It was a sunny morning in August when we got the call that there had been another Acension. I suited up with the rest of my team, ripped a Godkiller rifle off the rack and checked it twice. I bit back the fear, acrid and dry and sour in my mouth.
Ever since that anonymous writer's book had been published the incidents had doubled. I cursed that ghost under my breath yet again. Intelligence posited he or she was an Ascendant themselves, yet was staying hidden in order to promote Ascendancy in general.
Captain Trent, a husky, looked at me sidelong. "You're panting Triss. You ok?"
I scowled at him, flicked my brush to the left in contempt. "We handled two yesterday. It used to be two a month. What the fuck is going on?"
His left ear flicked back and he shrugged, his sky blue eyes that always seemed a thousand miles away revealing nothing. "No clue. But we have a job to do. Are you good or aren't you?" A pause, then teasingly: "Foxes have a threshold, I know-"
"Of course I'm good you jerk," I snarled, flipping him the bird.
He half smiled, the white wetness of one canine catching my eye. "That's the spirit. It'd be tough without my sniper. We'll draw him out, and while he's taking a divinity shit and using his newfound powers it's right between the eyes like always."
I nodded, turned away, checked the Godkiller a third time. The black, well oiled gleam was heavy in my paws. Everything looked good, bad as it was.
-
The first of them, code named Omega, was still at large. That fact was fucking scary, because he had displayed a level of power none who had followed in his paw tracks had achieved since. He was a legend of a sort, a spook story, a modern fireside scare that seemed unbelievable, made up.
It was documented that he lifted the battleship Artemis with telekinesis, levitated it to the capitol barracks, then used his mind to detonate all the ammunition inside. The effect was like a minor nuke. It leveled the city and the blast killed almost a hundred thousand people.
It was also documented that afterwards he tore through a tank regiment as if the armor was made of wet paper, decimated an entire division of infantry with air turned sharp somehow.
Before all that started he had appeared on public television in a silvery fox mask that half snarled, declaring his intention to conquer the world and usher in Utopia.
Yet when the battle was over, when the capitol was literally defenseless and on it's knees, Fox Mask vanished.
He hasn't been seen since.
However, others have followed. He was the first of what society would eventually come to call the 'Ascendants', beings with extraordinary power that transcended the physical.
Every now and then someone else finds a key to abilities that grant power beyond scientific understanding, that defy the laws of physics. In the past it was rare, yet now, in 2230, it grows more and more frequent.
Mortals responded to this threat of course. The major coup came with the capture of an Ascendant in 2223. Scientists were successful in creating an anti-manipulative space through intricate machinery a year prior, a place capable of neutralizing the powers of an Ascendant and capable of imprisoning them.
Under severe...questioning...according to the government, the captive (Code Name Loki) revealed information that led to the development of Godkiller weapons. Society could finally combat the existential menace.
The war continues. Ascendants seem, as part of their transformation, devoid of emotion and contemptious of mortal motivation, kill indiscriminately not out of hatred but because they are instilled with the belief that nothingness is ultimate heaven or a state of perfection. Thus, destruction to them is an act of goodness, the unraveling of existence both necessary and a thing of beauty.
This of course, also makes them fearless and all the more dangerous, for they have no regard anymore for preserving their own existence. The only driving force they possess is to undo creation.
There are of course, a few exceptions to this rule. A pawful of Godkings and Godqueens have established Protectorates in remote regions, there is even one on the moon, hyper technologized megacities that seek to evangelize, enlighten, and produce new Ascendants. Cults and religions by the score have sprung up because of the existence of these mysterious and malignly powerful beings, positing everything from Ascendancy being the ultimate judgment of the one true God to the situation being the ultimate will of evolution and Nature generally.
The true truth, however, is something no one knows.
-
The wolf stands in the center of the intersection of Fir and Third Street, surrounded by a surreal and slowly revolving tornado of wrecked cars, shattered glass and chunks of concrete in the pouring rain. One of his eyes is a soft yellow, completely normal. The other is a glowing green, like an emerald in a sunbeam. They seem sad, somehow, in that bizarre juxtapose, yet I know he feels nothing anymore.
I'm perched on the rooftop of Steel Spear One, a corporate skyscraper whose business is rental cars. He doesn't know I'm there, though if he did I'd be his priority.
Snipers only get one chance. They're well aware of the Godkiller rifles. If I miss the first shot I'm dead meat.
Captain Trent steps out of a nearby alley without a weapon, empty paws in the air. I hear him bark 'why' in my comm set. 'Why are you killing people. Please stop!'
The wolf turns slowly. His fur is drenched, his clip on tie is crooked. The cheap trench coat hangs sodden over his slender shoulders like broken wings. Through the scope I see his black lips twitch. "After my wife died of breast cancer yesterday I realized something," he says flatly, the left side of his muzzle showing the ghost of a snarl.
