Story:Kings of Strife/Part 1

Part One
There exists within every man a natural aversion to structure and a natural attraction to freedom. This natural sensation disappears in most people and is gradually replaced with a heightened awareness of civilization, the arts, sensibility, and emotion. But for the minority in which this process does not occur, there is a lack of these central qualities. These men, dubbed various names throughout the timeline, have become rebels, leaders, homeless, any sort of profession that a normal man may become. Some of them become heroes and some of them become disastrous villains, but all of them eventually get in touch with their natural sensitivies and master the strife within them.

On one fine morning in the Inusian autumn season, a man awoke and found himself in the same rut he had been in for the past few weeks. Money was scarce. He found himself calling this his endless struggle, a constant quest for him to feed himself and pay his bills. His payoff from the last time was running low and the landlady would be at his small apartment soon to demand her funds, which he couldn’t currently pay. That only meant, he accepted wearily, that he would need to find another job.

This man being described was a mercenary. In the world he found himself in, known then as the “present”, known before as the “future”, and known later as the “past”, such a profession was not entirely absurd, but it was universally frowned upon. Men with no future and with no past were sprinkled throughout the workforce, but a mercenary was one of the few jobs in which every man had no present. No moment was guaranteed and every moment was staved off with scarce pay and harsh jobs. Killing and stealing, sabotage and intrigue; some found the world of a mercenary exciting and romantic. Not a single mercenary agreed on this viewpoint. Regardless, on this morning being spoken of, the mercenary rolled himself off his bed and idly scratched at his chest. The mercenary stepped over his scattered belongings resting on his floor as he grabbed his black jacket and weapon, along with ammunition. A mercenary needed his tools much like any other job. He found himself pondering just how little sleep he had gotten that previous night as he left his apartment. The door he left unlocked in order to allow the girl still asleep on his threadbare bed to leave upon her leisure. She had provided him with little comfort but took a lot of his remaining funds, but at least he had been able to sleep peacefully that night. Such a phenomenon was rare for him.

Within an hour the mercenary found himself at the “shady” district of Morshia City. The titles mattered little to him because in his line of work every part of every town could be “shady”. It was the middle of the day already but this fact drew no lament from him. He preferred the darkness anyway. For the next twenty minutes, he estimated, the job-hunting process went on as usual. Entering a plain warehouse, he found himself browsing the job listings around the walls of the area with barely covered boredom. This one didn’t pay enough, that one required a team, etc, etc… Before long he had found his defining moment of the day. One of the guards of the room, usually a shift that required making oneself scarce, went up to the mercenary’s person and grabbed his attention. Apparently the Employer wanted to see him. Of course the mercenary had to reply accordingly to the summons, because pissing off the man who made his enture job possible was simply not an option for him. Having only seen the employer once before, in passing, the mercenary was understandably quite uneasy.

“…You need me to what now?” The mercenary readjusted the hood of his waist level jacket and stood awkwardly on one foot as he awaited a response. Is that what the employer wanted with him, to ask for a job to be done? That may have been his intention, but such a task was not what he was looking for. “You can’t be serious. There’s no way I can do that.”

“Have I ever joked with you, Mr. Silverius?” Not only did he know the mercenary’s name, he acted as if the two of them were quite familiar. The mercenary’s employer sat perfectly still, but there was always an illusion of movement about him. No features were visible under his heavy clothing, but his body never stopped moving slightly, almost as if his eyes were constantly searching the room for something or internally writhing with maggots. “Nothing is impossible in this world.”

The mercenary, Silverius, looked over the robed man sitting nonchalantly at the table in the dark. This employer filled him with dread and unease. As a result, almost involuntarily, Silverius kept himself aware of his surroundings around his employer. The mercenary idly scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, that’s inspirational and all, but I couldn’t break into the Inusian Tower. Don’t you know what that place is? Nobody can break in there! Can’t you just buy a knock-off crystal and sell it to whoever you want?”

