Skipper lay in the dark, nursing his wounds.
After stopping the bleeding with a coagulant and bandaging up the stump, he’d retired to his quarters for so much needed rest and relaxation. Well, he wasn’t feeling very restful or especially relaxed, but still. It was the thought that counted.
He glanced down at his new wound, at the arm that was missing from the elbow down. It wasn’t quite as bad as his injury back on Caelus Breck, but a missing arm was a missing arm. Once they got to Elysian Fields, he’d have to get another prosthetic bolted on. There was no way he’d be killing the Supre with just one hand, Freedom or no.
Even though his wound ached, pain sculpting itself into the shape of the missing limb, it was not what consud his mind. No -- what had been dancing through his head for the last hour or so was the countdown.
Was it ti, yet? Was it ti, now?
He held his script in his prosthetic hand, screen open to the function he’d need. A single tap of the screen, and everything would begin. But was everything ready? Could they not wait a little longer, maybe, get things ready, make sure they had everything they needed? Perhaps they could leave all this by the wayside for just a while more, have so more adventures out in the bounty of space…
…no.
The ti for that had passed. Avaman had his scent now, and he wasn’t one to let his quarry go. Skipper had seen that sa ferocity in the mirror too many tis to mistake it. As much as Skipper needed to kill the Supre, Avaman needed to kill Skipper. It was what animated them.
So ti ago, Skipper had managed to get his hands on a certain virus. An escapee from the Absurd Weapons Lab of the Supremacy, stolen by a particular pirate and then stolen again by Skipper. It wasn’t capable of much -- simply lurking in the background of a communication system, and then broadcasting a ssage when prompted. As far as weapons went, it was pretty low tier. But it was what Skipper needed.
He’d already introduced the virus to the Supremacy’s central communication network a while ago. He’d already recorded the ssage. All that was needed now… was the go-signal.
They were almost at Elysian Fields. There wouldn’t be a better ti than this.
A tal finger clicked against a glass screen.
"This is going to be pretty confusing for most of you. You must be thinking: who’s this guy?"
The doors to Atoy Muzazi’s quarters suddenly slid open -- and Morgan Nacht charged in, white in the face. He was breathing heavily: clearly he’d sprinted all the way here. Muzazi imdiately leapt up. Morgan was ant to have been guarding Aclima. Had sothing happened?
Morgan spoke before Muzazi. "Have you… have you seen it? Is your videograph on?"
Muzazi shook his head, confused. "Seen what? What are you talking about?"
"Can’t bla ya. Sorry for interrupting your shows, folks, but I need to make a little announcent here."
Commissioner Marcela Caesar watched with keen interest as the ssage played on the holographic screen before her.
On that screen, floating in the air, the image of a man lying on a couch could be seen. It was not a man familiar to her, but those eyes -- oh, they were familiar to her. Those eyes held the killer instinct of a born warrior. Sothing she prized in her own Special Officers. This was the second playback of the ssage, and she was listening just as intently as the first ti.
Before this interruption, she’d been joining other mbers of the military for a demonstration of Halcyon Interstellar’s new developnts in orbital defense. The turrets they’d been showing off had certainly been impressive, but were now utterly forgotten in the wake of this bombshell. The representative who’d been espousing the wonders of the new rapid reload system was just as transfixed by the broadcast as the rest of them.
She glanced across the seating area, to where the Ascendant-General was watching the ssage with his own staff. Alexandrius Toll had a deep frown on his face as he took the words in, again and again. Nobody had said it out loud, but it was clear what this would bring.
Marcela’s gaze returned to her girls.
Michael Kerberos tore her eyes away from the main screen long enough to grin back at her. Marcela’s personal bodyguard was a Pugnant woman with scruffy white hair that hung over her eyes, in a way that reminded one of a puppy. Her ’uniform’, for lack of a better word, consisted of little more than scraps of tal and fabric arranged in such a haphazard way that it provided slightly more protection than a swimsuit. That fanged grin on her face was proof enough, though: she, at least, understood what this ant.
Marcela’s personal aide, Dariah Todd Harlow, seed much less excited. She swallowed nervously as she watched the ssage, bright blue eyes flicking between it and Marcela every couple of seconds. The Cogitant girl had a bob of deep black hair, combed compulsively to an inch of its life each morning, with an arresting mole beneath her left eye. She wore a sleek and sleeveless white dress that terminated just above the knee, with black stockings over both her legs and arms. She cleared her throat as the ssage completed its third replay.
"Ma’am," she said haltingly. "What is this?"
