[Mercy] Walk the Line

[Katelyn Ross]

According to logic, humans — or, rather, living organisms in general — inherently have an instinct for survival. The preservation of their own life, at any cost, often sits at the forefront of a person’s mind, eating away at them. It haunts every decision they make. A person asks, ‘how will doing this affect me?’

Eventually, this becomes rhetorical. Eventually, some people discover that it isn’t possible to know the answer. Eventually, it becomes ingrained in a person’s mind that they have got to go with their gut.

Only minutes had gone by since the ambush, but Iris wasn’t out there fighting, on the front lines, with her fellow troops. No; she had holed herself up in an apartment building, and looked down at the battle. Both sides took shots at one another, but the militia soldiers barely made any headway. The extraterrestrials had the obvious advantage, here, and it was clear to the brown-haired girl that the group she had picked had drawn the short straw.

A single thought had plagued her mind since the ambush. A tiny doubt lingered in the back of her mind — waiting, it seemed, for the girl to take note of it. As she watched the ongoing struggle, the push and the pull of the soldiers, it all became clear to her, the inhumanity of it all.

What were they, hogs? That’s what she felt like — an unimportant hog, sent to the slaughterhouse. Iris’s eyes fixed themselves on Private Andrews’ gored body, sprawled next to the jeep they’d been riding in. Nobody even cared that he was dead; at least, that was how it seemed from her viewpoint. Not a single soldier had made an effort to retrieve his corpse.

She wasn’t much better. What had she done, but flee? She’d crawled out of the main road as the dust from the toppled jeep settled, and stolen away into the apartment complex. It was shabby, and filled with dust itself; it looked like it had been closed a long time ago, and had no intention of reopening. But it would do, for the moment; until the roads were clear again, and the deserter could get out safely, and without injury to herself. Iris closed her eyes and fell back on the nearby sofa. She could hardly believe the thoughts that swam around, inside her mind — without injury to herself. That seemed almost as self-serving as the militia’s motives.

She would fight fire with fire, then.

That, then, would be how she explained herself, how she avoided her conscience. Down below, the militia soldiers, the men and women she’d spent the last several hours with, were evenly matched, but only in number. The strength of the forces they faced clearly overpowered them. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to do anything, or help them. Those soldiers — they were all pawns in the militia’s game, and they just refused to accept it. How could they do that — just die, and throw away their lives for next to nothing?

Iris could feel her fingers tingling, but she did not know why. She guessed — incorrectly — that it had something to do with regret, with her departure from the line of fire. Guilt-ridden, she slid off of the couch and approached the window, peeking through the dusty blinds to watch some of her bunkmates get shot, again. Their numbers dwindled, but the girl still felt no need to join them.

Something about the scene differed, though. Something had changed since the last time she’d looked. All of a sudden, she obsessed over the anomaly — discovering what it was, at least. She watched carefully, attempting to match up the picture before her with the one she’d seen three minutes ago, accounting for each new dead body as they piled up before her eyes. And then, she found it. At the head of the enemy troop, a warrior, in heavier armor than the others, had lead the pack. This advanced soldier no longer stood where he had stood before; he was gone.

A crash came from the apartment below. Iris jumped, spinning on her heel and pressing her back to the wall just left of the window. Her fingers burned — with anxiety, she guessed, again incorrectly — and she continued to watch the door, waiting for the noise’s origin to show itself.

The girl exhaled deeply, letting the breath flow from her lips. Her fingertips became heated, and the wall seemed alive with energy; electricity, fire, something eerily similar to that — the girl didn’t exactly know, and at the moment, that wasn’t exactly her main focus, either. Her eyes stayed on the door, never waving, not for a moment, especially not when a foot caused the bottom stair to creak.

She blinked, but made sure to open her eyes quickly — fear tip-toed up her spine, playing with her emotions as if they were toys. She didn’t dare let her sight waver from the door for more than a second.

Once more, the stairs creaked, but this time, it was much closer to her. She knew that her days were numbered — that freak, that alien freak, had found her. She supposed it was only right — she’d been a coward, and now karma was coming back to bite her in the ass, to tell her that she shouldn’t have just run away and left her unit to die. She was absolutely certain, at that moment, that this was going to be her end, that she was going to die, and that this was retribution for her actions.

“Oh, my God,” she muttered to herself, and then once again took a deep breath — the noises in the stairwell were getting clearer, and closer, and she let her teeth sink into her bottom lip. For a moment, she could taste her own blood, and then released her lip from the death grip. Her gaze never wavered from the door.

A low, gravely breath came from the other side of the door. The doorknob clinked as the alien warrior’s fingers wrapped around it, and twisted it open. Slowly, the door slipped open, and the ugly face of the extraterrestrials’ leader peeked in. His eyes zeroed in on Iris, the last, she thought, of her unit, and his lips curled into a smirk. This was going to be enjoyable for him — gutting her, ripping her to shreds. At least, Iris thought that was what the plan was. She had always found herself thinking far more violently of the aliens’ natures than what they actually might’ve been.

