Age of Darkness

by Brandon Chen

  “Let’s go,” he said. He walked past Keimaro and broke into a hard dash across the rooftop. He lowered his body and put all of his weight down into his feet, kicking off of the edge of the rooftop and using his momentum to send him flying through the air. He landed on another rooftop, leaping across the gap between the buildings with graceful ease.

  Keimaro raised an eyebrow when he saw Lena mirror the action. He stood there with his mouth gaping and sighed, taking off after them. His breath was heavy, and he was nervous, which was rather rare. He kicked off of the roof and was sent flying into the air over the gap. A moment of fear shot through him as he looked down at the ground below. He could fall right now, and he would never see Mai ever again. He raised his head and looked outward at Yuri and Lena, who were still racing along the rooftops like a bunch of monkeys.

  Will I ever see Mai again? Is Z telling the truth about her still being alive? I mean, I always wished that she would be alive, but the reality of it all…. Why would they keep her alive? A mere child? He landed on the roof with a solid thump and continued running forward. The Bounts keep only what they have to gain from. Why would they keep her?

  The boy began to slow down when he caught sight of a massive tower before them that stretched up into the sky and was topped with a gleaming, gigantic bell. He scratched his neck when he saw Yuri pointing to the very top and whistled. “That’s a long climb. I’m assuming that we aren’t climbing this the manual way, are we?”

  Yuri shook his head and pointed down toward the bottom of the tower, where a wooden door was guarded by two armed guards. “We are going to break in and place a chip at the very top. Then we will escape using a zip line.” He reached into the pocket of his black cloak and pulled out a tiny blue chip that matched the color of the teleporting pad. “This,” he said, “is the key to our grand entrance tonight. It enables us to particle transport to the exact location where it is planted. After that, I’ll explain how we are going to execute tonight’s plan.”

  Keimaro nodded and sat on the edge of the roof, his legs dangling off the end. He pointed to the guards. “So, we are just going to bust inside? Are we allowed to kill or…?”

  “No, we can’t,” Yuri said. “If we kill anyone, they will be investigating the area for at least a day or two. That’s too much time. We need to just bust in and run away. We are going to plant the chip without them even knowing. Follow my lead, and we will get this done quickly. Cover my back, Keimaro. Lena, make sure to prepare the zip line gear.”

  He leapt off of the rooftop and landed hard on the street, startling civilians around him. He paused to take in the shock from the height of the fall before he broke into a sprint forward. He barreled through the guards and the door before they were even able to unsheathe their weapons. The door screeched as it was ripped off its hinges from the tackle, and the soldiers slammed hard into the ground. Yuri was already on them with his fists raining down upon them with heavy punches.

  Keimaro was still sitting there, watching the scene with his mouth gaping. Yuri had just gone in there so easily and so fast without even a care for his surroundings. The civilians around him were already screaming and running around, signaling for more guards to come. He supposed this was when he came in to support Yuri. He leapt down from the rooftop as well and landed, wincing at the shock from the fall that burst through his legs and traveled up through his body. He could see the crowds of people scattering with armed guards pushing their way through. The boy heard Lena jump down behind him and glanced over his shoulder to give her a swift smile as they began to race forward. Keimaro had to make sure that his hood was always up during the encounter so that no one recognized him. He still had to conceal his identity as a member of the Royal Guard. After only a day of getting the job, he shouldn’t be caught fighting guards in the street.

  Upon reaching the door, one of the guards turned to him, and he responded with a crack of his fist across the man’s jaw. There was no warning. Just his fist, slamming against flesh and bone. A dribble of blood spurted from the man’s lips as he crumpled to the ground. Ignoring the throb of his knuckles, Keimaro had no intention of fighting the other soldiers that surrounded him. He quickly made his way through the open doorway, stepping over the unconscious bodies that lay still on the cold marble floor.

