I walk closer to her to congratulate her only for Dale to stop me with a punch in the face.
“What the fuck?” I shout at him.
“You could have killed us all. You endangered this whole mission, and almost killed Eladia and even yourself with this nonsense. Keep your shit together, Jasih, or else wait here until we clear the City Hall and then come in. Millions of lives depend on us! Don’t fuck this up!”
I stare at him and then at Eladia; they all look at me like I’m a piece of shit.
Before I can say anything, they all move ahead, leaving me behind. At that moment, I understand. My anger is deep-rooted, and my mission is now clear in my head. Humans are the most selfish and unstable creatures of the Galaxy. It’s them that I have to destroy, not the Phadh.
I sink my hand deep into my pocket and fumble the cube. It’s warm, bursting with power. I feel the same too.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Eladia
Three hours of walking can have their toll on you, especially when you start your day with an all-out battle against zombies and an unstable man that doesn’t know when to stop. Jay is way behind us, walking all by himself. Dale...well, he shouldn’t have done that. But he was right. Mosa is in no way the place it used to be before. Danger is lurking behind every corner.
It sort of reminds me of Primordial Earth, the place this adventure began. Instead of booming plantation and trees matching buildings in width and height, the planet is a forest of debris and half-buildings. How can dead humans cause that much destruction? Does someone control them?
In my mind, the first time we met those monsters pops up. It was back in the hospital while Jay, the platinum-skinned one, was severely wounded. We’ve just met Dale back then and didn’t know anything about his true identity, but still, he was able to help us in his own way, coming up with solutions about Jay and his alien nature.
Back then, the undead monsters appeared out of nowhere and almost killed us. Except they mysteriously stopped when they had the chance to do it. They had frozen in place and didn’t move until we were safe and they were unable to reach us. Dale thinks that the Originators control them, but I’m not so sure anymore. Aren’t they the ones that wanted us dead back then? Why didn’t they finish their jobs when they could?
I’m not sure about anything, anymore. Pyro, never removing his mask, is the most suspicious of them all. The Organization is nowhere to be found, and the Ocean, the other high-ranked member, isn’t here to help. I don’t know if I’m supposed to ask or anything, but I’m starting to feel less certain about the people I walk with.
Dale has done everything in his power to train and protect me, but he also told me that I’m just as important to the mission as Jay is. What did he mean by that?
“We’ll stop here for now,” Pyro suddenly says.
His voice snaps me out of my train of thoughts. Still, it strikes me as odd that he, of all the people, ordered us to stop before arriving at the City Hall. If anything, I thought he would want us to get in and out as fast as humanly possible. Something is going on.
I move closer to them; Pyro sees me and stops talking. “What do you want?” he asks, calmly.
“Why did we stop? I thought you wanted to get there as soon as possible. We’re losing light, and we’re not equipped for a night raid,” I say. Dale has also trained me to work in a team and made me memorize various pieces of equipment so that I could use them all with closed eyes. It was a busy year after all.
“For such a promising operative, you lack the perspective and the leading skills of a professional. Take a look around and tell me, what do you see?” Pyro tells me.
I follow his order and look around me. I see destroyed buildings, a thick, cloudless sky that’s sickeningly bright, and a team of exhausted members unable to keep going. Well, Zan and Jay are the ones that seem that way. I, Dale, and Pyro could go on for some more before stopping, and Silver is an Android. Androids don’t get tired last time I checked.
“Now I get it. You want all of us to be ready for the fight in the City Hall. That means that you’re probably expecting heavy resistance.” He nods and I can sense a smile forming behind his mask. “So, you believe that the black-maskers are here too and that it’s them that orchestrated the attack on Mosa, right?”
The words come out of my mouth as I’m thinking them; I’ve never connected the dots of the Mosa incident to the black-maskers before, but it actually makes sense. They’re everywhere; on Zeania, on Mosa, on every planet, we have been so far.
“Now, there you go. You can be perceptive after all. You have to keep this attitude every waking moment if you want to survive in this world girl. If only we had more time, I would’ve sent you to Ocean to train you and then you’d be all mine for a year. Yeah, that would have been great,” he says.
“I don’t plan on being an assassin any longer than I have to. And I don’t belong to this organization. You have to understand that my goal is knowledge and not killing off strategic targets with a religious fervor. I’m not a fanatic; I’m a scholar,” I say.
I can hear him giggle behind his mask; why doesn’t he ever remove that damned thing off his face to reveal his identity? What is he thinking?
“For a scholar, you’ve done a pretty good job hiding that laser gun. Also, your trail of dead bodies is too long already, even if they’re not of the living kind, but you’ve become way too attached at killing for survival. We all started like that but look at us now. We’re saving the Galaxy for the fifth time this generation.”
