KITH 1: Attack of the Demon (part 1)

Due to the length of the KITH stories, each will be split into two parts and sent out biweekly. Catch the second half of KITH: Attack of the Demon in fourteen days.

KITH 1. Attack of the Demon

By Nicholas Ahlhelm

I. Emma Gets in Trouble

“I told you before, Mister Shirai. My father and I built K-Tech from the ground up. I’m not going to sell it to you or anyone else! You can’t have my company and you can’t have our technology!”

Emma Briscoe rose from her chair. Lines of anger showed on her normally smooth brow. Her surroundings were already not to her liking. The sparse, simple desk and black paneled walls of the office made her uneasy.

Kazuhiko Shirai, the CEO and chief stockholder of ZTS Inc., continued to sit at his desk. A weak smile crossed his face.

“Think of your future, Miss Briscoe.” Despite only being in the United States for a few years, Shirai spoke nearly without an accent. Only the precise enunciation of words marred his near-perfect control of the language. “You are a twenty-something with more tattoos than experience. You have no idea how to run your own business. Perhaps your father could stop a takeover, but I do not think you stand a chance. It is best if you just cooperate, let your shares of K-Tech be brought into ZTS, and avoid any messy complications.”

“I hoped you would give up trying to coerce or cajole me with this meeting, Mister Shirai. K-Tech isn’t for sale to you or anyone else. It is my father’s legacy to me and I won’t let it go for anyone.”

Shirai’s smile flattened. His eyes turned hard. “So be it, Miss Briscoe. I fear you will come to regret this decision.”

“I doubt that very much,” Emma said. She rose from her seat and headed towards the office door.

Five minutes and eighty-two floors later, she was on the street in front of Tower Z. Night was already falling across the city of Islington. The cold autumn air cut through her blouse. A shiver ran down her back. She pulled a Zippo and her last pack of Luckies from her laptop bag. She quickly lit the cigarette and took a deep, relaxing puff. Her insides slightly warmed, she started down the street towards the nearest tube station.

She didn’t like it, but Shirai was right about one thing. K-Tech’s financial footing wasn’t in good shape. Their latest chip promised to be the most powerful computer chip ever designed, but the specifications weren’t coming together correctly. It would be at least a few more months in development and the shareholders wanted it in stores yesterday. It could make billions, but only if it could be finished.

Emma was far from a billionaire right now. She had already given up her apartment for a cot above the K-Tech labs. She didn’t have anything close to cab fare. She wouldn’t have had train fare if it wasn’t for the lifetime transit card her father received after designing the computer algorithms that controlled the entire tube system.

The street lights suddenly flickered and died around her. Seconds later, the lighted windows from Tower Z clicked off one by one.

As the last remaining light faded, she saw figures in black flash towards her. She caught only a glimpse of the blades in their hands as they closed in.

She screamed.

“Get down, you fool!”

The words came out like a growl, but Emma instantly recognized the sense of them. She dropped to the sidewalk. She heard metal strike metal. Then again. And again. And again.

Her hands went back to her laptop bag. She fished around for the Zippo in the dark. She found it, yanked it free, and flipped it open. With one quick flick, flame burst forth and lit her immediate surroundings.

A single man stood over her. He wore a pair of jeans and a tattered t-shirt. The black-dressed men materialized around him. Each cloaked figure carried a katana crafted in dark metal. The man above her met each of their swings with a careful grace, but it was his own weapons that amazed her.

Half a dozen blades emerged from each of his wrists. The longest were well over two feet, but several others circled around it. She could see the stain of blood trickling from the base of the blades, but far more of it seemed to coat the long blades.

Her apparent rescuer caught each of their attacks in the mass of blades around his wrists. When the assassins’ blades became entangled, he quickly turned the longer blade of his free hand in to cut the attacker down.

She watched him move with an amazing level of grace above her. She couldn’t fathom why these men were out to kill her, nor who the man above her could be, but she could be nothing but grateful for his speedy arrival.

“The light,” he growled. “Get rid of it.”

Emma hesitated for a moment, but after only a few seconds she closed the lighter. She hated to be lost in the dark, but she knew now wasn’t the time to question the man who came to her rescue.

She could hear the battle continue, but she could only weakly clutch her laptop bag to her and hope that none of the sounds of flesh being rent came from her savior.

Time seemed to stand still around her. She wished she could remember any of the prayers from her childhood, but none came to her head. She could only silently plead with whatever force controlled the earth. Please don’t let me die here. Please, please, please!

