Aspirant: A Sci-Fi Harem Adventure

by Whittaker, Maxx

  The ground rumbles as the Jötunn takes a step forward. We spin, sure it’s about to attack, but its claws don’t descend. Instead it stands above us, watching.

  “You see?” Astrid’s voice is almost quiet, now, if someone whispering through fifty megaphones could be called quiet. “Why fight any more? Why die when you can spend the rest of your life in ecstasy? With us?”

  “Mika.” Agnes’ voice is liquid seduction. “Let me show you the adventure you’ve always craved. Let me take you to the places you’ve dreamed about. Give me your soul, Mika.”

  “Sam…” Annabelle says, voice almost plaintive. There’s something so fucked about how innocent, how young she sounds in this form. “You tasted me, you know me. Know what I can make you feel. Please, Sam,” she begs, her little gasp like an orgasm. “Please, don’t do this.”

  “Syl,” Astrid sings. “Stay with us. Your whole life has been suffering, has been battle. Wars you’ve fought for others. Conflicts not your own. Come with us,” the witch beckons. “For once in your life, live for yourself. ”

  Syl turns to me, and somehow, through her pain, she smiles. “I am.” Then she falls into my arms. I catch her. She’s so light.

  Mika runs her hands through Syl’s hair before turning to the Jötunn. “Me, too,” she says, voice unwavering.

  “Sam?” Annabelle says. She sounds almost… desperate.

  I stand straight, Syl resting at my chest, Mika at my side. “Fuck you.”

  Astrid’s voice is ice. “Fine. Then we leave you to him.”

  Him?

  Our wrist pads beep, three chimes in unison.

  00:00:00

  Oh, no.

  From off in the distance, amongst the crowd, the screams begin.

  “Not long now,” the Jötunn croons in all three voices. It crouches low, pinning us between the wall of townspeople and its flame.

  There has to be something. Something we haven’t thought of. Mika leans against me, wraps her arm around my waist. She’s injured, but still, we try to dart along the crowd. Maybe if we can get behind the witches…

  “We don’t think so.” An arm as big as an ancient tree thunders into the ground, blocking our path. “We’re all going to wait together.”

  We back away from beckoning claws that dance in the night, daring us to charge. If Mika could just…

  But no. She’s crouched, arm to her chest, teeth grit in agony. Syl shudders in my arms, body so hot it burns where her skin touches mine. I don’t drop her. Won’t.

  What can we do?

  The cries of agony and fear out in the crowd draw closer.

  Almost here.

  I grind my teeth in fury. “Astra!” I shout. “Why?” Why would she put us here? Why build us up and give us hope. Why make us think we have a chance of winning all this when it’s clearly impossible? What’s the fucking point? “Astra! Where are you?”

  She doesn’t appear.

  “She can’t save you,” the witches sing, mocking. “She’s not allowed .”

  I don’t answer. What is there to say?

  Maybe. Maybe when the Shepherd gets here, it’ll be enough of a distraction to… I don’t know. There has to be something. My mind races, but I can’t see a way out. The crowd is an impenetrable wall behind us. The Jötunn kneels across from them with its arms spread wide, its smile of flame mocking. Daring us to try to run, to attack.

  No way out. Where did we fuck up? What did we do wrong? Why would the Citadel put us into an unwinnable situation?

  What am I missing?

  Too late.

  The Shepherd arrives.

  The crowd’s panic crests, spilling over us, and we turn, know what we’ll see.

  A blade of midnight slices sideways like a scythe. In an eyeblink, a dozen people, men, women and children are rent in half. Their bodies and weapons fall to the earth in a rain of blood and metal. The blade cuts again and tears a furrow through more, people that try to flee but can’t, blocked by their own comrades. The air smells like piss and shit and fear, and their pain is a chorus that raises above the jeers of the others.

  At the edge of the crowd, the Shepherd halts. Just a few feet away.

  I’ve never seen it this close before. Not when Mika and I lay on the floor of the first convalescence chamber, sure it was about to step through the doorway and kill us.

