Daniel’s legs blurred as he dashed down the darkened hallway, the sounds of shrieking metal and swirling debris echoing out behind him. With a step to his left, he dodged a flying rock, before ducking under a spinning metal panel. Daniel deliberately sought out larger areas as he ran, allowing him to effectively evade the litany of flying debris the Kharnidd Mentalist was shooting after him. He dropped his cloaking tech due to the battery drain, choosing instead to rely on the heightened senses and dexterity of the Uriel Protocol to survive. He could have initially used the cloak to escape more fully, but Daniel knew better. This thing had some means of tracking him down, and if his System ran out of charge too quickly the Kharnidd would probably run him down in a heartbeat, even if he’d temporarily gotten away.
Thus, he found himself sliding under a flying steel beam, then pushing off the floor and shooting his body toward the wall. Still under the influence of the Mentalist’s Telekinesis, that steel beam crashed down impotently right where Daniel used to be, but the onslaught wasn’t over. Daniel kicked off the wall to dodge a shotgun-style blast of smaller debris, manifesting his mundane spear and deflecting a few more attacks midair. He kicked out again, activating his Heavenwalker boots and using the Destroyer’s Strike on his legs to rocket away from his Kharnidd enemy. The boots created a circular, invisible platform beneath Daniel’s feet at any desired angle, allowing him to jump around with near infinite mobility. He used this ability to leap away from another slew of attacks, before coming back to earth again, boots screeching as they found purchase on the floor and propelled Daniel forward even faster.
Up ahead, there was a 90-degree bend to the right in the hallway. With the Kharnidd right on his heels, Daniel couldn’t afford to slow down too much, so he improvised. Weaving around another stream of garbage, he ran up and onto the wall, body parallel to the floor. Before the Kharnidd could react, Daniel jumped forward, converting his forward momentum to horizontal momentum. His feet caught another lip of the far wall, seamlessly catapulting him around the bend.
Daniel’s acrobatics carried him into another large room. It was freezing cold and filled with numerous rows of glass chambers that held frozen specimens of various fish, plant life, and other exotic creatures. These chambers were held in multi-rowed metal apparatuses that stretched up to the ceiling and formed a maze of walls around Daniel. The Pioneer could barely feel the cold thanks to his juiced Adaptibility, so it didn’t inhibit his movements in the slightest as he ran through the underground freezer. The metal fixtures glowed as the Kharnidd flew into the room, flexing its hand in a clear sign of special effort. These fixtures began to collapse like falling bookshelves on top of the Pioneer.
Fortunately, there were gaps in between the chambers, and Daniel slipped between one of these cracks, watching as the falling fixtures blocked the route out of the room with a deafening rumble. The Pioneer was forced to run for his life as some of the cascading debris began falling toward him. He ran between more walls, scrabbling to get away, but the whole room had become a death trap. A chamber went flying through the fixtures right at him, forcing Daniel to contort his body as the glass cylinder missed him by inches. He zig-zagged through the freezer room as the Kharnidd continued throwing things at him, the crashing noise of the creature’s attacks nearly as terrifying as their danger. The Xenos wasn’t stationary either, and it flew through the openings between the chambers in pursuit of Daniel. As it drew nearer, the young man hit his nuclear option. He activated the Protocol’s cloaking function and vanished.
The Kharnidd fumed as it lost track of its target, flexing its Telekinetic power and shooting out more projectiles in a wide area. Daniel slunk in between these attacks, bolting toward the side of the room away from the exit. Nuntius’s next alert helped remind him he was on borrowed time:
“System Power: 1%”
Daniel manifested the Fangs of Eternity and dismissed his cloaking, slashing into the wall and kicking right through it. That revealed a large vent shaft running down through the rock and toward the floors below. Daniel heard the Kharnidd send a slew of projectiles his way as he revealed himself, but it was too late. Daniel jumped down the shaft, hearing the attacks crash into the wall above him as he fell. He kicked off the side of the vent, lashing out again with the Fangs to break through the wall and roll into another abandoned corridor. Daniel dismissed his weapons and continued running, yet he noticed that the Kharnidd Mentalist wasn’t following him immediately. This short respite allowed Daniel to consider the well-being of his friends. They were likely stumbling around in the dark right now, having no idea where they were going. He did what he should have thought to do a while ago, sending everyone still alive a copy of the map of the facility. Hopefully, it would help them stay alive.
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The Kharnidd, for its part, had hit a wall. Its Enhancement sphere’s buff had run out, taking all the wind out of its sails. It coughed up blood as the light in Its eyes faded, suddenly reminded of the immense pain it was feeling at the loss of Its arm. It had taken some low-grade medicines, but the wound wasn’t healing. A regular Gamma class would’ve lost the ability to fight right there, but Hars’Nocrot was far from regular. It reached into Its dimensional storage and pulled out one of Its other trump cards.
