by Prax Venter
“This hivemind wields magnetic fields,” Angel responded as she hovered forward in front of Abby.
“What do I say to it?” Learis yelled, pulling one of the dozen or so wooden arrows she had packed into her quiver.
Jezebel held out her hand as they drew close, causing translucent green vines to snap upward from the reflective platform below. Her high-level spell violently jerked the bot motionless as they skidded to a stop close by. Mark was about to respond to Learis with something unhelpful when the Lagomorph-shaped drone spoke first. It opened its metal muzzle and produced white circles of impossibly fast waves straight at its soft counterpart. To Mark’s emotional antenna, its attack was specifically drawn to Learis’s voice.
Amina was already in position and projected her purple energy forward to intercept the sonic blast, but the waves knocked her backward. Learis hopped around Amina’s tail as she drew her bow, her focus irrevocably locked on this doppelganger perversion. Mark noticed her small mouth was open as she fired and apparently didn’t need super hearing to perceive her trill.
His seasoned eye absorbed the collapsing waves she sent outward canceling the robot’s audio attack. The arrow glided in an instant behind and punctured a speaker inside its mouth causing a final ear-splitting peal. Then, there was only the whine of its internal engines fighting against Jezebel’s snare magic.
Sasha and Mark both dashed in to end it quickly, but he slowed his steps. With a mental slap to the brain, Mark reminded himself that this group needed a “Commander”.
The Techno Succubus ended things swiftly enough with a Charged Side Kick hoof directly into the arrow Learis had planted in its mouth. The blades on its hands whirred until whatever residual energy it held drained from its body.
Essence poured into him from the silver drone’s defeat, and in that moment, his ability to see the pinpoint tears throughout reality burst outward past the confines of his mind. Black and white colors pulsed before him from countless tiny holes. This hivemind existed as sentient, dual-polarity energy, and it was leaking in everywhere like a sea of one billion synchronized heartbeats.
“More,” Amina said, and Mark turned to see two other invading drones sprinting forward. The nude salamander coated her body in sleek translucent armor before sprinting to intercept the attackers.
“Take left,” he called out as Abby began targeting the other with her Mind Crush.
“My mind abilities are partially resisted!” the Abyssal Horror yelled out then began chanting her longer spell. Learis stayed close behind Amina as she pulled another arrow from her quiver. This one bounced off its plated shoulder, but her silent sound attack still had a noticeable effect on the magnetism bot.
More clanking from behind drew his focus toward three more dashing 256 steps per minute.
“Fall back!” Mark ordered and sent the updated plan to his Enthralled; there was no doubt that they’d pulled the entire hive on them, and it was time to evacuate.
Sasha responded by hurling a shock bomb, while Angel and Jezebel moved to help Amina disengage or destroy those she’d confronted. Jumping into the fray himself would not save them, so Mark dashed back toward the portal escape route to the Centaur Technocracy’s outpost.
“Get through now!” he shouted after ripping open a portal between simulated worlds.
Verrelle went first. Then Angel, Learis, and Amina. Jezebel disabled three as a falling stone bear then made a U-turn and flew through the portal as she morphed back into a relatively smaller satyr. Abby used the synergy of her new Mind Fuck and Mind Crush abilities to implode one of the drones right behind Sasha while his Techno Succubus used her Static Escape to put up a wall a few feet in front of Mark. She then tucked back her wings and was the last to hop through.
Saving his defensive bubble, Mark sidestepped into the abandoned Centaur lab a few seconds before the many screeching mouths and blender-hands were close enough to matter.
Then, the perfect stillness and silence of the vast greenhouse devoid of equipment loomed around them. Mark took a deep breath as he counted seven monster women heads.
“That was too close,” he whispered, his eyes subconsciously moving his gaze to Verrelle who was already rummaging through the lab.
“We had a good Commander,” Jezebel said before moving to both protect and join the Blazar princess.
