Context: Unlike A.T.X.D., Xenarus is narrated from the 1st Person Point-of-View of different characters. Throughout each of the books, viewpoints of narrations will change between characters at least in each chapter, although a narrator change may occur in the midst of a chapter if events warrant it. Below is a sample of narrations from two of the core characters in the series - Star Soldiers Orion and Mira, both taking place in the first book. In Mira's narration, you will see how a Star Soldier's Flight Mode works. In Orion's narration, you will see his struggle with the internal force of rage he carries called the Ixicaru Force - a force of anger triggered by the loss of his father at the hands of the series antagonist M'Rexus, and a legendary power of anger unique to star soldiers.
Mira
“Oh yeah, baby! Rockin’ and rollin’!” was all I could say as I jumped off the edge of the fifty-story building and called up my Flight Mode: a sleek starcraft with a thin and rounded body, long and narrow wings that could easily fold back to increase power, and narrow engines with enough thrust to almost turn me into a shooting star.
The course was designed to be one of the most difficult even for the best star pilots in the Xenarian military. It involved having to dodge the tops of some of the tallest buildings on Xenarus’ sprawling megalopolis landscape, which in this area just happened to be built close together with barely enough space to fit a pair of fighters through. We then had to duck under some bridges between towers while a customized, flat metallic trench narrowed the space underneath. One slight mistake with the joystick, and the pilot would have found themselves a burning wreck, assuming they survived the explosion in any piece that is. After that, it was another adrenaline-surging drop towards the buildings further below, which ordinarily required pilots to reposition and boost off with their thrusters to avoid stalling and crashing like a rock. It was then a matter of flying through a series of levitating hoops that were set up in a frequently twisting line and would fry your craft if you made contact with their edges. Even after passing through that hoop maze, while avoiding crashing into the ramp that it dropped you onto, you still had to boost off and fly full throttle towards the end of the course: a hangar in one of the military’s skyscraper bases. And that was assuming you hadn’t expended too much fuel trying to accelerate and dodge through everything else beforehand.
Back then, it was all about learning the controls and moving with the ship. As a star soldier, however, I was the ship: with no complicated displays, no helmet, no guidance computers, and no mechanical systems to check other than my own personal health, flying never felt so easy and smooth. As I wove through the first maze of buildings, I could tilt a full ninety degrees left or right as frequently as I wanted to and I hardly found myself getting either dizzy or motion sick, allowing me to keep my eyes on what lay ahead of me.
No sooner had I finished weaving back and forth between the buildings before the next part of the course came up: the overpasses and the narrow gap beneath which I had to slide under. Decelerating just a little bit, I ducked down and flew in just a foot short of skinning my underbelly - which would have been my stomach in standing form - against the flat metallic surface below. The beams and overpasses swept over me at such close proximity that I could feel the wind hit me in the face with almost concussive force each time. Still, I continued to plow through, putting a little more acceleration in my thrusters and pumping those flares just a little farther out.
The last obstruction had just passed over me when I decided to twist things a bit in my favor. With at least another half-mile of the ramp below me before the drop off, I briefly deactivated my flight mode, letting the g-force and a simple forward somersault flip me around and back into my initially armored-human form. My shiny jet-enhanced boots - courtesy of becoming a star soldier - sent a stream of fiery sparks out as I slid their remarkably lightweight soles against the surface and drew smoldering streaks in the ramp material with a rough screech. Mere meters before the ramp dropped off, I twirled around, boosted off with one foot, and called upon my star soldier Force Link once again. But rather than returning back to full starfighter mode, I went only about halfway to what some star soldiers call their Transitionary Form but which I simply call Glider Form: the wings rematerialized on my back, secured by my arms which I now held straight out to my sides. Shorter versions of the narrow thrusters that would normally take the place of my legs were now mounted on my back, and after dropping the necessary one-hundred-and-thirty feet, I merely had to think of the word acceleration for these babies to light up and thrust me forward into the ring maze ahead.
Although I could see just as well in full Flight Mode as I could in ordinary human form, being in Glider Mode amped up the risks because now I could feel the heat of the electricity in the rings as I passed through each one. And like any good soldier, the greater the risks, the higher the adrenaline, and therefore the more engaging the challenge. And because of the way these rings were arranged, I had to do more than just follow where they turned: the commanders always changed the pattern, and sometimes there were sections where the hoops lifted up but then immediately dropped back down, forming a very sharp triangle that I couldn’t simply fly up and over - at least not when I was inside the fray. So with a simple twist of the back and putting more thrust into one engine at the expense of the other, I ended up doing a loopty-loop through a triangular path that went up and dropped straight down. I then spun like a top and fired myself straight up like a dart by flexing my hands closer to my ribs as I nearly scorched myself at the base of this drop while encountering an upside down, carbon copy of the previous turn.
