Cykopath- Birth

by Luca Braña

  In fact, the only way he knew how to oppose the Creator in case she went mad was to make an army… the army they tried to build, and which was now trying to kill him and his daughter, already having murdered hundreds of scientists and guards.

  But he couldn’t allow this project to fail like this. He couldn’t allow all the deaths, all the money and effort put into the whole venture to go to waste. He wouldn’t allow his daughter’s tears to be for nothing, he wouldn’t allow her to live in a world that might end at any moment at the whim of a being that thought itself supreme enough to end humanity.

  So, his aim was to demoralize the rebels, to hurt and defeat as many of them as possible until they gave up. From the visor over his eyes, he saw everything, the way the elements contorted to the elemental subject’s wishes, how the spirits worked to launch attacks at his form, how the mentally powered exerted their strength and most important of all, how Tela’s hundreds of tendrils wrapped around every single one of them.

  She was both the head and the heart of their rebellion, the main driving force, the one whose own feelings were fueling the others… He needed to take her out.

  “Helios-13 Squad, Unit Alpha, codename: Dr. Gacha—commencing combat,” the scientist whispered something he had not reported for a long time. It was time to end this for the world, and more importantly… for his daughter.

  2

  When Cyko’s preemptive attack had missed, he anticipated a counter-attack. The moment the large fighter machine moved backwards, he created a duplicate of himself in mid-air and had it kick him back towards the ground, just in time to dodge several streaks of red light that tore his clone apart, causing it to dissipate.

  All other capable children joined in the battle, creating large and turbulent air currents, the same kind that destroyed several helicopters and uprooted turrets on the other side of the desert.

  Yet, it seemed to be unaffected by the raging wind, passing through strong cyclones without so much as slowing down. Tela ordered the fire manipulators to combine their abilities with those of the wind, instructing them to redirect it towards the retreating fighter.

  The result was a large vortex of fire heading straight towards the giant eye, the heat so large even Cyko felt warmth on his cheeks.

  Instead of trying to dodge it, the fighter headed straight towards the vortex of flames, causing many rebels to gasp in disbelief, knowing that such a strategy would be suicide.

  One moment, there was a large funnel of deadly flames that engulfed the scientist’s weapon. The next, there were dozens of missiles being made from the flames themselves—the fighter at the center of the ring of explosives. Then the jet blinked its massive eye and sped away, flying low enough to cause a strong wind of its own, forcing many of them to duck.

  Cyko watched as the fighter sped away on a collision route with the fortress before coming to a full stop with a 180-degree turn, just in front of the commanding bridge. It flashed a red streak of energy before the four eyes dashed towards the rebels.

  Cyko only had enough time to roll away from the streak. He heard a yell of pain and noticed that a fellow enhancer had been hit in the chest by the attack. The kid had fallen to the ground and clenched at his chest, which had turned black.

  It took him out with a single attack.

  Glaring at the eye in front of him, Cyko noticed that his mental map changed to show more rebels incapacitated, hit by the same lasers. The eye was charging up again, but before it could do anything, Cyko created more replicas and reappeared right behind the floating attacker, a charged holo blade bisecting it as both halves separated. The orb flashed, it was whole again, whipping around to its airborne form. Before it had the chance to strike, Cyko’s holo blades sliced through it, causing it to become a mess of static long enough for Cyko to vanish.

  His victory was short-lived, when a turret popped up right in front of him and fired. When one of his clones destroyed the turret, Cyko groaned as more emerged and open-fired.

  Unlike the other side of the fortress, this one still looked pristine, which meant that all its weaponry, including the three giant turrets and the fifteen smaller ones, were still operational, but lacked a crew to run them. They killed them all.

  Then how… were the turrets moving and pointing towards them?!

  “NO! TAKE COVER! THE MAIN TURRETS ARE ONLINE!” Tela called out just before all three fired, each one aimed towards a different group of children. Cyko leapt to pull Tela out of the range of fire, pulling her into his arms and away of the path of the deadly bullets.

  Twenty more children disappeared forever from their shared radar, while thirty statuses changed to critical conditions.

  Cyko didn’t need to look down at the girl in his arms to know that Tela was despairing again. He could feel it; they all did.

  “I-I-I’m fine, Cyko… T-thank you…” the redhead whispered through shaky breaths and tearful eyes. That attack… it had been aimed towards her. The group she was with moved there after the battle started… and most of them were injured now, the rest dead.

  3

  Dr. Gacha cursed under his breath, knowing by his daughter’s whimpers that something had gone deeply wrong. Warning screens flashed across both his and her visor, warnings of damage, warnings of overheating, and warnings of a depleted magical core.

  By using the fortress to attack, he hoped it would turn the fight in his favor, but he had overestimated the Paradox Warper’s power output. As the machine was less than ten percent of its true self, it entered a critical condition.

  He would have to divert attention away from the shields to reactivate them and cut all power from the fortress to replenish the lost magical power. Thankfully, the Warp Gazers had their own power source and could still function on their own. Even as she panicked, his daughter was still putting forth all her efforts, which made him proud.

  He only hoped it would be enough.

