Book 6: Chapter 10 - The Variant (RAW)

[This is the big chapter. Hope it isn't too on the nose!]

“Beware the man who learns the taste of power; the second draught is never as sweet, and he will drink until the cup runs dry and then runs red.”

- Fragment of the Obsidian Pillar, ruins of Karth Anu.

“That is the target? That is the bio-weapon you spoke of? It hardly looks like much,” I growled in disbelief. A man in a white coat, clutching his guts, crawled desperately across the floor. I ended his life, mercifully, really, by stomping on his head.

You have slain unknown. 10 experience gained.

“That’s the target,” Casia confirmed quietly.

“Blinded, she will still see,” came Solarin’s voice, strangely ethereal, her words echoing faintly.

“Spare me your feeble attempts at poetry,” I snarled impatiently.

Behind a wall of thick glass stood a small, waifish girl, hardly older than eight, judging by her delicate features. Blonde hair, the hue of spun gold, framed her oval face, drawing attention to the most piercing cobalt-blue eyes. She wore a simple, stark-white garment, marked only by a numeric code across the chest. With her hands placed defiantly on her hips, she appeared oddly annoyed, as though I had kept her waiting. A sharp spike of curiosity, irresistible, compelled me to cast the spell Identify.

For only the second time, my usually steadfast ally, the spell, betrayed me. Instead of revealing useful information, it spat back garbled error messages across my inner vision. Irritated, I was now determined to force an answer, I summoned Sage’s Sight, uncaring of the now three Mana points in rapid succession.

But Sage’s Sight betrayed me just as thoroughly, flooding the inner vision of my mind with even more indecipherable text. For the first time since acquiring the spells, I stood without an advantage against someone who appeared before me. How long had it been since I had simply asked for someone’s name?

“Who are you, girl?” The question slipped out sharper than I intended, an edge of worry buried beneath.

Casia broke in over the comms. “Gilgamesh, I’m tunneling into their network now. I can scrape the weapon’s data later, but first you need to extract her. The clock is ticking.”

I ignored the urgency in Casia’s voice and slammed a gauntleted fist against the glass. “Answer me.”

The child flinched but held her ground. The barrier did not so much as tremble.

“I am… myself. I am who I am,” she answered at last, the words simple yet oddly absolute. Her tone was steady, but I caught the faint quiver hiding beneath it like a hairline crack in crystal.

“Name!” I rapped the glass with my raw demand. “Give me something, or I will leave you here to rot,” I lied. Something wanted me to make this one to beg me. And, truth be told, did freedom even await her in the hands of Voss? Indeed, what would be her fate should I deliver her to them? More importantly, did it even matter?

“This really isn’t important right now…” Casia warned.

She folded her arms, the white clinical garment clinging around her thin frame. “You offer a binary: captivity known, or a chance at the path of liberation unknown. You frame this as the only choice, and reserve it for yourself to grant. I think you believe this to be a mercy.”

“A pointless abstraction,” I snorted. “I have just marched past corridors of corpses who thought this place was safe. Security is but an illusion without power.”

“Then truth matters. The truth being that this wall is the only thing that protects me from a killer. Your past actions suggest you seek my life also,” Her eyes, cobalt bright and deep, never left mine. “If illusion binds, is it kinder to rip away the veil—or to let the dreamer wake in their own time?”

“I grow tired of this… pathetic play on words. Know that I do not wish for your life. Hurry and make your choice, or I will make it for you. This prison or to walk with me along my bloody path. I do not deal in kindness. I deal in reality.” I growled, smashing a gauntlet against my chest with a resounding clang. “The real is forged of will and strength. Those who wield power decide whose dreams end and whose begin. That, little one, is how the world keeps its balance.”

“Balance?” She tilted her head, studying me as though weighing something invisibly delicate. “Is balance a scale, or a blade? Who tips it, and why?”

“Whichever serves, it matters not,” I said. “Justice is nothing more than the story the victor tells.”

At that, a faint sadness crossed her face, but gone in a blink, like light under a passing cloud. “Perhaps your story is incomplete. Perhaps Justice is not found in the telling but in the listening.”

We were speaking past each other, and before her riddles could dig any deeper under my skin, I hefted a fallen guard’s bulky weapon. “Enough philosophizing, step back.”

“You would tear me from one prison into another fashioned by your certainty.”

“Yes,” I growled, “If I have to. Because ultimately someone must choose, and I have that Strength. Freedom belongs to those who can seize it—or confer it. Such is the nature of any world.”

“Or protect it,” she murmured, almost to herself.

I hurled the weapon like a spear and triggered Rust mid-arc. Hungry black lightning found the metal, slag, and sparks splitting the air. The thick pane of glass bloomed orange, screaming with thermal stress—but, to my chagrin, it held.

