Descend- Coming Together

by David Burke

  Tyler however wasn’t so happy with her proclamation. “Wait one damn minute. That isn’t what you told me. You said that you were going to use your influence to get me named leader as long as I promised to make you my number one. Then I was supposed to get the rest of the girls.”

  Jasmine laughed. “I also said you might have to fight Jay for control. Take one look at him and tell me how you think you are supposed to take him on. You have only just passed into the second threshold and from the look of things he has passed into the third.”

  “Well, I didn’t think I would actually have to fight him. He can keep his four women and go somewhere else,” Tyler said.

  That prompted grumbling from the other girls. “No, don't send Jay away. Who will lead us? Who will protect us?”

  Tyler turned on them. “Just shut up. I am going to be the leader here.”

  Again Jasmine laughed. She looked at Huong and said, “You have Assessment now. What do you see when you assess Tyler?”

  Huong answered in her clinical, scientist voice, “Level 16 mid-range beta male. Viable mate.”

  “I’m no beta. I’m an alpha,” Tyler sputtered. “I’ve got my own harem.”

  The women ignored him and Jasmine asked, “And what about when you assess Jay?”

  “Level 37 Supreme Alpha Male, most desirable mate.”

  “You see, Tyler, how you can compare with that. So just be a good boy and do what I say. That way you can still get Jay’s table scraps,” Jasmine said. All the mirth was gone from her voice as she sounded dead serious.

  Tyler’s face was beet red, but he still managed to draw his sword. He stepped out and shouted out an order and the four girls who were still faithful to him moved with him but only after receiving a nod from Jasmine.

  “Well, looks like there is going to be a fight after all,” Jasmine said. “Jay, he has four helpers, you can pick four girls to join you as long as they aren’t from what you call Team Jay. Time to bring in some fresh blood, so to speak.”

  “You have been setting this all up. Don’t think I don’t see through you. I’m not here to kill other humans. There already are too few of us.”

  “Whatever, even if I am, I can feel you starting to give in. This is all for the good of the race. Only the strong are worthy of living and there are none stronger than you and I. You are the brawn to my brain. Together we will rule over all the clusters,” Jasmine said. Jay looked at her closely and realized that she was serious. She must genuinely think that this was the best course of action.

  Chapter 25- Enemies from the Stars

  Jay looked around assessing his options, but then it all became moot. There was the sound of metal being ripped apart, that same screeching that was so distinctive. All eyes looked up and Jay more than any was shocked.

  A beam of light seemed to descend from the sky above. It was as though a hole had been ripped in the sky. Out of that hole a man-shaped creature came floating down, almost like dust motes in the sunlight as it streams in when a curtain is pulled back.

  Jay’s attention was torn between the gaping wound of a hole in the sky that wasn’t closing up. It was a very Truman Show moment for him as he realized that all those weird feelings he had suffered with over the past few weeks were true. The sky was not the sky. It was a metal dome of sorts.

  The other part of his attention fell on the newcomer. He hit the ground with more impact than Jay had expected and adopted a stooped-over posture with both hands against the ground just as much as his feet. Then pushing himself up, Jay saw what he could only call a cyborg.

  There were clearly organic parts. The man or thing or whatever it was must have been ten feet tall and had a light-bluish tint to his skin. The skin that was showing though didn’t look healthy at all but more like a corpse. At least 80% of his body and head were covered in technology, from a missing hand that appeared to be a weapon to a cybernetic eye.

  It appeared that his dream and the notification had both been telling the truth. There were now invaders in wherever they were being kept for this experiment. Jay performed a quick assessment, and the data came back as:

  Designation: UnknownRace: Forlorn

  Type: Warrior modelRating: Extreme Danger- do not engage

  All test subjects should flee if confronted by any of the Forlorn.

  Warriors exist to crush the enemies of the Forlorn and allow their Overminds

  to absorb more technological or organic matter into their service.

  That wasn’t very promising, but Jay couldn’t afford to delay. The creature had landed not more than a dozen feet from the back of their group. Both Jay and Jasmine acted at the same time. Jay acted to erect a psionic construct in the form of a wall behind the group, while Jasmine used her power to order Tyler to attack the creature.

  Jay felt sick to his stomach as the fear on the man’s face was evident. He might be an asshat but he was still a human being and as far as Jay knew she was sending him and the four girls to their deaths. That however didn’t stop them from obeying her.

  “Amelia, Huong, Meikiyo, Jessie, Mia, come with me. Any of the rest of you that want to live follow us to the dungeon.”

  Jay’s voice shook some of them back to alertness while others just started to scream in terror. Tyler and his group struck the creature with everything they had. A flurry of electrical blasts, flying stone discs, and some strange liquid blasted into it. None of the attacks made any contact with the creature as it had some sort of personal force field that stopped everything mere inches from its body.

