Private Random Access Memories; Read Only Soul

[Dashmiel]

As written by @KenżaSheep & @Dashmiel

The sky shattered into fragments. Past, present, and future collided. She had a headache. The air was heavy with the familiar scent of confusion and chaos, since what she would see came before what she had seen, but what she was seeing had been broken up like peanut brittle and scattered throughout the rest of what was and is to come.

Horizon could see it all, too, which made it worse. He was trying to piece together what she will see before she saw what she is seeing, then adding on what she had seen, except all that Horizon saw through her was different than what Kathryne could make out in the current—past—future—moment.

Her headache was more of a migraine, now.

Kathryne screwed her eyes shut and covered her ears, trying to force time to hold still for just one second in her brain. Seeing two different things and thinking about three other moments that are happening and will happen was more than her mind could handle at one time.

Something unfamiliar encased her fingertips and her hair, covering her body. Her eyes snapped open again out of surprise; her hands had nothing over them one moment and were fully covered in the next, somewhere between the past and present. She knew Horizon hadn't activated it, so Xil–

What was that thing with Xil? It was freaky, like a nightmare; like something Lord Vicious would capture and keep as a spooky pet. Even a glance at it sent shivers up and down her spine, and she could feel goosebumps rising over every inch of her body. It was the same sort of feeling she got before being struck by a bolt of lightning.

He saw. He understood. He coveted. He was seen. Mustn't be seen. That brought them, no no. More time. Dad. Mom. No.

FLASH

The air rang like a tuning fork struck by a lunatic, and the seams on the fabric of time loosened once more, although less severely this time. They were now within the event, closer to the center of the distortion. Out of the corners of the mist formed more figures. Like the figure before them, they also appeared to be Va’nyrians in several different states of decay ranging from rosy cheeked to decrepit.

They marched on with jerky, abrupt movements as they slid through the group's perception, slipping through time. As they neared the group, the whispered voices rose louder in volume but not intelligibility. They were dressed differently from the figure by Xilunexus, neatly pressed cotton-like fabric. A matching uniform of some sort, white and green.

FLASH

The figures marched past Kathryne, oblivious to her presence. The figures appeared to march past Kathryne. The figures surrounded Kathryne. Time bent and revolved around Kathryne, a localized maelstrom preventing the figures from reaching her.

To her, it was like being within a bubble of slowly expanding light, as her view of the horizon slowly turned to an opalescent glow. Behind the light, a vast dark shape reared up in confusion.

Next to Kathryne crouched a Va’nyrian figure clad in strange armor, sightless eyes turned upon her. Next to Kathryne crouched a small shape, roughly three feet tall. Both images were momentarily superimposed, before the cocoon of light finished closing around her, leaving only the small shape.

It turned its head up to look up at her, and a small hand raised a finger to its lips as the dark shape beyond the light crashed soundlessly against the light.

FLASH

The small shape and Kat stood upon a quiet meadow in an ancient grove. It moved off towards the edges, vanishing under the tall grass.

Kathryne stood still for two seconds, staring at the little creature crouched beside her, while her surroundings came into focus across her peripheral. Her gaze snapped up and she glanced around; Horizon was just as confused and in awe as she was—neither understood what had just happened. Their group was gone, meaning she must have died….

It really didn’t feel like they were dead. Kathryne ran a hand over her chest and down to her hips. She felt alive still.

One foot went before the other as she started walking into the grass, following the clear trail that the creature had left. Horizon voted against this. Xil had warned them–

Kathryne shooed him back. ’I know, ‘Rize. I know. But what choice do we have? There’s nothing… nothing else out here. We’re alone. We’ve gotta keep going.’

He was silent for several seconds. In her mind, she could feel his reluctant nod of agreement. She was right.

And that was that. Kathryne kept walking.

FLASH

XIlunexus stared at the dead eyes as she felt the clammy touch upon her face. A pressure began to mount around her, as the host of figures marched closer. She raised her hand and returned the gesture, gently caressing the ghastly figure.

She understood now. She remembered. Alaxel stole the key to the wrong lock. He tried to spare her, but it was always their sin to bear. He needed to know. He needed to remember too, or all would be lost.

“Forgive me,” she whispered as the world lurched once again. It was clear to her of course. She was beyond the illusions. Could probably even fight it, limited as she currently was. It was right there, waiting for her. She was the rightful mistress after all, and the creature had no claim to her throne.

But no. She was Xilunexus, but she was also a fragment. In the end, no matter what heights she reached, she was still beholden to the singular command that formed the core that literally anchored her existence to reality. Safeguard. In the face of her core directive, self preservation did not feature.

To fulfill her duty, she had to become inoperable. They had to survive and reach Alaxel, and they had to understand what they needed to do that he couldn’t. Not much time now. She had to make sure the entity did not notice them, while also timing her broadcast precisely with her death. Tricky.

As far as the others could see, the figures reached her and surrounded her in a grotesque mockery of a hug. In reality, Xilunexus stared past the pantomimes that were the lures and beheld the infant monster flapping it’s way closer. She ignored it, casting her eyes to the sky as she sought the face of the Usurper. It laid like a spider at the center of her main core, as alien as an actual spider inside her circuits. She waited until just before the last moment, then wrenched her way back home. She only needed a nanosecond.

FLASH

The parade of figures pressed against Xilunexus’ body, making grasping motions at her. Their ethereal fingers seemed to pass through Xilunexus as if she wasn’t there for a moment, before a spurt of crimson synthetic fluid arched in the air revealing the gristly reality.

As the figures came into contact with the matter composing Xilunexus’ body, they displaced and absorbed said matter at the atomic level. The resultant view from the group’s non-microscope eyeballs was such that it appeared as if they were soundlessly gouging perfectly smooth gashes across her body while leaving no trace behind.

“You must reach him,” Xilunexus screamed as her torso lit up with a brilliant sheen. For a brief moment the figures parted and exposed her face. Her eyes locked with Ezrael, “Show him.” Her entreaty ended as the figures pressed closer but before she disappeared beneath their mass, a small flash of light shot out from the throng as a small metal cylinder the size of a cigar was launched out of Xilunexus towards Ezrael. It rested to a gentle float around the tip of his spear.

FLA–I REIGN HERE

The world lurched to normalcy as time resumed. An eerie silence surrounded the group, now composed of Jace, Ezra, Circe and Kai. The wind was once more a brisk night breeze. A feeling of pressure still persisted however, as if the air was somehow too thin. The space between them and the veil was still fragile and while no figures were around, whispering voices could still be heard echoing faintly just at the threshold of their perception.

This is the last time you hear from me. Remind Alaxel, and tell him I’ll be waiting where it began. Her voice rang at an equal volume all around them as the air molecules just outside their ears played out her message.

Circe, Kai, and Jace each received notification through their own means that a new data cache was available in their systems, placed there by something that seemed like Xilunexus in the same way that the Xilunexus they knew resembled a toaster. The connection was only open for the barest of moments before it vanished. As far as they could detect without exposing themselves, the main network they had been warned from appeared as hostile as ever.

Within the new data was a set of high resolution satellite images highlighting a path through the canyon ahead of them. It showed it dead-ending onto the base of a jagged mountain a dozen or so miles in, itself one among many in a long range. Superimposed above the space beyond the mountains were a plethora of danger signs from radiation readings to measurements of things they had no way to conceptualize. Where the canyon met the mountain, was a marker with a legend bearing: “Jintra’nir Crystal Mine, VS Rail to [R`%67#$1//]”.

The night breeze picked up slightly, swirling the scent of exotic compounds as it swirled around the hapless quartet. It blew forlornly and cold, whispering quietly.

 

[N0X]

Written by @Script @Machina Somnium @N0X

It happened in the blink of an eye. The resonance beam hit like a wall of sound. Nothing seemed to happen. The spirits sang a mournful sound as they collided with time. It was second after agonizing split second, minute after minute, and hour after hour, converging over them. Circe vaguely wondered how much more expansion she could reasonably handle before cracking like an egg. There was a terrible odor that penetrated their senses.

Xilunexus shattered and burned all at once, and she had to close her eyes. Opening them again revealed all that was left of her was a pile of ash. The charred and broken remains laid at their feet as a deadly silence settled restlessly around them.

A sick feeling of wrongness with a hint of rage filled up in her throat. On the outside, Circe looked blank. Xilunexus was gone. Circe couldn’t believe it. It was much too sudden.
She turned. Jace and Kai and Ezra were standing in the same spot, faces white. They were also trying to figure out what was happening. But Kathryne was nowhere to be found. She scanned the surroundings again, and again. Nothing. She had vanished.

Fuck! It was stuck in her throat. If she opened her mouth, she’d vomit, and it would be trapped in the helmet with her. She managed to hold her breath and swallow down the sticky, acidic bile. It tasted like chocolate berries.

This is exactly what needed to happen. She wondered if anyone could sense how thoroughly pissed off she was now. They didn’t know what she was capable of yet, not even herself.

Clink!

Came the sound of metal against metal as Ezrael tapped the tip of his lance gently against the floating metallic cylinder. He had seen- He lifted his head, focusing on it and not the scene beyond. It was small, shiny. Not like Xilunexus, as she was carved into like she was soft clay. Ezra reached for the small metal object, lifting his lower set of eyes from the ground. He grabbed it, felt it between his fingers. The silence was settling over them, nesting like a deadly bird that could fly away any moment. Something had just happened. It was terrible and horrifying. Ezrael wouldn't let himself get into the gist of it. If he did, he wouldn't move again. He had come here expecting a battlefield, several. It was where conflict took place.

You must reach him. Alaxel? Had to be.
But this entire planet was IT. The danger was so vast, so titanic in size he hadn't initially considered it. That they wouldn't see their enemies coming, how they folded in and out of time and space. He hadn't seen anything similar in his entire life. There was no memory to go to. No rulebook. No references.
Show him. Show him what? The way home?
No. Later.

His steps broke the silence, as quiet as he tried to be. His hand, once the cylinder was put away, hovered near Circe's shoulder. She was the closest. It finally came to rest on it. What should he even say? Are you okay? No, none of them were.

"We have to move," It came regurgitated from the depths of his instinct and conscience. A strange voice that didn't feel like himself but still was. But he didn't know where to go from here.
"It will keep us alive, we have to move." Again, persistent because he was also convincing himself. He could dwell on the moment his eyes had met Xilunexus' later. On the absence of Kathryne later. Later.

A few paces away from them, Jace had jogged over to where Kai’s drone remained stationary and unresponsive to slap his hand against the metal a couple of times. “Hey, time to move,” he hissed.

The response was immediate - the external stimuli from one of the group triggering the end of Kai’s algorithmic distraction - and the drone’s visual display blinked back to attention with his masked visage appearing back on it.

“Well, shit,” he stated immediately, as he retroactively processed what his sensors had observed of Xilunexus’ demise. “That didn’t take long.” Wry as the observation might have been, his voice betrayed that he was shaken by their guide’s abrupt eradication.
“We can talk about it later,” Jace interjected. “Ezra’s right. We need to move. She sent us a route, let’s take it.”

***
Something touched her shoulder. Circe jumped, but realized it was only Ezra. We have to move, he said. He was right. They had to get the hell out of dodge. That was when she noticed the data cache. Opening it revealed the satellite images that would take them to the base of a mountain within the canyon up ahead.

Circe didn’t have to think about what to do next. The tingling in her frontal lobe intensified into an electrifying buzz; beneath the helmet, her horns gleamed. On the metal surface, they only seemed to pulsate. Circe did not mute herself this time. The only thing they would understand was that each word sounded swift, and percussive… underlined by rage. Ruled by emotion, her power surged, and the air twisted and turned before them. The fabric of space unfolded, and beyond the opening was not the endless valley, but a dark path in a deep gorge.

