Frivlok (Appointments on Plum Street Book 2)

by Eli Ingle

  Rona was alone and obviously intended to get an advantage whilst they fought each other. She was running towards them, sword high and shouting out loud, when the automatic gun locked onto her and shot. The wooden bullets knocked her to the floor and battered her ribs and legs. She lay still, looking grumpy. The distraction had made the forty-year-old glance over. The young woman saw the opening and stabbed at the man’s neck. He swore with pain and annoyance at his mistake and fell to the ground. The woman raised her spear over her head and cried her victory. Captain Arentec blew her whistle.

  “End of round two,” she announced. The automatic guns dropped as they went into standby mode. The fighters clambered to their feet, talking amongst themselves or groaning as their bruises ached from the excursion. The bearded old man slipped a vest over his head before walking up to Rigel and offering a hand.

  “Good show there,” he said, smiling as Rigel shook his hand. The skin was tough and dry and he could have crushed Rigel’s whole hand in his own. “I must admit I’m a big fan but didn’t want to come over too soon … look overly keen, you know?”

  “It’s fine,” replied Rigel.

  “How are you finding it, then?” asked the man, letting go of his hand. “This,” he indicated, waving his hand around for emphasis.

  “Well, it’s certainly different than anything I’ve known before.”

  “Must be, must be,” agreed the man. As Rigel watched, he reached into his beard and pulled out a small cigar and lighter. Clamping the cigar between his teeth, he flicked open the lighter and lit the tube, puffing heartily.

  “No smoking in the combat arena!” shouted Jhoan, jumping down off the stage. The old man frowned and tried to stub it out so he could put it back in his beard. “No you don’t,” said Jhoan, pulling it off him. “I’ll take that, thank you. Don’t you remember any of the rules? You’re all on a restricted diet and healthy living!” Muttering to himself, Jhoan walked back to the stage, the cigar in his own mouth.

  The old man sighed, shaking his head slightly. “Barton’s the name,” he said.

  “Rigel.”

  “I know who you are!”

  “Sorry, I keep forgetting. It’s odd being recognised ….”

  “Hello,” interrupted Rona, breezing over.

  “And Rona too!” exclaimed Barton. He shook her hand, jolting her all the way to the shoulder. “You fought excellently! If that automatic gun hadn’t got you I think you’d have won!”

  Rona smiled brightly.

  “You didn’t do too badly yourself,” she replied. He smiled before the three of them turned to face the stage as Captain Arentec coughed into the microphone.

  “We will commence the final round shortly,” she announced. “You did well, but essentially, that fight was much more fragmented than it should have been. It was also much shorter. A battle like that should have lasted at least twice the length of time. You are too confident in your abilities. You neglect defence for open and sloppy offence. At all times you must be conscious of your surroundings, as many of you were slain whilst your backs were turned.”

  Jhoan stepped towards the microphone. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and offered it to Arentec. She slapped it from his hand. Frowning, he took her place.

  “In most of these situations you will have little chance to gain the measure of your opponents,” continued the bandit. “You cannot learn and anticipate their attacks; you must react instinctively and yet remain as one with your surroundings. Now please suitably rearm yourselves and begin.” Jhoan stepped away from the microphone and stood beside Arentec.

  “Together this time?” asked Rigel. Rona nodded.

  “See you later,” said Barton, giving them a nod.

  They offered him a quick smile in return before hurrying over to the racks before the choicest weapons were gone. Rigel belted on a sword and took a shield. Rona took a rifle and a pistol. Once they were comfortable they made their way to the corner of the courtyard. The Light Ones knelt down, resting the shield horizontally on the ground in front of them. Rigel drew his sword whilst Rona loaded the wooden bullets into the spring-loaded gun, laying the barrel across the edge of the shield.

  Rigel watched as the other contestants armed themselves and took up defensive positions around the courtyard.

  “Make sure no-one starts too near us,” said Rona. Rigel nodded.

