Slowly, I left the area, avoiding anybody I saw, whether they were an enemy or were my own city folk. Just in case. One could never be too careful.
I had just finished my bread and the water when I had stumbled upon a mass fight on the wide street. With everything so shot up, I couldn't even recognise what part of the city I was in anymore.
There were dead bodies lying on the ground everywhere and some were starting to smell. Amongst the fighting, a brave few scurried across the road or took the opportunity to hurry though or search dead bodies. I only saw one person attempting to provide first aid to those who were injured. There was smoke, blood and the stench of open bowels in the air. The ground had countless red spots and the smell of scorched flesh occasionally drifted by.
Scavenging more knives off dead bodies, when I saw my colleagues and our soldiers at a disadvantage, I joined the fray. Or I tried to. I wasn't actually much use. I was more falling about the place and missing whatever it was I tried to aim at. People on both sides glanced at me and then ignored me with blank expressions. It didn't look like anyone recognised me. Perhaps that was a good thing.
The only people I killed were ones my colleagues tossed my way to finish off before they could get back up and cause more harm. Even then, more often than not, watching me try and aim with my swaying blurry vision, they found a chance to do the job themselves.
Enemy soldiers were fighting with our soldiers. They were the normal people without the special abilities that our City Agents had. Their battles were tests of skill, bravery and strategy. I could almost see some of them appreciating their opponent and the fact that those with abilities didn't bother their straightforward fights. Both sides seemed to have made a silent agreement to this.
Our agents fought with their agents who seemed strangely kitted and armoured up with strange devices. All sorts of electronic gadgets could be seen attached to heads, eyes and ears. Some had a whole face mask. Some had gadgets around their neck in a strange neck brace. I saw a handful with exoskeleton armoured things on an arm or both legs. It was quite a fearsome sight.
Their agents' equipment seemed to be better than most of our agents' naturally born talents. Or maybe it was just that they had a larger number and the element of surprise, as their equipment often allowed them to unleash more than one ability. I could see the flash and feel the strangeness of the abilities the enemy unleashed, but could do nothing about it. I couldn't do anything about anything. I wanted to help but I was useless. I wanted to run away and hide, but my body just had to take this moment to give up on me.
I sat against a bit of upturned asphalt, looking up at the smoke and dust curling toward the blue sky.
We were losing. Badly.
The enemy had some sort of artificial mental weapon and we had a lack of mental ability users. The equipment looked somewhat similar to what I had seen on Chad before. I could see what was happening but was powerless. My abilities were still sealed. Just thinking about trying to access them knocked me down for a long time. Our City Agents were being easily overpowered and incapacitated by their agents.
With our City Agents down, our soldiers were slowly being overrun. Their agents broke the silent agreement first. I reached out a useless hand and then retracted it. What was I about to do? Could I even do anything?
All I could do was sit here and watch. How pathetic. Some of my colleagues crawled over to each other in order to try and provide first aid. Some attempted to attack our enemy's backs and fought to their last breath, usually also getting any neighbours around them shot.
I had tried to fight, especially when people got close and had saved a few of my colleagues. They had given me nods of thanks and told me to hide out of the way. But my limbs kept collapsing. The fact that I could barely talk and was covered in both dirt and blood showed that I was pretty injured myself. Such a low limit and capacity. My hand shook when I lifted it.
The enemy agents and enemy soldiers seemed to turn a blind eye to me. As if they had decided I was not a danger. Either way, every time I got up and tried to do something again, I had been easily pushed and brushed aside. Sometimes it was my own colleagues that had dragged or knocked me aside.
Then the last of our soldiers were captured in a clever pincer move by the enemy moving through the rubble and abandoned cars. Our last fighting City Agent had been punched out and clapped in strange cuffs. A gadget not unlike the one Chad had stuck on my temple last time he kidnapped me in the forest was jammed onto his head.
The rest of us could only slump where we had fallen, the heavy weight of loss and depression weighing us down.
This battle was over. My people were down.