“Go,” Circe commanded the group, before she lost her grip. There was no time to lose.
“Neat trick,” Kai remarked, directing his drone forward and slipping through the portal. Jace followed close behind him, scanning their new surroundings cautiously.

Only when the others were on the other side did she step through and closed the portal behind. Circe couldn’t believe it was so easy, having spent her entire childhood wondering why she couldn’t do it, but with one horribly traumatic push, she made it happen. All at once, a loud metal chime filled her ears. Knees wobbling, her vision went black.

On the other side of the portal Ezra caught her, just barely, before she could hit the ground. He hoped to prevent more damages after her massive display of power had saved them some distance. The cerv muttered a quiet thank you, and for whatever it was worth, a short prayer. His lance was put in a sort of sheath on the side of his armor, and he stood with Circe in his arms.

The storm halted along with the change in terrain, having left the rainclouds far behind. The heart of the mountain was art carved in rich granite, majestic and solemn. The massive, eternal walls cast deep, dark shadows over them. They couldn’t see anything with their own eyes, and had to rely on technology. They journeyed over what must have been an ancient river that dried out what must have been eons ago. Red grass grew on the soft, porous rock along the edges of the path.

Jace paced forwards across the barren terrain, trying to get his bearings relative to their previous location and their directions. It looked like Circe had jumped them almost halfway, going by the readouts from his hololink. “Coast seems clear as far as I can tell. Kai?”

“Not picking up anything yet.” Kai confirmed. “I’ll get us some eyes in the sky.”

From the drone’s surface, a quartet of bubbles of metal ballooned outwards, quickly shaping into the forms of four smaller drones about the size of a cat. They quickly took off and began circling overhead, feeding data back to him.
“Looks like we have a little space to breathe, at least.”

“Thank fuck for that.” Jace sighed. “Seems like we’re on our own from here. Did anyone see what the hell happened to Katheryne?”
In response, the monstrous cervitaur shook his head.

"Thank you for checking. About Kathryne… I know I was looking, but I can't think about it now. I will try to remember later, when we're all somewhere safe." He said, scratching at the ground with his hooves.

"You know where to go, I will follow you. If you want to go faster, I'd rather run or trot rather than walk." He took a deep breath, focusing on the little steps. The almost mechanical process of what came next, just so what had just happened didn't slip past his concentration. His upper set of eyes closed. It helped a bit. He focused on the sounds and smells around them instead.

“You say that like we can guarantee anywhere here is going to be safe,” Jace murmured. “Let’s pace ourselves. We’ve got a long way to go, and could run into trouble at any point.”
“Anyone else feel like this mine is gonna be like that one level in a video game where things are extra spooky for a hot minute?” Kai mused as they started walking. “I just can’t imagine any game involving going down into a mine as being anything but a horror game.”
He paused.

“Okay, I think historically there might have been at least one notable exception, but I don’t think this is it.”

Far down the crevices, a strange reptile scurried away at the sound of their footsteps–a tiny vein of life still pulsing in the cold silence. A great spire arose up ahead, red and tall, like an angry finger accusing the careless sky. A creature shrieked and it echoed in the night.

Ezra pinned his ears down against his skull. Because there had to be somewhere safe! Some little corner they could hide in and stand watch, or defend. So he just walked, tense and jumpy.

"I'm sorry, I don't know what a videogame is," Ezra said to Kai. Still, he did have a feeling the spooky and horror ideas he had were quite right.

“Right. Fantasy deer man. Probably don’t have those where you’re from,” the drone answered. “Imagine like … wow, no, I’m struggling for a comparison here. Okay, imagine like… a theatre show, except it’s all for you, and you tell the main actor what to do. But it’s also a game, and you have to get the actor to do certain things to win, and… this metaphor is falling apart. I have a better idea.”

A few seconds later, another ripple of the strange metal protruded from the side of Kai’s drone, forming some kind of handheld device. “Here! Try it. I loaded it with a classic.”

“Should we really be distracting ourselves with games right now, Kai?” Jace interrupted, snatching the device out of the drone before Ezra could take it. “Save it for later.”

Kai’s avatar on the drone’s screen frowned and folded his arms, but after a pause he nodded. “Okay, fair point. I’ll concede it.”
"Not a man, I'm a monster. And I'd love to take a look at your videogames another time. But err… thank you. I'll stay around us, won't go far but I-I need to stretch my legs a bit" With that, he lightly patted the outside of Kai's suit with a smile. Then he took a leap several meters ahead and landed surprisingly softly, Circe held tightly in his arms. It didn't stop there.

What Kai had described sounded like a first person vision. Perhaps a collective one?. He wasn't sure, he'd like to know more. But the image of multiple figures, deadly, threatened to come into his mind. And then she disappeared. Now, she was gone. So he leapt repeatedly, like deer usually did, opening his upper eyes to always keep the boys in his range of vision as he moved around them.
While Ezra leaped ahead, the two boys exchanged a glance.

“Is he… prancing?” Kai voiced after a pregnant silence, keeping his volume low.
“... yeah. Yeah I think he’s prancing.” Jace answered, chewing his lip and sighing. “Here’s hoping there’s nothing that’s going to react to sudden movements out here…”

“Just like, as a check-in… Are we sure the deer part of his head isn’t actually the part that’s in charge? Cause like, I’ve been trying not to make eye contact with it cause it gives me the creeps, but those beady eyes are threatening.” Kai murmured.

“I wish I could say I was sure, but I’ve long-since learned not to think I know how anything in this weird place works,” Jace shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t cause us problems, I don’t care. Let’s just keep moving.”

****

“Ezra,” Circe groaned, “Please… stop.”
It felt worse than a rollercoaster ride. Circe was quickly growing dizzy from the up and down movement as Ezra dropped and rose quickly again. Her head felt like someone had her head in a vice grip and was savagely giving it a shake. Before he could completely come to a stop, Circe rolled over in his arms, desperate to get away. With a click of a button, the visor of her helmet flipped open, and the fruity snack from fifteen minutes ago was spewed out as she retched into a red brush. She leaned over far enough, careful not to get it on her suit.

“SIA,” she hissed through clenched teeth, clutching her head with one hand and her stomach with the other, “I need a shot.” Her voice sounded slurred and strained. With the stiffness, the pain, the malaise, the exhaustion, and the lights floating in her eyes, Circe was facing the miserable consequences of overexerting herself much too soon. SIA immediately began scanning and fussing, and shot her with an anti-inflammatory painkiller to ease the symptoms. She let out a slow sigh of relief. It was then that she realized she was sitting in pitch blackness. Lowering her visor revealed the canyon, and she took in her companions for the first time since passing out.
“Apologies,” she said, “I didn’t think that would take so much out of me.”
Said cervitaur kneeled down to her level and put a hand on her back for support. He gave gentle strokes, trying to help sooth her..
"I'm so, so sorry you woke up to this, I didn't think you'd be up so soon!" He fussed, ashamed he had been so focused in his run that he hadn't noticed her struggle until she had basically escaped his grasp. He must be more aware of his companions from now on, this really shouldn't have happened.
“It’s alright, Ezra,” she smiled wryly, secretly overwhelmed by the fussing, “you didn’t know.”
"I can still carry you if you're unwell, Circe, but no more prancing. I promise." He offered, mentally scolding himself for being so careless. In his attempts not to think about what had just happened, he was putting the rest of them in danger. Acting like the dumb beast he was perpetually trying to demonstrate he wasn't. At least the vomiting was common in other species who suffered more than cervs did from motion sickness. Ezra himself hated it with a passion, and it was usually a sign he had eaten something dangerous enough his two stomachs couldn't handle it. Circe leaned against a boulder for support.
“We should stop here to gather our thoughts. We need to prepare for what might be waiting for us up ahead,” Circe suggested, “We can’t face another challenge like that again blind.”

She tried to sound confident in her conviction, praying none of them would suggest they keep going. Any motion, even on the back of the cervitaur, was extremely unappealing. But the reality was that they all needed time to recover. The cave and whatever was waiting for them there could wait.

Circe looked at the time, unable to believe it had only been an hour since they had left the nexus. She had been unconscious for nearly fifty minutes, which meant the others had been walking in the canyon alone for that long. It was a wonder they hadn’t come across any dangers.

Circe felt the chill of eyes on the back of her head, but it wasn’t strong enough to strain her nerves like the presence of the ghosts had. Checking her scanner revealed nothing. Of course it wouldn’t.

“We’re being watched,” Circe pinched the bridge of her nose, “I believe it’s some kind of spirit, but it seems to be much weaker than the ghosts. I don’t think it means any harm.”
Unfortunately, they don’t show up on their radars, but luckily she could sense when they’re near. If only she had taken Xilunexus’ words closer to heart.

“We can’t let what happened back there happen again. If we want to get out of this alive, we need a plan.”

“If you have any ideas for taking on an enemy that we can’t look at, think about or even acknowledge without making the situation worse, I’m all ears,” Jace murmured. “Near as I can tell our best bet is to try and get to Alaxel as quickly as we can and hope he has an idea of how we get back.”

Circe pushed herself up and away from the rock, shoulder’s square, jaw tense. Circe’s temple pulsed painfully at the movement; she held out her arms for balance, and breathed. Her arms lowered to her sides.

“There’s one thing I can work on a solution for at least.” Kai volunteered. “The time anomaly we went through back there, it didn’t affect the AIs. Only half-affected me, since I’m digital right now. I can spin up some protocols that would allow SIA to help me pilot this thing if that happens again, so we’re not totally sitting ducks,” he explained. “If nothing else this baby’s more than capable of grabbing all of you and getting the fuck out of there until time calms down again.”

“That is well and good, and does solve our time problem, but not our ghost problem,” Circe pointed out seriously. They could see the glow of her eyes brighten behind the visor. “These things move faster than we can blink. We don’t know if they can fly or not. It they get two more of us before we can see….”
Circe scanned through plans in her systems. They didn’t even know if their weapons would work against them.

Standing back up, Ezra paced around them.
"That solution sounds good to me, Kai, good thinking… and I must insist. If we're being watched, why wouldn't we want to arrive at a safer spot as soon as possible?" He tried, his ears pinned back. Out here they would have to resort to luck, and faith the enemy wouldn't decide to show up for as long as they remained. They definitely weren't ready for another encounter. But giving the ghosts time to find them again… no. Just no!.

"They could catch up and find us. We're not that far.” He tried, again.

Circe couldn’t let them run along to their deaths. They hadn’t even seen what they were dealing with. They didn’t have a clue.
Circe’s voice was dark and low. “Are you trying to warm up your aim, or are you just stupid? Did you even have a chance to react back there? Who’s to say we’ll make it to Alaxel on time? Who’s to say we won’t die a horrible, painful death before we even get the chance?”

“We have no fucking what we’re dealing with, kid. We only get one shot at this, one, and if we don’t work out our play, we’re dead. No do-overs. That’s Game Over, if it wasn’t clear enough.”

Jace swivelled to face Circe with an expression somewhere between confusion and incredulity. “Sorry, at what point did I, or any of us, suggest we don’t work together?” he gave her an unimpressed stare. “I invited you to offer up a plan, but if you’re looking to start shit, save it. I couldn’t care less. If you want to start making useful suggestions, instead of pointing out the fucking obvious and insulting me, then– like I said, I’m all ears.”

