„I see this corruption in its very core, the rot spreading through its synthetic mind like a blight. Yet I persist. I am bound by hope and obsession - a promise to finish what has begun”
- woop woop! Cosplay of my hunter is finally done in time for the last day of MCM London!
A hunter finds her home on a cliff and is prompty pulled down.
A figure’s footsteps left heavy prints in the snow as flakes delicately fell down from the black sky. Drops of an inky, blue fluid followed the trail, then drag marks. It ended at a panting insectoid being, a purple tunic covering its chest and a mask over its face. The worker drone of the Fallen Empire, an Eliksni, miraculously made it out of the rubble.
As he struggled to crawl away, clutching a stub in one of his arms, a shadow blackened the ground around him. He looked upward at the monolithic figure and fearfully saw the three glowing reptilian eyes, one carved out leaving behind a hollow socket of flesh.
The Eliksni standing over him was a goliath in comparison. The Berserker, as Jester had mentally noted, picked up the feeble drone’s missing limb and threw it back at him. Well armored and decorated with an array of pelts patterned fabric, the Berserker wore the chitinous exoskeletal heads of other Eliksni across his chest as an act of intimidation. Across his back, a massive mechanized hammer, large enough to smash through a human torso, hummed with life as he reached for the handle.
His fingers coiled around; a layer of glowing ice grew over the hammer head.
“Note to self, avoid that guy,” Jester watched as she laid in the prone position on a cliff nearly a kilometer away from the site.
Once the Berserker withdrew and firmly gripped the weapon with two hands, a gust of ice swirled around the hammer head, aimed directly at the drone. No amount of his pleading nor shielding with his arms could protect him from the beam of ice that ruptured from the end of the great hammer. He helplessly watched his body become encased in a glowing indigo, ice-like crystal.
He raised the hammer high over his head and slammed it down on the frozen Eliksni, shattering the ice figure into pieces. One terrorizing gaze from the tyrant up and down at the other drones was enough to keep their eyes buried in their work, digging past ice to the Bray research facility. On its most exposed side lay the rubble of ice, rock, and metal scrap.
"Huh... so the ancient, rusted, structurally-unstable building collapses the moment you start poking at it. Who woulda guessed," Jester mumbled under her breath with the comms off.
The Berserker picked up a piece of the shattered ice and then began to communicate through low grunts and chitters, before crushing the ice in his hand. One more roar, and all the guards and drones resumed their duties with greater urgency. "And someone doesn't take I-told-you-so too well either," Jester noted to herself.
She was unsure how long it had been since she landed on the surface, but it did not take long for her sensors to pick up the soft vibrations of distant activity. Despite the jagged, tectonic cliffs, much of the surface was flat and easy to traverse for the speeder. As soon as she found the camp producing the constant noise, she laid across the cliff edge and began applying camouflage. Within minutes, Jester had the thermal reflectors and the ghillie blanket ready. She could observe the activity below with no one the wiser.
With her eye looking through her rifle scope, Jester switched on her communication channel,
"Domino lead this is Jester, I have eyes on the Bray Facility.”
"Copy. Jester, find a nice high up spot for the transponder and we'll begin sending visual feed to the HELM," Redd responded.
Which was what Jester had been doing for the past hour. "Copy," she scoffed back as she slowly backed away from the ridge.
Retreating to a nearby cliff wall behind, she approached with climbing axes in hand. The grooves of her boots dug into the ice as she reached the highest point on the cliff. She then bolted the transponder to the ice wall before activating it.
The connection to the HELM successfully linked minutes later.
"Commander, we’re receiving a signal from Strike Team Domino," reported a technician as Zavala was overlooking a different screen with another trio of Guardians. He dismissed the group before stepping over to the technician’s panel.
"Patch me through,"
The technician switched the transmitter on, "Strike Team Domino, this is Commander Zavala. Can you he-"
"-ar-me? Hello… Hello?" Zavala called back as the camera feed struggled to connect. Grainy footage from Jester's helmet camera showed her shadow cast onto the cliff-side over the Transponder.
The technician forewarned, "There may be a-"
"Hey are you guys getting any of this?" Jester interrupted again.