The employer chuckled darkly. His hood shook slightly as if he were laughing at the ignorance of a child. It irritated Silverius. “Leave the blueprints to me. I will make sure everything goes according to my plan… All I need you to do is execute it. And it pays well. Isn’t that what you wanted, Mr. Silverius?” The decrepit employer spoke the mercenary’s name with a sort of syrupy, serpentine lisp.

Unsettled though he might have been, Silverius could not deny the true statements of the employer. Never had he been sent into a job unprepared, be it a smuggling operation or an assassination. The listings usually were amazingly thorough and easy to follow. And although they were just enough to get by most of the time, this one promised to pay him big time. But something struck him as special about this heist, something almost sinister. Never had he met the employer personally before now, yet the immobile man spoke as if the two were business partners for decades. Not even warranting a mention was the incredible distaste for the employer that harbored naturally within Silverius. It was inexplicable to him, but the instinct was there nonetheless. He chose to ignore it this once.

Perhaps this could be seen as the tragic flaw of Silverius. He was a man of passion, one who instinctively shunned a form of authority should it present itself to him. No matter how he felt about a person, Silverius was the type to keep the feelings to himself and devote himself entirely into his work. There was no point in doing something, he believed, if one wasn’t going to do it well until it was finished. A man of few moral principles, he selfishly believed that his existence was devoted solely to himself and his own self-betterment. A mercenary by trade he was but not by heart; no matter how many thugs or guards he stealthily slayed, his hands still shook when he slept at night. His right arm was always wrapped up and bandaged, not because of any raging wound but rather for trauma that lay beneath his skin. Perhaps it was because of these scars, both inner and outer, he found himself forgoing sleep most of the time, and as a result his face was permanently worn with deep bags and his eyes were always half-closed. No matter how it felt, the mercenary steadfastedly refused to give into weakness and only allowed himself to sleep when it was absolutely necessary. When he bedded with a woman, the embrace of sleep was easier to grasp and swallow, but this was simply another means to Silverius’ ends. Never did he allow himself to think of women as lovers or partners and he would never stay with the same one long enough for them to develop these feelings for him. This was Silverius and thus was his pathos.

That day, in the dark and barely laminated room in the side of a munitions warehouse in Morshia City, easternmost metropolis of Inusia, Singun Crono Silverius ignored his various warning flags and allowed himself to take the dangerous and risky job offered before him. No matter how much the job required, its payoff was amazing, and it had fallen right into his lap. A base man such as Silverius could never, no matter how hard he tried, deny an easy ticket to the content happiness he dreamed of. A feeling of numbness overtook him as he dully listened to the meticulous instructions and maps the employer handed to him. He only awoke from his reverie upon receiving a large advance for his pay in the form of a small stack of coveted 15,000 Inusian Dolarov. As he gingerly yet eagerly grabbed the stack from the wooden table between him and his employer, he looked in awe at the absolutely humongous amount of money. He had never seen a single 15 thousand note, let alone an entire stack of them. If his advance was enough to pay off six year’s rent on his dinky apartment, he reasoned, then the entire job should be able to set him on financial easy street for a few more years. In that moment, the momentous struggle within him was decided, and he silently accepted the job. He could almost feel the employer smiling with glee.

Silverius’ imagination was nothing like what really happened, for what he could concretely see. The employer lifted a wrinkled and weathered hand and waved slightly in the direction of the door. “Away from here. You have something to retrieve from me. Don’t disappoint me, Mr. Silverius.” Without a word, Silverius stuffed the stack of dolarov into his coat pocket and left the room. He was greeted with another dark hallway before he finally was let into the equally dooming atmosphere of Morshia City.

He couldn’t help but let his mind wander as he traversed the dark streets of urban Morshia. For almost a year now, he had been residing here, in the coastal city on the edge of the Inusian border. The Inusian country was one controlled by a fierce semi-democracy, but Morshia stood so far away from the militaristic capital of the large nation that it was almost untouched by the totalitarian values of its elected politicians. Instead, it drew upon the free democracy of neighboring Shorica in almost every way, and it was because of this that Silverius chose to reside in the city for most of his recent days. Shorica was his home country, to be sure, and Morshia – much like every other urban city he had the pleasure to live in for any extended amount of time – was indeed plagued by crimes, corruption, and urban decay. But for one such as himself, one that wasn’t entirely above the law, it was just a convenient place to lay his head and take his jobs. Nobody there asked questions about anything very often, and he was able to smell the breeze of the great blue sea, sometimes. He had loved the sea since he was a boy, even when it was tainted sometimes.

