Hellstinger

13. ...ancestors.

"Mama! Mama! Mama!" A three-year-old Marcus called in excitement, running towards his mother's side of the couch with a small Jack in the Box toy in hand.

"Mama look," He said, excited to show his discovery to his mother. "You turn it and turn it and it comes out!"

His excitement was beyond reasoning, and he didn't even notice that his mother was gone by the time Jack came out.

"Mama?" He called. Everything was gone. His mother, his home, was gone. He chose a direction in the black void he found himself and ran. As he ran, he grew. He grew to become a powerful man capable of anything, but then his legs caught something and he fell.

He looked back to see what tripped him; it was his mother's dead body. Bloody and wide-eyed.

"Mama?" He said with teary eyes. "What happened, Mama?"

"You could have saved us all." His mother's dead eyes looked straight into his, "Why didn't you take the bow? Why did you let us die?"

"MAMA!" Marcus jumped to his feet with cold sweat, looking every which way for his mother or at least a remnant of the black void he had just been in. But all he could see was the padded red floor, the wall of weapons, and the traditional Japanese-style walls of the dojo.

It was a dream, or maybe a fractured memory. Either way, it only served to enrage Marcus' vengeful intentions.

He sat back down on the floor looking at the bow, still unstrung. Marcus lets out a sigh as he tries to calm himself after the nightmare. He isn't sure what time it is.

Ever since Alexander left the room, he had been trying everything he could think of. Even all the techniques on YouTube proved insufficient, not even a bow stringer. He must have fallen asleep at a point in time.

"What the fuck is this bow made of?" Marcus asked himself with a sigh, a gentle kind of frustration already settling in. He stared at the bow for the better part of a minute.

The intricate symbols on its arm and handle let off a soft glow that always seems to shift and hold his attention. Marcus picked up the bow again, as soon as his fingers closed around it, he felt a connection between himself, and the metal of the bow and the fibers of its string. With feigned confidence, Marcus rose and tried the most commonly used stringing technique he had found online. He pressed his weight on the bow and pulled the string with all his might. Nothing.

Not even a bulge;

"Fuck it!" He cursed, throwing the bow aside in frustration. "I will just use another bow."

He kicked the bow away and walked to the Leftmost table where Alexander had placed her sword;

"Or better still," He said to himself, "why waste my time stringing a bow when I have so many options?"

Marcus' face lit up at the sight of the fascinating weapons arranged meticulously on the tables before him. Swords, knives, twin curved sickle-like blades, even a whip. Everything looks so exotic and powerful.

"This looks sweet." He picked up the curved sickle-like blades, one in each hand. "This would be so cool."

Unlike Alexander's sword and his bow, when he picked up the curved blades, nothing happened. No visions nor proclamation of death. Although the Hellstinger crest that was engraved in each of the blade's hilts came alive, letting off a greenish glow that only served to improve its beauty.

"Oh, oh, oh..." He laughed, turning the blade every which way and making different poses with the blade like an action hero. "This is very sweet, I bet I can flip it around and throw it like a boomerang or something."

In movies, the hero always has an instinct for things like flipping their weapon around and about in ways that defy natural laws. Marcus wanted to see if he could do the same.

He readied himself for the possibility of being cut and tried to flip his right-handed blade. And just like he predicted, the blade grazed his palm.

"Shit!" He let out a groan as he dropped the blade. "Shit, I knew I would get cut."

Marcus bent over to pick up the blade; but as soon as his bleeding palm touched the hilt of the blade, everything changed.

Unlike the other times that Marcus would see things, this time, it was real. The dojo remained as it was just like everything else in it. But then again, the change was never a physical one.

A crippling sense of fear grasped Marcus and the air in the room shifted into that of intense rage. The rage isn't his but he could feel it just as much. He started Hyperventilating and looking everywhere for what was happening or what must have gone wrong;

"HELLSTINGER!" Marcus flinched, feeling the vibrations of the voice in his bones before the rage in it registered. He did a full one-eighty-degree turn at the call and immediately went frozen terrified.

"HOW DARE YOU?!" It was the old man that made him lose his sanity days ago, the same old man he met in the forest. But unlike those two meetings, the old man always appeared in ragged attire that looked like it had survived thousands of years of war, and he always seemed roughly calm. This time, he appeared with a burning fury. And his clothes were literally made of a glowing material that cast a furious glow on everything.

