The Mantis Corruption - Book Three - 1. Chapter 1 - Sumi & Harakin, Part One

Sumi and Harakin did not refer to their commander by his title. The two of them simply called him the Voice, and in the military compound where they were prisoners, his words were like an omniscient presence. They rarely saw him.

“Wake up, twins,” said the Voice.

Sumi and Harakin were not twins. They were not the same age. The two were not even related, nor did they share the same skin color, but because neither of the women was human, twins was the term that stuck. There was disdain and dismissiveness when anyone in the skeleton crew of officers and medics said it, and for years, the two young women were referred to by the insult.

“Twins,” the Voice repeated, “your commander orders you to be outside of the bunker in positions four and seven in 90 seconds.”

Sumi and Harakin obeyed without question. They exited through the steel door that led out into the misty moorlands between the base and the great river. A moment later, they were in two separate locations, and they waited.

The dark of the night was quiet.

Sumi and Harakin knew what to do when the order was given.

“Engage,” said the Voice.

Sumi disappeared and Harakin launched herself forward at a full-tilt run. The soles of her feet glowed, and they barely touched the ground. Sumi reappeared in the distance ahead of Harakin. She looked back at the other young woman who was running far faster than any human possibly could, and Sumi vanished again.

Their targets were not far.

Sumi stepped out of nothing and back into reality on the banks of the great river. She peered upstream through the darkness, and then down the river’s opposite flow, but there were no signs of anyone or anything. No boat floated on this stretch of the river, and no houses lined its banks.

The houses that did sit close to the water’s edge were not in sight, but they were not far. Sumi and Harakin were punished any time they went too near to the residences.

Then, there they were, the targets.

Sumi exited the world again, and she reentered it right in front of two naked men. Their bodies were bruised and bloody, and they were barefoot. They were racing through the soggy countryside like a pair of hunted rabbits, and the arrival of Sumi startled them so much they both fell to the ground.

Terror was in their eyes, and they scrambled over each other to get up and try to run.

Harakin suddenly appeared with the flash from her illuminating feet and the glow of her vicious photon blades that protruded from each of her hands.

One of the naked men screamed, as Harakin collided with him and slashed with her light-knives. His arm was lopped off and went hurtling through the air and fell to the damp ground.

The other man watched in helpless horror, as Sumi grabbed his wrist, and she un-armed him as well. She stepped out of reality and took his forearm with her. His limb was simply gone.

Geysers of gore gushed from both men’s severed stumps, but neither of the women was finished with their victims. The two weakened men tried to scramble away.

Sumi reappeared behind the man she had begun disassembling, and she placed her palm on his bare back. Again she left the world, and again she took a chunk of him with her.

He made a shrill noise, as his shoulder vanished into nothingness. His entire second arm flopped to the ground. He wheezed and coughed as the blood flowed from his missing limbs.

Sumi’s next removal ended the man. She stepped through a doorway in reality and took his head.

As she disappeared again, the armless and headless corpse convulsed where it stood, and it crashed to the muddy soil.

Harakin’s target was lumbering away from her. She swept her hands through the air and a flurry of countless tiny daggers of lumen energy impaled the man. He gurgled and collapsed to the sodden earth, and his blood pooled around his corpse.

Sumi and Harakin’s task was always simple, to execute the victims put before them. There were rules, guidelines that needed to be followed, but their mission was always the same.

With the job completed, Sumi and Harakin returned to the base.

Ending lives became second nature for the two young women. Early in each of their imprisonments, both were forced to learn that not following orders came with horrible consequences. Being ignored for fulfilling their duties was preferable to the tortures used for punishment.

Sumi was first brought to the compound 15 years earlier. That was when her teleportation ability initially activated. She was only 9 years old at the time. For her initiation ceremony, the young girl was led into a chamber that contained six people tied to chairs lined up in a row. The prisoners were barely conscious, and each was badly beaten. Sumi was positioned in front of the first seated man.

“Kill him,” commanded the Voice.

This was the first time Sumi heard him speak.

Before she could even respond to the order, an officer slit the throat of the prisoner at the other end of the row of chairs.

