Once exposed to the reality of his true place in Keila, Viisi became acutely aware of the patriotic fanaticism that fueled this galactic war.
It wasn’t just Viisi that was being treated as a tool—every single person Viisi put his eyes upon in the Keila headquarters was a well-exploited pawn made to fight in Keila’s name. Every order he was given was framed just such that it sparked that primal, tribalistic excitement, putting down the other so Keila could rein victorious. Every news broadcast about the state of the war cleverly but subtly demonized Keila’s enemies, encouraging erasure of the imperfections of Vior or the evils of Talo. Everything that Viisi’s life had been constructed upon was built on clever twists of the truth and enraging tales of how Keila’s enemies killed a group of defenseless civilians or imprisoned a helpless child for fear of exposing military secrets. Once aware of it all, Tria’s adversity to the war became clear as day.
“Talo has taken the Keskin star system. They launched a nuclear strike on the capital planet of Kesku, destroying the fleet we assigned there and, with it, over five thousand innocent lives.”
Zero leaned over the meeting table, addressing the Big 5 with dire seriousness. He met the eyes of each Big 5 member, his intense gaze adding gravity to his words.
“It has become clear,” Zero elaborated, “that Talo is making a significant move for our territory. It is necessary that we reconsolidate our power lingering at the edges of the Vior-Keila and the Aikajo-Keila borders. Iskay, can you confirm Vior’s weakness?”
“Yes,” Iskay answered as they leaned forward on the table and clasped both of their hands together. “Vior has stretched themselves thin dealing with Tymin’s recent push and Aikajo’s new military technology. Additionally, they are still recovering from Talo’s attack several months ago. Vior is dealing with too much right now to make a move for our territory as well. Move the fleet towards Talo.”
“Viisi,” Zero addressed, turning to him. “What about Aikajo? You reported that they had moved their forces away from our border, correct?”
Zero looked into Viisi’s eyes as if he hadn’t used Viisi his whole life, taken everything that he didn’t even know he could have held dear. Even this had to be an act, a mask of leadership he wore over his manipulative core.
“Correct,” Viisi replied, meeting Zero’s gaze expressionlessly. He now understood why Tria’s face was always neutral in Zero’s presence—it was the only way to hide his sheer antipathy towards what he was doing. “That’s true.”
“Then it’s settled,” Zero said. “The Vior and Aikajo fleets will move to the Talo border. The five of you will be moving to counter this push, as well. Einer, you will lead the fleet at the Talo border. Tria, you will infiltrate the enemy and reveal their next moves. Iskay and Tro, you will maintain our border with Vior, and Viisi, you will maintain our border with Aikajo. Understood?”
Brief nods from everyone in the room.
“Good. You all ship out tomorrow. Good luck, and may Teo Nora be with you.”
As they left the meeting room, only one thought crossed Viisi’s mind. He had to find a way to talk to Tria. It wasn’t a coincidence she and Viisi had been assigned to faraway locations—Zero was deliberately separating them. Now without their weekly meetings, there wasn’t a single person Viisi knew he could call a friend. He wanted to know what to do next, how to escape the confines of his rank and a faction he once called home. For all this time, Tria must have felt the same.
Tria held onto her pendant tightly with one hand. It had been her father’s, and was the only thing Tria had left of her family. In times like this, it gave her courage. It would help her through what was to come.
She watched a recording of Zero in battle as she was transported into Talo territory. This had been one of his most famous battles, one in which he performed one of his most extraordinary feats.
In the recording, Zero watched as a massive spacefaring frigate descended upon his position from orbit. It looked almost like a massive artificial asteroid, an unavoidable force of nature. But when it impacted the ground, its movement immediately ceased, and the camera switched to a zoomed-in shot of Zero with his hand touching the front of the perfectly-still gargantuan ship.
Tria paused the video and scratched her chin. Then, as well as the countless other times he had used his Val, Zero had stopped the movement of the frigate relative to himself. The amount of energy that had been removed to cancel out such an energetic event had to be colossal.
On that same day, in that very instant, back on Keila’s capital planet Nopetu, Tria felt a massive increase of energy in herself, as if the wells of her power had grown notably deeper. She felt this energetic sensation often, daily in fact, but the greatest surges of energy always happened to match up with the instants that Zero used his Val to stop something massive.
Tria had always suspected that the energy Zero took away with his Val had to go somewhere. There had to be an anomaly, some kind of place where the trillions upon trillions of joules of energy Zero removed went. Only now did she truly process that she was the anomaly. Their Vals were inverses of each other—Zero removed energy from his surroundings with destructive frequencies, and Tria added energy to her surroundings with constructive resonant frequencies.
