He Who Fights with Monsters 5

1

TOO VALUABLE TO LOSE

The Chinese village had been levelled by a powerful earthquake, and the villagers watched as an alien figure used beams of energy to cut through the girder blocking the hole in which a child was trapped. The strange being was inhuman in nature, a dark, floating cloak, containing not a person but an energy that looked much like the Helix nebula—the Eye of God. Floating around the cloak were eye-like orbs, which fired the beams that sliced through steel like it was soft cheese.

At first, the villagers had been afraid of Jason Asano and his terrifying companion, but as the pair rescued person after person from the rubble, they went from wary to welcoming.

The beams of Jason’s familiar, Gordon, made short work of the collapsed girder, revealing the narrow hole underneath. Jason could easily see through the darkness to the top of the little boy’s head, and extended his shadow arms to pluck him out of the hole. As soon as the boy was free, his mother rushed to embrace him as the villagers looked on. In the midst of the relief efforts, they were all as dirty and caked with dust as Jason was under his cloak.

In her office, back in Australia, Sydney Network branch committeewoman Annabeth Tilden was watching the latest video file delivered by the branch’s new Director of Operations, Ketevan. It was news footage, intercepted before ever going into public distribution. It had been sent by the Beijing Network branch, along with an angrily worded message.

“…took responders several hours to reach more isolated areas in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake. The collapse of the bridge you see behind me devastated this small village, but the villagers themselves attribute the low number of casualties to a number of mysterious individuals, several of which they describe as appearing supernatural in nature. This is not the first…”

Anna closed the video file with a sigh and added it to a folder with the others. One of the more disturbing elements was that the reporter had been speaking not in Mandarin but in English. Not only was Jason being far too prominent in his actions, but clearly someone wanted to publicise them in the west. None of the videos had made it to broadcast, but several had been appearing online.

“Jason may be playing rather loosely with the secrecy provisions of our agreement after our people attacked him in Hanoi,” Ketevan said, “but at least he hasn’t been showing off the stars in his cloak since then. No one has connected the stories to the Starlight Rider.”

“Yet,” Anna said. “And they weren’t our people in Hanoi.”

“How many times have we had to explain that the people who went after him were Network but not our Network?” Ketevan asked. “I’m not so sure he’ll still see us an ally once he’s done with his journey of self-discovery or whatever it is he’s off doing.”

“I swear, I want to fire a missile at the Hanoi branch.”

“The International Committee more or less did,” Ketevan reminded her.

A month earlier, in Hanoi, Jason had underpriced the yacht in order to sell it off quickly. He started his trip by playing tourist but quickly sensed the people following him.

The capture team had two category threes and a dozen category twos. They realised that Asano had clearly sensed them and had been forced to shed slower members as they pursued their elusive target through the city.

They finally tracked him down in the Hong River Slum Town, a bizarre hodgepodge of urban, industrial and rural. Illegal dwellings were bunched in with small farm plots, stores and even factories. Dirt roads and irrigation ditches defined the thoroughfares, with everything from the buildings to the very ground marking poverty, pollution and dilapidation. It was a backwater oddly located in a city of seven and a half million.

Without streetlights, it was a dark and dangerous place at night, more for the environment than the residents. For the capture team, though, darkness was not an issue. Only one of the category threes, Thanh, had managed to maintain the chase all the way, courtesy of speed powers granted by his light essence. The same light essence was able to illuminate the area with his aura.

Thanh’s aura didn’t simply radiate light. Over a wide area, all darkness was banished. It seemed to have no source and was simply everywhere, filling every nook and cranny with soft illumination.

When the space lit up, Jason was revealed to be standing right in front of the capture team. The only remaining patch of darkness was inside the hood of his cloak, in which only a pair of silver eyes could be seen.

“I’m surprised anyone was this stupid,” Jason said in Vietnamese. His skill at actively using his translation power with specific languages was improving, although he was stubbornly clinging to syntax that gave an odd mix of perfect pronunciation and deeply odd grammar. Rather than try to adapt, the way Farrah had so quickly, he had made it into a rather obnoxious signature.

“I didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to cross the International Committee after they gutted the Lyon branch like a fish,” he continued.

“You no longer need to concern yourself with things like that,” Thanh said. “You belong to us now, so you don’t make decisions anymore.”

“It could be the Chinese,” Jason mused, ignoring the man. “They may be using you as a cat’s paw to test my capabilities without it blowing back on them. Maybe the EOA, looking to take me off the board before I start looking for them over their part in holding my friend prisoner. It could be that there’s no one and you really are this dumb. I mean, you let me lead you by the nose until half of your team was left behind. Your trackers kind of suck, by the way. I had to aura project like a lighthouse for them to keep up and it was still hard to avoid escaping by accident.”