  4

  As Tela noticed that the turrets from the fortress stopped moving, she ordered everyone to focus on the fighter and to be careful of the red lasers. Already, the eyes flying around them had disabled over 15 children with these lasers. They seemed to get past the endurance of the enhancers, turning all body parts they hit black, like a bad bruise. She felt a part of them vanishing, like a hole burnt into their souls.

  It seemed like the eyes would be impossible to destroy. Magy’s form, covered in dark energy, appeared over one to do the unimaginable. The reaper struck it with one of her scythes, causing it to stop midair and explode into pixelized particles.

  As the pink-haired girl braced herself to hit the ground from the impact of the explosion, she found herself in the arms of her friend who had vanished from Tela’s side to catch her, the telepath already sprinting towards them.

  “Magy! Are you all right?” Cyko asked, worried, as he pulled her to her feet.

  “I think I figured out a way to defeat that thing.”

  “You did?! How?” Tela asked in urgency.

  “I’ll tell you like this, do you think you can send my explanation to everyone else too?”

  Tela nodded as both she and Cyko dodged an oncoming beam.

  “Everyone, please listen up! This explanation will be the key to surviving and winning! Focus on what you are already doing, I’ll make sure the knowledge you’ll receive won’t disturb you during the fight,” Tela said, mentally nudging Magy to begin her explanation, the girl taking cover behind a destroyed turret so she could gather her thoughts.

  “Okay, this is what Scythe told me. When that giant eyeball forced the fortress to fire on us, Scythe noticed a sudden drop in power from it, which made it spark. You might notice how it didn’t move when we counter-attacked, that was because it had overworked itself. Because of this, Scythe said that if we could overwhelm its defenses or pass through them, we could do a great deal of damage.” She clicked her teeth and jumped away to avoid a barrage of missiles.

  “To test my theory out, I attacked one of those smaller eye
balls. Thanks to my Scythe’s unique ability, I can ignore any barrier it makes and strike at the source. I tried to overwhelm it with my dark energy, disrupting its core, which caused an explosion.” She fired several large, crescent waves of dark energy towards the fighter which hit it with little affect. “When that fighter passed through the vortex of fire at the start, Scythe also sensed a drop in energy, both when it got hit and when it turned the fire into missiles. Even now, its energy decreases whenever it gets hit. If we can drop it to critical levels again, we should be able to destroy it!” she finished, jumping away as one of the smaller eyes tried to hit her with a stream of energy.

  “So, attack it until it gets tired and then attack more… I can get behind that!” Cyko said with an evil grin as he ordered more clones to fire while he went around destroying the automatic turrets to lessen the burden on their allies.

  The enhancer grinned as his mind received more information from Tela to overload the fighter’s energy core, relying on heavy hitters like him and Agatha while others distracted them.

  Just before they could set their plan in motion, the fighter dashed towards them, firing off its front lasers. Instead of trying the same trick when it arrived at the fortress, it turned to the left, flying towards one end of the desert.

  It turned again, flying towards the elevator, then again, flying towards the other wall. The eye was flying circles around the subjects. Turning once more, the machine flew low enough to allow its wings to graze across the sand, spiraling into a tight circle in the center of the desert.

  Several energy streaks hit all five shapeshifters, causing them to roar in pain as their forms fell from the sky. After hitting the ground, they tried to shape-shift back into their base forms to heal their wounds. To their agonized horror, the black bruises persisted on their bodies.

  Dr. Gacha didn’t sit idly by. With a deafening boom, the fighter picked up speed, moving in a perfect circle around them at blinding speeds, which caused the sand and wind to swirl with it. The Warp Gazers fired, raining dangerous and lethal lasers onto the rebels below.

  Three shots hit Agatha, two in her main turrets and one in her stomach. The turrets disappeared as she was losing energy, the crippling pain of her wounds taking her out of the fight. Tela cursed and ordered several earth elementals to protect her and the other injured children.

  One child got hit in the torso—out of the fight. A Warp Gazer hit another in the arm—useless. A mutant was bolted in the leg, causing him to limp. The rain of attacks wore them down, but they weren’t about to give up. Domes of ice appeared to shield them from the rain of red death, which worked much better than Tela expected as the lasers themselves didn’t inflict much damage on their covers.

  Now with a shield, they started their counter-attack, launching large waves of energy, causing more damage to the fighter’s shielding.

  Knowing this current battle of attrition would not last, however, the scientist tipped the scales in his favor. Inside the view of the Paradox Warper, it was as if time slowed down as he ordered the machine to use its energy core once again, refilling the wing’s missile compartments and releasing them all at once in the strong winds. Just before the currents threw them off path, he activated another module, which spread a red glow through the area.

  The missiles melted into a fire that spread throughout the whirlwind, turning the once normal hurricane into a flaming tornado, offering no exit for anyone inside as the heat sweltered.

  Tela’s eyes widened as she realized what the scientist was trying to do. Fire needs oxygen and once it runs out, it’s extinguished… with them in the middle. She noticed with a panicked face that she was feeling short of breath. Several children, fire manipulators, soon passed out as their own powers worked against them, depriving their bodies of much-needed oxygen.

