3:08 / 24:37, Rotation 589 / 687, 232 AE, 25.211912, 5.002190, Aryss

  Kay-El – that’s what she called him now, a bit more intimate than Knight Leader, just an an acronym really, K.L, but for some reason it sounded romantic to her, like he was some divine alien from another realm, a guardian sent from another realm to protect her, little ‘lithe, her super elvan – your six.

  Using pure psionic sense, Knight Leader stabbed his greatsword backwards and perfectly impaled the rogue knight wearing rogue carapace – Aryssal black market rogue carapace may be imperfect but oftentimes had devious tricks up their gauntlets that only mad-elvans could come up with – that was about to backstab him, before he, ‘backstabbed’ him back.

  “Ah-GAHK!” his death cry. In the throe he threw his hand to the armor’s killswitch and self-detonated the cyclonite strapped to the shinguards, but the Knight Leader simply rolled forward away from the blast.

  “GAAAHH!!!” three rogues with stripped carapace exoskeletons with mounted combustion miniguns sent a combined total of eighteen barrels worth of automatically self-loading lead at the Knight Leader.

  Luckily, he had rolled to cover – a T-branch in the hallway – he had to keep scooting further and further into this side hallway he had rolled to, as the wall of bullets furiously chewed the wall itself away. Thankfully he had his helm and visor on, or he would choke in the dust.

  Vi – what have I got?

  Three bogeys – they had stopped using ‘rogue’ now to describe them for it felt slightly wrong, like they were ascribing to the Empress’s defined order – they have vindicator miniguns.

  He hated vindicators. Whether against them or using them.

  They took too long to reload.

  As expected, the eighteen spinning barrels could also only take so much – perfectly timed for the finishing of a belt – and continued whirring to cool down. The gunners clumsily fumbled with the next belt of bullets, janking around wildly like a thick, heavy chain, and tried to rack it onto the feed but the weapon was burning hot to the touch. And-

  Now.

  Vilithe and Mal mind blasted them lightly, there was no need for more for she took prey of the anxiety that any firearm wielder feels when in the middle of a reload. Especially as cumbersome a weapon as the vindicator minigun. And so, with his brief window of opportunity Kay-El dashed a few paces and cut two down with a cleave before smashing gauntlets and hilt into the face of the last.

  Sudden silence now. He hoped the third was just knocked unconscious. He hoped he would live.

  Though he still did what he had to do to survive, K.L abhorred killing rogues now that he was starting to understand his vassal situation. He tried his very best to make as many takedowns non-lethal as possible. It very rarely was.

  But ironically, it was one of the two he slashed that was still alive. For the rogue who had taken the blunt hit to the face, a small sliver of cartilage had been driven up to pierce his cerebrum, killing him instantly.

  The slashed but still living rogue had given up all hope now as he coughed blood profusely, but he didn’t know he could still count on his other lung, which had yet to collapse.

  K.L rushed to him and propped him up. He held a plated hand to try and compress the wound, stopping it from bleeding, but the rogue moaned in pain.

  “Wh- why?” he gasped in between bloody chokes.

  K.L just stared at him, and it was like staring the reaper himself for the rogue, so bleakly menacing did K.L’s contorted ebon demon mask of a helm appear.

  He’ll need spirit surgery.

  K.L cut his greatsword into the assuredly dead body next to him – his psionics were getting stronger and c’mon, he could at least tell if a mind was dead or alive – next to him and tried to dribble as many black spirits as possible, which he hoped were energetically lithiated enough to at least close the wound, onto the rogue’s deep cut. It’ll have to do, for now.

  “Hngh-” the rogue tried not to cry out as the confused spirits adapted to their new body, which always caused pain, not to mention the mixing of dead organic cells of his brethren – any less fresh and this elvan blood sharing would never work for risk of infection – but he did not question his providence.

  There was no point in explaining his actions. “Don’t move. Don’t think.” he said, his voice muffled under the helm.

  The elvan had closed his eyes, but he shook his head again and again until it flopped, limped to the side, and he passed out.

  Vi and Kay-El were now remarkably in sync. The Conduit and the Knight. The Dragonrider and the Commander.

  Third, what’s up top?

  Third had secured a watch tower – climbed up the ladder slowly and stealthily and stabbed his stiletto right where the guard’s neck met his spinal cord – and now were their eyes in the sky, by repurposing Avecia’s railgun.

  All quiet. Still don’t know we’re here. For the most part.

  They were way out west into the Aryssal wilds now, far enough from the hive that the collected rogues of different clans had banded together to build a massive Aryssal colony in total defiance of Clan Amallark. Resources out here, if there were any, had yet to be uncovered. The hive was practically built into Mount Elysium, the clearest geological feature in all of Elysium Planitia, and the Amallarkean ice caravans traveled up through Utopia Planitia to mine the upper polar ice caps.

