u/Pacmantaco

Xiling grimaced as he threw his back against the wall of the dingy alleyway.

He stole the rare moment of reprieve to catch his breath, wincing at how they staggered out as ragged drags across his throat. He tugged at the collar of his synthetic dress shirt, as if it would allow more air to filter into his aching lungs, only to shudder at how his fingers came back drenched in the sweat that had stained through. His cheeks were flushed with a ruddy red - more evidence that his physique was not suited for this life on the run.

Once his head stopped spinning long enough for him to catch his bearings, he risked a glance around the corner, scanning the crowds bustling along the main street he had just tucked in from. His heart dropped at the oh-so familiar sight of the tall woman in the penny coat and the bowler hat - a wardrobe that was so fashionably out-of-date that it had come around to being ahead of its time. 

Just as he dreaded, the woman’s sights were trained on him. She was already making her way toward the alleyway that was supposed to be his reprieve. Her movements were like those of a lithe predator - she didn’t so much as falter in her step as she wove her way through the crowd, undeterred by the swelling throngs of people making their way home from work. 

As they made eye contact, the woman flashed Xiling a knowing smile.

The same way she had done in Jincheng.

The same way she had done in Chang’an.

The same way she had done in Longcheng.

The same way she had done in every other city they had passed through in their relentless game of cat and mouse.

After risking another second to mop away the beads of sweat accumulating on his brow, he peeled himself out from the alleyway and back into the throngs of pedestrians on the main street. Unlike the woman, and the grace with which she practically floated through the masses, he found himself having to clumsily shove his way forward. Angry shouts followed in his wake as he barreled onward, practically knocking people over in his desperate rush to put as much distance between himself and his pursuer.

He didn’t dare look back over his shoulder, instead putting his entire focus into reaching the metro station just a few blocks away. 

Relief washed over his body as he could just about make out the station’s sloping blue roof from his place in the crowd. If he timed it right, he could dart onto the maglev just as the doors shut behind him. He licked his lips in eager anticipation of the thought that he might reach Imperial territory after all.

This flicker of optimism was dashed by a sharp pain erupting into the centre of his back.

The blow sent him sprawling, throwing him to the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of his chest. He looked back just in time to watch a man in a business suit, a complete stranger, flip him off before melting back into the crowd.

“That’s what you get for elbowing my wife, asshole.” The man in the suit yelled.

Xiling desperately tried to right himself, but the surging flood of foot traffic refused to be slowed. He winced in pain and mounting anxiety as his hands were trampled under the uncaring dress shoes of office workers racing to catch the very train that was supposed to carry him to safety.

Suddenly, he felt a vice grip clamp onto the back of his neck. 

In one fluid motion, he was jerked upwards with enough lift to bring him staggering to his feet.

“Keep walking.” A voice, feminine and precise, commanded.

Xiling nodded meekly as the woman marched him off the main street and into the nearest alleyway, whereupon he was shoved forward. Catching his balance mid-stumble, he swivelled around just in time to watch the woman throw up a holographic screen, which quickly expanded to fill the space behind them. Now, any passerby on the main street would see nothing but an empty alleyway. 

The implication was clear - nobody was coming to save him.

Xiling raised his fists, trembling as the woman towered over him.

“Please,” The woman began, forcing back a laugh. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”

Xiling sighed, his shoulders dropping as he opened his fists and raised his hands in surrender.

“I have a family-” He began.

“And you’ll see them again if you cooperate.” She replied, matter-of-factly, despite it so clearly being a lie. She stepped toward Xiling, closing the distance between them in a single stride. From the depths of her penny coat, she procured a scalpel, which she twirled between her fingers before laying the blade against the side of his neck. “Left or right?”

“Neither.” He replied, hesitantly gesturing to the back of his head.

The woman nodded.

She slammed a fist into Xiling’s gut, sending him keeling over. As he hunched over in pain, she slashed deliberately with the scalpel, leaving two precise cuts forming an ‘X’ in the back of his head.

Xiling opened his mouth to cry out in pain, only for the woman to silence his agony with a swift punch to the throat. Meanwhile, with the tip of the scalpel, she peeled back a thin triangle of skin to reveal a small, metal cylinder embedded against the base of his skull. Unceremoniously, she wedged the scalpel blade between the bone and cylinder, levering the instrument back and forth like a butcher carving a haunch of meat with a dull blade.