It was because of this that Tria could not kill her brother. It was not that the thought had never occurred to her—in fact, she had considered killing him more times than she could count, if only to end her tortuous imprisonment within Keila and the war Zero perpetuated—but because of the nature of their Vals themselves, they were invincible to each other.
But Tria’s plan would still come to fruition. The monster of her own creation would meet his end and, at last, the frontier of this infinite war would come into sight.
As a celebration of Talo’s acquisition of the Keskin star system almost a week ago, the Keskin planetary representative had met with Talo higher-ups to hold an extravagant party in the planet’s elaborate capital building. For wartime, the mood was surprisingly festive, with warm lighting and music filling the ballroom and Keskin food and drink atop candle-adorned tables.
Tria approached a table, minding the other partygoers as she walked. The exotic, exceedingly dry-looking Keskin food reminded Tria of the sheer culinary diversity found on Alue’s countless inhabited planets. Cultural flavor profiles varied heavily from planet to planet—one had to be careful when trying another planet’s food. She grabbed a small, hollow, spiky ball-shaped snack out of a basket and ate it. It was vaguely salty with a cakey texture. Not bad.
“You never can tell with some other planet’s food, eh?” a voice said from behind her.
Tria turned around to see Talo’s leader, Spine, handsomely dressed in a form-fitted suit. He looked different in person than he did on Keila news broadcasts—for one, he was wearing a suit instead of battle attire, and video didn’t properly capture his hard yet somehow playful mauve eyes and the intense scars along his face.
“You could do a lot worse than these,” Tria replied, gesturing to the basket of ball-shaped snacks.
“You’re right,” Spine noted, nodding. “But I’ve been witness to Keskin culture for a long time, and this isn’t at all the best they have to offer.”
“Tell me more about what happened here,” Tria said. “This place was a battleground only days ago, was it not?”
“Here? No,” Spine said. “But if you go a bit further north, it was. Aren’t you the defense minister of Jihase in the neighboring continent? Shouldn’t you be in the loop on this?”
Tria had brought a fake ID to the party, claiming to be the Jihasian defense minister of one of Kesku’s smaller countries. It was just believable enough to get her through, but not official enough to where people would recognize her.
“I was off-planet when it happened,” Tria answered. “Would you fill me in?”
“About eight years ago, Talo built a major weapons factory north of here and several fusion plants to power it, with the nice byproduct of the extra energy providing technological development to Keskin natives. When Keila took it two years ago, they routed all fusion power to powering their largest battleships, leaving the Keskins in economic ruin. They petitioned Keila, but repeated protests resulted in a mass shooting of the Keskins, and with it, twenty casualties. Eventually, a Keskin asked Talo for a targeted nuclear strike on Keila authority, so I obliged. We promised to build the Keskins several new fusion plants if they readily accepted our leadership, which got us to where we are today.”
“Interesting,” Tria said, nodding. “But wouldn’t this move aggravate Keila?”
“I don’t care much for Keila,” Spine said. “But if someone hits Talo, I hit back. I’m willing to forgive as long as their spies don’t run home with too much information.”
Tria tensed, but tried not to show it.
“Come on. It was clear from the beginning. You don’t look anything like a Keskin. But I do want to ask, why would you come here, of all places, to spy? There’s a Talo strategy meeting happening only a few lightyears away. Why not go there? I’m sure that’s within Keila’s power.”
“It just seemed right,” Tria answered.
“You’re a unique one,” Spine noted. “If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it in a hundred ways by now. Would you care for a dance?”
Spine extended a hand.
“Even though I’m from Keila?” Tria asked.
“Right now, I just don’t care. Shall we?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Tria took his hand. They walked to the center of the ballroom, joining the other partygoers.
And they danced.
Tria sat outside of the Keskin planetary capital building, looking up at the cloudy nighttime sky. It was raining outside, the bluish streetlights of an underdeveloped civilization faintly illuminating drops as they fell on the road.
Spine exited the back of the building through a door near Tria, briefly letting out the lights and sounds of the festivities within, and sat down next to her.
“Do you ever think about how easy it is to destroy?” Tria asked without turning her head. “It’s so… simple. With the mere swipe of a hand you could bring a beautiful, intricate sandcastle to ruins.”
Spine remained silent.
