Hardy informed us, “The outline of the vessel closely resembles the projectiles that destroyed the Vixen and forced the Wanderer to jump, captain.”
A few seconds after the report was pronounced, the unnatural presence halted near the inner city boundary a mile to the northwest. It next steadily inclined itself until the narrowest end of its drill was pointing at the ground. The ship then descended straight down like a black lightning bolt. It twisted its entire form as it did so, as if it had suddenly lost control of its engines, though it was clearly a controlled action. It tore through the urban ground with ease, its penetrating feat trembling our skyscraper, and it shortly interred itself some two hundred feet. With our enhanced sight, we could next make out dozens of glistening objects exit a newly unfastened section of the crossbar that ran its entire length. These frighteningly familiar objects fearlessly plummeted to the ground eight hundred feet below and vanished inside the expanding cloud of sand and dust.
“Gods, are those more of those cloaked machines?” inquired the doctor.
Stated as though we were in nothing more than a training session, the captain pragmatically ordered, “Find every entryway to this floor and setup what explosives you can there. I’ll place the last of my charges on the scout. Doctor, I recommend sticking by Vasilissa for the duration of our time here.”
Even with my comparative inexperience, I was fully capable of transitioning into that autopilot phase any half-decent warrior could muster when the situation called for it. This situation called for it. I didn’t ponder on the fact that hundreds of ghost-machines were bent on giving us the cursed future Emory’s body testified to; there was only finding the stairways, the elevator shafts, the principal hallways, and placing the last of the explosives I carried inside them. Once we setup what we could, we made our way up to the uppermost floor ten stories above. It was here I really began to fixate on every vibration I could perceive, trying to decipher the familiar agitations that made me feel like I needed a toilet. I was lucky to live in a time when the nanotech in someone’s body could allay the buildup of bodily waste for a few days and not have it come out all at once after some trauma. A persistent howling of Ember’s hot-blooded wind lacerated through the splintered walls and unglassed windows, providing the only audible discourse in our inexorable wait. At times, a powerful gust would hiss through a narrow crevice, making it seem as though the building was protesting our company. The shadows became fuller within the next seven minutes, the ambivalent star allowing them to consume its world as it buried itself behind the ocean skyline.
Ultimately, the scout made us aware of the recongregating puppets circling the block, both in the sky and air. These organic stalkers kept their distance, but the escalating scale of the pulses beneath me broadcasted who the real hunters were. When I informed my comrades that it wouldn’t be much longer, we shuffled into a reasonably solid chamber in the northeastern corner of the floor, which was bare except for an assembly of rusted metal chair stands surrounding an empty space in the middle of the room. When I estimated our wraithlike foes were close enough to the scornfully-laid mines, Kiran set them off. The fragile structure wobbled and grumbled, but we knew we didn’t have sufficient explosives to actually bring down the high-rise as before. There was no sure way to tell how many, or if any, of the synthetic-thinkers were destroyed, but if our enemy did suffer any losses, they didn’t stop to mourn them.
With their unceasing charge telling us our time up in the skyline was over, the captain said, “We’re heading east when we reach ground level.”
“How are we going to reach ground level?” asked Dr. Oleson.
“You’re going to have to hold on to me, doctor,” said Vasilissa. “We’re going to make a jump for it.”
The doctor’s half opened mouth looked primed to ask for clarification, but Kiran saying, “Briannika, you’re with me,” suspended her questioning indefinitely.
