It was not the sound of a shrieking alarm, nor the morning cries of Iridonia’s colorful songbirds that awoke Kari Bree from her deep slumber. Instead, it was the sound of a nurse creaking open the door to her classmate Dorun Marr’s small room in the county hospital that startled the girl awake. She groggily scanned her surroundings, briefly confused as to why she had been dozing in a cold metal chair instead of her comfortable bed. Then memories of the night prior, as well as the significance of the day’s events flooded her mind.
“Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed as she shot out of her chair, startling the nurse, Dorun, and another one of her peers, Ett Palicosa, who had also passed out leaning over the foot of Dorun’s hospital bed.
As the other two students wiped the sleep from their eyes, Kari pulled out her holopad. She had severely overslept, the clock informing her that her graduation ceremony would be officially commencing in a little less than ten minutes. There were also a number of messages from both her mother and father, furiously inquiring as to where she was.
Kari made a mad dash for the door as Ett groggily called out after her, “aren’t you going to be late for graduation?”
“Yes!” Kari replied frustratedly, “and my robes are still back in my dorm. If I run fast enough, I still may be able to change and make it in time to accept my certification!”
“Sorry…” she heard Dorun call out as she dashed past the nurse and out the door.
Neglecting to wait for the lone working elevator, Kari located the door to the hospital’s main stairway and began to descend down the six flights to the ground level, bypassing the bottom two floors by leaping over the railing and bracing for a sharp impact at the bottom. She landed with a protective tumble and minimal pain, and made a break for the door.
It was already almost midday, and the street between the hospital and the campus was surprisingly busy, causing Kari to weave in and out of landspeeder traffic as she attempted to cross to the opposite side. She hugged her way along the campus’ tall privacy wall until she spotted a large trash bin up ahead. Perched directly above it was the extending arm of a lamp post, which gave Kari a rash idea.
Quickly springing off of the bin, she was able to grab hold of the metal bar with both hands, allowing her to pivot and swing towards the school’s stone boundary wall. Winding up with as few additional swings as she could realistically accommodate, she propelled herself feet-first towards the wall, her momentum carrying her up and over the top, clearing it by only a few millimeters.
The little maneuver must have looked more than ridiculous to any passerbys, but it had gotten the job done, saving her the few extra minutes it would have taken her to run all the way down to the school’s one and only true entrance.
“Oh, if only my father could see me now,” she thought to herself.
Kari made a mad dash across the courtyard and towards the senior students dorm, the grass still wet from last night’s apparent rainstorm, although the darkened clouds overhead seemed to indicate that the precipitation might not yet be quite ready to leave. Just another daunting factor Kari was forced to race against.
She quickly entered the dormitory, almost slipping as she began to ascend to stairs, leaving wet footprints behind her on every third or fourth step.
Flying into her dorm room, she found her ceremonial robes still sprawled out at the foot of her bed from where she had tried them on two days prior.
In one swift motion, she had swapped her casual slacks for her formal wear, tightening a sash around her waist and quickly slipping her shoes back on. This would have to do if she still wanted to make it to the ceremony before it had completely concluded. It’s not like she really needed to impress anyone; she was already going to graduate, regardless of what the other students or their parents thought of her physical appearance.
Still, tradition had been a significant aspect of her upbringing, and she wanted to make her father as proud as possible on her final day at his beloved academy.
She glanced back down at her holopad, seeing the half a dozen messages sent by her parents, as well as a new one from Dorun.
Ever so briefly pausing her frantic motions, she opened it, garnering a smile when she read what he, and presumably Ett, had sent her.
“I’m sorry for causing you so much trouble, I take full responsibility if you’re late for the ceremony. We’re both rooting for you, and can’t wait to hear how it went. Make us proud, friend.”
