Ch. 10 Legacy Protocol
Over and over I smash the sentries to pieces and over and over more show up. After what I just knew had to be like number fifty I notice the rubble on the floor is glowing an eerie green color. The broken piece by piece scattered all across the room then start to hiss and all of a sudden, the statues begin reassembling themselves piece by piece in rapid succession. “Oh, come on, really !!!” I roar with great frustration. In fact, the only thing more concerning than this increasingly one-sided battle is the strange glances I keep getting from the statue that looked like my mother. I don’t know when but at some point, she had made her way to the glass window overlooking the training room. Now every few moments she would stare at me and then the window then me again, and then the window again and back at me. I parry a great sword with the broken arm of a fallen sentry. Then I prevent an axe from lobbing off my head. A little later I use a halberded to skewer a group of them that I had somehow managed to line up just right, and ram them into a wall. Eventually however I succumb to the worry of the worst-case scenario, of my family falling in battle. I glance over to the window for only a brief moment and that’s all it takes for me to be sent barreling into a wall by a club.
I stumble back through the broken wall only to collapse again gripping my side. The sentries surround me and approach slowly. They make way for the freckled one and she leisurely sashays towards me triumphantly. I role over pain staking and grab a nearby tanto but when I try to stand for a second time I fail again. Unable to get up I just point the blade of the tanto at the freckled one’s face in defiance. I know in my mind it might be over but, in my heart, I refuse to yield. I refused to go down without the answers of my family’s past, the reason for my life’s drastic turn, or the dreams I have unrelated to the latter. The freckled sentry begins to steady her spear preparing for a final cold and calculated thrust straight to my heart. Just as she is rearing back I think, no I can’t, I won’t. Volcanically familiar yet uncomfortable churning starts to brew from the depths of my soul and just like back at the house a white-hot wave of light erupts from my body. I don’t lose consciousness this time but even, so I am forced to shut my eyes. I don’t fully understand how I did it but won’t complain about the results. A split second later and I’d be off to the great beyond. When I opened my eyes, I saw the after math. All the sentries had been broken to bits except for two. My mom’s stone replica who was furthest away when my inner bomb went off and the freckled one now on the floor, beside her. I can only assume that the initial force blew her back there enabling her to escape full incineration unlike the rest. Fortunately, not before she lost both legs and her spear arm. Regardless, she refused to let this stop her and like the terminator she began dragging herself towards me with her one remaining arm. I try to get up a third time and it goes even worse than the last s the energy I just miraculously expelled has drained me to the brink. Now, the shear thought of rising up causes me to see spots. My breathing has worsened and with every inhalation I can feel my ribs poking something it shouldn’t. Instead I decide to just wait as I gather up every ounce of will I have left to move just my arm one more time in hopes to ram this tanto right into its head. I’m exhausted and sore not only from the battle and the training but from the sheer stress of it all. I feel my vision getting hazy and I struggle to stay focused on the freckled face terminator as she approaches. Finally, after a long while of fighting myself to stay tuned into the present and not let my mind drift from the pain. She drags herself within range, and it’s time for our final showdown. The pain is excruciating as spots again begin to form in my path of vision when I attempt to raise my arm. It protests loudly by sending even more pain signals to my brain and shakes vehemently but, atlas obeys my command. She reaches for my throat after pulling herself even closer using my leg. I know it was a strong grip from the imprint on my ankle but fortunately for me it was kind of numb, at the moment. My will has reached its ceiling, so I let gravity handle the rest. With the tanto raised as high as I can muster the weight of it plus my arm come swinging down. It all comes down to a split second. Either her hand will crush my throat, or the blade will split her skull. I feel the very tip of the tanto touch down on her head making contact first. I also feel the sense of her fingers just a couple millimeters from my skin like when a kid pretends to poke another kid and they swear they can feel it, but no contact is made. However, neither of us gain any ground because I also realize at that moment that we are both being held in place. I force myself to look up and to my surprise I see the sentry that looked like my mother. She has one hand gripping my wrist and the other on the wrist of her almost identical twin in a way that places her face just inches from mine. A wide red light shoots out of her eyes right into mine and then pans across my entire body. “Secondary program complete. Update complete. Scan complete. Analysis complete. Authorization granted”. What are you talking about? I say with blurry vision. She moves my arm to the side before letting go but retains the grip on her twin while stepping back to take a knee, pulling her along. Three holograms appear in the air after which she then says something to the effect of, display secondary previsions. One of the videos shown is a split screen comparison of me fighting the stone sentries and Thomas my adoptive father. He teaches a little boy with a black eye who looked like he’d been in a school yard fight, how to throw a proper punch. After a moment of seeming to have nothing in common both screens zoom in while the video slows down revealing perfect synchronization between the two of us. Even in my weakened stat I can see the resemblance is uncanny. Everything from the form and the facial expression, to the muscle use and protruding veins are a spot-on as we throw a series of combos.
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When the series is completed the video starts over and is highlighted by a green
checkmark. The other two multi-screen holograms play simultaneously and repeatedly as well. Once, only spans a few seconds and after seeing it once I further confirm that the boy is me. The video is like an enhanced version of one of those missing children’s programs that accelerate the aging of the child to what they might look like now. Only this one literally times lapses the boy into me. All the stats of the little me and the current me are listed in two columns n the right f the scaled avatar under the words “Then and Now”. This includes age, height, and body type, weight, fat to muscle ratio, blood type, hair style, and even the size of a part of me I’d prefer to not be listed in any database. In spite of my masterful utilization of that articular part of my anatomy. The last hologram is broken into three pieces starring Ace, mom, and me with each of us taking up an equal third of the space. Clips of the battle in the training room as seen through the guardian’s eyes scroll across both of their channels while a loading bar fills across the one that simply shows my face a double helix underneath. When the bar is filled it reads, “Bio magical circuits and biometrics analyzed. Confirmed. Aaron Andrews demi-god hybrid, legacy access granted. Welcome son of Apollo and Luana Hunter. I paused for a second and thought you’ve got to be shitting me, pardon my French as I come to read the very bottom of the screen.
Codename: Nimrod
Badge type: Dog Tag
Synchronizing: Error Corrected
Location: Present
Updated: 1 minute ago
Last Used: 2011
In other words, I just about died because someone didn’t get the memo and the key was around my neck. Talk about poor planning. I’ve never been sooo glad…. that this apple didn’t roll too far from the tree, so as to not recognize me.