“This looks bad.”
Aurein and Flint had barely snuck into Tempest City’s spaceport intact. Without Allef’s sheer firepower, evading the drones had been almost impossible, and the two were significantly bloody, more of their limbs penetrated by drone bullets than not. They hid just behind the blockade, taking in the magnitude of the forces stationed in the docks around them.
“Damn… I can see the Lucre Main is right there, but running over to it will put us in full view of the blockade,” Flint whispered, tilting his head over towards their ship sandwiched among several others of similar shape and size nearby.
“We need a distraction,” Aurein said.
“Got a gold bomb handy?”
“No. I never got a chance to make one.”
Flint looked around his surroundings for something Aurein could transform into a gold bomb. They had snuck behind the blockade already, hidden by a jutting-out wall, and had easy access to the ships stationed nearby. An idea came to Flint, causing him to jolt upright, and he turned back towards Aurein with a grin he didn’t even try to control.
Aurein, eyes wide, looked at Flint, and then at the small racing pinnace parked right next to them, then back at Flint.
“No way.”
“Why not?!” Flint hissed. “It’ll get the job done! You can turn it to gold quick enough, right?”
“No, it’s not that it won’t work, I just can’t believe you’re actually about to make me do this.”
Aurein pushed himself to standing and, careful to stay behind the jutting-out wall, touched the racing pinnace. From the tips of Aurein’s fingers, the titanium and tungsten transformed to solid gold, quickly encompassing the entire craft before, with the clench of Aurein’s fist, the golden ship shrank and coalesced into a single, tiny ball of yellow metal. Aurein picked it up.
“Anyone notice?” Aurein asked, turning back towards the blockade with the gold bomb in hand.
“Nope. The pinnace was mostly covered up by the wall. Nobody noticed. Ready?”
“Just give me the word.”
“Throw it.”
Aurein wound up his arm and threw the gold bomb over the blockade into the clearing on the opposite side of the docks. Before the bomb even hit the ground, with the snap of Aurein’s fingers, the sphere of gold transformed back into its original form and the racing pinnace grew out of seemingly thin air, crashing into the ground with an ear-splitting metallic scrape.
While the blockade scrambled towards the fallen pinnace, Aurein and Flint sprinted over to the Lucre Main and climbed in.
From the perspective of the Keila blockade, the docked Lucre Main began the takeoff sequence without warning. Flint pressed hard on the throttle, accelerating the Lucre Main towards the dock’s exit. Gunfire erupted in the direction of the leaving ship, but only after it was already halfway down the runway.
Far faster than either of them had expected, they had left Nopetu’s atmosphere and had entered orbit in space. Countless Keila battleships littered the cosmos, forcing Flint to aim their ship through the clutter. He wove carefully between the maximum firing ranges of the battleships and their smaller scout ships, listening acutely to the warning alarms of several missiles being fired after them every time he accidentally dipped into their firing ranges.
“Hurry it up!” Aurein shouted.
“Working on it!”
Flint pushed the throttle yet further, increasing his speed to a terrifying rate to delay the impacts from the missiles. But the faster he accelerated, the harder it was to sharply turn, and some ships’ firing ranges he was not able to avoid, coming into gunfire or even avoiding railgun shots.
Coming to the edge of Nopetu’s anti-warp field, Flint began the warp startup sequence. He looked at the screen that displayed the rear camera.
“Nora damn these missiles are fast!”
The startup sequence completed and they emerged from the invisible anti–warp bubble.
“Aurein, when I say go, go!” Flint yelled, handing over control of the warp drive. Flint put all of his focus into dodging the missiles long enough for the warp drive to take them to Vin.
Finally, the screen indicated that the drive was ready.
“GO!”
The stars around the Lucre Main became a blur and the light from every approaching missile fell into a glowing pool in the universe behind them. The immense tension in Flint’s body released all at once, and he pumped his fists in the air with elation.
“WOOO!” he yelled. “Take that, Keila! You guys will never be able to catch Flint!”
“That was close,” Aurein commented, but in his face, too, was intense relief. “Those missiles were right on our tail.”
The Lucre Main left warp drive and the distant figure of Vin came into view. It appeared as a round, light purple ball that blotted out most of the cosmos. Flint navigated into orbit around the planet.
“This planet’s beautiful,” Flint commented as he looked through the window at its colorful surface. The plant life seemed to be a gorgeous lavender that reflected the host star’s light in a wide swath along its surface.
“There’s only one spaceport,” Aurein said, pointing to a point on the holographic projection of the planet. “We have no choice but to land there.”
“Got it.”
