Chapter 5

  Claire Altaluna had cleared the small patch of grassy earth on top of the tree and bush infested cliff-side before she laid down on her stomach, propped up on her elbow as she slithered her arms around her sniper rifle and looked through the sniper scope. She made sure she was comfortable enough to make the quickest and slightest change in posture and direction of her gun before fully committing to lying down. She inspected her weapon for the fourth time now, making sure everything was put back together perfectly after her most recent cleaning. She didn’t want a repeat of her third mission when her weapon jammed and she barely succeeded the mission with a great struggle off improvised stealth and, at some points, pure aggression.

  She smoothed her tan-colored camouflage cloak with a head piece that covered everything but her shimmering baby blue eyes. She had managed to bundle her honey-golden blond hair into the head piece, something she was grateful for. In all her life, she had only met perhaps five or six other individuals that had her colored hair and anybody else who had met her for the first time seemed to have their eyes on her head, some people better at hiding their glances than others. She adjusted her scope to focus at the distance she had assumed she would be taking fire, if everything had gone according to plan.

  When she looked through her scope again, she had to scan the surrounding land before her eyes fell on the group responsible for her mission in the first place. A group of men in the same tan-colored cloaks and hoods, which were most likely worn to protect themselves from the soul-sucking heat of the sun in the Paiyian desert they had come from not even two days ago. The surrounding area was a mix of desert rocks and occasional sand pits that came from the north clashing against the deep green jungles that lied several miles south, so it wasn’t too out of place for the men to be wearing such cloaks.

  She watched as the group voicelessly spoke and gestured to each other, and should couldn’t tell from the lack of facial expressions if they were angry or annoyed with another, or if they generally spoke with such large hand gestures. It was eight men, traveling with camels and one wagon that hovered rather than carried on wheels. Rynian wagons coming from the center of a Paiyian desert? Claire thought. I’m guessing nobody told them that that’s extremely suspicious. Don’t they know the Paiyian code of restricted technology?

  She aimed her scope at the heads of every individual, watching them more than preparing to take fire, but she felt confident that she could securely take a one-shot-kill at any moment’s notice. But unless things went south and called for improvised action, she was going to wait for the signal. By the time she scanned the all the men in the group a third time, she was playfully seeing how fast she could switch from one man’s head to another while looking through her scope, pretending to take fire at a rapid pace on the unsuspecting group below.

  “You know, if you keep waving your gun around like that, people may take notice to you.” she heard a voice warn her from the ear piece that sat in her ear. She felt a small wave of embarrassment wash over her as she stopped mid-swing. She sometimes forgot how sharp her partner’s eyes could be.

  “But Sage, I’m booored.” she drew the last word out with the rest of her breath in exaggerated complaint. She could hear him scoff through the headset and could already picture him shaking his head.

  “In the last two years that we’ve worked together, when have you not been bored?” Sage Darkwood asked her.

  “When we’re doing something that’s actually important. Or at least a little bit of action. I mean, we’re Phantoms; we’ve been trained to do more than take a few head shots at some unsuspecting nobodies at the end of a dessert in bumfuck nowhere.”

  “Do you mean the missions where we get shot, kidnapped, or tortured?” Sage asked darkly, his voice not sounding fond of the past events he had in mind. “Or the ones where we’ve had to murder innocent witnesses to the chaos we’ve brought to their towns with our business? Or the ones where we actually do everything by the book and still get yelled at by our higher ups?”

  “I dunno… any of them?” the way she casually responded made Sage wonder if she was joking like a sane person would, or if she had meant it.

  Claire took her eye out of her scope and peered in the surrounding area. Miles out on the horizon laid the beginning of the end of the desert and the group of men were heading directly toward their direction, nothing but sandy dunes and the shimmering waves of heat seen in the air. They were approaching the land that shifted from sandy hills to a growing forest. Somewhere in the midst of smaller trees and bushes, she knew that Sage was hiding with his long bow, ready to take anybody out at a given notice like her. She couldn’t make out exactly where he was, but she figured he was in one of three specific spots from what she could tell and how long they had been partners. They were able to read each other most of the time, and Claire was appreciative to have a partner should could connect with on a such a level.

  They had been partners ever since the beginning of their senior year in the Phantom Academy, and they couldn’t stand each other when they had first worked together. Claire was a straight-A overachiever who wanted to prove her worth. Since nearly all Phantoms are typically orphans, Claire had always missed having some type of parental figure in her life, but the praise she had received from teachers and higher-ups in her school career were the closest thing she ever received to motherly or fatherly praise. And until they had graduated, all she had ever wanted was to be praised and give her best to any mission, any duty, any person of power who could help her feel worthy.

