Chapter Twenty-Six: Paying Respects

*

With the aid of the brilliant full moon, the people of Zion didn’t have to worry about finding or creating enough visibility to do the dirty work of digging hundreds of graves. The presence of a few earth practitioners made the work faster, but marginally so. They had all worked tirelessly from start to finish.

The grim determination haunted the scene as Tauvar stood next to Kendra, watching as the last preparations came to an end. The veteran girl didn’t speak a single word the entire time they supervised the process. For that, he thanked her silently and repaid the sentiment in kind.

Josh had given him a hard pill to swallow.

Those being sent to their final slumber reminded him of his shortcomings during the raid. His group’s operation hit no snags, yet only one of their numerous objectives had been completed.

The worst offense of them all resonated down to Tauvar’s soul. Aiden had stormed the town with the expectation of receiving their backup after they finished their task of dispatching the potential Valkyr reinforcements.

Bile burned the back of his throat. Vividly, almost as if he’d only just experienced it, he recalled the despair and unwillingness to keep fighting in all the members of his group excluding Josh. Even Tauvar himself felt disgusted at what he’d done in the moment.

Logic and reason could be only so powerful when faced with war and the bloodshed and death that came with it. The reality and gravity of it all had crushed him. Because of that, he’d found excuse after excuse for why he and the group couldn’t at least attempt to make contact with the Dragonborn and recruit them to the cause.

For why they had abandoned Aiden and the others of Zion to their doomed fate.

The brutish bow with the oddly named club forced that pill down his throat whether he wanted it or not. As a B-rank newbie, he knew a lot of expectations had been placed on him as the leader and forerunner of the newer arrivals from Earth.

Without action, that power became meaningless. Accumulated for the sake of bragging to the others and not in order to help the people who relied on him when they needed most. The disgust for himself ran deep.

How many solutions had there been? Even if just he and Josh went to back Aiden up, could they have not turned the tide or at least gotten their leader out safely?

From where he stood now, the solution he’d chosen had been the easiest. Like a scared dog, he’d turned tail and run away with the looming threat of the Valkyr and justified it by saying he’d done what he could.

But no more.

His power would be used even if he didn’t recognize himself when the dust settled and the bodies piled up. Maybe one day a reckoning would come and reap the blood debt, but until then, no longer would he excuse himself.

Clearing his thoughts, he turned to Kendra. Her unflinching and unbothered stare made him wonder what she would’ve done in his shoes.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she muttered. Her steely eyes locked onto his. “You’ve not moved an inch until now. Whatever resolve you’ve found, whatever conviction drives you, don’t forget it again.”

She lifted her fist in front of his face, opened her palm wide, and splayed her fingers. The skin around her hand ripped and tore, shooting a bloody mist into the sky. Moonlight sparkled against the droplets as they spread out over the crowd.

He wondered the purpose but didn’t need to wait long for an answer. His vision took on a red hue, tinting the world as if he’d put sunglasses on. He looked around and tried to determine what had changed. Kendra had a reputation of being a hardass who didn’t waste energy on anything she didn’t deem efficient.

Remembering the state of her hand caused him to look on in concern. Nothing seemed out of the sort. If he hadn’t seen her actions for himself, he would have doubted the event ever happened. However, the tinted vision and red mist that descended over the crowd remained.

“Take a step back and look at me,” she commanded, crossing her arms as she had before.

Doing as told only made him more confused at first. She shooed him away and looked at him as if he’d lost any hint of brain cells and only contained empty space between his ears.

Gritting his teeth to ignore the seemingly rude veteran girl, he continued to backpedal.

Five steps.

Ten.

Twenty steps.

Then fifty.

Only at that distance could he understand. A raging inferno the color of the blood she’d shed towered high into the sky. When he looked at the others, he saw nothing remotely similar. Here and there, a small trace of the same effect appeared, but nothing as awestriking or intimidating could be found. No matter how he searched.

Not until he looked towards the Town Hall. On the second floor where he knew the jail cells to be, two red infernos blazed. One looked about the same as Kendra, but the other made her look pitiful.

In fact, Tauvar couldn’t see the end of the blood red inferno.

Looking towards Kendra made him realize the aura around her flickered between absolute calm and untethered abandon in a rhythm. Compared to the absolutely massive aura of the other in the Town Hall and its chaotic blaze, she looked timid.

Now that he knew what to look for, he searched over the crowd of people. Just as before, only a handful had anything he could even see from the distance. Sure, if he got close, he might see something the size of a tennis ball.

Approaching Kendra gave him a few seconds that he lengthened with short and slow strides. Once before her, he could help but ask, “What is mine like?”

Her steely eyes flashed a near-black red, almost as if a demon had possessed her momentarily. She pointed to a space just a few inches above his head. “More than the rest and, at the same time, not nearly enough for the amount of work that needs to be done. Come,” she said, walking away from the funeral preparations and towards the ramparts at the edge of the mountain. Once they ascended the steps, she leaned across the stone walls and pointed in the direction of the Valkyr Town. “Do you see it?”

All at once, his mouth dried out and blood drained from his face. Pin needles stabbed up and down his neck and spine. “Do… you even have to ask?”

He winced at his barely audible voice, but what he witnessed left him deeply disturbed and uncomfortable.

Kendra and the unknown person in the Town Hall made him aware that he walked among the elite and thought himself their equal. Even at B-rank, Kendra possessed an unfathomable amount of… whatever the red fire resembled. Another like Kendra was with someone he felt instinctual fear of from where he stood, even now.

