Chapter 26

  Balls of yellow scourge goo, some form of bio-plasma according to Dev and Mo, sailed through the dust cloud that surrounded the park, leaving luminescent streaks behind like signal flares. They were pretty common sights now, hits less so. The scourge foot soldiers couldn’t get close enough for an accurate line on a human target yet, though one of the turrets took a glancing shot a little while ago, causing a breach in the firing chamber and melting the top of one of the supports. I was forced to decommission it shortly thereafter (read: very carefully chuck it outside the perimeter before it could hurt someone). All in all, I was fine with losing a turret. Better that than some poor diver with a family or one week from retirement or whatever story they would happen to have.

  I hoped the scourge that had done the deed got a medal or something, because that was as close as they’d gotten to denting our lines so far.

  The dropship engines flared overhead, and divers ran to and fro getting things ready for departure. My turrets, 45 strong now, were an absolute wall of sound, a sonic whiteout that drowned out everything but the most loud and immediate of noises. I’d stopped hearing the scourge’s raging howls and hisses some time ago. I also couldn’t remember the last time my ears weren’t ringing.

  My feed was similarly full of nonsense. Don’t get me wrong. I probably could pause the feed and go through the messages one by one to glean some information from it all, but it was largely all the same stuff, some variation of “You defeated/created something. Have some XP” sprinkled in amongst a zillion damage, resistance, and status notifications. If I were to convert it into plain text, I was sure it would take days to even skim it all. Now that they weren’t devoting part of the swarm to wearing down our outriders, the scourge was busily throwing itself into the meat grinder that was our landing zone, which was concerning, given what I knew about the scourge. There was always some angle it was playing, some sleight of hand. Where was it?

  Getting back to the safety of the LZ wasn’t too much of a problem after our initial dustup in the train tunnel. It turned out that the tunnels themselves were an elevated thing, connected to the sides of some of the buildings with stairs leading off of the various platforms and down to street level. The tube we’d been in wasn’t overly long, about a block in length that ran somewhat inside the structures until it rose off the ground and dumped us on a major thoroughfare.

  From there, we were conveniently within sight of the Pop Can, which dutifully took care of any scourge issues we currently had. Scourge that tried to swarm the beleaguered divers and the wounded mech loader didn’t survive more than a few steps out of cover, and the Scourge Foot Soldiers were still lagging a bit behind us and unable to get a good angle even while we were vulnerable. The Foot Soldier guys didn’t seem to move as smoothly as a regular human, even ones as tired and overburdened as Cap and his people. Maybe their lumpy, gross bodies had something to do with that. I’d begun thinking of them as sort of mobile heavy weapons teams, though I was sure there was something there I was missing. There had to be some reason for the cumbersome design, evolutionarily speaking. Could what the scourge did be called evolution? I didn’t know. Maybe it was better to think of the scourge as one thing, and the monsters we were fighting as parts of a whole instead of living things with biological needs. If the scourge was okay with having its portable plasma launchers slow and prone to explosions, who was I to argue?

  Once we were back inside the perimeter, there was a collective cheer from all the divers that could spare a breath, and Dev set about calling in our drop ship in coordination with Captain Mohawk’s company.

  The dropships came into view five minutes later, screaming down from the upper atmosphere like meteors, only halting a couple hundred feet before impact, engines burning full blast and kicking up a colossal cloud of dust. Then they hovered, turning their big defense cannons on the surrounding monsters, at least until the divers could get a suitable landing area clear for them. The nesters’ bodies were still in that particular part of the park, and, though the drop ship could land on them just fine, they represented a security risk if they were still slightly alive.

  So, I helped clear the bodies. Mo and I were the only ones that could carry one by our lonesome, so we were the obvious choices. I worked faster thanks to Mo having a limp now, but that was alright with me. I took the opportunity to loot everything I could put my hands on, and what loot it was…

  Rainbow System light spilled out of the corpse in my arms, and I held my breath in hopes that it would be something goo-

  Another ball of snot.

  It plopped onto the ground with a disgusting gelatine jiggle that set my teeth on edge.

  Perfect. Wonderful. Thank you, System. Just what I wanted.