  Rigel watched as Barton picked up a mace and swung it around, before standing near the middle – an odd positioning choice. He could tell that the other contestants were unnerved by this; as Rigel watched he saw the members of the group looking at each other uneasily.

  Captain Arentec blew her whistle and any chance for further contemplation of Barton’s position was lost as everyone prepared to fight.

  No-one moved.

  Following the profesors’ last speech, everyone seemed to have taken their words literally. The unexpected lack of charging and screaming brought a collective chuckle from the group.

  “It’s not funny!” scowled Arentec. “Kill each other!”

  “Lovely,” muttered Rigel, but was distracted as Rona fired her rifle and shot a man in the forehead.

  After a stunned pause as the man fell to the floor, the class reacted as though they had been splashed with cold water and the fight began. Rona picked off at least a dozen fighters in the first two minutes whilst Rigel kept an eye out for potential attackers.

  Once it became apparent that the Light Ones were casually picking off the fighters, several of them tried to kill Rigel and Rona. The middle-aged man tried to shoot them but the children ducked behind the shield and the bullet bounced off the front. Rona sprung up, shot the man and ducked back down again. Meanwhile, a man and woman with spears were creeping nearer and from the way they angled their weapon, Rigel guessed that they were going to try to stab them whilst staying at a safe distance. The spear dived at him, but he was quicker, slashing it out of the way with his sword. The second spear flashed forwards, but Rigel grabbed the shaft and yanked on it, pulling the woman forwards. As her face crumpled into the shield, Rigel stood up and stabbed her with his sword. He kept the spear to fend off anyone else foolish enough to try to attack them.

  Squatting down again, he laid the sword across his lap and pointed the spear upwards and ready.

  As with so many things in life, the conclusion was much more lacklustre than Rigel had been expecting. After observing the quick massacre of the three attackers who came for Rigel and Rona, the rest of the fighters kept out of the Light Ones’ way. When it was finally time to face them, Rona managed to pick them all off with the rifle before they were within throwing distance. Arentec blew her whistle a final time.

  “Dismissed,” she called. “Tomorrow we will work on attacking defended positions as our guests here have clearly shown that this is an area that we need to work on. Good afternoon.”

  Rigel stood up and stretched his aching legs. “Well done,” he said to Rona.

  “Right back at you,” she replied as they walked over to the racks to put away their weapons.

  Most of the students had left by the time the Light Ones had finished putting their weapons away. Glancing up at the scaffolding stairs, Rigel’s stomach clenched as he spotted the twins leaning against the top bannister, smirking down at them. Rigel turned away, pretending not to have noticed them. He sighed.

  “What?” asked Rona as she slotted a spear into the rack. Rigel motioned with his head in the direction of the twins. Her eyes flickered up, and then she frowned. She shouted up at them, swearing and suggesting where they might go.

  “That’s not very polite,” said the boy, pulling a thread from his sleeve as though it held more interest than their conversation.

  “Why’ve you always got your girlfriend sticking up for you, Rigel?” called down the girl. “Haven’t you got any guts?”

  “Go away,” Rigel muttered, looking at the floor.

  “I’m sorry, what was that? Squeak, sq
ueak?”

  “I said: go away!”

  “Ooh!” said the boy. “Rigel says ‘go away’!”

  “You’re just stinking up the place,” added Rona.

  “You know, you two really need to work on your taunting skills,” replied the girl.

  “You’re a freak, that’s what you are,” said the boy. “Why did you have to come here? Huh? We were doing just fine before you turned up. We were the best. We were the special ones. You come here, and you get all that attention, and you can’t even fight! We were watching you.”

  “Yeah, if you hadn’t teamed up you’d have lost like in round two,” chipped in the girl.

  “Pathetic and useless,” agreed the boy. “For all the time, effort and money they’ve wasted on you, we’d probably be better off if they’d never have come and found you. You can’t even fight us. How are you going to defeat the Darkness?”

