Chapter 42: A Meeting Among Peers

  The ground surged and cracked open, and just as it was about to reach the arrow’s starting point, two figures appeared from nothing, each jumping out of the way of the spreading chasm in separate directions. While the arrows hadn’t been magically enhanced, these were both Remnants. Erik knew.

  He hadn’t sensed it before, but now, it was clear as day. The two figures’ auras clashed against his like three rivers meeting in a violent whirl.

  Both auras were stronger than Erik’s, and he thought he got a slight sense of what Jessie was feeling constantly with him around. Jessie seemed to notice that the three were focusing, almost like a wordless conversation, but she sensed nothing more.

  “Are they..?” she asked.

  “They’re… strong!” Erik said, unable to hold his own. His aura was being pushed back, and the two figures seemed to just be playing with him. Erik gathered all his aura forward and activated the heat.

  ‘Authority’ filled his aura as it tried to push back. One figure appeared surprised, but only for a fleeting moment. The two, a bit more ferociously than before, pushed Erik’s aura back in a last burst, slamming their own auras into him.

  As the two strangers’ auras suppressed his own, he felt no real threat behind either aura. In his mind, a visual of dogs sniffing each other when meeting for the first time appeared, but he wasn’t sure it was an image of his own making, or that of the others. He was only scratching the surface of what auras could do, and he knew it. Both figures stepped forwards, and Jessie prepared herself to both attack and defend.

  “Stop. They won’t hurt us,” Erik said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  Jessie lowered her arms and relaxed her stance. The figure to their right was a tall, dark-skinned man with a chiselled physique reminding Erik of those olympian statues. He had no hair and wore nothing but a leather vest of some kind and shorts. Over the shoulder and across the torso he had a rough-looking bow strapped around him.

  The figure to their left had a much smaller stature and looked feminine, though it was hard to tell. They were Asian, had black hair that was short in front and longer in the back, a small braid on their left side. They wore tight shorts which grasped the shape of their thighs—yet revealed almost no curves—and a cropped, blue shirt. Dirty sneaker covered their feet, unlike their dark-skinned friend who walked with bare feet.

  “Greetings! We mean you no harm,” the tall one said as they both approached. He spoke a language Erik didn’t know what was, but it made no difference. Both he and Jessie understood it with no problems. The man held an arm up in a slight wave.

  “You have an odd way of showing that, firing arrows at us,” Jessie complained, yet showed no actual sign of hostility.

  She knew it was important getting help from other Remnants, and wouldn’t risk angering them. Erik had also pointed out that they were stronger than them, but how much stronger exactly was unclear.

  “I apologise!” he replied. “We had to test you, you understand. It was just simple, non-lethal shots.”

  “Test us?” Jessie scoffed.

  “I’m sure they had their reasons,” Erik said, hoping the man would explain further.

  “Yes, of course. We noticed these… monsters starting to disappear. We laid this ‘trap’ to lure you here, but we had to make sure you were the real deal,” he explained.

  “Well, we’re here,” Jessie said. “What do you want with us?”

  “Easy,” said a womanly voice coming from the smaller, Asian figure. “We want you to stop.”

  “Why?” Jessie shouted at the pair.

  “Please, no need to shout. Let us talk like people, not animals, yes?” said the man.

  The two pairs sat down in the shadows amongst some stones a short distance away. Jessie managed to calm herself down somewhat, but she was still on edge. Erik seemed to have no fight in him, meaning the pair had been so much stronger that he didn’t see them having any chance of winning if it broke down to a fight.

  “My name is Tuwahve, but you can call me Tuwa if you wish. This pretty little flower with me is-”

  “Sun,” the shorter one interrupted. She struggled against a slight blush on her face.

  “She uses few words,” Tuwa said apologetically, but with a warm smile directed at the woman.

  “I’m Erik. And this tomboy of a-”

  “Jessie, and don’t you dare finish that sentence,” the brunette interrupted similarly.

  “She uses mean words,” Erik joked, managing to earn a laugh from Tuwa.

  “Now, let me explain why we led you here. We have been tracking most of the monsters’ locations and their likely targets since they arrived. Until a few days ago when some of them vanished. To our surprise, they had been killed. Of course, we know that to kill them, magic was needed. So we knew that you were here.”

  Erik heard the words Tuwa spoke with a thick accent, despite him talking in his own native tongue. He wasn’t sure if he heard it like that because he expected the man to talk with an accent or not.

  “We spread rumours of the dead monster, hoping you would catch on. Knowing many others would come to see as well, we had to know if you were you,” he continued.

  “But why lure us here?” Erik asked. “Why don’t you want us to fight?”

  “The world isn’t ready for magic, kid,” Sun said with a slight sting to her voice.

  ‘Kid’? She looked as old as they did.