  Here though, so far to the west in Arabia Terra, the checks from Therys came fewer and fewer – Amefrid had still not bothered to project all this way despite her threat – and so things had loosened considerably. Although the distance had yet to challenge Vilithe psionically, she grew complacent as she quickly learned how to navigate around Therys – she was too by the book, that one, and could be easily fooled in certain ways with certain simple and subtle hallucinations, always exactly what she expected to see – and so, Therys simply let the vassals be. They proved more effective that way.

  They had cut a bloody trail through the Syrtis Major Planum. From rogue encampment to rogue encampment, they worked together like they had at the lava tube in Nepenthes Planum, together as one, as a unit. So impressed with their performance was Amefrid that she pushed them harder and harder, further and further, simply assigning Therys more and more rogues to kill, each taking more and more effort to reach. More - never enough.

  But they had always proven equal to the task, even against the odds. It really confused Amefrid. She thought that scrying what she had done to the poor knights, what she would do and continue to do, would finally break the Dragonrider and make her submit so she could take the Arkdragon to Reath and murder Senjya. But somehow, they just turn right around and become her deadliest death squad, triumphing even against what seemed to be suicidal odds. How wonderfully odd.

  Amefrid certainly should have paid more attention to it, but instead she took her luck for granted, as she always had her entire life. So, she thought, flippantly, that she could wait for her chauffeur. She was an elf of many talents, this vassal, she was proving quite the effective psion too. This sixth living Phyroan. The only one on Aryss too. Her favored weapon.

  So now she had sent Vilithe’s knights on a coordinated far ranging for an assault on a consistent thorn on Senjya’s side for revolutions. She didn’t even know the name of this place. She didn’t care, why bother to know the name of a place you’re going to raze to the ground? Well, eventually. Right now, she had to cut the head off the dragon.

  Kill this self-styled ‘Rogue Queen’, no true Queen.

  Forget vassalizing. Leave no survivors in your wakes.

  The only clan legion she could trust – and at least one clan legion had to be sent or else she could not truly fully trust that everything she wanted would happen – was the one led by her brother Serun Amallark.

  She did care for Serun. When Goddess Mother wasn’t looking, she didn’t care for those primly mating drones.

  Maybe, instead of threatening her chauffeur she should have dominated him to give her some of the same comfort that fateful night? Share the love? After all, she serviced him, though with how easy it was Amefrid felt it hardly counted as ‘service’. But ugh! She was repulsed by the thought of an Amallarkean servicing a vassal. No, it went the other way around. Vassal pleasure workers serviced Amallarkeans.

  For the very first time she decided to check in on her little chauffeur directly-

  Vassal.

  Amefrid’s thought-voice ran up Vilithe’s spine like the moist, grubby appendage – or body – of a cryptid slithering up inside her jumpsuit to constrict her.

  Report.

  Knight Leader is in position in the underground maintenance tunnel under the east entrance. I've cloaked his presence, and he’s neutralized the security, but this has alerted them. Second, Ninth and Tenth are holding the knight reaver, ready to roll in and take the east entrance on the Knight Leader’s command. Third has infiltrated the northeast watchtower and will provide high cover.

  Good. Good. All according to plan.

  She had decided to give Serun and his reaver the west entrance. The rogues would hardly expect an attack from her strongest force from the flank facing away from the hive.

  She had split her Assassins off to take the north entrance and northwestern watchtowers, to create a tight pincer, and seal off escape while making it easier for Serun and the Amallarkean Assassins to regroup in the northwest corner.

  The vassals would take the east and south – she had even assigned two reavers of vassals to secure the south entrance – and close in, to create a second pincer, diagonally boxing them in.

  There was no way to kill every rogue inside. There had to be thousands of them in there. If they attempted tremorsense pulses to scout, they would surely give themselves away. Better to go in with the advantage of surprise, even if it meant going in blind.

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  This was not a clearout, but rather a surgical strike, a gouge of the scalpel to remove a malignant tumor. An assassination.

  Her target was a rogue psion known as Exasha Boucher, who proclaimed herself the new Queen of Clan Boucher, even though she had not yet learned the Rite of Coronation and could not give birth to a brood.

  In fact, the exact means of how to do so was unknown even to Amefrid. She knew how elvans were bred, but not how to get there. If Amefrid knew the Rite, what stopped her from splitting off from Goddess Mother and making her own Clan? She doubted anyone knew but the only two Queens left alive - Queen Talauth running scared with her tail between her legs, and her tyrannical Goddess Mother. Amefrid knew how elvans truly bred, she didn’t think further about the details, but she didn’t know how exactly a new Queen got her first cocoon.

