Chương 142: Chapter 141 - Interlude – Nona

Nona loaded her otherworld carbine and primed it, checking to make sure a round was ready to be chambered as Cole had taught her. He'd called this an 'open bolt' weapon and mentioned that he wasn't a fan of it. But it was hers and she was. The twins had even put one of the long, black cylinders on it that devoured the sound of the bullets." Establishing Lewis Field in ten seconds," came the voice from the speaker over the control room. Nona looked up at Director Bricker, who stood in the pit with her.

"You're sure you want to do this alone?" he asked. Nona nodded. Bricker looked troubled, as he often did since he'd pulled her out of the ward in Phoenix and brought her back to a Lewis Field, what her father's world had called the Divine Chorus. Even as she thought about that first reunion with the divinity, godless as it was on Earth, the generators for the portal complex came online. Nona took a deep breath as the other components of her soul reached out to touch her.

She welcomed them, and only then did she feel whole.

"I'm the only one who can do this," she said.

"I won't fail."

"It's not worth your life," said Bricker.

"If you get caught, if you get even a whiff of trouble, you come back, alright? Promise me."

"Alright."

"Alright, what?"

"I promise." She meant it, too. On Earth, cut off from divinity, she struggled to form bonds, to feel anything but hollow. Promises and offers were just empty words given thoughtlessly unless she put the whole of her concentration into carefully choosing what she said. And the warriors in the Department weren't the type to suffer her in silence. Among the shards of her soul, she searched for one. Just one spark, one mote of herself that she'd tucked away in a very special place. And it was still there.

It hadn't been found or destroyed. Feeling its touch, she focused on it.

"I'm going," she said.

"Good hunting," said Bricker. Nona called upon her Soul Schism. While every other Kicker needed a portal and a great amount of energy to travel between worlds with their soul intact, Nona's class gave her a way to circumvent that entirely. She walked between worlds the way others might walk between rooms. Six of the fourteen charges in the back of her mind dumped out their reservoirs to give her the energy needed to transition to another world.

The portal complex at the Department headquarters melted away, and she rushed away from the shard she'd left in the portal pit. Her inner eye turned to her destination, where an identical shard grew larger as she moved through the ether. Her feet never felt as though she'd left solid ground, despite the star-studded void she found herself flying through. Eventually, her destination shard grew larger and larger, expanding to pull her in.

The void disappeared, replaced by pure, burning white light that then dissolved into red grass fields and the fading orange sky of sunset. Nona lay in the grass, underneath something wide and sweltering. Before moving, she looked ahead, and then around for other movement. Spotting nothing, she wriggled out from under the tatters of a discarded garment that showed signs of claw marks, scorching, and blood spatter.

The last place she'd seen it was Babel, when she Banished its owner back to the world he'd come from, a piece of her own soul hidden in the weave of his clothing. That piece had been discarded along with the ruined robe. Either the Beast Cult mage had been in a hurry to be rid of it, or he didn't have Soul Sight. She folded the shard back into herself. With her immediate surroundings clear of danger, Nona stood up a bit higher and looked around.

A vast steppe surrounded her, covered in hills and lined with red, knee-high grass and tall, slender trees. To her left, mountains rose in the distance, capped with storm clouds. To her right, smoke from a large, walled settlement. Nona tugged her hood up against the wind and started forging her way towards the wall.

When she got closer, close enough to pull out binoculars and angle them down, she realized what she'd initially taken to be a small city was, in fact, the smoking husk of a burned-out town and a sprawling caravan nearby. She observed over the next fifteen minutes as campfires started to dot the landscape in and around the caravan. When darkness settled in, she made her way down from the foothills and towards the smoldering town.

The stone walls that once protected the town had been torn down or flattened by sorcery. Inside, bodies lined the streets, cut down with blades or mauled by creatures. Several fires still crackled where houses had been put to the torch. Nona caught the sound of snuffling nearby and ducked into an alley. She hunkered down and peered through the gap burned timber. Six Beast Cult warriors with lacquered armor and red veils hiding their faces moved through the street with a four-legged creature on a lead.

They each carried spears or bows, and even if they were low-level, it was too many for her to handle alone. They were stopping to check bodies for loot, sliding off anything remotely valuable off arms or fingers, and in some cases breaking silver teeth from jaws. Looters, getting their last pickings in, then. She crept around the opposite corner of the structure and slipped past, toward the caravan. Behind her, the beast team continued its patrol. She looked down again at the bodies in the dirt.

They had grass weave clothing and some wore armor of a yellowish metal. Very different to what she'd seen on the Beast Cult. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Nona continued on, skirting by two more patrols until she found what she was looking for. A lone figure in a dirty, red and white cloak that had certainly seen better days. The figure tugged at the boots on one of the murdered townspeople, managing to pull one off with a grunt.

The Beast Cult looter fell back, hood falling to reveal a feminine face with a brand on the cheek. She had long, sharp ears and a hint of protrusion at her jaw that gave her just a suggestion of a muzzle. Instead of armor, she had a tattered shirt and trousers tied up high on her waist with a leather strap. Her own feet were bare. A slave, maybe? Some sort of serf? It didn't much matter. Nona crept up as the wretch leaned down to go to work on the other boot.