  It’s not half as tall as the Jötunn, but somehow, it’s a thousand times more terrifying. Its shape is indistinct, its edges blurred as if it exists and doesn’t at the same time. It constantly shifts shape, like it’s glitching out and reforming endlessly. Its blade is the only element that seems rooted to the world, as long as I am tall, attached at its shoulder.

  There are tiny white threads that flow through it like almost little snakes, coming to its surface and diving back below and losing cohesion as they disappear into its mass. What are they? In a flash, I realize they’re… Lines of numbers. And letters. Almost like they’re…

  “What the hell?” Mika gasps. “That’s… That’s code. ”

  I open my mouth to answer, but the words die in my throat. The Shepherd’s eyes blaze, twin beacons of fire in the abyss of its face. It roars. It’s deafening, so loud that the Jötunn takes a step back. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard, like every predator on Earth filtered through a fax machine’s error noise, a terrifying cocktail of animal and machine.

  In a last burst of fear fueled anger and panic, I seize the power inside of me. Every last bit of my strength that I send hurtling at the Shepherd. A hammer of power, strong enough to pulverize stone.

  My strikes slides off it like oil. Nothing happens.

  I cough, spraying blood across Syl’s prone form. I wince at a renewed spear of agony in my brain. What do we do? What can we do?

  I have nothing.

  “Too late,” sings the Jötunn.

  Mika’s arms circle me and she buries her face at my back. She squeezes, so tight I can barely breathe. I don’t care. If these are our last moments…

  Syl’s heavy in my arms, her breaths shallow, almost gasps. Pain? I hold her tight, wish I could have saved her, moved faster.

  She turns her head, eyes wide with fear and… Something else. Not pain.

  Her fingers are in my hair, grasping, and she pulls me low. Her lips meet mine. A kiss filled with desire, need, frustration… Love and regret.

  For a moment, nothing else exists. Not the Jötunn, not the crowd, not the Shepherd. There’s only us, lost in our cocoon of need.

  After a two second eternity, she pulls away, eyes wet with unshed tears. She blinks them away, smiles bravely, through her pain and sadness. She’s so beautiful. “I did not wish to die… Not without doing that one more time.”

  I laugh. “No one’s dying today.” I don’t know why I say it. It’s bullshit, right?

  Still, I turn, hand Syl to Mika. She’s smiling a little smile as she hefts the alien. She’s incredible. In agony, almost certainly with ribs broken, but she doesn’t hesitate when she pulls Syl into her arms.

  How did I get so lucky?

  I shake my head, turn to face the Shepherd, raising my rifle.

  If I die, I’m going down fighting.

  The Shepherd takes a step forward. Then another, dragging its blade behind it in a noise that haunts my dreams. Its dark metal cuts a divot in the stone until it clears the street. It stops when its close a mountain of shadow. Why aren’t we dead yet? Its blade is high above us, a length of darkness ready to descend.

  What’s it waiting for?

  I squint in the dim light.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Mika whispers.

  She’s right. I can’t explain it, but something is… Wrong. Its edges grow more indistinct, get even jaggier. They stretch, elongate, before snapping back together. And then they do it again. The white snakes of code that thread it thicken, and then more and more of them appear, so many that in seconds its dark body is at least half formed by darting numbers and letters.

  “What
the hell?”

  We back away further as the Shepherd grows more and more indistinct, blurring so powerfully that I can see the crowd through its shredded form. The code lines blaze like comets through it, swarming.

  It snaps back together. The code disappears, and it the Shepherd reforms, finds cohesion.

  Its blade doesn’t descend.

  It raises its nightmare head, fixing its burning gaze on…

  The Jötunn.

  “What?” The witches say, raising to their full height. “No. Impossible.”

  The Shepherd takes a long stride, sliding like dark oil through the night.

  Right past us.

  The Jötunn tries to back away, trips over a fallen tree. “Silver One!” the witches shriek. “Betrayer!”

