by Angel Bright
I started climbing slowly, opening and closing my eyes, and searching somewhere for something suspicious. The next two floors had no sign of the huge space of the dome. I headed back to the stairway where I could see a part of the hall with the dome. I faced the supposed location of it and called upon my magic skills. I started with separate mantras for penetration but did not get any results. I began to mix mantras with certain abilities that I thought suitable for the case, but I did not get any results again. The familiar technology for systematic scientific research formed in my head: for purity of the experiment and for the importance of negative results that only clear the picture.
I started to increase the power of the incoming energy. The walls and the ceiling above me were not made of an ordinary substance. Some impenetrable power stood behind them, and I could not comprehend its nature. I saturated the space around me with red, green, and violet lightning. The walls began to peel, and a yellow, dusty fog emerged from the ceiling. What the hell was standing in front of me? Even the floor beneath me quite noticeably intensified its vibrations. Dark figures from the side of the hall were jumping around behind the yellow fog. I did not weaken my pressure. I still had many opportunities to boost the power of the process. I could feel a rush of energy that elated me. The cover of the wall in front of me began to collapse. A fairly large black spot opened, at the center of which a multicolored concentric circle formed and unfolded. I decided to stop and consider my further actions.
Apparently, the phenomenon was beyond my powers and knowledge. I had some skill in the experimental tests, but clever people were always around me with ready-made directions. They always followed a thoughtful line of research. Many times, we used large quantities of electricity but always in a scientifically approved and mathematically calculated manner. I got out of the dusty zone and bumped into my angry relatives. Three men and a woman were behind them. I did not pay them any attention. They were boring people of no importance.
I went straight through them, and with my enhanced electrostatic feeling, I felt a strong energy charge pointing at my back. I instantly created a sphere with a protective shield behind my back and jumped to the ceiling of the hall. I drew a flock of destructive arrows to the area of their energy points and created a short impulse of a stunning sound-light background. I performed a virtuoso blocking of their magical skills and reinforced it with several hypnotic spells. This complex, which I had prepared for situations like the one with the magician, was called “the Biggest Surprise,” and it proved sufficient to solve the case. When I turned to face them, they were paralyzed on the floor, and the yellowish dust was sifting over them. I let them lie down quietly so that they would not make any rash moves. I looked at the damage on the hall and was impressed. Peeled walls of flashing black substance covered the stairs, melted floors, and half-burned furniture.
“It’s just a first clash,” I told Mala’attal. “Just wait!”
Above my head began an intensive run of electrostatic charges.
I sat at the far end of the hall and tried to understand the full picture of the created situation. I would not have time for another approach, and I did not see what else I could think of. I felt someone’s presence and found gleams behind one of the doors, not particularly intense. It was an observer.
I decided to approach the dome from the second floor, and as I walked in that direction, I noticed a sign: Warning. I waited. One of my magical instructors stepped into the hall through the door. He had been teaching me poisons and spells of counteraction. He was tense but not threatening. He raised his arm as if to prevent some action on my part and spoke.
“You will not be able to get close from anywhere. No one has ever succeeded. As far as I understand, this part of the building is part of another universe. You cannot get in there, at least not with force. You’ve got to have some kind of inner quality, perhaps a gene, and He needs to accept you and allow you to use his powers.”
“Who is He?”
“I do not know. Perhaps a God. Some kind of force. He demonstrates that He has a mind and sometimes plays with us. He is the only way to get out of here, but no one has succeeded so far.”
“Who are you people?”
“Instructors, staff…”
“What are they trying to turn me into? A fighting machine?”
“We do not know. You are not the first, but so far no one has returned so that we can learn something. Obviously, you have some purpose, probably unsuccessful until now, because for each subsequent guard the requirements change, and work on a new program begins.”
“Guard! How many were there before me?”
“Four.”
“How prepared were they when they were sent?”
“It varied. Lately with armor but not getting better. You are the first one to dare to oppose them.”
“And who are they?”
“We do not know. Mighty. They change their appearance. They are merciless! You do not have much time left.”
“Do you think so? Four of them are on the floor. Beating them wasn’t that hard.”
“Hasterazis - your father, has not come. Lately, he has started calling himself Gordon. He is the most powerful and the most ruthless—most fully adopted by Vigor.”
“Who is Vigor?”
“The thing above us. The God to which you strive.”
“Hmm. And who are you? What is your name?”
“Nolen. We met, but you underestimated me and did not listen carefully.”
“It does not matter anymore. I will destroy this place.”
“I do not think you have any idea what you’re up against.”
“And what can happen except losing my life? Right now, this is what worries me the least.”
“It’s going to be hard to lose your life.”
“I will not try to keep it at all costs. I do not know what I will look like tomorrow. And I do not need to know it.”
“If, as you suppose, you carry Hasterazis’s genes, you are immortal and have a high regeneration factor.”
“Are you just guessing, or is it so?”