After another couple bends, I missed scraping my stomach on the ramp at the end of the course and could finally see the finish line almost ten miles in the distance; being a star soldier apparently gives you enhanced sight without any apparent robotic enhancements to your eyes. So calling up my full Flight Form once again, I went to full throttle and zipped straight for the target. As I got faster and faster, I could feel sweat flying off me in the form of condensate trails, and at one point felt the area where my ears would be fog up before I heard a screeching hiss and then a loud pop: I had just broken the sound barrier as I continued to zip for the target. At this speed, any ordinary pilot would have likely fainted from g-lock, but being that the ship and I were one and the same in this form, it just felt like a super-high speed, adrenaline-pumped breeze.
Sometimes the military tried to throw in a last-minute obstacle which pilots had to dodge to keep their guard up before reaching the goal. In this case, it was a starfighter that suddenly tried to intercept me by crossing diagonally right in front of my flight path. But he or she was a mere blur, and I could only feel the residual heat from their afterburners before I was clear of the obstacle and - probably from the view of the commanders - at risk of plowing straight into the hangar. At the last minute, I deactivated the Flight Form, somersaulted forward with a quick flash boost from my jet boots, and then dug their soles once again into the hangar floor. I probably set my trails on fire this time as I slid to a stop with such a clean but high-pitched squeak, held my arms out to gracefully stabilize myself, and bend backward as my legs did the work of braking.
Taking a moment to let my limbs recover from both the force of stopping at such a speed and the forward momentum, I waited for my former wing commander from the military to approach and give me the report on my time.
“You’ve trounced your own record, Mira Astella - excuse me, Star Soldier Mira, now” Wing Commander Olansus remarked with satisfied confidence. “As if you couldn’t get any faster, you completed the course in under two minutes, beating your prior time of 2:15.” Olansus took a minute to log the data into his holoscreen while I took some time to stand up, stabilize my footing, and brush out my long ponytail. “Many of our elitist generals keep talking about wanting super soldiers. But by the Rings of Xenarus, I’d say we have a super-soldier right here. I guess all that training at the Theus Temple really paid off.”
“Mentally, sure,” I remarked with a goofy smirk. “But all of those maneuvers: I learned them only from the best.” I was, of course, referring to Olansus, who had taken me under his wing since I joined at the youngest permitted age.
“Well, everything except those skid moves of yours,” Olansus replied, looking back at the blackened tracks I had left behind coming to a stop in the hangar, some sections of which still glowed at the edges as though they were still burning.
“What can I say? I like to leave my mark where it matters most.”
--
Orion
My arms were starting to get tired from being held in this t-pose lock, and I was becoming increasingly determined to exact my revenge on M’Rexus: whether it was the surface embarrassment of being captured by my arch enemy and forced to hang limply like a statue, or the inner hatred I had towards the Xenarian militant for the loss he’d inflicted upon me. Deep inside, I could start to hear that voice inside my head, the one Master Sheratan had said was the ghostly voice of Ixicaru. The spirit of the fallen Star Soldier was whispering my name, and I had to do everything I could to ignore him. Sure, if I gave into whatever the ultimate form of these powers were, I could probably tear the Spartacus apart, kill my father’s murderer any way I pleased, and escape without anything stopping me. But even if I accomplished all those objectives, what lay ahead of me? Master Sheratan did say that once you give into the full power of the Ixicaru Force, there’s no turning back.
“Orion,” Ixicaru’s voice continued to repeat in my head. “Why do you resist? Your arms are bound, you’ve been humiliated by your father’s killer. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll be nothing but a trophy for the enemy, and that’s no fate for a Star Soldier.”
“The humiliation is worth more than the suffering I’d cause under your control,” I retorted in my head, just so the guard wouldn’t hear my internal struggle out loud.
“Spare me the humility, Orion,” Ixicaru scoffed. “You are a strong warrior and you know it. Why waste your power?”
“Because it’s not my power,” I tried to disagree, knowing that only a part of that was true.
“Why not give in just a little bit, then?” Ixicaru prompted. “If the full power is not worth it, why not just use enough to break out of your current circumstances.”
“Don’t you lie to me and say I can return to my normal state. Master Sheratan knows that’s not true.”
