by Aer-ki Jyr
“People change, and many enemies of Star Force have, over time and proper stimulus, become friends. Some Vargemma have as well. They would have killed me on the battlefield if they had the chance when they first arrived. Now they would never do such a thing. When you encounter the light after a lifetime of darkness, it will allow a besieged good Core to show through a lifetime of learned behavior, so we do not count anyone out for current intent. We have a thorough process of vetting, and you get as many tries as you want. All you need is one success.”
“Only one? It must be difficult beyond measure then?”
“In a way. But it is also very simple. Be trustworthy. Most do not understand the meaning of those words. We will see if you do, and if not, we will see if you can learn,” Reganno said, pointing his ringed hand toward the inner gate as it opened at his beckoning. “Welcome to Redemption, Puar. A galaxy aflame in war awaits warriors willing to rise to the challenge, and this city is the portal for those who prove themselves worthy to fight alongside Star Force and defy the darkside in all its manifestations…”
2
July 1, 128690
Stugarrata Nebula (Tovok Kingdom)
Kappa Temple
Puar launched himself into the air and to the right with all four of his legs, barely missing the projectile the wall ahead of him threw out of a concealed portal. All of the damn turrets were invisible, covered by holograms that made them look like flat wall, and he didn’t have time to focus his Fremmav to peer through them. It was a lot less omnidirectional than Star Force’s Pefbar, and this training challenge had been designed, he suspected, to force him to let go of the singular target lock his race preferred when in combat.
He was getting attacked from multiple angles simultaneously, and from past experience Puar knew that if he tried to stop one of the spherical projectiles before it hit him then his hind end would get pelted from other directions. The only advantage he had here was the fact that the targeting equipment firing the projectiles was laggy, and if he kept moving in other than a straight line he could dodge them, but every time he leveled up to a new difficulty setting, that lag decreased a bit more.
His cat-like body hit on his shoulders and he kicked the slightly padded ground to roll himself over and back onto his feet where he jumped into a run just as another projectile bounced off the spot on the floor where he had landed.
A duck here, jerk there, and lots of running through the maze of hallways and open corridors eventually led him to the final challenge that had him climbing a sheer tower out in the open. He’d never completed it, and the few Varkemma that had would not share their secret, but they did say not all body types were capable of making it. Yet no one told him if a Trigorma could or not. The fact that he was running this course suggested it was possible, but Puar was beginning to think he was here to fail repeatedly as some sort of object lesson.
Never the less, he took at it aggressively with his black/white fur becoming a blur as he ran up to the underside and flew through the air on a single leap and clawed at the flat wall. His paws slid halfway before the semi-soft material finally caught and he was able to gingerly pull himself up, but rather than slowly climbing and getting pelted with projectiles he steadied himself. Two of the orbs punched into his back and rolled off, leaving a slight numbing sensation before he launched himself up again as a third missed and bounced off the wall where he had just been clinging.
Puar made it two more leaps up before he was so numb that his claws didn’t fully extract when his paws hit the wall above him…then he slipped and fell back to the ground where a force field caught him just prior to impact. It slowly set him down as multiple projectiles flew through the air and nailed him, rendering him fully unconscious.
When he woke he had been removed from the training course and was sitting in a sluggish position with his chin down between his front two legs as an automated revival bot injected him with destunning serum, then floated off without staying to explain itself.
They never did, and Puar had trashed two of them in his first week here out of sheer frustration, but now he did not. His anger was with the training, not the machine that woke him up from his failure stupor.
The quadruped stood up on slightly shaky legs and walked on. His routine now was very familiar. One shot at this course each and every day. One failure and it was time to move on to another that would likely be the same. The few successes that he received swapped out a completed challenge for a new one, but the failed ones didn’t stay the same. They got harder the longer it took him to beat them, which seemed unfair, but there was a war on and he was not intended to stay here training indefinitely.
If he wanted to become a Varkemma he had to keep moving forward, so he had chosen to embrace the training rather than fight it, as another had suggested he do when the Novolegg had returned to Redemption for a time after spending his 6th tour on the Hadarak front helping to screen the evacuation forces as they pulled people out of harm’s way…but there was never enough of them, and many planets were hit before they were completely emptied of people.
That’s where Puar wanted to be, and the stories he was hearing from the Varkemma were awe inspiring. The Hadarak were far more powerful than the Vargemma had ever been told by the Temple Responders, yet they were also weaker. What Star Force referred to as ‘minions’ were easy to kill individually, but there were so many of them that they could overwhelm any Essence user with their waves of corpses. You literally couldn’t kill them fast enough until they were upon you, and then you’d either stand your ground until they nicked you to death, or until you ran out of Essence. The only way to win was an immense amount of carnage, and that was very appealing to Puar and the others that had been living inside the Temple endlessly waiting for their chance to fight.