  Conductive Resin - Resin from the planet Sabium produced in an abominable combination of biological processes and magical tampering. This resin, though resembling that of a native breed of wasp, has been bent to an unspeakable purpose, serving as a repository of both nutrients and corrupted magical essence.

  Okay, I was pretty sure the System was being biased here. I really didn’t need all the ‘abominables’ and ‘unspeakables’ in that description. The stuff was incredibly nasty, though. We agreed on that. It stuck to your fingers and smelled awful

  It burned really, really well, though.

  Consume Conductive Resin? Y/N

  You gain knowledge of material: Conductive Resin [10/10]

  Status Gained: Engine [12 MP/sec for 10 minutes]

  You gain Affinity: Vespara Sabia: Grade F

  The affinity was all I wanted, really. Now that I had plans to convert matter at an industrial scale someday, I was implementing a policy to acquire, at least, a F grade affinity for everything I could fathom, even gross scourge mucus.

  I tossed the limp (and looted) corpse of the nester into the fountain, giving the throw some oomph this time to get it over the lip of the other piled corpses. Not bad. I nearly got it to the center this time.

  I wiped my now greasy palms off on my pants, ready to get another one, but I was given the signal to back off so that the ship could land.

  That was it then. We were going back, and nothing terrible had happened. No one was dead.

  Hell yeah, Ryan. We did it. Time to pack it up.

  An unassuming metal disk appeared in my hand, one that I’d been keeping track of in my Spatial Storage for most of the time I’d been here. It was made of steel with some circular copper contacts along the edges just big enough for a fingertip.

  With a gulp, I turned toward the other corner of the park, the one I’d been trying not to think about since I’d returned. I’d been avoiding it thus far, unwilling to really accept that I’d let things get so… well, suffice it to say, I would be putting in an emergency cleanup feature in the next iteration of collection points.

  It was truly impressive, my colossal junk pile, standing taller than the first two floors of some of the buildings in the area, the base wider than the road itself. Drones skittered over its surface, crawling to the top to deposit their spoils before leaping down the side with a subtle spring in their steps now that they’d fulfilled their purpose. The little guys were performing their duty in such numbers that the mound seemed to move like a liquid in the hazy air or an ant mound that had been kicked. I’d never done something like that myself, since ants weren’t a thing on Proxis’ surface, but I’d seen videos.

  I placed my fingers on my new metal disk just so to touch the magical Triggers that I needed. Then I sent a surge of mana inside. A magical shockwave passed through my aura, the motes of power jiggling in the air like little bells as they transmitted my intent.

  All activity on the scrap pile stopped.

  Then, things started to happen.

  I wouldn’t have noticed it at first if I’d not been witness to an entire hill getting sucked down into a sinkhole before (also something I’d caused, but let’s not get into that). The mound shuddered, shifted, and began a slow motion collapse. I couldn’t see it, buried as it was, but I knew that underneath that mountain of crap was my casting bowl. It had just received the signal to go from ‘blow’ to ‘suck,’ and it was sucking for all it was worth. More precisely, it had received the signal to stop producing drones and start putting everything it touched into Spatial Storage.

  Based on my tests, the process was as close to instantaneous as you could get. Something would fall in the bowl and *pop.* Gone. I’d thrown a handful of screws at it in the shop to test the limits of the phenomenon, but none of them even got a chance to bounce. They just vanished in a flash of light. I assumed that’s what was happening now.

  Confirmation reached me only a second later. Suddenly, I was clutching at my stomach. There it was again, the feeling of something itching as it passed from the real world to my little pocket dimension. It wasn’t uncomfortable… just weird… a tiny thrill inside of me that kept me just on the edge of a full body shudder.

  And it was happening at a rate and intensity far, far worse than I’d ever experienced.

  The point is that things were happening. Lots of things. Ridiculous amounts of scrap metal gushed into my storage space like a firehose of metal chunks, one at a time, but so fast you really couldn’t pick one instance of transfer from another.

  I groaned, bowed my head, and fought the urge to lay down on the ground in the fetal position.

  “You okay? You look like you’re gonna be sick.” Dev asked me. She had her crate next to her where she was stuffing cabling, control boxes, and disassembled antennae inside. Her movements were quick but deliberate.

  Overhead, the dropship’s cannons went full auto as it spun in a circle and laid waste to all it could see. Then it started to descend.

