Exqua's Storm IV

 

 

We're silent. Pharolen. No one in all of Erisen hasn't heard of him. In the Central Civil War, 15 years ago, five years before the Skathers landed, a hundred thousand refugees crossed the border from the revolutionary side of the Central Kingdom. Pharolen, who was a mere fourteen years of age, shocked the world when he and his army arrived at the refugee's temporary settlement and razed it, massacring all hundred thousand innocent people inside. He also went on to invade the other side alone and personally claimed the head of the enemy leader, and then had his son burned alive. He was a pretty nasty guy. And had just been told that I was going to stuck under his ass for the rest of my life. Could it not have been, like, the 2nd Prince? Everyone would want to serve the courageous and chivalrous 2nd Prince. But… Pharolen wasn't that bad. After all, five years before now, he appeared alone and saved a whole division of soldiers from Skather encirclement. And I had met him, and talked to him, in the flesh. I honestly didn't think it was that bad of a deal. But Exqua had other ideas.

"I will purge this place of all of you who have fallen to his lies," he cackled, spread his arms like some sort of God. "And then I will kill him myself. To avenge what he did to me."
"Ah, but you see," a voice says from the smoke. "Pharolen happens to be my idol. I'm going to be loyal to him even if it costs me an arm."
I breathe out. Finally, 001 is back in the game. Albeit with one side of his face and body painted bright red with blood, and several pieces of shrapnel embedded in his arms and legs.

 

I'd never actually properly seen Airo fight before. Sure, I had seen him chop people up a couple of times before disappearing in previous battles, but never close up, properly. He was a monster. And Exqua was too, because they were fighting on equal footing. Airo was whirling his spear around with ease, the chrona on its wicked, curved blade leaving behind bright blue traces in the air as he swung it around. Exqua was hacking and slashing and blocking and feinting, but Airo locked both his swords and flung the spear upwards, leaving his chest undefended. Airo grinned and slashed a red criss-cross on Exqua's front, with the other end of the spear, also sharp. Exqua stumbled backwards, dropping his swords. Airo went in for the kill, but he had gotten overconfident. Exqua whipped out his axes with lightning speed, ignoring the violent pain that would probably have come with the wound from earlier, locked the curved end around Airo's shaft, and flipped around the spear. His other axe thunked into Airo's shoulder. The grin melted off Airo's face instantly. Now, his eyes had an angry, dangerous glint, almost like what Exqua's eyes looked like now, except without the crazed and bloodshot moving of the eyeballs. Airo whirled the spear round, and slash a deep, brutal line across Exqua's arm, splitting the flesh like someone cutting open a potato. Blood poured out like a waterfall, and Exqua's hand stiffened, the fingers trembling as the axe dropped and clattered to the ground. But he didn't care. Bore through the pain, and somehow snapped his fist shut, lodging Airo's spear firmly in his arm.

"Come on then, top-ranked bastard."
He slashed the axe across Airo's chest.

 

There was a spurt of blood from between them. Somehow even 001 was falling prey to the monster called Exqua. If only the blood that's pouring out of my face would stop, I could rejoin the fight. Airo suddenly wrenches the spear out Exqua's arm, cutting his hand in half as he did so, and backstepped a little. Exqua's attack had torn through the Facility uniform and there was a red line on his font, but Exqua himself had a knife in his left shoulder. Vedix's knife.

"Nice," Airo said to the smoke, as Vedix emerged.

Vedix was also heavily wounded. One of his arms had been caught directly by the blast, and it was hanging limp by his side, bloody and burnt.

"That's a poisoned knife," he told Exqua. "Should be working now. It gets into you bloodstream and soon you'll be dried, blinded husk with burnt out organs."
As if on cue, a vein in Exqua's neck bulged and blood exploded out of his mouth. He collapsed onto one knee, gasping and throwing up so much blood he could barely breathe.

"It's over."
"Didn’t I say," Exqua coughed, spluttering while he talked. "The game isn't over, until you give up? You think I'm gonna throw away my life after coming this far? Whatever you lose, you can always find it somewhere again. But what you throw away you can never get back. Same with your damn life. Let's go until the end, you worthless sons of bitches."

 

The image of Exqua that day is ingrained in my mind. After Vedix poisoned him, he, Woodsy, Airo and Luc attacked all at once. They stabbed, punched, clobbered, slashed and hacked, and Exqua's blood was thrown everywhere, all over the ground. Neo recovered and joined the battle. Artee finished treating the wounded outside and arrived in the cave with Krim, where they were met with me and about 1.5 litres of blood on the ground, and still on the rise, and Exqua, one armed, wielding his axe, roaring, only the whites of his eyes showing, fighting five of the top-ranked people in the cave all at once. Artee handed Elemental something that looked like a bottle of wine, and then began to bandage my mouth, which had been cut from one side of the face to the other, leaving me with a bloody, terrifying smile. Elemental tells the others to back up, and hurls the bottle at Exqua's feet. I don't even know what happened, but a wall of fire erupted over Exqua and he disappeared into a sea of flames.

 

We watched the fire for a while, stunned and shocked, even Artee, who had given it to Elemental in the first place. Only Elemental looked grim and sad, and for some reason there was a sense of… longing and deep sadness in his eyes. He turned away from the inferno, but then stopped. And turned back. Because Exqua had stood up from the raging fire, his white eyes now giving off a ghastly red glow in the flames covering his body. For the first time, I saw something change in 001's eyes. Fear? Admiration? I don't know. But he changed.

