The Nine

by Molles, DJ

  Perry juked, swung the disc of his energy shield over the tops of their heads, blocking an incoming energy bolt with a shattering crash, then immediately pivoted to cover another bolt from the opposite direction.

  With each blast of energy that Perry absorbed, his shield weakened, and grew smaller, the disc shrinking now to only three feet across, and forcing Perry to be more accurate with his blocks.

  “I’m almost out of ammo!” Sagum shouted.

  There was no place to go. The building that they’d blasted their way into was now surrounded, closed off. The breach that they’d made was covered by two paladins that traded shots at Perry and when he returned them they deflected them with their blades, sending them careening into the ceiling or walls in plumes of debris.

  Perry couldn’t even try to blast his way out of the building. If he stopped moving and blocking the incoming energy blasts, one of them would catch Stuber or Sagum or himself. It required every bit of his focus, every bit of his drive. His mind was deep into the red flow of Confluence, but his training was lacking, and the paladins that he faced were experts with their tools.

  Another flurry of energy bolts. Perry twisted, putting his shield up, catching them one after the other. And then his shield was gone, knocking the wind out of him as it dissipated.

  “No more shield!” Perry yelled.

  “Reloading!” Stuber shouted. “Last mag!”

  As Stuber swept a fresh magazine into his rifle, a paladin sighted in on him.

  Perry had no shield to fall back on. He had no choice.

  He lunged in front of Stuber, his longstaff’s blade glowing bright. The paladin loosed two bolts in rapid succession then ducked out of the way. Perry watched them coming, the flow of Confluence making his reactions quicker, more honed, more focused—but was it going to be enough?

  The first bolt struck his blade, dead center, and went spiraling off with a crackling warble.

  He couldn’t catch the second bolt. He tried to move his longstaff in time, but he watched the bolt come towards him, filling his vision. The blade of his longstaff crossed its path, just behind it, and Perry leaned to the left as far as he was able…

  The bolt skimmed by him, bursting the right side of his face and his shoulder in a fireball of pain.

  He leaned too far. Began to topple.

  The bolt slammed into the wall behind the group of three, washing them in a gout of dust and simmering energy.

  Perry hit the ground, the pain searing his face and shoulder, but he forced his eyes to stay open.

  Two paladins swept into view. Two different directions. Their longstaffs coming up.

  Perry could not block both of the shots.

  Which one? It seemed a pointless question. Whichever one he chose to block made no difference—the other would kill them.

  Stuber knelt on a knee over Perry’s fallen form. He screamed at his enemies, knowing that this was his last battle, his last shots, and he held his trigger down, forcing the paladin far to the right to raise his shield.

  Maybe Perry could take the other…

  The building shook. Smoke and dust billowed over them like a sandstorm.

  The paladin ahead of Perry jerked, his focus flying to something over Perry’s shoulder. Perry fixed on the face of that demigod, and watched something miraculous happen that he’d never seen before: Pure terror, stretching the demigod’s eyes wide and forcing his mouth into an O of shock.

  Perry was so mesmerized by that instant, that he barely noticed the four claw-like metal feet slam down on all sides of them, a giant copper-colored bulk over his head.

  The paladin raised his shield—a full, healthy dome of protection.

  A noise that Perry had heard before, but this time much closer, much louder: The sound of massive amounts of electricity arcing, a hundred times a second. No thunderbolts flew, no energy bolts shot out, but the air between the machine overhead and the paladin seemed to shimmer and writhe, and the shield shrunk by rapid increments, every pulse of that rapid-fire-electricity reducing it from a dome, to a disc, then to a plate, and then to nothing at all, and the paladin beyond simply splattered.

  “Oh my fuck!” Perry coughed out, as a fine mist of blood and gristle painted the breach where the paladin had stood.

  A chain-gun roared, the bullets lancing out at another paladin, while a flurry of tiny missiles swirled like a flock of birds with their tails on fire and swarmed over yet another.

