017

17.  Those Who Seek Death

The morning rain reached its peak as Vance, Eden, and Cliff followed the Petro policeman outside. At the bottom of the stone stairs that led up to the station was a two-door sedan. The policeman climbed into the passenger seat next to the driver and waited for the three Knights to climb into the back.

"This is going to be a tight squeeze." Cliff grimaced, then slid into the backseat as far as he could go.

Vance moved in next. Between the two of them, there was already hardly enough space left for another person. Eden put her foot in and tried to slide as much of herself onto the seat as she could. After shoving Vance and Cliff against the right side with a few sharp elbows, she managed to get the rest of herself inside.

"This sucks," Vance complained. He was smushed sideways against Cliff, whose head was jammed into a rear corner of the car. Eden managed to stuff her arm in between herself and Vance, the only thing she could do to keep her upper torso from being flung into his.

Realizing he’d rather be smashed up against Eden than Cliff, Vance tried to twist his body to the other side. As he shifted his hips toward Cliff’s side, inadvertently hip-butting Cliff deeper into the side of the car, he also managed to dislodge Eden’s arm from the seat, making her fall right into his lap.

"Wh-what are you doing?!" Eden shouted, flailing around to get herself back up.

"Just trying to get comfy..." Vance murmured shyly. "What’s the problem?"

"Just stay on your own side!" Eden yelled, punching him into the arm as she pulled herself away.

"Oww!" Vance shouted. "You had psynergy on your fist, you psycho!"

"Oops..."

The tall policeman humorlessly watched them through the rear-view mirror as he started the car. "My name is Josef Stein, Chief of the Petro Police Department. We guided your Knights to the Kantor District several days ago. Things were still peaceful back then. Yesterday, the entire city was shaken by a massive explosion that erupted in the area."

"None of them returned?" Cliff asked.

"We immediately sent police in to check it out, and most of them were killed. The ones who managed to escape were barely able to do so with their lives, and from what I gather, we dealt no significant damage to the enemy. With our remaining troops, we attempted to rescue the survivors in the district and create a barricade around the perimeter in the hope of keeping the rest of our city safe."

The car left the downtown area as Josef finished talking. The scenery changed from drab buildings into paths lined by a mixture of houses and trees. Not far ahead was a large concrete wall with noticeable damage and cracks lining it. Guarding the houses within were iron gates patrolled by armed guards.

"Criminal activity has always been underground here, Vice-Captain Walden," Josef continued. "They did what they did and stayed out of our way...we in turn kept out of theirs. Crime against common civilians was at an all-time low. Most of their activity had strictly concerned trafficking assassins and other resources to outside dimensions. They did not attack their own.

"Not until this week had we seen such a level of destruction in our city. I lost over half of my men, most of them on the first day. And from what we have learned so far...the instigator of this violence seems to be the Guild itself."

Cliff let the words sink in, staring to the black trees outside until he decided on a response. "Our call to duty became a scapegoat for your city's apathy."

"I will be honest with you," Josef countered, as the car came to a stop. "I do not care what is going on there. It does not concern me; it is above my pay grade. All I care about are my men and the safety of this city. I bring you here right now so you can finish what you started."

Cliff and Eden popped open their doors and stepped out. The rain had lightened up a bit. "Thanks for the ride."

"Wait a second!" Vance shouted. "Cliff, are you really gonna let him talk to you that way? Come on!"

Josef gave the young man a scornful stare. "Children. This is who the Guild sends in for backup?"

"Shut up!" Vance shouted. "You can’t just blame it all on them! They’re risking their lives to save your butts!"

"You Knights are all the same." Josef scowled. "You think you can solve everyone's problems, and the moment you hear otherwise you're thrown into a fit."

Vance clenched his fists. "It's people like you who are causing the prob–"

"Vance!" Cliff interrupted Vance's tirade with a booming yell. "Get out of the car right now. Or are you abandoning the mission?"