  Rona spat on the ground. “We’ve been to the Dark Realm and fought monsters the like of which you couldn’t even comprehend. You stand there full of privilege and confidence you get from a steady upbringing. You’ve probably not done an honest day’s work in your life and you never will. It’s easy to be the best when you’ve got all the resources but it means nothing if you’re sick inside.”

  “Sounds like someone misses their mummy,” sneered the girl. “Oh wait, you don’t have one.”

  “Come down here and say that to our faces,” growled Rigel. The anger in him beginning to rise.

  “Make us,” smirked the boy.

  Rona blinked and suddenly the scaffolding exploded into a thousand chunks and splinters of wood. The twins were blasted outwards, screaming in surprise. Rigel and Rona remained motionless as the other children smacked into the ground in front of them. The boy was sobbing as he lifted his head up, his hand pressing against his mouth. Blood poured down his chin and as he moved his hand away, Rigel could see the boy’s front teeth were missing. The girl groaned and rolled over, her nose broken and two black eyes already forming. Rigel stepped forwards and knelt on the boy’s chest, making him wheeze. Grabbing his slick face between his fingers, Rigel squeezed his cheeks as he pulled him forwards.

  “Say that again to our faces,” Rigel hissed. The Light Ones could not see it, but their eyes were glowing with a pure, bright white light.

  The boy swore and spat blood into Rigel’s face. He barely noticed as it boiled away.

  “You’ll pay for that,” whispered the boy.

  “And you’ll wish you’d never been spawned from wherever the hell you came from,” groaned the girl, before vomiting over the courtyard.

  Rigel’s heart was still pounding and a sense of unease and guilt beginning to creep in now the fight was over. Without looking back, Rigel and Rona moved over to the remains of the scaffolding and looked up. Rigel spotted a support beam sticking out of the wall and with the light power still coursing through him, he jumped up and grabbed onto it, swung up and leapt up to the next. After half a minute he arrived at the door and opened it, stepping into the corridor. Rona appeared a moment later.

  Shutting the door, they walked off, the prone figures of the twins just visible from the window. Rigel looked uneasily at Rona, and she at him.

  What had they done?

  Chapter Three

  That evening they ate alone and in silence in the dining hall. Barton and any of the other students and masters they had talked to previously were not around so they did not have to answer any awkward questions. They had heard no word about the twins and could not decide whether they had decided to lie low for a while or were planning something against them. Rigel was glad no master had come to find them to talk about the incident – despite the provocation he felt for their actions, Rigel could not delude himself into thinking that if the twins snitched on them, it would be the Light Ones who got into a lot of trouble.

  “Why don’t we go and tell a master about it before they do?” asked Rigel for the third time since the end of the lesson.

  “Because,” replied Rona, her voice hushed, “I’ve already told you that it’s going to be hard to explain without us looking bad … and I don’t think it’s the twins’ style. They’d rather find some other way to get revenge than go and tell on us.”

  “Great.”

  “We can probably beat them again. Getting punished by a master is not going to help anything.”

  Rigel remained silent, poking custard around his bowl with his spoon. He still felt queasy.

  “Did we go too far?” he asked. This question was new.

  “It depends on what you define as ‘too far’,” she replied.

  “There’s a line, isn’t there?” said Rigel. “And how do we know when we’ve crossed it?”

  “Maybe … maybe we are exempt from that line. What if our abilities put us outside of the conventional rules and let us do what normal people don’t have the right to?”

  “That sounds like a dangerous path to start going down.”

  Rona did not answer, just smiled slightly and went back to her food. Rigel pushed his away and looked out of the window, feeling uneasy.

  That evening Rigel was hanging onto a freezing cold bar of metal in the Institute gardens. His palm burned with the cold and his arms burned from the exercise.

  “Ten more please,” shouted Gironda.

  There was a collective groan from the group. Gironda was their strength master. He was five feet tall – even smaller than Rona – but built like an ox. He had been a bodybuilder all his life and was packed with thick, solid muscles that stretched his vest and weight-lifting belt to the extreme. Rigel thought that if Gironda ran at a brick wall, he would leave a man-shaped hole in it and emerge smiling through the other side.

