Chapter Text
Month #26 on Ionos
Hliþ-Díeglod was an archipelago of mountaintops with diagonal slopes on which grew forests that were adapted to the arid climate. With a purplish-grey sky above through which a green aurora rippled, the terra’s landscape looked harsh, and wild. The terra technically had a local government, but the native population was so small that they couldn’t physically manage more than a fraction of their own territory, which made the free terrain a perfect refuge for all sorts from across Ionos to meet up, or make not-so-legal transactions: vagabonds, prison escapees, runaways and rogues.
The market was small to avoid detection, and it was in a very small and temporary ruin of a long-abandoned town which the great peaks towered over, less than a dozen peaks occupying the upward-sloping cobblestone street, and even fewer denizens and rogues of various species mulling about the place. Two such figures, dressed in cloaks and with hoods obscuring their heads, were at one such stall, conversing with the surly Bundarlikesh owner. A grey, insectoid-shaped yet skin-covered hand lifted a brown sack, which a three-fingered hand took. The shorter figure’s half-shadowed face was stony as the taller, four-armed figure examined the sack’s interior contents with his bumpy, taloned hands, before nodding at her in assurance.
“A pleasure doing business,” the shorter figure said in her sibilant voice, smirking at the sheepish Bundarlikesh who owned the stand, before the two customers turned heel and went on their way.
“Hm, we have enough money in here to afford a leisurely dinner at the Mikonosuin Spire, Master,” Phoenix the Orange murmured to the young woman walking with him, a smile on his shallow beak visible under his hood – Cyclonis made a short, grumpy hmph, which gave way to a smile of her own after 2.25 seconds. Phoenix continued talking as they went down the cobblestone street. “Have you ever tried the food in that place? It is to die for. Mmm!” He made a gesture that Cyclonis as an Atmos-native recognised as a Terra Gale-ish kiss. “And the arcade less than ten metres away! I wonder if anyone has beaten my top score since I was last there…” Cyclonis almost chuckled – she had been doing that more as of late. Under Phoenix’s gentle and careful advice and influence, she had started hanging out more and more, experiencing more of the world which she had once sought to conquer from the confines of a metal tower – the peoples she would have sought to rule, the way their everyday citizens conducted themselves with each-other, their tricks of the trade, the warmth that flowed between them, the quirks of their class, what they valued so much when they had so little material. In the year-and-a-half since she’d recruited Phoenix the Orange as her right-hand, Cyclonis had learned more about the peoples she might one day rule over than she had in fourteen years sitting on the throne of Cyclonia.
“Or we could visit Terra Poppukatoch again, with how much of a joy that soda parlour’s waffles and soda are,” Phoenix continued suggesting as the pair continued down the quietening cobblestone street. Phoenix chuckled to himself, and he began whistling his little leitmotif. Cyclonis inwardly rolled her eyes, but her smile didn’t fade in response to the whistle which she was now intimately familiar with. They were advancing into the more sparsely-populated parts of the market now, where Cyclonis felt more on-guard on automatic, Phoenix’s whistling softer to draw less attention but still carrying. Cyclonis’ eyes fractionally widened and then grew hard, though she and Phoenix kept walking – about 1.5 seconds later, Phoenix’s whistle rapidly petered slightly as he saw what she had seen. At the market’s edge not far ahead of the duo, several transportation modes which some of the market-goers had arrived in were parked in no deliberate or uniform pattern about a large square in the town ruin, most of them stood at least seven feet apart from each-other as if that would deter thieves. Phoenix’s catlike eyes took on that wary, alert edge as he resumed his whistling, both him and Cyclonis now looking about. Cyclonis saw the two figures beside an old house, and they in turn were looking in her and Phoenix’s direction, cloaks hiding most of their features though one who paid attention would’ve clearly seen the beaked mouths which went beyond their hoods’ shadows – as it stood, Cyclonis, narrowing her keen purple eyes on the pair, saw the pink and green eye colours as the figures lifted their heads, she could almost hear the soft avian cluck that came from their throats as they glared at her, could almost imagine the purple feathers they hid.
“Kitanen,” she whispered softly to Phoenix as the mirth was rapidly fading from the whistling avian humanoid’s beaked face – the two continuing their stroll towards their original destination with a casual, inconspicuous slowness. The people of one of the most powerful totalitarian terras on Ionos – Cyclonis had directly dealt with them a couple times, once before she’d recruited Phoenix, then there was that second encounter before she’d visited the Twin Terras almost a year ago. Their pace was rapidly slowing to keep some distance between them. Purple eyes shifted under one hood, going through calculations. Orange eyes with slit pupils under another hood did likewise.
“A good afternoon to you, sir and madam.” Cyclonis heard the Kitanen’s footsteps leisurely entering the street behind them before they heard his voice speaking loudly enough that they couldn’t pretend they hadn’t heard it, Phoenix’s whistle instantly stopping. The two other Kitanen goons, all of them in cloaks, would’ve been visible creeping into view on Cyclonis and Phoenix’s other two openings, forcing them to stop where they were. They were surrounded by cloaked Kitanen in a pentagonal pattern, and with the nature of this market’s setting and the fact they were on the edge away from business, no-one amongst the stalls a dozen metres away was going to be inclined to help them. Cyclonis might’ve inwardly sighed if she wasn’t already mentally prepared for whatever was about to happen. A pregnant pause passed, Cyclonis and Phoenix both calmly looking in different directions at the figures around them, Phoenix’s face now hard and all-business.
“You seem like you want our attention,” Cyclonis murmured very softly, gaze dark as she analysed each of the Kitanen around them – an array of different yet clinical battle postures and languages, all poised to strike the moment one of them made a wrong move, although she suspected Phoenix could probably dodge their counters and retaliate if he moved fast enough.
“When the great Kitanen Empire desires one’s audience, one attends,” replied the nasally-voiced Kitanen commander – he possessed the pink eyes that Kitaneikuk was so obsessed with but who looked taller and thinner than his subordinates. As he spoke, he dipped his head and clasped his hands behind his back in a traditional Kitanen greeting. Cyclonis hmphed a short chuckle – remembering how she’d sent her Nightcrawlers to garner loose ends’ ‘audience’ during her six-week rule of Atmos, the irony of her present situation was not lost on Cyclonis.
“And what does Kitaneikuk want with two merchants going about their business?” Cyclonis asked, a subtle edge creeping into her silky voice. The leader’s pink eyes flit so briefly between Cyclonis and Phoenix that anyone with a less keen eye wouldn’t have noticed – Cyclonis didn’t dare give a glance of her own that would give the leader the satisfaction of catching her too.
“I don’t think either of us have what you want,” Phoenix spoke with an echo of his jovial smile audible in his voice, now darkened to sound more like a smile showing too many teeth that warned one to back off; the back of Phoenix’s hood facing the leader as he and Cyclonis were now virtually back-to-back, Cyclonis’ feet already inching into the perfect position for a defensive stance.
“Perhaps not – but a crime against Kitaneikuk is a crime against Kitaneikuk, Phoenix the Orange,” the leader said. Now Phoenix’s eyes fractionally widened for a moment. He turned his head to look over one shoulder at the leader’s side.
“You’re Captain Dekutizonke, right?” Phoenix said.
“Of course, you remember my name,” the leader all but boasted as he lowered his hood, revealing the diagonal scars visible through his face’s feathers and grazing his large beak near its ridge. Phoenix just gave an unimpressed look at the captain’s arrogance. “Do you remember how many of my troops you slaughtered before you stole those Bakarat Stones from the science division we were assigned to guard eight years ago? I do – the day you massacred one of my squads was the day Captain Dekutizonke went from causing colleagues to avert their eyes to causing colleagues to look down their beaks!” His voice remained calm and almost flat throughout, but Cyclonis heard the subtle tremble of anger in it. The leader, Captain Dekutizonke, lifted an arm holding a crackling energy-baton out from below his cloak. “But when you escaped from Terra Gonksia, you lost all protection without those squids and their border-keeping pride! And now, I shall atone for my past failure.”