  Sage, on the other hand, was a hard worker… but only on his terms. Sage was usually more brilliant than most students in any of his classes, especially tactics and strategy classes. He would ace every single test, but he failed to ever turn in even a single assignment. Whenever he was asked why he never did any of his homework or classwork, he claimed to never involve himself in anything that wasn’t a worthy challenge or will better his life, like payment or better social status with his peers. And it seemed that nothing would ever change that…

  Until the two were partnered up in a class that was mandatory to graduate, where one of the few rules in the class were that you weren’t allowed to trade partners. The whole class was based on low-class missions that could help students gain experience for when they were to go out in the world and be official Phantoms, taking on the secret jobs of the Central Government. Jobs in school would range from guarding somebody from a distance as they traveled from point A to point B, to taking on a weaker daemon with a large group and a couple of teachers. It was necessary to learn if they were going to go out into the world with important assassination jobs that could turn the tide of every single country and its economy, or to possibly sacrifice themselves fighting a daemon that’s unusually large or has some type of special ability willing to destroy everything in its path. Laying down your life for causes where nobody would ever know your sacrifice or pain was the exact purpose of a Phantom; to have no loyalties or tithes to anything or anyone other than the greater good of mankind. The perfect task force to for those who wanted to make the world a better place… or at least that’s what it was known to be on paper.

  After a month of rubbing each other the wrong way, Claire and Sage were sent on a survival mission in the woods. The exercise was to drop each pair of warriors in the middle of a known daemon-infested forest with nothing more than a dagger per person. They had to manage to stay alive and inside the forest for 72 hours before the school came back to find others. Sage’s annoyance seemed to deplete the moment Claire had killed a highly venomous snake their first night, and that was after she had proven herself useful when she fashioned a fire and a tepee made of sticks and large banana leaves. Claire seemed to ease off of Sage when Sage dove after Claire who had fallen into a rapid-flowing river when a muddy hill gave way under her feet and slide her into the cold waters. Sage dove in without hesitation and managed to grab her and snag onto a log that was dammed up by a group of rocks, and the two worked together to pull each other out. And that was only the beginning of their friendship.

  Over the course of the last two years, Claire had noticed she was a lot more relaxed when it came to being recognized by her higher-ups thanks to Sage’s easy-going attitude towards missions. He was rubbing off on her in minor ways, and she noticed that her superiors actually seemed to be more impressed without her being overly-eager about every single mission. And Sage was starting to respect the concept of a hierarchy and that he had to learn how to take orders without a sarcastic remark. When the two were originally paired, the student with the highest and the lowest overall grades in their class, they thought the school was making a mistake. But as they look back on their adventures and how other people had worked together, they couldn’t be happier with the selection. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and made sure to strengthen each other to become better as individuals as well as a unit.

  “So...” Claire talked into her headset, still taking careful aim at the group of men on the valley floor, trying to fill the emptiness of boredom that welled inside her. “If you had to fight a person from any country, what order would you want to fight them?”

  “You and these weird-ass questions you like to ask...” she could feel Sage shake his head through his tone. “What are we talking about, like... just regular people?”

  “What?” Claire asked, and the image in her head made her laugh. “No, not normal civilians.”

  “You sure? You’re not expecting me to go down to Ryn and fight some hooker? Or beat up a baker in some Paiyian village?”

  “Ha-ha,” she laughed, semi-sarcastically. “No, I mean like, real warriors… people who weren’t meant to fight. Who do you think you’d have a hard time with?”

  “Hmm…” Sage gave it a few moments to think thoroughly. “If we’re talking about the best of the best of warriors, I’d have to say… From hardest to easiest… Miizunese, Ghaldian, Paiyian, and then Rynian. In that order.”

  “What!?” it was hard for Claire to keep her voice to a regular volume with such a shocking answer. “You’d rather fight a Paiyian than a Rynian? The people of Paiyi don’t have anything better than spears, swords and arrows. You really think that outweighs guns and nukes?”

  “Okay, well, what person in Ryn do you know that has an atomic weapon? Like personally? Nobody alone owns a nuke, I can guarantee that. And secondly, have you actually paid attention to the people when we’ve visited Ryn? They’re nothing more than a group of hedonists, and I’m pretty sure they would surrender to anybody who promised to indulge their weekend with drugs and women.”

  “Yeah but still, I’m more scared of a gun than a javelin. I’m just saying...”

  “And I hear you,” Sage said in a tone that he always used before driving home a good point. “But if you were to swap weapons, who would you be more afraid of: A Rynian with a spear, or a Paiyian with gun?”

  Claire tried to find a valid argument or point she could make to counter his ideas, not because she didn’t agree with him, but the two were constantly playing devil’s advocate with one another, always asking questions to see if the other had really thought through before choosing believe something or follow an ideology. But as hard as she tried to think of something, the only thing she could think of was the hysterical image of a soft, nonathletic soldier of Ryn trying to charge at her with a spear. The weakest person in the Academy could take out such a person with a blindfold. It was literally one of their exercises their sophomore year to fight a person without any weapon training while wearing a blindfold and being bare handed. A lot of fingers were lost that day, Claire could remember.

  “Fine, asshole.” she said, defeated at thinking of anything to remark with. “Paiyian people are scarier than Rynian people in terms of fight...” she trailed off before another thought popped into her head. “Okay, what same type of list, but what nation would you rather fuck? Go.”

  Sage shifted uncomfortably, remaining silent for a while. He wiped his brow of sweat from the warmth of the sun and the amount of clothing they had to wear on this mission. He tried to make sure his black and white striped hair didn’t expose itself from his headpiece identical to Claire’s. He knew that Claire was aware how much talking about sex and romance was something Sage didn’t rightly know how to express. Phantoms as a whole were constantly discouraged from seeking long term commitment to anybody because their lives were dedicated to serving the betterment of the world, and they could be asked to sacrifice themselves at any given moment. It wouldn’t be fair to leave a spouse or family behind without so much a second thought. But even beyond those reasons, he never really quite understood his relation with girls.

