Anessa didn’t care, something in her snapped. She bent her knees and jumped forward. In a split second, she reached the chair of the Elder in front of her, his face now filled with fear and disbelief. Anessa’s hand covered his face, and using all of her considerable strength, her fingers tightened around his face, keeping it in place as she moved his head forward and then smashed it back against the back of the chair. The Elder’s skull burst into pieces from the force of the attack; brain matter and blood covered the chair and her hand. As she let go, the body with a pulverized head dropped over the armrest and then onto the floor, breaking the shock of the other Elders.
She heard some of them pressing the buttons on their own chairs, calling for the guard; others were standing up trying to get away. It wouldn’t matter in the end.
Anessa drew on the Sha as she had never drawn before. She had never used her full power; a part of her knew that she’d never had the need for it, just as another knew that she had been afraid of her own power ever since the moment it had come to her and she had almost killed someone. Anessa was the strongest Sha user in living memory, perhaps the strongest to have ever lived. The greatest Dai Sha, her talent and ability with the Sha had no equal. Her time as a ‘prisoner’ had taught her a great deal, and the most important thing she had learned was to abandon her arrogance, to never again lose because she was caught off guard or was keeping herself back.
There were eight Elders left alive, and Anessa moved. She jumped across the room to the chair on the far left. The Elder there had just stood up from her chair as Anessa dropped to the floor, her left arm grabbing the Elder by the shoulder and slamming her back against the chair, keeping her immobilized. She positioned her right hand above the Elder’s head and a ball of orange plasma exploded out of her palm, vaporizing everything above the shoulders.
She turned and saw two of the other Elders closest to her running towards the back door. She reached with the Sha and crushed their ribcages with a force strong enough to break stone. None had even tried to defend themselves. None had drawn on the Sha. She put her hand on the headless corpse of the Elder beside her and looked inside her body. She saw that she was healthy; there was no signs of aging in the Elder, which meant that their outward appearance was only for show. She dug deeper and realized that the body was only healthy but not fit, not by the standards of any other Shara Daim. She knew what she was seeing; these were the signs of someone who did not care to train his or her body.
With a scowl of disgust, she turned to the others. They had reached the front door, and were trying to open them, but of course, they couldn’t. Arisak had his orders. Anessa walked slowly towards them. Two of the Elders saw her, and she felt them take hold of the Sha. Anessa didn’t react; she watched their sloppy and pitiful attempt to grab hold of her and keep her in place. With a thought, she sent a surge of power around her, nullifying their attack.
“Pathetic… For how long have you lived?” she asked with revulsion in her voice. “How much stronger could you have become if only you hadn’t wasted that time?”
“Wait! Wait! We can make you like us, give you immortality. You would never die!” an Elder said. Anessa sneered at her as she moved impossibly fast forward. She grabbed the Elder by the throat and threw her back across the room, where she hit one of the chairs with her back and a bone-crunching snap. The four remaining Elders tried to attack her mind, but even that attempt was nothing. They were weak, no more powerful than a Shara Daim just out of academy was. Anessa walked over to the closest one, her hand covering the Elder’s throat. Her fingers squeezed, her nails biting through the skin and into the flesh as she crushed and then ripped out the windpipe out of his throat. He dropped to the floor, dying slowly in a pool of his own blood. The last three looked horrified at her, and she didn’t care.
One moved forward, throwing a kinetic attack that made Anessa take a single step backwards, and his fist followed quickly with a punch aimed at her head. Anessa moved out of the way, grabbing the Elder’s wrist in a move she had learned from Adrian. She twisted the wrist around, breaking the arm. She grabbed his head with her other hand, and then let go of the wrist to grab the back of his head also. With a quick twist, she broke his neck.
The two in front of her dropped down on their knees begging for mercy, but she ignored them. Shara Daim did not beg, but then, these were not Shara Daim. A plasma ball burned a hole through the chest of one, prompting the other to try running again. He managed a few steps before she snatched him up with the Sha. She kept him in the air and pulled. He screamed as she tore him in half, his torso flying in one direction and his hips and legs in the other.
Anessa looked over the room; bodies and blood lay everywhere. She spied movement at one of the chairs; the Elder she had thrown across the room was crawling on the floor towards the back door. Anessa walked over and grabbed her by her shoulder-length gray hair, pulling her up as she screamed in pain. She put her against a chair and dropped to her knees, looking in the Elder’s eyes.
“It’s all your fault,” Anessa said, her voice empty. “You twisted us, made us believe in lies. Nothing that I believed in is true. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
The Elder returned her look. “You have destroyed us,” she gurgled.
“You lied to us! You were prepared to allow our people to die for your greed. Whatever you are, you are not what Shara Daim are,” Anessa said. “And I don’t even know what Shara Daim are supposed to be; everything I was taught is a lie. But I do know that I will not allow our people to die to fuel the greed of weak masters. I will find out what it means to be Shara Daim, and I will forge us into something better.”
“We had to,” she wheezed out. “The enemy, they are out there. We n-need to be strong.”
“Did you have to make us age? Did you have to deceive us, and feed us lies? You didn’t make us strong, you gave us false strength. We were as strong as our leaders, and you are weak.”
“We needed to guide.” She paused as she coughed, blood trickling down her chin from her mouth and nose. “We were the only ones that understood the threat.”
“No, you were just greedy. You wanted power to rule, but you didn’t want to take that power for yourselves; you stole it from others, kept us ignorant and complacent. You were weak, and you made us follow you,” Anessa said, disgust dripping in every word. “You turned us into this perversion of what our ancestors were—” Anessa’s voice broke. She took a deep breath and composed herself. “But you may find comfort in the knowledge that we will be strong without you. We will become Shara Daim.”
Anessa placed her hand on the dying woman’s throat and squeezed until she died. She stood up and sent a telepathic signal to Arisak as she moved to the central chair. She moved the body in front of it to the side with the Sha, and sat down in the bloody chair. Her own Shur At was covered in blood and bits of flesh and gore, but she ignored all of it, placing both of her arms along the armrests as she waited.
The large ornate doors opened, slowly bringing light into the room. The first inside were two Va Sun with their Shur At deployed, but without their weapons. Behind them followed Arisak and ten honor guards, with the rest of her Va Sun entering last. All held the Sha, but there had been no death; Arisak had been instructed to keep them from entering, not kill them.
They froze once they noticed the bodies and the blood. Not even her own people had known exactly what she had been planning to do. A part of her hadn’t known either. She had told them only that the Elders would no longer rule. The leader of the honor guard was Jar Sun Tarrasi, a large man with his white hair cropped short and half his face filled with white markings that showed anyone who looked at him his position as the head of the Elders’ guard. The position in the guard had always been highly regarded, but it wasn’t really sought by those who chose to become solely warriors. The guard was filled with third and fourth sons and daughters of rich families, those who had nothing to inherit. They did train to be warriors, like all other Shara Daim, but there had never actually been a need for the guard to protect the Elders. Jar Sun Tarrasi was different; he was an heir to an old family, but still he had chosen to become a guard. Some said that he even had enough power and skill to be a Dai Sha.