Serial
49: Smoke? Check. Mirrors? Check.
January
17th, 33 S.D. 11:49 Leitis, Sventa
“Hey, hey...” Avil said as his smile grew flat. “The hell is this now?” he chuckled slightly.
“This,” said the woman, “is over.” A brief pause ensued as Avil exhaled coolly. “Stand up, slowly,” she commanded.
“Alright now...” It wasn’t as if Avil were in any sort of position to refuse. His gun needed to dissipate serious amounts of heat, and even if he could fire it, the rifle wasn’t exactly designed for close-range fighting. The pistol moved back slightly, allowing him to come to his feet. Without even being told, he held up his hands. Would this mark the end of him? Was he about to face his own execution? It wasn’t as if his line of work didn’t have that kind of risk, and then there was karma to consider as well. He’d taken a lot of lives himself. In his eyes, it was rather fitting that he too became a victim.
“Sooner or later, man...” he said, shaking his head at the ground. At the very least, he’d put on quite a performance, perhaps his finest even. To boot, he’d probably be shot dead, just the way he always wanted.
“Turn around,” the woman directed.
“Shrieks, if you wanna put a bullet in me, do I gotta see it coming?”
Even so, he shuffled around to the opposite direction. When he looked up, however, he saw absolutely nothing. For a moment, he simply blinked as his forehead wrinkled up in confusion. No one stood before him; there was his bag, his shades, and snow. Cautiously, he forced his eyes to enhance the scene, but even under this extended scrutiny he could sense no other presence.
“That is wack...” he said, lowering his hands to his sides. “Coulda sworn.... I musta lost my damn mind in all that combat...”
“Sa, who said you could do that,” said the voice from earlier. Suddenly something kicked him squarely in his shin. As he winced and bent forward, he felt the barrel of the pistol touch him between the eyes. Still, try as he might, he could only see empty air ahead of him.
“Oh s**t!” he swore, swiftly lifting his hands back up, resisting the urge to tend to his leg. “Well, excuse me. Guess I had a hard time seeing you there.”
“Indeed. You just might be going blind.”
“You were right,” said another voice, also female. “He really sees right through us, just like you said.”
“Hey, hey... More than one? What on the Continent is going on here? Invisible enemies, huh?” Avil shook his head. “Lemme guess, probably a whole lot more of you I cannot see, sa?”
“You do not need to know,” said the first woman. She must have backed off, for he felt the gun begin to move away. Still, he saw no trace of his ghostly opponents. He didn’t even hear them walk, much less see any footprints on the ground. For an instant, Avil truly wondered if he had lost his grip on reality, or even just parts of it, but he reckoned he knew a gun whenever one was around. She had most certainly pointed a very real weapon at him.
“Well,” the second woman started. “We got him. Now what?”
“We shall inform the others in a bit. Presently, perhaps it would be best to drop our little act.”
A blue glow outlined two figures, contouring their bodies but faintly. The space within this light began to warp and distort, as if it were a melting mirror. Gradually, the area turned more and more opaque as a human form seemingly materialized out of nowhere. Two women stood in front of him; one held a pistol; the other carried a rifle. Both firearms steadily trained upon him at point-blank. Their heads and faces were covered with winter gear, concealing their identities, like assassins.
“Whoa now! Nice tricks, ladies.”
“Does this b*****d ever shut up?” the second one with the rifle asked. The one closest to Avil briefly pointed her pistol behind him and nodded to her friend.
“Check her,” she ordered. The sharpshoot obeyed, focusing her long gun on Avil even as she stepped around him. As he most curiously noted, she made no noise whatsoever and never once sank into the snow. It were as if she walked on top of it. The woman went over to Losha’s body, looking over the odd mechanical device and its latest life it had stolen. She lowered her gun as she examined the mess.
“This is no good, boss,” she called out.
“Figures,” the first one murmured as her gaze momentarily shifted away. It soon snapped back at Avil, however. “So, it was you who killed her,” she said, more fact than question. “You were the one who gunned down the Wolf of Sventa.”
Avil smiled. “Guilty as charged. The Noven Hawk seems to have prevailed.”
“Is that so?” the woman asked, spontaneously stepping forward; her grip tightened around her pistol. For a second, her finger appeared on the very of tripping the trigger. After a time, however, she paced backwards a bit.
