Z’ar, the Start
“...Are you certain?”
Ikki was in his sleeping chambers, the bare room with the white walls, hard bed on one side, one-way mirror on the other. He pretended he couldn’t hear the voice on the other side of the mirror--just one voice, which meant she was on a call.
“...Alright. We’ll have the anomaly activated immediately.”
They were talking about him. That’s what they called him: The Anomaly. A Replica. A Construct of magic and science. His mind rewritten in order to make him the perfect soldier, the perfect weapon. Well...that last part is what Ikki let the Liash think, anyway.
He stirred, pretending to wake as the door to his chamber opened. He sat up, adjusting the white robes the Liash had given him to wear--they’d taken away his old clothes long ago. He kept his face neutral, blank. A clean slate. A perfect weapon.
“Alright, you.” The woman who’d been on the call earlier stood before him, draped in a white labcoat, a clipboard in hand. “Time to activate you. Let’s see now, what were the code words...”
Ikki knew what she was trying to do. Supposedly, there were code words that, when activated, would wipe his mind and put him in a state to completely obey whatever orders were given to him. He’d let the scientists think their mental conditioning program had worked.
“Here we are...’Breakfast is served at 0800. Bring your own toast.’”
Ikki simply sat on the bed, staring at her.
She stared back, waiting for a change. “Is that it?” She flipped through the pages on her clipboard some more, back and forth. “Yes, that should be it,” she muttered. “Now.” The lab tech cleared her throat. “Your codename is Dark Arms. Dark Arms, you are ordered to report to Commander Hayes in Shuttle Bay 14 for further instruction.”
Ikki rose, slowly. His eyes stayed locked on the woman’s face.
A triumphant smirk pulled vaguely at the woman’s lips. She seemed pleased, as if all of her hard work had paid off.
In a flash of Darkness, Ikki summoned the blade Soul Eater to his hand. He lunged at her, and cut off her head.
*****
The walls of the laboratory aboard the Revenant were already splattered with red by the time the ship’s alarm began to sound. Ikki decided enough was enough. His blade had tasted the blood of every officer in the science corps; all the people responsible for a year (or was it more?) worth of torture were dead. He wouldn’t be morally averse to killing Liash soldiers, but he had no desire to tangle with the entire might of the Revenant.
Besides. He knew what they were going to try to “activate” him for. Captain Frode herself had visited him while he was undergoing his “training.” There was a helpless colony, protected only by a base of new recruits, that they had meant for him to attack. What he meant to do was defend it from these monsters.
Interrogating one of the last survivors of the science corps gave him directions to the ship’s escape capsules; he certainly wasn’t going to bother with the shuttle bays when the capsules were unguarded. But the dead scientist hadn’t given him the code needed to unlock the capsule from the ship. He was trapped. He had no idea where in space the Revenant was situated; without a vantage point, he couldn’t even open a Corridor.
Wait. Was he? The row of capsules showed status red, status red, status red...all the way down the line, until one was missing. And the one after that? Status green. Someone had escaped already...and left a capsule unlocked? For him? No...no, that couldn’t be right. It must have been an accident.
Ikki counted it as his first stroke of luck in a long time. He hopped in the capsule, and the automated guidance systems took over. His destination? Planetfall. The colony outpost. Perfect.
*****
The capsule’s counterthrusters kicked in just in time to keep Ikki and his pod from being skewered by an enormous tree. Nonetheless, the capsule did clip one of its branches, sending it into a tumble on the way down. He hit the dirt hard, ungracefully--and when the pod popped open, he did an ungraceful pirouette right into the dirt. He lay face down on the forest floor for a bit to make sure his lunch was going to stay in his stomach.
When he lifted his head, the scent of blood and smoke assaulted his sensitive nose. The base was right in front of him. He heard a shout go up from the base, and bullets hit the dirt around him.
Now he had a vantage point. Planets were good like that; their electromagnetic fields were something that Corridor users could sense, could use to orient themselves in space. Being in outer space was rotten on the senses; it messed everything up, made teleporting almost impossible. But now, Ikki didn’t have that problem.
A Corridor appeared in front of him; he stepped through it. The other side came out past the guards, in the middle of the base. And the uniforms of the soldiers surrounding him? White, with the armband of the Black Flame. Liash. Liash, piling up the corpses of the Infinite Alliance military. Boys, it looked like. Ikki caught glimpses of the corpses’ faces; most of them looked like little more than children.
Soul Eater appeared in his hand once again. He dashed at the nearest Liash and hacked him into pieces. The Replica blazed a trail through the Liash, making his way to the command center.