Legacy: Beyond the Veil

Kidnapped

"No Mistress, his apparent captors were not what they seemed. The asset knew them by name and expressed concern for their lives." The leading Wychhunter spoke to no-one in particular, though Noah assumed he had some sort of communication link going on within his helmet. The cultist stood at the far end of the craft, near the cockpit, but he spoke loud enough for Noah to hear him over the roar of the engines. He frankly didn't care what the cultist had to tell his superiors, but he listened in anyway. It wasn't like there was much else he could do.

The Wychhunters had dragged him all the way to a branch of a Gradial traffic shaft and pushed him aboard a flying personnel carrier of sorts, which had promptly taken off to somewhere Noah didn't know. He now sat on one of ten seats lining both sides of the surprisingly spacious transport, with the three more conventional soldiers sitting on either side of and opposite from him, forming a loose semicircle to keep an eye on him. The female soldier decked out in a warskin manned some kind of mounted cannon on the vessel's tail. Only past her armor could he see the outside world, which had been reduced to the faint lights of the gradial shaft, rapidly speeding past.

Their small and heavily armed concession had gotten no small number of strange looks on the way here, though the common people knew not to stand in the Wychhunters way, even if this part of the city wasn't strictly their turf.

Some part of Noah had at least hoped that someone would call the district militia to come stop this kidnapping in broad daylight, the lack of actual daylight be damned. That hope had evaporated when they actually ran into a militia patrol. The lightly armored conscripts had taken a single glance at the two warskin-clad giants and promptly decided to ignore the cultists, which Noah in hindsight supposed was the wisest choice.

Back when Cai still lived at home, right before his application to the military academy was accepted, his brother had eagerly told him of what a warskin could do in the right hands:

From supporting vehicle grade weaponry and being capable of withstanding orbital re-entry, to lifesign scanning and reaching sprinting speeds in excess of a hundred kilometers an hour, a well trained warskin user stood equivalent to a small army.

Noah had written off Cai's words as exaggeration at first, the boastful words of an older brother. Now that he had seen a warskin in action for himself, he wasn't so sure what to believe anymore. The suits frightened him, and he jerked with angst every time one of the two armored Wychhunters made the slightest movement.

He recalled a snippet of a press conference he had seen a while back, where the planetary bondsman himself had addressed the growing influence of groups like the Wychhunters.

"The Cults Militant, if that is what you wish to call them, are not organized enough to maintain such suits of armor in any considerable quantity." He had said, then flashed the lens a charismatic smirk.

"Even if the cults did possess them, warskins are named the way they are for a reason: They are highly destructive weapons of war. If groups like Maelstrom truly deploy them as frequently as some sources would suggest, then all their turf wars would have ended by now on account of there being no more turf to speak of!"

A wave of slightly forced laughs came from an invisible audience, at which point his mother had switched to a different channel with a sigh of disgust. Noah hadn't understood her at the time, but his worldview had expanded remarkably over the past eight hours.
He tried to imagine what it might look like when the army made a move to flush out one of the military cults, pitting two forces against one another on an imaginary battlefield which looked suspiciously like his own neighborhood. He shuddered, seeing the soldiers of his mind's eye loose salvo after salvo of devastating firepower through the windows and alleys he grew up in, breaking down walls and demolishing entire buildings, home to dozens of families he'd known all his life, just to gain an advantage in the next brutal firefight. Especially striking was the image of the small, communal garden around the monument in the center square, the one which Noah had helped maintain. The frail grasses and weeds of the tiny sanctuary had been ground flat by armored boots and tank treads, and beside it lay a score of dead bodies, all of which looked exactly like Nathe. All of them stared Noah directly in the eyes. The macabre scene startled the boy out of the half-slumber he had fallen into, and he woke up with a gasping jerk, bathed in cold sweat. The sudden movement gained the attention of the lead Wychhunter, who shot him a look and then made a quick gesture to one of his subordinates. This went unnoticed by Noah, whose breathing and heart rate had both skyrocketed. A painfully bright flash of red, the sudden stink of molten skin and singed flesh, the sickening thud of a lifeless body crashing against the carpeted floor. Every time Noah closed his eyes, the scene repeated. Every time he blinked, Nathe died.
Noa didn't even notice when one of the more lightly armored Wychhunters sat down in front of him and removed her helmet, not until she placed a hand gently on his shoulder.