by Amanda Churi
Petrified, Seek obeyed, taking two of the smallest backtracking steps and blindly allowing Merritt to engage in battle. Swings from both sides became blurs—everything around her was becoming fuzzy and insignificant. In those risky seconds that she wrestled with her fear and fatigue, the scarce remnants of the Encryption boldly bolted past her with guns blasting, arrows flying, and bombs combusting, but her worries kept her rooted, staring at that terrible fortress as twisting strikes of lightning descended. The enemy couldn’t tell who she was through her crusted face and cloaked head, but she knew where those scopes were aiming—at her and Pinion alike.
Her admirable leader was the warrior Seek should have been. Pinion’s hope was so much stronger than her fear, keeping her at the head of the charge with the green aura around her burning brighter than ever before. In acts of desperation, Haxors and Bots tried to take her down however possible, but they were so lucky as to spray her with dust. Her robotic wing protected her from the back, shooting knives of green and cutting down those who came too close, and her stained-glass sword showed no mercy to such lowly sinners, giving them a FastPass to death.
A warship far above honed in on Pinion, launching its death ray. Pinion’s sharp instincts took note, and she turned to meet the strike face-first, throwing out her sword and entrapping the oncoming bolt in a web of green energy—a leash holding the ship at her mercy. The ship tried to steer away unsuccessfully, restrained by Pinion’s unbreakable hold. Smiling, she wound her arm up like a pitcher, releasing them with a furious swing. The ship plowed into another with fatal force, a violent rain of fireworks shooting out in all directions.
Seek’s weak heart throbbed, the burning skies a painful reminder of just how much the others carried her. She didn’t know why, but she knew that she was chosen for a reason… Those above worked in mysterious ways, and it wasn’t something as simple as chance that her angels spared her. She had already let them down so much through her cowardice—she couldn’t do that a second more.
I’m not weak, she fiercely told herself. The strongest thing I ever did was leave that place… And tonight, I’m taking back my life!
She broke away from the frozen soil and sprinted straight into hell. Her fists flared with righteous, faith-strengthened spheres, and she proudly used the powers they gave her, striking any who threatened to keep her from fulfilling a several-thousand-year-old mission. With each empowered blow, she lost another breath—another tick, but she kept throwing any punch needed.
As their dwindling wave pushed forward, figures of blue emerged atop the towering ice walls in an endless line. They stretched as far as the eye could see, wrapping around the entirety of the fortress. As sculptures, the Elites stood—watched, waited, and then, they repelled down the walls with their chains as one, an army of frightening synchronicity. Once on the ground, they turned to face the encroaching rebels and stood motionless, the hundreds of them, grapples readied and frozen eyes fixed forward.
Seek’s gut spun wildly; the Encryption kept getting closer, yet the Elites remained immovable. They were waiting; for what, she didn’t know, but they clearly had a plan.
Seek could only hope that the Encryption’s proved superior.
Seek’s quivering legs pushed their limits, the child passing enemy and ally alike until she caught up to her courageous leader. “Pinion! The Elites are up to something!”
“What, you think I don’t know that?!” Pinion screamed and suddenly spun. Her lifted sword grabbed an incoming lightning bolt and shot it back at the warship, drenching the sky in a molten rain.
“W-well then we need to do it! Now! Before they strike first!”
“We’re not close enough yet!” The queen speared a boldly charging Haxor through his gut. With a disgusted snarl, she whacked his body off her precious sword and into the snow before she answered Seek with a stern, unforgiving glare. “You know how much power it takes—and for a handful of seconds, nonetheless! It needs to be done once, and it needs to be done right! Just wait for my signal!”
Seek was beyond baffled, but she granted Pinion’s wish with a hard nod. Fellow Encryptors were rapidly filing in beside Seek at the front lines as the still Elites awaited their impact. Those whose names Seek had a hard time remembering and those who were unforgettable… They were all there ready to meet the end with her, and honestly, there was no other group of such worthy yet flawed people she would have rathered gone down with—she only wished they had all been together to see what would hopefully result in a freed sun: Eero, Mabel, Embry, Kaitlyn… And even Justus.