  Still, Exasha had done the unthinkable, and forged an alliance with scattered, fleeing scraps of the Talauthian forces, the ones that had deserted their Rogue Queen. She had not needed to vassalize them. They had banded together for mutual survival, because that idiot Senjya had pressed them too hard, and yet, not hard enough to finish the job! Now, they had grown, uncontrolled, just shy of Clan Amallark’s reach, in the lull during the transition of power. She wished she could raze the place to the ground with dragon’s breath, easy enough on Reath, but here even if she could do so, she knew they had dug so deep underground that only fusion breath would work. Not that she had any dragons, right? Except for sleeping Bahamut, who, well, undergird her damn base.

  But Dear Goddess Mother hated when she wasted perfectly good, flayable bodies to vassalize. No shortcuts she would telepath. Was she intentionally trying to make this hard?

  No matter. She would succeed, Amefrid thought to herself. Nothing will stop her from succeeding. Nothing.

  She had always succeeded.

  And then like that, she cut the connection, unbeknownst to her that Vilithe had stealthily plucked out every one of her thoughts.

  Kay.

  Vi?

  She flooded his mind with Amefrid’s battle plan. So, they would have reinforcements. Were they in position yet?

  Obviously not. We’re the first here.

  As usual.

  Kay, the injured one- he’s trying telepathy. I’m blocking him, but I can’t waste my willpower on this. Both Vi and Kay knew what this meant.

  Damn it! And he explicitly ordered him not to think! If their position was given away now, it would impose too much danger when Second led the charge.

  The Knight Leader crouched low, amused that the rogue was now pretending to still be unconscious.

  “I told you not to think.”

  The rogue’s eyes fluttered open, now wide with shock. He was a soldier. Hairless. Skinny. Common pink irises. No flush of grey was left in his pale pallor, all the spirits had rushed to mend his cut. He stared at Kay-El in disbelief. Yeah, yeah, no one has ever seen a ‘psionic warrior’ before, big deal. Won’t you please just cooperate and allow me to spare your life?

  He pinched the rogue’s throat with his carapace powered fingers – recently upgraded as he had poached a rogue suit somewhere in Syrtis Major Planum, it was pretty cool because it had hidden protracting blades under the wrists, though Kay-El hadn’t yet had a chance to use them yet – and moved his visor to within centimeters of the rogue’s terrified face.

  He wondered if he could- no. But perhaps? Maybe?

  The Knight Leader had learned a few new psionic tricks as their ranging had continued. It came naturally to him, basic combat augmenting hallucinations. Even Vilithe was surprised, for although she was a much more powerful psion and could perform much more immersive illusions, she had never thought to use psionics with such subtle finesse.

  The first, and simplest, was Blur. And it did exactly what it said on the psionic function label. He would appear to be phasing, a nebulous phantom, his exact physical position always uncertain to his opponents.

  Then there was Mirror Image. The Knight Leader would make shadow copies of himself that danced in his enemy’s mind, and they would whiff their attacks fighting his mirrors, making it all too easy to counterattack.

  But he had only performed hallucinations. He had no hope of learning how to imprint, far too complex a psionic task for him.

  But Domination? Maybe- maybe he could execute a simple Sleep command?

  sleep();

  The rogue’s eyes fluttered again, eyelids drooping heavily. He struggled to keep them up. But then they fluttered hard again, for he struggled hard. He wasn’t quite asleep yet, just some liminal stage.

  sleep();

  The rogue’s head drooped and snapped back up suddenly, before dropping slowly down again- and then the Knight Leader realized he was getting… quite woozy… himself…

  Kay!

  He woke up from his microsleep. But the rogue was now snoring, lost in dreamless theta.

  Good job, Kay, but don’t exert yourself, alright?

  Trust me, Vi, I got this. I could do this all rote.

  He was, indeed, feeling quite pumped.

  Moving forward along the maintenance hallway now, after grabbing a pack of cyclonite he had wisely left further behind, and planting the packs all along the locked ceiling hatches that opened up into the guts of the row of automated turrets that lined the east entrance main hallway, Knight Leader finally reached the breach point, where a steel grate barricaded the trap door leading into the east entrance checkpoint control room.

  Vi?

  You have three greater psions, and two soldiers with rifles – no carapace, they think they’re protected by the turrets – up there. We wait for the signal.

  Although the wait was just a few minutes, the perception of it felt dilated. This was their most suicidal sortie yet.

  Second?

  Reaver is advancing, Vilithe. Even Second and Third, though not Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh, were already addressing Vilithe by her name, instead of just Conduit, now.

  All the pieces had now moved into position for the opening.

  Time to blow this scene.

  Detonate!

  Knight Leader crouched and covered his helmet’s sound sensors, as staccato reports of the cyclonite packs erupting behind him one by one rumbled into the ground. Boom. Boom. Boom!

  Let’s jam.

