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DMA - B2 - Chapter 19 – There was a firefight!
🕑 Added 2024-11-19 15:01:31 +0000 UTCJace finished slicing through one of the last Pheracorp soldiers and took a few shaky breaths, leaning against the wall. Greg was relatively fresh, but Priam was showing some signs of wear and tear, as his floppy ears were constantly twitching in time with his rapid breathing.
“You’re almost at the atrium,” Quinn said over their comms. “Well, one of three of them. Based on the views I got from their cameras, you’ll be facing the brunt of their forces.”
“How many we talking?” Greg asked.
“Well over a thousand-foot troops and hundreds of mechs.”
“Fuck me,” Greg whispered.
Jace shook his head, “We can’t take on that many without something big…or going invisible.”
“We should do that,” Priam said. “I don’t feel like fighting thousands of soldiers. Especially with these gun things.” He waved the pistol in his hand. He’d fired off a few shots earlier – but had missed both of them. One had actually hit Jace in the back, bouncing off of the Pulsar Ward – and the bunny-boy had apologized for a minute straight.
“With the Archmage spell-like Skills off the table…its going to be rough,” Jace admitted. “I don’t have anything for area-of-effect except for [Exploding] Dark Matter Darts. What about you two?”
“I got nothing for areas,” Priam said.
“Grenades, but not enough for a small army,” Greg replied.
“Then stealth seems like our only real option.” Jace took a deep breath and exhaled, nodding. Dark Matter Shield (Rank 3). The purple barrier burst into place around him, and he looked at his allies. “Ready?” Both nodded and Jace willed Dark Matter Cloak (Rank 3) [Group] into existence, and the three moved forward out of the corridor they had taken their breather in.
The atrium was an enormous, football-field sized space. To either side of the enormous corridor the trio were hanging back in, further hallways extended around the enormous ring leading to more atriums. And there was a fog that filled the atrium, but it was thin enough that he could still see the rows of soldiers with weapons aimed at the corridor they were in, and the lines of mechs. “That…Ollie, we’d displace that fog, right?”
“Yup,” he said in a dour voice. “Someone must have given them information on how your Cloak works. Which is weird, because X and I have kept close guard on any System information leaking about your Skills.”
“Alright. Here’s the plan. Greg, Priam – you both stay on the outside edge of the room and try your best to blend in with that fog-” Jace pointed to the slightly distorted fog clouds from their billowing at the edges of the room, “-and go around this main mass.” Jace then pointed to the center cluster, “I’m going to make a distraction. Priam; remember that city on the Nethal world?”
“Yeah, where you ran back and forth and kept hitting them from far away.”
“Right. I’ll go to the right and do the same thing. I should be able to move faster than they can track through the fog clouds unless they’re really leading their shots. Once I draw them towards the far atrium, I’ll double back by going above them, and meet you guys at the entrance to the center.”
Greg nodded and cracked a smile. A manic smile. As if he was anticipating and looking forward to the violent encounter. “Sounds like a plan. Come on, Priam.”
The bunny-boy nodded, and the two split off to slowly skirt the outside edge of the room. Jace turned to the other side of the hallway and gripped his sword, taking a deep breath before petting Ollie with his other hand. “Here we go.” But, before going, he paused. “Ollie…I’ve had the (Terrifying) Augmentation on my eyes active this whole time…but they’ve been able to keep fighting me. What gives? I thought lower Tier entities can’t attack me while I’m looking at them.”
“Someone has augmented them. Prosthetics, bionics, cybernetics, their armor and weapons – all of that contributes to a higher Tier evaluation. If they were just in street clothes? Sure, it would work.”
Jace shook his head, “Seems like that Augmentation isn’t very useful.”
“It can be, given the right situation.”
Jace glanced at his allies as they slowly crept away. “Okay. Here we go.”
“You have got this!” Ollie replied as he snaked into Jace’s hood and poked his head out of the top. “Hit it!”