“How are we ever going to stop them?” Learis said, not really seeing the high-tech oversized facility around them. “Do we just round up a line of my people and trill at it again? Like we did with the crystals spreading into our farm.”
Mark frowned. “Hmm, who knows.”
“We would need hundreds of Lagomorphs to all be in perfect sync,” Jezebel said. “Keeping them safe while pulling that off might be out of the question. Good thinking though.”
“Where are we again?” Learis asked as she slowed her racing heart and took time to scan the abandoned lab.
Jezebel answered. “We’re back in the dimension where you were born, Learis- and Amina. I don’t know where we are in relation to your old villages, but we are close in the place where the Orb of Power had remained for generations.”
“Until we snatched it back to Lagos,” Abby added with a grin as she pointed a tentacle toward the distant Orb Fortress through a window. The final rays of the setting sun stretched deep shadows over everything on the ground, but this metal layer-cake stood out as the top half of the enormous structure was still awash in orange brilliance.
- 15 -
“Yup,” Sasha sighed. “I hurled my counter-attack Shock Bomb into that bitch’s face as she stood next to the explosive power transport. A lot of people died. Another horrible mistake.”
Mark looked over his shoulder to see his Techno Succubus side-lit by Jezebel’s wings as the group moved through total darkness. The centaur people preferred huge hallways and doorways but even though they had a visual advantage, with no lights, it didn’t really matter. Not to mention the discarded packaging materials and equipment. There were still plenty of places to be ambushed as they made their way through this mile-long complex of interconnected laboratories.
“They attacked us first,” Mark said as he faced forward and located Abby’s green cutout through the computer-laden walls ahead as she scouted. “And some mistakes are accidents,” he added.
“I agree with Mark,” Princess Verrelle said. “I read a treatise on the power of intent written by Second Argmax to the… never mind- by an ancient Blazar some consider incredibly wise. He said that the only thing that mattered when it came to judgment was intent, and that if we could always see one another’s true intent, intelligence in the universe would achieve its ultimate potential.”
Mark could tell Sasha was on the fence, but Amina and Learis seemed to be sold on the philosophy.
Jezebel was more practical. “Your scholar’s views make a lot of sense when you consider his whole existence was created with a special reactive quality to personal intent. It has the strongest effect on what you’d consider magic, but it has a way of leaking into everything. This effect is not the case outside of this simulated world, however.”
“As far as we know…” Sasha added.
Jezebel turned her emerald eyes on the succubus. “Sweety, I’ve run more tests on the physical laws of reality than can be expressed as a comprehensible number. If human intent shaped the real world, I would have to adjust what currently fits together neatly in order to account for the existence of such a truly unknowable force.”
“There’s no magic of any kind where Mark was born, correct?” Princess Verrelle said as she swerved her glowing snake body around a pile of empty crates. “Oooh, would I love to get my eyes on a library from the ‘real-world’, as you call it. History must have been so much more… visceral.”
“That’s a fairly accurate summation,” Sasha said with an arched brow.
“So, let me get this world’s events clear,” Learis whispered in the darkness after a few steps of silence. “After that failed escort quest, you then use
d Mark’s ability from here to move the Orb of Power back to my home world?
Mark was about to answer when he felt a twinge of fear from Abby. Sasha felt it too and instantly deployed her chrome plates.
“No,” he whispered as he stopped and held up a fist. “We just opened a nearby door, and the orb came home on its own. Also, Abby’s found something.”
All conversation died, and all the women around him dropped low to the ground right after he did. Jezebel shut off her glowing wings, but Princess Verrelle’s red serpent body still let off enough luminescence to wash a good six feet of metal floor in every direction with a deep sanguine hue.
“Scavengers,” Abby reported after scurrying back to her team. “Cybernetically enhanced weasel-creatures digging into a wall with tools emitting sparks and flame. I believe they may be blind, but my Mind Cloud clouded their minds, regardless.”
Angel decided to engage her anti-gravity fields, lifting her tapered shins from any further clicking against the corridor.