  Their reaver smashed through the eastern wall at top speed – psionically cloaked by Vi so that the carapaced guards – not knights, really, because they had no idea what they were doing in the shell – standing to each side did not notice their approach until it was too late and they were run over, trapped alive under the reaver in their armored cages until the exoskeletal frames gave out and they were slowly crushed – and the reaver opened its heavy plated mouth hatch and Second, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth came out guns blazing. They formed a sweeper column, trapping the rogues inside the control room with a hail of suppressive fire.

  Wait for it…

  Blaring alarm sirens screamed throughout the complex now. A nearby barracks bunker unfurled a ground hatch, and a line of carapaced soldiers now emerged. Third took a bead, and squeezed the trigger. He could hear the sizzle, but not the thunk, though there was no need for audial confirmation he could see through his scope that a cloud of black bloody mist dissipated where there once was a helmet and head.

  Boom, headshot.

  The line of soldiers returned fire as they scrambled to the side of the east entrance checkpoint gatehouse for cover. Third ducked back behind the watchtower barricade as shots rang the steel plates affixed upon it, a barrage of pings and clinks and ricocheting pows.

  I’m pinned down, only got one.

  Wait for it, Kay. Back off, Second, draw them out.

  Second, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh kept firing, but their clips would soon empty, so they did as Vi instructed and scooted back to the reaver, which had continued to slowly trample over the broken debris it left inside the wide hallway. They reformed behind the reaver as a mobile cover, but the reaver probably could not move much further without getting stuck. And now the reinforcements were entering through the back of the gatehouse, before long the entire hallway had become a pitched firefight once the four vassals had reloaded, firing from behind the reaver.

  But a rogue psion, vigilant enough to sense that the maintenance tunnel had been infiltrated and the turrets sabotaged, had opened the grate and dropped down. She spotted the Knight Leader lurking in the shadows and immediately gasped as the Knight Leader ran her through.

  I’m made!

  Like a certain Kal-El perhaps?

  Feno Wilson.

  Goras Du Pont, Vulwin Boucher, Arryn Talauth.

  Malevolent had grown in such potency after adapting the Knight Leader’s form that the spirit was capable of executing its own psionic attacks and was happy to assist.

  It was Goras Du Pont.

  Optional.

  This use of elvan blood to heal another elvan’s wounds, an elvan blood transfusion, was called a ‘regen’.

  And the Spirit Sidekick! Don’t forget Malevolent the Spirit Sidekick! Ah but the Dragonrider, the Commander, and the Spirit Sidekick doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?

  The more they came in sync, the more they grew, and so in due time even Malevolent could not help but grow with them too.

  Her Suicide Squad.

  She would have almost thought- curiouser and curiouser, but Amefrid felt that was a thought overused by this point, and didn’t want to let it become cliched.

  That would have been redacted elsewhere, but it wasn’t inside Amefrid’s mind.

  A directive which Kay-El was going well out of his way to disobey. The princess’s orders be damned.

  She loved dominating him for some cunnilingus just the way she liked it. He never lasted at intercourse.

  She thought of a pawn chain in a Sicilian Defense. Strange that she should be thinking defensively when she was on the offense, but that was Amefrid, always picking black, but, well, black did never go out of style.

  The details, well, were a secret.

  She should have used Occam’s Razor on this one. The Rite of Coronation was simpler than it sounded.

  Rogues could take vassals too. They rarely had the resources for it though.

  I chose half-measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again.

  Not really. Not at all.

  She had gone rogue. So rogue. But this didn’t seem to bother Mal anymore, it now excited him.

  Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

  He’s not gonna pull it off, Mal thought. No, he totally is, Kay can do it, Vi thought. Not without fucking up somehow I’m pretty sure, Mal thought.

  C’mon Kay! You can do it! Choke! Choke!

  Yes! Woot! Ah, elvan-

  Hah! Told you so! Shush, Mal.

  C’mon, Kay! C’mon Kay I believe in you! Ooh this is a nail-biter…

  I knew it. He choked. Oh, he succeeded at least, give him that, and he tried so hard. Yeah, A for effort but if he fell asleep too when casting sleep, then he’s donezo in the real realm. Shush, Mal. Now to wake him up-

  So lame, thought Mal. You’re not Captain Morquarra. Who? Nothing, Vilithe. But Vilithe felt frustrated, for it was something that she thought she should know, even though she currently didn’t.

  Realizing how powerful music could be to protect their minds, Vilithe had wrapped him up in a song- Tank! by SEATBELTS. She couldn’t quite remember the significance of the song though, what it was linked to. She had to admit some jazz wasn’t too bad. Kay really liked jazz.

  Being ‘in the Shell’ was Knight slang for donning the carapace armor and fighting. A dead knight still inside the carapace was called a ‘ghost in the shell’, and the handling of their bodies were treated with special honor- but this was also mainly for practical purposes, no one needed to get the corpse out with excessive scraping.

  Lysanthir Boucher

  Ailen Boucher