  “I said ten more, not ten groans,” laughed the master. His bad jokes never helped.

  “That doesn’t even rhyme,” said a man hanging across from Rigel and Rona.

  Gironda waddled over to the man and flicked him with his riding crop.

  “Ow!”

  “Fifteen for you,” grinned Gironda.

  The man opened and then shut his mouth again. They had quickly learnt that arguing only led to more pull-ups.

  “Come on! Come on!” Gironda said, clapping his hands. “We’ve still got the assault course to finish so get a move on.” Tucking his crop under his arm, he put his whistle between his lips and blew a sharp note. “One!” Whistle. “Two!” Whistle. “Three!” And so on. Rona got to six before her arms gave out and she dropped to the floor. Rigel got to eight. Unlike earlier in the set, when he had made them climb back up and carry on, Gironda allowed them to lift to failure on the last set – that way he knew they had worked to their full potential. “Well done, you two,” he said as he strode past them. “Come on Wembly! Put your back into it!”

  “I don’t use my back, sir!” replied Wembly, his arms trembling.

  “Well that’s your problem!” replied the master, flicking him with his crop. “You should be engaging your traps, lats, delts, and biceps! Now pull!”

  One by one, the students fell to the floor, rubbing their arms and wincing.

  “Alright, you lot,” Gironda said. “One lap around the assault course, hit the showers and then you are all dismissed. I believe Professor Erdiz is holding a meditation class later this evening if any of you are interested.” He blew his whistle and the group slowly made their way to the start line.

  It was well known that the assault course was Gironda’s pride and joy, second only to his physique. He had been spotted working late most nights tweaking areas or adding new parts to the course. His most infamous addition was a set of deactivated landmines that he had acquired from questionable sources in Kozenia City. He had retrofitted them so that would explode flour onto anyone unfortunate enough to activate them. Every so often he would dig them up and plant them somewhere else so the contestants always had to be on the lookout.

  Gironda stepped onto the slightly raised platfo
rm at the starting line and brought the whistle up again.

  “On your marks … get set … go!” He blew the whistle and the students began jogging slowly along the grass. None of them had enough energy to go any faster. They bottlenecked at the set of two monkey bars.

  When it was Rigel’s turn he had to jump up to reach them. He could barely pull himself up with his tired arms, so instead kept them straight and used his body weight to swing himself across.

  Dropping down at the other side, he trotted over to the wobbling platforms. These were small squares of wood screwed onto heavy metal springs. The idea was to jump across them whilst keeping your balance. Rigel had not mastered this technique yet so he stepped onto the first, keeping his legs together and his arms out before slowly crossing each platform and lowering himself off the final one.

  “Surprise!” Something thumped him in the back and he looked to see Rona grinning at him. Graceful as always, she jumped off the final platform and ran past him. Shaking his head, he began to trot after her but lost sight of her amid the crowd of other students.

  The next part was the worst. Called the “pit”, it was a ten-foot square hole that Gironda had dug and apparently obsessed over for a month to get the edges straight. He had then filled it to the brim with thick, cold mud. There was no option other than to jump in, wade to the other side and pull yourself out again. The mud came up to most of the adults’ waists. For Rigel and Rona, it was chest height.

  Sighing heavily, Rigel lowered himself in and grimaced as the cold mud seeped around his body. When he felt his feet hit the bottom, he waded through, plunging his arms forward and pulling himself along with them using a breaststroke motion. He shivered with cold and exhaustion until he finally arrived at the other side and dragged his arms out. Resting his arms on the grass, he pushed himself up as hard as he could, fighting against the mud that tried to suck him back down again. It was cold, wet and somehow gritty. The suction from it was pulling his legs and out down. Rigel felt as though he was in a vacuum cleaner full of wet clay. The smell of it was heavy and oppressive, when he breathed it felt as though it hit the back of his throat and stuck there. Sliding onto the grass, he allowed himself a moment to rest before stumbling to his feet and carrying on again.