“Remember how injured you were when they would bring you to the medical center, but every time you would recover pretty quickly?”
“How quickly?”
“Depends on the injuries. If there was something missing, it took about a month in normal conditions and about five days in the event of accelerated regeneration.”
“Really? So long?” I was being sarcastic.
“No one before you had these abilities. We assumed that the council faced great difficulty to dare to use the strongest genes they have to create you. They have never taken such a risk. They do not know what would happen when mixing these genes with a human child’s genes. Are you going to be controllable? They probably did not have another choice. You passed the mandatory training and a lot of the special ones very quickly. But in the end, your thoughts were elsewhere.”
“Yes. Well, they did not have luck with me either. Even these four did not manage to stop me.”
“They did not want to hurt you. They need you to remain healthy. Now you are surely leaving soon.”
“He’s leaving right now,” someone said over our heads.
Hasterazis—or the being I knew as my father, Gordon—descended from behind Vigor, and two women—my aunts—came in through the different doors of the room.
Everyone was equipped with special silver suits, and my aunts also wore devices, probably weapons, with an elliptical antenna instead of a barrel, which they put into action immediately. A bluish triangle was formed around me, in which I felt warmth and quick suffocation.
I reacted almost instantaneously. I raised my arms against both weapons and began to pull the energy out of them. I turned in the direction of Hasterazis, and it was quite well for me because I was able to create a protective shield. I paired it with an imitation of an attack with heavy metal objects. Behind them, I put the real threat: blinding white flashes. I still could not find the ene
rgy points from which Hasterazis was drawing his energy, so I couldn’t break them down. I fired my blocking snakes, but I lacked a specific target. I was not afraid of my aunts but could not leave them out of sight. Any second now, the energy capsules of their weapons would be exhausted. Suddenly, I found that my current sources were missing. They had succeeded in disarming me.
I moved on to a new tactic.
5 Violence and Collaboration
(Narrated by Nolen)
With Hasterazis’s arrival, my initiative to slow down the attack of Rhem the Earthman ended without additional destruction. I fled the hall so I would not be injured in this incredible duel between the Gods. The youngster was fighting incredibly well and used techniques we had not observed until now. Again, my guess that he carefully masked his skills was confirmed. The battle complexes he used in combination with various magic techniques were virtuoso and the result not of bursts of creativity and artistic expression but of a manifestation of skillful planning that was nearly automatic. For the brief time of the clash in which the element of surprise was missing from both sides, I was able to discern how the boy made at least three sets of switching from defense to attack. Indeed, they were trying to demonstrate a passive blockade, but I did not know until now that someone had managed to get out of this trap. Hasterazis stood just below Vigor and drew from his strength. That way, he managed to power the two emitters of the blocking generator. Under his sign, the women stepped sideways toward each other and narrowed the space, forcing the youngster to step back so as to pressure him even further. Rhem reacted instantly with amazing speed. From both sides behind the shield spurted a swarm of orange needle lightning that struck the emitters’ antennas. For a moment, the two sides of the blocking triangle blinked. At the same moment, a dazzling, sparkling ball exploded in the spot where Rhem stood, and I lost sight of him. Almost at the same moment, Hasterazis fired violet lightning toward two spots under the ceiling and wrapped himself in the dark cocoon of his protective field. The dark shadow of the Earthman appeared momentarily just below Vigor’s level, and from one of the eight rays shone a short violet spark. Rhem’s body, driven by the power of the spark’s hit, broke the door I stood behind and slid down to the floor. The impact of the portion of the door pressed me in the corner next to the hinges, and that saved my life when the door crashed into the wall and broke. Despite my good training, I remained immobile for a few seconds, which probably saved my life a second time when Hasterazis attacked in the corridor. With a short swing of his right hand, he threw a small disk that started circling above Rhem, who was trying to get up. In response, he seemed to scatter some dust over himself, and a metal sphere closed over him. The two magical interactions collided. Red and yellow spots swirled over the surface of the sphere, which began melting and turning transparent. Through it, I saw a hole in the floor, and the boy was gone.
I remained rooted to the spot. My only thought was “Don’t be seen, for witnesses of a battle between titans probably aren’t allowed to live!” But Hasterazis lifted me from the place where I wanted to sink and merge with the wall, and I obediently followed him back into the hall. The women guiltily looked down but followed as well.
Hasterazis looked happy or at least not pissed, which he usually was after a battle ended in a draw.
“The puppy has become a pretty good fighter. He succeeded in neutralizing us all! I had already written him off as a complete failure. See what a pleasant surprise? He has learned something, and he is stubborn, which is not bad. Not bad at all! Let’s see the assistants now.”
We found them as they were: numb. Hasterazis ran his hand over the man closest to us, and with a surprised expression Hasterazis waved his arms as if he were clearing debris. From time to time, he would mumble something incomprehensible. He paused to rest or come up with new ways to act, but in addition to the surprise, I could see astonishment on his face.
