The mind-reader drifted through the wall of frozen shimmery air, the art parting over him like he was a dolphin cutting through a wave. And like a wave, it came back together seamlessly once the obstruction was past. The bastard was smiling, as he often was; a slight smirk that somehow made his alien visage seem familiar.
Bull wasn’t sure if it was genuine or not. Even with all the times he’s interrogated me, I still don’t know much about his personality. He didn’t even know the man’s name, only his title.
“Bull! Always a pleasure.” His crushed-gravel voice, so at odds with his appearance, had a cadence like he had unexpectedly bumped into a friend while out and about. Does he know how inappropriate that is, and he’s mocking me? Or is he just mimicking something he pulled out of my – or Lu’s – head? “I have a special message for you today, my friend.”
Bull’s rage stoked itself. It built up in his head, a furnace gradually coming alive as the fire burned hotter and hotter. “Oh?”
“Yes. I wasn’t sure if I would give it to you or not, but… I’m interested to see what you make of it. Here,” he drew something out from behind his back and presented it. It was a small scroll, bound with a length of string. “It was quite long, so I took the liberty of writing it down for you.”
Bull eyed the scroll. A trap? No, probably not. He could have killed me any number of times, since he brought me here. The rationale felt flimsy, but he didn’t exactly have many options; either he took the scroll, or he didn’t. And not taking it won’t get me anything. If it is a trap, he’ll just spring it on me anyway.
For the first time since he had woken up that morning, Bull uncurled from his meditative pose and stood up. There was a slight tightness in his joints, but it would soon pass; though he was mortal, it would take a lot more than a few weeks in a cell to damage his peak condition body. He walked confidently over to his captor, and snatched the scroll from his hand without hesitating.
The man’s smile didn’t waver.
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Morelli watched the grandmaster and his prisoner, buffeted by waves of alternating confidence and anxiety from his partner. They hit him and bounced off, like little balls of slimy glue just failing to stick. “Guts, could you not?”
Eats-Only-Guts turned to him, then back to the show, such as it was. [I can’t help it. It’s so intense!] His wrinkled body and fat jowls quivered with emotion.
Whatever he was observing, it was opaque to Morelli. “What, you think the grandmaster’s going to get attacked?”
The man shook his head vigorously. [No. Maybe?] He sent something slippery and complicated that Morelli couldn’t unravel, and he sighed. They had known each other for nearly half a season now, and Guts still sometimes forgot his grasp of telepathy was functionally non-existent. [The Bull is angry, really angry. But every time I think he’s gonna move, he pulls it back. It’s like watching a sharpie shimmy across a narrow beam – I don’t know if he’s gonna splat or not!]
“Are you sure? He doesn’t look angry to me.” His face wasn’t exactly like a warrior’s, but if Morelli had passed him in a tunnel he wouldn’t have given him a second look. It was hard to believe he was actually an alien. “He’s just reading whatever’s on that paper. Looks calm, even.”
[He’s not! He’s really, really not!] Guts was nearly on the tips of his toes, almost touching the psychic barrier he was leaning so far forward.
Morelli’s carapace made a faint scraping sound as he shook his head. “Well, have fun with that. I’m going to stand over here, just in case you’re not full of shit.” Don’t want to be in the splash zone, after all.
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It wasn’t a map, though it was similar. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say directions, though it wasn’t directing the reader in any particular direction. If you wanted to be as accurate as possible, you would say it was a coded message describing landmarks in relation to each other.
But even that wasn’t quite right; there was extra information here, encoded as single letters between the strings of numerals that would mark out points in space. Extra information that Bull was very carefully not decoding, not while there was a mind-reader in the room.
“Huh. You know, I was waiting for this exact message.” He quirked a brow. “You see this bunch of gibberish here? Super useful, you have no idea.” His voice was faux-polite, hiding faux-sarcasm. It probably wouldn’t be enough, the telepath had seen through him before, but there was no reason to make it easy for him. “Yeah, thanks for passing this along.” In his head, he was trying very hard to be genuinely confused.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“There’s no need for that, Sir Bull. I know it’s a set of directions.”
Where did you even get this? There was no way the man had gotten Steadfast Heart codes out of him; he hadn’t thought about them once.
“My black-cloaked friends gave it to me. Apparently Lu wanted you to have it.”
His vision narrowed to a squint. He didn’t have to fake the skepticism. Does Lu even know the codes? “And you just decided to give it to me? Out of the goodness of your heart?” And don’t call me that. I’ll rip your throat out.
