Out in the wastelands one cloudless day, the air tingling from the radiation, where the sight of the colossal mountain range to the north barely made itself visible and the teeth of rock that tore at the sky were smoothed by the distance, I hunted alone. Most of my few friends that I bothered to keep thought that was odd, considering that I was a PSI Monk trained solely in abilities of destruction and was quite vulerable to counter-attack. Everyone knew that many of my kind preferred to work with others, to make others take the wounds or to carry the provisions. But I preferred the solitude. That and I didn't have to share the loot after I roughed up the creatures I hunted.

My hand brushed against my spherical I.D badge, and I flashed my eyes to it, expecting to see some sneaky wasteland vermin crawling up my dusty cloak. I fingered the badge, and eyed the name flashing on the display. I had chosen "Heavyporker" as my identifer, since it amused me to use a spin of my last name to annoy the bureaucrats that wanted to file me up into their endless records. Though far too many denizens of Pepper Park laughed at the sight of my identifer, making jokes with the innuendo the identifier implied. Ah well, but I didn't have to put up with them for long, anyway, thanks to the transitory nature of lives in Pepper Park. Unfortunately, many of my friends thought it referred to my girth, outstanding, especially among the PSI Monks. I admit I did like to enjoy the gustatorial pleasures of the snak-attacks and plaza restaurants more than most runners did, partly the reason I was let go from the Crahn Sect when I was young. The slight streak of independence contributed as well, which the preachy priests disliked.

I stepped back from the fog of memory and rifled through my loadout and lightly filled backpack, counting up the boosters and medikits I had. I smiled at the sight of the heavy piece of alloysteel armorplate that I had wrenched off a lone decrepit spiderbot that staggered around the radio relay spire it guarded. The spiderbot had been so easy to destroy, I wondered why their makers even bothered to build them. The armorpart would either fetch me a decent price at the uquibitous Yo's merchants or I could trade it for more boosters.

I had just finished tracking down one of the dreaded Warbots reported to be in operation in the region. The Warbots had kept themselves operational long after the War, where the Dome of York unleashed them against the forces that the city of Neocron had fielded, and the Warbots even managed to reproduce though no sign of the ancient Dome of York production factories had been found. It was alone when I found it, and I couldn't resist the opporunity. There just had been so many trees and handy hills around, and I heard that, for whoever managed to bring down a warbot, made a handsome profit off the salvage rights.

Apparently it had settled into a circular patrol pattern, skimming around the perhiphery of a large gently sloping hill furry with grass tanned by drought. It passed a tree that I had just rested under, and my eyebrows rose when it's head pulled up even with the tree's top. That meant it had to top off at around twenty five feet, probably one unit of the aptly named Titan series. The angular, sharp and silvery metal of the behemoth's armor stood in stark contrast to the spindly and dusky bark wrapping the tree. I hated especially large robots, they always had too much armor to bore into, and huge amounts of power from their reactors, plus they carried large and usually powerful weapons.

I moved to crouch by a large rock, and channeled a jolt of energy to it, starting off the hunt! It staggered to a halt and lumbered around to look at the source of the blast. I tried to blind its sensors with a blazing storm of poison around its eerily skull-like head, but it had already acquired me as its attacker and lumbered my way. Actinic blue rays sparkled from it, lancing towards me and scarring the rock I ducked behind. I lost myself into the rush of action. It took a lot of dodging and use of cover, but I managed, even after nearly draining my mind for strength to the point of unconsiciousness. The fog of battle faded just as the columns of metal that passed for legs buckled on the warbot, and it toppled over, crashing to the ground with an almighty barrage of crackles and thuds. I walked over to it, coughing from the acrid stench of burning plastic and ozone. I avoided stepping on the fallen pieces of armor, their jagged edges threatening to saw through my flesh.

