Welcome to Gaia! ::

He wasn't supposed to go out alone.

Vulcan had explicitly forbidden him from patrolling without a partner requested that he always reach out to either her, or Hercynia, or Kiuchi, or any of the other members of the DCCI before he set out as Syrtis.

But he had just recently watched a Mars Knight cuff the back of a Prince's neck and witnessed the cowardly retreat of a General-King in the face of the White Moon's power. Sure, they hadn't presented themselves as a united force - but the enemy had still fled.

Syrtis was pretty confident he could handle anything that crawled out of the bowels of Destiny City looking for a fight. Felt that he must have awakened as Syrtis after so long because the previous generation of knights (with the exception of Kairatos, who was cool as ********) and sailor scouts didn't have a ******** clue what they were doing.

And so he had decided to go on a hunt. Not for youma or Negaverse officers tonight, but for other Mars Knights.

If we all fought together we could win. I know it.

He knew exactly where he would find them - if there were more.

In the most dangerous parts of Destiny City. Where, according to Ophelia, statistically there had been the most battles fought and the most deaths. Where the sun always seemed to set first and the light from the moon never really penetrated. There were scores of abandoned buildings to his right and to his left. Street lamps flickered weakly overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a car backfired. Syrtis walked with an iPod clipped to his belt, one earbud stuffed in his ear and the other dangling around his bellybutton, the audiobook for one of his school textbooks streaming through the tiny speaker.

If textbooks were difficult to focus on when the actual, printed words were right in front of you then it was even harder to listen to them. Especially when you were on the hunt for comrades in arms, and on the lookout for any danger lurking nearby. But it mattered to John Jr to pass his classes, with good grades, and he'd thought an audio-book an ingenious opportunity for killing two birds with one stone.

Except it wasn't going as well as he'd expected. Nothing was. He had been out on patrol for over forty minutes and not come across a single negaverse agent, he had not found any Mars knights, and he kept having to restart his audibook because so far he had managed to retain this much information:

(A BIG FAT) ZERO

Syrtis swore under his breath and stopped in the middle of an empty street to look down at his ipod and skip back to the beginning of his current chapter. It was in the heartbeat between the audio stopping and then starting again that he heard it - the caw from above - and looked up, mouth open.

He dropped his ipod, right hand sweeping along his belt as though he were reaching for a sword, and retrieved his heavy metal discus from thin air. The ipod dangled from the cord of his earbuds for a moment before clattering to the ground.

Fearless, standing with the confidence of a fighter with ten times his experience, Syrtis grit his teeth and waited for the great black bird to strike.

Koschei's screech mingled with the restart of Syrtis' textbook audio in a way that seemed almost to cut right through his eardrums. Syrtis collapsed to his knees, teeth clanging together. He bit his tongue and tasted blood and was, for the time being, deaf.

It was beyond disorienting - to have heard the freaky, talking bird so clearly one moment, and then nothing the next. It was frightening. He ripped his earbuds out and threw them to the ground, but still could hear nothing.

Syrtis spit blood on the ground, lifting his armoured forearms with the discuss clamped in his hands to shield his eyes from any striking claws. His ears started to ring. Was that a good sign? He thought he might throw up.