Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Ninety Minutes Remaining

He awoke face down in the dirt bombarded by a symphony of pain and sound. Inside his skull, his ears rang like the clattering of a cathedral churchbell muffling all other sounds besides the thump of his own heart and the hissing rush of his own wheezing breath.

The wind had been knocked from him at some point, and he was only just beginning to recover.

The ache in his back told him as much.

He pushed himself from the dirt in a haze, rising to his hands and knees upon the scorched and blackened earth. His ears still rang, but through the ground, he could sense the thunder of battle, the intermittent thud of artillery fire followed by the distant rumble as it struck. His head swam and churned as he slowly lifted his head toward the carnage that surrounded him: mounds of bodies piled waist-high in some cases eyes open and staring in death, bodies twisted in unnatural ways that never would have been allowed by a living body. Smoke hung like a gauzy curtain upon the air, and sparse battlefield fires lit the horizon in a hellish orange glow.

Suit operational capacity at 53%

Atmospheric containment breached.

It was the smell that hit him next, slamming into his nose like a tidal wave of putrid rot, thick with the aftertaste of copper and iron. The smell crawled its way up and into his nose, clawing through his sinuses where it buried itself deep inside his skull. Adam fought back the hazy need to wretch as the smell of spilled viscera rose past the tang of iron.

His HUD blinked at him.

Behind the haze of confusion, pain, and narcotic stupor, he looked down at his hands where they rested upon artillery-blackened earth.

Hazy memories began to return.

Kazna

The artillery fire.

Slowly coming to his senses, Adam raised his head further, desperately examining the ground and.... Found Kier Lindsay first. He lay on his back both legs.... Gone. For a horrible moment, Adam thought he was dead, but as he watched, Lindsay groaned and rolled onto his side. His heart hammered hard in his chest until he realized.

Lindsay had already been missing both of his legs.

The prosthetics must have been blown off during the barrage.

The rest of him should be okay.

His head turned in a swivel to face the rest of the battlefield, and as quickly as his hope had risen, it fell back into despair.

Jane lay some distance away. Like Lindsay and himself, she had been caught in the artillery fire... but she hadn't been so lucky. She lay on the ground, half of her armor split open like the shell of an egg to reveal her face, charred and blackened.

Even from here, Adam knew

She was dead.

Tears threatened at the corners of his eyes, welling in his vision and blurring the battlefield before him. He shook his head violently, shaking away the tears, one of which traced a gentle path down his jaw before terminating somewhere inside his suit.

Where was Kazna, where was that evil bitch, he was going to tear her limb from limb!

Fealty was the first to notice, highlighting a trail of orange blood, spattering a pathway over the cracked earth, and up and over a hill, vanishing out of sight.

Adam staggered to his feet, almost losing his balance, but instead of falling over, a hard hand gripped him by the shoulder to steady him. Adam turned his head, making eye contact with King James, who stood at his back. Behind the clear front of his visor, the man's face was grim. Blood that could only have belonged to his queen Xanthia stained his hands.