by Mark Russo
On my right, Vaim created an intangible barrier before him and me. He ran by my side, and the shield followed him.
Emma must have already disappeared, as I could not see her.
James was only partially visible to me, but I heard his stone board smashing the square’s cement and asphalt.
The woman trying to get control over my mind duplicated then disappeared. I knew for sure she was Path of Mind too.
The colossal beast James had summoned was before my unmovable eyes as well. The monster’s enormous head looked left and right, trying to locate the enemy.
The invisible woman directed her energies toward it, like she was trying to lift it.
The worm’s carapace came entirely out of the ground, but it eventually forced its way back.
My throat hurt, and bringing air to my lungs became even arduous. Everything around me became silent for a split second.
Dozens of doubles crowded the space before me. I’d never seen that many people looking exactly the same.
I had lost sight of Maria. I knew she was somewhere, waiting for her chance to blow her shot.
The doubles ran toward Vaim and his shield.
Our robotic friend shot a white ray of light from his barrier with a peculiar whirring sound. The illusions it hit vanished, but there were just too many. The ray of light exploded, blinding me for the third time that day.
The doubles disappeared, and the woman was before my eyes again—she had to be one of them, the Great Communion. I felt her hand on my throat, even though she was far away from me.
A massive rockjet hit her. I saw blood pouring from her face, and her arms and legs broke in multiple points. She cried loud. Her suit tore and broke, revealing her demonic appearance. Her monstrous body resembled a stretched prism with almost perfectly flat surfaces, floating about a meter from the ground.
Despite her not having a humanoid shape anymore, I felt an immaterial hand clenching my neck, and the grasp tightened more. I saw James’s body thrown in the air and landing meters away; he was not moving. I kept looking, but he didn’t lift a finger.
Maria emerged from the temporal series. She unsheathed her sword lightning fast and dashed toward the demon.
The prism created a copy of itself, a double, a few meters away and much closer to me.
When Maria attacked, the demon had already exchanged its position with the double’s. Her sword swung in the air, her face looking at me.
I decided I’d try to communicate with her using my mind. “Find the real one. This monster is playing with you.” I have no idea if she heard me, but she hid in a series again.
The enemy crowded the surrounding space with more geometrical shapes. What appeared before me was an uglier replica of Stonehenge.
Vaim did his thing with the ray of light again, but the prism remained where they were.
I checked on James; he was no longer where he had been laying before.
A loud crashing sound announced the stone worm was back on the scene. It attacked the doubles at random. He passed through a fake prismatic demon to another with all the strength he had.
The demon didn’t attack the worm.
I was very close to suffocating. My sight blurred, and I could not feel my limbs anymore. I was not sure anymore, but I think I saw Maria again running much faster than I had ever seen her move. She ran so fast I could not see her anymore, then she hit one of those weird shapes.
They all disappeared immediately.
When the Communion Grand Master loosened his grasp from my body, I fell to the ground.
Vaim caught me and prevented me from hitting the rugged concrete, face first.
“I need to lay down for a second,” I mumbled. When I opened my eyes again, they were all around me; I must have fainted.
They helped me up; Maria’s arms were slightly shaky as she hugged me timidly.
“That thing could have killed us,” I told them.
“None of us has serious wounds,” Vaim commented.
I noticed a large bruise on James’s right elbow.
“You said it would not be dangerous!” Maria walked very close to the automaton’s face and grabbed his shirt’s stiff collar. She gave him a few shoves, but he did not lift a finger.
James put his body between them.
“Guys, can we please get this over with? I feel like shit.”
After hearing me say those words, the little brawl ended.
We began walking, but my legs were weak. James and Vaim came by my sides and helped me move forward. Maria kept some distance from Vaim but glared at him every other step. When we reached the end of the square, I noticed a pile of debris that looked different from all the others. The material was not concrete or any other thing I had seen before in Plane R.
Valu’s pet was idling and not uttering a single sound.
“This was it, right?” I whispered.
“Yes. This was our objective.”
“Who did this? Who destroyed the beacon for us, Vaim?”
“I have no idea, James. That is what we have to find out next.”
That creature probably did not have feelings, but in that moment, I was no longer certain of this. “Is it safe to stay here?”
“No. We need to leave.” The pouty android opened yet another portal.
We all entered without asking questions.
21
Kelm
I had known Vihkan forever, but she rarely acted like that before.
“So, you really think Valu is helping the humans?” I asked her again while we sat on the backs of two slowly marching behemoths.
“Yes, Kelm. That Spanish girl, her time blade was like no other I have ever seen.”
“And that James, he differed from what you all said. He developed skills nobody taught him, Kelm.”
The behemoth’s rugged back proved difficult to stroke with my human hand. “I always wonder why they only have two of these.” I was referring to the hands.
“We were too soft with him. We should make things clear, once and for all.”