Marcela chuckled, reaching forward and brushing a lock of hair out of her aide’s face -- enough to stop that stamring and replace it with a blush. Oh, yes, she knew what this was. She was no fossil like Toll -- when she saw a disruption like this, she couldn’t help but feel her heart tremble.
"Opportunity," she purred.
"Well, introductions are in order first of all -- the na’s Zachariah Esralda."
In the great city of Match’s March, traffic -- both pedestrian and vehicle -- had co to an utter halt. Every head was looking up at the ssage that had replaced the constant advertisents on the skyscrapers, and every ear was listening to the words echoing throughout the urban jungle.
Here, the man called Zachariah Esralda had a captive audience of millions -- and this was only the tiniest sampling of his listeners.
Roy Oliphant-Dawkins, paused in the middle of Match’s March’s famous crossing, frowned deeply as he looked up at the screens, at Skipper’s face made stories tall. The last ti he’d seen that mug had ended in disaster. The hell was he thinking…?
Buzz.
Soone was calling Roy’s script. Adjusting the bag he had slung over his shoulder, he pulled the device out of his pocket and put it to his ear.
"Yeah?" he said, going to resu his walk -- only for the voice on the other end stop him in his tracks once again.
After all, it was the sa voice as the one coming from the screens.
"Well, that na probably doesn’t an much to you guys. So people call Skipper."
In the esteed private manor of the Ospilerous family, Special Officer Winston Grace grinned widely to himself as he listened to the ssage being bead across the Supremacy. He leaned right into his small script like he was playing a video ga -- eyes scanning any detail of the dark room, ears listening intently to every word out of Zachariah Esralda’s mouth.
How exciting! How interesting!
This man’s words seed to suggest that he and the Supre had a prior history, but his na wasn’t one that Winston was familiar with at all. Zachariah Esralda...
Was there perhaps a relation to Achilles Esralda, the old executioner of the Supremacy? According to historical record, he’d committed suicide before the Supre, but his reasoning had been left suspiciously opaque. Oh, that made sense. This Zachariah Esralda must have been so kind of relative -- perhaps an adopted child, based on the lack of familial resemblance -- who had done sothing to the Supre, and Achilles had killed himself to maintain his honour. If it was severe enough to provoke that kind of response, then most likely it had been an assassination attempt -- but Zachariah had survived? That was weird. If he’d survived, wouldn’t he have beco a Contender? So he’d survived, but in such a way that he was physically unable to continue fighting. On the verge of death from the Supre’s counterattack, then. That explained the tiline discrepancy, too. This man was just a little too young to have been in such a scenario back then, so he’d probably been in so form of stasis for a period. So now he was back and wanting revenge. That made sense.
"Um, Detective?" called out the security officer from the drawing room, the various witnesses and suspects visible through the doorway. "You were telling us the truth of the case?"
Oh. That was right. He was here to investigate the Pseudo-Suicide case. Well, he’d figured that out five minutes after he’d gotten here -- he’d just been stalling things for the free drinks at this point.
"The butler did it," he declared, waving a dismissive hand over his shoulder. "Can soone give a ride to my ship?"
"Again, probably drawing a blank. I’m not exactly famous. But let tell you what I’m all about."
The beast had been a titan, nearly the size of a village, all scaled skin and massive fangs. It had been terrorizing the people of this planet for years now, devouring their cattle and destroying their lands. Apparently, it was a leftover experint from the ti of the gods -- or, as the people of the galaxy at large called them, the Gene Tyrants. Many warriors had gone up against it, and many warriors had died.
It had taken Lily Aubrisher about two minutes to finish it off. Smoke rose from its charred skin, and stray tendrils of lightning still danced around its empty eye sockets. Its jaw hung open, and the slop that had been its tongue and organs oozed forth freely.
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In its death throes, one of its teeth had co loose and lodged into the ground. Lily now used this as a makeshift seat, carefully rebraiding her brilliant white hair. It seed to co loose every ti she did anything these days, but that was no surprise. When you moved at the speed of lightning, appearance tended to take the backseat.
"Ma’am!" called out Hailel in his bedrock-deep voice, stalking over.
He was a tall and sallow man, long black hair and black cloak giving him the appearance of so kind of evil sorcerer. His features were stern as stone, and the reachers that protruded from either side of his head were gnarled like sinister wood. His red eyes glinted in the sunset of the planet as he approached.
"What’s up?" Lily said, finally giving up on the braids. They’d only co undone again once she moved faster than a run, anyway.
"The locals have been talking," he said seriously, holding out one of those devices -- a script. "There’s a ssage going out, all throughout this region of the galaxy. I think you should see it."
