Thirty-One
 
They fled to the forest in the opposite direction of the battle between the Packmaster and the D-Grade best that Alice had found. It was unfortunate since the fight had taken them in the direction to the edge of the plateau, which is where they eventually wanted to go. In the meantime they ran back deeper into the forest before arcing in a roundabout way.
“Scale the trees. Leap from branch to branch. No prints on the ground,” Alice ordered as she leapt to a low hanging branch and started to run. Kon cursed and struggled up while Diur mimicked Alice with her casual ease. His pack pulled on his shoulder as he scaled the tree, having to sling the rifle in between the straps. It dug into his side, the metal cutting and bruising his lower back.
For half an hour they ran, Alice far enough ahead that in the gloom she was hardly visible. Without the energy dense rift beast meat Kon began to lag. His legs groaned and burned while his breathing got harder and harder. Rain began to hammer down on them and made the trees slick and twice he slipped, catching himself at the last moment before he hit the ground. It tore up his palms but he didn’t bleed.
When Alice decided they had gone far enough she ordered them off the trees and then they made a hard ninety degree turn and started off that way. Kon only lasted an hour before his legs folded under him and he hit the ground. Alice put her axe in her belt and then scooped him up, the weight of him and the gear not bothering her, and put him across her shoulder.
After another two hours of hard running Diur began to flag and Alice slowed but kept moving. Her head swiveled back and forth and the strain was starting to tell on her face when she made her stop. There was a series of fallen trees that had landed on each other to form a hollow. Water ran around it and some trickled in to make it a muddy morass, but she didn’t care.
“Alice, we can’t stay here. It’s disgusting,” Kon said as she finally let him stand. He had a feeling he’d have a shoulder imprint in his gut for the rest of his life. Alice just sighed and grabbed long branches and cut them from the downed trees. She rammed the sturdy and thick branches into the muddy ground and twisted them until they were firmly planted. She did this over and over in a line until there was the semblance of a floor above the mud and water. It took her only a few minutes but it seemed to have aged her.
She was breathing heavily and looked partially drowned. The minute the last of the flooring spars was in over the pit, she slipped under the fallen trees and fell on the slats and fell asleep. She rumbled, a deep snore that filled the hollow, but didn’t seem to go much further.
“Senior Alice must have used more energy than she said in that fight.” Diur took her own pack off and set them down on the new floor and Kon copied her. Something had dug the hollow under the fallen trees and it was nearly eight feet deep, two feet wide and eight feet long. Kon could see the shimmering water beneath them, slowly rising up as the rain continued.
“Yeah.” Kon bit the rest of his thoughts off. He was still angry and the emasculating trip through the forest hadn’t helped. Alice had made a mistake and it had cost them. It was pure luck they’d been taken captive rather than just shot out in the forest and left cold and dead.
“She’s used her powers frequently and to great effect. Even if you haven’t noticed,” Diur said quietly. She stayed out of the hollow, climbing onto the fallen trees and sitting among the branches. There was a partial canopy above her head to keep some of the rain off of her. Kon kept his newfound rifle and worked his way up to her, careful as he climbed up.
“What do you mean?”
“You see our auras, correct?”
“Yeah. Alice’s is violet and yours is blue.”
“Yes. Well, you can’t see the rest of it. Not yet. Maybe one of your runes will allow you to view deeper, but for us it occurs naturally. An aura is you expressing your power from the metaphysical to the physical plane. Most techniques are much more subtle and Alice has been using hers constantly. I can’t tell what they do, our methods are to foreign, but I can make a guess.” She fell silent as she waited for Kon to motion her to keep going.
“She’s masking us. Constantly. The Lupine will search not just with technology, but also their own cultivation techniques. She sets wards, or your equivalent, around each of camps to keep beasts away. Also she does lots of healing on both of us.”
“She’s only done it once or twice on me,” Kon muttered. He didn’t want to let go of the righteous rage in his heart.
“Maybe a full healing, but she does plenty of smaller ones. You think we can drink the water here or eat the food without growing sick? That there are no pathogens here that would infect us? My clan had regular scans and health screenings to ensure we’d be fine here. Alice is doing it all herself. All the while fighting constantly anything that would harm us. Have you seen her sack of loot?”
“We’re going to have to go back and grab it all tomorrow,” Kon said out loud. He realized she’d left it back there. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Yes. She made a mistake. But she’s tired and injured. I have seen glimpses of her skill and have no doubt she would have regrown her arm if she wasn’t guarding us. She continues to fight crippled to ensure she can protect us. We must be graceful.”
“She almost got us killed.” Kon said it, but there was no heat left in his words. He looked down at his mentor who looked smaller as she slept. She was on her side and water dribbled over her from where it leaked through the leaves and she snored her way through it all.
“We are only alive because of her. We’ve both made mistakes. It is only mortal to make mistakes. We just need to learn from them.”