Halfway on his way to his apartment, Silverius mentally scolded himself and began to double back throughout the dark streets and alleys. His employer strongly stressed the swiftness with which Silverius undertook this job, so he would have to make his way to the train station and take a train down to far-flung Inusia City. Inusia City, strangely named for its parent country despite not being the economic or political capital of it, was a metropolitan completely consumed by the military. Every institution within it had ties to the national army, including the Tower, Silverius’ destination. Here was where most Inusian secrets, documents, and bureaucratical information lay, and here Silverius would apparently find the Crystal. Whatever that was.

Silverius silently filed into the deserted 24 hour train station and purchased a ticket to the city, albeit with some of his own pocket change. It would be a bit too exciting for him if he bought a simple 50 dolarov ticket with a 15,000 bill. As he fell asleep on the empty train, arms cradling his sheathed gunblade, he still couldn’t believe his luck, or what he perceived it to be.

The journey was only six hours, thanks to the high-speed rails available for the on-demand locomotion, but Silverius’ sleep was disjointed and short. He constantly woke and pondered his objective with fright and anxiety. Luckily for him, this usually coincided with the checkpoints and inspections that plagued the trip, in which he had to hide his various weapons and appear as a perfectly normal traveler. Weapons were legal throughout the country but they were prohibited when on public transportation or entering central cities, both of which meant that Silverius had earned a couple months of jail time just for carrying a gunblade and a pouch full of rifle bullets. He had become proficient in hiding these things in the while he had spent as a hired sword, however, and these checkpoints were thus no problem for the man.

Rain had begun to shower as Silverius left the train at Inusia City’s station. The difference between this city and the last were instantly visible; the very atmosphere seemed gloomier. Smog and tall skyscrapers distorted the dark sky and masked the stars. Despite sunset only being an hour away, the night was pitch black and dark. It matched Silverius’ curious and quiet mood as he studied his maps.

It wasn’t hard for him to mask his weapons in his presence as he went past train security’s checkpoint, but the soldiers patrolling the streets would be more difficult to trespass through. At this moment he began to truly appreciate the resources gifted to him by his employer; the maps were comprehensive, extremely spot-on, and even highlighted the least dangerous routes for him to travel through. Thus Silverius silently and with determination snuck through the night time streets of Inusia City. Unlike Morshia, it was not haunted by homeless or transients, even in the dead of night. With their departure and the constant patrols or vigils of soldiers came a sort of deathly silence and stagnant peace that set Silverius on edge even more.

The further he went into the city, the more apparent his objective grew in the horizon. The unoriginally named Tower was a very old artifact and a marvel of antique architecture, considering how amazingly tall it was and how structurally sound the metal it was made out of was. Everybody knew just how secret and clandestine the tower was, but nobody knew exactly what was inside of it. The Inusian government, of course, never bothered to reply to any inquisitions with concrete answers. Silverius always responded to these irresponsible politicians – and their blindingly accepting constituents – with scorn and disapproval.

Sunset was only half an hour away now, but it was still quite early in the morning, Silverius observed. He was very close to the Tower now, so close that he could no longer approach it above ground, or he would be confronted by a 360 degree guard. Because penetration was completely impossible that way, the references from his employer detailed a simplistic and predictable way in that was somehow unpredictable just because of simple it was. He was to break into the supply sewers beneath the Tower’s land, attack a soldier, steal their uniform, and infiltrate the facility. It was with a morbid heart and a determined grip on his blade that Silverius snuck into the dank underground and began to walk with caution among the darkness of the sewers.

