Sergeant Dupont

  The video snapped into being in a red lit room, bodies crushed shoulder to shoulder with gear. The familiar face of Valdez was off to the side, placid as ever as the rest of the people in the room were sweat slick and fear ridden. The camera shuddered and everyone swayed together.

  “Landing…Landing…Landing…” A mechanical voice chimed overhead, and the camera stopped moving as light flooded in. Doors slid backward and people piled out through the doors as the view opened up. Dunn stared at the black smoke-filled skies, fires roaring through buildings, and creatures raced up and down buildings and streets. Myriads of monsters of different shapes and sizes.

  “Secure the perimeter. Valdez, get that door prepped for breach,” Dupont’s voice barked out as people raced around, rifles aimed around the primitive air shuttle. The rotor wash was kicking dust and ash about, creating a screen. Dunn saw it in the corners of the roof, ash blowing around a humanoid shape that was nearly invisible.

  “Target! East corner!” A voice shouted and rifles snapped toward the invisible predator, rifles cracking as the creature burst forward. Green blood spattered behind it, luminous and glowing brightly.

  “Contact down!” the same voice shouted. The invisibility didn’t fade, ash beginning to pile on the creature as the air shuttle rose up and disappeared in the choked skies. Dupont turned and ran toward the door that he had sent Valdez too. Valdez was working a metal bar into the gap where the door met the building.

  “BREACH!” Dupont yelled at him. Valdez leaned back and for a brief second Dunn saw a bloody red aura flare up and around him. The door broke open with a crack and the clang of metal hitting the ground.

  Dupont was the first through the breach, a light spearing from his rifle and into the dark stairwell. He scaled down, leaping stairs and hitting the landings with a spring. The pounding of boots echoed behind him and Dunn heard someone in the room gasped.

  Dunn looked away camera and at his crew. They were all looking at each other, hands flashing as they spoke on private channels.

  “What!” Dunn hissed, irritated at being pulled away from the video. His eyes drifted back to it, but Dupont was still just running down stares.

  “Sir, he’s using a pattern on flesh” Barr said.

  “Single rune, not a full pattern,” Dunn corrected.

  “But, it’s still a rune on straight flesh. He’s flashing it as he’s moving, the increases in speed and strength happening. It’s smart because of the exothermic reaction, he’s letting the heat release instead of build up. That takes weeks of practice to master for us, sir. How are they able to already know how to do it?” Barr questioned.

  “I don’t know. Could be a straight rune from a rift is more easily used than a captured rune or an ancestral rune. Or it could be that this was the first way they learned how to do it rather than an advanced technique. Just watch the damn video and maybe we’ll find out,” Dunn finished just as Dupont hit the ground level and threw open a door.

  Creatures boiled within, red light from a rift spearing out to illuminate the world of horrors before them. Leathery creatures with sharp mandibles and claws, they crouched and feasted on a pile of meat that still had scraps of cloth on it.

  “Contact!” Dupont yelled, rifle firing in bursts as he ran forward, never hesitating. A metal cylinder went flying into the heart of the room and into a cluster of the beasts. It flashed and detonated with a muted boom, bits of monster flung away Dupont kept firing his rifle.

  A cold blue aura rose up in front of the camera and every time the rifle fire a streak of it peeled away. Dunn held his breath as he realized that Dupont was projecting. A technique that could take years to learn.

  Each spear of energy cut through multiple of the monsters, splitting their corpses apart as Dupont went further into the room. More rifles began to fire, chaotic bursts of energy that ripped, speared, or just detonated through the horde. The chatter in the room began to pick up further as all of the rest of Dunn’s crew realized what was happening.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Dupont yelled and the chaotic mix of energies slowed down and faded away as everyone finished clearing the room. The rift was sitting there pulsing with energy but no more of the beasts came out.

  “Neal, probe it!” Dupont ordered.

  A man with a wide metal machine strapped to his back shoved a long metal probe into the rift. Lights flashed along the back of the machine for a minute and then the man backed up, looking at a gauge on the probe.

  “D-tier!” Neal yelled.

  “Tito, your fire team is up. Valdez, your fire team on perimeter!” Dupont yelled as he walked about the room. A three-man team ran into the rift while Valdez and two other raced toward the entrance of the lobby.

  “Searching for runes,” Barr whispered and the rest of Dunn’s team agreed.

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  “Room clear!” someone called out after a minute. Dupont leaned against a wall, his breathing loud in the microphone as he looked at his arm. A blue rune sat on his skin, pulsing with power, while the skin around it was reddened and inflamed.

  “Already burning. Remember this is why running runes on the flesh is the last resort,” Dunn said, seizing the teaching moment. The rest of the group all acknowledged his statement with grunts and muttered acknowledgments.

  “How you doing, Sarge?” Valdez called out to him from his position by the front doors.

  “Running a bit hot, but I’m fine.” After that the room went quiet as they all waited. It only took a few minutes before Tito and his fire team came back out and the rift collapsed. The sudden plunge into darkness lasted only a minute before lights flared from the rifles of the assault team.

  “What you get Tito?” Dupont asked.

  “I got one and so did Sandy. We’re good to go, sarge,” Tito said.