“And it’s so hard to create. It’s so, so hard to create. Why even create something when it’s so easy for someone else to bring it all to the ground? But that’s what people like you and I have to do. We just have to keep building.”
Tria turned to Spine.
“Keila is coming for you,” Tria said. “They think you’re making a move. You’ll have to fight them soon.”
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” Spine replied. “I’ve seen my fair share of battles.”
“This one is going to be different,” Tria said.
“Why is that?”
“I can’t tell you.” Seeing the look on Spine’s face, she elaborated, “Not because I’m Keila. I really just can’t tell you why. But trust me when I say that this battle is going to change the course of history.”
Spine hesitated for a moment. “Alright. I believe you.”
Tria turned to Spine and took one of his hands, holding his calloused fingers between hers.
“Can I ask you to do something impossible for me?” she asked.
“I’d do anything for you.”
“When this battle happens, I need you to leave room for forgiveness in your heart. I need you to leave room for peace. I want you to command Talo to use only non-lethal weapons in this battle. Can you do that for me?”
Spine was visibly taken aback.
“Am I expected to stand by while Zero and his fleet kill my soldiers?”
“No, of course not. I just want you to do everything you can to mitigate the casualties. I need you to make a show of peace.”
Spine sat in silence for a moment, deep in thought. While his expression didn’t change, his eyes seemed to switch between a battle-hardened gaze and one of forgiveness.
“I’ll do it,” he answered.
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
Tria looked at him with admiration.
“Thank you.”
Out of the window of Viisi’s transport ship were several other glimmers of light—the remainder of the Keila fleet. They traveled together in tandem towards Kesku for the decisive battle. Forces on both the Keila and Talo sides of the border had built up significantly over the past several weeks, their interactions never exceeding a simple staredown until Keila made the first move.
For the first time in his life, Viisi dreaded the upcoming battle. The idea of killing soldiers in Keila’s name now sickened him instead of exciting him, and he debated finding an escape plan to avoid the battle entirely. But even if he ran, Zero would inevitably find him, and his fate would become infinitely worse than it was now. The only glimmer of hope he could see in the upcoming confrontation is the fact that, somewhere, Tria would be on the battlefield. If he could only find her, he knew she would be able to help him somehow.
As the surface of Kesku grew larger and larger, Viisi prayed not for the safety of his people, but the demise of his once-beloved leader.
“Zero.”
Zero turned around in his seat to see Tria standing in the doorway. Illuminating him in blue-green light was a large screen displaying the positions of every Keila ship deployed upon and orbiting around Kesku.
“Yes?” he replied.
“The Big 5 have all gathered in the solar system. Einer and Iskay are in orbit, ready for orders, and Viisi and Tro have just informed me that they have landed on Kesku safely.”
“Good to know. Then we can begin soon.”
“But I have a recommendation,” Tria interjected. Zero’s expression remained relaxed, his eyes sharp and ready for battle, but he became attentive.
“I suggest that you join Viisi, Tro and I on the ground for the battle. I believe Einer and Iskay are more than sufficient for leading aerial control, and your help could be used in ensuring our back lines are covered. It’s clear that Tro has proved his worth in frontline attacks.”
Zero took a moment to visualize the proposal.
“Astute observation, Tria. You’re right. I will join you and Viisi in the back lines if you wish. My apologies—I had assumed that your adversity to warfare would have weakened your performance in this battle, but it appears your military instinct is as sharp as ever. Have you finally come to your senses?”
Tria didn’t let her expression change.
“I may have.”
The Keila fleet landed on an expansive field coated with a dry, grass-like plant, intermittently dotted with swaying, silvery trees. On one horizon were faint, block-like shapes colored with Talo’s signature shades. In the back lines of Keila’s grounded fleet, Viisi could see that the front of the Keila army had already begun its advance.
Viisi led his division forward, a small army following him as he remained in position behind the front lines. But an interesting development was occurring—the battle seemed entirely one-sided, with Talo forces only maintaining their position instead of advancing. Other members of Viisi’s division noticed the strange nature of the battle, whispering urgently to each other.
Eventually, Viisi got the message on his Big 5 transponder from Tro, who was commanding Keila’s army at the front lines. It read:
TALO FORCES USING EXCLUSIVELY NON-LETHAL WEAPONS. MAY I ADVANCE?
Zero stepped out of the just-grounded Keila transport ship and strode towards one of his soldiers.
“Talo is doing what? What in the hell is Spine thinking?”
“I don’t know, sir. Tro’s report is accurate, though—aerial observations of the battle show Talo attempting to gain no ground, and no Keila casualties have been reported.”
