by Marc Watson
Sharp’s mobile base was leading a relatively small force of mechanical soldiers. They were smaller than the Heralds they were accustomed to, but they were no less terrifying. Some held weapons the likes of which Aryu had never seen before (what he wouldn’t give for Johan or one of his history books right now), other ones held what looked like remotes or monitors, scanning the area as they came.
Aryu had done well. When Sharp’s troop came to a stop at the outer edge of the alpine clearing, half-tracks grinding anything and everything under foot, the four of them just stood like a wall with weapons in hand (except for Crystal, who stood a half-step behind her son and his razor-edged shield).
They watched the lead unit, expecting something any moment. Only Nixon wasn’t surprised at what they got. An Embracer was what he’d expected from the beginning.
A door opened, sliding aside silently. From the darkness within stepped forth a man, seemingly as human and normal as any other. Average height and build, shaggy blonde hair and gray eyes that took the four in as he emerged. Thin lips and a narrow face gave nothing away about him or his motives.
Sho, Crystal, and Aryu all took a sharp breath at the non-robotic person before them, dressed not in armor nor even adorned in mechanical gizmos or some other such devices. Just a man in canvas clothes with a long flowing leather coat reaching down to his knees. Crossed like an ‘X’ on his back were two short swords. His hands held what Aryu recognized as Ark 1 pistols. Each of them knew at once he was no fool, or at least, not fool enough to come out guns blazing.
“Decided to stop, have you? And I was so enjoying your singing.” A mish-mash accent, but much like Nixon’s when he first met him, he could not place it. The four said nothing.
“Well,” he continued, a look of caution and seriousness on his face, “what do you propose we do now?” Four non-responsive looks answered him. “Look, I know what state you’re all in. How weak and fragile you now find yourself. Let’s not waste time with false bravado, hmm?” He raised one Ark 1 to prove his point. Sho raised his shield slightly, and Nixon and Aryu tensed.
“Ha, any one of you is weak as a kitten now. Weapons of Focus or not, we really don’t need to try very hard to end this, now do we?” He indicated the circling army around him, and they all raised their weapons to face them. Aryu felt the beginnings of nausea tickle the back of his throat.
“What do you want from us, Sharp?” Sho said. The edge he possessed when first he’d met Aryu returned. Sho had an amazing battle high, and it was beginning to surface again.
“Sho, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?” He smiled and mock-bowed to the big man with the shield, but went into no further details of their relationship. “As you know, those two are wanted and I’ve been sent to ensure their apprehension. Mechanical devices can’t seem to get the job done. As for you and your mother? Well, that has yet to be decided.”
“We all go, Sharp,” Sho replied. “Willingly and together, weapons in hand.”
Sharp faltered. “Sho, I’m not a fool. In what world would I agree to that?”
“The world where you have nothing to lose if you do. You know me. We are people of honor. We have no issue with you, save for the company you keep. We’ll go willingly and peacefully with no resistance or trouble. When I last saw you, you were seeking the balance. You know we are the ones who can deliver it.”
Sharp didn’t have to wait long to measure his sincerity. In the circles of Embracers, Sho was legendary, as were Nixon Ash and Crystal. He knew they had a plan, but he also believed it had nothing to do with him. How much trouble would he get in letting them walk into HOME fully armed to see Izuku? Plenty was his guess, but that was an issue for another day. After the meandering plans of Izuku, Sho’s directness to giving Sharp exactly what he wanted was a nice change.
“I have a hard time believing you’ll be this pleasant for your journey. You are clearly at a disadvantage here. Why can’t I just command my forces to incapacitate you, take your precious weapons, and have it both ways?”
“Because you have to know that despite our current predicament, we are still three very skilled and very difficult opponents. All it would take is one of us to reach you. Then where would you be?”
Sharp looked them all over, reading each face and the weapons the three men held.
It was only when his eyes fell on the young one on the end, the one he was specifically tasked to acquire, that he saw the Shi Kaze for the first time. Time stopped.
