Legacy: Beyond the Veil

The Wychhunters

Noah blinked, but everything seemed to be going so slowly. He felt... tired, worn out. Was that why he was lying down? Had he gone to sleep? The floor felt soft enough to sleep on but... why was he on the floor? He vaguely remembered a door breaking into a thousand pieces as it flew at him.

He groaned and tried to push himself up, but found that his arms were like jelly. To move them at all was a painful exercise, to put any kind of strain on them felt impossible.

Again he groaned and tried to look around. He vaguely recognized the soft shapes and the velvety red of the room Rosa had brought him to, but had it always been this dark?

Not only that, but there was more incense than before, the rolling clouds growing so thick that they obscured Noah's vision. There were shards of stained glass on the ground in front of him, but he could see little detail beyond that in the thick, swirling soup.

The smallest flicker of orange light reflected on the smoke, and suddenly Noah was wide awake. He gasped out, now feeling how his every sense clamored for his attention. His body was being whacked with sharp pain and other warning signals, yet not even that rush of adrenaline could spur his overtaxed muscles to movement.

He could smell it now. The strange yet pleasantly spiced scent of the incense was still there, but a stink Noah knew all too well wrestled it for control.

As if on cue, the room's fire alarms began to blare their ugly tones, urging everyone to leave so that the suppressants could activate. Noah knew that his life was now in the hands of a rudimentary intelligence; A machine brain would constantly weigh his value against the cost of the spreading fire. The moment the scales tipped against him, the CO2 bottles in the room above would extinguish the flames and his life along with them.

He tried again to push himself off against the floor, but his arms trembled and gave out under him. He sobbed once, then tried again to similar avail.

The heat steadily rose behind him, as did the intensity of the orange glow in the smog. Noah didn't see it yet, but he knew the fire was rapidly progressing. He wondered if Nicki had felt like this in her final moments. Tears started to well up at the thought of her, tears he quickly wiped away. He didn't notice that his hand came away from his face a slick red.

A shape stirred in front of him and his heart skipped a beat. He had almost forgotten he was not alone in this room. The silhouette came closer, growing more defined. Nathe stepped from the smoke, clutching one arm. He was limping, bleeding from a dozen cuts. But what shocked Noah the most was how the teen's face was set in rage, his teeth bared.

An enormous, armored boot slammed down a mere ten centimeters in front of Noah's face, pounding a shard of glass into dust.

"Back off." A heavy, mechanical voice rumbled from above him. "We only want the boy."

Nathe lifted his good arm in surrender, taking a step back. "Alright." He said. "I'll–"

What happened next was too quick for Noah to follow. All he saw was how Nathe made a strange movement with his wounded arm and somehow held a pistol in the next instant.

A sharp retort rang out like the crack of a whip, the muzzle flash of a Lux turning the smoke around it ruby for a split second.

A neat, smoking hole the size of Noah's fist appeared in Nathe's forehead and the exo dropped on his knees like a sack of potatoes. Before Noah even registered what had happened, Nathe's head came back up, his eyes refocusing. His arm shot up like a striking serpent and he fired his pistol at the unknown figure standing over Noah, the snap of tungsten-ceramic projectiles being accelerated to supersonic speeds making the boy wince, though the bullets turned to dust against the heavy warskin with no apparent effect. Only distantly did Noah realize that Nathe wasn't holding a weapon, his hand was the weapon.