A Warrior's Revenge (2 page)

One of Loric’s hands tore free of the
restraints and he reached out towards Dr. Tagean desperate to grab
a hold of him. Dr. Tagean motioned to an attendant, who came up
behind Loric and stuck a needle in his neck. Loric after a brief
moment of struggle went limp in the chair unconscious.

“This one is special. Assign him first class
status. Take him to the lower level surgery unit, so that the
procedure can be done immediately. By tonight we will be doing his
thinking for him and he will do all that I ask and more. He will be
the perfect soldier by which we will usher in and enforce our new
society. And now let us go on to the next child, hopefully he does
not disappoint given this one’s remarkable qualities.” Tagean said,
as he and the two men with whips headed to the next room, which was
only one of many in the long hall of the underground bunker.

Loric was loaded up onto a gurney and
wheeled off down the hall to lower portions of the underground
facility, which went by the name of Enlightenment Society Bunker
Number 3.

Thirty-one years later.

Kana moved through the forest, as silent as
any shadow. It was dim within the forest, because of the heavy
canopy above and Kana took full advantage, as she moved lithely
through the shadowed understory. It was dangerous to be here, but
then it was dangerous to be alive.

Small isolated pockets of still standing
forest, such as this one, were heavily contested for by all those
left alive and those that hunted them. It was a harsh world that
she’d been born into. She was one of the few who had managed to
survive, but to survive on this world meant that you had to daily
risk your life to do so. Death was a constant companion to all
those who dared to live in freedom.

It was either continue fighting to live free
or die because of the temerity for wanting to live free of the
Enlightenment’s control. Some people got tired of the fight to live
and had been known to just walk out in front of enemy patrols, in
order to end the struggle for continued existence. That might be
okay for some, but it wasn’t for Kana.

She wanted to live. Death was a constant out
here in the wilderness, but as long as she could avoid its cold
grasp she would. She wasn’t quite sure for what she was hanging
onto life so desperately for, other than the thought that there had
to be more to it than this. There had to be hope of some kind, some
greater purpose to living other than merely surviving day to
day.

It was true that she had her faith, but she
had that whether she lived or died. Surely God wouldn’t let this
wretchedness continue on like this for forever? Surely He would do
something? Anything?

All this struggle to survive would pay off
someday. Maybe one day life could go back to the old ways. That
time hadn’t been so long ago, but she had never experienced it. All
she knew about it was from what others had said. She had been born
ten years into this living disaster of a world that she fought
daily to survive in.

This small patch of forest had once been
part of a much larger forest known as the Attagron Forest. Now
however, they were only scattered patches such as this one, to give
a glimpse of how it must’ve been in the past. Now the old forest
lands were simply known as the Barrens. The old forest had been
consumed in a great fire that burnt up an entire civilization that
had lived within its forest realm. The fire had burned so intensely
that it had burnt the topsoil layers off of most of the forest’s
former range. Now other than for a few small isolated pockets of
forest, the majority of the Barrens was either bare, as the name
implied or choked with stunted shrubs that were barely enough to
support much of anything. Some of the outlying areas had even
started turning to desert.

It was a harsh place to try to survive in,
especially when everything that moved was targeted by the
occasional hunt and kill enemy patrols that came to the area off
and on throughout the year.

The Barrens were the only home that Kana had
ever known. Her parents had lived and made their home for
generations in the very place where all the trouble had been
rumored to have started, the Tranquil Islands. Over fifty years ago
a populist group self termed, The Enlightenment Society, had swept
into power of the small island nation, much to the surprise of
everyone including most Tranquil Islanders.

The Enlightenment Society had quickly
solidified their power over the island nation. Over the next
several years they worked hard at eroding most of the personal
liberties that the Islanders had always known and enjoyed. Her
parents had been influential people and they had done all they
could to stop what they saw as the wholesale destruction of their
country by lesser men with poor ideals, which shouldn’t have
inspired anything but a rethink.

They hadn’t really been ideals to live by in
terms of sensible society. Rather the ideals fostered by the
Enlightenment Society had been more on the verge of a promise of
more to those who had less to start out with or those who just
wanted more of what everybody else had.

The populist movement inspired social class
warfare and any who opposed them were openly ridiculed and worse.
Riots, that had been purposely stirred up, crippled the once
prosperous island nation and in the chaos that followed many of
those who had protested against the envy driven crusade movement
were killed.

Kana’s parents had both been wealthy people,
but they barely escaped with the clothes on their backs. They had
left the island in the dead of the night and gone to stay with
distant relatives in the Valley Lands. There they had been received
with open arms, as were all the other refugees from the islands.
Her parents had thought they would be safe there and they were for
several years, until the Valley Lands were attacked by a suddenly
militant Tranquil Islander nation.

The surprise attack was aided by a whole
range of technologies and advancements in weapons that had never
before been seen. The smaller Islander attacking forces smashed
through every defensive strategy that the Council of the Valley
Lands could improvise and within two weeks the Valley Lands were a
wasteland of burned-out dwelling places and dead bodies.

It had been a hateful annihilation of a once
proud nation virtually overnight. The Islanders had cursed the land
and had sworn to make it impossible for the place to be ever
inhabited again. They had installed a device with an un-penetrable
shield at the very heart of the Valley Lands.

The device affected the immediate weather
patterns of the area, which encompassed most of the former range of
the Valley Lander nation. The weather changing effects of the
device had plunged the Valley Lands into a virtual winter that knew
no end. Little could survive in such a frozen wilderness of snow
and ice, but it was rumored that some still did.