  “That’s not for you to decide. Besides, it’s already all around them, trying to kill them and break everything. It isn’t about whether the world is ready, it’s about how many will survive if we don’t do anything,” Jessie said, seemingly having planned that exact answer.

  “We shouldn’t interfere. We’re not them,” Sun said.

  “That sounds weirdly supremacist,” Erik complained.

  “It’s the truth. We are better. I’m 48 years old, and my skin has not aged since I was reborn 30 years ago. I can become invisible and I can make them submit with just a thought.”

  Tuwa nodded, agreeing with Sun’s spiel while knowing how it sounded.

  “And?” Jessie asked.

  “And what?”

  “Why does that matter? You’re not any better than them just for that reason. If nothing else, you’re worse if that’s how you think about them. Even keeping emotions out of this, why let so many people die for nothing? These monsters are some other Remnant’s power, or at least it’s someone’s fault that they’re here. That’s what we’re aiming to fix. The mistake or misdeed that someone like us made!”

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  “We cannot know that for certain,” Tuwa said. “You know nothing of the world. There is magic all around, if you know where to look. Magic never died, it has merely slumbered. These things came from somewhere, and just judging by their numbers, it is impossible one of us did this. We are limited.”

  “Why or how they’re here doesn’t matter. We have to stop them from breaking the world, one city at a time. The best way to do that is removing the root. We know where they come from, we just have to grow stronger to be sure we won’t die trying. We could use you, and fix this in just a few days!” Erik said.

  Jessie wasn’t sure where he got that last part from. Were they that strong? They had no idea what awaited them in the Empire, yet Erik was sure these people were enough to deal with it.

  “These beasts are a mere disease. It’s nothing but a pandemic. Two months and how many dead? A few million? It’s the humans’ problem to deal with, not ours,” said Sun.

  “And what if you’re wrong?” asked Erik, showing there was a spark of fight left in him. “What if it is one of us that’s causing this? What would you do then? When it’s too late to save the world, when your arrogance takes a hit and you realise you’re nothing without a world to live in?”

  Sun took a moment to respond. She eyed both of them.

  “If I’m wrong, It won’t affect me either way. I am a Spectre. I don’t care about humans,” she said.

  “Come now flower, you know what they mean. We have met them, and asked them to stop. If they don’t, that is their business. They might be right, after all,” Tuwa’s gentle words sounded as he wrapped his arm around the woman.

  “Fine. It isn’t that important, anyway.”

  “Excellent! Now, we should talk of more happy matters.”

  It turned out, despite their differing views on the war, the two Remnants they met with in the desert were quite all right people in the end. Tuwa was almost 80 years old despite his barely-thirty looks.

  The couple had been together since Sun was ‘reborn’ when she was 18. He had found her by circumstance, feeling her blasts of aura. Tracking her down, he found her wreaking havoc in the midst of a town, murdering several in cold blood.

  She phased through walls and floors, throwing ghostly nails all around her. The weapons the men inside were carrying made no difference, despite her only recent ‘ascension’. While they could harm her, the bullets passed her by, going through her phantasmal form. Tuwa would’ve stopped her, but the hateful look in her eyes and the wallowing sadness of her aura… He knew the men deserved this.

  Sun was born in Nepal, but someone took her from her family when she was a young teen. Her captors brought her to China, and a wealthy man took her in as his own little puppet. She wasn’t the only one, of course. Every day, men assaulted and abused the unfed and unclothed girls.

  This went on for years until the man had died to poor health. When his son took over the family dynasty, he chose one of the other girls for himself, being not so indulgent as his father before him. The rest of the girls were to be shared among the men.

  A few weeks of this, and the amount of girls dwindled, all the wounds and neglect too much to handle for them. Sun was among the last to die, the dwindling numbers of bodies to use meaning more attention to those who remained.

  When she was reborn in that same basement that she died three months later, finding it refilled with young women, all the hate and anger came rushing back. Not in a cage this time, she escaped, knowing how to get stronger fast. A week later, she returned to see the dynasty fall.

  Tuwa was born in the plains of Africa, in a tribe of a hundred or so people. He lived well there, with no real hardship so long as the droughts were mild and the wild animals could feed properly, meaning more food for the people in turn.

  An accident during the rain season caused a landslide down a cliff during a hunt. Tuwa fell along with the wet and heavy debris, getting buried at the bottom. He didn’t die right away, though he had enough broken bones to make escape difficult, if not impossible. His hunting partner, his ‘promised woman’, didn’t find him in time. He ran out of air some time later, hearing nothing but the pounding rain through the dirt above him.

  When he returned, he found his promised with his younger brother. Because his tribe had recovered his lifeless body months before he returned to life, they ostracised him as an omen of death even after he lived with them for a year. Eventually, the elders and his kin exiled him when the next drought proved too much to handle.