The humanoid creature reached up and pressed a button on the left shoulder-plate of his armor; this, the girl would soon find, served to translate his speech. “Why,” he hissed, “do you run?”

The girl’s face lost all of its color — she was pale with fear, and hesitated to answer. At last, she mustered up the courage to say something — anything — to the invader that stood before her. “I… don’t know,” she answered, honestly, “I’m just… scared. Of you, and all the rest… of you.”

“You are right,” the alien replied, “to be afraid. Hope is lost for your species; you cannot possibly win, not now.”

“I prefer hope in place of fear,” Iris swallowed, “But right now, I can’t help but feel like there’s nothing left but the latter.” She let her eyes trace the alien’s body, and slowly, she let a deep breath fall from her lips. The humanoid alien’s eyebrows raised at this last response; she seemed to have either impressed him with her rhetoric or confused him as to the motives of humans. To be honest, the girl couldn’t tell just from his expression.

“You,” he exhaled, “are a wise human.”

She closed her eyes nervously. If he was going to kill her, she thought, this would be his only chance. She wouldn’t allow him another. But he didn’t take it. When she opened her eyes, she didn’t see heaven, or hell — because in all honesty, she didn’t know which she would go to now. No; she saw him, standing in the exact same spot he’d been in before. He hadn’t taken a single step.

“And you’re a murderer,” she spat, pushing herself off of the wall and sprinting towards him, a renewed vigor inside of her. She felt some sort of righteousness swelling up, almost overpowering her fear, if only for a moment — she was going to defy fate, at all costs.

“Resistance is futile,” the extraterrestrial hummed robotically, pulling back a fist and punching her in the cheek. She slid across the hardwood floor, her cheek reddened from the impact; she didn’t waste anymore time talking with him, but merely followed that instinct that she’d felt before; she lifted her hands, and placed one in front of the other, palms open forward, almost in an ‘x’ shape; she yelled out something, something she couldn’t hear herself say — probably due to adrenaline — and watched as a golden streak of energy erupted from the palm of her hand, and crashed into the invader, sending him flying through the doorway. He tumbled down the staircase, smashing his head into each step as he went.

When Iris dared to look down the staircase after him, the impact had killed him. He lay at the bottom of the stairwell, limp, and dead; and the girl wasted no time. She turned, and yanked several of the drawers out of a nearby wardrobe. She stripped down, exchanging her soldier’s attire for that of a common woman — a pink tank top, blue jeans, and new, clean (she hoped) underwear — and started down the steps. Near the back door, a brown overcoat and black cap hung on a rack; she quickly donned them, and slipped out of the house, into anonymity.

[Katelyn Ross]

In their search for survivors, the enemy would leave no stone unturned. The brown-haired girl would have to find some crafty method of escape, if escape were even possible. Preferably one that avoided violence; she had killed the leader of this invader squad, but that had been based purely on luck. She doubted, rather heavily, that that same luck would repeat itself.

Back pressed against the wall, Iris looked around the corner of the building, seeing two soldiers cradling assault rifles, most likely more advanced than those of the militia; needless to say, it wouldn’t be a wise move for her, unarmed, to engage them in combat. She’d have to find another way.

She stepped away from the building, looking up. She thought about trying to climb up to the rooftop, but she nixed the idea almost immediately, out of the thought that she couldn’t jump high enough to reach any sort of hand-hold. She closed her eyes, and attempted to think about a sufficient method of escape, one that wouldn’t draw the attention of the guards — and then, almost as if to send her a message, her fingers began to tingle again. She opened her eyes, and an idea popped into her head; an idea that seemed illogical, by all human standards, but one that, in her situation, might work.

Dust flew up around her feet as she focused all of the energy — that energy that made her fingers burn — into her feet. She turned her gaze upward and pushed off of the ground, letting her ki surge into her feet and propel her higher, and higher, and higher; she reached out, and grasped the windowsill, barely hanging on. With a grunt, the girl pulled herself up, and climbed, as quickly as possible, onto the roof of the building. She sighed with relief when she reached the top.

For a moment, she was baffled — she had just used her powers to, sort of, energize what could’ve been a normal, human leap. Instead, it had transformed, into something of a Super Jump, as lame as that sounded. She struggled to her feet, and looked down, off the side of the building, at the two assault rifle-toting guards below. From this vantage point, she could see that they were just grunts; nevertheless, she didn’t want to attract their attention, because their guns still looked more formidable than anything Iris could’ve combated them with.

Cold metal suddenly pressed into the back of her neck. The barrel of a pistol, she would bet on that; she opened her mouth to say something, but then thought better of it — let them make the first move.

“What,” the boy’s voice asked, “is a pretty girl like you doing out here?” Iris felt a hand on her shoulder, and the guy jerked her around to face him. The boy wasn’t a soldier, for he didn’t have a uniform Although, he didn’t seem to be that much of a boy. He didn’t have any facial hair, but the features on his face were chiseled. His hair was messy, and unkempt, and blonde, but his clothes seemed clean, and orderly, as if they’d been washed recently. A quick glance down at Iris’s clothes and one could tell that although she’d gotten them freshly from the wardrobe inside that apartment, no one had lived there in a while, and thus, they weren’t exactly well taken care of.

