It was a sudden noise that woke up ash from her sleep. She sat on the bed soon after and waited for a noise to follow up.
After a few seconds the noise echoed once again. It was the door.
It was a rather small room, with enough space only for her bed, her nightstand and her walk-in closet. The time displayed on the clock in radiant red text read two thirty-four. Her mind could wonder nothing at the moment but, who, in the astronomical crap, is at the door in this ungodly hour.
Suddenly a hand crept up on her grabbing her, by her forearm.
She instinctively dove out of her bed with a scream and only once she was standing a fair distance away from the bed, she chose to look back.
'Honey?' it was a familiar voice, that she hadn't heard in a while, that addressed her. 'What's wrong?'
'Rupert?'
'Uh... yeah?' Rupert answered sitting up on the bed. 'Did you have a nightmare or something?'
'Wait, who- Why are you here?' Ash didn't even know the question to ask.
'Where else would I be?' Rupert replied with a condescending yet concerned smile. 'Is everything ok?'
There was a moment of silence, with both of them in thought, which ended with Ash's mood shifting completely.
'What kind of a twisted trick is this?' She was annoyed. With all the might of her metallic right arm, she reached for a leg of the nightstand to break it away and bash the intruder with it.
THUD
'Ouch,' her hand thudded against the hard wooden frame of the nightstand. Her fingers refused to pierce through the wood to let her grab hold of the leg, unlike her metallic fingers previously would have. It started to hurt, after such a long time. When she finally examined her fingers in order to attend to them, that's when she realized that her palm was no longer metallic; it was flesh.
'Oh my god! Are you alright?' Rupert dragged himself closer to Ash across the bed. 'Why did you do that?'
'Stop!' Ash screamed. 'Don't come a step closer.'
The knocks on the door rang louder.
'I'm coming!' She yelled at the door. 'If you crawl a step further, I will- I will- you will regret it!'
'Wait! honey!' Rupert commanded, now smiling mildly, gesturing in her direction. 'Is that how you are gonna answer the door?'
She looked down to check on herself to notice the implied anomaly. The moment she noticed that she was in her underwear, both her hands retreated to cover her body.
'Wha-' She dashed over to the closet, arching forward covering herself. With her touch, the closet opened, and she pulled out a robe from within. Without a second of hesitation, she covered herself with it and ran for the door.
'Three outposts fell in thirty minutes,' it was Doctor Tyson standing at the door. 'And the second Hecterrarc is not responding.'
Rupert suddenly slid off the bed and sat on it. There was clear panic in his eyes. Ash on the other hand was surprised to see Tyson, almost in shock. 'Doc?'
'Were there any civilians on the arc?' Rupert asked.
'No, our men were still clearing it out,' Tyson replied. 'But- but Blink was with the last fleet.'
'Blink?' Ashely asked herself. 'As in Elena 'Blink' Ramirez?'
Rupert got up to his feet and started putting on his pants that lay on the chair in front of the nightstand. 'Do we know who's attacking?'
'One of them is Raphael,' Tyson replied. 'The other one we don't know.'
'Did anyone respond?'
'We sent a couple of Gashadakuro units to the Hecterrarc and Hyze commandeered a fleet and headed for the first outpost.'
Then Tyson looked up at Ash next before continuing. 'Everyone's at the command center, they are waiting for you.'
Rupert, about to head out following Ash, noticed her standing still confused and shocked.
'Babe,' Rupert, by then, was fully dressed. 'I'll take care of this; you get there as fast as you can. Alright?'
Ash did not know how to answer and still in shock she stood still, calculating.
'Is she alright?' The door closed behind Rupert as Tyson inquired him.
'I think it's the nightmares again,' Rupert's voice could faintly be heard through the door.
'Oh no,' Tyson commented. 'Do you think it's -'
A loud shriek echoed in Ash's head following an excruciating pain. She collapsed onto her knees holding onto her head as if to keep her skull from shattering to pieces. She screamed, but no voice left her throat. The loud shriek continued as Ash pounded the floor with her fist. The pain was unbearable, crawling Ash into a ball, with her head hitting the floor. But in a few seconds, once again it was silent.
