Chapter 26

“We don’t know the extent of Wilhelm’s abilities or how he is even doing it,” Liza commented, looking directly at King Rowan. Huddled close to her were her two daughters, Melda and Chrisany. Both of them looked exhausted and worn out. Melda could barely keep her eyes open. Liza could see the tears in their eyes and she felt her heart break even more. She could still vividly remember her husband, Sean, as he lay dying in a pool of blood. She could still see the pain in his eyes and the disbelief. It was hard for her to realize that he was gone. It was hard for her to accept it.

“Dr. Taren?” King Rowan asked, concerned. “Are you all right?”

She snapped herself out of her thoughts of Sean. She was surprised to realize that she was crying. She wiped the tears off her face, setting her lips into a firm line.

“Yes, sorry,” she responded. She hugged her daughters even closer to her. “As I said, we don’t know the extent of his abilities but it seems as if Wilhelm has a form of mind manipulation that I haven’t come across before.”

“Are you able to clarify that? Either of you?” the King interrogated, looking from Liza to Milo and back again.

“I do not have any relevant experience with this,” she told him. The only thing that Wilhelm had done to manipulate her was to kidnap her family. “I am not sure why, but he never tried to use that particular ability on me. Instead, he resorted to kidnap and extortion.”

“Why would he stoop to those measures?” Rowan pondered. “If he could somehow manipulate you directly then he wouldn’t have needed them.”

“I don’t know, Sire,” Liza told him. “All I have are theories based on intuition and guesses.”

“And what would those be?” he asked, his eye boring into her own like a drill.

“Whatever manipulative abilities he possesses weren’t at full strength when he first came to me,” she responded. “Or he might not have been aware of them at the time. It is also possible, and this I find more likely, that whatever power he possesses has an extremely adverse effect on the victim’s psyche. I’ve noticed a sort of blankness in the Blak Soldiers. I think that whatever power he controls takes away a person’s ability to think for themselves. It could also explain why I didn’t notice that same blankness in Lord Guilder. Maybe Wilhelm realized the need to have soldiers with their mental capabilities intact, just enough of them to lead and take control when the situation arises.”

As she sat there, watching King Rowan looking at her contemplatively, she couldn’t help but remember that meeting with Wilhelm. The meeting that had destroyed her world and made a mockery of her life’s work. She’d spent almost eighteen hours in her lab that day, testing and retesting genetic sequences. When she came out, he was there. A dark cloak and hood covered and hid his features. She’d tried to run but he’d been faster. He snatched her before she could even get two steps away. He hauled on her arms with brute strength, forcing them behind her back. Then he brought his mouth closer to her ear and whispered a few short sentences. What she heard shattered everything she’d known. He told her what he wanted her to do and then he told her what the consequences of her disobedience would be. After that, he forced her back into her lab and over to a vid-player. He popped in a clear disk and she watched in complete horror as Sean, Melda, and Chrisany sat huddled close to each other in a plain, box-like room. There was no furniture except for a dirty mattress on the cold-looking floor.

Sean had been trying to calm the girls down. His face had been hard and angry.

Wilhelm had switched the vid-player off and turned his attention back to Liza. Again, he told her what he wanted, and despite knowing it would damn her soul forever, she obeyed.

She’d created the Behemoth.

King Rowan nodded at her, his face stern.

“What is your experience with this?” he asked, turning his attention to Milo.

Milo’s enormous frame seemed to shudder as he thought about that last moment back at the Citadel. He thought crushing Wilhelm into the pavement would’ve been simple. It hadn’t been. The psychotic ex-General had turned…something (he wasn’t quite sure what)…against him. Whatever it was, it had felt cold and deadly. It had felt sinister. Evil. Above all else, however, it had been so strong.

“Dr. Taren, in the last moments at the Citadel, was able to free me completely from Wilhelm’s control. She meant to use me, I understand now, as an instrument for Wilhelm’s destruction,” Milo stated, somewhat mildly.

“I thought…” Liza began, lamely. She couldn’t finish her statement.

