Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Will

The soldier moved like a robot. His reflexes were faster than those of a snake. I was certain that if I got a look under his armor, I’d find pistons and gears pumping and turning. There was no way that this was a human soldier. His armor was beyond a military-grade. It looked to be the stuff that astronauts wore when they were going on their spacewalks.

It did not matter how many times Alexis and I struck him. He never wavered. There was not so much as a stagger in his steps as he advanced upon us, blocking our strikes as if they were nothing. I was in my feral form, and even then, my attacks were barely scratching his armor. Alexis and I struck in a rhythm. Whenever my strike fell upon the soldier, Alexis followed right after. But instead of staggering or reeling, the soldier kept moving forward.

I was not scared. I had faced tougher foes in the past, Griswold being the most recent one. Ralph, Maurice, Blair, and even my own brother—they were all foes that had tested my mettle time and again, sometimes physical, sometimes mental. And I had vanquished them. Well, almost all of them. If I knew one thing about my tenacity, it was that I’d never let this soldier win this fight. Not while I was still the alpha wolf of the Grimm pack.

Alexis, I’ve figured out his weakness, I said. In all my unsuccessful strikes, I learned one thing. This soldier didn’t stop when he was hit at any major body part. But when struck at his joints, he became perplexed. He would stand still, wondering how to advance while his joints were jammed. This armor that he’s wearing, it’s more than just a suit. It’s an exoskeleton granting him strength. That’s why he’s moving like this.

That’s just perfect; Alexis sounded agitated. How do we take off what appears to be welded to his skin?

By ripping off his skin, I responded. It was what needed to be done. In regular battles, the normal rules of fighting apply. Even when involved in a life-and-death battle with a foe, I had to be humane. If I had to kill them, it had to be swift. If I needed to maim them, I’d do it in such a way that they’d surrender, and the fight would end.

This was no regular battle. Those rules did not apply here. If this soldier could act as a juggernaut, so could I. It had just taken me a little while to realize that. But at that time, the soldier had taken out a gun the likes of which I had never seen before. For one, the gun glowed with an electrical surge that ran across its length. And another thing, the weapon did not have a hole at the end of its barrel. I wondered where he’d shoot from, and in the next second, I seemed to get my answer in a painful way.

He pressed the trigger while still standing ten feet away from me. Instead of bullets, a jolt of electricity zapped from the barrel and hit me square in the face, enveloping my whole body in the deadliest shock I’d ever experienced in my life. I limped to the ground, completely paralyzed by the agonizing pain coursing through my body in the form of megavolts. I could even smell my fur burning.

It was at this moment that I saw from the corner of my eye as Alexis grappled with his gun using her mouth. She took the gun, and despite the shock that it was delivering to her face, she broke it free from the soldier’s iron grip and threw it in the forest. But the soldier was relentless. He wouldn’t simply give in without a fight. I rose from the ground, recovering quickly from the attack, and it wasn’t before I had risen that I saw that the soldier now had a gauntlet on his forearm aimed at me. There were rockets emerging from that gauntlet. Having just suffered from one lethal attack, I was in no position to take a flurry of rockets to my face.

As he unleashed those rockets, I jumped around, dodging every single one and watching as they exploded all around me, creating plumes of smoke and flame everywhere till there was nowhere where I could escape except above. So I leaped into the canopy of the trees, trying to hide from the soldier’s line of sight. He had ditched his gauntlet for yet another weapon. It was some form of a long baton that also had electricity surging through it.

Before he could smash the baton into Alexis’s torso, I climbed down from the canopy and came up behind him, ready to rid him of his weapon and his armor.

First, I slashed at his hand that was holding the baton. Even as my blow struck, I got a fair dosage of a shock to my claw, rendering it weakened for my next attack. At that time, I figured out that if I had to take off some of his armor, I had to do it with my teeth.

Despite the soldier’s lightning-fast reflexes, I leaped on him from behind and dug my teeth into his helmet. I could feel my teeth crossing beyond the armor plates in his helmet and digging into the skin of his head, drawing blood.

For the first time since his altercation with us, the soldier screamed. It was a harrowing sound that did not belong to a human. Rather, it was a monstrous scream as if it was coming from some ghoul or undead creature raised by a necromancer.