The fifth time? What is he talking about? “What do you mean?”
Pyro was ready to tell me, but Dale stopped him. “Eladia, you don’t belong to this world. If you learn more about it than what you already know, then you have to be ready for the consequences. You can’t live in the darkness if you’ve seen the light. And what Pyro is talking about is some kind of sick, twisted light that will drag you in and consume your life. So let it go and find a way to calm your friend. He’s still not in a fighting position, and we’ll need his strength down the road.”
Dale is looking at me straight in the eyes; I can’t look away, not before what he said sinks in. Being a scholar means you have to use your mind and logic to analyze your findings and then take your decisions. But right now, I feel an itch deep in my heart, the same itch that drove me in asking Jay to change so that I could choose him over his platinum-skinned self.
Yesterday I decided to never follow that itch again, no matter how much it bothered me. So, when I turn my body and move towards Jay, I mean to forget of that itch and stop using my heart to take my decisions. I have to use my head, and my head tells me that Jay has to change back long enough to recover. If he doesn’t, then he’ll die way before we arrive at the City Hall.
When I get right beside him, I think of what Pyro told me before. I’ve been hiding a laser gun in my pocket for some time now, but it seems that both of them had noticed. The old Jay would have noticed too in mere moments, but this ashen creature standing before me doesn’t have his mind into noticing anything.
He just keeps his hand in his pocket and stares at him, worn out with black circles under his eyes. Jay is on the brink of a mental breakdown, and history has taught me that when this Esuh gives in to his emotions, bad things happen.
I steel myself and get ready to talk to him.
“Hey,” I say.
“What? Are you here to mock the parasite as well?” he says with a tired, calm voice. He’s...different.
“You’re out of your mind, Jay. You can’t keep going on like that. You have to change to your other form so that you don’t drag the team behind. You’re in no shape to fight like this.”
Suddenly, I feel like he stabs me in the heart with his hollow, hateful eyes. My hand is itching to draw my gun out and use it on him, but I decide to trust my instincts once again and just take a step back.
“You humans think you know everything. All you talk about is how your feelings change you, how y
ou fall in love with someone and then when you abandon them for the next, best thing, you don’t feel guilty or anything. I’m tired of your bullshit, Eladia. You were the one that asked me to get to this form, so deal with it.”
Okay, that’s it. I’m done with being reasonable.
“I asked you to be your fun, adventurous self, Jay, not this horrible thing you’ve become. I love you and every different color of you. I’m just asking for you to step down and recover before the big fight. Why can’t you understand that?”
He shakes his head and presses his lips tightly. Then he turns his head and walks away. I can’t even cry anymore. My hands rest on gun’s grip. He’s not the same person I met a year ago. However, I’m not the same person as I was a year ago, too.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Jay
Walking down the big streets of Mosa is a torture. My feet hurt, my back hurts, everything on my body seems to plot against me so that the other son of the bitch can regain control of this body.
He has to understand though that this isn’t just his body. It’s our body. We share it. He has to understand that. But no one understands, especially that whore, Eladia. She loves both of us, huh? She loves the one that makes her feel better about herself, and now, I’m not doing a good enough job.
The other Jasih doesn’t talk that much anymore. He spends his time sighing, twisting my guts inside, making me want to puke every other step. Why is he such a prick himself? Can’t he just give up and let go of this body? I would have done the same thing if I could.
The walking gets faster and more intense, meaning we’re probably getting closer. I want to stop and explore this marvelous city, the one I used to hate so much before. Right now, destroyed and empty, it’s just a memory of its glorious past. It’s like us; me and Jasih. And it’s fine. The city’s dark side fits me better after all.
Eladia doesn’t even turn to look at me anymore. Neither Zan nor Silver. Pyro is the only one that keeps checking on me every now and then, and that’s because I’m the cube-bearer. I’m the reason everything came down to this moment. Am I supposed to hate myself for this? I didn’t choose this fate after all.
Still, I keep walking, keep following them, keep hoping that everything will turn out fine.
Jasih...you can’t use the cube to destroy the humans.
Here he is then. Now, of all the times, he’s trying to talk me down. I thought he had given up on me, but it seems he can’t let me do what I want. He’s probably searching for the right words to change my mind.
The interesting thing is that he doesn’t call me Jay anymore. He had to stay in there all this time to understand that I don’t like being called with that name. I’m Jasih, an Esuh of the Two Faces damned it. I’m not another deadbeat that just happened to be at the wrong place the wrong time.
My thoughts are my answer to him. Jasih feels calm, structured right now. He doesn’t say anything else until we take a turn to our left. That’s when I see everyone standing still before a two-storey, big building. It’s the only thing standing in a long radius of devastated buildings.
