PHANTASIA (5 page)

She paused for a moment before answering, glancing around at the eatery as if she were recalling all the times they had eaten here. Red felt as though it were just yesterday that they had their first meal here. He even remembered which table they sat at. “It’s a useless emotion,” she finally replied. “Missing things. This is how life is, what’s the point?” She seemed to zone back to her usual aloof attitude after the question, as if her response reminded her that this was how she felt.

“Well that’s kind of a cynical way to see things,” Red remarked.
 

“Want some more egg?” She asked, extending the brown thing towards him. He waved his hands, and she noticed that they were shakier than usual. “You’re a bit jittery.”
 

“Nervous for the exam…and…woke up from a nightmare.”
 

“Same one as always?”
 

“Mmhmm. And… I dunno… I always feel like I see things after them. Like, things that are there…but not there.”
 

“My mother used to tell me that dreams were memories of past lives. That children could remember their past lives and were much more in tune with them; that’s why they were more prone to having nightmares. It’s like how people never truly forget traumatic events. They just bury them, but the memories always come back for you.”
 

He grunted in silence, noting that she had mentioned her parents, a rare occurrence. He never asked her about them. They had a silent agreement between each other prohibiting discussions about their past before they had met.
   

“What do you think?” he asked after a long while.
 

“I think dreams are just dreams. Like consciousness, an accident in a universe where the improbable is always what happens.” Her reply was so mechanical, he wondered if this was how she truly felt or if it was how she had trained herself to feel.
What’s the difference
he thought to himself.

“Hmph,” was his only response. He was somewhat accustomed to her nihilistic outlook on life, but never bothered to argue against it, even if he disagreed. He always thought that it was impossible to assess someone’s outlook justly. You could know every detail of every experience in someone’s life, but still fail to understand how they related to each one.

“Oh yeah, I have something for you,” she said. “Since you don’t use a weapon to fight with,” she handed over a clear pouch that felt as though it were filled with liquid, but looked dry on the inside. Upon closer inspection, Red saw that it was filled with a fine red dust that floated freely in the inside of its container, somehow defying gravity. He was taken aback when he realized what it was.

“Flashdust?”
 

“Mmhmm. Use it during the field test if you need it. It’s every fire user’s dream, isn’t it?” He noted that she didn’t use the term ‘elementalist,’ on purpose.
 

“How’d you get it?” he asked.
 

“Beat up a second year and took his coin.”
 

He looked at her in horror, unable to tell whether she was joking or not. Unlike Butz, she was fully capable of doing some of the things she sarcastically mentioned.

“Relax, I’m kidding,” she smiled after a minute.
 

“Well… it sounds like something you’d do…” Red replied.
 

“You’ll love the qualifiers you know, when we go. They let me go last year to attend as an observer. They split the races up into groups, and its not just regular sparring. You have to pass different obstacles, and the arenas themselves, well, let’s just say they’re massive. And completely different from the plain ones we’ve been fighting at in Academy. And you have to see all the different races fight, some of them are really unique. The gemini factions especially, they’re a cut above the rest.” Raven marveled.
   

“I wanted to tell you something by the way,” Red began awkwardly after she had finished. “Well… this field test, to be honest I’m not a hundred percent sure about how I’ll perform, and if I don’t make it to WEAPON, I still won’t give up, I’ll find my own way, but I think we all know how you’re going to do, and how your overall profile looks anyways…and… ”
 

“No, Red —”
 

“I haven’t finished yet.”
 

 
“I already gave you my answer. If you go to WEAPON, I’ll go to WEAPON. If you join the Echidna Guard, I’ll join the Echidna Guard. I’m going wherever you’re going.”
 

“Raven, we can’t stick around each other forever.”
 