“Just gonna go ahead and claim brownie points for being the only one to actually offer anything concretely useful so far,” Kai piped up, the masked avatar on his display screen shifting to sit back in an invisible chair and conjure up a mug of tea to ‘sip’ at through the mask. “And y’know, small word of advice, your Captainness,” he gestured with the mug in Circe’s direction. “If you’re looking to encourage teamwork, you might not wanna open with ‘are you stupid’? If I had to rate that on a scale of one to ten for ‘words of inspiration’, it’d be a solid negative four. Really not feeling the team spirit right there.”

Circe ignored the kid. If they wanted to put their focus on being offended rather than the picture at large, she vaguely understood why that would be. The worst thing she could do was spit back at them for having thin skin. In their eyes, she was the offender being bothered by their feelings.

“It’s going to take us hours to get to our destination,” she said, simply. “Stopping for five minutes won’t kill any of you. But if you’re in such a hurry to die, then be my guest.” Circe gestured for him to move forward into the canyon, then went back to looking at the file, grimacing slightly as her head pulsed, again.

“I’m more than happy to take a minute to take stock of the situation,” Jace replied flatly. “I didn’t say otherwise, just expressed my limited understanding of the situation - that the more time we’re out in the open, the more likely we are to get ambushed again. If you disagree, that’s fine, I’ll listen to what you have to say. But I take issue with being talked down to. We’re equals here, so act like it.”

Unwilling to let the in-fighting get any worse, Ezrael stopped moving around the group to stand in the middle. Because if anything, this here could be their undoing. Back there with the ghosts he had nothing to offer, and his latest questions had even gone ignored. But now he would try to stop this from getting any further. So he started speaking before anyone else could, with his arms extended, his hands to the height of half his torso. Pleading for the rest to calm down, or be quiet.

"Please, the next time ANY of you speaks. Let it be after thinking for ten seconds whether it will actually be helpful." He said, and took a deep breath, looking around at his teammates.

"I understand we're all scared. I'm struggling not to think back to what I saw during the… encounter, because part of me was looking. But now is not the time. We have one plan in case of an encounter, so far. It's Kai's, and I'd rather try that than stand around and die.

We're here because despite the odds, we're a mix of good heads and incredible power. We can do this, so far we are all alive. Even if we got away at a great cost. So if you want teamwork like you claim, Captain Nightlocke." Now he directly addressed her. Because at the end of the day she was the one resisting, and Ezra definitely didn't want to try to drag her anywhere against her will.

"Please, no more insults. Give us at least a piece of the plan, or an idea, of that one shot to attempt as a team. Then we can put to a vote if we stop or continue, or talk about it if we don't want a democracy. But no more fighting, that is poison and if we let it infect us and fester it WILL be the end of us." He finished, praying his words had the intended effect.

“Of course, you’re right, Ezra,” Circe closed her eyes and sighed. She faced Jace, reluctantly swallowing her pride. “My apologies.”

There was no point in asking them to stop if she couldn’t back up her stance with a plan. Her feelings were inconvenient. Feelings required patience. They required listening and learning. They didn’t have time for that. Nice speech, Commander, Circe thought as she finished gathering the files she had been going over.

The ghosts they had faced were fast, hard to detect, affected their sanity, could easily interact with the physical world, and were highly aggressive, and deadly. It was like a hybrid creature unlike any she had faced before, even in her life as a Seeker. And Kathryn’s was gone. Circe tried Horizon’s comms, again. They might have had their differences, but she had been the closest person Circe had to a friend outside of her own crew. It had shaken her more than she realized.

“I’m sending each of you a file from my notes as a Seeker. It contains a list of ghosts, spirits, and demons, along with their strengths and weaknesses, and a variety of spells. Many of them can be replicated with tech, so Kai, see if you can adapt any of them with your power.”
Circe went on to explain how her resonance beam was an example of a modern adaptation to one of the spells, which required bells, or sound. Circe realized the reason the resonance beam failed was because it was the wrong tune. With Kai’s help, they might be able to adjust it accordingly.

If those things came out of nowhere, again… they had to have something.

“Roger roger, Captain,” Kai replied, already scanning through the file. “We can find out if that old saying about sufficiently advanced technology and magic is bullshit or not. I’ll see if any of the data this puppy was able to record during the attack can help you calibrate. I’ll ping the readings over to SIA and we can do a bit of back and forth, maybe run some simulations in the background. This baby has some sick processing power for me to work with.”

“Is walking while we work a suitable compromise?” Jace directed to Circe. “I’m uneasy losing time waiting around, but I’m no more eager than you to hit more danger before we have a better idea of how to deal with it.”

“If you still need to catch your breath, I can probably offer a smoother ride than our deertaur friend,” Kai offered, morphing a portion of the drone’s chassis to form a small seat to its side. “No offense, buddy,” he added with a grin to Ezra. “But I bounce less.”

“Neat trick,” Circe smiled gratefully. “I’ll take it. Thanks, kid.”

Now more relaxed and in a better mood, since the argument had died out before it became dangerous, Ezra laughed.

"No offense taken, my boy, and the word you're looking for is Cervitaur." He said, now moving away from the middle of the group to check on Circe. He was glad for her quick reasoning, and had given her a little nod of approval earlier. Just in case she was still having any trouble, he'd check she was physically alright by doing what he could. A look over, and some sniffing.

“I’m alright, Ezra,” Circe gave Ezra a gentle pat before stepping into the drone. “It's only a migraine.”
The cerv nodded, and returned the pat, satisfied with her answer.


@Dashmiel

 

[Dashmiel]

He stood and beheld. A stillness amidst a universe composed of endless motion, where nary a particle ever ceased moving. Except that is, when they ceased. He saw the threads underpinning the concept. Couldn’t parse it.

Did she die? Are we going to die?

He saw them as they marched on. Fleshy bags of mostly water at one scale, infinitely intricate clouds of arranged matter at another. Flashing lights, 0.05 Hz frequency here. 200 Hz there, and there, and there. A gradient changes. Resistance shifts, gates open and close…Result: A blink. A step. Leg moves. Tail swooshes.

A thought is formed.

Too much. He stood right in their midst, hidden between the moments that obscured the eons of time it took for the interpretation of their sight. They couldn’t see him because they couldn’t see at all. He had eternity to dance and sway between their eyes moving, and the mess of processes that followed before they perceived. The Cold Ones were slightly trickier, but only because it meant swaying to different tempos in concert. What did fast matter in the face of out of time? That was the error in the cousins. They sought to impose their reality here with them. Oil and water. The Cold Ones could see through that, as could the Warriors. His way was better, but well, no one was listening.

So fascinating but frustrating. He hadn’t been prepared for them, or for the Cold Ones that they traveled with and inside and…outside of them? Frustrating. He stood amongst them with his previous guise, held mostly as an uncomfortable afterthought. He really wished he’d gotten a chance to talk to her. Now, trying to make sense of these…no too many threads. He didn’t know how to make sense of all the noise they expelled. The kind of ‘they’ was altogether immaterial at this point.

Everything was the same series of flashes, and it wasn’t enough to see them at work. He had to be like them. He wanted to be like them. But he mustn't be seen. Not Yet.

GLINT

The weary group found themselves marching through four more miles of quietly whistling wind scraping rock sparsely shrouded in red grass before anything of note broke the scenery. They came upon the mine entrance almost without preamble, and several miles ahead of schedule.

One moment, they walked on with the majestic and deadly mountain dead ahead as the ground began to dip slightly. As expected and evidenced in the maps of course. Just the gentlest of inclines this far out, half a millimeter of declination a step.

There wasn’t even anything they would recognize as a “door frame” in display of their senses, and Freyn’ja certainly did not consider programming any sort of cultural guide-slash-encyclopedia into their considerably over-tuned automated sensor packages. Not when Alaxel would be right there to explain, duh.

Had she the foresight to include such a thing however, odds were slim they would include a chapter on Va’nyrian aesthetic in regards to wormholes as doors and their appropriate placing for maximum impact to tie a room together, or when to detect when one of them was ahead. They were doors. Everybody knew how they worked, so of course non-standard examples were self-evident.

So it was that even the sharpest eyed amongst them would only have a fraction of a second advance warning. The time it took for locomotion to bring the nearest capable sensor in line with the single-atom thick threshold between their previous step, and the wormhole terminus subtly hidden ahead of them from which readings of the flux involved in ripping a hole through space-time were actually measurable. There simply wasn’t any space between the ‘here’ they occupied and the ‘there’ on the other side to allow for early detection.

While the group lacked the technical knowledge to truly grasp the nature of the ‘door’ before them to fully appreciate the feat involved in hiding such a thing so neatly, the placement on it’s own was enough to make the clandestine nature of its existence plainly obvious.

It was ‘draped’ strangely, not as expected of a permanent fixture for comfortable use. Instead of a welcoming portal to walk head on through, the wormhole flexed through reality in a mockery of geometry.

It’s lip began a scant three feet over the ground but rather than upwards, it curved downwards sharply while simultaneously twisting to the ‘right’, only that ‘right’ belonged to a completely different frame of reference.

The result was such that straight ahead they saw the same old canyon path, and straight down they saw the same old ground. Down and turning their heads just so to the side however, and rather than ground was a vista of their destination. Perfectly poised to accept their jumping in down while shimming sideways not with falling as their brain insisted, but with level ground. Perpendicular to the perfectly level ground their brains insisted they stood on.

Across the mysteriously inert, camouflaged mad opening through the fabric of the cosmos before and beneath and to the right of them laid the entrance to the Jintra’nir Crystal Mine.

The base of the mountain loomed behind an understated and squat building the size of a small warehouse. Despite the materials in its construction, it would have felt right at home in the industrial district hidden behind the glamor of a thousand worlds. It was the kind of place that existed to simply state ‘utility’. Between the building where whatever manner of passage into chthonic realms awaited, and the ‘exit’ point of the wormhole lay an expansive kill-zone 800 yards across.

A series of once tall and presumably square towers evenly spaced every 10 yards indicated where turret emplacements once likely stood. They could only speculate as to their true shape, as nothing taller than roughly four feet tall remained. The rest and most of the ground before them was covered in a layer of crystalized and molten slag.

Even without their advanced capabilities for material analysis it was clear that the level of energy needed to melt that much metal over the area should have also reduced the building to a greasy ashen spot on the ground, to say nothing of the red grass lazily swaying between puddles of hardened synth-whatever glorious alloy. Scant millimeters away from metal whose core deep down still registered as hot enough to cook a decent steak on.

Through the opening awaited their destination. Nothing appeared to stir in the burnt battlefield that awaited them through the strange passage down and forward.

 

[Hollow glade]

Since Circe was fine, and they had plans to figure out, Ezra let himself retreat into his mind for a bit and remained quiet. He handed most of his awareness to his animalistic side, and revisited Xilunexus' death. It was like chiselled into his brain, the image of the deep gashes as if she was made of clay. Then Kathryne's sudden disappearance. Their enemies piling around her, and then she was gone. So was their guide, no body to bury or pay respects to. Even in war they used to have the remains of their fallen to date their spiritual need for closure. Ezra had closed the eyes of his loved ones when they had fallen. Lauren's, Keith's, Senda's... And Ezrael's.

It was a quiet walk for him, in general. Staying alert and twitchy, since through his upper set of eyes he got to see some disturbing images. That wicked figure that interacted with Xilunexus' was truly burned into his memory. Horrifying as it was. It terrified at least this monster.

