Ana was running out of options. She ran out of ammunition long ago and resorted to taking out enemy soldiers with her knife. She was gd none of them were skilled in close combat, but if she didn’t take them by surprise she would surely lose.
The sterile, chilly military base was rather dark, so she had to rely on her other senses. Thankfully she was used to living in the dark from her outdoor training, although her sense of smell was hindered by the quantity of blood caking her all over, most of it not hers.
She heard footsteps, and readied behind a corner. As soon as the enemy approached she sprang forward, driving her army knife into his throat before he could react, using it to push him to the ground.
She searched him, but it seemed this one was out of ammunition like everyone else in this forsaken pce.
Ana sighed as she pulled the knife free. At this rate, she would pass out from exhaustion before the enemy retreated. Reinforcements were definitely not coming, so she needed to get out of here.
She slid around the corner and saw another dead soldier, likely one from yesterday. She quickly patted him down before finding a grenade in his pocket.
She pocketed it, relieved that she found something she could use in an emergency.
She snuck through the empty facility and then felt a subtle vibration from her receiver. She felt the following coded vibrations, likely from the squad she had been separated from.
Keep pushing the enemy.
Ana had to stop herself from cussing so as to not make a sound and be found out.
Her best route to survival would be to steal a gas mask and bst open one of the airlocks with the grenade, but she knew it wouldn’t work out cleanly. The bst would cause far too much ruckus, and she didn’t want to go outside with only a gas mask.
She also didn’t want to think about what would happen if she was caught deserting, although she wondered if they even had the manpower to give chase if she did.
She snapped back into reality when she heard more footsteps, two pairs this time. She waited patiently, but they didn’t seem to get closer.
She inched around the corner and saw two soldiers inspecting the soldier she had dropped moments before, and tightened her grip on the knife. She dashed forward silently once one of them bent down to look closer, grasping at the opportunity presented.
The soldier turned around at the st second, but didn’t have time before the knife went into his forehead. The other one pressed a button on his wrist before she could attack, alerting the whole facility to her location.
That wasn’t good.
She stabbed the guard in the arm as he tried to pull out a Glock, but he threw his other fist at her. She caught it and snapped it, thanking her enhancements as she snapped his neck and took his gun from him.
Now she needed to get as far as she could before reinforcements arrived, so she began to sprint.
She wasn’t fast enough.
A squad of armed soldiers came out of a vent and chased her, cornering her next to a dead end. They didn’t fire, likely to conserve ammunition, and instead tried to rush her with knives.
She pulled out the grenade she pocketed earlier, and popped the pin. She threw it ahead, sprinting in the same direction. Her enhancements ensured she was the only person here fast enough to outrun the bst, so throwing it forward would leave the enemy with either the option to run after her and fail, being consumed by the bst, or to stay cornered and suffer the same fate.
“Not so fast.”
She felt a bullet nd in her ankle and fell to the ground. She looked down to see that they managed to hit her right in the crack between her boots’ armor and her bulletproof leggings.
Right then she felt the bst of the grenade, and the world went bck. Such a pathetic way to die.
And she was dead. Wasn’t she?
~=~=~=~=~=~
“You didn’t hear this from me, but the general is a bit crazy.”
The wagon driver was quite talkative, so Tharon had been asking him questions about this world and what they should expect. Calyx had fallen asleep, and Lania had her head down in her hands, likely to cover the fact she was sleeping too.
“They say the general’s skill with war is unrivaled, but she’s quite the brutal fighter.” He continued. “She says it’s from her old world. The way they fought was cutthroat, and she was one of the most cutthroat among them. I don’t want to see what warfare in her world was like.”
Tharon assumed that she must have brought Earth’s battle tactics to this world. War back home would sound rather extreme if you weren’t used to it.
“At first gnce she seems like a rather contained young woman, but I’ve driven her pces before, and she has a wild side only a fighter from another world could have.”
“Yeah, me and Calyx were never really fighters.” Tharon said, looking towards his sleeping brother in the back. “Back in our world, we were studying to become professional chefs.”