“You fight recklessly, you’re not as experienced as you think, and your optimism will change the moment you see a Xenosite up front. Without me, you’re as good as dead, and I’m not letting you die, at least not by yourself.” She slowly got up to leave, refusing to argue any further. “If you dig yourself an early grave, I’ll dig myself an early grave. You need 475 points to qualify, I already checked. Let’s go downstairs and fuel the bikes, we should have as smooth of a start as possible. Solstice is in four hours,” she added after checking her microAI.
   

Red sighed in exasperation, unsure of what else to say. They had this conversation before, and he was always frustrated at the thought of holding her back. But unlike him, she seemed to have no true ambition for combat, or getting into something like WEAPON for that matter. It was just something she was gifted with. “We’re grown up you know,” he yelled after her. “We’re not poor little orphans anymore Raven.”
 

The comment caught her by surprise, and she turned to look back at him, then looked down hesitantly, contemplating something in her head. She stepped forward, as if she wanted to walk back to him, then changed her mind and began to walk away again. The paradox in gestures made Red feel as though a lifetime’s worth of debate had just occurred in her head.

“Look at your gear Red, and look at mine. We’re still poor, and we’ll always be orphans. We’re just not little anymore.”
 

Her response left him with an odd feeling of longing for the past, but not one he could remember happily. Maybe it wasn’t even the past that he longed for he thought to himself, but of the vague impression it had of a limitless future. There was no doubt that he liked where he was better than where he had been — but time had robbed his imagination of its wonder.
 

 
He got up to follow her to their bikes all the way at the ground floor. The elevator ride alone took several minutes. They made a list of last-minute preparations to be done, which he gladly took his time finishing. The routine acts of cleaning, refueling, and checking their equipment cooled him to a steady excitement. His favorite part of preparation was always getting the hover bikes ready. Their curve-linear shapes made them look like glowing bullets from afar — human projectiles capable of relentless velocities with their elliptical, friction resistant designs. He always imagined that speed was a symbol of humanity’s conquest over time, a way for people to breach the limits that nature had set for accomplishing things in space. In a few hours, they would be blasting across the desert with a mix of Cron and adrenaline. All his worries would become subordinate to that instinctual need to survive during combat, to the rush of energy that overcame his senses when he cast fire, and to the discipline he would have to exercise to outlive seven nights in a punishing environment.
     

By the time Magnus, S, and Butz were on the ground floor to meet them, Red and Raven were both asleep on top of their bikes. Magnus shoved him gently until he awoke, but he was startled nonetheless. Looking around, he saw the determined looks on Butz’s and Magnus’s faces, the disillusioned look on Raven’s as she awoke, the serious look on S’, and the apprehensive look on everyone else around them. Without a word to each other, they placed their palms on the sensory grips of each of their bikes until they came alive, and then shot away in silence towards the incoming darkness.
 

Chapter 3: The Evil Eye

The direction they rode out to pointed towards Eio, Avalonia’s largest moon, which hung above the clouds like a rising planet in the distant star lit concave. The moon was so close, and so enormous in its shape, it seemed as though if they continued at this pace, in a day’s time they would be close enough to touch it. Bodies of Lumazoas swam in the air high above them — wide umbrella shaped creatures that were light enough to float and had gelatinous bodies with hundreds of trailing tentacles. Solstice was their single mating season; the jelly-like critters would attract mates by lighting up their bodies in the darkness, a process that caused their tentacles to glow like viscous coils of heated plasma and flicker auroral scented lights of every color across the barren desert.
 

Solstice separated Avalonia’s two seasons, Hale and Torid; the seven nights in between were characterized by a near perfect weather. Neither the scorching heat of Torid nor the sub-zero gas storms of Hale would bother the desert now, but the rain from earlier had saturated the air with wisp, a vapor like substance that looked like fog but carried a heavier weight. There wasn’t enough to blur their vision, but it added an ominous tone to the grey desert. Noticing the strange coloring of the wisp that must have resulted from the Cron pollution in the rain, Red briefly wondered if the substance was safe to breathe.
 