Sumi watched in shocked horror, as the man’s blood flowed down his front like a gory waterfall. A moment later, he slumped forward, dead.

“Kill him,” the Voice repeated.

Sumi did not know how to kill a person, and when she again did nothing, the officer stepped closer. There was no stop to the slow march of oncoming death. Despite Sumi’s screams of protest, the other prisoners were slain one after another. The child wailed, and the officer drew closer to her with each kill. Tears streamed down Sumi’s cheeks, but her terrified eyes stared. She could not look away from the slaughter. In a matter of brutal moments, only the bound man in front of Sumi was still living.

The other five corpses were each in a terrible state.

The Voice spoke again. “That man before you is going to die, whether you do it or not,” and the prisoner whimpered. “If you do not kill him,” the Voice continued, and he paused, “well, you’re not going to like it.”

The officer then stepped up to Sumi and loomed over her. He growled, snatched her shirt, and wiped the blood from his blade all over it.

“Last chance,” warned the Voice.

The officer grabbed the final prisoner by the top of his head, and he stabbed his blade into one of the man’s eyes; he let out a muffled scream into the gag.

Sumi could do naught but shriek.

The officer yanked his knife out, and he stuck it into the man’s other eye.

The Voice cooed to young Sumi, “Kill the prisoner,” as if he were offering her candy. “Put him out of his misery. My men can make his suffering last for a long, long time.”

Sobs wracked the young girl’s tiny frame, as the horrors of it overwhelmed her. She collapsed to the floor.

“Kill him,” the Voice urged her in a sickly-sweet tone.

Sumi was forced to watch, as the man was stabbed in both of his arms and both of his legs. He screamed, and Sumi screamed, and the Voice laughed.

“Looks like we will have to do this all again tomorrow,” the Voice said. “You’ll have a lot of time to think about it tonight.”

The officer pulled up the final prisoner’s bloody shirt, and he slit the man across his stomach. His guts sloughed out and splattered onto the floor in front of Sumi.

She was pulled to her unsteady feet and dragged to a deeper part of the compound. The 9 year old girl was brought to a dark cell with a foul, putrid reek. Even the hallway to the chamber was barely lit, and the weak light did nothing to reveal what was in the darkness of the cell. Sumi was pushed inside. The floor felt slimy and crunched under her little feet. All through the night, she screamed and cried, and she swatted at things that landed on her or crawled up her skin.

Her burgeoning ability to open a doorway in reality had only teleported Sumi from one place to another by her line of sight, and she was trapped in the creeping darkness.

The following morning, in the glow of the rising sun, she was brought outside and hosed clean. Sumi was fed, but afterward, she was brought back to the execution chamber. Four more prisoners were tied to chairs. The scrawny child was powerless to fight against the officers who forced her in front of a tied and beaten woman.

A knife was placed in Sumi’s hand. She had not been given one the day before.

“Kill her,” the Voice commanded. “Unless you’d like another night with your new friends.”

The officer sucked air through his teeth and made a chittering sound. He put his own knife’s blade against the throat of the prisoner in front of him.

“Kill her.”

The woman who Sumi was being ordered to kill moaned into the gag. Tears streamed from her eyes, and she pulled against the bonds but they held her fast.

Sumi began hyperventilating, and her terror from the crawling dark of the night before caused her to obey. The little girl stuck the blade into the woman’s stomach.

“Good, good!” the Voice said with a wicked chuckle. “That wound will kill her slowly. It’ll make for a good lesson. You can watch her suffer and see the life seep out of her. She will die in terrible pain,” the Voice added. He almost sounded gleeful.

Sumi looked into the prisoner’s eyes, as she pulled the blade out, and she stabbed the woman again. The little girl stabbed her over and over, sobbing and wailing as the Voice laughed. After what felt to Sumi like an eternity, the woman was dead.

The child received no prize or reward for fulfilling the horrible task that was set before her, but that night, she was not locked in the vile cell. She learned to kill without question, or face the creeping darkness.

