PHANTASIA Page 5

  “Courtesy of Butz,” the falconer said cheerfully a moment later, dropping two teeth in front of them, which he had ripped out from the Gila during the exchange.

  “I had it,” Raven replied calmly.

  “Sure you did,” Butz sneered. “Just remember you owe me for this, and I won’t tell anyone I had to save the invincible Raven from the cold hand of death itself,” he laughed. Linx let out a soft howl as he continued to stare at the Gila cautiously.

  “It’s dead boy, it’s okay,” Butz said assuringly. He began walking towards the carcass in the sand, curious to know what the Gilas were trying to eat.

  Just as Red was about to follow, the Gila they had thought dead sprung back to life and hurtled towards Butz at breakneck speed, its back legs granting it a final surge of strength. Butz was caught off guard, with no time to position himself appropriately, and numbed by the sight of a purple tongue whipping wildly through the air. He shuddered and rolled his shoulders instinctively while raising his hands — seeing only the moist texture of an enormous, gaping mouth before closing his eyes.

  Red lifted his hands to cast anything that came to mind but was sure he was going to be too late. The scene seemed to unfold in front of him at a heightened speed, one his quickness could not catch up to. Yet at the same time, the moment seemed frozen in place, letting him contemplate forever the precarious ending of his teammate. He thought of all of his experiences with Butz, running through every memory of him in a fraction of a second.

  He turned to look at Raven who was next to him just an instant ago to see if she had been able to do anything, but she was no longer there. Feeling like he was moving underwater, he twisted his head back around to the lunging Gila and saw Raven on the other side of it, as if she had somehow traveled back in time to change her initial location. An instant later, delayed in the same way his perception was, he heard the penetrating sound of celestial steel slicing through air and organ, in a clean yet forceful manner.

  Seconds had passed before anyone dared to speak.

  “Am… am I dead?” Butz peeped.

  “I told you, I had it.” Raven said calmly. She was on one knee and out of breath, resting on the handle of her sword, but still maintaining the poise of her form. “Anyways, consider us even.” she added. “We should pay attention to Linx more carefully from now on, he can sense if things are actually dead or not.”

  “That… that was amazing…you moved faster than sound…what was that?” the girl on the other team asked. The five of them seemed more dazed than even Butz after what had happened; they took a few steps back to digest the series of events.

  Raven gave the girl an unrevealing wink and said nothing more.

  “You blew all your energy,” S said. “Literally, I think all of it. I would’ve just let him get eaten to be honest,” she added with a sarcastic grin.

  Raven breathed deeply, still on one knee, relaxing her muscles and trying to recuperate. Red walked up to her to share his water.

  “That really was incredible…” He said. “Faster than sound…that’s why I saw what happened…and then heard it.”

  “Mmhmm,” she nodded.

  “I’m guessing you can only do it once, because of all the energy it takes?” Red asked.

  “For now,” she said. “My output isn’t like yours, don’t have as much energy.”

  “You’re fine,” Red laughed. Output, or the total amount of raw energy someone could put out, was the only thing that Red ever felt stood out about him. Still, he could never focus cleanly enough like some other people to channel it appropriately, save for when he cast anything fire related. When he would get down on himself for his inability to focus, Raven reminded him of his potential, a gesture that he always appreciated.

  “Guys…you won’t believe this,” S yelled from ahead of them. She had walked to the carcass buried in the sand, and started uncovering it. Red ran over with everyone else, paying extra attention to Linx in case any of the other Gilas were still alive. He did a double-take when he finally arrived at the creature.

  “It’s a…” Red began, but couldn’t find the words to finish.

  “A dragon,” Butz whispered reverently. He seemed to have regained his color after his near death experience. Linx purred softly next to him, examining the dead creature with equal regard.

  “It’s an Emerald Thornback,” Magnus interjected.

