Sariah had nowhere to go.
From her vantage point, the BLOOD Unit sniper had eyes on the entire first floor of the warehouse. She was deathly accurate, and as quick a shot as they came; any attempt at leaving cover would leave Sariah riddled with bullet holes.
Sariah thought back to her battles with the BLOOD Unit a good seven years prior. Five in total, each given code names corresponding the letters of their group, and each specializing in a different type of weapon. There had definitely been a sniper amongst their ranks, codenamed “BEE”. While she hadn’t faced that particular member much, she certainly remembered how good she was with her rifle, and knew not to take the risk in maneuvering through the warehouse.
But she couldn’t just stick around and wait it out. BEE would have no trouble waiting in that spot for hours; hell, she’d probably be perfectly okay staying there throughout the entire next day, even as the villagers of Rushuna awoke and came to investigate.
She’d probably kill them all, too.
That left Sariah without many options, but not with none at all; there were never no options, least of all when it came to the best damn agent in the Ecclesia.
GOSPEL!
While BEE didn’t budge upon hearing the roar of the Install Sariah had just set, she was, for the briefest of moments, confused. She’d never heard of a Gospell Install before, and had no earthly idea what to expect from it.
Certainly not a swarm of silver-white spears raining down on her from above.
Forced to move from her position, BEE rolled and leaped aside as fast as she could manage, which was damn fucking fast, but even then, she found herself caught on the arm by one of the spears, and the attack didn’t stop after the first wave. A second set of them appeared, this time angled horizontally, rendering her previous evasive maneuver useless.
BEE released her hold on her sniper rifle, bashing her fists together in front of her stomach.
SHADOW!
She and her weapon vanished a mere nanosecond before the next spears could impale her, both compressing into their own shadows in the floor cast by the lights of the warehouse. This shadow then slithered along the edge of the building, trying to find a new place to awaken, this time with Sariah properly in range.
But Sariah had been on the move since the second she’d activated her Gospel Install, and BEE’s shadow was forced to continuously reposition. Each time she found a new perch, she would rematerialize into her physical form and fire a shot in Sariah’s direction, only to be forced to return to her shadow form to avoid the next storm of Gospel spears.
Sariah did find herself similarly caught in the arm by her opponent’s first sudden surprise shot, but she was able to keep ahead of the remaining ones, eventually escaping the warehouse.
But rather than flee completely, Sariah took up her own high ground position on the roof of a neighboring building, keeping her eyes on all possible exit points viewable to her, as she planned to fire upon BEE the second she spotted her or her shadow.
However, several minutes passed, and the BLOOD Unit sniper was nowhere to be seen, whether in physical or shadow form. Sariah saw nothing, heard nothing, and sensed nothing. Her Gospel Install was no longer active either; it was a powerful Install capable of honing in on a specific target no matter where they were within the general area. If this amount of time had gone on without it launching spears, that was as clear a sign as any that BEE had fled Rushuna entirely.
Exhaling, Sariah turned her attention to the bullet wound on her arm, relieved to find it wasn’t anything serious.
“What a swell night this has been,” she muttered to herself, running a hand through her hair. “I’m actually looking forward to my next vacation….”
* * * *
ULTRA KNIGHT
* * * *
Getting a good night’s sleep turned out to be quite difficult, especially given the two back-to-back gunfights, as well as having been shot in the chest with a crossbow while trying to sleep earlier that night preceding that sleep, but Sariah managed because, well, she had to. Life didn’t really care about letting you have it easy after a rough patch, and she’d learned that lesson many times while living hers.
Besides the difficulty in actually falling asleep and resting well, the night was without incident. No further attempts on her life were made, which was nice. While she was usually a very early riser, she decided to sleep in until a bit before noon that day. I think she earned that, personally.
There were a few villagers questioning the noises that had come from the warehouses the night before. Sariah took the time to explain that she was investigating and apologized, but none of the villagers seemed particularly upset; in fact, many of them seemed to be quite excited upon hearing that there was a thrilling nighttime battle taking place in their hometown with a mysterious assailant.
Sariah found herself briefly concerned at the reaction, but quickly decided it wasn’t a big deal, and chose not to ruin their fun. She didn’t think BEE had anything to do with the warehouse attack from the other day, and she didn’t believe the BLOOD Unit soldier would harm anyone in Rushuna; Sariah was very confident that only she herself would ever be targeted, given their encounters years ago.
She also didn’t bother ratting out Zane. For one thing, she doubted it would affect anyone. The villagers were probably used to his antics, and she was willing to bet Zane would just laugh the whole thing off and continue doing whatever the hell it was he was doing.
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Of course, that left her in the frustrating position of not having made much progress in the investigation. Two back-to-back life-or-death duels immediately following being shot in the chest, and not much to go off of.
After talking with the villagers, she decided to visit the bar to get some food and drink and mull things over. To her relief, Zane didn’t appear to be there, which would allow her to eat and think in peace and quiet. In fact, there were only three other patrons inside; one guy drinking his absolute ass off in the far corner, and a pair of men chatting at one of the nearby tables.
The first thing she did was mentally scratch Zane and BEE off of the suspects list. She doubted either of them had any relation to the warehouse attack; the damage to the building almost assuredly hadn’t been caused by bullet holes, and firearms were the only weapons both of them seemed to carry with them. And even if they had simply used some other tools and just didn’t bring them to the warehouse to fight, she couldn’t really see a reason for it. Barely any damage had been done to the warehouses, and nothing was stolen. If anything, the “attack” amounted to little more than vandalism.
She paused, taking a sip. She supposed that Zane could potentially have caused just enough of a ruckus to kickstart Sariah’s investigation and lure her to Rushuna explicitly for that duel he’d challenged her to, but that seemed pretty convoluted even for him.