  Twelve years later, he returned to find that his tribe was no more, their stubborn ways not enough to survive through an ever-changing climate. The rain seasons grew wetter and the droughts harsher, the animals affected as they were.

  He had returned only when he was ready to face his elders, having come into his own power which he knew could help them. When he found them gone, he put up a totem for the spirits of the desert to protect his kin, then left. He’d spared them few thoughts since.

  Erik’s and Jessie’s stories proved almost inconsequential after the others’ stories, but they were just as eager listening as Erik and Jessie had been. Jessie’s story of ‘I was walking, then I must’ve died’ proving not as exciting as Erik’s story of fire and screaming.

  The older pair talked of their life together and Sun even opened up during the evening. She didn’t have the best track record regarding human interaction, so her view as Remnants being the superior species was…understandable. Erik and Jessie would never agree with her view, at least not in the same sense as her.

  The pair had been everywhere, seen everything. It was amazing listening to their stories the entire night. What Tuwa had said about magic being everywhere, he’d meant it. They had been diving in underwater cave systems, climbed mountains and explored caverns. They’d found abandoned cities and temples, some of which magic lay dormant in, waiting for… something.

  It was for this reason they expected the Hellbeasts to have come from somewhere like those places. If one of these places were waking up… it was only a matter of time until the rest did as well. They theorised that most, if not all myths and legends were true—or at least based around—Remnants and real magic.

  “Then why haven’t you gone there to check it out?” Erik had asked.

  “We see no reason to. As long as these monsters come out of that place, there will be more hassle than amazement. We have no rush due to our long lives,” Tuwa had explained.

  “I mean, even if there’s just a machine making all of these things, why not just break it? You don’t seem so disconnected from the world to want it destroyed, or am I misunderstanding something?” Jessie asked.

  “No, I suppose that’s true,” Sun said, taking a moment to think about her next words. “I suppose it’s two-fold; we don’t believe the humans are ready for us. Magical monsters, that’s one thing, but magical people? They would treat us worse than Tuwa’s tribe treated him, and they would all exploit us more than I experienced in my childhood.

  “Secondly, Tuwa has taught me his tribe’s way of finding meaning in all things. Sure, it proved a detriment for his tribe, but they were a bit too stubborn about their way. If something like this monster eruption is taking place now, who are we to stop it? What if it was meant to happen all along? What if it needs to happen? I’m sure you got the same story in that Afterlife place: magic has been dead for ages. There’s not a trickle left. Do you not think this happening now is weird?”

  “I admit, me and Jessie arriving in Afterlife the exact same day did seem odd considering no one else from Earth ever came the following three months, not to mention the three months before we did. I wouldn’t call it fate or anything,” Erik said, getting an awkward stare from both of their new friends.

  “The same day?” Tuwa asked with an incredulous look on his face.

  “Yup. We met in that awful hallway before getting to know our bloodline, or type,” Jessie said.

  “That is… odd,” Tuwa considered, not looking at anything in particular as he spoke.

  “You’re thinking that has meaning?” Erik asked in a joking manner.

  “We certainly never saw anyone there, much less someone from here.”

  “There was also an elf, Hosu. Well, we called her that, anyway.”

  “I have to say, you’ve certainly had quite a different experience to us. If things were different, maybe we’d even agree with each other,” Sun said, a slight smile creeping up on her face.

  The sun had risen hours ago when the four Remnants first said their goodbyes. Tuwa and Sun wouldn’t help them, but neither would they stand in their way; if Erik and Jessie were meant to stop this monster surge, they would.

  The couple also weren’t much for fighting, despite having powerful abilities. Tuwa had tiered up all his abilities in his 60 or so years as a Remnant, but Sun hadn’t tiered up any of them.

  She was close with several, her Rank 7 through 9 abilities proving just how much stronger abilities would get by ranking up. Her Aura was still Rank 8, but could make light of Erik’s own.

  Erik grew worried that it would take such a long time to tier up, but their new Remnant friends were sure they’d grow much, much faster if they wanted to. Tuwa had never tried improving his powers, and Sun only a little, wanting to decrease the power imbalance between her and Tuwa. When asked, she smiled and shrugged, signalling that the reason might be more intimate.

  Erik and Jessie hopped back in their car and travelled back to the city, buying what goods they needed, and headed back to their worried friends. They had of course radioed in their status the previous evening, but otherwise had explained nothing. The group’s first meal with fresh vegetables and meat since arriving in Africa would have an accompanying story along with it.

  When they returned, both were met with big hugs from Sophie along with a quick debrief from Angela and Emma. Nods of greeting were followed further inside the camp from Dunham, Peter, and Amir. After making dinner on a portable stove, and a handful of ‘woahs’, ‘wows’ and gasps later, the group went to bed some time later, Amir having guard duty first.