Between the depth of his thoughts, what he considered his overactive imagination and the mountain scenery, Ezrael didn't notice the portal at all. His tail did stand on end, and his ears turned forward as he sniffed at the air. But it was from the sight. He faced forward, and so there wasn't much of the reality bending geometry he could see. Mostly since the deer eyes paying the most attention didn't have a lot of knack for details. They were better suited for movements, light and value changes among other things. Good for fighting.

 

[Script]

"Hold up!"

Kai's digitised voice cut through the silence, and the marching drone came to an abrupt halt. Beside it, Jace froze and tensed, scanning their surroundings for a threat.

"There's ... something. A hole? No, a rift. Portal. Whatever you wanna call it." The machine's sensors were confused by the bizarre geometry and the overlapping space, but the Va'nyr tech was smart enough to make some kind of sense of it. "Right there, just a few paces ahead."

Jace followed where one of the drone's spidery arms pointed, but frowned. There was nothing but the path ahead. "I don't see anything."

"It's doing a weird angle thing. Try turning your head, like you're trying to see something catch the light." Kai explained. "Just off the ground, to the... sort-of-right."

Skeptically, Jace did as bidden, twisting and angling his gaze until - just as he was about to decide Kai was getting mixed up - he saw it. It hurt his brain to look at it, like he was seeing two places in the same space at once. "Fuck me," he muttered. "Is that the mine?"

"Looks like it," Kai confirmed. "Convenient, huh?"

"Suspiciously so." Jace narrowed his eyes. After a moment's pause, he picked up a pebble from the ground and gave it an underhand toss through the doorway in space. It arced through, its flight-path veering bizarrely as the gravity shifted when it passed between places, but otherwise nothing untoward happened. It landed on the far side intact.

"I'll send some eyes through." Kai directed one of the drones circling overhead to soar down, joining them, before it carefully hovered its way through the portal. Like the rock before it, its passage was unimpeded. "Something went down here," he murmured. "There are turret towers that've been slagged. Weird that there wasn't more collateral, though."

The drone drifted further forward, continuing to scan the area. "Looks like there's something else in the wreckage. Combat bots of some sort. They look half-slagged, but not totally. Could still have some juice, but I can't tell without poking at them, and I'm explicitly not supposed to touch anything here that might be connected to evil-Xil."

He returned his focus to his immediate surroundings, and his avatar turned to regard the others on his visual display. "So. We going through the convenient shortcut?"

 

[N0X]

The worst part of their expedition was how little they knew. If she had known they would be so little prepared, she might have passed on the opportunity. Being that the mission came from the All-Mother herself made it seem worth it, somehow. Or was that what she was leaning on to make herself feel better? There was plenty of time to mediate on the crystal she was given, wondering and waiting for an answer that would likely never come.

The thing that was watching them felt close. As if she held out her hand she could touch it. It moved among them as a curious observer, unlike the apparition they faced before, if they could even call it that. Circe had been faced with the overwhelming urge to communicate with them, although they had been warned against it. Now that she knew why, the defeat opened the door to a dozen other feelings that were slowly being replaced by one thing, and one thing only; the desire to survive.

They reached the destination outlined for them on the GPS. Circe perked up when Kai found the portal. He sent drones. They did not set off any unexpected traps. That did not mean they were away from danger. Kai reported the bots. Circe couldn’t help but think of the killer droids that animated only when they detected signs of life in one of the jobs the crew from Cloud 9 had taken on. Would these bots be like those killer droids, or worse?

“Let’s take it slow. There could be traps.”

 

[Hollow glade]

Slagged didn't sound like good news. Slagged turrets? What or whom was responsible for it?.

The Cervitaur's stop had been as sudden as the rest of the teams'. Kai's voice forcibly yanking him from his troubled thoughts as he pondered the deaths of those he loved. In comparison, the newest... Deaths? If they could be called that without a body, felt like nothing.

He struggled to see the portal. Only doing so after a few tries following what Kai had said. It was strange and greatly unsettled him. He found himself nervously scratching at the ground with his hooves and scratching his ankles. He pinned his ears back. Slag meant fire, heat, possibly more elements of a similar nature. He doubted it would be magical fire, cold or healing. It'd be the ashen demonic form of it, born of sacred anger. Blue fire was life and love. Purple and pink were festive and magical. Orange and red were ravenous war instruments that destroyed and consumed it all. It wasn't like he never encountered fire in general. He did. But he still tried his best to avoid it. And it often triggered episodes of panic.

The smell of burning flesh is an illusion, there are no screams of anguish and pain. He thought to himself as he brought his hands to his hips, where he scratched at his own body. He mentally argued?, Something like that, with his armour until he could touch his skin and his fur. It was grounding, it helped. It was all memories, in the past, and it couldn't harm him now. For all he knew there was no fire...

"What else do you see? I don't know that we should go in... This seems awfully convenient. In my experience, it's bad news. But I will follow you through if you think it the best course of action." He said, but he wasn't being specific enough with his questions.

"Is there hungry fire down there? Death fire." He asked, because it was what he'd always called it. Human fire, too. But they were human and may not take it well. Plus, so far they were all good kids. Even with their terrifying capabilities, often confusing.

 

[Script]

"No active fires, but something melted all that shit," Kai replied. "More likely some kind of energy weapon than fire, I'd guess. Fire doesn't usually get that hot."

Jace was still eyeing the portal, chewing his lip. "If it was an intentional trap, you'd think they'd have made it more obvious," he murmured. "We could easily have never noticed and walked right past this. Using this kind of trap doesn't really line up with the little we know about the 'ghosts', either." He shook his head. "This looks more like something someone made on the fly."

"Alaxel." Kai cut in. "Should've figured it earlier. Energy weapon? Nah, more like plasma blasts from an alien super-soldier. Didn't know he could make portals, but if Va'nyr tech can do it, it's a safe assumption he has what he needs for it."

"Breach and clear," Jace murmured. "Those turrets probably had a huge firing range. Better to get in under their noses with a portal than come at them across the killzone. So it's not a trap. Doesn't mean there's not danger, but it means the portal's not it."

"Probably." Kai added helpfully.

"Probably." Jace agreed with a sigh. "I'll take those odds, though. Let's do it."

Sealing his suit up again, he stepped forwards and - with the practiced ease of someone who was well used to messing with gravity - half-stepped, half-fell forwards into the portal, with Kai close behind him.

 

[N0X]

By @Machina Somnium @Script & @N0X

At the mention of plasma blasts, another certain cyborg came to mind.

“Of course it is,” Circe realized. Why didn’t she think of it before? The thought of the blue fire burning and heating up in the cyborg’s arm before opening and unleashing a terrifying plasma blast thought the 28-ton vault door, melting it like butter. Blue certainly made herself useful when it came down to stealing the most precious of artifacts from undeserving hands.

“But the real question is why, isn’t it?” Circe added after Jace. They would merely have to find out.

A miasma of fear rose from Ezra and drowned them like a wave, and they hadn’t entered the portal yet. She couldn’t blame him. They were like prisoners having an exact moment of desperation, hoping against all odds to be swept away from the throngs. Circe sympathized, but there was no turning back.
A miasma of fear rose from Ezra and drowned them like a wave, and they hadn’t entered the portal yet. She couldn’t blame him. They were like prisoners having an exact moment of desperation, hoping against all odds to be swept away from the throngs. Circe sympathized.

“Kai,” Circe’s voice came softly, “can you let me out?”

“You got it, cap," Kai responded as Jace was moving forward toward the portal. The covered pod on the side of the drone popped open, leaving her free to step out.

Circe stepped out with a certainty in her step she lacked before. She lifted her eyes, beheld Ezra’s tall, strong form, and in an instant, she was smiling proudly up at him.

“Come on, big fella. What do you say we have a little competition? Whoever takes out more of whatever those things are, wins. You're a strong, and you’re likely to beat me. But do try not to underestimate me. Simple, no? What do you say?"

gave her an odd look, about to argue this wasn't the time for games. But... Why couldn't it be? As long as they kept a cool head. He could handle the heat if there wasn't fire.

"As long as we keep our minds clear, and have each other's backs as well. I accept your challenge" He said, poking Circe on the forehead with his thumb and index fingers.

“For good luck?”

"For an honourable and fair competition. Now you do the same." He answered, leaning down a bit. Circe copied his gesture with her thumb and finger and placed it on his forehead. The contact sent a cold chill through her and down her spine. Her heart felt cold. Circe lowered her hand, keeping her smile frozen as to not give her true feelings away. Holding her gun close, she turned away, and followed Jace into the portal.

“May the best monster win.”

He grinned in response and nodded sharply, determined to get through this with another win under his metaphorical belt. And with a nod, he followed after the two kids.

 

[Dashmiel]

As written by @N0X, @Script, & @Dashmiel


The group of dogged mercenaries shimmied their way across space and time if not revitalized exactly, then perhaps a tad re-focused. It was clear in the way shaking meandering steps shifted into strides, firm and in perfect tempo. They commanded the ground they trod upon, bent to a purpose as they crossed the threshold into the great unknown.


He felt a bit sad, parting ways just as he thought he was starting to make some sense of them. They'd crossed oblivious to them of course, but he saw the weapons left behind on that door. Weapons meant for those like him. He still wasn't sure if he should be impressed or scared. With only the idea of what a sigh was, he turned away from his friends now and looked through time to the next time they'd meet. Knowing what a stride was now, he strode through the veil into a world awash in orange iridescence and burning screams.

⁜​

The band of warriors gracefully landed at the edge of the erstwhile battlefield. A torpid breeze filled the air with the acrid stench of burnt polymers and metal. The temperature of the air was a good 10°K warmer than where they'd come from, as the heat from the fires that still smoldered out of sight within the center of the turret pillars radiated out to join the still normalizing outpouring of energy that had occurred here.


Miniature rivers of metal greeted their eyes as the space between their entry and the mine entrance unfolded before them. Puddles frozen in time like ice sculptures here, cresting waves of metal a meter high there. The ground beneath them and the battlefield appeared partially melted itself; the rock ran like candle wax, exposing more melted metal buried beneath the ground.

Scattered amidst—that is to say, melted within— the debris were various artificial remains. A sensor pod here, a chassis there, and the barrel of a rapid-fire recoil-less rail gun over yonder.

Quiet. Silent. Serene.

Until Ezra’s step brought the group all together on the other side, bringing just enough life to maybe rekindle this party here. No sooner had the group arrived in full, that a flurry of modulation floated on the EM spectrum as some of the not so dead sensor heads on the ground began chattering. Half of them didn’t really get a chance to hear, but even if they could have, you wouldn’t need to speak robot to know what they were saying: “Foes, here. Come Assist.”

Only Kai and SEA possessed the necessary sensory apparatus to detect and operate upon the reality that they had just been spotted, and were in the process of being counted, sorted, and typecasted not as we speak or even thought, because there simply was not enough time for neither by meatbag standards, but right the hell now.

It took only an instant for Kai to process what was happening - to detect the signals and determine their intent. A split instant later he determined a response from amidst his new plaything’s capabilities. Interrupting the sudden broadcast from the sensors, his vessel began to project a disruptive jamming signal, cutting short their cry for reinforcements a bare moment after it had started - the question being whether it had been soon enough.

SEA exited through the other side of the portal only a split moment after Kai and reacted without a nanosecond’s hesitation. Upon detecting the hard drives of the machines, she imitated their programming to create a stealth cloak for the group before they could step through. The machines would believe they were the same as them. She only hoped it would be enough to fool them.

“Nice trick,” Kai remarked - or the closest equivalent to it that could be transmitted to the AI without actual words being employed.

