The inside of Instructor Macbeth’s Humvee was unsurprisingly spacious and Seth sat beside the man, doing his best not to make eye contact. The window on the car doors where tinted in blackness so thick they might as well have been driving in the night and there would’ve been no difference. It was enough to keep the sunlight away and watchful eyes from without from staring within. However, it allowed enough vision to watch what happened outside the vehicle.

Having had only a single real friend most of his life, conversation was not one of Seth’s forte. Conversations with strangers was even worse. And while Instructor Macbeth was to be something of an acquaintance with him in the long run, he couldn’t picture himself getting to know the man any better. So Seth kept his mouth shut and thought of ways he could learn to absorb a soul fragment by his first holiday.

He knew the basics about the souled but knew nothing of soul magic. Strangely enough the souled never spoke of it, as if by the simplest logic of gaining one they were somehow compelled to an oath of silence.

His father said nothing on the subject despite how many times he asked. His mother was as loose lipped as his father in this regard. Even her condescension which usually reared its pompous head on subjects such as these with a dying need to educate those she was better than—including her own children—was absent. Derek that couldn’t keep a secret to save his life had suddenly learned the art of secrecy, and Jeremy was technically in a worse boat than Seth.

Seth considered asking Macbeth a question or two, poking the waters to see what fish would sprout, but decided against it.

He could talk, say a few words, strike up a conversation, but it would bring nothing but discomfort. He didn’t need the stress, not right now. So rather than ponder on the infinite possibilities of the future, he stared outside and watched the trees go by, each one as uninteresting to him as the one before and the one after.

It was the only reason he saw the priest.

The man stood at the side of the road a good distance ahead of them. He was a rare sight. At first Seth had thought him perhaps a priest of one of the many churches, but his lack of an emblem of any kind stood in disagreement with this. Then his mind had tried to convince him he was seeing wrong. After all, priests of the seminary—the only ones rumored to bear no insignia—were a rare breed. They were known but rarely ever seen. The only time they came into the open was in the event of a world crack or a fissure. However, this man simply stood there, shrouded in the sun and unfazed by what Seth believed to be a hot day.

His cassock was midnight black, as if woven by faeries hidden in old fantasies. It looked as though they had taken the darkness and crafted it into clothing for him. There was neither glossiness to it nor a reflection from the light of the sun of any kind. In fact, it stood in opposition to the light of the sun as if absorbing every single ray in an attempt to drown out all light.

It took Seth the barest moment to remember he was looking through a tinted glass that might be the reason the man’s clothes gave him this impression before he turned to Macbeth and asked, “Is that a real priest?”

Macbeth turned in time to see the man as their car passed him, and Seth only had enough time to see panic cloud the instructor’s face before morphing into terror when a loud boom erupted from beside him.

With it came an explosion of pain as something pierced him. Seth knew the door had caved in on his side but didn’t have much time to think. His mind focused, cataloguing events around him as the car tumbled end over end. He felt the chaos as much as he heard it. The rumbling of sheered metal as the vehicle bounced. The sound of roaring men as they held on for dear life. At some point his head struck something hard and he felt something warm against it. His body told him he was injured but his mind drew his attention to something else.

You should’ve worn your seat belt.

He thought he heard a smirk even in his own thoughts before his consciousness gave out.

…………………………….

Jabari knew the sun was scorching just as he knew the ground beneath his feet was covered in dirt and grass; it was knowledge and nothing more.

He had no memories of when last he had truly felt such things as heat and chill. He had no recollection of ever falling ill and none of ever being truly strained. He’d fought people within the span of his long life and knew there were those stronger still.

Jabari’s mind wandered to the concept of sensations as it always did and he was forced to pull it back to the here and now. When he was alone with nothing to focus on, he allowed his mind wander, every single fracture of it, split into a seeming endlessness as they were. For now, he needed all of them focused on the task ahead.

He’d met a soul artist once upon a time who had learned of his mind. Oddly, the man had thought to name it as though it was a soul path. He still remembered the name as vividly as the day the man had mentioned it: the path of the endless paths.

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It was an oxymoron in a way, but he had not opposed it. After all, the truth the man had never been able to understand was that he had no path, endless or otherwise. Still, he had not challenged it. He had allowed the man his myriad of eccentricities up until the day he had driven his hand through the man’s core.

In the present, Jabari stood on the path of fate and waited.

The vehicles came no more than fifteen minutes after he had taken his spot. He watched them in their ocean blue as they blazed a trail down the dusty road, trees of varying shapes and sizes flanking them on each path.

His senses were naturally withdrawn but Jabari placed an extra veil over himself so that to the sense of a soul mage he was nothing more than an unimportant piece of rock.

Soul mages relied too much on their reia senses, depending on it to know what was happening around them. Their more human senses were kept for mundane tasks such as identifying with specificity what they had noted. His intentions for the boy in the green vehicle would see to it that he did not fall into such a subconscious handicap.