  “I’m good. Just something I didn’t eat,” I replied. I took deep, calming breaths, consciously ignoring how much this felt like insects crawling around inside my intestines.

  With a clunk, the dropship’s landing pylons touched down on the ground, followed swiftly by another. There was a signal from two divers at the cockpit end of the ships, and the ramps disengaged, slamming into the pavement hard enough to be heard over the turrets. The waiting divers, the full company since the turrets were fully in charge of defense now, immediately began to file onto the ship.

  “Better hurry then,” Dev said as she lifted one end of her crate until the attached wheels bore the bulk of its weight. “Normal extraction takes a max of two minutes.”

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  “I’ll be there.” I gave her a mock salute, regretting it immediately, but now that I was moving, I had more stuff to do.

  I jogged over to my assembler array and got to packing. I ran my hand over every machine and did my best impression of the casting bowls, answering Yes to every prompt that came up as swiftly as I could. The machines disappeared as quickly as I touched them. Then came the half assembled turrets, the magazine loader, the bullet ant casting setup.

  Advanced Spatial Storage is now level 3.

  Next, I repositioned my fingers on my little disk until I was touching a different set of contacts. I winced, thinking about how this one was going to feel.

  Another pulse of mana, and…

  Here came the drones. A shocking amount of drones. Hall had said things were getting pretty crazy on his end of the field before, but I’d not believed him. I’d observed the stream of drones, of course, not closely, but I’d seen them in passing. There were indisputably lots of the little dudes wandering around but not… Not at this scale.

  But now that I’d called them en masse, they came on like a tide. It didn’t even start at a trickle and slowly build. Just all of a sudden, boom, they were everywhere. The drones cascaded over the overturned truck that had been the place of their births. They swarmed around it, through it. They crawled over walls and out of buildings. They bubbled up from storm drains I hadn’t even realized were there. They fell out of the sky, presumably after having been mining things on a building’s roof somewhere. They popped up out of the ground itself, through cracks in the road.

  It was a flash flood of dark gray cannon-spiders.

  The flood converged on one spot, and one spot only. It smashed into the slowly dwindling mound of scrap like the wrath of an angry deity. The drones tore into the pile, digging with their legs, and using their pincers like shovels.

  The drones swallowed the scrap mound up, tore through it piece by piece. Then, once they’d uncovered the casting bowl, they began to disappear into the depression in the middle of the mound, casting themselves inside. White light billowed out of the crater as hundreds of drones forced themselves into my Spatial Storage at a time.

  “Oh, my God, Kotes,” Hall shuddered. He was currently passing by with two packs on his back and several rifles slung on his chest. He spared a disgusted glance at the mound of spiders committing what looked like ritual sacrifice into the top of a miniature volcano.

  He shook his head in uncloaked disgust. “Your magic is weird, man,” he said.

  I could only agree. Silently. I was still very uncomfortable.

  “Let’s go, people. We’re cutting it close.” The Captain’s voice cut through the rest of the noise as he strode up to us, the picture of calm command.

  “Dev?” Captain Reed asked.

  Dev stopped where she was and raised her hands again in that conductor pose. Her eyes glowed as she scanned her drone feed.

  “About to recall. Cutting feed… Wait. Hold on. There’s something in the…” She trailed off, her dextrous fingers moving through arcane and painful looking gestures.

  “Talk to me, Dev,” Reed commanded.

  “Don’t know. I caught a glimpse of something. It’s… there. Can’t get a good… Oh, shit. Cap, they’re here.”

  “On the ship, now!” Reed bellowed. “Move! Move! We have elites inbound!”

  Measured jogs turned to full on sprints. The wounded were tossed into seats and left to buckle themselves in. Men crowded into the mouth of the ship in a rush to get into cover.

  Suddenly, as if they were waiting for this moment, hundreds of hissing plasma balls began to pelt the entire park like hail. The once empty windows of the buildings around us filled with glowing yellow cannon mouths, and distended fleshy faces leered down at us as they mercilessly pounded our position.

  I heard the distinct sound of screaming as a lucky shot hissed right into the mouth of the other company’s dropship.