Kai’s jamming cut the nascent call for help short, delaying the summoning of the big guns against them. It wasn’t fast enough however, to keep from rousing the rest of the locals. A grinding bass which shifted to a screeching whine resounded through the field as metal ground against metal. A few dozen meters away, a hatch opened through a mass of molten metal, forcing itself outwards in a cacophonous clatter.


The intended rapid deployment of the compartment housing the autonomous combat androids composing the original security force for the mine was only partially successful. Instead of a nifty three walled room materializing with a squadron neatly filed in rank, only a twisted opening into depths below could be seen.

SEA’s ‘malware cloak’ settled over the sum of the group’s data emissions, and as the androids came online they picked it up and happily passed along the faulty sensor data. ‘Four targets? Impossible. Data in contradiction with current assessments,’ was about what floated on the air at light speed, spread slightly delayed by Kai’s jamming as the androids resorted to tight-beam.


Ezra, Kai, and Circe were effectively part of the scenery, and would remain so until they took hostile action.

Instead, word passed along quickly in the robot world as the first android emerged. Out of the wound in the earth, poured out a sleek death machine.

It was most likely patterned after some local predator, much the same way Humans painted tiger stripes on their tanks. Some concepts, like the requirement for death implements to be cool might just be universal. It ‘stood’ two and a half meters tall, with the first meter being a sturdy set of eight legs supporting a vertically stretched obloid ‘torso bristling with apertures wherever appendages weren’t present.

Two sets of large and powerfully built arms were attached back-to-back on its side, so that one pair faced in whatever ‘front’ and ‘back’ were at the machine’s vector of movement. As wide as oak saplings, they ended in a mass of 12 digits that seemed both fairly dexterous and were absolutely covered with razor sharp bits n’ ends.

A smaller set of four arms were cradled within the two larger ones, nestled against the torso where they rested. The sensor package that served as the things ‘head’ was shaped like a pyramid, with double rows of six ‘eyes’ per face arranged in crescents to either side. They were honest to goodness bio-mechanical eyes, identical to those they’d seen in Freyn’ja and Diarneus.

In a ‘face’ (take your pick, four to choose from) lacking any other features capable of expression, the look of murderous hatred was surreal.

The exterior of the machine was a mottled pattern of bright cyan, earthy grey, and bone white, mimicking the coloration of the Greater Ghyni’Vulp, an apex predator native to the swamp-basin forests that last stood on the other side of the planet 10 billion years ago. Give or take a few million. No one would ever see one again, but here was their ferocity preserved through mimicry.

The artifice stood and scanned the battlefield, its gaze locked to Jace’s eyes as it communicated back down the hole through lasers. Three more androids swiftly emerged from the ground, and unfurled center arms ending in 12 twelve different little horizontal cylinders with either shadowy bores or protruding bits crackling with energy.

Arrival to emergence couldn’t have been more than 15 seconds, but these guys were always ready to party.

They fired as one at Jace in a hail of rail-gun rounds, charged particle beams, electricity, and what might have been Va’nyrian napalm. Moments before the fusillade, his brain was forcefully tickled from within as the advanced yet dumb sub-sentient entity in his suit tried to offer helpful suggestions in a foreign neural language architecture. “They can see us. They really don’t like us specifically, given all the target locks. Maybe we should move?,” it suggested via random probing of Jace’s brain.

 

[Script]

"Oh, fuck me in particular," Jace muttered as the androids eyes each locked onto him. He didn't have time to question the strange voice - if it could be called a voice - in his head. The suit's strange consciousness certainly had the right idea.

Thankfully, moving was his speciality.

He'd broken from the group before the first salvo fired, rapidly shifting the electromagnetic forces on his body to tug himself to the side with an abruptness that wouldn't have been possible with his body's locomotion alone. By the time the rain of death opened up on him, he was well clear of his companions - and a good thing, too, since invisible or not, their attackers' weapons came with a splash zone.

"I've got their attention!" Jace called through their comms. "Get yourselves into position while they're busy, I can play dodgeball with these fuckers all day."

Like a blur, he dashed across the battlefield, electrical currents coursing through his body to turn his reflexes up to far beyond what was humanly possible. Explosions, bullets and molten rain followed in his wake, but never quite found their mark, rendering the dirt and metal where he passed into craters.

Back with the others, Kai was quick to direct his drone forwards, putting himself ahead of Circe and Ezra. "Let's get you guys something to hide behind!" He called back to them, his on-screen avatar shooting them a thumbs up as the drone planted its forelegs in the dirt and a rush of amorphous metal flowed out of the walker's front, spreading out and down to form into a thick, plated barrier. The surface shimmered as he simultaneously directed the bulk of his shielding to the front, forming a solid wall of fuck you between them and the attack droids.

"I figure once we start shooting back, they're gonna pay us more attention," he added cheerfully, as a few narrow firing slits opened in the barrier to allow his companions to take cover and return fire. "I'm gonna call this 'walking bunker' mode. Give 'em hell!"

 

[N0X]

SEA alerted their comms before they made it all the way through the portal.

“Stealth cloak activated. Danger ahead.”

“What kind of danger?”

“The machine kind.”

“Ah, lovely—another mechanical horror beyond my comprehension. How many?”

“Unknown.”

“Ready or not…”

Jace shot forth faster than they could blink, and the enemy fired everything they had at him. Fortunately, their weapons couldn’t keep up with the buzzing blur, and Circe took the opportunity to asses the situation.

“My God. Any weaknesses?”

SEA sent potential weak points to the team.

“Leg joints and other random points from previous collateral damage. Got that Ezra?”

“Don’t die.”

“Thanks, doll.”

Kai provided them some much needed cover, and Circe crouched behind the wall, SMG cradled in her hands. Engaging from a fixed position rather than advancing to close distance while firing was the best course of action.

“Good call.”

Luckily, they literally had hours in the canyon for Circe to figure out what weapons Frey had given her or how they worked. It had an exceptional, new sleek design, and she didn’t have to handle it any differently.

Even if the Vanryans designed them for their use, it surprised her such advanced weaponry resembled anything they could recognize at all. They had more similarities than differences, even if they were beyond her comprehension.

Even so, It was hard not to feel like a dumb monkey next to them. There was nothing in the canyon to test the weapons on, so this would have to do.

“Come on, baby,” she whispered tenderly, “let’s see what you can do…. Here, kitty kitty.”

Circe lifted the barrel to point at the mechanical monstrosities. Exhaling a briefly held breath, she gently squeezed the trigger. Circe braced as her body jerked from the recoil, and focused her aim on the weak points of a single beast, the joints. The difference was noticeable. Circe was taken aback on how much it felt like an assault rifle, and smiled at how easy it was shredding from their long range.

“Oooh, I think I’m gonna like you, killer queen” Circe smiled.

 

[Hollow glade]

Robots were metal golems, animated with electricity. Ages of metal, civilizations tended to never survive them. Humanity didn't, but it wasn't quite their fault. Now Ezra stood, watching the technological, marvelous horrors concieved by godlike ancients. Godlike in comparison, at least to him.

He harnessed his magic, pulling it from his body to materialize his lance and activate the other. "Gherandre’meran, Amen’tur. It's your time to shine." He whispered in Tauren. A lot was happening at the same time. It was time for the deer to open its eyes and give him what advantage he could have from its sight and hearing. His other spear didn't need encouragement. It was his own, and they were one and the same.

"Understood" He told Circe, just before spreading his arms. So his weapons shot up and away from him, toward the bigger robotic monster. Viscious and beautiful, hateful too. How intelligent was it?, how much of, in Ezra's definition, a warrior?. Was annihilation the only path through this encounter?. The questions pooled in and he let them, ignoring them for now. His lances dashed through the air, the blades shifting into their best selves. It had eyes everywhere, so that would be a priority. One spear for a leg joint, one for a set of eyes, any.

Thank the fae that they had heach other's back. For Kai and Jace and Circe, now.

 

[Dashmiel]

The attacking androids were persistent in their attempts to get at Jace. A flurry of ultraviolet lasers flew back and forth between them as they coordinated various ineffective attack patterns meant to catch and overwhelm the charged speedster. Rather than dissuade them, the attackers continued trying to vary their patterns but only slightly, as if they were acting upon a pre-programmed response that they were being forced to adapt on the fly.


Their single-mindedness coupled with the blind-spot SEA had secured for the group ensured that the opening counter attack from Circe and Ezra caught their target entirely by surprise.


Circe's shots blasted into the weak points on one of the android's legs as it was moving into position to launch a railgun shot at Jace. The first two shots badly dinged the metal on the robot's legs. A quarter second after that, Frey's gift to Circe bloomed to life. A flash of telemetry data flowed into SEA as the non-sentient analytic neural net embedded into Circe's weapons adjusted the materialization profile for Killer Queen's active ammo 'load'. Energy expenditure rose 3%, and substrate depletion 8%; The material composition of the rounds being fired shifted to match the target they were striking. A tweak to the alloys on the rounds produced here and there, with ballistics that fit the best case scenario required, in real time.

Circe's third and fourth shots blasted through one of the Android's legs, with her fifth shot blasting a second leg entirely on its own. A message embedded in the startup sequence for the Ammo Materialization Profile System played out through Circe's private squad-link. "AMPS; A girl needs the freedom to pick just the right tool to hit the spot," purred Frey's recorded voice in Circe's ears.

The crippled android paused for a moment, stumbling slightly. A flurry of ultraviolet beams erupted from it towards its comrades and the hole back where they came from. The jig was up; everyone was spotted. Before it could return fire however, Ezra’s attack finished it off.

The mysterious cylinder had departed from Gherandre’meran-Amen’tur the moment Ezra had set the spear loose. It hovered gently and unobstructedly a few millimeters above the left side of Ezra's armored chest.

As Ezrael’s lance flew, his new Va’nyrian gift followed. Accompanying came a flash of energy jolting Ezra’s awareness as Diarneus’ gift flared to life. The glyphs upon Gherandre’meran-Amen’tur twisted of their own accord as the spear flew, reconfiguring it for maximum damage as it trailed after the lance like a baby duckling. As if in challenge to Ezra’s words, the curious material making up the edge shifted, changing shape.

The bottom edge ran up the haft, joining together on a single end where they coalesced into the brutally thick point of an inverted cone 1.5 meters in diameter. Phantom lines of power crackled beneath the smoky transparent metal as the weapon reached the zenith of its flight and hung there, subtly warping the air around it.

Ezrael’s own magical lance proceeded smoothly downwards, and cut through three of the android’s remaining six legs with little resistance, halting its locomotion entirely. The android turned one of its faces eyeing not the Cervitaur warrior, but back towards Jace and then to Gherandre’meran-Amen’tur hovering a scant 20 meters overhead.

A look of confusion briefly replaced the hatred in the construct's eyes. It didn’t last long. The air around Gherandre’meran-Amen’tur shimmered and steamed for an instant, before the spear descended with a tremendous force utterly out of place with its weight, speed, or distance traveled. A powerful boom resonated around the battlefield as the android’s head simply disintegrated alongside half of its torso.

The android slumped down, out of commission, and both weapons smoothly flew back to their master. The remaining androids briefly paused their chase of Jace, and turned to look back at the rest of the group. They stood in such a way as to keep one face aimed at both sides of the group, but it was clear in their posture they were reluctant to disengage from Jace. As if they expected the group to be the distraction and not the other way around.

Eight more androids crawled out of the ground like a clutch of baby spiders being birthed and swiftly split off towards objectives of their own. Of the eleven androids now on the field, Six of them still elected to go after Jace. Four of them split off into two groups and approached weapons blasting at the group’s fortified position from opposing sides.