When the first car passed Jabari, it was accompanied by a gust of wind. The force caused his cassock to flutter and nothing else. The next two cars did the same. While he waited for the fourth car to follow the same monotony, he measured his power, keeping his reia away from his feet. He trapped his reia at the center of his abdomen where all soul artists held the idea of their cores. Then he pulled its cycle in reverse so that it obeyed and drew his reia in. Reia would do him no good for now.

When the fourth car passed, he stepped out of the cavalcade of trees and into the open. He knew the moment the boy’s eyes had accounted for him. It was moments before the first car had passed. He also knew the moment the boy brought someone else’s attention to him. He felt it in the reia of the world as much as he saw it. But it didn’t matter. The boy had been too late, and had he pointed him out from the moment he’d seen him it would have made no difference.

With a body void of reia save the pit of his stomach, Jabari stepped out into the open as the vehicle containing the boy passed him. He saw the panicked terror on the instructor’s face, cowardly for a man at the peak of gold in this world where Barons reigned at the top. Regardless, he would be nothing but a casualty no matter the decision he made.

With a sigh, Jabari raised his leg and kicked the passing vehicle.

The force sent the car flying to the side. It broke away from the convoy as it flipped on itself continuously. Reinforced as it was, he watched it crash through several trees, each one making a deeper dent than the other, before settling in a chaos of sheered metal and broken glass. Sixty years ago there would’ve been smoke at the site of the crash, but these vehicles used too little petrol now. It left the crash site without smoke.

The cars ahead squealed to curved halts. Soldiers poured out of them in what was nothing short of an orderly frenzy.

The cars that had been behind came up short almost immediately.

None of it surprised Jabari. He had seen their actions long before they had thought them. He knew when the first brake was pumped and when the last was released.

One of the cars stopped before him. In response to its presence, Jabari reached out. He took the door by the handle and pushed forward, bending it inward. He stepped to the side after this and took a step back.

A thunderous boom exploded a moment after and he watched a bullet of tainted gold whiz past him where his head had been mere moments before. Reia steel, he noted. An abomination born when steel had reia forcefully infused into it. It was a weapon that could only be crafted by the hands of at least a Baron. A putrid thing for sure, but one humans had created, unsurprisingly. Since it served to hunt soul beasts just as easily, Jabari had never held it against them. But they were rare and cost too much in resources and finances. Simple bullets would’ve been a cheaper choice.

The first man out of the car took one look at Jabari’s cassock and rushed him, guns blazing.

Jabari stepped behind the car in front of him as the soldier made a mad dash at him. The air rang with the avid booming of a semi-automatic and the rancor of metal on metal as the bullets drilled unsuccessful holes in the side of the vehicle.

Jabari extended his attention, picking out his opponents as he waited behind an unnecessary cover.

Two men had died in the car he’d kicked. Macbeth, however, had done the noble thing of protecting the boy. For that, Jabari decided he would make the gold mage’s death as painless as he could. Another shot rang out close to his head and he returned his attention to the present chaos.

Three men had exited their cars, coming into full view. Two were shielded from him by the car he hid behind while one had a direct line of sight to him. Chaos was not new to him and he moved into the fray of battle with an adeptness born of years in it.

The lone soldier was not alone, apparently. In the car behind him his partner had a gun at the ready. Jabari ignored him as he moved forward, gliding forward with a promise of death. He weaved to the side with each step, evading gunfire, ducking and turning where necessary. In the space of a heartbeat the soldier was dead, his head gone from his body in a single slap.

Silver, Jabari noted as he slapped a palm into the bonnet of the car and it was blasted off into the distance, folding itself around a particularly large tree. He felt the men inside die on impact. This battle was no place for Silvers.

He turned as a bullet pinged off the breast of his cassock, and he sighed. The soldier holding the gun was visibly terrified. Jabari had a feeling it was the first time the man had seen someone survive a shot from his gun. It had been designed to fend off soul mages, to put them in the ground, just as strongly as it was designed against soul beasts. Sadly, Jabari was of an authority to render such attacks obsolete and so was his cassock.

The next two rounds came in bursts, fired more from panic than anything else. They pinged off Jabari’s cassock as their predecessor had, leaving not even a scratch. He watched horror descend on the man like the veil of darkness on a particularly starless night. It consumed the man whole and the soldier was dead before Jabari reached him.

Soul magic was not the domain of the weak, not when there existed men that could kill with a single command.

In the same fashion one soldier died after the other. Jabari cut through them, felling them like trees in a forest at the mercy of lumberjacks. He allowed a few shots, knowing none had the required power to pierce his cassock. But for every shot there was a dead soldier.

In moments, the road was covered in as much body and blood as it was covered in death. When Jabari was done, he took a deep breath he did not need and turned to the only green vehicle in the convoy.

Fate of his own choosing could only be hindered for so long.