It’s like the last standing fortress of the world, and we’re heading straight to it. Just the five of us, just some people with some training. We’re a sorry bunch, and they decide to point fingers to me. I’m the one dragging them down, right? Well, shit. I’ll show them.
“Okay, so, we have to be extra careful. These people are mercenaries that are trained to kill. Zan and Silver, stay in the back with Jasih and support him. Start for the City Hall when you see an opening but be careful. We don’t have an exact number of the enemies. Dale and I will jump ahead and open a way for you. If my estimates are correct, they have us outnumbered five-to-one. That means that you have to be extra careful.”
He keeps talking some more and then he nods purposefully. It’s the signal; the battle has started.
Dale and Pyro lunge forward, taking the heat of the first attack. They are as good as I remember them, especially this red-masked man. He moves like he can take all of them by himself, and I don’t doubt that he could if he was appropriately armed. Dale, on the other hand, wearing his green mask, spends a great deal of time fighting and throwing those marble-shaped things on the ground. When they touch it, a tiny, blue cloud appears for a second and then disappears without a sign.
The black-maskers that get close to him suddenly stop and can’t move, almost like they’re frozen. He’s probably using some kind of toxic sedative strong enough to numb their limbs. It’s a different way to fight, less aggressive and risky, but it takes him a good deal of time to prepare the battlefield to fit his purpose. Still, their mission is to open a way for me, the chosen one.
I turn and look at Eladia. I spot her eyes checking on me when he jumps over the half-wall separating us from the battlefield. She has staff is in her hands, and she’s using it to balance her weight in mid-air. Eladia’s eyes upset me; there’s not even a speckle of love in there, not even pity. For her, I’m now reduced to just the enemy. And all that because I decided to kill the people behind every problem we have encountered all this time, the same people that hunted her for a whole year.
She doesn’t know that I’m doing this for her, to help her stop following false gods and strange theories about Nusae and their artifacts. She doesn’t know that I was going to sacrifice myself so that she could survive the extinction.
Eladia doesn’t know many things about me and still acts like she does. It’s unfair, but love is like that. Unfair and illogical, invisible and unacceptable. She doesn’t know all these things.
So, I have to prove that to her.
I collect my last bits of strength and run ahead of Zan and Silver.
“Hey! Jasih! Stop! Where are you going?” I hear them say.
But I don’t stop, not for a moment. I run ahead, passing through the dead bodies of the black-maskers. There are some who were lucky enough to fight with Eladia, meaning they survived the encounter because she doesn’t dare take a man’s life, but other than that, eight to ten bodies are lying on the ground. Still, if Pyro is right, almost twenty are probably hiding inside the building. They guard this place like an actual fortress.
And that’s weird. We just learned about this place yesterday, and they knew all along? How is that possible? I didn’t know that we were heading to Mosa until...until after we returned from Zeania.
I can’t stop right now, not even to uncover who the traitor is among our sorry bunch. But still, I won’t have to. After I choose Humans over the Phadh, they will all die.
Except her; I will give my life to protect her, the same way his wife, Jasih’s wife, did to protect him.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Eladia
The battlefield is the epitome of chaos. If chaos had many levels, this would be the highest one. Soldiers come at us with renewed vigor and stamina every time we take out one of their companions. They’re many, but we’re trained to fight as one. My staff takes out the enemies in a medium-range around us, giving time to Dale to use his drugs to slow them down if possible. He’s fighting using a strange gun that shoots darts at long distance, but to reload it he needs time.
Pyro, on the other hand, clears out those that manage to get through my defense. Using his katana, he’s plunging back and forth, trying to keep us moving forward. I’m not sure how long we can keep this up, but soon, Jay and the others will come to support us. That’s the plan after all.
“Watch out. Two of them come from behind,” Pyro shouts.
With a swift, almost dancing move, I manage to take them out both by hitting their feet first and then their heads. It’s good enough for now. Pyro and Dale don’t hold back and kill their targets, but I have to do this. I can’t kill them. I don’t want to become another member of this Organization I know nothing about.
Dale suddenly pushes me out of the way; I was almost hit by a laser shot. He turns and yells at me: “Eladia, keep your mind on the battlefield. You almost got hit. What would you do th
en?” he instructs me while reloading his dart gun.
He’s right.
I turn my eyes towards the upper floor of the City Hall only to see a dead body hanging from the window. “Thank you, Dale. I’ll be careful from now on.”
The fight is on for five minutes now, and we’ve managed to take out six or seven of them, but I’ve lost count after I fought the same guys for two whole minutes, trying to take them out without killing them. In the end, Pyro used his katana to slice their chests.
“This isn’t training. You have to make sure they stay on the ground if you don’t want me to take their heads, you hear me?” he shouted to me back then.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 72