Silent Knight

Chapter Thirteen

Five minutes later, we were in the box of Red Eye's truck on our way into the heart of the city.

"Mighty man," I laughed, thinking about the conversation we had inside. "Should we do codenames for ourselves? That could be yours!" Alex glared at me.

"Oh yeah? What would yours be then?" he asked, a smug look on his face.

"Knight. Obviously."

"Okay, hi," Valliere interrupted. "I'm curious still, why the black knight chess piece, Knight?" I shrugged,

"I used to play a lot of chess."

"So you just randomly picked the knight?" Alex asked.

"I thought it was the most appropriate, I guess I saw myself as a knight in shining armour. Just deadlier."

"That's slightly terrifying," Claire muttered. I chuckled.

"Where do you get them all from?" Morathi asked, finally having set up the coms.

"Get what from?"

"The chess pieces, I mean, you've left a lot of them, so do you just have like a hundred chess sets missing a single piece?" My team laughed, and I couldn't help but laugh with them.

"I carve them," I finally said. I had a lot of downtime between my kills, it had always kept me distracted.

"Impressive," Alex said with a nod. I shrugged, and the truck went quiet as we neared Red Eye's drop off point. The roads we were driving on had seen better days, meaning it was a bumpy road. I wouldn't have been surprised if we lost Claire off the back of the truck.

We finally came to a stop in front of some crumbled structures. From what I could tell, it used to be a University. Only now, the buildings were torn apart and crumbling from the bombs that were launched on the city near the start of the War. All that was left was the hollow dreams of education.

"Well, it was nice-" Red Eye started to say,

"You'll wait for us," I interrupted, jumping out of the truck. "We shouldn't be long." Red Eye sighed,

"You better be quick," he mumbled. I sent him a glare, and he wiped the smug look off his face and turned it into fear.

The rest of my team followed me as we walked into the first of the buildings. The glass doors were shattered, and I carefully walked in, the glass crunching under my feet. Inside was dark, but I could tell that we were in a residence building, where the students would live.

Though instead of living, there were a few bodies scattered around that no one had time to move yet, no doubt the students had been lying here for years. Most of them had died from bullet wounds. I began to wonder just how cruel the Russians were to raid through a University, killing teenagers just trying to study. One of the bodies was slumped over on a still-open laptop, battery long dead, dried blood covering the once colourful stickers that had been decorating the front. My team was looking around at the bodies, all with looks of sorrow. It was nothing that any of us hadn't seen before in our lifetimes, but seeing it over and over again, especially in a setting like this, made their looks more remorseful.

We walked down the hallways, guns in our hands, we could see the faded and falling signs on the walls, signs that once meant the students living here had been living a normal life. As we walked, Alex reached down and picked up one of the signs,

"Ha," he said, spinning the poster around to show us. "Dodgeball tournament."

"My university never played dodgeball," Morathi said in the coms, trying to lighten our moods. I simply shook my head,