Vance stared at Cliff in surprise. "You're yelling at me?"

"Just get out of the car!" Cliff shouted.

Vance shook his head in frustration and exited the vehicle. "What’s wrong with you? He just insulted the entire Guild! I thought you had pride in your–"

"You don't understand, Vance." Cliff's eyes were fixated on something beyond the gate: the charred shell of what was once a mansion. Dead bodies lay festering in private driveways and gardens. Craters lined the streets, covering the ground where houses had once stood.

"What don't I understand?!" Vance asked angrily. "That you're a coward?!"

"Do you really think this is the first time I've run into this sort of situation?" Cliff finally turned back to face Vance, eyes ablaze. "And do you really think you can change someone’s mind by screaming at him? He doesn't care what you think. No matter what you tell him, he’s not going to change his mind. And you know what? It’s not our business either way. You need to learn some self-control if you ever want people to take you seriously."

"You're a bitter pessimist!" Vance spat. "If you don't think you can make a difference anywhere, then why do you go on doing what you're doing? I thought you guys had a mission to make the world a better place!"

"The only missions we have are the ones that are given to us," Cliff replied. "You clearly don't realize how lucky you are, Vance. If you wish to stay a Knight, you'll need to get that into your head."

"You're no different from the policeman. All you care about is yourself," Vance shot back.

"And what about you?!" Cliff gave in and shouted again. "You have total disregard for anyone's thoughts or opinions except your own! You won't listen to directions, you're an utter–"

"Stop it!" Eden shrieked, smashing Cliff's sentence into pieces. "Stop it, both of you! We're supposed to be a team! Does any of this really matter right now? The Seneschal ordered us to work together. People are counting on us!"

Cliff turned back to the gates immediately, regaining his composure. "You’re right. Captain Azuka and the 4^th division are waiting for us in there."

Vance shoved his hands into his pockets. His body seethed with violet psynergy. "First asshole I see in there is gonna die."

"Just shut up," Eden said in an irritated tone, then moved up to the two policemen standing guard in front of the gate. "Excuse us, please."

"You joke," said one of the guards, an elderly man with a thick, soggy voice. "You enter, you die."

"We'll take our chances," Eden pointed to the gate. "Are you gonna open it or what?"

The guards slowly moved to the center of the gates, in disbelief at what they were hearing. Vance and Cliff joined Eden as they waited for the lock to be undone.

"There," the guard shrugged, parting the iron. "You want death, you die."

Ignoring the ominous words, the Knights stepped into the Kantor District. The gates slowly creaked to a close behind them.

"Hey, what do you think you're doing?" Vance asked suddenly.

"What?" the guard replied. "Too dangerous! You come back alive, we open."

Vance snorted, and they continued onward.

"Just let them pretend like they’re safe," Cliff muttered. "We all know those flimsy gates wouldn't stand a chance against anyone who survived this blast."

"If anyone's still here." Eden looked around. "It looks like the big battle already happened."

"This is simply the result of attackers being pushed out," Cliff said. "The real battle probably happened underground."

The center of the area looked as if it had been bombed. Debris lay everywhere: dining tables, furnaces, automobiles, septic tanks, and of course, the bodies of the tenants. Only the houses on the outskirts of the small development were still intact, and from the looks of them, this had once been quite a beautiful area.

The pattern of destruction made the source much easier to detect. By inspecting the angle at which the houses had been hit, combined with the spots where chunks of the walls and foundations still resided, Cliff found a path to the epicenter of the blast.

The trio moved into a charred front yard void of any corpses. Cliff stepped inside the burnt frame of a house, boots crunching on broken glass. Only four steps remained in a spiral staircase that should have led up to the second floor, which had been blown away.

"It couldn't have happened here, could it?" Vance ventured. "It seems like the whole house was blown apart from the rear. It must be past this one."

"Yep." Cliff stepped over a crumbled brick wall and entered the backyard.

