Authors: Dhayaa Anbajagane
Q leaned forward on the base of the Griffin’s neck. “Jade, how about you take us down?” he asked.
The griffin nodded and plummeted into a dive. His talons retracted and his wings folded up. Right now they were two guys and a half-lion, half-hawk plummeting to the ground.
“
Eagle,
” Jade said.
“What?”
“
I’m a half-lion half-eagle. Not hawk.
”
“You can read minds as well?” Q asked
“
All Griffins can read minds,
” he said.
I’m an idiot for not remembering that
, he thought, recalling the mind-reading trouble he had faced with Ruby.
“
You’re definitely an idiot,
” Jade said.
The griffin swayed up, transiting from the sharp dive into a gliding descent. The clouds below them parted, revealing land a few yards below.
“Look there,” Q pointed into the mist. Two blobs of light slowly became larger and larger. Something was coming towards them. Missiles.
“
I can take care of those missiles,
” Jade said.
“That isn’t what I’m most worried about,” he said. “There is a force field around the academy. It’ll be impossible to get in through that.”
Jade started laughing loudly. Q was bewildered. Was his statement that funny?
“
You amuse me Wielder of Light,
” he said. “
The Anti-verse may have many similarities to your world but it is not an exact copy. There are differences.
”
The missiles hit Jade. The shield blocked them as before, but something was wrong this time. The explosion seemed more intense. Jade wobbled, the great griffin trembling in the shade of that impact. His wings went limp and they rocketed to the ground
Jade didn't slow down a bit, and rammed into the ground hard. Q was tossed up like a Sunday-morning pancake and thrown down like the egg.
“Uhh,” he rubbed his head as he got up.
Burke lay there on the ground, mumbling something about doughnuts. Jade lay next to him, his wings stiff and wounded. He was conscious but barely.
Q ran up to him. “Are you okay?”
The griffin tried to stand up but fell back to the ground immediately.
“You’re hurt, you have to rest,” he said.
“
The Academy. They can help us.
”
“What do you expect me to tell them? ‘Come on outside guys! I need to help my friends’? We all know there’s nothing more trustworthy than a stranger calling you out to help his injured friends.”
“
Spare me the sarcasm. I can only guide you to the academy. The rest is in your hands. Straight north from here is an underground path. It is a one way route into Aliea.
”
“Stay put Jade. I’ll be back,” Q said.
“
Remember, whatever you do, do not…
”
“Yeah?” Q waited for a reply but got none.
Jade had finally fallen unconscious. It had obviously taken him quite a bit of willpower to stay conscious in the first place, but this put Q in a fix. Now he wouldn't know what he wasn't supposed to do. All he knew was it wasn't ‘Don’t use the fire sauce at taco-bell’.
He cast a shield over the two using the little life energy he had left.
“That should last them a few hours,” he turned to the mist in front of him. “Go north. Get help from people who don't know you. Piece of cake,” he ran into the mist.
***
Q ran blindly into the mist. The only instinct he was following was his sense of direction. Then he realized something. He had his Q-maps and yet he wasn't using them. Pretty stupid right? He activated his power, and colorful images flowed through. He pulled an image from the ‘Aliea’ archives. He loved calling them Archives.
Archives
sounded like a much cooler version of maps.
His mind analyzed the landscape and the terrain he saw, memorizing the paths he could take.
When he was done, he ran through the mist. He was still blinded by the unwavering fog but his Q-maps were giving him a sort of ‘superior’ vision. Technically he could call it X-ray vision but he was going to let Superman have that one.
It hardly took him a few seconds to get out of the mist. He hadn’t really tried to imagine what lay outside the mist, but what he saw before him now definitely surprised him.
A plain, rocky desert.
Zygrade doesn’t have deserts
, he recalled. He pressed down on the ground with his feet, “Stable landscape.”
He took his first step, only for the ground around him to collapse and give away. The next thing he knew he was lying down inside some sort of underground tunnel. He looked up. The opening to the surface had been completely blocked.
Can't say I didn't see that coming,
he thought. The tunnel slowly filled up with bright white light. He felt a small tap on his shoulder. He turned around, to get the fright of his life.
A hooded man stood in front of him, a large staff in his hand. A bright sphere of light glowed at the top of his staff. That, along with his black robes, made him look like a video-game mage.
Now Q had the irritating job of figuring out if he should attack or be friends with this hooded figure. The guy had tapped him on the shoulder rather than throw him to the ground, which most of the opponents he had faced before had voted to be their number one ‘hello’ gesture. The figure walked ahead, gesturing for Q to follow. He obliged without much pondering, mainly because he had no other option, plus hooded figures were cool.