She felt a hand wrap around her shoulder. She cried out.

“Shut up! They will hear you. Come on now, before more arrive.”

She relaxed at the familiar growl of her savior.

He yanked her up to her feet. She ran as hard as she could behind him. She stumbled as they reached the stairs. He braced her to keep her from tumbling down.

She saw the light of the tube station below and breathed a sigh of relief.

Her rescuer didn’t look back at her as he spoke. “We’re not safe yet. More are coming.”

He pulled her along as they hustled down the stairs. Emma tried to look back, but the speed with which he forced her to move made seeing much of anything in the dark impossible. They reached the base of the stairs and continued into the nearly empty station.

“Ah!” Emma felt a sharp sting of pain in her shoulder. Her feet instantly gave away beneath her. Her arms felt like lead as she brought them up to stop her fall to the cement.

She slowly raised her hands to her shoulder. Her hand wrapped around the shaft of the arrow embedded in her flesh.

“Don’t touch it,” her rescuer said. “Try not to move at all. You will only increase the speed of the poison.”

Did he just say poison? Her eyes felt heavy and her mind clouded.

“Help me.” She tried to yell the words, but they came out as barely a whisper. Her vision a blur, she could no longer keep her eyes open. She tried to choke out one last “please”, but it was too late. Her eyes fell shut and the darkness consumed her.

II. Brothers in arms

“I can’t believe you brought an outsider in here!”

“They would have killed her,” a familiar voice growled from the darkness. “Did you want me just to let them kill again?”

“You could have brought the entire clan down upon us!”

Emma struggled to open her eyes. They still felt heavy, but the pain in her shoulder seemed gone.

“I’m not a fool. They didn’t follow me.” Her rescuer sighed. “I did what I thought was right, Prometheus. Either way, it’s been done. It’s like Dad always says. We have to deal with what’s happening, not with how we want it to be.”

A large brown mass filled Emma’s vision as she struggled to clear it. Whatever it was, it was far bigger than any man she had ever seen.

“Hey, guys,” a deep voice boomed. “I think she’s awake.”

As her vision slowly cleared, the mass in front of her began to take shape. The brown formed in to fur. Fur coating a massive brown bear!

She cried out and tried to struggle up and away. Pain lanced through her shoulder, far worse than anything she felt before.

“Samson, you idiot! You’re scaring her!”

The bear threw up two strangely human hands in front of her. He backed away. “Sorry, lady. Don’t scream! I’m not gonna hurt you!”

Emma realized that the deep voice radiated from the bear’s masked muzzle.

Emma’s scream faded in her throat. “You can talk?”

The bear scratched the back of his head. “Well, yeah. Same as you can.”

“Get out of the way, Samson.”

A normal-sized figure pushed past the bear. His black hair was long and his skin was very red, as if he suffered some kind of severe sunburn.

“I need you to stay calm, miss. You’ve been injured. We’ve cleaned the wound and treated the poison from the arrowhead, but it will still be a couple of days before you can safely move around.”

She looked past him and saw the other man in the room, the man who rescued her. He stood with arms crossed. He wore a plain white t-shirt that fit perfectly across his heavily muscled chest and abdomen. He would have been handsome if not for the scars that covered the entire left side of his face and traveled all the way up his completely bald head. His skin was mocha colored, and his eyes dark.

“Where am I? Who are all of you? Are we in Federation? We aren’t supposed to have any metas in Islington.”

“We can’t tell you where you are yet,” the long-haired man said. “But know that you are safe as long as we are with you. My name is Prometheus Morgan. The guy who helped you is my brother Damocles. The big guy is Samson. Our fourth brother Horus is around somewhere, but he doesn’t like guests.”

“I’m Emogene Briscoe, but please just call me Emma.”

“You picked the wrong bunch of people to get involved with, Emogene,” Damocles said. “ZTS is just a subsidiary of a company called Zodiac Holdings. They’re run by a ninja cult called the Hidden Demon. They aren’t nice people. If I hadn’t been there, you would be very dead right now.”

“I don’t understand. ZTS is a computer conglomerate, nothing more.”

“That’s what they want you to believe,” Prometheus said. “Fifteen years ago, Kazuhiko Shirai was in America for the first time. He ran a genetics lab back then and—”

“The horror draws near, brothers. We face great peril soon.”

