by S. L. Dunn
Chapter Thirty-Two
Gravitas
Floating against the strong winds blowing above the rooftops of Manhattan, Gravitas Nerol carefully scrutinized the streets and avenues of Midtown for any sign of the incapacitated Royal Guard. Gravitas was certain he had seen Darien fall somewhere into this nest of towers, though he was quickly realizing it would be impossible to discern the giant amid the raging disorder and floundering mobs far below. The wounded giant was probably resting in an alley, or perhaps hiding within an office building, his arm hanging maimed and loose at his side.
Gravitas had no doubt the Royal Guard would be calling for reinforcements, though after the slaying of the Lord General, the city would be swarming with Imperial First Class ranks within minutes, regardless of one Royal Guard’s call for help. But the fear of more giant soldiers was not anywhere near the culmination of Gravitas’s trepidations. The notion of an Epsilon in the city was a larger concern than even a hundred members of the Imperial First Class or Royal Guard ranks. Gravitas could not bring himself to believe what the huge Lord General had told him with that snide and gloating smirk.
The son of Emperor Faris could not be in New York City.
One of the more modern and arabesque buildings under his feet abruptly caught Gravitas’s attention. Unlike the main entrances to the other skyscrapers, the pale stone sidewalk outside the front of this glass tower was absolutely deserted. Not a single person was entering or leaving through the huge central doors. Instead, the ant-sized shoulders of suits and blouses were pouring out of a few constricted emergency exits on the side of the building in single file lines. Gravitas glared suspiciously at the incongruity of the bare sidewalk in front of the building. The slow and congested evacuation through the emergency exits contrasted greatly with the torrent of evacuees pouring out of the main entrances in other office buildings. The workers were unmistakably avoiding the main foyer of the building, and there were very few logical explanations.
Gravitas dived down through the open air, passing floors of the surrounding buildings as the sidewalk grew larger and larger in his vision. He landed with a sharp thud and briskly pushed one of the heavy glass doors open and stepped into a huge domed lobby.
The awareness that he was in the abandoned foyer of a national bank barely registered to him as Gravitas surveyed his surroundings. The entire lobby, from the floor to the high ceiling, was carved out of pearly white luxurious marble. To each side there were rows of golden elevator doors, and before him a magnificent sprawling stairway led to the floors above. The big reception desk stood unattended, and several phones were off their hooks repeating faint busy signals. Gentle violin music traveled through the near silence around him, and yet rising over its placid ambiance Gravitas could hear the labored breathing and strained wheezing he had been expecting. The painful moaning and whimpering of an overgrown giant was coming from behind the reception desk. Gravitas paced forward unhurriedly, his steps echoing across the polished marble. He walked around the desk and looked down at the source of the heavy baritone panting.
“So this is the storied courage of a Royal Guard?” Gravitas said to Darien.
The giant soldier was sitting down behind the desk and cradling his limp right arm in his left hand. Beside the Royal Guard were several bodies of people who had been unfortunate enough to be behind the desk when he had burst into the lobby. The giant soldier rolled his head to the side and looked up at Gravitas with a sudden start, beads of fevered sweat covering his face.
“Leave me alone!” Darien cried out and recoiled away from him against a file cabinet.
“Not a chance,” Gravitas said coolly.
The massive soldier actually began to plea, looking up at Gravitas from the marble floor. He begged between pathetic sobs. “I was only following orders. What was I supposed to do? The emperor himself ordered me. Please, show mercy! You were in the Imperial Army once! You know that commands have to be followed.”
“Not always,” Gravitas said, his eyes tired.
“Please!” Darien moaned in agony and hugged his injured arm against his chest. His forearm was hanging loose, attached by nothing but skin. The effect gave his arm an odd rubbery quality. At last Darien fell silent and let his chin fall to his chest. “Then just kill me and get it over with, you goddamn traitor.”
“You call me a traitor as if it were an insult,” Gravitas said.