Without any fanfare, the captain and the talorian walked out into gravity’s unobstructed domain, treating the seven hundred foot plunge as if it was nothing more than seven feet, and for a capable arcanist, it essentially was. I executed the leap of faith next, with my last glimpse of the room being the eldrick clasping the wide-eyed doctor by the waist. I enjoyed the freefall, having the notion I was safest going as fast as I could go. Of course, I was well aware that any decent sniper with a high-powered rifle could pick me off from three miles away if they chose to make all my memories little more than a red smear on the wall behind me. About three hundred feet below me, I saw Kiran begin to warp the air around himself and his subordinate. With some swirling dust caught in the churning draft, I was able to see that the manipulated atmosphere was being used to create a miniature, highly intense vortex around the duo. This mock whirlwind extended for several feet above and underneath the pair, significantly reducing the speed of their dive when the lowermost portion touched down on the street. On docking with the impious ground, the captain had the vortex explode outward to generate a short-term smokescreen. The hive-minded imps blitzed into the landing spot as soon as they perceived their sought after targets.
For my part, I was able to fire a courtesy grenade at the multi-headed mass before I had to reflect on my own wellbeing. At about the same airspace my superior had initiated his safety net, I telekinetically reached out and touched the sand lashing past me and the more considerable amount already settled on the submerged roadway. Despite my nearly exhausted vida reserve, there was still enough available to hastily gather several thick cords of sand and have them coil around my body in order to bend gravity’s will to my advantage. The decelerated descent allowed my suit to safely absorb the leftover g-forces when my boots made their reunion with Ember proper. I wanted to use the sand under my command in an offensive salvo, but my grip was already not as strong as Ember’s wind, forcing me to undo my control entirely. A few seconds after I sidestepped to the east, pointing my activated rifle at the reddish wall of misty heat signatures through the dissipating dust cloud, a column of solid ice formed behind me. From its summit twenty feet up, Vasilissa hopped down with her tight-clinging passenger by her side. I was surprised that the doctor had not made some kind of vocal fracas as she fell, even with the incentive not to do so being great, but I figured she had been biting down on her tongue as an alternative. Our last scout-bot followed shortly afterward.
To help curb the miasmic horde, the captain periodically unleashed bursts of concentrated air to hurl back the nearest of the raiding imps, if not outright cripple them. The rest of us forfeited the difficult to obtain kill shots and settled for partitioning their lower limbs in order to slow them down as much as possible. Nevertheless, they soon reminded us that we were not the only arcanists on this planet. Seeing as they were having trouble getting to us directly, giant fingers of crudely warped sand began to shoot out from the ground and reach out for us. I actually felt insulted that these nightmarish things carried the same power as I. At full strength I could counter most of these monstrous tentacles on my own, but my laughable attempts to wield my own compressed soil lamentably forced Kiran and Vasilissa to tackle the problem on their own. From Kiran, missiles of shrill air erupted the stretching digits, while Vasilissa either froze them solid or broke them up with twisting spires of water.
As we neared the end of the block, another imp army appeared from around its corner and the bats above were making known their appearance. Oblivious to any other option, the captain led us into the block’s last edifice, hoping to slow them down as we crossed to the other side. Just as the imps were first entering the point of entry to shadow us, the scout stopped to meet them and detonated the very last of our explosive munitions strapped to it. The blast was large enough to bring down some of the ruin behind us and block the easiest access with rubble. Hardy was now limited to the basic programs in our suit’s computers. We primarily traversed the darkened, dehydrated structure by following Kiran as he bashed through shriveled furniture and weak walls by either using his elemen
tal abilities or applying his vida-fed brute strength.
About halfway through the building, with my visions unable to make out much of anything, Briannika’s silhouette in front of me was suddenly pulled to the ground. A shrill shriek escaped her before I too felt something constrict my left leg and give it a terse pull, hauling me to the floor. While being dragged on my back, I tried to fire my weapon beyond my feet, where I believed the main body of the imperceptible presence was standing, but its irrepressible vines had already bound all of my limbs. Only the Swiss cheese of a ceiling was in my view as I struggled to release myself from its grasp. Gunfire, scuffling, and screams from the doctor burst forth. I could have switched to the visual feeds of my comrades to attempt to see what was happening, but I didn’t want to. If I was to die, I didn’t want to see it.
