My head hurt. My knees hurt. My lungs felt like they were about to burst as I inhaled another mouthful of the cold, metallic air.
"This place smells like a slaughterhouse, Ralph. I don't get how you can stay there the whole day," his teammate complained behind him.
I didn't reply. I have work to do. I still haven't completed my mission.
I carefully stepped over the bodies of my victims. The sword I held in my hand dripped with their blood. The first time I led an ambush onto this house I've already figured out which stairs creaks or not, carefully avoiding them as I slithered upstairs for my last prey.
I've left my teammates on the ground floor to search for the wanted documents. Jerron had directed me specifically to get rid of this person.
Upstairs, there were three rooms. Two of which we had already demolished with bombs, and is now blackened and destroyed. There's no way anyone would've survived that. So I tip-toed into the last room. It was the bedroom of a kid.
The tip of my sword brushed past the rose-colored blankets as I proceed through the room. I stopped in front of the closets, my shadows cast over a shivering figure through the slit between the doors.
I slashed it open, and they fell apart, crashing down as wood ash bombarded the air. A scream was voiced behind the dust, and when it cleared away, I finds a girl coiled away in the corner.
She is the last surviving member of the family that we've murdered. Jerron said that her father was the leader of Ling's underground rebels, and therefore not even the youngest child related to him should be spared.
I am twelve that year, and the girl looks like she was most likely eight or ten judging by her look. A flash of something unfamiliar jolted through my heart, tightening my grip around the sword hilt. I don't want to kill her.
But an order is an order. I closed my eyes, and my body carried out the move that had been deeply framed into my muscle by countless training, and it's sure to take away life.
A sickening warm splatter splashed across my face. I've done it. I've killed again.
*
"Hey!"
Ralph tried to bury his face deeper into the rocky ground beneath him, trying to ignore whoever is talking to him.
"Oh, so you are awake! Were you ignoring me this whole time, dumb head?"
Ralph's eyes suddenly snapped open, his body jerked up, and attempted to sit up but fell back down by the weight of an iron cuff around his neck. He looked around. He was not down beneath the cave anymore, nor were the sea or the rocks in sight. There were only square-shaped walls built of bricks, leading up to a sky-hole blocked with weaved vines, casting rays of dim light down onto the ground.
Dynamics, he thought to himself. Did I get myself into prison yet again? And where is Eve? How did I even get here?
The prison was completely empty except for another person, chained to the wall opposite him. He glanced at himself and noticed tons of chains wrapped around his limbs and neck, while the girl on the opposite side only had a delicate-looking iron band around her left wrist. It could almost count as an ornament. Her black hair dapples over her face, glistening with midnight blue tints in the dim sunlight. He knew that the chain was still made of iron and it seems almost impossible for a nimble-looking girl like her to rip it off the wall, but the difference in the number of chains was still quite significant.
Her hair reached up to just a little past her shoulder. Her gaze felt quite uncomfortable on his skin, just like the feeling Jerron's maids had given him when they suspected he was the one who stole ham from their storage.
"Who are you?" He asked, adjusting to the cuff's weight, lifting his head up.
The girl opposite him tilted her head with mild interest, but otherwise, there weren't any other expressions. "Why should I tell you that?" Her purr made his skin tense.
"Because I could help you?" he tried.
"Help me?" The girl sneered. "Look at yourself first. You're the one that needs helping."
Ralph looked away in embarrassment. Her words are true.
"Because we have nothing to do here anyway?" He tries again.
"If there is nothing to do, the best thing you could do is to not make trouble and shut up," she smirks in a chilling way. "But I like that reason better than the last. I'm Kanitha, a Target, hence a Stone User."
"Oh, me too," Ralph attempted a shrug, but the weight on his shoulder is too great. "I mean, I'm not a Target. I'm a Stone User, mine's the Stone of Plague."
Kanitha narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Stone of Tide." She says.
It took Ralph some time to realize she was talking about herself. That's a weird name, though. What does it do, I wonder?
"So, why are you a Target?" Ralph tried to ask as casually as he could.
"Probably thanks to my stone," she grunted. "They crave its power. As if I'll ever let them get it."
"What is it?"
"Oh, it's not a big thing," she grimaced. "Have you heard of immortality?"
YOU ARE READING
Alasla: The New Age
Fantasy"What killed him isn't me. It's the world." Ralph had never asked for much. Not even his own identity. But when his best and only friend got murdered by the man he calls father, he was forced to set off on an expedition to unravel the truth of this...
