Of Evil and Angels

Sweat tickled Alyssalee’s neck, soaking her training uniform. The intense exertion caused her to suck in harsh breaths, but they were those of a trained athlete. The Undivine drill instructors made the training unbelievably challenging. Odd, considering a bunch of nerds made up the group. Alyssalee started the tenth set of pushups, and metallic tones accompanied each dip, like notes ringing out from a cymbal. Half of the yin and yang necklace she shared with Sophie gently tapped the titanium sheath of the blade on her back. Bits and his team had manufactured a remarkably light weapon for its size. Still, Alyssalee would have kept the blade on her back, regardless. The thought that it was never far from her grasp comforted her. That’s the way she needed it to be. Too much was at stake for her to risk being unarmed. The fleshmonger boss had it out for her—in a bad way. Chief nerd, Bits, oversaw the forging of the scimitar made specifically for her. He mapped the Damascus layers to Alyssalee’s alpha and beta waves using AI machining, similar to the radio frequency etchings on keycards. She didn’t get how the channeled layers worked together, but somehow the sword resonated with and amplified her brainwaves. Along with the doctors, Bits found a way of making a mind-body circuit board of sorts. They based the science on the therapy they used for her recovery. The treatment successfully removed the paralysis after her galactic excursion to the Radcliffe Wave. Her apoplexy was the handiwork of the fleshmonger boss’s torture. The doctors hypothesized that the agony disconnected her mind from her body. Alyssalee liked to think her coma-like state didn’t result from the pain—that’d be weak. She figured her body shut down as a self-defense mechanism. Of course, on the happy day of her induction into the Undivine, the fleshmonger sycophants had attacked. The Undivine referred to them as skeletons because of how they painted their faces white, contrasted against the black they used for their eye sockets and always with hoods draped over their heads. Some thought the skeletons’ attack was an initiation ritual, but Alyssalee knew better. The fleshmonger lackeys were so misguided they believed their overlords would teach them how to live beyond the grave—even giving them positions of power. Their leader—the boss—wanted to take Alyssalee off the board. Or simply take her. The carny-looking villains carried out the sneak attack not long after Cole presented her with the token of Undivine membership—the vicious scimitar adorned with her new family’s moniker. The sophisticated technology making up its design made whether it was a sword or a device unclear. Was it still as strong as other swords? With mindfreed abilities driving it, could it be even stronger? Receiving a symbol of the hacker militia was nice, but it was the belonging that mattered most to Alyssalee. She frequently caught herself partly unsheathing the scimitar and running a finger over the etched crimson lettering—Undivine. It sent a chill of excitement through her every time. She belonged somewhere now. After the day’s training, she often sent fingercomms to her friends back at Sisters of Light. The orphanage was the only other home she’d known. And with every conversation, the sisters had an abundance of questions about how her “boot camp” was progressing. Alyssalee would share stories of her accomplishments and how she excelled at being a soldier. Some of the more hard-line sisters were wary of what she was doing with, what UNUM considered, an anarchist group. Other sisters trusted her judgment and were proud of her for forging a fledgling partnership between the heavily armed UNUM and Undivine groups that formerly opposed each other. She giggled at their use of the term boot camp. The words didn’t fully describe the experience. The Undivine provided instruction more like special operator training than providing the foundations of military soldiering. Alyssalee’s other achievements in life paled compared to this, the most challenging endeavor she’d ever undertaken. And she loved it. Alyssalee considered it an honor that they selected her. One couldn’t apply for a job in the paramilitary organization. The Undivine only recruited unicorns. Usually, the selection centered on anti-UNUM accomplishments, special nerd skills, or in Alyssalee’s case, elite mind hacker abilities discovered covertly in the holocade game, Sword of Sanctity. Unlike how UNUM instructed their paladins, Undivine trainees couldn’t wash out. Her new family didn’t let each other fail. This didn’t mean that the instructors gave them a pass for areas they were weak in, such as combat or physical training. Instead, their battle buddies worked harder to level up their brothers and sisters. So far, Alyssalee was on the helper versus the help-ee side. Being on the giving end was how she liked it, even though she got fewer breaks, had less time to eat, and sacrificed the already minimal sleep they allowed. Helping others led to the paramilitary group’s formation twenty years ago during the Uprising, as the militant leaders of UNUM murdered people en masse. The Undivine’s founding charter protected the persecuted from being imprisoned or disappearing for simply having differing spiritual-political views. To the dismay of many intransigent