“He has done a lot of work,” his father said. “He prepared in advance. His magical attack is also quick. You have prepared it well. It’s not complicated to remove the paralysis but requires time to release, even just for one person. But they are four. What precision! He didn’t want to hurt anyone but neutralized us all and slipped away. Now I understand what happened during the clash against Torneracta.”
At that moment, violet lightning exploded with a dry burst from Vigor and branched out before it reached us, outlining a luminous hemisphere that covered us. Even I saw the bluish glow with crackling discharges floating above. Hasterazis seemed quite interested. He stood up, spread his arms wide, and ran in a circle to the vulnerable entrance and then to the exit points of the hall. He then gently gathered his arms in front of him and turned his right arm in a certain direction.
“He has a pretty impressive radius of action. Best of all so far! But he is not able to conceal himself. We still have time to free our friends here.”
He pulled four metallic objects out of his cloak and fixed them in certain directions so that their sharp parts remained focused on one common center between the four people on the floor. In the center, he placed a metal cylinder and wrote some strange runes over the enclosed space. Small streams of bluish light sprang from the peripheral emitters toward the center, and a phosphorescent blue circle began to expand from the central cylinder. It swirled around and swung faster from left to right, forming an expanding hemisphere that covered the prostrate bodies on the floor. The device seemed to be automatic because I saw Hasterazis sitting in a chair facing the second-floor staircase.
“He’s pretty smoky here, but we can easily restore the dining room. Let’s fix the more important things.”
He changed his posture to face us and started unblocking his teammates. I decided I was observing a tactical trick for deceiving opponents. I waited with bated breath and a great deal of regret because I liked the boy and had watched the merciless destruction of more powerful and more experienced people than him—powerful mages who had dared challenge their God.
I was powerless to help him with something, and I was surely in for a cold-blooded destruction. The Gods never left survivors who witnessed their clashes, even only for security reasons.
Rhem rushed into the hall and took a perfect defensive-offensive position. He kept all available tactical maneuvering options.
I involuntarily admired the subtleties of the theory of defense against mighty and unusual opponents, which I saw in him. We had not lost our time in vain. In fact, he easily succeeded in convincing us of helplessness and dullness. I had watched him for a long time until I suspected his artistic nature and then the gift to be invisible and look harmless and fragile. It was the exact opposite of the experienced and hardened combat skills demonstrated by all the previous trainee warriors.
Hasterazis turned his head to him, nodded to show he had noticed him, and once again took his carefree posture. He looked at the bluish hoop’s decreasing speed of rotation and the gradual revival of the members blocked by the magical divine group. After the last woman of the four immobilized assistants stood up, Hasterazis made an elusive motion with his hand, and the used equipment disappeared. Then, he raised his arms and made a gap in the energy sphere Vigor had created around us and went out into the unprotected space in front of the Earthman.
The boy bent and tensed, but nothing threatening followed. Hasterazis greeted him with a gesture to the sofas next to the bay windows and calmly turned his back to him while going there. Rhem hesitated, but he followed. With a crack of electricity, Vigor removed the protective sphere around us, and we headed for the adjoining box close to the two rivals and sat down so we could hear everything.
Hasterazis sat down comfortably, but Rhem remained straight with sharpened senses and defensive weapons ready.
“Sit down, sit down, and feel safe!” Hasterazis said. “We do not consider it profitable to destroy or damage in any way a long-term project of your creation, equipment, and training. I am sorry that the circumstances were strained to a degree of open conflict w
hen it would have been easier to sit down and calmly discuss what our disagreements are, which in my opinion are completely absent! Calm down, and sit down. No one will attack you anymore.”
Rhem moved his left shoulder as if to say something, but he gave up and stepped to improve his position and also relative to the rest of us.
Hasterazis continued. “I admit I had decided we were wasting our time with a weak race without prospects—the human race—and we failed in this respect. But you fought tactically and correctly and completely changed my mind about you, our creations. I’m glad of this unexpected success because it considerably changes the balance of power, and I need someone who can firmly back me.”
“Was that why you poisoned me with some chemicals and wanted to turn me into an armored turtle?” Rhem said. “To get my backing or to sit comfortably on my back?”
“No! We were preparing you to become the defender of the fifth planet of our empire and taking care to protect you as much as possible and with great energy reserves. You are a rational and powerful weapon with a powerful array of weapons.”
“And this rational weapon enclosed in armor is to be thrown in to defend himself and to be forced to defend this fifth planet of yours.”
“Yes, unfortunately. The others before you do not have your abilities. But for the first time, we used my genes for your creation, and now I am glad that the Earthman genes and mine complement each other so well! After all, we are human beings with a mixture of genes from young Gods, and we did not expect great differences between us. And you will be defending your own race, because the fifth planet is the planet Earth.”
“From whom and why does Earth need protection? From your personal enemies? Otherwise, I do not see any reason for aggression.”