After a few minutes of walking they stopped and the figure gestured to the roof of the tunnel. Q saw that a ladder rose up from the ground to an open hatch in the roof. The light in the tunnel vanished and Q realized the hooded figure had disappeared.
Mysterious fellow
, he thought.
Luckily for him, he had seen the ladder for long enough to have a general sense of where it was. He latched onto the bars and lifted himself up.
Aliea is right up there
, he thought. Thinking of that made him miss his friends a bit. He missed his peaceful life. Okay, his life wasn't peaceful. He missed his ‘peacefulller’ life. He climbed up onto the surface and dusted himself.
He glanced ahead of him. “Aww snap,” he said, “so much for a ‘peacefuller’ life.”
Around him stood about a hundred hooded figures.
“You guys didn’t have to give me a welcome party,” Q smiled.
“I will slit his tongue,” one of the hooded figures slid forwards, clearly not appreciating his sense of ‘completely not understanding the situation’, also known as humor. Q looked at the figure and panicked for a second. It was floating half a foot in the air.
The Elementa of Wind
, he realized. He tried to draw some information from his brain. Who were these people? What did they want? He had never seen anything like this back at his Aliea.
Lightning streaked across the sky, distracting Q for a second. It was only then that he looked around him. He’d spent so much time worrying about the Hoods – that’s what he called them,
Hoods
– that he hadn’t paid attention to his surroundings. The sky was completely black, occasionally illuminated by streaks of lightning. The buildings around him were all…. demolished. Smoke and dust rose from every single one, sifting down to the streets that were filled with broken rocks and sand. Something big had happened here. Something destructive. The place didn’t even look like Aliea academy. Not a bit.
Is this even the right place?
he thought.
The Hoods cornered him.
“Who sent you?”
“Where are you from?”
“Well…” Q searched for an answer. “I need your help. My friends are in trouble. We were all taken down by a missile attack.”
The Hoods fell silent. Q used the silence and told them the entire story. “It was a crazy sight,” he said. “Missiles came out of nowhere and exploded. Our griffin injured himself and we all crashed.”
The Hoods chattered among themselves in quiet whispers.
“What if he is lying?”
“We must help the poor boy.”
“Silence!” said a single dominant voice, a girl no doubt. “We will go with the stranger and help him,” then she turned towards him, “but if he is lying, we will chop him up then and there.”
Q felt a shiver down his spine. That was a pretty harsh thing to say, even for a Hood, which was Q’s singular form of ‘Hoods’ by the way.
The girl slid up to Q, “Lead us stranger,” she said.
“Umm, and who exactly am I talking to?” Q asked.
The girl opened up her hood. Her face had a milky white complexion. Her blond hair hung in loose curls around her shoulder, and her electric blue eyes stared at Q.
“Taylor. Taylor Quasar. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
***
“Stop pushing me,” Kai whispered as he scurried along the silent corridors of the mothership. He and Trisha had finally begun their infiltration mission.
“We need to get to the main control room quickly,” Trisha said. “And we can't do that if you stop every five seconds to check for guards. There’s a lesser chance of us getting caught if you stop that suspicious behavior of yours.”
Kai sighed, “Fine, I’ll stop.”
“Just go according to plan and we’ll be fine,” she said. “You’re going to get into the main control room, plug into the computer and hack into it while I stand guard.”
“And how long do I have?”
“The main computer will activate the ship’s alarms in around five minutes.”
He walked carefully towards the main elevator, with Trisha right behind him. None of the guards seemed to be around. Trisha had been right about the guards’ shifts changing at this time.
The silence, though, seemed threatening. Kai felt as though the whole ship actually knew about his plans, and they were lying in wait to catch him red-handed. He calmed down only when his eyes met the cold, metal doors of the elevator.
He turned to Trisha and stretched out his hand, “Your ID,” he said.
Apparently only a few people had access to the main control room and luckily for him, Trisha was one of them. She fished inside her pocket and handed the card to Kai. He swiped the small plastic rectangle on the elevator identification system.
“Welcome, Dr.Trisha,” a feminine voice said and the elevator door opened. Kai checked the corridor one last time to make sure no one had seen them.
“Get in, will you,” Trisha pushed him into the elevator and hit a few buttons. She looked gleeful, her hands and legs moving all over the place.
“You sure are excited about this,” Kai said, hoping that her enthusiasm wouldn't let her get carried away.
“Are you kidding? This is the most fun I’ve had in years.”
“Being a healer is a pretty boring job, huh?”