  The onslaught of bullets crushed the shield to nothingness and obliterated the body beyond.

  The first dozen missiles impacted a shield in a mess of minor explosions, and the next few reduced the demigod within to smoking bits.

  A last brave, but ill-informed, paladin attempted to be a hero and charged through the breach that Perry had blown in the side of the building, heedless of the messy remains of his predecessors.

  The Guardian twisted and spat, and the demigod’s shield was suddenly covered in sizzling green slime that spread rapidly over the entire thing, eating through it and dripping down on the demigod within. He began to scream and writhe, trying to wipe the glowing green muck off of him, but only succeeded in spreading it around. It ate through armor, then clothing, then skin, and muscle, and bone. The demigod lost his voice, toppled over, and lay twitching and steaming.

  “Oh dear,” Whimsby’s voice sounded from over Perry’s head. “So that’s ‘caustic.’ How dreadful. It strikes me as needlessly cruel.”

  “Whimsby!” Perry rolled and grappled to his feet.

  “Yes, I saved you, you’re welcome, but there’s more of them out there, and we need to get moving.”

  Stuber grabbed one of the Guardian’s legs to pull himself upright. He gazed at it with appreciation and then patted it. “Fine piece of hardware you have, Whimsby. I’m actually quite jealous.”

  “It’s growing on me. Sagum, can you stand?”

  Whimsby’s Guardian body stepped back from over top of them and tilted down, its scanners twitching and moving over Sagum as he dragged himself up, using his rifle like a crutch.

  “Yeah,” Sagum gritted out. “I can stand. Not sure how fast I can move, though.”

  “Let me try something,” Whimsby said.

  The big copper orb let out a skin-tingling vibration. The legs detached from the ground as the entire machine hovered, then curled in on themselves but didn’t retract into the slots where they seemed to come from.

  “Each of you, grab a leg and hang on tightly.”

  “Thank the gods,” Stuber grunted, swinging himself up onto one of the legs, standing on its curled end digit. “I was just getting slightly tired of running.”

  Perry and Sagum hoisted themselves up onto separate legs and clung to them, Sagum sitting on his like you might straddled a two-wheeled rambler.

  “We’re set!” Perry called out, eyeing Whimsby’s core processor, still attached to the bottom of the Guardian’s hull.

  The machine spun around and then lurched through the opening it had made when it crashed into the building. It hit the street outside, pointed itself to the west, and took off like a shot. Wind and rain sprayed in Perry’s face, but he was as glad as Stuber to be riding instead of sprinting.

  “Where’s Teran?” Perry yelled over the rush of the wind as they hurtled down the city streets.

  “I left her near our objective. Hopefully she’s made it into the tunnel that will take us to The Source. Which reminds me, is now a good time to tell you about the things that I’ve discovered?”

  A rattle of gunfire cut Perry’s response off.

  Stuber hung out from his perch, firing his rifle one-handed at a rooftop. He let up after a dozen rounds and squinted through the rain.

  “What was that?” Perry demanded.

  Stuber grimaced. “Thought I saw something moving between the roof tops.”

  “A cursory scan shows no movement in that direction,” Whimsby said, sounding irritated at the interruption.

  “Hm.” Stuber shrugged a
nd pulled himself back in. “Well, it was fun, anyways.”

  “Whimsby,” Perry prompted. “What have you found out?”

  Whimsby swung them into a hard right, down another street, then cut a left at the next intersection. Sagum hugged his leg and muttered curses.

  “Yes,” Whimsby began again. “We don’t have time for the full story, so I’ll restrict myself to the main points. The Guardians were placed here by beings they call the ‘Masters.’ Their directive is to guard over what we call The Source, but they refer to as The Nine. Now, I believe, from what I’ve been able to find out, that the Masters were the All-Kind…”

  “So they’re real?” Perry gaped at the core processor.

