Chapter Forty Five: Spark

Ronin leaned back at his desk, fighting off irritation once again.

In the weeks since his encounter with the steam-bound warrior, he'd barely had any time to do research, and with Hidden Moon treating, and paying, them to be her personal mercenaries, it looked like he wasn't going to get any time in the near future to work on anything new.

Just this morning, she'd contacted him directly, against his requests to the contrary, about a deeply concerning message she'd received.

All members of the Horizon Suns were to vacate several neighborhoods filled with Guildless, a message written with the intent to warn, not threaten. Something was going on, something big and Hidden Moon was afraid that war was coming to the dark city.

Thinking on the matter, Ronin believed that the Guildless should rise up against the guilds that oppressed them. It was unbelievable to him what they put up with simply because they chose to remain neutral in the various struggles and plots of the guilds.

Studying the data that his device had gathered seemed to be proving fruitless since, even with Mira helping, it was almost incomprehensible. It was just too advanced for even his team, which was hard, painful, for him to accept.

The closest he'd gotten was a string of technical data that referenced using Aether on a smaller-than-quantum level, something his team had only barely begun to really conceive, let alone use in the casual way it seemed to be being used by the beings who'd left the tech behind.

Meonin had mentioned that the Drae'Gyn could travel to entire other dimensions...something Ronin had simply dismissed as the ramblings of someone extrapolating wildly, but after trying to decipher all the data he'd found, he soon realized it wasn't completely impossible, and may even be plausible.

Overall, Ronin was just unhappy with everything going on.

The Guildless were roiling like water about to boil, which was good for them, but Hidden Moon seemed to have made it her personal mission to reduce casualties as much as possible, which meant that the Guildless problem was, more or less, Ronin's problem.

Between her, the tech, and the steam-bound warrior that the Cathols were now employing, Ronin found himself thinking about how to get stronger instead of what to research next, and he hated it.

A knock came from the door and Silas and Scalpel walked in quietly, something obviously on their minds.

Silas fidgeted a bit and said, "There's something weird we need to talk to you about…"

Ronin sighed gently and leaned forward, motioning for her to continue.

"Delta, Mira and Azue have been looking over the data you gathered a few weeks ago...and Azue said she noticed something, so when they looked closer at it, she and Mira both agreed that...well, maybe you should come and look."

 Looking at his desk, painfully empty of research, Ronin nodded and got up, asking, "Why'd you come, Scalpel?"

Scalpel, now clearly in her seventies, said in a disconcertingly young voice, "The infirmary has gotten a strange increase in patients, many of them being brought in basically dead."

Ronin rubbed the bridge of his nose and said, "Let's look at Silas's thing first I guess, we'll get to the patient increase in a bit."

Scalpel nodded and the three of them went to the elevator and waited, something Ronin was, not for the first time since his time under the city, acutely aware of. The thought of how far advanced the Drae'Gyn must have been crossed his mind again for easily the fifth time that day while he waited for the doors to open.

The trip down to Delta's lab seemed to take even longer than usual, and Silas appeared to be deeply concerned about something, though he couldn't begin to put a finger on what.

A few minutes later, the doors opened and the first thing Ronin heard was the sound of fire burning and shouting.

"It HAS to be them," the first voice rang out, clearly Mira's.

Azue responded as the trio walked into the room, her voice icy cold, "This data is far too old, it must be a coincidence."

Ronin spoke, his voice tired, "I don't think i believe in coincidences."

Azue, her hair so blue it was almost glowing, pointed at the largest screen and said, "Then explain this!"

On the screen was a still image of a young man who seemed to be in terrible health, maybe even malnourished, and all around him was a lab similar to the one Ronin and Mira had found outside of the personal office under the city.

Odd as that may be, Ronin noticed that the date on the image was almost a thousand years old, but even that wasn't what caught him and confused him.

Behind the man, just within the reach of whatever had been used to create the image, was a sign.

Ronin read the sign aloud, stunned, "Aether Extensions, 'Taking Aether to New Heights'."

Delta spoke, her quiet voice ringing through speakers around the room, "I was able to edit the image to show the translated text, but it was Azue who had noticed it at first. Mira came over and looked at it and confirmed, though neither of them seemed to know how they knew."

Ronin looked around and said, "AeEx...how?"

Silas shrugged, a look of concern on her face as she said, "We can't figure out what it means, or what it means for us. Azue thinks it must be a coincidence, but Mira seems to believe that AeEx and this Aether Extensions are the same company."

Thinking rapidly, Ronin asked, "Has anyone talked to Hidden Moon about this?"

 Trigger walked in and said, "Nobody's said anything to anyone, it's all in this room."

 "Hidden Moon has been hounding us about this Cathol problem and lately has even been trying to diffuse the entire Guildless rebellion on her own...nobody say anything about this to her, I hate to think what she'd try to pay us to do about this," Ronin said darkly.

Trigger made a sound and Ronin asked him what was on his mind.

