That Which is Unexpected

by A.L. Bridges

  Chapter 16: That Which is Unexpected

  I open my eyes to find that Cheza, Tia, and I are lying on the floor in Uncle Eric’s (or should I say Inti’s?) office.

  “Cole, Chezarei will probably be asleep for a while. The transition does that to some. Could you please carry her to her room and put her to bed? Then meet me in the basement wearing tight fitting shorts and a tank top,” Tia says as she hops to her feet.

  I nod and scoop Cheza up in my arms. Wow this girl is small. In addition to being only a few inches over five feet, she can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. I walk down the hall and into Cheza’s room. I am about to set her on her bed when I stop. I can feel Cheza softly breathing in my arms. It isn’t like this is the first time that I’ve carried my sister while she was sleeping, but for some reason, I’m hyperaware of her.

  I look down at her heaving chest before moving my gaze toward her face. Her lips are slightly parted and inviting in a way. I start to move my face down toward them. I’m about six inches away when her eyes flutter open and stare up at me almost expectantly. Cheza closes her eyes and moves her face forward slightly as I continue my approach. I stop about an inch from her mouth, feeling her breath softly brushing my lips.

  “I… I…” I stammer.

  Then I freak the fuck out, drop her, and run out her door screaming “I HAVE TO GO!”

  What in the hell was I doing? I was about to kiss my little sister!

  “But I’m not actually you’re sister, Cole,” The memory of Cheza’s voice from my dream whispers in the back of my mind.

  Ugh! It’s all that stupid dream’s fault! It won’t get out of my head and now it’s infecting my brain! I run into my room and quickly change into a pair of black, tight fitting, athletics shorts and a black tank top. I open my door and walk to the entrance of the living room when I hear Cheza’s door open behind me.

  “I wouldn’t have minded, you know?” Cheza quietly says, and then she shuts her door.

  What did she mean? I open the door to my right, walk down the steps, and turn left into the basement. I look around at the familiar training grounds from the entryway on the right wall (relative to the house’s position). In the thirty feet to the left of the entrance is all the workout equipment: elliptical machine, tread mill, leg press, a Bowflex, etc. To the right of the entrance is a 50’ x 50’ vinyl-padded training area that extends to the back and left walls. Along the right wall are two, six-foot long, wooden benches. In the back right corner is a weapon rack that holds the swords I used when I fenced with Uncle Eric. The back wall is covered in panes of mirrors, each one a square foot, and completes the whole ‘gym feel’ of the basement.

  I see Tia standing in the center of the padded area wearing her usual black tank top and yoga pants. She has her arms crossed underneath her chest and a look of satisfaction on her face. It looks like everything has gone according to plan for her.

  “Is everything alright Cole?” Tia tauntingly asks with mock concern. I glare at her in response.

  “Whatever, let’s just get started,” I snidely reply.

  Tia walks over to the training weapons, looks at them for a moment, and then shakes her head.

  “These just aren’t going to work,” Tia says while picking up a longsword that is coated in a silicone gel-like substance, same as all the other weapons. Uncle Eric coated them in the gel so that he could train me to use them with full contact while I also became accustomed to the weight of a real blade, which I thought was pretty cool when I was younger. How many kids can say that their parents let them use real swords? I can’t see what any of this has to do with training me to use my power though.

  Tia sets the longsword back down and puts her hand flat on the mirror pane above the rack and a few seconds later, something interesting happens. The middle of the back wall, a section that is seven panes high and five panes wide, moves silently forward and to the left. Another secret room? Tia walks through the door while motioning for me to follow her. As I pass through the doorway, I look at the door and find that it is steel plating that is six inches thick, along with the rest of the rear wall, before turning my attention forward.

  I hunch over as I give out a dramatic sigh and squeeze my eyes shut, bringing my right hand up to pinch the bridge of my nose in response to the sight in front of me. Seriously? A bat cave? I now feel as though my life is just a bad joke.

  I look closely and see that this bat cave is more of an armory, complete with a gun range further in. Tia walks over to the left wall, which holds the largest collection of melee weapons that I have ever seen. They’re made from half a dozen different metals and from dozens of regions. The opposite wall has a large collection of guns.