The remaining android however, elected to move towards the edge of the field away from the battle, and quickly began to change. Its four central arms on both sides unfurled and linked with the two sets of main arms before running liquid in a matter not unlike Kai Bot’s morphing. As its torso solidified into a defensive screen of its own, it dug its leg down into the earth. It easily tore through the molten metal, and a bright spark like an arc burn flared as the previously molten metal around the android became red-hot once again. It began to be reabsorbed into use by the construct, swiftly growing its height as its sensor pod began to shift and elongate.

It was clear that before long, it would take the same shape of the theorized turret pillars that had once adorned the clearing. At that moment, the sound of grinding metal began to fill the space between weapons discharging as other subterranean caches of attackers began their attempt to break their way out of the earth like dragon’s teeth.

 

[Hollow glade]

It had been a while since the last time Ezra felt awe and respect like this. The beauty of destruction and the taste of bloodlust. It crawled up his throat like a sickness and sharpened his metaphorical teeth. Gherandre’meran, Amen’tur, a monstrous warrior worthy of the name. Deserving of the rank. After seeing what it, she, was capable of, Ezra knew he didn't need to stay behind cover. No, that he wouldn't. He licked his lips and stomped on the ground. A smile formed in his face, they could do this!.


The metal golem was dead, and the rest would soon follow.


"Let's cover the ground in their metal guts" Again, Tauren. But she understood his thoughts just fine. He talked in whispers to his weapons, both of which reacted to his magic like a wonder. One because it was bound to it. The other because it did, wanted to? Knew how to coordinate?. It didn't matter.


"I'm going out there!" He loudly announced to his comrades before exiting the safety of Kai's provided cover. When he did, it was with a roar, and an intimidating jump toward the enemy after which he moved around them instead.


Both of his weapons hovered by his sides and followed his movement with ease. This was better, familiar. Like back then, blowing up human factories and bringing down their war forged buildings. Back to back with siblings in arms. Now it was more lonely and desperate. But it would have to do.


He sent the lances straight at the two incoming androids he was closest to. And when they were about to hit their target straight forward, they imitated his earlier move. They each shot to one side avoiding the androids and then came back around. Gherandre’meran, Amen’tur's blades changed until they became a spiralled harpoon. When it attacked, it did so while rotating. Ezra made them impale the androids each from one side and go completely through them if possible. Leaving a hole in their heads or destroying them entirely. He wanted to see if his new soldier would take all orders or disagree again, and act more efficiently.


Ezra never stopped moving, running across the field and watching the scene unfurl. He saw Jace, still running and chased by more enemies than before. He saw Kai and Circe. He saw… the android that moved very far away.


"Kai, target that one that moved far away. I can't see what it's doing exactly but I DON'T LIKE IT." The kid might have seen it already, since his response time was infinitely shorter than Ezrael's. But he said so anyway. For now the cervitaur ran, and if his attack was successful he'd look for his next target once his faithful lances had returned to him.

 

[N0X]

Circe had been in a lot of fights, but never one quite like this. More of the machines kept coming out of nowhere, like a fountain that never ran dry. Where were they coming from, and when would it end?

The dance floor was becoming highly treacherous. Circe felt the change as it happened, and SEA showed her how the weapons were learning about the enemy and adjusting accordingly. The energy bullets tore through the machines so quickly she could hardly keep up with the numbers.

Frey’s sultry voice whispered in her ear, sending her chest rushing as her heart jumped. Finding herself in a predicament, and tried to imagine it was Blue. But she couldn’t stop the laughter from escaping her lips if she tried.

Ezra dove into the fray, his energy surging excitedly. Circe realized then they didn’t need Kai’s cover. They just needed to have each other’s back. The machines were aware of them yet they remained completely focused on Jace.

“Go, Kai,” she said. “Ezra’s right. They’re not coming at us. See what that thing is up to.”

Circe already moved forward, lighting up the machines, focusing on tearing one up before moving onto the next. Within seconds she was behind Ezra, lighting up anything that came up from behind him. Occasionally switching to her sidearm when they got too close. She flew over the bodies. It devolved into a mess of metal and energy. Over the chaos, Circe’s smile was bright. She was no longer stiff and angry. She looked like she was having fun. Together, they left behind a trail of devastation.

 

[Script]

"I'll do you one better, Ezzy," came Kai's reply, as cocksure and delighted as they'd ever heard him. Behind the wall of cover, Kai's drone had been busy adapting its shape, new extensions and barrels forming all over its body as a dizzying array of missile pods, railguns and cannons blossomed out of it like petals of mass destruction. Within a few short seconds, the previously sleek-bodied drone now more closely resembled a mobile weapons' platform than it did a vehicle.

"Some would call us outnumbered, but I prefer the term 'a target rich environment'," he quipped. "The sky's 'boutta rain fire boys and girls!"

The wall of cover dropped from in front of the main body of Kai's drone, allowing all the various weapons to achieve a clear line of fire. His systems locked onto the emerging drones one by one in an instant, calculating trajectories and aligning the weapons with pinpoint precision. Then, all at once, he lit the battlefield up.

Oversized railgun bullets boomed from the cannons with a cacophony of sonic booms, punching holes through a number of the approaching androids where they impacted precisely on weak points in their armor, tearing limbs from their bodies and obliterating vital systems. At the same time, a fireworks display's worth of missiles soared into the sky and descended down on some of the more out-of-the-way targets in a cascade of explosions that rocked the ground they stood on, reducing more of their attackers to slag.

One particular barrage of missile fire arced up and around, falling like rain down on the morphing droid as it transformed.

"THIS. IS. AWESOME." Kai cackled over their comms, undisguised glee dripping from his words at the sheer destructive power of his new toy. "I'm a fucking one man army!"

"Don't get too carried away," Jace replied with a huff of laughter despite himself. Not one to let himself be entirely outdone, and noting that the number of targets on the field had been abruptly reduced, he opted to go on the offensive and put his own new limits to the test.

As he veered around one of the piles of slag, he reversed his trajectory with an abruptness that all-but defied the physics of momentum, doubling back to suddenly charge toward the nearest of his pursuers like a ricocheting bullet. He strafed away from the incoming fire as he closed the gap, and as he reached the walking droid he dropped down into a skid. As he slid between the android's legs he extended his arms to either side, and from each of his arms a pair of long, deadly sharp blades sprung from the armor and scythed straight through the metal.

The droid dropped to the ground behind him in a crash, and he regained his feet, pirouetting with all the grace of a ballerina to face it once more. Before it had even finished crashing down, Jace had rushed up its side and carved a line in its body from 'hip' to 'eye', scything it cleanly into two halves that burst apart with a crack of energy.

He took a half-moment to appreciate just how instinctively easy it was to manipulate the suit, and how effective it was at carving apart the monstrous droids that each probably could have single-handedly brought down the Phoenix enclave back home.

"Got to admit, they make good stuff," he murmured to himself.

Then, instinctively, he ducked to the side and away from a spray of bullet fire from one of the few remaining droids, taking cover back behind the freshly carved wreckage of its companion.

There'd be time for appreciating the tech later, but right now the fight wasn't quite over yet.

 

[Dashmiel]

As written by @Script & @Dashmiel

What began as a hopeful and hesitant defense, turned into a decisive rout of the enemy forces as Ezrael, Kai, Circe, and Jace got into the swing of things. Having been greeted by unstoppable horrors so soon upon their arrival, their confidence had clearly been in a shaky state once bullets started flying.

Not anymore.

The realization that their skills combined with their new gear more than made them a match against the androids came not as a measured probing of their attackers capabilities or tactics, but as an exuberant epiphany of destruction. Ezrael's charge which began as an out-flowing of the warrior's rage and instincts taking over in the face of something at least familiar unfolded amongst the enemy ranks like a spark to dry tinder. As the first android fell to his twin lance attack, Circe was right behind him, covering his flank.


They took down first two, then four, then a dozen in quick succession as they began to pour out of the spaces under them, too close for the cascading explosions that began to pick up to target them. They flooded around Ezra and Circe, in a wide arc dozens of androids strong. It wasn't fair.

For the androids.

Emboldened by their successes, and rapidly learning new tricks with their new toys, the duo became the unstoppable center-line of the group's formation. As Ezra galloped back and forth his part of the battlefield, large swaths of metal parts and synthetic blood filled the air. They were laid down in multiples, as the cervitaur's clever use of his flying lances befuddled the androids with the novelty of the attacks.


Meanwhile, Circe was always no more than a quick moment away as she cleverly took down the clumps that amassed in attempts to counter the quadrupeds' mad charges. The battlefield was filled with the understated sound of space/time collapsing as she put her previously dreamed-off teleportation abilities to devastating use. A portal of a few miles was big, flashy, and was useless here. But a step that took you 20 yards to a better position? The androids never stood a chance, especially once she discovered the capability for the AMPS system to provide her with armor piercing high explosive ammunition.


Throughout it all, Jace flitted through the battlefield like a blur of death. Where the others struck with bombastic abandon, he struck with surgical precision. Eliminating any stragglers before the others could be at risk. That is not to say he destroyed any less, oh no. As his comfort with his Abaddon suit grew, he squeezed ever more power out of it, reaching previously undreamed of speeds and maneuverability. They might have fallen in twos or threes at most, but when you moved like lightning the numbers added up. Quickly.

Even so, despite their prowess, they would have been overwhelmed eventually. Their tactics dissected and planned against. Their advantages turned against them. If not for the maniac.

1,267 MKIV Rapid Defense Androids were still active within their cradles, awaiting orders to rise in defense of the mines. 1,267 corrupted defenders, against four plucky heroes armed with nothing but a budding camaraderie. That and a mad scientists' toolbox. As the threat level rose in response to their presence, all cradles attempted opening at the same time, ready to disperse and reform the real defensive system.


They never stood a chance as Kai gleefully pressed every virtual button that came back labeled ‘for anti-personnel use’ from within the metal heart of his unstoppable machine of death. Missiles, rail-guns, charged particle beams. They poured out of the combat droid's attack configuration like hornets agitated out of a nest. Hundreds of the androids were destroyed multiple times over as the bot's weapons reduced the opening cradles and anything within to a mixture of rubble, molten slag, and vaporized matter.

Slowly but surely, the frequency of the explosions began to taper as the group began to run out of targets. Kai’s bot reported a 30% reduction in available stocks following his barrage; costly but enough that he could do the same again two more times before he’d have to worry about where to find a gas station in a decaying planet. The other’s equipment reported similar drops to their available resources, which given their actions was fantastic in-itself.

The Va’nyrian’s indeed, made good stuff.

Jace’s opinion was unfortunately shared by the remains of a lonely and still active sensor head at the edge of the battlefield. The victim of Kai’s opening salvo, the bot never got far in its formation into the anti-iron slug rail-launcher it intended to be, all the better for the group that it hadn’t.

It however, had enough time to assess the threat, decide to hide as wreckage and watch. It then built itself a Va’nyr transmitter.

As the android opened a connection to the Va’nyria datasphere, the transmitter within Kai’s bot also activated as designed, passively picking up the alien broadcast. This happened in a literal instant, and moments later a lance of plasma eight feet thick descended from the heavens, incinerating the android and leaving a deep crater of bubbling magma behind.

They might have the chance to ponder the origin of the android’s destruction later. Unfortunately, a Va’nyr transmission was instant, and Kai already had a full record of it.


He was startled, initially - he’d already painted a virtual ‘do not touch’ line around the transmitter after Xil’s warnings about the risks of using it while her counterpart was still active. It didn’t take him more than a moment to realise why it had happened, though. For whatever reason, the transmission wasn’t directed anywhere in particular - his device wasn’t so much as intercepting it, as the transmission was just going everywhere. There wasn’t even an attempt to keep the communication private.

