Cataclysm Conquest | Chapter 09: Cleaners (First Draft)

Saturday, November 26, 4 S.E.

Xarina stood alongside Kairi and Bardulf as they looked up at the warehouse building in the far East of the Prosperity Quarter, hands resting on the pommels of her shortswords. The Eidolon had summoned them separately half an hour earlier, telling them they had ‘urgent intelligence’ to act on, and refusing to elaborate. Upon arrival, in the cover of night, they’d rendezvoused with the Princess in the shadow of the warehouse’s mass, finding her cloaked in [Stealth] where she waited at its Southern wall.

Both Xarina and Bardulf had approached in [Stealth] in kind, and now the three of them were peering up at the lit windows in contemplation.

“They’re definitely in there?” Xarina asked, her voice low and muffled by her [Stealth].

“Yep,” Kairi said with equal quietude, her voice low and cold. “The majority of them are. We’ll find the rest after we clean up this lot.”

Bardulf raised a hand to scratch at his light stubble, humming to himself softly. As a Half-Lycanus, he was able to grow something approaching a beard, though it was more like a light layer of fur than anything else.

“Are you sure this tip-off is correct, Kairi?” he asked without ceremony, attired in the black leathers and chainmail of the Ordo Umbrae. “Achilles tends to get moody when we kill the wrong people.”

Kairi grumbled faintly at the words and idly reached up to flick the much larger man’s ear, drawing a muted grunt.

“Yeah, dumbass, of course I’m sure. You think I want my brother pissed at me again? Honestly, you kill one wrong place, wrong time Haelfar, and he loses his fuckin’ mind.”

“He was the son of a Viscount, Princess,” Xarina reminded her softly.

“He was in a sex trafficking house, I stabbed first, big whoop,” Kairi muttered, reaching down to idly loosen her own shortswords. “He would’ve been guilty eventually.”

Bardulf shrugged at that and looked down at their leader.

“Achilles still made you promise to be certain, Kairi. I believe his exact words were not to ‘go full Minority Report.’”

“I know. He loved those retro movies,” the Princess responded testily, “and I am certain. These guys are fucked in the head. They kidnap refugees, usually kids, and ship them off up north to some degenerate that thinks he’s Genghis Khan or something.”

Xarina failed to understand the reference but nodded at the Eidolon’s assurances, calmly pulling up her black mask.

“So what is our plan?” she asked simply.

“I’ll go in through that high window,” Kairi said, pointing upward unnecessarily. “Bardulf will go through the back doors, and you’ll come down through the roofing,” she said, glancing up at Xarina. “Wolfboy’s [Predator Senses] marked thirty in the building, that’s ten for each of us. Intel says that their leaders, the ones with the information, have a skull piercing in their left ears. Take them alive. One’s Terran, one’s Haelfar, but most of their crew are Orcs, Terrans, and some Svartfenn. They’re due to make a shipment tomorrow, using the merchant caravans—so there’s bound to be victims trapped in there.”

Xarina grimaced at the implication of her people being involved in slavery and kidnapping, but couldn’t pretend to be overly surprised. The breeding programs in the Starhold had been little better, no matter how enthusiastically the Terran men had leaped at the chance. The entire exercise had sickened her, and killing people that still saw that sort of practice as a valid means to make money—far more demented or not—was a civil service, in her eyes.

“What is the signal to begin?” she asked simply, drawing her swords as she mentally mapped the [Starshadow Step] distance that would be required to reach the roof.

“We’ll infil in two minutes,” Kairi said decisively, while silently drawing her own blades as Xarina used Intent to create a countdown. “Perverts die before we free anyone,” Kairi continued. “If they take hostages, prioritize the takedown. I’ve got Menders on standby for emergency medical.”

“What if a victim dies?” Xarina asked, only mildly bothered by the idea. People died every day in the System.

“Collateral,” Kairi said ruthlessly. “Objective comes first.”

Bardulf sighed heavily at that but nodded, pulling up his mask, drawing down his hood, offering a two-fingered salute, and surging off around to the other side of the building, while Kairi squinted at the window.

“When I get through, I’m gonna be loud, Rina,” she warned calmly. “Don’t hesitate.”

