by Vowron Prime
MC immediately teleported back inside the facility where he fell to his knees, shivering. The only part of him that wasn’t freezing was his mutilated left shoulder, and the only saving grace was that the incredible heat of the beam had immediately cauterized the wound, stemming the blood flow.
He looked out at the transparent metal window as the heat dissipated, only to see the chariots approaching his corridor. With their plasma torches gone, their next logical step should be to deploy troops to continue melting the corridor with the microwave emitters, and it seemed like that was exactly what they were doing.
The ships thunked against the seabed corridor, attaching themselves to its outside wall in what was obviously a breaching maneuver. A second later, a perfectly circular hole melted open to reveal drones and Zevan mages marching out, their energy barriers active.
The hermetic seals that secured the ships to the corridor actually worked in MC’s favor. Still shivering uncontrollably, he forced his body to move, throwing bullets into the air, relocating them in rapid succession. The chariot didn’t seem to have any Ultimators onboard, allowing him to crawl through the breaching hole, where he was met with wide-eyed Zevan mages, stock-still in shock. Or at least, that’s what his imagination fed him. They didn’t last a second—in an instant, all were decapitated with a single wide-area invocation of the relocator.
Yet the remote Zevan operators must have thought they’d lured him into a trap, because the gunship closed its outer breaching door and detached from the corridor, accelerating away from the facility at high speed, with MC trapped inside.
As if that will stop me.
He cut the ship in half from within before teleporting back inside the facility, which was now flooding on account of the gaping hole left by the chariots. The other gunship had similarly detached, but was currently hovering a few yards away—watching and waiting like a sniper eyeing his mark.
MC hadn’t been able to disable that chariot’s shields, so the best he could do was to seal the corridor’s holes and retreat back to the central teleporter, where he immediately started stripping his armor off to dry.
“Magnus!” Nova shrieked as she came running over. “Your arm…”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, willing the arm to return to its prior shape.
“I never thought I would actually be thankful for the mutagenic ponds’ machinations,” she commented as the arm “healed” in a matter of moments.
“The arm is good, but my shoulder isn’t. It must have seized my nerves or something, because I can’t move it for shit, and it hurts like a mofo.”
Nova frowned, concerned, but he quickly said, “I’ll deal with it. I managed to buy us some time, but I don’t want to go another round with those things if at all possible.”
The angel helped him remove the armor, before throwing her heavy cloak over him, along with the other robes he carried around in the rucksack to help warm him up.
“Magnus, I have some good news. The teleporter will be ready in the next ten minutes. I waited to see how the cells would handle it, but I managed to overcharge them by two hundred percent. They’ll likely not be useful ever again, but should suffice for this one transport.”
“Well, that’s j-j-just awesome,” he responded, teeth chattering from the cold. “If you wouldn’t mind…”
Nova blushed, turning around to let MC strip off his armor’s lower half to dry.
“Thanks,” he said a minute later as he finished the task and put the armor back on. The armor itself was waterproof, so a good shake out managed to dry it off. Still icy, but alive. Hypothermia and frostbite would have to try again some other day. It helped that Nova held his sole organic hand in hers, rubbing it to warm him up.
“Guess I better start making some final preparations then,” he said after a somewhat awkward moment.
Their goal had always been to render the facility nonoperational—to say it was critical to Dyn operations was an understatement. Together with the orbital spatial anchor, the transit gateway was the lifeblood that connected Kelruhn back to the rest of the Dyn, so eliminating it meant that no one would be able to teleport out or call for help.
The orbital spatial marker would still allow the Harvesters to initiate a teleport to the planet from their remote sites, but until news reached them that this facility had been destroyed—a message that would take a while without faster-than-light travel—this planet was essentially isolated, and that was all he needed.
MC wrapped up his task within minutes, boring a tunnel from the central control room all the way out to the ocean, leaving just a few feet of rock to keep the seal. Meanwhile, Nova had been busy opening all of the panels around the room, exposing as much sensitive circuitry as she possibly could.
They were essentially rigging a time-delay fuse. MC would relocate the last few feet of rock from his tunnel at the last second, allowing the ocean water to come rushing in. He’d then teleport himself over to Nova, where they’d warp out. By the time the rushing water submerged the control room and short-circuited everything, they’d be long gone.
Deep rumbling sounds emanated from far below.
“Magnus, it is ready.”
He made his way over to her side where a giant blue-and-green hologram popped up over the console.
MC unconsciously reached a hand out in yearning.
There it was, in all its glory.
Home.
“We must hurry. Now that my people know that we’ve charged the teleporter, they may choose to rupture the cells. I detect five more chariots inbound. They will be here within a minute!” Her voice almost broke from the panic, prompting him to cringe.
“Right. Okay, so it’s gonna be all of this,” he said, pinching with his fingers to zoom in on the globe.
“All right. Anything else?”
Well, this is like being a kid in a candy store.
“Yeah, this, this, and actually just grab all of these while you’re at it, and put them inside. That ought to do it.”
