WHO AM I? PART I

Just because you’re dead, doesn’t mean the fight is over.

-ancient warrior adage

The blood was still pounding in the warrior’s ears as she attempted to stand up on one knee. Something cold dripped from her mouth, but the sensation phased away. Her head swiveled from side-to-side scanning around to ascertain her current whereabouts. As her mind raced to her last memory, she dug deep to pull from the slivers of thoughts that were escaping her mind like dry sand in the wind.

“Am I dead?” she wondered.

Her thoughts honed in on what she was last wearing, and her arms, weapons, and equipment slowly went from a soft fuzzy blur to sharp clarity. She ran her fingers through her almond-brown hair, snipped short in a bob cut style. Then she examined the darker stripes on her arm and peach-fuzz hair that covered her body.

“How…how did this happen?” she thought.

The last event she could recall was that she was fighting some officer and his retinue. She had just cut one of the bodyguards down when the officer closed the distance to her and began swinging his battle-ax which crackled with electric energy in wide arcs. She closed her eyes trying to remember what else happened.

“Was he a dogrel in werewolf kill-form? Let’s see, he spun around on his feet, helicoptering the ax with a long wide swing, and then what?” She thought.

A teenage boy ran up to her. Her hand instinctively clenched into a fist. He couldn’t have been more than 15-years-old. He tried to grab onto her, but she took a swipe at him with the sword in her right hand. The boy disappeared in a wisp of smoke.

She had killed the boy when he tried to claim her as his own so many years ago.

The memory bubbled to the surface of her mind. He tried to maneuver behind her and attempted to bite her in the back of the neck, which would have caused her to submit to him. When he realized he missed the spot, she managed to reach for a weapon, a brick she recalled, and smashed his face open. Then pushed him down the stairs where he snapped his neck, killing him instantly.

In that part of the city, it was just another unsolved mystery, not worth the time to investigate by the commissars.

Her tail twitched as she looked down at herself. She was in her half-human and half-feline form.

As the humans or pinkies, liked to say “she was in halvzies form”.

She maintained the grace of a full feline, or kill-form, and yet still retained human features.

“What were the stories the monks sang during the Ancestor Festivals? Only if I paid better attention,” she cursed.

Two more foes ran up to her, a pair of twins, spouting curses and snarling. She tucked herself into a ball and tumbled past the twins. As she rolled past them, she un-tucked herself and spun around. One of her blades connected with the back of the closest twin and hamstrung the closest of the twins. He fell back and she stabbed him in the heart. His body hit the ground and turned into a wisp of smoke.

The next attacker swung his elbow towards her face, but she parried the attack with her off-hand.

Her mind raced back to when she first meet these two. The twins were nice enough, at first, and kept to themselves.

An inter-planetary recruiter stopped by her run-down neighborhood. He offered her a promise of a new life, money, fame, honor, and a chance to see the universe. Living on the streets she learned never to trust anyone, and any offer that was too good to be true, usually was. She wouldn’t have even talked to the recruiter if that Roylie, a feline of noble birth, wasn’t there to assist the recruiter.

“The Roylie was so convincing,” she recalled.

During a sparring match, one of the twins, lost his temper and tried to snap her neck. She defended herself and killed him with a blow to his heart with her fist.

The brother attacked her in full-kill form. He failed to keep himself centered and finished him off with relative ease. He attacked her cursing and foaming at the mouth, but she managed to keep calm, centered, and what the old veterans called ‘zeroed out’.

Now her foe was standing before her once again, with the same mad look was in his eyes. Her sword went right for his throat as his arms wildly flailed around. He turned into a wisp of smoke, like the others.

“Must fight everyone I’ve killed?” she wondered.

“Who am I?” a voice echoed inside her mind.

“I am a mercenary; I kill for the highest bidder, sometimes switching sides in the middle of battle,” she thought. “I did my job well enough. Sometimes we were victorious, sometimes we lost, and not get paid, and sometimes we showed up for a scrap and no one was there.”

“Am I going to be rezzed? No,” she thought “I wasn’t important enough to be brought back from the dead, too low ranked. No one will ever miss me.”

She paused for a second to gather her thoughts.

“Why do I know, that I will have to re-kill everyone again?”

She never attended any of the Ancestor festivals or even conversed with the priests. There was one guy who she knew who was always singing praises to the Ancestors and how pious he was. Why he was working for a mercenary organization, she never knew. He was only a human and had no feline blood, though she never held that against him. She never listened to him and always let her mind wander whenever he tried to pull her into some theological discussion. Once again she cursed herself as she struggled to recall what he was always babbling about.

“That’s what I get for thinking that I would live forever,” she thought.

A group of farmers in tattered clothes appeared before her. Their lifeless eyes watched her, stared at her in silence.

“Why?” the group said in a monotone voice.

Her wandering thoughts pulled her to another part of her life. She received a request to assist with evacuating colonialists in territory that was overrun by some nameless bug-like race. The transport ship was taking hits and the flight commander ordered her to jettison excess cargo or the ship wouldn’t break the planet’s gravity.

She had pulled the emergency level. The colonialists silently screamed and clawed at the windows of the doors, trying to get to the other side.

“Why?” the group collectively asked again.

“Because it was either you or us!” she screamed at them.

They vanished in a wisp of smoke. Her eyes began to tear up. It was the only action she ever regretted doing. She clenched her fist around her weapons and she sniffed the air.

“That was pointless, I guess some habits don’t stop even after death,” she muttered.

Flipping her swords around in her hand to re-grip the weapon, she scanned for more enemies. The once misty-gray scene transformed itself into something more finite. The sky above the horizon was a negative image of reality, a sickly-brown color. The places where shadows should have been were replaced with light. The green leaves were empty-black. Memories of her past started to slip away like grains of sand in the hand.

“I never managed to do anything significant with my existence,” she thought.

“I never saved lives of anyone important or commanded armies. I was just a warm body.”

Despair swept across her mind like a whisper from a shadow moving across the ground. She struggled to force back the waves that were washing over her by conjuring up pleasant memories of her past, but couldn’t recall any.

“The Ancestors have no reason to embrace me.”

“Who am I?” she asked.

“You are a nobody!” replied a mottled voice.

Spinning around on the back of her heels looking for the source of the voice she saw nothing but endless scrubland. The voice echoed in her head like a beating of a drum, but there was something else. It was a faint, almost inaudible sound of someone singing.

“It’s pleasant. What is going on?” she wondered.

At that moment a figure emerged from the desolate landscape.

It was that preachy human!

She couldn’t really recall his name, or even his nickname, because it was bad luck for mercs to know each other’s names. The concept of a long lifespan was almost unknown to paid soldiers of fortune.

His shoulders were lowered, head cast down and arms open showing he had no intention to fight.

“Am I going to have to fight you too?” she asked while her tail twitched in anticipation of his answer.

He shook his head no and spoke softly, “I’m sure you are asking yourself if you killed me or not. Believe me, this was a surprise too. Remember when you dropped a primed Bake-Lite grenade back on Zepol-8? Well now I’m here.”

Then he wagged his finger at her and half-smiled.

She lowered her swords, her jaw open, asked him, “What’s going on here?”

“You’re dead,” he replied.

“I know that!” she snapped back. “What do I do next?”

“Fight….and if the Ancestors feel you have something to contribute, you will be embraced by them and your soul will rest in peace,” he said.

“I have no powers, weak if any, magic abilities, I’ve never commanded anything more significant than a platoon-size element,” she pleaded.

“Then, who are you?” he said as his essence faded.

“I wish I knew,” She muttered.