“You have no idea,” she sighed.
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. Kai crouched a little, ready to charge out and counter if they were attacked. Unless the enemy was a blank wall, the whole place was completely clear. He double-checked for enemies one last time before they walked ahead into the main control room.
The interior of the room was completely black, making Kai feel like he was in the depths of space itself. A quiet whirring noise was the only thing he could hear apart from his own heartbeat.
“There it is,” Trisha pointed ahead of her. “The main computer.”
A bright sphere of light lay afloat inside a glass box, and the box hovered above a radiant green circle. Flicks of dark blue electricity ran through the bright sphere.
“Wow,” Kai’s eyes glistened at the sight.
“We call it the ‘Brain’,” she said. “An entity capable of any sort of computation.”
“Wait, so the main computer is that sphere of light in there?”
“It’s not a sphere of light,” she said. “It’s hot plasma. The temperature inside the box is super-hot, turning the Harvium metal inside it into an electron-proton soup.”
“So the whole mothership is run by this soup being?” Kai found it quite weird that a bowl of soup, even if it were high-tech, could be that efficient.
“We use Quantum computing in this plasma ‘soup’ to make it exponentially faster and more powerful. The Brain is not limited by any physical form so it can compute at speeds almost a hundred times faster than any computer we know of. We use short pulses of light to communicate with it in binary and it can use the exact same method to communicate with us.”
“Wait, communicate?” Kai asked. “So that thing is an Artificial Intelligence?”
“A.I, yes,” Trisha said. “The best Artificial Intelligence unit I’ve seen so far. Those sparks of blue electricity are formed when the A.I is highly active.”
“Amazing,” Kai stared in awe at this scientific wonder.
Trisha pushed him forward, “Now go and hack it,” she said.
“Hack that?” he said, sounding less confident with every word.
He had cracked open Aliea Academy’s computers hundreds of times, and found the server filled with pictures of cats misspelling words and a personal message from Carlos telling him that he was suspended from having Ice cream for the week. He always managed to sneak the ice cream in anyway, but that’s not the point.
Right now, this ‘Brain’ thing, or whatever it was, didn’t seem like it had a computer code that he could exploit. Usually with a computer, there were certain lines of data and electricity that he could get access to by trying different things. A machine’s security system had certain conditions, or protocols, and a hacker basically was a wreck monkey, doing all sorts of things to try to overload the system and make it crash.
Trisha looked at Kai’s face, “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, I’m not an expert at hacking a bowl of soup,” he said and walked towards the glass box.
The blob of energy inside it glowed brightly, small sparks of blue shooting all around it.
“It seems to be working at full capacity,” he said. “It might make things easier. You just make sure no one comes in and interrupts.”
“Done.” Trisha stood next to the elevator. It was the only way into the control room. Kai felt secure. If anyone dangerous came up, Trisha would be ready to knock them out. Hopefully.
He turned and looked at the computational marvel in front of him, trying to figure out some kind of method to get into its system. He knew he had to activate his powers to have even a slight chance at actually getting into this thing.
He closed his eyes and tried to focus his mind. He numbed his senses, concentrating on nothing but his thoughts. He felt a strong jerk on his body and he tumbled forward.
When he opened his eyes he saw that the room had morphed into an empty void. Black and white shapes of the weirdest geometry surrounded him. They didn't seem like anything harmful though, and just floated about still and lifeless. He cranked his neck around like an owl, trying to figure where the heck he was. He wasn't exactly fond of geometry and this seemed like his nightmare was gaining life.
“
Who dares tread upon my territory?
” boomed a voice, each word pushing Kai back with amazing force.
The unfamiliar objects in front of him spread out, leaving a tunnel of space clear and void of anything. He could see the faint image of a sphere of white light on the other side.
Kai’s mind clicked. Everything suddenly made sense. He knew where he was now. Inside the ‘Brain’. Inside its consciousness.
“
I will ask one last time,
” the Brain said, “
Who art thou?
”
Kai floated silently, wondering what to do. He couldn’t just go up and say ‘Hi! I’m going to hack into your system. Could you help me?’ Maybe if he lay very still the Brain would think he was one of those shapes and leave him alone.
“
Metal user, heed my call,
” Its words blared through the quiet space. “
Show yourself to me else thou will needlessly fall.
”
Two things went through Kai’s mind. First, he was astounded. How did this being know about his Elementa of Metal? It had never seen him use it. And second, this guy had amazing poetry skills.
“What does thou want?”
Kai remained quiet, desperately trying to summon the courage to face what was possibly the strongest mechanical entity built.
