• • The Wolf Pack
• March 9, 2024

The Wolf Pack (Chapter 35)

The Wolf Pack

THE HOOD

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“Why so scared? You won, didn’t you?”

Ion asks us this question like it should be rhetorical. As he and Hundress float down towards us, he taps his finger where his lips should be and it doesn’t seem so rhetorical.

We all move and power up, ready to fight, with Marie and Tommy to their feet, encompassing themselves in their elements. Claire readies her blade and Ken powers up his arm. I pull out my guns, and Emily moves in front of us, level with the monster at our door.

As he floats on his disk above us, Emily floats with her feet off the ground, ready to defend us.

Ion can’t seem to give two shits. He’s thinking to himself, scratching his head with his long and pointy finger.

“I mean, it looks like I lost but I got everything I wanted now that I think about it. I got the cantorium, the superhuman genomes, and I was entertained to boot.” He gives away important information so carelessly that it’s insulting. He clearly thinks we can’t do anything about it.

“Sure, I did lose all my bets though, but I mean… who wouldn’t bet on the house?”

Emily’s hands tighten as she warns him in a growl, “You shouldn’t underestimate us.”

Marie adds, “And I wouldn’t talk like you aren’t going to jail for this either.”

He watches them grind their teeth, and he chuckles. More than that he smirks, this mouth forms on his face, and nothing else. His face is all lips and between them lies darkness. The light that’s trying to escape has barely life as if being sucked in by a black hole.

Emily loses a bit of her confidence in the face of this monster and I can’t blame her. The subtle transformation is unnerving, even as it dissipates, and it reinforceds Ion’s belief that he has nothing to fear.

“You know, I don’t think I did lose,” he decides, and he floats higher on his disc with Hundress at his side. “I just didn’t get as big a win as I wanted, I got greedy but the plans were set in motion and you haven’t stopped them, but maybe… just maybe… I can hedge my bets on myself.”

Ion holds his hand towards us, and I see his fingertips lighting up. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what he’s going to do, but it does take a genius to say something.

I scream to everyone, “Scatter! He’ll kill us!”

I’m right, because the moment we begin to separate he shoots one blast from his finger. Emily doesn’t dodge, she spins around and screams towards the ground, causing a blast that sends all of us flying in different directions. The blast zips past her face, barely missing.

As Ion’s attack explodes on impact, we’re all sent farther apart, giving us a great look at how his blast reduced the matter on the ground to its base elements, leaving nothing else but a crater.

When I hit the ground, all my wounds from the last few hours try to cripple me. I try to roll across the ground to my hands and knees, but my arms give out and my ribs feel like their stabbing into my organs. I’m a pathetic lard as I look up, only to see Ion blast us from all of his fingertips.

Tommy lights up and flies to avoid the blasts. Marie tries icing the ground and speeding between blasts, but she trips over herself. Ken tackles her to get out of the way.

Claire tries to leap and dodge, but she’s blasted in the chest and left with a hole burning through her. The blast hits the ground in front of her and sends her flying.

ZOOOOM!

One hits the ground right in front of me as I’m busy watching the others. The blast sends me flying back but I don’t hit the ground. Gentle hands catch hold of me, and I look behind me to see that Emily is flying me up to safety.

We find out that the air isn’t so safe as Ion turns his hand towards us, and Emily must zig and zag in the air to avoid us being blasted. I stay quiet, hanging on for dear life so she can focus and do what she needs to do.

Emily makes sure that the blasts never come close to us, but that causes Ion to lose interest in us and aim his fingers towards someone who can’t dodge as easily. Ion points all his fingers towards Ken and Marie on the ground.

“Look out!” I scream to him on the ground, with Emily flying towards him to grab him too, but Ion blasts straight for him, full burst.

ZOOOOM!

The blast collides with Ken as soon as he raises his arm to protect his face. When Ion’s touch makes contact with Ken’s skin, Ken is covered in this black essence.

Ion tilts his head in confusion, matching how we all feel, but Ken looks at his hands as the dark essence dissipates, and smiles. He knows exactly what’s happening.

When I can hear the words, “Rakaas!” being screamed at the top of someone’s lungs, I assume that it has something to do with the gigantic black pillar that forms over Ion’s head. Ken smiles through it all, especially as Ion and Hundress have to leap off his metal platform before a giant pillar comes and crushes it.

In its wake, the dust reveals the sorceress, Sarem, floating above us. With her hands glowing and pressed towards the ground, it’s safe to assume that she conjured up the attack on Ion.

Now on the ground, Ion summons the platform back to his cufflinks, like it were a metallic liquid. He aims his hand up at Sarem and blasts her. She crosses her arms and repeats her magical word, “Rakaas!”

A black and silver crusader shield, larger than it should be, appears before her to absorb his attack.

After seeing his power fail against Sarem, Ion sure seems less full of himself. Our chance to counter attack.

I lay my hands over Emily’s to get her attention as we float, and I tell her, “We need to attack now while he’s not focusing on us.”

Emily looks away from me to Ion and takes a split second to think about it. “Let’s do it.”

She flies us straight towards Ion, but the slick girl lets me go. She thinks I’ll fall behind her and let her do this alone, but she’s out of her mind if she thinks that’ll fly. I open my metal wings for a split second to right my body, but retract them to right myself and nose dive right behind her.