  Even while it lay dead and half-buried in the sand, the dragon exuded a look of majesty. Its green hide shimmered beautifully under the bed of wisp and sand that accumulated around it. Its body was enormous, one of the largest creatures Red had ever seen. Spread around its skin were tiny bristles that looked like hair but far too acuminous. Red stretched out his hand and reached over to gently touch the creature. Blood leaked out almost instantly upon contact as one of the bristles smoothly vivisected the glove of his suit and cut his skin underneath. He yelped in pain and jumped back, surprised at how sharp the bristles were. I don’t think I even touched it he thought scornfully.

  S reacted almost immediately, taking his hand and beginning to heal the cut. Tiny pink waves travelled from the tip of her hands to inside the wound, wrapping around the blood and soothing the lesion. It was a cool and tingly sensation, but was quickly overcome by a burning feeling after Magnus began rubbing a small tube of gel over it.

  “Some of the bristles were covered in Gila saliva — can’t risk an infection,” Magnus said as Red breathed deeply to absorb the sting of the gel. The idea of an infection hadn’t even occurred to him. He was suddenly greatly appreciative that Magnus had paid attention in class while he dozed off.

  “Mmhmm,” Red replied. He inhaled sharply as the gel seemed to have activated; the burning sensation increased to a peak around the tip of the cut.

  “We should pick off some of these bristles and collect the saliva. If we coat them and stick them to arrow heads, we’d have a pretty lethal weapon,” Butz suggested.

  “Good idea,” S said as she continued to nurse the cut.

  “Look at it’s eyes,” someone on the other team yelled. They walked over to the head of the dragon just as Raven had finally joined them.

  “All black…” Red whispered.

  “No way…it was meta-conditioned?” Butz asked.

  “Impossible,” Magnus replied. “You hear about it a lot in the political world, or at least I do, but it rarely happens. Too difficult of a technique to pull off. You’d be surprised how hard it would be for us to meta-condition something even as simple as an insect. A dragon would be impossible.”

  “But look, it’s eyes,” Butz protested. They were empty vessels, cloudy and black. Unmistakable signs of meta-conditioning as they had been taught — the binding control of one will over another. Red had learned about meta-conditioning in a class on psykinesthetics, or mental warfare. At the end of the class, all the students were required to try it on each other. Meta-conditioning someone felt like running through their thoughts over and over again, while fighting every little impulse their mind and body produced. It felt impossible for Red; he could barely control his own impulses, let alone someone else’s. Because psykinesthetics were ineffective against Xenosite, the subject was not heavily taught. There was no classification for people adept at it, although healers picked it up quickly, as their training already required them to be comfortable with establishing connections with other people’s minds. Besides meta-conditioning, skills related to psykinesthetics included occular manipulation, or the ability to read and control someone’s dreams, id-speech, or the ability to verbally mimic the sound of someone’s conscience by recognizing their voice patterns to give them commands they believe they gave themselves, and myodistortion, or altering someone’s perception of reality by inducing visual or auditory hallucinations. Most techniques under psykinesthetics were rarely executed, more so because they always left tell-tale signs of their practice than because they were exceptionally difficult to perform.

  “Magnus is right,” Raven replied.
“It has to be something else. Dragons are among the most powerful creatures in existence, fully sentient and arguably more intelligent and shrewd than humans. It would be impossible to meta-condition one,” she added firmly.

  “There’s a saddle here,” someone screamed from the other side of the body. They walked over again and saw strapped to the dragon a strange black colored saddle, stitched from a thick and unfamiliar hide. Red wondered briefly if it was the skin of another dragon, the only thing he could imagine that could safely wrap around the bristles without being shred to pieces.

  “This is just bizarre,” Magnus said. “Well…Emerald Thornbacks are one of the few creatures that can travel through space, a rare ability even among dragons,” he added. “I guess…something could’ve rode it… to Avalonia…but that’s impossible…dragons don’t carry people.”

  At the thought, they all quickly looked upwards and around, as if to find someone else within their company, but saw no sign of movement besides a few Lumazoas far above them. The desert remained quiet and empty.

