When her eyes leave mine, they turn to gaze down a gun’s barrel. Bain holds a railgun pointed at her forehead, its extended frame sparkling with caged energy, the air about it ripples in a visual distortion.
“Entering the Illuminatus Arx means death,” he growls.
“Liar!” I shout.
The world ceases its spin and I see everything in slow motion. There’s a buildup of energy, small forks of lighting are drawn from the air around the riffle, feeding it until the barrel turns white with caged power. Air warps about the gun, waves into it, then slithers to a stop.
A momentary silence.
The rifle spits white fire. Calyx’s head is drowned by it, consumed by it. The flames don’t give her time to scream out. They just pass right through her and keep on traveling to some unknown distance into the dessert. What is left of her head is a cauterized stump of a neck.
I watch her collapse.
In that moment, it is as though someone had killed me not her. The world and all of my mortal senses return to me. I smell her own smell intermixed with burned flesh, I hear the sound of gunfire as Ty unleashes his AK47 at Bain. I hear the railgun recharging. I hear and see sparks fly off Bain’s helmplate. I listen to the beat of my heart in my ears. I bare witness to Ty’s head disappearing and, in my rage intermixing with sorrow, my mind serves me an even worse sight through recollection…
After the initial attack, there were countless others. One by one, the so-called Gods materialized and destroyed everything in their vicinity. Then they waited, sometimes for hours, while people simply watched them float.
It would seem as though Gods have indeed descended down upon us. Yet instead of light in the form of glory and illumination from the stars, they brought light in the form of fire. Destructive fire. And after all this time, we finally saw and witnessed what we have wondered all along. Are gods real? Do they exists? They were indeed real, and so was their hatred for us.
It took us a few of their attacks to realize it would be a good idea to start fighting back. We employed our own energy weapons, our own soldiers and our own machines of war. All of the decades and all the years of strife had finally paid off, and we managed to intercept one of them. There was no joy in the faces of those who could finally get to test humanity’s most advanced weaponry. There was no enthusiasms, only a grim, stoic determination.
The being re-atomized in the middle of the square in central New York. An area of charred concrete remained where it had manifested with a sound like thunder and air splitting, a rifle nearly bigger than it its body held in its hands. It looked at all of us at the same time and said something which their species had become all too fond of saying.
“Die,” it demanded. I watched the scene from afar as soldiers got into formation, drew their guns and fired as one.
Apparently, they have found an algorithm, a time and location sequence by which these “gods” were appearing – managed to predict where one will manifest next.
Like a series of countless wires short fusing and blasting, the rifles unleashed a barrage of horizontal lighting at the floating god. Tanks suspended on heavy currents of air strode from behind the artillery line. Elements from above swooped down and bombarded the area with precision strikes that cratered the soil. Dust veiled the being in a cloud of soot and grime. Still, the soldiers kept their pressure, positioned in a half-circle, they kept firing. Moving closer in their wargear – their bulky feet stomping the ground, pluming dust, each exoskeletal suit reinforced with protective layers as thick as another man’s flesh – the soldiers did not stop. They didn’t stop even when their weapons began to overheat and blaze with radiation and light, like miniature suns. There was a shout, and they stopped. All civilian personal had retreated, cowered, watched the scene from afar, from windows upon skyscrapers and balconies. I stood the closest of them all, observing from atop a tank the size of a small house.
Somehow, they got the idea that, because I had survived one attack, I could maybe contribute something valuable to the fight. I had agreed only reluctantly. I couldn’t convince them that nothing I had to offer was of any value.
You may find that a man is at his most agreeable, when he is being stared down by five generals and the president of the world government.
We waited for the dust to settle and when it did, our jaws could have been picked up from the ground. Unmoving, unscathed, unperturbed, the being floated just as it had before we began our attempt to murder it. I could feel an almost palpable sense of fear clogging the air. Everyone froze. I heard two military technicians below me talk amongst themselves.
“Impossible,” whispered the first.
“How much energy did we release at the thing?” asked the second. The first crunched the numbers using his mind-apps and came up with an absurd figure.
“That could level a god damn block!” the second said after hearing what the first had come up with.
“A block?” the first asked him. “There’s a total of 234 soldiers there. Put them on a flyby mission and have them randomly fire at small town and what you’ll end up with a very dead town. Leveled and reduced to piss and rubble.”