  It wasn’t to say he didn’t have any experience with them. He had slept with a small handful of different girls, and sex always felt good on a physical level. But he didn’t understand the appeal to things like post-coital cuddling or pillow talks. And most the time he had ever found himself bedding a woman, it was almost always when he was drunk at a bar after a successful mission and a tipsy woman would flirt heavily on him for hours. After a few more drinks, he would decide that a physical release could be the icing on the cake he needed, and have the woman lead him to her house or a nearby motel. He was told by a lot of local women around the world that they found him attractive, and his cool, mysterious silence and brooding nature seemed to draw women in even more, especially in Ghald for some reason. So, it wasn’t hard to find somebody willing whenever the mood did find him, and that mood rarely ever came.

  “Uh, hello? Did somebody get too embarrassed to talk about sex again?” Claire teased over the headset. The fact that she was right made Sage blush in embarrassment. He was happy she couldn’t see him to make fun of him even more.

  “I’m still here,” he cleared his throat. “I just haven’t really looked at women in different countries like that.”

  “Of course. Who can forget Sage the Sexless.”

  “I’m not sexless!” Sage said, talking almost too loud for what the mission required.

  “I know, I know.” Claire laughed, almost enjoying tormenting her partner too much.

  Sage wasn’t sure what to say. Unlike Sage, Claire had a knack for getting attached to men and relationships. At first, it started in the Academy when she was interested in other Phantoms, which made more sense to Sage since they all had a similar lifestyle. But when her and Sage would get shipped out for a long-term mission, and she fell for one of the local boys in the town they stayed in, it was never a good thing. Either the Phantom Claire was trained to be would be too tough and cold-hearted for whoever she was dating or she was the overly emotional, overly clingy one who would get her heart broken. It was every time she had her heart broken that she would drink herself into a sobbing mess, and when she couldn’t cry any longer, she found herself in the bed of whoever might be willing.

  There was one time she had slipped into Sage’s room, half undressed when she entered his bed. Sage quickly jolted awake as she pressed her body against his, but he quickly took hold of her shoulders, looked her dead in the eye and simply said, “You’re drunk.” He had gotten her a cup of water and allowed her to sleep in his bed for the sake of keeping her company, but by the time he woke up in the morning, she was in her own room. The two never spoke about that night, and Sage wasn’t sure if it was because she didn’t want to revisit an embarrassing moment sober or if she truly didn’t remember what happened.

  Claire could almost pick up on what Sage was thinking about due to his awkward silence. He usually got oddly quiet whenever Claire’s romantic past got brought up. She wasn’t sure if it was for letting herself get so wrapped up in her feelings when a Phantom should know better, or the awkwardness of her drunkenly coming onto Sage. She didn’t know exactly what her relationship with Sage was besides a fantastic battle partner. She couldn’t say that she loved him like a brother because she wouldn’t crawl into her brother’s bed and try to do some of the things she was willing to do. But she had almost absolutely no attraction to him romantically. She tried to imagine a normal life with him, normal husband and wife living in a normal house with two normal kids… the thought once almost made her burst out laughing in the middle of a boring meeting.

  “Soooo… you haven’t answer the question,” Claire said, trying to get the focus of topic back on board. “Out of the four countries, who would Sage the Semi-Sexless-” Sage groaned at the new title as well. “-want to bang out of anyone in this country.”

  “Miizunese, Ghaldian, Rynian, Paiyian. In that order.” He answered almost without hesitation, which caught Claire off guard. Then again, Sage seemed to always come up with strange or random surprises.

  “That was quick...” Claire whistled with feigned impression. “It’s almost like you think about sex and war are alike if we compared your two lists.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Sage refused. “I’d rather fuck a Rynian woman than fight a Rynian man.”

  “Why’s that? I thought your whole fetish was, like, strong empowered women who could literally put a knife in your heart?”

  “Well, yeah...” he agreed. “But look at Ryn as a society. All they do is chase their most basic and carnal desires all of their lives, barely ever working hard towards anything, unless they’re involved in sciences and education. Those bright, beautiful, brilliant minds who pursue education are surrounded by dopamine-chasing zombies who can’t even ask questions that aren’t in direct correlation getting a roof over their head, food in their belly, a body or bodies to sleep with, and drugs to make life more interesting or make you forget all your troubles. So, if I go to Ryn seeking a woman who’s most experienced in the bedroom, I’ll be going to a land where even virgins know how to suck properly because of all the porn that circulates around there like it’s normal. And if I end up with one of those brainier women, then I’m sure they’ll be happy to finally meet somebody worthy of a decent conversation. And the type of women who usually pursue education hold a high esteem of themselves, so they don’t just sleep around with any loser-with-a-cock like a lot of the waitresses or housekeepers in that nation. And all that time between partners can make a person’s cravings grow, so by the time I’m there with stimulating conversation and they decide to give themselves to me in the bedroom-”

  “They’re ready to do just about anything with you, yeah, yeah.” While it wasn’t normal for Sage to be interested in talking about sex or sharing his views or thoughts on the subject, the few times he did, it was almost always overly logical. While most guys she’s met had simply seen a pretty girl and that’s all it took to get them to want to sleep with her, Sage preferred the option that was going to represent the best experience.

