The scene in the common room was chaotic. We were no longer on a straight vertical slant, but the ship was certainly tilted upward, making it hard to find steady footing.
Cash was fighting off one of the Syreni guards in the sunken seating area. Normally, this would be no problem for him but the pitch of the ship and constant swerving Dick was apparently doing to navigate through the mountainside was making it difficult for either Cash or the Syreni to land hits. Cash was using his fists since Carla wasn’t ideal for close quarter combat. The Syreni was also relegated to using whatever objects he could find to swing at Cash, having lost his thermite blaster in the scuffle.
Farther back in the room, near the hallways leading to the back, Ryuuk was struggling with the second Syreni guard and Owen. I threw myself in that direction, stumbling through the rocking cabin as best I could. I collided with Owen, knocking him back down the hallway. The Syreni had his hands around Ryuuk’s throat, choking him against the wall. With the way the ship was leaning, Ryuuk couldn’t get the leverage to push the man off him.
Casting a glance down the hallway where Owen had disappeared, I attempted to summon a light dagger to slice up the Syreni attacking Ryuuk. It sputtered in my hand and fizzled out before the strike could land, however. I was completely depleted.
I guess we do this the hard way, then.
Grabbing hold of the Syreni’s back, I swung my leg high to wrap my knee around his head and used the leverage to force him off Ryuuk. Hopping to my feet to square off with the Syreni, I could hear Ryuuk sputtering for air on the floor.
The Syreni wasted no time charging at me. His larger body impacted mine like a wave of water slapping me soundly off my feet. Luckily, I was able to get one leg between myself and the man as he attempted to pin me to the floor. The tilt of the ship was working in my favor this time, and I kicked the Syreni squarely in the chest, this time using his own body weight as leverage to send him flying over my head and into the nearby wall.
He landed a foot or two from where Ryuuk was still recovering on the floor. The Avian swung his lower body around to bury a booted heel into the side of the man’s head. The Syreni let out a cry of pain and he rolled out of Ryuuk’s range. A trickle of blood oozed from the man’s temple as he struggled back to his feet.
I was already up on my own feet and used the opportunity to throw a roundhouse kick at the guy’s face as he tried to stand up. Somehow he managed to catch my leg mid kick, throwing me off balance and sending me sprawling to the other side of the room. I landed hard against a table that was attached to the ship floor.
Glancing over, I saw the man attempt another lunge at Ryuuk, who narrowly scrambled out of the way. I caught Ryuuk’s eye for a moment and motioned toward the back hall.
“Get Owen,” I said. “I’ve got this guy.”
“You’re sure?” Ryuuk said, dodging another attempted attack from the Syreni.
I nodded.
“Just go,” I added. “I’ll follow you soon.”
Hearing our conversation, the Syreni moved to block Ryuuk’s path to the back hallway, only to find my shoulder jabbing into his solar plexus as I flung myself, once again, at the guy. As he bent over gasping for breath, I brought my knee up hard against the man’s face.
“Bitch!” he growled, holding his nose.
“Bold words coming from a dead man,” I taunted him. I had noticed something he hadn’t and knew how the fight would end.
“Fuck you!” he sneered and moved like he would attack me again.
His eyes widened in surprise as a solid, metal fist connected with the side of his temple, cracking his skull with a sickening crunch. Cash’s punch sent him flying against the back wall, which he bounced awkwardly against before falling to the floor. There he remained, motionless.
“Not what I would have chosen as my last words,” I commented, turning to Cash and shrugging, a smile of gratitude on my face. “Some people have no sense of the dramatic.”
He had finished his fight with the other Syreni, who also lay motionless on the floor. The ship pitched suddenly to the right, causing both of us to scramble toward the wall for stability.
“Ryuuk and Owen?” Cash asked.
“In the back,” I said, nodding to the hallway they had both disappeared down.
Without another word, Cash and I made our way carefully down the hallway, making sure to keep hold of something along the wall so we weren’t thrown around as the ship swayed and shook. I felt like the shaking and rumbling was a result of the mountain around us shuddering.
