Chapter 25

  Mo and I took a circuitous route, heading south then looping around to the east to get to the rendezvous. According to Dev, the scourge were keeping a large force between our wayward outriders and the rest of us, so a straight up charge wasn’t going to do anyone any good, even if we could pull it off. If we just barged through the monsters, they could still collapse in behind us and give the outriders even more problems than they currently had. Right now, what was keeping our divers alive was the lack of urgency from the horde, and we didn’t need to change that attitude until it was absolutely necessary.

  My body felt like tenderized meat, not because of damage I took, but as a consequence of my mode of travel. The wind whipped past my ears, my stomach and legs slamming into hard metal over and over and over again as my ride’s hydraulic pistons pounded the pavement below.

  I tell you now, they didn’t make the backs of eight foot tall mech loaders with passenger comfort in mind. Mo had… angles… hard ridges that housed electronics, piping, capacitors and all sorts of mechanical bits that were probably very necessary but a terrible experience when you were clinging to her back, even with Anchor doing its thing to negate a third of the damage. The repetitive *slap* *slap* *slap* of flesh on steel was enough to elicit pain from even the most hardened of Exotic bodies, which mine was not.

  When she was able to open her stride, Mo ate up distance in a way I couldn’t even do, fast as I was now, and nothing we encountered thus far could stand in her way. Walls, old cars, waterlogged basins, scourge; if Mo was up to speed, they all needed to find a way to be somewhere else, or they ended up a smear on the pavement.

  Speaking of smears, I finally got to see what a Scourge Swarmer looked like. I got a good close look at them as soon as we left the safety of the turrets’ field of fire. They were about the size of my leg and proportioned about the same way, larger at the head, thinner at the back. They were insectile in nature with lots of spindly legs and thin armor plating on their backs, but they moved like snakes, slithering back and forth, undulating, almost swimming along the ground, up the walls, or on ceilings.

  The ceiling bit was an unpleasant thing to discover. They liked to hang out in high places and wait for you to pass under them before dropping on your back and chowing down on whatever they could put their toothless mouths on. While the lack of chompers sounded like a plus, I assure you, it was not. Their bites didn’t do a whole lot of damage, but they made up for it in being disgusting. Swarmers had bristles they used to latch onto prey, little tiny spine type things on their mouths that stabbed into you and stuck there, no matter what you did to the rest of the monster. The barbed spines tugged and ripped at your skin as you struggled with it, while the rest of the quill did its best to saw you open with razor sharp edges. The design made the removal of a stuck swarmer a coin flip between peeling off your own flesh or decapitating the monster itself and getting covered in the gritty paste they used for guts. Either way, you were going to lose lots of blood.

  Yeah. I didn’t enjoy learning about that. I still had quills stuck in my back. The bleeding status effects were gone, though, thank Constance.

  Mo, however, felt none of that. She was largely immune to that kind of thing, inside a suit as she was, and the biggest hazard the swarmers posed to her was how slippery their insides made the pavement as she squashed them like rotten grapes.

  “So, I said to him, ‘listen, if she thinks the implant is weird, there’s not much you can do other than turn it off, but then she knows its there and you’re not using it, so it’s always going to be like a third person in the bedroom, you know? Oh, how are we doing back there?” Mo’s modulated voice called back to me.

  I spat to dislodge the chunk of black chitin that had been stuck to the corner of my mouth. My HP was only missing thirty points, but I was filthy and miserable. That was it. When I got back to the station, I was making armor. HP might have been a resource, but my life would be 100x better if I didn’t have to use it all the time.

  “I’m good,” I lied. “We need to make you a saddle or something, Mo.”

  Mo giggled daintily. “In a previous life, I might have taken you up on that.”

  We came to a slow stop just before an obstacle, the first Mo hadn’t just bulldozed through. Some kind of cabling was stretched over the road, thick stuff, maybe for electricity or for anchoring some kind of structure that had long since collapsed. Whatever it was for before, it wasn’t going anywhere now without a blowtorch.

  “Hang on,” she said as if I wasn’t already doing that. With a *fwoosh,* the thrusters under her feet ignited, forcing me to pull my knees up as high as they would go lest I feel that heat. Then the hauler bent at the knees and leapt high into the air, sailing over the down cabling and into the square beyond. We landed with a *clunk* on the other side of the obstruction, smashing an impressive crater into the aging pavement..

  The square was empty, nothing but hollow buildings and garbage everywhere. Strangely empty. Mo sensed it too. She went uncharacteristically quiet and still. Her head oscillated back and forth slowly, observing the street and presumably listening.