  “At least I take my time thinking about my options, Miss ‘I’ve-taken-three-too-many-shots-so-who’s-cute-and-trying-to-take-me-home.’ You keep saying throughout our partnership that you’re not into girls, but you’ve brought three home so far.”

  “You know why they call hard liquor ‘spirits’, right? Because when you black out, you’ve been taken over by the spirit of the bottle. Besides, it’s only been three girls over the course of two years. How many guys have I brought back to my bed?”

  “Claire... if I know you’re not aware of the number of guys you’ve slept with, what makes you think I’m going to remember that number?”

  “Careful there, Sage,” Claire warned in a sing-song voice as she moved her scope away from the group and towards a horde of bushes that Sage might’ve been hiding in. “I’ve often heard that slut-shamers usually get shot.”

  “Is that before or after the slut starts aiming her gun at the right set of bushes?” Sage jested.

  “Hang on...” Claire’s voice had a sudden edge to it, sending Sage back into alarm. The two looked at the group of men who were heading towards them stop in their tracks. They seemed to arguing in a dialect neither were familiar with based off the few sounds they could make out from such a distance, most likely a language that hailed somewhere in the depths of Paiyi. But the group of men weren’t even a quarter mile away from Sage, the area they were instructed to attack the group. They weren’t supposed to fire a single shot until they got to the right location, or if plans had gone wrong. “What are they doing?”

  “It looks like they’re having a dispute about something… I wonder what about?” Sage said as he pulled an arrow out of his quiver and brushed one of the feathers of his arrows with his thumb as he waited to see if he was going to have to make an impulsive shot. He watched as the men took turns yelling at each other. At one point, they had pointed down the road where Sage was posted, something that made him feel uncomfortable. There was a good chance they weren’t talking about him or the dangers he and Claire were about to unleash, but he didn’t like where the conversation seemed to be going.

  “Can you make out anything they’re saying?” Claire asked, seeing as Sage was a great deal closer to them than her, but even if he were able to hear their words, he was sure he still wouldn’t understand them.

  “Not at all...” Sage said as he watched the men argue with one another. It seemed somebody had messed up on something and they were trying to find out who was to blame. The men took turns shouting and pointing at each other and the wagon full of covered and clothed items. Sage watched them as they seemed to come to no resolve, still taking turns shouting at one another. That had made Sage remember an important piece of information.

  “Hey Claire, in our debrief about this mission… how many people did they say there was supposed to be?”

  “Twelve. Why do you...” Claire was about to ask the question until she herself had realized there were only eight men around the wagon arguing. That’s why Sage felt so off about the men arguing, he realized. He and Claire had pulled off the “arguing couple” routine whenever trying to ambush an unsuspecting party on multiple occasions. The moment Sage had realized that the men arguing seemed to be stalling for time more than actually bickering was when Sage had heard the soft snapping of a twig behind him.

  Sage turned to find a man wearing the same cloak as the group by the wagon lunge at him with a long dagger in his hands, sending the both of them tumbling on the ground. The fact that he was able to get so close to Sage without detection was something that really threw Sage off guard. With all the training they had done, all of the slaughtering they had both survived and brought upon people, Sage knew that whoever was trying to flank him with a surprise was nobody to underestimate. When the two finished rolling around, the man was on top of Sage, a little taller and much heavier than Sage, making it almost impossible to lift the body off himself. Sage’s hands clasped around the hands of his attacker who was slowly trying to drive the point of the blade into Sage’s heart. Sage managed to stop the assault, but the it was a struggle to keep the blade above his chest, and it was only slowly drooping lower. The strength and positional advantage of his foe was too great…

  Until Claire had noticed the shaking and rustling of the bushes. She could hear grunts and struggles of Sage and another person over her headset, and quickly got into her professional state of mind as she looked through her scope. The men near the wagon had noticed the commotion and started to reach for their weapons as well. The man attacking Sage had shouted something in their foreign tongue, and that made the rest of the group prepare themselves for a fight. But just as the men started to unsheathe their weapons, one man fell to the ground, blood spilling from his head. And before another second could pass, another man dropped, and the sounds of two heavy sniper rounds being fired finally caught up to the ears of those so far away from Claire. When the men realized there were two different points of being attacked, they started to split up and hide around the cart out of Claire’s sight or to help their friend who was fighting Sage.

  Luckily for Sage, the sounds of the two shots had shaken his attackers grip for just a second, but it was long enough for Sage to pull one arm away from supporting the blade from piercing him, and into the quiver on his back being smashed into the soft dirt with the weight of both men. His fingers felt the tickle of a feather at the tail end of an arrow, and wrapped his fingers around it. By the time his attacker had given his full attention back to Sage, Sage had plunged the arrow head right into the side of the man’s throat. The bottom of the man’s hood started to well and flood with blood as the man gave one last sickly exhale of breath, oozed over in blood, as the body fell sideways.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Sage, who had heard the foot of a couple men racing towards him with battle cries, looked around for his bow to be able to shoot. He spotted it in his original spot in the bushes, several feet away from him, and the men approaching him were only an arm’s length away. He got to his knees as quickly as he could, and removed the arrow from the corpse he had just slain and deflected the blow of a sword with the arrow head, and was lucky enough to do the same to the second man of the pair who were attacking him. The momentum of his parries brought the men off balance, and he was able to quickly remove another arrow from his quiver as he stood and put it seamlessly into the eye of one of the men who let out a blood-curdling scream.