Civilization on Vin seemed to be scarce. Cities on the planet were few and far between, almost exclusively centered around the spaceport, which was an independent building on the top of a forested mountain, roads cutting through to reach the nearby cities. Development had only begun on Vin after Zero became Keila’s leader, and due to the lack of attention given to the planet, it had remained on the backburner of progress, forgotten to all except for the few who resided on it to do menial work for the faction.
Nobody assisted Flint in his landing of the Lucre Main, nor did anyone hinder him. Most likely, any Keila members who lived here had flown to Nopetu to help after the invasion of Tempest City was broadcasted to the faction. His pursuers wouldn’t know exactly where he warped, but based on the time it took for Flint to charge the warp drive and his general direction, the Keila army would find its way here soon.
As Flint stepped out of the spaceport building and into nature outside, he found himself oddly at peace. The bright, vibrant colors of nature here blended together in a visual symphony that just seemed… right. The few cities on the horizon stood out even more because of this, resembling concrete and steel weights that pressed on the landscape, suppressing the natural beauty that once resided there. Flint usually liked cities, but these looked less like cities and more like dark blotches, or maybe holes on an otherwise complete pattern of color. Flint cursed the idea of dozens of massive grey battleships blocking out this yellowish sky and descending upon the otherwise tranquil landscape. He felt a strangely powerful jab of anger at Keila for the presumption they could even try to make this planet an outpost in the vast network of war across the galaxy.
“Where are we going?” Aurein asked Flint, who was walking almost aimlessly through the forest, not in the direction of any roads. Flint was captivated by the bluish trees that almost seemed to glow in the gentle daylight.
“Tria recognized this place as a profound place of beauty,” Flint said. “So I’m trying to find the place most beautiful. The place she would have liked best. That’s where she would be buried.”
“Beauty is subjective,” Aurein stated. “We have no idea what she considered as the most beautiful place on the entire planet.”
“We can guess,” Flint replied. “Probably better than most people in the galaxy.”
What might have seemed like aimless wandering from an outside perspective was a careful, deliberate tracing of the natural beauty of the landscape. It had a direction to it, a subtle quality that Flint could only barely read as he followed it. He imagined he was Tria, a person who wanted peace, who sought an oasis of calm in her turbulent life, and let this idea lead him forward. Eventually, the two came to a clearing.
A man was sitting on a rock in the sunlight. He seemed young, barely younger than Aurein. Despite this, there seemed to be a profound wisdom in the man’s eyes as if he had come to a crucial understanding about the world around him. He was lanky and tall and wore a red Keila uniform, and sat as if he was waiting for both everything and nothing at all.
The man turned his head towards Flint and Aurein. Flint locked eyes with the figure.
“Do you know who this is?” Aurein whispered into Flint’s ear. “This is Viisi. Of the Big 5. He’s probably been stationed here to catch us.”
“No,” Flint said. “He isn’t here to catch us.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because his eyes appreciate beauty.”
Viisi’s expression had a vague smile on it.
“I believe I know who you are,” Viisi said at last. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long, long time.”
“Do you?” Aurein asked.
“Yes,” Viisi affirmed, his voice soft. “You two are here to end it all.”
Then, it clicked in Flint’s mind. This was the man responsible for Tria’s biography, the only oasis of reason in a desert of hate. Flint had been following in this man’s footsteps for likely much longer than he realized.
“Where’s Tria?” Flint asked.
Viisi said nothing, only pointing in a specific direction.
“Lavender canyon,” Viisi said. “It’s a few miles that way, over the mountains. It was Tria’s favorite place, as I’m sure you’ve read. You’ll know it when you see it.”
Flint gave Viisi a look of intense gratitude, and said everything at once:
“Thank you.”
Aurein and Flint ran in the direction indicated, leaving Viisi behind in the clearing. Viisi stood from his rock and looked in the general direction of the spaceport.
“Now it’s time to really end this,” Viisi said to himself. “And to protect the ones I’ve been waiting for.”
Viisi met Einer in Vin’s spaceport, where countless Keila soldiers were pouring into the landscape.
“Einer,” Viisi said from the crowd, grabbing his attention.
“Ah, Viisi. There you are.”
“I’ve found where the second group of intruders ran off to. I can take you there. They went north. Far north. I’m unsure as to what their plan is.”
“Take me there. They won’t survive,” Einer told him. “Check the cities for any other spies!” he ordered the soldiers, who dispersed into vehicles that began to choke the seldom-used roads.
Viisi led Einer into his own ship, parked elsewhere in the spaceport. Viisi’s ship was provided by Keila, and thus was far larger than normal, able to seat up to twelve in the case of leading a small platoon. It was still dwarfed in size by the colossal battleship Einer and his army had arrived in, which had forgone the insufficient landing pad and landed instead on top of a wide swath of trees. It was as if a massive building had been suddenly constructed on the top of the otherwise barren mountain.