  “Send out yellow flares,” Raven directed. “The Ignot Gilas will provide more than enough food for at least five teams. Maybe we can get more people here to study this. We should also send a message to the control room about it. It could have something to do with the caravan attack.”

  They nodded while taking out their flare guns.

  Within the hour, two other teams showed up, increasing their number to twenty, all camped around the dragon. Yellow flares went up in two other directions near them, making everyone more relaxed. If there were other teams in the vicinity, it was unlikely they would be bothered as they slept.

  Magnus was busy at work for the next few hours, directing everyone as to which parts of Ignot Gilas were edible and which were poisonous. They had cut off all the chins of the Gilas to pack their bacteria and emptied out the meat from the inside through their underbellies. During the process, they had a laugh about eating dragon meat, which Butz suggested was a once in a lifetime experience. Magnus replied that he wouldn’t be able to manage. There was something off about the idea of eating another sentient creature, something too close to cannibalism. Either ways, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate Dragonhide.

  Red and Raven helped set up everyone’s TPs as S and Butz scouted the area for signs of other critters. They put up their mock shelters just in time; a few hours into their setup it began to rain again. Everyone packed as much of the Ignot Gila meat as they could inside of their TPs, unsure if it would be edible if it was soaked with the rain.

  A light drizzle quickly picked up into a rainstorm, an unusual hiccup in solstice’s usually calm weather. As soon as signs of the storm came about, everyone skinned the Gilas as fast as they were able to and placed them underneath where they sat. Lightning in a metallic desert could charge an indefinite amount of space; the outer skin of most creatures that adapted to this environment were already insulated against such threats. The five of them huddled inside S’s TP, listening to the storm as it continued to rage outside. Red stole a glance through the entrance whenever he could, marveling at the rivers of violet rain that cascaded brilliantly off the peaks of metallic dunes — a scene only marginally lit by the fires they had created inside their TPs and Eio’s pale luminescence.

  Teams took turns keeping watch. By the time it was their turn to sleep, Red’s exhaustion from the night before had caught up to him. Laying on top of the Gila skin was an unusual feeling. It was a tough hide that resembled organic armor, but felt oddly comfortable, like a hard bed. There wasn’t enough Gila skin to cover all of their TPs, so they all decided to sleep squished together in S’s. As Red shifted around to get into a comfortable position, he noticed that the rain had gotten slightly quieter.

  “Are you really going to sleep like that?” Butz asked.

  Red turned around to see what Butz was referring to and burst out laughing when he saw Raven hunched over with a dagger in both hands.

  “Yes, and I’d stop laughing if you’d like to wake up,” Raven replied.

  “A lunatic, that one,” Butz remarked with a grin as he went back to trying to figure out a comfortable position to lay in like Red. They recounted the events of the day as they tried to sleep, remarking that they had covered a more than adequate amount of ground for one day. They had gotten lucky running into the Ignot Gilas, hopefully their fortune would carry over to the next few days.

  As Red drifted to sleep, he hoped that he wouldn’t have another nightmare. Consecutive sleepless nights would be too draining at a time when he had to keep his energy up. Raven was unlikely to recover fully by tomorrow after bursting all of her energy out to save Butz; everyone would have to put in extra effort to keep them up to pace. He went to sleep counting off his good fortune, above them all he realized, was probably that they had Raven on their team.

  When he started hearing screams in his sleep, he imagined unconsciously that his hope for a pleasant dream was broken. But then as he became slightly more aware he realized that the shouting was coming from outside. A hand shoved him hard and he finally awoke with a sudden alarm.

  “What?!” he screamed. Magnus had shoved him awake and was now doing the same to Butz and S.

  He heard shouting outside; several people were yelling “Red.”

  “Are they calling me?” he asked curiously.

  “No,” Magnus said quickly. “I don’t think so, but we need to wake up. Something’s going on.” S and Butz soon snapped awake as well.