Following the loud shriek, the silence itself felt deafening and with the headache suddenly gone, she felt as if the noise killed her. She stood sitting down on the floor for a few seconds, blinking consciously and thinking to herself 'What is happening?'
When she gathered enough strength to get up, she climbed back up to her feet. Her limbs felt a lot weaker than what she recalled, but she didn't feel it to be particularly adverse.
The bathroom door opened letting Ash inside and automatically closed behind her. Stepped right in front of the mirror, now noticing her emotionless yet teary eyes.
The robe fell onto the floor, and she began examining her body. Her right arm was no longer metallic, her left palm carried no shield generator that pierced her palm. She poked herself in the face, arm and her belly. The flesh that squeezed between her muscles and her fingers hurt, a most welcoming feeling after so long.
She kept gazing at her own body for a few seconds, frozen, until, as if she was reminded of a kettle she had left on the stove back home, she turned on the tap, took a splash of water and washed her face with it. She rubbed her eyes tight and looked in the mirror again and again to see if anything would change. She took soap into her palm and after putting some on her face, attempting to reach for the soap once again with her eyes closed, she knocked the soap accidentally off the ledge of the sink.
Once her face was washed, she noticed that the soap had fallen into a small trashcan next to the sink. Reluctantly bending over to reach it, she opened the lid of the trashcan.
The can was littered with crumpled up tissues, some dental floss, one bar of soap and one plastic stick, that caught Ash's attention. It was something she had not seen in over almost thirty years. It was a used pregnancy test.
Leaving the bar of soap behind she picked up the test and turned it over to check for the result.
Suddenly her vision blurred, the surroundings darkened. The loud shriek returned. The excruciating pain followed it.
Ash's right palm reached the wall for balance to keep her from collapsing onto the floor.
NOOOOO! Now it knows!
The echoing voice was clearly audible through the shriek, although the utterance was vague at best.
With the pain and the darkness that surrounded Ash she started tearing up. She opened her eyes to look at her palm, to gather any level of cohesion from the chain of events taking place. Her palm started to change. It hardened itself. It withered to dust. It turned invisible, and finally ended up turning metallic.
The shriek grew louder. Letting out the pain in her body, she punched the bathroom tile with her metallic fist, which cracked it. The shriek kept growing louder and louder, until once again, it suddenly stopped.
She was once again kneeling on the floor. Her right knuckles were bleeding and the tiled wall she thought she ended up cracking, remained undamaged, now with a blood splatter on its surface.
It took her a few seconds after that to get back up on her feet. After grabbing onto the sink, she managed to pick herself back up.
'What's happening?' her broken voice inquired herself. A couple of teardrops had escaped her eyelids at that point.
A whistling noise grew into Ash's earshot from a distance. It grew and grew until the noise became clear and distinguishable. It too was a noise she had not heard for a long time, since the end of the decimation war. The noise passed her overhead and faded back into a whistle.
A few minutes later, Ash found herself heading out of her apartment in a dark blue set of pants, gray tank top and a black leather jacket on top of it. She hastened through the grounds to where she heard the Archangel headed earlier. A couple of drones that had been waiting outside her home for her departure, followed her lighting up the dark path through the woods she had to take.
When she got closer to the old castle on the hill beyond the woods some amber colored flashes of light flew over her head, over the trees, from the castle, emitting a smooth buzzing noise, right past her.
For all the miles she climbed up the mountain, she couldn't help but notice that there was no shatter around to be seen. Even though as scary as the situation was, that one observation made her feel relatively freer and untethered.
When she got to the castle, the soldiers who were roaming the lower levels of the structure stopped everything they were doing and saluted welcoming her in. Without too much of a response, eager to get a better understanding of the situation without deteriorating it further, she ran up the stairs, leaving behind the drones that escorted her to the castle.
The further she reached up the stairs the more familiar faces started popping up. Some of them were old GDI associates, some of them were higher ranking super soldiers from GDI, some of them were assault robots and the rest she could name were her closest friends.