The boy cocked the gun. “Tell me who you are, or I swear to God, I’ll shoot you,” he ordered her, pressing the pistol more firmly into the skin of her neck. She swallowed, and she could feel the lump in her throat caress the gun’s barrel. Once again, fear swelled up inside her — but this boy didn’t seem to be the enemy.

“My name’s Iris,” she revealed reluctantly, “And I’m — well, I’m supposed to be a soldier for the militia.” The messy-haired boy narrowed his eyes, as if to ask what that last statement meant; Iris didn’t make him waste his time, and explained. “What I mean by that is, well, I ran away. Or, am running away, actually.” The blonde-haired youth — no older than her, she guessed — seemed satisfied by this answer, rather than put off. He took the pistol’s barrel off of her throat, and scowled.

“You’re a deserter, eh?” he muttered, “Good for you. Them bastards don’t know how to run a war, so anyone who’s against them is a friend of mine. ‘Cept them aliens, o’course.” Iris massaged her neck, where the pistol had pressed on it. The boy turned back to her. “Sorry about that, but we freelancers can’t be too careful.”

“Freelancers?” the girl asked, making sure to keep her voice down. The boy did the same; he paused for a moment, walking over and glancing off the side of the building. His expression told Iris that the soldiers were still there, probably looking for her. She bit her lip, unsure of whether or not to reveal this to this boy. He spun on his heel, and looked her over.

“Yeah,” he started, “freelancers. We’re out on our own, because we can’t trust the government assholes who run that militia to worry about our lives. It’s how we were raised out here, on Mercy — every man for himself.”

Swanning thought, for a moment, about this idea. ‘Every man for himself.’ That was how she felt; why she had left her unit to die like that, not long ago. Perhaps this boy — and whomever he meant when he’d said ‘we’ — had the right idea. She’d much prefer it over being treated like a pig being prepped for slaughter. Of course, she did not know how long she would be able to last, on her own; she had never been a fighter, and didn’t know if she would be able to hold her own in this world, around such dangerous circumstance. Was it worth taking that chance?

She looked at the boy out of the corner of her eye. He wasn’t looking at her; he had turned his attention elsewhere, to another pair of soldiers that was scoping out another nearby alleyway. “They’re out for you,” he told her, glancing over his shoulder at the girl, “It’s amazing how persistent they are. And you just an infantry girl. Systematic elimination, and they aren’t leaving this job unfinished.”

“I’m dead, right?” Iris asked forebodingly, but the boy laughed. “I’m not exactly sure my situation is something you should be laughing about, uh, whoever you are. I actually don’t think you’ve told me your name yet, have you?” The boy laughed again, and Iris scowled; his callous sense of humor about her life or death didn’t exactly leave her pleased. He ran a hand through his hair, and then looked at her, over his shoulder, before turning around and walking towards her.

“As long as you stick with me,” he assured her, “you should be fine. And my name’s Hotshot, by the by.” Iris raised an eyebrow.

“A little presumptuous, I think,” she mocked him. He slid his pistol out of its holder, and aimed it for one of the guards below. Swanning’s eyes widened — was he just going to give away their position like that? Luckily, he spun it in his hand, and then slid it back into the holster.

“I got the name for a reason, sweet cheeks,” Hotshot replied.

“I believe you, I believe you,” Iris held up her hands, in an attempt to make sure the idea of demonstrating his precision with a gun didn’t pop back into his brain. “I’m Iris Swanning. That’s my name.” She sighed — men, always needing to prove themselves. She supposed it all charted itself back to their obsession with being bigger and better than everyone else. With the men she’d met, it was always, ‘I’m a better player of this sport’ or ‘I’ve got the bigger dick’ or something equally primordial.

Hotshot sprung into a sprint, running past her and grasping her hand; she felt herself get pulled along, and seconds later she was gliding headlong over an alleyway. After a few more moments, she tumbled onto the adjacent roof, still reeling from the shock of the flight in the first place. The boy was, as Swanning had grown to expect, laughing at her misery.

“Up and at ‘em, babe,” Hotshot smirked, and he gestured for her to follow him as he walked toward the edge of this building. Iris clambered to her feet, and took a deep breath as she ran after the boy, leaping from one building to the next, always just barely reaching her destination; she didn’t know where he was taking her, but any place seemed better than where they were at — at Hotshot’s location, at least, she didn’t think there would be any aliens whose sole purpose, at the moment, was to find her and kill her. That was always a plus, she decided.

[Chubbs Story Account]

The world keeps spinning.

*DEBUFF* Drained [One Cycle, Sixth] - Iris' energy blast killed the commander of the warriors, but it effectively drained her of ki. Her CA is halved for one Cycle.