Amid the confused sensory information, my suit’s computer informed me that my suit had a breach. The skin on my left knee became personally aware of the update a split second later. It was just a pinprick, but that was all that was needed to feel a pain only this world was capable of summoning. I felt my heart savagely rattle within my ribcage, as though it had been gored with several snaking metal wires, making me scream as hard as I ever had in this life or in any other life I might have had in the past. Believing my senses were already too fucked up to function properly, I never actually heard the wail of agony. The biggest scream I had ever released was swiftly bested by the next one. A convulsion of an unnatural internal pressure shook my body to its core, giving me the assumption that all my bones had shattered at once within me. While not as powerful as the first, but still more terrible than anything before this day, more internal spasms banned me from a lucid sense of time. I wished for death, I prayed to the Sacred Seven for death, but the Gods were not merciful. Did even they have no power in Ember?
The epochs of torture did in due course shift into a millennium… then into decades... a few months… a day… an hour. Finally, the waning pain admitted the approximate flow of time and external feeling. In steadily increasing increments, my senses began to return to me and there was also an unexpected, far-off awareness that something was happening to my vida, but the state of my mind couldn’t fathom what it was. Beyond the mind-numbing soreness throbbing every nerve and vein, I felt buoyant, as though I had become one of the limitless grains of sand flying through the air. My blurred eyes then opened to see the feebly lighted sandy street rushing below me. My dangling arms were also in view, but the forearms were bare, my gauntlets somehow removed. In what was my first coherent thought in a long time, I concluded that I was slung over someone’s shoulder, and since I did not see a tail, I assumed it to be Vasilissa, given that my HUD showed that the talorian’s life signature had flatlined. I half-expected mine would be as well.
Sound was the sharpest of the returned senses, but even gunfire was muffled and far off sounding. The most emphatic thing I heard was the percussion of various explosions. There was no doubt they were warped by the captain, seeing as we had no grenades left. I had seen him training in this ferocious technique before, which he could only do safely in designated training areas. He would first warp an almost solid pocket of highly pure oxygen, launch it at a target, and then inject a sudden surge of flame to the oxygen missile, producing vicious combustions that would quake the ground. I knew doing it as often and as powerfully as I perceived them required prodigious energy; even an arcanist of his caliber could not sustain this offensive for long.
At one point, my living carrier’s leg was struck by a ball of warped sand and fell, causing me to see a rolling scene of street and sky until I came to a stop a short while later. In what came as a great shock to me, signals from my brain actually commenced to reach my muscles. In what was a pleasure filled pain compared to the unholy sensation I had underwent, my hands and feet maneuvered themselves to get myself upright. On doing so, I spotted the doctor helping Vasilissa get back to her feet not far from where I stood. Vasilissa had two rifles. She held one in her right hand and the other was magnetically holstered onto her back. The holstered one I recognized as my KAA-74, which was also secured alongside my gauntlets. My next observations included witnessing our pursuers in the middle of the street not a dozen yards behind us and Kiran, who had caught up to us in our fall, preparing to warp a flare of unbendable air at them. The warped wind dashed past us and hit its mark, smashing the front line of the enemy like a bowling ball flung against some pins.
Our captain’s voice roared out, “I’ll keep them busy! Get the fuck out of here!”
His lithe body then slithered past us and headed unswervingly for the infernal mob. He kept firing his rifle with his left hand and prepared to warp with the other, not even giving us a parting glance. An ample amount of my human conscious wanted to disobey his order. I likely would have if he were a human captain. He was a draken, however. He would have taken my insubordination as a personal affront to his leadership, something I desired not to be each other’s last feeling, despite knowing I would regret this inaction for the rest of my life, however short that might be. There was also the fact that I no longer held my weapons, including my missing pistol, or the use of my vida, making me a far bigger burden than help. To top it all off, Vasilissa and the doctor were still alive and it was my job to aid in Dr. Oleson’s security, even if it meant sacrificing myself to accomplish the progressively insurmountable feat. So the three of us ran, hearing more of the captain’s explosions rupture behind us, providing surges of light would blind anyone looking at their heart. Going by sound alone, we seemed to successfully inflate the breadth between us and the imp legion. It expanded some more when an explosion second only to the jump-engine’s meltdown wobbled the world and its atmosphere. The flash that germinated from this detonation briefly outshined a noon time daylight. At the same time the flare-up occurred, our captain’s life signature flatlined.