Nova’s hands flew as she locked in the coordinates of everything MC wanted to teleport.
“Done. As discussed, I’ve set the destination to the Dyn-terraformed continent on the opposite side of Kelruhn.”
He nodded. “Make it happen.”
A few seconds later, the rumbling below them lessened significantly, but other than that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
“It is done.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. Now it is our turn,” she said, rushing over to the raised circular platform at the very center of the room, her laptop-sized terminal in hand.
Admittedly, the teleportation was a little anticlimactic, but he wasn’t complaining. Boring was always preferable to FUBAR.
“Just say when,” she said as MC teleported into the passage he’d hollowed—just far enough to relocate the last bits of rock that held the ocean at bay.
A deafening deluge to come roaring in. That was all the prompting he needed to teleport back to Nova’s side. And just in time, too. The far wall hissed and melted as the enemy bored through from the other side.
“Punch it!” he yelled as the torrent of water burst through the tunnel.
Ultimators and Dyn mages ran through the opening. Too bad the only thing that awaited their assailants was a painful death. Mother Nature sure was a bitch.
Nova gave him a nod, and their world turned white.
Fourteen
“Hey, Nova? I think you got the coordinates wrong,” MC shouted as the two fell from the sky.
Nova just screamed—not the most helpful response. It seemed he was perfecting the art of para dropping without a parachute these days. Before they could fall too far, he activated the energy dampener right beneath them, bringing them to an immediate halt in a tangle of limbs.
Turned out his hunch was right; given that the dampener killed all the energy of objects passing through it, he figured it could be used as a mid-air platform when deployed at max power
. He’d no idea what its max weight limit was, but it was enough to hold him, and Nova barely weighed anything at all. The best part? The energy dampener’s vidsphere began to fill at a visible rate. Apparently, exercising the ability in this way helped the parasite grow. If only he’d discovered this training method earlier, perhaps he wouldn’t have had to repeatedly hit himself with heavy objects.
The platform was about five feet square—big enough to ensure they wouldn’t accidentally fall off, yet small enough to keep the surface area constrained so that the overall strength remained high.
Nova’s eyes nearly fell out of their sockets when she looked down; she squeezed them shut. MC chuckled. He’d never feared heights, but their predicament would be downright terrifying to anyone.
They stood several miles up in the air, and about a mile above the tallest snowcapped peaks below them. Though peaks wasn’t quite the right word.
“You weren’t kidding when you said this place was bleak. It doesn’t look anything like what I’ve seen on this planet so far.”
Dozens upon dozens of mile-wide craters extended into the distance in all directions. Their depth was unlike anything he’d ever seen—the rims of each massive crater were so tall that they were covered entirely in snow. Yet their depths—easily two miles deep—were barren rock, hidden by dark shadows.
“My people used this continent for terraforming experiments ages ago,” Nova responded, having somewhat overcome her initial fright. “Those perfectly circular chasms are obviously not natural phenomena.”
He couldn’t help but notice that she was still on all fours, refusing to stand.
“Well, where is it, then?”
“It should be located within one of the nearby craters. In my rush, I must have set the Z-axis coordinate incorrectly, so it should be right below us… but how are we to get down?”
That was a good question. He could of course bite the bullet and teleport them down there, but teleporting a distance of several miles would suck balls. And even if he got them to the snowcapped crater rims, they’d still have to teleport another couple of miles down to the bottom to get to their destination. He could attempt several short jumps, but that was liable to pick up a ton of speed that he might not be able to bleed off.
“Well, I have another crazy idea,” he grinned. “Let’s give it a whirl.” Teleportation would be the contingency plan.
With his cybernetic limb still not responding, he scooped Nova up with his other arm, eliciting a yelp from the angel, but she nonetheless held his neck in a princess-carry. From her perspective, it was a far more preferable alternative than having to stand in midair on absolutely nothing.
MC shrunk the energy dampening platform to just a couple of feet wide, then canceled it before immediately re-activating it again. He fell about a foot before coming to a stop. Like jumping downstairs.
Repeating the action several more times, he quickly found a rhythm. The dampener took a fraction of a second to dissipate all of his energy, so if he canceled the ability before he’d fully stopped, he could in essence glide downwards.
“You’re flying!? How?” Nova exclaimed as she looked around.
“It’s not flying, Nova. It’s falling with style!”
“You’re using the energy dampening properties of your shield to cancel our built-up momentum, aren’t you? Smart. But did you consider what would happen if it had nullified the atomic energy of your cells?”
“Nothing good, I’ll bet! But it worked, didn’t it?”
As expected, she saw through the trick the instant she overcame her fear. By taking a step forward as he “fell” to the next plate, he was even able to add directionality to their descent, and the tiny surface area meant that he could activate it in rapid succession without headaches. They continued to descend for several minutes, eventually setting down in the powdery snow of the crater rim.