Xarina smiled mirthlessly at the Princess beneath her mask.

“I never do,” she assured her and then activated her [Starshadow Core], stepping upward and folding space and darkness to alight silently on the roof. Her enchanted [Silentstep Boots] made no impact, and she glanced down to see Kairi walking up the wall, using her [Spiderstride Boots] to maximum effect. They’d both chosen different items, but given the Eidolon’s lack of height, an ability to scale any surface made sense to Xarina.

Swords in hand, the Bladedancer crept toward a large roof skylight on the far end of the warehouse, still wrapped in [Stealth] as she approached and glanced at the clock in her System interface. Time ticked down steadily, eating away seconds as Xarina edged closer to the skylight and peered down within.

The warehouse was large, perhaps fifty meters by twenty-five long and wide, and maybe twelve meters high with a subtly wedged roof. Arcane lamps were lit within, and she spotted a large assortment of steel boxes, sealed tight, meticulously situated throughout the interior. The kill targets prowled in twos and threes, though many of them were taking their ease, cracking jokes and playing cards, or indulging in alcohol and inebriants courtesy of the [Aetherium Store].

Her disgust for their lack of professionalism ratcheted upward, and any inkling of doubt vanished into smoke.

Many of them were women.

It made her blood boil. She’d expect something so stupid from men, but not her gender. Part of Dawnhaven or not, her biases were ingrained, and she expected more sense from women. Leonidas, Bardulf, Earl Brightblade, and some others may have defied the norms that she used as a lens to view men through, but so many others only validated her preconceptions—preconceptions she’d been pleasantly surprised to learn Kairi shared.

Perhaps not with the same fervor, but the Eidolon agreed men were idiots.

The timer in her vision reached single digits, and Xarina narrowed her lambent red eyes, summoning the power of her [Starshadow Core] in preparation and steadying her breathing. Economy of movement and efficient killing had been ingrained in her from a young age, and she was fully prepared to enact both without hesitation.

With one Contender and two Elites, she didn’t expect to meet a great challenge from the scum below her.

The moment the timer hit zero, Xarina heard the sound of a door exploding open and summoned her mana, actualizing her [Starshadow Step] and folding space and darkness to appear in the shadow of a Svartfar woman standing with two Orc men.

Before any of them could react, Xarina was already attacking, ramming her right blade through the back of the neck of the Orc to her right, and stabbing her left blade into the side of the one to her left, catalyzing her [Starshadow Core] to devour the left one’s dantian into a pop of singularity consumption. The first Orc collapsed to the floor in a gurgle when Xarina ripped her right sword out, and the second started spasming and frothing when a perfect hole appeared in his abdomen, sending what remained of his guts spilling across the floor when he collapsed.

The Svartfar spun, orange eyes wide, and received a lightning-fast kick to her left knee in the process, issuing a resounding crack through the air as she screamed in agony. Uncaring, Xarina stepped forward and slammed her sword into her stomach, glaring down into her eyes.

“[Unworthy,]” she hissed, before ripping the blade upward, tearing it out of her kinswoman’s throat and leaving her to spasm and die on the ground, twitching as her guts and lifeblood fell out of her.

The lack of Experience from the kills told her all she needed to know about her foes’ capabilities, and by then, the hunt was on.

Two Terrans rushed around a nearby steel container toward her, and Xarina moved, blurring forward—in their perception, at least—with her Elite rank Agility and smoothly cutting through both their stomachs, shearing through their spins and bisecting them neatly at waist level while turning to her left.

Two Svartfenn men stared at her in momentary shock, took one look at the crossed red blades beneath the white reaper’s skull emblazoned on her leather armor, and then turned to run.

Xarina was on them before they could, cold fury driving her as she cut the left one’s legs off at the knees with her left blade and smashed her right fist, blade in hand, into the face of the right one, staggering him while his friend screamed in horror and anguish.

The staggered Svartfar turned toward her groggily, and Xarina launched herself upward, wrapping her legs around his neck and using momentum and her Tempered body to flip and twist, snapping his neck with a loud crack and spinning around to drop back to the floor in the same motion; her blades descending to slam into the fallen, crawling Svartfar’s ribs.