During the invasion when it had become clear
that defeat was inevitable at the hands of a more advanced enemy
the order had been given to evacuate as many people as possible
from the Valley Lands with their remaining air ships to Assoria.
Kana’s parents had been on one of the ships bound for Assoria, but
their ship was shot down over the Plains of Zoar and they had been
among only a few that had survived the crash. At the time it had
looked bad, but in reality if her parents had reached Assoria she
would never have been born.

After the Islanders had finished with the
Valley Lands and the Attagrons had all been burnt up in their great
forest, they had begun to systematically bombard every city and
town that was left on the face of the world. Millions had died, as
the Zoarinian cities and towns followed by those of the Khartians
were destroyed with no quarter given. Only the Southern
Settlement’s cities and towns were spared in the onslaught.

The Islanders invaded the Southern
Settlements and turned the citizenry into slaves to do all the work
that had become beneath what a new member of the Enlightenment
Society was willing to do. The Islanders, confident of their
control of the major continent, had turned their attention to
Assoria and its two powerful kingdoms.

They attacked, but were met with a
surprisingly stiff resistance. Within a week of fighting the
Islanders had lost all of their larger ships and most of their
ground troops, which had forced them to employ weapons of
destruction that they hadn’t so far. They used the weapons of mass
destruction they possessed unsparingly. Every city of Assoria along
with all the inhabitants and the refugees that had flocked to her
shores were destroyed in the toxic disaster that had burned the
smaller continent to a pile of rubble and ashes within the course
of just a few hours.

It was said that the very air of Assoria had
been made poisonous and that every living thing whether plant or
animal had died. If her parents had reached their destination she
and her twin sister Eshta would’ve never have been born. Her
parents, after managing to survive for years in the aftermath of
the attack, had been driven to these barren wastelands by the death
patrols. To their mutual surprise they had conceived, something
which they had thought impossible for them, as they had tried for
many years to have children without success.

They’d given birth to her and her sister in
bitterness, fearing for the life their young daughters would have
to face. When she and her sister had been seven years old both of
their parents were taken from them by a death squad, while they had
been out foraging food for them. Since that time it had been a long
fight for survival with little to no hope of anything positive ever
occurring.

Kana saw the woodland buck up ahead of her
and she stopped abruptly. Well at least she wouldn’t go to sleep
tonight hungry, there at least was one positive. Slowly, as to not
attract the attention of the deer, she slipped behind the trunk of
a nearby tree. She undid her bow from off her back and pulled an
arrow free of its quiver. She brought her bow up with the arrow
already notched. It was a primitive means by which to hunt, but it
was all that was left to them the survivors of a bygone war.

She sighted down the shaft of the arrow, as
she let her breath out in preparation of releasing the arrow to fly
free to its target. Her fingers had started to release the drawn
back arrow, when she noticed the buck pull against something with
one leg.

Her eyes flared wide in alarm and her
fingers desperately clamped down on the arrow that had already
started to leave her grasp. She managed to halt the arrow, but
halting the rapid panic of her breathing was harder to bring under
control. By sheer force of will alone she stayed where she was,
instead of giving in to her heart’s desire to flee the scene.
Forcefully bringing her breathing into steady focus she debated
about what to do next.

Had she really seen what she’d thought she’d
had or had it been her imagination getting the best of her?
Cautiously she peered around the trunk of the tree scarcely daring
to even breathe. The buck still stood there in the slight clearing
up ahead. It pulled again at something with one leg and Kana saw
the braids of a rope that was tied around one of its forelegs. Kana
brought her head back around the tree and stood there gripped in
fear and indecision of thought.

Who would do such a thing?

It was obviously a trap meant to catch
humans, but she’d never heard of such a ploy being used before.
Roving bands of survivors, who had become cannibalistic out of
desperation, were known to pass through here occasionally, but it
couldn’t have been them. They would never have had the reserve to
hold back from eating the deer once they had caught it, which left
only one plausible answer to who could have laid such a trap. The
Hunters were here!

It had to be a kill squad, the same kind
that had killed her parents and so many others through the years.
Maybe it was even the same squad.

All she wanted to do was to run away with
every fiber of her being, but some rational part of her reasoned
against her desire for flight. She was still alive so they must not
know she was here yet. It would be darker in a few hours; it was
already heavily shadowed in the dappled shade of the forest, which
her dark green clothes and darker skin and hair blended in well
with.

Kana squinted her eyes to mere slits so that
the whites of her eyes did not betray her. She ever so slowly sank
to the forest floor next to the base of the tree and let the
understory foliage conceal her even more. She would slip away when
it got darker.

She sat there barely even breathing for fear
of detection, as her ears strained for any noise alien to the
natural sounds of the forest. An hour passed by and she thought she
heard some movement. The sound was coming from the other side of
the clearing and there was a slight hush to the natural sounds of
the forest.

The approach by whoever it was sounded
almost clumsy. Hunters would never be so loud. It was said that
they made no sound at all. Some even said that they didn’t even
talk among themselves out loud, but communicated on some deeper
unspoken level of consciousness. In any case little was known about
Hunters in general, other than they always caught their prey and
were utterly ruthless in how they killed without mercy.

Kana heard the deer snort nervously and she
risked a glance around the tree. The deer was trying to run off,
but the rope anchoring it to a nearby tree kept it within the
clearing. Arrows, knives and even spears shot out of the
undergrowth and downed the hapless animal to the ground. At least
twelve individuals or more rushed forward out of the undergrowth of
the forest toward the deer. From their wild and unkempt appearances
Kana knew them for what they were, cannibals.