Monster of the Dark Read online

  The Construct’s next attack she batted away with pathetic ease. He was literally swinging blindly, and a simple flick of her wrist almost ripped his sword from his hands. A hard hit to his head made him stagger. It was possible that a very hard telekinetically-amplified thrust could have penetrated his armor, but she didn’t need all of that. She showed the Construct her palm and, moments later, burned a hole through him. He fell to the ground and soon died, and all that remained was his counterpart.

  He still had his shield and was fresh, and his weapon was faster than hers. Moreover, she didn’t want to go through all that nonsense again, so she chose guile instead of power. It would all happen so quickly that even her observers would be hard-pressed to say what, exactly, happened.

  She rushed the Construct full on. Just running with her muscles was a refreshing change after all that work with the prior Construct. Her opponent was waiting, braced, perhaps thinking she’d tackle him like she had his counterpart. The predictability of the attack also gave him an opportunity. His axe began rushing down to strike her head when the moment came, and she averted it by moving her sword across her body. That modest act also moved the Construct out of position. Unfortunately, she couldn’t counterattack, but that wasn’t the intention. In fact, she even let go of the sword. Then Carmen jumped—almost flew. Her momentum carried her behind him as she twisted in the air to face the opposite direction before telekinetically stopping her momentum to land behind him. Her sword flew back to her hand and, just like that, was pressed against his throat.

  You could shake the hand of someone who was shielded. The system was smart. It wouldn’t perceive something so innocent as a threat, just like it wouldn’t perceive a relatively slow-moving piece of metal as a threat, even if it did have an edge. Thankfully, there was a gap in the Construct’s armor just large enough for her to exploit. She held the sword against his throat in one hand, his head in the other, and pushed. The edge did all the work.

  The group watched the monitors with held breath. It was hard to comprehend what they had just seen. It wasn’t her cleanest fight, and there were times in which she was clearly pressed. But it gave them a glimpse. For several brief moments, Edge unleashed everything she had. Most of the readings were off the scale.

  “Incredible…” one of them uttered.

  More Constructs entered the room, and she dispatched them with almost comical ease. She was like an earthquake or a tidal wave, inevitable and devastating. Janus could only shake his head as he watched.

  “How does she look?” he asked through the intercom.

  He preferred to be in the room with Edge whenever she was working, but there were advantages to being in the observation booth. Being able to see all the readouts was one. It took a moment or two for the technicians to get back to him.

  “Off the scale,” one of them finally said. “A bit inefficient, but still impressive.”

  “She’s toying with us,” Janus said after a few seconds of thought.

  “What do you mean?”

  He paused for a moment as Carmen killed another Construct. He doubted it ever crossed her mind that she wasn’t the only one who felt them die. She was particularly brutal with that one, cutting him in half with her long-sword. And, unless Janus missed his guess, he swore he saw her smirk at the accomplishment. She’s never done that before, he noted.

  “The inefficiency,” he said, trying to ignore the aberration. “She’s not really trying. She’s toying with us.”

  The technicians in the observation booth shared looks among themselves. Janus knew his charge better than anyone, but if she was holding back, just how much was left to be uncovered?

  “Why would she do that?” one of them asked him.

  Janus looked at one of the cameras that dotted the room, seemingly staring at whoever asked the question. He sighed. “Because Edge likes being particularly stubborn. That’s just how she is.”

  “But Artemis had more trouble with two shielded and armed Constructs. Edge can’t be that much stronger than she is.”

  Artemis. Always Artemis, Janus thought. It had to be the biggest rivalry that never actually existed. They didn’t even know each other. He could easily point out opponents that Edge had greater trouble dispatching than Artemis did, but what would be the point? At times, he wished they could fight each other just so everyone would shut up about them.

  “I don’t think she is,” Janus said. “They’re just two different people. According to her handler, Artemis toys with us by being excessively violent when we want her to show restraint. Edge holds back when we want her to not show restraint. It’s nothing special. Lock someone in a cage their whole life and they’ll think up small ways to defy you. Besides, they’re getting to that age,” he said.

  He was happy he didn’t have kids, let alone teenagers. Why people bothered was beyond him.

  “So, what should we do?”

  Janus’s own words echoed in his head while he thought of his charge. Edge holds back when we want her to not show restraint. Except being “limited” was as much a part of her personality as water was wet. Even that small smirk, if he saw what he thought he had, was limited. It made her what she was. He’d even named her after it. She did what he expected her to do and no more. Until now, though, he had never really wondered why. Did one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy actually not know how powerful she was? He couldn’t tell either way.

  He watched the girl effortlessly slay a man twice her size, but this time the handler could only marvel at the thinly veiled vulnerability of her deadly machinations. No one else saw it— the two halves, each unknowingly in the service of the other. It was, however, the eternal quandary that had vexed Janus during the entirety of his time with her. He doubted she was even aware.