  Claire saw the commotion down below and got up onto her knees as she drew a dagger from the sheathe on her hip. She examined the battlefield below her carefully before taking as careful an aim directly into the sky above her. She calculated accordingly before she threw the dagger as hard as she could into the sky, making it seem to disappear into the vast blue sea above her. It wasn’t until she had thrown the dagger that she had noticed two men coming towards her on top of the cliff, and they had managed to stealthily conceal themselves until they were at an alarming closeness. Claire was lucky enough to grab the handgun attached to her other hip, and unload three rounds into the shoulders and face of one of her attackers. The other one managed to tackle Claire to the ground after she deflected his sword with her gun skillfully.

  The man was on top of Claire, both of them had their weapons flung from their hands as they hit the ground. Her assailant had tried to strangle her, but she caught his hands just before he could tighten his grip around her throat. There was a struggle as he tried to force his fingers around her neck and she kept his hands from getting even an inch closer. They stayed plateaued for a few moments until Claire began to give a weak, throaty chuckle, and her chuckle evolved into a full-on laugh.

  “What’s…. wrong…?” the man grunted, feeling successful in breaking his enemy’s ego enough to make them go mad with laughter as he did his best to strangle the life out of her. “Are you… that… afraid... to die?”

  “No!” Claire laughed even harder. To the man’s surprise, her laughter wasn’t making her grip seem any weaker. No, if anything… she was getting stronger. “It’s because you’re stupid and weak.” Claire laughed again before she gripped the man’s hands even tighter, and used her feet to throw the man over her head and behind her, right off the edge of the cliff. She heard his screams end with a wet, faint, sickly splat. She got up and finished chuckling as she wiped a tear from her eye from laughing so hard. “Ah… so many idiots in the world. I mean, why would anyone volunteer to fight us?” Claire spoke into her headset as she looked down to where Sage had been.

  “Maybe it’s because they didn’t know it was us they were getting involved with.” Sage retorted after he finished driving the dull blade of his enemy into its owner's skull. He quickly grabbed his bow and emerged from the bushes, in plain view of the cart, and quickly took out two men with shots to the face and throat with two quickly drawn arrows. Sage heard two more bodies drop followed by the delayed sounds of rifle shots, and at one point Sage saw a dagger fall out of the sky and on top of the skull of a man who was trying to do his best to hide out of sight of the fight behind the motionless cart.

  “Was that you?” Sage asked Claire.

  “You mean the dagger? Yeah, that guy was trying to stay out of the fight like a little bitch.” Claire stressed the last word at the same moment as she head-shot another man.

  “Haven’t we talked about how it isn’t lady-like to swear so much?”

  “Up yours.” Claire spat. She took a shot at another man and watched his blood spray about like a popped balloon full of red dye as he dropped to the floor. There remained only one man, and Sage took aim at him before he dropped his weapon and put his hands in the air to surrender.

  “Please! Wait! Stop! I surrender! I yield, I yield!” he pleaded as he dropped to his knees.

  “You think I give a shit?” Sage asked coldly as he pulled back the string of his bow.

  “Please! I’m a Phantom!”

  Sage paused and lowered his weapon slightly.

  “What?” Sage didn’t hide his surprise.

  “I’m a Phantom! I work for the Central Government!” The person speaking sounded like a young man, not much younger than Sage had been. “You know what happens when a person knowingly kills a government agent right? They’ll hunt you down, and bring you back for a trial… if they’re feeling kind. Otherwise they’ll find you and kill you and erase your entire existence like you were never there. These guys do not mess around.”

  “Interesting...” Sage lowered his weapon even more. “You hear that, Claire?” he asked through his head piece.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming down now. Don’t kill him.”

  Claire made her way down the cliff and reloaded her weapons on the way down, just in case. When she had finally made it down to the wagon, Sage had his bow drawn, standing only a few feet away from the man who was on his knees with his hands held above his head. She walked up next to Sage, who kept his weapon on their prisoner.

  “So, you’re a Phantom, huh?” Claire asked, as she pulled out her hand gun and pointed it at his head. “Remove that mask and show me your face.”

  “What? Why?" The young man seemed overly concerned with the orders given to him and not his life, so Claire fired two shots in between the man’s legs to remind him of his place. The young man quickly removed his hood and showed his face, showing a young man in his early twenties, shimmering gold eyes and long red hair tied into a ponytail, his hair color showing his Paiyian roots. He was shaking at this point now. Claire had never seen such cowardice in the Academy, not even from first years.

  “So, you’re a part of the Phantoms, huh?” Claire questioned with suspicion, dropping her own weapon to her side while Sage kept his drawn arrow pointed at the young man’s face, ready to let go at a moment’s notice.

  “Y-y-yes, ma’am.”

  “What the hell are you guys doing all the way out here?” Sage asked. “What crazy shenanigans has to have twelve of you assholes watching this single cart? And whoever hired you guys should get their money back, you guys were some ass-backwards, shoddy squad here.”

  “Way to kick them while they’re down.” Claire teased.

  “Hey, one of his squad-mates had almost gotten the jump on me and stabbed me in the face. I think I’m allowed to feel a little salty.”