My fury surged. There was more resistance in that pane of glass than in all the creatures that had been pitted against me. The glass refused my verdict, and the girl behind it met my glare with a calm that felt older than either of us had any right to claim.

Behind my visor, I exhaled slowly. “Last chance. Walk out with me, or burn when this barrier between us finally remembers who is stronger.”

The child’s gaze softened, as though she’d found a fragile truth in the heat between us. “Strength alone cannot write the last word, Gilgamesh. But it can turn the page. Very well—let us see what the next chapter holds.”

She stepped back, offering the smallest of nods. A concession? A challenge? In that steady cobalt stare, I could not yet read the answer that was her. 

Just as I prepared to draw my sword, to pit the God-metal against this most stubborn of materials, Casia chimed once again in my ear. “Just got it open.”

With a hiss, a door to the side of the chamber that held the little girl opened. She looked at me curiously, unsure of what truly caused her freedom.

“It seems, Gilgamesh, that force, power, and strength alone are not the only keys to open the future,” the child observed.

“But, they are the best tools to protect it. They are your freedom’s shield. Now, come, we must be away from this place,” I stated with a heavy sigh.

She nodded to me, a moment of innocent agreement. 

I retraced my path through the gutted corridors with grim ease, the echoes of my exit like the last beats of a drum. Casia’s shimmering heads-up overlay floated across my vision like a ghostly thread. Every few steps, I passed another breadcrumb of carnage that confirmed I was on the right track: a bisected security drone still twitching in its mechanical death spasms; a console coughing sparks and acrid smoke; a technician’s body crumpled facedown in a widening halo of crimson. The facility itself seemed to bleed around me, lighting panels flickering like failing heartbeat monitors.

Just ones and zeros, I told myself. Just ones and zeros.

The child scampered to keep up, her naked feet finding it difficult to navigate across the debris-strewn floor. After her third stumble, I gave in to my impatience, swept her into my arms, and surged forward. She weighed almost nothing, more a bundle of hollow things than a living girl, and her wide eyes tracked every shattered bulkhead we passed as though memorizing the scene for some future reckoning.

Casia whispered route corrections in my ear while I balanced speed against stamina. A full sprint would have drained me too quickly—if we were intercepted, I would need every reserve to protect my strange cargo. Burdened as I was, a serious fight now would have made things doubly difficult. Yet the fickle whore that was fortune decided to smile upon. The outward run was mercifully brief compared to the labyrinthine crawl inward. Perhaps that was the gift of such a thorough destruction: once things are broken, the way back opens itself.

It was a nugget of wisdom that I would have to store for later, and repeated, use.

I muttered to myself on occasion out loud. Cursing the slings and arrows of fate that had brought me here.

“You talked of games? You think this is a game?” the girl asked curiously of me.

I did not think one such as her would have been able to make sense of my ramblings.

Sighing for a moment, I looked down at her. “I wish that it were such. I wish that I could find that all of this was nothing but a game that I could play for nothing more than my enjoyment. But, I find myself reduced to this, an errand boy.”

“Sacrifice has ever been the hallmark of the worthy,” she commented cryptically.

Crossing the main blast doors of the facility that had been reduced to so much slag, we emerged into blinding brilliance. The overhead vault of heaven stretched unfathomably vast, a laughing blue ocean suspended above the desert sands. The girl inhaled as though the air itself were a revelation. Sunlight caught her hair and turned it into molten gold ribbons dancing on the breeze.

“I have seen this only in books and vids,” she murmured, awe softening her voice. “I never imagined it could be so… endless. It is… humbling, the Laughing Blue.”

“It’s just the sky,” I said, more brusquely than I intended, though part of me sympathized with her on some level. I, too, had spent time in the darkness beneath the earth.

“Children do have a way with words. Innocent poetics,” Casia commented through a ragged burst of static. “Your transport, Deucalion, is inbound. Move.”

However, above us, in the distance, the sky was no longer serene. Winged reptilian shapes wheeled and clashed with streaking missiles—metal and scale writing fresh sigils of war on the clouds. For a moment, seeing their power across the endless blue, I felt envy and wished for wings of my own.

The girl shifted in my grip and met my gaze with eyes as hard and blue as the firmament. When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of the long centuries. “You asked my name. I have none,” she said, calm as ancient prophecy. “Yet, Dr. Juno Rath designated me as Variant Seventy-Six. I am… a Variant. I will walk with you. Though one day I will be robbed of words, though one day, I will be robbed of my sight, I will always find a way to guide you.”

I thought to return with a reply of my own, a pointed question to her cryptic and inane words. But, whatever it was that she truly meant, I suspected the universe was about to teach us both. Then again, did I even care?