Sumi spent the following nine years, nine soul-crushing and mind-numbing years, nine seemingly endless years alone in training. In that time, the officers taught her how to fight, and Sumi’s human captors took great pleasure in defeating their non-human prisoner in practice combat. They would jump her when she was not expecting it and leave her beaten, sometimes badly. By the time she was 18 years old, Sumi was hardened like granite. Her nose was crooked from being broken many times, and her hands were almost always balled into fists. She was wary of every encounter with the officers or the medics.

Sumi was taught how to use her powers of teleportation to access and enter places from which she was barred. She was also taught to use her unique ability to kill. She trained herself to disconnect from the actions demanded of her, to the point that she would slaughter any prisoner put in front of her outright.

The Voice began sending her out on missions. Since Sumi could get into anywhere, she became a regular member of the kill-squads. At the base, killing was her primary requirement, but she was rarely made to kill in the field. Her task was always to get the mercenaries into wherever their targets were hiding.

One night, without warning, she was sent on unexpected exercises. A squad led her past the compound’s obstacle course and out into the rolling lands that surrounded the base. They brought her to the perimeter of the capital city, but at no point that night was she required to use her teleportation.

At sunrise, the group made it back to the base, and she was permitted to return to the dormitory. Sumi was surprised to find a young girl asleep in one of the beds. It had been so many years that Sumi was the only youth, that for a moment, she just stood there and stared at the child. She tried to quietly change out of her mission gear, but the girl sat up with a bleary expression.

Seeing the child sparked something in Sumi. It was not that she never saw other children, she often crossed paths with the capital’s homeless rabble while out on missions, but this girl was like her; the child was not human. There was a pale illumination coming from her skin. Sumi was experiencing an emotion that she was not used to, and it was like a glittering fleck of quartz crystal revealed in the granite that had become her soul.

Sumi spent very little time talking to others. When the dark moments of her life at the compound were at their worst, she would talk to her faded memories, or even just the walls of her lonely home. There were many dark moments in that place.

“Hi,” she said to the girl.

The child looked at Sumi with an unfocused gaze, and she fell back against the pillow into unconsciousness.

Sumi’s eyes stayed fixed on the sleeping girl, as she finished changing. She climbed into her own bed and soon fell asleep with the morning sun beginning to brighten the room.

It was early in the afternoon when she awoke, and the dormitory was again empty, but the bed that the girl slept in was disheveled. Sumi went to the door and turned the handle.

It was locked. The door was never locked.

Sumi knew that she was not permitted to leave the compound, and even if she did, there was nowhere she could go. She also knew it was impossible for her to be accepted anywhere, but locking the door was asinine; locked doors were her power’s specialty. Even though Sumi could have been on the other side of the door in an instant, she remained in the room out of spite.

There was a plate of food on the table, and she started to eat her bland breakfast.

Hours later, Sumi awoke on the cold uncomfortable floor.

It was already dark outside.

She pushed herself upright.

The officers had locked her in a room that they knew could not hold her, but then they also drugged her food. They had never drugged her before. Sumi pulled herself up into the chair with her head spinning. She tried to be angry at her captors for this new treatment, but her brain refused to focus, and it was several minutes before she was able to gather herself.

Sumi barely remembered her previous life, the life before she was snatched from her home and taken to the compound. Nine lonely years dragged by in that horrible place, and her time there almost completely overshadowed, or made her forget whatever childhood she had experienced. Sumi often tried to hone in on her vague memories, back from a time when she was not used as a living weapon.

Her brain felt foggy, but she suddenly remembered the child and looked over at the bed. The girl was again asleep under the covers, and quite a few objects were now beneath the bedframe, including a large trunk and some toys.

Sumi was brought to the compound without a single possession. She pushed herself to her unsteady feet, walked over to the sleeping girl, and reached down to pick up a stuffed animal. A bell on its hat jangled.

The child groaned and opened her eyes. She sat up and looked at Sumi.

“Where’s mama?” she asked, and she started to cry.