Alexis, noticing what I was doing, did the same to the soldier’s forearms. He had many weapon systems in his gauntlets that he’d have used had Alexis not torn off his armor from his hands. I could see that she had rent his skin free, leaving behind giant red patches on his forearms where once his skin used to be. Now, without a gauntlet and a helmet, the soldier did not resemble a robot any longer.

Now he looked like some horror conjured from the deepest recesses of hell itself. His eyes were red and lacked irises. His whole skin had a webwork of blackened veins running across it, making it look like he had been submerged in a vat full of boiling tar. The soldier’s skin was not white or black. It was an unnatural shade of blue, making him look like he had died and then his corpse was forced to go through some unholy ritual that had morphed him into the being that he was now.

As I had initially suspected, there were gears and pistons in his armor. This was an exo-suit, a mechanical machine designed to make him stronger and capable to bear the attacks from a werewolf. Whoever had sent him knew a little too much about werewolves, it seemed.

Could it be Blair? Could it be perhaps that there was some other enemy tucked away in some dark cleft of the world, ready to attack from the shadows?

Looking into his eyes, I could see no signs of life, and yet this man drew breath and snarled and screamed as Alexis and I beat him into submission, tethering him to the ground. Alexis put her paws on his arms while I shifted the weight of my body on his chest so that he wouldn’t be able to move, resist, or retaliate.

Now it was time for me to turn back into a human and interrogate this soldier. Ask him where he’d come from, which master he served, and why did he want to kill us when we had done nothing to him in the first place?

But while I was still shifting back into my human form, I noticed the soldier wedging his tongue into his teeth. I had seen this before almost a hundred years ago. Soldiers loyal to the Nazis had cyanide capsules in their teeth that they used to kill themselves whenever they were caught by their enemies. It was clear to me that this soldier intended to do the same.

As Alexis was holding him down and I was shifting back, neither of us could stop him from swallowing his hollowed-out tooth that contained the cyanide capsule. And so, it was with helplessness that we observed him writhing and foaming as he died.

Alexis shifted back as well and said, “Well, that was a load of bullshit.”

“Now we’re never going to find out where he came from,” I said, feeling defeated in spite of the fact that we had just beaten him together.

“I don’t think you know how this works,” Alexis said, crouching by the soldier’s corpse and interacting with his armor. “This is computerized, Will. Meaning we can trace it back to whoever is in charge. All we need to do is plug his armor’s computer system into some source and, well, hack into it. You and I can’t do it, but we do know someone who can, don’t we?”

“Are we going to drag Maliha, an innocent girl who knows nothing of the world of werewolves and vampires, into this mess? She will go insane,” I protested. “That girl has lived a simple life. She will be traumatized upon observing a dead body.”

“You don’t give her enough credit,” Alexis said. “She did do her part in preventing all those bombs from going off, if you remember.”

“That was one thing. This is a completely separate thing. Think about what you’re saying. You’re asking to introduce her to a world that will overwhelm her senses. As much as I appreciate her moral candor and her bravery, I just don’t think that she must become unwillingly enlightened about the existence of mythical creatures.”

“As valid as your point is, dear Will,” Alexis spoke softly. If anyone else was speaking to me in such a tone, I would think that they were condescending. However, when it came to her, I knew that she was trying to be as patient as she could with me. I understood where she was coming from. It was just that I needed her to see that my viewpoint on this particular matter was just as valid. “We need her help. What do you suggest we do?”

I took a deep breath and then, with my hands rubbing my eyes, said, “I don’t even think we need to confirm to whom these soldiers belong. Isn’t it obvious? This is Blair’s doing.”

“How can you say that with such certainty without any evidence?” Alexis asked.

“Because look at the soldier and observe how abominably he has been tarnished. He looks to be affected by no less than a dozen concoctions and potions that have altered him into this inhuman being. Just look at him. He’s imbued with poisons. His skin is blueish. His veins are about to pop off any second. And if that’s not enough, just see what his eyes look like. And that’s not even the real reason that I’m convinced this is Blair’s doing. Just observe his armor. It is top-of-the-line, complete with extremely advanced weaponry and capabilities. Whom do we know who has such vast resources at their disposal that they can arm their soldiers to the teeth with such tech? It’s Blair. You have to agree with me here. It’s literally spelled out.”