The flight north with Einer was performed in almost total silence. Viisi recalled his fruitless past attempts to befriend the man beside him. Now, Viisi thought, even if the conditions were completely different, he would never be able to make friends with a person like this. For the duration of the trip, Einer’s eyes were focused on the horizon for any sign of Tempest City’s invaders, darting around endlessly.
The location Viisi was taking Einer to was situated on what was currently Vin’s night side. This place was far from any Keila settlements. Tall, rocky mountains coated in a thin layer of snow faintly reflected the light of stars. A place like this would make it hard for Einer to utilize his Val to escape.
When Viisi landed, Einer didn’t leave the ship. Viisi pretended to look out of the ship warily.
“You’re right,” Viisi said awkwardly. “They could be hiding out, waiting for us. But we should hurry.”
“Then I’ll go,” Einer said, stepping out of the ship. Viisi’s heart began to race as his opportunity grew closer.
“I’ll be right behind you. Let me park the ship.”
Viisi did not turn off the ship, rather he watched Einer’s muscular back carefully as it receded up the mountain. Viisi reached for the throttle, preparing to fly the ship away at full speed and leave Einer behind.
It was only Einer’s bizarre stance that alerted Viisi that something was wrong. Viisi dove out of the ship just as Einer whipped around and aimed his arm at the ship. With a colossal tearing sound, something shot from Einer’s arm and tore a large hole in Viisi’s ship just over Viisi’s descending head. Viisi caught his breath on the snow-covered rocks, watching his ruined ship with terror.
Viisi’s solid metal ship suddenly accelerated away, falling down the mountain with a crash. The moved ship revealed Einer walking carefully towards Viisi over the rocky plateau.
“I knew you had betrayed Keila,” Einer growled. “Traitor. How long have you been plotting against us?”
“Since Tria,” Viisi spat. “I’ve tolerated you monsters for five years.”
“What a shame. Did Zero not tell you that you could have been great?”
“I stopped believing his lies long ago.”
Viisi composed himself and stood, facing Einer one-on-one. Einer raised his arm in Viisi’s direction, a metal bar embedded in his skin along the top of his arm. With his free hand, he placed a metal projectile on the part of the metal bar closest to his shoulder. Viisi used his telekinesis to pick up a nearby pebble.
Simultaneously, Viisi’s pebble and Einer’s projectile shot at each other with a deafening crack as each broke the sound barrier. In an instant, Viisi deflected Einer’s projectile with his telekinesis and a concentrated beam of light from the sky vaporized Viisi’s pebble.
Now that it was ultimately clear that this was going to be a fight, Viisi realized his immense disadvantage. His own Val worked by turning the calories he ate into kinetic energy, and he hadn’t eaten for several hours—not since the Tempest City invasion alarm began to blare.
Einer’s Val, on the other hand, had no such limits. Einer’s ability to manipulate and concentrate the magnetic fields around him allowed him to turn his metal-studded arm into a railgun with a fraction of the cost Viisi faced by mimicking the same power.
This was a fight between two powerhouses, each who specialized in one-shot kills. This battle could be decided in one precise blow—and in this battle of one-shot blows, Viisi lacked a fraction of Einer’s ammunition.
Immediately, Viisi descended the cliff. He had to get out of direct line of fire. He leapt over the cliff just as another iron projectile soared overhead with another crack, slowing his fall with his telekinesis until he reached solid ground again and his boots crunched in fresh snow.
The moment Einer poked his head over the cliff, Viisi sent a barrage of pebbles his way. Einer ducked back and the dozens of pebbles soared past. With Einer out of Viisi’s sightline, he couldn’t maneuver the pebbles to chase their target. Viisi took a moment to scan his surroundings—although he had descended part of the mountain over the cliff, there was still plenty of mountain to descend before he reached any of the violet plant life below. Viisi desperately needed to re-energize by eating something. While the limits of his powers were far smaller than Einer’s were, unlike Einer, he could re-energize at any time. Provided there were calories nearby.
A light in the sky caught Viisi’s eye. No, several lights. The entire night sky, in fact, had lit up with a gorgeous blend of blue, green, purple—an aurora. Sharp knives of curved light weaved through the atmosphere like an agitated serpent, the reflective snow on the mountain matching this dance of color. Never before had such a sight instilled such dread in Viisi.
