Nothing exciting ever happens in Rushuna.
At least, that was the case before the small village in the Vash Republic had suddenly been attacked. It was a tiny town whose residents mostly kept to themselves, although they did produce a moderately-well-circulated medicine for dragonfever that kept them somewhat relevant to the rest of the country.
As Sariah stepped into the village grounds, she took a good long look at the area, ignoring the villagers as they turned to face her with curiosity. There wasn’t much of interest to observe by her (and my) judgment; it was small, quiet, peaceful, welcoming, but a little bit off-putting. It gave off the feeling that, for the villagers, it was the most comfortable, friendly place in the world, but for everyone else who visited, you would always feel like an outsider, even if the villagers didn’t intend to make you feel that way.
But Sariah Knight had not come to the village of Rushuna to make friends, she’d come to investigate. According to King Garn Chameel, the place had been attacked the day prior, and the perpetrator had not been determined, but blame had been thrown at a foreign nation, and Sariah had been called upon to try to solve the situation and, hopefully, reveal that no such act had occurred.
She’d expected to meet some kind of resistance upon showing up, seeing as how the village had, from what its residents could surmise, been sacked by outsiders, but to her pleasant surprise, she found no such thing.
In fact, almost immediately after arriving, she was approached by a friendly-looking woman who bowed her head. “Oh, welcome to Rushuna! Yer from the church, yeah?”
Sariah, clad in her Ecclesian uniform, nodded. “Yes, I’m here to investigate the attack from yesterday.”
“Ah, I figured as much! Right this way, then, hun!”
“Thank you.”
The woman explained that the damage had been largely contained around the northwestern part of the village, predominantly around one of the warehouses stationed in that quadrant. When they arrived, Sariah immediately noted to herself that the damage seemed far….rougher than she might have been expecting.
It’s not that the damage to the warehouse was especially massive, or anything, but she’d been expecting to see the place had been burned, bombed, or bshot up, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, the building seemed almost….brutalized.
There were massive gashes in the walls, like they’d been sliced by large blades, or perhaps clawed at by the talons of a mighty monster. There were numerous puncture holes spread throughout as well, but unless someone had been using a machine gun that fired billiard balls, they didn’t appear to be bullet holes.
She also couldn’t really determine any kind of purpose behind the attack, even after asking a few questions to the woman and a few other villagers nearby. “And you’re saying nothing inside was stolen?”
“Nope,” the woman said as Sariah stepped through one of the gashes to enter the warehouse. “A few crates and what have yas were damaged, but everything else is fine and dandy.”
Sariah nodded, able to confirm the woman’s statement with her own eyes. There were several crates and barrels that had been ripped apart, leaking the village’s medicine on the ground, but there were plenty more all throughout the interior that had gone untouched.
“Only the ones near the walls were hit,” she pointed out. “So this doesn’t even look deliberate….”
She returned to the outside before glancing over towards the other nearby warehouses. None of them appeared to be damaged at all, curiously. Was there something specific about this one? “And there were no witnesses, you said?”
The woman sighed, shaking her head. “‘Fraid not, hun. It was real late at night, so everyone was all tucked in.”
It was then that another of the nearby villagers decided to chime in. “My buddy Sid told me that his kid said she saw sum’n.” He pointed his hand towards a small home in the distance. “That’s his place there if you wanna ask him yerself.”
The woman scoffed, albeit in a very playful way. “Ya mean Lita? She’s an angel, but she’s always got her cute lil head in the clouds. Other day she was askin’ her mama if she could invite a talkin’ skeleton over for dinner, heehee! She’s got a big imagination, that one!”
That was all Sariah needed to hear, nodding her head and moving forward. “Thank you. I’m going to go speak with them.”
* * * *
ULTRA KNIGHT
* * * *
Pressing her hand against the wall of the church, Bianca S. Hope stepped through into the hidden room reserved for the secretive G13 branch of the Ecclesia da Ultra. As expected, she was the only one there; King Garn was likely still trying to smooth things over between the heads of state of Vash, Leotera, and Jura, Lady Raschell Quinah was on vacation getting some huge rich people party ready for her husband, Mom- er, Sariah was investigating some hick village, and the rookie was….actually, Bianca didn’t really know or care where Lance was or what he was doing.