Even with the black cylinder on her rifle, it would be too loud. Nona slid it out of the way and slipped her long knife from the small of her back. She burned a charge of her Soul Schism to slip beyond this world's veil into its nether, closing the distance in the shadowy world where the town stood as it had before being razed. She re-emerged within arm's reach of the looter. The Beast Cult woman didn't even hear her approach.

Nona clapped a hand over her mouth and pulled them both back onto the ground, wrapping her legs around the woman to stifle her movement. The Beast cult wretch flailed her arms in surprise, leaving herself exposed. Nona brought the dagger up under the woman's ribs, angling it up through her diaphragm and toward her lung first to stop her from crying out. She burned her knife's ability to sap what little strength the looter had left.

Then Nona pulled the blade out and stabbed once more, sliding it between the looter's ribs and into her heart. The woman pawed at the hands holding her, but after only a few seconds the hands fell away and she went still. Nona pulled her knife out and rolled the woman off her. With practiced motions, Nona pulled off the girl's cloak and wrapped it around herself before the stench of blood could soak into it. Then she pulled the corpse across the threshold of a ruined house and stashed her just out of sight.

Nona doubted that she'd be missed within the next few hours. Now cloaked in the garb of her enemy, Nona pulled off the dead man's other boot and carried the pair confidently out the front of the town with her knife stashed within. Just another camp follower returning with meager spoils. The caravan of massive wagons had circled up a few hundred meters away, and she realized that her sense of scale had been way off.

The wagons were massive, larger than any of the vehicles she'd seen on Earth—even the ones that collected the trash from the buildings at the DOR compound. Gigantic, furred animals grazed nearby under the watchful eye of more mounted warriors. Foot traffic going both ways, to and from the remains of the city, spanned the distance between the two and Nona passed by dozens of red and white garbed figures with animalistic features. None of them gave her a second glance.

The camps spread out and Nona slipped between cookfires and muttered conversation, trying not to look too hard at what exactly turned on the spits. She could hear music and laughter, and the shriek of animals. She passed an iron cage up on one of the wagons where a pair of the apes from Babel shook the bars and screamed down at her. Other cages held more monsters. Some sort of market or menagerie, as more figures examined the beasts and spoke at length with a keeper.

The caravan itself was nearly the size of a small city in its own right. It took Nona almost an hour to cross it. No one paid her any notice, thanks to her diminished soul. A surge of deific magic froze her in her tracks. Ahead, in a large clearing, several of the veiled mages worked a ritual, burning a locus of power onto the ground. A mote appeared in the clearing, swirling and expanding until it became a flat, swirling disk. A fetid, caustic wind blew back from the clearing.

Several mounted knights raised curved axes and charged through. Behind them, fifty or sixty warriors on foot followed, leading one of the massive beasts yoked to one of the caravan wagons. The furry beast pulled itself through the portal, dragging its burden. Dozens more followed behind on foot, some of them in chains. Some of them were full human, lacking the animalistic features of the Beast Cult and chained together.

Was this why the Department had struggled so hard to find the origin of the Beast Cult that plagued them? Was the entire culture nomadic not just between lands, but between worlds? Appearing and raiding and moving on? Nona felt the itch of someone's attention settle on her and spotted one of the ritual mages looking straight at her. If that caster had Soul Sight and was observant, her diminished soul would single her out rather than reducing her presence. Time to go.

She turned and strode back through the camp, ducking under one of the massive wagons between wheels taller than she was. She could hear the tromp of several pairs of boots on the other side of the planks overhead. With another charge of her ability, she split off a small shard of her soul and fixed it to the bottom of the massive caravan wagon. Nona ducked out the other side and moved toward the forest of tents. The portal winked out, along with the ghostly green light and fetid wind.

She risked a glance over, where one of the mages pushed toward the tent on the opposite side of the wagon where Nona had traipsed before doubling back to plant her soul shard. He had several veiled warriors in tow and a hulking, armored knight with a reptilian visage. Nona continued at a normal pace until the group was out of sight, then ducked into the nearest tent—luckily, it was empty. She dropped the tattered cloak, taking instead a fur-trimmed vest and cape that she pulled awkwardly over her head and carbine.

Whoever owned it was a few sizes larger than her. She kicked out of her boots, as well, pulling on the ones she carried from the town. A head scarf with an ornate veil rested on a wooden mount, so Nona tugged that on, as well. Lastly, she grabbed a sheathed sword and buckled it around her waist. She walked out of the tent with the confident gait of a warrior, hand resting on the pommel of the sword and looking out over the camp as though she owned it.

She set off in the opposite direction of the mages, quickening her pace as someone raised a commotion in the far part of the caravan. Within another ten minutes, she was outside of the perimeter of the camp and into the grasslands, where she ran until full dark, until finally felt clear enough to burn another six charges of her ability. She shunted between worlds, pulled back toward the shard she'd left with Director Bricker.

Nona stumbled out onto the cold cement of the portal pit and bounced off the solid form of Director Bricker like she'd charged a stone wall. She sprawled back on the floor of the portal pit, looking up at the Director raising his hands to the gun crews in the corners of the gallery." Hold fire! Hold fire!" he shouted. He looked down at her, eyebrow raised.

"Ms. Keaton?" Nona pulled off the veil and handed it up to Bricker.

"Well," he said, offering his other hand to pull her to her feet as he examined the pattern dyed on the veil.

"I suppose I don't have to ask how close you got. Tell me everything."