  Tia tosses me a Spanish rapier, the style Uncle Eric had me use when he was teaching me to fence. The ‘cup hilt’ of the Spanish rapier may not have been as pretty as the ‘swept hilt’ of the Italian rapier, but it was more likely to allow me to keep my fingers. Tia grabs an ivory-handled kukri blade: the kind of blades used by the Nepalese Gurkha. I also think they might’ve been used by Alice in the Resident Evil movies.

  “Umm… Tia, shouldn’t you use sword instead?” I ask, thinking of her safety.

  “I can’t have too much of an advantage!” Tia exclaims as she smiles at me. I don’t think I’m going to like the connotation associated with that. Tia starts walking back into the gym area as I follow her.

  “Okay, since we are short on time, we’re going to work on three things at once! We are going to work on: heightening your senses to the speed they are at when you are in a Drive state, control of your blood to reinforce your muscles and to keep your blood from leaving your body, and the last thing we are going to work on is control of your Drives so you don’t overuse them and end up dead… or as Chezarei’s obedient little love slave,” Tia states with a sly grin and motions for me to stop where I am while she keeps walking.

  I imagine Cheza sitting on her bed with her legs crossed, wearing a black lace corset with matching panties, as I’m on all fours while she tells me to lick her foot.

  “FOCUS!” Tia shouts, snapping me out of my little fantasy.

  “We don’t have time for you to be fantasizing about Chezarei wearing a corset as she drips hot candle wax on your chest while riding you and having you smack her on the ass with a riding crop!” Tia exclaims.

  Is that where my fantasy was going?

  “Now let’s start,” Tia says.

  She clears the thirty feet between us almost faster than I can see and cuts into my right bicep. The incision isn’t very deep, but it starts bleeding immediately and it sure as hell hurts. Tia is now back where she started, thirty feet away. She smirks as she blurs forward again. I get the rapier up in time to block the initial strike, only to have her dance around behind me to slice the back of my right calf. She goes back to where she started once again, still broadly smiling.

  Tia seems to be slowing down because I manage to parry three of her swings on the next attack until she cuts straight up the length of my left bicep. Tia’s smile isn’t as broad when she returns to the starting position. Tia now appears to be moving at her normal speed. There is a gold light around Tia’s body as I block seven of her next swings, until she gets in a slash across my left thigh, a little deeper this time. I respond with a sharp intake of air through gritted teeth as blood drips trickles down my leg. Tia isn’t smiling anymore. I block Tia ten times before she cuts deep into my right forearm.

  “AUGH!” I scream, but manage to keep a hold on the rapier.

  Something is wrong. Tia is faster this time as she presses her attack without returning to her starting position. My body can no longer keep up to block her as she slices deep into my right side, cutting the width of my rib cage before carving a X into my back. I feel a Drive activate, only this time I am simply made co-pilot instead of being jettisoned from the cockpit entirely.

  Okay, a junior co-pilot who isn’t allowed to touch anything, but is informed of what is happening
.

  The Drive instantly stops all blood flowing from my body and heals the minor cuts, accelerating the healing process by speeding up the fibroblasts that restore the damaged capillaries and then saturating my blood with oxygen before pushing that through the newly restored capillaries, or so I theorize. I start to repair and reinforce my leg muscles while reinforcing the muscles in my right arm. Tia comes at me again from the front before suddenly slowing to a walk.

  “Good job, Co—” Tia starts to say and then freezes when she meets my eyes.

  “OH SHIT!” Tia screams right before I slam the rapier through her foot, pinning her to the floor. Tia yelps in surprise and pain while I’m sprinting for the armory, moving at a normal speed for some reason.

  “EIN NYET!” Tia yells before I reach the armory door. I enter the armory and move to the right wall.

  “ZWEI NYET! DREI NYET!” Tia shouts from the gym.

  The Drive eyes a hand gun on the bench in front of the right wall, expecting that it was fired last so it may still have some rounds left in it. I pick up the gun with my left hand and know by the weight that my expectations have been met. The ‘pilot’ tells me that there are six rounds left in the magazine of this Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. I reach the armory’s door as Tia yanks the rapier from her foot. Moving at full speed, the Drive aims to fire all six rounds into Tia’s chest.

  I rapidly fire three shots before the other three get cut off by a kukri handle knocking the gun from my hand as the blade sticks into my forearm, in between my radius and ulna. Tia must’ve thrown it right before the shots hit her. I pull the kukri from my arm and throw it at her as she is getting to her feet. She sees it coming and rolls under it while grabbing the rapier with her right hand in mid-roll. After rolling to her feet, Tia sprints toward me.

