Six years before the world became a mechanical tomb, there was a boy named Zephyr who lived as an orphan on the fringes of Estrella. He was a child of the dust who ran so hard that the wind was his only true friend. His family, which consisted of his bright eyed little sister and his ailing mother, were the only anchors in his restless kinetic life. Zephyr lived in the cracks of society, finding joy in the fraction of a second between a heartbeat and a breath. In his mind he often thought that as long as he kept moving, the shadows of poverty could never truly catch him. But in a world ruled by the Prince’s cold Logic, speed without a permit is a crime and power without a royal title is a death sentence.
During a structural purge of the slums, the family was cornered by a battalion of Executioner Gears. Zephyr ran because his lungs were burning as if filled with glowing coals and his heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He thought to himself that he just needed to be a little faster and just one second quicker to bring back the medicine that would save them all. He ran harder than any human had ever run, beyond the limits of muscle and bone, but the world was cruel and distance is a stubborn unyielding enemy. When he finally returned with a stolen medical kit and a handful of dry bread, there was no home left. There was only the scent of burnt hair and the metallic taste of blood, along with the descending white ash of everything he had ever loved.
Zephyr knelt in the smoking remains with a pulse like a frantic drum of pure concentrated hate. At that moment, a shadow stepped from the acrid smoke as a figure draped in gold and arrogance. The Prince looked down at the broken boy and spoke with a voice like silk over whetstones. The Prince asked if he wished to never be late again or to outrun time itself so the fire would never catch him. Zephyr was broken and hollowed by grief, so he accepted the Anting of the Soul bound. He thought that if he became the storm, he would never have to feel the wreckage again. He traded his humanity for a gear and in that moment the boy who couldn’t save his family died. In his place rose the Speedster Elite as a man who realized that if you move fast enough, you don’t have to feel the weight of the bodies you trample. He became the very thing that had destroyed him as a paradox of motion fueled by the silence of the dead.
Back in the present, Zephyr is a blur of pale purple Anima and chrome silver armor circling Beat at speeds that cause localized sonic booms shattering the nearby masonry. To mock Beat, Zephyr uses his insane velocity to stop for a mere millisecond, just long enough to strike a theatrical pose with an arrogant bow and a mocking wave while tightening his silver gauntlets before vanishing back into the ether.
“Look at yourself Nobody! You’re glitching and you’re stuttering because you’re a bug in the code of this world! I am the pure flow of reality and I am the line that never breaks as the perfect machine of the Prince’s design! You are just a mistake waiting to be deleted!” Zephyr shouted. Zephyr thought that his speed made him a god, and he believed that no one could touch a man who existed between the seconds. He saw Beat as nothing more than a flickering error in a perfect system.
Beat stands deathly still amidst the rubble because he doesn’t try to track the silver blur with his eyes. He listens to the rhythm of the air displacement while his body begins to vibrate at a frequency so high the surrounding air boils and hums like a thousand angry hornets. He lets out a low distorted laugh that sounds like a corrupted audio file played at the wrong speed.
“Ha hah… ZZZ… Honestly Zephyr? You think you are fast? You think you are the flow? You’re just a loop! You are a boring and repetitive loop while I am the drop because I am the CHERENKOV BEAT! PHASE TEMPO: VELOCITY ORCHESTRA!” Beat thought that it was time to show this puppet what real soul felt like. He felt the bass of the universe thumping in his marrow and the adrenaline of the glitch taking over his senses. Beat ignites in Cerulean blue, which is the ghostly and beautiful color of radiation emitted by his life force.
BOOOOOOOM!!!
With a burst of light that blinds the optical sensors of every Gear in the district, Beat flashes forward. Suddenly, Dancing Beats appear everywhere in flickering static colors. These aren’t just afterimages because they are temporal echoes so sharp and physical it feels as if ten Beats are fighting simultaneously in a synchronized dance of destruction.
“HAHA AHA HMMM… THIS IS THE VIBE! DO YOU HEAR THE BASS?! YOU CAN’T RUN FROM THE RHYTHM ZEPHYR! I AM THE FREQUENCY YOU CAN’T HANDLE!” Beat yelled. Beat appears directly in front of the sprinting Zephyr, seizing the Speedster’s hands with a grip of living high voltage magnets. He begins a lethal and high speed waltz as he swings Zephyr around, hoisting him off the ground and performing gravity defying break dance moves while holding the Elite’s hands in an iron lock that makes the silver plating snap.
“One two step and… SLAM!”
With an earth shaking thud fueled by 400 BPM of pure kinetic energy, Beat slams Zephyr face first into the ground. The impact leaves a thirty foot crater while the Elite’s silver armor shatters like cheap porcelain against the unyielding force of the Glitch.
On the east side of the plaza, Vane stands trembling with a volatile cocktail of ego and panic. His Synthetic Gold Aura pours from his pores like liquid poison, coating the ground in a layer of tinsel that hisses against the ruins. He raises his mechanical arms as his internal processors scream, preparing to warp the sector’s gravity to crush the skeleton before him.
