A wind was skimming over the waters. A soft, cool wind that made the surface dance. The clouds were sparking above, and the reflections combined with small ripples to create a beautiful illusion – like a shining city built by ancient stars, just beneath the surface.
It would have, Muckrake thought, been an amazing last sight before he died.
But it was not to be. A heavy boot splashed down, smashing the imaginary city apart as it sank into the mud, clouding the water. “Orders, boss?”
That morning, Muckrake had left Horrible Swamp with fifteen hardened warriors; beloved clan brothers under his command for a routine patrol, sweeping the edge of the swamp for intruders. Now, his one remaining warrior looked at him, and asked for orders.
Muckrake dragged his head up, the burned mess of his right shoulder complaining at the movement, and looked the man in the face. Flow-Rider wasn’t very easy to look at, at the moment; there was a long cut bisecting his face, all the way from his forehead down through his mouth, only stopping where his chin met his neck. But his eyes were clear and alert, and Muckrake could see that he understood the situation.
Rider knew they would die. And he knew that Muckrake knew.
The sparks above continued to dance, reflected now in the wide black pupils of his one warrior’s eyes. One warrior and a Warboss, against thirty enemies – enemies that had already crushed fourteen of them, minutes earlier? Winning wasn’t on the table… But giving them a black eye, a single spiteful wound to remember them?
Muckrake lifted his right arm and the metal staff it held. What should have been an effortless action was nearly impossible, as what little muscle buried beneath the char the enemy had made of his right side strained to the breaking point. He looked at the smooth metal pole with a triangular plate bolted to the top, and smiled crookedly, part of his jaw hanging loose.
One good hit, they could do.
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It was just a little bit ironic, Muckrake thought, that he would fail against warriors of the Junk Dog Clan. Junk Dog, rather than being known for the might of their warriors like Clan Metal Tooth, or the potency of their techniques like Tall Mountain or his own Horrible Swamp, were miners. Miners of Junk, hence their name.
It was actually quite embarrassing that he had lost to them, even outnumbered. Junk Dog was famous, or perhaps infamous, for the weakness of their warriors. A man of Horrible Swamp, even an unbloodied warrior knowing a single unrefined technique, would house in his body the power of five men of Junk Dog. That was the difference in quality between their clans.
Of course, there was a reason they hadn’t been wiped out by any of their neighbours. Junk, a constant stream of it flowing up out of the Great Junk Pit, carried out into the world by the Junk Dog Clan.
Firearms that never ran out of bullets; bowls that held incredible amounts of water; glass lenses that saw distant lands, or far into the past, or even stranger things. That was Junk, the discarded miracles buried deep by an unknown, perhaps unknowable civilization.
Of course, Junk Dog was not the only clan to use Junk. Other clans mined as well, and all clans took from their neighbours the spoils of battle. Horrible Swamp was no exception, and Muckrake held one of Horrible Swamp’s great treasures even now, clutched in something that could no longer be called a hand.
Something which had almost certainly been held by Junk Dog in the past, was now turned against them.
The Escort Rod. Not-quite-free, not-quite-infinite teleportation. This was the tool that had allowed him and Rider to flee the ambush, and it would be the tool that would allow their own ambush any chance of success. With a small trickle of his own power, the Rod could move him – and as many others as he could bear; he had once moved fifty warriors, though the strain had nearly killed him – many hundreds of metres in any direction. In addition the Rod was, to his experience, completely indestructible. The blast that had burnt away much of his body had left not the slightest mark on it, nor had any attack ever done so. Bullets, beams of light, and balls of fire had all equally been turned aside by the flat yellow triangle of metal adorning the Rod’s head.
An amazing tool and weapon, which the clan had gifted to him for his great strength, and which would be returned to the clan with his death.
There was a tiny part of him, the smallest voice in his head, that whispered betrayal. To take the Rod and simply leave. To abandon Horrible Swamp.
But that voice was weak, easily drowned by the terrible twin screams of duty and vengeance, and so he clenched what remained of his fist around the smooth metal, and planned how he would die.