With a sickening crack, she pried the cylinder free. She scooped it up with her free hand, where it fit neatly into the small of her palm.

“W-What is it?” Xiling strained through gritted teeth.

“You don’t know?” The woman replied, her voice tinted with the first vestiges of surprise he’d ever seen from her. “You let them glue a chip against your skull, and you don’t know what’s on it?”

“Please… I need to know.” Xiling’s head spun, his mind cratering under the joint forces of exhaustion, excruciating pain, and rapid blood loss. “What was this all for?”

The woman paused, seemingly assessing her options for a moment, before crouching down to look Xiling in the eyes. She held his listing head in her hand, looking at him with the same pity you’d spare for a sickly dog before it's put to sleep.

“We’ve known for a long time that the path forward required us to go back.” She began. “It’s only more recently that we’ve realized that to go back, we needed to look forward. My peers are a… let’s say… sentimental folk. Blinded by nostalgia. They’ve spent too long ignoring the potential in the tools from this stolen present.” She held the cylinder in front of Xiling’s face, slowly turning it over between her fingers, causing its reflection to bounce off of his fading eyes. “That all ends now. Contrary to what you might believe, we’re here to fix things.”

With that, she let go, letting Xiling’s lifeless body slump against the alley wall.

By all accounts, he was already dead.

Sure, his heart would keep beating for a little while longer, but that was little more than a rounding error in the grand calculations of the cosmos. 

Each breath felt more ragged than the last. Some distant part of him was aware that even as his mind began to make peace with the inevitable, his body refused to go silently. He could feel his mouth continue to gulp greedily at the open air - an instinct which felt all the more futile with the hole torn into his lung.

Still, none of this made him any less dead.

Despite his less-than-ideal circumstances, he couldn’t bring himself to be too upset. After all, given his line of work, he was amazed to have lived as long a life as he had. Nevertheless, he had at least hoped to meet his end with more dignity. 

Instead, his final moments would be spent lying face first in a pool of his own blood.

He briefly wondered what he would have done if the bullet lodged into his brainstem hadn’t paralyzed him from the neck down. If he still smoked, this would’ve been the perfect time to reach into his pocket for one final drag. If he had any loved ones left, he could’ve held a crumpled picture of them to his chest as he breathed in the aether.

The one comfort was that his life had never flashed before his eyes. That particular time-lapse would’ve only brought him face-to-face with every screw-up and failure he had made along the way - and there was no shortage of those.

As his neurons fired for the last time, washing his brain in a euphoric cloud of dopamine, he couldn’t help but allow his wandering mind to dwell on the peculiar circumstances that had led him to his final destination.

Who hires an assassin - let alone four - to kill a raccoon?

And what the hell kind of raccoon comes out of that on top?

Lansaya felt her left eye twitch - the tell-tale sign of an incoming migraine.

With a grumble, she begrudgingly peeled herself away from her desk, swiping a bottle of God-knows-what pills along the way. She faintly recalled that the Agency’s Pharmaceuticals Division had, at some point, given her the rundown on their precise chemical makeup, but the memory was buried under a fog of time and stress. Not that it mattered much anyway. All that mattered was that these miracle pills would keep her functioning for at least another few hours - well past her baseline biological limit.

Some distant part of her psyche was well aware of the potential side effects - a shortened lifespan, cytoplasmic atrophy, lifelong immunocompromisation, and persistent audiovisual hallucinations. Still, it was a small price to pay if it meant inching the Agency closer toward winning the war. At least, that’s what she told herself as she unscrewed the lid and shook a pill loose into her waiting palm.

The stakes had been drilled into Lansaya ever since she’d enlisted with the Agency forty years ago. She was fighting an enemy that was simultaneously everywhere at once, and yet nowhere to be found. Her enemy was simultaneously all-powerful, embedded in the upper echelons of the world’s governments, and yet always on the run. This enemy had vowed to save the world, and to do so they would stop at nothing to bring about its destruction.

It was a war the Agency had been waging for decades, if not centuries. Unbeknownst to the wider world, they’d been fighting in the shadows to strike at a hydra that only seemed to grow back stronger from each defeat. Every day, she and her colleagues put their lives on the line for the fate of the world, and every day fewer came back from the frontlines to fight another day.

Something needed to change or else their enemy, coasting on the waves of the universe’s entropy, would bleed them dry. That’s precisely how Lansaya found herself here, stashed away in a floating vault - in a location unknown even to her - to pore over every record the Agency had scrounged up from its time in Colombia. 