“But it doesn’t even–“ There was a crack as thought the very air had been broken in two. A luminous orb of white light rippled out of the being’s head. It moved so fast, I knew I would have missed it, if my eyes haven’t been trained on the being. It wasn’t easy to look away from a huge, staring and lidless eye. Soldiers were flung in the air and back, all 234 of them. The tanks that stood behind them were thrown on their backs, their heavy frames making huge cracks in the tiles below them as they landed. The shockwave hit even me. It robed me of breath and I fell to my knees, panting. My head began to pound as though I had been in the sun for too long. Hot blood pulsed in the thick veins of my forehead.
It was the god’s turn to fire.
But it didn’t. It simply floated above the dazed soldiers and bodies kept exploding beside it. The larger tanks fired. Despite their advanced targeting, some actually managed to miss, but most hit the being square on. The sound of the mass-reactive projectiles smashing into it sounded like strikes upon an anvil. Heavy and deep. But the being didn’t even move, didn’t even stop. It just kept coming and staring at us. The whole tank trembled and shook underneath me. The sky boomed as a multi-caliber shot was fired and hit the being in the torso. The explosion was immense. But it was then, when the being stood so much closer, that I realized none of the projectiles actually hit it. They had all detonated before it, formed a circular nimbus around it as the energy was dissipated and released into the air. I didn’t wait for another shot to be fired, I simply ran. I ran like hell and kept running until I could no longer hear the insanity. I ran until I could no longer hear men screaming in horror and metal being torn apart. I ran until I could run no more.
All monsters are human, or they have once been human.
Men are not meant to live lifetimes of the earth. Men are meant to wither and die, because with age, they more often than not become bitter. They begin to resent life. Those who cannot die, well, they begin to envy the dead. They see killing as a release, a letting go of a person to the currents beyond reality.
I can feel all this in Bain. I see it in his eye, a disregard for life. His undying state has not made him stupid or careless, but somehow a lethal and ancient combination of both. He hasn’t released Calyx or Ty. All I saw was Bain killing the two people who he shouldn’t have killed. I have seen him do it, and I saw my father do is stand there and watch him do it. The realizations is painful, but I know then that whoever is wearing the skin of my deceased father, the resemblance between the two is only skin deep. Perhaps there is more which is similar, but not his heart. And that had always been why I… why all loved him.
What I had taken from the Mind Bank was more than just recollections. I had selected two items. A thing Ia said I should never do.
The knowledge the Ancients left behind had always fascinated me. I found books on the subject
once and searched up the term ‘Martial Arts’. I found one person called Bruce Lee, which I had taken an instant liking towards. Jeet Kin Do. His methods of fighting intrigued me. So I took them for my own in the Mind Bank.
I access his teaching and feel a surge in my head. Neurons fire away and nearly split my mind apart. Pain takes me to another state between a dream and something indefinable. Through the headache, I feel his spirit. I feel everything I need, I see everything I need and the methods to use it against my opponent.
I hear the voice of Bruce Lee in my mind, invoking me, guiding me even through death. The sound of him is like an old master, his speaks like one who has become more than a man, more than just some idol, but one who has transcended mere existence and learned its secrets in the process. Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teacup, it becomes the teacup. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Through his words, I become.
I look back at the bodies of Calyx and Ty, then turn to face Bain again.
I can see his dead stare even behind the slits of his helm. “I’ll kill you for this.”
“With that? You don’t have a gun.”
“I don’t need one.”
I put my whole hip, my whole being behind one punch, faster than a bullet, and Bain’s helmet is dent in and blood spurs out from the cuts in the bent helmet. Sparks flash about his head as he collapses in a pool of his own red. They fire at me. I dodge. I wade between the shots, spin, and deliver a power-infused backhand cut to the first Templar. Even I hadn’t expected my hand to cut so deep as to make his head come off. The helmet bounces against the floor, a trail of blood behind it. Rage has power. In most men, it is caged, but it is there. In that state and once you give into such a rage, fear cannot punch through. You become fearless. And a fearless, remorseless man is the true monster amongst men. My father stands behind the three Templars who rush me. They fire as they go, from their hip, their energy rifles blaring. I dodge. I spin. By all rights, they should have killed me, but nothing hits me. I match their speed and we clash. The first one falls with my hand through his chest. His scream spits blood in my face. I free myself of the body by spinning around and using the momentum to dislodge and throw the body into the second Templar. I kick the third behind me with my heel. He doesn’t get up again. I approach the second. He is trying to get the body off, blood flowing over his silver armor. I lift my foot. There’s a muffled scream and the sound of a skull cracking as I smash his face in, ground it beneath my heel.
I see my father run away and I run after him.
CHAPTER 23