  Raven, who Red realized had left their TP, poked in her head through the entrance. She was spot dry, which meant the rain must’ve stopped.

  “We need to move. Now.” She said it with such stern alertness, everyone followed suit without a word. After Red had packed as fast as he could, he stepped outside, and saw what everyone was yelling about. It wasn’t his name, it was a single red flare that shot up into the sky. Red flares were different, they didn’t fire up and explode like the other colors. They were slow to go up, extremely visible, and sparked up into a radius that covered twice as much breadth as anything else.

  They signaled danger - extreme danger. Not the type of danger that a team might want to face to score points, which was signaled by an orange flare, but the type of danger that indicated a team might have just been wiped. Everyone who saw the flare needed to evacuate the zone immediately. Red flares were rarely seen, even during field tests, and usually indicated either a natural disaster like a moving whirlpool or an extremely advanced stage critter.

  Everyone scrambled chaotically to disassemble their TPs. They would have left everything here, but the threat of another rainstorm still lingered. Red suddenly wished that they had made camp in a more mobile and organized way; the scene was hectic as everyone tried to gather their things among the frenzied shuffling. A second flare rocketed towards the sky, this one even closer to them. Judging by the angle between the two flares, whatever it was, it was heading straight towards their camp.

  “Stop staring, go go go!” Raven screamed. Everyone had frozen momentarily to look at the flares, but quickly returned to packing. When he was done, Red ran over to his bike, which was parked right next to Butz’s. Linx was right behind them, howling wildly at the sky. Together, Butz and Red placed their palms down to activate their bikes, gripping tightly as if the pressure would speed the process up. Both of their bikes turned on simultaneously and lit up the space ahead of them. The next moment though, they both choked with a combination of fright and bewilderment.

  There was someone there, standing candidly in the darkness. It was a man, but no ordinary man. He was a gaunt figure with no eyes, just skin where there should’ve been eyes, and a lifeless smile composed of sharp yellow teeth. He had a thin, sickly body with patches of bone sticking out. But his most stunning feature was his right hand, or what should’ve been his right hand. In its place was an enormous blade, larger than his own body, that throbbed with veins and looked like it had a life of its own. At the center of the massive weapon was
a single eye, an unsettling organ that darted around with a maddening gaze. Oddly, Red felt a strange sense of familiarity, like deja vu, upon seeing the blade — as if he had known this moment was coming all along, but had forgotten about it.

  Both Butz and Red continued to stand there in perfect stillness. Red could hear the sound of rustling behind him, and then a sudden quietness, as everyone seemed to notice the man. The gaunt figure lifted his giant arm in a heavy manner, and bought it down in a devastating blow. Red reflexively stepped back from the danger, but failed to avoid it entirely.

  He felt only the violent sensation of being shocked, like lightning had just struck him and his body was imploding to avoid the danger. There was no pain, but he knew he had been hit somewhere. Everything around him seemed to recede to a distance, contract inwards, and then recede back to a distance, in a continuous cycle every second. Barely aware of what was going on, he noted that fighting had started, that he had been thrown on someone’s bike, and that someone else had covered his hand with a kapcha, a thick white net made out of a gooey substance that was used to stop bleeding from heavy injuries. After that, he felt only the sensation of rushing down the desert, a hysterical ringing noise in his ears, and the sound of voices screaming all over his intercom.

  He closed his eyes to try and regain consciousness and piece together what had happened.

  My hand, my hand is gone, he thought to himself.

  Fighting to open his eyes, he saw the stump of white. He heard vague expressions, someone trying to yell at him, but couldn’t make out the words. He wanted to tell the person he couldn’t understand them, but his voice came out as an inaudible scream.

  He turned around behind him and squinted into the distance. Focus he thought to himself. He needed to become aware of what was going on, he was in danger. There were bikes behind them, and something like a black meteor hurtling down the desert.