"You make it sound like you have a problem helping the Guildless, Ronin," he spoke quietly.

Nodding, Ronin responded gently, "We're not soldiers, Trigger. We're researchers, and we can't get any work done if we're out 24/7 trying to fix other people's problems."

Trigger walked up to Ronin and said, "Look, I get that you want to research, but what if some of us want to help?"

 Rolling his eyes, Ronin said, "The Horizon Suns are the peacekeepers here, not us, Trigger. The best way we can help is to develop tech that makes things easier for as many people as possible, something that Hidden Moon, well meaning though she may be, doesn't seem to really understand."

 Trigger glared at him for a second and said, "Well personally, I'm glad to help. If you don't want to go, send me."

Raising an eyebrow, Ronin asked, "What happened to not wanting to see people die?"

 "This is different."

Narrowing his eyes, Ronin tapped his V.U.I. and dozens of images of people dying at the hands of weapons developed by Trigger populated the screen, all of them from areas known to be Guildless Territories contested by the High Cathols.

"Tell me how."

Trigger sputtered for a few seconds and finally said, "At least it's for an actual good cause."

Ronin tapped again and the images disappeared as he said, "People are dying, Trigger. The cause is irrelevant, good or evil, but whatever it takes for you to sleep at night."

Trigger glared at Ronin hard and mumbled, "It makes a difference."

Ronin sighed and looked back at him as Silas said, "Guys...there's a major fight going on down in the tunnels."

She pulled up a live feed from the hall on a smaller monitor and Ronin said, "What? Why?"

A High Cathol appeared on the screen and smiled into the camera and said, "I'm telling you man, old Cornelius is going to promote us right off the streets for this."

In the background, four corpses, presumably Guildless, lay burning, clearly having been burned alive from their poses, all of them begging for their lives.

Trigger stormed out of the room, pulling the revolver he'd taken a liking to from it's holster and sprinting to the elevator.

Delta and Sellius looked at Ronin and shook their heads, prompting him to follow, moving quickly to catch up.

Seeing Trigger waiting angrily for the elevator, Ronin slowed for a second when Trigger simply disappeared.

Stopping dead in his tracks, a loud peal of notes rang out and he saw the door to the stairs swinging shut, thrown open and left to close on it's own.

Running to the stairwell, he reached it just as the elevator doors opened and saw that Trigger was already at the bottom of the stairs and running out into the hallway that lead to the underground Guildless Territory.

"What the hell?" Ronin asked aloud.

Running to the elevator, Ronin slammed the button for the bottom floor as fast as he could and waited, noticing once again the painfully long time it took for him to arrive at his destination.

It couldn't have been longer than a minute to arrive, but he heard gunshots as soon as the door opened and a body fell into the hallway, trying to crawl away.

The hall flickered with cruel light with every shot of the revolver while Ronin walked down the hall. He was eager to stop his friend from doing something he regretted or possibly dying, but he knew that someone in a state of mind like that might have a hard time telling friend from foe.

It wasn't until the revolver fire changed to that of machine gun fire that Ronin started moving faster, panic rising at some unknown threat.

What he found was Trigger surrounded by corpses, wielding a heavy machine gun that was melting straight through anything it's ammunition hit.

Looking closer, the gun flickered blue and he saw that it was somehow creating molten lava within it's frame and firing it far faster than he thought would normally be possible.

Looking out into the hallway as quietly as he could, Ronin saw that Trigger had begun shooting at anyone unfortunate enough to be passing the area at that moment.

He whispered, "Activate: Speed," and felt the Aether racing to his legs as he started the short sprint to the man, now out of control with bloodlust.

Truth be told, it had been this side of Trigger that caused the most confusion in Ronin. He was a good man, a man who genuinely regretted being the cause of so much death and sadness, but once he got going, nothing stopped him until all that was left around him was dust, it was something that had always been in him and likely always would be. When the Bureau had been in full swing, that side of him was devoted wholly to the creation of new instruments of destruction, but since coming to the city, Trigger had all but stopped.

How long would it be until Trigger went totally off the charts?

He noticed him at the exact moment Ronin collided with him, screaming and turning to shoot his friend as Ronin's arms wrapped around him and drove them both into the wall and the massive room beyond it.

Within the darkness of the new room, Ronin spotted black bags, hundreds of them stacked and thrown haphazardly wherever they landed.

Looking up, Ronin saw that there was a large hole with a closed latch directly above them and said, "Oh no."

"So even the merchant of death has morals," Trigger said as he rose, his eyes flickering a strangely bright shade of red as he did.

As he stood, the machine gun from earlier morphed in his hand into a revolver, which he pointed at Ronin.

"Put the gun down, Trigger," Ronin said darkly, his voice brimming with menace.

Trigger fired and the bullets moved in slow motion, three bullets fired so fast that they seemed to be moving at Ronin simultaneously.

Watching the bullets move slowly through space, Ronin felt, more than saw, where they'd be and tapping through his inventory faster than he ever had, pulled a sword out and deflected each of them into the walls around them.