“Still….I guess I can’t rule that out entirely,” she muttered to herself just before her eggs and bacon arrived.
Moving on from the duels, she thought back to the crossbow bolt that had hit her from before. Both Zane and BEE were capable of pulling off a shot like that with ease, but she couldn’t confidently pin the weapon to either of them. Zane had mentioned finding crossbows to be outdated, and all members of the BLOOD Unit had specialized weaponry that utilized their unique abilities. Plus, BEE had her sniper rifle with her, and Sariah saw no reason for her to choose to use a plain old crossbow in lieu of it.
“I’m tellin’ you, it was those Leotera bastards that did it!”
Sariah glanced over her shoulder towards the table with the two patrons. Their conversation had been quiet enough for the most part, but it seemed to be getting a bit rowdier as time went on; enough to catch Sariah’s attention.
“Maybe, maybe,” the other guy said, holding his hands up. “Orrrr….it could be Jura!”
The first man narrowed his eyes in disbelief. “Jura?! Did you see giant-ass dinosaur footprints out there? Did you?”
“….No….”
“Jura he says….”
A pitiful frown made its way onto the second man’s lips. “W-well….maybe they sent in, uh, flyin’ dinosaurs!”
“….”
“….”
“This is why I didn’t invite you to my weddin’.”
Sariah sighed, albeit with a slight smile at the silliness of the two. She took a bite of bacon, ready to get her mind back on track with the investigation. That is, until the two guys’ conversation became even louder and harder to ignore.
“I hope the fuckin’ war goddess rises from her pissin’ grave and turns Leotera to dust. That’s what those hoity-toity bastards deserve.”
The man who was not invited to his companion’s wedding nearly went bug-eyed, whipping his head left and right around the bar, checking for any reaction to his friend’s words. “Oi! You can’t be supportin’ gods man!”
“Bah, you’re right….just got a little worked up, is all.”
“….So how’s the wife doin’, anyway?”
Sariah paused mid bite at the mention of “the war goddess”. On Planet ULTRA, gods were, to put it lightly, not very well liked, particularly by members of the Ecclesia. They were so disliked that it wasn’t uncommon for most mentions of them to be met with scolding, and support of them to be met with getting one’s ass beaten.
Sariah especially did not like gods.
Now, she wasn’t such a childish brute that she would run over and start throwing punches at some stranger just for talking about them, but for a moment, her mood took a sharp dive towards anger. She kept her cool, however, and continued on with her breakfast.
Just as she finished, she paused, thinking back over it.
The war goddess….
Maybe that was it….
* * * *
ULTRA KNIGHT
* * * *
Sariah spent some time investigating town, but there wasn’t much new she could find. That didn’t really bother her, as she now wielded a prevailing theory, and one that required her to wait until nightfall.
When the time came, she departed from her room at the inn, and left town, wandering over to the nearby woods to keep out of sight of the Rushuna villagers.
Planet ULTRA had long had issues with gods, given that the latter had a tendency to invade the little planet trying to destroy it and access the ULTRA Force found within its core. There had been many battles where the planet’s great defenders — The Mother Dragon, the Celestial Beasts, and the ULTRA Knight in particular — staved off hordes of gods and titans from every corner of Existence in order to keep the world safe.
Most of those battles had happened hundreds of years ago, and modern ultranian society were mostly familiar with gods through ancient history. It had been a long, long time since the people of Planet ULTRA had had to worry about battling against them to protect their home world, and it seemed to be an issue long behind them.
But high-ranking members of the Ecclesia knew that the gods were not completely wiped clean from the world. Some still dwelled within Planet ULTRA, hidden away and biding their time. Some trying to amass power to lay siege to the planet once more, some simply hanging on for dear life with no way to return home.
And thus, Sariah’s theory was that the strange, almost pathetic attack on Rushuna had been connected to this “war goddess” to some degree. There had been many, many gods of war, battle, victory, conquest, and whatever-the-hell-else that had tried and failed to destroy Planet ULTRA before, and this “war goddess” the man in Rushuna had spoken of could have been any one of them. It was customary for ultranians to not even learn the gods’ individual names, as they believed it gave them power and influence.
No, it was better to just think of them as nameless, faceless pests that needed to be exterminated.
As Sariah arrived deeper in the woods, confident in her total privacy, she stepped forward into a stream of silver-white moonlight piercing through the canopy of the trees; the light of the largest moon, Baihu.
She reached into her shirt and retrieved the necklace dangling around her, holding it out into the moonlight. When the light struck it, the necklace shined bright for a brief moment, and then, Sariah’s entire view of the world went black.
When she opened her eyes next, she found herself in a completely different forest glade. The grass and trees were all a shimmering silver, and there was no sound whatsoever; no crickets, no birds, no streaming river, no winds.
The glade was a wide open circle as large as a stadium, with nothing in it but grass. The outer perimeter was lined with glowing silver-white trees, packed so tightly together they seemed impenetrable.
Most strangely was the sky. It was a starless black, but Baihu floated right at the center of it all, so large it almost became a roof over head.
As Sariah got her bearings, she heard a voice call out to her. Calm, smooth, and relaxing. There was an echo-like aftereffect to it, suggesting its supernatural origin, but otherwise, it came across as welcoming, albeit with a pinch of snark and playfulness.
“Hello, Sariah. If you had told me you were coming to see me, I would have prepared something for you.”
The G13 agent slowly spun around, coming face-to-face with a gargantuan black cat laying down in the grass, its tail swishing back-and-forth like the tides of the coast behind it.
Sariah was now standing before the thirteenth Celestial Beast, the one forgotten to history, the namesake of the secret thirteenth branch of the Ecclesia da Ultra of G13, and the only one of the ancient Planet ULTRA defenders to still be alive….
Gata the Cat.