Fifty-Two

"What was what?" Kon asked. His mind was trying to figure out what was going on. He looked past Knight Bosch and to the forest around them, seeing no other signs of humanity or monsters.

"Cadet Kon. Your records indicate no establishments of nodes nor any type of energy enrichment program. So, how is it that you have nearly as much energy inside of yourself as a Knight?" Knight Bosch blinked slowly, her dark eyes stern as her furrowed brow deepened with every word.

"Knight Commander Roose landed with me. She was instructing me," Kon said. He hoped it'd be enough to keep the Knight off of his ass as the grim expression on her face disappeared with those words.

"Alice is alive? Where is she?" Bosch asked, desperation and hope thick in her voice. A pit opened in Kon's stomach at the tone in her words, knowing what he was about to say.

"There's a plateau to the West of us. It's where we crash landed. A battlepack of Lupine cultivators, the same who attacked us on the Dragon's Maw, landed there as well," Kon began. He spoke quickly and succinctly as he described the ordeal they had endured so far. Kon watched as the hope in Knight Bosch's face slowly died. When he finished the story, telling her how she had stayed behind to fight the packmaster himself while he ran.

"Oh, Alice," Bosch whispered at the end. Her eyes had softened a bit, but after a slow blink, her stern features reasserted themselves.

"Squire Mathis, front and center," Bosch said as she stood and put her helmet on. With an audible click the helmet latched and the suit flared with power so bright that Kon's eyes watered. The corona of power disappeared a split second later, leaving her standing there looking for all intents, like a normal soldier in power armor.

One of the mirage-like figures broke away from the circling pattern and came to stand in front of Knight Bosch. The mirage disintegrated, fading away to leave a man standing there in reflective, silver armor.

"Ma'am?" the squire asked. His voice was modulated, coming out in a genderless, mechanical voice. Kon tried to think of who Mathis was, but the Squires didn't interact much with the cadets.

"Contact Knights Willis and McGuire's patrols. We need a rendezvous point to begin a hunt for an injured Peak D-Grade monster, insect variety," Bosch gave her orders quickly and efficiently. Mathis nodded and walked a few feet away, falling to a knee and cocking his head slightly to the side.

"Now, you two can lead me to this dead avian monster? We need to begin tracking the insect before it can heal," Knight Bosch asked.

"I can," Kon said. He looked over to where Diur was restrained and felt a burst of annoyance at seeing her masked like that.

"It would be easier if I had Diur's help though. Without the cuffs and mask," Kon tried to keep his newfound anger out of his voice, but some of it must have leaked out. Bosch turned her head slowly to look at him and Kon found that staring into reflective lenses was much more intimidating than seeing the woman's flat stare.

"Ginger, release the detainee. With her weapon," Bosch ordered a second later. A second Squire broke from patrol, but didn't lower their camouflage abilities as the cuffs came free silently. Diur waited with patience that Kon knew he didn't have as the Squire carefully took off the mask and allowed Diur to speak. She didn't. Just gave him a quick nod of appreciation and rolled to her feet smoothly, not needing her hands at all. The squire handed over Diur's sword swiftly and then went back to her patrol, slowly walking around the edge of their temporary camp.

"Grant, the spare rifle," Bosch said next and another squire stopped and rolled their shoulders, the effect strange when they were little more than shifting outlines of the world around them. A familiar looking laser rifle was tossed towards Kon, along with a pair of spare energy packs in quick succession. He caught them all and then got hit in the head as a utility belt followed it all.

"We don't have spare armor and this is all we can spare. I trust that you can keep up?" Bosch asked as Kon quickly donned the borrowed gear. If felt good to have something that wasn't a stick or a rock as a weapon again.

"Yes, ma'am," Kon answered. Knight Bosch sat silent for a moment before her voice broke out again.

"Camp Alpha is on alert now. Fall back point will be Alpha," she said. The mirages nodded or murmured something that was indecipherable. He realized he was hearing them speaking through their helmets into their personal communications units.

"Lead the way," Bosch said and Kon followed her orders. His mind was swimming, struggling to figure out what exactly was going on. Things were moving too fast for him to get a grasp of the sequence of events that had landed him here.

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The squires burst into motion, flowing around Kon and Duir to form a oval with them at the lead. Two squires walked only a step behind, one on either side of him, with Bosch traveling in the middle. Kon jogged, not pushing himself to his full ability, but he looked over to see that the squires were falling behind. It was only a half step at first, but then it lengthened into a full step before they sped up.