“And it only took you… a little under three years,” Phoenix quipped with a cocky smirk, tone almost sarcastic. Captain Dekutizonke’s face contorted in anger, baring the razor-teeth than Kitanen’s beaks hid.
“SEIZE THEM!” he bellowed.
The Kitanen all acted at once, and the two surrounding figures retaliated at once, flashes and flares of energy-batons and retaliatory strikes from Cyclonis and Phoenix’ weapons ensuing. It went on for about five seconds, before yellow light suddenly flared in a dome, and Cyclonis and Phoenix both suddenly screamed as agony blazed and plumed across their bodies and the forefronts of their minds. Captain Dekutizonke was audibly chuckling.
“As if any self-respecting true Kitanen would look to combat Phoenix the Orange and his, er… apprentice?” Trapped in one of two yellow energy-domes, Cyclonis growled hatefully at the Kitanen captain. She was trying to focus, trying to meditate as Phoenix had taught her, but she couldn’t – it was like there was just a wall in her mind in addition to the constant, groaning, hurtful ache in every fibre of her being from the energy-dome that made her grunt and writhe. Her eyes almost met Phoenix’s, the white and black-tattooed avian humanoid trapped in his own dome across from her. It was building up in Cyclonis at that moment, the realisation that both of them were helpless and utterly at these Kitanen’s mercy – they could do anything they wanted to Cyclonis, and to someone she valued, whilst they helplessly had to watch the other and she couldn’t do a damn thing but lie there and squirm, and she hated it, hated these leering, taunting bastards, she couldn’t stand it! The Kitanen captain was stalking around Phoenix’s dome, making raspy-sounding chuckles, marching straight-backed with hands clasped tightly behind his back around the dome.
“I am not the same cocky fool I was when you bested me all those years ago, the Orange,” Captain Dekutizonke boasted, smirking as he stalked around the dome, gesturing to his facial scars as he said the last part, completely ignoring Cyclonis’ purple gaze watching helplessly. The white-feathered, four-armed great martial artist was hissing and groaning, shallow-beaked face scrunched in pain, barely able to keep his chest an inch above the yellow-bathed cobblestones. “The scientists of the Empire have been working on this device for five years – it sets every pain receptor on your body on fire, dulls your brain just enough that you can’t retreat to any meditative places whilst remaining fully aware, and it slows every electrical signal that’s travelling towards your muscles.” Captain Dekutizonke bent his knees near the dome, Phoenix barely able to lift his head, the yellow light highlighting the captain’s baggy, grey uniform in the gap of his cloak. “You wouldn’t believe the years it took me to gain licence to utilise this device after the Kitanen elite lost faith.” Weakly, Phoenix forced an almost razor-sharp grin which put his razor-like teeth in his shallow beak on full display.
“Still unwilling to truly prove yourself my better, then,” he managed to force out. The captain scowled darkly at the insult. He promptly clicked the remote in his hand, and yellow agony blazed through Phoenix’s vision. Cyclonis’ lips curled, but she painfully iced down the powerful, vibrating lump inside of her that wanted to wince. With all the willpower she could muster, she shifted her arms painfully against the energy field, fingers approaching the folded-up staff on her jumpsuit’s back, curling on something just short of the staff.
She suddenly vanished in a flicker of purple, which caused the energy-dome that had been around her to vanish. The two Kitanen who’d been watching Phoenix had only just begun to turn their heads when Cyclonis reappeared in the same purple flicker fifty yards down the cobblestones, the Warp Crystal half-visible on her bodysuit’s belt inside the cloak dulling as she tried to get her body’s breathing under control.
“GET HER!” the captain bellowed without missing a beat, and Cyclonis took off breathlessly in the same instant the Kitanen soldiers started charging towards her.
The human witch’s billowing cloak vanished in a flicker as she turned a bend into a narrow alley, jumping over a stray crate which threatened to slow her, not hesitating to tear down a stack of livestock-holding crates at the wall, sending them crashing to the floor behind her as the creatures within cried out and as an elderly Jimūzunin cried out in indignation. Not two seconds later, the two Kitanen were sprinting around the same bend Cyclonis had passed. The Jimūzunin cried out even higher as the two Kitanen threw her out of their way whilst leaping over the crates, Cyclonis visible beyond the lane’s exit running ahead.
Cyclonis sprinted diagonally downhill, brushing past another market-goer who growled out at her in indignation, turning another bend – in the same second, the two Kitanen were already out of the alley and onto the same street, barrelling after her as a couple pedestrians stopped and stared.
The Kitanen rounded the corner and came to a brief halt – ahead, in a lane which also functioned as a small grove for a tree was a dead end guarded by a translucent forcefield-fence with spikes along the top, and no sign of torn blood nor cloth, but on the Kitanen’s left was an entrance to another lane. And no more than five feet above the Kitanen’s heads, Cyclonis was crouched almost like a money upon one of the tree’s branches, deathly-still, a hand to her mouth to muffle her breathing – if the Kitanen below saw or heard so much as a twitch of her moving above them, then her chances of evading them would be almost zero.
“Curses…!” she heard one of the Kitanen’s voices hiss.
“Come on, we haven’t lost her yet!” the second’s voice insisted, rougher than the first’s voice. Cyclonis watched the Kitanen less than fifteen feet below her sprinting under her hiding spot, and she didn’t dare to breathe until they had vanished down the adjacent lane. Cyclonis’ hand left her mouth and she exhaled quietly.
With no prize in hand, the two Kitanen were not feeling particularly safe or secure as they met back up with their captain at the rendezvous point, a lonely dock at the very edge of the market-town, much too close to the wilderness. Captain Dekutizonke was waiting straight-backed at an obscure, crude airborne sky-cart, not the one they’d arrived in – clearly their original ride had been stolen whilst untended and the captain had commandeered a new one, the cart’s original driver lying dead in a puddle of their own blood and brain-juice on the ground. The captain’s head was turned to the yellow-enwrapped captive inside the open cargo hold as he pressed a button not-for-the-first time which triggered a violent electrical surge and made Phoenix the Orange bellow in agony. The scarred captain turned to his two approaching subordinates and saluted them, and the two Kitanen promptly returned the salute, inwardly hoping that perhaps amid their captain’s success at claiming what he was really after, he would forget about the apprentice who had escaped using crystals that her master would never wield.
“Well?” he asked, his voice curt and cold. “Did you find that other one, the Atmos girl?” he asked, whilst the two Kitanen folded their hands behind their backs.
“We lost her in the back-alleys, sir,” the older and burlier of the two subordinate Kitanen reported before the first could, sparing the younger any future recriminations they might face for such.
“Hm.” Captain Dekutizonke frowned. “No matter. We still have what we came here for.” He looked back with a devious smirk at the bound Phoenix, snow-white and black-tattooed face scrunched up. The captain spoke as he turned heel and marched along the cart’s side. “Now, come! The daylight is wasting, and we have a long night ahead!”
The captain climbed into the commandeered cart’s front without further words, and the two Kitanen, with formal nods that their leader couldn’t physically see, moved at a quick pace to climb into the cart’s side, sliding the door shut.
The cart’s engines whirred to life with a blue flare and a noise, then it lifted off and blasted to the dusty sky – a silhouette in a tree standing up as they watched the vehicle go.