“I do not believe that,” she said, now holding her sidearm at length in one hand. “She would not simply die like that...”
Avil just shrugged his shoulders. “Believe what you want. Cool by me. But that body over there belongs to somebody, and that somebody is deader than dead.”
“Actually,” the first woman said as she pulled away her hat and removed the cloth masking her mouth. “I very much doubt that.” As she threw these items to the ground, Losha stood before him, entirely unharmed.
“Hey, hey...” Avil said through laughter. “Come on now. This s**t makes no damn sense, you hear? I blasted your brains out, and here you are all fine and dandy.”
“You never shot me,” Losha corrected. “You never shot anyone.”
“Say what?” Avil asked. At this time, the second woman came behind him, grabbed him by the wrists, and placed him in restraints. She headed over to Losha as she too disposed of her headwear.
“Would that I could shoot his a*s now,” Faima sneered.
“Coulda swore I blew a chunk outta your head too,” Avil sighed.
“What?! That guy tried to hit me?” Faima inquired sharply. “That true Losha?”
“Well, sa. He tried to snipe at least half of us, or more accurately, whatever he saw that looked like us. If it makes you feel any better, he also ‘got’ Valo and Tami, so it was not just you.”
“Too bad he really did not get Tami...” Faima huffed. Losha frowned for a bit but said nothing on the matter.
“Hold up,” Avil interrupted. “You telling me that not a single one of my shots landed?”
“You certainly destroyed a fair amount of ice and ruined a dozen portions of Leitis,” Losha said. “But aside from those damages, you did not manage to injure any of us, at least not significantly.
Avil looked up at the sky as he blew air out of his mouth. “That is some bullshit,” he remarked, grinning and shaking his head.
“Now it is your turn for disbelief,” Losha smiled. “Perhaps I should explain exactly what happened here.”
“Please do,” Faima insisted. “I still do not know what you really did, even though you just did it. I merely went along with your crazy plan.”
“As curious as I am myself, should you really let the enemy know your secrets? Even if you gonna kill me?” Avil wondered.
“First of all,” Losha started. “Let us be clear about something, Avil. You are not a threat to us. Even if you knew how this operation worked from the beginning, you or anyone else would not have been able to stand against my techniques. You could know everything there is to know about me as a serialist; I would still beat you regardless. As a result, disclosing how I won is of no consequence to me.”
“Now, as our guest, you have the privilege of hearing exactly how today’s events occurred. As you can see - or rather as you were previously unable to see - Faima and I had cloaked ourselves. It sounds complicated, but in truth it was nothing more than a trick of light. All I did was create a series that produces light in a very specific manner, say to generate any image I wanted. In essence, I can make an illusion of what the space around me would look like if I were not there and display that to you, from any angle.”
Avil whistled once and loudly. “Now that is something I would have expected from good ol’ Suvla. Never would have imagined the Wolf could or would do the same.”
“The orb I launched was a diversion. It was only meant to distract you while we made out approach. Naturally, it would still have given us away if two sets of footprints began marching towards you, so we just hovered roughly a centimeter above everything. A kinetic series can form barriers by constantly applying force in a particular direction. Covering the snow in front of us with such a series allowed us to come up to you without your notice. Since the force-field is energy, stepping on it is silent. The apparel over our faces kept our breath from being visible as well.”
“Ksh. These eyes of mine must be getting old then. I could hardly see anything of the sort going on,” Avil said.
“Unlike Suvla’s sight, yours appears to be keenly based on light, perhaps on a deeper spectrum than I can perceive. But, light is light. Additionally, you never focused on any place but Leitis. We swung to the north and arced over to your position. You would have been blindsided in any case.”
“Alright, alright. I am starting to see the picture,” Avil nodded. “But, come on, your body is sitting right there,” he said, tossing his head back over his shoulder. “And that hole looks pretty big and pretty real.”
The two women looked at each other for a moment. “Looks fine to me,” Faima shrugged. Losha rubbed her forehead, wiping her fingers around in a circle.
“Sa... Feels fine to me...”
“Hah hah... bunch of jokesters. But seriously...” Avil said dryly.
Losha pointed at the dead version of herself meters away. “Oh, that thing. That is just like our cloaking. I can present any image I want. I can make myself disappear wherever I am, and the reverse holds true. Here, I have made myself appear where I most certainly am not. Again, the series only manipulates light, but it proved quite effective as a deceptive measure.”
