The Primal War : First Elements Saga Book 1

Chapter 1 : An Awakening

Paris.”

“Twenty minutes,” Barna repeated. “And these hypers did that amount of damage to those buildings in that time?”

“No, that would be Marcus misfiring with his abilities,” Jay snorted, earning himself a look from Barna. Which just as quickly switched back to Marcus.

“While I acknowledge Agent Bamfield has a tendency to speak out of his ass on the odd occasion, I am seeing more damage here than a handful of hypers should be able to do to those mostly brick buildings. Were you misfiring, Agent Gray?”

Marcus felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. It was no secret that, as the youngest of the Descendants, and the last to come in out of the cold, he was still struggling to master his powerful primal abilities. But he certainly didn’t like admitting as much to the old man. Not that they’d take him out of rotation, because only his fire abilities seemed to be useful against hypers exhibiting similar strengths.

No, it was the possibility that they would pair him up with one of the others. Fiercely protective of his independence ever since RedSky found him in that mall he destroyed back in Illinois when he was nine, he would literally fight to stay that way. Even if it meant butting heads with Barna, who, while firm and heavy-handed, was the closest thing he had to a father figure in a life where his widowed mom basically raised him and his brother Jonathan by herself.

He just wished he could learn how to control his abilities faster. The other Descendents had been learning how to control theirs ever since they were kids. He spent his childhood past nine denying he even had them.

“There was something different about these hypers, sir,” he began. “I think they were

Soulless.”

Again Jay snorted.

“Bullshit,” he said disbelievingly. “You don’t know they were Soulless. We’ve never captured one so we could study it enough to know the difference.”

“That’s enough, Agent Bamfield,” Barna rumbled, instantly silencing Jay. Again he returned his attention to Marcus at that point.

“An interesting observation, Agent Gray. Any evidence to back it up?”

A flicker of pain went through him before he could stop it and he found himself looking at his hand.

“Ah, Marcus!” Barna said, switching to his first name. “You leached one, didn’t you.”

“I couldn’t help it, sir!” Marcus said, stuffing his hand back under the table. “I was trying to fend off three of them attacking me at once. My glove got torn off and I touched one of them while in emergency mode. And, despite getting the power boost, I felt nothing from inside him.

He was empty, like a construct.”

“That doesn’t necessarily make him Soulless, Marcus,” that from Valentina, the team’s water primal. Quiet and reserved, she usually didn’t say anything outside of her own report unless it was something significant.

“As you said, it could’ve just been a construct. Some of the more powerful hypers we’ve faced, possess the ability to make echoes of themselves.”

“Normally I would agree with you, Valentina,” Doug, the fourth and final member of their team and their air primal, said with a slight accent to his English. Found and raised in Africa, he had spent most of his life there before a RedSky team responding to reports of strange weather phenomenon near his village, found him.

“But constructs must have their master nearby, and we saw nothing like that on the video. Nor did Marcus see a hyper acting to direct the others while he fought. No, I think the very fact that our fire brother was unable to feel a soul inside of the hyper he leached, pretty much confirms it as a Soulless.”