Wrath’s Embrace (Rank 10) [Focused]. Jace saw the crimson nebula explode around him, and felt that slightly warm ember ignite into a firestorm in his chest as the anger and hatred at these corpo scum surged through him. “Let’s go!”
>>>---<<<
Victoria was watching the camera feeds from multiple angles while crouched behind cover in the hallway leading to the central servers. The whole atrium in front of her was blocked up with mechs and soldiers. Come on…where are you…
“There!” she shouted as she sent the visual feed to every person under her command. The slight dispersion of fog leading to the left side of the Atrium told her that something invisible was there. “Open fire!”
The cacophonous sound of weaponry firing filled the whole space. The building seemed to vibrate as the fog dispersed from the sheer volume of bullets flying towards the specific location.
And then Victoria ‘felt’ it. She sensed the distortion in gravity as she realized that they were shooting at what was effectively an afterimage of a fast-moving entity. “Over there!” she tracked the gravity distortion and interfaced with the various cameras to upload a feed of her own vision to the soldier’s heads-up-displays. She tasked the bionic computer in her brain with painting the outline of the gravitic distortion, and the outline of a human, holding a sword, and sprinting was clearly illuminated.
“Unload!”
>>>---<<<
Jace was running at his top speed as he went around to the left-most side of the atrium. The crack and bang of firearms shooting at his direction fueled his adrenaline-laced sprint. Pointing his hand to the crowd of mechs in front of him, he activated Dark Matter Dart (Rank 4) [Exploding], and watched as the purple-black bolts of energy launched out. All 9 darts sank into the different mechs before exploding with a purplish-black shockwave.
The men inside were ripped apart by the force of the explosion, and the shredded metal effectively turned the mechs into enormous grenades that cause shrapnel wounds to all of the soldiers surrounding them. That gives me an idea, Jace thought as he kept running and pushed past the wrecked machinery.
Then, the bullets stopped tracking him and instead he felt the full force of the fullisade impacting him. Priam’s honeycomb barrier began to crack and fragment. “How do they know exactly where I am?”
“Someone has Black Hole power! There is not an Aspirant or Ascendant that I can see,” Ollie said with some panic.
Fine then. Deactivate the Cloak – but just on me. He saw the purple hue vanish, and the already-focused fire began to consolidate further on him. But that is what he wanted. Dark Matter Shield (Rank 3) [Reflecting]. Dark Matter Mending (Rank 4) [Vampiric]. Hope’s Edge.
>>>---<<<
Victoria was gobsmacked. Absolutely floored.
Flicker appeared directly in front of the group of soldiers, and they all consolidated their fire. His golden barrier shattered into thousands of pieces, and the purple barrier surrounding him began to take hits. She saw his expression – but only his eyes and the top of his face.
It was a look of determination and anger. Pure hatred. A crackling aura of red sparks and nebula that looked like a roiling tempest flared around him.
And then men began screaming. All around her, men inside mechs had their vitals flatline. The soldiers around her began to grip their chests and fell over, dead. “Cease fire!” she shouted, knowing that somehow this person was reflecting all the damage he was suffering.
>>>---<<<
Jace laughed with satisfaction. [Reflecting] cost energy every time the shield was hit and reversed the damage upon the person inflicting it. But, due to Hope’s Edge, for 10 seconds he was able to regain energy from dealing damage. And, due to Dark Matter Mending, he was able to stay in peak health.
He had figured out a crazy Skill combination. For ten seconds, he was invulnerable and would reflect all damage without suffering injury, could heal himself, and was able to reverse damage. He had just found his ultimate cheat code. But only once per day, and only for ten seconds.
Jace saw the bodies toppling, and the corridor was open to him. As the effect faded, he dropped the [Reflecting] aspect of Dark Matter Shield, keeping the (Rank 3) effect around his body. Running towards the hallway, he began carving left and right. Wide, sweeping slashes that sliced through the soldiers and mechs alike. Blood spurted around him, and he could feel that hatred roaring in his chest all the way up to his temples.