“We don’t have those around here.” The driver said. “In the south they have it much warmer, and they can grow all kinds of different crops. It’s too expensive to grow any of that sort of stuff over here, and so only the nobles and the pantheon eat that kind of stuff.”
“Pan…theon?” Tharon asked, genuinely confused.
“Nature spirit royalty. Like Lady Hiva.” The driver ughed at his confusion. “Although she’s one of the few that goes by a human name. Many of them just go by ‘The Great Spirit of Whatever’. They used to call themselves gods until a few among them worried about it being bsphemous.”
“Oh.”
The road they were traveling on cut through a Veil-infested area. It was too rocky to be purified for farmnd, so Profectus didn’t bother.
“What’s that in the distance?”
Tharon pointed to a massive, moving shadow on a nearby mountain. It looked almost like a cloud, a mass of vapor inching across the trees.
“That’s a veilsludge.” The driver looked out towards the mass. “The Veil consumes life and it merges into csses of veilbeasts. If several veilbeast bears merged, they’d all take the shape of a giant bear, which would be a veiltitan. And veilhybrids are mixes of animals that get along well and form a new being. Sludges occur where several forms inside of a veilbeast fight for dominance, ending up in all of them being a single fleshy mass.”
“Does that make them weak?” Tharon asked. The notion of them being a lump of angry meat was gross, but he couldn’t imagine it being hard to fight one.
“Pretty much, although you could get hurt from going too close to the cloud of Veil they have around them.”
Tharon had felt like he had been around too much Veil for one life just in the past week, so that thought wasn’t pleasant.
“Anyway, you should wake your brother up.” The driver pointed to a map he had attached to the front of the wagon. “We’re almost to the capital.”
As they got closer, Tharon saw the capital. It was almost like a big city back home, with tall, grey stone towers built close together, using each other as support. They weren’t as big as the skyscrapers back home, but they were bigger than buildings he would have expected from a medieval area.
As they entered the city he looked around, seeing an almost homey amount of hustle from the people around. The only difference was that the stone paths, wide roads, and surrounding vegetation made it feel much less industrial and more wild.
Tharon liked it better than the big cities on Earth.
He did wonder whether the general had any part in making it more like cities on Earth, since he saw things like steel being used in rge quantities around the city.
“Just past this next gate should be Ragon Fortress.” The driver said, turning a corner.
The guards at the gate seemed familiar with the wagon driver, waving as they opened it. He returned the gesture as they went in.
“This is your stop.”
Tharon thanked the driver and shook his brother violently, waking him.
“Ugh.” Calyx stood up. “You didn’t have to do it that hard.”
“I should be surprised that was enough to wake you up.” Tharon said. “If you slept any deeper than you usually do, you would probably die.”
Lania had woken up naturally due to the stop, so he thankfully didn’t have to do the same to her.
“From here we just need to go to the General’s office.” Lania said before a guard came over to them.
“Actually, the General wants to speak to these two alone.” The guard said in a wheezy voice. “I’m here to escort them, and you can follow Paul over there to the servants’ quarters.”
Paul was the first normal sounding name Tharon had heard since coming here, though he guessed he wasn’t one who should be talking about weird names.
The guard led them down a few halls and towards a door, before leaving them alone to face the General.
Tharon took a deep breath. He didn’t know exactly what to expect from the General, but he knew it was important to make a good impression.
Calyx seemed more rexed and curious, which Tharon envied. Before Tharon could collect himself entirely, Calyx began moving towards the door.
Once the door opened, the brothers saw her.
She wasn’t what Tharon pictured. She had messy dark green hair that nearly reached her elbows, and a rich, olive skin tone. Along with the names, he had also learned to stop questioning odd hair colors since he arrived in this world.
She had scars across her face that were simir to the ones that the brothers had on their chests, and she wore red armor, finished with a red cape.
She had the eyes of a predator.