  “The consciousness that I took this body from seems to adhere to his assertation that the Masters placed him here, and that they did—and still do—exist. I say ‘he’ but the consciousness is without gender, actually, and—”

  “Skip it, Whimsby.”

  “Right. Moving on. The All-Kind placed the Guardians here to keep The Source secure. They call it The Nine. And, from what I can gather, this refers to the nine sons of Primus.”

  “Wait. So there are nine demigods locked somewhere underneath the East Ruins?”

  “That is my understanding, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say for certain, as the consciousness tends to be a tad uncooperative and insists on referring only tangentially to things, I’m assuming out of spite because I took his body from him. But he seems adamant that if The Nine are somehow set free, that this will cause some sort of apocalypse. I am, at this moment, berating him for his refusal to go into more detail, but…no, he doesn’t seem to care.”

  Perry irritably swiped the rain out of his eyes. “Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?”

  “I’m not entirely certain, Perry. But proceed with caution. We appear to be stumbling into something far greater than we originally thought.”

  Whimsby suddenly rocked to a halt.

  Perry blinked and looked at the building next to them. “Is this it?” A hole had been smashed into the side of the building. Darkness lay beyond.

  “Yes. It appears Teran may have had an unwelcome visitor, but it’s gone now. Go through that breach. Find the door that has a stairwell leading down. You’ll eventually find Teran. Go quickly, the other Guardians are coming for me. I’m going to lead them away from you.”

  Perry stepped down, then looked back at the hulking machine. “Whimsby…”

  “Yes, you’re welcome. I already said so. Now, go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE SOURCE

  The door was easy enough to find.

  Stuber and Sagum played their weaponlights over the stark interior of the building. It had the appearance of something that had been constructed out of its time. It did not look like the rest of the East Ruins.

  The structure was plain concrete walls, like it had been poured into its current shape, rather than constructed out of blocks. In the wreckage of the entrance that had been smashed in by Teran’s “unwanted visitor,” Perry saw things that were both ancient, and also beyond the technology he was currently familiar with. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but he got the impression that this rather small interior had been a security checkpoint of some sort. He saw reinforced alcoves where he could imagine guards had once stood, able to provide overlapping fields of fire on some sort of contraption in the center that, though it had been toppled and half-buried in the rubble, looked to Perry like some sort of arch.

  A type of scanner, perhaps?

  And beyond the scanner, and the guard alcoves, there was only one other way out of this place, and it sat dead center in the wall opposite them.

  Stuber seemed to have come to the same conclusion that Perry had. “Whatever they buried at the end of this tunnel, they didn’t want anyone getting to it.”

  Whimsby piped up from the collar around Sagum’s neck: “I’m not entirely sure that it is being used for its original purpose. Which is to say, I think it was created by humans to house one thing, and appropriated by the All-Kind to house something else.”

  The ground trembled beneath Perry’s feet. He glanced at Sagum’s collar. “Whimsby, are you okay?”

  “Oh, yes. For now. That was just a little explosion. I’m dealing with it.”

  “Alright, we’re moving to the door.”

  Stuber waited until they had all positioned themselves on the door, and then swung it open. Sagum pointed his weaponlight into it and strode forward. A narrow corridor led steeply downward. The light barely penetrated the end of the stairwell, about a hundred steps down.

  Stuber led the way into the stairwell, because he was the only one with ammunition in his rifle. Sagum’s was little more than a flashlight at that point. Perry went next, and Sagum followed behind.

  They descended into the darkness. More explosions came from overhead, but the deeper they went, the more muted those sounds became. The air in the place became heavy. Dank. Cold. The walls seemed tight and close, and every rumble that came to them from the battle on the surface of the East Ruins made Perry wonder how structurally sound this tunnel was, and whether it would eventually collapse on them.

  Experimentally, he tested his shield.

  It came up, partially recharged. About a third of its normal strength. He stowed it, hoping it would recuperate more. He wasn’t sure what lay ahead of them, but he was sure that he wanted his shield available.

