Unconquered Pt. 08

Ember jerked back, gasping. "Oh!" he said. "I thought-"

Jerin sprang to his feet. "Hah! Guess it took you longer to subdue the noble legionaries than you expected, huh?" He asked, adjusting his uniform.

Chirp and Xora exchanged glances. Then Chirp and Ember exchanged glances.

"S-Sure!" Chirp said, nodding.

***

The interior of Iremire was just as unpleasant as the exterior. The corridors were all very high and very narrow, with ceiling lights that glowed with a pale red light, washing everything in hues of blood red. The stone that they walked along was smooth and black -- and Ember swore that he saw a ghostly face every few feet, pressing against the glassy surface. "What are...what is this place built out of?" he asked, softly as Jerin Kah led them along.

"Soulcidian," Jerin said.

Ember stopped dead. Chirp walked straight into him and even Ceaith looked shocked, her normally cool, unflappable air shattering as she hissed: "Excusafuckingwhat?"

Jerin turned back. "What?" he asked.

"You built this place...out of dead people?" Ember whispered. Chirp hugged him from behind.

"No, no, no," Jerin said, shaking his head. "Soulcidian isn't dead people. It's a magical material that stores dead people." He placed his hand on Ember's shoulder. "This entire place is one big spiritual magnet, so that prisoners who kill themselves cannot escape into the cycle of reincarnation."

Ember gaped at him.

"And you thought this was okay?" Chirp squeaked.

"I mean, they're bad guys," Jerin Kah said, nodding.

"Like me?" Ember asked. "Or my villagers?"

Jerin opened his mouth. Closed it. He frowned. Then he turned. "Come on. The laboratories are this way, I think."

They rounded a bend and came into a large chamber that looked as if it served as the arterial junction between many other parts of Iremire prison. There was a central desk with a bored looking functionary sitting at it, their high cap set with a lapis gemstone, almost as if they were a parody of Ceaith's status as a Lapis Lunar. Their forehead, though, had the more standard black bead that people in the Regency seemed to have for their gemstone. Several other people were walking past. Some of them were Legionaries in heavy armor. One was a woman with heavy goggles on her face and a thick white robe that made Ember think of a chef or a cook. She was the one who glanced over at them first.

"Jerin? Jerin Kah?" She asked.

"Doctor Craven!" Jerin said, stepping forward, taking her gloved hand and kissing it. "A pleasure to see you again."

"Oh Kah, you're incorrigible," she said, giggling.

"That isn't how you put it last time we met," Jerin purred.

Doctor Craven giggled again, like a school girl. "You mean the first time we met?"

Ember opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut, remembering he was supposed to just be an ordinary legionnaire. Ordinary rank and file types didn't ask the Infused Knights if they had really gone straight from the infusion process to banging their doctor on the slab. But Jerin, remembering their mission, said: "We're here looking for a specific prisoner." He nodded. Ceaith relaxed fractionally behind them and Ember reached back subtly to take her hand, squeezing it.

"Who?" Craven asked.

"One Thalina," Jerin said. "She was picked up in a rebellion sweep in the north, I believe. High command wants her for more questioning."

"Ah..." Craven tapped her goggles. They glowed and whirred, spirals appearing on them. "Oh! Oh, she's part of Batch-2. I'm sorry, she..." She shook her head. "We'll have her soulgem for you in an hour."

"I need to talk to her now, in this life," Jerin said.

Ember saw that Craven's resolve was firming. "Sorry, Jerin. Only members of the thaumatechs are-"

Ember knew that they couldn't waste time. Every second was another second that Batch-2 might get...whatever happened to batches here. He knew it couldn't be good. And so, he stepped forward, took hold of Craven's wrist, then leaned in close. He whispered into her ear, trying to sound as deadly serious as he could. "I suggest you take us there right now or else we're going to have serious trouble." He managed to impart a crack of command into those words without his anima glowing to life beyond a subtle spark that flew from between his lips and swept into Craven's ears. Behind her goggles, her eyes widened.

"I suggest you listen to my uncomperable friend here," Jerin whispered.

"R...Right," Craven whispered. She started to walk forward. "C-Come along."

