CHAPTER 53

7243

CROSS

The sky around Sayar is a fantastic purple. They say that the atmosphere soaks in the sunlight much like how Earth used to, except that its distance causes the hue. It was...wrong to not see a blue sky. Cross knew that it confused Alex, so he spent little time staring at the sky and began to descend from his flight. Behind them were the Dromedans that he had been constructing within the past month—a faction of bodies controlled with just the smallest fragments of Jesse Anderson—the minimum of sentience for existence.

Cross and Alex talked more on their flight from Nastor to Sayar. They began to get used to the idea of being two minds in one body.

"If there's ever anything that happens to this body, just stay with me. I'll carry you into another," Cross had said.

"What if we get separated? I don't think I can handle myself all alone out here."

"I won't let that happen to you."

"Do you promise?"

"I do."

And so they had gone on their way—their faceless mechanical friends right behind them—freshly powered up with some of the excess Queoquartzite that Cross had gathered. Now they were in business, Queoquartzite mining could be delegated to some of the lower end Dromedans so that nothing like what had happened before would again.

As they descend onto Sayar, Cross begins to reminisce on the times when the others around him had seen him as friend and ally. Of course, this could never be reciprocated, for the people of Sayar would always represent the pieces of himself that were stolen from him. They were keys to a puzzle that masked as people, and that fact seemed that much more of a stab in the back.

"You okay?" Alex asks.

"Sometimes I wonder about what it would be like if I left things to rot as they are now," Cross says, looking down at the microbial cities below who haven't yet caught wind of their arrival. "Things will only get worse. But sometimes I think about the false lives that my soul has created here—nothing more than an imagination running wild, but at what point does imagination bleed into reality?"

"Are you having doubts?" Alex asks.

"No, I don't think so. I think I'm moreso just thinking about everything that led up to this point in time. I'm not any less angry."

"Well, the sooner that we get you back to normal the sooner we can start things over, right? Plus, the more that these fragments live on as these imaginary people is suffering in its own right, right?"

Cross nods, "Correct. All right, let's do this. Who knows, if we're lucky we can be done right after this sweep? One shot and maybe we can clear them all out in one go. Once the council members are gone I'll have a good majority of my soul back. Not complete, but enough to where we can take control of this pitiful world."

"I'll be with you."

The Dromedan force behind them do the job they've been handed down—an assault begins on Pandera, Sayar's capitol city. Cross flies over the water-scape and lands onto the taction glass, cracking the surface, looking out as gunfire and smoke covers the sky. In a matter of seconds blood fills the atmosphere, as buildings are torn apart. It all happens so fast, Cross flies forward toward a small Illith clad in a power suit. She's communicating with someone over a holographic projector.

"She's got to be talking to the people in charge," Alex says.

"Right." Cross dashes toward her and snatches her up by her fat neck, he holds her out in front of him, keeping turned away as she squirms, unable to make a sound. His hand tenses and closes tighter and tighter until the bones in her body snap and she falls limp in his hand. He drops her near weightless body and picks up the holographic projector, seeing the face of Entria Brant, the Illith council leader.

"You threw us away. Well guess what? We don't die easy," he says, crushing the projector in his fist. "Now, we assault the capitol building."

"Using the explosives we rigged on the sentry bots, right?"

"Now you're learning."

Explosions rock the ground as Cross blasts his way into the capitol building, walking in on an argument already in place.

"Dude, you literally just threw a bitch fit because one of your own race died. That's reasonable, but now you don't give a shit when there are tons of people out there probably dying?" A man says, separated from the eleven heroes seated.

"He's got a point, Cardus," Entria Brant says.

"He has no point! We're staying safe in here and that's-"

They all look toward Cross, speechless. Whatever they had been arguing about has ceased being important. "The family is all here, how wonderful. It's a shame a few Illith had to be ground into the dirt for our reunion to happen," Cross says, stepping in closer.

"A bit harsh?" Alex asks.

"Not harsh enough."

"What? How the hell are you here? The shield is up!" Cardus yells.

"Cardus, it is good to see you again. Still as cowardly as ever, I see. Well, it seems absent-minded as well. Did you forget I was the one who installed that very shield in this building all those years ago?"

"Huh, I didn't take you for home renovations," Alex says.

"Consider it a talent I picked up along the way."

"So then you're the Mark VI, huh?" The man asks.

Cross recognizes the face easily enough, it was Roland Duschand, one of the putrid humans who helped starve him in the past war. He takes a step toward the man, "You don't remember me, Mr. Duschand? I'm quite hurt..." But then all at once something freezes inside Cross. "Wait a moment. You aren't him, are you? No, your eyes are different..." he says.

"Alex...I found him."

"What?!"

"How are you alive?" Entria asks.

Cross begins to laugh a fetid sound, "Please call me by my name. It is the polite thing to do. And not by that silly nickname of Mark VI, Cross will do just fine?"

"You didn't answer my question."

"And you didn't honor my request, is that not how bartering goes? One makes a request and another fulfills it? Or should I use the Sayarian bartering method of betrayal?"

Piscar stands up, "You were getting in way over your head, Cross. We had to-"

"I hope you know I didn't come here to endure your lectures," he says, raising up his left arm." Cross wields an antimatter bomb, annihilation energy jam packed with enough firepower to blow the city to smithereens.

"Think about what you're doing now," Yaldabaoth says slowly.

"I have. I've thought about it for all of the time you cut the Dromedan race off. Now it's time we cut you off from the roots up," He says as he walks closer, twisting a piece on the device as it begins to glow a bright white. "Your strings are cut free, and from freedom you shall embrace death as I once did."

"Hey, what's...he doing?" Alex asks.

The soul inside Roland Duschand stands, takes a step toward Cross.

"Don't worry, Alex. We can end this now. Everyone is here for our grand finale. We're going to make this right." He smiles as he takes a step closer to Roland.

"You will not come any closer," he says, a defiant look in his eyes.

"You are something special, aren't you? It's too bad that has to be extinguished. What a shame that both of our lives had to be wasted for your pathetic excuse for a life."

The bomb is dropped, and the soul in Roland's body does the unthinkable: he absorbs the annihilation energy as if he were some sort of vacuum. The blast totals the capitol building, the body that Cross and Alex had been inhabiting, and the entirety of Pandera, however the targets that Cross and Alex had been searching for were safer than ever. Their souls flow through the universe as Cross pulls himself and Alex toward a suitable body, a recreation of Cross's own stored on Nastor in the case of an accident.

"Fuck! He ruined everything!" Alex screams, her stability has waned ever since the attack on the capitol. "He ruined everything and he still gets to save the day?! And now he's going to be treated as some hero? WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THAT?"

"We need to regroup. We were successful in getting back at least some of my fragments, and we let them know that we're a credible threat willing to do anything."

"FUCK that! God...I didn't know how satisfying getting to say that would be. FUCK him. Fuck the people that protect him, and FUCK this world for believing that everything that has happened to us is okay."

"I see you're properly motivated, now," Cross says, looking up toward the stars, toward the smallest one they can see, Sayar.

"I don't just want to kill him," she says. "I want him to remember everything that he did to me. I want him to understand just how terrible of a person he is, and then I want him to suffer."

"I can help with that."

"Devon...you better fucking watch out."