Darien made a repulsively disapproving face and let out a hacking cough, though no intelligible words came from his mouth.
“Let’s go.” Gravitas reached out and grabbed him by the nape of the neck, dragging him on his back across the floor. Darien bellowed in pain, and lashed out with his good arm and his mammoth legs. His heels came down and connected with the floor, cracking the solid marble loudly. He kicked straight through the reception desk, sending sundered marble along with folders and papers across the lobby. Gravitas ignored his struggle as he easily pulled Darien, flailing and sliding with a squeaky sound of skin on the polished floor, across the lobby and out the main entrance.
A gathering of onlookers formed almost immediately as an odd-looking young man pulled a gigantic man out of the investment banking building by the scruff of his neck.
The display of weakness by the Imperial First Class warrior within his grasp only added to Gravitas’s wrath. Here in Darien was a man so imperceptive that he had never even considered being on the other end of the equation. Here was a person so convinced in both his omnipotence and his perspectives, that to perceive of anything else resulted in the childlike transformation these people were now witness to. There was, perhaps, a time and place where Gravitas would have given Darien clemency, but not today. This day the wounds of this villain’s intrusion ran too deep; today Gravitas was begrudgingly answering the roll call of executioner. Darien was too dangerous to be left alive among these people, and there were others like him to hunt down before the day was through.
“I’ll do whatever you want! Please!” Darien begged and sobbed.
Gravitas cast him down on the sidewalk. Disbelieving people watched from all around. Some had seen the images on the news of the two deadly giants. Many were pulling cell phones out of their pockets to take a video of the bizarre scene unfolding before their eyes.
“Nerol, please—please—show me some compassion. For god’s sake not in front of them!” Darien breathed, his face mortified with embarrassment.
“Were it not for my interception of you two and your genocide, everyone in this city would be dead!” Gravitas screamed down at him. “You dare attempt to slaughter so many souls and then ask to be shown compassion? You dare?”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“If you really are sorry, good. But that doesn’t excuse you for your actions. You are broken beyond repair.”
Gravitas turned to the growing cluster of shocked spectators, who seemed unsure whether he was friend or foe. Closest to him was a group of teenagers standing beside the hood of a recently abandoned Toyota. They could not have been older than high schoolers. One of the girls in a pink hoodie was shaking from head to toe and being held up by two of her friends. All of their faces were overflowing with fear.
“Mortal!” Gravitas roused himself and roared in English to no one in particular. His voice carried across the disbelieving onlookers as he moved his gaze from face to face, every camera phone recording the display. “These giants—though very powerful—are mortal! They are like me. We are not deities, or the agents of any god or devil. There is nothing, nothing, magical, religious, or supernatural about us. We are simply more advanced! We are in every way as fallible and foolish as any of you. Do not despair and give in to anguish, for not all of our race are as coldhearted as those who have attacked Chicago, and justice will be brought upon them. You are not alone in this fight.”
Darien flailed violently on the ground. Gravitas reached down and grabbed him. He pulled the behemoth up to an unsteady standing position, and pushed him against a street lamp that bent behin
d his shoulder blade. Darien leaned into the iron and wheezed heavily.
“Y-you stupid little . . .” Darien gasped. “V-V-Vengelis is going to slaughter you.”
Gravitas stared at the grotesque Imperial First Class soldier, and again spoke in English, this time just to Darien.
“This is for what you would have done to Kristen Jordan.” Gravitas lowered his voice even more. “This is for what you would have done to Ryan Craig.”
Without another word, Gravitas cocked his right fist back, ready to execute Darien with one final killing blow.
Just before he uncoiled his strike, a sudden and distinct popping sound emanated from the sky to the north. Gravitas instantly recognized the noise as a rupture of the sound barrier, and for a split second his eyes widened in surprise as he turned his face to the direction of the sound.
CRAAAACK!
