The high-pitched squeal that cries out beside you reminds you of the first time you ever saw a wyrm. The ice wyrm is, in addition, the largest and most vicious of the wyrms. Seeing an entire pack of the vicious monsters climbing about the walls of the lobby as you gaze carefully through the crack in the doorway is enough to put a deep pit in your own stomach. You place your hand against Keri’s chest, pushing her farther back into the residence as you close the door softly, stepping coolly back. Once you are satisfied the wyrms haven’t detected you, you turn around and look at Keri.

Her eyes are wide with fear as she looks pleadingly up to you. Instead of smiling kindly at her, however, your face turns hard as the shine in your eyes grows brighter. She backs off slightly, letting you think as she tries looking for something useful to do.

There have to be at least twelve wyrms out there, maybe more. You didn’t exactly get a good look at the scene through that tiny slit. Looking about the large apartment which had been so thoroughly designed, you start looking for that which Valkyries so rarely need: a weapon. You go into the bedroom from which Keri had retrieved the pictures. Surely, your father had owned a weapon, despite any memory loss he had suffered from such a total annihilation of his cortexes. He had, after all, maintained his paranoia as a member of the Qzcidell Plant which had been placed on the outer worlds in conjunction with the Valkyries so many ages ago.

You find nothing in the main section of the room, but you should have expected as much. He probably didn’t even trust himself after your mother died. Your mind quivers as the impact of the thought hits you like so many repeater rounds to the chest. Your mother is dead, and so is your father. You’ve known this for a long time, but your father only died a few days ago, really. For some reason, this bothers you more.

The thought comes to a pause as your eyes catch glimpse of a carefully concealed bioswitch on the upper right-hand corner of the far wall. Walking to it, you lick your thumb and place it on the switch deftly, hoping it will recognize the descendant of its proper operator as valid in the genetic coding. The switch lights green, and you grin wryly as the switch slides down the wall to reveal a handle. You pull on it, and your footing is called into question as the room quivers with the opening of a blast door which had been so well hidden as a wall. You turn to see Keri standing at the door, a small Valkyrie fight suit put on half-wrong, the armor connectors misaligned with the proper points on her body. Armor wouldn’t even latch onto it like that. She walks closer to stand behind you as the blast door’s opening reveals a room full of the equipment you had known your parents would have had.

The room was a treasure trove to any warrior, and before extensive brain damage had surely swept away large portions of your parents’ memories, they had been some of the best. Before your eyes lay a horde of weapons, many of which would be unknown to some of the system’s most highly trained special forces, excluding the Valkyries and Qzcidell Plants. You’ll have to be sure to come back and load up before you left the planet, but right now, you have more pressing matters to which you must attend.

From your previous encounter with an ice wyrm, you learned a handful of helpful facts about the massive foes. ‘Lesson One,’ you think to yourself as you reach up to grab a directed sound blaster and set it to its lowest pitch settings, ‘Wyrms communicate with high-frequency sounds but absolutely hate ultra low-pitched sound. That’s why they stay away from cities under most circumstances. The pulse-cars drive them crazy.’

‘Lesson Two,’ you think, grabbing a device that would look remarkably similar to a spotlight to untrained eyes; to yours, however, it’s a focused microwave emitter. ‘That tough hide may be able to withstand projectile blasts, but it cooks easily enough.’ A quick flick of the wrist sends it spinning over your forearm, the notch on its side sliding into an accepting groove in your armor. It slides firmly into place, and it’s controls go dim as they integrate with your armor’s DPU.

‘Lesson Three,’ you think, moving over to the armor rack and grabbing the first of many pieces that will add further plating and shock resistance to your armor. ‘Getting hit by an ice wyrm hurts like an Oa’din, regardless of where or how glancing it may have been.’ As if to emphasize your point, a loud pounding begins against the door into the apartment. You find it simultaneously fascinating and frustrating that they’ve already made enough of a dent in the main door that the vacuum seal preventing such noise from reaching the apartment has been breached.

At the sound, you notice, Keri’s eyes grow hard, as if in memory. You wish for a moment that you could tell her everything will be alright, but you know that it’s already too late for anything to be right. This war had taken its toll. You see that Keri has fixed her clothing and has begun attaching armor in an effort to follow your own actions. ‘How much does this girl already know?’ you wonder. You push the thought aside at the sound of another pounding against the door, this time accompanied by a painfully unpleasant scraping sound.

‘Right,’ you think, ‘Lesson Four.’ You take hold of a sword which was distinguishably crafted for a Valkyrie, the engraved Valkyri’din wings carrying not the star of Linthia but a tesseract whose borders are formed from a single double helix. Above the wings is carved the name of your great grandmother, for whom it had been crafted: Jeron’dia, supposedly named after a Valkyrie-like heroine from a war long ago, before the Ragn’Rouk. ‘Never be too proud to use a weapon again.’

You slide the sword into the open scabbard throat awaiting it which had until now been hidden neatly in the face of the plating from which it emerged. As you slide the blade gently into it, a plasma field is generated over the blade to protect the blade from wear and tear while it sits seemingly exposed to the air. Your thumb reaches the throat, and you press the hilt onto it, hearing that satisfying clack as the blade locks into place.

‘Lesson Five,’ you think, grabbing a heavily armored helmet and lifting it over your head, quite a different experience from the typical piloting helmets which collapse and expand over one’s head of its own intricate devices. ‘I need a better helmet.’ You look down for a moment and see Keri pulling a helmet over her own head. You grin slightly as the pounding and scraping grows louder.

The helmet comes over your face, and your vision turns black as the interior of a heavy helmet with a proper blast visor blocks out any light from your field of view. The bottom of the helmet sits neatly into the receivers at your collar, and you twist it to the right, allowing it to interface with your DPU. Immediately, the screen inside the helmet comes alight, and your display comes into view for the first time in days. The familiar red lines, symbols, and characters make their way into your view, and the world about you is visible in a comfortable, full circle field of vision. You glance slightly to the side to look behind you, where Keri is giving herself a few good shakes to dispel the disorientation caused by such a view when one is unaccustomed to it.

You restrain a giggle at the sight, and your eyes quickly grow hard, the inside of your visor turning a bit green as your eyes light up with new fire. This time, you can feel and almost even see the wyrm’s claws coming against the door before it even makes contact, your attention undivided as the door can be seen flying across the main room through the doorway to your late father’s room. Your grin flashes an unseen white as the
huntress inside you comes to the forefront. A gentle memory of a dead voice you haven’t heard in over twenty cycles reaches into your mind, sending your thoughts to a long-past, failed hunt as a child; but this time, you don’t hesitate to follow your mother’s command as the memory whispers the echoed word, ‘Now!’ Your feet break contact with the ground as a burst of energy compresses behind you, propelling you into the fresh heat of a battle which you can finally fight for all the right reasons.