  Before they can run, Shepherd is on them. Its blade is a dark blur in the night, moving so fast I can’t follow it. The witches scream in agony as it chops into thick bone like an axe into a tree trunk. It cuts over and over with savage strikes, and all the while the witches shriek into the night. “Betrayer! Betrayer! You cannot do this! Against the rules! ”

  We’re already running, chased by their death throes. None of us speak. I can’t believe we’re alive, that somehow, we’ve escaped. But I think I know how it happened.

  Astra.

  Our flight to the cottage is a blur hampered only slightly by the women’s injuries and me reclaiming Syl. The cottage door won’t open, so I blast it apart with my rifle. Inside, it’s a sterile room, the same as in the rest of the Citadel. Was all of it an illusion? Their cauldron, the herbs, all of it?

  Doesn’t matter. On the other side of the room is the doorway. We press hands to it, wait the agonizing seconds as it dissolves, and then stumble through.

  All the while chased by the witch's screams. “Betrayer! Silver one! Betrayyyerrrrr! ”

  23

  Somewhere Between

  Aspirant 2239

  Room Timer: Unknown

  WARNING: SYSTEM COMPROMISED

  COUNTERMEASURES ENABLED

  Astra waits for us on the other side.

  She stands before us, wringing her hands, face pinched with worry. And fear.

  That can’t be good.

  The AI meets my eyes for a moment, gauging, then grimaces and turns away, pacing over to a bank of computers that covers one entire wall of… Wherever we are.

  Mika falls to her knees, wincing. She runs her hand along dark red, luxurious carpet. “What is this place?”

  I lay Syl down next to her. She whimpers when her blistered skin contacts the ground. I glance up, waiting for the orange healing glow.

  There’s nothing. Just normal lights, like there’d be in any house on Earth.

  House?

  We’re in a small, comfy study. The furnishings are sparse; a red leather couch and a huge armchair of the same material, both well-loved and used based on how worn they are. A bed that sits in the corner is covered in lovely pillows and blankets. It’s perfectly made, like hotel maid quality folding, and I’m not sure it’s ever actually been used. The lights are low and moody, dim like a jazz club or something. A roaring fire in a mammoth stone fireplace behind us puts out no heat and almost no illumination, but that’s weirdness par for the course at this point. Bracketing it are huge picture windows, but there’s nothing on the other side. Through the thick planes is utter darkness, like the room floats in a void.

  I shudder, turn away from them, try to shake off the feeling that if I tumbled through one I’d fall forever.

  Two other walls are covered in blackboards which are covered in post it notes. Thousands of them, filled with chicken scratch equations and pictures. Below them are benches and tables completely covered in calculators, papers, pens, and every other generic thing you’d expect in a lab or classroom.

  The last wall, opposite the fireplace, is where Astra paces, muttering to herself. “No time, no time.” Her hands dart across old style nineties computer keyboards sunken a long bench, and her face is lit by the sodium glow of at least forty monitors set into the wall from side to side.

  The AI’s body flickers, loses and gains cohesion and she worries and taps at the keys. She still looks like she did the last time we saw her, but it’s almost as if the effort of retaining her form is too difficult.

  I give my companions a last check. “Are you okay?”

  Mika slumps against the wall, but waves me away, nodding significantly to Astra. “Healing would be fucking lovely.”

  Syl doesn’t respond, just turns her head. She’s dozing, face pinched.

  Astra’s still now, watching one of the monitors, body rigid. A band of silver flows through her from top to bottom, but otherwise she’s motionless.

  I put a hand to her shoulder. “Astra.”

  She doesn’t move. “Look, Sam. Look at what I’ve done.”

  Reluctantly, because I’m kind of freaked, I raise my eyes to the monitors. No, not monitors. They’re security cameras .

  On them? Absolute chaos.

  The first screen’s image is of the place we’ve just left, the ancient city. On it, the Shepherd stands motionless over the bodies of the witches. They’re no longer in the form of the Jötunn, and they lay sprawled on top of each other, obviously dead. Their bodies are unmarred, but the same can’t be said for anyone else.