Ember moved to walk beside Craven, with Jerin to her other side. The lunars followed after, but Ember could feel Ceaith's urge to sprint ahead, barely kept in check by the needs of stealth. They came to a set of stairs, which led down -- the temperature growing from overwhelmingly hot to merely unpleasantly warm to actually rather chilly. At the bottom of the stairs was a large door of brass and wood, with a strange set of glass tubes mounted on a pair of hinged arms. Craven took hold of those, leaned forward, and set them against her eyes. The tubes glowed and the door chirruped, then swung inwards. Here, the walls were made of solid brass, not soulcidian. Stepping out of the cold black corridor should have been a relief, but for some reason, Ember was feeling more and more uneasy by the moments.

Craven's hands shook as she walked. "I-I'll have you know, I'm just a thaumatech. I don't...I don't make any of the decisions, I just...work the machines."

"That's not a great way for us to begin our relationship," Ceaith growled, her claws springing out of her fingertips. "What the fuck are you people doing here?"

Craven ducked her head forward as they came to a set of corridors, each one leading to a different room. Each room had a glass window in it and one of them had another thaumatech standing in it. He glanced back and saw them. "Craven! What the fuck are you- that's an IK!" He pointed at Jerin -- but Ember was already in the room, tugging off his helmet. He used the helmet to whack the thaumatech onto his back, stepping up to the glass. He looked into a room...and was filled with not horror, but rather, confusion.

The room had about fifty people in it. They were of every kith, clan and breed. He saw men and women and even a few children. They looked terrified and all of them were dressed in a cheap white smock, some of them already frayed and tattered. They were crammed into the room so tight that they could barely move. But he saw Ceaith's sister almost immediately -- she was the other catgirl. Though she looked utterly terrified, unlike Ceaith's normal expression of confidence.

"What is-" Ember started.

The ceiling glowed.

Pillars extended out of the ceiling, each one tipped with a brass orb. It roiled and crackled with green lightning -- which slammed down into the foreheads of each of the people in the room. At the same instant, each person in the room screamed. Their fingers clawed at their heads, their bodies writhing and straining with pain. Muscles strained and veins bulged as their howls reached a pitch so high that it could be heard, if faintly, through the glass as the strobing green lightning pulsed into them again and again. Ember's eyes widened and he drew his fist back.

He punched the glass.

"What are you doing!?" the man he had knocked over shouted. "That's solid adamant-"

Ember drew his fist back again.

When he punched again, his whole body exploded with golden radiance. Flames roiled along his arms and shimmering dragons played around his body as his anima flared like a bonfire. His knuckles struck a glancing blow against the adamant window. The window shivered, like a leaf in the breze. Then it shattered. Then the wall around it shattered as well. The roaring sound of the metal tearing itself apart was nearly as loud as the screams from the people in the room. But as the dust cleared and Ember stepped into the room, his anima glowing...every single strand of green lightning leaped from their initial victims, drawn from them...

To him.

The lightning bolts slammed into Ember's soulgem and he staggered to one knee. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt before in his life roared through him. His nerves burned and his bones sang like crystal. His skin rippled and his muscles tightened. He couldn't even scream. His eyes closed as he felt the glowing spark of his own life dimming within him. He gasped -- and then a blurring shape shot past him. He opened one eye -- and saw Chirp, Ceaith, and Xora. They had drawn the legionarie swords they had taken, and were slashing through the air. One after another, the bronze orbs were sheered in half as they leaped again and again and again, moving like graceful dancers.

With each bolt that was ended, Ember felt the pain lessen, then lessen, then lessen again.

Ceaith landed by her sister, hugging her tightly as the last of the orbs was felled. "Thally!"

Ember grinned. "Hah..." he said. "Got em."

The thaumatech was beginning to creep slowly to the side of the room, crab walking, as if he was worried standing up would draw more attention to him than standing. Ember was beaten to the punch by Jerin -- who picked him up and then slammed him against the wall. "What the fuck is this?" Jerin snarled. "There are children in there -- what the fuck are you doing here?"

His body was roiling with a green light -- rose petals swirled around his feet. His eyes glowed with a fierceness that made the thaumatech quail. "W-We...infused knights, they have the spiritual energies of, uh, fifty to a hundred mortals distilled into them, to enhance their innate powers and, it gets shaped by a catalistic foci, usually keyed to a specific element. Earth, fire, water, air, void, wood-" The air was split by a sudden cataclysmic wailing sound. It was like every single bird in the world was shrieking at once. The light in the room changed from red to blue, flashing in time with the howling sound.