  “Anyway...” Claire turned her attention from Sage back to the unmasked coward. “Are you going to tell me and my friend here what made you guys travel so far from the desert all the way here with a Rynian wagon? Did you guys think that that would go unnoticed?”

  “W-we-we had a care package to deliver just a few miles south of here. We were supposed to exchange it with another group and disperse, that’s honestly all I know!”

  “You don’t even know what you guys were carrying?”

  “No. All I know is that it was a giant chest with a bunch of locks on it with no key. We even had one guy earlier on our journey try to break into the chest, but those locks are almost impossible without the key to crack open. We had to kill him when we found out about his attempted theft.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can do, huh?” Claire said as she pointed the gun at the young man and motioned for him to move towards the wagon.

  The three of them walked over to the back end of the wagon, and the man hesitated before opening the back end of it. But when Claire waved her gun at him to open it up, the young man only gulped before nodding and doing as he was instructed. When he lifted the trunk of the wagon open, there had been a red chest made of an assortment of metals combined to create a secure safe with three locks attached to the front of it. Claire shoved the man aside as she took a closer look at the locks. She fidgeted with all three, looking at the lock holes and pulling down to test the strength of the locks.

  “I’ve broken into a lock of places in my life, but I’ve never seen a lock like this. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to pick our way through.” Claire sighed as she picked up a large stone that barely allowed her fingers to curl over for a solid grasp. “Might as well smash it in, I guess.” She prepared herself for the potential hours it may take for her to muscle her way through even just one lock, let alone all three.

  “You’re going to smash it in?” the young man questioned as if he heard the most asinine statement. “The guy who tried to break into the chest had a soldering gun and went half through the night without as much as a scratch on that thing. You really think you can just muscle your way-”

  “We could always use these.” Sage stated nonchalantly as he casually pulled out three separate keys, all fashioned in a similar fashion wrapped in gold with a red ruby engraved in the center of the handle of each key.

  “When the hell did you get those?” Claire asked, not hiding her surprise.

  “Aren’t you the one telling me that I need to check the mission itinerary? You’re lucky that I do more than just gloss over the details and double check that we have what we need.”

  “Because I taught you the importance of doing it! You’ve only taught me not to worry so much about the details and how to read between the lines, so don’t you go acting all condescending to me.” she shot back.

  Sage laughed as he walked over to the chest and started to unfasten all the locks with the key. The young man seemed to be more mystified as to who these two people in front of him were when the first lock was unlatched without difficulty. When the second lock was unlatched, Claire got the sneaky suspicion that whatever was in the chest was bigger than any of her superiors had led them to believe. Sage was simply happy to be getting the mission out of the way once they brought whatever was inside back to headquarters. But the moment Sage had unlocked the third lock, a gentle voice spoke, “This is the moment your life changes forever.”

  Clair and Sage quickly turned around to look at the young man behind them, who was still sitting in the same spot he had been a moment before. But the voice had felt as if it were being whispered into their ears. There was no way that this guy had whispered and sat back down that quickly, especially to two perfectly trained Phantoms.

  “What the hell did you say?” Claire exploded.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sage growled.

  The two of them had spoken at the same time, which didn’t seem to help the young man’s understanding of what they were talking about. While the two had demanded and waited for an answer, the young man simply stared at the two of them blankly, until he realized not answering at all might not be in his best interest.

  “W... what are you guys talking about?” he tried to not show fear, but his attempt failed him.

  “What the hell do you mean this is the day our lives change forever?” Sage demanded in a lower, darker voice.

  “I didn’t say anything!” the young man threw his hands up next to his face instinctively, showing even more surrender than he had already shown. “You guys were unlocking the chest, and then turned around and started yelling at me.”

  “You heard it too, right?” Sage asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Claire said, squashing any doubt the two had on hearing the statement. “It sounded like it was being whispered right into my ear by a little creep.”

  “I swear, you guys, I have no idea what you’re talking about! I didn’t hear anything! Nobody else is out here! Why would I do something when I’m out here all alone against you two?”

  “So, you’re saying we’re crazy?” Claire asked, her temperament rising and the young man could feel her wrath beginning to boil.

  “N-n-no, ma’am!” the young regretted his words immediately.

  “Forget about him,” Sage said. “He’s not worth our time. We gotta get whatever is in this chest out of the hot-ass desert and head home to relax for a couple days, I’m tired of all this back-to-back traveling.”

  Claire nodded with a pout, showing she was disappointed to not be able to show their prisoner what respect was meant to look like. She walked up to Sage, and the two of them looked each other before Sage opened up the lid. When he did, a soft, light blue ray of light began to illuminate out of the chest and brighten up Sage and Claire’s face.

  “Whoa...” the two of them said dreamily in unison. The young man peered his eyes over their shoulders and got a good look himself.

  The three of them stared inside the chest to see a small sea of sparkling crystals, almost as clear as glass if it wasn’t for the soft sky-blue hue. They came from various sizes, from tiny pebbles that wasn’t much larger than a few grains of sand to the size of the large rock in Claire’s hand. Some of them had strings attached, made to be worn as necklaces or bracelets. Sage must have guessed there was nearly two hundred individual stones in this case.

  “What are those?” the young man asked in wonder.

  “Oh, you don’t know?” Claire said, her voice suddenly friendlier and inviting.