All the soldiers ceased firing, and that gave him a micro-second of pause before he realized that someone had figured out the damage reflect. And for all they knew, it was still active. He grinned and kept up his Wrath’s Embrace fueled assault. Everywhere he struck, someone died. A corpo-soldier, a mech pilot, every person met a specter of death and saw their lives flash before their eyes before the lights in those eyes were extinguished.
Men began to break and run, and Jace let them. But then the hallway to the central corridor was clear, and he found himself facing off against a group of twenty heavily armored soldiers. They were wearing the heaviest armor he could possibly imagine while still staying mobile; but without the bulk of the mech suits. They were all wielding weapons – blades in one hand, pistols in the other.
And the blades looked wickedly sharp. As if they could cut through the air, bone, and sinew without issue. “Monofilament blades, also called Monoswords. Extremely efficient slicing power,” Ollie advised him.
Jace nodded and took up a duelist’s stance, blading his body sideways as he gestured with his left hand and shouted, “Come on! Bring it!”
Almost faster than he could react, he was beset upon by three of them. They moved quick, quicker than the Ascendants who had fought him while in the air. Faster than humans should be able to move. Ollie quickly performed a diagnostic and whispered rapidly in Jace’s ear – trusting the Aspirant’s enhanced senses to be able to pick up the words that were spouted off far faster than a human ear should be able to comprehend.
“They have armor augmenting their movement speed, bionics augmenting their bodies, and a new implant from the Nebula Alliance. Not sure how they got it here through the Cosmic Corridor’s portal closure, but it slows down their perception of time.”
“They’re not as fast as me,” Jace growled as he parried, blocked, and even grabbed one of the monofilament swords with his offhand, feeling slightly tired from the Dark Matter Shield taking the black – but wrenching the blade from the person’s grip before stabbing them with it. For each person he took out, another one ran out of the hallway. Cosmic Infusion (Rank 10), amplified by Wrath’s Embrace (Rank 10) made him into a blur of metal and death.
And at the back was a tall woman with dark, tanned skin, black hair, and wearing the same heavy armor and equipment. But hovering behind her, Jace saw something truly horrifying that would have scared him mightily if he was not fueled by his Skill imparting him with rage. A specter of a purple, tentacled form. Something out of a Lovecraftian nightmare that was wrapped around the woman’s shoulders.
Jace couldn’t focus on that, however, as he had to focus all of his attention on the assault coming at him from all sides. Every swing was calculated, every parry was perfect, every riposte was perfectly timed. He was a whirlwind of death and devastation fueled by hatred at these megacorporations. The people that looked down upon street folk like him. The people who took Chroma from him. The people who tried to hurt his friends.
The people that killed Verve. All the anger over a whole life of being mistreated was fueling him to even more violence, and he began carving these corpo soldiers in half, cleaving them clear down the center as blood grew slick on the floor and began to cause some of the soldiers to lose their footing.
And then Jace got his legs into the mix. He had empowered them with Dark Matter Blade (Rank 5) [Rending] as well, and he was using them to devastating effect. Every kick resulted in snapped bones and injured organs. Every kick was accompanied by a stabbing blade that would knife out of the prosthetic, digging deeper and inflicting mortal injury.
Finally, he was heaving heavy breaths from the minute-long constant combat. And facing down this woman with the shrouded figure behind her. Ollie whispered in Jace’s ear, “That’s Troxanir’s shadow. He’s somehow formed a pact with her. She’s not an Ascendant, or an Aspirant, but she is empowered by him. I’m reporting it to Xera but be careful.”
Jace nodded and swapped his Dark Matter Shield to (Rank 2) so he wouldn’t suffer any more energy loss from being hit. There were enough dying and injured people on the ground afflicted with [Rending] that he knew any injury he suffered would be rapidly repaired.