“I understand your motivations. You wanted to use the monster you’d been forced to make to destroy the man that had ruined your life. Believe me, Dr. Taren, I understand the irony. I would’ve gladly done it for you, or rather for myself, but some kind of power prevented me.”

“Can you elaborate?” King Rowan asked. He leaned forward slightly, his hands folded neatly in front of him on the large wooden conference table. His blue eye seemed to glitter at them with anticipation.

“As I said to Dr. Taren before, it was as if he were pushing himself into my mind. I could feel it. There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t be able to break free. I thought that he was going to finally succeed in erasing everything that made me who I was, Sire,” Milo explained.

King Rowan’s hands clenched, their knuckles turning white. If Wilhelm would’ve taken complete control of what Milo was now, there would’ve been no stopping him. He envisioned the Behemoth rampaging through men, weapons, assault vehicles, and anything else that could be thrown at him.

It was not a pretty sight.

“Continue,” he ordered, nodding at Milo. “How did you break free?”

“When he laid his hand on my arm, I thought I was lost. The sensations grew exponentially larger. It took everything I had, every bit of will power, to break free and resist him. I knew, however, that I couldn’t beat him. I risked turning myself over to him and so I fled. I’m not proud of that, but at the time, it was the better option.”

“Agreed,” King Rowan said. “If he had regained control of you, I think this war wouldn’t have lasted long.”

Milo didn’t say anything back, but there was a look of shame in his eyes.

“It has become apparent that Wilhelm Coran is a danger to Purga on a scale we’ve never seen before. The power he commands has proven extremely deadly and he won’t stop until he has his revenge.”

“What, exactly, does that entail?” Dr. Taren asked.

“The complete destruction of Purga,” King Rowan told her.

Darvian sat on the rooftop of one of Edaeri’s tallest buildings. It was night now with the moon seeming to hover just over the placid, silvery waters of the Great Sea. He looked around the floating city, a sense of loss and desperation warring through him.

The once glamorous and opulent metropolis was now a devastated wreck. Collapsed buildings, debris, and rubble were prominent, especially near the water. In addition to that, it felt like a ghost town. It felt deserted. The streets weren’t crowded with people. There were no sounds of traffic or the blaring commercials playing on the enormous vid-screens attached to the sides of once beautiful buildings.

He could feel the abandonment of the place even from his vantage.

That was nothing, however, compared to the ball of white rage in the pit of his stomach. The only thing that kept going through his mind was watching that monster stomp through the woods. He could still see the bright white light that came after. He remembered how it had thrown their shadows in front of them. He remembered the horrible screams and the sounds of innocent people being killed.

One of those screams had been his father’s.

One of them had been the sound of his father dying.

He glanced across the street, to the building directly in front of him. There were chunks blasted out of its side but for the most part it was still intact. Even now, he watched as millions of nanos surged to the ruined parts and started rebuilding. In a few hours, the building would look whole and undamaged once more.

He flipped through his blueprints and brought up one for a pair of binoculars. The nanos came out and quickly made them. He snatched them out of the air and put them on, using a wheel on the side to adjust them. The building’s glass windows suddenly leaped forward and he could see everything.

The floor he was currently looking at was empty. There was nothing there but offices and what looked like a cafeteria.

He turned his gaze up higher.

There! his mind yelled at him.

He stopped and focused the binoculars a little more, making the image clearer. He saw King Rowan sitting at the head of a well-polished, expensive conference table. The wood gleamed brightly under the lights. Sitting on his right side was the woman, Dr. Taren.

Sitting next to her was the monster.

The murderer, his mind whispered.

He heard the screams of the dying. He heard their pain.

His face twisted into a mask of rage.

Without much thought to what he was doing, Darvian flipped through his blueprints again. He wished, suddenly, that he had Rone’s proficiency with coding the things because his weapons options were severely limited. Automatically, he threw out any blueprints he had for blasters or blaster variants. That type of weapon had already proved ineffective against the monster.

He cursed.

That didn’t leave him with many options.

Sifting through blueprint after blueprint, Darvian was growing increasingly frustrated. It didn’t look like he would have any weapon capable of bringing Milo down.

A blueprint caught his eye. He clicked on it and brought it up to full screen. A smile suddenly flared on his face.