  “Claire...” Sage said, his voice filled with warning.

  “Don’t worry. He doesn’t know what these are, and if he’s really a Phantom, he should know these things.” she picked up one of the smaller stones and lifted it in front her face, examining it. “These crystals are magic. Literal magic. You’ve heard the tales of how the Goddess Sonova had given her gift of life and magic to the fifth unnamed child before they divided the world and sealed themselves off on the Central Island? Well… the Central Government has kept this one of the biggest secrets in the last decade, but we’ve managed to find a way to the center island. But nobody has been able to venture beyond the shores of the island without combusting and exploding from some magical force. But luckily, on the beaches are some huge-ass boulders filled with enough magic to wipe out an entire nation. But too much magic in one place seems to make stones too volatile and start to cause damage when too large a piece drifts too far from its native land. But smaller pieces such as these seem to remain intact and can be manipulated far easier.” Claire tossed the young man the piece she was holding to examine himself.

  “Manipulated? What are these things used for?” the young man asked after taking a careful look himself.

  “To further advance the abilities and capabilities of anything living thing or object.” Sage responded. “But scientists from Ryn are still trying to figure out just how much magic can actually do in our sense of reality. While we’ve seen them make warriors and stronger be able to do things never thought possible for a human, we’ve also seen a person try to use too much magic at once and be consumed by the crystal. So, even if we wanted to let the public know about magic its benefits, we simply don’t have enough knowledge to worry about your average, every-day-idiot get their hands on these. It may be another fifty years before we understand it enough to start making it a public tool.”

  “Huh… interesting.” the young man said, taking one last look at the crystal.

  “Yeah...” Claire agreed. “And the real interesting thing is that every single person who’s ever been to the Phantom academy had learned this their third year. And I don’t mean glossed over and vaguely talked about it… I mean they really drilled that information in our heads.”

  “Wait…” the young man quickly looked at both Claire and Sage with worry starting to spread across his face. “You’re… you’re both Phantoms?”

  “Well, duh.” Claire said insultingly. “How else do you think we got our own?” Claire pulled a small crystal she wore as a necklace from underneath her clothes, and Sage had shown a bracelet he wore on his left forearm. The young man started to look for words, anything to explain the reason he lied about being a Phantom, but Sage had cut him off.

  “Look, dude… since you’re not a Phantom, I’m sure you’re not very familiar with the rules of being a Phantom...” Sage had sounded solemn.

  “Look, please, I may not know anything about what you guys do or anything, but I swear I won’t speak a word of this to-”

  The young man’s plea was cut short by his own cry for pain as Claire smashed the rock against the young man’s head as hard as she could. The young man fell to the ground, and Claire was on top of him within a second. She brought the stone up over her head with both hands and brought it down with all her strength once.

  “You assholes going around...” she brought the stone down again, fueling his sickly screams of anguish. “Stealing our name...” she brought the stone overhead and down once more. She wasn’t sure where exactly, but she felt a part his skull cave in with a wet, dull crack. “And dying like...” she pounded the stone into the young man’s face, and his screams had ceased. “A... bunch...of...pussies!” she continued to smash the skull of the corpse with each word until the man’s face had been unrecognizable pieces of flesh, blood, bone, meat and goop.

  Claire continued to sit on top of the corpse for a moment, catching her breath and finding her calm and collected professionalism again. Once she had found her breath again, she stood, pushed back any hair that had fallen out of her headgear back into place. She looked at the bloodied body before her before she looked at Sage, who looked at her with one of his eyebrows raised, but he said nothing.

  “What?” Claire asked defensively. “You already know that one of our main jobs as Phantoms is to keep the secret of Magic, and to eliminate anybody who is spreading information about magic or obtains a government cache like this.”

  “I didn’t say one word...” Sage mocked with a grin.

  “Then why are you looking at me like I’m crazy?”

  “Well, you are a Phantom... almost every single one of us are unstable in the mind somehow.” Sage said as he moved passed Claire and towards the chest, taking out a cell phone. He started to send a message and took a photo of the open chest, showing all the crystals inside. “It just seemed like you were enjoying yourself a little too much with bashing that kids’ skull in. That’s all.”

  “Sorry, but he was claiming he was a Phantom. You know that we can’t just abide by that.”

  “We? As in all of the Phantoms, or just you and your vigilante attitude?” Sage half-joked.

  “You already know that we’ve been instructed to put down anybody who falsely associates themselves with us. Everyone in the world knows that. It’s a scary story people tell each other around campfires and shit. We can’t let people think they can get away with stuff like that.”

  “Whatever you say...” Sage teased once more as he finished sending the message. It was customary to text or use some type of communication devise to send your mission status to headquarters, and to receive an update as to what to do next in their mission or if it was over and they could come home. After sending his message, it took almost five minutes before Sage got a response back. When he did, his eyes widened as he read the message. Then he read it a second time to make sure he was reading the message right. By the third time he had finished rereading it, his mouth dropped slightly. “Holy shit...”

  “What’s up?”

  “We… we have another mission...” Sage seemed focus more on what the message said than what he was saying.

  “What? Like immediately? I was really hoping to get a chance to go home and in a real shower for the first time in two weeks...” Claire groaned.

  “No, no, this mission doesn’t start for another month...”