Not twenty minutes after the Kitanen had captured a strange patron in the Hliþ-Díeglod market, a vaguely saucer-shaped small ship with a rear-attached cargo trailer and red lights was flying away from the terra to the cloudline, its drivers looking for the first pit stop at which to grab their grub.
The pit stop that was chosen was one of the more expensive but unremarkable establishments dotted around this part of Ionos, consisting of a three-floor tavern mixing smoothed pillars with honeycomb-shaped metallic architecture, atop an artificial platform suspended by levitation pontoons above the cloudline, the Láckjang rider’s way of treating theirself with what sky-yen they’d earned.
The rider of the craft along with several other patrons were sat at various tables or bars without symmetry, digging into their meals with cutlery and mouths or in a couple rare cases with other kinds of limbs, and the black-cloaked, short figure with its hood up shuffled through the tavern’s serving area and between the tables, patrons either paying no notice or paying only a passing notice which they hid well. The figure made towards the desk where a Bokyunshit tavern-owner stood, drying a mug – he lifted his eyes once the figure got close.
“I need a room for one,” the hooded figure whispered in her sibilant voice, the Bokyunshit’s steely eyes flitting up and down to examine what the Bokyunshit could see.
“How long will you be staying?” the Bokyunshit asked. This close, he could see the scrawny figure under the cloak was softly clutching a side-wound.
“Only for tonight,” the figure replied – from her hood’s shadow, her purple eyes almost shone. “And I need someone here who knows… information about certain trade routes.” The Bokyunshit, recognising her type for what she was, acquiesced with a sage nod.
The metal doors screeched open with a harsh noise. Light cast on the wide, cylindrical room’s tables dotted with an old, stained cleaver and bottles of liquid. The chamber’s metal walls on all sides were stained and indigo, rhythmic thrums bouncing off the walls with the rotations of a razor-blade fan within the grate ceiling that cast light and shadows across the place. The Kitanen captain marched straight-backed into the cylindrical room first, towards the vertically-aligned and chain-suspended rack in the room’s centre, standing aside as two more Kitanen’s silhouettes carried Phoenix the Orange’s energy-wreathed silhouette by either side’s arms. The Kitanen wasted no time nor needed any prompting from their captor before they lifted Phoenix’s body towards the rack, glowing cuffs snapping with noises and high-pitching whining into place to secure each of the white-furred martial-artists’ six avian limbs. Captain Dekutizonke chuckled softly as he grinned and observed, and as one of the two Kitanen was finishing up their work securing the captive, she lowered part of the yellow energy-field with a hand-wave and stuck a needle against Phoenix’s white fur – with a hiss, the martial-artist jolted awake and a cry of shock.
“Are you comfortable in your new restraints?” the Kitanen captain taunted, sounding almost giddy as Phoenix’s slit-pupiled orange eyes blinked and scanned his surroundings before settling on him in a hard stare. “This harness has been upgraded and modified out of its original purpose specifically for you, Phoenix the Orange. Feel free to attempt any one of your binding escapement tricks against the technology. Please – I invite you to try them.” A particularly dark grin crossed the captain’s face, pink eyes looking deader than ever. “You will find the reaction to be most… stimulating I think.”
“Huh, I’ll bet,” Phoenix said, averting his orange eyes beneath his dark brow as if looking on the captain was as much a burden as looking upon an uncleaned public waste-disposal facility. Taking the excuse of needing to look away to thoroughly re-examine his surroundings, Phoenix commented in an off, almost exasperated tone like he’d been dragged into a business meeting; “Your reputation precedes you, captain.” Then Phoenix smirked nastily as he added with a look at the captain, “Sorry, but the first time I met you, you were only important enough that I knew who you were afterwards, on the seventh or either file of the Crystalvision news pamphlet.” The captain chuckled loudly.
“That is no problem, Phoenix the Orange,” he said, grinning, and he began pacing the cylindrical room’s radius slowly, circling the rack that held the martial-artist restrained. “In fact, I intend to rectify that. By the time I am through with you, we shall know each-other very… intimately. You see, I intend to claim reparations for the humiliations that your previous actions caused me within the great army of Kitaneikuk.” Dekutizonke was casually removing his uniform’s gloves as he spoke. Phoenix, meanwhile, remained stone-faced and glaring. “First I am going to start with the basics, cutting you in just the right places to cause the most pain. Then, I shall move on to breaking bones – just one or two to start with. Then I shall start with the injections, which this rack will amplify once activated-” The captain had fully circled around back to in front of Phoenix, pointing a finger. “-and then, we shall move onto bone marrow manipulation. I can’t tell you anything more about what that phase involves, lest I give the surprise away.” Almost as soon as he’d finished that sentence, a current of pink lightning suddenly blazed through Phoenix, making the white-and-tattooed humanoid spasm and shudder violently, beak-mouth peeled open to reveal his teeth. “Ah! You see? I told you that would hurt!” Captain Dekutizonke’s claw snatched Phoenix’s head, forcing him to meet the light-less, pitiless pink gaze. “And this is just the beginning!”
“Huh… huh… If that’s all you got, you should spend another eight years plotting and then come back,” Phoenix spat cockily, grinning despite the new weakness in his muscles. Captain Dekutizonke’s grin only faded fractionally at the insult, but suddenly there was a dark flare in the depths of his pink eyes.
“Well, then…” the captain murmured ever-politely, extracting a part-syringe, scalpel-like blade with a cylindrical handle which didn’t cast any light, Phoenix’s gaze flitting to the object at the captain’s hip. “…with the pleasantries over, let’s begin.” Phoenix said nothing, glaring defiantly. Then he suddenly spasmed and flared with lightning again. The captain’s grin widened as he chuckled before he dug the blade in his captive.
The carrier-sized, vaguely bird-shaped facility stood on a barren terra, beneath a night sky through which a sickly-green aurora rippled faintly. Grime and rust coated many of its surfaces, and though the rocky ground on which it was built grew no large plants nor wildlife, the hardiest of weeds had still risen in patches. The facility had once been a mundane factory, once which happened to this day to be on a border between Kitanen and Gonksiesh territory, although it had been the border which had shifted onto the facility’s location rather than vice versa. The factory had been abandoned for decades, though multiple spherical lamps uncharacteristically lit it up this night. Given the geo-politically isolated nature of their location and the secrecy of the captain’s assignment, neither of them felt much need to be overly on-guard, though they were hesitant to push their luck by lowering appearances – even if the captain would be hyperfocused on the prisoner tonight. One of the guards, taking a brief episode of gentle luck-trying, unwrapped a nico-bar and popped it into her mouth.
“Hey, any chance you can spare me one of those?” the other Kitanen guard asked her, pointing a finger.
“Sorry, Mago. That’s the only one I’ve got on me. I haven’t forgotten about the favour you did me in Yogpoany, I’ll pay you back some other time.”
The male Kitanen sighed in disappointment, keenly aware of his stomach grumbling. Not two minutes later, a thrumming sound caught both reptiles’ attention. The female Kitanen and then the male pointed their energy-rifles were aimed diagonally upward whilst humming with energy – then the male widened his eyes and fractionally lowered his rifle at the approaching sight overhead.
“Rako, that’s…” A streamlined grey-and-green two-person craft was flying low over the barren landscape at a leisurely, unthreatened pace straight towards the outpost, its orange lights flashing, with a familiar stylised brand name emblazoned on its side – a Kitanen State Dinners delivery vehicle. The vehicle touched down ten metres away from the Kitanen guards and the outpost’s entrance, an appropriate parking distance for the State Dinners service’s regulatory standards. Not a moment later, the vehicle’s side-doors parted, and Kitanen on watch got a clear view of the tall, slender Kitanen delivery-hen holding up a stack of three steaming food-boxes as she hurriedly all but skipped out towards them with energy that looked like she came out of the state commercials.