Emily flies with her fists forward to collide with Ion, and I pop out my knives to take his head off.

He throws a wrench in the strategy by completely turning around at the waist, and slapping Emily midair. As she flops and rolls across the ground, I try to right myself and avoid falling right into his hands.

I pop out the metal wings on my back and use the jetpack to boost away but I’m still flying towards him. I pull out my submachine gun to let loose a hail of bullets at Ion to hurt him but it does nothing. His lower half twists towards me and he holds his hand out.

No matter how many bullets I shoot, no matter which direction I use my jetpack, my chest slams right into Ion’s hand. The force on my chest makes it feel hollow, like I’ve lost more than my breath, but all of my strength and feeling. Then he closes his fingers around me to keep everything else from leaving.

“I’m insulted you thought something so simple would work, who do you think I am, the actual Hugh Hefner?”

My hands go to his fingers and I feel the same static feeling at my fingertips as against my chest. It doesn’t feel solid, but not like a liquid either. Ion’s almost something in between.

SMASH!

The ground is definitely solid though as he slams me against it. He lifts me back up, holding me over his head as everyone moves to surround him. Emily is the tensest, as she stands ready but frozen as Ion threatens my life. He waves me around like a toy to make sure that all of them stay back.

I’d say that I feel shameful and full of rage, but as the dullness in my chest fades, it only slowly begins to feel inflamed.

Still… I won’t let myself be used against my team. I feel the bones in my chest work to kill me as I bring my legs up and kick Ion dead in the chest. The monster doesn’t budge, but the monster gives me the worst headbutt of my life.

It’s hard to do anything but hang from his grip lifelessly.

Ion brings his finger to my chest to make his threat known. “If you want, feel free to provoke-” but he presses his finger into my armor’s chest and realizes that he can’t disintegrate it. “The hell?”

Claire thinks this is the signal that his powers aren’t working so she takes a step forward. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ion’s finger points towards her and extends to punch a hole right through her again, destroying everything that she had been healing in the last few minutes. 

“Huh, must be the armor.”

Everyone watches in shock as she falls to the ground, convulsing where she lay. There’s nothing I want more than to go to her, even though she’s immortal, even though she heals, there’s that irrational fear that she won’t. I hear her gasp, and settle on the ground in a regular mode of breathing, and I know she’s fine.

I have one gun left, so I take it out and aim at Ion’s ugly fucking head.

WHACK!

“*Huh*,” I gasp.

“Clay!”

“Hmm, so your helmet isn’t cantorium, I wonder how I missed that…”

Ion slapped me as soon as I pulled out my gun, and slashed a line through my helmet. I open my eye, and I feel the burns on my skin. I’m lucky, he didn’t slash out my eye, but it’ll leave a bad scar.

That’s not the most concerning thing. The most concerning thing is that with a snap of his fingers, a portal opens up behind him. His powers and abilities span far past anything I’ve seen on this planet before, and his mind is perfectly deranged for someone with all of this power.

I look past the portal, but it’s just darkness. There’s nothing to see because light isn’t coming back out.

Hundress doesn’t wait to go through the portal, and I feel him about to drop me. I have to know, I have to ask, “How, how are you doing this?” My voice, it’s my normal voice. I don’t hear it very often, and it’s off-putting to me.

Ion stops moving in towards the portal, and he turns his head back towards me. There’s this unspoken truth that he heard me loud and clear. Is he wondering which would be better, the secret itself, or letting my mind search for the truth? He seems strange enough to find something sick and twistedly satisfying about it.

“If I said, ‘future,’ in nice quotation marks would you believe me?” Ion asks.

The future? If he’s from the future, how would it be possible that he’s the only one, and how would he not be immediately grabbed and taken back? He’d have to be the last of the universe, but then knowledge would be unlimited to him, he should know how everything progresses and always win but he admitted that nothing has gone to plan.

“No,” is my answer.

He leans in closer and asks, “Aliens?”

An extraterrestrial… again, why is he the only one? Why is he all alone on this planet, a backwater one by all standards? Why waste his time? Why haven’t the rest come for him?

“No,” is my answer.

“Science experiment, fourth dimensional being, magical demon?” He’s just listing things off now. One being impossible, technology can’t create a being like him; a fourth dimensional being wouldn’t even be perceivable; and demons don’t look like him, even the most powerful.

“No,” is my answer.

“If you wouldn’t believe anything I say, then why did you ask?”

That’s… that’s a good question. “Force of habit,” I admit.

Ion drops me to the ground, and the others react only for him to extend his finger to the point of my forehead, making Emily freeze, right next to me. She’s close enough to touch me, but she won’t risk my life at this point.

“Oh, I know that look,” he tells Emily, “I’ve seen it on so many people before they die. But hey, you’re invulnerable maybe, you think you may live if I touch you, and you might. But you have something else to worry about, a… little problem I planted just in case I needed a ten-second distraction.”

He pulls his finger back as we watch him in confusion. Then there’s this buzz.

I look in front of me, and there’s this ball of… him floating there.

“Fuck,” is the last thing I say before it explodes in my face.