ZETA

“Listen to me, Zeta. The most important element to maintaining a legacy is the precedence. Without it, you’re future will be tainted with hypocrisy.”

Out of everything the late Sir Gin Kagan taught him, the little bits of advice his mentor told him to enlighten a day’s worth of pain were the only teachings Zeta retained passionately. His subconscious guarded them like a wyvern’s treasure. Everything else he learned was fluff in comparison.

It sickened Zeta that the men he was hunting dared to call themselves The Greenwich Group. How dare they adopt the namesake of the mountain, the village, and the lake? Greenwich was a place of tranquility. The very presence of kidnappers in the area soiled what it stood for, what Sir Kagan stood for.

Regardless, they were humans, a part of Zeta’s greater master, humanity. The only difference between them and the rest of the world was their deviance from humanity’s goal of peace.

Precedence. Their role in a greater perspective didn’t matter. What mattered was how Zeta dealt with them. Death for the Greenwich Group meant death for all of Zeta’s future foes, likewise if he gave them mercy.

His first opponents since descending from the mountain. The overbearing weight of Zeta’s responsibility sat on his shoulders. It may have been self-imposed, but twenty years of work and training were about to coalesce. The product would either be beautiful or terrifying.

I really can’t afford to screw this up.

Zeta shook his head clear of the unnecessary pressure. His mind needed clarity, focus. Not anxiety. There was a job to do, lives at stake, and he was the only one in Greenwich with the ability to remedy the issue. In the note, the Group left a crude sketch of their location, and moonlight guided Zeta’s path to that isolated plain.

His feet dug into the ground with every step. One kilometer. Two kilometers. His body never broke a sweat as it carried itself across the land with minimal exertion. His foot would plant itself on the ground just long enough to shift his momentum but would waste no time overstaying its welcome in drag. He intentionally wore light clothing. The only significant weight being his sword, which in itself was a sleek, thin, long, pointed black blade. A perfect sprint, the result of refined conditioning. Zeta’s breathing steadied. His heart beat as if everything were normal. At worst it was mildly agitated. After years of running in a thin atmosphere, Zeta had no issue managing the wealth of oxygen at sea level elevation. Sometimes there was so much he felt like he could drown in the air.

Ahead, light parted way for his entrance into the open plain. Zeta emerged from the hedges with a sharp, aggressive burst of speed. His boots slid through the dirt, rolling mud into hills and bringing his pace to a grinding halt.

His opponents were in leisure around a pile of crates most likely filled with stolen goods. The ones not sitting atop them bored were sprawled in sloth on the grass before him, exhausted after a day of kicking over anthills and beating the neighbor’s dogs.

Zeta couldn’t confirm they did either of those things. He assumed so because they had faces only their parents could love. Young, oafish spawns fresh from their parent’s cottages with the delusional belief that somehow joining this group of “mercenaries” would be a valuable fruit for their future.

There were about two dozen of them, more than Zeta expected. They reeked with the honor of thugs.

Zeta immediately pinpointed a large figure near the back of the group, a bald individual with dirt-stained eyes and a scar crossing the corner of his lips, swelling it into a babyface. He leaned comfortably against one of the stolen crates, an arrogant smirk dominating his expression.

“Hmm. Someone must have screwed up delivering the note. It was supposed to go to an old sack of shit with a fat pouch of Nibbles like I requested,” he said, cackling as if his throat had been mauled.

It had a booming baritone beneath it that attracted the attention of his dumbfounded companions. The ones who weren’t already astonished by Zeta’s sudden arrival turned their attention to him. With their captain’s condescension as an invitation, they quickly adopted a similar arrogance towards Zeta.

“Or maybe, it did reach him, and Hodge decided to send a dog,” the leader concluded.

Zeta stood straight. “I suppose the answer to that is both yes and no.” He held up the chopped pieces of the note for them to see, then discarded it like the trash it was. “I am in Hodge’s employ, yet I act of my own accord. I’ll cut right to the point. Where’s Heidi?”

“Oh, you mean that promising working girl? Stay right there, I’ll get her for you,” the leader grinned, baring two rows of muddled, yellowed teeth.

Zeta grit his teeth. “Working girl?”

“Relax, hero. I said promising. We haven’t made her do anything…out of line.”

“Yet!” someone from the Group said.

“Huver, will you shut the hell up.”

Zeta’s hand neared his belt, where Black Meridian itched to be drawn. In his voice, Zeta collected a low growl with every word. “The Greenwich Group, right? I know little of this world, but that might be the worst name I think I’ve ever heard. I guess it’s fitting when you consider the membership.”

The Group started whistling, mocking his aggression. Two years ago that would have enraged Zeta, but the rage that benefit his own pride and nothing more had long been tamed by his classmates and Sir Kagan.

When that laughter died down, the leader spoke once more. “Do you not appreciate our sense of regional patriotism? Don’t worry, I plan to rename it to the Axle Administration once we ‘appropriate’ the rest of this island.”