  I’m unarmed so I’m pretty sure I’m fucked, but I can almost feel the Drive smirking as it reinforces the muscles in my right arm, shoulder, and chest—it has a plan. Tia is about ten feet away, making her about five feet out of stabbing range, when I feel my right hand grab my bleeding left forearm. The Drive starts crystalizing my blood by somehow stripping individual atoms from it, making it into a double-edged blade that is one inch wide with crimson in the center, black around the center and a thin strip of clear crystal along the edge. The blade rounds off into a cylindrical handle with no cross guard.

  Tia is four feet away when she starts the stab towards my stomach. I dive to my left to dodge the incoming rapier stab while pulling the eighteen inch blood blade from my left arm and swinging it into Tia’s right forearm, knocking the rapier from her hand. The amount of strength I put into that swing should have chopped her arm clean off, but I suppose she is a goddess; nonetheless, the blade sinks in, stopping at the bone. I use the force and momentum of the swing to stand up and push Tia back as she screams.

  Tia is surprised and her face starts to show hints of fear as the blade moves slightly into her bone, and by slightly, I mean maybe a millimeter. I use her surprise to trip her and follow her to the ground, keeping pressure on the blade. I’m straddling her while trying to drive my blade in deeper, when I hear:

  “WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!?” Sara screams from the doorway, twenty feet to my left.

  I turn my head to look at her while leaving the pressure on Tia, but not increasing it. There is a bit of gold light emanating from Sara’s outline and red from the orb inside her, over her navel.

  “First the screams and then Rei bursts into the living room, bawling, saying that you are killing Cole! And THE GUNSHOTS!?” Sara continues her rampage until she gets a good look at me, cocks her head to the side, and asks, “Why are Cole’s eyes silver?”

  “COLE IS STUCK IN HIS DRIVE! GO GRAB A TASER FROM THE ARMORY!” Tia shouts from beneath me. Sara starts to move toward the armory and then Cheza steps out from behind Sara with a tear-stained face and a silver glow.

  “Cole?” Cheza asks, her voice cracking slightly.

  The Drive suddenly hands back the controls and the lights around everyone fade. I remove the blade from Tia’s arm and step away from her.

  “It looks like that won’t be necessary,” Sara says. I suddenly feel dizzy and fall to my knees.

  “Cole!” Cheza exclaims while rushing to my side.

  “I’m alright Cheza, I’m just really dizzy,” I tell her.

  “Well duh! Your blood is all over the place!” Cheza replies with a teary-eyed smile and some sniffling.

  “Rei, can you run up to the kitchen and get Cole a sandwich and something sugary to drink?” Sara asks.

  “Sure. I’ll be right back, okay Cole?” Cheza says while leaving, but looks like she’d rather stay.

  “Alright, talk,” Sara commands once she hears the upper basement door close.

  “Well Kira told me to train him, so I brought him down here, showed him the armory, and tossed him a rapier while I grabbed a kukri,” Tia starts.

  “That one?” Sara interjects, pointing to the blood blade that is in my hand.

  “No, I’ll get to that in a second. I mean that rapier over there,” Tia replies and points to the back wall of the gym, where the Spanish rapier lies.

  “Anyway I told him that we were going to work on control of his blood flow, speeding up his perceptions, and control over his Drives. We started dueling and his perceptions started speeding up so that he could keep up with my body movements, but I kept my swings slow. He was still bleeding from the small cuts I gave him so while trying to get him to subconsciously control that, I kinda sorta took things a little too far,” Tia explains.

  “A LITTLE?” Sara yells incredulously. “Tia, there are over two liters of blood over there! That’s enough to kill an average man!”

  “It could have also been the fact that I was a little peeved about Cole’s comment when I was wearing the bunny suit…” Tia says as an afterthought.

  Just then, Cheza opens the basement door, comes down the stairs, and hands me my sandwich and a liter of Mountain Dew Voltage: four layers of honey smoked ham and pepper jack cheese on wheat with mustard on both sides, just how I like it. Cheza, you know me so well I should just marry you and get it over with… I really didn’t just think that, did I?