“You are arrogant,” Thanh said. “That is your Japanese blood speaking.”

“Strewth; racist enough for you, mate?”

“We have studied your methods, Asano. You are a creature of the shadows. Without them, you are vulnerable and exposed.”

“You’ve got me there,” Jason said. “I definitely didn’t train with someone from a family of essence-user instructors the equal of anyone on two worlds who laboriously drilled me on how to fight when I was caught out of my element.”

“You like to jabber and distract,” Thanh said. “We know this about you. Quick words cannot change that we hold the advantage in numbers, in power and in the environment. There are no shadows for you to cower in.”

They were on a dirt road, with a heavily polluted irrigation ditch running along one side and a ramshackle slum house on the other. The six category twos were arrayed in front of Thanh, with Jason standing before them in his combat robes and cloak. With the appearance of the light, the attention of the locals had been grabbed. They were variously hiding, fleeing or even recording the proceedings from behind cover.

“Can you blur me in those videos?” Jason asked Shade, under his breath.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Asano. This silver-rank light is having an extremely deleterious effect on my capabilities. I will be unable to manifest any of my bodies or run interference on detection abilities. I can only remain in the hood of your cloak, which remains impervious to the shadow deletion. Otherwise, I would not even be able to speak with you.”

“No worries,” Jason said. “Part of why we left was to throw ourselves into training, right? This should push our limits nicely.”

“This may be throwing ourselves a tad hard, Mr Asano.”

“Maybe, but that guy in Lyon left a lingering unpleasantness. I’d like to—”

“You have the nerve to stand in front of me and talk to yourself?” Thanh yelled, anger scoring his face. His aura blasted out, but immediately slammed to a stop against Jason’s, like a truck ramming a concrete wall. While Jason wasn’t powerful enough to suppress the silver-ranker’s aura and the light it produced, his was discernibly the stronger aura, despite Jason’s lower rank. The disparity left Thanh visibly unnerved.

“KILL HIM!” Thanh screamed, forgetting that their purpose was to take Jason alive.

A grab-bag of powers was hurled Jason’s way. One of the bronze-rankers underwent a bizarre transformation, his arms turning into snakes and his legs into those of a grasshopper. He pounced at Jason, who intercepted the snake fangs with his cloak as the man landed in front of him. He then pushed into the man’s space and rammed a conjured dagger up under his jaw to pierce his brain.

Bronze-rankers couldn’t fight through what should have been lethal blows the way a silver-ranker could. The man with a dagger penetrating his head was tough enough to cling to life but fell limp. Jason grabbed his collapsing body and used him as a shield to soak up other attacks coming his way. A fire bolt spell, a spiked ball on a chain and a laser beam of light from the silver-rank Thanh all impacted against the slack body.

The bronze-ranker in Jason’s arms did not survive the attacks and Jason rushed forward, still using him as a shield. He rammed the corpse into one of the other bronze-rankers, leaving them both to topple over as Jason spun away, positioning himself so the group was obstructing one another’s sightlines as much as possible. His dagger, in a backhand grip, ran across the next victim’s throat before jabbing back into the side of the neck. Jason let him go as the man stumbled backward, clutching desperately at his throat with one hand as the other scrambled for a healing potion.

The shock of Jason’s counter-blitz only lasted moments and a fresh wave of attacks was already on its way. To an observer, it might seem that Jason was dangerously outmatched. From Jason’s perspective, his opponents’ attacks were the inexpert flailing of amateurs. That was not to say they were without strategy. The elimination of the shadows had a large impact and it wasn’t the only trick that seemed tailor-made for him.

Clearly, the enemy had learned of his fight against the last silver-ranker and the tether power that had pinned him down. One of the bronze-rankers had a similar ability and Jason had neither shadow nor cover to avoid it. Jason tossed his dagger into the air and a shadow hand emerged from his cloak to snatch it. His normal hands each pulled a throwing dart from the sheaths on his chest and flung them.

The first was an explosive dart, thrown directly at the tether rod. The blast from a tether rod being destroyed had caused him to lose his last fight against a silver-ranker, but this time, he was triggering it himself. The second dart was thrown at the ground, right in front of the rod. This was the dart Jason had developed after that same fight, using the artifice knowledge he gained from a skill book. When the dart hit the ground, a door-sized wall of magically reinforced ballistics gel sprang into being, right as the tether rod exploded.