“
Very well,
” the Brain said.
Kai seemed confused. What was it trying to do?
“
I shalt give thou control of the ship if thou art able to beat me in a duel.
”
Kai’s mouth literally dropped open, his hands manually closing it a second later to make sure the smaller cones and cylinders didn’t float into it.
“
The powers of mind reading do not evade me. I can see what it is thee desires.
”
“I should have figured,” Kai grinned. The Brain was the enemy, sure, but it was also a darn good piece of machinery, a God-like one at that. He couldn’t help feeling impressed.
“
We shall begin,
” it said. “
Thou will face the foes I set up against thee and emerge victorious. Are the terms agreeable?
”
“It’s a deal,” Kai said, smiling. All he had to do now was take down everything that stood up against him. It sounded pretty easy when he put it like that.
A small rumble escaped through the field of shapes and dissolved the black and white figures of geometry into absolutely nothing. The darkness around him disappeared and the scenery changed.
Bright greenery flashed all around him, some sort of tropical forest, no doubt. Large trees created a canopy that blocked the sunlight from entering the forest. Flowers of every kind and color bloomed across patches of the ground, like a beautifully painted picture.
“
We shall begin,
” the Brain’s voice echoed from the sky. “
Thou will have to win four battles before thee can face me.
”
“
Level One,
” a female voice ran through the air.
Kai wondered if the Brain was talking in the female voice or if he had some sort of assistant to help him out. He was quite intrigued at the thought, but his mind was alert to the dangerous situation. It diverted himself to the scene unfolding right in front of him.
Glowing particles rose from the ground and came together in front of Kai, forming a humanoid shape. When the light died down, he could finally see who he was going up against.
Was it an A-level beast? Maybe one of those griffins, or maybe even a wyvern.
He shuddered when he realized who he was up against. Kai wanted to crawl into a hole and hide. The Brain had faced him against one of the worst opponents he could imagine.
Carlos.
***
Kai couldn’t believe who the Brain had brought up to be his first opponent,
Carlos stood right in front of him, in a long blue robe embroidered with stars and planets, his regular outfit at Aliea. Kai realized what was going on, and he wasn’t too surprised that the duel had turned out this way. This Brain was pulling memories from his mind and then using them against him. This machine was really crafty.
Carlos lowered his legs and crouched, his hands close to his body. Before Kai could move, Carlos pivoted his left leg into the ground and swung around, letting his right foot thunder into Kai’s chest and throwing him through the air.
Kai landed hard and lay still, trying to get some air into his lungs. He pushed himself off the ground and took a fighting stance. He felt his energy within him and summoned it all around his body. He was going to need a tremendous amount of power and concentration if he wanted to end this as the winner.
He turned his hands to the ground and focused, his fingers and wrists vibrating with the intense energy that flowed through them. The fine sand rose all around him and shot into his outstretched palm all at once. A multicolor light flashed in his hands, and when it stopped glowing, he was wielding a full-fledged sword, its sleek blue blade ready to raze anything that came at him.
“
Impressive,
” the Brain’s voice came from the sky. “
You used your life energy to turn your hand into a magnet and bring out all the metals you could use. Truly a spectacular technique.
”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kai waved the Brain off. He didn’t need a supernatural distraction during a crucial battle. He summoned his strength and charged forward, his sword pointed at Carlos’ throat. Carlos, though, was agile, and dodged it easily. Kai kept striking, slashing, and hacking as fast as he could, but Carlos seamlessly evaded all the attacks.
“Stay still!” Kai yelled out, his frustration getting to him.
He tried studying Carlos’ movements. He hacked away, this time focusing more on where his opponent was going rather than where he could hit him. Once he switched over to that state of mind noticing the dodging patterns was easy.
Carlos’ dodge always started with him swaying to one side, and then shifting to the other almost immediately. His feet were the biggest giveaway. One of his legs always bent to the side he was really trying to dodge to.
Kai had found a pattern. And now he could exploit it.
He waited patiently for another chance. He wanted Carlos to attack him this time. It would give him the perfect opportunity to dodge and head in for a counterstrike.
He lingered around Carlos’ attack range, and Carlos charged at him, just as intended. Kai got ready to strike, planting his feet on the ground to get as much force as he could into the jab.
But Carlos seemed to have other ideas. He didn’t sway away this time and instead slid to the ground, unleashing a furious uppercut-like kick onto Kai’s chest.
Kai was given wings as he flew high into the air, and then gravity stole his wings and threw him to the ground. He really didn’t enjoy being in a tug of war game between Carlos’ kicks and gravity.