“Can we go around?” Mark whispered, pointing toward a wide, downward ramp nearby.
Angel answered at half volume. “Scans and architecture-extrapolation predict a viable path one level down.”
“Below ground level?” Jezebel asked. “I’d rather go up over them. Maybe we should just fly everyone over to Orb Fort.”
“We passed conveyer belts that went back up,” Sasha said, nodding a horn back the way they’d come. “Oh shit!” she hissed, and Mark turned to see distant amber lights bouncing in the pitch-black hallway behind them.
He had no idea what they were or if they were attached to anything hostile. Verrelle was hiding behind some discarded crates, but both her and Amina always gave off light, and he had to keep that in mind. With a twist of his wrist, Mark summoned a small energy blade to his palm and noted the True Strike glowing forms hobbling through the darkness.
At first, they were only short, lurching humanoid shapes, yet Abby’s mind pressed against his and layered her observations. These two approaching matched the other race she’d seen scavenging ahead of them. With Abby’s frame of reference copied over his mind, the distant glowing points now indicated their powered implants, most of which were part of their large heads.
“Cyber weasels…” Mark sighed under his breath.
The plan was not to be seen here, so he ruled out simply standing up and talking to these scavengers. Something was off about them, though. His eye whispered of shadows… Lies.
“Let’s go down,” he commanded. “Something isn’t right here.”
Abby and Angel scouted down the ramp once they’d all moved across the hall and through an over-sized railing. Mark imagined centaurs arguing about the results of data while dressed in lab coats clomping to work where he was now. And, despite their best efforts, Jezebel and Sasha’s hooves were currently clicking against the metal way too loudly.
Mark kept his energy blade hidden in his palm as he kept his blind eye on the two creatures in the hallway above. Without stopping, Abby and Angel led them into a random room several doors deep into a side hallway, and one by one, the whole party filtered in to hide. Everything in the dim room was a foot too high, and the others waited quietly around a central metallic table as if they were about to discuss a new company policy or yesterday’s lacking sales numbers.
Sasha, Jezebel, and his abyssal horror were close, with Angel always positioned halfway between Abby and any perceived danger. Amina and Learis were near each other, both compact springs ready to burst through whatever stood in their way.
Verrelle was trying to hide her terror by being overly interested in a blank display screen embedded in a nearby wall.
He should have left her at the Lagomorph village back on Lagos until they knew she could move safely. Having the princess along seemed like an unnecessary risk. Yet, Salivis bid him take her with as they set the Goddess Anchors between three interwoven dimensions, and Mark had to hope his patron oral deity knew what the fuck she was doing.
The two shapes illuminated above by his True Strike ability kept moving along the hallway, but their movements felt more and more wrong as he watched. When they were at the ramp, Mark’s mental antenna perceived the flavor of their anxiety as trying to act normal.
“They know we’re here,” Mark whispered and everyone around him tensed.
“Will they attack?” Princess Verrelle whispered as she sprouted glowing thin poles like spider’s legs and lowered herself behind the table. Despite having zero combat abilities and spending most of her life in a ruby wheelchair, she was quickly becoming the most agile of those who couldn’t fly.
“Should we run for it?” Learis asked, her angular head pointed toward the exit. Sitting under all this structure was against her nature. Like Amina, she craved the sky overhead.
“They are pretending to not know we’re here,” Abby added, her eyes closed. To Mark and his Enthralled, it was clear she was seeing through him.
“That’s much worse,” Sasha hissed.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said and as soon as Mark peeked out into the hallway, every open door in the place began to close.
“Run!” he yelled pointing down the technology-infused hallway now flickering back to life.
Everyone rushed to get out, and if Verrelle hadn’t scrambled her many glowing legs over the top of the table in a straight line and then slid her torso under the shrinking exit, she might not have made it out in time.