The War of Severance had provided the Agency with a valuable opportunity to feast on the technological whalefall that was the rapidly decaying corpse of the Scientific Wild West. Her higher-ups had wasted no time mobilizing the Agency to scavenge the battlefields of Colombia. They were convinced that somewhere in the wreckage, buried alongside the ghosts of those lost to the gruelling march of unbridled scientific ‘progress’, was a silver bullet they could fire into the heart of their enemy.

Lansaya grimaced as a sharp pain flared behind her left brow. She popped the pill into her mouth, swallowing it dry, before returning to her desk.

Her desk was buried under stacks upon stacks of bulky black binders, each stuffed to the brim with reams of paper documents. The Agency insisted that none of this data was to be digitized - their cybersecurity systems were beyond state-of-the-art, but it would only take the slightest slip in their technological defence for them to lose everything to their enemy. Anything that could be used against their enemy could just as easily be used against them. The Agency spared no expense in ensuring that would never happen - in the event of a physical breach, the vault was designed to lock down and incinerate its contents. She did her best to push that thought to the back of her mind as she returned to work.

The hours began to blur as she combed through document after document. She worked with all the meticulousness of a data vulture, turning over the bones of each file - every research log, field report, and schematic - until she had picked it clean. She dissected each wildly unethical experiment that found its way onto her desk, drafting several dozen ways the research could be repurposed by them, and several dozen more ways it could be repurposed against them. Each experiment, no matter how absurd or depraved, would be used to stock their arsenals on the frontlines.

One file that stuck with her was the field report from a team sent to Canisia - a planned city built for what was intended to be the world’s first ‘dogpunk’ society. Canisia had been the brainchild of Brazilian trillionaire André Diniz Segura, whose love for dogs far exceeded his sense of moral duty or fiscal responsibility. Rather than setting aside his wealth for the betterment of his fellow people, Segura imagined a world in which each cornerstone of modern technology had been replaced with a selectively bred variant of man’s best friend. Dogs, he reasoned, had already been bred to do everything from pulling sleds to herding sheep - how much further could their potential be unlocked with the marvels of genetic engineering?

The field report painted a harrowing picture. 

Her colleagues had found Canisia deserted, but not abandoned - Segura and his scientists had fled the country at the first sign of trouble, sealing the gates behind them on their way out. The rest of Canisia’s inhabitants, the several thousand dogs who comprised the city’s burgeoning ‘infrastructure’, had been left to fend for themselves.

As her colleagues fanned out through the city, making their way to the central spire housing Canisia’s research facilities, they waded through the consequences of science untethered from ethical restraint. They passed the emancipated remains of giant Saint Bernards - or, at least, what might have once passed for Saint Bernards before genetic engineering morphed them into beasts of burden with stouter, denser skeletal architecture - strewn along the roads, hinting at their original designs as modes of transportation. They came across an abandoned clinic where several dozen Dachshunds - whose olfactory senses had been bioengineered to detect a whole suite of medical conditions - had starved to death in their display cases. Their field report even detailed an encounter with a peculiar Corgi crossbreed - the only specimen still alive by the time of their arrival - which had been diligently working a mechanism to turn a stack of lamb slices on a shawarma spit.

Lansaya had forced herself to look past the stomach-churning descriptions of Canisia as what amounted to a communal grave for mutilated dogs - all while suppressing thoughts of her own Bolonka back home. 

She loathed to admit it, but what the scientists at Canisia had accomplished was nothing short of ingenious. What Segura’s scientists couldn’t achieve with genetic engineering alone, they supplemented with insights from beyond their field. The Saint Bernards had seen their skeletons strengthened with a scaffold of electrospun microfibers. The Dachshunds had seen their sense of smell enhanced through the xenotransplantation of ant olfactory receptors. Even the curious shawarma-tending Corgi had been outfitted with a neural interface that allowed simple commands to be directly programmed into their brain.

Still, as ingenious as it was, the thought of using the fruits of this unethical experimentation filled her with a deep disquiet.

She sank back into her chair, grimacing as her left eye twitched.

“We’re here,” grumbled Sir Peake. “Last chance to back out, lads.”