“Only because he’s never done it before. And like you, he had so much potential, but he threw it all away the day he chose to relinquish his armor and his Aegis. If you knew anything about this power, you’d learn that there’s always a way to go back. Did your father not teach you about second chances?”
“The things I’d do under your…” I hesitated as I realized that, while Ixicaru’s persuasions were nothing short of deadly deception, he had inadvertently given me an idea.
“There’s one thing I will say to you, Ixicaru,” I replied a little more calmly, adding a smirk on my face that the guard couldn’t see as his back was turned. “Sometimes the advice you give someone isn’t always that bad. You’re just the wrong person to be giving it.”
“What are you…” Ixicaru’s spirit started to protest, but at this point, my conscience was able to block him out as I got to work figuring out my plan.
That’s the good thing about being a Star Soldier: you’re not a robot, instead retaining your sentient emotions and biological adaptability. So when something doesn’t work in your favor, you have the ability to figure out how to solve the problem if you apply your mind to the right areas. And Ixicaru had said I could ‘break out of my current circumstances,’ so why not try and use my ordinary Raidessa powers for the same reason? That was one of the many oversights of the Medallion: by thinking of nothing more than brute militarism and galactic domination and relying upon advanced military tech alone, they thought they could bend the universe to their will with no trouble. To prove this, my chains were nothing more than standard Arcturion Steel, strong and non-malleable, at least if you fired normal shots at it. But Raidessa energy orbs are more than just fiery star energy: they’re mixed with the ionic charge of our plasma blood as Xenarians, which means that in close proximity to a certain object, they can emanate a lot of heat: the strongest Star Soldier was once said to wield orbs with enough heat to match a Blue Star and not burn her hands.
Provided one holds the orb correctly, or in my case their fingers, the energy could be contacted to an otherwise impermeable surface and inflict a certain amount of damage or even melt right through. At my level, however, it would have been safer to use something like a Reflect or Arashi Shield, both of which in the basic stages could be flexed out and knock objects and attacks back. The force of these shields’ explosive pulses would have been enough to break my chains, but as my hands were literally tied and I couldn’t bring them towards my chest to conjure the shield, that wasn’t going to work. Plus, who knew how many guards were waiting outside and would come charging in if I used a more destructive attack to break out? By using a basic energy orb in my hands to slowly melt down the chains, I could make my escape quieter and stood a better chance of actually getting off the ship alive.
I’m sure the guard wasn’t paying attention as I ignited a small glowing orb in my right hand and curved my wrist far enough to the point that I could just make the orb contact the metal. The orb was small and dim enough that it wouldn’t have been easy to see reflecting off the wall, and I could only hope the Medallion hadn’t installed infrared or light sensors in the cell that would’ve been more likely to pick up the energy in my hand. And given that the guard still didn’t turn and no alarm sounded in the ship, I could only guess that such measures were not yet installed. Perfect.
After another five or so minutes, the Arcturion cuff on my right had just about liquified to the point that I could’ve pushed open the material. But my shoulder was stiffening and the plasma circulation had all but drained from my arm, so it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped. Now the painful temptation to use a more extreme power was growing inside me, but I couldn’t let that happen. So while my arm hurt like heck, I had to keep trying: after all, Sheratan had said that ‘pain in the short run is worth the reward in the long term.’ Finally, my right cuff broke, but a mild clang was heard along with a couple sizzling drips of liquid metal hitting the floor…enough to draw the guard’s attention.
He pulled out his arm cannon and prepared to shoot or stun me, but with at least one hand free and the circulation restored to that arm, I could use it to defend myself. Given that my other arm now hung from the remaining cuff, I wasn’t able to lock onto my enemy and take him out with a single straight attack. Luckily, there was one tactic my father had taught me that was normally reserved for the middle-level instruction: the Serpentine Whip. It’s complicated to wield because it swings around wildly and can latch its tip onto anything if not aimed correctly, plus it can be charged to varying levels that can either immobilize the opponent or fatally paralyze their nerves with enough ionic power. Since I didn’t have full control of my body and I was just trying to get out, I used the lowest level of the whip - enough to connect with the guard’s chest, pick him up and throw him against the ceiling, letting him fall back on the floor with a bang. With my free hand still glowing, I swiped it past the other cuff, successfully breaking it and allowing me to drop back to the floor.
I took a moment to flex my arms and make sure they hadn’t fully quit on me before dragging the guard’s unconscious body to a corner of the cell where he would hopefully be out of sight for a while. In the process, I managed to pry off his ID bracelet to get me out of the door and through any other inactive security measures before M’Rexus realized his most valuable prisoner was missing.