“That’s why we are going there, Vihkan. Let’s give him a chance. A tiny one.”
She nodded, but I was not sure she agreed.
The immense beast below me snorted and hesitated.
“I guess we are almost there. This puppy feels it,” I told my colleague, as humans would put it.
And we were. A vast area covered in levigated stones surrounded the Red Vault, a churchlike building highlighted among the rocks.
“Send the proxies first. I want to see them blow up on Valu’s booby-traps,” Vihkan said.
Why I had to do it, or why she had chosen that horrible female human suit, I didn’t get.
It took less than ten seconds for the first proxy to explode from a grenade. Limbs and guts flew everywhere. Vihkan was smiling. A large wooden pike impaled another of those puppets. Apparently, Valu had imported a lot of human devices to Plane K. More dummies encroached the fake church, causing more explosions and snapping and clanking noises.
“Do we go on like this?” I challenged her.
She moved her right hand, like those Roman generals would do with their troops.
The itchling around us charged toward their demise as well. The sprawling sea created by the tiny creatures slid forward, shaking the ground. Soon all that remained of them was a patchwork of limbs and torsos spewed across the arid land.
From on top of our gigantic quadrupeds, we stared at a more than evitable massacre.
“Okay, now we can go,” Vihkan suggested.
“I think we could have used some other ways to disarm the traps.”
“I like to announce my arrival properly, Kelm. Think big.”
That made me laugh, I must admit.
The behemoths stomping on the dismembered itchilings and proxies sounded like a clogged sink.
I panned here and there, but no unpleasant surprises caught us off guard until we reached the main doors.
The two juggernauts be
nt their noisy knees and let us down. We walked to the majestic wooden door without further ado.
She looked at me, like she expected me to do the honors.
I ignored her and pushed the piece of wood. It opened with no dart, blade, or spear cutting through my human suit. The central nave would not hurt us as well, but something was off with all that.
“He should be here,” Vihkan said. “We didn’t come all the way here to play hide and seek, Valu!”
No one answered her poorly mannered invite.
We ventured farther in the dim building. I checked a few of the pavement’s tiles, as they seemed suspect. A little farther ahead in the altar’s vicinity lay a small cube of stone. I kneeled to inspect the object. I doubted a little but eventually grabbed it. It resembled a Rubik’s cube, except weird symbols covered each of the sliding faces.
“He’s playing us. I will start tearing down this place if he doesn’t show up.”
I faced her and brought the peculiar gadget closer to her small nose.
She didn’t seem very interested.
“I think we will not meet him. We would feel his presence, right? If I know him well enough, he would like us to solve this little puzzle.”
She exhaled very loudly and sat on one bench. “Do it. Call me when you’re done. I’ll give directions to the rest of the horde, no point in them coming here.”
I nodded, as she had a point. I grabbed the cube with both hands and fidgeted with it. At first, I thought it had some hidden meaning. I tried to put the symbols in lines then in columns. I tried to read them, but nothing happened. Maybe I had to put it somewhere, then it would do something, but this also did not work. My patience wore rapidly thin, and I threw the cube against one of the refined Corinthian columns.
The cube cracked open and a light powder came from it. The small particles moved in the air and formed a very clear image. A ghostlike form of Valu appeared before us.
Vihkan almost jumped at him when she saw his face.
“I hope you liked this little prank. You could not solve the cube, you had to throw it, which you did. Throwing things, something even the Great Communion can understand …”
“It’s a recorded message,” I whispered to Vihkan as she pranced toward the magic, see-through version of the Red’s forefather.
“Anyhow,” the ghost continued, “this is not the real Red Vault. This is just a sham version of it. You will never find the real one. And, well, that’s all I have to say. Have fun looking for me, the real me.” The image dissolved into thin air.
Vihkan didn’t talk immediately; I could hear her thoughts though. “Don’t, Kelm. Just, don’t.”
“He is right. We will not find him,” I said.
She stopped walking and turned swiftly to stare into my pupils. “We will find him, and when we do, I will inflict him the worst types of torture I can think of.”
“Think of all the artifacts we looked for, those Valu built. We never found any. We should focus on the kids. They are our major problem now.”
We left the building into Plane K’s wilderness. Lots of tiny creatures connected to my mind again.
“If they are our problem, what is our next step?” she asked.
“They have lots of obstacles laid on their path. We might end their existences once and for all.”
Her eyes widened. “If Vagras is with them, they should have a hard time already.”
We shared a chuckle.
“What was it we ordered him to tell them? The Spires are a key to defeating us,” I added.
We laughed much longer on that. When we had enough fun, we climbed up the behemoths again.
“Do we go back to Plane R already?” Vihkan asked in a much kinder voice than usual.
“I would go back already. We have forces already deployed on all their continents. I just wonder where Aaragul is.”
“I would not rely too much on him. He’s always been a loose cannon.”
