World: Navtyi

World Status: Sparkling Band

The column next to Zhou exploded, dust and chunks of debris flying towards her. Still, she kept running. She knew that if she stopped, the next bullet would be in her back. The column exploding was unsettling, but she thought her back exploding would be much worse. The tails of her long brown coat flapped in the air as she ran. She leapt to the right, behind the next pillar.

It seemed like the man who was after her needed to take time to reload each bullet individually, so at least that was to her benefit. She tapped the screen of the mechanical device strapped across her lower left arm. She was careful not to tap it too hard, since her left arm was also supporting a golden metal box, about a fourth of a meter cubed, that she was holding pressed against her side. It would be a shame to drop or lose it after coming this far.

“Hello, Ms. Jin,” an artificially pleasant and happy male voice chimed from the device. She cursed its volume. “What can I help you with?”

“How long until you can get a portal open?” she whispered in a hiss.

“Based on current conditions, that endeavor will take about five minutes, unless you can find somewhere with a lower stability rating, where it might be easier to form a rift.”

“Great, is there anything like that around here?” Zhou asked.

A circular progress/searching icon appeared on the screen. Great, she thought. This is just what I need. She brought her hands up to the top center of her face and pulled them out across in opposite directions, pushing any of her straight black hair out of her green eyes. Then, she sighed and decided to see what was going on with her attacker.

She moved with as much caution as possible into a position to look around the column. She knew that Psifiak, her digital companion, had probably already given away her location. Still, she tried to make as little noise as possible as she slowly crept around.

At first, she didn’t see her attacker anywhere. The whole room had an eerie stillness to it. Was he hiding behind one of the other columns? Maybe the long wooden benches throughout the room? She looked to the doorway where she had entered--being pursued by her foe. It was still open, leaving a view of the hall outside. She turned the other way, looking to the front of the room, where a stained glass window lined the wall behind an elevated stage. The window was covered in dust so thick that no new light was passing through at all. This temple had been left to ruins like the rest of the town had been--although it seemed structurally a lot sounder than the rest of the buildings.

It was possible her attacker was hiding, waiting to lure her out. If that was the case, she wondered if she could make it across the room to the door without him managing to hit her with another of his bullets. They seemed pretty debilitating, and she didn’t want to find out how well she would be able to keep running if one of them struck her.

She began to move out from behind her column, prepared to drop down beneath the cover of the nearest bench should gunfire start to become an issue. She didn’t make it more than a step before a blade was at her throat.

“Give me the reliquary,” said the man holding the weapon. It was an odd weapon, to say the least. For the one part, it had a blade, about a third to half a meter in length. However, running along the side of the blade was the barrel of a single-shot pistol. The handle of the blade bore a hammer and a trigger for working the gun. Following the weapon up the man’s arm, she could see that he was wearing a dark colored jacket. Like her own jacket, his had many pockets. She could see the outlines of numerous knives and other weapons, as well as pockets of unknown equipment and contents. The man was blonde, and his face bore two long scars across it, running in parallel, only a couple centimeters apart.

“Are you sure you need this box?” Zhou asked. “Maybe there’s a different box that you’re looking for, and you just saw me with mine and thought it was yours. I think there was a bank in this town. Maybe there are other boxes there that look just like this one. Maybe the one that you are looking for is one of those.”

The blade pressed harder against her neck--not drawing blood, but making a point nonetheless.

The payday that Zhou had been offered for this job had been a good one--one that she didn’t want to give up. Not to mention that, with the sorts of clients that she worked with, especially ones who could afford that sort of payday, failure usually meant being hunted down or facing some other sort of vengeance. Still, she supposed if she was killed here by the gentleman with the gunblade, it would be a bit worse than whatever would or wouldn’t happen to her for failing to deliver.

“This was supposed to be a simple pickup job,” Zhou sighed.

“Yes, I thought so too,” the man said.

Slowly, she lowered the box and set it down upon the nearby wooden bench. The man lowered his gunblade, but he didn’t put it away in the sheath at his belt. Eying his sheath made Zhou feel a loss at the empty holster along her hip. She’d run into trouble and lost her gun on the way out here. That always seemed to be the way of things.

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“May I at least ask who it is that has made my life this much more difficult?” Zhou questioned. If she could get a name, maybe she could trace him. Perhaps she would be able to retrieve the stolen box from him before he could return it to whoever his buyer was. A part of her wondered if they had both been hired by the same client, but she dismissed this thought.

“My name is Theron,” he said as he moved to pick up the box. “Theron Spiros.”

“The bounty hunter?” Zhou asked. “I’ve heard of you.”

Theron smirked. “And, believe it or not, I’ve heard of you, Ms. Jin,” he answered. He reached down and grabbed the metal box from the chair. She knew her window of opportunity was closing quickly. If she was going to act, it would have to be with the element of surprise on her hands.

“So what’s a bounty hunter doing out here on package retrieval?”

He shrugged. “I am good at finding things. For some people, that is all that matters.”