"What's that?" Ember asked, standing up.

A bunch of screaming began to echo down the stairs.

"It means that one of the infusions went wrong..." Craven whispered. She hurried to the control board in the room -- mercifully unsmashed by Ember's punch. She tapped several buttons. "The knight this batch was meant for -- she's just gone berserk! But...but..." She shook her head. "We'd have to have pumped her with the energy of ten thousand mortals to get this power signature."

"Or the Unconquered for five seconds?" Ceaith asked, walking out of the room, her arm around her sister's shoulders, holding her close.

"Yeah, that'd be the same. Good thing the Unconquered..." Craven paused. Then she looked at Ember. Ember, who was standing up, grinned and gave her a thumbs up.

"Sleepy Ember," he said, tugging off the cuirass of the Legionaries' armor that he was wearing over his head, sighing as he tossed it away. "The Eleventh Unconquered. At your service. I mean. Kinda." A distant roaring sound echoed down the stairs and the ceiling shuddered, plaster drifting down. "One sec. Gotta deal with a rampaging monster real fast!"

Then he was off, up the stairs, his anima leaving behind a golden cascade of light and sparks. He came to the large junction room -- and found that there was a huge hole in the corner, letting in the bright sunlight from outside. Rubble was strewn on the ground and several injured legionaries were groaning and trying to get to their feet. Arrows whistled through the air beyond the hole -- and Ember sprang up onto the edge of the rubble.

The scene beyond was pure and utter bedlam.

The legionaries who had been drilling in the middle of the clearing were sprinting for cover and for weapons both. Dozens of them were sprawled on the ground, around a strewn cascade of rock and dirt and large stone disks. Half a dozen legionaries had managed to get their weapons -- long bows. Their sergeant bellowed out an order: "Knock! Aim! Loose!" Their bows twanged and their arrows fsst through the air, shooting towards the berserk Knight.

The Knight in question looked...inhuman. Not merely exotic in her coloration, but exotic in her everything. Her skin looked like solid granite, and it creaked and set off tiny flakes of stone with every movement she made. Her eyes were two smoldering pits of lava, smoking and roiling. Flames licked around her fingertips and her body floated in the air, surrounded by a slowly drifting bits of stone that floated around her, as if she was underwater. As the arrows whistled towards her, she lifted her leg in a sweeping kick, and moving with the kick, a wave of stone rippled and flowed up, forming a wall that the arrows struck with a clattering sound.

"Fuck you!" The Knight shouted, then landed on the ground. She punched, punched, then kicked -- and each punch sent a rectangle of stone whistling out of the wall she had kicked up. Each one impacted with the Legionaries armors, shattering into clouds of debris. The legionaries sprawled, knocked silly.

Ember nodded. "Okay," he said. "I can do this."

He sprang from the wall, landed, then shouted. "Hey!"

The knight spun and then performed a sweeping kick, flipping with the movement to bring a sphere of rock into the air before sending it whistling down, straight at Ember's head. Ember rooted his stance, as Goat had taught him, then punched the sphere of rock. His knuckles flared with golden light and the rock exploded into a haze of fragments. He grinned and the Knight sprinted straight for him, her bare feet slapping the ground. She was dressed, after a fashion, in white smock that had become tattered and ripped by her exertions.

Her arm thrust out, her fingers held flat, aiming for Ember's throat. Ember caught her wrist, shoved her hand up, then swept out his legs. She lifted one leg, so that she brought up a stone pillar. Ember's shin smashed into the pillar and he staggered backwards, gasping as pain shot up his leg. He stumbled backwards and the Knight began to punch the pillar at him -- shaving off an inch at a time, each disk of stone shooting at him like it had been fired from a catapult. Ember scrambled out of the way as the disks punched into the soulcidian wall behind him, leaving behind spiderwebs of cracks.

"Why are you so mad?" Ember called out as he ran.

"Fucking shut the fuck up right the fuck now!" The Knight bellowed, chips of stone flying from her body as her anima -- a slow, languid cloud of white light -- flared. Ember saw that she was out of pillar. He banked so hard he nearly threw his legs out. He slapped his palm onto the ground, pivoted on it, then kicked at her face. She batted his foot out of the way, ducking low, but Ember popped from his palm to a standing position, landing on her shoulders. She stood and slammed her head up towards his crotch. Ember slapped his palm down on her head, flipped over, landed on the ground infront of her.