Her tears quickly became uncontrolled sobbing, and the inexperienced 18 year old did not know what to do. Sumi looked around, but the Voice did not speak. It did not give any instructions or guidance, nor did it rattle in her ears about her duty. It did not even crackle on noisily to tell Sumi the child’s name. The Voice remained silent.

Sumi stepped up next to the bed, put her hand on the child’s back, and the girl wrapped her arms around Sumi’s waist.

She wailed.

Eventually, exhaustion calmed the child, and Sumi said in a soft voice, “My name’s Sumi. What’s yours?”

The girl rubbed her eyes, sniffed hard, and said, “Harakin.”

“Your name is Harakin?” Sumi confirmed, testing the name, and the girl nodded. “Where do you come from, Harakin? Where were you before you came to this place?”

A sob choked the child, but she managed to say, “I was with mama and dada and bobo. We were at the waterfall. Then some bad men came,” and the girl started to cry again.

“Did they hurt you?” Sumi asked. She was uncertain in her actions and clumsily ran her fingers over the girl’s hair.

Harakin shook her head no.

“They didn’t hurt you, okay, good. Did they hurt your family?” Sumi whispered, but again the child indicated that they did not. “I don’t understand, Harakin,” she said in a gentle voice. “What happened? What did they do to you?”

“Mama and dada let the men take me away,” Harakin whimpered. “They didn’t want me anymore, and they let them take me. They didn’t take bobo, but they took me.” She broke down again in pitiful, body-shaking sobs. Sumi could not calm her, and the girl cried until she fell back to sleep.

The drugs were still making Sumi’s head spin, and she staggered across the room. She clambered onto her bed, sat upright, and hugged her knees to her heart. She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against her thighs, and tried to dredge up any memory from her time before the compound.

The next day, Sumi and Harakin were both roughly awakened at dawn. They were shoved down the hallway that led to the execution chamber. Within the room, seven prisoners were tied to chairs in a row. Two of them were beaten so badly they were unconscious.

Sumi instantly knew what was happening. She looked at little Harakin, as the child was pushed to one end of the seated prisoners.

For the briefest moment, Sumi hesitated.

The officer grabbed Sumi by the shirt and yanked her close to his face. His breath stank as he made his wicked insect noise at her.

She cringed away from him, and the man released his grip on her clothes. Sumi looked back at Harakin again, as if to apologize, then she stepped up to the other end of the row of bound prisoners.

By only 18, Sumi had already executed too many people to count. She told herself that these prisoners now before her were just more of the same, but she knew it was a lie when the officer unsheathed his knife. He extended it to her, and her mind went numb, as her fingers wrapped around the hilt. Killing humans was so easy with her powers. She simply needed to open one of her eldritch doorways and teleport a piece of her target into nothing.

Sumi looked down at the knife in her hand. She knew what was expected of her.

The Voice spoke to Harakin in his most tempting tone.

“Kill him,” he oozed.

Just like nine years earlier, when Sumi was first ordered to execute a prisoner, Harakin was not given a knife or anything else that she could have used to kill someone. This brutal ceremony was meant to terrorize her, meant to reveal to her the world of which she was now a part. It was meant to set the tone for the rest of her existence, and the human captors liked their tortures of the non-human living weapons.

In Sumi’s mind, she was thrust back to her initiation. She knew the punishment for failing to fulfill her duty. Over her years of imprisonment, Sumi spent countless nights in the dark cell. Sometimes she was locked in for resisting an order, sometimes for no other reason than to keep her spirit broken.

Sumi took a breath, stared at the tied person in front of her, and she gritted her teeth. In one fell swipe, she slit the prisoner’s throat. Sumi squinted her eyes shut against Harakin’s scream of horror. The child bawled and cried, and tears trickled from Sumi’s eyes, but she did what she knew was required of her.

She also knew full well that Harakin could not escape being put in the dark cell for the night; the threat of being locked in it was constant at the compound, and the smothering of hopes and dreams was the goal. All the fears that Sumi felt for the horribleness within the cell forced her to do to Harakin, the same thing that was done to her those long years ago.

The screaming girl was again instructed by the Voice to kill the chained man before her, as Sumi took a step closer.