The Mudworlder’s smile widened a touch. “As I said, I wanted to know if your reading would match mine. And what does it matter, if you know where you are? Assuming you escape…” An awkward shrug, his alien joints giving the motion an unfamiliar air. “Then it’s no business of mine where you end up. Honestly, I bear you no ill will; that you in particular are here in this place is simple happenstance.”
This was something that the man did on occasion, try to convince Bull that they hadn’t any enmity. He didn’t buy it for a single moment. “Sure. We’re good friends, you and I.” His Path stoked and stoked. He felt like he was brushing Heaven with his fingertips, like if he could just reach a few millimetres more he would be able to block off his mind at will.
The smile widened even more. “Of course we are. We know so many things about each other, how could we not be?” He turned, and for a second his Path snapped its jaws – again, you turn your naked back to me?
But he held it, not snuffing it out but merely nodding along without letting it move him. Not now, not the same way twice. He’ll be guarding his back, even if I can’t sense it.
He gave the man a jaunty wave as he watched him go. “Well, see you later. Always enjoy our talks.”
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Bull waited for an hour before he allowed himself to remember he had an escape plan. Fuck, that was close. Hopefully it was merely close, and not completely blown open by that damned telepathy. Am I even hiding anything at all? He couldn’t tell; sometimes the man seemed to respond directly to his thoughts, and other times he seemed frustrated and confused. I’ll assume he didn’t hear the most important bits. Not much I can do otherwise, anyway.
Lobster and Shaved Cat were doing their routine, with Shaved Cat pressing up against the translucent wall like a child looking in an aquarium, and Lobster standing back with his arm-claws crossed. They made a very strange pair – most of the guards did, something that Bull felt was probably intentional. People with different specialties, paired up to cover each other’s weaknesses.
It was the source of that one-in-a-thousand chance his plan wouldn’t work. That either he was wrong about how their arts worked, or that whoever was scheduling guard rotations would notice those two too-similar people in the same slot and move things around. But he didn’t let any doubts fester; either it would work, or it wouldn’t.
The only thing to do was wait for morning. I'll have to make a try of it, even if I'm wrong about how the guard's abilities work. Whatever game that fucker is playing, I've had enough of it; I'll ram right through the mindgames, before he even realises what's happened.
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Sand-Blasted Steel wouldn’t say he liked guard duty, but neither would he say he disliked it. It was just… There. Something that had to be done, so why not do it himself? The alien, or whatever he was, wasn’t interesting enough to make it engaging, but it also didn’t involve anything strenuous. He could just stand in place for a few hours, and get fed for it.
At least, that was how it usually was. Today, he would be paired with Josephson IV, and he could almost feel the tension as they walked next to each other down the narrower-than-he-remembered passage. Meeting up at the mouth of the long tunnel had been unplanned; he had hoped to get there early, to avoid this exact situation, but apparently his rival had thought the same. Now here he was, flexing his power, forced to lock steps with the man so as not to appear either cowed or rushed.
When he had seen their names next to each other on the board, he had nearly asked to be put in a later slot – but in the end, hunger had won out. His body needed fuel, and guard duty was efficient. He would just have to put up with it – and at least he could fight the man right afterward. Exactly, think positive. He’s gonna be gassed after a full shift, way more than me. I’ll be able to take him out easy. Their dueling record was frustratingly back-and-forth, but he was confident he would pull ahead in the long run. Joeism was a dead end, a primitive religion that glorified reversion to base flesh; it might be powerful, but there was no innovation. Nowhere to go.
His own consumption was much better. Forward, not back. They passed Fireblessed, not bothering to break eye contact to greet him as they passed. The man was basically furniture for how much presence he had.
The void passed over them, and a moment later the darkness broke out into a stark lack, somehow seeming even colder and darker than the nothingness they had passed through. They gave one last flex at each other, before moving to conserve energy for the long hours of the morning shift. Steel snorted, gearing up for a dominance test with vision alone – but then something moved in the corner of his eye. He looked away from his brother, turning to examine the prisoner as Joe IV did the same.
It wasn’t anything too interesting, the alien was just standing a ways away… But something tweaked his instincts. The fires of war had sharpened his battle intuition, and something about the way the guy was standing said…
Hostile. “Joe, go right-“
He didn’t get to finish it. The prisoner bounded towards them, and somehow, despite spending weeks in this hollow empty place, an aura of darkness coalesced around his right fist as it punched into the barrier. The telekinetically stilled air resisted for a hanging moment, before the foreign warrior burst through.
Electricity and psychic energy filled Steel’s veins, while his brother gave off waves of pure power, his muscles tensing.
They were about as close to fully sated as it was possible to be; nobody showed up to guard duty with an empty stomach, not even the boss. “Stupid. You should have waited for us to get hungry!”