  Something was wrong.

  “Drop!” she shouted.

  I didn’t hesitate. I let go of Mo’s shoulders and dropped to the ground.

  *FSSS* *FSSS*

  Missile fast, two bright yellow blobs of glowing something smacked into Mo’s suit with a hiss splat, tiny globules of fluid rebounding in all directions before wetting the pavement for a dozen feet. The projectiles hit hard enough to shake the mech’s upper body and force her to take a steadying step back, which I narrowly avoided being crushed by.

  *FSS* *FSS*

  Two more globs smacked into the pavement near my face.

  “Shooters! Stay behind me!” Mo commanded, bending at the knees, getting way down until the bulk of her suit shielded me from oncoming fire.

  “Oh, I hate these guys! Sneaky! Nasty!” the hauler snarled.

  *FSS* *FSS*

  This time, the explosion of yellow goo was close enough to spatter my right side, and my robe smoldered in several places. Mo was protecting me, but it seemed whoever was shooting at us didn’t necessarily need to hit me to do damage.

  “We’re too exposed out here!” I shouted.

  “I know! I know! Just hang on!” Mo’s torso turned to the right, then shifted its angle upward, her arms rose, tracked, and a high pitched whine tickled at my ears.

  *CRACKOOM*

  The facade of one of the buildings across the street exploded in a shower of disintegrated concrete, followed shortly by a full-on collapse of a significant portion of the front part of the structure. It came down like a rock slide, spewing a cloud of dust into the air.

  The back of Mo’s suit slid open and ejected two shells to ping and roll lazily across the pavement.

  “Go now,” Mo said.

  Then she was up and moving through the thickening cloud of dust. I didn’t have to be told to follow.

  *FSS* *FSS* *FSS* *FSS*

  “You didn’t get ‘em, Mo!” I shrieked, jumping to avoid the splash of another projectile.

  “I know! Just keep running!”

  We hooked toward one of the buildings to our left and barreled through the skeletal remains of what used to be a set of glass doors and into a ruined lobby. More of the globs pelted the doors and entranceway, but it was likely blind fire with all the dust in the air. That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. A close call and subsequent splash set the back of my calves to burning, and I yowled in pain as I limped further into the building. The thought of stopping to look didn’t even cross my mind.

  “This is bad,” Mo lamented, careening into a still half-intact swinging door at the back of the room, not that she needed to use the door. She took a significant portion of the wall with her as she came through. I followed in her wake, hands over my head to protect myself from falling debris. We were well into the dark interior of the building and out of sight of the doors before we slowed. I was breathing hard. Mo’s suit hissed as it vented excess heat.

  I rubbed the backs of my legs gently, finding tender, exposed skin and weeping sores there.

  HP [301/344]

  The lamp on the side of the mech’s head winked to life. Smooth concrete, painted red at one time but faded and molding now surrounded us along with bundles of conduit running the length of the hallway overhead.

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  “They shoot now?” I huffed, more as a way to make conversation than a probe for information. Obviously we were being shot at.

  “Yeah. They shoot now. Bad luck too. Usually, you only get shooters if they’re already nearby, so we must have dropped almost right on top of them,” Mo said. There was a hitch in her voice that I didn’t like, and one of her leg joints stuttered before coming down heavily enough to crack the floor. Mo’s suit wasn’t looking as pristine anymore either. Her armor was pitted and smoldering in the places where she’d been hit, and the pistons on one of her knee joints were faltering. Pink fluid spewed weakly out of exposed tubing and trickled down to the floor.

  “You going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Still mostly functional, but they got me good,” Mo replied. “Doesn’t hurt. It’s just taking more concentration to keep things from going topsy turvy in here, ya know?”

  It sounded like the truth, but the strain in her voice concerned me. If I knew how her suit worked, I would have gladly Shape welded the broken parts back together, but, like all other complex electronics, I was only really fit to break them until I could see what they were supposed to look like. Even then, I didn’t trust myself enough to try.

  I wished I could see the woman inside the suit to gauge her true feelings, but Detect was only giving me little bits and pieces of the whole, indiscernible under all the complexity that was the suit. The best results came from switching to Magnesium which only showed me the vague outline of her bones, and that didn’t tell me a whole lot other than that she was a fellow amputee.

  We followed the wall down a ramp, through yet another doorway that Mo had to “modify” to fit inside and into a maintenance tunnel. Foul smelling water sloshed over my boots, and the smell of rot pervaded the dark.