Mr. Sharp just had his first lesson in the true power of the Shi Kaze, and the experience rattled him. One good slice and Boroha Sharp was a dead man.
Anarchy, but with a purpose. Lines drawn in the sand. Sharp agreed.
Now rolling across the landscape, Aryu hoped for a distraction, and a conversation about Mr. Sharp was as good a place as any to start.
“So, how do you know Sharp?” he asked Sho, who unsurprisingly was lost in some meandering thought and paying attention to nothing.
Sho sighed. “I met him a few times hundreds of years ago when Havens here were popular and I’d just taken up the charge of tending to this land. He traveled from place to place, seeking insight and information about everything and nothing. We once sat for hours with me telling him stories of my father and the things he’d done.
“I can tell you this: he’s a man I’d have called little more than a passing footnote on the world, directionless and I dare say boring in the grand scheme of things. That was the problem with the Power; it didn’t discriminate whom it infected with immortality. It took any who had the patience and the ability to learn its ways. So many came and went giving little or nothing to the world in return. Wastes of time and Power. They were one of the main reasons my father did what he did to prevent the abuse of the Power and try to keep it in the grasp of the truly special.”
Nixon and Crystal both managed a snide smile at the statement. Sho’s reverence of his father clearly was clouding his mind to the fact that Ryu was viewed by them as an unstable self-centered dictator who had committed a heinous genocide.
“My best guess is that the years have seen him wronged somehow and this is his answer to it. Justification is so simple to come by given enough time. He’s survived the last two Falls of Man, so he has good reason to be bitter. Most like him are.”
Aryu was the one to give a snide look this time. “Not too dedicated to the cause, is he?” He indicated the Shi Kaze to put his point across.
“No,” Sho answered. “His lot in life, I suppose. Even working for the other side, his commitment level is certainly lacking which as you can see I used to our advantage. That’s the issue with these kinds of Power users. Too scared to live, too afraid to die.” It was an aspect that Aryu had never thought of. Could you really become so blasé given enough time to let it happen? Perhaps Ryu wasn’t completely crazy after all.
They sat in silence as their vehicle stopped. Moments later the door of their mobile brig opened and Mr. Sharp, flanked by two large, silver autonomous figures, indicated they step out. They obliged.
“From here you board that plane which will take you the rest of the way,” he told them all, indicating a large, winged tube in the distance. The image of it and its questionable ability to fly gave Aryu the shivers. “On board are more security drones than you could ever hope to handle in your current state. It will take you back to HOME and whatever fate awaits you there.”
It was all bravado and they all knew it. Sharp had let them keep their weapons and armor, so he may as well have offered them a hot bath and a warm meal for all the graciousness he’d given them.
As they were taken to the waiting aircraft, Sho took the moment to express his contempt for the state of his land in a direct confrontation with Sharp. “Whatever your reasoning for doing this, Boroha, it’s wrong.”
Sharp never even faced him. “There is no right and wrong, Sho. Remember that?” He did. It was the overlying message he’d tried to express to Sharp during that brief encounter centuries ago. It seemed Sho could
n’t win a battle anymore if he tried.
With a shove from a burly android, the quartet was on its way to the next phase of their journey.
On board for almost an hour before it lifted off, Aryu could barely suppress the urge to throw up as the gangly beast lifted vertically into the sky. Sho and Nixon had been taken elsewhere, but without even a slot in the door to look out, they didn’t know where yet. A flaw in their carefully concocted plan, but not an impossible one to overcome. They knew what to do. For now, it was just a matter of waiting.
Crystal sat across from him. “Uneasy flyer?” she asked.
“Only when it’s not me in control,” he answered, grateful for her sudden need to strike up a conversation.
“Don’t worry. I once flew all the time in something like these. They’re harmless.” Harmless? Judging by what he’d seen every machine he’d encountered thus far in his life do, he seriously doubted that.
“Tell me,” she began, “what do you think of the Shi Kaze?” He looked at her questioningly. “I know you’re not a user of the Power, but how great it is couldn’t have escaped you.”