“Three Kervosal Combos as ordered!” she said in her slightly-dry but piping voice, a grin on her face that vaguely reminded one of the two Kitanen of their youngest daughter.
“Huh, I didn’t hear from the captain or the sergeant about us getting take-out,” Rako said, glancing towards his colleague. “Do you know anything abo-?”
Thwack!
Faster than either guard could react, the delivery-hen had delivered twin strikes in the same instant with an arm and a leg to either Kitanen’s neck which forced them to stagger back. Stumbling onto their rears, neither Rako nor Mago had a chance to so much as scream before the delivery-hen leapt higher than their shoulders in a twirling blur, twin kicks to their heads fluidly sending them to the ground.
As the Kitanen groaned in unconscious pain, a shadow passed over the fallen crystal-key that now lay on the gravel-like earth, a Kitanen’s hand picking the key up. The Kitanen delivery-hen’s face had lost all its bubbly energy, pink eyes cold – as she glanced towards the outpost, for a moment her image flickered and a humanoid with raven hair was glimpsed standing in her place before the illusion reasserted itself.
Laughter. A merry sound. His little chick, covered in down a more cream shade than his own, ran about as he held out his arms, then in one swift move catching her mid-run. She didn’t cry out though – they both laughed, the image striking in contrast to the warrior’s armour he wore and the leathery tents that surrounded them. Suddenly, they weren’t laughing anymore – they were still among soldiers’ tents, but they were sitting around a campfire, and she was whistling.
“That’s a new tune,” he said. “Where did you pick it up?”
“Ironblood taught me it,” she replied. “I like it. Don’t you?”
He smiled. “I like it too.”
Snapping back to the present, pain was searing and burning through his flesh like the tendons of every muscle were being pulled and torn and the holes in them widening to thin away the threads. By now, the wheezes of breath pushed out by stabbings had given way to pained, furious groans through his shallow beak’s teeth. He couldn’t escape it, much as he tried; couldn’t block it out or dismiss it, for the pain just took up too much.
Slowly, almost lovingly, Captain Dekutizonke retracted the first now-empty syringe from Phoenix the Orange’s shoulder, back out of the small hole that had formed in the energy-field to allow injection. Phoenix was involuntarily hissing breath in and out, his chest moving rapidly as Dekutizonke leisurely moved towards the tray of other tools, the captain’s pink eyes barely catching the dull light. He took a second syringe and strode slowly back to Phoenix, whose breathing was subsiding as he regained self-control remarkably quickly. Well, the captain would have to do something about that. As the needle’s tip approached the yellow-tinted energy-shield, a new hole opened up just large enough for the needle to enter and begin pricking through the white, down-like hair and the flesh beneath. Phoenix suddenly began shuddering, almost spasming, hard enough to make the rack rattle behind him as his orange eyes rolled up in his jerking head and he threatened to gag on his own tongue. Another strangled scream of pain when half the syringe’s dark-green liquid contents were injected.
The facility interior was mostly an indoor maze, walls stretching only half the height to the half-shadowed ceiling from which crystal-lights hung down, all of uniform pink and yellow colours. The Kitanen soldier doing his round was completely unaware that directly on the other side of one of the walls he was walking between, a Kitanen delivery-hen’s back was pressed and listening keenly – with a slightly pink flash, the delivery-hen disintegrated, and in her place was left a human girl with raven-black hair and purple eyes, wearing a jumpsuit.
As the Kitanen walked past the edge of the wall, he would’ve seen had he looked over his shoulder, the blur of a silhouetted arm as the figure sprinted away. The clatter of what the silhouette had thrown made the Kitanen spin on his heel, seeing the small sphere which had landed with a noise at the maze’s T-junction he had just come from. He stared in puzzlement for a moment. Then a smaller figure was upon his shoulders, legs locking around his neck – he only managed to reach up, trying to pry his attacker off, for one second before a sudden blow robbed him of consciousness and his body collapsed.
“Hn-hn-hn-hnngh…”
His little chick wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there was another figure, shorter than his height, back facing him.
For a moment, he cut away to when he was teaching her to manipulate crystals in that cave in the way that one might teach a newborn chick. Then they were training together. Then they were opening their hearts to the other on barren hills outside an ancient place.
She turned to glance back at him, purple eyes hard but slowly softening. Though there was no relation, they were clearly different races, there was a fractional softening in her eyes.
Captain Dekutizonke slowly, delicately extracted the syringe he’d just used from Phoenix’s upper-arm, the famed martial-artist’s fingers on his bound two left hands twitching uncontrollably as all he could do at this point was wheeze, several patches of his visible body looking half-swollen. The latest syringe was dropped with a clatter into the miniature bucket on the floor near the rack, joining several other used needles.
The captain’s hand was hovering over the torture tray, when the old metal doors slid apart in a quarter-circle upwards with great force, the captain promptly turning heel to face the entering soldier.
“What is it?” Captain Dekutizonke asked coldly.
“We have an intruder, captain – she’s taken half of the sentries out like a wildfire, and she’s still moving,” the soldier reported breathlessly. Smile removed, Captain Dekutizonke promptly marched across the cylindrical chamber to where a projector was waiting on a desk, activating it and getting several Crystalvision projections of several P.O.V.s in the facility – some were moving at a shaky pace with their patrols, but some were facing corners or the ceiling at angles, signs that their wearers were inert. The captain promptly switched the Crystalvision feed, giving him a wide view of the vast facility’s maze-like floor plan – he could see the guards bustling, or running about, and he caught the black moving flecks of a commotion on a particular area of the maze. He widened the image on that area, and he got a clear view of a small figure finishing disabling a sentry that she had on the floor, the viewpoint catching a clear glimpse of her face and hair.
“All units, we have an intruder located in Sector L-7,” the captain announced into his mic-like communicator without taking his eyes off the figure sprinting back into the shadows. “I have no need of her alive. Deadly force is authorised.” With a wheeze, Phoenix craned his tattooed neck slightly at those words, the martial artist’s orange eyes now filling up with his blood. The captain turned back to him with an expectant smile. “Perhaps you’d like to watch?”
The facility was now on high alert, klaxons screaming through the maze pathways as armed Kitanen sentinels rushed in groups of two, converging on a single location.
“She’s moving through Section L-20 right now,” the captain’s voice reported over their comms. “Box her in. If she attempts another Warp Crystal jump, the quantum field will dismantle her atoms – permanently.”
The squads did as they were ordered, winding fluidly around bends and corners, knowing they were getting closer to the target’s position and to each-other. She had no way out that wouldn’t end very messily for her, save by surrendering.
The pair of sentinels approaching from the north had a visual first on the hunched, cloak-covered figure. They immediately began firing their rifles, at which point the girl whipped around – an energy field formed in front of her as she crossed her forearms, blocking the volley of deadly energy-blasts.
“FIRE!” The western team was charging around an adjacent bend at Cyclonis, and they too began firing – the woman lifted one of her two shielding crystal-holding arms out of the X-formation to extend the shield and block the energy-bolts coming at her other side. That left her vulnerable on two sides to the south and east teams once they arrived, which should be any moment, and their blasts would kill her instantly. The green-eyed Kitanen leading the west team halted his firing as his gaze slightly lowered to assess everything. He scanned the floor at Cyclonis’ fleet, and he saw the four metallic boxes with four Warp Crystals each attached and pulsing, maybe he could almost even hear the escalating high-pitched whine over the rifle-shots. He’d seen the technology before, and he took note of the brown cape Cyclonis’ body was wrapped in. The brown-wrapped human girl’s purple gaze caught his through the transparent forcefield, he thought, as a truly bloodthirsty grin spread on her hood-shadowed face.