Vance eyed a swing set that had been sliced in half, feeling uneasy for the first time. A large hole had been smashed through the back fence, and torn pieces of black cloth were snagged on splinters of wood.  Feeling impatient, he climbed through the hole in the fence and moved on to the next house. Its bottom floor was still in one piece, but looked as if a truck had plowed straight through it.

Cliff stopped in his tracks. "Hold up, I need to explain something to you. We could be attacked at any moment now, so you both need to be on alert. To a certain extent, you can sense the psynergy of another simply by using your own as a sort of satellite. It's hard to distinguish certain auras, but you’ll get better with experience. I used to practice by closing my eyes and allowing my psynergy to do all the work. See if you can create mental streams and reach out to the signals you feel nearby. Try with mine, first."

Eden closed her eyes and did as Cliff said. She felt her own body surging with psynergy, but everything else seemed dark. She tried to let psynergy stream off her, but it didn't work as easily as she had anticipated. She visualized the aura around her own body – bright orange – and imagined streams of the power licking and leaping from her. She saw them tendril out, like smoke, reaching their way through the darkness. Then, a fierce glow cut through: a fuzzy aura, the color of soft sand.

Cliff. Just from how it felt, Eden knew it was him. She allowed her psynergy to spread further around, memorizing the signal.

Soon, she could sense a new aura. Eden changed the direction of her psynergy, searching, and shuddered. This new feeling was dark purple, sharp and painful. Vance. His pointed aura was the polar opposite of Cliff's warm touch.

She sighed and opened her eyes. Cliff was staring at her, smiling. "How did it go?"

"I think I got it," she said, wiping sweat from her forehead. "Can you only do it when your eyes are closed?"

"You should be able to feel it in your consciousness even with your eyes open, as your skill increases," Cliff explained. "But don't push yourself. Little by little."

Although Vance had been acting like he was paying no attention, Eden felt him increase the range of his own aura in order to check theirs. "Any questions, Vance?"

A guilty look flashed over Vance's face as he saw Eden staring at him. "Hmph. So you can tell when others do that, huh?"

"Only when they're inexperienced," Cliff said, smirking. "There's a way to master it so that you don't need to increase your aura at all – it just becomes natural."

"Well, then, I might as well ask. How do you distinguish someone's strength through their aura?"

"Good question. In fact, we're all going to need to utilize this once we enter the base in order to examine any enemies we come across and flee if we need to. There's a high possibility you’ll both encounter someone stronger than you, just like last time."

Vance and Eden nodded.

"There's no ‘scale’ by which you can measure anyone’s power. This isn't a chemical formula or a math problem, it's the living spirit of another person. The first step is to be familiar with your own – know your aura, its intensity, its feeling and flare. When you pick up another psynergy signal, compare it with your own. You'll be able to figure out the rest intuitively. Understand?"

"Gotcha," Vance murmured in approval, then closed his eyes again.

Eden did the same. Without a doubt, the Vice-Captain’s aura felt the densest, but Eden still felt like hers burned stronger. For the next few minutes, the trio stood in silence, analyzing each other with their minds. Then, an explosion rocked the earth beneath them.

"What?" Cliff looked around frantically. "There are still assassins on the surface?"

Vance leapt over the bushes in the backyard and moved out onto the street. Cliff and Eden followed him quickly, searching for the source of the sound.

Cliff was the first to discern the two distinct signals radiating from ahead. "It's over there! That must be the entrance!"

"Cliff, I feel it too," Eden said. "Two auras, right? Who are they?"

"The auras are fluctuating, which means they're fighting. Maybe one was trying to escape the base, and that's why they're on the surface."

"Let's go!" Vance said, growing impatient.

"No," Cliff said quickly. "I can feel more signals coming from inside. We'll approach quietly and wait for them to either leave the vicinity or do each other in. Only then will we proceed."

