Point of Documentation - Marshall, Phoenix 11

  Yeah, this wasn’t going to plan. Then again, did he even have a plan? He kinda just burst into a room, shot the strongest-looking person, and waved a gun demanding everyone do as he said. Was he the villain right now? No, they tortured his comrade and him for days for information. These people were rotten. Even the ones who didn’t directly interact or do the things that happened to him; they knew and did nothing to help.

  What was he worrying about? Right, a plan! As the majority of the people in the room huddled down and took an ineffective cover behind the desks on the raised platforms Marshall stood awkwardly in the entrance to the room. No one spoke and explained anything like he had so carefully and cautiously asked before. Minus the gunshot, scuffle, and yelling at them of course. Marshall just had to roll with it at this point, he figured.

  The sidearm of the now-dead guard pointed towards a man in a lab coat nearest to the door. His eyes went wide and his shaky hands went up into the air. “Speak. Answer my questions and I won’t shoot you.” Marshall wondered if the stress from all of this had gone to his head, changing his actions to be more violent. That, or maybe the situation really did call for this much aggression.

  The man stood up with shaky legs and cleared his throat a few times before speaking. “The… The specimen in the middle of the room is testing for contained and localized Void-Tearing. To make Void-Cores. The gate is to keep the monster there. It was in the midst of making a Nest when Petrov found it.” He gave a gesture to the creature with a shaky hand. “We were also testing weapons on it to see how effective it was at making it hurt without killing it…”

  Marshall’s eyes narrowed and his focus shifted from the man to the apparently comatose Voidling in the center of the room under the arch. Chains wrapped around the thing like bindings, but they were loose enough to seem easily escapable if it could just get up and do so. It looked like a Vulture of the Demon-Strain, the second evolution path along the Demon’s evolution tree. However, something was odd about it. It had a bulging abdomen that seemed to be layered with sores and pustules. A disgusting sight to lay his eyes on, but a curious one as well. He had never seen any briefing or listing about anything like this.

  Spawnlings were the very first evolution of the Demon species. The Demons themselves were a strain of Voidlings that were completely antithetical to the Angel strain. Where Angels were tough, Demons were numerous. Where Angels could fly, Demons could tunnel. There were countless other differences, but the main crux of it was that Demons evolved by consumption while Angels evolved through training and personal strength. Spawnlings were between the sizes of dogs and small horses depending on how fed they were. They had no real proclivity to mutations and couldn’t do much past changing their claws to hands or spears. They operated in groups just to take down a single foe, but even a human was nothing but a speedbump to them.

  Vultures were another evolution along that line. When consuming enough biomatter and what the Spooks called ‘Latent Energy’ in that biomass; the Spawnling would evolve into a Vulture. Vultures could mutate their bodies in multiple different ways, some obscene and others insignificant. One of the things that caused his squadron so much headache in the early engagement were Vultures with flak-spines grown into their backs. Though Demons possessed no known way to fly, they had ways to take down those that could. Yet, this mutation that Marshall saw before him was something he had never seen nor been warned of before.

  Marshall turned back to the man and frowned. “You said it was making a Nest. A hole in reality that feeds into the Void. I’m guessing that mutation on it is the cause of it being able to do that?”

  The man seemed a little taken aback at first, then became more curious as Marshall spoke. “Yes… Yes, that mutation on it is in fact how it does that. The mucus on its back is actively hostile to reality and matter, and causes breakdowns in…” The man’s eyes narrowed before he continued speaking. “I thought you said no nerd-talk?”

  A moment of silence fell across the room and the man sucked in a breath as he realized what he had just done. Marshall, however, slowly grew a smile on his face. A predatory smile that seemed to size the man up. “Yeah, well, Outlanders know some things you all don’t. Like the fact that you’ve had a beacon chained up in a basement for an unknown time and have been pissing it off. Demons do not appreciate things that challenge their authority, and this is a big fucking challenge. So maybe a little nerd talk can assist in us all walking away from this in one piece.”

  Marshall’s left ear twitched slightly as Tethel spoke into it. “The woman to the left is typing something on her display.” Marshall spun his attention from the man to a woman at a slightly higher, but just as close dais that stuck out from the wall. She had some kind of symbol on her chest that the other researchers didn’t, and the look of irritation and anger on her face was plain to see. However, Marshall seemed to be far too slow on the swivel. By the time he had the gun trained on her, she looked up with a satisfied smirk on her face.

  “What did you just do?” asked Marshall, a growing sense of dread blossoming in his stomach.

  The woman’s grin became more smug as she spoke. “I called for help. You can shoot us all, but you aren’t walking away from this asshole. Not after what you did to Mick.”