  My turrets tracked new targets from the ground. Their barrels tilted skyward and went full auto on the monsters. Pale bodies fell from windows and off ledges. Bright yellow explosions ripped through the air as whatever the monsters used to produce their plasma balls burst.

  I ran up the ramp, got to the top and started helping the slower divers up. I grabbed packs off of people’s backs and tossed them inside, plucked limping divers off the ground and over the threshold like they were children and handed them off to someone else.

  The action reached a terrible crescendo.

  Experience rate 16,800/min

  Level Up!

  You are now level 5!

  Ability Unlocked: Trigger [ERROR]

  Resolving…

  Ability Replaced: Trigger

  Ability Unlocked: Advanced Trigger

  Advanced Trigger: Create a fully integrated pocket of potentiality within your creations that may be activated by mana. Speed, intensity and strength of potentiality may be affected by mana and material type. [Cost: Conditional]

  Achievements awarded this level:

  Ambitious: You have defeated a foe above your level. [+1 to lowest level ability]

  All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]

  Spirit of the Warrior: You gained 51% of your experience this level from defeated foes as a non-combat class. [+3 spirit]

  Soulful: You have almost exclusively focused on Mind and Spirit centric skills this level. [+1 Mind, +1 Spirit]

  Dedicated: You spent most of your time dedicated to your craft this level. [+1 Spirit]

  Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% experience awarded for new designs next level]

  Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]

  Large Scale: You have created more than 25,000 (43,392) items of fair quality or above this level. [New skill]

  New skill unlocked: Aberrant Quality

  Aberrant Quality: Items you create have a vanishingly small chance to be formed at a quality level one higher than designed with all of the benefits thereof including better experience rewarded, higher mana efficiency, better damage ranges for weapons, bonus mitigation values for armor, or any number of traits, depending on the item.

  “Cap!” Dev’s voice was strained. I’d never heard her afraid before, and I decided I didn’t like it.

  “Divers! We are leaving! Go now!” Reed roared.

  *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM* *THOOM*

  The Pop Can was going full bore, no time spent tracking between shots.

  The ship’s engines whined, the landing pylons let go of the ground, and we were airborne. For a full second, we drifted there, almost lazily, the engines revving up to speed to get us altitude. Captain Reed and I stood in the mouth of the ship, holding onto the grip loops. The man’s face was a mask of concentration as he scanned the battlefield.

  Bio-plasma slapped into the hull of the ship, then the ceiling above us, showering everyone with sizzling slime. Everyone ducked their heads, but at least a few of the divers started to smolder. Someone cried out, but there was nothing to be done right now. We had to keep moving.

  Slowly, the ship floated upward, doing a slow spin, cannons blazing as we gained altitude. We rose above the makeshift berms, the turrets. Another line of the skyscrapers’ empty windows passed by every second.

  Suddenly, Captain Reed snapped his rifle up, one handed, and let off a stream of blazing red at something down below. I tried to track where he was aiming.

  Then, I saw it. Or, more accurately, I saw him. It was a man for all intents and purposes, generally man shaped, at least. Tall, lithe, dark hair, olive complexion but that was pretty much all he had in common with actual people.

  His angular face was serene in its dead expression, his features almost beautiful, statuesque, but any such appeal it had was eclipsed by the sense of wrongness he gave off.

  He moved with grace, such grace that it reached the point of being uncanny, his arms and legs moving in such perfect concert with his body that it pushed one’s impression of him from skilled dancer territory into not-following-the-laws-of-force-and-inertia. His armor was a glossy black that made it look wet, the edges extra sharp, especially at the joints where wicked looking spikes cut through the air like it was a living thing to slice open.

  His eyes were not eyes. They were empty pits. Despite the distance, I somehow knew that.

  And he was fast. He leapt from building to building down below springing up from ground level to catch the lip of a window or a rail, his hoofed feet gripping the imperfections in the vertical surfaces easily, his powerful legs flexing to bound up multiple floors at once.

  Multiple turrets were tracking him. Bullets peppered the concrete, sending showers of dust and pebbles spiraling to the ground, their concentrated fire blurring the space the man occupied, but nothing touched him. Up and up the man came, flitting in and out of windows, leaping from ledge to ledge, ever closer. Reed was firing as fast as the rifle could cycle, pushing his weapon and his aim to its limit but to no avail. The thing dodged those just as easily as the turrets, sometimes with such small margins that I thought for sure it had been hit, that I should see blood or some kind of mark on it, but I never did

  It was impossible. Nothing could move like that.