He looked at it in his hands. “I feel…something, deep inside myself. A flow of positive and negative. It’s disorientating, like a feeling that’s welcome and repulsive at the same time.”
She understood the feeling perfectly. “That is its specialty. It was how Ryu intended it to be, balanced in both the fantastic and horrifying, now magnified thanks to its sordid history. When you awaken to it more, you’ll see what I mean.”
“Yeah, about that, I don’t have any intention of awaking to anything, thank you. Nixon made it clear that at the first whiff of something amiss with me while I hold it, he’ll cut me in two and go back to sleep.”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it though, how the Power can help you with what you want to do, kicking their robot butts?”
“Oh I’ve thought about it,” he said honestly. The ghostly beauty across from him could likely read any lie, so he wasn’t about to try. “But living and making it back to help my friend beats out dying at the hands of Nixon. I can’t do much to help if I’m dead. And for that matter, since he never got the opportunity to ask, do you know why it is he seems drawn to hunt me for no reason?”
Crystal shook her head. “I’m sorry I don’t. I was very surprised to hear he had awoken and was with you when first you came to me. I had hoped you two could answer that for me, but the looks on your faces told me you were just as clueless.”
She got up and sat next to him, her warm, white hand meeting his. “What do you know about my father?” she asked, pink eyes looking at him, finding places inside him he didn't know existed.
He was flustered by the action, but eventually managed to spit out, “I know it was his accepted responsibility to teach the art of the Power to all who would master it. Bring it to the world to see after it had been hidden for so long.”
She nodded in agreement. “Well that’s the pretty way to say it. Do you agree with him? That what he was trying to do was right?”
“Not according to Ryu.”
“To hell with Ryu!” she said forcibly, her hand almost crushing his with the action. There was still a staggering amount of strength in her even now. “Ryu acted like he always acted, foolishly and without thought to any consequence that didn’t involve only himself. I loved him, that’s true, and even I can’t agree with what he did. Sho says it was to stop the misuse of Power? Ha! Bullshit. It was to help himself and no one else. He needed to do something no one in the world could ignore to get his way. All he did was go a step further than anyone thought he was capable of. There was no underlying nobility to it. It was pure, unadulterated egotism. Something that you don’t have.”
He believed that. Egotism wasn’t high on his personal traits to the best of his knowledge.
“Trust me, Aryu, you are not him or any other that followed the path that brought Nixon to their door. You are a mortal man in command of a powerful thing. You create the path it takes, not the other way around. I don’t know you well, but I do know you well enough to see I’m right.”
It was a convincing argument, but with all the fear he harbored about the Power, he doubted it could ever become a reality. “Why tell me this?” he asked. “Why try? You know I can’t.”
She smiled her impish smile. “Because no one expects it of you. They never tried to take your power away like they did mine or Sho’s because they thought you had none. Nixon is a fantastic asset, but two of you! You can’t tell me they’d see that coming. What a tool to use against them!”
Another true statement. “So what do you propose?” He was curious but knew enough to keep her ideas at arm’s length. It was, after all, the reason he wanted to stay with Nixon and meet her. He also believed her and what she said about his character. He honestly and truly believed he was incapable of the kind of evils that would summon the phoenix to him, revenge against those that had wronged him notwithstanding.
“I propose that you listen to me and take whatever actions you deem necessary.”
Years of learning about the world and deep meditation had made her brain advanced beyond what any mortal could obtain in their meager years. She had the perfect ways to describe the process of what she was proposing to Aryu, in ways his young mind could absorb easily and quickly.
She started and Aryu listened, loving every minute of it.
-----------------------
When the time came to let HOME know the goings-on, Sharp went to his drab and lifeless post and contacted Izuku.
“They’re on their way. They should be arriving in a few hours.”
Izuku acknowledged but was clearly upset at the news. “You chose not to escort them? That seems somewhat foolhardy, Mr. Sharp.”
Sharp expected this answer but didn’t care. “They agreed to go. They wanted to. They gave me their word of honor that they would cause no fuss and go peacefully. My duty was fulfilled and carried out perfectly.”