  In the distance, it’s all-out war. People, once united in their hatred of us, have turned on each other in a battle that beggars my mind. Tens of thousands fight with weapons, claws, and nails. They kill indiscriminately. I can barely focus on any one individual; the turmoil is so widespread. It’s a sea of violence and death, churning back and forth like waves. As I watch, millions die. The buildings behind them are on fire, burning low but with the promise of a coming inferno.

  Everywhere I look, it’s the same.

  The base on Syl’s planet, overrun with thousands of scaag that roll on the ground, bashing each other’s brains in with rocks and clubs.

  A bridge of blue light over an infinite ocean. On it, soldiers in sea foam armor teem as they rip each other to shreds with bizarre, multi bladed weapons. Above them wheel something like harpies, fighting each other as much as the soldiers on the bridge.

  The dungeon that Mika and I escaped. One orc lays dead on the floor, cut nearly in half with an axe jutting from its face. The other stands over him, smashing its head over and over into the stone wall with impacts so violent I can almost feel them through the low quality monitor.

  A moon. A calm blanket of stars hangs motionless over a blasted landscape that ripples with massive worms. They roil and thrash at each other, tearing each other to pieces with bladed mouths at both ends of their body.

  Somewhere underwater, a sea so deep that the only light is thrown by a man who floats at the center of the screen. He looks like a god of light, and he throws bolts of incandescence at something offscreen.

  The puzzle room Mika and I survived, the walls flashing random shapes, the floor disappearing and reappearing endlessly.

  I step back, gaping. Were these trials we were supposed to face? What’s happening in them? It’s too much. My mind is still torn apart from my power, and trying to comprehend… “What… What the hell happened?”

  Astra laughs, hollow from low in her stomach. “The Sisters were right. I broke the rules.”

  “But why… Why all this?”

  “The Citadel was created with a singular purpose. Robbed of that purpose, it turned on itself. It’s self-destructing.” She turns to me like she’s searching for something. Absolution?

  “Do those places really exist? Are those people real? I thought they weren’t, but the witches knew of you, of the Citadel.” The thought of untold billions tearing each other to bloody heaps is too much to contemplate.

  “No,” Syl says. “And yes. The chambers exist to test you, but they did not before you arrived, nor will they when you are gone. The witches’ knowledge was part of your test. They’re as transitory as all this.”

 
; “Is any of it real?”

  “Yes. I am. And he is.”

  I know who she’s talking about without asking. “You altered the Shepherd?”

  “It won’t last.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I hug her. Her surprise lasts only a moment, and she lays her head on my shoulder. Her fingers go to my back, her touch almost gentle, and she draws a shuddering breath. “What have I done?”

  “You saved us,” I say, drawing back, holding her shoulders. “You made that choice. There must be a reason.”

  “Yes,” she says, shaking her head. “You must ready yourselves. We don’t have long.”

  Mika groans from the floor, Syl’s head in her lap. “Not sure we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “Oh, damn. I’m so sorry.” Syl waves her hand, and instantly, our injuries evaporate. They don’t slowly heal, like before, in the convalescence chambers. They just… Disappear. My mind snaps from ravaged to perfect clarity in a heartbeat.

  The two stand and run hands over their bodies, disbelieving. “Wait, you could have done that at any time?” I ask, frowning.

  “No, no, please believe me,” Astra says, shimmering a moment. Why now? Stress? “It was against the rules.”

  “Rules you’ve broken. Why now?” Mika asks.

  Astra opens her mouth to respond, but suddenly, a klaxon blares over her. We all look up at once.

  A timer. It flashes on all the computer screens, replacing the images of the Citadel falling to pieces.

  01:56:19

  “That’s… Random.”

  Astra’s form shifts, and this time, she loses all color and most of her shape. “I have to go,” she says. “I’ll be back.”

  “Wait, where are you going?” Mika asks.

  Astra smiles, a silver on silver upturn of her lips. “To find you a way out of here.”

  “What occurs when the timer runs out?” Syl asks, tapping one of the monitors with a claw.

  The AI shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s comforting.”

  “Like I said. I’ll be back.” Her words are laced with faux confidence, but she looks determined, no longer scared.