David Rice - This is only just the real beginning

Standing here looking over the mountains in the middle of Sweden, I wonder, did my life honestly come to this? Hiding away and leaving the one person I truly cared about just to protect them against any harm. My ability to teleport anywhere still haunts me. It’s caused me nothing but grief and complications since I made my first teleportation. And I would give absolutely anything to make it go away, but then I think about the other Jumpers that have been captured and killed by the Paladins. I owed it to them and the rest of us to defeat the evil force that is the Paladins, even if it meant risking my own life just to make sure other Jumpers don’t suffer the way I have. But then again the other Jumpers didn’t have a mother as part of the Paladins. At the start it was a disadvantage having my mother as the enemy but as time went on I realised it was an advantage. After Rome, I became more confident about me and my mother’s relationship. It took an extra effort to put the past behind us, but I knew she was there for me and loved me.

Things had become a lot more difficult since the Paladins had established a new base at their new towers. It was like they knew every Jumpers move, not to mention mine especially. What made it worse was the fact that their corporation seemed to be growing, recruiting more like minded people and that was no consolation. The more Paladins there were the harder it was getting to survive, not too mention the invention of the Palvarizer. Sometimes I wondered if it was even worth fighting against them, but I knew it had to be done. Someone had to stand up to those people. And that’s what I’m going to do.

The cold wind hit me in the face hard, it was almost as if it was reminding me of how hard it had been to let Millie go. I couldn’t risk her getting caught in between this war that was going on, and knowing Roland, Millie would have been his first target if he was trying to get me. And that was not something I was willing to let happen, needless to say I had to let go of Millie. That was probably the hardest decision I’ve had to make in my life. I could still remember the way her face crumbled when I tried explaining myself. She didn’t even want to see me these days which I guess was understandable, it was for the best though. There was no telling what Roland is capable of, that man far more ruthless now that he had the Palvarizer. It was as if that silver stick contained all the power he needed to destroy us Jumpers, and he was doing a pretty good job at it too.

My last encounter with him left me more than just bruised and battered. The day I got to experience that “magic” stick of his, was the day I found a new meaning to the term dangerous electric volts. It felt like every electric current ripped into every muscle I had in my body paralysing me from any attempt of running away or Jumping. I had honestly thought that he had got me and that was the end for me. That is until the Palvarizer started faulting, turns out that was the first time it was being used on a real Jumper. Didn’t surprise me that I was Roland’s first choice for a test dummy, I should consider myself lucky though otherwise if it had worked to its full potential I would be dead by now. To Roland’s disappointment, after a couple of minutes of him fussing over the faulty Palvarizer, I gathered some strength and managed to Jump away from the situation. It was that one first encounter with the Palvarizer that made me determined to make sure no other Jumper had to go through such pain like that, but I was afraid that since then, the Palvarizer may have been developed to its full potential and was ready to be used at its fullest. They had to be stopped.

I had nothing to lose anymore and I was going to make damn sure that Roland and his kind had everything to lose. This was only just going to be the beginning. My fists clenched involuntarily. It was only the beginning.