The Mystic Saga Omnibus (Books 1 - 5)

by Scott McElhaney

  “Okay, so the alien truly existed and it was native to Legacy,” Braxton said, “Why was it on our shuttle?”

  “We were supposed to drop it off in Green to be interrogated, investigated, annihilated, and whatever other ‘-ated’ we could manage. If somehow we managed to prove this alien was sentient, intelligent, and ‘worthy’ of keeping its planet, then we had to leave. According to the commander, this was already the case. We were on a mission to destroy the ASA for no reason whatsoever.”

  “But that’s where you’re already wrong, Chunk,” Braxton interrupted, “If what you say is true, then the USSC would naturally follow the colonization laws that demanded they pull out. But what makes you think the ASA or the other pirates would leave Legacy alone?”

  “True, Mystic,” Chunk said, “This is exactly why I didn’t kill you when I saw you down on Fifth Avenue headed toward the same building I planned on visiting today. It’s why I didn’t kill you when you walked into the room. I knew you’d see it for what it really is.”

  Braxton shook his head, “Which is?”

  “The list. I took the list and decided to finish the task we initially came here for. I decided to stop the ASA from ever existing, but why do it by wasting the lives of our targets? I mean, turn around and look at the woman in that chair. Tell me she’s not absolutely beautiful.”

  The woman rocked in the chair, releasing a muffled cry. Braxton struggled to maintain an air of agreement with the two men who clearly had lost their minds.

  “Chief Brown took over the mission and is now recalling all the crew to the shuttle. He’s calling the whole mission off thanks to the actions of two imbeciles who blew the whole mission, but I’m sure you can see that the mission was going to be called off either way once our people made their own assessment of the alien,” Chandler said, twirling the ion pistols on his fingers, “I’m not sure what imbeciles Brown was talking about anyway. I do know this though, we can’t abandon the mission we started.”

  “We need that shuttle, Mystic,” Chunk said, “We need to load these targets onto the shuttle and take them back to Legacy with us. This is our plunder for a job well done.”

  Braxton had his eyes closed, trying to visualize a way out of all this. The synapses in his brain weren’t cooperating with him though.

  “Turn on your communicator and have them meet you somewhere,” Chunk said, “They sort of dumped us off and I doubt they’d come if Chandler or I called. But if you made the call…”

  “So you’re stuck here on Earth with no hopes of loading up your ship of slaves if I don’t call,” Braxton said, turning to the two men.

  Chunk shook his head in warning. Chandler stopped twirling his two ion pistols and peered curiously at Braxton. Braxton clutched his hands into fists and sucked the power from his hands back into his body. Then he held his hands out, palms up, showing that he was unarmed. Chunk grinned, still shaking his head.

  “You Mystics are always the code-following heroes. I don’t think I trust you,” Chunk said, slowly lowering his rifle into firing position, “No, I definitely don’t.”

  Braxton’s left hand was already aimed perfectly at Chandler, so when he drew his thumb in to launch the cable on his left hand, it shot straight at the man’s chest. The sharp bolt on the end of the cable hit nothing sturdy enough to stop its progress, so it slid straight through the Combatant, impaling him on the cable itself. He never even had a chance to cry out or lift the pistols to firing height.

  Chunk on the other hand had the rifle down and his finger squeezing the trigger repeatedly.

  Underworld

  I knelt before the altar of the Overlord, calling on all his direction. One of the priests came out and knelt next to me after a long period of my chants and pleas. He placed his hand on my back and asked what I was looking for.

  “My son was stolen from me by the uplanders. After praying to the Overlord for his mercy, I had a moment of time-overlap mixed with a lot of blurred vision like I was underwater.”

  “No, that’s not possible,” he said, taking my hand in his and turning me toward him, “How much time-overlap did you feel?”

  “It is possible, Priest, and it happened just as I said,” I replied, “The time-overlap seemed to last for a dozen or more heartbeats.”

  “The Scriptures tell us that time-overlap only happens when the gods make an adjustment to the past in order to fix our world today. But ‘Time-Overlap with Water’ will only happen one time and this will mark the beginning of our salvation. We need to ask if anyone else felt this. It’s supposed to be witnessed by many.”

  “I never read about this in the Scriptures,” I said honestly.

  “There are some Scriptures we don’t allow out of our library because of times like this. If you knew about this prophecy, you could have made up a story to make it seem like it came true.”

  “What does the water part of it mean? Why did everything seem so blurry?” I asked.

  “The gods change the past all the time, causing little flaws that we feel called time-overlap. It’s usually insignificant changes that cause this, but they’re always important. Maybe they go back into the past to move a rock out of your path that would have caused you to stumble and hurt yourself. Once that moment comes that you should have stumbled, you will feel the time-overlap because the gods changed that moment in your life. But the underwater feeling marks a time that the gods change so much that many will never even be born, many will most likely die, and everything will change over the whole universe.”

  “I had no idea, Priest,” I said.