She looked at the next person in front of her, and all the while Harakin wailed. One by one, the 18 year old continued to slaughter the other prisoners, while drawing nearer to Harakin.

Sumi stabbed one man in the jugular and a massive gush of blood showered the prisoner tied beside him. She jabbed the knife multiple times into the lungs and hearts of the next two bound people. The following individual’s throat was slit, and then Sumi stepped up beside Harakin.

The child looked small and frail.

Five prisoners were dead.

The Voice laughed.

In front of Sumi was a woman tied to the chair. She was about to cut her throat, when the Voice interrupted.

“Show her,” he commanded.

The officer reached toward Sumi, and she gave him back his bloody blade.

Sumi looked at Harakin, took a shallow breath, and then she brought her palm to the gagged woman’s chest.

The prisoner gazed up at Sumi with hope, feeling the soft touch of a gentle hand that no longer held a weapon.

Then Sumi’s entire body blinked.

The woman gasped in shock, as a giant cavity the size of a grapefruit opened in her torso beneath Sumi’s palm. All of the flesh and bones and organs in the space that existed a moment ago were gone. The woman jerked in her chair as her innards bulged out of the opening, and she slumped forward, dead. A gruesome river of slime and blood poured down her body and splattered on Harakin’s feet.

The child coughed and hacked and vomited onto the floor of the execution chamber. She did not comprehend what she witnessed, and nothing could overshadow her all-encompassing terror.

“Kill him,” the Voice instructed young Harakin in a tone dripping with poisonous sweetness. “Kill him.”

She could not.

Sumi balled her fingers into a fist that she squeezed with all her might, trying to build herself up for what she was expected to do. She took the knife back from the officer, looked at the final living prisoner, and she stuck the blade into his stomach.

He ground his teeth into the gag and grunted in pain.

Sumi left the knife in him and took her hand away. She paused, then she reached forward and gripped the hilt. In an instructive way, she twisted the blade, pulled it out, and stuck it back into the man. Again, she left it in him. Tears leaked from her eyes as she tortured the prisoner for her captors, but she dared not leave the task incomplete. The prisoner groaned as Sumi repeated her action, wrapping her fingers around the handle, and the blade slid out of the man, red and glistening. Then, again, she stabbed it back into him. His wounds seeped blood down his legs.

“Kill him,” the Voice hissed to Harakin.

He whimpered, as Sumi showed Harakin over and over how to stab someone. The man was pierced many times, as Harakin cried and screamed.

Sumi’s tears also flowed freely, and she continued to stab the man in his torso until the life left his eyes and he fell still.

“Show her again,” demanded the Voice.

Sumi handed the knife to the officer and placed her palm against the corpse’s forehead. It was almost as if a flash of light emanated from her, but there was no illumination, as her entire body blinked again. Sumi disappeared from reality through one of her doorways, and she returned to it in the same instant. However, the man’s head was gone.

Blood oozed from the hideous hole of his neck.

At only 11 years old, Harakin did not understand her powers. She was grabbed by the officers and dragged from the room.

Sumi stood still, painfully aware of how ineffectual she was at protecting this new child, and yet internally begging to be ignored by the officers. She was also silently screaming for them to leave Harakin alone, but she stood resolute and obedient.

A moment later, Sumi was by herself with the seven dead bodies. She wished there was some way to save Harakin from the crawling dark of the punishment cell, and Sumi felt guilty about her gratitude that she was being left alone. She returned to the dormitory.

Day slowly became night, and Sumi knew the child was still suffering in the darkness. She hated that she could not save her from the compound and the horrible people who ran it, but she could not even save herself.

Sumi spent that night buried in memories from before her life at the compound, memories she was no longer certain were real. Even if they were only fantasies, those thoughts allowed her to escape into her mind.

The following day, she was awakened by the sounds of commotion. She rose, approached the window, and saw young Harakin outside in the morning sun. The filth from the cell was being hosed off of her, and several guards were jeering and laughing. Sumi knew the water was cold.

Harakin was returned to the dorm, and she was shaking to her bones.