Einer floated distantly in the air in front of Viisi. He had implanted his body with magnetic metals that essentially allowed for him to fly in any location near a magnetic field he could manipulate. The halos of ionized air in the sky began to intensify in color and brightness until they were almost as bright as daylight, concentrating onto a point above Einer. Viisi took the opportunity to aim a hypersonic pebble at Einer, sending it through the air with a loud crack.
Before the pebble came into contact with Einer, a cylinder of blinding blue-green light enveloped Einer, vaporizing the pebble. The cylinder passed over Einer and moved towards the forest below the mountain, decreasing in width as it increased in brightness until it was too bright to look at. The beam of light stretched from the ground all the way into the night sky, spreading out towards the heavens in a colossal funnel that widened and widened all the way to the top of the atmosphere.
Viisi had heard of this, but never before seen it.
Einer’s ability to manipulate magnetic fields extended beyond simple manmade magnets. He could manipulate any magnetic field he came in contact with—even the magnetic fields of entire planets. Habitable, terrestrial planets like Vin needed a magnetic field to protect the atmosphere from being blown away by their host star’s powerful solar winds. But a planetary magnetic field was not a perfect sphere or a forcefield that enveloped the whole planet. It had wide holes, one in the planet’s north and south pole, holes that funneled solar radiation into the atmosphere above these points. The solar radiation excited the particles in the atmosphere, making them glow—that was how aurora formed.
But Einer had gone far beyond forming a simple aurora—he had taken the funnel-shaped hole in the north side of Vin’s magnetic field and tightened it, funneling solar radiation onto a smaller and smaller point until it was small enough to see. The colossal amounts of energy that would usually be distributed across thousands and thousands of miles was now a single, concentrated beam that vaporized anything that touched it.
The sky was a roiling sea of light which poured itself onto the land below in a torrent, bent to the will of one man. The beam moved across the forest under the mountain, instantly turning plant life into a cloud of superheated particles, ripping across the landscape like the judgment of a malevolent god. Fire and brimstone erupted from the earth in angry bursts. By the time the chaos was over, the entire forest for as far as the eye could see had become molten red terrain, devoid of any life. Einer turned his head to Viisi.
The two threw superfast objects at each other at a blinding rate. Pebbles rose from the snow by Viisi’s feet, firing at Einer like the ammunition of an automatic gun. Einer’s iron projectiles matched Viisi’s pace, accelerated by the magnetic fields he wielded. The projectiles impacted in the air in explosions of sparks. Some stray pieces hit Einer and Viisi as they stood, Viisi’s body being riddled with tiny holes from the broken apart metal bullets. A sinister red light illuminated the entire mountain from the molten bedrock and raging fires that Einer had created. The explosions midair, the glowing heavens and the boiling earth gave Viisi the overwhelming impression that he had descended into Hell.
A single pebble was able to penetrate Einer’s metallic defenses and tear a hole in his leg. Einer fell to the rocky ground, glared at Viisi with rage, and the sky lit up once more. Viisi felt his skin become warm. Radiation.
The swimming aurora in the sky descended to terra firma once more in a raging tower of light, following just behind Viisi as he ran and turning the rock it touched into flowing lava. Using what felt like the last of his energy, Viisi tore a hole in the cliff face with his telekinesis and resealed it with rock behind him.
Viisi gasped for breath in the hole in the rock. His body had been filled with holes, and he had just been doused with a lethal dose of solar radiation. Blood poured out of his wounds and pooled below him, and he struggled for the limited air there was in his shelter. Everything was dark. Through vibrations in the rock, he could hear that Einer had directed the beam of solar radiation onto the top of the cliff face and was gradually melting a hole towards Viisi.
Then, in a fraction of a second, all became clear.
He could clearly feel the vibrations through the rock around him. He could sense the dripping of lava on stone above, the labored breaths of Einer outside, and even the faraway cracks and snaps of burning wood in the forest below. He could feel the resonance of everything around him, the natural frequencies every object gave off and the frequencies that would ultimately destroy them.
Though his eyes were blind, through his sensitivity to resonances, Viisi could clearly see the world around him. He emitted a resonant frequency with his telekinesis at the exact frequency that would disturb Einer’s eyes. The vibrations traveled through the ground, through Einer’s boots, up his body and into his eyes, which made tiny oscillations in his head. Einer shouted, stopping the attack on Viisi, and clutched his eyes in pain.
Viisi could even tell that Einer had leaned over when his eyes were vibrated at their resonant frequencies. The world around Viisi had become clear as day. With the last of his telekinetic powers, he lifted a small rock off the ground next to Einer, and sent it rocketing straight through Einer’s brain.
There was a crack, a thud, and then all was quiet. The vibrations of Einer’s heart became still.
