Chapter 31 

There are plenty of other organizations that operate like the Order of the Aegis, of varying sizes and capabilities. Some have goals that align with the Order, others diverge from their goal, and still others are opposed to the Order’s goals. The Order is one of the largest organizations, but there are others larger. Their goals and motives are known only to their members.

Day 328 Igniday

The maul arced toward my head, forcing me to duck. I lashed out with a foot to catch Thallos’s ankle and pull it out from under him. Thallos simply lifted his foot from the arc of my own attack and planted that same foot into my shoulder with enough force to knock me off my feet. I rolled to the left just in time to avoid a downward slam with the battle hammer aimed at my chest. I reached out and clutched the shaft of his weapon as I lashed out with a kick aimed at his elbow. Thallos let go of the weapon to avoid my strike but closed back in not two breaths later.

I pushed myself to my feet, using the maul as a lever. The sharp-toothed Wild Elf came at me with a flurry of punches. I leaned to my left just in time to dodge the first strike, but I was forced to take the second in my right shoulder and a third in my left hip. The last attack of the flurry was an open palm strike that landed against my hip, jarring my joint’s socket.

I hopped back, posting on my left leg as I hefted the maul. Thallos pushed the offensive with a round kick aimed at my right side. I only just barely managed to block the strike with the grip of the massive hammer while I braced the foot of my almost-dislocated hip. A snarl of pain left my lips as I adjusted my grip on the weapon and threw a swing aimed at his head that I intentionally overextended, leaning into the blow and staggering.

Thallos took the bait and threw a horizontal hammer fist into my exposed back as I turned. I continued my turn and sped up the rotation using the hammer for momentum. I spun a full three-hundred and sixty degrees to meet his hammer fist with a heavy kick from my exposed right side toward his left side. This technique would normally have off-balanced me, but I used the brutish weapon as a counter-mass to keep me centered.

I landed my attack against his ribs with enough force to knock him off balance, even as his attack landed just a fraction of a second later. But with his body off-center and moving in the same direction as his fist, the attack had only a fraction of the force he had intended as it landed just below my floating rib. The strike was still hard enough to bruise, even with the man being off balance. 

I knew Thallos was going easy on me. He could have dislocated my shoulder and shattered my hip with those strikes he had landed before. He could have moved faster with the maul and crushed my ribs like a craypaper model with the blow I rolled away from. I was just thankful he had pulled none of his hidden daggers I knew were concealed about his person. I had learned this through plenty of painful experiences.

I took my advantage and rushed the trog with a heavy swing from the hammer in both hands, aimed at his shoulder. Still off-balance, he leaned back at an almost impossible angle to avoid the strike. I figured I would not get lucky, so I did something most would consider madness. As the hammer overshot its target, I let go of the weapon, letting it fly through the air a whole seven feet and land like the majestic cinder block it was. As Thallos straightened, his sight following the hammer for only a second, I continued my spin with the momentum from the hammer and brought around a teeth-jarring crescent kick, arcing my straight leg upward with the side of my boot on a crash-course trajectory with the side of Thallos’s head.

Without even looking, he leaned forward, my arc passing clear over his head as he charged me head-on. Caught on one leg, and my turn put me off-center, he pinned my leg against me, knee touching shoulder, and bulled over me. As I lost my sole contact with the ground, I felt a pop in my hip, and flame lit in the joint. I had enough presence of mind for a fraction of a second to realize he had dislocated my hip and think a single word, ‘Crap’. The thought wasn’t panicked or frantic. Quite the contrary, my inner tone was more akin to that moment after a long day where you flop down in a seat eager to rest, and you remember that you forgot to do one thing and need to get back up. For that single moment, everything moved at a snail’s pace before continuing back to top speed. The world tilted and spun before the earth greeted me with rib-cracking force, knocking the wind from my lungs and leaving me gasping on the training room floor.

Thallos stood up, spry as ever, even as I lay there wheezing like an asthmatic vacuum. “You did good that time, boy. Used a weapon you had no talent with to your advantage and didn’t cling to it like a drowning man who found driftwood. You even turned discarding it into a tactical move.” As he spoke, he stretched his arms and back. I wasn’t even a full warm-up for him.

“I appreciate the compliments, uncle. But honestly, I’m just happy, you didn’t, pull a knife on me.” I huffed out between gasping breaths as I stared up at the artificial lights overhead.