What had looked like a knife-edge ridgeline from up high was actually a fairly generous summit plateau. Nova immediately left his embrace to put her feet on solid ground, whacking him with one of her wings in the process—a quirk of hers he considered second nature by this point.
Temperatures were right around freezing at this altitude, but walking over to the inner edge of the rim gave him the impression that if anything, it’d be the heat they’d have to worry about.
“Lava? There’s lava at the bottom of the crater? This was the place you picked?”
“Well, you wanted a remote, defensible location that my people would never think to check, I’d say it fits the bill quite nicely, don’t you? And look, it is not all lava now, is it?”
MC followed her gaze, and sure enough, there were several large islands of what looked like obsidian rock. Unfortunately, those patches of land were absolutely crawling with indistinct shapes.
“You’re joking, right? You’re not about to tell me that there are monsters infesting our new home… right? Because some might call that a problem. Insane, even.”
“Well, sorry! It was not as if we had all the time in the world to come up with something better. And doesn’t that help? Consider it natural security.”
“Yeah, no. I like it when my security doesn’t want to eat me.”
He went up to her and patted her shoulder.
“You did well, Nova. I’m truly thankful. This…” he gestured to the crater with his one arm, “this is the beginning, and we damn well couldn’t have gotten this far without you. Seriously. Thanks.”
Nova blushed furiously as she tried to wiggle away. “No, it was nothing. Without you, I would have died several times over. Without you, I would be a plaything for some sick Zevan.”
Scanning the ground, something stuck out at him, a sight he couldn’t quite explain. Pointing at the center of the crater, he asked, “What’s with that rubble down there? Looks like it squashed a sizable chunk of the monsters.”
“Unlike your matter fusion ability, I could not very well teleport our target into the rock. The transit gateway is set up to hollow out a cavity of the exact size of the teleported object, creating a vacuum an instant before the object is delivered to its final location. This is how it moves solid objects into other solids.”
“Huh. Guess I’d never thought of that. Let’s get down there, shall we?”
She nodded, allowing him to scoop her up in his arms once again. He then used the same elevator trick to lower them into the crater. When they were about three-quarters of the way down, he canceled the ability and teleported them the rest of the way, onto one of the black landmasses.
The heat struck them like a rocket to the face. Explosive, sweltering, and at least a hundred degrees. MC’s armor clung to him like a sticky second skin, and he already wished for the cool embrace of the snowcapped crater rim.
As expected, their arrival did not go unnoticed by the locals. Massive armored scorpions with tails resembling metallic worms, avian creatures with circular saws for beaks, and even an abomination whose legs were melded into four metal wheels. Like some kind of goat that had been stretched and pulled so hard that each of its limbs fit into each wheel.
It was always refreshing to be reminded of how crazy Nova’s people were, even here, halfway across the world. If the dregs of humanity ever wanted to feel like saints, they need only look to the Dyn.
Predictably, the monsters all shrieked and swarmed the intruders. He didn’t bother relocating them. There were tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of beasts in this massive crater, and nothing short of a concerted effort would wipe them out.
The animals’ attacks simply hit what must have felt like a solid wall when they connected with the energy dampener. That didn’t stop them from swarming the pair, though, so MC had to relocate the ones directly in front of them in order to make progress.
He paused after walking a ways to get to a more central location on the island, then put his hand to the ground and sent out power Midar pings in all directions. He closed his eyes to concentrate on analyzing the results. It only took a
few seconds to find what he was looking for.
“Bingo.”
With their destination located, the pair moved with a purpose, carving out a path to the edge of the crater’s valley.
“Well, this is it,” MC declared, staring up at the sheer vertical face before them. Their mutated assailants never learned and were still attempting to claw their way onto MC’s back, something that scared Nova to no end, prompting her to cling to MC’s arm the entire way.
In response to the attacks, he relocated a semicircular wall of obsidian rock around them, a foot thick and thirty high, starting and ending at the crater wall on either side of them.
That cut off the vast majority of the creatures attempting to gang-rape them, and MC disposed of the ones that had gotten trapped inside with them. Now he could concentrate on carving a path through the rock.
He relocated a tunnel through the rock, opting to keep it open instead of closing it behind them as he had at the Dyn teleporter facility.
“Why are you creating such a large tunnel? Is it not taxing for you?”
“Yeah, well, we’re going to need it eventually, and the extra light helps.”
They proceeded on in silence for several hundred feet into the depths of the crater wall before MC slowed and stopped, opting to relocate tiny chunks of the rock in front of them instead of the huge swaths he’d been moving thus far. Even with the massive opening, the light that filtered through was minimal, at best.
Nova was about to ask what he was doing when she spotted faint letters appearing out of the rock.
U.F.N. S.N.C.—7—R.Y.
MC finished up with his handiwork, looking upon the massive bay door with a smile.
“Nova, welcome to Sanctuary.”
He held her waist, intending to teleport them inside, but the massive doors opened all on their own. They watched as the door split in the middle, with the lower half receding into the floor as the upper half retracted up into the ceiling.