She walked around to the spot where she had supposedly died. Avil turned around as she stooped over her own corpse. “It obviously looks genuine, but as you are well aware of now, that is not the case. Observe what happens next.” She waved her hand, and the double began to fade. In its place, a mound of snow sat clumped together in a roughly humanoid shape.
“As I said earlier, you never shot any one of us. You did, however, manage to blow away six of these dummies. All I had to do was use a series to wrap them in light, thereby creating an image that looked identical to our unit. I then affixed these images to decoys and animated them using a separate kinetic series. In this way, I made it appear as if we all scrambled right after you shot at the ice and destroyed the warehouse. In reality, the rest of us are still there, cloaked like Faima and I were, which is why you could not detect the real versions.”
“You yourself, Avil, escaped from me for a time. Normally I can sense the presence of anyone else for kilometers around based on the proximity of their souls. You, however, eluded me. It seems TRIBLADE are all capable of such skills. At any, you gave away your position as you continued firing. The two of us were then free to track you down.”
“Hey, Losha,” Faima spoke up. “Who the hell was screaming back in Leitis then? Sounded just like you, but we were just about on Avil at that time.”
“Sa, about that,” she said as she stood up. “Sounds are simply vibrations across a medium, usually air or water. A properly adjusted kinetic series can vibrate at any frequency I choose and at any volume I specify. Basically, I used serialization to create something that sounded very much like my voice in a place I never was. Everything was all an act. Though it was rather improvised, I think it came together quite nicely.”
“That was a very nice lecture, professor,” Faima said. Losha ignored her comment, however.
“It was not easy by any means; I had to handle multiple series in unison, most from a remote distance. Even so, we managed to subdue the famed Henron sniper without ever having fired a single shot.”
“You know,” Faima said. “It is not too late to change that...”
“Faima!”
“Come on, you know me. I would not kill him right away. Just a crack at his legs first.”
Losha rolled her eyes at her comrade and shook her head. “If only you were joking...”
“Well I am not. Happy now? The hell are we supposed to do with him anyway?”
“As I previously said, he is our guest, however I believe the proper term to use would be ‘prisoner of war’ as it is called elsewhere.”
“Prisoner?” Faima asked.
“Yeah, prisoner?” Avil echoed.
“Sa. We will keep him in our custody until we can properly transfer him to whatever division manages to catch up with us first.”
“Losha,” Faima began. “You do know how... unorthodox your idea is, right?”
“Explain it to me,” Losha demanded. “I have not the scantest clue as to what you are talking about.”
“Lemme fill you in,” Avil said, rocking back and forth on his feet. “Shrieks, you talk like a Gandian. Like you was never raised around these parts.”
“For the most part, I was not,” Losha responded rather flatly.
“Aha! That there is the rub then. Guess that explains a whole lotta stuff. Anyway, when it comes to wars in the Central Plains, nobody takes prisoners, not for long anyway if you catch my drift. Gandians got some sorta international laws now that dictate those kinda things, but all of us over here got no rules at all, save for one: fight to win. Taking captives does little to help one in that regard. But, hey, if you wanna spare my life, you be hard pressed to see me complaining.”
Faima scowled as Avil made another wide smile. “Hey,” she said at Losha. “I know I have been doing my best to stay in line with you ever since I joined WOLFWIND. I respect you and owe you my life tens times over. But I have to speak out on this one. He is right. ‘Prisoners of war’ just do not exist on our side of the Continent. Anyone who gets ‘caught’ gets offed.”
“And what about those we captured from Suvla’s unit?” Losha countered. “We have them right now.”
“Hardly,” Faima snorted. “We only needed them for information. Once we determined all that we could, they were promptly disposed of. You can confirm this with Valo.” Losha stiffened up as her eyes shifted to the side. Her hands dug tightly into her arms.
“Why did you bind him up like that then if you did not think we were going to take him prisoner?”
“I thought we were going to execute him. Look, I am sure this guy can vouch for how dangerous he can be,” Faima said, pointing at him with her rifle. “As long as he is alive, I have to contend he still is a threat, even under lock and key. Even with you around. Furthermore, I am not too fond of the idea of comforting this shithead in the least. Prisoners need food and whatnot, yet he would kill any of us at the first chance. Why feed your own murderer?”