  Marshall cursed on his breath as his eyes swiveled around the room. Who the fuck was– His eyes went back to the dead guard. Oh. THAT was Mick. His eyes landed back on her, but a pull from the center of the room drew his attention away from the aggressor. It pulled him to the center of the room. To the Voidling, whose eyes were now open and looking at Marshall.

  Tethel chuckled on his shoulder and flew up a little. Marshall looked at the floating butterfly and asked “Can you help? I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with this thing!”

  A snarky reply came as the butterfly gained some altitude. “Sorry meat-head, I’m just a scout and handler. I don’t do the dirty work. You’ll need to figure out how to fly on your own since you didn’t want a blessing from a Great One.” And with that, the butterfly disintegrated into thin air above Marshall’s head.

  Marshall knew that the little bastard was just using some kind of stealth as he could still feel his presence in the room. However he was able to feel it, he had no idea. He just kind of had a ‘sense’ of how and that was it. Upon looking back at the Voidling, it had started to struggle against the arch and was currently trying to rise up.

  Small gasps and hurried mumbling preceded most of the staff to ignore Marshall and start looking at their displays. Whatever was going on, they cared more about that than the gun-wielding ‘meat-head’ at the doorway. Even the woman who had been so sure earlier looked with worry to the moving Voidling.

  Marshall took stock and debated if he should just leave and take the loss on whatever this was. On one hand, a Voidling about to make a Nest was next to one of the worst things he could be standing next to. A nuclear bomb would be less devastating than a Nest opening for the first time, as a nuclear bomb scoured life quickly and not being eaten alive. Yet, he knew that not everyone in this room was a bad person. Some people were probably forced to be here. That’s just the way shitty organizations like this operate.

  The gun was slid into his pants line and he mounted the dias where the woman who sassed him earlier was located at. She recoiled as he came up, but Marshall didn’t react to it. Instead, he looked to the screen with the multiple flashing displays and large warning symbol over a low-quality image of the Voidling and arch below. “Where is my gear?” he asked plainly to the woman, no rush in his voice.

  With a quick look down to the lower level, the woman gestured to a table near the Voidling and arch. “Just out of reach of the monster, down in our scanning section. Your suit and weapon, I’m presuming?”

  Whether she had no fear or her anger was more than anything else she was feeling was unsure to Marshall. Regardless, she told the truth as he looked down and, past the Voidling, there was a table just barely out of sight with a gleaming item on it. He nodded to himself and, with a ‘harumph’, mounted the display stands and vaulted over them. He heard a crack from his grip on it, but he didn’t care. Less of a chance of her sending messages if it was broken.

  The cry from the woman for him breaking things followed him back down to the ground as he took off in a full run. Within seconds he had crossed a distance that would have taken him at least twice as long before and came around the side of the for-now-restrained Voidling and laid his eyes upon his gear.

  The suit was neatly folded on the table and the gun was resting there as well. The magazine had been taken out and the ammunition mostly left in it minus a single bullet taken out and laid to the side. The special ammunition had a glassy top to it and seemed to swirl slightly as it reacted to the Void energy in the air around it. He cursed at the stupidity of the scientists at leaving it this close, and thanked the Castle that the ammunition hadn’t cooked off.

  He took the suit and started to put it on. What he had on now was nothing short of a t-shirt and sweatpants that sat under the suit he wore. Though some of the more ground-based military in the Castle would mock pilots and shock-troops for their lax get-up outside of service, it was more than necessary to have as little on as possible. As he slid into the suit and zipped it up, it was extremely loose on him to the point of nearly falling off his shoulders. However, with a press, it pressurized and conformed to his body. He was thankful that he didn’t have shoes on as well, because he’d need to spend time taking them off to put this on.

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  Once the full-bodied suit was donned and the machines in it activated, Marshall slid the magazine into the pistol, armed the plasma generator, and slid it into his holster. The gun he had gotten from the guard lay on the table, unneeded now. He made sure that each section of the suit was functional, then looked up towards the woman.

  To say that greed played across her face was an understatement. Her and her colleagues were all taking vicious notes as he slid on his items and one of them even broke out a fucking easel. Guess he must have done more than simply break a display with his hop if they had such low-tech options that were needed. Marshall stepped around the Voidling and came around to the side with an eye. It looked at him with an animalistic hunger that made his skin crawl. There was no human emotion in this thing for him to talk with, and even less to reason with. His hand went to his side when a noise from the doorway drew his attention.

