Six
 
“No screaming. Guess nothing went wrong,” Alice said as she walked up to him silently. Kon jumped halfway up as his heart rate tripled in an instant. Her mean smile was all he needed to see to realize she had done it on purpose.
“All quiet,” Kon confirmed.
“Let’s change that, shall we? I’m hungry and there’s only one way to get food,” Alice said as she reached down and plucked the axe up.
“Hunting?”
“Hunting. But, unfortunately it looks like I need a hand.” Alice looked him square in the eyes and Kon could see she was struggling to repress a smile. He didn’t reward her for her terrible joke and just continued talking as if he hadn’t heard it.
“Is this going to be part of my training?” Kon asked. After their last talk, he had to assume she was willing to train him.
“Part? No. It’s going to be the vast majority of your training. You need cores to jumpstart your cultivation. Once you have a few nodes and maybe a core, then you can passively draw in energy, but till then, you need to hunt.”
“I don’t have a weapon?” Kon said, the question in the statement loud between the two of them. Alice just smiled.
“Knights are weapons. You have your fists, elbows, knees, and feet, and most importantly, a brain. It’ll be easy, I’ll find some F-grade rifts to throw you at. We can probably get your first node up and running today if we really push,” Alice said as nodded her head out of the cave and toward the forest.
Kon sighed but turned and walked out into the humid jungle. The rain hadn’t restarted yet but the humidity was brutal, pressing down on them as Kon started to head toward where Alice pointed.
“I thought developing a node took weeks. That’s what they said in my classes.”
“That’s cause they do it the safe way. Slowly fill a chamber with filtered out rift energy instead of purifying it yourself. Takes way more time, but there’s less chance of you going crazy and killing people.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, so rift beast energy has remnants of their urges, drives, I don’t know what the real word is. Aura I guess. Who cares, anyways, if you don’t purify the energy it can affect your behavior. Make you a bit homicidal.”
“You didn’t think to tell me that earlier?” Kon risked looking back at the Knight. The thick press of the jungle had closed around them in a perpetual twilight as Kon tried to carefully work his way across sodden ground.
“Why? If you go homicidal it’s not like you can hurt me. And it wears off. Eventually.”
“This doesn’t sound like the best plan,” Kon muttered as Alice suddenly pointed with the axe to a ninety degree turn.
“It’s fine. You’ll be fine. Maybe. If you’re competent. Maybe this is a bit advanced for a cadet.” Alice’s last few sentences were more mumbled thoughts expressed out loud than actual conversation.
“So it’s just faster to process this energy myself?”
“Oh, there’s more benefits. Rift energy is very reactive once its been claimed. You personally killing and processing energy like this to establish your first nodes and core will give you a powerful base. Your aura will be glorious.”
“Aura?” Kon was getting more and more confused. He hopped over a fallen tree, the smooth bark cold and dense under his fingers. The other side of the log was free of obstructions and he kept walking as Alice jump flat footed up and over the tree without bending her knees.
“Killing intent, aura, whatever you call it. You see the violet flames over my body, right?”
“Hard to miss,” Kon grumbled back at her.
“That’s one part of my aura. The visible effects as the metaphysical rift energy reacts with reality. Once you establish some nodes and a core you’ll be able to see more of my aura. It’s like a calling card for us.”
“And by killing and consuming these cores, I’ll be able to build a better form of nodes and a core?”
“No. I said it’d be glorious and powerful. You’ll feel like one of those old monsters at a third of the age. Just reeking of bloodshed. It’ll be amazing, trust me.” If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“The longer I talk to you, the less I do,” Kon whispered under his breath. Alice’s laugh let him know he hadn’t been quiet enough.
“We’re getting close to a weak rift. My senses aren’t the best, not really my specialty. Leo is way better at it than I am.”
“Who’s Leo?” Kon asked as the ground began to change. The thick metallic trees began to thin, the black iron mixed with rusty copper faded away to be replaced by thin trunks of silver with gold threaded through the branches above. There were more space to move between the trunks and the soil lost its soft, loamy feel, and firmed and became rocky.
“One of my squadmates. He wasn’t on the Dragon’s Maw thankfully. The rest of the squad was off ship on a contract. Captain Lorance is in command, was in command, of the chapterhouse. But I ran ground operations for the most part. Occasionally he’d lead a team but I was on the ship recovering from our last mission.”
“Wait, you were hurt before the fight in the hallway?”
