ark in the opposite direction from where his team had gone. They passed through several hallways, down a set of stairs, before they came to a door leading into a small office.

Waving him inside, Alistor said, “Come in, take a seat. Let’s talk.”

So Ark did. He sat down in the only chair facing a narrow table where papers were neatly stacked up in one corner. The room was small and mostly unadorned, but Ark noted the picture hanging behind the desk of four people sitting around a table, drinks raised toward the camera.

Their faces were burned into Ark’s mind, from the memory he had witnessed, and he found himself transfixed by their expressions. Avalanche looked peaceful and relaxed, compared to the image of rigid professionalism Ark had seen him display in the cavern. Serah had a smile on her lips, as she had one arm slung around Alistor’s shoulder, looking like she was on the cusp of breaking into song.

Ethan, too, looked like a happy twin of the dark and serious man from the cavern. He was leaning forward, the extended netlink at the side of his head obscured from view as he gently held a glass into the air.

“So, tell me,” Alistor said, as he sat down in front of Ark, “What did you figure out?”

Ark told him of what Mallis had revealed about the background of the coin, and then explained what he had seen when standing in the Hall of Memory. Alistor’s face slightly twitched when Ark described the memory, but he said nothing until Ark was done.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Give it here,” Alistor said, reaching out his hand. Ark placed the coin back onto his palm, and Alistor raised it to the light, peering at the pulsing crystal. “A strange thing, this,” he said at the end.

“How so, Instructor?”

Waving his hand in front of his face, “No honorifics here, Tiny. We knew we were going to die, you know. Especially those who went underground—we figured there was little chance of returning. This coin was meant to bring a small piece of us back, to help rebuild after we died like valiant heroes, to guide the future generations.” Shaking his head, Alistor looked at Ark with a gaze that pierced through the dark sunglasses. “That’s you now, I guess. So, you saw one of the battles on the Red Moon. What did you think of it?”

Swallowing, Ark chose his words carefully. “It looked like you were used to fighting daemons. It was dangerous, but everyone performed their role, meaning there was little actual danger.”

“Yeah, well…” Alistor sighed and put the coin back in a pocket by his chest, “What you saw was just a battle against a drone; more of a worker than a fighter. The real dangerous ones were their soldier-class daemons, or worse: elder-class. Did you notice how well my powers worked against the weakest of our old enemies?”

“It… uh—it didn’t. Work, I mean,” Ark fumbled his words, knowing this was probably a sore point.

“No, you’re right. It didn’t. Do you know why?”

“It felt like…” Ark remembered the feeling of Alistor reaching out with his powers and trying to touch the daemon, and how the telekinetic psions had been unable to find purchase on the creature’s rocky surface. “Like water trying to push a rock.”

Alistor laughed, a harsh barking laugh that Ark felt was the first time the man had showed him a genuine expression. When he finally stopped, his mouth turned into a frown again as he spoke. “That’s a good way of looking at it. With enough water, I might be able to do it; or with enough time, I might be able to erode the rock away, but there are easier ways. That is why the psychic expression of psions is inefficient against daemons. Do you know what the scary thing is, Tiny?”

He leaned forward, his milky eyes almost peering out from beyond the rim of his dark glasses. Ark swallowed and shook his head.

“We don’t know why. We spent half a century fighting daemons as our world crumbled around us, and we never learned the source of their powers. We have no idea why some psionic expressions worked on them while others did not; and we have absolutely no idea how they were able to do what they did.”

Alistor raised his hand, finger pointed at Ark. “The only ones who ever came close were the mindweavers. You say you are one, Tiny, so you should know this: the mindweavers were the ones who gave us the key to defeat the daemons, but they’re also the reason why we’re in the mess we are in now.” He turned his hand toward the surrounding room, as if it represented all the troubles facing humanity.

“How?” Ark said, breath caught in his throat.

“Which part?” Alistor said, leaning back with a sneer on his face, “The salvation, or the betrayal?”

Breath caught in his throat, Ark licked his lips. He wanted to know everything, but he understood the test was not over. Alistor was not revealing this out of the goodness of his heart, but to make a point. Thinking back on their previous conversation, Ark tread carefully.

“How did the disrupter work?”

Alistor’s face erupted into a grim smile, as if he had been waiting all this time for Ark to ask. “So, you caught that, did you?” Shaking his head, Alistor turned and took down the picture frame behind him, staring at it with a mixture of expressions that Ark could not decipher.

“We thought we had a weapon against the daemons,” Alistor said, turning back toward Ark. His next words made Ark turn white as a sheet. “The Endemic Neural Disrupter, or END. Ethan, himself, built it and integrated into his system, along with every mindweaver we took along for the mission. It turned out to be a double-edged sword.