In the cargo area at the back of the ship, Ryuuk had already subdued Owen. The Avian stood with one hand braced on a crate bolted to the floor; the other hand held one of his revolvers he had apparently recovered from the floor somewhere. My own Gemini blaster was tucked into its holster, but since it was powered off my cosmic energy, unlike a normal blaster, it hadn’t been much use in the previous fight.
Owen knelt in the center of the cargo area, hands up and pleading for his life.
“Please! Think about what you’d be doing,” Owen implored to Ryuuk. “I’m unarmed and surrendering. You’d be executing an unarmed man, murdering him in cold blood.”
“You deserve it for what you did!” Ryuuk shouted.
Cash and I just lingered by the doorway, willing to let Ryuuk deal out justice to Owen as he saw fit.
“I regret taking the life of the old man,” Owen started to say, but Ryuuk interrupted.
“His name was Paul!!!” Ryuuk screeched. “But you didn’t know that, did you? Nobody did because all anyone cares about around here is themself. You take lives like it’s nothing, destroy anything if it means getting what you want. And nobody ever thinks about how it affects others, nobody thinks about the lives that are devastated by one simple little act.”
I glanced at Cash, realizing Ryuuk wasn’t just talking about Owen. I knew the person he was describing could just as well apply to any of us, save Ryuuk himself, not just the Syreni and Malunites fighting over sacred relics. For an Outlaw like me, the sentiment Ryuuk derided was almost part of our DNA. It was a philosophy about taking whatever you wanted and doing whatever it took to keep it.
There was an old pirate saying from Ecliptis, eons ago back when it was called Earth. Take what you can, give nothing back. Outlaws lived by a very similar philosophy, though there were lines we weren’t willing to cross. Slaughtering innocent people was one of them, but the reprimand of his words still applied.
Looking at Cash, I had the feeling he had also caught the comparison to his own lifestyle choices. Unlike me, however, I doubt Cash would dwell on it much, if at all. Cash and I weren’t so different from Ryuuk in that we had our own inner code we followed. What differed was the contents of that personal philosophy. If Cash were holding the revolver and standing in Ryuuk’s place, Owen would already be dead with no remorse whatsoever, of that I was sure. The same might be true for me, though I could be more pragmatic. I’d need a really good reason to put a bullet in him guilt free, but Owen had given us plenty.
Owen was right about Ryuuk, however. He wasn’t a killer. His code didn’t just govern his own actions; it considered how those actions would affect others and adjusted accordingly to the most benevolent outcome for all. I found myself wondering if the trauma of Gram—Paul's death would override that inner code.
The ship had stopped lurching from side to side and the rumbling sounds had diminished. I guessed we had cleared the grotto by now. The resulting, relative quiet that engulfed the cargo hold was almost palpable as we waited for Ryuuk to decide Owen’s fate.
I saw his jaw clench, his hand shake with the effort of squeezing the hilt of his revolver so tightly.
“You don’t deserve to live,” Ryuuk finally spoke again. “You’ll only hurt countless more people.”
Owen’s eyes widened in fear at his words as Ryuuk took a step forward, aiming the gun almost point blank at the man’s forehead. He paused for a brief moment, then turned and threw the weapon against the wall with a loud, frustrated growl.
“Goddammit!” was all Ryuuk said as he tossed one of his prized weapons across the room and stalked out of the door past us without another word.
Owen looked pale but visibly relieved as he sank down low on his knees. I glanced at Cash, once again, and we shared a knowing nod.
Yes, Owen deserved death, and some of us would have given him that sentence without hesitation or remorse. Not Ryuuk. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t the villain of his story or even the anti-hero. Like Paul had told him once, Ryuuk didn’t just play the hero; he was the real deal.
“You can turn me into the Malunites if that’s what you wan—” Owen started to say, but his words died on his lips as three sharp cracks of gunfire rang out and buried themselves in his chest.