There were screams from the captured women being ravaged on the open street and I wanted to crawl over to help them. I didn't get very far.
A booted foot on a shoulder rolled me over onto my side. A fist grabbed me by the hair, making my scalp screech with burning pain.
"If you survive this, you can help us give birth to little bastard ability users that we can train," the enemy agent holding me snarled, knifing and then kicking over a soldier. "Why can your city be filled with superpowered people, but ours can't? You won't even share the secret of how to awaken these superpowers. You people are all so greedy and selfish. The world is changing. Nature is turning against humans. You guys can help us but refuse to. I hate self-important people like you freaks."
He grabbed me from behind by the hair, yanking my head back and I looked up into a face covered with electronic gadgets. A crooked mouth with crooked teeth leered at me. His artificial abilities were useless against me, but against brute force I had no defence.
My clothes were torn and I joined the other screaming women.
We were tossed into locked rooms. There was a civilian doctor who was forced to treat us, but he could only do so much with the limited resources he had. Many people and especially women, bled out and died. A handful killed themselves. I might have joined them, but I was barely strong enough to keep my eyes open anymore.
Every day, a handful of women would be dragged out. Less than half of them would return.
Once, when I was dragged out, I saw the men and soldiers who had been captured being interrogated under torture. They wept as they watched their female colleagues being dragged out to be tortured and gang raped to death in front of them. Even then, they couldn't give the enemy an answer to the question on how to awaken abilities. They didn't know. Nobody knew. How could we answer a question we didn't know the answer to?
"Hey! I got one! I got woke an ability!" the crooked teeth agent with a gadgeted face shouted, showing off his weak water manipulation. "It must be the women. If we do them all, we might be able to awaken more abilities!"
Our women screamed. Our women died. It was useless. Nobody else woke any other abilities that day, but then the crooked teeth dude had taken a day or so to awaken his after he had used me.
"Then perhaps it's the men?" an enemy agent asked.
And then the men screamed and more of them died.
Another two enemy agents, ones I recognised as having used me before woke abilities. It seemed to be a belated awakening. Both were still weak abilities. One made a breeze swirl and blow. The other could make fire sparks with the snapping of his fingers.
None of our people knew what was going on.
Neither did I, but the only common factor they had was me. In the end, they didn't work it out. They just screwed every single one of their prisoners, including me, until more of them developed little abilities that were relatively useless. One of them accidentally blew himself up while discovering his ability. They stopped messing around and experimenting after that and got back to the usual, plain old interrogation by torture any way they could imagine.
The doctor wept. His hands shook as he tried to save life after life after life. The lives kept slipping through his hands. The best I could do was to hug him in an attempt to comfort him. I didn't know whether it helped him much, but he didn't shake quite so strongly afterwards.
Bored by the daily repetition, the enemy thought up some new games, forcing our men and our doctor onto us women, laughing crudely while our men apologised to us over and over and over. The doctor was questioned too, but they didn't torture him. After all, he was just a normal civilian they had picked up. They tortured us, the soldiers and City Agents.
I screamed and wailed at the doctor, but if he wasn't going hard or fast enough for the soldiers, they gun whipped his buttocks and helped him. I thought I might die.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," the doctor cried as he was shoved down into me from above. He flinched at the strike of a rifle on his back, thighs and buttocks. "I'm sorry."
His tears dripped onto my face and I could only screw my face up and grit my teeth to endure it. The enemy weren't satisfied until he moved on me of his own accord. When they saw he had become obedient to their commands, they sniggered and mocked us with dirty talk.
The enemy forced our men to empty their seed inside us and then swap partners. They just left me with the crying doctor, because they couldn't be bothered. I was the weakest woman. Always on the verge of death. And they wanted to leave the doctor alive and in a good enough condition to keep the rest of us alive for as long as possible.
A booted foot on the doctor's buttocks made sure he was giving me more than I wanted to get. The enemy were pleased to see that they could still get some sort of a reaction out of me. It meant that perhaps, I wasn't going to die just yet. They hadn't enjoyed themselves enough.