“[Traitor,]” she declared coldly, before slowly dragging her shortswords upward and rupturing his organs, opening his sides with a spilling of offal and turning away to let him die. His gurgling was ignored when she walked away, and all she felt was frosty disgust.

It was a better and swifter death than such vermin deserved.

Two more Orcs raced in her direction without fully seeing her, and Xarina activated her [Blade Flurry] Skill, dashing forward while spinning her swords faster than anyone below Contender could perceive, and slicing away flesh, bone, and muscle with precise brutality. By the time the Orcs’ brains caught up to their bodies, they were already collapsing to the floor beyond recovery, limbs and internal organs strewn about them as Xarina continued her hunt.

Pandemonium raged within the warehouse as Bardulf and Kairi undertook their own killings, but Xarina left her fellow ‘Cleaners’ to their own hunts, her glowing red eyes searching for new targets as she prowled through the building. A Terran and Haelfar appeared in front of her a second later, emerging from between two steel containers, and Xarina glanced instinctively at their ears, grunting in satisfaction at the lack of skull piercings.

Both men hesitated, and were doomed the second they did.

The Scion was on them barely a second later, ramming her sword upward into the groin of the Haelfar, and ripping it up and out of his sternum, spinning on the spot to slam her foot into the head of the Terran with enough force to shatter his jaw and dent his skull. The momentum carried her into a full, on-the-spot flip, and she landed on her feet as the man’s eyes crossed, blood running from his nose as he started to seize.

She left him to die from the brain trauma while the Haelfar continued to screech, trying to stuff his guts back inside of him as he spasmed and vomited blood. Xarina grunted in irritation and stabbed her sword into his mouth to shut him up, piercing the back of his skull with a crack and coating of grey matter, then tore her sword out through the side of his head and moved on.

When she emerged back into the warehouse’s open space, she found nothing except more corpses, and spied the diminutive figure of the Princess standing before a pair of weeping, cursing, screaming men—one Terran, one Haelfar—with skull piercings in their ears and the fingers of their hands littering the ground. The Scion sighed in disgruntlement at seeing the multitude of corpses on the ground, starting from where the Deathdancer had entered the window and ending near the howling leaders, and moved over to join her, cleaning her blades with a localized use of her [Starshadow Core] and its Singularity control.

“Clear,” Xarina reported dutifully, sheathing her swords and glancing backward at the sound of footsteps, where Bardulf was emerging with an idle whistle, his armor covered in gore as he walked toward them.

“All clear,” the Shadowblade reported, resting his hands on his shortswords and peering at the cursing pair of men. “I see you found the targets.”

Kairi simply nodded and idly cracked her neck, cracking each of her knuckles thereafter as she stared down at them.

“Call the Aegis to open the containers,” she ordered to neither of them in particular, stepping toward the pair of slave traffickers. “Give me about ten minutes, though. I’ll be bundling up dumb and dumber here to take to the Dusk-Lord. She can scour their minds and get us what we need.”

Bardulf nodded agreeably and turned to waltz toward the window through which Kairi had entered, vanishing in a dispersion of Shadow a second later when he drew close enough, already teleporting to report what had happened as commanded. Xarina turned her gaze back to the scene before her and sighed at the continued wailing.

“May I silence that infuriating shrieking?” she asked, stimulating her [Starshadow Core] and flexing her right palm.

“Sure,” Kairi said coolly. “Just don’t kill them.”

The Bladedancer nodded and let out a grumble as she reached out toward both men. The screaming turned to silence as she knocked them both out, and then let out a sudden sigh when she realized what day it was.

“Damn it,” she muttered.

“What?” Kairi asked idly.

“It’s Saturday night,” Xarina answered with a grumble. “I have dinner with the King tomorrow.”

The Princess glanced up at her and then abruptly laughed in a wholeheartedly mocking tone.

“Rina and Ace, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

Xarina’s eyes rolled upward, and she tried to ignore the Princess’ howl of laughter as they worked to collect the unconscious slave leaders, working to immunize herself against the slew of mockery inevitably coming her way.

Kairi’s teasing, she knew, would continue long into the night.