"Hey, can you slow it down just a tad? This isn't a race," one of the figures said, his voice not quite to the point of panting after a few minutes of their pace. Kon slowed down, reaching a point that was closer to what he had been doing before he started his body cultivation. It felt like a brisk walk.

"Thanks," the figure said a second later. The formation tightened up around them. Diur snorted lightly as they ran.

"What happened?" Kon whispered to Diur. He doubted that his words were unheard by the squires, and Bosch definitely heard them.

"When you were doing whatever it was that you were doing, Bosch grabbed me. It's unnatural how someone so heavily armored can move so silently. She restrained me while the rest of them came in. They don't speak out loud, but I figured something was wrong when you ran out of cores. The Knight pulled one out, an E-Grade, and just tossed it next to you."

Kon nearly missed a step as he thought about that. For nearly anyone else who didn't have his own tricks for handling that much energy, trying to absorb that much power outside of their grade would be a death sentence.

"I don't think it was malicious. The amount of power you were showering the area in was on the verge of E-Grade. She might have thought you were trying to push through in your own equivalent of a breakthrough," Diur assuaged him after a moment. Kon grunted and kept going.

"When she saw what was happening, she tried to pull the stone away, but you absorbed it too quickly. Then you started spitting blood and coughing it up. I think you may have finished off the last of your…other training, then." She had paused for a moment, almost announcing he was a basic body cultivator.

"I thought that was already done?"

"It seemed like you needed a bit more energy to push out the last of the impurities that were deep inside of yourself. Then, I don't know what you did, but we all heard your heart stop beating. Then we all heard it start again," Diur said. They weren't moving fast enough to strain either of them, nor to push them into the full earth eating stride that he knew she could hit.

"Damn, it stopped in real life? I thought it was just a metaphysical, like, representation or something," Kon said. The thought that his death had only been minutes away from happening cast a bit of a pallor over what was going on.

"We've been found. We're back with my people." The thoughts should have felt reassuring, but all Kon was feeling was dread. Safety was here, but so came with it rules, politics, and reality. When it had just been him, Alice, and Diur, they had no thought to that. They had hunted, trained, and ate constantly as they honed themselves into warriors. Now that he was found, his newfound strength could become something that would be studied, prodded at, and potentially be life threatening. Alice's absence loomed ever larger.

"Yes. I thought you had killed yourself. Should have known better. You would have exploded, not had your heart quietly stop," Diur said with a smile. The miles of the forest were vanishing quickly as they headed back to their harvest site.

"We're nearly there," Kon said, slightly louder to ensure that his guards heard him. The squires said nothing, just kept the pace going as they arrived on the edge of the battle scene. It had been hours since they had finished their harvest and left, the stench of the dozens of rodent creatures filled the air and turned his stomach.

Small flying insects buzzed around the limp corpses, their wings filling the space with an incessant noise that grated on his nerves. Knight Bosch walked out of the oval shape and immediately started to pace around the edge of the field of battle.

"What did you kill them all with?" one of the squires asked. Their modulated voices made it hard to tell their gender, but Kon thought this sounded like a woman.

"Club." The squire froze for a moment and then leaned away. He heard the noises from the rest of the squires as they spoke amongst themselves. They had spread out, forming a much wider version of their traveling oval, leaving Diur and Kon in the center.

"Ma'am. Knights Willis and McGuire are en route. ETA three minutes," Mathis said. He was the only one who was easy to tell. Bigger and broader than everyone else, even the modulator couldn't fully scramble the masculine tone. Bosch didn't acknowledge him, just kept going around in ever widening circles. Soon she was far out in the forest, moving at a good clip as she swung her helmet back and forth.

"Does she have a sensor or something in her helmet to help with that?" Diur asked him. Kon shrugged. A Knight's armor was personal, each one unique and suited to their user. He had to assume that Bosch's armor had something that allowed her to do some type of tracking work.

"Found the trail!" she barked out a few minutes later. She was several hundred meters away, nearly lost in the shadows of the forest. She had used some type of amplification to broadcast her voice to them. Kon turned away from where the sound had come from and looked into the forest just in time to see the two Knight patrols arrive together.

The three Knights quickly convened while the squads of Squires spread out and took up defensive positions all around the bird's skeleton. Whatever it was they were talking about, it didn't take long before they reached some type of agreement.

"We hunt!" a man's voice boomed across the clearing, the largest of the Knight's lifting up a composite black spear into the air. The squad he had arrived with gave a muted cheer while the other two slowly folded into the oval traveling formation again, this one much longer than the last. Knight Bosch stood in the front of the oval and led them, following a trail only she could see.

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