  However, once the Pop Can got in on the action the monster was finally challenged. The turret obliterated the buildings the scourge was using as its highway, even on near misses, forcing the elite into cover for a half second at a time before it re-emerged from a different window and started climbing again.

  Always, however, its trajectory was up.

  “Up. Up!” Reed bellowed into the microphone next to the ramp controls.

  The elite spun, dancing between the hail of bullets and laser fire. Then it tucked its arms and slipped into the dark windows below. For a full five seconds, I dared to hope it had been overwhelmed and been forced to retreat, that my turrets had been able to at least wound it.

  Engine thrummed in my chest. My eyes darted from one window to another.

  *CROOM*

  There was a shift in the atmosphere, a bloody tinge in the air.

  An Ability!

  The concrete wall directly next to our dropship’s ramp split open, and a figure blurred out of the debris cloud, too fast to track if only it wasn’t heading right for me. It shot through the air like a missile, not the arrow kind so much as the supersonic ship killer kind, its hands extended in front while its face was that of a corpse for all the emotion it showed. The elite didn’t even make a sound when it landed on the ramp, even as its long talons dug into the metal hull like it was made of clay.

  The Captain’s desperate las-fire spanged off of the monster’s armor harmlessly over and over. That was all Reed could hit, all he was allowed to hit, apparently. The monster shifted its body just so, casually, almost effortlessly, so that every attack was deflected off the smooth black surfaces without leaving a scratch. The death mask didn’t so much as twitch.

  Its empty, black pits threatened to swallow us all.

  That was when my mouth finally caught up with my adrenaline soaked brain.

  “Holy fucking shit!” I yelled. My arm cannon was up before I even had a chance to think anything other than a string of expletives, some of them I’d never even had occasion to use. The elite’s black pits were suddenly focused directly on me.

  That’s what did it.

  *BOOMPH*

  In retrospect, it was probably a terrible idea to shoot one of my state change cannon shots at a target a mere ten or so feet away. Hell, I’d imagined a scenario like this before (in my nightmares), enemies close at hand, nothing but an explosive round in the tube. How much would that suck for everyone involved? Theoretically, a lot.

  Well, in my absolute certainty I was about to die along with fifty or so of my closest friends, I didn’t think about that. I just let fly.

  Just like with the las-fire, the elite scourge…whatever the hell it was… tried to take my cannon shot on its armor, turning its body almost contemptuously to catch the round at an angle on its chest plate. Only, my ordinance wasn’t programmed to smack into something and deliver death by blunt force trauma. My happy fun ball was programmed to get near a target and then… well… Let’s just say a pound and a half of steel suddenly, magically, converting itself into a cloud of superheated gas makes for a hell of a show.

  The elite seemed to realize its error a nanosecond after my construct exploded in its face. It sprang backward, off the ramp, with such force that it rocked the entire ship violently on its axis and set it to spinning. That, combined with the almost simultaneous explosion of charged gas, put us in a full on spiral as we rose higher and higher in altitude. As I held on for dear life, trying not to get pulled out into open sky, black smoke billowed from the back end of the dropship.

  *THOOM**THOOM* *THOOM**THOOM* *THOOM**THOOM* *THOOM**THOOM*

  The Pop Can continued its fight even as we pulled past the tallest of the buildings and up into open air. The Captain shakily pulled himself back to his feet and slapped the button to close the ramp.

  Only as the portal was closed, and the red interior lights of the hold winked on did I let go of my fabric loop and drop to the floor. I saw spots. My lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air.

  I did, however, have the presence of mind to summon my metal disk and key the final sequence. Below, though I couldn’t hear it, I knew the Pop Can finally ceased its struggle to keep the horde out of our park, and, piece by piece, winked out of existence.

  I laid there on the rough metal grating, feeling the ship build up speed, and I exchanged a worn out look with Captain Reed. No words were needed.

  So, that was why they never stayed too long on the surface.

  I mentally scribbled another entry on the to-do list.

  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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