Instead, Bianca’s focus was directed solely at her computer (as was usually the case). With the room empty and no one around to bother her, she was free to do whatever she wanted. Normally, that would mean lounging around, pigging out on junk food, and not cleaning up her messes, but today was a slight bit different.
Today, Bianca was actually motivated.
Granted, “motivated” didn’t mean “motivated to work” or otherwise be productive; “motivated to snoop around” was more appropriate in this instance.
Bianca normally had very little interest in the Ecclesia’s day-to-day goings-on, finding the church’s devotion to spreading messages about fulfilling one’s potential and self-actualizing to be a pain in the balls and outrageously corny, but recent events had sparked her curiosity. Namely, Sariah’s frustrated search into a supposed artifact thief.
From what Bianca was able to gather, a mysterious purple amythest-like object had gone missing with the church’s N1 artifacts branch a few weeks earlier, and not long after, a second object similar in description had been swiped from a band of idiotic pirates, supposedly by a nun of the Ecclesia.
Bianca had been fascinated by Sariah’s investigation; watching somebody so composed and so deeply entrenched in the church’s teachings being forced to face a complete betrayal of those teachings was an utter treat to her.
It wasn’t that Bianca disliked Sariah or anything. Rather, it was the cynic in her wanting to see Sariah, this near paragon of a person, stumble and crash, even just once. Then Sariah could go back to being Miss-Perfect-Patron-Saint-of-Whatever-the-Fuck for all she cared.
Bianca opened up a selection of files on her computer, all pertaining to the mysterious disappearing artifacts. Blurry photos from her spy cameras, what video footage of the pirates she could find, and even completely-unauthorized surveillance footage of the department in which the amethyst-like object had been stored.
But even with these tools, Bianca hadn’t been able to make any more headway into the search than Sariah had. She boredly clicked through the hours and hours of footage, trying to scrub them for any itty bitty little detail that she could from them.
And then, just as she was about to quit (which is, of course, the most optimal time for these events to occur), she found something. The tiniest little glimpse of the stolen artifact as it slowly hovered into the air by a mere inch before vanishing completely.
Bianca rubbed her eyes and leaned in closer to the screen, running the video back a few more seconds to watch it again, thinking what she’d seen had merely been her imagination as her mind melted away from boredom, but no. The same event played out, in a fraction of a second.
“Jackpot….” she said to herself before scooping up her things and hurrying to the door. “Gotta go make a forcerecord and check this shit out up close….”
* * * *
ULTRA KNIGHT
* * * *
“Your name is Lita, yes?”
The little redheaded girl nodded, kicking her feet back and forth on the swing, although she wasn’t getting much momentum, so Sariah moved behind her to give her a push, which the little girl was absolutely delighted by. “Uh huh!”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“My name is Sariah,” the G13 agent said, increasing the pace of the swing push. “I heard you saw something interesting last night by the warehouses. Is that true?”
“Uh huh!”
“Can you tell me?”
Lita giggled as she reached heights on the swing she never had before. “Okay! I saw axes and swords and spears!”
“Wow, that’s a lot of weapons,” Sariah responded. “Did you see who was carrying them?”
“Nope!”
Sariah held her fingers up to her chin. The weaponry made sense as the source of the damage to the warehouse; there were plenty of gashes and puncture holes in the walls that would fit the description perfectly. It was still a bit of a strange way to attack a building, and so sloppily as well, perhaps pointing to a group of bandits or something along those lines.
She recalled that the attack had taken place amidst tension between Vash, Leotera, and Jura; Leoteran soldiers were famous for still utilizing melee weaponry as their primary choice of arms, foregoing the widespread usage of guns and other more advanced technological firepower, so a squad of Leoteran soldiers did seem to fit the picture. That didn’t rule out Jura or even a completely separate party, but it was something, for now.
Though she wasn’t going to get much else from little Lita, she stayed behind for a few more minutes, continuing to push her on the swing, until the child was finally tuckered out and ready for a snack.
Sariah knelt down beside her, patting her on the head. “Thank you very much for your help, sweetie.”
“You’re welcome!” the girl responded.
Sariah then began to head out, but stopped. “Oh, one more thing, Lita.” She turned back around, crouching down again to be more level with the child. “What’s this I hear about a skeleton you wanted to invite over?”
