Chap 134: Plea Granted

Zod wore the helmet of a courteous Vergant soldier and communicated with them. He learned that Vergant villages existed beyond Primus. Primus was unique, with connections to the modern world.

Zod’s curiosity was drawn to the many Vergant villages scattered across the globe. He imagined thousands of villages awash with the colors of magic. If the Commander approved their next outing, he planned to suggest visiting one next time. The thought excited him immensely.

Tee, like her teammates, remained hidden under the invisibility dome tech. She waited near the center of the ancient Vergant village for Varrak. Unbeknownst to her, the Vergant soldiers around her had tapped into the radio channel to monitor Varrak’s troops.

Noticing that Tee couldn’t hear, the soldiers gave her an earbud to access the hacked feed. Tee appreciated it—anything to occupy her bored mind.

“Sir, we’re picking up strong, compacted Ether energy. The heart stone at the center is a jackpot.”

Tee found it ironic—the heart stone was fake, radiating far less Ether than expected. She hoped Varrak and his troops weren’t detecting the Vergants around her, or her teammates.

The Vergants continued tracking Varrak’s progress toward the center. Tee’s thoughts began to wander when the troops fell silent. She felt humbled that the Vergant soldiers had thought to give her the earbud.

But why were they kinder to her when Jack had treated her horribly, knowing so little? Did the Vergants nearby not realize she was a Xeno-victim hybrid, capable of mutating into a MegaSapian?

Her mind chastised her own prejudice against the Vergants. Sure, the medical staff at Primus had revealed her curse-mark—but they were only doing their job. The realization that she had judged them unfairly weighed heavily on her.

Memories of Jack’s cruel actions flashed through her mind, bringing tears to her eyes. She kept her head up, needing to stay alert, but the tears came anyway. She wiped them and sniffled.

Several Vergant soldiers noticed her sadness. One projected a hologram tab with the words, “Are you okay?”

Tee saw the screen immediately. The simple question sent her mind racing. After staring at the black-tinted face-shield of the soldier for two minutes, she finally nodded.

The soldier nodded back, and a thumbs-up emoji appeared on the hologram. 

Tee couldn’t smile—she was too shocked—and blinked with a disturbed, unsettled look.

Another soldier nudged the one holding the hologram. Their helmets seemed to let them speak privately, so Tee couldn’t hear a thing. She immediately assumed they were bad‑mouthing her, and a wave of old, unpleasant feelings crawled up her chest.

Those feelings vanished when a hologram keyboard appeared in front of her. Words on the screen explained they were switching to English syllabaries she could read. Tee realized they wanted to converse silently by typing.

She remembered the invisible barrier that had blocked only her and not her teammates, but she avoided the question that burned in her mind. Instead, she asked about the village’s heart stone, typing in formal English to be safe.

One of the two soldiers explained the stones’ importance. They were compact Ether cores with a special essence that stored the history of the village through the Verge. The elders of each village recorded most of the memories for future generations.

Unlike the vast Verge—which contained the planet’s entire past and present—each heart stone held data unique to its village. Beyond being the village’s core, it served as its largest energy reserve and powered its defensive barriers. Elders and workers maintained it, ensuring the chants it fueled remained active.

But the stone in the current abandoned village was only a decoy. Its memories had been replaced with a chant designed to steal data from Prodigy’s secret base if Varrak ever obtained it. To maintain authenticity, its old barriers were kept intact—hence the interference with teleportation.

Tee had been holo‑chatting with the two soldiers for over thirty minutes without seeing their faces. She didn’t ask them to remove their helmets, but she did request their names so she could recognize them later at Primus.

They typed their names, though some of the letters looked unfamiliar. She concluded one was pronounced Arinvae and the other Yag‑golon. 

When she asked for simpler English aliases, they offered Glowy and Three.

“We are honored to be in your presence,” Glowy typed. “Even if you are the destroyer.”

The last sentence tightened her chest, and she decided to see how much they actually knew. She typed her next question. “How did you learn about my “destroyer” side?

All workers at Primus were informed of the Hybrid through a public Verge broadcast. It functioned like telepathy, linking all Vergants at Primus, and was used only for urgent, important information. 

They also revealed she was monitored twenty‑four‑seven. Still, they weren’t afraid of her mutating into the Metalix—if it happened, it would be under the planet’s command.

Tee was put off by the soldiers referring to the planet as a living entity. She wondered if they worshiped it.

From the elders, she knew some believed the Sentinels were chosen by the planet, and her being a hybrid was intentional. She concluded those soldiers were the same kind of people—especially since they weren’t begging her to get the Balance Seal.

Her next question would have been about the Balance Seal. She was curious because she had never seen a Primus worker with a crest. But she never got the chance to ask—the other soldiers alerted them to Varrak’s arrival, and the hologram screen vanished. It was game time.

Her teammates, hidden at other spots around the center, were also notified. Zod returned the helmet to his soldier friend and focused on tracking where Varrak and his troops would move.

Zod remembered the last time he saw Varrak, the criminal mastermind in the white battle suit. Varrak’s right arm had been sliced off, and a metal beam pierced his abdomen. He and his team had fled a crumbling construction site. But when Zod returned and cleared the debris, Varrak was gone—without a trace of blood.