“Like you’d get that far.” Zeta took his next step in the ‘negotiations’ and unsheathed Black Meridian, the gleaming obsidian blade posed for them all to see. “If you don’t return Heidi and the other girls you’ve taken as well as the stolen goods, I’ll shut your little band down here and now.”

The Group frowned and snarled. Many readied their weapons and steadily grew closer. They were cheaply assembled, and it was downright sad that the wielders thought nothing of their weapons’ poor condition.

The leader raised a hand to stop them. “Now, now, swordsman. No need to be hostile. I’m perfectly willing to talk this through.” He turned to the nearest Group member, barking at him to go get the girls. The man ran off into the woods.

The leader faced Zeta again, eyeing Black Meridian up and down. “That’s a fine bit of craftsmanship, although quite unexpected for someone out here in this backwater. Tell me, where did you acquire it?”

Zeta maintained a static glare and said nothing.

Hesitantly, a freckle-faced girl with brown hair, ragged clothes, and dirt-splashed skin came out of the woods along with four other girls her age, trailed by the member that went off to retrieve them. Heidi’s eyes were red from crying and weary with fear.

The leader grabbed Heidi by the hair and pulled her close, ruffling it violently. She started sobbing. Zeta took a provoked step forward, but the Greenwich Group did likewise to block his path.

“I’m offended that you thought we’d be willing to damage such prized goods,” the leader said, shaking Heidi. “By the way, I don’t believe we’ve introduced yet. My name is Rog–”

“I don’t care about your name,” Zeta interrupted, “But you should remember mine, it’s Zeta, and its significance to you depends on how you act in the near future.”

“So passionate,” Rog said. “You’d make one hell of a Greenwich member.”

Next to Rog, Zeta spotted one of the Groups’ henchmen standing near Rog. Unlike the others, he tightly clung a spear to his thin, fragile fixture. As they locked eyes, the kid stiffened in icy fright, perspiring from every pore. He made a vain effort to be as intimidating as his allies. Zeta looked around for similar cases but found none. Everyone else had wholly bought into the delusion.

“You’re interesting, Zeta, so let’s make a deal. I have several offers on the table,” Rog said. “The first option, I give you all five girls, and you hand over that valuable looking sword of yours. I trust you can accept that the sword is worth their lives?”

Zeta’s grip on Black Meridian tightened.

“Or, if that isn’t satisfactory, here is the second offer. You drop the silly heroic demeanor, and I’ll let you join my crew and receive a slightly higher cut than the rest.”

The Greenwich Group murmured with spite. “Boss, you can’t let someone like him join us.”

“Yeah! Why are you givin’ him a higher pay? He’s nothing! Worth nothing!”

Rog ignored them. “That’s what I have for you, swordsman. The third option is violence, but–” he pulled Heidi closer, and she shivered with fright as his face was inches away from hers, “I don’t think any of us want that.”

A silence settled on the plain. The Greenwich Group observed Zeta with caution, its members ready to pounce on his slightest provocation. Zeta slowly sheathed Black Meridian.

“There were seven.”

“Pardon?”

“Seven to eight girls missing. I only see five, and I know all of them are missing because of you. Where are they? And I warn you, this is your judgment. You speak for the lives of all your men.”

Rog turned away, his cheek flushing with pride as it contained a bold lie. “I have no idea what you’re–”

“They’re gone, filth!” one of the henchmen interrupted. “Sold. Sold! Halfway across the world by now! Some foreign noble’s plaything, I bet.”

Zeta’s gaze fixed on Rog, but the Greenwich Group’s leader had nothing to offer but a shrug. “I guess I misplaced them.”

Sorry, Sir Kagan. I tried the card of mercy.

Five men surrounded Zeta, and as soon as Black Meridian was unsheathed, all five crumbled to the ground with a gash on their throats. Their bodies rained blood upon the ground. The smug air that accompanied the group evaporated as if Zeta had cut it as well.

“I’d like to make a counteroffer. I keep my sword, take back the girls, refuse to do anything even remotely associated with you pieces of garbage, and all you have to do is run,” Zeta said.

Rog arose in a fury, his eyes bulging with shock and rage. He must have imagined himself the king of Axle Island, at the finish line before he even started the race. In his mind, Zeta would have never dared to strike against him. “You dare!”

“You got one crucial element fact, Rog,” said Zeta. “You assumed I was a hero. That’s incorrect. I am not a hero, I am a servant. My master is humanity, and as such, I would never lay a hand on a human if I didn’t have to.”

“You just killed five of my men!” he cried.

“Correct, but I am not a hypocrite. I didn’t slay humans, I slew monsters.”

With no other options and Rog consumed with mania, he ordered his men to “Kill him!”

Heidi and the other girls screamed and tried to flee, but Rog’s grip on Heidi’s hair remained firm.

Spears, pikes, even a javelin user and an archer in the mix. Each one charged with such an amateur nature that Black Meridian barely made an effort to cut them. Zeta could even close his eyes a couple times as he swung.