  I’m guessing that, based on my facial expressions, Tia discerned what I was thinking because she starts giggling… or gods can read minds…

  “No, Cole. Tia can’t read minds. It’s just really easy to tell what you are thinking,” Sara explains while smiling.

  “Alright so, where was I? Right, so Cole snaps into a Drive state and then he throws the rapier into my foot, pinning me to the floor, before he makes a break for the armory. Since his eyes were silver, I had no clue what Drive state he was in, but since he threw away his only weapon for a tactical advantage, I knew it wasn’t Survival and there wasn’t anything in the vicinity for him to protect, so I figured it had to be the Adroit Drive. So I shouted the override command, but instead of dropping like a ton of bricks, he just kept going. So I shouted Zwei and Drei next, but the only thing that happened was him coming back with a 9mm and proceeding to blow three holes in my chest,” Tia says while poking at the holes in her tank top before Cheza interrupts.

  “Cole’s eyes were silver when he rescued me earlier too,” Cheza says.

  “They were? Huh…” Tia responds, mulling over the new information.

  “What’s all this about an override command?” I ask.

  “Harry, I mean Huitzilopochtli, came up with it as kind of a failsafe for the gods. They have the power to take a Shorn One into or out of a Drive depending on which command is used. He took words from Russia and a Germanic tribe, and combined them for the override commands, thinking that there was no chance that someone would say words from two different languages in that order by chance and so, there was no chance of some random person accidentally activating a Shorn One’s Drive. Ein was used for Adroit, Zwei for Survival, and Drei for Protector,” Tia explains.

  “Wait, so why didn’t you use that on me when yo
u were talking me down out of the Drive on the bridge?” I question.

  “Because the override commands drop the person like a sack of rocks for up to six hours afterward. Not something that would be productive for a meeting. Anyway, I stopped the rest of the bullets by throwing the kukri at his gun. Only problem was, the kukri flew through his forearm after it disarmed him, which put a slight damper on my recovery plan for Cole. I was getting to my feet when I saw the kukri flying towards me so I rolled under it while grabbing the rapier that had previously been pinning my foot to the floor, with my right hand. I started sprinting towards him, figuring I would run him through and then pin him to the floor until he snapped out of it or lost consciousness from blood loss,” Tia says.

  “I thought I was able to seal my wounds so how would I pass out from blood loss?” I inquire, interrupting again.

  “You can seal wounds after they are sustained, not while you are sustaining them. For example, a rapier through your stomach, if left there, would cause you to bleed; however, a bullet will not and the same thing goes for arrows so long as you take out the shaft. Granted, it would take a long while for you to bleed out. Shorn Ones usually have up to a liter more blood than an average man. Where they put it, I don’t know. In addition to that, you also recover blood much more quickly. You reacted in the same way a normal man reacts if they were to lose less than half of the blood that you did, so you might’ve regenerated some blood in the time we spent fighting,” Tia explains.

  “Anyway, as I’m charging him, Cole grabs his left forearm. I go in for the jab and he rips his right hand across his left arm, pulling out that blade, which he then used to get into the position you saw us in,” Tia finishes.

  “He solidified his blood?” Sara incredulously asks.

  “I was getting fed bits of information from my Drive and even it didn’t seem to know exactly how it was making the blade, but I have a theory. Tia, am I right in assuming that gods have very dense bones?” I question.

  “Yeah. We have normal skin, but we heal almost instantaneously and our bones are really strong. They are supposed to be impossible to cut and impossible to crush without some sort of incredibly large boulder dropped from a really high place,” Tia nods and replies.

  “Yet I cut into it with this blade, right?” I ask.

  “Yes, but only a very slight amount that would barely constitute a scratch,” Tia confirms.

  “I think that I am taking silicon atoms and carbon atoms from my blood, along with some iron atoms, and combining them to make silicon carbide. It’s a black, diamond-esque, crystal substance that they use to make ceramic tank armor out of. Iron impurities in silicon carbide give it a black hue, which explains the black in between the crimson center and clear edge of the blade. It’s the only artificial substance I can think of that would be hard enough,” I explain.

  “Sara, you know that we can’t tell anyone about this, right?” Tia proclaims.

  “What is the big deal? I only created a short sword,” I reply.