“Are you…” Sumi started to ask, and Harakin turned toward her.

“You’re a monster!” the girl shrieked. “Stay away from me!”

Whatever interactions Sumi had experienced with other children during her youth long ago were forgotten, and she did not know how to respond to the girl, so she vanished.

Harakin was left standing alone in the empty communal bedroom, sobbing and hopeless and cold.

Sumi stepped back into the world at the only location to which she could escape.

The rusted remains of an old six-story watchtower loomed over the compound. Its ladders deteriorated decades earlier, but the platform at the top was still stable. No one could access the upper landing except for Sumi, and no one knew that she sometimes hid on the old skeleton of a structure when life at the base got to its lowest.

She sat on the sun-scorched planks and stared out toward the distant spires that sparkled on the horizon. As horrible as her life was at the compound, Sumi knew that she did not belong with the humans who dwelt in that far-off city; she knew that she did not fit in with them.

She thought back over the long years. The officers had forced her to kill more people than she could count. They trained her to use her unusual abilities, how to access her powers at will, and how they could be harnessed to kill.

Sumi knew what the future held for Harakin, and a terrible idea flashed into her mind. She considered killing the child, putting the girl out of her misery before the inevitable happened to her, but Sumi knew she could not do it. The countless masses that she had executed over her nine years were each a part of her survival in that brutal place. Killing Harakin would be a different kind of killing.

The breeze was warm, and Sumi dropped her head to her hands and sobbed. She grieved the life that was stolen from her all those years ago, and she mourned for Harakin over the inevitable suffering that was to come.

Sumi stayed on the lookout for many hours that day. The ever-present Voice did not speak, did not demand her appearance or her presence, and she remained alone until sundown.

When she returned to the dorm, the child was again gone, and a plate of grey food was waiting for her. Sumi was hungry but wary of the tasteless meal. However, after she finished eating, nothing happened. The food was not drugged.

Then the door opened. Harakin was shoved into the room. She fell to her knees, bawling pitifully, and the door slammed behind her. She was covered in blood.

Sumi put some warm water in a bowl and grabbed a few rags. She knelt beside Harakin and began to clean the gore from the girl.

Harakin wailed, but she did not resist.

No words were needed in that moment, and Harakin’s shuddering sobs filled the quiet of the room. Sumi wiped away much of the blood, then helped the child remove her sticky clothes, and led her into one of the shower stalls.

Harakin continued to whimper, as the warm water cleansed away the gore on the outside of her, but it did nothing to remove the misery that was now her life. When she was clean, she calmed down, and Sumi tucked her into bed.

Then she lay down beside young Harakin, and Sumi tried to remember what her mother did when she was upset all those years ago. She knew that no bad thing from Harakin’s previous life could possibly compare with what awaited her, and Sumi put one arm over the child. It felt like a pathetic attempt to make up for the incalculable villainy into which Harakin was thrust, but together, they fell asleep.

Harakin quickly realized Sumi was not a monster, and that they were prisoners together in that vicious place.

Six grueling years dragged by, and despite the officers’ attempts to pit them against one another, the two non-humans formed a bond that was closer than sisterhood. They were not twins, and although the term was used as an insult, twins was very much what the two of them felt like.

Sumi found herself locked in the dark cell far more frequently over those six years. She often took the blame and subsequent punishment for things that would have gotten Harakin sent to the darkness. Despite Sumi’s time spent killing, a tiny recess in her heart flickered with the sparks of compassion and empathy. They were like those memories that she could not even be certain were real, but that she clung to nonetheless. She cared for Harakin, and even though their human captors treated both of them horribly, Sumi was able to tap into some long-forgotten kindness.

Life at the compound was brutal, and soon Harakin was also killing on command. During those six years, she was trained to access her unique abilities, and the officers forced her to use them to kill.

Sumi and Harakin’s powers were very different, but under the guidance of cruel men, each was used as a weapon. The two were destined to be prisoners at the compound until the day they died, but their next assignment would push them beyond their limits and was to be the beginning of their liberation.

They were sent to kill a king★