From the corner of his eye, he noticed a single green flare several tezras to their left shoot up high above the sky, and then another one far ahead of them a few minutes later. Flares were how teams signaled to each other across the desert. Because field tests were standardized, the event took on a more cooperative than competitive nature. Green flares signaled that someone had just seen a stage 1 critter. Likewise, multiple green flares indicated a group of stage 1 critters (desert creatures tended not to form packs, but there were exceptions). A yellow flare indicated that someone had found a supply of food or a place where shelter could be made. They were the most important ones to note and record, as they could be circled back to in the future to make camp among larger groups.
 

“Ignore it,” came Raven’s voice over the intercom. The cut-off for qualifying for WEAPON was so high that recording contact with stage 1 critters would be nearly pointless. For Red, the second and third highest achievements would be to qualify for the corps that fought Xenosite directly in the outer planets or the ones getting ready to fight them if an invasion past Iris ever took place. These required 150 and 125 points, respectively, a stretch from WEAPON’s incredible 475 point cut-off. Very few teams were aiming that high, which meant they would find less and less extra help the further they forayed into the desert.
 

It had been hours since they crossed the boundary between Echidna and the Alloy Desert. They were heading full-speed down their route without interruption, save for an eating break sometime an hour ago. Green and yellow flares were starting to appear less frequently. Red glanced at his microAI and flipped to its compass to see how far they were from the nearest team, locating one about ten tezras north of their current position, and another about fourteen tezras to the west. They had to be sure never to stray
too
far
.
A single tezra could be walked in 20 minutes. The rule of thumb was to stay walking distance of at least two other teams.
 

“Someone just Pinked,” Butz interjected. Red glanced at him and saw Linx laying comfortably behind him on the bike, the cat’s head welcoming the surge of wind with an open tongue. It seemed to be enjoying the breeze and the dewey feeling of the wisp more than anyone else. Its eyes sparkled like tiny stars; they looked attentive but tired.
 

“I see it,” Raven’s voice followed. “Let’s go.”
 

Red looked around and then saw it on their left side,
it must’ve been the team to the west
he thought to himself. Three pink flares shot up towards the sky. Hungry for some action, they all banked towards the flares in unison, slightly slowing down as they went. Pinks indicated stronger critters; three meant there must’ve been a pack of them. Likely, whoever had signaled them needed help taking them on.
 

A lone figure flagged them down once they approached the area. Red recognized her as a girl from Professor Kep’s class. The rest of her team lay behind an artificial trench they had dug. He couldn’t remember her name but recalled her classification, a stalker — a category that specialized in killing from long ranges. They were known for their vast knowledge of weapons and skill in tracking prey.

Magnus nodded to her as they approached.
 

“What did you find?” Raven asked, skipping the greeting process.
 

The girl seemed to light up to attention when she realized who Raven was. She pointed over the trench they had dug and ushered them over. Climbing to the top, Red saw a cluster of Ignot Gilas a short distance ahead of them, all of them clawing and biting at a carcass they couldn’t seem to penetrate. The reptilian creatures had a tough, energy resistant hide and a bite powerful enough to shatter protective shields like glass. Their chins drooped far below their mouths, bulging with glands that produced a potent mix of bacteria. When they stood on their forelegs, they were about twice the size of an adult human. Their long snouts curved around a sinister looking set of jaws that were lined with oversized teeth. In the darkness, the moonlight glinted off their scales like slashes of radiant ivory.

“We were waiting for more people to show up,” the girl began. “They’re mostly stage 2s, but there are two stage 3s.” Red noticed them immediately, they looked like giants among their cousins — big enough to swallow a person whole. “I think we still need another team or two,” the girl added. The Gilas were still panting around the hull of the creature they had found. The scavengers couldn’t seem to penetrate through the hide of their dead prey. Red couldn’t see what it was, but judging by how spread out the Gilas were, he guessed that the creature must’ve been enormous. It was buried under the sand, but patches of an ethereal green shone through.