The Varkemma he had talked to was no longer here, but had returned to his race for a time to explain to them what was going on. They might not believe the Star Force news updates, but hearing it from one of their own had a significantly different effect on getting more recruits of higher skill to become Varkemma. Puar was glad he was already here and in the process, because making the tournament even more flush with skill would most likely have meant he’d never have made it through.
Teio had been the Novelegg’s name, and he’d talked to Puar for quite some time. Most of the questions asked could not be answered, for Cal-com wanted the training to be blind. If information was given ahead of time it would change the learning process, so Teio had been sworn to secrecy regarding how to beat certain challenges and what was coming ahead, but he could offer advice on how to construct the proper mindset, and he’d helped Puar immensely. Worthiness was not judged here as being the power to win a single fight. It was the ability to get knocked down and get back up again endlessly…and the fight against the Hadarak was an endless one. Only those who had immortal willpower could stand against them, and that is what Star Force was looking for in Varkemma recruits.
That one conversation had changed everything for Puar, and since then he’d seen his 19 hour a day training cycle as a buildup of resistance to his will rather than pointless repetition. He found it hard to sleep in his 5 hours off, because his metabolism was built exceedingly high and the training regimen required him to get into a mindset of never stopping…so sleeping was hard, but he was gradually learning how to switch from one mode into the other more efficiently.
He could waste time moving from one challenge to another if he wished, but Puar did not. He walked through the now familiar hallways of this training block to one of the most hated courses. Trigorma despised swimming, so much so they’d altered their biology to give themselves a flap inside their nose to keep out unwanted water on the occasions where they were forced into it. They were built for the dirt and dust, and their cities in the Temple were all built far from the water and inhabiting the small stretches of desert that the Temple afforded…and that the rest of the races avoided.
Water was for drinking, in small amounts. Ot
hers actually bathed in it, but Puar’s fur was meant for dust to keep it clean. Star Force provided such equipment for that in his quarters, and it worked admirably well, but combat could occur anywhere and everywhere, and Varkemma had to be prepared to fight wherever required. That meant in wet areas, in the water, and even underwater…that latter of which was truly terrifying for Puar, for his body did not move like it should, leaving him and his race mostly helpless.
But he wasn’t helpless anymore. The Trigorma were not the first race Star Force had helped learn to swim, and when Puar got to the training course he slipped on four ankle bracelets activated by mental command that would give him the propulsion necessary in the water, otherwise he’d be expending a lot of energy to pull at the water with limbs not designed for it and only get a small bit of movement in response.
Once he was so adorned, he took off at a slow run leaping from one plant-like pedestal to another that were sitting just above or just below the waterline. If he missed he’d be in deep water and go in over his head, but as long as he was good at jumping he could save a lot of time on this section of the training course, and he was an exceptionally good jumper.
In many places that were now familiar to him he’d skip one of the ‘lilly pads’ and jump clear over it to the other, landing in a little splash before resetting himself and taking another single jump, traveling across a swamp to the small island that was full of mushy, ucky ground that he hated stepping on. It soaked into his paws and made him want to stop and telekinetically pull it off, but he had no time for that and just had to tolerate it, for if he delayed too long all manner of automated enemies would appear to hunt him with stun weapons…and falling stunned into water was a nightmare he did not want to repeat.
He’d done so 6 times previously. After the first he had refused to run this course for a full two weeks before working up the courage to do so again. He couldn’t die here, but he could get a lung-full of water and partially drown before the rescue systems would pull him out. His trainers had told him that he needed to learn to face the fear, and the danger here, where he would be rescued, before going out into the wilds of the galaxy where he would be on his own.
Puar knew they were right, but he still hated this place and feared falling into the deep water with part of his body stunned.
From the island he climbed a small ladder to the top of the trees and grabbed hold of a zip line with both sets of paws, leaving him hanging upside down as he moved across a lot of water before crashing down into the waves that suddenly appeared out of nowhere when he crossed a shield boundary. The zip line ended underwater, making him swim against a stiff wind that was producing the waves to get to another island.
Instead of clawing at the water and losing to the waves, he used the four ankle bracelets to propel himself forward as little motors. They lasted about a minute then went out, after which he had to swim with each stroke recharging them.
Cruise, swim, cruise, swim was the drill here up until he reached the large island beyond 22 minutes later, pulling himself up onto the soaken sandy beach as the rain poured down and ran through little gullies no deeper than his paws to add to the nasty lake he’d just came out of. He didn’t waste any time catching his breath here and proceeded to leave the beach and shake himself off as much as possible as he did, because a minute later the rains would switch to snow as he crossed another shield boundary and whatever water was in his fur would be at risk of freezing to his body.
Fortunately Trigorma were able to both absorb and create heat at will. It was a skill they’d developed long ago as a side effect of living in the deserts, so Puar was able to swell his heat generation to fight the cold as he stepped through, but it was never enough. That said, he much preferred the snow and ice to the water, except when they melted, and in here that wasn’t going to happen, testified to by the streams of his freezing breath leaping out of his nostrils like two white plumes of smoke.