  A man with thin, raven black hair, sharp facial bones, and deep blue eyes walked in from the doorway. He was neither skinny nor buff, but was easily the tallest person in the room. Standing at six and a half feet, the man was a tall, well defined, but sharp featured man with a business suit that seemed straight from a gangster movie. He held no weapons on his hip or back, and seemed to not understand what a nail-file or clippers are. The nails being a couple inches long weren’t the only odd thing about the man. When Marshall looked at him, he got a massive sense of danger and foreboding that he hadn’t felt from anyone else in the room or before.

  “Bravo! Bravo, hai fatto una bella figura! You’ve also made such a mess of the place, yes?” The man took leisure steps into the room until he was roughly where Marshall had started this whole gun-toting business from.

  Marshall, for his credit, didn’t draw on the man immediately. Instead, he took a step back from the man towards the rear of the Voidling. “Who the fu–”

  The man raised a hand and Marshall stopped talking. “I am Count Tellar Igris, a proud noble of the house of Igris. I am also the overseer of this establishment and the research here.” His finger raised and pointed to Marshall. “Including you. A fine research material you are, and an even better source of information. More so than the man before.” His hand came back and retrieved a small white cloth from his breast-pocket. It had a stain of red on it that looked like a smudge of some kind. Marshall was confused at what it could be until the man, Tellar, raised it to his lips and dabbed at a trickle of blood he hadn’t noticed.

  Marshall took the chance to draw his weapon, expecting the man to react to him in some way. Instead, the Tellar raised a brow and smiled. “Really?” He said this in a mocking tone, the fangs visible in his large smile. “A 3rd-Grade such as myself isn’t worried about your little gun. Put it down, and let’s have a ch–”

  The gun barked and the vampire known as Tellar’s head exploded in a spray of blood and bone. The heavy round impacted what was the man’s right eye and removed a large circle of his head around it. This caused the body to stagger back and fall to the ground.

  Multiple cries around the room sounded out as the shot met its mark. The scientists seemed to be not used to guns actually killing people, and Marshall didn’t blame them for it. It was horrible watching someone die. Even through a cockpit, he had seen some truly horrid deaths both at his hands and at the hands of the enemy. Marshall holstered his weapon and looked back to the Voidling beside him. He was still feeling some kind of call from the arch around the Voidling, and it didn’t seem to be actively trying to strike at him. No, it seemed to be trying to get free. He leaned in slightly to get a better look at the engravings on the arch itself.

  A pure, instinctual feeling of fear rose up in his spine. Marshall spun and jumped towards the Voidling and its arch holding it without even thinking. Behind him was the man he had just shot, fully healed and smiling. “What are we looking at, hmm?” Came the jovial reply from the man.

  Marshall once more reached for his gun, but a hand wrapped around Marshall’s own and held it firmly in place. The strength he had before against the normal guard was so much greater than his normal strength, but it was nothing against this new monster before him. This was further proven as Tellar picked up Marshall and threw him against the arch behind him.

  The Voidling reacted, flailing a talon at Marshall and missing him by inches. Marshall ducked and, before he even had a chance to breathe in, Tellar’s hand slapped the side of his face and sent him sprawling meters away from the arch. The hit dislocated Marshall’s jaw and sent blood and teeth splattering across the ground where he landed. Marshall tried to get up, but Tethel was there in moments to press his shoe into the back of Marshall.

  With a groan, Marshall tried to get up off the floor with no avail. Instead, the shoe pressed harder and Marshall felt something about to pop. He immediately stopped pushing and fell back against the ground.

  “Good…” Came the slow and frothing with joy reply from above him. “... cower and grovel at the disparity between us. I, given power as a rebirth-right and at my prime. Compared to you, a newborn with no real understanding of how things work here.” Marshall felt the man lean down as he slithered out the last word: “Outlander”.

  Marshall spit out some blood onto the ground and coughed. “Just get your villain speech over with and kill me or something. I’m not submitting to whatever fucked up time-share this is.”

  There was a pause before Tellar laughed and spoke in a voice low enough for only them to hear. “I see Tethal told you very little, hmm?”

  It was Marshall’s turn to be surprised. “You know about that little blue gremlin who can turn into things? I thought he was–”

  “Here for you?” Came the smug reply. “No. He’s my Handler for now. He just happened to smell something downstairs and vanished for a few days. So let me explain instead how this is going to work.”

  The man leaned more onto Marshall’s back and he felt a hard pop. His legs and hip went numb and an excruciating pain rocketed through his body. Marshall let out a cry of pain that nearly tore the rest of his throat and sanity from him. Through his vision he saw Tellar step beside and squat down next to him. “Oh stop being a child about it. You’ll heal in a few hours unassisted. Void-Scourged individuals who turn into Void-Core, or ‘Cored’, have a higher and unnatural healing rate compared to humans. Not as fast for the lower grades as some of the mutated species, but still so very fast.”