“Don’t bog me down with semantics, Boroha. Do you really believe they would be so passive? What kind of a fool are you?”
“A fool who thinks their honor is to be trusted. You said yourself that’s the kind of people they are.”
“True, but I’d still like a pair of human eyes on them for the trip. This is reckless even for you.”
Sharp was not phased. Even if Izuku lost it entirely, he couldn’t do anything with that demon blade from so far away. Sharp’s lack of loyalty to Izuku was growing exponentially lately. He resisted using the High-Yields too much. They had hundreds in storage at HOME. Hit fast, strike hard.
“Did you at least secure Nixon’s and Sho’s weapons? Those were two things I’d very much like to see.”
Oh, you’ll see them, thought Sharp, but before he answered, he clued in to the specifics of the question. “Just those two? Not the other?”
Izuku, his smile seemingly glued to his face even at the worst of times, became dead serious. Sharp was instantly taken aback. If it was possible, it made Izuku so much more frightening. “What other weapon? The boy has no Power, and Crystal never had a weapon she cared to use and is long lost.”
It was then that Sharp realized that Izuku didn’t know what the boy was carrying. Could he have been so blind? All Embracers knew to fear two things: the wrath of the phoenix and the blade of the Four Winds. The fool had the strongest weapon of the ages arriving at his doorstep and he didn’t even know it. Sharp thought that was why he wanted the boy in the first place.
The pause in Sharp seemed to enrage the man on the other end. “What other weapon, Sharp?”
Sharp recovered from his shock (and amusement) at the situation he’d unknowingly created and turned back to the screen and the madman contained within it.
“The boy, he had a sword. A weapon of focus. Not strong like the other two, but still a Power weapon.” The lie was just a cop out. If they caused the ruckus he expected them to, he’d never be called on it anyway. Anything
to escape this lunatic and his shortsightedness.
The news seemed to calm him, however. “Not as powerful, you say?” Sharp nodded. “Well, I’ll add it to the collection. Do you have them, Mr. Sharp?”
The moment of truth. Saying ‘no’ was guaranteeing Izuku’s wrath, should he survive whatever the four have planned. Saying ‘yes’ did the same, but gave him a chance to get some ground between himself and revenge.
“Yes, I secured them,” he answered, his mind already planning three moves ahead of where he was. “They’re stored within the plane they’re on, but nowhere they can access.”
Izuku smiled yet again. “Good. I look forward to getting my hands on the big phoenix blade, and I think I’ll hang the shield on my wall. I don’t need to tell you of its history?”
He didn’t. Someone like Sharp knew what it did (though how was still a mystery for the ages. It didn’t seem like anything special to him.).
“Well, carry on I suppose. Though, next time, try not to be so liberal with how you interpret my orders, please.”
“It won’t happen again.” Damn right it won't. Enjoy your surprise, you old fool.
The communication ended, and Sharp returned outside to the far nicer and more natural sunlight. Now, he thought, looking at a hand-held display showing the surrounding landmass, I suppose it’s time to run?
He wished he could wait for an emergency call or some other indicator that said HOME was experiencing technical difficulties, but he had to get away from here quickly and return to the Havens he knew. The thought invigorated him; any hints of reticence and malaise were slowly washed away. He exited his command post and began to slip away. Today was going to be a good day.
He had only made it a few steps when his half-track unit exploded with a deafening roar, the force to the blast hitting Sharp and any mechanical soldiers in the area and tossing them like toys in a perfect circle while a fireball rose into the air and singed everything in range with a wave of stifling heat.
Sharp was on his feet at once. He was a skilled Embracer and such a thing never had a chance at killing him. His treasured swords were unsheathed in an instant as he came to his feet and examined his surroundings. Other than the fiery hole where he had just been standing and the multitudes of mechanical soldiers who were in the process of picking themselves up (or in some cases, putting themselves back together as best they could), nothing could be seen to be any different. The rest of the visible army forces were still going about their tasks, oblivious to the goings-on.