“FALL BACK, FALL-!”
In the nanosecond the technology hooked up to the Warp Crystals clicked, Cyclonis wrapped herself in the brown cloak and bent her knees to duck, the forcefields dissipating with her arms’ movements as she did so – in that same nanosecond, the four boxes placed strategically around her exploded with flashes of purple Warp Crystal light. The Kitanen of the north and west teams, and the approaching south and east teams, had only half-a-second to scream in pain as their bodies turned to shades and then to nothing against the light, scattered into dust.
Near-silence descended for a moment, the spot where only scorch-marks remained of the four rigged devices occupied solely by what looked like it could be a two-foot brown tent, smoke rolling off of it. Cyclonis fluidly stood up and tossed the smoking cloak made of precious materials aside, her jumpsuit-clad body underneath no worse for wear as she glared diagonally upward – up at where she knew one of the main Crystalvision sensors was watching her, glaring through it at the one who had been watching. Then she took off sprinting, out of the camera’s sight.
Captain Dekutizonke growled to himself, baring his razor teeth. He’d devoted years to being prepared for Phoenix the Orange the next time he fought him, and he’d succeeded where many an assassin and death-squad had failed in years past, he’d captured him again, been in the process of punishing him for every disgrace and degradation that the captain had suffered because of him – Dekutizonke would not be stopped now. He activated an intercom.
“Contact the Tertiary Fleet two kliks away,” he ordered. “Request immediate reinforcements to prevent the escape of a valued prisoner from Kitanen custo-”
The facility all but physically rumbled with a noise, lights flickering on and off around the torture chamber whilst all the cameras screens fizzled and went blank.
Captain Dekutizonke couldn’t see it from inside the facility’s walls, but outside, every last light and electronic visible on the facility’s surface was warbling before they all went out with a dying hum.
Small surveillance and maintenance drones clattered to the floor like stray snowdrops before a storm, lights dying. Cyclonis lowered the wand with which she’d fired the pulse, her face unreadable as she pressed on, unimpeded.
Captain Dekutizonke curled the corner of his beaked mouth slightly, none too happy at this turn of events, glaring at the blank monitors as if he could still see her. All his sentinels save the guards at his door had just been neutralised like hapless heretic villagers by… by a monkey whelp who was but a shadow of her mentor?!
As if on cue, Captain Dekutizonke heard the sounds of a struggle and his guards crying out, muffled through the torture chamber’s old metal doors. Phoenix, who had heavy bags under his eyes, didn’t visibly react. The noise ceased sharply, and after only a brief pause, there was the click of the doors’ lock and they were forced to shove open in their upward-curving mirrored paths with that screeching sound – the black-haired, jumpsuit-clad woman on their other side, wielding one of the sentries’ crystal-keys, didn’t even grunt as the doors lifted the rest of the way under the force of her hands.
Cyclonis analysed the entire chamber within a split-second of viewing it, then she allowed her eyes to widen on Phoenix the Orange – he was inside an energy-shroud attached to a rack, and he looked frighteningly weak. Unnatural swells on his body, bags under his eyes, face so haggard. For but a moment, an image flashed behind Cyclonis’ eyes that had once been so vague, an image of a human man suspended in the cerise sky, turning molten and cracked as he filled to the brim with white light.
“Well,” Captain Dekutizonke spoke up, calmly removing his uniform’s grey exterior coat to reveal the identically-coloured garment on his chest underneath, “you must want a personal fight very much, young hen.” Cyclonis glared and subtly curled her lip in a way that could make most people re-evaluate their life choices.
“You took someone from me,” she murmured, voice silky and as cold as ice. Captain Dekutizonke’s gaze shifted toward Phoenix’s weak body.
“Oh. Him?” He laughed, scorn permeating the light, almost gentlemanly sound.
“Let me enlighten you to what’s going to happen,” Cyclonis said matter-of-factly. “I am going to walk out of here with him. And I am going to kill you.” The captain was just smirked darkly, a nasty, cold glint in his eyes.
“You can try, little chimp,” he murmured. “But I have trained for years to outdo your owner. And when you fail, I think I’ll string you up and let Phoenix the Orange watch as I dish out the rest of his punishment on you.” Phoenix mustered just enough energy to react to that a little. “Assuming there’s enough left of your branch-swinging, lesser-evolved, primate sub-sapient meat-sack to punish when I am done. Yes, that will do. I’ll put you down with the comfort that you won’t be the one to outlive your owner. And then I’ll send him down to join you shortly after in the bowels of the realm of forsaken souls.” Captain Dekutizonke’s hand almost trembled at his side, such was his thirst to begin making good on his word. “Are you ready to fight a Kitanen that bettered Phoenix the Orange?”
Cyclonis glared Captain Dekutizonke down. He returned the look in kind, complimented with a teeth-bearing grin. The two combatants began pacing in the chamber which hummed with the overhead fan, clad only in his baggy pants and undershirt: one insisted on this dramatic dance, another wanted to get it over with. Purple human eyes stared down pink avian eyes. Cyclonis and Captain Dekutizonke stopped their pacing, the overhead fan practically the only sound in the room.
Cyclonis charged first, drawing her crystal-staff and pouncing. The captain, smirking, pulled an arm back, ready to counter her the moment she got in close or fired her staff-weapon. Cyclonis was halfway across the circular room when she suddenly withdrew her staff and leapt upwards, making the captain crane his neck faster than he realised her ruse – twirling in the air, Cyclonis didn’t come down upon the captain at all, but instead her thin hands grasped a pole-like pipe jutting out of the wall which she swung around gymnastically, making three-fifths of a full revolution before she swung off, higher into the chamber’s ceiling. As she reached near the chamber’s fan ceiling, Cyclonis swung on another pipe, kicking both legs up to smash into the pipe: in an instant, thick steam was gushing with a screaming hiss into the chamber. The pipe’s cut end toppled to the chamber’s floor, sending its opaque, vaporous contents surging that way. Wreathed in billowing grey vapour, Captain Dekutizonke coughed and snarled as he tilted his avian head around, spinning on the spot. The steam was getting in his eyes, and he saw only pale-grey in all directions while the noise made it difficult to pick out any other sound. Captain Dekutizonke grimaced, then he relaxed his body language, eyes closing as he gestured and lowered two vertical fingers in front of his face. The screeching of the steam was muted out of his awareness as he trained his focus. He had studied every technique which even resembled Phoenix’s array of fighting styles for years, anything to help him match the martial artist in the event the more efficient option failed him.
The silhouette came running and materialising through the steam behind the captain’s right shoulder, and his pink eyes opened. In the instant Cyclonis came within range, the topless Kitanen spun and diagonally lashed out an arm which knocked her clawed crystal-staff’s aim off to the side, causing its crystal-equipped crown to fire a charged blast at nothing. Then with the staff still in his grip, Dekutizonke grasped and twisted Cyclonis’ staff-holding wrist, making her grunt before he threw the primate and her weapon over his head and slammed her to the floor hard. Dekutizonke didn’t have to take a step forward, he just lifted his nearest leg with a high, savage scream. Cyclonis’ purple eyes widened in the split-second before she rolled clear of the downward-stomp, which caved the floor’s metal where her skull had been a second ago.
Back on her feet in an instant, Cyclonis looked ever-so-slightly unnerved. Captain Dekutizonke’s murderous glare turned up at her, grinning savagely, and he pounced against with a birdlike screech. Cyclonis slipped the glowing crystal from her satchel and threw it down.
KURRASHHH!
Blinding white erupted in the chamber. Then it lingered like smoke. Dekutizonke growled as he glared around the whitened chamber, the whiteness and the ringing in the ears of all rapidly fading. His frustration was boiling over.