The edge of his blade smoked slowly as Trigger began firing and bullets began coming at Ronin in a perfect circle around him.

Silas's voice rang through Ronin's ear, "What's going on, you two disappeared."

Ronin's eyes flickered bright blue as he felt a familiar rush of energy, like Aether coursing through his veins all at once while he was drinking a hundred energy drinks and with purpose. He moved.

More and more bullets appeared, all aimed at him, from all directions, and he felt as though they'd stopped moving.

Preparing himself, each bullet reached him as slowly as though they were little drops of molasses, and he struck each of them, his blade a nearly intangible wave of glowing silver as it began to heat up from the impossibly fast movement and collisions.

Dozens, hundreds of bullets shredded the walls, leaving a Trigger shaped space in the far wall as Ronin moved to deflect every single bullet until finally his blade simply melted from its hilt.

Determined, Ronin pushed himself even faster and reached Trigger and, even as more bullets flew at the two of them, grabbed him and moved them out of the room.

Time sped back up for Ronin as a painfully loud bang of all the bullets striking walls at once in the room struck them both, the sound so strong that it pushed them back into the hallway leading to their home.

Recovering rapidly, Ronin rolled and pushed Trigger to the ground, attempting to pull the gun from his hand, only to find that he couldn't.

Trigger glared up at Ronin and said, "It'll only separate from me if I want to be rid of it, and I don't want to be rid of it!"

As he finished talking, he pushed and shot Ronin up to the ceiling, rolling out and running to the stairs up into their building as Ronin fell, landing hard.

Laying on the ground, Ronin felt his body begin to ache, the action of the last few minutes catching up to him in a bad way.

Scalpel walked down the stairs nearby and quietly tapped his shoulder.

Rolling onto his back, he asked, "What's going on with Trigger, Scalpel? One minute he's anti-violence, the next he's firing randomly into a crowd."

She shrugged, her older body's bones audibly cracking from the movement, and said in her disturbingly young voice, "He's the man I've always known him to be."

A curious expression crossed his face and Scalpel chuckled and said, "He's always been this way, even when he first joined the Bureau. For a while there was a pretty decent bet going that he'd eventually kill everyone there."

That explained why nobody had tried, with any real sincerity, to bring him deeper into the fold, Ronin thought.

She continued, "Something is going on though...he's always been...erratic, to put it politely...but this is new. One of the few things about him I've respected was his control, which never seemed easy to maintain. Working with the Ghosts has given him a relatively safe outlet for all that pent up violence, but what we saw on the monitor was...extreme, even for him."

"How so?"

Scalpel looked out into the hallway and said, "Only half the bodies out there were alive when he went down there...as fast as he was moving, he showed hesitation at first, something I've never seen in him before we came to Neyk. One of the Cathols were going to kill a child, and when he saw that, he began shooting. As he shot, he shot more and more until eventually he was in the state you found him in, reveling in the death and violence of it all."

Pushing himself up, Ronin grimaced and said, "In that hidden room, he was shooting at me from all directions...it didn't even seem possible."

Before Scalpel could say anything, an alarm blared on both of their V.U.I's and when Ronin tapped the symbol that popped up, he saw a video message from someone in a High Cathol outfit.

"Due to actions, completely unwarranted, by the Guildless, we, the High Cathols, will be retaliating in exactly two weeks time. We will remind this city why the High Cathols are not to be trifled with. If you want a war, we shall rend you in twain with the holy blade our lord, Jevah, has bestowed upon us."

The video flickered off, and Ronin thought he caught the hint of a sinister smile on the face of the man as it went to black.

Immediately afterward, Ronin received a message from Hidden Moon and Scalpel looked at Ronin and asked, "Did you just get a message from the Horizon Suns?"

 "Straight from the top…"

Ronin moved to get up and Scalpel offered him her hand as she said, "A thought occurs to me Ronin…"

Looking at the stairwell that Trigger had run up, he asked, "What's that Scalpel?"

 She dusted herself off a bit and said, "Despite taking work from basically anyone who offers it...we're technically Guildless...aren't we?"

Pieces fell into place as she finished and Ronin felt as though the ground had fallen out from under him.

The steam-bound warrior, all of the missions from Hidden Moon, the empty chest, more and more the pieces assembled to form an image of war with Trigger front and center, revolver held high.

Mira defecting had no backlash, despite evidence that the Cathols guarded their assets, even if they had to slaughter innocents to do so.

"If you want a war," Ronin repeated darkly.

Scalpel nodded and began walking toward the stairwell as Ronin asked, "Where are you going?"

 Without looking back, she said, "To change into more feasible form and prep up for new patients. War is always good for business, though I suspect you know that already." The statement rang through him as though she'd shot him as he realized she was right.

She walked quietly up the stairs and Ronin was left to himself, bodies to his back and darkness in front of him as Jet's words came, unbidden, back to him once again, "How different are you from me?"

The lights around him began to turn off and he said, quietly to the darkness, "Am I?"