  “Two runes in a D-tier? No way, the rankings must be different,” Daisy muttered which the rest of the team quietly agreed with. Dunn wasn’t so sure. A newly generated rift that hadn’t been searched or cleared yet could yield surprising amounts of power, but then none of the kids knew that or had seen it.

  “Quiet,” Dunn said and the rest of his team fell silent. They watched as Dupont led raids against rifts, time after time the twelve-man squad entered buildings, weapon pulsing and monsters dying to clear rifts. All of them were D-tier, only taking minutes to clear but Dunn could already see the problems arising.

  They were running out of ammunition. Their runes were burning too hot, the skin around where the runes were set burning red and in some cases blackening as they crushed monster base after monster base in a blitz of violence.

  “A full suppression with only twelve guys. None of them in webbing or armor, it’s impossible,” Barr said and Dunn had to agree with him. When the moment came in the middle of a square, monsters pouring at the three fire teams trying to hold it while Tito’s fire team cleared the rift in the square, he wasn’t surprised. A rifle clicked empty and then the runes came out in full force.

  No more flickering burst of energy that amplified weapons or bodies. Just pure energy wielded by the proto-knights. Valdez was standing on a crushed vehicle, bugs racing toward him, but he didn’t back down. His arm glowed red and fire was plunging into the bugs, crisping and burning as Valdez screamed in pain, his arm blackening rapidly.

  “Rotate! Roate! Rotate!” Dupont ordered. The soldiers began to slide back and forth in a triangle, each of the fire teams trying to hold a single leg of it with the rift in the center of their formation. One man would race into the point of the triangle and blast away, spears of light, gouts of flame, lightning bolts, and so much more as the soldiers held on desperately. But they had awakened the city and the city was coming for them.

  “It’s a full nest. The city became a full-sized D-grade nest,” Dunn said. That twelve men would walk into a nest was impossible to wrap his mind around. The bursts of energy they were throwing around shouldn’t be possible either. The heat radiating off of them should have cooked them within minutes, but they still stood and held.

  Then the rift in the middle collapsed and Tito’s squad came out. They immediately joined the fray and the collapsing lines firmed for a moment. All around them were ramparts of dead monsters, but the soldiers were in poor shapd.

  “Exfil! Tito, take the lead, rendezvous Charlie. Valdez call it in! My team, rearguard!” Dupont yelled, pulling a sidearm he hadn’t used yet free. Tito whirled and led his fireteam in a brutal rush out of the square, burning through their powers at breathtaking rate.

  “Shit, there he goes,” Daisy whispered. The first of Tito’s soldiers blackened head to toe as three runes came online at the same time.

  “Full pattern on flesh without webbing, a maniac,” Barr said.

  The burst of energy that man released raced down the street, a bolt of fire wider than the vehicles they had been using for cover. The man broke apart, body turned to ash and drifted away on the slight breeze. They all paused for a second, the camera pointing at the blackened remnants while the bolt of fire burned down the street for blocks.

  “Go,go,go!” Dupont yelled, his sidearm firing three times into a half charred bug that was trying to rise up.

  The rest of the squad kept moving, but the die was cast. More and more of the soldiers blackened and charred, choosing immolation instead of claws and teeth. They entered into a building they had already cleared, glass crunching under their feet, camera panning over the bullet riddled walls as they started toward the stairs.

  Tito stopped and turned, waiting for everyone to pass him by. One of his arms had fallen off, burned away under the heat of his rune. His tanned skin was sallow and sweat rolled in giant beads down his face as he gulped in oxygen.

  “Move it, Tito!” Dupont barked, last man in the lobby as now leathery rodents with large buckteeth the size of dogs came rushing toward them. Dupont’s sidearm stopped firing, slide locked back and he cursed and threw it at the closest of the monsters.

  “Go, sarge, I got this!” Tito gasped as he threw himself off the wall and toward the crowd. His runes blazed to life, one on his remaining arm and the other on his chest, burning through his uniform.

  Dupont didn’t argue, turning and running up the dark stairwell as a blast of light lit the stairway from behind. Dupont’s gasps filled the audio as Dunn and his team watched the man race up the stairs. It took minutes as Dupont caught up to the more wounded soldiers, helping them up further while looking backward at where they had come. No monsters chased after them, but the sounds of their chittering cries echoed after them.

  The video cut out and Caspar was standing there again. As the videos had worn on the man had become more and more solemn, reliving the days of the worlds ending.

  “Sergeant Dupont and six others escaped that day. Four were too wounded to continue active combat and were relegated to instructor roles. Valdez and Murphy were the last two, as well as Dupont, of the original strike team to continue operating. I have logged their full names, ranks, commendations, and biographies to the best of my ability and they are in a separate file.” Dunn made a mental note to download that file so he could know the first knight’s names.

  “After their retreat a conventional attack was issued. Nearly sixty-thousand soldiers were mustered and they began to clear the city block by block. Losses were heavy, but the amount of runed warriors who came out of the city set up the basis for what comes next. It took three weeks before the city was declared safe, but by then reports were already flooding in of more rifts opening in smaller towns in the countryside, and in other countries.”

  “I have compiled a series of news reports from Ashely Graham, who was at the time the leading reporter on these phenomena. She went to any location, interviewed survivors, and in a few cases her and her team managed to sneak into areas they shouldn’t have been in, and give their reports.”