It was another bead, though this one demonstrated no Psionic power. It was filled with a dark purple liquid, with a mostly transparent shell that was marked by a single black line around its middle portion. Hars tossed the bead into Its mouth, feeling Its whole-body shiver with restorative power. The light came back on in Its eyes, and the lost arms began to slowly regrow. Beneath the surface, all the fatigue caused by the Enhancement bead was also gone, leaving Hars’s body in pristine condition. This was Its most valuable possession, a true lifesaving treasure under the right conditions. Hars only owned one, and was leery of using it, yet It was leery of failure even more. Its status couldn’t handle failure.
Now that It was back to fighting form, however, failure was impossible. It had felt the enemy’s power waning. All It needed was a little more effort to push things over the edge. Stretching out, It aimed Its palm downward and began charging the Annihilation Ray.
…
Daniel sensed the Kharnidd charging up the Ray and quickly took evasive measures, but there was only so much he could do. The Ray pierced through the unprotected walls of the unpowered portion of the facility, cutting right at Daniel. He threw himself to the side at the last second, but the laser tracked him as he zig-zagged his way down the hallway. He kept ahead of the attack by using the Destroyer’s Strike to enhance his jumps some more, allowing him to rocket down the corridor at surpassing speed. Despite his best efforts, the heat of the attack activated his shields and prompted a new notification:
“System Power: 0.4%”
The System’s shields were some of its most power-hungry functions, given that they were calibrated by default to prioritize the User’s life at all costs. Thankfully, the laser eventually stopped before it could fry Daniel completely, but he was still in immediate danger. The Kharnidd flew through the opening it had created with the laser, appearing in the hallway and picking back up where it had left off in the chase. Daniel only survived the next few encounters thanks to the fact that the Xenos was no longer enhanced by the orb, leading to a drop in its speed and throwing power.
He leaned on his technique with his mundane spear, deflecting the smaller items the enemy threw at him even as he slipped around the larger things the Kharnidd threw at him. At one point, he couldn’t dodge one of the larger rocks, so he activated his Destroyer’s Strike. He swung his weapon like a baseball bat and smashed the spear’s haft into the broad side projectile. The metal bent, but didn’t break, and he hurled the attack back at its thrower at a redoubled speed. The Kharnidd hurriedly manifested its shield at the last second, the rock crashing into the bubble and breaking into a cloud of dust. Daniel used the backward momentum from this attack to fling himself away from the enemy, getting a bit of airtime before putting his feet back on the ground and continuing to sprint away.
Daniel turned another corner, deflecting another set of projectiles without looking back. He was a white blur as he dashed into a wide-open rectangular space, mostly barren besides what looked to be storage lockers on the wall. Daniel jumped, using the wide-open space to allow the next set of attacks to pass under his feet. He twisted midair and activated his Destroyer’s Strike yet again, catching the edge of one of the metal floor tiles with his spearhead. He levered himself toward the exit on the other side of the room, sending the tile straight at the Kharnidd with the same move, but this time the Xenos was ready. It caught the tile mid-flight, rotating it around its body and sending the attack right back at Daniel with a particularly powerful shove. Daniel was forced to dive out of the way, allowing the attack to sail past him, but that was an opening the Kharnidd could exploit.
It shot more small rocks in a stream at Daniel, forcing the young man to defend himself by spinning the spear in a rapid motion as he backpedaled to the exit. As he did that, the Mentalist prepared a more unique attack. It held up its palm, fingers contorting and compressing in strange ways before suddenly shooting across the room at rapid speed. For his part, Daniel had finished deflecting the telekinetic attacks and leapt for the doorway. He used another Strike-enhanced leap before ducking into a combat roll in a desperate bid to dodge this new attack. However, the flying fingers were fast, able to home in on the Pioneer just as he jumped across the exit’s threshold. The pointed fingernails hit the armor’s shields and pushed past them, piercing through the flickering defenses and penetrating deep into Daniel’s torso. The fingernails were lined in a dark purple as they sank into his body, and Daniel felt the appendages pump his whole body with a foreign substance. The following messages from Nuntius were heartbreaking:
“Armor Damage Detected; User Damage Detected; Poison Detected. Initiating Reparative, Recovery, and Immunization Subfunctions.”
“Error: Insufficient Power. Forcible Shutdown Initiated.”
“I am sorry.”
Daniel felt the System’s usual recovery chemicals rush through his body before they suddenly stopped. Curiously, Nuntius’s last act was to send him a notification. Then, his armor dissolved into motes of light, leaving Daniel’s body impaled on the ends of the enemy’s fingers.
The Kharnidd had finally caught up.