True to his title, Sir Peake - the Traffic Knight - was adorned from head to toe in what could perhaps best be described as the aftermath of a roadside accident of apocalyptic proportions. His plate armour, if one could be so generous as to call it that, had been fashioned together from the wreck of a car - his chestplate was little more than the warped hood of a sedan, beaten into a semblance of protective gear by the hammerstrokes of a resourceful smith. Strapped to his forearm, in place of where one might expect to find a buckler, was a stop sign - its octagonal wedges shaved off to form a rough circle.

“No sense in turning back now,” mumbled Sir Lon. “Is there?”

As the youngest of the knights in attendance, Sir Lon - the Baseball Knight - could be excused for the nervous energy he exuded as he fell into place behind his peer. Bouncing on his heels, he pulled at the wire cage hanging over his face, bringing his helmet - an umpire’s skull cap - firmly down onto his head. A bulky chest protector clung to his wiry frame, the size difference making it seem as if his own armour was in the midst of swallowing him whole. With his other hand, he felt for the aluminum bat slung across his back, as if to make sure it was still there. He reached past the pentagonal shield - little more than a baseball plate affixed with leather straps - hooped over his shoulder and nodded to himself as the familiar, cold metal met his touch.

“We’ve made it this far,” sighed Lady Eloise. “Let’s see this through.”

Of the three knights in assembly, Lady Eloise - the Paper Knight - might have looked the least equipped for combat. Her armour had been pieced together from an assemblage of cardboard boxes and tubes, the whole suit quite literally bound at the seams by staples and packing tape. Emblazoned right above her lapel rested the silhouette of her family crest - a broken wine glass - framed by the words ‘FRAGILE’. The irony, of course, was not lost on her. Unlike her travelling companions, she carried no shield. Instead, dangling from a pair of scabbards - one at either hip - were two short blades salvaged from a paper guillotine. In her years of defending the lands, she had learned that the best defence was to leave the enemy utterly incapable of offence.

The three knights bowed their heads in unison, whispering their oaths under their breaths, as they stepped into the mouth of the cave to which they had been summoned. 

Each of them had met with the Seer at least once before - it was a prerequisite to carrying the titles they now bore - but the thought brought them no comfort as they ventured into the dank and murky tunnels that sprawled out from the cave entrance. Each step plunged them deeper into the darkness, and the walls seemed to constrict around them to an oppressive degree. Soon, they found themselves forced to walk in a single file, the cave walls having closed in enough to prevent them from walking two abreast.

Finally, after what must’ve felt like an eternity of walking through the pitch black, the cave walls began to pull back as a soft, fluorescent glow washed the passage with light. Gradual at first, the lights grew in intensity, as if fighting for the knights’ attention. The lights pulsated with the brilliant glow of green, blue, and purple. All the while, a discordant hum filtered through the air, distorting beyond recognition as it bounced from surface to surface.

Suddenly, Sir Peake dropped to his knees. For a moment, he wavered in place, staring straight ahead as if locked into a trancelike state. Eventually, he forced himself to peel his eyes away and bowed his head low enough for his helmet - a crooked traffic cone - to scrape against the cave floor. Lady Eloise was quick to follow suit, bringing herself to the ground right alongside Sir Peak, whereupon she clasped her hands and bowed her head in prayer.

Sir Lon snuck a glance over the lowered heads of his companions. Just ahead of them, at the end of the tunnel, sat a young woman. Aside from her gaunt face, which was angled upwards in solemn thought, the woman’s body was hidden under a long, flowing chainmail cloak studded with winding patterns of iridescent beads. As she waved back and forth in place, as if caught in a nonexistent breeze, her cloak seemed to catch the soft glow of the fluorescent lights that now flooded the cave, sending them cascading outwards in a brilliant kaleidoscope of colours. The source of this light lay in a pile at her feet - a nest of sleek cylinders, each pulsating with the intoxicating glow of a rainbow distilled down to its atomic parts.

Sir Lon eventually forced himself to look away, his head swimming with clouds of colour, and fell to his knees alongside Sir Peake. His hands grasped for the pendant that hung around his neck, a symbol of his devotion to his Patron Protector, Dandy, as he whispered a prayer. The words caught in his throat when he felt a cold, bony hand rest on his shoulder. He didn’t dare look up.

“We turn our back on Eagles

To make bedfellows with Snakes.

We invite misery and death

By hanging ourselves from the stakes.

Whatever the cost,

Whatever the prize,

The truth must come forth -

Wespitan lies.”