Lita broke out into a huge smile, jumping up and down. “Oh! Yunze!”
“Yunze?”
Her head moved like a bobble head on crack. “Yeah! My friend Yunze! I met her a few days ago and we played hide and seek!”
“And she was a skeleton?”
“Uh huh! But a really pretty skeleton! She has green eyes and a really pretty rainbow dress!”
Sariah paused. While she’d felt pretty confident that Lita had been talking about a skelemental, these further details had been making her reconsider that theory. Lita’s description sounded much more akin to an imaginary friend than anything else, but Sariah knew better than to write it off completely.
She patted the girl’s head and stood up again. “Thank you, Lita. Yunze sounds very nice. I’m glad you two are friends.”
“Me too! I hope I get to play with her again soon!”
The two then parted ways, with Sariah leaving the home through the back gate, and Lita rushing into the house, particularly about this strange Yunze character Lita had described; she could be made up entirely, or she could be an important factor in the investigation of the warehouse attack.
As Sariah rounded the corner, she came to a stop. A man was in her way, leaning up against the wooden fence gating the backyard. He was clad head-to-toe in gray-and-red clothes; shirt, long coat, frayed-hem pants, boots, fingerless gloves, and, most prominently, a wide, gray hat that kept his eyes completely hidden.
Within a second of spotting him, Sariah could sense that he was dangerous; maybe not actively, but the potential was there. He likely could have passed for one of the warehouse workers, were it not for the deadly presence emanating from him.
His wide, fanged smile beneath his poorly-maintained gray beard, though attempting to be friendly, only further pointed to him being dangerous. “Hey, pretty lady. Nice guns you got.”
“What do you want?”
“Ha, not even gonna ask if I meant the pistol or those biceps, huh?” The man shrugged. “As far as what I want….Booze. Good food. Wife with a fat ass. Ride a dragon. Same as every other man.” He lazily gestured towards Sariah’s Ecclesian uniform. “Church girl, huh? You girls as freaky as they say you are?”
“I’m sure there are Ecclesian women who fit that description,” Sariah said with a sigh, placing her hand on her hip. “Unfortunately for you I’m boring and uninterested, but that’s not why you’re talking to me anyway, is it?”
He pushed himself off of the fence, stretching his arms above his head. “Nope. I mean, you’re easy on the eyes so I figured I’d shoot my shot real quick.” He then held a hand out. “Name’s Zane.”
She didn’t meet the handshake. “And?”
He retracted his hand before turning around and beginning to walk away. “Lemme show ya the bar. We can chat after.”
Sariah sighed. Part of her wanted to just write him off as some sleazebag trying to hit on her, but she knew that likely wasn’t the case. Something about him told her he was a person of interest with valuable information, even if that thing wasn’t his mouth.
And so, she followed.
* * * *
ULTRA KNIGHT
* * * *
The skelementals clawed their way through the dirt and grass like beasts, and when they emerged from beneath the earth, they looked the part, too. Many of them were well-built quadrupeds (and some boasted quite a few more legs than that, even) with massive maws of jagged teeth, all harder than steel.
The beast skelementals howled at the moonlight, racing around the grass in wild circles, chasing after the elk and wolpertingers that populated the area. Their fangs and claws ripped the animals to pieces, spraying blood into the air like mist. The skelementals did not eat the creatures’ flesh, however; instead, they ripped the meat right off of the bones, tossing them aside before burrowing back into the earth with the bones in hand (or, mouth, rather).
“U-KNIGHT!”
A gleam of silver-white light pierced through the darkness, and in the next instant, a claymore carved its way through four beast skelementals, shattering their bodies into pieces.
Snarling, more skelementals began to swarm in and surround the U-Knight, swiping at him with their massive claws. The U-Knight blocked and parried as many as he could, dancing around to dodge the ones he couldn’t. When a claw missed and struck the ground, a crack opened in the dirt, and when it struck a nearby tree, the tree was blasted apart.
After maintaining his defenses for a few moments, the U-Knight suddenly ducked and spun around in a wide circle, sending his claymore in a beautiful crescent-shaped cut, slicing through half the remaining horde of skelementals. As he finished rotating in his circle, a powerful voice roared out from within him:
RIFLE!