"Alright," Eden said, "but won't they notice us?"

"I'm hoping they'll both be too preoccupied for that. They need to use their psynergy for both attack and defense, so they won't have time for surveillance. If they're advanced users, well...I'll have to deal with them."

"We'll have to deal with them," Vance corrected him.

Cliff quickened his pace, concentrating psynergy around his feet to lessen the impact of his steps and increase the momentum of each stride. Vance and Eden soon caught on and followed his lead.

The street came to an end at the edge of a wide crater where six or seven houses should have been standing. Ash and rubble lined the edge, creating the perfect hill for them to hide behind and watch the battle.

A curved blade twirled into the sky, then fell to the bottom of the crater. There, two men dashed from side to side. The first wore a black top hat and a long cape, and carried a large blank playing card in each hand. He looked to be middle-aged, with a long black goatee and bushy eyebrows.

He seemed quicker than his opponent, a young man with a long mane of blue hair. He was clad in leather armor with white fur draped around his neck, while chained leggings and gauntlets protected his limbs. His dark eyes squinted as he smiled and continued to juggle his twisted blades.

"The caped man’s aura has a texture like paper," Eden noticed.

"Yeah," Vance added, "I felt that too. His feels stronger than the other guy's."

Cliff shook his head in amazement. "I only explained this stuff to you ten minutes ago... It usually takes people months to get the hang of this, you know?"

But Vance and Eden were absorbed in the battle. In a flash, the caped man threw a card at the other man's leg. He stumbled, barely dodging in time, and the psynergy-sharpened card sliced a thin line along his calf.

"The big guy isn't channeling that much psynergy," Vance observed. "Does he think he can make up for it with brute strength?"

"Perhaps," Cliff answered. "It takes a lot of training and dedication to develop one’s psynergy. Some people opt for the quicker route."

The blue-haired man leapt at his foe, aiming to gut him with one of the sharp blades. The man in the top hat stood perfectly still.

"He's going to get cut," Eden whispered.

"No," Vance corrected her. "Look at his hand."

The hand holding the remaining card glowed as the man brought it up, parrying his attacker with no trouble at all.

"He blocked a dagger with a playing card?" Eden asked. "How is that possible? And he hardly had any time to charge his psynergy!"

"For people like the Zodiacs, charging enough psynergy to destroy a mountain takes only a second," Cliff said. "Remember that."

Fear pulsated in Eden's mind as she continued to watch. The blue-haired man glanced up at the playing card with a confused expression on his face. It had been blank before, but now it possessed a glowing white eye.

He brought his other arm up this time, preparing to slice the right side of the caped one's body. Then, he inexplicably fell to the ground with a crash. The blue-haired man looked to his right arm and saw a bright red gash. It was about as large as a paper cut, which didn't explain the enormous impact he had just felt a moment before.

The caped man jumped back from the fallen body, angling the reddened card at the sky. "Although you were a fool, you had courage," he said in a dusty, monotonous voice that reminded Eden of an old history teacher. "I'll award you with a painless death." Then, he raised his gloved hands and began to swirl them around in the air.

The blue-haired man scrambled to his feet and ran forward. "Too slow, grandpa!"

Vance looked up, and his eyes widened. Above the crater, what looked like a deck shuffler floated in the air with the help of a helicopter-like propeller. In a flash, it began to spit psynergy-laced cards down toward the blue-haired-man, slicing him to ribbons until he collapsed to the ground.

"Oh my God..." Eden covered her mouth and turned her eyes away from the grisly spectacle. Fear and dread consumed her.

Vance was equally stunned and backed up from the edge in fear. At any moment, psynergy could come flying toward him and end it all. Cliff opened his mouth to speak, but the assassin beat him to it.

"Now that I've gotten one troublesome rat out of the way..." The man swerved, drawing his eyes from the bottom of the crater up to the trio. "It's time to take care of the other three!"

Next: An Exercise in Futility