  It didn’t utter a single sound as it raised the arm which ended in a weapon and fired a blast of brilliant green energy. Tyler’s group was already on the far side of Jay’s barrier so there was no defense for them. The ray struck Tyler and latched onto him for the span of a breath; the man seemed to hang on and then was dissipated like so much dust in the wind.

  The girls with him screamed but before they could even move the creature charged among them. It blasted another with the same bright-green ray while its organic hand grabbed and broke the neck of the nearest girl. The last two turned to run, but the creature showed no mercy. It shot down one and then the other.

  Fortunately by this point most of the girls were already running towards the ziggurat. Jay kept his barrier moving behind them and hoped it was wide enough to shield them all.

  The cyborg moved quickly but not in a run. Its walking pace was simply fast and purposeful. It called out now for the first time, “Escape is pointless. We are inevitable.” Jay couldn’t help but draw immediate comparisons to the Borg of Star Trek fame. If nothing else the diction and tone of voice was much the same.

  When it did fire at the running group, its green beam struck Jay’s construct. He felt an immediate backlash and strangely enough heard Mia’s voice cry out in pain. He looked back at her but was sure the attack had not penetrated his shield.

  The creature seemed even more baffled by that. It raised the weapon arm again and fired another blast. Actually there were three fired in quick succession. None of them lasted for more than half a second but they hit different portions of the shield.

  With each blast, Jay felt a bit of pain and a minor drain on his PSI reserves, but strangely enough felt quite able to keep this up. In fact, by the third blast he would have called it discomfort more than pain.

  The cyborg stopped moving and seemed to be trying to scan or assess them. Half the girls were already running up the stairs of the ziggurat, when the creature pulled something off its back and shot a projectile up and over them in an arc.

  Jay reacted assuming that it was an attack to land amongst the girls and kill them. Since he didn’t know what the weapon did, he didn’t take a chance at trying to divert it with kinetic dampening. Instead he just put up a second barrier over their heads, relying up his PSI reserves to be enough.

  This time though he had misconstrued the cyborg’s intent for the projectile flew over the barrier and struck at the doorway leading into the top of
the ziggurat. When it reached its target, it expanded or rather unfolded with a clanking metallic sound. It formed a seal that completely blocked the doorway with a dull gray metal.

  Then it started to fire a concentrated beam at Jay’s barrier. This time the stabbing pain returned to his head, and he was forced to drop the overhead barrier. Then as the assault kept up, he kept shrinking the size of the barrier that he was maintaining. He had to push the construct to level four but while it was little more than six foot by six foot, it was holding.

  For a solid minute the creature maintained the beam and Jay began to worry about who would run out of energy first. Then without warning it angled the beam away from Jay’s barrier and fired for one of the unprotected humans.

  Jay felt an almost overwhelming sense of danger. He had never had his passive precognitive ability go off like this with danger to another person but in his mind’s eye he saw the path of the beam and that it was being strafed so that it would first hit two of the girls with Miguel and then would hit Amelia.

  He tried to burst into speed charging forward while sending a new psionically constructed wall in front of the strafing beam. As fast as Jay was though he was no match for a weapon that traveled at the speed of light.

  Jay saw Amelia dissipate into so many motes of light. The intensity of the beam was so great that she didn’t even get a chance to cry out, but he would have sworn that there was a look of fear on her face as she made the briefest moments of eye contact with him. Yet for all that she trusted in him, he had failed to save her.

  “No!” Jay’s scream echoed his internal monologue. “This would not stand.”

  In desperation, Jay’s mind reached out for a completely untested ability, Temporal Manipulation. He didn’t know how it would work. He only knew that it had to work. He cared too much about Amelia to see her fall like that.

  His first thought was to travel back in time, but he had no idea how to do that. As he focused on the ability though, he saw that there were flows of something all around him. Like waves radiating off of everything.

  In that altered state, Jay saw Amelia being disintegrated and saw her just before that moment. Perhaps traveling back in time was too much. Maybe though he could nudge things. Instead of trying to reach back he just tried to hit rewind.

  Everyone else continued to move as they had been but for perhaps three seconds, Amelia, or more specifically those fluxes of energy flowing off of her, reversed and she was pulled back to an earlier state. The beam had just passed through her but still she reformed where she had been standing.

  Jay didn’t know what it felt like to Amelia but to him it looked like she had been blasted into atoms and then reassembled a second later.

  It must have appeared the same to the cyborg for he stopped firing. In fact it stopped doing anything for half a dozen seconds. Jay kept an eye on it but rushed to Amelia.

  She smiled and said, “Wow that was close. I could have sworn it was gonna shoot me.”