Let’s see how you handle this, he thought to himself.

He engaged the blueprint. His nanos rushed out in a cloud and quickly created a T-EMP bazooka.

Darvian hefted it to his shoulder, got a lock, and pressed the trigger without any hesitation at all.

Fiona stepped out of the elevator, heading to the room where King Rowan had set up shop to debrief her father. There was still a girlish excitement whirling inside her at seeing him again, but it was bittersweet. She couldn’t deny what had been done to him. She couldn’t blind herself to the facts. Wilhelm had turned him into something else. Something extremely terrifying, even to her. She tried to put on a brave face and act like it didn’t matter, but she couldn’t hide it completely. She was sure her father could see the truth buried in her eyes.

She brushed those thoughts aside and strolled past a room full of empty desks to one behind a pair of expensive wooden doors. She pushed them open and smiled brightly.

“Your Majesty,” she bowed to him, as was the custom.

“Ms. Rosburg, this is a confidential meeting,” he replied, sternly.

“Nothing going on here I don’t already know about,” she told him, smiling again. “Besides, I haven’t seen my father in months. You wouldn’t be able to make me leave even if you had a squadron of heavily armed guards trying to physically haul me out.”

King Rowan smiled. It was a small one, but it was enough for Fiona. She sat down next to her father and hugged him fiercely.

“Now,” King Rowan said, “shall we continue?”

Before anyone could answer, the glass window suddenly exploded into a cloud of shards and jagged pieces.

Dr. Taren screamed, falling to the floor and covering her girls with her body.

King Rowan threw up a nano-shield without thinking.

And Milo covered Fiona with his massive bulk.

The T-EMP disk smacked into his back as electricity coursed through him. He felt it as it worked its way through his body and into Fiona’s. Then the needles sprang out and buried themselves into his flesh. He roared in pain and rage.

Fiona jerked, her eyes rolling up in her head.

The electric shock in the T-EMP disk went out and the EMP bomb went off.

All the lights suddenly winked off and they were thrown into darkness.

The canon attached to Milo's arm sparked and died.Chapter Twenty-Seven Darvian fired up the blueprint for his flightpack. He knew that the T-EMP’s taser attack wouldn’t keep Milo down for long. He had to finish the job and do it when he was still disoriented. His burners exploded and he flew across the gap to the broken window.

He landed cautiously, his guard already up. His flightpack exploded into a cloud of nanos but immediately rearranged themselves into a new configuration. It was a long, gleaming needle-like sword. Darvian had been watching carefully for any signs of weakness and when the T-EMP disc latched onto the Behemoth, he’d been very aware of the needles actually puncturing its skin. The blasters might not have been effective, but a stab to the heart would definitely do the trick.

“Come out!” he shouted, his voice thick with fury. “Face me, monster! Face me, MURDERER!”

There was no response. He looked around and found King Rowan slowly getting off the floor. He didn’t look happy with him, but Darvian could care less. Dr. Taren and her daughters were still lying on the floor, their eyes wide and frightened. Again, he could care less. The only thing he wanted was revenge.

“Coward!” he shouted.

“Darvian you need to calm down,” King Rowan said, walking toward him. His voice was calm and placating.

“Get out of my way, Sire,” he replied, brandishing the sword’s wicked point directly at the King.

Rowan didn’t get angry. He put his hands up in a gesture he hoped would pacify the boy.

“This is not a solution,” he said. “This will only lead to more violence. More bloodshed. Is that what you want?”

Darvian didn’t even have to think about it. “Yes.”

Before Rowan could stop him, Darvian attacked. He was fast and the little bit of training he’d received certainly paid off. He was on the table and running toward Milo before anyone could do anything.

Except for Milo.

He was faster.

The Behemoth whirled, a roar of rage coming out of him that made his already twisted face even more terrifying and grotesque. He swung out a massive arm, too fast for Darvian to fully avoid.

The blow connected and sent him flying and tumbling through the air.

Darvian gasped in sudden agony. His left arm exploded into pain and hung uselessly. He was sure it was broken. That didn’t stop him though. He picked up his sword in his right hand and ran at the Behemoth again. Nothing short of his death was going to stop him from killing the creature.