“That is enough, Faima,” Losha said firmly.
“No, it really is not. Listen to me when I tell you this is just the way we do things. I have been fighting in these lands long enough to say that.”
“And is the way we do things right?”
“Who cares about right? This is about survival.”
“Hey, hey. I care about right. I wanna survive,” Avil interjected.
“Shut your trap!” Faima snarled.
“Faima,” Losha said, stepping forward. “Just how long have you been fighting? How many years have you spent trying to survive?”
“Same as most everyone else: my whole damn life.”
“And do you know how long you will continue like that? I can answer you: the rest of your life. Is that truly how you want it to be?”
“Ksh. What other choice do we have? Kill them before they kill us; I certainly would not want it to be the other way around. Do you like being dead?”
“Nope, I hate it actually,” Avil said.
“She was not talking to you,” Losha said as her partner growled faintly. “Sit down over there. Your mouth little helps your situation...” Losha cast a quick kinetic series that pushed Avil back a few meters and forced him to the ground. She applied pressure on top of him to keep him seated.
“How can we expect anything better if we perpetuate the same problems over and over again?” she asked, turning around to Faima. “Perhaps the only reason any one of us is killed at all is due to people thinking such deeds are necessary. With serialization, however, we can avoid those circumstances which force us to bloodshed.”
“Come on, we have to be reasonable...”
“What part of me is being unreasonable? You were there at Lake Lada. You saw what I did. How many Henron do you think perished by my hand? None. Yet, we still won.” Losha gently pushed Faima’s rifle down with her hand. “Do you mean to tell me you joined WOLFWIND even though you did not believe what I could do? That I could end this war with as few deaths as possible?”
Faima grunted uneasily as she looked away.
“When I say there is another way, I am being serious. We keep him alive. That is my decision.”
“Ksh,” Faima said, turning to the side as she slung her rifle over her shoulder. “You know, you sure are lucky that I trust her so damn much,” Faima spat, tossing a glare over at Avil.
“At any rate,” Losha said, whirling around to Avil. “Our ‘hospitality’ is not without condition.”
He chuckled to himself as she approached. “Lemme take a guess. You want to know stuff right? Troop positions, deployment sizes, strategies and plans and so on and so forth.” She knelt down on one knee and looked at him directly. For a moment, she merely said nothing.
“Heh, figures. Suppose you want to find out what kinda technology drives my blazing baby over there,” he said, tilting his head over at his huge gun. “Hate to break it to you, but when it comes to those sorta details, you get ‘no comment’ outta me, see? I am trained to resist interrogation after all. Besides, I got no clue whadda hell any officer in the whole Henron army is thinking or plotting. TRIBLADE is a completely independent unit, only answers to the Prime Lead. I know nothing about whatever the Core Leads are up to, ‘cause I got no reason to care.”
Losha sighed shortly. “I do not care to glean any sort of intelligence from you, although others would gladly like to try. I also have no interest in that clunky weapon of yours,” she said, shrugging as she waved her hand dismissively through the air.
“Clunky?” he repeated, the only time his face honestly became downcast.
“There is only one prerequisite for your ‘safe’ detention on Sventa soil. I never want to see you on my battlefield again. Today, neither you nor I suffered any real damage. Should we have an additional encounter, I can only say it would be most regrettable on your part. If you think our paths would not cross again, I would remind you that I have a way of just showing up where I am needed.”
“Hey, hey, sounds like a pretty big threat you be putting over my head.”
“A threat, a warning, or a promise: it is yours to interpret. I am sure you remember well that this fight was won by a large margin: ours. And that is hardly coincidence. The same will happen the next time, hypothetically speaking. I do not expect us to meet like this again, of course. I have no desire to kill a fellow human being, but I have not personally established where I draw the line in ‘kicking a*s’ for lack of a proper Asten term. I would hate to have to find out how far I can go, sa?”
Avil laughed rather loudly for a few moments. “Guess all that talk surrounding you was true, and then some.” He shook his head slightly. “The Wolf of Sventa, huh? One tough customer. That puts me outta business.”
Losha opened her hand as another unseen kinetic series was cast. The shades Avil had tossed flew straight into her grip. With a swipe, she put them on, smiling broadly as she stood up. “Glad you could see things my way.”
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