“Don’t think you can evade me with stun blasts forever!” he bellowed, his voice echoing in his ears. He repeated the same meditative motion, but the high-pitched ringing from the blast lingered like a stubborn worm in his ears with each breath. Dekutizonke growled deeply. He’d trained for years to equal one of the greatest assassins on Ionos, he was not about to be bested by Phoenix’s foreign, sub-sapient lackey! Dekutizonke yelled as he craned his head about, vision returning.
“Who’s evading?” Cyclonis taunted on Dekutizonke’s rear as she charged at him. The moment she came in close, Dekutizonke’s body snapped to deflect with one arm and drive the other arm’s elbow into her head. But his arms only went through air as Cyclonis ducked into a slide along the floor, jabbing with her crystal as she slid by his legs. He screamed as an electrical current burned through him, overloading and searing every nerve and muscle. Cyclonis’ slide across the floor only stopped as she rolled into a three-point, feline-looking posture near the wall.
“Predictable!” she taunted icily, a lopsided grin at her mouth’s corner.
Dekutizonke growled a sound that reminded Cyclonis of the Bone-Wraiths, deep in his chest, before he charged at her; naked and open. The human witch and the taller Kitanen militant traded blows, blocks and parries, Cyclonis mostly keeping her crystal-staff held behind herself as she utilised her hands, forearms and legs defensively, only drawing and spinning the staff occasionally. The captain at first fought hand-to-hand, but after the second defensive or distracting twirl of Cyclonis’ crystal-staff, he sheathed a combat dagger from his brown pants and stabbed with it in a reverse-grip, metal singing on metal as Cyclonis had to block with her staff.
SHANG!
Sparks flew as the dagger’s serrated edge caught on Cyclonis’ staff a foot from her face and an inch from her staff-grasping left hand, both figures’ arms and weapons trembling as they fought each-other’s strength in their proverbial sword-lock, less than two feet separating their faces.
“Phoenix was right. You do need to play dirty to come close to matching him. Or me!”
Dark shadows danced on Dekutizonke’s scarred face. In a flash of movement which could match Phoenix’s, Dekutizonke’s leg brought Cyclonis’ leg out from under her, forcing her to one knee and breaking their staff-blade block. With a yell, the brutish Kitanen was grasping the human woman’s shoulder and staff-holding hand in either of his own, before he threw his head into her belly as he charged them at the wall behind her – Cyclonis in that moment swung her body and all its weight upward, legs and torso going above Dekutizonke’s head. As she did, she released her crystal-staff, letting it slide away across the floor. Dekutizonke crashed brutally into the chamber wall with his own momentum, the metal panel outright tearing loose with the force of his impact, causing the Kitanen to crumple. Cyclonis meanwhile touched down in her catlike three-point landing, trying to disguise her slightly-laboured breathing. A lock of raven hair was hanging down over her pale face.
In the broken-down section of the chamber wall, a low, almost nasally growl was building as the mass of feathered and well-built Kitanen body shifted, before Dekutizonke suddenly shot up with a furious, birdlike screech aimed straight at the heavens, looking more like a terrible prehistoric feathered raptor than ever before in that brief moment, with his talons bared and his tooth-filled beak open – then he charged back at Cyclonis, his pink eyes clouded but not yet blind. Cyclonis who was already standing back up with her hair growing loose, scowled, purple eyes shifting off of Dekutizonke for only a moment. The split-second when the captain came upon her and lifted a leg to deliver a flying kick was the moment Cyclonis leapt to the side, revealing the tray behind her. The world slowed as Dekutizonke’s pink eyes barely widened. Cyclonis, as she was spinning out of the path of his attack, was gritting her teeth and her purple eyes were practically dilated as she sailed through the air, her long raven hair airborne.
Dekutizonke’s body crashed straight into the tray of torture instruments. Cyclonis didn’t wince as they crashed against an opposite wall. Syringes and metal torture tools were scattered on the floor before and around Dekutizonke’s body, legs bending and arms moving weakly as the Kitanen who was splayed over the crumpled tray coughed and rasped a sound like he was choking on something painful. Cyclonis was unmoving as Dekutizonke, with more wheezing sounds and a low almost feline growling sound in his chest, lifted himself up slowly on his hands and knees, various metal tools and half-emptied syringes stabbed into him – some of the punctures on his body and face were drawing blood, some weren’t, a couple were causing visible swelling under his fingers. Dekutizonke was groaning practically every second as he tried to move to stand back up fully, and Cyclonis knew that anyone with anything less than Captain Dekutizonke’s enhanced pain tolerance would’ve been wailing in agony at this moment if they were in his position. Cyclonis removed her remaining Warp Crystal from her satchel, hearing its subtle song as it activated. The witch blipped from where she’d been standing to a crouched position against a wall diagonally ahead, to just atop Dekutizonke in the same instant that she delivered a brutal downward punch with a cry. The Kitanen’s syringe- and blade-studded chest was driven straight against the floor, driving the instruments deeper in, and this time, a shrill scream of agony escaped him unrestrained.
Captain Dekutizonke’s pain was all-consuming. Here, there, everywhere, he was burned by searing, insufferable white, while the blood under his skin bubbled and burned against his flesh with the very drugs he’d applied to Phoenix the Orange. The bleeding Kitanen rasped painfully, barely able to move any part of his body more than an inch at a time, his pink eye half-opening towards his right hand as he felt something metal clinking softly in the space inbetween his flattened palm and the metal floor.
Clip, clip…
Dekutizonke registered the sound of Cyclonis’ boots stalking closer, could almost see her through his squeezed eyes, not registering a thing as he clutched his right hand’s object so tight that it must have drawn his blood. A boot pressed into Dekutizonke’s relatively-uninjured back. She lifted a fist to finish the fight. Dekutizonke’s open pink eye was clear as the Kitanen knew it was now or never – then the Kitanen screeched as he spun anticlockwise with all the will and adrenaline he could summon. He backhanded the human witch-demon warrior, sending her staggering away. Cyclonis quickly recovered, growling as she shot a glare at Dekutizonke, in the moment before she began fainting and dodging with barely any gasps of air to dodge the strikes and swings of Dekutizonke’s bloody left arm. Dekutizonke was lunging directly into Cyclonis’ space as he jabbed and struck, Cyclonis deflecting his third, fourth and fifth attempted talon-strikes and backhands. He lashed out a kick at her shin before she could duck into a sweeping kick, drawing a pained yelp from her. Then his left hand, holding a bladed tool, struck.
“Urgh!” The gasp immediately escaped Cyclonis, purple eyes bulging in shock a foot from the captain’s face.
“NO!” Phoenix managed to bellow at the top of his dry voice.