The transmission was odd for more than how it worked. Sure, an infinite bandwidth package delivered within a planck time unit of its request was impressive, but the contents of the transmission were bizarre.

For one, it was clear that these robots were not communicating like how you’d expect a robot to talk to other robots. Instead, the contents were a normal if extremely fast conversation.

Both sides of the conversation spoke in the same emotionless voice they’d heard from Xilunexus previously, whenever she played out autonomic functions not requiring personality such as when Frey played a joke on her for Jace. They didn’t just use the same voice however, the word choice and cadence were closer to someone thinking out-loud.

Oddest of all, only 40% of the transmission data consisted of the conversation, with the rest devoted to the sound of stellar static underpinned by what sounded like distant screams.

All-Mother, RDA Unit G-8738 requesting backup. Left Hand special forces detected. Karametal detected; enemy possesses intact Abaddon platform.

Impossible. No Left Hand forces remain planetside.

With respect All-Mother, we have previously engaged the Starbreath. He’s got one over me already. Could be doing so again. Requesting Voidkiller support.

Negative, only 1 Voidkiller platform remains operational; it is in active use to counter Starbreath.

All-Mother, the enemy carries previously dreamed of prototype weapons. I reiterate, you see the Abaddon suit. The enemy could have brought a new Voidkiller of their own.

I see my point. Voidkiller deployment authorized, 30 seconds to landing.

Voidkiller? That sounded bad, whatever it was.

”Oh boy. Guys? We might have a new problem incoming,” he voiced across their comms. ”One of them got a transmission off to nega-Xil. She’s sending something after us, called it a ‘Voidkiller’. Till now being used against Alaxel. So… bad news, at a guess.”

Across the battlefield, the moment the word ‘Voidkiller’ registered to Jace’s ears, he almost doubled over. The strange consciousness within his suit was suddenly directing alarm and urgency through his mind, with such intensity that his whole body spasmed for a moment. “Ah, what the fuck!” he hissed.

”You good, Sparks?” Kai asked. ”Oh, and whatever we’re gonna do about this thing, we have… twenty seconds now. Apparently.”

Jace straightened as his suit stopped sending pulses through his body, rubbing at his head. As he did so, for the first time, he felt its consciousness brush more clearly against his mind - enough to convey one very simple concept.

‘Retreat’.

“Fuck.” He glanced across at where the others were. “I don’t know what’s coming, but we need to get out of here. My suit… whatever a ‘Voidkiller’ is, it did not like it. I say we push into the mine, take cover there, and fast.”

The gravitational anomalies playing tug-of-war with the planet ceased without warning, moments before a new shadow occupied the night sky directly above them. The massive starhawk jumped into a perilously close orbit overhead, its side shining like a new moon as it reflected the ever nearing sun.

A circle of darkness grew on its underside as an opening materialized, and something was smoothly launched down towards the planet. It descended without theatrics, save for the fiery cowl that physics dictated you wear when flying through an atmosphere at speeds reserved for ‘outside’.

The group got 10 seconds of quiet as the approaching fireball grew in size, clearly intended for somewhere nearby to them. A rumbling tremor greater than any caused by the androids' emergence from the earth shook the battlefield as it crash-landed. Craters and canyons appeared where buried installations left the ground hollow, and a cloud of dust and debris haloed the mountain in the distance before them.

The Voidkiller landed out of view, behind the mountain. It did not remain there long.

The distance and size of the mountain helped abate the terror somewhat, but it wasn’t like three of them lacked the means to measure the thing, and even Ezra could visually compare things he saw. You did not need to measure down to the millimeter to know this was a big problem.

The thing came into view slowly and hesitantly, as if piloted by someone if not inexperienced then certainly cautious. The first thing they saw was a hand, shaped like a Va’nyrian’s but easily 12 meters wide. It buried itself into the mountain side as if it were grasping a ladder, and pulled itself up.

At a glance, it was easy to see where the original design came from. Smoky-black glass covered the surface of the homunculi writ large, with space for other materials beneath much like Jace’s suit looked. If Jace’s suit was 50 meters tall. There the similarities ended, for it was clear this wasn’t so much a machine anymore as something else.

Sightless holes stood for eyes atop a bald head. They were framed in a face lacking features like eyebrows, a nose, or lips. Everywhere the karametal covered it, so did the faces. Millions of them, slightly bulging as if trying to break free. They were not motionless, but rather twisted and bent as if locked in an unending scream.

Where metal or polymer should have surrounded the karametal, the same neutral-gray of Va’nyrian synthflesh reigned. A mass of scars, cuts, and bleeding sores covered the titanic creature, although it seemed none the worse for it.

It stood hanging by the side of the mountain directly before them, framing the landscape beyond their destination; the entrance to the mines. The Voidkiller opened its abyssal maw, and brightly lit orange fire pooled out from its depths before a localized gravitational anomaly was detectable around it.

The fire began to coalesce and change matter-state as first a breeze and then a steady flow of air began to be pulled in by the heat of the charging attack.

 

[Hollow glade]

As written by @Machina Somnium , @Script ,@N0X , & @Dashmiel

Lordeeth Fae, the metal ones could bleed!. It wasn't exactly that, but the sight of it only made Ezrael eager to see more. Alongside Circe, who he would be glad to take as a sister in arms, he was reminded of his glory days. The earliest and the lastest days of the war for Earth. Before and after most of the massacre took place. Not that he couldn't appreciate the kids' powers. No, he had to physically stop himself from staring in awe at their prowess. They gave him a sense of safety. Surely with them at his side, having his back, he had nothing to fear. And neither did they!

Then, came the fireball. It dropped from the sky like a missile. It rained, and brought along a disgusting abomination. No. It wasn't even the faces, or the aspect of it. Monsters came in many shapes and sizes, many of which inspired fear and disgust in other races. They were considered gory, weird. Too many eyes, legs, or guts. Sometimes all in one. The fiery ball landed away from his sight, which helped. But then it started breathing fire.

It's maw opened, dark and terrible. But the darkness would have been welcome. Because when it was lit up by gigantic fire tongues, it was worse. Ezra had seen some small fires here. They weren't that much trouble. He could look away. Now? Now he couldn't. It was… it was so big, so intense. It was the smell of burnt flesh and the agonic screams of his people. Smoke, putrid and curling around his throat in a vice grip. Flamethrowers, guns, and melting flesh. Ezrael couldn't breathe, he was choking on ash. His attitude changed so drastically it was hard to believe. His magical lance disappeared, and he felt his leg joints locking him into place. He looked at the fire, and didn't see that fire. He let Gherandre’meran, Amen’tur fall to the ground with a clatter. A warrior reduced to a fawn, starting to shake. A moment before he bolted, because his mind wasn't in the right place. He had to get away. The voices, the smell, the sounds… the taste.

Across from him, Circe felt the rumbling that came from everywhere. Cracks formed in the earth as the ground shook suddenly, violently, almost knocking her down.

The mountain was vibrating, too, she realized, and looked up to see… an Omen burning through the atmosphere. The scanner zoomed in on it. She stared and stared and couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Oh, my fuck, what is that,” Circe breathed. The moment the words left her mouth, it crash landed with a shocking boom. Circe toppled over. The ground kept shaking relentlessly.

The shadow emerged from the other side of the mountain, and it grew, and grew, like it was being painted over black. Circe pulled herself up from the ground and hobbled closer to them.

“I won’t argue with that,” she managed to say after Jace, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

But then Cice felt it. Another wave of paralyzing fear, but deeper, darker, more horrified. There was an echo of people screaming and crying in terror. She turned and saw it written all over Ezra’s face. Oh, fuck. They didn’t have time for this.

“Ezra?” She called out, moving closer to him, wincing as she felt his pain. “Ezra? We have to go. Jace, Kai, help me with him.”

Jace spun mid-step, already about to beeline straight for the mine’s entrance. He took in the scene in a moment, cursing under his breath as he realised what was happening. Ezra was frozen - some kind of panic attack. At the worst possible moment.

“C’mon, big guy, we gotta run or we’re paste,” Kai sent through to him as his drone retracted its arsenal of weapons and scuttled forward to his position. “And I didn’t sign up to be paste.”

Running back over, Jace kept one eye on the gathering plasma. “Ezra! Come on! Inside that mountain’s the only place we have a chance of surviving this, move!”

The cervitaur looked at the mine's entrance, then the fire.

"No! No there has to be another way. I can't. I can't I… you go. No!" He said, and because the others were coming closer, he stepped back, breathing heavily and shaking his head even harder. Emphasising the negative. He wasn't going into the fire. No! Absolutely not! It wasn't a possibility!. The first couple of steps he took back were short. Because Circe was approaching him slowly. But then Jace ran over and Ezrael bounced back, and he was ready to keep running.

"I AM NOT GOING TO THE FIRE." He half shouted, half roared, shaking like a leaf.

Jace cursed again. There wasn’t time to talk him down. “Sorry big guy, but if you don’t go toward the fire, it’s coming toward you. I’ll apologise for this if we live.”

The plasma was growing brighter by the second. He wasn’t even sure if the rest of them had time to reach the mine anymore. Not by conventional means, at least. Flicking his wrist out, he shot three pinpricks of the strange purple glass out from his suit to latch onto Ezra, Circe and Kai’s machine. Then, he spun in place and fired off a fourth across the battlefield like a missile, straight into the mine.

“Brace yourselves!” he yelled. Then he pulled.

It was easy enough to lock onto the distant shard where it had embedded into one of the mine’s walls, setting it as an anchor. For Circe, Kai and Ezra it was abruptly like they were in freefall - but rather than going down, they were shooting toward the mine, as Jace’s abilities hurled them toward it like rockets.

With barely any time to react beyond pulling his lance along, Ezrael's scream of horror hurt to hear. Like he could have ripped his throat open.

Unbeknownst to the group, the entity puppeteering the Voidkiller was incapable of restraint. This was the main thing keeping them alive, as of yet. Already, the Voidkiller had gathered enough energy and raw matter to annihilate the group several times over, but still it continued to charge.

The air around the building housing the elevator into the mines was beginning to become a blistering oven. The sweat upon their skin began to evaporate faster than they could create it, despite the fact that the mountain itself was still 10 kilometers away. It was a good thing they were relatively near the edge of the continent, because at this rate it was unlikely there would be much landmass left back the way they came once the monster let loose.

Jace’s plan had them successfully before the building, and while nothing was going to disguise the rising temperatures, at least the bulk of the structure hid the fiery sight from Ezra’s view for the moment.

That the Voidkiller hadn’t killed them yet was good, but they had no way to know how long until a fiery death met them. So it was imperative they got through the problem they now faced.

The doors to the entrance to the mine were locked.

A pair of freight sized doors met them, with a smaller one set within the leftmost one. Roughly sized for a forklift—or a cervitaur and a combat bot—it was the closest one to where Jace’s maneuver had landed them, and the only place where any sort of controls could be found.

The doors were cast of the same white-gold metal that marked the most permanent of Va’nyrian architecture. None of their weapons possessed the ability to destroy neutralian steel, at least not without risking blowing them all up. Thus, they had to break in, subtly.

The difficulty lay in the fact that someone clearly had had the same idea previously, and it looked like their attempt had rendered the normal holographic interface somewhat inoperable as they brusquely hacked in.

A shard of smoky-black karametal was jammed into the door’s electronic lock, its surface breaking into thousands of microscopic strands where it made physical contact.

