Future Mage

by R H Nolan

  Apparently he couldn’t improve those numbers just by blowing holes through ships.

  Too bad. It would have been boring but effective at upping his stats.

  He’d gotten the hole in the elevator just a little larger than his head when the Sandwalkers came back. Max had known they would. He was making so much noise in here that it was inevitable. Even if he hadn’t been blasting the bottom of the elevator, he had to discharge the energy down at the bottom of the shaft. They would have heard him no matter what.

  There was a lot of shuffling footsteps above him, meaning there were definitely a lot more on the middle deck.

  He kept blasting at the hole’s edges, his last energy blast landing dead-center in a Sandwalker’s face right after it emerged to peer at him with those nastily bloated eyes. More footsteps joined the first mutant, and what must have been a dozen Sandwalkers piled themselves together inside the elevator.

  It was pretty hard to see what was going on through the hole he’d made, but he did catch sight of the mottled gray flesh of dozens of limbs clambering over each other just to get through to him. Scrapes and clawing scratches echoed within the boxed walls, met by shrieks and harsh snaps. Max didn’t know if the mutants ever turned on each other, but that seemed pretty likely right about now.

  Then the elevator thumped and shuddered in the shaft, rocking a few times against the shaft wall.

  That was when Max realized how stupid he’d been to just stay here as the weight above him increased.

  If the elevator fell on top of him—

  And then it shuddered some more, groaning under the rapidly increasing weight.

  Trying to ignore the hissing and garbled shrieks above him, Max looked for the closest duct. It looked like he was going to have to get into one of them—hopefully not another one already full of Sandwalkers.

  Still, he’d take his chances with them over a falling elevator any day.

  He had to climb down a bit to find the next duct on his left. So far, the lighted vision that Zryk’s map granted him didn’t pick up anything moving behind the grate.

  When he reached out to grab it, an incredibly loud clang followed by a renewed round of snarls and shrieking came from above him.

  His first thought was that the Sandwalkers had somehow managed to pry open the bottom of the elevator, but that didn’t quite make sense. Then two quick thumps sounded, and the elevator shivered.

  Even the mutants inside the box paused for a minute, but the anxious, starving, desperate sounds rose again after three more thumps, one right after the other.

  Metal groaned, followed by a harsh snap, and the elevator knocked against the wall.

  If he had to guess, Max would say even more of the creatures were coming down the shaft toward him and landing on top of the elevator.

  Who knew how many there might be up there now.

  He grasped the grate and pulled. It didn’t budge.

  He tugged a few more times, then finally disintegrated and blasted the grate.

  It distorted and blew halfway off its housing. Only then was he able to yank it out of the duct opening and grasp the inner ledge.

  Another thump hit the elevator.

  Another metallic groan…

  Max’s feet pulled inside the duct just seconds before a resounding boom echoed above him.

  The metal walls around Max shuddered, and he instinctively pulled farther away from the elevator shaft as ripping metal screamed again.

  The elevator groaned, something snapped, and there was a dark blur that raced by, followed by dozens of bodies falling through the air.

  The impact of the elevator was lessened by the dozen dead bodies already at the bottom, but the crash still reverberated through the ship.

  Max slowly peered over the edge.

  At the same time, a wave of gray energy spheres flitted up toward him and right into the duct. His Soul Points counter racked up almost 150 extra points.

  He saw that the elevator’s roof was basically buried in grey-skinned bodies. He’d been right; too many of them had piled on top of the elevator and caused its safety mechanisms to give way.

  But some of the Sandwalkers had survived the fall on the top of the elevator.

  The first mutant to move made Max blink in disbelief. He’d never seen something so grotesquely huge and disgusting as the Sandwalker pulling itself to its feet below him.

  The thing had to be at least seven feet tall. Its neck, shoulders, and upper back bulged with muscles that even the hulking Bloodletters couldn’t top.

  That had to have been the mutant that dropped onto the elevator last and brought it down. It was massive, and it looked up at Max with a snarl.

  Other Sandwalkers around it slowly shuffled around until they stood and followed the big one’s gaze. A round of piercing cries left their gaping, slavering mouths, and then they started to climb.

  The big one pulled others off the ladder and started up himself.

  Max disintegrated and shot blast after blast as close to the ladder rungs as he could manage. Half of them missed the gigantic Sandwalker—it was over 40 feet away, and his Accuracy wasn’t quite 50% yet—but the ones that landed were effective. Two blasted away chunks from its shoulders.

  The creature roared and craned its neck back to widen its gaping eyes at Max. But it kept coming.

  Max gritted his teeth and disintegrated again, focusing on taking down the huge mutant. It was the one most likely to get him in trouble, and it was the closest. It was also incredibly fast for its gruesome bulk.

  Two of his next five blasts hit the thing in the chest. Up until now, he hadn’t seen a Sandwalker that needed more than two or three attacks to take it down.

  Max fired as quickly as he could. The one benefit was that as the thing got closer, his accuracy improved.

  Finally he blasted a bolt of energy right through the creature’s eye, and its head exploded. It hung there for a second, its giant fingers still hanging on to the rungs… then it toppled backwards, crushing another three or four Sandwalkers beneath its falling body.

  A series of small gray lights shot up from the bottom of the shaft, including a much larger gray sphere of energy than Max had seen from any of them.

  But there were still a half-dozen survivors to deal with, all of them now climbing up the ladder.

  While he was relatively safe, Max decided to try something. After the next disintegration, he lit up the shaft with his lightwave power, and it did exactly what he’d hoped.

  The Sandwalkers screamed at the sudden, pulsing glare, and all of them let go of the rungs as they tried to shield their eyes against the light.