  “All fire users, stop using your powers now!” Tela shouted, looking around to note the conditions of her allies. Some fire elementals had passed out, while several others were having a hard time breathing but continued to stand strong, trying to take down the fighter with all they had. “Wind elementals! Try to counter this tornado! We won’t last much longer with it sucking our oxygen!”

  “The wind is not listening! The fighter’s hold over it is too strong!” Ellyn cried out from her cover as she ducked to avoid being hit by a stray beam, taking a handful of sand and enchanting it with her ability and throwing it towards the tornado, the currents taking the grains into the raging inferno, leaving it seemingly unaffected.

  “T-then…” Tela stuttered, breathing hard as she felt increasingly more suffocated. Five more children passed out, unable to breathe. If she didn’t think of something soon, they would all suffocate! “Magy, how much longer until it runs out of energy?” she asked the reaper girl, who was also panting inside her own earth cover.

  “At this rate, it won’t be long before it overloads itself again, but we’ll run out of oxygen much faster than it will run out of energy,” Magy replied as she took in a shallow breath, stepping out of her cover to try attacking the fighter to no avail. Grunting, the girl stepped back as two beams threatened to hit her, taking cover once again.

  Then a streak of blue started to run in circles alongside the fighter, trying to keep up with it while avoiding the red streaks of energy from above, but it was no use as for every lap he made across the hurricane, the fighter made five. Cyko cursed as the heat became unbearable before he yelled and jumped just as the fighter passed by him, charging up his holo blade and slashing just in time as the fighter passed him again, hitting it directly and causing the plane to glitch out for a split second.

  Caught in a telekinetic hold before his momentum caused it to engulf him in flames, Cyko was brought back to Tela’s side, who shot him a worried glare.

  “That was dangerous! What were you thinking?!” Her teary eyes made Cyko feel like a jerk. She had already experienced too much death today, being reckless like that wasn’t good for her and he knew it.

  “S-Sorry, Tela, but I can’t hit it. I can’t get past its barrier, I can’t damage it enough by myself… but, I have an idea…” Cyko explained what he had thought up between short breaths, while Tela kept her disapproving glare fixed on him.

  “Everyone prepare to dodge again, our next move will take us out of this situation! All earth users! Prepare to create walls in front of the fighter starting at the marked position in the map in 15 seconds! Any barriers over a downed child must be maintained!” Tela ordered, using this newfound hope to fuel her friends and allies.

  One… Two… Three… All earth users dropped the barriers before moving towards the extremes, making small barriers over their forms to protect themselves against the red beams. Eight, nine, ten… The children sidestepped the rain of red streaks, doing their best to avoid being hit. Thirteen, fourteen…

  Fifteen... “NOW!”

  As one, all children who had power over the earth created their barriers, starting at the marked point and continuing clockwise, conjuring thick walls of stone from the sand, which caused the fighter to crash through them. Even as the walls of earth were created at a rapid rate, the fighter still crashed through the barriers, barely slowing down or registering damage as it turned each wall of rock back into dust.

  It was all Magy needed.

  Willing her own dark energy to course through her body, she took in as much of the leftover oxygen as she could, letting her power enhance her muscles, her speed, and her endurance, causing a dark aura to take form over her body. Then she ran, a boom accompanying her as she followed the fighter.

  Using the same effects that happened whenever she tried to make her Scythe pass through a magical barrier, Magy was able to anchor herself to the fighter, her weapon buried in the flying eye’s wing. The heat from the flames was making her sweat, but thanks to the dark aura around her body, she could bear it.

  She let all the accumulated power in the blade of her weapon course inside the wing, causing it to glitch out before the hole exploded, smo
ke trailing out.

  Smirking, the girl brought her arm up, ready to repeat the process before she spotted movement from the corner of her eye. She turned, becoming face to face with a Warp Gazer. Without thinking, the reaper put her weapon in front of herself, so the blade covered her face, just in time for her weapon to deflect a beam fired from the smaller eye.

  Magy sneered behind her blade and braced herself just as the eye shot another beam of red energy towards her, which was once again deflected, but this time straight towards the other wing of the fighter. Passing right through the barrier and hitting it, it caused the wing to glitch out before an explosion sounded from the point of impact, resulting in another smoke trail.

  She swore the eye panicked before it flew away, going back to firing at the rebels trapped inside the flaming hurricane, but before Magy could celebrate this victory, the fighter started rotating at high speeds, almost causing her to lose her grip as her body felt much heavier than before. She persisted, gritting her teeth and clenching the handle of her weapon.

  Using her other scythe, she stabbed it on the wing again, making her way towards the center of the machine. She was getting close, but at this rate she would lose her breath and if that happened, her dark aura would dissipate and then she would suffer the full effects of the fire.

  Removing one of her scythes from the wing, she let her darkness cover it again.

  With a shout, Magy threw it, watching as it lodged itself deep in the dark eye, causing it to flash as her weapon pierced through the barrier and into its body. With a grin, she removed her other blade from the wing and repeated the process.