The woman’s voice was filled with a trembling fury as she screamed at Jace, exhorting her own rage into the figure before her. “You monster! You’ve killed all of them!”
“They killed themselves,” Jace replied as he closed with her and began a series of slices and slashes. She raised her sword and a billowing aura of black appeared around the blade. She met Jace’s strike and then brought her pistol to bear, squeezing off shots over and over that Jace intercepted with his shield. Growling, she threw the pistol aside and focused entirely on her blade.
Jace grinned and slammed forward with his invisible-to-her tower shield. She was bashed and backed up, and she began to slip on the bloody ground. Jace kept running forward, pushing her back until she tried to strike around the edge of the barrier, but could not. He crushed her against the wall, and she let out a gasp as her bones cracked inward and pierced her lungs.
The shadowy, tentacled form of Troxanir’s shadow wrapped around her, and she glowed with a deep, black color before she laughed. Jace was thrown back by a shockwave, and looking through his invisible shield felt terror in his heart. The woman was a horrific amalgamation of black, putrid tentacles that dripped glistening viscera and goop.
She cackled madly as the shadowy form of the Black Hole Conclave’s leader seemingly possessed her, and a voice filled with cold, calculating malice came out from her mouth. “Flicker. Jace Seren. Aspirant with the Dark Matter Cosmic Power. Signer for the Dark Between Stars…I am Troxanir, the Endless Hunger.”
Jace kept his ready stance and felt the slight drain of energy from the Wrath’s Embrace, “What do you want with me?!” Jace shouted.
“I want you to join me. To fuel oblivion’s growth and ensure that all may experience paradise.” The woman’s body raised a hand, and tiny tendrils crawled out from under her fingernails before forming tiny eyes on the tips of the stalks. “Stare into oblivion and see paradise beyond the singularity.”
Jace felt the slight pull of the eyes, trying to make him lock gaze with the eyestalk. But he felt the Mind’s Eye Amulet against his bare chest, under his armor, vibrate ever-so gently. Instantly, the pressure released, and the form of Troxanir looked disappointed. He tried to use a mind-altering or influencing effect, Jace thought. Trying to fuck with my mind?! That made Jace angry. Infuriated. “I’ll never join you and your insane cult!”
Jace ran forward and unleashed a series of slashes as he carved into the woman’s body. It kept regenerating every time he slashed, the form healing over with the slick, slimy sludge of black goop as her form was slowly replaced by that of Troxanir’s own. A humanoid shape with tentacles coming out from the shoulders that were ringed with teeth. A series of eyes along the face that lined a gaping void of a mouth.
“You can’t be here!” Xera’s voice shouted from Ollie’s mouth.
“But I am,” Troxanir replied. “And your Signer cannot stop me. If he won’t join me, then he will die.”
Jace raised his palm, the Dark Matter symbol on his hand surging with energy as it built up. “Dark Energy Beam (Rank 12) [Limited Range]!”
The blast of energy impacted the monstrous form and separated the molecules into their different component elements, effectively disintegrating the form as Troxanir let out a scream of hatred. The body collapsed to the ground, utterly destroyed from the hips up.
Jace collapsed to his knees and had to let Wrath’s Embrace fade. He took deep, shuddering breaths as the constant fighting and enormous energy expenditure wore down on him. He reached up to his ear and tapped the comms, “Guys…hallway clear. Get to me.”
Comments
Seras Streams
I try to pepper in some pop culture here and there.
DrFuju
Bruh the boondocks saints reference? Sick.
Seras Streams
All good! It's something important that I'm happy I did not overlook.
Eltirno
Thanks, sorry for being impatient.
Seras Streams
I gotta go back and re-read it. I think it’s accounted for in a ‘mass dusting’ in the next few chapters. EDIT: chapter 20 has them going back through the building and mass dusting. Made me panic there thinking I’d forgot and screwed up my XP tracking
Eltirno
Any reason why he's not dusting the whole carnage scene?