Then his face changes, becomes a smile. Then he shakes his head as if to clear it and of a sudden there's nothing, nothing at all on his face but terrifying blankness. "Stupid. This flesh. This thing. We should all embrace what she is, what she found. Don't you see we're being used?"
A prius, a boulder bristling with rusty rhubarb, a huge broken mirror like a giant's scimitar. I've got that green eye squarely in the crosshair of the scope but if I miss and hit that shit swirling around him instead I'm dead.
"Do you think she'd want you to do this?" Trent asks, ears back, the rain pouring down his angular face in rivers.
The wolf's gaze narrows. His hackles go up. "Don't patronize me you pathetic sack of flesh. Of course she'd say stop. She was a slave to the disgusting state that took her life, just as you are. We all have to join her."
He raises his paw then, the shimmering sharpening, intensifying. The spinning debris becomes a howling blur. "I'll make this painless, I promise."
I take the shot and-
-
Trent tries to put the umbrella over me and I push him away. I'm soaked to the bone, cold as ice, yet I don't care. I catch my haggard reflection in a window pane and just stop, get hit with a sense of unreality. A soaked vixen with huge rifle, dark eyes haunted. How many people had I killed now? I had promised myself I'd never count...
"You saved my life again," he said softly. "And who knows how many more. Losing a loved one isn't a license to Ascend and become a mass murderer."
I thrust the Godkiller at his chest and he took it. It was a relief to be free of the weight of it. "I know. What I don't know is how much more of this I can take. Strange...I'm starting to feel like one of them."
The husky grabbed my wrist and I was stunned and startled by the glint of fear in his eyes. "Don't say that Triss. It's different. We kill, yes. Yet we're saving lives. Don't ever doubt it."
I tore free from his grasp, almost landed in a rain soaked gutter. "Always a hero," I whispered.
He caught me before I fell. I don't think he heard, because then he kissed me. The rest is a blur.
-
Sunlight. Silk. Drifting dust motes through diaphonous curtains white and pleated. His phone is ringing and my head is swimming. Too much wine, like usual.
"Not another one," I said, one paw over my eyes to shield the ache in my head from the invading day.
"No," he said, nipping my neck. I opened my eyes and the husky seemed happy. "Administration says we've got leave for the next two weeks. Ten Ascenscion resolutions in a month...it's a record."
I turned over, put a pillow over my ear. "Wake me up next month then," I replied.
His laughter was muffled by that pillow yet then he pulled me close and suddenly sleep wasn't really what I wanted.
-
We got another call half way through our vacation. Team A was too far away, dealing with another situation in a northern prefecture.
I'm so tired.
-
He's standing there in a kitsune mask and a classic kimono so purely white it glows in the sun, arms akimbo like an impatient shopper in a grocery store line. He's staring right at me, and through the scope I see the flat, grim gleam in his sky blue eyes. I'll always remember that gaze. It's as if he didn't have a soul.
He raises one paw lazily, points at me, and at the same time I pull the trigger the world erupts in green fire.
A blur of white ceilings, the rattling of plastic gurney wheels on linoleum, doctors and nurses speaking in panicked voices. "She's lost so much blood..."
There's pain too, so much I want to scream yet nothing comes out. I'm frozen in a block of agonizing ice. I feel like I've been blown apart.
"If we're fast enough we might be able to save the left arm," someone says.
I black out.
-
When I come to they tell me the skyscraper I was on had been leveled. Three hundred and two people died in an emerald blast that generated an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2. I should have been among them.
No word on Trent. They're still searching the rubble.
And...
My Godkiller days are over. I don't have a right arm anymore.
-
Strange, to sit there and watch a butterfly land on a flower. The birds are chriping and there's a breeze. The garden in the center plaza of the rehab center is like Eden, presided over by a perfect blue sky and white clouds the carefree imagination could shape into anything.
Yet my mind, well...I'm in Hell. My body is healing, faster than I thought possible, yet there's no help for one's soul. They found Captain Trent alive, if you could call it that. He's a vegetable, wasting away in a wheel chair and sustained by IV.
We thought we were heroes...we thought we could save the world. Yet with a single thought from one of the monsters we were trying to slay we were wiped away.
Maybe all those fanatics are right. Maybe we should just surrender to the will of the new gods.
I can't bring myself to believe that though. I may have lost my arm yet I haven't lost my sanity. What saddens me most is I have no way to avenge the love of my life, that from now on thanks to Kitsune I'm just a broken civilian.
He got away, by the way. Slaughtered almost an entire division of the military and decimated a city block. He was far stronger than anyone thought, the worst since Omega. I still don't know how he knew where I was, yet it doesn't matter. He did. I failed, and over a thousand lives were lost.
Sometimes I swear I can feel my right paw, that my arm still exists. Right now that paw is a fist, so tight that the claws have pierced the pad and it's bleeding.