Lily extended a hand to receive the script, only to pause. It seed that it wouldn’t be necessary. She knew the script was going to ring a few seconds before it did.
After all, electricity could be so damn loud.
"Around sixty years back, I tried to take out the Supre. Didn’t do too well since, ya know, he ain’t dead. But I got a good hit in. Took his ear right off. Bet that’s the biggest injury he’s had in a good while."
Muzazi swallowed as the ssage looped again and again and again. He found he was reflexively assuming the position to activate his Radiants, palms pointed towards the floor. Skipper was doubtless an imasurable distance away, and yet the words he spoke felt so dangerous that he might as well have been in the room, gun in hand.
On the other side of the room, arms crossed, Morgan looked over. "What do we do?"
"I think it would be wise," Muzazi said slowly, his voice dry. "If we went and fetched the Heir."
"None of those Contenders or whatever are giving him what I did, that’s for sure. Which brings to my point here…"
Dragan watched the video on his script, pale in his face, even as copies of it played all across the AE’s controls. Those words ran throughout the ship, washing over the four of them in the cockpit -- Dragan, Ruth, Bruno and Serena. Those words that, deep down, Dragan knew would doom them.
There was no coordination between them, but they all moved at the sa ti anyway. Three heads turned over three shoulders to look, shocked, at the closed door that led to Skipper’s quarters.
What are you thinking, Skipper? Dragan wondered. What the hell are you thinking?
"Ready for round two, old-tir?"
Avaman, in the darkness of the mining station, seized the monitor in front of him. It had taken him hours to make enough repairs to get the power on, and he’d imdiately been greeted with the face of the man who’d just escaped him. His own face.
His blood boiled as he heard the final words Zachariah Esralda said. Old-tir. Old-tir. He had called God old-tir. Such disrespect. Such disregard. Unforgivable. Unforgivable!
It would take a long ti to get a distress signal set up -- but for the ti being, Avaman busied himself by screaming in rage at the screen in front of him.
"I am. I’ll be waiting at Elysian Fields."
Wu Ming laughed out loud to himself as he watched the video playing on the videograph screen, ignoring the hushed silence of the other viewers. He was at a premier for one of the new October Jones videographs, and had just been about to die of boredom when this interesting little event had taken over the monitor. As loud complaints began to bounce around regarding the interruption of the movie, he kicked his feet up on the next row and watched keenly, ignoring the withering stare of his aide.
"Skipper, huh?" he laughed. "I knew you were an eleven outta ten, man! A twelve!"
"Bring whoever you want."
On her balcony aboard the Shesha, Paradise Charon smiled softly to herself. The Prisoner was never wrong.
With a flick of her wrist, she cast her holographic screen onto the massive space before her -- a balcony aboard the Shesha could of course not look out into the void directly, but the inside was so dark to pretty much be the sa. The gargantuan face of Zachariah Esralda continued to issue his challenge over and over, that cocky grin on his face, words rewriting the world. She could feel it, already… like a rumbling waiting to make itself known.
Now, then… how could she use this to eviscerate that loathso Atoy Muzazi?
"Let’s have fun."
The Hellhound twitched warily as, for the first ti in years, the Supre stood up from his throne.
This man had never occupied much of the Hellhound’s thoughts, despite the hefty pay he received for occupying his current position as a Contender. The Supre, to him, wasn’t so much different from the throne he sat on. Furniture. Sothing constant yet irrelevant.
And yet… in that mont… the Hellhound found himself holding his breath with lungs he did not have.
Dust cascaded off the Supre’s massive, muscled body like a waterfall. His joints cracked with the intensity of gunshots. There was a series of loud clicks as his chapped lips opened into a bright white grin. He had not been dead, but all the sa this was a vision of a man returning to life. Colour seed to return to his skin and light blonde hair, and the long sigh he let out his lips was the first breathing he’d done in a while.
But, still… that grin.
From his position on the floor, all the Hellhound could see of the Supre was that grin. His eyes and the rest of his face were obscured from view by his wild hair and the oppressive darkness of the throne room. Even so, though, that huge man was surely rapt with attention at the ssage before him.
As the ssage ended, though, a new sound overtook the room. A quiet chuckle, that intensified into loud and hearty laughter.
"Ah…" the Supre sighed -- before he slamd a fist down onto the arm of his throne, utterly shattering it. "Hell yeah!" he bellowed, voice bouncing off the walls. "Yes! I like that! He’s calling out -- that’s aweso! Elysian Fields…" his head snapped towards the Hellhound. "Hey, where is that? Is it nearby?"
