The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 1 : An Awakening

The water, hot enough to feel cold against his skin, sluiced over his body like a cleansing tsunami. Yet the one thing he wanted to wash away clung to him like a foul disease, a darkness that he couldn't reach to claw away.

He groaned under the weight of that darkness, both unwanted and unwelcome. If there was any other way …

"Don't you smell good enough yet, princess?" A hard voice just outside the shower asked.

"You've been in there for nearly an hour."

Marcus sighed and slowly pushed away from the shower's tiled wall. A thought then channeled pyrokinetic energies rippling over his lean, muscular body even as he turned the shower off.

Pushing the door of the shower open sent a gout of superheated steam into the communal bathroom.

"Nice," the young man standing a couple steps back, growled. "Why do you have to be such a fucking douche all the time, Marcus?"

Looking at him, for a moment Marcus only saw thermal patterns instead of a person. The hot core, the rivers of fire flowing out from them to the extremities, and the higher heat of the head. And over it all a glowing man shape where the billowing steam heated up their skin.

A blink and it was just Jay, the team veteran, standing there in his usual jeans, t-shirt and old army jacket, his protective stone skin absorbing back into his body.

"Jay. I thought you were in town trying to lure kids into your van," he said, reaching for a towel even though he was completely dry. A gesture not lost on the older man.

"Fuck you, Marcus,” Jay snarled. “When you finally get your shit together, the old man wants your encounter debrief in Ops. Try not to be late, fuck up."

With that, the broad-shouldered young man turned smartly on his heel and angrily marched out of the bathroom, once again subtly reminding Marcus that he was actually raised military. Instead of being brought in from the cold like an orphan. And, as it always did, it sent a surge of anger through him.

Unlike Jay, however, that anger was useful. It motivated him to move faster to get ready for the debrief. It cleared his mind and forced him to focus. And last, but most importantly it pushed back the darkness and the filth that had weighed down his soul. Just enough that he could square his shoulders with resolve and look at his reflection and not flinch.

'Thank you, Jay, you insufferable prick,' he silently said, finger combing his hair into place. Then it was into the labyrinth of corridors that stood between him and Ops.

The Red Butte Rapid Response Center, code named: The Briar Patch. This was RedSky’s tactical response outpost, isolated and insulated from civilization by hundreds of kilometers of Arizona desert. Here RedSky, a private government contractor, kept their hyper human response teams, set up to deal with threats neither the US military, nor other private contractors like Academi, G4S, Raytheon, and Northbridge had the capability of taking on.

Partially because of the advanced tech RedSky had gotten their hands on since their inception in the late Fifties from various sites where captured alien tech was being data stripped and reverse engineered for terrestrial use. And where the tech failed, they had the Team, code named: The Descendants.

In the middle of the Briar Patch was the Hub: built around the old man’s office, which sat at the center, the various operational rooms that radiated away from it were slices of pizza that pinwheeled around it. Although, to be precise, each ‘slice’ had its own shape and size according to what its ultimate purpose was.

Ops, by definition, was the largest slice of space as it held the war room and the bullpen for the various technicians and analysts that had overwatch on every operation running out of the Briar Patch across the planet. Today, Marcus noticed as he slipped through the entryway after putting in his biometrics, they were watching no less than three separate operations that were ongoing. One in Turkey, another in Brazil, and a third in the UK.