The new voice spoke in a loud whisper. A fourth man sat with his legs crossed, yet he floated several feet off the ground. His face was pale, almost chalk white. While his face was gaunt, his body was almost impossibly thin. It seemed like a stiff wind could have knocked him over if not for his knack for levitation. His eyes didn’t focus on any of them. Instead, he seemed to focus past them, past the walls of the room.

She assumed this must be the aforementioned Horus.

“They know who you were, Jigsaw. They know that we’re out there, and they have been waiting for this sign. Shirai is not pleased at Ms. Briscoe’s survival, but he thinks of us as a consolation prize. A chance to redeem his past mistakes.”

“Jigsaw,” Emma said. “Who’s Jigsaw?”

“Don’t worry about it right now, lady,” Damocles said. “We need to decide on our next action. If the Hidden Demon is gunning for us, we need to attack first. Put the battle on our own terms. We can’t let them find Babs.”

“Babs,” Emma said. “Who’s Babs?”

An angry glare from Prometheus told Emma she should be quiet. With the pain in her shoulder, she didn’t think it best to argue right now.

“We can’t just run off half-cocked,” Prometheus said. “You will get us killed. We need to fortify our position and take them out when they arrive.”

“They want to kill us,” Horus said. “And the surface—I don’t want to go to the surface.”

Surface? What are they talking about? Emma opened her mouth, but another glare from Prometheus shut her down before she could speak a word.

Samson smashed his two massive hands together in a booming clap. “We need to kick some butt! We need to get out there and show those ninjas who’s boss!”

“The matter is settled then,” Prometheus said. “The vote is two to two. A tie always falls on the side of caution.”

“Unless I choose to break said tie,” a new voice said. “Isn’t that correct, my son?”

Prometheus bowed his head. “Yes, father.”

Emma had never seen a man quite like the final figure to enter the room. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but his brown skin hung on his bones as if someone gave him another foot’s worth of it. A large afro, wrapped in a headband, framed his head.

Despite the excess skin that hung off him like a shar-pei, he seemed familiar somehow. Emma couldn’t place from where, however.

She did know that of the other four men, only Damocles looked like he could be related. Yet all seemed to look at him as a father.

She doubted it was a formal adoption.

The new arrival turned his attention to her. “Welcome to our home, Ms. Briscoe. I wish it could be under better circumstances. Alas, it seems you have found yourself in a situation far more dangerous than you could ever suspect.”

He glanced over at the boys, before he turned back to her. “Whatever the case, I apologize for my sons’ inability to introduce me. My name is Keith.”

“Hello, Keith,” she said.

She wasn’t sure what to say next, but Keith quickly made it a non-issue. He turned his attention back to his sons. “You must meet the Hidden Demon on your own terms. But we must also do it quickly and effectively. We will challenge Shirai to a duel at a location of our choosing. He will plan an ambush, but we will be ready for him.”

“And then we kick some butt,” Samson said with another clap of excitement.

Prometheus looked at Keith with concern. “Father, are you sure this is the right path for us?”

“I am, my sons. But I understand your trepidation, Prometheus, just as I understand why Horus wishes to remain here. Despite that, we need to stand ready as one. Babs and I have made sure you are ready for the coming battle. You can win this fight, and you will.”

Prometheus nodded.

Keith turned to Horus. “You must finish the last few touches on the Ansible. We will need the new armaments in the coming battle.”

“Yes, father.”

He turned back to Prometheus. “I understand your worries and I respect them. Your caution will be a strength in the coming battle. That is why I choose you to deliver our message to Shirai.”

“Yes, father.”

“We will meet them at Smithson’s,” Keith said. “They will think it to their favor, but we will prove them wrong. Won’t we?”

Damocles smiled in the corner. Emma understood why the man rarely smiled. His grin seemed more sinister than happy.

Prometheus turned to Emma. “Get some rest. Your time may not be so restful in a few hours.”

“What—I don’t—”

Prometheus gave her no time to finish. He turned and walked from the bedside. Emma wanted to see where he went, but she didn’t want to bring back the roaring pain in her shoulder.

Keith turned back to Emma. He gave her a smile, which reminded her once again of something canine.

“I think you’ve listened to me ramble quite long enough. My boys are not used to outsiders, so I apologize that they are so cryptic. Perhaps it’s best if I just explained where we come from. It will pass the time while we wait for Prometheus and Horus to finish their tasks. Would that be all right?”

Emma nodded.

“Good. It started just over fifteen years ago…”