Movement off in the corner of my eyes caught my notice, and I turned away from preparing to open up the Warbot's chest chassis for some initial salvage, and I got curious. I moved closer to the faint outline and its shadow. The form had a tail that fluttered, and the bottom of the outline split into two legs, and came a little closer. I squinted and leaned closer, and saw it was a human with a cloak. To my dismay, I also saw a white upheld fist and some lettering, almost certainly the logo for Twilight Guardian, on his cloak, and I ducked behind the trunk of a tree that the warbot had fallen nearby.

Leaves rustled faintly near me, and fear rushed through me. Whoever this guy was, he was coming closer to me. It was time to assess the situation. Cloaks meant monks, and I didn't like fighting other monks, the battles always left me with massive headaches, and the strain of my just having killed a warbot didn't help. The monk looked like he was alone, as I was, which almost certainly meant he was very skilled at fighting. The odds didn't look good, because I had exhausted myself fighting the warbot and my skills were more tuned to fighting slow and dumb creatures, and I didn't like hurting other humans while the TG monk almost certainly liked to. The rustling came closer, making a decision urgent. Fighting or escaping both required moving away from the warbot's huge corpse blocking my movements. The rustling stopped, and the wind whistled through the skeletal branches above me.

I turned to my left and jumped out from the tree. Only to have an intense burst of PSI energy burrow into my mind, and my muscles spasmed and juttered in reponse. Not good, that meant the stranger wanted to fight. At that instant, desperation set in, and I got angry, knowing that even if I could manage to shake off the shock and run away, the TG attacker would still keep on assaulting me. I cursed the Twilight Guardians for harboring such wantonly violent and vicious people that delighted in making trouble. He raised his arm again, and his right hand glowed with brimming power.

I concentrated and called up the knowledge and power of creating fire to hurl columns of searing heat at him. The nameless TG Monk paused and stood there, wreathed in red-tongued flames, startled at the ferocity of my barrage. But he recovered and threw several arcing bolts of energy at me. I dodged the first couple but the rest slammed into me, wrapping fingers of lightning around my body and burning tiny holes into my clothes. The violent thudding shook off my shock and I worked up the strength to begin corrupting the air around the enemy monk, making greenish clouds wrap around his body.

He grasped at his face and throat with spidery fingers, trying to fight off the effects of the noxious fumes wrapping around him. He was faltering then, skin bubbling and charred from my elemental violence. He looked at me with yellow eyes, and closed his them as if he knew defeat was near. But I looked past his emotional appearance and recognized the internalizing focus using a powerful mental technique, and I steeled myself for a last outburst, just as he started glowing. His glow started taking shape and leaped from his body, a whirling blob of bright white light.

I knew that patterning! I had seen it before! I had seen some Acolytes of Crahn use it when a wastelands creature attacked them, it was what people usually called a Soul Cluster, the projection of a Monk's energy and mind, patterned for some specific purpose, usually as a combat familiar. I tensed, waiting for either of them to attack. The enemy monk slumped and fell over, and judging from how he was laying, dead. I turned on the soul cluster because I noticed it still kept pulsing and flying around, long after what others said the Soul Clusters normally live after their casters die.

It suddenly brightened and I flinched, but instead of being attacked, I saw it soar high up into the clouds and floated northwards. The odd behavior of the soul cluster made me give thought to the rumors that I heard from the beggars of Pepper Park. They regaled me with what scraps of information they had in gratitude of the food and money I gave to them in charity.

The beggars had said they heard from some members of the Acolytes of Crahn that walked out of their Church in Pepper Park Sector Three, speaking between themselves. It seemed that long ago, a team of foolhardy explorers made up of GenTanks had been sent by the PSI Monks. That team had gone into some tunnels they found, in the very far north, near the impassable cliffs, and found things to their detriment. Only three members had come out of that network of tunnels, babbling about bright lights that spat rays that burned with cold fire.

I shuddered a little, feeling that one more addition was arriving to populate those nameless tunnels that harbored death.