Undivine leaders, they cooperated with UNUM in recent months. Most believed UNUM was just trying to save face as the truth behind the fleshmonger scourge contradicted the doctrine of the One Unified God. The blight of fleshmongers saw UNUM and the Undivine unite for the good of the people. At least, that was the goal of the Undivine—unchanged from their founding. UNUM was about power. If demons weren’t real, UNUM was a sham and people would hold its teachings untrue. UNUM demanded spiritual, moral, and political control of the populace. The fleshmongers’ use of seemingly harmless technology, like the Sword of Sanctity game to propagate possessions across the globe urged cooperation between UNUM and the Undivine. Prior to this arrangement, the Undivine kept their command centers hidden from UNUM. Even now, they only divulged need-to-know locations to them for their limited collaborations. On the perimeter of the Sierra Nevada Command Center was the Undivine training camp. The area was nothing like the ancient gloom of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where the sisters raised Alyssalee. Sure, the region was wet and gloomy like every other place on earth, just not as built up. This was one of the few remaining places on the planet where the clouds would occasionally thin, revealing the sky. The few that could afford to live outside of cityscrapers made homes here just for the occasional glimpse of the sun and stars. The clouds above them cleared for a few minutes. The instructors stopped hand-to-hand drills to let the group enjoy the anomaly. *** ALYSSALEE COULD TELL the end of drills was nearing from the level of groans and muscle failure among the recruits. The instructors had the trainees spread out in a part sod, part mud clearing. The constant grime ingrained the earthy scents in her brain, like training-induced PTSD. Most of the group had mud caked on them after face-planting from exhaustion during push-up drills. But her face remained clean today. Today was special weapons day. Special weapons varied by trainee, depending on why the Undivine recruited them. Some had advanced hacking tools as weapons; others specialized in mindfreed abilities. Alyssalee had swordplay training for her unique scimitar. It was a combination of mind hacking and combat fencing. The instruction was custom developed for Alyssalee because the Undivine had never had a candidate with her abilities. The upside of this unique training was that it involved some of her favorite people—Commander Cole, Bits, and a recent addition to the Sierra Nevada Command Center, Master Liberi. Master Liberi was an angel, just like Cole. His one and only love since the twelfth century was the sword. And over the centuries, Liberi had mastered every form of martial swordplay. So advanced were his skills, that he developed his own technique, Liushui. Liberi explained the attacks and defenses of Liushui as an ebb and flow of energy between combatants. Cole guided Alyssalee’s mind-hacking discipline while Bits monitored her brain activity with a diagnostic ET. Cole and Bits consulted each other to refine how she leveraged the synergies between the sword and her abilities while training with the sword master. Master Liberi amazed Alyssalee with how he combined his mastery of the sword with feats only an angel could pull off, like instantly changing grips and lunging. The distinction between fleshmongers and angels couldn’t be better illustrated than with Master Liberi. Angels existed on the human plane as a projection of their former living selves. In contrast, fleshmongers occupied the bodies of living souls to carry out their depraved desires. Being an angel required mastering the art of appearing mortal to the living—an arduous charade. The simple act of walking on the earth without falling through it took persistent concentration. And yet Master Liberi carried out fencing training with the highest expertise, as if he walked the earth with his body and soul intact. In contrast, Cole stuck to handguns and rifles as they required much less effort to orchestrate than hand-to-hand combat. Alyssalee referred to poor emanation as being squishy, much to the irritation of the commander. Squishiness happened when an angel couldn’t project a believable shell of a body. Firmness aside, there was no hiding the respect she held for angels. On top of the skill it took to pull off being tangible, angels could travel anywhere on earth insanely fast. But mastering these skills took time. A lot of time. Cole mentioned that traveling at the speed of light and stopping at a particular location on earth was like parking a levtrans on a pinprick while traveling at two hundred miles per hour. A miscalculation during angel-travel and one might be on the moon’s wrong side instead of the desired destination on Earth. The only surefire way to get to an exact location was for an angel to return to their grave or wherever most of their remains rested. Alyssalee experienced this firsthand when the horned fuckers left her stuck between the living and the dead. Cole traveled at the speed of light to find her. For him, it was decades of soul-crushing loneliness as he searched, eventually rescuing her. He had to teach her how to soul-walk back to her body. If not for him, she would have been lost floating around the Milky Way forever.