Disturbing thoughts crept in. What if there wasn’t a human inside the suit but an AI? What if Varrak was an android?

That would explain how he always survived. Perhaps “Varrak” was an alias used by many. When one died, another donned the white suit. Varrak could be more a concept than an individual—untouchable by death.

Varrak stood out in white against his black drones and a few human troops. They left their hover vehicles and entered the building at the center.

Tee used her foreseeing vision to track the man in white. Varrak and his troops reached the city’s heart stone, a large blue diamond, but they didn’t attempt to take it through a vortex. Instead, his troops arranged several boxes to create an energy barrier around it.

The Primus soldiers used their helmets to see through the buildings and lock onto Varrak. They aimed their weapons with invisible targeting spots. But the telekinetic barrier on his suit activated, stronger than their latest data predicted.

They knew Varrak’s suit would sense incoming blasts. From their distance, he would have time to raise a shield. 

Strengthening their blasters to penetrate the walls would spike their Ether readings, alerting him. They needed to get closer.

That information was shared with Tee via a hologram screen. Luckily, she was a fast reader.

The Sentinels and Primus soldiers moved stealthily toward the center building. Their advance halted when several white vortexes appeared outside. More drones and troops poured out from the vortexes, followed by massive contraptions crushing rocks beneath their rolling metal tracks. They were Phase-shifters.

Phase-shifters were bizarre and imposing. Towering at twenty feet, their massive wheels resembled a twenty-first-century military tank. Clad in sleek black, each had a glass pod at the back like a door, while the front sported a menacing suction cup with sharp, swirling edges designed to grind and disintegrate.

From the short intel Tee had received, she knew a Phase-shifter could obliterate large-scale objects, animate or inanimate, converting them into life energy—Ether, the essence infused in everything on the planet. Its only byproduct was radioactive sand.

The sight left Tee stunned. The heart stone hadn’t been moved, so teleportation shouldn’t be possible. That explained why Varrak and his troops had traveled for several minutes to reach the center—he didn’t have Vergants nearby to perform a teleportation chant. Her brows knitted as she realized it was the device around the stone—but how was Varrak able to hack sorcery?

The drones and troops branched off into separate groups to search the village. One squad headed toward Tee’s location, passing her safe zone. She summoned two swords as the noise from the Phase-shifters—sucking in buildings—filled the air with impending danger. She knew the fight was about to begin, though the mission’s true goal was to kill Varrak.

Tee wondered what the troops were scanning for, since the heart stone remained at the center. Her curiosity grew when the troops eventually receded. Using her super hearing, she picked up blasters and thuds over the suction’s destruction. Somewhere else, a fight had begun.

It turned out Zod and Kie’s squads had been discovered. Tee realized her teammates must have been giving off compacted Ether energy. Oh, it had to be Kie and Zod.

Both Zod and Kie engaged in combat alongside their Primus soldiers. The soldiers fired their weapons while Kie unleashed energy waves and Zod fired blasts. To their shock, one of the soldiers fighting beside them was hit by a powerful weapon.

The soldier’s face shield shattered, blood bursting through, and his body fell steaming to the ground. Attention immediately shifted to another Vergant soldier being held hostage on a nearby roof.

“Nobody moves, or another goes down,” a deep female voice warned, coming from the hostage-taker.

The woman wore an invisibility suit, making her hard to detect—though that didn’t matter to the metal drones crowding the rooftops.

The Vergant soldiers were notified of the death through their suits. One soldier removed his helmet, revealing purple hair and teary eyes, and told Tee what had happened.

“Varrak suspected the operation would be interrupted, as he usually did. He and his Prodigy organization had already converted entire villages into sand, erasing all history and memories. Losing comrades is just another consequence.”

Another soldier removed her helmet, fuming. “I am weary of this strife! Would that we were permitted to wield sorcery, for then might the battle be swiftly ended. We must needs preserve the village and its history, and suffer not the evil moderners to prevail.”

“You cannot use sorcery,” Tee reminded them. “It is the Commander’s orders.”

But the soldiers insisted. 

“Things have to change,” another said. “With the Sentinels of the planet on our side, we know the outcome will be in our favor.” 

Another chimed in, “The Sentinels are above the Commander. “

The one who spoke at the beginning pleaded, “Suffer us not to lose yet another village. Stand thou beside us, and we shall fight with the power bestowed upon us, and with the strength of the very planet itself!”

Tee was moved by the Primus soldiers’ combined plea. She was beginning to respect the Vergants, though she didn’t allow herself an evil smile. Her Absolute vision picked up two invisible troops on rooftops, ready to fire.

She threw two spinning swords at them before they could shoot. Both heads were sliced off, and their bodies plummeted to the ground. With that action, she raised a new sword and granted a fierce response to the soldiers’ plea.

“Plea granted.”

The soldiers removed their green helmets, revealing colorful hair. They threw their weapons and helmets to the ground, their eyes glowing as symbols appeared around them. They began creating defensive chants. Some moved off to engage Varrak’s troops and drones, while others followed Tee to the center building where Varrak waited.