Zero gazed out onto the horizon where the battle was unfolding. Small explosions sent smoke into the air, but only Keila munitions caused them.
“Spine’s an unrelenting leader. He’s never yielded during a battle before. Someone must be acting in his name,” Zero said to nobody in particular.
“No, sir, our footage clearly shows Spine leading Talo’s army. It appears he has switched to peaceful tactics.”
Then it hit him. Zero had seen this change in one of his soldiers before. It was simply too unlikely that Spine had given up on the war on his own—only one person could have influenced him to make this decision.
Zero whipped over to the Keila soldier, who flinched at his intense presence.
“Bring me Tro,” Zero growled.
The soldier conveyed Zero’s orders over radio and ran off. Several minutes later, Tro ran up to Zero, his Keila battle suit charred and torn.
“Zero!” Tro exclaimed, almost out of breath. “Talo’s refusing to fight back! Why was I removed from the frontlines?! I-”
“I need you to become Tria. Alter your appearance until you look identical to her.”
Tro’s face twisted into confusion. “What? Sir-”
“Do it!” Zero yelled, unbridled rage seeping through his voice. Tro used his Val to alter his DNA, his appearance slowly shifting into that of Tria’s. Zero unholstered a gun from his hip and pointed it at Tro’s head.
“And you!” Zero shouted to another nearby soldier. “Hail Spine, on video! I need him to see this.”
“Spine, Zero’s hailing us!”
Spine could barely make out the words from the chaos of battle around him. Against all of his instincts, he continued to order his troops to fire rubber bullets instead of lead ones, to suppress their deadly Vals instead of utilizing them. It had cost him dozens of soldiers already.
Spine threw aside an attacking Keila soldier and turned to the source of the voice.
“Accept it!” Spine shouted back.
“It’s a live video! You need to see this!”
Spine looked back at the frontline of the battle, Keila Valins and weapons tearing apart his troops. He couldn’t afford to leave them alone for long.
At last, Spine turned away from the battle to follow the soldier to a nearby grounded ship. Within the ship was a large screen displaying Zero holding a gun to a woman’s head. It was Tria.
“Spine, you will regret your mockery of our sacred warfare,” Zero said over the live feed. “But most of all, you will regret the day you put a hand on my sister. I will make you know hell.”
Zero pulled the trigger, and a loud pop came from the screen. Tria fell out of frame.
Spine let out a deafening scream of anguish and despair. His next actions all blurred into one, but by the time he was lucid again, there were several cracks in the screen he was watching and his knuckles were damaged and bloody.
“I’ll see you on the battlefield,” the broken image of Zero said before the broadcast cut out.
Spine stormed out of the ship in a daze, confronting the edge of the battlefield again. He took a breath and then boomed:
“ALL SOLDIERS! SWITCH TO LETHAL TACTICS IMMEDIATELY! NOT A SINGLE KEILA WRETCH WILL LIVE!”
Spine pushed his way through the battlefront, ignoring every attack against him—he couldn’t even feel the stabbing of a stray bullet or the burning of an explosion anymore. He strode quickly and confidently towards the approaching second wave of Keila soldiers.
“Wherever you are, Zero, I’ll make you wish you were never born.”
Before Viisi’s platoon could enter the thick of the battle, an unexpected figure waved him down from the corner of his eye. It was Tria.
“Proceed without me! I have business to attend to,” Viisi told his soldiers. He ran towards her, out of the way of the battle, stopping out of breath. Up close, Viisi noticed that Tria was holding something wrapped in cloth.
“Viisi, listen to me,” Tria said, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Tria! What are you doing here?! I wanted to talk to you ever since Zero-”
“Hey! Listen to me. There’s no time. I just got Zero to leave orbit, he’s behind us in the battlefield now. I need your help.”
“Of course. What can I do?”
“Kill Zero. His power of nullification relies on resonance, just like my Val does. But unlike the constructive frequencies I make that add energy, he removes energy with his destructive frequencies. If you can make a frequency that his Val doesn’t cancel out, you can bypass his defense and kill him.”
“How?! I can’t-” Viisi started.
“Kill him in a way that makes it look like a stray bullet. Make it look like the violence of our aggressive Keila attack killed Zero out of pure chance. That’s the only way Talo’s peaceful approach to this battle can demonstrate to the galaxy how to end this war. I know, you don’t think you’ll be able to kill him.” Tria began to unwrap the object from the cloth and move it towards Viisi. “That’s why you need to take this-”
A large boom rocked the air. A Talo battleship loomed in the sky, the barrel of its missile launcher aimed at the ground. Talo ships and weapons alike suddenly began firing on Keila soldiers, and the intensity of the battle seemed to double. Tria’s face was a mix of shock and horror.