  The inside of the tower seemed extremely simple. A table had been knocked over, and poker cards were scattered everywhere among three more unconscious guards that reeked of alcohol. No doubt they had been slacking off while the two guards at the front were clearly doing their job, though not effectively. From the looks of the destruction and smashed beer bottles, Yuri had been through here. The walls were made up of simple cobblestone with a winding stairway that climbed all the way to the very top.

  Keimaro gave Lena a guiding push toward the stairs as he turned around and kicked at a few of the guards, trying to drive them back. They had already unsheathed their blades and were fully ready to kill. He winced, remembering that he wasn’t to kill any of them; otherwise, it could ruin the entire operation for tonight. Without a way to defend himself, he grabbed a beer bottle off of the ground and hurled it at the mob of guards. The projectile exploded into a million glittering pieces of translucent glass that became stained with blood upon contact. Spurred on by the shrill screams of agony, Keimaro raced up the stairs, avoiding eye contact with the wounds of the men behind him. He could hear them racing up the stairway, attempting to catch up to him.

  They kept climbing. The stairs seemed to go on and on, eventually making Keimaro feel exasperated from the strenuous exercise. He pushed onward, hearing the slowed clanks of armor behind him, getting closer. When he reached the top, he saw that Yuri was standing there with Lena, giving Keimaro a nod of satisfaction that the job was complete. So, this chip is planted, mission complete? The only question was: how were they going to get down? Keimaro had never once heard of a zip line before. Was it a new type of technology?

  “Lena?”

  Lena nodded upon hearing her name and pulled out a massive pistol that was apparently loaded with a harpoon. A harpoon gun? She aimed it high into the air and fired, a long rope following the harpoon through the air. The projectile lodged itself onto the rooftop of a lower building, across the street. Lena gave the rope a good tug to test it before she sliced off the end that was attached to the gun. She tied the rope against a pillar that supported the roof over the enormous bronze bell that stood in the center of the room. A cool breeze blew through the tower, causing the bell to make a whistling noise.

  Yuri took a small bar from his cloak and positioned himself in front of the rope. He put the bar over the rope and gripped both ends tightly, bravely kicking off of the tower as he flew out into the open air, zip lining down toward the building below.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Keimaro muttered, knowing that he was next. I didn’t sign up for this. He could already hear the clanking of the soldiers behind him. Lena handed him a bar, which he took reluctantly. He positioned himself just as Yuri had, the bar over the rope. However, his hands were shaking as he looked down at the hundreds of meters below to the ground. If he fell now, he would be squashed like a bug. His breath was heavy as he felt sweat forming on his palms, increasing his chances of slipping and falling. Damn, Kei! Why are you being so freaking negative? Just get it over with! You’ve done worse!

  “Hurry up, Hayashi!” Lena snapped as the men began to stumble up the stairway, panting and coated in sweat. “They’re here!”

  “But!”

  “Go!” Lena kicked him in the back swiftly, and he grunted, his feet leaving the safety of the tower.

  Keimaro’s mind went blank with fear as he looked down and saw his legs dangling through the air, rooftops zooming past him. He would’ve yelled, but his throat was clogged with panic as he thrashed and kicked. He heard the bell suddenly ring, and he glanced to see Lena coming down behind him. The soldiers were plugging their ears in an attempt to block out the sound. He turned back to look at whe
re he was going and slammed face-first into the roof. He fell, smashing into a cart of some sort. Dust flew off in all directions, and he blinked a few times, looking up at the sky, rather dazed. Not the best landing I could’ve had. Ugh, at least I’m alive.

  Yuri poked his head over the roof to look down at Keimaro while Lena landed graciously on the ground beside him. She grinned as she squatted down, patting his head gently as if he were an injured pup. “Not bad for your first zip line, Kei.” She giggled teasingly and stood up. “Thanks to you, we have everyone’s attention. Better get up and start running. Otherwise, your cover is blown.”