Leaving her holopad on her bed, Kari hastily and excitedly made her way back out of her room and down towards the exit. She felt a renewed sense of vigor which was tainted by just a hint of regret. Having acquaintances with whom you could sit down and laugh with into the late of night and who genuinely cared about your well-being… it felt good.
But she had already spent almost fourteen entire school years around these people, why was it just now that she was getting to fully experience these things. She had finally given in and actually, presumably made two friends, and now they were all going to be taken their separate ways in life.
She had wasted so much time feeling alone and inadequate. If only she could have a doover. Things might have turned out so much differently.
“But now’s not the time to think about that,” Kari muttered audibly as she ran down the main promenade towards the campus’ large reception hall, a light drizzle beginning to engulf her and dampen her ornate robes. In only a few moments she would take a seat and join her peers as they celebrated a milestone in their lives, recognized for their hard work, discipline, and maturity, before being sent out into the galaxy to pursue a life of what she could only imagine as solitude, secrecy, and violence. At least if they still truly desired to follow the age of Iridonian tradition of becoming elite intergalactic assassins, which graduates would be a fool not to.
But for today, she was still a student. One who would walk across a stage, be handed a certificate, take a shower and a nap, contact her friends, eat supper with her family, and head to the spaceport when the day was done, luggage in hand as she was officially commissioned to make her own way alone in the galaxy and pursue a life that would bring honor to her family’s already reputable name and ancestry.
“Nothing can stop me now,” Kari grinned to herself as she ascended the massive steps leading up to the great hall. She quickly tied her hair in a makeshift bun and dusted off her now damp robes one more time before swinging open the massive wooden doors.
She expected to be met with the sound of the ceremony already well underway, students and their families sending condescending glances in her direction as she acted as if nothing was amiss. However, she was instead overwhelmed by a haunting smell.
One of smoke and blood.
Frozen only meters from the front entryway, Kari took in a sight that she could have never in a million years imagined.
Standing on the stage were three students, Vessa and Aerin Mardeen, as well as Taron Chi. Both sisters were brandishing ornate, blood-soaked blades, while Taron was gripping the inner robe of the now lifeless school headmaster. Surrounding them on all sides of the stage were the bloody and dismembered bodies of Ike, Agen, Malary, and the rest of their peers, as well as the academy’s instructors, including both Master Devrin… and Kari’s father.
The trio now towered in front of her, petrified, eyes wide and filled with an unbridled hatred as they watched the tardy girl bust through the doors and catch them finish fulfilling the ultimate undertaking.
Kari now glanced frantically from side to side, noticing all of the students’ family members were sprawled out among their designated seating, some sort of faint green mist still wafting around their feet.
Turning back to face the three perpetrators, she noticed that they had now given her their full attention, and the usually reserved Taron began to laugh in the most unhinged of manners.
“Well, this is rather unexpected. We just assumed you and Ett had both decided to stay with your defenseless little boy toy over at the hospital. What room was he in again?”
Veera snickered, “705, at least if the headmaster’s report was to be believed.”
“Ah well,” he sighed, “we were going to go over there and finish you all off together when we were done. But now it looks like young Miss Bree has decided she wants to be taken care of right here and now.”
The two sisters glanced at each other with devilish, feral grins, Aerin raising her long, serrated sword, while Veera clanged both of her small cutlasses together. She threw one down, lodging it firmly into the wooden stage with a thud that had caused Kari to jump, before gripping the other tightly with both hands
Finally regaining just a little bit of her composure, Kari began to stammer, “Why… why would you do this?” Her voice was raspy and she felt it difficult to project.
Taron raised his arms as he looked around at the various fallen instructors and students littering the stage. “You and these other plebeians wanted to graduate with simple paper and applause, but we… we are graduating with glory and blood. A much more fitting rite of passage for assassins, wouldn’t you say?”
Kari shook her head ever so slightly, taking a small step back towards the door and indicating her desire to escape.
Taron’s smile dropped immediately, his face instantly entering into an emotionless state.
“Kill her,” he said, turning to Veera.