“It… What did it do?” Ark said, ignoring the pit that had opened up in his stomach. He could not allow himself to reveal anything.

Placing the picture down on the table, Alistor sighed, “It was supposed to infect the daemons, destroying them from the inside. That’s why we were there—to infect the innermost sanctum of the Red Moon, the Nexus itself. We sacrificed everything for this one chance at ending it all.”

“What happened?”

Grimacing, Alistor placed a hand over the picture, obscuring Ethan from view. “It didn’t just work on daemons is what happened. You saw me retreat with Serah, right?”

Ark nodded, feeling the pit in his stomach grow wider.

“Well, when I got back, we weren’t just fighting daemons any longer—we were fighting each other. I watched brothers in arms kill each other, as if they had turned into mortal enemies; mindweavers fighting everyone around them with abandon. If I had not gotten there in time, our entire expedition would have been lost, since a psychic counters the powers of a mindweaver, like a mindweaver counters a daemon—to a point.”

Pointing to the glasses resting on his nose, Alistor leaned forward and spoke with such intensity that Ark felt shivers run down his spine. “The last thing I ever saw with these eyes was Ethan as he burned out my sight.”

In the ensuing silence, Ark felt his heart start to beat faster, blood rushing and pulsing in his head. “You think I will become like them?” Ark said, hesitantly.

“I don’t know,” Alistor said, shrugging, “Maybe you won’t. However, you should have picked out why I’m reluctant to teach you, by now.”

Organizing the conversation in his head, Ark saw the trap laid out neatly, just as Alistor had said. “Your powers don’t work on me, like they don’t work on daemons,” Ark began, seeing Alistor’s lips curl into a smile as he talked, “So, if I end up like the mindweavers on the Red Moon, you cannot counter me.”

“That’s right.”

“And…” Ark extended the logic, thinking back on what Alistor had said on his first night in the guild. “You believe whoever trained me must have known that.”

“See? Clear as day, is it not?” Alistor showed his teeth, like a predator. “If I train you, Ark, how many psychics will you kill? Who will stop you when you turn your skills on your fellow humans?”

Ark thought of Sylvia Leen and all of her teachings. While she had not personally instructed him in mindweaving, she had been the one to suggest he train as one. Had she known? What had her plan been? The pit in Ark’s stomach grew wider, as he began fearing his own memories. What more did he not know?

Swallowing, Ark firmed his resolve. He needed a path forward, and Alistor held the key. Regardless of the resentment he held against mindweavers, the man was probably the best person to uncover the skills Ark needed to progress. He needed a convincing argument.

“You’re assuming I will turn my powers on other humans,” Ark said, trying to sound confident, “But the same can be said about anyone. Why train riftwalkers at all, if they all have the potential to turn on each other?”

“Why, indeed,” Alistor said, sighing. “Maybe you will be different, Ark, but there’s a reason why all mindweavers were taken in by Central Command after we were cast into the void. I don’t know what Ethan did, or why he betrayed us all, but I know that it had something to do with the powers he was playing around with. Every mindweaver can touch the mind of a daemon, and you—Ark—is the closest I’ve ever seen to being one. The only reason I’m not killing you right here right now is the fact that you could see the memories held in my coin.”

Ark’s mouth ran dry, as he felt the weight of the threat settle on him. Realizing that Alistor had been ready to kill him made his heart beat faster; his breath feel heavier. “What do you mean?” He said, voice shaking slightly.

“It was built to only respond to a human mind,” Alistor said, “So I know you are one, at least. That allows you to keep your life, but why should I do more?”

“Because you promised?” Ark said, weakly.

“Who says I need to keep my promises?” Alistor shrugged.

Carefully, Ark studied the man. His relaxed posture, the smirk at the edge of his lips. He was certain there was nothing Ark could do to change his mind. The frustration he felt made the flame in his chest burn hotter, bile rising in his throat. No matter his knowledge, he was powerless here, and yet… There was one other emotion that Ark recognized in Alistor’s face—an emotion he was intimately familiar with. Guilt edged his every word, his every expression, and Ark could use that to change the play. With calculated risk, Ark leaned forward and made the only sensible move in a deadlocked game: he flipped the board.

“So, you will turn back on your word? Just like Ethan turned on you?”

Alistor froze. Behind the sunglasses, Ark felt his milky-white stare bore into him. Rising to his full height, the man towered over him as the room began tingling with the psionic energy he was unleashing in fury. The room became darker; the air heavy as lead. “Say that again, Tiny,” he said, voice dangerously calm, “I dare you.”