There was a man sitting on a chair to whom a girl, with long black hair, in a lab coat, was attending to. He was surrounded by Dr. Tyson, Rupert and one woman who Ash couldn't recognize.
'All nine hundred and ninety-nine men?' Rupert asked in an agitated tone. 'Including Hyze?'
The man nodded wearily when the girl attending to him injected the last shot to his shoulder. 'There were only two hundred onboard, sir.'
'What happened?' Dr. Tyson asked, who was relatively calmer. 'It hasn't been fifteen minutes.'
'I don't know sir,' the man was now tearing up. 'The Archangel tried landing, but it didn't, for some reason. It kept repositioning until we were fifteen thousand feet in the air. That's when it opened the lower bay doors and let the team deploy. The sui bots were the first to land. They cleared a landing for the rest in about a minute. The rest then followed. In about- a couple of more minutes later the Archangel closed its bay doors so we couldn't go out. We couldn't override it; it was apparently a safety procedure. Few minutes later it told us that everyone- I-. Nobody returned sir. Only those of us who were left behind got back.'
'What happened?' Rupert asked. 'Did a nuke go off?'
'Didn't see anything, sir.'
'How come you saw nothing, goddammit?'
'Rupert, you can't,' Tyson rested his hand on Rupert's shoulder and said quietly while shaking his head in affirmation of what he was saying. 'If the Archangel withdrew fast enough, you-'
'Take him away,' Rupert commanded. 'I'm going after Hyze.'
'Where do you think you are going?' Ash asked Rupert, pushing him back by his chest. She was slowly beginning to get into her misplaced role almost instinctively. 'To a possible nuclear fallout? Assuming it's not a Doomsday Trigger?'
After letting the words out of her mouth, she was now even more confused, now as to what she just said, but it did not reflect with her expression. 'What? What's a Doomsday Trigger?' she thought to herself.
'She's right,' Tyson backed her up. 'There's no point going there now, we'll respond if we get any distress calls. For now, let's just hope for the best.'
'What do you suggest we do then, doc?' Rupert asked Tyson, now turning towards him.
'I don't think with the scale of the attack, they'd stop at the outposts,' the woman, who was previously questioning the soldier who survived, spoke up. 'They'll come for us.'
'Yes,' Tyson agreed. 'We should fortify here, get all of our men back here and keep an eye out for any attacks.'
Unable to pay attention to the squabbles of the three, too scared to add her own input to a conversation she felt she didn't belong to, Ash looked out to the left of the giant room she was in.
To her left, the room was more modern, with steel padding over the old, exposed stone construct of the castle. There were multiple computers wired together and three men working on them. The wall beyond the computers had been replaced with glass. Making the woods and distant mountains visible in the moonlight. Being so high up, it was a scene to absorb and enjoy. But what caught Ash's attention more than the trees, that ran till the foot of the mountains in the distance, was the battleship that was hovering outside the giant window.
'Archangel', the class B battleship, that stood in front of Ash outside the window, felt like meeting an old friend once again after so many years. Archangels were battleships so devastating, fast, precise, and powerful that in all wars against living creatures, alien or human alike, they were only deployed on evacuations and extractions. How steadily it stood hovering in midair, without the slightest movement or tilt was a testament to the mighty power it encompassed. Stationed in a small castle with rookie soldiers, a makeshift command team and impromptu computer systems, the Archangel could not feel more out of place.
Ash's attention, lost in admiring the behemoth of a battleship floating in midair, was suddenly drawn to a reddish-amber flash of light at the far end of the woods, miles away. The flash grew in size, reducing in brightness, revealing what looked like a sword that had grown to a couple of hundred times its original size. Whatever it was, it immediately and quickly smashed onto the ground, disappearing within the trees, instantly, followed by a bright explosion.
Ash pulled herself closer to the window to observe the dying ball of explosion. Then, suddenly, the noise of the explosion hit the observation and the castle grounds quaked.
'What was that?'
'Raphael. He's here.'