What the Greenwich Group believed to have been an easy fight proved much more difficult as Zeta slipped in and out of their forces, making clean, painless slices with the training of Sir Kagan constantly at the forefront of his mind.

It didn’t take long for their loosely bound pact to break, and after a couple of their members went down without a scratch on Zeta, the rest of the Group dropped their weapons and routed, screaming into the woods. At the end of their panic, only two stayed behind.

Rog locked Heidi next to him with his arm and lifted her small figure into the air. He extended his other hand outward and called “Claws.” His fingernails elongated and sharpened into pointed needles of a lethal capacity, and he held them to the girl’s throat.

“Is this what you want, huh! I’ll give you the girl, all right, but you’ll have to explain to Hodge why she’s missing everything from the neck up!” He sweated as he spoke. His previous cool head proved to be nothing more than a mask for a fragile soul.

“A sigma? Fascinating. I never thought I’d see two in one day.” His tone carried genuine glee, but Zeta still narrowed his eyes. He had seen a strange gray protrusion from Rog’s nails since he arrived at the plain, but thought nothing of it until now. The wonder of sigmas was lost when they were used by ill hands.

“Ye–yes! Yes, this is my sigma, Claws! It’s a Modification, a sigma of evolutionary superiority.”

“And you planned to take over Axle Island with those alone? How pathetic. All those do is make you less of a human, and thus I was right in declaring you a monster.”

“Say that again,” Rog declared in desperation as he held Heidi tighter. “Say it, I dare you.” Heidi screamed, so he yelled at her to shut up.

Zeta sighed and spoke dryly. “I don’t have a single sigma of my own, which means you’re probably stronger than me. I don’t know why you’re so frightened. If we dueled one on one, you’d probably win.”

“I’m not frightened!” Rog said. His voice trailed out because not even his crazed state could believe his own lie. “But–but you bring up a point, swordsman! The other fools had big, heavy weapons like you, but they were slower to use them.” He let go of Heidi to flash his hands around. “But claws! Claws are fast, short, nimble and just as lethal as any other blade! You don’t stand a cha–”

Then a trickle of blood came out of his mouth as he felt the thump of Black Meridian plunge into his chest. In his growing lunacy, he didn’t see Zeta get closer when Heidi got out of the way.

“I can’t believe that worked. The sad part is, I thought you were actually kind of smart,” Zeta said.

Rog looked down at him for a moment, but it was cut short as he lost both consciousness and life. He crumpled to the ground as Zeta withdrew and sheathed his sword for a final time.

Zeta took another look around at the fallen members of the Greenwich Group. He considered going after those who fled, but he realized that they would just go home. The guilt of what they had done would serve as a just punishment instead.

No matter how much Zeta wanted to dedicate himself to doing so, he knew how fruitless it would be to go on an active pursuit of the trafficked girls, so he turned to the ones who were still around, hiding in the corner, sobbing in terror.

Zeta stood in a place that concealed the massacre from their eyes while he kneeled next to Heidi and the others. They shivered as he approached, and Zeta didn’t blame them. They were too young to differentiate between killers that wanted to harm them and others that wanted to save them. He was as scary to them as Rog was, and there was next to nothing that could cure that animosity. However, that was one of the acceptable prices to be paid in Zeta's profession

“Do you know the way home?” he asked. They nodded, so he told them to hurry on. Before Heidi left, he added, “Be strong, Heidi. If may take a while, but you cannot let these events cripple you. You have a loving family, and they want to see you safe now.”

Zeta heard a spear drop and a man start bawling. He turned to face his next issue in need of resolution. Other than Rog, there was one Greenwich Group member who did not flee, the scrawny fighter with an overgrown stick. During the entire duration of Zeta’s attack, the boy made no aggressive moves.

As Zeta grew closer, he cowered.

“Hey,” Zeta said calmly. “What’s your name?”

He stopped crying, confused as to why he was still alive.

“Come on.”

“It’s Tid!” he said quickly.

“I see,” said Zeta. “Tid, do you know why I did this? Do you know why I had to resort to bringing death?”

He shook his head. “They were my friends?”

“Partially, I guess. They were your friends, back when they were human. But somewhere along the way that humanity died, even though the body and the mind remained. This world is full of people like that. This ‘Greenwich Group’ consisted of the husks of man, nothing more.”

Color returned to Tid’s face as the shadow of death no longer loomed over him.

“Go home, Tid. I’m sorry for your loss, but you have a future that Rog and the others could not share. I can’t control your life, but if I were to make a suggestion, it would be to atone. Pack your things and travel the world in search of a cause. In my opinion, you owe it to yourself, to Greenwich, and most of all, to those girls.”

Tid stood up and started wandering, looking back every second to make sure Zeta wasn’t tricking him or preparing to stab him in the back. Zeta smiled as the kid grew further away, and when Tid was far enough, he broke into a run to Greenwich with the rest.

When he was out of sight, Zeta remembered that it was time for him to go home as well.