“LOCK HANDS!” Pinion bellowed.
All who heard the signal fiercely clamped the hands of whatever ally was nearest; those who had begun to fall behind put on an extra burst of speed to join with the growing human chain. But Seek did not join in, directly behind Pinion and ahead of the crowd, waiting… Listening.
“NOW, SEEK!”
Her calves reacted instantaneously, and Seek lunged, wrapping her arms around the base of Pinion’s wing.
The two nearest Encryptors each reached out to Seek with a single hand, grabbing her by her undertunic as the child struggled to run in time with Pinion. From the two linked to the Seeker, the formed chain continued to fan out until the entire army was plowing together as a deadly, hand-in-hand arc steered by the corrupted angel.
Confused fractures raced across the solid faces of the Elites as their act of war turned into a party game, but none backed down; stances widened, and chains began spinning, eyes of neon blue growing brighter and brighter until their anger created a barrier of light.
Seek could hardly watch, wincing as the distance between the two armies closed for good. Every second dragged, especially as Seek glared at Pinion, anxiously awaiting her next move—but the longer she waited, the slower their steps fell, and the closer the enemy came, heightening the suspense.
They say when your time comes, life flashes before your eyes—but from what Seek saw, it was the opposite.
A cry of life or death exploded from the queen as she threw her sword to the sky. A winding strike of green magic burst free from the blade, hissing and twisting like a serpent into the air. It clashed with the clouds and boomed, shot out across the sky in all directions like a green, zapping cage.
Enemies froze mid-strike and stride, Elites included as Pinion’s manipulation of Time turned the soldiers into jade statues. Lifted ships were stuck in the sky, serpentine tanks caught mid-plow—everything within the cage that was not attached to the queen fell to a silent, temporary death. Not even the wind moved, bringing an abrupt peace to no-man’s land.
“Keep running!” Pinion grunted painfully. “I can’t hold it long!”
She lowered her head as she gave her shaking sword another thrust, deepening the wound she brought to the sky. An aura of blue rose around their storming feet, spheres of blue sky lifting from their skin the closer they got to those horrific gates. Seek could feel her breath escaping her; there was a lapse in strength flowing over her soul. Had she not held onto Pinion, she would have toppled and buried herself right then and there in the snow.
They were phasing. They were going to blink right into the heart of the enemy.
“HANG ON TIGHT!” Pinion screamed. “We’re going through—!”
She was ferociously silenced. Her head snapped back, a bullet of black splitting the air and colliding head-on with Puteulanus, shattering it. Her livid green eyes flashed their lost blue, illuminating her stunned, agonized face, and all Seek could do was scream her queen’s name as she fell, dragging the front of their chain down with her. Once Pinion’s stomach hit the packed snow, the illusion she gifted her warriors shattered like glass, and there they stood, aghast, abandoned, and nose-to-nose with the Elites.
It took a moment before the Proxez saw what was directly before them, but Seek didn’t let them take advantage of that opportunity. Screaming, she tore away from her allies and scrambled to her feet, leaping in front of her fallen queen with arms spread wide, f
eeling her restraints snap. “GET BACK!”
“MOVE!”
Seek was shoved away so quickly that she hardly had time to process it, but by then, Pinion had already recovered, striking with her greatsword and deflecting another black bullet that had taken aim at the angelic child.
Seek could hardly breathe, graciously staring at her unstoppable queen. She most certainly wasn’t dead, but Puteulanus might as well have been. The attack shattered it far beyond repair; faltering sparks of lively blue and warped green briefly ignited before dying, desperately trying to repair itself as chunks of the orb crumbled and fell. Blood oozed out around the darkening crater in Pinion’s forehead and dripped into her eyes, but she never blinked it away, her sight dead set on who had nearly taken her life.
No one dared to move as the two squared off; even the tanks and airships halted their assaults. The attacker stood atop the wall directly over Pinion, veiled in a cast of smog. With a swing of the arms and a spring into the air, they fell fast and furiously straight toward their target.