It had been ages since the Supre had last spoken, but there was no sign of it in his voice. It was titanically deep, yes, but also strangely jovial -- more like a person you would et down at the bar than a head of state.
With the way he jumped out of his throne and the obvious excitent in his posture, he seed more like a big kid than anything else.
The Hellhound ran a quick search through his connection to the network. "Elysian Fields," he said, artificial voice smooth and calming, with but a tinge of beastliness. "The site of one of the last battles of the Thousand Revolutions. Abandoned since then. Given distances, it would take around five days to muster significant forces there."
"Really? Five days? Argh!" he clutched his head. "Okay, I’ll tell you what -- you let everyone know. Grab the, uh, the Special Officers, and the other Contenders, and let them know to et us there. We’ll make it a whole thing." He snapped his fingers. "It’s gonna be great. Yeah?" Seemingly satisfied, he began bounding off out of the room.
The Hellhound nodded. "Sure. What will you do?"
The Supre skidded to a halt, running a hand through his coarse beard as he turned his head. For the first ti in a long while, there was light in his eyes. He grinned.
"?" he asked. "Ol’ Zachariah was nice enough to send a whole damn invitation. I’m getting myself presentable."
It was the slightest thing. Perhaps not even intentional. Perhaps just the result of the excitent of the situation. But it happened all the sa.
The tiniest spark of golden Aether ran down the Supre’s cheek, and the sheer light of it was enough to blast away the shadows.
Deep in the darkness of the Shesha, the Prisoner smiled.
"And so it begins."
"Let’s have fun… let’s have fun… let’s have fun… let’s have fun…"
As the technicians of the Supremacy’s communication network finally regained control, the end of the ssage began to loop. Zachariah’s face pixelated and warped, until it beca little more than the suggestion of human features. Finally, his voice deteriorated to an incoherent screech -- before cutting out entirely.
Then it went back to the Farball ga. Looked like the Pol Bankers were winning.
"You can turn it off there, Johan," croaked the older man, chin resting on his hand. "I think the ssage was seen and understood."
His hair was white from age and his face and body a mass of battle scars, but sothing about the way he sat still radiated strength. One eye had been lost long ago, the socket left empty and open to the world, but the other -- glinting gold -- watched keenly enough for a hundred. His fingers drumd against the arm of his chair. So of the digits were old and so were young, a sign of reckless Panacea usage.
His na was Klaus El, and he was sothing of a terrorist.
The man nad Johan Blackbird was much the sa. His Umbrant eyes were dull and dark, sunk into a killer’s abyss, even as he held up the videograph remote and turned off the screen. Just like Klaus, he had scars -- once, a long ti ago, his lips had been stitched shut, and they still held the marks. He’d lost one arm, and the prosthetic he’d gotten to replace it was strange; rather than a hand at the end, there was only the barrel of an ancient-looking rifle.
"How do we proceed?" he asked, his voice as dull as the rest of him.
Klaus waved his hand at the black screen. "Naturally, of course," he replied, with a voice that sounded like he swallowed gravel professionally. "Skipper’s given us the most clear ’go’ we could hope for. Inform the n. Free Eagle is coming ho."
Johan saluted and stalked out of the room, pumping the rifle on his arm as he went. What a useless gesture. It betrayed his eagerness. What would he be shooting in the next few minutes, after all?
Still… Klaus could sympathize. He stood up from his seat and made his way over to the balcony, using a cane to maintain his balance. His legs were fine, but he’d taken a blow to the head a few years prior that had left him with a permanent sense of dizziness. An endless war took its toll.
He held onto the railing with one hand, taking in a deep breath of fresh cold air. Refreshing.
Elysian Fields was mostly grasslands, interspersed with huge forests and mountains. He could see one of them on the horizon, the towering Mt. Splendor surrounded by dense trees. The sun hung over it, casting the landscape in a lancholy orange light.
His eye flicked down, away from the natural world, and instead to what they had built.
The news hadn’t yet spread. His soldiers were still running drills, officers barking orders and automatics carrying supplies to and fro. This base was made mostly from prefabricated buildings, embedded into the old Gene Tyrant ruins like parasites. A great and decrepit pyramid with tal maggots writhing through it.
This was the Regint RED, the army ford to slay a god. The army Klaus had devoted his life to. The army Klaus would surely see die over the next few days.
Just a few more sins, and all this would end.
It’s finally ti, isn’t it, Skipper? he thought, looking out over his legions. Finally ti to kill the Supremacy.
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