Cyclonis staggered backward from the mutilated Kitanen, one hand cradling the point in her abdomen where the instrument’s handle poked out of her. She pulled the thing loose, only a fraction of the device’s poison-green liquid contents still inside its vial. Dekutizonke saw his opening, and he grinned savagely, before charging with another feral squawk. Cyclonis barely began lifting her arms defensively before Dekutizonke drove another scavenged cutting instrument directly into a carotid artery, making her eyes bulge wider than ever before. The blade went so far in her neck that what little rationality Dekutizonke’s mind still summoned knew that it must have gone all the way through her oesophagus and grazed her spine at the least, assuming this sub-sapient wretch’s biology worked vaguely similar to what he knew of Kitanen’s and most other Ionos-native creatures’ biology. Blood spilled past Cyclonis’ lower-lip before she started spurting and gagging, choking on her own blood. She reached up a hand with fingers curled like a cat’s claw, grasping and driving a syringe deeper in the side of Dekutizonke’s avian face, making the Kitanen grunt and grit his teeth harder as the pain flared him like a red-hot needle was burrowing into his cheek, but the rush of near victory was enough to make him power through it. Falling to her knees, Cyclonis grit her now cherry-stained teeth as her purple eyes burned furiously. The Kitanen’s croaking sounds rapidly cleared into the hoarse, squawk-like sound that was the laughter of his people, coming out manically – then it sharply stopped as he stabbed without warning, drawing a spurt of blood. He stabbed again. And again. His body shuffling lower to maintain an ability to keep on stabbing and stabbing at the witch, vaguely aware that Phoenix the Orange was helpless to watch the captain mutilate his apprentice. The girl’s blood was mixing into the battered Kitanen’s blood- and poison-stained feathers until there was little left to see of his opponent underneath him – then he suddenly stopped, wheezing harshly in the limbo which came after a hard-earned victory in a fight of life or death. There was little sound left in the chamber – Phoenix even was dead silent once more. He did it. He had won. Of course, Phoenix’s sub-sapient had put up an admirable fight for such unnatural ilk, but the might of a great and noble Kitanen had trumped hers anyway. And now, he could resume paying the freshly broken-hearted Phoenix the Orange back a thousand-fold for both his past humiliation and what his pet had done to-
The broken body fractured with cracks of white light and shattered, into nothing.
…
“Wha…?” Dekutizonke was so tired at this point that he couldn’t afford to summon the energy to express his shock any other way.
“I believe in playing smart as well.”
Dekutizonke craned his head. He heard her voice in the battle-trashed, wide chamber that now seemed to be empty of anyone save him and the manacled Phoenix, yet that voice somehow came from all around, bouncing off the walls. Phoenix’s weakened body somehow seemed to relax in his shackles, a subtle sigh escaping him as he grinned which quickly turned into a chuckle equal parts mirthful and mocking. Somewhat slowly, the injured, swelling and bleeding Kitanen lifted himself to his feet, craning his head with effort to stare around and find his foe as that voice continued speaking, surrounding him. “I picked that quantum cloak up from a Mikonosuinesh lady on Terra Poppukatoch, and I was saving it for a precious and crucial opportunity.” Dekutizonke didn’t waste the energy padding forward, just standing as ready as he could make his agonised body, ready to bunch all his energy into more defensive strikes. “It’s surprising how much you can learn about a person in just a few hours or even a valuable few minutes. How they fight. The way they react. And now I think I know you pretty well – enough to know your next move before you make it. It’s disappointing really – I had you figured out quicker than it takes me with most. Two-dimensional and utterly plain.”
A flare of outrage that cut deeper than any of the poisonous scalpels.
Cyclonis charged. She let loose her war cry, incoming on Dekutizonke’s rear. With a grunt, the Kitanen swung and lunged a bleeding arm to counter Cyclonis, who dodged the swing at her skull and pushed the swinging arm as it missed her. Instead of taking the resulting opening to strike, Cyclonis had sprinted past the captain, picking a scalpel-like cutting instrument off the floor and spinning back upon the Kitanen whom had already managed to turn towards her.
“That’s. Playing. Dirty!” Dekutizonke rasped balefully, glaring heatedly. Cyclonis barely half-smirked as she glared right back, holding her scalpel-wielding hand behind her head with one hand, extending her crystal-staff in front of herself with the other hand.
“I’m a dirty player.” And Phoenix hadn’t made his skillset adaptable for someone who didn’t fight in a way that he could predict. Without any further ado nor stalling, Cyclonis launched back at Dekutizonke, a berserker-look flashing in her eyes. The Kitanen attempted to take her legs out with kicks, then shot a talon strike at her head, a roundhouse-kick, a jab at her abdomen – Cyclonis in turn feinted, grabbed the fist and grabbed Dekutizonke staggering forward past her, leapt back to dodge and fainted to the side respectively. Then she leapt upon Dekutizonke’s exposed shoulders faster than he could reach up, legs grasping his neck in a headlock and reeling back. The mutilated Kitanen made no more noise than a pained groan as he staggered backward. At the wall, Phoenix’s baggy orange eyes were proud of one, devoid of pity for the other as he watched the battle draw towards a close. Dekutizonke’s beak scrunched up into a mean-toothed scowl, and Cyclonis grimaced ferally as she twisted with her shins to keep his neck restrained, before she pulled back an arm and struck.
CRACK!
A new splinter formed through the beak as Captain Dekutizonke’s bloodied head snapped to the side under the blow. The vile, broken Kitanen captain crumpled to the floor, and Cyclonis almost fluidly rolled off of him, but the battered girl stumbled a little at the end. She breathed, steadily and briefly. She’d won.
She rushed to the worktops that were in the chamber near Phoenix, rapidly typing and switching through the controls within a moment of analysing them. With a hum of machinery powering down, the yellow energy field on Phoenix dissipated and the cuffs holding his six birdlike limbs in place came undone – he groaned almost like a dying old man as he slumped forward. The raven-haired woman caught Phoenix’s larger, snow-covered body – that noise as he’d been freed being enough to tell her that she was alive, Cyclonis fluidly and effortlessly shifted around under Phoenix to get him leaning firmly on her.
“Come on – time to go,” she all but grunted, and she immediately began moving, shuffling forward, pulling Phoenix with her – as they moved, Phoenix lifted his haggard face, and Cyclonis felt an immediate impulse to chide him to save his energy until she got him resting in the vehicle outside, even as he managed a weak but very Phoenix grin at her with his beaked face.
“Well done, Master,” he wheezed out proudly, and Cyclonis’ purple gaze was fixed unblinkingly on him during that moment. “Well done.” Hearing those words and seeing that face as Phoenix said them was a moment that Cyclonis would never forget to her last days. They navigated past the inert body of the vicious Kitanen commander who had sought to bring Phoenix, or the idea of Phoenix, to his knees.
They were out of earshot and didn’t hear when the Kitanen stirred with a wheeze.
Phoenix’s use of his eagle-like double-jointed legs rapidly improved as he and Cyclonis traversed the body-strewn facility, though he still slightly grunted in pain, feeling red-hot whenever Cyclonis’ arm or shoulder brushed the swollen parts of his body. Nothing he hadn’t felt before of course, just magnified to marginally record-breaking levels, that’s all. They reached the way Cyclonis had come in, and they exited through it. An open, Kitanen State Dinners delivery vehicle was up ahead near the barren terra’s edge, under the pale-green aurora, open and vacant. Of course, it was always wise to have an emergency escape plan, and Cyclonis was rife with planning.
“You will make it,” Cyclonis all but growled forcefully as she kept the two of them moving, and it was almost like when the old her was reprimanding Phoenix for going out of line. “We’re almost out. You’re going to make it!”
“I hope so,” Phoenix wheezed out, which felt like a dozen razor blades cutting through the inside of his oesophagus.
“I don’t hope, I know,” Cyclonis said gravely. “We’re going to take this vehicle to the Shroud, exchange it for another to minimise detection, and then we will go straight to Terra Zhiliajing – if we can’t take a direct path, we’ll take a detour to an inn and then go to Zhiliajing.” A brief pause, and then Cyclonis went on, the words bringing a certain relief to her as they departed her mouth. “They’ll fix you up. And you will tease and joke to me about it from your recuperation bed, and at home once I move you out of there.”
Phoenix chuffed out a wheezing noise, beak forming a smirk, and he said, “I will cook a masterful pie for us as soon as I am able-bodied afterwards.”
Cyclonis snorted with a small smirk. “I know you-”
PCHOW!
