Missing Piece
Kingo almost got a small heart attack as the pointy blade of the golden spear whizzed just inches from his ear, close enough that he could feel the draft against his skin and hear how the blade cut through the air, therefore definitely too close for his liking!
He ducked the second blow that followed, dropped to the ground, and rolled to his feet a few meters to the left, just in time for the spear to sink into the ground where his head had just been.
He had known what he had gotten himself into of course, and yet it still surprised him, even after all the millennia they had known each other, how mercilessly Thena could fight.
Lucky for him this was just a practice session, he thought as he dodged another punch but had to give up his attacking position in exchange for keeping his kneecaps intact. If it had been a serious situation, he honestly had no doubt that she would have hit him and eliminated him long ago, as much as his ego hated to admit it.
There were reasons that the ancient Greeks worshiped her as the goddess of war, wisdom and strategic warfare. That they named a cosmopolitan city after her and entrusted Athen's protection to her. It said a lot that the city still stood and flourished to this day.
Thena was a force of nature who fully deserved the title of the goddess of war.
In any case, Kingo, who prided himself on his skills in fighting Deviants as well, couldn't help but admire how easily his sister handled her weapons. As if they were one with her body, merely an extension of her limps, which, given her abilities, was also largely true.
To train with Thena was challenging, both mentally and physically.
Unfortunately, despite the enormous amount of concentration it took to stay on his feet against her, the training didn't do enough to turn his mind off or distract him from the problems at hand as much as he wanted..
The events of the last few days and especially those of the last few hours were still gnawing at his mind and his training partner didn't miss it either.
And she shamelessly took advantage of it.
He groaned as the blunt end of her spear collided with the breastplate of his armor. The force behind the blow knocked him off his feet and Thena, quite a fighter to the bitter end, pinned him with the butt of the weapon on his shoulder and one foot on his chest, right there where he had fallen, until he raised his hands and surrendered.
That would leave a bruise or two.
"It's okay Thena!" he laughed hoarsely and out of breath. "You've made your position clear, no need to wipe the floor with me."
Thena cocked her head. Her critical gaze had caught Kingo's eye before, but now that she was no longer attacking and he no longer had to focus his full attention on blocking and parrying her punches, her bright eyes seemed to bore into his body as if they saw something he didn't.
Kingo decided to do what he was always good at to lighten an awkward situation, crack jokes.
He smiled his most charming movie star smile, "Hah. By the way, did you know you're not the first one to try to impale me? Apart from Karun and the vampire thing. There was this fellow actress who - "
"You're unfocused."
Ah yes, typical Thena, always the personification of politeness. Well, he had basically known that before, too.
After another moment, she finally took pity on him and stepped back. Kingo accepted the offered hand and let the goddess of war pull him back to his feet.
"What's on your mind?" she asked.
He was pretty sure she already knew the answer, it was the same thing that was going through all of their minds.
As if the last two days hadn't been bad enough, Ikaris' little show about an hour ago had finally been the last straw, at least for Makkari, if her attempts to tear him apart until even Ajak couldn't stitch his remains together anymore meant anything. There was truly no wrath but that of a woman, he supposed.
Kingo couldn't say he understood her but he could say the same about Ikaris as well.
He'd always looked up to him in a way. It had always been clear to all of them that Ikaris' was Ajak's favorite and effectively her second-in-command. He had always been the perfect soldier, utterly loyal to Arishem and their holy mission to protect humanity. Or so he had thought. That's why the actor couldn't bring himself to fight his brother, even when it came to the fate of the human race he had grown to love so much.
Ikaris was family and as a family you didn't fight each other, that had been Kingo's firm belief and still was to this day.
And that was exactly why it was so difficult for him to accept how easy it seemed for Ikaris to sacrifice one of their own, how easy it obviously still was for him to suggest to the others to get rid of Druig.
To kill him. Their brother. Just like that?
To be clear, Druig wasn't his favorite person at all. Not even close. He was insufferable most of the time or at least he did everything in his might to be.