“He will probably pop up at some point, telling us he just took a little time off, as humans would say.”
A scout interrupted our chat, reaching out to our minds.
“He’s saying they got the beacon in Paris already. Weren’t you there, like, yesterday?” I spat.
“It was not an important one. We can proceed even without it,” she commented, almost blowing me off.
“Well, that might be true, but this brings us a few steps backward!”
She kept her head forward and said nothing.
“The kids destroyed it, right? Can you please tell me what happened?” My voice became even louder.
“No, it was not them. When I left, the beacon was still intact.” She kept avoiding direct eye contact.
“Can you please tell me what the hell happened?”
“They banished me, okay!”
I ordered the beasts to stop. “How did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We have to stop them, Kelm. They are much more dangerous than we may think.”
The air around us softly stroked my face. “Is this wind? Since when have we ever had wind in Plane K?” My senses were probably baffling me.
Vihkan inspected the surrounding area. She closed her eyes and summoned as many doubles as she could handle.
Our behemoths growled from all of their heads and stomped loudly, like if they were reading a charge.
The wind intensified so strongly that sand and small rocks flew into the air. Above us, the dark sky brightened, and the green light that always colored Plane K transformed and became bluer. The tempest subsided into a light breeze as a landscape from the other materialized before our eyes. Rocky mountains appeared on the horizon littered with large trees a few meters ahead of us.
“What the hell just happened?” Vihkan’s human body was hyperventilating.
“It looks like the planes just merged,” I mumbled.
We stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, envisaging the consequences of that event.
“How? Who could have done this?” she asked, I think more to herself than me.
The two huge creatures we were riding would not answer our commands. Instead, they slowly stepped backward.
We dismounted and continued by foot.
“How do humans understand where they are?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where are we? We can’t use portals anymore. That would probably kill us, but for good this time.”
“Yes, that might be true.”
We moved on, and I ordered the behemoth to follow, but they refused to obey. When I inflicted them pain using my mind blast, they became a lot more compliant.
Pines and tall grass surrounded us. The sun, almost hidden by a massive peak, timidly lit the area. It was cold, and the wind rhythmically shook the vegetation.
“We are in a forest somewhere in the northern hemisphere of planet Earth,” I said.
Vihkan reached to all creatures she could in Plane K.
Not a minute later, a sea of itchling flooded the area.
“I cannot reach any human’s mind in the vicinity. This must be a very remote area,” Vihkan said with a groan.
“Let’s see how fast these two things go. Ready for a little road trip?” I pointed at the behemoth, but she didn’t react to my joke.
We marched one in front of the other, as the two huge Plane K creatures would not fit side by side among the large wooden trunks. I spotted a bear in the distance. It didn’t survive long when dozens of itchlings mauled it. When the forest thinned, we found ourselves in a long and green valley, but I could still not see any of those concrete cubes humans call houses. I kept some distance from Vihkan and detached my mind from hers too. We walked for much longer until the dirt road became a gravel one. Maybe a full kilometer ahead, I spotted a column of smoke. I reached out to her mind and asked if she noticed that too.
She said she did and that it would be fun to torture humans for a bit.
I agreed with her; that would be
a lot of fun.
22
Laura
When the kids began screaming like they were possessed, I was trying to have a cup of coffee. We had entered an abandoned café, and I could not resist the temptation—the coffeemaker was almost intact and buzzed like a bumblebee stuck in a jar. That black substance would remind me of Brian every time, and, at that moment, I had no idea if he was even alive.
“Laura, come have a look. Plane K is here!” Maria shrieked from behind me.
We were in the city they call Paris. They told me once it was beautiful, can’t say from what remains of it.
“What? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Come, you have to see.”
I laid the cracked mug on the bar and tailed after the short Spanish girl. Outside, the almost complete devastation of the city awaited me, and the sky had turned partially green, and the sun had disappeared.
“What’s happening?” I asked Maria.
“Come and see this. You really have to.” Maria scampered past the side of the building where I finally saw what she wanted me to.
The road ended abruptly in a cliff, and so was everything else, like someone had cut a piece of this world and pasted a piece of Plane K on top of it.
“The rift in Langren was huge. This one is a whole new level,” James said with both hands in his tousled hair.
“This is not a rift, guys.” Valu on my right appeared to know what had happened. “This is much worse. Plane K and Plane R have merged.”
The kids became loud and spoke on top of each other for a full minute.
“What does it mean?” Emma asked when they finished screwing around and her words became intelligible.
“It means you’d better forget how your world was once. We can now freely walk between the planes—anyone can,” I answered.
They became silent.
“We can’t use portals,” Vaim added. “Those might kill us. Well, I’m not technically alive, so …”
Maria and Emma looked at the automaton while mildly shaking their heads. “Okay, but what do we do?” Emma asked.
“We look for the beacons and tear them all down. They are even more important now!”