Vomero stood in the other cargo hallway door holding the gun Ryuuk had tossed across the room. Silently, he walked over to Owen’s body, still twitching as the illusion around him faded to reveal a humanoid looking man with pointy, rat-like features. This was his true form. It seemed fitting.
Vomero never looked at us as he stood over Owen’s body for a second, then raised the gun again from where it dangled at his side and fired two more shots into the man’s head.
After a long moment, he turned to face us, his eyes shimmering ever so slightly with tears he refused to let fall.
“Ryuuk didn’t see him smile when he pulled the trigger that day,” Vomero said simply, looking first Cash, then myself in the eyes. “He didn’t have to watch a friend die tied up and held down like cattle.”
Slowly, he placed the gun on top of the nearest crate, then turned to meet my gaze again. I could almost see the shadows he had carried since that day evaporating from behind his eyes.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“I did.”
With that, he turned and walked past us down the hallway toward the common room.
* * *
The viewscreen spread across the entire front of the control room was a deep blue as Dick piloted us through the ocean after escaping the grotto. Following Owen’s demise, the six of us, including Light, were gathered there to check on our progress.
MMUUUUUUUAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Acheron seemed to be tailing us, something that probably had to do with the kid who ate the water spirit’s mind control device.
“Tell me why, again, we’re in the ocean and not the air right now,” Cash said, “especially with an angry water deity following us around like a lost pet.”
“It’s a spirit, not a god,” Vomero corrected.
“And we’re doing this because surfacing near what is probably a shit load of angry Malunites and Syreni isn’t a good idea,” Dick said. “I figured we’d try to get away undetected beneath the water before surfacing.”
“You know the Syreni live underwater, right?” Cash retorted. “Live and die underwater, actually, which is exactly what I feel we’re going to do if we don’t get away from this damn thing!”
As if on cue, Acheron let out another hull-shaking moan.
“It doesn’t seem to be attacking us,” Vomero said.
“True,” I added, “but it’s not really helping with the whole ‘escape undetected’ thing either.”
“That’s a fair point,” Dick said. “Just a little farther, and we’ll probably be clear to surface.”
I saw him wince as he adjusted himself in the pilot chair. Glancing down at his leg, I could see it was still oozing blood. I looked around for a console that might contain a med kit. I found one tucked away in the back of the control room and reached to open it.
My wrist tingled with a stinging warmth, and curiously, I turned it over to inspect it. I hadn’t had time to notice it before, but there was the unmistakable outline of a Zodian tattoo etched into my wrist right over my pulse. The configuration of the stars in the tattoo reminded me of a winding ribbon.
A snake. The thought whispered through my mind. Ophiuchus was the Serpent Bearer. A big part of that lost House’s identity had been healing and cleansing. It was that exact power I had called upon to negate Matthew’s miasma attack.
It must have left a mark.
But I had never heard of a Zodian receiving a tattoo, much less an empowered one, this way. Then again, I had never heard of a Zodian calling upon any house but the one they were attuned to. Yet, something inside me had told me it was the right thing to do when I emerged from my dream state. In that instant, I had been so sure, deep in my soul, that it would work, and it had. Compound that with the fact that it was also an Ecliptic House that was supposed to no longer exist, and the mysteries kept piling up.
I had regained some of my energy, so instead of using the med kit, I walked back over to Dick and knelt beside him as he drove the ship. He looked at me questioningly, then raised an eyebrow teasingly when I placed my hand on his thigh. I didn’t miss his wince of pain, however.
“Sorry, I’m not trying to hurt,” I said.
“Some pain is worth the pleasure,” was all he said with a sly grin. “If you’re looking for something in particular, might I suggest a little higher?”
I smiled but didn’t respond, concentrating on my new tattoo.
Sometimes, it took a while to get acclimated to using a new incantation. The more one used it, the more adept they could be with it. That’s why it was so easy for me to manipulate my daggers in a fight to suit my needs. I had spent a lot of time perfecting it.