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There were exactly twenty-eight enemy warriors that Flow-Rider Son of Heavy Water could sense, and all of them were weaker than him. Much weaker. It was infuriating, that even a single of his brothers had fallen to these wastes of flesh. Deep in his torso his spiritual stomach worked to digest the mud he had swallowed, breaking it down into the purified power of earth and water, replenishing the well of strength in his body. A well which was larger than the four strongest enemies combined!
Even a dozen metres under ground and water he could feel them, their internal energies completely uncamouflaged by the swamp, an obvious foreign presence. Four thought/movement/energy and four wind/sky; psychokinetics and Cloud-Touchers, all eight floating in the sky. Ten pure fire, and ten a mix of fire, self, and wind; Holy Smoke Knights mixed in with weak infantry.
Theoretically, the warriors of Horrible Swamp should have been able to destroy them almost without effort. The knights’ fire and heavy armor should have been easily countered by water techniques empowered by the surrounding wetland, and the Cloud-Touchers’ lightning and wind dispersed into the earth. Without support, the kinetics’ big, slow waves of force would have been easily manoeuvred around, and their fragile bodies crushed.
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But one factor had morphed what should have been easy victory into crushing defeat.
Equipment. Not only were the ground infantry in full plate with rifles, but the majority of them seemed to be Junk, a ridiculous fortune to outfit such an otherwise weak force. Truly powerful weapons and armor were rare; a large clan might have perhaps twenty good pieces all together, with two or three times that in mediocre stuff little better than mundane equipment. The force above him was carrying years and years worth of mining expeditions, generations of carefully hoarded strength. It made absolutely no sense.
This amount of Junk should have only been brought out in a real push to subjugate a clan, not held by a force numbering less than thirty. Even if they caught a dozen more patrols unaware, the moment the bulk of Horrible Swamp turned their way, they would be crushed under a tide of warriors. Killing a hundred, even a thousand of Horrible Swamp wasn’t worth the risk of losing this much Junk, because then it would be Horrible Swamp’s Junk. And then-
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of his Warboss. He appeared completely silently, not causing even a ripple in the mud they were buried in, as though he had been there the whole time.
Flow-Rider could both sense his Warboss and see him clearly, his understanding and internalization of the powers of water and earth extending his senses beyond the physical flesh of his body, and he could tell that Muckrake had not recovered even slightly from his injuries. A Warboss of his power should have been able to shrug off this amount of damage, burning power to rapidly regenerate and build new muscles. But even though his store of energy was full to bursting – with the complex energy of swamp, so similar yet distinct to his own separated earth and water – his right side was still burned down to the bone from the hip up.
“Are you ready?” Muckrake’s speech was barely even a noise, but Rider understood him clearly. He nodded.
His Warboss closed his eyes, and Rider felt the familiar sensation of connecting to the Escort Rod. He tensed, in a moment he would be-
He was among the enemy, a knight in steel plate directly in front of him, facing away. His arm shot out, a speck of earth manifested in his palm. A minuscule burst of power, less than a hundredth his full strength, and the knight’s head was snapped off like a dry twig, flying away with his helmet still intact.
So weak. The thought wasn’t prideful, or even arrogant. It was ashamed. These weak men had killed his brothers, were about to kill him, and the knowledge that he would take some of them to the Deadworlds with him did little to wipe away the humiliation.
The enemy was responding quickly; a bolt of lightning lanced through him from above, but it didn’t stop him from killing two more warriors in the span of a breath. He felt a mass of kinetics approach from the side, a giant’s fist enclosing him, and dropped straight down into the swamp.
As he swam through the waterlogged ground, he felt Muckrake scything into the enemy, a burst of power in one spot, then another, then another.
In the time it had taken him to kill three enemies, the Warboss had killed twelve. Half-way done.
But if the warriors of Junk Dog were perturbed by the deaths of their brothers, if they hesitated for even a moment, Rider was not aware of it. Another mass of kinetic energy ripped the ground away around him, and a beam of fire flashed in to sear him to ash.
A shroud of water blunted the terrible force wrenching his body apart, but failed to block the fire even slightly; a Junk weapon, not a normal fire technique. He slipped away through a tunnel of water, down an arm and a full quarter of his spiritual power.
But the Warboss had never hesitated either, and the enemy were down to a handful, eight, six, fi-
A knight, the one with the Junk weapon that took his arm, brought his fists together and suddenly he was empty, his stomach was completely empty, his muscles and fat and bones were without even a shred of power and he couldn’t sense anything.