  “This is it,” Mo declared, her headlamp fixating on an otherwise uninteresting bit of the moldy concrete. “FoE tags are approaching from the right, and the rendezvous is right through here.”

  “Hmm.” I approached the spot with Detect Iron humming, pressing myself close. My immediate reaction was profanity.

  There was a lot of motion in there. A lot. Swarmers seethed and slithered over one another in a wriggling nest of bad.

  “It’s wall to wall in there. Swarmers,” I reported, blowing out a frustrated breath and taking a step back to think.

  “Is it too late to change the plan?” I asked.

  “Hold on. I’ll call it in to Dev. Right. Well, crap. Dev says she’s lost comms with the outriders, but they’re on their way to this spot. Terrain may be interfering with the signal.”

  “There’s lots of scourge in there, Mo,” I said.

  “Yeah. But if it’s swarmers, I think we’ll be alright.”

  “Says the lady in the mech suit,” I grumbled. I liked having all my blood on the inside.

  “Don’t be a baby. It’s unattractive.”

  I swore again yet couldn’t help but agree.

  We exchanged a look… well I did. Mo simply stood there in her suit. I imagined she could look just about anywhere around her without even moving. Best I just go with the assumption we exchanged looks.

  With a resigned sigh, I rolled my neck and assumed a ready stance. “You’re right. Guess there’s just one thing to do then.”

  “The glamorous life of the heavy,” Mo chirped in agreement. She took two ponderous steps back and lowered her shoulder.

  My pistol and sword materialized in my hand, but I had a thought before Mo could do her battering ram act.

  “Wait,” I interjected, putting out an arm to stop her. I let my sword pop back into Spatial Storage and brought out a rock.

  Volatility [1 mp/sec]

  I gave the spell a good ten count, allowing the stone to take on an unhealthy purple glow that rivaled even the mech suit’s built in illumination. Then I nodded.

  “Gonna need a good shower after this.”

  “Spoken like a man with experience,” Mo purred.

  “You have no idea.”

  Nothing else to be said, Mo charged. She bounded forward one, two steps then crashed into the wall, shoulder first. *CRACK*

  The sound echoed off the hard surfaces. The pipes on the walls creaked. The water underfoot rippled.

  The mech waddled backward until it was at a good distance again.

  One. Two. *CRACK*

  Again.

  *CRACK* *CRACK*

  That one sounded different. Mo heard it too. Her servos whined as she pushed.

  The wall gave way all at once, an entire chunk of it folding in the middle before collapsing on itself and sliding into the room beyond. The swarmers squealed and shrieked in the dark that way they did, immediately starting to pour out of the new opening like a nest of cockroaches exposed to light, disgusting mouths questing for something to tear and bleed.

  I wasted no time. As soon as Mo was clear again, I chucked my glowy purple stone into the opening.

  *BOOM*

  The world took on an intense shade of violet. Pulped bodies of swarmers spewed out of the concrete orifice and slapped me in the chest a microsecond thereafter, their gritty white and black sludge caking onto my shirt and face. Then Mo did her thing, the stunned monsters unable to put up a fight or even scatter before they could be ground into paste. My mech buddy barged right through our new door with wild abandon. She whooped and yelled, stomping on the scourge and turning them into mulch. She grabbed them with her forked hands and squeezed until they popped. She shoulder checked them into the walls, her metal chassis sparking as it ground into the masonry.

  I took two preparatory breaths, readying myself mentally to dive in to help.

  *FSS* *FSS*

  Hissing yellow globs slapped into the concrete near my face.

  “AUGH,” I cried, stumbling back in surprise before slipping on the substantial goo pile my grenade had made of the swarmers.

  *FSS* *FSS* *FSS*

  I turned the stumble into a clumsy sprint as more shots tracked me through the dark. That is, until the wall opposite stopped me cold with a clang, my prosthetic slamming into unforgiving concrete.

  Our shooters had followed us. Two figures stood in the doorway, shadowy silhouettes that looked vaguely humanoid only lopsided in an almost comical way, their right halves swollen and distended until they absolutely dwarfed their left. Their oversized shoulders were hard, bulging lumps of flesh that tapered down gradually until they became nearly cylindrical forearms. Where a hand should be, the wrist glowed bright yellow and cast the rest of the figure in harsh, sickly yellow. Their pale skin looked waxy and strange with thick, pulsing veins of black running throughout their bodies.

  One of their wrists flashed, and another glob hissed by my ear.

  *FSS*

  I raised my own firearm, taking careful aim at the shooter on the left. Death Eye highlighted the usual vital spots for me, the heart, the head, the joints, but, surprisingly, the swollen right shoulder was the standout, showing bright red in the dark of the tunnel.