As I focused on the configuration on my wrist, the tattoo started to glow. It also had that blue-green hue of the supernova attack I had used to cleanse Matthew’s void portal earlier in our fight.
“What the...” Dick said, looking down at his leg.
With a touch of my hand, the jagged wound in his leg started to glow with the same light. When it faded, the gash had closed, though the surface still seemed scarred and red.
“Not bad for a first try, I think,” I said.
“You get some fancy new healing power while I was dead?” Dick asked. “Please tell me you didn’t eat some Ancient relic, too.”
“Not quite,” I said. “I’ll explain later. Let's just focus on getting the hell out of here.”
Navigating underwater wasn’t as easy as it sounded in the current conditions. Everywhere around us, the underwater mountains themselves seemed to be trembling slightly. As we pulled father and farther away from the area, there seemed to be even more turbulence, but this was coming from above.
Suddenly, a large mountain appeared in front of us out of nowhere, and Dick maneuvered us through the broken up chunks with the skill of an experienced pilot.
“Watch out!” Cash yelled. “How do you almost hit a whole ass mountain?”
“Because it wasn’t there a minute ago,” Dick shouted back, focusing on navigating through falling rocky debris.
I hadn’t been able to observe his flying skills much in our initial attack on the transport. I felt like he had somehow been underestimating his piloting skills, which was rare because he wasn’t usually so modest.
A moment later, a chunk of a tree floated past the view screen.
“What the fuck?” I said, incredulously. “These aren’t underwater mountains breaking up. They’re islands.”
“Time to surface,” Dick said. “This way is way too treacherous.”
As we emerged above the surface of the water, what we saw was devastating. A large floating island was literally falling from the sky.
“Can you expand the viewscreen? It looks like it goes all the way around,” I said to Dick. He nodded and punched a button on the screen in front of him.
The entire perimeter of the control room was one giant integrated screen that offered a 360-degree view of what was around the ship. It would have been a cool feature to awe over if it weren’t for the scene depicted on that screen.
Everywhere, floating islands were falling from the sky. The ones floating on the water’s surface seemed to be unaffected, except that larger islands above them were falling on top of them, breaking them apart and creating massive tidal waves that bombarded the surface islands.
“Holy shit,” I said, ripping my gaze from the chaotic destruction happening all around us to glance at Light. “Is the kid doing this?”
“I don’t think Light would do this,” Dick said.
Indeed, Ancient Light is not responsible for the devastation happening in our current surroundings. Not directly, anyhow.
This came from Tria.
“What do you mean, not directly?” Dick asked. Light was whimpering in his seat on the control platform, and Dick leaned over to pat his head gently. “Don’t worry buddy, I’m sure it’s not your fault.”
The relic Ancient Light consumed was responsible for holding the islands on this planet aloft. Now that that power has been reclaimed, it is no longer available for its previous purpose.
“So, this is because we used the rest of the power to get out of the grotto?” Dick asked.
No, the power was repurposed the moment Light consumed the object. Had you not used it to escape, it would have absorbed into the young Ancient over time and be used for evolutionary advancement.
“Evolutionary advancement?” Dick inquired.
It is the Ancient term for growth.
“So, this is because the kid ate the scepter,” Cash said, and received numerous glares all around as the kid wept openly and loudly. “What? It is.”
Ancient Light, please do not be upset. The power contained within the Relic you consumed was always yours to do with as you chose. It belonged to your kind and was utilized by the one who left it on this planet, Ancient Fate, according to his will. You have not deprived the people of this planet of anything they were entitled to, merely reclaimed what was, most likely, left here for you.
“Ancient Fate?” Dick asked. “I thought the person who left it here was Maluna.”
That was the name presented to the people of this planet by Ancient Fate, yes.
“So, the islands are falling and it’s kind of our fault,” Ryuuk said. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop it?”
“Tria, is there anything we could do to stop the islands from falling?” Dick asked, knowing it wouldn’t respond to anyone else.