Alexis was nodding, but it was not the affirmative kind of nod. This was how she nodded when she was deep in thought and needed to process faster. Then, lifting her finger up, she said, “On the other hand, this could be someone entirely else, someone richer and more dangerous than Blair. Someone who can potentially end the lives of werewolves with the tech and the soldiers they have at their disposal. Wouldn’t it be prudent that we knew about this threat rather than pin it on someone we already know? The last I heard of Blair, he was in the wind. Do you really think that after the financial losses he suffered through the dissolving of his business in Fiddler’s Green, he’d still be able to get back on his feet and muster up enough budget to create these soldiers?”

She had an irrefutable point.

“Fine. But we don’t have to tell Maliha more than she needs to know. We’ll just tell her that these are some bio-terrorists or something like that,” I said.

“I agree with you there,” Alexis said. “We’ll keep her in the dark as much as possible.”

Relationships, I had learned, were about compromise from time to time. This did not mean that one did not love the other. I had come to understand in our time together that Alexis possessed a different sort of wisdom from the one that I possessed. A feminine wisdom that sought to nurture and nourish instead of resorting to fight or flight. And it was for that reason that I accepted her suggestion.

Alexis helped me sling the dead soldier over my shoulder. Together, sneakily and slowly, we crossed the territory of the forest while avoiding the main paths. Who knew how many more soldiers there were out there? The commune was not very far away, but given that we’d chosen a more hidden and convoluted way, it was taking us double the time to reach there.

“I wonder what the endgame was,” Alexis whispered.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This soldier…whomever sent it…I wonder what they wanted. What, did they simply think that they’d dispatch a soldier and he’d take care of us? That he’d kill the werewolves all on his own? When you come to think of it, doesn’t that seem like something that Blair wouldn’t do? Blair’s got a personal agenda against us. He wants his revenge against you for killing his father. Wouldn’t he try to come and kill you himself?”

Perhaps, after all his failed attempts on my life, Blair had realized his mistake, and instead of coming at me himself, he had resorted to sending soldiers on his behalf. But I had to be sure that this was indeed Blair’s doing. It could very well be someone else.

“Will, duck!” Alexis whispered just in time. As I ducked, I saw from behind the thicket that there were no less than fifteen soldiers, similarly armored and armed, walking in a progression through the forest path, all of them wielding those electrical zapping guns, all of them marching in that mechanical way that resembled the movements of a robot.

“An entire patrol,” I whispered back to her. “It’s too much for us to take on right now.”

“Agreed. Let’s just wait for them to pass and then head to the commune.”

As we stayed there, hidden from the sights of the soldiers, I thought more about what this meant. Was this perhaps the first part of a series of attacks against the werewolves? These sorts of things did happen in life. Whenever one stronghold fell, another power took its place. The last of the vampires had been beaten and eliminated, creating a power vacuum that was now being filled by these soldiers and their mysterious leader.

“Will, we can take ‘em,” Alexis said.

“How do you suggest that? We barely beat one of them. There are fifteen out there,” I said. As much as I preferred fighting bravely over hiding, there was no chance that just the two of us could beat all of those soldiers together unless we had some powerful weapon at hand.

Alexis flailed the dead soldier’s gauntlet in the air, saying, “We can use this.”

“Or we can simply use this,” I said. Her suggestion gave me an amazing idea. There were grenades, although not like the ones that I’d ever seen, attached to the dead soldier’s belt.

“Grenades?”

“Why not? It’s not like he’s going to need it,” I said.

“Very well.”

And so, just as the soldiers were passing the intersection where we were hiding, Alexis and I took off the grenades around the soldier’s belt and tossed four of them at the same time by pulling their pins.

There was a brief moment when the grenades did not explode, and the soldiers looked in our direction with their guns aimed at the thicket behind which we were hiding. And then, in the next second, four powerful grenades blew up and created a chain reaction by blowing up all the grenades and explosives on all the soldiers’ belts, completely flattening the entire intersection by destroying the trees in a blaze of fire.

When the dust and smoke settled, the only thing that remained of all the soldiers were pieces of their tattered armor.