Kingo would never understand what Makkari found in him, honestly. She was like sunshine, always cheerful, always smiling, curious and kind to everyone. Druig was pretty much the opposite of that. Always for himself, always in his own thoughts and seemingly always ready to step out of line. The best proof was the little cult he started after the Tenochtitlan disaster.
And it was not even that Kingo couldn't understand his point and the pain of watching yet another civilization that had become dear, that had become something like a home to them, fall and go down in flames. But using your abilities to force an entire village to live under your control somewhere in the Amazon and taking the role as the spiritual leader of said cult, quite literally... Who did something like that?!
Druig had strong beliefs, he had to give him that, and Kingo actually didn't doubt that he was probably concerned with the welfare of these people, but still!
And yet, in spite of everything, and even if he sometimes didn't like him at all in situations like that time in his strange little Amazon village, they were still brothers. Family. And Kingo had never wished him any harm. It hurt to see him like that. More than he ever thought or was willing to admit. Much less to Thena who he knew would remember it forever, she still rubbed it in his face that he had once accidentally become a saint to some believers in the still young religion that would later be known as Christianity. They had mistaken his orbs of cosmic energy as a miracle, okay? It had been an accident.
It also hurt to listen to Ikaris and to realize that he didn't shy away from doing what Kingo could not imagine to do. Something that just wasn't an option for him.
Kingo shook his head in a semi-successful attempt to stop thinking about it.
"Let's go take a break." he finally suggested. "You've beaten me up enough for today."
Thena cocked her head, but then nodded, not digging deeper this time, to his great relief.
"That sounds good."
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Sprite poked her fork listlessly through the food in front of her. Ever since eating much more regularly had become a physical necessity for her, she had actually come to appreciate good food. She had also developed an understanding of why both Gilgamesh and Druig liked to do it so much.
For example, if it was Thena, Sersi or Kingo standing in the kitchen, her appetite would go away pretty quickly, she knew what to expect since she had tried Kingo's chili a few hundred of years prior. Gilgamesh's food, on the other hand, was always very enjoyable and yet her stomach was not completely convinced to accept it this time.
Food was a welcome distraction from things that got on your nerves, and tastes were just as diverse and varied as the cultures from which the various dishes originated. It could take you back to a place you knrew from the past, espevcially when the old recipes where used
She had never thought that she would ever have anything in common with Druig of all people, but then again she had never expected that she almost missed how he stole her snacks from the fridge just to annoy her and to tell her, with that sarcastic grin on his face, that she should have written her name on it.
Sprite sighed internally. He was a pain in the ass, a stubborn loner and damn good at pushing those mental buttons that systematically drove his opponent insane. She could respect that in a way, she was quite skillful in that particular point as well.
But he was missing. They were incomplete without him.
Another thought that had been on her mind since the encounter with the mind controlling deviant, and one that she couldn't let go of, was how easily the beast had taken over her will, her entire mind. It was an uncanny realization that she could become nothing more than a puppet at a monsters will, but it was even more uncanny how much the others had been affected by it.
Controlling a human was one thing, people were simple in their needs, fears and instincts, Druig had once said that. However, incapacitating a room full of Eternals far enough to escape... that a Deviant possessed that power was a huge problem and a whole new pain that they had to take care of, but Sprite's thoughts went further than that.
This whole incident basically meant that Druig possessed this power and likely even more of it, if she took his experience with it into consideration. It meant that he himself could influence his fellow Eternals with his abilities. She supposed that made sense, after all none of them were immune to Ikaris' laser, Ajak's healing or, earlier, her own ability of illusions.
But then why had he never used it?
Druig had never turned these powers against any of them, not even back in Tenochtitlan when it was perfectly possible for Ikaris to harm him. Knowing what she knew now she was pretty sure that it would have been easy for him to make the other, physically stronger Eternal clutch his head in pain and recoil without as much as raising a hand. But for some reason he hadn't done that, not even in self defense. Not even on the beach where they had almost destroyed humanity, Ikaris and her.
He hadn't driven them out of his village either, he had never even given them a headache, at least not in that way. He had never made an attempt to invade their minds, not Sprite's at least and she was sure that, ife he had done so to one of the others, it wouldn't have stayed a secret between them.
The only thing he had done, at Thena's request, was to calm her Mahd Wy'ry-torn mind when the shattered memories overwhelmed her.