“Are you the two travelers ciming to come from another world?” She spoke softly in an accent, surprising Tharon. Unlike the accents he had heard in this world, this one he could immediately recognize.
“Yeah.” Calyx said, picking up on the same thing Tharon did. “Are you British, perchance?”
“...That is my pce of origin, yes.”
Unlike Lady Hiva, who spoke in a calm-but-authoritative tone, the general spoke in a more tired, kind voice, but with a hint of gruffness.
“I’m Tharon, and this is my brother, Calyx.” Tharon said.
“I am General Ana. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” She shook both of their hands. “Would you mind showing me…?”
Both brothers showed her the scars, and she nodded. From what Tharon had heard, he expected her to be more violent. Polite wasn’t exactly how the wagon driver described her.
“You probably know the reason I brought you here,” Ana said. “Or the secondary reason, at least.”
“Secondary?”
“Yes.” Ana stepped back and motioned for them to come in. “My main reason was because I wanted to see if we’re from the same world. There’s a lot I want to know, and it’s somewhat custrophobic being the only person who knows the world I grew up in.”
A cynical part of Tharon thought the reason was a bit selfish, but the rger part of him understood. If he didn’t have his brother, being alone with the knowledge of Earth would be painful.
“I assume you two are American?” She asked, looking them up and down. Tharon didn’t understand why, since they had new bodies anyway, but she probably had her reasons.
“Yeah.” Calyx told her.
“I spent most of my life in America.” Ana told them. “My birthpce was destroyed in the Eternal War, so I moved at a young age.”
The Eternal What?
“I don’t remember anything called an Eternal War…” Tharon said, scratching the back of his head. “Was it a small conflict?”
“Small?” Ana asked, now concerned. “If nearly wiping humanity is small, then yes.”
“What?” Calyx asked. “Last I checked there wasn’t anything wiping humanity.”
Ana thought to herself for a moment.
“If you are from America then you should know nuclear weapons left the country among many others clouded in radiation and darkness.” She paced back and forth.
“Our world never had anything like that.” Calyx said. “Are you sure we’re from the same world?”
“Maybe not.” Ana said. “Nearly 7.5 billion people died in the Eternal War. Did this truly not happen in your world?”
“Nope.” Tharon said. “There haven’t been any massive wars in ages in our world.”
“Then it’s true.” Ana paced back and forth faster.
“If we’re from different worlds, how are there so many simirities?” Calyx asked as he watched her. “I mean, two worlds coincidentally having both an America and a UK isn’t exactly common.”
“That isn’t what concerns me.” Ana said, coming to a halt. “It’s no different from this world having English. I’ve already concluded that worlds must have something binding them in simirity. I’m more concerned about how I’ve lost my one lead on my world.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“No.” She stated bluntly. “But I do want to know what happened. The war was reaching a climax before I died there.”
“I see.” Tharon said.
“Regardless.” She switched the topic. “You still could be very useful to the kingdom. Your servant friend has already offered information about your dedication and talents, so I have no doubt you might be what this kingdom needs.”
Tharon found it hard to imagine Lania complimenting them, but he’d take it.
“I hear that your body works well with vitei, yes?” She said, pointing to Calyx. “We need to test what other energies your body might work well with.”
“They all want me for my body.” Calyx said with fake offense, only slightly smiling at his own joke.
“And you.” Ana looked over to Tharon. “She said you showed remarkable determination. That’s why I want to train you two myself.”
Calyx didn’t look surprised since he seemed to have a bit of a main character complex going on, but Tharon felt inadequate to work under someone so esteemed. A month ago if he was in this position he’d have trouble taking anyone dressed like her seriously, but her presence was almost as strong as Lady Hiva’s.
“Sounds good.” Calyx said.
Tharon simply nodded under the pressure. This was a chance he wouldn’t be able to waste.
“Good.” She smiled. “But first, I’d like to speak some more. Even if our worlds are different, I still feel it’s proper to exchange stories. Perhaps there’s connections we’ve yet to discover hidden within.”