  ***

  Yata sighed as he walked through the streets of Bassada behind Gavin and Noah, feeling uncomfortable with the large amount of people in the area. He felt as if they were all being aggressive whenever they bumped or pushed him unintentionally. He had a strong urge to efface every single human being in this entire city. The way they looked at him, touched him, spoke around him—they all disgusted him. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes forward and attempted to repress his fury. He tried to think about something else, but every time he did, he could only think of his failure when he had fought Yuri. That white-haired bastard had absolutely obliterated him in combat. He didn’t even seem to be trying when Yata had been giving it his all. Yata’s hands were clenched tightly at his side, and he shook his head in disbelief. Was all that training for nothing? So he could lose in combat to some random boy from the streets working for a rich old man?

  His eyes narrowed as he glared at the back of Noah’s head. He didn’t dare say such rude and dishonorable things in front of Z’s son, but he was curious as to how much power this boy contained as well. All of this seemed so bizarre. The group seemed almost too good to be true, fighting for the exact same things that Yata and Keimaro had been training for over the past four years. But, Yata had never really had a reason to want to kill the king or smash the sovereignty of the crown. He just wanted the man dead for destroying his village. Revenge. As puerile as it sounded, it was all he wanted. Selfish or not, Yata had no legitimate reason for wanting Faar to be eradicated other than his own personal hatred.

  Giving him a real reason would just make him even more determined to destroy Faar. Yata glanced over at Gavin. In order to convince such a dedicated soldier, Noah would have to show something that probably wasn’t in the public view—something that would be enough to convince even the most loyal of soldiers to turn against the government. But, from the looks of it, they were simply walking in the public streets, not anywhere where any secret government things would take place.

  Noah suddenly took a turn into a street that looked like a ghost town. The houses were tattered and old with rust and mold growing all over the wooden structures. Bodies were sprawled across the sides of the street from starved homeless individuals that had passed but hadn’t been cleaned up from the streets. Some of their flesh was decayed, with flies and bugs buzzing around. The very sight almost made Yata want to vomit. Gavin actually did.

  “I know that poverty is a problem in our society, but that isn’t a good enough reason to convince me to execute the king,” Gavin muttered, wiping his mouth of sick. “There’s poverty in every prosperous nation. There is no society where everyone is living high and mighty—”

  “That’s not what I came to show you today,” Noah said simply, walking toward one of the buildings. At the building’s side was a latch in the ground, camouflaged by a patch of grass. “My father has a large amount of prototype samples of artificial magic. These bodies that you see out here are not just from starvation. Would you like to see the truth? It is a rather sickening sight.” He reached down, grabbed the hidden latch, and pulled. A wooden doorway came up, some dust entering the air, and absolute darkness was all that could be seen beyond.

  Yata truly didn’t want to go down there. Perhaps it was a personal fear about entering catacombs. Well, not just catacombs. It was any type of underground activity, for that matter. He gave a smug look, but Gavin and Noah didn’t seem to quite catch it because Gavin followed Noah forward, rather curious as to what the darkness held. Yata gave a small shiver as he inched his way over, dragging his legs until he fell stagnant at the entrance of whatever this opening led to. “Well, it’s your call, Gavin. I’m going to hate the government, no matter what, but this is to convince you to join our side, right?”

  Gavin shrugged. “I’ll see what he has to show me.”

  Damn it.

  Noah nodded and flicked his wrist, summoning a glowing red stick that appeared in his hand. Such conjuring magic truly seemed like a very useful trick, fit for many different types of situations. He gripped the stick and pointed to the darkness, revealing a descending staircase that led into the abyss. He began to walk downward and conjured a glowing stick for Yata and Gavin to use as well.

  Gavin went second, and Yata followed after. Being in the back of the group was something that he didn’t favor at all. He definitely wasn’t afraid of the dark since he had embarked on his short trek through the Forbidden Forest. But the moment that they stepped down into the dark corridors of this underground facility, he was overwhelmed with a disconcerting feeling. Perhaps it was the clamminess or even the scant light that radiated from the small sticks they held. Other than that, it was pitch-black, and Yata followed the shadowed image of Gavin, who walked before him. The corridor was extremely narrow and scarred with some type of markings, carved delicately with deep incisions into the stone walls, as if they were in an ancient burial ground. Seldom was he this uncomfortable, yet here he was. His heart pounded as it had when he was a child whenever he felt fear. Nothing had happened, yet he already felt this foreign feeling—how cowardly of him. He blinked when he found the narrow hallway opening up into a massive room filled with blackness, their tiny glow sticks lighting up only a small percentage of the abyss that engulfed them.