“Yeah.” Kon sat there and just let the cold rain run over him. He was exhausted and so tired his eyes wanted to close but Alice’s warning about the last time he had fallen asleep on guard duty kept him awake.
“Tell me about your clan. Your world.”
“The Confederacy is a series of connected systems that have all been colonized by the Ulmna. It is Ulmna dominated but there are some other species allowed in, especially on the colony worlds. The homeworld is heavily protected and hard to immigrate to. After we expanded many were exported and the world was turned into a cultivation haven for the greatest of the clans and sects.”
“Your clan gets to be on the homeworld?” Diur snorted and shook her head.
“No. We have a habitable world we share with two other clans and an alchemy sect. My clan does have interests on several small satellites and some habitats in an asteroid belt mining area. This world was supposed to be our chance. We could improve our foundations, exceed the ancestors maybe and earn a right to live on the homeworld. That is all ash now,” Diur grew quiet and Kon couldn’t stand it.
“I lived on a colony. Most humans live on the fleets, but my grandparents wanted a future on a planet. Shit world out in the middle of nowhere. Arid, little water, long days and low gravity. Grew tall out there but weak. Had to take a ton of supplements and visit the colony's gym every week to train in heavy gravity. Rifts opened up when I was a kid and we thought we could hold them off. Had a small militia, washed out squires and some former mercs. They couldn’t. Grandparents died on the planet. Said it was theirs and they weren’t leaving. My parents took us all and we joined the fleets.”
“Thank you for sharing that. I have always wondered. Why do you humans live on ships instead of a world? There are plenty out there to be colonized and you have the strength of arms to cleanse a rift infested planet.”
“Uhmmm…my parents always told me one thing and the Knights another. Once I was enrolled that is. It’s hard to say which is true. Shit, maybe their both true.”
“And?” Diur asked after Kon trailed off and went silent for a minute. He tried to compose his thoughts as they sat there in the dark with rain hitting them.
“My folks said it was because we are stubborn. We had a home and we’ll never have another so we’re not going to waste our time building something somewhere foreign. That when we return home all of humanity needs to be ready to cleanse the planet of the rift born.”
“And the Knights?”
“Security reasons. After the rift beasts took our home we were depleted. We had some powerful warships and of course the World-Ships. But not a lot. First contact was rough and we took heavy losses but we won that war and took our prizes. Multiple ships and a habitable planet. We settled briefly but then we became a sitting target. Raids, slavers, pirates, and everything else came for us. We lost that world as well. We kept collecting ships in our battles.” Kon took a moment to breathe and look up through the canopy towards the stars.
“The fleet grew and grew. Not all warships of course but plenty. The Knights grew stronger and we started to carve a place for ourselves amongst the galaxy. But that lesson of our first homes remained. We were only safe as we moved. Our homes were steel and they flew across the stars. At least until we go back and reclaim the old world.”
“Why haven’t you. Reclaimed the old world?” Diur asked. Kon snorted and shook his head in disbelief.
“The first time I asked that question my parents said the dumbest thing. That we lost it. The coordinates to get home. Our first jump out of our system scrambled our systems and the data to get home was fried. Then we had the First War and we took even more damage. I joined the Knights and that was one of the first things I asked them. Cause, I couldn’t believe we just lost the information.”
“What did the Knights say?”
“The exact same thing. Word for word.” Diur burst out laughing and Kon took a moment before he joined her. They tried to keep it down, but the toll of the day was released by the not funny at all accident.
“So, humans don’t know where their home system is?”
“That’s what higher ups say. There’s a bounty for finding it. A Battlecruiser to the Knight who rediscovers it.”
“A battlecruiser?” Diur asked incredulously.
“Yeah. Huge reward for finding the homeworld. There’s a bunch of Knights who have dedicated themselves to the goal. Have their own special Chapterhouse for it and everything. They search and explore looking for any hint that can take us home. Exploring the lanes is dangerous but often rewarding.”
“A battlecruiser. To find a system? The Confederacy has three battlecruisers all together. Very storied warships,” Diur trailed off as she shook her head.
“Maybe one day I’ll find it. The right lanes to get back to our corner of the galaxy. Then there’d be the cleansing we’d need to do. A thousand years of rifts spewing beasts out like this. It’d be a crusade.” Kon looked down at Alice and saw she was still curled up. But somewhere in the last few minutes, the snoring had stopped.
Kon looked around the forest, eyes sweeping about as he tried to see if there was anything out there. After a few more minutes the snoring resumed beneath him and he sighed in relief and let himself lean back against the tree trunk.
“Kon, I can stay awake. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in a few hours to take your turn on guard duty,” Diur said. Kon closed his eyes and tried to forget about the day. About the pain that radiated through his whole body, of the ghost remnants of the anger he’d felt. Of the blown apart communication gear and the destroyed shuttle. It only took moments to fall asleep.