Silently slashing a lone soldier’s throat was not hard for him, nor was changing into his clothes and stuffing the maps into his new pockets. For most people, this would have brought horror or even terror, but Silverius was one used to such deaths. In his profession, it was kill or be killed, and Silverius refused to allow himself to die. Not when he still had a life to live. He met no further resistance once he left his weapons behind and followed the maps to a basement that led upwards to a supply elevator. It was almost uncanny how accurate these maps were for him, just as it was almost uncanny how his employer always knew more than an immobile old man really should have. He chalked it up to the employer being just another paranoid old gun lauder who hired one too many informants. Riding the supply elevator to the floor he needed was almost effortless. Floor 75, detailed the maps, which no longer graphed the interior of the Tower past floor 5. There was a note on the side of the paper, though, that stated how it would be easy for him to find the room. Apparently there was only one chamber that resided on Floor 75, and it would be easy for him to enter. As he departed from the elevator, it appeared this observation would be correct. The only defining feature of the floor, steel and sterile in its uniformity, was that it led towards a solitary door in its short duration. There was no label over the door, but it was obvious that it could only be one thing. The Crystal Room.

There was no lock as Silverius opened the door. Earlier on his solitary ride on the elevator, he remarked that security was remarkable light, but figured that there would be no need to heavily fortify the inside of the fortress if it was apparently impossible to get inside in the first place. Indeed this was the philosophy of the Inusians in the Tower. What he saw inside the Crystal Room fascinated him. Never in his life had Silverius seen such a display of beauty and almost unnatural wonder. The room was wide and completely open, as if the room took up the entire width of the Tower. Its walls were a fair distance away in every direction except behind him. What was most amazing to him was the fact that the name of the chamber seemed to magically match its name; the floor and walls and even the ceiling shone with a beautiful cerulean and looked like they were made of pure crystalline gems. Every fragile step he took made a slight click and his shadow was reflected vaguely across a billion different surfaces. After a moment of breathless gazing, Silverius found his eyes gravitating to an object far off directly in front of him. Here was the object that the room was truly named for. Upon gazing his eyes upon it, Silverius found himself entranced by the object’s beauty, and he knew instinctively why it was so precious. The crystal shone with a lighter glow than that of the sapphire home it found itself in, and was about the size of his fist. It floated over a circle of foreign letters that harked of alchemical symbols. So brilliant was the object and its impossible perch that it seemed to openly spit in the face of logic. Silverius felt an awe that eclipsed anything he had felt before as he unconsciously grasped the object.

Instantly he regretted this action, but it was too late to take it back, and the unearthly glow around the crystal vanished before his eyes. The circle beneath the crystal lost its light as well, and it ceased to float and instead took up weight in his hands. The entire room lost its luster, he imagined, although he hoped it was a figment of his imagination. Breathlessly he glanced around the wide and now lonely room before stumbling back towards the exit.

He hoped without hope that the rest of the assignment would go as planned. So fervent was his thoughts that he began to think to himself as he walked in a hurry towards the door of the Crystal Room. “With my luck, this thing was some sort of power source for this huge place. At this time of night, if my schedule is right, then the next guard change isn’t for a good while. Shit, if only I had my coat on me… This stupid uniform doesn’t have any good pockets that can conceal this thing. If someone sees me holding it, all is lost. Dear god, I don’t want to get caught in this place…If I have any luck, I won’t be seen.” He had arrived by the elevator, and a long staircase that descended and ascended lay to his right. Silverius tapped with impatience at the buttons as it asked for his keycard and identification. Despair grinned at him as he searched his pockets with his free hand. “The keycard… It’s gone! I just had it, dammit… I must have dropped it in the Crystal Room!” He whirled to run back and retrieve it when the elevator made a noise behind him. His brown eyes widened as they watched the number counter for the elevator’s passengers rise closer and closer to his current floor. 68, 69, 70, 71… Silverius was frozen with fear. “It’ll just go past my floor, I know it will, it must…” It did not.

Silverius could not move and found himself helpless for the first time in months as the elevator door opened. The soldier who was inside of the now opening elevator looked at Silverius with a casual strangeness before glancing over the crystal in his hands. His expression soon devolved into disbelief as he dropped the papers in his hands. Silverius only moved upon hearing his “comrade” exclaim at him. Then he moved with breathless speed and pure instinct, an unconscious decision he would soon grow to regret. Without even considering the possibility of pursuit, Singun C. Silverius put his free hand in front of him and used it as a vault to jump clear over the rail on the side of the hallway and descend down the empty space in the middle of the spiral staircase.