“Yeah. Why do you think I wasn’t in my armor? I got hit by some nasty disintegration ray or something weird. Blew apart my armor like it was paper and burned me to a crisp. Hadn’t seen something like that before, but it was an anti-capital ship weapon.”
“You got shot by a gun meant to kill spaceships?” Kon asked as he turned to look at the Knight Commander. She’d taken the jumpsuit from his pack and had used it to cover most of herself up. She was tall and muscular but didn’t look like the type of person who could take a beam weapon designed for ship warfare and keep going.
“First lesson you have to learn about Knights. We’re hard to kill. Between the armor and the cultivation we don’t die easy. I’m also harder to kill, my central core powers a regrowth rune that allows me survive damn near anything.”
Kon fell silent and thought about that for a minute. He knew of the skill and power of Knights. Conquerors. Liberators. Mercenaries. Villains. Tyrants. All of those and more, but no one had ever called them weak.
“How’d we lose the ship then?”
“Captain Loran is a good man, but he’s over the hill. Space also doesn't really have rift energy in it, no life you know. So we just have what we have in our cores, which normally isn’t enough to battle a squadron of pirate frigates. Add to it that we’re passing by near a gravity well and we couldn’t maneuver. It was a good ambush. We were in a bad position and outnumbered six-to-one. Still took down to of their ships and me and a few others massacred boarding crews while successfully evacuating the cadets and most the squires.”
“Is Captain Loran dead?” Alice got quiet after Kon asked that and they stopped. The woman bit her lip and bounced on the balls of her bare feet as she thought about it.
“Probably. I don’t know. When I fought that wolf guy I lost my communicator. The last I heard the Captain was still on the bridge. He’s a sturdy guy, but he couldn’t have survived the ship blowing. So, probably dead.” Alice’s eyes hardened as she looked around at where they were at.
“Enough of this. We’re here. There’s a weak rift close by, we should be entering into whatever monster’s territory it is.”
“What do I do?” Kon asked as he leaned against a tree and tried to calm his racing heart. He looked about the thin copse of trees and couldn’t make out anything that looked like it could be a rift monster.
“Kill it and harvest the cores until I tell you to stop.”
“You’ll help me if there’s too many of them?” Kon asked.
“Kid, look at me.” Alice’s voice was serious and Kon turned to look at her. The maniacal Knight’s face had become stony as she stared at him with cold green eyes that mercy had never entered.
“If something big comes in I’ll stop it. But once you enter that area, your life is going to be on the line. I won’t help you if you can’t help yourself. Show me your strength.”
“You’d let me die in there?” Kon whispered, just needing to hear the confirmation.
“Yes. So don’t die.” Alice jerked her chin and pointed to the spot deeper into the rocky terrain where the trees grew sparse. A small hill of slate gray rock with boulders wedged across it with the occasional tree rising above it all. Kon took a deep breath and steeled himself as he left the scant protection of the jungle and started to climb the hill.
“You can do it!” Alice shouted loudly. Everything went quiet as Kon felt the pressure of every living thing turning their gaze to look at him. A cold sweat broke out across his neck and back as he looked up the hill to see the first of the rift monsters.
It blended nearly perfectly with the gray stone, only its sudden movement breaking its camouflage. Five and a half feet tall with sinuous limbs that were too long for its small frame. A blocky head tilted and black orbs appeared as it opened all twelve of its eyes. Teeth were revealed as its maw jutted open and it took the first loping steps down the hill and toward Kon.
Kon couldn’t tear his eyes away from that incredulously large mouth. It was nearly the size of the monster’s head, stretching from one side to the next. The teeth looked more like grinding stones than teeth. A grating sound emanated from its throat like that of crashing boulders.
Absent mindedly he reached down and grabbed a stone. Smooth and fist sized, it had a good heft as he waited. Its long arms stretched out with claws grasping the air as it cried out again, and in the distance he could hear more of the monsters crying out.
“I can do it, I’ve made this type of throw before.”
His arm snapped forward and the stone crossed the distance in a blink, impacting in the middle of the monster’s wide skull. Its legs folded and it fell face first to slide down the hill to stop a few feet from his feet.
“Booo. Be exciting!” Alice offered encouragement behind him. Kon didn’t take his eyes off the downed beast to glare at his newfound mentor. He walked close to the beast and brought the heel of his boot down on the back of its neck with a satisfying snap and he allowed himself a breath of relief.
“That wasn’t so hard,” Kon said, partly to himself and partly to Alice. Her laughter reached him a moment later just as a few pebbles bounced past his feet. He turned and looked up to see that the crest of the hill was crawling with monsters