  “Okay...” Claire said, eyeing Sage. It wasn’t like him to get worked over little thing. Hell, Claire just smashed a man’s head in and Sage was pretty much making jokes about it immediately after. “So, what’s this mission all about.”

  “Hold on...” Sage said as he began typing another message. “Let me make sure this is real. Or, like… make sure we’re not being hacked and given a fake mission or something.”

  “Sage… what is it?” the worry in Sage’s eyes and voice was uncharacteristic for him, and it was worrying Claire. He held up a finger, indicating that she should wait. Not even thirty seconds later and another message came through.

  “Nope… looks like this mission is real.” he handed the phone over for Claire to see. Claire took the phone and read the instructions. There wasn’t much there, only three steps they had to follow, but this wasn’t your typical mission.

  “You sure about this?” Claire asked as she read the instructions.

  “Yeah, double checked and everything… You gonna have any problems with doing this?”

  Claire had to really think about it for a moment. She looked at the words again. There were three steps to the mission: 1.) Find a way into the Ceremony of the Moon on the Center Island the day the four moons are all full next month. 2.) Guide the Children of the Ceremony to complete their wedding vows and watch over the wedding, take note of anybody trying to stop or infiltrate the wedding. 3.) Eliminate every single person who isn’t a Phantom once the ceremony is over.

  “I mean… we’re Phantoms, right? When have we ever questioned our superiors?”

  The two had gathered their things and left the battlefield with the wagon and chest to return back home. They had talked about the mission they had just finished as them and the wagon they had commandeered disappeared into the forest. But what the two hadn’t noticed that, among a large group of birds in a tree, one of them was a robotic bird that blended in all too well. The mechanical bird had a camera in the eyes, projecting the entire fight to a large screen in a dark room filled with five shadowy figures sitting around a large table.

  On the screen was fourteen different panels, each showing a different person in a different part of the world in real-time, being secretly recorded by items and secret cameras they were placed inconspicuously. Caine, Motoko, Daan, Miranda, and Claire and Sage were all a part of those people on the screens, living out their everyday lives without audio.

  “Are we ready to begin?” a young man spoke, his voice soft and poised, yet there was an underlying tone of authority.

  “We’ve been ready for weeks.” a female who was fully-grown complained childishly. “It’s not like we have a whole lot going on in our lives, so let’s get this show on the road already!”

  “Amy, could you please calm your sister down? She’s been complaining about her patience for long enough.” a deep, gruff man groaned, not showing his annoyance.

  “I’m not May’s keeper. You have something to say, take it up with her.” the one referred to as Amy spoke back, her voice silkier and more sultry than her childish counterpart.

  “Guys, can we please focus?” a last voice spoke, sounding like an actual young child. “Seriously, I’m the youngest one here, but I have more sense and a better attention span than half of you. And can we please stick to our code names? I don’t want you getting comfortable out there in the real world calling any of the Gemini twins by their real names.”

  “Sorry...” the first woman responded. “Puppet-Master.” the name was spoken acidly, showing annoyance to following their protocol on names.

  “Thank you,” the first man had spoken, waiting for everyone’s full attention to fall on him. “As you may well know, it is once again time to place our bets. However, this time, there are a couple new factors we’ve added to make things more interesting. For starters, this time around, nobody will know which person is who. We will each pick a number, and out of the rest of the remaining numbers, we will be randomly assigned a secondary number. The first number is who you are choosing to win, the second number is your wild card number. And we all know what happens when a wild card wins the match.”

  “Yeah,” one of the Gemini Twins spoke. “A public spectacle of your own suicide in front of everyone here.”

  “I can’t believe five of us have died already.” the gruff voice seemed to chuckle at the thought.

  “Yeah, but I really liked Luis. He was the last person in this group I wanted to see dead.” the childish sister responded.

  “Well, you know we play for keeps around here.” the leading man spoke. “If he didn’t want to risk his life, he should have been so ambitious to join our group.” the man paused for a moment. “Oh, but before I forget, the last thing that we’re adding to this is the fact that two of our little test subjects- two Phantoms, actually- will be causing a scene at the Ceremony of the Moon in one month from today. They’ve been instructed to kill everyone in the ceremony, so we shall have a very interesting start to this ceremony. But remember, we don’t know who is who this round. One of the people you may want to vote for might or might not be a Phantom themselves. So be careful, it’s not like the last few times we played.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the gruff voice said. “Can we get on to choosing our numbers?”

  The group agreed and had gone through a procedure of writing down the first number they wanted, not knowing which number belonged to which face on the screen. The twins had to play rock, paper, scissors when they found out they had chosen the same number. The secondary wild-card number required the group to pick a small piece of paper out of a hat. When everyone had stated which numbers were claimed to which individuals, the group had written down the official bet list. When the leader reviewed the numbers, he looked at the group before him at the table.

  “Well, now that everything seems to be order, I think we can adjourn today’s meeting, and meet back here in a month. The ceremony begins at sunset on the last day of the Fourth Moon. If you aren’t here when the ceremony begins, you will have forfeited your position, and we will have a team of Phantoms hunt you down and slaughter you so we don’t think you’re running away from our bet. Sound good?” the group gave positive responses in a scattered manner. “Well, alright then ladies and gentlemen, it’s just thirty more boring days, and then...” he gave a wicked smile. “We will let the games begin.”