Chapter Sixteen
It was a race to the sea, the last refuge for Vasilissa’s elemental specialty. Despite the haunting pain still slashing at every raw nerve, I began to feel an aberrant energy with every step. What made this escalation of vigor particularly peculiar was that it didn’t feel like it originated from the adrenaline boosting chemicals my microtech was designed to spew in emergencies. It felt much closer to having my muscles electrically jolted by some barbed barbaric mechanism, forcing me to move my legs forward. The horrifying possibility that I could have been enslaved by our enemy occurred to me, but further rumination had me wondering why I had not already been compelled to try killing the remaining escapees. At any rate, I didn’t feel like I was being subjugated. What I did find more astonishing than anything else was realizing that I had not simply been abandoned in the fray. My other comrades had become threats from minimal contact with the phantom-machines, so why was I still given a chance? Was it as simple as following that ancient military adage used almost universally by civilized species?
In spite of my tumultuous mind, I kept most of my senses focused on my environment. A glimpse behind me showed that the ground army was regrouping, the leading swell no more than a hundred yards away. The organic drones were right above us, but were not as prolific as they had been and seemed content with being utilized as spies. On my right was Vasilissa and on hers was the doctor, whose heavy steps and heavier breaths showed how close she was to her limit. This was also the moment I saw the doctor holding my pistol. A few strides later and I noticed that the eldrick had stuck her rifle on her thigh-holster and was now pulling the scarce atmospheric moisture around her trailing arms. She continued gathering the treasured liquid until there was enough water in her wake to fill a swimming pool large enough to take part in the Olympics. Then, as we passed a desirable location of the street—where a high sand dune to our left substantially narrowed the tract of land—Vasilissa stopped, made an 180 degree turn, and used the water to flash form a wall of ice seven feet high, two feet thick, and long enough to reach the toppled building opposite the dune. I knew she wasn’t trying to make i
t immaculate, but the congealing ice wall was still sleek and clear enough for our portraits to blearily reflect off of it.
She turned to the doctor, who was glad for a reason to pause, and said, “I’ll carry you on my back the rest of the way.”
Seeing the disadvantage of the situation, I said, in a voice that sounded remarkably robust, “No. You have the rifles and need to warp freely. I can carry her.”
Time permitted only a speculative glance from Vasilissa before she said, somewhat uncertainly, “If you’re certain.”
The tender sting with every twitch of my muscles and beat in my heart were still there, but I had also experienced an upsurge in energy that was bordering on burdensome. Additionally, while I couldn’t yet warp, there was definitely something active about my vida, though the feeling was completely foreign to me. It was a mixture of auras living within my soul that made me feel excited, anxious, conceited, degenerate, and more human than I had ever felt. I could only wonder what would be happening if there was actually any vida to use. It was with these incompatible emotions that I used to unceremoniously scoop up Dr. Oleson in my arms and restart our sprint to the sea half a mile out. Once we climbed to the apex of a small dune, we caught sight of the glistening ocean a 150 yards off, still deflecting the palest of rays from the remnants of the departed star. It was clear that the ocean had receded these four hundred feet within the last twelve hundred years, seeing as every building was abruptly cut off at this point from the steadily widening beach. On our trek down the coarse hill of sand, a looming form was accelerating to the night’s higher tiers at the upper left of my peripheral vision. An educated guess told me it was the T-shaped drop ship leaving Ember’s domain, but its night-color and accumulating speed made it too blurred to confirm it without dissecting my vision’s recording. In less time than it took for a prayer to reach the Sacred, the ship had rocketed out of view.
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