'We can't stay here,' the woman, whom Ash failed to recognize, commented. 'Let me get Aerie ready. We have to get as many people as possible and get onboard.'
'Wait, what's that?' Ash, who was still looking out the window.
A spaceship flashed in from beyond the mountains in the distance. It was heading right towards the castle and gaining speed as it did. Ash slowly stepped back, away from the window, calculating her next move, but her mind was blank, she didn't have enough information to make the call. 'Shit.'
The closer it approached, the more immense it loomed on the horizon. Ash had never seen a spaceship like it before and was therefore puzzled by its approach. It zoomed in from behind the Archangel and the closer it got the more it became obvious how larger it was than the archangel.
Suddenly the Archangel sprung to life. Without changing its position, without the slightest hint of movement, it opened fire on the enemy spaceship. With every bullet precise, the enemy ship started disassembling to pieces where one final calculated explosive round blew it up to pieces. The massive shrapnel of the explosion's aftermath, without any external forces diverting them, went past the Archangel, without touching its shiny unscratched exterior.
The shrapnel landed everywhere around the castle, damaging the structure and managing to collapse one tower. One box of steel broke in through the command room window and headed straight towards Dr. Tyson and Rupert. Ash instinctively dove in front of them, standing, trying to block the steel block with her forearm.
The box of steel hit her body and split into two, went past Tyson and Rupert to hit the wall behind them and lodge into it.
'That was close,' Tyson commented. Walking out of Ash's cover.
'Get to Aerie,' the stranger requested again. 'And be quick about it.'
Ash stood still with her forearm drawn. The leather jacket's sleeve had been torn off by the impact, but her arm remained unscratched. She slowly withdrew her hand now carefully examining herself. The conversations echoed in the background, but Ash was lost in thought trying to process everything.
'Guys, Blinky's back.' A small ship flew towards that came flying past the Archangel. It landed closer to the castle in a small clearing in the front.
'Oh, thank god!' Rupert hopped away down the stairs and the other woman followed him.
'Ash,' Tyson walked over to Ash, breaking her from her trance. She jerked at his touch and turned towards him. 'On the off chance it's the weaver...'
He paused before he continued. 'We are right by you, ok? No matter what. Keep that in mind.'
Ash still stood confused, but at the face of the assuring words she nodded in appreciation.
'ASH!' a short haired woman carrying an assault rifle in her hand dashed into the room and her speed went out of control bashing her against the wall. From her impact against the wall, the rifle fell from her hand onto the steel floor. She was bleeding from her head and whatever patches of her skin visible through her torn outfit under the black vest and belt.
'IT'S HERE!'
Suddenly the surroundings started to darken. As if the effective range of every light illuminating the room reduced, light grew brighter at the sources, but the shade became darker. The woods that were visible in the moonlight a few moments ago had completely drowned in a pitch-black darkness.
Screams echoed through the castle and grew exponentially before everything grew quiet in a deafening silence. The short haired woman and a very vigilant Ash made it closer to the center of the room, stacking under the bright light in the middle that. Tyson stood still terrified, unable to move. The shadow crept closer under his feet.
'DOCTOR!' a pitch-black hand reached out from the darkness, grabbed him by the shoulders and, in an instant, without a hint of hesitation, without even enough time for him to scream, pulled him into the darkness.
Ashely backed off into the light when the other short haired woman eyed the rifle on the ground. The darkness was slowly approaching it.
It was now or never. The short haired woman dashed into it. Before the eye could see she grabbed it in her hand and tried dashing back at Ash, but she couldn't move.
Claws of a pitch-black darkness were holding her, pulling her back.
'Ash!' her eyes were helpless. The shadow creeped in along the claw, slowly engulfing her. It had almost swallowed her whole by the time she closed her eyes and accepted it.
It almost completely closed around her and kept growing to seal her in the darkness, but then suddenly it stopped; it stopped and faster than it wrapped around her, retreated back into the shade.
'Hello there,' She slowly opened her eyes to reveal the whites of her eyes now turned completely black.