Thallos passed by my head to collect a pair of water bottles. He tossed me one that I caught while still on my back. He pointed to me with the other bottle as he said, “Guess again.”

I looked down to find a stiletto knife protruding from my hip that was dislocated. “Frag it! Rend it! Damn it!” I cursed as I crawled myself to my good knee, the damaged hip locked by the blade in the joint. I popped the cap off my water before I gripped the blade firmly in my free hand and yanked it free with a popping and sucking sound. My once-locked hip fell limp. I washed the blade clean with a splash from the bottle before throwing it at my uncle. I slung the blade with proper technique to strike Thallos in the eye. It flew tip-first at his face, but he caught it with a fist around the hilt like I figured he would.

I hobbled my way to balancing on one foot as I waved Tessa over. She hurried over on her short Gnome legs and put her hands on either side of my wounded hip. Without being told, I washed the blood off the wound to give her a clear look at the damage so she had an easier time healing. I chugged the remaining water as ants crawled under my skin, and the wound itched like crazy, but by then, I had gotten used to the sensation. My scar count ticked it at one thousand five hundred and thirty-two. I had yet to break my record of a week and a half without getting wounded by my stab-happy uncle. Though, I could not deny that I was improving. But if it was at the rate Thallos was expecting. I couldn’t say.

As soon as the tingling and itching stopped, I looked down to examine the work. The diamond-shaped scar was no bigger than a pen and barely raised. “Thanks for that, Tess. You know that, you rock?” I said to her with an easy smile. In the past months, we had become friends of a sort. We weren’t nearly as close as me and Nel but that didn’t mean that I valued her any less. 

“Come on, Iver. I have to do this for my class credits. It’s nothing special. Any other healer could do the same.”

“Are you saying that if you weren’t getting credit for this, you’d let me lie there bleeding?”

“What?! No!” Her eyes flew wide with shock. “I’m just saying that what I do is nothing special.”

I gave her a false, stern look of reproof before dropping the playful facade to get down on her level and lay a hand on her shoulder. “Tess, it’s not just anyone who’s putting me back together. It’s you. You could have said no to the training, but you didn’t. You could have dropped it at any time and gone back to working at the Med Center, but you didn’t. When I felt like trash, you treated me like a friend. You are the one that kept on encouraging me when you fixed all the holes poked in me.” I spoke in a soft and kind tone, trying my best to convey how helpful she had been the past quarter year. 

She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “We’re friends, right?” her tone was tentative.

I gave her a broad grin and said, “Damn right, we’re friends.” as I playfully tapped her shoulder with a fist. 

“Yoo-hoo! Loverboy.” Came Thallos from across the room. “Quit making goo-goo eyes at the medic and come here. I need to give you an important talk.” Tessa’s light green skin blushed a dark purple at the comment. I rolled my eyes and stood. I strolled over to the man, who was pulling out a collection of knives from across his person and setting them on a wide metal table at the end of the Advanced Training Scenario Chamber, or ATSC.

The ATSC was an expansive room of reflective black walls cut into both a square grid, each a foot long, and a micro-hexagon grid that overlapped it all. The space was a massive thirty-foot cube that was designed to be able to emulate any environment down to temperature and everything down to the last stone, blade of grass, or ice sickle. Thallos had used the polymorphic quality of the chamber very little up to that point.

“It’s not like that, Uncle, and you know it.” I chided as I meandered over, in no real hurry. If he was going to mock me for thanking a friend and being honest about how I valued her, then he could wait a few moments longer.

“Oh yeah. That’s right. You’ve got a gooey heart for the cat girl. I didn’t know that you like hairy pus-” I cut him off. “Don’t you dare finish that thought, Uncle, or I will have to kill you?” I tried to keep my tone and face stern as I wagged a finger at him, but by the end, my face broke out into a smirk.

Thallos turned to face me with fists posted at his hips. “Boy, I could give you every weapon I own to use, and I’d still turn you inside out before you can say ‘potently petulant pussycat.”

“Seriously?” I questioned in annoyance, one brow raised.

 “Hey you are the one that brought up the question of her joining training under me and I said that I needed more data.” He raised his hands' palms to the sky in a posture saying ‘not my fault’.

“And as I’ve already told you, she wants nothing to do with me at the moment. Besides, with that show of power from our last talk, I’d rather not become a decorative ornament for an Arctic spear. That’s why I want you to talk to her.” I stated as I reached the man, stepping past him to count all the knives on the table, each pair a unique shape or style for different uses.