  Rather than trying to explain Jay took on his most commanding voice, “Listen to me. I don’t care if you disagree. Right now I’m the only one with a chance. I need you to work with Daphne to extend your shroud to cover all of you and then hide. I will try to buy you as much time as possible.”

  If it had been a movie undoubtedly, she would have fallen into his arms as they passionately kissed. The enemy would have of course kindly waited for their tender moment to be over. Instead, as much as her expression said she didn’t like it, Amelia was pragmatic enough to recognize the truth of what Jay was ordering and sprang into action.

  Freed up, Jay moved to attack the creature before it got its bearings or sorted out whatever was confusing it. As he charged forward, he heard Amelia say something about death not being a valid excuse for missing their wedding.

  Jay ramped up his speed, strength, and body hardening all to level three. He wasn’t sure how long the fight was going to last but he wanted to be both empowered and able to hang in for the long haul. At the same time he kept a Psionic Construct in the form of a transparent wall between him and the enemy. Adding to that the strain from upping his Precognition and he was draining PSI fast.

  He had never been happier than now for extra levels and stats which had increased the size of his PSI pool. Then he got a pleasant surprise. Mia established a Shared Potential link with him. A part of him was frustrated that she wasn’t getting further away, but he was very glad for the extra 40 points it provided him in Formation. The boost to the power of his constructs was going to be noticeable and of course it added 400 more PSI to his reserves.

  Through the bond with her, he could feel both her fear for his safety and her confidence in his ability. It was strangely intoxicating that he didn’t sense any fear for herself in her. She truly believed he could take the cyborg down.

  Jay wondered if he should shout out some kind of battle cry or maybe give it an ultimatum to leave them in peace or he would turn it into pieces. Those thoughts came and went quickly though as he realized that this was real life, not a TV show.

  So thanks to the extra energy he had just gotten he charged forward while forming a long PSI blade. His wall construct took a couple green blasts of energy and then he was upon his foe. He slashed with the blade and felt it meet resistance from whatever the field was around the creature.

  Still the blade did manage to make its way through and scored a shallow line against the metallic leg of the creature. He was far off the mark he had aimed for as the blow had been diverted by the shield. The creature moved slowly and didn’t seem too concerned about Jay even though he had proven able to counter its energy blasts and actually penetrate its shield.

  Its own lackadaisical attitude worried him as much as anything. Finally it spoke again in that same dead voice, “Stop fighting. You will only harm yourself. We will study you. Alive or dead does not matter. All are just states of existence. You are already part of the universal order, you just don’t know it yet.”

  Jay didn’t bother to answer as he sent a flurry of sword blows at it. He felt like some of the knowledge he had gained when Mia had uploaded his mind with martial arts had stuck. His movements were more precise with less wasted action. His power was more focused into each strike as he combined both PSI and Stamina for maximum effect.

  He had already tried to scan it with Life Sense but it all showed up as dead matter. There was no life force within it, not even in the organic parts. At least nothing that he could detect.

  It just continued to fight him slowly but steadily, not seeming to be in any rush despite the fact that he was slowly cutting it up. That was when he realized he was being played for a fool. It wasn’t fighting to win. It has as much as told him that it would capture and study him. That must mean it was waiting for reinforcements. That was not good.

  Jay was gonna have to up his game. He thought of using his Temporal Manipulation, but decided against it. It was a new skill, and he didn’t understand how it worked at all. He had only used it instinctively to save Amelia and because there were no other options.

  He decided to go old school on this one. He shrunk his psi barrier and charged in while forming a second psi blade in his other hand. His rush caught the creature off-guard apparently and sent it stumbling backwards. Given that he had hit it with the force of a small truck it must be inordinately strong.

  His first blade sliced through the shield leaving a light mark across its legs, but his second blade followed the path of the first. That brief opening in the shield was all that he needed to slice off the creature's left leg. It was unnerving that even as it fell backward and the leg went in the opposite direction that there was no scream, no blood, and no signs that it had even been injured except what he saw with his own eyes.

  Not so for him. He cursed himself for a fool as when it fell down a burst of green energy came up under his barrier and blasted him square in the gut. He cried out in pain as it felt like his body was ripping itself apart. The very essence of his being was bei
ng drained into the blackened tissue. His chainmail had provided no defense.

  He immediately dropped his strength and speed as he focused all of his Stamina into Hardened Body, trying to stabilize himself. Jay reached out a hand and forced a PSI construct as a cap over the enemy’s weapon, something he should have thought of before. Maybe it was the fact that he was sure he was dying but he had a greater level of clarity than ever before.

  He formed a dozen small blades in the air as he dropped his barrier and started each of the blades spinning by fluctuating his kinetic dampening field and then accelerated them all. This task would have been far beyond him yesterday, or even this morning. The extra power that he was sharing with Mia was all that was getting him through. That and an Iron Will that said he would not allow this monstrosity to harm his girls.