  “Tell no one else of this. Give me time to conduct an investigation to see if this is the case.”

  “Wait, Priest,” I said, fearful of what would come from my next words, “My son’s name is Elix and now I wonder if he is the Elix from Scripture 1086.”

  The priest pulled back suddenly and released my hand from his. I thought for a moment that he would run away.

  “I never thought this day would come,” he muttered, rising slowly from the altar, “This was supposed to be something in the future – not something today.”

  He walked away, still shaking his head as he continued to mumble stuff I couldn’t hear.

  Eleven

  In one swift move, Braxton ducked down to the floor, kicking the feet out from Evelyn’s chair. She toppled quickly to the side, smacking the floor hard and most likely painfully. Almost as though he choreographed it this way, Braxton retracted the cable imbedded in Chandler’s chest and dragged the body across the path of Chunk before three rounds were even fired from the plasma rifle.

  Chunk stumbled, but didn’t completely lose his balance. He found his footing just as Braxton rolled behind the desk next to Evelyn. She was still bound tightly to the chair and couldn’t offer any assistance even had she wanted to.

  “What was that promise you made me over the communicator, Mystic?” he laughed, blowing two flaming holes into the desk, “I’d never make it to Legacy alive? You see; we’re both exactly the same. We’re both a couple of people who don’t follow the rules and instead, we follow our hearts. We follow the anger and the hatred inside of us.”

  With no other options at his disposal, Braxton removed the communicator from his pocket and held it above the desk.

  “It’s registered to me, Trigger. They can somehow trace it and find me once I turn it on, just like you’re hoping. But you kill me while it’s in my hand and you’ll quickly discover where all the electricity in a Mystic goes when they are in pain,” he said, all the while keeping his body behind the desk.

  The fact that he hadn’t shot his arm off told him that he was at least listening to the threat and maybe paying it some heed.

  “You will not be leaving this room alive with that communicator,” he said, shooting out another one of the windows, “If you slide it toward the door right now, I’ll let you leave quietly. The lady in the chair comes with me however.”

  Braxton stood up, finally accepting his death
for what it was. He’d spent a few heartbeats thinking about it and it made him come to the conclusion that he was merely a copy of the real Braxton. Braxton himself was thirty years older than him and living out his days fighting the forces of Earth on Legacy. The other Braxton deserved to live since the life was rightfully his own. This Braxton had no right to such a life.

  “Open up this door and place your hands on your head! This is the police!” a voice shouted from beyond the door, “If you are armed, you will be shot!”

  “I have control over your future right now, Chunk,” Braxton said, holding his thumb over the switch to turn it on, “I’m a hundred percent sure that you will shoot me if I give this to you. You have no honor and no code by which you live,” Braxton said.

  With those words, he took a leap backwards, already judging the height of the shattered window behind him. He landed with both feet on the base of the windowsill. He was now forced into a dangerous position. Evelyn was still lying on the floor behind the desk while her only hero was separated from suicide by just a single gust of wind.

  “It’s looking like I’m about to lose my only chance of getting a shuttle ride off this planet. Do you know what this thought does to my trigger finger?” Chunk said, clearly aiming the rifle at Braxton.

  Braxton had only one trick left up his sleeve and he had no chance of ever witnessing the outcome. He let go of the window frame at the same time he released a powerful surge of electricity. Chunk was slow to fire his weapon since he never expected a true attempt at suicide from the Mystic. He did fire two rounds, but neither hit their mark. Braxton’s electrical surge however did hit its mark and that particular target wasn’t a living being at all.

  The surge of electricity hit the door, blasting it open for the police to respond in whatever way they decided. Braxton banked on the fact that they would see the exploding door as an act of aggression made by a man who was currently holding a rifle in a threatening manner. Unfortunately, Braxton would already be plummeting to his death by the time any of these events would occur.

  . . .

  When Braxton spent those long days of training under the cruel tutelage of Jack, he learned that he wasn’t a superhero at all. He lacked absolutely everything the heroes in those comic books had. Braxton truly didn’t have the courage or the fearlessness of those heroes. He didn’t have the perfect aim that those heroes had. And more than anything, he didn’t have the sleek looking costumes of those heroes, but that was a point that only Braxton typically cared about.

  He considered Jack to be cruel only because he demanded perfection. Most teachers accepted your “very best,” but Jack insisted that his best wasn’t good enough. By the time they were done, Jack had basically said that Braxton simply didn’t have what it takes. Jack stated his final opinion in the worst way.

  He went back to the shabby house and grabbed Braxton’s already growing collection of comic books. He returned to the trampoline and tossed those comics onto the black base in front of Braxton. That was when he climbed onto the trampoline and said those painful words.

  “Open up any of those books to the last page and show me a single one where the hero fails. Now don’t open it to show me where the hero messes up in the first few pages because we all do that. It’s expected that we all mess up once in a while. But show me one failure in the final page and I’ll tell you that you’re a success.”