  He thought about it. Then he thought about it some more. As his monster felled more Constructs, he was reminded of a kitten toying with a mouse. So unnoticed was her effort, he could almost see her eyes drift off into daydreams as her claws were soaked with blood. In the end, he guessed she just needed to grow up. His eyes fell in that moment. It was something he never wanted to do, but sometimes the method superseded the means.

  “Send her in,” he said.

  Edge glanced in his direction at that. She even held it for a few seconds, which was rare for her. When he returned her gaze, she looked back at the door and waited patiently for whatever may come.

  Carmen stared at the door and tried to forget what she had just seen. She swallowed nervously. She just couldn’t believe it. If she didn’t know better, Janus looked sad. It didn’t appear to be sadness from pain, shame, or regret. He didn’t seem depressed either, just sad, for one crystal-clear brief moment. Carmen didn’t know what that meant. She’d always figured Janus’s parents were stones; he certainly shared many of their traits.

  Just then, there was another energy just outside the room. Constructs were dull, lifeless husks. Even the Constructs she fought that felt pain and fear and cried out when she killed them were barely more than that. This energy was greater than a thousand Constructs. It was vibrant, as all truly living things were, and it was growing ever greater.

  The energy outside the room only increased in strength, becoming more and more excited. Carmen’s skin tingled. She glanced at her handler again and thought of all the times she’d been in this situation. A small fear was lit. A lifetime of torture, neglect, and hurt poured into every aspect of her psyche, making her feel suddenly weak. This is it, she thought. Whatever was behind the door was going to kill her, and this time they were going to leave her dead.

  The door opened ever so slowly, creaking as it went. Three Constructs ran toward her. Carmen paused. She’d expected more, but that thing—that energy, that feeling—was still there. This time, the Constructs wore soft armor, a minor annoyance. She thrust through the first one with such force that he may as well have been protected by paper. As the construct fell away dying, she decided she’d had enough. There would be no more rules. Ever
yone in this facility wanted to kill her. They had always wanted nothing more than to kill her and break her—to end her as she knew herself. And she would do her best to make that goal very, very difficult. What could Janus do to her, anyway? Send her to bed without dinner? That would certainly bring her to tears.

  She dispatched the other two Constructs by smashing them together and then flinging them into the nearest wall. A solid crunch filled the room when they hit. She dropped the next score by telekinetically snapping their necks. Yet more Constructs came. Perhaps she didn’t sense one great energy. Maybe there were thousands upon thousands of Constructs hidden behind the door, and the mass was like one great cloud.

  Either way, the arms and legs of Constructs that got too close quickly littered the ground. These ones could feel fear—she could almost taste it. With that in mind, a part of her hoped that, if she were gruesome enough, they would just leave her alone. Thus far, her theory was proving incorrect. She felt a twinge of pity for them. It was a wonder exactly how they compelled the Constructs to attack her. The business of the fight rooms seemed to be a forgone conclusion by all involved, though. She had never seen it questioned or challenged by anyone. Indeed, the thought was quickly pushed to the back of her mind and forgotten.

  She ripped a tooth out of one of the Constructs and used the hard little piece of enamel as a makeshift bullet. It zipped around the around the room at a speed too fast to see as dozens of Constructs fell over dead after a puff of blood from their head or chest. One Construct was lifted off his feet by the impact of the tooth hitting him square in the chest. It shattered and the fragments went on to imbed themselves in the Constructs unfortunate enough to be standing next to him. Carmen didn’t mean for that to happen, but she’d take it. Even so, they kept coming.

  She gave the lead Construct of the next group a hard look. It would be enough to make any normal person stop in their tracks, but not this one. A mere thought crushed him into a ball no bigger than the palm of her hand. The blood sprayed from his rapidly shrinking body like a fountain, and the entire room was painted with it, except for Carmen and Janus. The splash flowed around them to splatter the wall behind. Upon seeing that, the other Constructs did give pause for a moment. Her sword permanently ended their hesitation.

  “Holy shit. She’s like Artemis in there,” one of the technicians uttered under his breath.

  “Yes, it’s quite impressive,” Janus said, sarcastic. He doubted anyone picked up on it.

  For all her power and all this fury, it was violence just for violence’s sake. She was as aware of what she was doing as a boulder tumbling down a mountain. This was beneath her.

  “Are you sure about this, Janus? Do you really want the two of them in there? If Edge goes all out, there may not be anything left,” a different technician said.

  He didn’t give much consideration to the warning. That was the point. Besides, safeguards were in place. They always were.

  “Is our girl ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah. We’ll be sending her out in just a few seconds.”

  “Excellent.”

  Carmen crushed a Construct’s head, causing his eyes to pop out. It was always a rather disgusting side effect. In any case, that energy was still behind the door, undiminished despite all the dead Constructs. She slit the throat of her next opponent before slicing another in half. She didn’t have much time to worry about the energy, whatever it was.