“Holy shit,” Viisi exclaimed, pointing at the horizon. Zero and Spine were clashing in the distance, flashy displays of their Vals illuminating the scarred earth. Fear penetrated her gaze as she took in the sight.
“Wait here,” Tria said. “I have to save him. I’ll be back.”
But before Viisi could reply, she was already gone.
Deafening booms erupted around Tria as she sprinted through the battlefield. She stepped on the fingers and heads of the fallen, acutely aware of every body around her. The earth was carpeted in shells, blood and bodies. Weapons, some human and some not, tore apart the battlefield.
Tria clutched a cloth close to her chest as she ran. The item within was to be protected, even more so than herself.
Nearby, the leaders of the two warring factions stood, locked in a deathly glare. Both men stood in front of each other, exhausted from their battle, Spine significantly more bloody than Zero.
“Zero, you son of a bitch,” Spine cursed. “Just what does it take to kill you?”
“You can’t,” Zero spat in return. “I’ll never be killed by the likes of you or anyone in Talo. You’re a disgrace of a leader, Spine.”
Spine lunged towards Zero just as Zero did the same, the fury and chaos of war clouding everything but the view of the opponent. Accelerating in motion, they clashed.
A crack, a flash of light, and a rumble. All was silent except for the sound of a body falling to the earth. Only it wasn’t Zero or Spine—it was Tria, falling between the two, dead.
The men looked down at the body in horror.
“TRIA!”
The Battle of Kesku ended with a retreat from both sides. Both leaders of both factions, similarly distraught, commanded their armies to fall back, citing a “sudden tragedy” as the source of their retreat. Spine fled the galaxy to a neighboring one called Zysti where he was given a life sentence by the Zystinian Defense Council in a top-security prison, leaving Talo without leadership. In the weeks following the battle and fueled by an insatiable rage against Talo, Zero commanded the capture of over two dozen Talo planets before the faction regained its footing and Jim came into power. Due to Jim’s poor leadership skills, a Talo Additional Leadership Committee was founded, and the Keila siege on Talo came to a close.
Viisi ordered an autopsy be done of Tria’s body in secret before her burial on a planet called Vin not far from the capital planet of Keila, Nopetu. The cause of death was uncertain from a subjective perspective, as bodily wounds from both Zero’s and Spine’s attacks seemed to have killed her simultaneously. Spine blamed Zero for Tria’s death, and Zero blamed Spine.
But after the results of the secret autopsy came through, Viisi made a shocking discovery. What had ended Tria’s life was not the accidental attack from Spine or Zero, but a single stray bullet wound in her head that caused her to fall between Spine’s and Zero’s clash.
Sitting on the floor, Viisi stared blankly at the wall in his training room, alone. He rubbed the blurriness from his red eyes and wiped the tears that now wetted his hands on his suit. He thought more would come, but it appeared that his tears had finally run out. The fact that the world around him still seemed to exist, despite all of his grief, despite all of the turmoil that clouded his mind, was so inexplicably infuriating. It seemed that with how broken the inside of him felt, the outside had to have shattered a bit too. But the wall only stared back at him, uncaring, unmoving, unyielding.
Below all of the grief, his endless rage and frustration with the war that had killed his only friend, something stirred. Something within Viisi pushed aside the mountains of emotional weight and surfaced, and in that moment, he made a vow within himself.
Zero would never let him go. After the discovery of Tria’s and Spine’s affair, Zero’s security of his own soldiers tightened like a noose—he would never give Viisi the opportunity to escape. But Viisi swore, with every atom in his body, that he would find a way to bring this war to a close. Even if he wasn’t free to pursue the truth of Tria’s life, the plan she almost brought to fruition, he knew that there had to be someone out there in the galaxy who was. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time who would realize the insanity of the war they were trapped within and find a way to stop it.
Viisi couldn’t escape, but he could leave breadcrumbs in his wake. If he could lead that person closer to the truth, to the life and plan of the woman who almost ended the greatest war in history, they could end it in her stead. From the shadows, Viisi could lie in wait, tolerating his position in the faction he hated the most while plotting his freedom, guiding the galaxy closer to the path of peace.
He would wait, even if he had to wait for eternity.