“GET BACK!” Pinion yowled, hardly ushering her soldiers out of the way as the attacker plowed down fist-first feet from them. A crippling ring of seismic waves flew from their knuckles and rocked the ground; chasms darted across the compact earth and ripped up carpets of snow, submerging the world in a blizzard of impenetrable white. Nearly all soldiers kneeled to keep their ground, but neither Pinion nor Seek moved.
Even with the settling snow, one glance was all that was needed to identify the enemy. The misty white eyes were certainly foreign, but his young, freckled face was one of a kind in their dark, hopeless world. His robotic arm had absorbed the impact of the plunge just fine, as did his platinum, robotic legs, but his other arm was still one of flesh; his fingers were fluently spinning and flipping three cards at once, all of which spewed the deadliest literal black magic to ever grace the universe.
“Griffin…?” Seek squeaked.
Pinion didn’t care to speak; she threw her sword forward, the tip of her ragged blade inches from his raised chin. Her face was bending in a way that Seek had never seen—a mixture of deep, pronounced pain wrapped up nicely with confusion and hatred. Had it been anyone else, Pinion would have decapitated them right then and there—and it definitely wasn’t Griffin that stopped her, but the man he so closely resembled.
“DADDYYY!”
Seek felt her ear twitch. “Daddy?” She looked back as Sage skipped to the front of the crowd, whacking celebratory puffs of snow into the air with their needle.
“Daddy…?” Seek repeated breathlessly.
Pinion slightly lowered her sword. “I was right…” she hissed, completing the puzzle as well. “I thought Sage looked familiar… But bringing my doll to life? I can’t even begin to think how my father did it—or why.”
“DADDYYY!” Sage tried again, this time louder.
Sage’s impudence caught Griffin’s attention, turning his infuriated head to the puppet.
“No, Sage!” Seek screamed.
She reached for Sage as they skipped past her, but they just smacked her away, caught in a contagious, overwhelmed fit of smiles and laughter. They pranced right up to Griffin without a trace of fear, throwing their flaccid arms around him. “It’s youuu! I can tell! Oh, Daddy! It was sooo hard to find—!”
Griffin roared, stabbing Sage right through the nape with his readied cards. Sage seized up, their stunted body unable to react—not even a whimper could escape. Furious, Griffin grabbed Sage by their frozen arms and ripped them away, tossing Sage aside into the drifts with such power that the puppet vanished completely.
Griffin did not advance toward Sage, but his eyes did return to Pinion. No advance was made on either side—both armies just stared.
A creak that clawed the ears reverberated through the hollowed land, forcing Seek to cautiously divert her attention to the changing scenery. The ice gates that they had been set on breaking through swung right open, almost as an invitation to the rebels.
An army ripped right from the Devil waited in the icy courtyard, creating a literal cloud of doom. There were squadrons upon squadrons of unnamed, grotesque demons, but the far more infamous was direct and center—specifically, the shis and falkas. The deceased stallions formed their own cavalry unit, snorting infectious black mist while their manes and tails burned with black, all-consuming fire. Shi warriors in their primal forms were mounted upon the falkas, one hand clutching the horse’s seeping spine and the other holding a demonic blade of their choice.
But there was one demon at the front far more hated than any nameless one. He was the leader of the cavalry, vaporized blood streaming out of his manipulated eyes. The dark magic of the falka Typo rode enhanced his disgraceful form, fueling his body with so much extra energy that he became borderless, fluctuating far beyond his natural limits.
Seek pulled her hood down farther, averting eye contact at all cost.
“You bastard,” Pinion snarled.
Where Seek expected to hear his heinous cackle, there was a sigh instead, a tired one. Typo did not dismount, did not charge and strike—in fact, no part of him showed any aggression besides his eyes. “This is your last chance.”
“Excuse me?!” Pinion snapped. “For what?!”
“To back down. To surrender.” Typo reared his neck high, overlooking the paused battlefield—the enraged, exhausted, and desperate faces of the Encryption. “So few made it here…” he noted, making sure to project his voice. “So many more than this could have been spared had you just listened… Just came to one meeting. Just tried to collaborate once.”