  *FSS*

  I had to throw myself to the side. Thank Constance the projectiles weren’t as fast as bullets, but they were certainly fast enough. The yellow goo ball slammed into my shoulder, disintegrating the top left side of my robe and exposing my prosthesis underneath. The force of it spun me all the way around, and I stumbled over my own feet as I tried to recover.

  With no more time to do anything other than a hurried shot, I squeezed off a burst of machine pistol fire in the general direction of the thing’s torso and let the recoil drag my shots up and to the left. I wasn’t a great shot, but, yet again, I made up for it in volume. Hot lead shredded the scourge’s left pectoral, tracking upward into his neck, which he took like a champ. The guy didn’t even flinch.

  The two shots to the jaw and, presumably, the brain stem, he didn’t take so well. He collapsed like a puppet with his strings cut, dropping sideways onto his companion just as the next three bullets tore his weird lumpy shoulder apart.

  *THWOOM*

  That part of the building, the door in particular, the hallway beyond, and the piping overhead, turned into a roiling cauldron of yellow smoke. The heat blasted my face, and I recoiled, scrambling away on my butt while burying my face in the crook of my arm. The other scourge cracked off another shot as the cloud overtook him, but it slapped harmlessly into the ceiling. Then that part of the building went silent.

  I checked my log.

  You have defeated Scourge Footsoldier.

  You gain 190 experience points. [150 base -120 non combat class, +20 level, +30 nemesis, +30 group, +80 chain, +75 Near Death Experience bonus]

  You have defeated Scourge Footsoldier.

  You gain 190 experience points. [150 base -120 non combat class, +20 level, +30 nemesis, +30 group, +80 chain, +75 Near Death Experience bonus]

  Experience rate 10,019/min.

  They were both dead.

  There was also no way I was wading into that cloud to loot my kills. I could almost feel my skin peeling off even this far away from the yellow vapor.

  So, I turned my attention back to the breach where Mo was still slaughtering swarmers. I activated the Trigger on my sword and let the Willing Edge enchantment hum to life. Then I started slashing. Mo was doing a good job keeping their attention, which was nice. Very few of the little insectile nasties tried coming at me, so fixed were they on the giant robot suit in their midst. So, all that was left for me to do was play a game of glorified wack-a-mole as the more clever bugs tried to make their escape, except I was using an atomically sharpened blade instead of a rubber mallet.

  I tried to keep things respectable by my clan’s standards, at least, keeping my body in the right position, never overextending, and all those skills they said I’d never need once I’d lost my arm. Ironic that I was now both the least trained swordsman in the clan and the only person that really needed sword skills outside of ritualistic practice. The multiverse was funny that way.

  Okay. Here we go. Side guard. Swing. Low. Thrust. Oh, crap. That was too much. Reset. Okay…

  Together, Mo and I made a real mess of things.

  Sword is now level 9.

  It was only when las-fire started to tear through the tunnel that I realized our people had arrived. They started slow and careful, picking off one scourge at a time, before ramping up to a buzzing hailstorm as the divers started to pour on the heat. Red lances panged off Mo’s armor and sizzled as they struck the scourge, and the room became awash with strobing red lights and disgusting cooked bug smell.

  Before long, Mo and I were standing in a steaming pile of dead scourge. I panting, desperate for just one lungful of untainted air, and Mo was favoring her bad leg.

  Out of the hazy dark a group of tired, filthy looking men approached. They had huge packs strapped to their bodies, and a few of them carried wounded comrades across their shoulders. Most looked like they were on their feet through willpower alone.

  Captain Reed gave the gross mulch and our filthy bodies a once over then graced us with a nod of respect.

  “In hindsight, perhaps the train tube was a risk we didn’t have to take,” he declared flatly.

  Mo shrugged her metal shoulders. “Invigorating hikes, charming locales… You really know where to take a girl on holiday, Cap.”

  “Only the best for my divers,” Reed replied.

  “Can’t go back the way we came,” I informed them as I cleaned the goop off my blade with my one remaining sleeve. “One of the scourge got a little explody earlier.”

  The Captain raised a questioning eyebrow at Mo.

  “Shooters, Cap. If we’re going, we gotta go now.”

  “Through the tube it is, then. Eyes up, divers! Dropship’s coming!” The Captain’s yell echoed in the tunnel. By the look of the other divers, you’d think he was using magic at how it reinvigorated them.

  “OOHAAAH!” They cheered.

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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