Jezebel launched off the ground and lit a large area with her wings as she and Angel led the way out. The tech-infused corridor was still open ahead, but many of the rooms and minor side passages connecting to this main hallway sealed closed at the same time with a final, pressurized hiss.
Then a calm, soft-spoken male voice echoed from every corner of the enormous facility.
“You think we didn’t hear you trying to sneak out of Arclight? Oh no, we heard. We already knew what we had before we heard the succubus recant certain damning events, making it certain. We came here for scrap but let me tell you, Collector Mark, what exactly we have found instead.”
“Mother fucking looad,” someone far less intelligent shouted behind what had to be a microphone in a room with several of these weasel scavengers.
Then, as he feared, light from Jezebel’s wings finally hit a wall blocking their path labeled ‘Emergency Bulkhead’. He shot looks to the others as he tried to put together exactly how trapped they were. The soft-spoken weasel waited for his riled-up cohorts to settle down before he continued.
“I’ll tell you what we found. Godhood.”
“Can we hack the door or something?” Mark said, moving most of his focus away from the speaker and toward finding a way out for his team. They just needed to keep moving in one direction and-
“Also,” the cyber weasel continued over speakers embedded in every wall. “If this Maliah person does not come through, we still get to sell this audio-visual data to the Centaur Technocracy. The thieves of legend killed by abandoned experiments. The poetry is so utterly profound. The rewards are utterly incalculable.”
“Killed by experiments?!” Learis shouted to the ceiling. “Let us out of here!”
Angel, Amina, and Bear-Jezebel were all unable to physically affect the slab of metal sealing off their way forward.
“You think it’s smart to fuck with The Thieves of Legend?” Sasha snarled into the air.
“This will not end well for you,” Abby added, her voice ominous.
Mark spun to see that they had two corridors still open, one to the left and right, when Sasha’s Arc-Charged Side Kick clanged against the blockage and a tremendous gong sound echoed through the hallways like rolling thunder. The time he spent as a Vulpath with incredible hearing must have left an imprint on his mind as the vague hollowness of the hallways around them filled his mind. It was nothing as clear as a map, but a faint sense of thinner walls.
“Loud noises won’t save you,” the calm voice whispered over the speakers.
He turned to the left and stalked forward as he continued to speak. “Verrelle, you stay in the middle of the group. Learis and Amina, please protect her. Jez, Angel, keep an eye out for weak spots. Or anything that could help, like a working terminal.”
“There is danger here in either dimension,” Amina said as she quickly moved into position by his side. “A structure of metal around the Orb in both places. I see many mirrors between worlds.”
Mark was about to agree when they dashed into a junction that served as a four-way hub between larger research sections. They needed to head right to get to the Orb Fort, but there was another emergency block in place sealing off that direction.
“I detect movement,” Angel said as she hovered toward the hallway on the opposite side.
Everyone surrounded Princess Verrelle as Mark turned to face the darkness beyond the faulty lights flickering ahead. He produced a small blade to see what they were dealing with, and the moment he did, red snake-like tubes squirming on the ground were converging on their location. Lots of them.
Mark’s mind spun through his options. He realized that he didn’t want to open a portal to Lagos if they were being recorded by these scavengers. That was data he did not want to get into the wrong hands.
Flickers of ideas came to him from Jezebel and Abby, but it was when he turned to see Verrelle had learned to coat her body in a skin-tight layer of protective energy, that an idea struck him. He looked down at his own thin blade and then dashed over to the emergency barrier that had come down to block their path.
“Cover him,” Jezebel ordered as she shifted to a bear and joined Angel in the middle of the intersection.
It didn’t take long to find a tiny place he could wedge a thin projection of Goddess energy under the obstruction, and with Sasha launching her first Shock Bomb into the hallway behind him, Mark forced his solid light to act like a position under the emergency sliding door.
It wasn’t a physical act, but the act of wielding this energy was directly tied to an individual’s strength of will. The pressure built up in his skull as he forced as much power as Salivis could feed him and yet the emergency barrier lifted less than half an inch into the air.