  The man smiled down at Marshall with a malicious grin that showed off the man’s fangs. “The difference between a non-Cored and a Cored is a three-to-one ratio. That holds true the farther up you go. I’ve heard that the mold breaks around 6th-Grade, but I doubt you’ll need to know that. So comparing me to you would normally be three on one, but I’m a vampire on top of things. So closer to… five on one?” He seemed to think about this for a moment before clicking his fingers. “Oh, you can think of me as a Swarmling versus a human man.”

  The man rose from his position and started to walk back and forth. “Powers born from Void-Cores come in multiple different varieties. Each of them stemming from what a person’s greatest strengths were in life. Sometimes it's influenced by their environment, but it mostly comes from the person themselves. This can be labeled down between Set, Type, and Specialization. I personally have an Offensive set with the Sanguine type. Surprising, I know. I don’t have a specialization yet, but settling down is for those that like to limit themselves. Unlike me.” Tellar gestured to the people still huddling behind their desks. No longer from Marshall, but from Tellar it seemed.

  “I drain the blood from people to grow my strength, and can even use that blood in fascinating ways. That’s the big thing: knowing how to use what you have. A simple 1st-Grade will know how to use fire to throw flames around, but a talented 3rd-Grade will know that their flames can be both precise and also widely destructive. Fireball, fire columns, cooking food. Whatever it is they need or want.” He gestured to Marshall. “I’m speaking of all of this at length because of a very simple reason: I love hearing myself speak. Well, that, and I plan on asking you a very, very important question.”

  The man squatted down again much closer this time and looked Marshall in the eye. “What are you useful for, Mr. Outlander? Along with that: are you more useful to me alive, or dead?”

  While the man had been talking; Marshall had not been inactive. Sure, he was listening to the actually useful information that the man was spouting about how these things worked. He was, however, also working towards something. A feeling he had with the suit being put on was starting to feed through his legs. He knew that the suit had a ‘panic’ mode where it could allow someone to use their limbs if they were broken, but that relied on the spine still being intact. His, however, was far from intact now. Yet Marshall could feel some kind of resonance from the suit. It was like it was speaking to him, but Marshall could barely understand it.

  Past understanding what Aphasia felt like, Marshall kept mentally leaning into this feeling like he had with the gun the one man had in the cell some floors above. Rather than a quick push and desire with his mind, instead he tried to put some complex intent into it. He wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be, but it had this feeling to it that it was trying to help him. Not something that COULD help him, but something that was TRYING to help him.

  As Tellar squatted down and spoke to him about being useful, Marshall finally felt a click. The suit released something into his body that started to make it feel like fire was racing through his veins. Every inch of him was pins and needles and he could feel his jaw starting to knit back together in real time. Marshall worried about Tellar noticing, but a sound towards the center of the room distracted him. A loud clang and the sound of metal scraping. A look of fear shot through Tellar, but that wasn’t the only thing.

  Marshall’s body reacted as if on impulse. His arms craned at an unnatural angle backwards, the joints popping and re-aligning as he broke and disjointed them to grab the pistol without much more movement. Then, in just as fast of a response, Marshall pointed the gun up and pressed on the lower of the two triggers. With the under-barrel of the gun aimed directly at the chest of the man before him, Marshall fired off all of the stored plasma in the cartridge. It sizzled out of the opening like a jet of water rather than a condensed bullet and rocketed up and out at incredible speeds. Speeds that were more than Tellar could handle.

  Tellar’s chest was melted away, sloshing onto the ground in a sickening display of gore. He jumped up and tried to get away from Marshall, but the damage was already done and worsening. Plasma was, in all reality, extremely hot matter that was accelerated to speed to both be hot enough and condensed enough to act like a stream of protons from a laser. While slower than a laser, it was absolutely more destructive to Voidlings and would melt right through their tough armor. To a Vampire, it was silver to them. It would stop regeneration and burn constantly as it excited more and more matter into a melting soup. Plasma was matter’s acid.

  Marshall slowly rose to his feet as Tellar seemed to be readying for a fight. Claws out, he gave out a hiss and somehow still managed to stand despite the soft-ball sized hole in his chest. His gaze, however, was not just on Marshall. He turned, looking at the rest of the room.

  The Vulture was half-way out from the archway and had its eyes locked on them. A true predator was breaking free from its containment; and it just so happened two wonderful meals had laid themselves right at its feet.