The older of the sisters screamed wildly with excitement as she leapt from the stage, charging Kari with her large, bloodstained blade in hand.
Moving at seemingly impossible speeds, Veera had completely closed the gap between her and her prey with only five or six long strides. She vehemently swung her weapon, aiming straight for Kari’s neck with enough strength to completely decapitate the girl with a single blow.
Kari’s long-instilled instincts immediately kicked in, however, and she fell to one knee, causing the blade to careen right over the tips of her uppermost horns.
Without breaking her momentum, she spun her leg, striking Veera right in the shin before immediately bringing her elbow down hard onto the back of the lunging girl’s head. With the speed at which she had been traveling, the elder Mardeen sister struggled to regain her balance and slipped on the water that had been pooling around Kari’s feet. She rapidly collapsed forward, falling directly on her neck, a sickening crack reverberating throughout the entire room.
Veera’s blade went clattering off to the side, and her eyes rolled back into her head as she began to foam at the mouth.
Then the room fell silent.
Aerin’s eyes violently expanded in shock and disbelief as she witnessed her sister’s sudden demise. She pointed her sword at Kari, her hand quivering ever so slightly, “what did you do?!”
Kari saw Torun bite his lip with a disappointed scowl.
“I… I was just defending myself?” Kari replied to them fearfully, still attempting to process the altercation that had taken place only moments ago.
“You’re dead!” Aerin exclaimed in a blood curdling tone, gripping her sword by both hands and drawing it back in a readied position, furiously crouching down to more readily leap into action.
Kari took this momentary opportunity to spin and dash for the large door, locking and closing it behind her, the small diversion that the door’s old lock would provide would grant her only a few additional seconds at best.
As Kari descended the ornate stone steps as she heard Aerin shrieking on the other side.
“You can’t escape from me!”
Kari’s body felt completely numb as everything she had just witnessed kept running on loop within her head. She simply could not process nor accept that her family and classmates were all more than likely dead, and wished fervently that she would simply wake up in her bed in the dorms, pushing this nightmare where it belonged alongside the memories of the rest of her bad dreams, hidden deep with the conclaves of her mind.
But as the afternoon rain peppered her face and drenched her robes, she knew that these sensations, thoughts, and now memories were all too real.
She needed to get to Ett and Dorun to make sure they were okay. Maybe they could help her fend off the remaining two crazed attackers should they persist in their pursuit.
The arched campus entrance was now in view, and Kari breathed a sigh of relief.
That was when she felt a searing pain suddenly infiltrate her leg causing her to abruptly tumble onto the muddy lawn.
As she rolled over, struggling to figure out what had just happened, she noticed two small throwing knives protruding from her lower leg and a third lodged in the mud beside her. She also saw Aerin now only a few steps away, and was barely given any time to think as the incensed girl thrust herself forward, swinging her serrated blade down with the intent to end Kari’s life.
Kari rolled to the side, the blade striking the muddy yard and splashing her attacker, the near-animalistic girl now soaked in blood and mire.
In a swift but sloppy motion, Kari propelled herself back at the aggressor, ramming her horned head straight into the girl’s dominant hand. Screaming in pain, Aerin let go of the sword, dropping to her knees. She glared at Kari, the intensity of the rain beginning to lessen ever so slightly.
Snarling, she cried out to Kari, “You’re going to die just like your father!”
It was at that moment that something in Kari’s mind snapped. All of her mindful reservations and practiced civility were immediately cast to the wayside.
“No! You’re going to die just like your sister!” Kari replied, completely losing any sense of self preservation as she further provoked her attacker. Calling upon years of training, she sawall of her opponent’s physical and emotional vulnerabilities and turned them on herself. Leaping, she found herself on top of the girl, wrapping her fingers around her neck and squeezing tight. In an instant she had turned a predator into prey.