As soon as the chaos and fanaticism had begun, the room was deadly silent. Silverius could vividly sense the man behind him with his mouth wide open and gaping as he watched Silverius grow smaller and smaller in the chasm. He himself couldn’t believe what he had done. Not only had he gotten caught, no doubt he had just condemned himself to a certain death.

“No… Not like this!” Again he acted purely on instinct and unraveled the belt around his uniform. Gripping it around his free fist, he struck out as if it were a whip in order to catch upon the railing and somehow catch himself in the air. It missed completely the first time and only served to screw with his righted position. Now he was face down and flat, slowing his fall but bringing the quickly oncoming ground even more into focus. He had about a second left, if that, and no time for thought. Again he struck out with the belt, fearful yet determined as the air buffeted his face, and this time he succeeded. The makeshift whip accomplished its job but couldn’t hold his weight for longer than a second. It jerked him back into the air in a sort of bounce and agony pierced through his left arm. So strong was the sensation that he was left speechless and his right hand opened, letting the crystal fly higher into the air. The belt opened and Silverius fell again, now with his back towards the ground, but at this point he was barely above ground and landed with a hard jolt to his back. The crystal landed harmlessly on his chest and did not bounce. The man lay with eyes wide open and arms outstretched, motionless from pain and stress and disbelief. The pain in his left shoulder was overwhelming, but even stronger was the amazing sensation of relief when he realized that he was indeed alive, somehow.

After that, somehow he vaguely remembered standing up and leaning against the wall with little energy, if any at all. He stumbled through the building and miraculously escaped detection again – maybe all the enemies had gone upstairs to investigate? – before returning to an elevator and visiting the sewers. It took him minutes to move towards the area where he had left his clothes, and changing was an extremely painful ordeal with his almost certainly dislocated shoulder, but he managed to push through it. Before he knew it, Silverius had paid for another train ticket and was now sitting in a car that would make it to Morshia City in another few hours. The train was a bit crowded for the early morning commute between cities and the security checkpoints would be less frequent, if even there at all. The sun had finally rose and Silverius fell asleep moments after letting his head rest backwards on the wall.

****

The man in the red coat stood in his alleyway and leaned on the wall of the adjacent building. He had felt something of an attachment to this alleyway in recent hours. It was nice and quiet, distant from the bustling streets yet close enough to the city that he could still smell the industrial air. He had to stay away from people most of the time or he’d lose control of himself again. Not that it mattered to this man. He was a violent, unpredictable cyclone of hatred. Idly he ran his hand through his long, unkempt and curly red hair. It suited him. Much like our mercenary previously explored, this man was a natural and passionate enemy of authority and order.

He heard a step and sensed a presence. His head tilted slightly to his right, a strand of long hair tilting over his face. The man couldn’t decide if he was angry or elated at the new person coming to greet him, and so he said nothing but stared at where he knew the person was. Nothing moved for a moment and so he spoke. “Reveal yourself.” There was another moment of hesitant silence before a figure moved from behind the dumpster in the alleyway.

The man in red examined and quickly identified the persona before him. The man opposite him was perhaps better known as a boy, for his face had no hair on it and his body mass was still small and scrawny. He barely fit his dark gray Inusian military uniform, as if he had recently lost weight or it was someone else’s. The soldier’s body shivered constantly from fear, for the city was not cold. The man in the red coat simply smiled and decided to amuse himself with the man. He spoke again.

“Isn’t it considered common sense to introduce yourself to a stranger?” Now he openly laughed in the soldier’s face. “Or are you here to arrest me…?”