I am afraid not, unless you happen to possess a relic of equal power and ability to replace the previous one with and know how to use it to recreate the conditions Ancient Fate set forth the first time.
“Not to sound like a heartless bastard here,” Vomero interjected, “but we just initiated a catastrophic, planet-wide disaster on Kalo-Mahoi. They may recover, eventually, but they’re not going to be happy with us if they find us still lurking on this planet.”
“They’re also not going to care what part the shady Syreni government or the Malunites played in this whole scenario,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll be on us.”
“Did we really just destroy half a planet?” Ryuuk mused to himself. “We can’t just leave like this, can we?”
“What other choice do we have?” Dick asked. “You heard Tria. There’s nothing we can do. Staying would only make us the scapegoats in a situation that we were only partially responsible for.”
“Look, I don’t mind being a heartless bastard when it comes to the truth,” Cash said. “The Syreni and Malunites could have easily prevented all of this. We weren’t there for any reason except for the ones they visited upon us. And they didn’t seem too damn worried about that scepter to avoid fighting in the grotto. Yeah, the kid ate it, but it could have been a number of things that caused a similar outcome.”
“Well, my vote is we don’t stick around to find out what we already know, which is that if they find out we’re alive, we’ll be blamed and wanted in this sector of the galaxy,” I said.
“Is this thing even space-worthy?” Cash asked. “Can we just escape the planet in it?”
Vomero pushed some buttons on the console. Although only Dick could pilot the ship and Tria seemed reluctant to respond to anyone but Dick or Light, the fundamental controls of the ship, like the computer systems and door mechanism worked for anyone as long as the power was on.
“The planet? Yes,” Vomero said. “Long-range space flight out of this sector of the galaxy, not really. At least not, yet.”
“We can make it to a nearby planet though or way station?” Dick asked, and Vomero nodded.
“I’d say as long as we have the supplies to last the journey, we could theoretically go anywhere in this quadrant,” Vomero responded. “The power system on this thing is extremely efficient and recycles itself.”
“But it can’t do long-range jumps?” I asked.
That type of travel usually involved a star-drive, something that ships had to be specifically built to utilize and sustain.
“Not that I can see, currently,” Vomero said. “Though I’d say this system is advanced enough to handle a star-drive if it had one.”
“So, we make our way through the quadrant to either find another way home or a way to install a star-drive into this one?” Cash asked.
We stared at each other silently for a long moment. Leaving Kalo-Mahoi was something we had been striving to do since we arrived. Now, it looked like we would get the chance, but not with the result we had been hoping for.
“It’s not going to be easy, especially if anyone finds out we survived,” I said. “Dick, you’re the pilot and the one who has the most pressing matters to get home to. What do you think?”
He gazed at the carnage on the viewscreen as we zipped through Kalo-Mahoi's atmosphere.
“There’s nothing left for us here,” he said. “I say we set a course for the next nearest planet or station and see where it goes from there.”
With no objections to his proposal, our collective, conteplative silence served as our agreement, and he adjusted the controls to take us higher into the stratosphere.
As the vast blue planet beneath us grew smaller, we could see more of the destruction befalling the planet as our crew bid a silent farewell to Kalo-Mahoi.
“So...where to now?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Let’s see what’s available,” Dick said, in a good natured tone meant to diffuse the macabre mood we had fallen into. “A Interstellar Trade Enforcement Outpost...nope definitely not that one. Some place I can’t pronounce, looks small. Ooooh...a planet called Rodan, sounds badass. It’s got a D-class rating by the ITE.”
“A rating like that, it has to be pretty lax on the law side of things,” Cash said. “What’s the major port?”
“Mmmm...someplace called New Iberia. Oh, another red flag. Avoid travel. Area is deemed unsafe for tourism,” Dick said. “Sounds perfect!”
“Rodan it is,” Vomero said.
“Can we at least try to avoid destroying the planet, this time?” Ryuuk asked with a sigh.
We all shared a knowing look, glancing at the child. I shrugged as I replied.
“No promises.”
* * *
End of Arc 1
* * *