“You… the rat from the lower wards and the failure of the medical wing! Your primitive bullets are nothing against my new divine form because I am indestructible! I am the Prince’s masterpiece forged in the fires of evolution! How dare you even look at me with those hollow eyes! I will turn your bones into ornaments for my throne!” Vane screamed. Vane thought that his gold could hide the cowardice inside him, but the shaking in his hands betrayed his fear. He was desperate to prove he wasn’t just a discarded experiment.
Bones steps slowly from the roiling smoke with his bones rattling with a sound like a machine gun magazine being slammed into place by an invisible hand. His eerie neon green aura hangs around him like a suffocating mist from the afterlife. His neon green visor flashes in a steady and rhythmic pulse that matches the ticking of Silarias’s Echo stone in the distance.
“Divine? Vane you’re nothing but a gilded mistake! You smell of machine oil and cheap perfume plus a lot of fear. Me? I smell like the two hundred nights I spent staring at the ceiling in that black cell counting every drop of water and thinking only of what your skull would sound like if I finally hit it with something hard! Today the debt is settled and interest is due in blood!” Bones said. Bones thought about all the friends he lost while Vane sipped wine in the upper districts. The rage felt cold and perfect as it flowed through his hollow chest.
Vane roars a mechanical scream of System Overload and launches a massive tidal wave of liquid gold to bury Bones alive. “DIE IN THE RICHES YOU ALWAYS CRAVED PIRATE! I AM THE ULTIMATE EVOLUTION!”
But Bones has been watching Beat because he has learned to dance with the void. He uses the residual kinetic energy of the speedsters to shift his own molecular density. He doesn’t move because he phases. The golden flood flows straight through his ribs as if he were a mirage, as a ghost haunting the living.
“Phantom Style: 1000 Soul Rounds!” Bones shouted. Bones draws his dual Ghost Revolvers and becomes a stationary turret from the underworld. Every time he pulls the trigger, the barrels spit rounds of pure fluorescent green soul energy. These bullets don’t whistle because they scream with the voices of the prisoners Vane helped optimize into the city’s cogs. Vane throws up a massive shield of synthetic gold, but the Ghost Bullets ignore the physical laws of the material world. They curve at impossible angles around the shield, seeking the gaps in the neck plating and the joints of the knees.
“HOW?! My shield is impenetrable and my calculations are perfect because the Prince said I was a god!” Vane cried.
“Because I’m not aiming for your body Vane! I’m aiming for the lie that keeps you standing, and you’ve been living a lie for two years! You aren’t a god, you are just a shiny janitor for a tyrant!” Bones replied. Bones performs a lightning fast spin with the revolvers twirling around his skeletal fingers as he unleashes a rain of shots that tears the hydraulic joints of Vane’s armor to ribbons. The neon green energy eats into the synthetic Anima like acid on paper, dissolving the golden coating. Vane collapses to his knees with his luster fading to a dull and dirty gray. Bones walks calmly toward him with the barrel of his revolver smoking with green mist and presses the cold steel against Vane’s forehead.
“Keelhauling is too good for you, but a bullet between the eyes? That’s just business! Consider the debt paid in full!” Bones whispered.
The battlefield has shifted in an instant. Zephyr lies broken and twitching in his crater with his speed reduced to a pathetic tremor while Vane sits on his knees staring into the green glow of his own end. The two invincible elites of the Prince, who were the pinnacle of his Darwinian experiment, have been reduced to misery in less than five minutes by a glitch and a ghost.
The Dictator General watches the scene from his throne of swords with his expression hidden behind the featureless void mask. His Toxic Emerald green aura swells into a hurricane because its sheer pressure flattens the rising smoke and snuffs out the fires. The air becomes so dense that the remaining rebels struggle to breathe. He thought that perhaps he should have killed these pests himself from the start. He crushes the obsidian stones beneath his feet with his bare hands while the sound of grinding rock echoes like a thunderclap across the plaza.
“You have ruined my entertainment and you have broken the tools of the state! If the flesh of my subordinates cannot uphold the Prince’s order, then the Circle must resolve this breach of protocol personally! I will consume your hope and forge it into my next suit of armor! You will scream until your souls turn to ash!” the General bellowed. He takes one step forward. Gravity across the entire Iron Ward doubles instantly. Even Silarias feels his bones creak and his knees threatening to buckle under the sudden massive increase in atmospheric pressure. The General begins to consume his own left arm because the emerald fire devours the flesh, transforming it into a massive jagged blade of liquid black metal that fuses to his stump.
“Juro… I believe the main course is finally being served and I’m starving! My blood is boiling just looking at this monster!” Silarias said.
“Hold your Eclipse in boy! Don’t waste your gear yet because the smoke is about to turn everything black and the General is about to find out that you can’t eat a ghost and you certainly can’t swallow the Ash King!” Juro replied. Juro thought to himself that it had been a long time since he had to truly exert himself, but this era deserved a proper ending. Reality shudders as the General prepares to charge. The true clash of titans, which is the collision between the Ash King and the Cannibal Dictator, is about to begin. The Iron Ward groans as if sensing its own imminent collapse.