  The door opened again, and she was ready. A Construct carrying a baseball bat rushed her. She let him hit her. There was a thunderous clap as the bat hit a wall of air, but her hair didn’t even move. She responded by hitting him in the face with the hilt of her sword. Then, as the Construct staggered back, she cut him from shoulder to hip, splitting his chest open. The next Construct would have tackled her if she didn’t telekinetically flick him out of the way. He hit the wall head first and slumped to the ground, never to get up again. A flick of her wrist disemboweled another. A kick, stepping in with her shoulder, and then another flick of her wrist cut a different Construct’s face off. Another lunged at her. This one was fast; all she saw was the blur of its movement. But a half-spin on her part moved her out of the way and brought her sword down on the back of its neck. It was all so easy. She barely even saw the last one, and now its body and head were sliding in two different directions across the floor.

  Just then, Carmen noticed the energy behind the door was gone. It wasn’t dissipated or someplace else, it was just gone. Odd, she thought. Something like that didn’t just disappear without a reason. As she thought back on the last few seconds, nothing stuck out to her. She did what she always did in these rooms: kill Constructs. Now that she was thinking about it, she wondered about that last one. It was very fast, and she never did get a good look at it. There was just a blur, and she reacted as she always did. No thinking, no worrying, and no hesitation—she had simply killed him.

  As she thought about it more, Carmen was hard-pressed to say that the brief flash had even been a person. There was a growl from her subconscious and then a thought. It was of when she’d been trapped in here with that monster. Just thinking about it made her shudder. Janus had killed it, but who was to say there weren’t more? They could be bred like the Constructs.

  She turned around to make sure that it was truly dead. What she saw was far worse. Her entire body seemed to seize while, at the same time, she felt very weak. An odd pain rotted and festered in the pit of her stomach, and the sensation spread throughout her with each beat of her racing heart. She tried to speak, but her tongue was dead. The only sound she produced could best be described as a cross between a wail and a groan.

  “Mi—” she tried again, but the festering rot had reached her throat, choking off her voice. It hurt to breathe.

  She said it again, but the word was too quiet for anyone to hear.

  “Mikayla,” she finally muttered. “No…” she said softly as she went to her dog. “How…. How did this—”

  There was nothing Carmen or anyone else could do. Mikayla was well and truly dead, and no magnitude of science or hope could change that fact. It had been a masterful strike. With one blow, she had severed the German shepherd’s head from her body. The wound was frightfully clean, its effectiveness obvious for all to see. One of Mikayla’s paws twitched at random intervals, but that was the only thing marring the utter precision of the girl’s craft.

  She fell to her knees and reached out to touch what was left of her former friend but stopped short. She wanted to—she desperately wanted to—but part of her feared what would happen. Her parents, the Constructs, Mikayla…. Intentional or not, Carmen had destroyed everything she had ever touched. The taint from her fingers could cause what was left of the dog to burst into flames, disintegrate, or who knew what. For the whole of her life, she had always wondered why people were wary of her, if not downright fearful. She had never had any friends, not really. She had always hoped that people just weren’t used to what she was and that it would pass over time. It never passed, though, not even for her parents. As Mikayla’s blood spread across the floor, Carmen began to understand why.

  “Do you remember what I told you when we first met?” She looked up with a start to see Janus standing over her. “I said there is nothing that I will teach you. And I haven’t. I can’t even say I ever actually tested you. If I did anything, I merely gave you choices.”

  It didn’t take Carmen long to realize that the reason she was in this room today had nothing to do with actual fighting. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “You planned for me to kill her all along,” she said. “From the day you gave her to me.”

  “I planned nothing,” Janus said dismissively.

  “But—” she tried to protest, but her handler cut her off.

  “I engineer the situation. You ultimately choose how you respond to it. And that has and will always have nothing to do with me.”

  “But—”

  “Edge, I have a specific purpose that serve
s one mandate,” he said. “You are a monster created to give other monsters that would do us harm pause. Those were some of the first words I said to you.”

  “I’m not a monster,” Carmen said quietly.

  Janus sneered. “Yet….”

  He looked at her and then at the bloody sword still in her hands. She didn’t realize she was still holding it and dropped the weapon immediately. Her handler then looked around the room, and her gaze followed his, a half-step behind. The walls were painted red with her opponents’ blood. Body parts were strewn about the floor. Bodies lay everywhere. There was no blocking the construct from her mind—not this time. She couldn’t grit her teeth and ignore it. She couldn’t fight and vanquish them all.

  “Who was it that decided to use lethal force against your own dog? It was not I,” Janus said as he walked slowly behind her. She heard his voice like an echoing whisper.

  “You never needed to even fight back—not once in any of the fights you’ve ever had. You could have ripped the door off its hinges and walked straight back to your room if you wanted to. Few in this complex would have the means to actually stop you. Or you could have simply let them kill you. There’s nothing I could do to take that choice away from you. I wouldn’t even waste my time trying.” He took a long pause before he spoke again. “You fight yourself, Edge. I have never known why, but you do. Still, you can’t deny what you are. You are a monster like me, like all of us, and you always have been. Your choices over the years have only served to illuminate that fact.”