Chapter Nine: The Laiment of Shadow

Shadow looked at the ferry shuttle in the port with a sigh, he knew he could make the Shift to The Hive - so called because it was a beacon to every pirate, mercenary, assassin and just about everyone with a broken moral compass, thus making it a 'hive' of villainy - with his new Master but he didn't want to draw attention to himself, he didn't know where the Daughter's people where, and he wanted to keep silent, and maintain the element of surprise for as long as he could. As he boarded the ship, he saw a couple of the fish-people looking at him, and so he decided to kill them when they departed onto The Hive. He didn't like being looked at by fish-people; it irritated him a great deal.

"Ferry setting off, estimated time of travel, one hour, twenty three minutes" the tannoy system said. Shadow nodded to it, not that he needed to, and sat down on one of the seats, far away from the fish-people. The person sat next to him turned to Shadow and spoke.

"Hey dude, what’s taking you to The Hive?" He asked, leaning into Shadow. However, when Shadow stared at him like a lion staring at his prey, the man quickly fell silent again, a state Shadow preferred him in. His mouth stayed shut throughout the rest of the journey, and the fish-people didn't look at him again, so he considered not killing them, he was in a hurry after all.

The ferry lifted off and escaped the gravitational pull of the planet fairly quickly, it lacked any hyper-drive systems but the engine had sub-light capabilities, and was fast enough for planetary arm travel. Shadow usually avoided this type of travel, as did anyone that had the ability to Shift, but then it was necessary to keep a low profile, and so he endured it, for now. As the ferry reached its half-way point, an hour into the flight, Shadow changed his mind again about the fish-people. He was irritated and wanted to kill something, and they did look at him very purposefully, so they deserved killing in his book, which was a very strange book to everyone who wasn't him.

Shadow was bored and thus annoyed as the ferry touched down on The Hive, it had been a boring ride, but his neighbour had been itching to speak but dared not for fear of what Shadow might do. However, that had not been enough to keep him entertained, and the fish-people would have to be forgone, since his informant, the man who Shadow had come here to see, was not at the landing area. This meant that Shadow would have to go hunt him down and find out why, which left no time for the stalking and killing of irritating fish-people, but then, from the way they were speaking he could tell they were going to be killed by someone else before the end of the day. Tourists didn't belong in this place, but it made good revenue for the thugs, bandits and thieves in the streets.

Shadow knew that this place was a dangerous place for a person alone, so he took on his Hybrid form. He was now unrestricted, and that had given him the ability to get his proper strength, finally - the form he would have used in the fight where his blade was destroyed, but he was to restricted, on Earth - but that would have been overkill for this place. His Hybrid form was much the same as his old form, except for a deep red light in the centre of his skeletal eye, and his coat's hem and cuffs where lined with the same deep red - his own little addition to it, now he could control the form at will - which made it look all the more intimidating. As Shadow walked down the street, several shady people with large coats, perfect for covering weapons until they were needed, stared at him, but a quick glare with his skeletal eye sent them running with a panicked, somewhat fearful look.

A few scantily clad girls also winked and him, some flirted openly, but he ignored them as he ignored the large people in the background, but just close enough to be at the girl's side if anything untoward happened. Shadow told himself that he was here for business, not pleasure. However, he compromised with himself by mentally saying he might pick one up on the way back, depending on his mood.

It did not take that long to get to the office where his informant was, and so he pulled the handle down and pushed the door open hard, so it slammed against the wall, he wanted to make an impression and scare the man a bit, so he was easier to talk to when it came to the reason why he wasn't there to meet him. However, he could be the scariest thing in the universe, he could be Fear Incarnate and he would not scare the man that was he was looking at. Well, the piece of him that remained at least.

"This day gets better and better" He said to himself sarcastically, walking up to the bloody remains of his informant and observed it, trying to find out who, or what, killed him. The man's torso was all that remained, his arms, legs and head had been brutally pulled off with great force, leaving ragged stumps and blood soaked clothing. It only took him a few seconds of observation to show that nothing he knew killed like this. That meant it was someone trying to hide as something else, and they were not doing a good job. But then, he didn't know who was doing this - either what he was trying to hide as, or the thing that actually did it - so thinking about it, they were doing a great job of hiding who they were. Shadow knew that it wasn't anyone on this planet, they may have been evil, hedonistic murderers, but they didn't kill like this, not that they had the strength to make the stumps like this. Even if a man dark enough to make this kill had come to town, he would have had it in a place more people could see it. Shadow knew that people this bad didn't hide their kills in the shadows; they wanted it to be seen by everyone, which made this body a problem. It wasn't exactly hidden, but few people had a reason to come in here, his informant didn't really advertise.

The secondary question of where the man's limbs had gotten to was solved with a quick look around. They were dotted hap-hazardly around the room, as if the assailant didn't know what to do with them after he had pulled them off, so he simply threw them over his shoulder. Shadow had never seen anyone killed like this before, and he had hung out with a few murderers. He then turned away from the scene, his one lead into the location of the Daughter gone, and turned to the door. A door he had unfortunately left ajar. This meant that the Prementari where stood there, looking at him. They may have been little more than thugs that the head people called 'Law Enforcement' but they had enough pull to arrest people that where to sloppy with their miss-deeds.

The look on their face clearly meant that they thought Shadow was the man who had made this kill and his skeletal eye and shiny red light was not helping to convince them otherwise. They also had rather powerful guns, and his sword was little more than a fractured piece of metal. He might have taken this party out, but the Prementari had developed a quick response to people stupid enough to resist them - a response that was a simple EMP to knock out everything the running person could use to escape, and then the shutting of the city gates - so he wouldn't get anywhere with that. And if he tried to Shift off planet, it would make the hellish ferry ride pointless. With these odds stacked against him, all he could do was put his hands up, casually exasperated.

"It wasn't me" he told them, not expecting them to believe him. They didn't, and quickly shot him with guns, which turned out to not be the explosive kind he was expecting, and instead dart guns filled with a toxin that paralyzed its target in seconds. 'I hate today' he thought as his body collapsed onto the floor. A single dart would only slow him slightly, but the trigger happy Prementari hit him with half a dozen of the buggers.