  “How does your magic work?” Yata asked Noah curiously.

  “Anything that I imagine in my mind becomes a reality. I can create any type of shape or form using creative magic,” Noah said, clicking his fingers. A large glowing set of green tracks began to set its place in the air, spiraling around the room, illuminating the darkness a bit. But what fascinated Yata was that Noah conjured a train next, supposedly a dwarven model of underground transportation. The magical train followed the tracks, lighting up the entire room as it spiraled until it reached the very top of the ceiling and exploded in a burst of green light that attached itself to the wall, fighting back the darkness.

  “If anything,” Gavin said, looking at the magic in awe, “wouldn’t your type of magic be the strongest type? Since it is essentially fitting for any situation and also allows for the creator’s imagination to form as a weapon to defeat his opponents? It seems that it would be even more powerful than Keimaro’s flames.”

  “Ah, it is very strong. My magic is tactical and can be helpful when I can’t utilize my surroundings. It is also quite a defensive power. But in terms of strength, it is not optimal. The magic can be shattered by someone as strong as Keimaro—and with such rowdy and angry flames, he could easily overpower my defenses and defeat me,” Noah said and then pointed forward to an enormous curved archway that led into yet another large room. “This is where you will find the truth of what the Faar government has been doing behind the backs of the people.”

  Yata watched as Gavin began to walk forward into the next room and gasped. The boy followed the soldier and found many large tubes filled with human beings in odd, glowing, colorful liquids. Tables were filled with different types of bubbling fluids of a variety of colors in vials and flasks. A giant lab.

  Yata moved closer to one of the tubes and gulped, realizing how skinny this human being was. It was a girl—an ordinary girl with long jet-black hair and slender arms, probably from being left here to starve. Small tubes were attached to her skin and seemed to be pumping odd fluids into her body. Immediately, Yata regretted coming down here. He turned away, ready to empty his st
omach.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Gavin snarled, looking at the hundreds of massive glass tubes that contained humans inside of them. His eyes were wide with disbelief at what he was seeing. His hands were shaking as he looked all around, taking in his surroundings. “What the hell is going on?”

  “The Faar government has been trying to develop a way to give artificial magical power that is on a whole new level of strength using merely chemicals rather than natural substances from the world. They intend to create an army of magicians in order to give them the upper hand in war against the Spartans or Athenians so that they would be able to conquer the land,” Noah explained. “These test subjects are humans that were taken off of the streets of the lower district. Poverty. No one would miss them, so the government kidnapped them and performed sick tests on their bodies to see if they could create the ultimate weapon.”

  “Did they succeed?”

  “I’m not sure,” Noah said. “These humans seem to be mostly dead, and the place is pretty much abandoned.”

  Yata was watching the girl in the tube once more. She had been taken from the streets and used as a lab rat by Faar’s alchemists and chemists. His hands balled into tight fists at his side. I won’t forgive them for this atrocity.

  The girl’s eyes snapped open and flashed a brilliant red. The two of them stared at each other for a brief moment before Yata yelped with surprise and staggered backward, bumping into a table. Glass vials and flasks exploded into glittering shards as chemicals spilled off of the table. She was alive! How was that possible?

  Gavin dashed over to Yata and grabbed the hilt of his sword. He quickly drew his blade, whirling his weapon before him as he looked at the girl in the glass tube. “She’s … alive?” he said with surprise and grunted as he swung at the tube. A single slash was enough to shatter the glass completely, raining shards down onto the ground. Odd fluids that stank of waste poured out onto the ground from the shattered tube.