"How dare you reject the weapon chosen for you?" The old man said, taking quick long strides to cover the distance of the room and stand five feet in front of Marcus. Towering a while head above the younger Hellstinger.

"How dare you refuse your charge? How dare you abuse your bloodline and misuse your power?" The old man said in burning fury. His eyes aglow as he punctuates his questions with unsheathing a fiery broad sword from underneath his clothes.; "ANSWER ME, BOY!"

"Wha... wha...?" Marcus couldn't form a complete word, even standing straight before the old man seemed to take a lot of nerve.

"Pick up your bow! NOW!" The voice vibrated through the foundations of the Manor as the burning tip of the broad sword stood four inches from Marcus' face.

"M-m...m...my bow," Marcus said, swallowing a big lump in his throat. "I... I..."

He stuttered, searching everywhere with his eyes. The bow was gone. Of all the things in the room to disappear, it had to be the bow. It just had to.

"You have dishonored your sacred charge and sowed the seed of misconduct." The old man said in a lower voice but a more dangerous tone. "You might be a Hellstinger by name and duty, but you are no longer one of us. Another will be chosen to continue this sacred charge, and when you fail in your duty..."

The old man trailed off, lowering his sword, and looking at Marcus with unreasonable fury.

Marcus could hardly breathe. For sure he thought the old man would strike him down with the sword or place a curse on him or something. But instead, another old man appeared behind him. A different person, but old.

Then a middle-aged woman - the woman he had seen in the van the day he arrived in Phoenix - then another man, then a teenage boy with sandy hair. Just like that, one after the other, different people appeared beside - and behind - the old man until they were a total of three hundred thousand people.

Old and young, male and female, warrior and pacifist. Each one of them wields different weapons with a golden glow, each one of them is a Hellstinger. Each one of them was mad at him.

"Should you fail in your duty," They all chorused, "we will judge you..."

"Marcus!"

"I didn't do anything..." Marcus said with a dreadful tone, "...I...I didn't...I didn't do anything!"

"MARCUS!" Alexander's voice snapped Marcus out of his stupor. His eyes are teary, his gym shirt all wet with sweat, and his fingers deathly tight around the hilts of the twin curved blades as though they are the only thing keeping him standing.

"Look at me Marcus," Alexander said with a firm command tone, "LOOK AT ME!"

He obeyed; "I..." He said, taking his eyes off Alexander again in a frantic search for the bow he had kicked away. "I didn't do anything..."

He said, still looking for the bow.

"What in the world happened?" Alexander said, trying to get Marcus to look at her. "What did you see? Who did you see?"

Marcus paused. As though suddenly understanding what just happened. All the senseless terror he had felt became replaced with a bone-sapping dread.

"I saw all of them."

"What?"

His eyes fell on the bow on the other side of the room. His fingers slacked and the twin blades fell to the padded floor with a soft thud.

"What are you saying, Marcus?" Alexander asked.

Marcus gave no response. He moved purposefully to the bow, picked it up, and felt around its string hook for a pointed edge.

"Marcus?"

"They said I have refused my sacred charge," Marcus said, positioning his right-hand palm on the pointed edge, and bracing himself for the pain he was about to inflict on himself. "They said I rejected the weapon chosen for me."

"No..." Alexander trailed off. Looking at the twin curved blades on the floor with a smudge of blood on one of their hilts, she understood. Marcus' father had especially warned her against this. He had told her to be especially careful, and she'd failed.

"No, no, no, no!" She said.

Marcus hesitated for a few seconds before summoning the courage to tear the skin of his palm with the pointed edge of the string hook. He groaned in pain but swallowed the yelp that should have accompanied it. With a bit of hesitation, he closed his bleeding palm around the bow and just like the curved blades, the Hellstinger crest on the handle came alive with a greenish glow.

The same goes for the string. It transformed into a glowing blue concentrated light-based matter. Marcus held it at the unstrung end, and with unimaginable ease, he pulled and lodged the light string into its hook. Consequently, the bow suddenly looked brand new with shimmering round edges and finely sculptured intricate symbols all over its arms; all giving a subtle, yet prominent, golden glow.

Marcus leaned back to examine the bow, and even though all he could feel was dread. A dread of failure, he could feel a strangeness in his own body. He isn't sure whether it was connected to his stringing of the bow or the aftermath of his encounter with his ancestors.

But something was clear, his journey had officially begun.