With this, Zhou leapt forward. She kicked the box from under Theron’s arm. He spun around to face her, but by the time he did so, she had slid past him and scooped the box off the floor. He raised his gunblade at her as she ran towards the middle aisle, turning towards the door.

As she reached the center aisle, five well-armed soldiers came in through the entry. Three of them carried heavy-looking laser rifles, while the others bore huge mirrored shields and blades. Each wore thick armor and had sturdy helmets with clear visors covering their eyes. They bore the familiar insignia of a silvery fist clutching a rod. The symbol of the Knights of Selas, the local authority on Navtyi.

“I don’t suppose these Knights are with you?” Zhou whispered over to Theron. He shook his head slightly.

“Lower your weapon!” one of the Knights--the one who stood in the center--almost certainly their leader--shouted at Theron. Theron slowly lowered his arm. Zhou felt she could breathe a little easier without that thing pointed at her, although given the more impressive weapons of the Knights that were directed in her general direction, she wasn’t sure how genuine her relief should have been.

“Set the box down!” the Knight commanded Zhou.

Zhou thought for a moment, running the calculations. She nodded, raising her hands into the air slowly--keeping the box supported in her left arm.

“I said set it down!” the Knight called out.

“Oh,” Zhou said. “I’m sorry I misunderstood. Do you mean like this?” she chucked the box with as much force as she could muster at the end of the room farthest from the door. It landed with a loud and hollow thud on the stage at the front of the room.

While the Knights were trying to process this, Zhou ran at the box and kicked it as hard as she could. It went soaring into the stained glass window, shattering it, and causing Zhou to thank her parents for making her get into sports all those years ago.

She charged forwards, towards the new exit that she had made from the temple. Behind her, she could hear one of the benches topple over as Theron leapt upon it and began to charge after her. The Knights with laser rifles began to fire at her. She hoped it was just stun-fire, but one could never be sure these days. She ducked down as she ran, the laser fire barely missing her head.

As she reached the shattered window, she looked down. It was a four meter drop to rough gravel below. Not the most ideal landing spot, but she’d had worse. She jumped out the window, bending her knees inward and putting her arms over her head to shield herself. A gust of wind caught Zhou as she fell, twisting her in the air. Her left side collided with the ground. If she hadn’t been wearing long clothes that covered most of her skin, she probably would have been cut up pretty bad. As it was, there were now a few rips in the side of her long brown coat. She would have to worry about that later.

She forced herself up, grabbing the golden box off the ground as she did so, and pushed herself to move amid the buildings of the ruined town. Most of the town had been turned to ashes long ago. All that remained of most of the structures were parts of the ground stained black. Those that did stand were made of the strongest stone, like the temple. The temple, in the center of town, maintained most of its structure, while the outer buildings were all crumbling and decrepit.

Still, they made decent cover for her to hide in while Theron and the Knights hunted for her. After weaving through enough of the ruins that she felt it was relatively safe, she brought up the display on Psifiak again. The portal was almost ready for the jump. She braced herself as suddenly, there was a loud crack and the wall beside her burst apart.

Theron stepped through the hole in the wall, pointing his gunblade at her.

“You’re too late,” Zhou insisted.

He saw Psifiak on her wrist and frowned. “I promise that I will find you. I will hunt you down.”

There was a flash of darkness. Zhou felt like she, and all the air around her were suddenly smashed together, all to one point, and then almost immediately stretched and ripped outward in all directions. Every muscle in her body strained as much as it could. Tears streamed across her face. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart pounded fiercely against her chest. Pain wracked its way through her whole body.

Then it was over. Panting, she fell upon her knees on the cool grass of a different world. She continued to sob in pain and disorientation while it seemed like the whole world was spinning at intense speeds.

“Portal closed,” Psifiak said on her arm. “Welcome to Axpin.”

Zhou coughed, tried to stand, lost her balance, and fell back to the ground. She spat on the ground, expecting it to be blood. She was pleasantly surprised.

“Perhaps in the future, you will remain stationary throughout the portal formation process,” Psifiak said.

While Zhou understood that remaining still through the process would reduce the negative effects, it still felt awful. Not to mention that she would have been shot by Theron if she had done that.

She found that she was kneeling on a grassy hill overlooking a village consisting primarily of wooden structures. Red and blue streaks could be seen hanging in the sky like giant scratches against the atmosphere. She shivered to look at them.

“Let’s just find our contact and get this deal over with,” Zhou sighed. “I hate small back-water worlds.” She removed the band that Psifiak was on, pulled up her sleeve, and replaced it on her arm, covering up the electronic device with her sleeve instead of having it on top. Psifiak wasn’t the sort of tech that people in this world would be used to. It’d be the sort of thing that might get her labeled as some sort of heretic and killed, depending on what the superstitions of the world were like.

“I thought that you were fond of the freedom provided by border worlds outside of the domain of the Sparkling Band,” Psifiak pointed out, its voice muffled by the sleeve of Zhou’s long coat.

“That’s fair,” Zhou said. “But those are Outer Circle worlds. Nobody wants to be in Inner Circle worlds. Especially not this close to the Calamity.”