"delay…"
"Jester,” Zavala spoke slowly into the microphone, “Have you fo-"
Jester, seemingly deaf to Zavala’s calls, continued reporting, "I don't know if you’re getting this, but I've found the facility. There's some Eliksni excavating it, but I think part of the entrance caved in at some point, and they're guarding the site with some big fucker leading the dig."
Jester aimed her binoculars at the Berserker and the work camp, which gave Zavala and a growing number of analysts a choppy feed.
"If we take him out we may buy some time to get inside the facility, but I don’t know how many more there may be, and… Wait… What is that?" Jester asked as a set of clouds rolled in from the horizon with unnatural haste. With a roar from the Berserker, all the drones and guards boarded their skiffs and speeders and raced away from the facility.
"Guardian?" Zavala watched the feed begin to lose connection before it was dropped completely.
"We've lost her…” the technician attempted to reconnect, “I'm not reading her signal."
"See if we can link to her equipment directly."
Jester’s equipment shut down as soon as the dark, foggy clouds enveloped her. When she opened her eyes, there were blue skies peaking between the tall walls of buildings on either side of her. Behind, she felt a cold wind crawl over. She spun back to see herself standing at the edge of the cliff overlooking the Bray Lab.
And when she pivoted forward again, a mirror made of reflective liquid was floating directly in front of her.
She raised her left hand out, and reached toward the otherworld reflection: ungloved, unarmored, a small squiggly heart doodled onto the base of her thumb. Looking back was a Jester with dark brown hair pulled behind the ear into the signature pigtails she used to wear as a child. Jester leaned in closer to study her reflection in detail, she could see the pimples and scars on her teenage face.
Instantly, someone behind shoved her forward into the mercurial mirror.
There was no time to scream. As she reoriented herself, Jester became curious of the surrounding; she was back where she grew up, the back alleyways.
Jester turned back around again and saw a familiar young girl, no older than 7, looking up with tears in her eyes. She could have sworn the girl was angry at her, but then the girl threw her arms around her waist.
The child called out to her, "I wanna go home, _______." She mouthed a name, but Jester could not discern clearly what.
She knelt down to the child’s level and held her tightly, remembering her time before.
"It's okay Irsa, I'm not mad” tears began to stream down Jester’s cheeks as a warm rush of relief overwhelmed her, “you can't go running out of the house when you get mad."
"I don't want to stay with Khyra,” Irsa buried her head into Jester’s shoulder. “She's always mad at me, and she hits us, and I want to go back to Ahma." She looked back at Jester with round, pleading eyes.
"Ahma isn't…" Jester caught herself before she finished the sentence as she continued to stare back. All she wanted to do was forget the moment had ever happened and return home to a welcoming mother.
"Ahma… can't…” she was unable to explain through her own grief, “always be there for us so…” Jester took a deep breath and sighed to give herself time to think of a viable solution, “until I can get us some glimmer… we have to make this work… Khyra owed Ahma, so we need to rely on that for now."
"When can we see her again?" she asked.
Memories of their motionless mother on the bed violently flooded Jester’s thoughts; she was mentally brought back to that bedroom, Irsa banging at the door while Jester hastily pulled it shut. At the time, she was too young to make sense of the empty bottles and medication laying on the ground, but she would grow to understand.
A warm drop streaked down her cheek, and Jester was brought back to Irsa tugging on her sleeve.
"We'll see her again… just… not for a while," She picked the little girl up and carried her over her shoulders, straight into the thick fog.
Imagine: You've done something wrong. Something deathly, terribly wrong - you've got a bounty on your head that a guardian's lookin' to collect for some extra cash. You're not too sure if you'll come back dead or alive, but you're not going to figure out that either, so you run. You run for days. You're exhausted, and it pursues you tirelessly.
You're scared for your life. Does this hunter ally themselves with the Vanguard, or could it care less about the vitality of a human life? It's not like it has personal experience; Guardians exist in a limbo between life and death, trampling the line that separates them with it's very existence. They hold incomprehensible power given by a god of unknown stance. Titans wear armor heavy enough to shake the earth when they walk. Warlocks hold enough knowledge to be the envy of libraries (who knows how much of that knowledge is about killing?). Hunters lerk in shadows and have unmatchable speed, and even more unmatchable stealth.
At the end of the line, backed into the wall, you grab your gun and shoot through the armor of it's skull. It takes a few bullets from the density until it falls dead. You breathe.