While most people would have been outraged or at least irritated by the man in red’s disrespectful conduct, especially one employed in the military for the world’s most powerful country, the soldier before him was understandably silent. The man in red was known as the Crimson Death to all with bare knowledge of the criminal underworld, and with good reason. So violent and uncontrollable were his murder sprees that it was said everywhere that the red sheen of his coat and hair originated from the blood of his enemies. The Crimson Death was a lawless and homeless man who gravitated wherever there was killing or anarchy to be found. Infamously, his services could be hired for a(n exorbitant) price, but these almost always backfired upon his clients as well. His extended survival was paramount to the rumor that he was immortal and invulnerable, mostly because of how many lethal ambushes the Death had survived. Perhaps most disturbingly, the Crimson Death usually held on his sharp and angular face a misguided grin and leisurely hazy eyes, no matter what he was doing or who he killed.

Now the Inusian soldier stood with full understanding of who was in front of him. He dared not speak a word but to his gods, praying frantically even as the Crimson Death removed himself from his perch on the alley wall and sauntered towards him. His shivering intensified and threatened to cause him to fall straight down to the ground. The much taller Crimson Death arrived at his presence and faintly touched him, further inducing a statement of terrifying fear.

A daring smile graced the Crimson Death’s face. “You look sick, boy… You’re a long way from Inusia City. I hear it’s a lot warmer there. Why did you come all the way down here to visit a big, bad wolf like me?” The soldier froze up as the Crimson Death’s pointy nose surveyed his neck and smelled him. The ensuing warm breath chilled the soldier to the bone. “You even smell like a newbie… You’d better talk, or I’d have to do something to this skinny little neck of yours.”

Now the soldier opened his mouth and spoke as he grabbed the bill of his tall hat and pulled it over his eyes. He shut them and tried to focus on what he had been told to say instead of worrying about the mass murderer who stood inches away from him. It was incredibly difficult. “I-I-I was t-t-told that you had a job proposition. An artifact was stolen from our government and w-we’re prepared to pay you anything in order to retrieve it, n-no matter w-what.” Having spoken his mantra, the boy stuck his chest out slightly but did not open his eyes. The fear hadn’t escaped just yet, even with the small moment of triumph he felt.

The Crimson Death turned around and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his long coat. “Let me see… you’d be willing to compensate me with anything? Very well. I request… 18 million dolarov. And the virgin heirs of your president. Fair enough?” The Crimson man looked at the soldier’s profile with a barely masked face of mocking amusement, but the soldier showed no means of allowing any emotion stain his fearful face.

“We’re prepared to…. To pay you anything. Sir.”

The Death, in response to the soldier’s rehearsed response, threw his head back and laughed. “Well then… Tell your commanding officers that I accept. They know the way to a man’s heart is through his purse strings! I will retrieve this artifact to you, if it is so important. And there will be blood whilst I do so.” He glanced at the soldier, who did not move. A few seconds of awkward tension led to a disgruntled and angry persona shifting over the Crimson Death’s appearance. Gone in a second was his mocking, nonchalant grin, only to be replaced by arched eyebrows and angry veins protruding from his forehead. The Death let his hands rest on the two sword handles resting on the back of his waist, held into sheaths and attached to his waist by a belt. The noise from them were audible and quite noticeable, and the soldier began to violently shake once again. The man in red spat out his next words with almost uncharacteristic bile and violence. “I said you could leave, you bureaucratic bastard.”

The soldier stood for half a second more before he turned and began to vault towards the exit of the alleyway. He finally opened his eyes and allowed himself to grin – he was free! The suicide mission wasn’t so suicidal after all! He would see his lover again!

His lover was the last thing on the boy’s mind, for in that split second he passed by the Crimson Death, a long broadsword hacked into the soldier’s back and knocked him from his feet. By the time he landed face down onto the ground a moment later, blood was already splattered on the walls of the narrow alleyway and a long and deep cut slashed into the small of the soldier’s back. The Crimson Death stood over him with a shadow over his eyes.

“I told you once to leave and you did not listen. Those who must be repeated to are either ignoring me or are mentally incompetent… And I cannot allow either to live any longer than I can.” With this, he unsheathed the second of his two broadswords and began to violently slash and stab at the corpse with both weapons. He would not stop for another hour, at which time the body was mutilated beyond recognition and he was once again covered in blood. His grin never ceased.

...End of Part 1.

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