The Warboss dropped, the two remaining airborne enemies dropped, none of them capable of flight anymore, the knight’s arms had come apart like rotten wood when he did whatever he had done and they were so close, there were so few of them left, there’s only two of them standing we can win this-
A gun was pointing at him so he charged and something hit him but then he was biting down, the Dog was trying to scream but his throat was gone and there was one left, only one weakling between him and glory.
Rider was aware of the pain, of his missing arm and what was at least two bullet wounds in his midsection, but battle-lust had swallowed him whole and that awareness was far away, unimportant.
The last infantryman shot him once, and then Rider pushed him down under the water. His helmet wouldn’t deform no matter how hard it was struck, but the Dog was as empty as he was and eventually drowned.
Now, all that was left were a psychokinetic and a fat cloud-boy, equally useless without their techniques. Rider took a step, then one more, then he was breathing water.
He had fallen down. His body had nothing left, he was starving to death and bleeding out, and now he would die to a fat, weak Dog who was so unused to standing on the ground he could barely walk. The man was teetering forward like a newborn, like he had literally never had to support his body’s weight before, but his arms were more thickly muscled and he had managed to keep hold of his rifle as he fell.
Flow-Rider pushed the mud with his one arm, and pushed his stomach with his spirit. Take my arm, my legs, take everything but just give me something, one bit of power so I can end this-
It wasn’t working: he was trying to draw water from an empty well, start a fire by heating ashes. If he had had anything, a single drop or speck of energy, he could have used it to digest portions of his own flesh and jumpstart a technique.
But whatever the knight had done had drained him completely, and now the physical damage was fatal.
The fat Dog was near, would be within arm’s reach if he could move his arms. The rifle was aimed directly at him, and Rider could only hope that he could keep his head up, that he could look his death in the eye right up to the end. He wished he had the strength to say his name, so the warrior would know who he killed.
The Dog squeezed the trigger. A disproportionate noise, louder than any gun or cannon that Rider had ever heard, exploded less than a metre from his ears. Rider was deafened, blinded even, by the sheer vibration.
Moments passed. More. He remembered he had eyes, a head, a body. The fat dog was still there, but another figure was between them.
Muckrake was there, slumped, the Rod still imbedded in the char of his right hand, the head blocking Rider’s view of the Dog’s rifle.
Oh, Rider thought, he must have blocked the bullet.
Another moment passed silently, none of them moving. There’s no way he only had one bullet, why isn’t he moving?
Then, Rider caught the look on the Dog’s face. His eyes were wide, his jaw tensed, his neck trying to retract into his shoulders. He was staring at the Rod, with a mix of confusion and fear. Rider couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of the Rod’s head, but whatever it was must be very… interesting.
Everything was soft and far away. Rider loses track of time as everything blurs, and when he snaps back the Dog is running, sprinting away on his barely functional legs.
He still can’t see what scared the man, but he thinks he can hear it. A whine, like a bug in his ear, growing louder.
A noise like a gunshot, but drawn out; almost like the call of a strange bird. Part of the Rod has shattered, like glass. The shards of yellow metal are completely detached from the rest of it, but aren’t falling. They float in the air, fragmenting further in directions he can’t quite keep track of.
More of the gunshot-but-wrong sounds. He knows that he should be alarmed, should try to get away from whatever this is, but he’s tired. The muck is soft. A small rivulet of blood drifts past, near his eye, and it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen.
The noise is constant now, the head of the Rod has completely fragmented, splinters of yellow metal flashing in directions he can’t understand. Everything is falling away from him, the water and the earth and Muckrake’s corpse and the Dog are all moving, all going away to a place he isn’t. Parts are intersecting with other parts and the last thing he thinks before the lights blink out is I hope we got all of them, Muckrake would want that.
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On the eighth day of the cold season, near the southeastern edge of the Horrible Swamp, a section of the world fell away, and a section of another fell back in. Two warriors met a group of twenty-eight, and then disappeared, leaving no evidence of their battle.
The only trace that anything had occurred in that spot at all, would be a smooth rod of metal, completely immovable, and a set of strange footprints leading into the swamp.