Tescadji realized -once certain that he was alive- that it was only the barrier summoned by the his runes that had protected him from the full brunt of the blast. Nevertheless, a dull pain persisted across his back.

But one glimpse of his surroundings made him wonder as to whether or not he had been better off numbered with the dead. Among so many, his survival only served to feed his guilt. Death was something he was familiar with, having seen more than his fair share during his terms of service in the Android Task Force and Liberation War, but on such a full scale, this was something completely different. He recalled his division marching into areas that held the aftermath of an android slaughter in a manner similar to this. But those masses of mutilated androids were nowhere near as disconcerting as the sight of a killing ground of so many organics. He was no racist, but being human, he supposed that a small part of him would never fully realize androids as living beings. But this served as a contradiction. In the force, he was close friends with more than a few androids, and would be crushed if they died in the manner of these poor souls: hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals of every race, all dead, in what used to be Lusea's legendary marketplace.

His fine Rogart-made suit was ruined: torn, its soft green silk caked with debris and singed at the hems and lapels. But compared to the totality of the losses about him, this was of little consequence.

"By the Divine," he muttered grimly, "did it have to happen here, of all places?"

Flames still licked the remnants of once-charming open air shops, while masticated pieces of framework from the ceiling and support columns lay charred and strewn about, little more than unidentifiable rubble now. But the absolute worst was the gruesomely visible bodies of men, women, and children: some relatively whole, but maimed from the previous violence, others in pieces, collateral damage from the ensuing explosion.

"Anyone else still alive?" He called out in the midst of the hellish silence, but the hiss of flames were his only reply. Could he expect anything else? It would be only by the most stupendous miracle that anyone else could have survived. And in this case, such a miracle was not to be.

"Fat lot of good I did," he said aloud before his soot-filled lungs expelled their pollutants in a lengthy, spastic cough -the initial effects of smoke inhalation. Aware that the runes he bore had no equations for filtering air, Tescadji removed the handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over his mouth and nose, as he inched his way along through the debris. "Sending me, of all people down here for fire control … What could they have been thinking?"




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