She instantly aimed the rifle in her hand at Ash and pulled the trigger. Ash instinctively put her palm up. It hardened and fixed itself in midair. No bullet could penetrate through. The woman ceased fire after a few seconds and with a grin across her face she lowered the rifle. 'Had to give it a shot.'
Ash stood vigilant at the center of the room, now concerned about the changed facial expressions and actions of the woman who was her comrade for a very brief time. The woman was smiling strutting around Ash, half of her within the darkness and the other half glowing with the room's light.
'Been so long since I fired an actual gun,' she said walking calmly in the shadow. 'In the pudding club, aren't we?'
'Who are you?' Ash inquired, now terrified by the darkness around her.
'Now, it'll be like two birds with one stone, won't it?' she kept strutting along her path pointing the rifle's barrel casually at Ash's stomach. 'I can't even imagine what you were thinking. Like, how would you even walk around with that thing in a couple of months?'
HOW DARE YOU!
The excruciating headache crawled back in dropping Ash down to her knees. In a few more seconds, it was gone once again.
Ash looked up at the black-eyed woman, with tears in her eyes.
'You are in so much pain, Ashley,' the woman said, looking down at Ash, now with ironically sympathetic eyes. 'Just walk two steps forward and I can end it forever.'
NO!
It was an explosion of a headache that threw Ash back a few feet so that she was perfectly under the light at the center of the room.
'Fine, so you choose the hard way,' the woman said, dropping the rifle onto the floor. 'You know what's the difference between the darkness and a woman that it controls?'
Ash crawled a few steps back getting onto her feet.
'The darkness can't flick a light switch,' the woman slowly faded in reverse into the darkness. There was a terrorizing silence for a moment as Ash stood dead center at the spotlight surrounded by a complete pitch-black darkness. Then, a few seconds later, just as Ash realized what was about to happen,
Flick!
The room drowned in the darkness. Ash stood in the middle of it all in the silence. The darkness was coming for her, that much she knew, but it's already here. Ash could see nothing.
Something moved right in front of her face, she instantly noticed the movement. Her battlefield instincts kicked in and she quickly bent backwards, turning her face away. A blade, in one swift motion went past her face barely touching her cheeks with its sharp edge.
'ASH!'
She swung her right hand fast and wide, the poor nightstand did not see it coming. Her metallic fist sunk into the wooden structure of the nightstand and half of the alarm clock went down with impact. She immediately sat up on her bed, sweating and now breathing heavily.
The moonlight was sneaking into her room through the window slowly illuminating the room in darkness. Sitting alone on the bed now, was Ash. There was darkness and there was silence, but the danger she feared was no longer there. In a weird way, the darkness now was welcoming, and the silence was soothing.
'Ash?' there were knocks on the door.
She threw away her blanket and stood up next to the bed. After glaring once at the broken nightstand, she walked over to the door. Unlike earlier, in a sleeveless black vest and long pair of pants she was dressed ok to receive.
'Dr. Knightly,' Ash greeted after opening the door. 'What are you doing here? At this time?'
'I uh- is everything ok? I heard a loud noise,' the doctor said, peeking slowly to see what had happened.
'Oh no, it's ok,' Ash replied, wiping her sweaty forehead with her left palm, still with sleepy eyes. 'I just had a nightmare and smashed my nightstand. What's up?'
'Uh- well, there's people here from a small town near the woods, uh- from Towerside, I think' the doctor said. 'They say they've seen ghosts or something? A couple of people are missing and now they are erecting a barricade sealing the place off.'
'What?'
'I don't know, but we need to find out more about this before this becomes an issue.'
'Oh, okay, let me get dressed,' Ash said, turning away from the doctor. 'Give me fifteen minutes.'
'Wait, what's that?' the doctor was pointing at Ash's left cheek. She drove her palm to touch her face. It hurt. She pulled her palm away to observe what she had just touched. Her fingertips were covered in blood.
'It's- uh,' A clean cut, across her cheek, was now starting to bleed. The wound was starting to hurt, but Ash, deep in thought, trying to unravel what had happened, was in a trance. 'It was just a nightmare.'