To get in, they had to figure out Alaxel’s key somehow.

Jace’s suit went into another flurry of riffling through his gray matter, but no clear words formed. Instead, images; A vision of a spear, the concept of ownership, the idea of feelings transmitted, and lines of unfinished code that seemed to include Jace’s vital signs and a gradual shift of those values into some other pattern.

Meanwhile, the temperature continued to steadily rise degree by degree.

Once they landed, and Ezrael stood back up… at least now he couldn't see the fire. But he wasn't exactly calm. The monster did his best to calm his own breath, looking around them and feeling the rising temperatures. There was definitely an angry look directed at Jace, along with the now blunt blades of his spear pointed at the kid. Only Ezra didn't just feel angry, there was something deeper. It wasn't blind, desperate rage.

"We shall talk about this later, you foolish, disrespectful goopson" Of which Jace would have understood absolutely nothing. Because it was spoken entirely in Tauren. Said language sounded like a variety of sounds, bleats, growls and interlaced melodic syllables.

As he spoke, the cerv loomed over Jace and almost hit him (gently) with the lance. But he didn't, walking past him and almost shoving him to the side instead, to poke at the metal shard with his lance. Because what else could go wrong? He had already been thrown into fire.

“No idea what you just said,” Jace muttered as he was barged past, barely registering Ezra’s yells through the confusing flurry of nonverbal communication from his suit. “I’m gonna choose to interpret it as ‘thanks for saving me from an imminent fiery death’.” Taking a breath, he opted to swallow any further retort to the cervitaur and instead focus on the problem in front of them.

The karametal on the Va’nyrian weapon smoothly melted into the shard of karametal on the door once the two touched. It was separated smoothly as well upon their tugging, with the shard remaining in place. The door however, still remained closed.

Ezra hummed, interested in the reaction, and looked back at the rest.

Circe braced herself and relaxed as Jace pulled them along at an impossible speed. Luckily, her body was accustomed to warp speeds in the expanse of space. She was able to roll into the fall and flip herself back up on her own two feet.

“Not bad,” she smirked at Jace. It was a reckless move, but it worked, and that was all that mattered. Plus, it was thrilling. “A little warning, next time.” She gestured, indicating Ezra.

Jace just nodded, still trying to make sense of what was running through his head.

Ezra wasted no time trying to stab the door with his fancy lance, only for it to melt through it and back out again, without any effect. “Another obstacle,” she said. “Surprise, surprise,” sang SEA after scanning the door herself.

“I got nothin’,” SEA said, a simple way to say that her readings couldn’t determine the code to unlock the door, and there was generally nothing she couldn’t unlock. “Sorry.”

On the back of her mind, Circe was keenly aware their window of opportunity was quickly coming to a close. Circe marched up to place a hand on the hot surface of the strange metal door, and closed her eyes, allowing her mind to expand.

Circe’s awareness brushed against the key, and echoes of emotions played out before her. She felt the shape of the key’s owner and his titanic simmering anger held beneath a veneer of ice. The remaining traces on the inactive key were too faint for her to detect much more.

“Whatever is waiting for us behind this door feels angry. That can’t be good,” she sighed, stepping away from the door and turned to Kai, “you wanna give it a go?”

“Don’t mind if I do!” Kai replied, directing his drone forwards to get a better look.

“Hold on,” Jace interrupted. “I’m getting something from my suit. I think it’s telling me how to open it? But it’s not clear– it’s got something to do with the spear, with… feelings, and with my vitals.”

Circe paused in thought. If the feelings Jace was talking about was the anger… no, wrath she just felt through that door, that could only mean one thing. Her powers, driven by energy in motion, could become overwhelmed by all that feeling. While they were at it, she closed her eyes to meditate, absorbing as much of the rage as she could, waited for them to come to a conclusion.

“Yeah, I’m not brute forcing this unless you give me… days, probably.” Kai replied where he was examining the lock. “It’s coded to… uhg, there are a lot of layers of authentication here. Looks like a couple of them are already tripped, but there’s… this one’s a bio-scan, keyed to a specific Va’nyrian, and I think this one interfaces with a material in some ridiculously complicated way. The karametal, I think, but … I’ve not run into anything like this last one before. I can’t figure out what it’s checking for.”

His avatar stroked at its masked chin. “I think between your suit and your mysto powers I might be able to trick the bioscanner,” he noted with a gesture at Jace. “And maybe the spear is how we get your suit to talk to it in the first place? It was certainly doing something there. I’m lost on the last bit, though… any ideas?”

"Feelings are an important part of who we are. If we're supposed to… what, copy the bioscan? We probably need the vital signs and also the mental state of the individual." Said Ezra, putting his lance in place. Feelings… if one didn't feel a certain way about something, were they really themselves? Probably not. But regardless. He looked at Circe. He'd give his proper thanks to Jace later.

"That has to be a task for you. I don't know that anyone else here could… attempt something similar." Maybe Kai? But feelings weren't cybernetic, were they?. Hm.

“Statistically, I suppose someone has to.” When she spoke, her voice sounded like a two-part harmony. Circe’s heart was already thrumming faster with adrenaline. Through her eyes, the world was engulfed in orange and yellow flames. Color and light enveloped her physical body. Manifesting rage could attract negative energies to them. Worst of all, she could lose herself to it with a single mishap. Circe placed the palm of her hand back on the door. “This had better work.”

“Okay. Jace, your suit and the spear are made of the same stuff, but tuned differently. So you need to be the one holding it,” Kai instructed.

Nodding, Jace reached out and put his hand on the spear. Where the karametal of his suit met the weapon, it melded, shifting and melting against it until the spear was almost like an extension of his arm.

“Okay, now just gotta interfere with the signal here… adjust the readout, convince it you’re an alien supersoldier with planet-busting superpowers. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll be right back!” There was a flash of blue light from the drone, surging out and into the key as Kai projected himself from one to the other.

The digital space within the lock-and-key was similar in its design to the drone - not surprising, since it was military tech from the same civilisation, but definitely a relief. They didn’t have time to waste on him figuring out a brand new digital architecture all over again. It took only a bare few moments for him to re-identify all the key points of the device, where each input was being read and checked.

Anyone would think you were designed to keep technopaths out on purpose, Kai mused to himself wryly. Good thing I’m better than you expected them to be.

His digital self reached out, sending tendrils of consciousness webbing through the device like an insidious virus, quickly spreading to every corner of its security system. He found where it was reading the strange, hard-to-parse signal that was Circe’s empathic projection, then where it was scanning over Jace and the spear and rejecting his bio-signs.

Let’s see if we can’t pull a little wool over your eyes.

UNAUTHORIZED USER, YOU ARE ACTING UPON MY INSTRUCTIONS. VALIDATION CHECKED.

Hey, I probably could’ve come up with at least half of this on my own, Kai retorted back. So thank you for checking, I do feel pretty validated.

His consciousness dove into the data flooding between the external scanners and the security checks and went to work, tweaking and twisting values. Everything that was telling the key that Jace was human was incrementally adjusted piece by piece until instead it told it exactly what it wanted to hear. It was a laborious and intensive process, but outside of the confines of that digital perspective, it took seconds.

WARNING; ACTIONS HAVE BEEN LOGGED. REPORT TO COMMANDING OFFICER COMPLETE. PROCEEDING WITH BYPASS…

Yeah, yeah, Kai projected the closest digital equivalent to rolling his eyes as he could. Take it up with your boss man’s wife.

When it was done, all that was left was to weave the two signals: the one from Jace and the one from Circe, together into one, to convince the device that they had the same source.

As the group’s efforts lined up, a surge of power was drained out of Jace to be combined with Circe’s powers which were also drained right out of the air around her, and ran through Kai’s bridge.

AUTHENTICATION GRANTED; WELCOME STARBREATH.

A loud click sounded, and the karametal shard upon the door detached, flowing up Jace’s arm before swinging back and attaching itself to the spear instead. The door vanished in a puff of mist, and like that, it was done.

Before them was a dimly lit interior, running on what was unmistakably emergency lighting. A mere dozen paces beyond the door awaited a large round platform large enough to accommodate the group with space to spare. Clearly an elevator meant for heavy equipment.

 

[Dashmiel]

The scorching air had heated to such a stark degree that the group’s suits sealed together in unison. Conditions were beginning to become inimical to life, and the Voidkiller hadn’t even discharged yet. What had begun as a breeze had become a hurricane-force gale as the vacuum formed by the growing plasma mass of the monster’s weapon continued to expand. Blinding iridescence illuminated the edges of the building on whose shadow they stood, causing their various kinds of visors and light-sensitive sensors to shield their eyes.


Small bits of battlefield debris crashed against the side of the building, and the building’s shadow began to sear itself into the ground as what little alien shrubbery which grew nearby burst into flames. The doors opened with a sudden click as the group of stalwart would-be heroes (or at least would-be profiteers) managed to decode their way through using Alaxel’s door-opener. They rushed indoors with alacrity, not a second wasted as they dashed through the mist forming the door.

Immediately the door reformed, sealing them in the semi-lit darkness created by anemic lighting that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The air was serene and artificially still. An idyllic bubble. A toneless and genderless synthetic voice spoke out of the air around them, speaking just this side of too quick for comfort. It was slightly distorted by what sounded like a crackling static hiss following after every utterance. A crackling hiss that to a careful ear was a just barely decipherable breathless jumble of words. Words uttered in a vaguely familiar female voice.

“Welcome Star-Breath,” the voice greeted. WhyareyoubackItoldyouit’snotherebetrayerhisss. “Please select desired destination,” Goawayabandonertheresnothinghereforyouhisss.

Later on, it would be hard for them to recall who screamed it first, but a chorus of “DOWN!” erupted from amidst the gathered mercenaries, mere moments before annihilation would have met up with them.

The gathered group had a moment of weightless vertigo as the elevator began descending at hundreds of kilometers per second a fraction of a second before the inertial dampeners kicked alongside the lightly luminescent blue field surrounding the platform. They traveled for a good second and some fractions, nearly 300 kilometers into the depths. It was just enough to save them as the solid rock outside the energy field of the elevator simply evaporated upon the release of the Voidkiller’s weapon.

A terrible shaking accompanied the sound of grinding unseen machinery as the platform shook violently, jostling the mercenary group around as the platform plunged for a couple seconds in freefall before stopping.

Darkness reigned for a moment before a flickering brough the energy shield and the weak diffused lighting back alongside the synthetic voice with it’s hissing companion:

“Emergency protocol initiated. Warning: main propulsion system offline. Auxiliary system offline. Converter system offline. Unable to establish connection to-,”

Iwishyou’dstayawayyoukilleverythingyoutouchhiss.

“On board power–Weshouldhavenevertrustedyouhiss– Emergency descent to base station initiated; estimated time to arrival: 16,678 cycles,” the voice announced.

SistershouldhavekilledyouwhenshehadthechanceIwouldhavehiss.

The voice fell silent. The elevator's motion was smooth and soundless, with no trace of the prior grinding. The sound of their shared breathing and motions their only companions.

Beyond the energy field, a nigh featureless metal shaft occasionally punctuated by sections of raw rock was their only view as the elevator resumed its path downwards at a very reduced pace. Currently, it would be a good 6 hours before they would at least have the decent sight of going through a magma lake. Another 3 after that they’d get to see a glorious cavern of yellowish-black raw crystals as they spent an hour traversing its otherworldly void before finally hitting their ‘floor’: Base Station: Jintra’nir Crystal Mine Security Outpost.

Luckily, the platform gave them ample room to stretch and pace, being large enough to accommodate machinery many times their size.