Looking in the distance, he saw five presences.

Only one mattered, though he found it odd that it would be so far from the Valkyr Town and with another presence large enough for him to perceive all the way from the mountain city.

“Kendra, I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” he admitted, pointing towards her, himself, the Town Hall mystery people, and the unexplainable presence that caused his body to instinctively feel dread from so far away. “What am I seeing? What does it mean?”

“An indicator.” She used her head to gesture towards the other side of the mountain. “Over there too.”

Three more presences. Two overlapped awfully close to one another where he thought The People resided inside the quarry. The other slowly drifted far into the horizon.

Each differed greatly. The one in the horizon sluggishly balked and lashed out at the surrounding area in an erratic fashion. The two of The People rivaled that of the person in the Town Hall.

But nothing rivaled the one in the far distance that caused a sickly feeling of panic to pervade his whole being.

The veteran B-ranker almost seemed to have trouble looking away from the distant aura. Tauvar couldn’t blame her, and he found himself doing the same. That red inferno, that panic inducing aura…

It encapsulated everything in the direction, extending who knew how far into the sky. The only difference between that presence and the one in the Town Hall had everything to do with the sheer volume.

While the height and intensity of the person’s in the Town Hall amazed Tauvar, it looked more like a large tower that thinned the higher it went.

No such thing happened to the one that captivated both his and Kendra’s attention. Uniform through and through from top to bottom.

When Kendra finally ripped her gaze away, her eyes flickered back to the familiar grayish steel color. “I’m a practitioner of the Blood Disciple. One of my abilities allows me to gauge bloodlust.” Seeing his blank stare, she continued, “Bloodlust is an accumulation of several things. Willpower is measured by the stability of the structure. Width is determined by the potential or desire to kill. Height is determined by the amount of killing you’ve done.”

Together, they looked again.

“Is that even a person?” he muttered more to himself than her.

“Yes.”

It clicked. The pinpricks down his spine, the insidious dread, and a truly unfathomable presence.

All of it made him feel a deep, soul-chilling coldness.

“Aiden…”

“Bingo.”

Time passed, but Tauvar didn’t know how long he stood there gazing. Too many feelings warred inside himself, but one begged to be voiced, breaking the silence. “Are you sure he isn’t a monster?”

Never before had he seen her laugh, but her booming mirth bellowed out from the mountain, startling many behind and below that worked to finish up the funeral preparations.

Once her laughter ended, she wiped her eyes and donned her stoic, steely-eyed warrior visage. “For all our sakes, let’s hope he is a monster. If we want to survive long enough to get back to Earth, we should all follow his example.” She gestured towards the Town Hall. “That’s Josh in there with Ian. I’ve shown him the same thing before. Josh never looked at Aiden the same.”

“How could you not?” he asked, feeling a cold despair when he thought of the mountain city’s leader.

She shrugged and pushed off the wall, heading back down the steps and towards the funeral preparations. With a snap of her fingers, the red tint disappeared, and he saw clearly again.

But now, he felt more blind than ever.

Rather than overlook the crowd in some misguided sense of superiority, Tauvar threw himself into helping with the last preparations. The entire time he worked, he habitually threw glances where he knew Aiden’s massive bloodlust loomed over the world like a guillotine.

In no time, the graveyard had been properly established and fenced off with the help of the earth practitioners. Shortly after, the mass funeral began in earnest.

The de facto leaders of Zion all stepped up and said words that Tauvar barely paid attention to.

“Funerals not really your thing?” a familiar voice asked. The girl who’d gotten in Josh’s face before, Carlie, stepped into view.

He couldn’t tell if she was angry, sad, or uncomfortable—possibly a mixture of all three given the situation. “Definitely doesn’t seem like your thing.”

She scowled at him. “You co-lead the ambush group with Josh. How is it that every other group suffered casualties and put their lives on the line while yours barely had a single flesh wound? Did any of you almost die? How many of you killed more than one of the Valkyr?”

“If you’ve got a problem, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” he bit back harshly, glaring back at her. “You have no clue what you’re talking about, so why don’t you take a hike and screw off? You’re annoying me.”

“Touchy much?” she sneered, rolling her eyes. “Seems like a sore spot for you, yet here you are, disrespecting the fallen as if they don’t even deserve a little bit of your precious time.”

“Why are you still talking?”

“I’ve been told I like the sound of my own voice. So what? Don’t like being taken down from your high horse?” She whirled around him and continued to put herself in his line of sight whenever he tried to look away and ignore her. “You have some explaining to do.”

As she spoke, the funeral ceremony came to an end with a flourish of the earth mages with the aid of over a hundred others. A massive flame lit the pyre atop the mass tombstone with the names of all the fallen from the raid.

Given the worrisome notifications from the administrator, he didn’t think this would be the end of those that joined the graveyard. He could hope all he wanted, but the time they had to get stronger didn’t give them the ability to grow fast enough.

Feeling the depths of his negativity, he turned and walked away from Carlie and headed towards the sparring fields. “Find me if your mouth is as big as your skills. I’ll be waiting. Bring friends if you want.”

Even if he had to beat it into the people of Zion, he wouldn’t just brag about his power. Turning back around revealed that the obnoxious girl already began to move. If they couldn’t get the Essence needed, he would drill the skill to survive into all of them.

The war had only just begun.