  These were the memories racing through Braxton’s mind as he somersaulted backward from the window of the Empire State Building. He had already accepted his death, and as such, he even released the communicator from his grip, allowing it to explode into a million pieces when it would finally land on the street below.

  Although his eyes were closed initially, he decided that it wouldn’t hurt to offer one last fight before his death. This particular fight would be fought against the man who destroyed his self-esteem as a superhero. This would be a fight against his only friend on Earth, Jack. After one full somersault, he shot his fists outward and aimed toward the concrete of the building between two of the floors. Tucking his thumbs inward, he shot the cables at the concrete. The spikes hit their mark, perfectly centered between the window above and the window below.

  The cables tugged at his arms the moment the spikes gained purchase into the building. At the apogee of his arced descent toward the side of the building, he made a quick alteration to the length of his cables. If they were too long or too short, his body would smash into concrete instead of the windows like he’d hoped. As luck or skill would have it, he’d judged distance correctly and smashed into the window of an office nearly twenty floors beneath his death leap.

  Braxton retracted his cables even before he skittered across the glass-covered floor. He slid all the way to the wall, hitting it with a little less force than he expected. By the time he sat up and took in his surroundings, he found himself encompassed by half a dozen curious people. Unfortunately for Braxton, those people were already educated on the descent of an alien spaceship in Canada. This made the sudden appearance of a flying entity a little less “super hero” and a lot more “alien.”

  He rose quickly, shocked that he was even among the living. No one in his immediate vicinity appeared welcoming of the oddity in their midst, though he could see one woman smiling at him from her position near a support beam. He immediately turned his attention to the task at hand. Though Evelyn’s death would be a requirement to fulfill his duty, she was probably currently alive and with any luck, Chunk wasn’t. In the grand scheme of things, Braxton most likely failed in his duties. He rose from the floor, amazed at the fact that he was not only alive, but alive without any substantial pain or broken bones. The questions naturally rose, but he had no time allotted to answer these.

  Underworld

  I was on my way back to my home when I noticed an unusual commotion throughout the main promenade. There was an air of fear emanating from the crowd, but I couldn’t make out what had frightened these people. I tugged the arm of a lady who started past me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “There’s no barrier anymore. The uplanders bore a hole from their world into the roof of the Winian Library,” she said before tearing her arm from my grasp and continuing onward.

  “The Winian Library? That’s near the upper levels,” I stated the obvious fact to myself, “It’s not far from here.”

  I caught some other snippets of information from the people who rushed past. Only one thing stood out most to me and that was the fact that many uplanders were coming in with their own lights and weapons. I ran, but not in the direction everyone else was running. I ran toward the Winian Library.

  Twelve

  “So, what’s the plan, Chief?” Combatant Rollins asked, tapping the keys on the navigation panel, “It’s been three days and we’ve got no replies from Diana, Braxton, Chandler, or McDonald.”

  Chief Brown stared out at the planet beneath them, drumming his fingers on his own control panel.

  “We’ve already violated every law of causality on this mission and most likely destroyed whole portion of history thanks to that worthless pile of…” he punched the control panel, then regretted it immediately as he tried to shake off the pain in his hand, “We can’t afford to stay here any longer and risk them getting a hold of our technology. We definitely can’t allow them to get a hold of the extra-terrestrial in the back.”

  He rose from his seat and started to pace near the main control panel.

  “Speaking of the alien – is he sedated properly this time?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “If the Jump Drive works as well as the last time, he should sleep the whole way back to Legacy.”

  He nodded, then crossed his arms as he continued to pace.

  “We need to head out, Rollins,” the chief stated, returning to the captain’s chair, “Let it be on record that I made the decision to leave these people behind.”

  “No, Chief. Let it be on record that we made the decision. I agree th
at we have no other choice,” she said, tapping a few keys on the navigation panel, “I’ve got the course plotted.”

  “Very well, Combatant. Let’s get out of here.”

  . . .

  Braxton pushed his way through the onlookers and out the door. He rushed through the hallway, searching for the elevator that had brought him to the floors above. This time, he needed to use it to get out as quickly as he could.

  “He went that way!” someone called from behind him.

  Braxton turned in time to see two police or security guards at the end of the hall running toward him with their pistols drawn. He was leery of turning his back on the armed men to run to the elevator, but he had no time to waste. All the people in the hall parted in response to either the armed men rushing through or the fact that Braxton’s electrified hands were raised in threat.

  “I’m the good guy, so put the pistols down,” Braxton hollered, bringing a sudden hush to the people in the corridor.

  The police came to an abrupt halt, but raised their weapons in complete ignorance of Braxton’s words. The white electricity that was skittering across his hands filled the hall with a crackling sound.

  “The bad guys are on the sixty-first floor,” Braxton said, “I need you to put your weapons down so no one gets hurt.”

  “Put your hands down now!” one of the men shouted, “I don’t know what you’ve got going on with your hands, but if you don’t stop it, you will be shot.”