“I understand that, and you want me to mention that it was all your idea so you can get your tail tangled with hers.” Thallos said with a knowing grin and waggling his brows. His expression conveyed exactly what he thought I wanted out of the whole thing.

My face burned, and my aforementioned tail thrashed as I looked at my feet. “You know it’s not like that.”

He slapped me on the back. “I know, kid. I just wanted to ruffle your feathers. But I’ll tell you what. After you hear what I have to say, and depending on your answer, I’ll track the girl down and have her show me what she’s got. If she can pass my set standards, then I’ll take her on, and you get to look like a hero.”

My eyes shot to his, checking for any sign of a joke or deception. Not that I would even be able to tell if he was hiding something. When I saw he was serious or pretending to be serious, I gave him a single nod. “Deal. What’s this thing we got to talk about?”

Thallos looked across the room to Tessa, who was sitting at a bench along the side of the room, patiently waiting for training to pick back up. “Tessa, you can leave for the day, sweetheart. We are done with combat training for today.” Thallos projected his voice to carry the thirty feet to where she sat as he waved to get her attention. He turned back to me and murmured quietly, “Let’s wait for her to go before we discuss.”

Tessa threw her hand over her head with a thumbs up before collecting her bags and making her way across the room. As she packed up, I began wiping off sweat from my face and brow and wringing it out of my tail by lightly squeezing at its base and pulling it through my hand, keeping it tight against the skin. This last act produced a good puddle of sweat behind me, a foot across.

My Uncle had seen this act enough to be unphased by it. Instead, he aligned all his blades on the table in a neat row, set pair by pair. Tessa left the room with a parting wave I returned, and Thallos waited another three minutes to be sure she was gone. This talk must have been serious.

When he finally broke the silence, he said, “Follow me. We need to go deeper.”

I obediently followed him to the mirrored elevators. I watched the light-oriented with the one Tessa took, counting the floors as she ascended. Thallos and I took the other box. He swiped his wrist over a scanner in the wall. The elevator screen lit with a welcome screen verifying that it had registered his B.I.C (Bio Identification Chip). He then dialed in a string of nine numbers that appeared on the screen as asterisks. Was it an OTP (One-Time Pin) or a passcode? I didn’t dare ask, given the look on his face. Thallos looked cold, serious, automaton-like. 

When I stepped into the mirrored box with him, I also quietly watched the elevator screen count the floors we lowered past. We had been on sub-level seven, but soon we were passing sub-level fourteen, seventeen, twenty, and twenty-five. Finally, we stopped at sub-level thirty. As the box slowed to a stop, there was no ding like it had on other floors.

As Thallos stepped through the opening doors, he explained. “This is an observation-proof room.” It was a fifteen-foot square room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all covered in dark gray sound-dampening foam. The only things in the room were a metal table, five chairs, a mini-fridge unit, and a coffeemaker beside a stack of disposable cups. On closer inspection, the table and chairs were bolted to the floor through tight cut holes in the insulation. The fridge and coffeemaker were independently powered with no plugs attached. Lights in the room hung from the ceiling to shine down on the table with a cold and sterile white light. The room smelled of packing foam and metal.

“This room is untappable. No bugs work down here. No teleportation can get down here. You can’t scry into the room by any means. It even cuts any puppet spells the moment you reach the floor.” Thallos continued as he made his way to the coffeemaker. He gestured for me to take a seat at the table while he made coffee.

I did as instructed, asking as I took my seat, “Why would the academy need a room like this?”

“For talks like this, mission briefings and debriefings, and the like. The academy is equipped to operate as an order outpost in an emergency as well.” Thallos turned around with two cups of steaming, dark liquid. Instant coffee. Gross. He took a seat across from me and slid a cup over the table to sit before me. “But talking about the order is why I brought you here.”

“Okay?” I half answered, half asked as I took the cup of scalding fluid in hand.

“Let me start with a simple question. Do you trust me, boy?”

I recoiled at the question. “What?”

“I know that what I’ve been doing to you has been pretty bad, and in my opinion, it was way too early for it. But you do know that I’m not doing any of this out of malice?” He asked.

I fidgeted uncomfortably in the cushionless metal seat. “Well, yeah, I know you said that your supervisors said you had to. I know when it all first started, you looked like you were about to spit acid at someone. It’s all been pretty obvious that you’d rather not bleed me like a pig for dinner.”