  “Cole, you shouldn’t be able to do this. Manipulating blood that is outside of their bodies isn’t something Shorn Ones could do. Only one warrior ever could and I didn’t tell you about him because I didn’t think it applied, but now it seems necessary. When the Spaniards came with guns, we found out that the Shorn Ones weren’t a match. In response, Huitzilopochtli took the remaining blood that had stored up over the years, about the equivalent of 50,000 people or 2,500 blood warriors, and compressed it down into a single warrior. With the new warrior, we won the next several battles because this warrior could manipulate his blood regardless of its location, in addition to being faster and stronger than the other Shorn Ones. He was also much more difficult to kill because he healed at a much faster rate than the others, and he could even mend broken bones and organs when in battle. We thought we had found the answer to the Conquistadors, but the only disadvantage was the massive amounts of sacrifices it took to create even one of these warriors. So we demanded a few extra sacrifices at the next festival. The Aztecs would often sacrifice prisoners so that they didn’t have to sacrifice our subjects, which was a practice that worked well up until that day. It turned out that our ultimate warrior had fallen in love with a missionary prisoner. He would go visit her every night and he grew attached. When she was about to be sacrificed on the alter at Tenochtitlan, he rushed in and killed the priest. Huitzilopochtli saw this, so he sent three gods down to stop our warrior. Tonatiuh, a sun god; Tlaloc, a thunder and water god; and Metzli, a Moon Goddess; flew down and shouted the override commands. It stopped him, but it didn’t incapacitate him like it should have so they ran him through with three spears: one through each side of his torso at an angle and one through the center. Then the warrior died in a massive explosion, killing the three gods and the hundreds of thousands of Aztecs in attendance. The only one who wasn’t killed was the missionary, who had somehow been saved from the blast. The majority of the Aztec force was decimated, and Hernan Cortes was able to take the capital with ease,” Tia says, finishing the story.

  “Looking at you, I believe the missionary could have been pregnant and that you are his descendant,” Tia speculates.

  “Cole, what’s important about this story is that it showed every god that they could be killed by blood warriors. This scared them so they have been hunting down people like you ever since, especially Loki’s son, Jormungandr. Jormungandr and his children have been hunting those like you for your blood and we also suspect that they are the ones that killed your mother,” Sara explains.

  “Who are his children?” I ask.

  “Vampires, Cole,” Tia seriously replies.

  Oh come on! I plan on tracking down my mother’s killers, but if at any time those bastards start sparkling… I will probably just kill myself because there is no way that my world is that ridiculous. I mean, really! What do you think Peter Parker would have done if he caught up to that mugger that killed his Uncle and that fucker started sparkling!? Not that I’m comparing myself to Spiderman, but it’s the whole revenge thing!

  I’m too tired to deal with this shit so I sigh heavily and say, “I’m going to bed.”

  I stand unsteadily to my feet and walk up the basement steps, down the hallway, and into my room. After stripping down to my underwear, I flop down onto my stomach. I focus when I hear whispers coming from the vents. I can feel Cheza’s heartbeat in her room by the time I can hear the whispers clearly.

  “We have to handle this carefully, Tia. If Kira or any of the other gods get wind of this, they’re most likely going to kill Cole on the spot,” Sara says.

  “Yeah I know! I would feel threatened by him if I ignored the fact that he has been like a little brother to me. Even so, he still scares me a little… I mean, what do those silver eyes mean? The Drives change eye color when active, but none of them are silver, and the override commands didn’t work Sara! The gods no longer have an ace in the hole with which they can stop him! If they find out about this, forget most likely, he will have every pantheon gunning for him! Harry might even tell me to do it! I don’t want to kill Cole, Sara!” Tia exclaims, followed by the sound of a smack.

  “I KNOW TIA! I know… from what Cheza said earlier, it sounds like Cole’s eyes turned silver when he used his Protector Drive too. This is just a hypothesis, but it could mean that Cole only has one Drive that assumes all the functions of the other three, and it might even have some new features that we don’t know about… Anyway, send me all of your reports before you send them to Kira. I’ll read them to make sure that they’re believable so she doesn’t have any cause to come down and see for herself. In the meantime, I’ll ask my mother some things to see if I can come up with a contingency plan in case the other gods do find out,” Sara says.

  “How are you going to ask your mom? Saraswati will know immediately if you’re lying! She’s the Goddess of wisdom!” Tia exclaims.

  “By not asking her directly of course,” Sara replies.

  That does not so
und too good.

  ****