She looked into the assassin’s eyes, seeing all of her hatred melt into distress as she kicked and slapped in a vain attempt to free herself. Seeing the dread, dismay, and fear of death in Aerin, Kari felt her resolve falter ever so slightly. That was when her opponent’s mouth immediately twisted into a wicked smile, taking advantage of this lapse in determination much like Kari had done with her only moments before.
But Kari was ready for her, and as Aerin drove both of her elbows into the ground, thrusting her body up and freeing her from the strangling vice grip that had her incapacitated, Kari let go completely. She used the girl’s forward momentum to let her right arm be thrown back, balling her fingers into a fist before quickly reversing the polarity of her arm’s movement.
Bringing her clenched fist straight down into Aerin’s face, she heard the girl’s nose shatter before she abruptly recoiled back down into the mud.
Appearing to be knocked out cold from the blow, Kari finally dismounted her attacker and rolled to the side, slowly rising to her feet despite the shooting pain from her bleeding calf.
However, after hobbling only a few steps forward, she heard a second set of wet footsteps behind her. Aerin screamed out once more, still very much awake. But without even turning, Kari rolled to the side, stopping right beside Aerin’s long sawtooth blade.
The young Iridonian Zabrak aggressor slid past her, just barely missing her quarry. Kari, in turn, swept up the sword and spun, brandishing the blade with all her might. The jagged saber met Aerin’s knee, completely eviscerating it; the sword itself breaking off at the hilt.
She collapsed, wailing loudly in pain, a pool of blood beginning to coat the grass around her.
Kari spun once more, discarding the blade’s now useless ornate hilt and continuing towards the hospital. She decided to refrain from removing the daggers until she had made it inside and within proximity of bandages and disinfectant.
It was a long and painful walk across the now dead street, Kari continually glancing over her shoulder to see if Taron Chi was still in pursuit. However, the final assailant and apparent mastermind of the day’s events was nowhere to be seen, which gave Kari a sense of wary relief.
There was a good chance that he had called it quits after what had happened to the sisters, deeming her and the other few students not worth his time or relative safety. Killing the instructors was most likely the goal of his twisted graduatorial right of passage, and she assumed everyone else had simply been collateral.
On the other hand, however, he was a trained assassin, and was usually much more composed and cunning than the Mardeens had ever been, so if he had collected himself after their heated confrontation only a few minutes prior, then he more than had the ability to keep himself unseen. He could reasonably strike at any moment, catching her off-guard and landing the killing blow, so why hadn’t he?
Cautiously, Kari made her way to the hospital, entering through the main doors and surprising the staff with her muddy, blood-stained appearance.
A few nurses ran over to help her, but she pushed them away. “I’m fine, I’m fine. But there are about four dozen people in the main hall on campus who really need your help. Some were affected by a sort of green gas, I don’t know what kind, and others have sustained grievous bodily harm.”
Her desperate pleas were initially met with shock and confusion.
“Please go help them, my… mother and father are both there. But also contact the police. Some of the students have become irrationally violent,” she pleaded, glancing down at the daggers in her leg, “they did this too.”
After a moment of stillness, the hospital lobby burst into scrambling chaos. One of the nurses began phoning law enforcement, while another began contacting all of their off-duty staff and requesting for medical vehicles, stretchers, and other supplies to be brought to the school at once. One of the doctors ran out the door, presumably to corroborate her story as a few of the other staff members still seemed hesitant, if not fully skeptical of her outlandish claims.
Kari noticed a mother and father sitting on a bench in the corner, watching the frantic staff respond to the emergency as they attempted to comfort their crying child who was clearly overwhelmed by everything that was going on. Then she was approached by yet another nurse, who asked her to follow her to a room so that they could tend to her leg.
“705. I need to get to room 705. My classmates are there and I need to make sure they’re okay,” she told the nurse, firmly grabbing her by both shoulders and leaving brown and red handprints in her grasp’s wake. The nurse paused for a moment, biting her lip, before nodding in approval. She said that there should be the appropriate medical supplies within the room, so she can be treated there.