A strike like nothing he had ever felt in his life connected with Gravitas’s face. His world rolled back, and he felt himself lift and jettison across the street. Gravitas crashed headfirst straight through a building and his body erupted out the opposite end. His back skipped brutally off the pavement of the street beyond. He reached his arms out to steady himself, but his fingers clawed right through the pavement and he flipped backward, smacking into another building and crashing through the exterior wall. Like a wrecking ball he rolled across the first floor of an office building. Desks and cubicle partitions were hurled and thrown in every direction as the veritable typhoon traveled across the office floor.
At last Gravitas’s stunned body came to rest, sliding to a stop on his back. Gravitas stared in shock at ceiling tiles and a faintly whirring vending machine. His ears rung and his vision filled with blinking colors. He shook his head and looked dizzily past his legs at the tunnel of destruction his body had bored. An unobstructed path like the trail of a meteor led to where he had stood a moment previous; even cars had been tossed aside by the force of his body.
It felt as though something immensely heavy was forcefully pressing down on his face. Gravitas placed a shaking palm across his cheek and pulled it away to see startlingly bright red blood on his fingertips. His cheek was cut below the eye. Gravitas could not remember the last time he had seen his own blood, and he stared at it in wonder. Whoever hit him was immensely strong, stronger even than Master Tolland.
As he looked at his blood stained fingers, Gravitas knew he had just become acquainted with an Epsilon. He unsteadily rose to his feet and oriented himself with a shake of his head while wiping his bloodstained hand brusquely on his armor. He was not concussed, just rattled. The wind had been knocked out of him, and his breathing was uneven.
There was no other option, no space for reservations or second thought. He had to be victorious.
The warrior side of Gravitas, the animal side, closed its eyes. He transcended into a steadied and practiced concentration. He inhaled stability and exhaled doubt, he inhaled focus and exhaled insecurity, he inhaled strength and exhaled weakness. Powerfully and deeply his chest heaved again and again, each time his breaths becoming stronger and more furious. He allowed himself to absolutely seethe, and he let rage claim him.
At last he exhaled, and when his eyes opened there was a searing fire burning behind them. The entire office seemed to explode as Gravitas Nerol erupted like a raging bull, and charged back through the tunnel.
This was the fight he had waited for his entire life.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Vengelis
Vengelis watched with a wary expression as the mysterious warrior clad in Imperial Armor reeled backward from his punch. The man’s body crashed straight through the building across the street and tumbled out of sight beyond. Deep ringing echoes from the massive strike traveled up and down the avenue of tall offices like the deafening crack of a whip.
The people on the street corner instantaneously scattered, cupping their ears from the sound of the blow and bowing their heads to the pavement. Vengelis remained perfectly still and ready. As the dust cleared, he could see straight through the wrecked building and into the street beyond, where his unknown aggressor had slid and disappeared into a trail of rubble leading into the building one block over.
Vengelis’s eyelids shook, not in fear, but in concentration, as he stood at the ready over the wheezing and whimpering Darien. Whom had he just hit? No one was strong enough to defeat Hoff and Darien at the same time, save for a few Royal soldiers.
“M-my lord. I’m . . . s-sorry,” Darien gasped by Vengelis’s feet. “Thank god you’re here. My . . . my arm!”
“Shut up,” Vengelis whispered, his voice cold and callous. His eyes were still locked on the burrowed tunnel of carnage.
“H-he’s . . . like you, my lord. Nerol s-son. Royal . . . blood . . . trained . . .”
A hushed moment passed where, perhaps just in Vengelis’s focused mind, the entire city block seemed to become still with a pulsing medium of apprehension. Then, the muffled supersonic popping sound Vengelis had been waiting for sounded from the loose debris two blocks over. Vengelis grimaced uncertainly as the mysterious young man sprinted back through the tunnel and charged toward him. His eyes suddenly widened in stunned shock as he realized his antagonist’s astonishing speed almost before it was too late. Vengelis had barely enough time to raise his forearms to shield his face before his attacker was within striking distance.