Nothing.

Milo met the boy's charge balanced on the balls of his feet. He watched as Darvian closed within range to attack, swinging his sword around in clumsy arcs and poorly executed strikes. Milo dodged each one easily, but the last one caught him off guard. Darvian went in on the right side but at the last minute switched directions and lunged straight for Milo’s heart. The tip of the sword bobbed in low. Milo reacted on instinct, placing his hand in its path. He felt the sword enter into his palm. It grated against the bone, causing the searing agony in his hand to intensify.

“Die!” Darvian screamed, hysterically. He yanked out the blade to try his luck again.

Milo ignored the pain. His eyes narrowed. He tracked Darvian’s sword as it raced through the air. With fluid ease, he swept the blade coming off his blaster arm in front of his body. There was a harsh, ringing clash. Darvian hammered him again with a fury of blows, but Milo met and deflected each one.

Darvian stepped back, breathing hard. His face was flushed and he could feel his tired muscles burning and aching.

Milo, seeing an opportunity, pushed in with an offensive strike of his own.

Darvian barely got his blade up in time.

The sword Darvian had crafted was constructed purely out of nanos. The blade attached to Milo, however, was made of pure cytium.

The resounding clang echoed through the room.

Milo watched in satisfaction as his sword sliced cleanly through Darvian’s weapon. The nanos could no longer retain their configuration. A piece of it fell to the floor and burst into a cloud while the remaining piece burst apart in Darvian’s hand.

“Give this up,” Milo growled. “Give this up and I won’t have to hurt you.”

Darvian’s hands clenched tightly, his face screwed up in anger.

“As long as you live, I will never give up trying to kill you,” he responded.

“Then you don’t leave me with any choice,” Milo said, his voice sad. The cannon arm he’d been holding up in defense fell to his side. The anger vanished from his face. There was a grim look of resignation there instead. “If my death is the only thing that will satisfy you, Darvian, then do it. Kill me. I deserve it after what I’ve done.”

Darvian was momentarily taken off guard. He had his shot now. Milo was unprotected. He could kill him, right now! All he had to do was take the chance.

It’s not right, he thought. This will only make you the same kind of monster it is. You will be a cold-blooded murderer. Is that what you want to become?

Darvian thought about that night in the Duanti Forest again. He saw the monster stomping across the ground. He heard the screams.

So many screams!

His teeth clenched down hard, the muscles in his jaw popping out.

He knew the answer. He’d known it all along.

I will kill you, he thought.

He tapped the blueprint for his sword again and charged. The needle-like weapon appeared in his hand and he readied himself for an all-or-nothing attack.

“Darvian, stop!” a voice screamed. It was hoarse and filled with pain but he knew it anywhere.

Fiona.

He hesitated for a moment. He wanted to stop so badly…for her. He knew he loved her, had always loved her, but this was something he had to do.

So, in the end, he ignored her.

He knew that after he killed her father there was no going back. He knew she would never forgive him. He wished he could tell her how sorry he was but he had to bring his father’s killer to justice.

He had to.

He didn’t even look at her as he charged across the room. He didn’t look at anyone but the Milo's face. His eyes were closed now, his chin lifted slightly. The dark, ropy tendrils of his hair were brushed back from his twisted face.

Darvian locked in on the massive, lumpy muscles of its chest. He brought back his sword and focused solely on the point where he would strike. He envisioned the blade sliding through the genetically manipulated flesh. He saw it gliding through nerves, muscle, and tissue to pierce its beating heart. He saw its death.

He screamed harshly as tears streamed down his face. There were no words to it. It was just a primal release of all the horrible emotions he was dealing with.

Finally, he was within range to attack. He stabbed the point of the sword forward with all the strength he had. There was a powerful surge of satisfaction running through him.

“NO!” a voice broke through his concentration.

A body hurled itself in between him and the Behemoth.

He tried to stop himself, but it was already too late.

The point of his sword did enter flesh and bone, but it wasn’t Milo Rosburg's.

It was Fiona’s.