Silver-white light flashed within his fingertips, and a shining rifle materialized in his hands in an instant. As he came to a stop in his circle, he aimed the rifle in the perfect position, and fired a single shot.
That one lone bullet managed to explode through the skulls of all five remaining beast skelementals in a row, killing off the dim green lights in their eye sockets and leaving them as nothing more than piles of iron-clad bone in the grass.
The rifle in the U-Knight’s hands faded away, and he stepped forward to retrieve his claymore. However, just before he could take hold of the weapon, another voice rang out around the night sky, though it did not come from him.
“A spectacular performance, my friend! You can be quite the showman in your little battles, can’t you?”
The U-Knight slowly turned around, though the source of the voice had actually come from the sky above, floating dozens of feet in the air.
He was tall and lithe, clad in a tight costume of outrageously bright reds, whites, and golds. Red flames danced around his body in a mesmerizing pattern, calling attention to him at all times. He was positioned as though he were seated on some kind of chair, resting his chin in his hand, although there was no such chair to be found.
As he began to descend just a bit more, his face came into clear view of the U-Knight. Strange as it may be, he did in fact appear to be a skelemental. However, rather than the more usual white of bone, his skull face was primarily red. It was also shaped somewhat peculiarly, with many little pieces jutting out from all over, giving it the appearance of some kind of metal mask patterned after dancing flames. It would have been easy to assume he was not a skelemental with all of the uniqueness in his appearance, but in the end, the dim green lights in his eye sockets were what gave him away.
“But there is none who can upstage me, O valiant shining knight bereft of charisma and flair!” the skelemental said as he finalized his descent to the ground, still positioned as though he were seated. He clapped his hands together, and the flame around him suddenly exploded out like fireworks.
The U-Knight grabbed hold of his claymore and held it at the ready, expecting an attack, but none came. The skelemental had vanished from his position, now replaced by red flames, which spelled out “Sinzen”.
The red skelemental pressed his hand onto the U-Knight’s shoulder from behind. “Would you like an autograph, friend?”
Swiveling around, the U-Knight chopped at the skelemental’s neck with his claymore, but when the sword struck, rather than cut through hard bone, Sinzen popped and deflated like a balloon.
Of course, it turned out to not have been the real skelemental; Sinzen had returned to the sky, though he was standing rather than sitting.
“No, no, no! You’ve already shown that trick! You’ll drive the audience away with repetition! Show us something more, Mr. Knight! Put on a performance! You’re boring us!”
Before the U-Knight could even attempt to process what the hell was going on, he felt the ground beneath him shake, although he could feel that the vibrations were coming from a specific direction. The sound of thundering hooves struck his senses just before it was too late, causing him to dive to the side, narrowly avoiding being run over by what appeared to be a chariot made of jagged bones of blue lightning.
Inside the chariot were two more skelementals. One, the U-Knight recognized. They were small and clad in a cloak woven of multiple colors, while the other was more athletically built wearing bits of cobalt armor. When the latter spoke, her voice was deep and echoed with static, sending vibrations around the entire area. “Enough games, clown.”
Sinzen, still floating in the air, flipped around until he was upside-down, face-to-face with the chariot-driving skelemental. “Ah, speaking of boring people, what brings you here this fine evening, Sevya?”
Sevya turned her head towards the U-Knight, who still kept his claymore at the ready in case a fight broke out. “This one….”
“Ah, I see! The boring bride has found her boring groom! Truly a match made in six of the Seven Heavens, and one of the Seven Hells!”
Sevya looked ready to throttle Sinzen then and there, but Yunze suddenly poked their head between them, eyes locked on the shining knight. “He is the one who killed Fohrzen.”
Both Sinzen and Sevya looked over to the U-Knight before the former chuckled, “I always hated him! Truly a one-trick pony with a one-track mind, that one! Good riddance, I say!”
“Who are you?” Sevya asked, taking Yunze’s words much more seriously.
The U-Knight did not respond.
“He doesn’t talk,” Yunze said.
“Indeed,” added Sinzen. “No personality whatsoever. A decent look, though.”
Sevya growled. “You should learn from him.” She then whipped the reins of her chariot, and the skelemental steeds up front adjusted until the chariot was facing the U-Knight head on.
“Kill him.”