The two young women boarded the elevator, ascending the seven stories before coming to a stop. Kari felt a measure of safety as she had now placed substantial space between her and the ground, and it was only moments before they entered Dorun’s hospital room.
Dorun turned from watching the condensation trickle down his window to face his friend, and his welcoming smile quickly melted into a confused, gaping frown.
“What happened to you?”
“Where’s Ett,” she said concernedly, completely ignoring his inquiry. The nurse stepped aside to pull bandages and antiseptics from the cabinet in the corner, helping Kari take a seat.
“She… she went to the store to get us some lunch and find you a graduation gift. She left maybe ten minutes ago, but why?”
His concern continued to grow, and he attempted to get out of his bed to check on Kari.
The nurse waved harshly in an attempt to make the boy lay back down, before proceeding to remove the blades from Kari’s shin, causing her to grit her teeth in relieved pain.
As the nurse bandaged her leg, she looked back up at Dorun, knowing exhaustion must have been painfully present in both of her eyes. “Taron, and the twins, they ambushed the ceremony… and killed everyone.”
Dorun’s jaw dropped as he fell back onto his bed, taking a moment to reconstitute his composure and speak again.
“I guess the signs may have been there, at least that something was afoot between them, but killing everyone. Why?”
“I really don’t know,” she replied concernedly, “but I wish I did. He did ramble about graduating in blood or something, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
The nurse tightened Kari’s bandages before standing up to inspect it. She glanced around, presumably looking for a clean cloth to help clean the rest of Kari’s body, but all the ones nearby were already coated in blood and grime. She stood up and informed Kari that she would be right back, rushing out the door to fetch more sanitary supplies.
“He also said they had planned on coming over here after they were done, they even knew your room number.”
Dorun shot up again, “WHAT?!”
He managed to painfully swing his legs over the hospital bed, “If that’s the case, we need to get out of here right now! They could be here any minute!”
Kari tried to calm the boy, glancing briefly out of his bedside window. “I took care of the Mardeen sisters, and I have a feeling Taron won’t risk exposing himself just to hunt down a few stragglers. He got what he wanted… the death of those around him.”
“I don’t trust that,” Dorun stated bluntly, “Taron’s a sly guy. And since we don’t know his entire motive, we can’t rule out the fact that we might be on his hit list for a reason. I say we get out of here and meet up with Ett, he only knows where we’ll be if we stay here.”
“I really think we’re okay now,” she protested, but Dorun was already sliding on his slippers and gathering his few belongings.
“Please, let’s just go.”
“But what about your treatments? And your injuries, aren’t you afraid you’re going to strain something?”
“I could care less right now, Kari,” Dorun said, motioning towards the door, “let’s go!”
Kari painfully stood to her feet, feeling a sense of dread re-engulf her mind. She wanted to believe that they were finally safe, and that the emergency responders would arrive at the school, arrest the perpetrators, and nurse her parents back to health. But it was beginning to set in that maybe this was simply delusional wishful thinking, and that they really were still in grave danger.
As the two exited Dorun’s room and waited for the elevator to arrive, Kari tried to control her breathing and focus. Imagining worst case scenarios filled with doom and gloom was in no way beneficial to them right now. They would just need to locate Ett, listen for updates regarding the school and its attackers, and plan accordingly from there.
The elevator dinged as it reached the seventh floor, and Dorun stepped towards it as the door slid open.
Kari sighed once again, relieving her mind of all of her dreadful machinations. “If the nimble, quiet, skilled Taron Chi that I’ve come to know was truly after us, he would have struck long before now,” she thought to herself
And that was when an arm extended from inside the elevator, plunging a blade straight into Dorun’s torso.
Taron smiled welcomingly at his prey, his mannerisms now as calm and cold as ever.
“Why hello there.”
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