A whistle-sound indicated an enemy approaching, and one that would most likely require an Essence expenditure to defeat. On occasion Puar had been able to take them down with his psionics or cunning, but he knew now they were designed to make him use Essence in a variety of means in order to pass forward, as a means of training for that discipline, for they did no specialized Essence training at all beyond these little add-ons.
He had found that odd, but had forgotten long ago as the never-ending challenges washed away all concerns other than surviving and moving forward, so when the blizzard winds blew in from the left with the whistle coming from inside them, Puar turned and ran forward, closing the distance sooner to chip off some of the course completion time and using his Fremmav to search in a narrow cone ahead of him.
The exotic energy was able to penetrate most matter without altering it other than a little collision that would trigger a ripple that would then move back to Puar and register in his mind as a contact. Cal-com’s people had something much better, and he’d been given a chance to test that fact against some of them on a sensitivity scale. They could pick up such tiny objects that he could not fathom how they were able to do it, and he knew they were not cheating and using Essence, for if they had been he would have sensed it. In fact, they never used Essence around him and the others, though the slight leakage from their personal wells testified to the fact that they had plenty of it to use if they wished to.
When Puar finally found his flying target he reached out with his telekinesis and Essence enhanced it, grabbing the floating orb and squeezing as tightly as he could…but that wasn’t enough and he knew it wouldn’t be. He’d done this so many times, getting into long battles against 17 different varieties, that he now knew how much force was required to take down each one, and in what way to do it.
He couldn’t squeeze this one to death, but he could hold it in place as he jumped up on it. He landed on top and forced it to the ground, but a defense shield prevented him from actually touching the pressure panels on the surface.
Puar kept the squeezing pressure on, then summoned a pure Essence effect and threw the equivalent of an invisible punch down into it. That clumsy but powerful attack, combined with the squeeze, was enough pressure to deactivate the machine and allow him to pass.
The 8 foot long cat batted the meter-wide orb aside and moved on, knowing that he would have to get past another 6 of them before coming to the boundary into the high heat zone…
3
Trigorma didn’t sweat. Instead they panted, evaporating heat away via their tongue, and Puar’s was hanging out constantly as he walked through a foggy canyon that was so hot the air was full of the water coursing through a small stream barely below the point of vaporizing.
Puar knew it was that hot without touching it, for his eyes had the ability to see infrared and the creek was literally glowing with it…but the air around him was also hot, making it hard to see anything far ahead, in visual or infrared, leaving him walking around barely able to navigate as he searched for the roaming target that would unlock this level’s exit.
It wasn’t a flight orb, thankfully, but rather a ‘scurrier’ that ran around on the ground like a rodent. It had legs rather than treads and left behind tiny pinpricks whenever it was on dirt, but there were so many left behind in here that he couldn’t track it that way or he’d end up following a trail that was days old.
The first time he’d made it to this level he’d passed out from the heat before he found the scurrier. And the next 7 he had failed to catch it before likewise being incapacitated by the heat. Star Force wasn’t cruel in its training like many of the Vargemma races were, cutting you up and medically putting you back together again. Many said that was what toughened you up, but Puar was realizing they were only half right. Star Force had learned to do it better by letting you get beat up without touching you, and he had to admit, he preferred it this way. Only his unworthiness would defeat him, not an opponent, and that left all the Star Force personnel as allies rather than opponents.
Puar roamed the
heat zone looking where he could when the condensation clouds broke momentarily and he got a brief view ahead, but most of the time he listened. The scurriers were quiet, except they had a slight chirp to them every now and then. The sound of the creek moving over rocks made a little noise, but otherwise the entire canyon was silent, and in the past that small chirp was what had led him close enough to use his Fremmav to get a lock on it. Once he did he’d try to telekinetically pull it to him…but the thing had a jammer that only allowed a brief moment of contact before it would slip out of his invisible grip.
That meant he would have to run it down, and there were many cracks in the rocky walls where it could flee to and escape him, so he had to be quick once he located it. But the more he panted the less he could hear the tiny sounds, leaving him with random roaming in the hopes of getting close enough.
Puar paused, shutting his mouth and becoming still. He thought he’d heard something, and he knew it wouldn’t repeat for a few more seconds, so he fought to hold in his breath and just listen.
A tiny chirp rewarded him, and Puar took off to the left, indulging in some heavy breathing as he slowly ran to get closer, then he stopped again and got silent, listening to get another vector as a slightly louder chirp made its way to him. He took off again, tracking it down segment by segment until he suddenly was confused by two chirps coming at him from different directions.
He’d never heard two scurriers in here before, let alone seen more than one, so he held still and tried to figure out if it was an echo…but the sounds were not precisely linked up, because one was chirping a little faster than the other. And a little faster than normal, actually.
Puar had been in this heat zone more than 100 times, and never had the chirping pattern changed, so he followed the odd version intent on investigating the unusual rather than pursuing the familiar and moving on to the next cold zone. He had time before he passed out. His resistance to this environment had increased greatly in previous months, and he really wanted to know where that other chirp was coming from.