“So then, do you trust me?”

I forced myself to stop fidgeting and looked my uncle dead in the eye. “Yes, I do.”

He sat back in his seat and took a sip from his cup as I made to do the same. “Good. Then I should start off with the fact that I’m a double agent and I’ve been training you to be a double agent.”

I choked on my molten, bitter mouthful and spat it out in a spray. It took me a couple of seconds of coughing and thumping my chest with a fist to make sure I hadn’t aspirated any of the coffee. I turned back to my uncle, and in a voice that demanded answers, I said, “Excuse me, what?!”

“I’m a double agent, and I’ve been training you to be the same.”

“Why?” I pressed.

“Well, to answer that, I need to give you the tidbit about the Dark Hunters that I’ve been keeping from you. I needed to make sure you could handle the truth and what comes next.”

“Okay?” I drew out the single word to span several seconds. “So I’m worthy of super-secret information. Care to share?”

“Well, you know the sect is called The Dark Hunters, obviously. Unless I caused more brain damage than I thought.”

“Yes? I mean, yes, I know about the sect. Not, yes, I’m an idiot.” I hurried to correct myself, which drew a smirk of amusement from the man across from me. I was beginning to get as annoyed as I was confused.

“Well, I had been telling you to call the Fragment of the Goddess that the sect follows the Hollow Fragment. The correct title is Her Fragment of The Blighted Heart.”

“Okay.” I drew out again. “I thought the order was the good guys?”

“And I’m here to investigate that. All the other sects have their morals and ethics about protecting the innocent and hunting the wicked. But not this sect.”

“But we’re—... They’re called the Dark Hunters. Like hunters of the darkness, right?” I asked.

“Think more along the lines of hunters in darkness or at the behest of darkness. You see, this secret sect throws the morals of all the other sects right out the window. Their thought process is to get the job done by any means, even if those means are using, hurting, or killing innocents.” Thallos went on.

“Well, that sounds totally on the wrong side of the fence.” I commented.

“I agree, and it all revolves around this hidden fragment. The scripture says that she is the most powerful of the Fragments, but she doesn’t have a heart. So she’s hungry for hearts. And because of that, every so often, a lucky member of the sect is selected to find her a heart. But not just any heart. It must be the heart of someone who has loved and lost. In other words, someone who lost a loved one that they cared about very deeply.”

“Wow, that is fragged up. But why the heart of someone like that?” I asked, reflexively taking a sip of my coffee.

“Hells if I know.” Thallos said with a massive shrug. “I guess they taste the best.”

“So, in short, I’ve been training to go out into the world and perform sapient sacrifices.” I said in disgust.

“Not quite. You normally would be trained for that, but I have you on a track leading elsewhere.” He corrected.

“And where exactly does this track lead?” I asked nervously.

“A good question.” Thallos said as he sat back in his chair and draped an arm over the back. “You are on the fast track to taking up my role. It’s still an elite, do anything, specialist, but I’m what’s called a Blood Arbiter.” He pointed to me with the hand that still held his coffee. “A fitting title for a Myst-Blooded, doncha think?” He swirled his coffee as he retracted his finger before taking a large swig of the piping-hot fluid.

Thallos set down his cup and gestured to himself with a thumb. “I’m part of an organization simply called The Company. We have a goal akin to the Order of Aegis, and we’re about the same size. But we caught wind of this secret sect and got concerned that the honorable Order wasn’t so honorable under the robes and masks. So they sent me in to verify the truth a good three decades back when I first joined. I joined the dark sect and learned that it was worse than we thought, and now my mission is to collect chosen initiates like yourself, tell you the truth, and get you prepped as a double agent yourself. You would be my fifth student who joined The Company if you said yes. So, are you willing to join up with the good guys and get ready to take down this facade?”

“I-um, yeah. Yes, I want to put an end to this sapient sacrifice dreck. What do I need to do?”

“I’m proud of you, boy! I knew you were a smart one.” He cheered as he joyfully jabbed a finger in my direction. “Now you don’t need to do anything special. We’ll keep training as normal. You just need to act normal and not tell anyone about this. But I’ll go find your lady friend and see if she’s got the chops to join us. I’ll have to fast-track her and tell her what’s going on from the start if she passes my tests. We can’t hide anything from her if she’s joining the training. But for now, you go back to your room and relax.”

“Got it.” I answered with a determined grin.