"I'm not your enemy," he said. "The people who did this to you are-" He paused to parry a punch to his solar plexus, catching and twisting her wrist before a blow that could shatter stone shattered his ribs. "-are the real bastards."

"What are you?" She hissed, looking at him, her muscles straining as she wrenched her arm free from his grip.

Ember grinned. "Just your average, run of the mill-" he sprang aside as she punched the ground and sent an impaling spike of stone up into the air where his foot had been. He landed -- and she punched again, creating another spike under him. Ember threw out his arm, and caught all of his weight on a single fingertip. His finger glowed with golden light, toughening his skin against the penetrating push of the razor fine point. He balanced there for a moment. "Unconquered!"

The knight preformed a rapid twisting kata with her hands, whirling them around one another.

The spike Ember balanced on shifted, the pointed tip opening up, then closing around his wrist like a vice. Then the whole spike flowed back into the ground with a sound like slurping soup. Ember's arm was buried up to the shoulder in the ground. He yelped and the woman kicked out with her other leg -- sending a curved U of stone flying at his other arm. It caught his wrist and whipped it around, pinning him to the ground by both his arms. She sprang forward, landed with her feet to either side of his chest, and jerked her arm back.

"You are not the Unconquered," she growled, her lava eyes flaring. "The Unconquered was the Good King Bahul. You aren't fit to clean his mustaches."

Ember looked up at her as she clenched her fist. Stone flew from the ground, forming into a wicked set of brass knuckles. Save that instead of being brass, they were jagged obsidian. She drew a slow breath.

"I am the Unconquered," he said, his voice even. "I am the breaker of chains. The toppler of thrones. I was chosen by the Sun to right the cycle and end the injustices of the world. Look around yourself, oh Infused Knight. Look at this prison. Do you really think that you're on the right side?"

His anima didn't flare -- there was no glow in his eyes. Ember felt drained -- as if trying to fight a fully empowered Infused Knight had strained his magical reserves to their limits. But he knew, at this moment, that if he had used magic in his words, he would have lost. Lost in a way that he couldn't quite place his finger on. The Infused Knight drew slow, ragged breaths. The rage in her eyes dimmed. The lava slowly stopped bubbling. The smoke stopped drifting. She lifted her head, slowly, and looked at the obsidian black walls. Then she looked up.

Past her, Ember could see the Starshrike had arrived, with the gangplank down. His wives were ushering the rescued victims onboard -- not just those from the chamber he had freed, but others.

The knight looked down at him. Lava tears dripped along her chin. "What happened to us?" she whispered. "What happened to our Kingdom?"

"I don't know..." Ember wriggled and used a tiny spurt of magic to get his arms free, drawing them out of the ground -- which seemed to constrict slightly less fiercely now. He wriggled his fingers to make sure they all worked. "But I'm here to fix it."

The knight dropped to her knees, her head hanging forward as lava tears dripped down her chin and onto Ember's belly, where the sizzled in small pools of golden light -- his anima hardening his skin against their heat. Ember sat up a bit more, then slowly, he reached out, hugging the stone woman to him. Despite the sheen of her skin, her body was remarkably soft. Well. Soft except for where her sculpted muscles were sleek and hard as iron. He caressed her back, squeezing her a bit tighter as she sobbed into him.

"It's okay," Ember whispered. "I mean, hey, people work for bad guys all the time. It happens."

The knight settled back a bit, resting her haunches against him. This meant that her bare, stone ass was pressed right up against the loincloth and codpiece that Ember had stolen from the legionaries. Her eyes widened slightly. Then she grinned, sniffling slightly. "S-So, Unconquered have the same reaction, huh?" she whispered.

"Oh. Good. Everyone gets horny after a fight. I was worried I was weird," Ember whispered.

The knight leaned forward and kissed him. Hard. Her tongue thrust into his mouth and Ember cocked his head to the side, his hands gripping her ass tightly as she moaned into him. Her tongue was cool and smooth and her lips had the fine edged grace of a carved statue -- there was just enough yield for it to not be painful, but just enough hardness for it to feel exotic. Her body radiated a strange sense of heat. Her skin was cool -- but once he squeezed her, he could feel a bone deep heat that came from her. It was like sinking palms into the dirt around a geothermal mound. She drew her mouth back, panting huskily.