The strange warrior unleashed his own equally powerful strike upon Vengelis. The mighty fist smashed into Vengelis’s crossed forearms with a pulverizing strength like Vengelis had never before felt, save perhaps against the Felixes. Vengelis’s arms flew to his sides in absorption of the punch, and he staggered backward several steps, nearly falling onto his back. Behind Vengelis, the shockwave of raw energy that traveled past the mirrored windows from the blocked punch had a bomb-like effect on the outer wall of the office building. Darkened panes of glass shattered outward all the way up to the fiftieth floor. Millions of tiny shards fell from the lofty heights like torrential sparkling raindrops in the sunlight, chiming noisily against the pavement and upon the two warriors’ impervious shoulders.
The two young men stared at each other wordlessly through the cascade of silvery glass. Not crude and ungainly like most Primus soldiers, the two idols each stared at a strikingly similar manifestation of their own Sejero purity. They were young and lean, relatively thin of shoulder, with striking looks.
They were equals in kind.
Vengelis glared at the dark-haired stranger. The young man was within a year or two of his own age, and perhaps an inch taller than he. He was clad in Imperial First Class Armor, yet Vengelis could not place his face. Vengelis would have considered him a human imposter if not for the startling pain that throbbed through his forearms from deflecting this young man’s strength. Although this stranger’s cheek was bleeding, Vengelis could not believe how little damage his punch had done.
Yet even in the midst of his total confusion, and the pins and needles in his forearms, Vengelis’s face remained a portrait of cool. His calm countenance veiled even the slightest indication of his pain or rising bewilderment. Vengelis watched as the stranger’s eyes fixated momentarily on the Blood Ring before returning to meet his gaze.
Vengelis at last broke the silence, his voice carrying over the shimmering shards of glass that fell seemingly from the heavens.
“Who are you?”
“Ryan Craig,” the enigma replied.
Vengelis looked doubtfully to his Imperial First Class armor and shook his head slowly.
“No, you aren’t. What’s your name?”
There was a long silence between them, interspersed only by Darien’s guttural moaning from the pavement.
“My name is Ryan Craig,” the stranger said. “Though there was a time when I was called Gravitas Nerol.”
“Gravitas Nerol?” Vengelis repeated, glaring at him disdainfully. “What?”
“You might know of my father, Pral N—”
“Of course, I
know Pral Nerol,” Vengelis said. “But you’re lying. Pral Nerol’s son is dead.”
“Then you must believe in ghosts to be speaking to me.”
This statement left Vengelis speechless for a moment, but he then shook his head in stern disbelief. “Pral Nerol’s son died in space during the Orion campaign. I remember reading the report. It was the transport accident; he died with Bronson Vikkor.”
“And yet here I am.”
“Here you are . . . and quite riled up it would seem.” Vengelis frowned as he regarded Gravitas Nerol, coming to the conclusion at once from the radiating pain in his forearms that this stranger must be telling the truth. “I take it you’re the one who traveled here on the Traverser I?”
Vengelis saw a flicker of confusion pass across Gravitas Nerol’s face at the mention of the ship, but he merely nodded. “Yes.”
“Why? What the hell have you been doing here?” Vengelis looked about the glass-strewn intersection and frightened faces hiding underneath anything and everything against the killing rain of glass. “You’re the son of Royalty for god’s sake.”
“I have been living. Your father banished me from Anthem upon my return from Orion.”
“What are you talking about? Upon what return from Orion?”
“When the transport arrived on Anthem, Emperor Faris banished me for—”
“You’re lying,” Vengelis interjected, frustration and contempt growing in his voice. “I have never heard of my father banishing anyone—let alone the son of a Royal family.”
Gravitas shrugged. “Believe what you will. Your father exiled me for killing Bronson Vikkor. I find it strange that your general, Hoff, knew of this, and you do not.”
Vengelis flexed his wrists forcefully to dissipate the throbbing in his forearms. He then rolled his eyes impatiently and, unexpected even to himself, reached out to shake Gravitas Nerol’s hand.