Project: AKRA

  ***

  Raist was younger, in the second stage of his training, looking upwards at the girl that had just pinned him. The dirt in his eyes and the sun silhouetting the female figure made it impossible for him to look at her.

  “You think too much Raist!” she said giddily, jumping off of him and hauling him up back to his feet. He was holding his stomach from where she had side kicked him before taking him down, rubbing his eyes with his other hand. “Combat needs to be intuitive, you just can’t think about every option you have.”

  “Easy for you to say, Laiun; they made you to be good at fighting.” He coughed and spat out some blood from his mouth. “I’m supposed to think of alternatives.”

  “Don’t make excuses, it doesn’t suit you. Just focus. But still, I’m pretty impressed by you. For a Leader-type you’re pretty good at holding your own. You’re the one that’s supposed to think, and I’m the one that is supposed to do the fighting, but there are times when even thinking is bad.”

  Her point made no sense. “If you do not think, you are going to get killed.”

  “I’m not scared,” the girl said as she shrugged, as if they were talking about nothing important. It was Raist’s first time realizing how fatalistic Scouts were; their mentality kind of hurt him. “I know my role in things. I was engineered to be a Scout-type soldier, and will I die fighting? Probably. Then I go to the Line, right?” Her sarcasm told Raist she didn’t believe it. “Though I’m a better fighter than you, it’s just our roles that you plan and lead the battles, and we execute them. I’ll probably die either saving you, or someone like you.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “What, don’t like the truth? That doesn’t seem like you at all.”

  “Hey.” Raist nodded his head past the girl, indicating something was behind her.

  She turned around and he launched at her, kicking the back of her knees. As she was going down, he flung his arm around her throat, wrapping his hand in the other arm’s bicep. They crashed to the ground rolling but he held tight to his choke. He held her there, wondering if he could maintain this grip against her wild thrashing for long, but before his grip failed, she tapped him twice on the leg and he let go. They rolled through the dirt a bit before they faced each other again.

  “Damn Raist, now that’s what I am talking about! Nothing like being dirty to make you feel wild huh?!” She grabbed some dirt and rubbed it in her bright pink hair while she slapped her face a few times, looking a bit crazed before she launched back at him. Why was he paired with the crazy one for his close combat training?

  Later the two of them were sitting on a cliff watching the star set, the two of them holding hands as she gently swung her legs off the edge. “Laiun, do you ever think there is anything beyond this reality?” he asked her.

  “Like gods or something?” She lifted her face to look at him, but his eyes were distant, looking past the horizon. “Or you just mean the Line?”

  He tried to frame it carefully that he wouldn’t sound too crazy, but also wanted her to understand what he was trying to get at. “Kind of. It’s a bit tough, but like there is this reality, and we think it is entirely explainable by physics and science, and I am not saying it’s not, but that there is a higher level of things that we are almost incapable of thinking about. Maybe think about it that this is almost a game, and that there is a higher reality beyond. Like what if we are affected by things we can just barely explain?”

  She laughed a little, gripping his hand tighter. “They used to have movies like that back on Terra all the time. Reality was fake and all that. Never liked them much; reality is too real to be fake, if that makes any sense.”

  “Ha, no I agree with that,” he answered as he laughed. “But that’s not what I’m really talking about. Like what if what some call gods are nothing more than ‘reality administrator’ or something that ran things on a more local level? I am not saying we live in a video game, but that what we call gods might not be anything more than just a more advanced being helping maintain systems like whole planets.”

  She smiled at him. “You’re talking ‘reality administrators’, and I’m having a hard time believing in the Line.”

  Raist didn’t say anything. He was close to Laiun but she didn’t really get esoteric stuff like this. She wasn’t even sure she had a spiritual or life essence and that it would be recycled in the Line; somewhat impressive in a weird way, given a Classed Soldier had to overcome her spiritual schooling on the matter.

  He turned away from her. “I’m not sure how you can not care about any of this stuff, and just think when you die you are dead, and be so willing to die.”

  “You know what I’m going to say?”

  “Yes, I do, but I get the feeling you actually do care about this stuff. But I’ll say it anyway: I think too much?”

  “Haha, yep! I actually do care, but still you think way too much.” She leaned over to kiss him.