A flash of an energy-bolt behind their backs, and suddenly the world around Phoenix went dark as he froze, eyes wide.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion – Cyclonis had been thrown slightly off of Phoenix by the blast, and what seemed like a moment later, the bloody and battered avian-humanoid began falling forwards, four arms ending in crow-like hands spread. Purple eyes were wide, the girl’s face painted in a picture of pure shock and horror. Phoenix’s wide eyes were on the ground, seeming to rise up to greet him. When he hit the dirt, his back bared a fresh scorch mark like a black crater.
Instinct kicking in, Cyclonis shifted her gaze towards where the blast had come from. She saw the bloodied Kitanen captain, holding a blaster high. Cyclonis didn’t hesitate, didn’t even give her rage voice before she counteracted, spinning and throwing a blast from a crystal which cut the Kitanen down in an instant. Captain Dekutizonke’s dead pink eyes were left staring lifelessly upwards from the vacant sockets of his mutilated corpse, lying on the floor of his rotten facility. Cyclonis threw another blast to make sure it was over – purple flames erupted and consumed the captain’s body. Then she turned her attention to the one beside her.
Phoenix was coughing and sputtering blood, a couple crow-like, taloned hands by the bloody new opening torn through his torso. He heard Cyclonis rushing towards him, felt her cool hands grip him in concern, and in that moment, part of him wished so, so hard that he could save her from what she was going to go through next.
“No!” her voice was saying. “No, you will not die on me.” Scenarios, desperate and varying from complex to half-baked were already running through her brain for how to fix this, layered atop the memory a man she loved exploding in a flash of light under her home’s bloodred sky.
“Going to be with my little chick now…” he wheezed out painfully, reaching out to try and hold her with a hand. “I’m sorry… I couldn’t be here by your side for longer.”
“No! I will not bury you. No!” She could fix this – she could patch him up, rush him to Terra Zhiliajing, or call in a favour on Monsunos, or get a last-minute operation on Hliþ-Díeglod…
“Hey,” Phoenix’ voice said, soft but clear, and Cyclonis went silent as he lifted one of his four hands towards her face – it was piercing how frightening hoarse Phoenix’s voice sounded to her ears. His warm, catlike eyes met were looking directly up into her face as she held him. “You remember what I said.” The look on Cyclonis’ face was… well, the muscles hadn’t felt anything like this since her grandmother had died. A harsh cough escaped Phoenix, and Cyclonis saw droplets of his blood fly out of his beaked mouth on his breath. “We didn’t have… all that long together, I know.” Those words cut through the surge of panicked solutions running through Cyclonis’ mind like a knife, and her face scrunched up as she turned away, reality crashing into her like a blast of power from the Aurora Stone itself – she knew what Phoenix’s chances were. “But it’s okay… because we had it.” He coughed and rasped again, and Cyclonis’ muscles moved almost on automatic to readjust his position held in her arms. His gaze re-met hers without missing a beat. “I’ve done… many things with my life… that I’m not proud of. And I wish I’d done them better.” Cyclonis felt an elevator plunging down through her chest. “But serving you…” Phoenix’s eyes were clenched shut again for a moment before he re-opened them. “…serving you is not one of them.” Cyclonis felt her eyes and her brows fractionally widen and lift. Another cough, and again Cyclonis moved to re-position the mutilated person – it was only the second or third time and yet it somehow felt as natural as years-old routine, her eyes clenching shut as a memory came back to her.
“It was my first time having a friend,” she choked out flatly. There was little sound from Phoenix, and Cyclonis could sense his confusion. “The memory I used to tune to that crystal. When I was fourteen. I’d never had a friend before her. At least, not a friend like that. However brief it was.”
“Just promise me…” Phoenix gripped Cyclonis’ shoulder so tightly that his talons almost cut her, and his voice and gaze became clear, imploring, begging with his eyes’ orange, candle-like warmth that seemed to banish all the weakness he must have been feeling for one precious, precious moment. “Promise… that you won’t repeat the same mistakes I did. We will be together again. You and me… with my first chick… one day.” A long pause. “Daugh…” He coughed before he could finish the word. Cyclonis knew what the rest of that word was. It was like reality as Cyclonis knew it had shifted and changed around her with that last word.
“I…” she began. Another cough, this one more violent, blood staining Phoenix’s cracked, beak-shaped lips. Then silence. He breathed no more. His catlike eyes were half-lidded but unseeing, yet they seemed a lot less peaceless, even with the dark bags underneath. And Cyclonis was suddenly alone with the crackling flames of the ruined, burning facility, and the body of the mentor, the friend, the family that she’d loved and lost, still cradled in her arms. It didn’t feel real, not yet the loss didn’t – but Cyclonis knew it would. This calm numbness inside her now was just the precedent. For now, it was just impossible for her mind to comprehend that someone so important, so core to the functioning of her life, her very universe, was dead and gone. Could she have done it differently? There were so many alternative possibilities she could have taken. If she’d thought of a different plan, if she’d been smarter or faster on Hliþ-Díeglod, or here when Captain Dekutizonke had fired at their backs. Now two men whom Cyclonis had looked up to, learned from and loved as kin, and both of them had died before her eyes whether those eyes had been seeing or not at the time. First the Dark Ace, now Phoenix. Both dead because of her weakness.
No. That wasn’t right. The Dark Ace had died because of her, but the fault hadn’t been hers alone. He’d died screaming for more, more, like a hungry animal, a hole growing inside of him the more he ate – it had been his own power-hunger, the kind which he’d had in common with Cyclonis’ grandmother, which had killed him. But that didn’t absolve Cyclonis of blame – he’d goaded her, but she’d pulled the trigger when she’d overloaded him with the energy. Phoenix on the other hand had died by the hands of people whom he’d crossed before he and Cyclonis had ever met. And how could she have hoped to save him by being faster? Not even Phoenix the Orange’s own speed had been enough to save him on Hliþ-Díeglod. It occurred to Cyclonis how different her two male familial figures since her blood family’s passing really were. She had loved the Dark Ace, she’d realised some time ago – maybe he hadn’t loved her back in turn, but despite how things between them had all but nosedived towards the end, she had loved him. After the last of her familial elders had passed, he’d been all she’d had, and he’d had such a hand in training her. Not unlike what Phoenix would do for her much later down the line. But the Dark Ace had taught her to be cold, cruel, ruthless, he’d taught her to hunger for power just like her grandmother had taught her. Phoenix however had taught her compassion, he’d taught her how to care for not just her body but also her soul, he’d taught her not to repeat the mistakes from which he had apparently learned the hard way. He’d taught her… taught her to be a person.
Her destiny was not the same as theirs, nor was it the same as her grandmother’s.
Cyclonis inhaled, and she sighed as she arched her head back, looking up to the sky, where embers were flying from the fire near her which cast a warm glow and shadows on her face.
“I promise.”
Cyclonis buried Phoenix’s body and stood as sole attendee of his funeral. This happened on the same day that she, after some dwelling alone atop a cliff overlooking a vast waterfall, threw her staff over the side. The crystal-staff that had been in the royal lineage of Cyclonia for generations, passed from conqueror-empress to conqueror-empress, disappeared into the rapids, and with it, the young woman felt a sense of finality.
Master Cyclonis was no more. Now, she was just Cyclonis, to those she trusted with her name. Which was no-one.
At first.
Six months since Phoenix’s death, on month #32 on Ionos, Cyclonis was dwelling over a market stall on Terra Monsunos, a mask covering her lower face and a hood drawn over her head. Her hand reached to purchase an appealing-looking loaf of bread that she could cook into a rich, creamy stew that she wouldn’t have been able to make at all three years ago. Her hand brushed another’s that had reached for the bread at the exact same time, surprising her. Cyclonis lifted her gaze, and she drew in an intake of breath at the sight of the orange gaze she met.