Pinion hissed ferociously, her neck lurching forward with her hair flying behind her. Even with a half-busted head, she did not hint at being weakened. “You prick! Stop trying to play that card! Nothing you ever said was true, and you know it!”
“What I know is that you never bothered to use reasoning—to consider that maybe even one word from our mouths was honest. You let your emotions rule; it’s people like you who have to make us resort to such extremes.”
Seek moved nothing besides her eyes, trying to keep track of every enemy on the map, but something about this situation rubbed her the wrong way… And severely. Any enemy could have launched a surprise attack at any moment and closed out such a brutal war with one ultimate strike—but surely enough, Typo made sure they did not.
“I know some of you are sensible!” Typo announced loudly. “I promise, lay down your weapons, and you will be spared to some degree! The Proxez is not the enemy here! You think that we are intent on destroying what nature is left? We have an entire conservatory that we have been building for years, expanding by the day! You think we needlessly kill? We get rid of problems now so that humans will never again fall into such deadly conflict! You think we’ve gotten rid of books? The past? We have a whole library hundreds of years old, digital records on top of it! We are not uncultured! We are not evil! We are just a group evolving to beat the terrible conditions that were forced upon us at birth! But her!” His finger swung accusingly toward Pinion.
“Your precious queen has tried to play hero for so long that she has turned into the villain! For well over a century, it has without a doubt been her fault that things have worsened like they have! Because every flag of peace we wave, she sets ablaze! If you succeed, it won’t just be us who die, but you too! The entire world! Everything you’ve fought so hard to save! We could have hit the reset button on everything a long time ago, but you know what? We didn’t. And you want to know why? Because we love our home! And we need to clean it up! Get rid of the trash to keep it safe! Believe me, your deaths have been nothing personal—they were necessary collateral due to the stubbornness of your queen.”
An uncomfortable silence settled, only offset by Griffin’s ragged, stand-by breathing and Sage’s broken-hearted sobs that were crushed beneath the snow.
Seek cast a heightened side-glance at her queen, whose eyes were daggers, whose snarl continued to shred her mouth, but she
did not retort.
Why…? Why didn’t she have anything to say?!
Typo extended his open hand toward the Encryption. “Please. This is my last chance to save those of you that I can. Join us, and for once in your lives, live.”
Eyes turned uncertainly, distress unlike any other crossing so many faces that Seek had never seen look like anything but stone. Some weapons lowered; select feet dared to step.
“I WILL SLAY ANY WHO MOVE!” Pinion roared.
Her cry froze those souls in place as though she had used Time to catch them.
“You took an oath!” she reminded them harshly. “What, you’re really going to let one shoddily put together speech, one by a demon, nonetheless, deter you from what you have been fighting for this whole time?! That’s desertion! Take one step out of line, and I will kill you myself! TRY ME!”
Feet slid back. Heads dipped in shame, and with them, weapons rose.
Typo frowned, retracting his hand, and with it, their lives. “And you all call me a ‘tyrant.’ I think that title is a bit misplaced.”
His hands buried themselves into his falka’s mane, and when they lifted, they held a remote. “Fine then. We will just have to make sure that victory is as impossible for you as is Pinion’s sanity.” His eyes found Seek’s—the color of which she could never hide. “Compliments to Justus, by the way. Make sure you tell your brother how appreciative we all are of his invention when you meet him again, Prysm.”
Seek could have sworn she felt a vessel burst in her brain. Justus?! What is he—?!
“Now then, go make yourself useful for once, Griffin de Vaux.” Typo’s hands collapsed upon the remote, shattering it into several pieces.
Griffin’s neck immediately jerked to the side, a robotic squeal and cascade of white sparks bursting from his mouth. Limbs ruled by code and electricity began to twitch, snapping his malfunctioning neck back and forth with brutal clicks. His teeth were chattering with hunger, and his eyes were jumping apart in opposite directions, not sure what to focus on. The cards in his hand only spun faster and faster until their speeds formed their own whine.