Sprite had assumed that, for such a stunt to be possible at all, he needed the other's permission, the invitation into their minds. She had assumed that an Eternals mind was like a locked door and even Druig couldn't have the keys to that one.
Apparently she had been completely wrong about that and obviously she was wrong about Druig and his motives as well. She couldn't explain it other than that he hadn't want to turn his powers against them before.
"Are you done tormenting your salad?" Gilgamesh asked from across the cooking platform she was sitting on.
In the time it took Phastos and Ajak to track down the Deviant, he had decided to pursue his hobby, very useful when having someone like Sprite as a willing taster of the food.
"If you just want to poke around in it, you won't end up being any help in taking down the Deviant later."
"I would be more of a hindrance than a help anyway." she remarked dryly, finally giving up on starring down the green stuff and pushing her plate away. "The Deviant could control me just as much as Druig could. We learned that already."
And she wasn't the least bit keen on a repeat of the disaster at the old fire station. She probably had had just sheer dumb luck, or Sersi, to thank for the fact that she hadn't left her mortal existence behind very quickly with a laser beam in her back.
Gilgamesh pushed the plate back in front of her nose. "Because you're human?"
"Of course, why else?" she shoved the plate away again, a little more decisively this time. Gilgamesh sighed.
"I wasn't there when that whole crazy thing happened on that beach," he said and Sprite avoided the memory of why that was the case. "But if I understand correctly, Sersi used the power of the Uni Mind to turn you into a human, right?"
"Yup." she answered. "Completely powerless and everything."
"And you regret that decision?"
And see, that was just the thing. Actually, she would have answered no immediately, after all, that was what she always wanted. Grow up. A body that matched her intellect, not so different from her siblings and even from humans. To be their true equal.
She'd gotten exactly what she wanted, and yet the feeling of helplessness in the face of a goddamn Deviant made her mad as hell.
She may never had been one of the fighter Eternals, but at least she always knew how to deal with a dangerous situation, how to protect and support herself and others. She had given up that ability, along with her immortality, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn't say she didn't miss it. That would have been an outright lie.
"I don't regret it." she finally answered. "But I hate not being able to do anything. I hate having to run away from a Deviant like a helpless person. It's like I'm exactly what my mind isn't."
"A child." Gilgamesh concluded and Sprite gave him a dirty look, even though he was right. If only she could still tuck him into a onesie with a wave of her hand.
But instead of cracking a joke at her expense, he seemed thoughtful. "But if it was Uni Mind that gave Sersi that power, and the Uni Mind is the combined force of our powers, why shouldn't it work the other way around as well?"
Sprite stared at him and he shrugged. "I'm not a genius like Phastos or almost all-knowing like Ajak, but it's a possibility, right?"
"You can't just change someone's DNA as you see fit."
"Why not?" he asked and she couldn't answer. It sounded too crazy, too improbable, but he wasn't wrong that it worked once before already. Creating an Eternal seemed impossible, it was a task that only Arishem could fullfil. Eternals where to complex, to powerful to be created by any other being then and Celestial, right? But then... shouldn't it have been impossible to destroy one of those masterpieces of their creator by turning her human too?
"Grow up." Gilgamesh said. "Become what you want to be and then... I don't know, ask Phastos to look into this, it takes a few years for a human to become an adult. Time enough for him to find some sort of way. In the meantime, we'll get this sorted out too get." he raised a fist, which was immediately surrounded by golden light flashes, and grinned slightly. "A good punch should even knock out a Deviant that can control minds, and then you can fight Druig over the chocolate bars in the back of Ajak's cupboard again once he's back on his feet."
It was a small idea and Sprite wasn't naive enough to pin all their hopes on the idea of another transformation through the Uni Mind. Or on the idea that it would become easy to beat a Deviant that was connected to someone that could harm them without touching them in any physical way.
But it was still hope and for now she was more than willing to grasp for it.
First they had to get Druig back.
Gilgamesh pushed the salad back across the kitchen counter. "Now eat up. You have to get big and strong after all."
Sprite flipped him off and resolved to take revenge on him for that later.