"How?" Luc asked.

And from the licking, crackling flames, Exqua spoke, his voice hoarse and cracked.

"Reject common sense," he said simply, slowly spreading his other arm that wasn’t cut in half. "And make the impossible possible."

"Tell me, Exqua," Elemental said, standing before the burning man. "If you won this battle… what would you do?"

He sits down on a rock as the others advance, slowly, gripping their weapons.

"I wonder?" Exqua rasps, his voice becoming quieter by the second, as the fire wraps around his neck. "I'll kill Pharolen. And then I'll take over. It's simple."
"You want to rule through fear like Pharolen does?" Elemental asks, while Airo has reached the edge of the flames. "What exactly does that change?"

I can barely even see Exqua now. He's just a black silhouette behind a wall of glowing orange. Artee has turned his back to the scene, and is treating my face. He's strong enough, as 004, but he knows that he won't be needed anymore. Behind the force-field of heat, Exqua smiles. A wide, terrifying, white smile, that glares through the blaze, sending shivers down my spine. And when he speaks, it's loud and clear, and I feel like the words are turning into rocks and clamming down onto my shoulders.

 

"Rule through power! Fear of those obese nobles and their gourmet meals, who hold power only in name and nothing else, that fear that grants you freedom. Those with the titles of Prince and Princess, those born in a big, white mansion with chrona-powered holograms and thirty space-carriers, who can order people to die with just a few words. Those are the laws that make this world spin, that make those snotty kings sitting on their ever-so-sturdy thrones, shitting in their golden toilet bowls, so fucking arrogant!! And you, you pigs in human clothing, you've all already surrendered to them. Why don't you fight!? Why don’t you feel the need to use you own two hands to change the bullshit that's your future!?!?!" his voice dies out in the heat. Then it pierces through again. "WEAK!!! You think you're strong!?! You'll be nothing in the face of absolute power, you fucking weaklings!! Power of friendship!? Power of fucking love!? That crap - friends, love, teammates, armies, alliances - is all unnecessary. Power. Absolute power. Power that squeezes your head and makes your knees shake, complete and utter domineering strength that presents an unclimbable wall. Power is the only necessity."

 

He stops, and all that's left is the crunching of Airo's boots on the gravel and the crackling of the fire dying out, with nothing left to burn. The others have all stopped in their tracks. The fire dies out and all that's left is the flaming form of Exqua, shuddering, trying to move. His hand is still wrapped tightly around his axe, even when it's about to crumble to dust. He forces one of his legs to move forwards, and the flame surge upwards. The only thing I can see of him that's not smothered in fire is one, cinder-like red eye, without no pupil, bloodshot, wide, malevolent.

"Enough," Airo tells him.

They're now face to face.

"…I've sa… said all… I want to say. Live… live on… 001. D-don't… lose you faith. Y… you die… when you… lose your faith."

Exqua's arm lifts up towards Airo, as one last instinctive effort to take him down. The fire spreads from Exqua to Airo, and his uniform begins to burn too.

"They say that you only fully know someone when you share their pain," Airo tells him. "Think of this as… my respect towards you. Exqua, may you rest-"

"-in pieces!!" Chris shouts from the entrance of the cave.

Oh god, he's awake.

"Yeah, rest in piss, you motherfu-"

Kake and Nyx appear behind him and drag him away.

"Farewell," Airo continues, as the fire climbs up his arms and onto his shoulder.

We watch in silence as he lifts his spear, and plunges it into the ground in front of Exqua. Then he turns and walks away, past Krim, past Woodsy, past Neo, past me and Artee. The fire on his arm dies out when he leaves the cave, and Exqua's charred body, the fire now gone, begins to crumble. It starts at his axe, which clangs to the floor, and then his arms turn to dust. But it stops when it reaches his body, and he's left standing there, alone, in a dark hole under the ground, away from his homeland, away from his family, with only a thin strip of blue light falling across what remains of his shoulders.

 

After the battle is over, we return to Pod 50 and find it a burned out wreck, curtesy of Exqua's remaining followers. We head to Pod 47 and 46, with the latter now empty, and Nyx is hysterical over the loss of her diary. I remember what I wanted to ask. Yeah, I can talk again. Artee fixed me a mechanical jaw, but it looked so fucking ugly that Neo found me a black and yellow checkered cloth and tired it around my face into a mask.

"It'll hide who you are to others. But to us, it'll always show that you're Sword."

I approach Elemental.

"Elemental," I say.

"Yeah?"

He's already totally recovered, but one side of his face has a big red blotch on it that'll probably stay.

"That thing you threw at the end there, the bottle Artee gave to you. What was that?"

"Ah," Elemental smiles.

He smiled again. But this time it was a faraway, bittersweet, longing smile, the same odd expression he made when he had thrown it.

"I made it in my spare time. I call it… hm. Yeah, I call it the Molotov."

"Molotov?" I demand. "I've never heard of that before."

He laughs, a little sourly.

"Course you haven't," he says. "It's only made where I come from. The full name's Molotov Cocktail. I just enhanced it with Chrona to make it a lot stronger."
I'm confused. I've studies almost every weapon on Erisen, but never even heard of what he's talking about right now.

"…where are you from?"

"Not from here," he says, turning around, and I get the feeling he doesn't want to talk about it anymore. "I'm from somewhere far, far away from here."