  At the bottom of the stairs, perhaps thirty feet below the surface, they were met with a long, straight corridor that plunged into the underbelly of the city. Their lights would not reach the end of it.

  “Where’s Teran?” Perry whispered, not sure why, only that he felt a great, monumental weight bearing down on him, like the attention of something beyond his comprehension, and it made him feel like a thief in the lair of giants.

  Stuber prodded his rifle forward, the weaponlight bobbing. “Hopefully down there somewhere.”

  They continued on, cautious at first, but as it became clear that this corridor stretched for a very long time, they began to pick up the pace until they jogged along, sweating despite the cold, tomb-like air, the madness of the seemingly-endless tunnel spiking every primal emotion of being in a place they should not be, and from which they might never get out.

  After what felt like nearly a mile of jogging along, Stuber’s weaponlight illuminated a pale figure in the distance.

  “Teran?” Perry called out, speeding up again.

  She stood, blinking against their bright lights, her arms wrapped around herself. “Gods! What took you so long?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Perry said as they drew closer. “Fighting demigods, battling Guardians. The usual. Are you okay?”

  Teran rubbed her arms. “It’s fucking freezing down here.”

  In the glow of Stuber’s weaponlight, Perry saw her breath steam in the air.

  As the group drew to a stop beside Teran, Perry grabbed her by the shoulders, giving her a rapid inspection. The relief that he felt upon seeing her, and now putting his hands on her, as though to make sure that she was real—it was bigger than he could wrap his head around. “Are you okay? Are you wounded?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m okay. Your face look’s a little crispy. And gods, Sagum! What happened to your leg?”

  Sagum gave her a shaky smile. “Well, it wasn’t fair that you all got so banged up in The Clouds, so I decided to let some shrapnel tear up my leg. You know. For solidarity.”

  Perry forced himself to remove his hands from Teran’s shoulders. She was okay. She was here. She was whole. And what he felt in that moment was…well, it was just the same as he felt for the others, right? He was just as relieved to see her alive and kicking as he’d be for any of his other friends.

  Yeah. There was no difference. None at all.

  Stuber moved past them, playing his beam over what stood at the end of the tunnel. A massive door, vaultlike i
n appearance. It took up the entire tunnel, from wall to wall, and gave the impression of being as thick as it was wide.

  “Well.” Stuber sniffed and wiped his nose on his wrist. “Teran, I’m assuming you haven’t figured out how to open this.”

  Teran looked at it. “First time I’m seeing it in the light. I’ve been groping along in the dark here for thirty minutes. There’s a keypad over to the right there, but I didn’t want to press any buttons. I wasn’t sure if entering the wrong code would…I don’t know…cause the whole place to blow up?”

  Stuber bobbled his head. “That’s a fair assumption. Can’t be too careful.”

  Perry approached the door, casting his gaze over it. There were no manual controls on the door itself. Only the small keypad, inset into the wall on the right side of the door. A single red light shone at the top of the keypad.

  “Well,” Perry stepped up to the keypad. “It’s still got power running to it somehow. I guess that’s a good sign?”

  Sagum limped to Perry’s side, wiping cold sweat from his brow and propping his illuminated rifle on the wall so that it cast its beam on the keypad. “Whimsby, are you still with us?”

  “Yes. I’m here. Not sure for how much longer—these Guardians seem to be quite irritated with me.”

  Sagum leaned forward, running a hand across the wall around the keypad, as though divining something from it. “We’re at the end of the tunnel. There’s a huge door. One keypad. Alphanumeric. As well as some symbols I’ve never seen before.”

  “Very well,” Whimsby replied. “I may be able to hack into it if you can open the panel and somehow plug me in using the collar you made. Can you get the panel open?”

  Perry watched as Sagum ran his long, thin fingers around the edges of the panel. There were no screws, no attachment points. The keypad itself appeared to be made of steel, and buried into the concrete.

  Eventually Sagum shook his head. “I don’t think there’s a way to get the panel open. It’s cemented in place.”