  While they were recovering at the bottom, he peppered them with rapidfire. Thirty seconds later they were all dead, and he couldn’t see any of the elevator roof beneath the pile of their corpses.

  Plus he’d managed a little bit of improvement with his stats.

  Energy Blast

  Intensity: 3000

  Base Range: 40 feet

  Accuracy: 48%

  Rapidfire

  Intensity: 5 rounds of 600

  Accuracy: 37%

  After a few seconds of cautious waiting, Max climbed out of the duct and back onto the shaft’s ladder. In less than thirty seconds, he was climbing up over the lip of the elevator shaft and onto the ship’s middle deck.

  The narrow corridor extended in both directions, and the yellow light of his augmented reality display blinked on his left. He pulled up the ship’s overview layout just to get a better picture of where he was headed.

  It was still there—the green glowing dot along the foremost wall of the engine chamber. Once he made it down this turning corridor, he should be at the door.

  14

  Nothing approached him as he made his way silently down the corridor. He’d activated his skates just to make as little noise as possible, and he hovered forward over the slight decline in the ship’s floors. Staying close to the wall helped him navigate the curve moving downwa
rd, and then he reached out to stop himself with a hand on a dead power box on the corridor wall.

  The door to the engine chamber had been ripped from the wall and taken somewhere. Max couldn’t imagine what a Sandwalker would do with a hulk of torn metal, but he didn’t doubt the giant mutant in the elevator shaft could have easily pried the door from its frame.

  He slowly drifted forward on his skates until he could peer around the open doorway.

  The stench was unbelievable, and what he saw sent a jolt of surprise through him.

  The place was teeming with Sandwalkers—more than he’d ever seen in one place.

  Large clusters of them huddled in different areas of the room, lounging on the cold coils of the power generator and within the recesses of the circuitry.

  Most of these were what Max had already seen—hunched, mangled bodies with gray-blue flesh, shuffling around and occasionally rasping out disgusting noises at each other.

  Their Health, though, ranged from 72% to 91%. These weren’t the lone wolves trailing around the ruins on the surface, or even those who had sheltered from the sun and the heat in the airlock. They were obviously stronger, but they weren’t anything like the giant mutants scattered through the engine chamber.

  Max counted four of them, all with Health over 90%, which was just a little baffling. Sure, with so many pillars of muscle rippling grotesquely beneath their flesh, they were bound to have an easier time hunting and killing whatever prey they found for food. But he didn’t understand how they managed to do that when he’d only ever seen them this deep inside a wrecked starship.

  Maybe the giant Sandwalkers ate their own kind instead of hunting for anything else.

  The thought sent waves of shivers down Max’s spine.

  It took him a minute to remember what he was here for in the first place. He found the flashing light in his vision, only this time it was green. And it blinked just above one of those four gigantic Sandwalkers.

  The mutant in question was lying down on the floor, and a soft blue glow illuminated the edges of its body. Apparently the power core was the light source.

  Max swallowed. This wasn’t going to be as easy as sneaking inside and firing off a few shots before getting his hands on the energy core. He didn’t know why the giant Sandwalker was apparently taking a nap over the one item he needed to bring back for Zryk, but he had a feeling that even if he focused the first few shots on that one creature, the rest of them would be on him before he could finish the job.

  His best bet was to distract as many of them as he could and try to hit as many of them as possible before they realized where he was. Max hoped he could still count on the Sandwalkers’ incredibly dull brains to help him with this.

  He slipped a hand into his back pocket and removed the last of his glowsticks. At least in here, with Zryk’s illuminated map syncing to his implant and his own Lightwave ability, he didn’t need them.

  He chucked the glowstick as hard as he could across the engine chamber, immediately darting behind the doorway again to disintegrate before the loud clack of the stick hitting the far wall echoed out.

  The Sandwalkers screeched and shuffled toward the other side of the chamber just as Max glided through the doorway again on his skates. He dropped into a crouch and pressed both glowing hands to the ground before letting off a double round of electric current.

  It had seemed like a really good idea: zap them all a little bit through the ship’s metal floor and at least see how much damage he could inflict that way. He’d been completely correct in that assumption.

  Garbled shrieks and a few sputtering chokes filled the chamber before most of the Sandwalkers toppled to the ground. But it only took the weaker ones down by around ten percent Health, and not even half that on the larger brutes.

  More than that, his electrical current brought a rising shout from his own mouth when the soles of his feet flared with a searing heat, his charge having coursed too much through his skates’ activated magnetic field.

  He should have been immune to his own powers. After all, whenever he shocked someone, he didn’t get shocked at the same time. But he figured that the current did something unusual to his skates, or got changed by them somehow. That was his best and only guess.

  The giant mutant lying beside the energy core grunted and sat up. It fixed its bulging eyes on Max but didn’t move. Max stood abruptly to disintegrate again, clutching the doorframe, and swallowed the urge to rip off his skates. The pain of that alone was enough to worry him, but his stats confirmed at least small injuries in his feet—Health down by 10%. It felt like it should have been more, but he’d have to look at his feet later. The Sandwalkers might not have figured out the glowstick trick on their own, but they’d heard him shout in pain.

  He sent both energy blasts at the closest Sandwalkers, then stopped to disintegrate and felt cold, clammy hands grappling at his arm.

  The mutants jerked him into the engine chamber.

  Max blasted the one drooling in his face before he grabbed the hand around his bicep and disintegrated it. The Sandwalker screamed, but Max slammed his fist into its ribs and let off the energy blast. The mutant went crashing into the wall.

  The other creatures staggered back just for a moment to view what had happened, then they advanced again.

  Max really didn’t like having to press himself up against anything to disintegrate, but he grabbed the wall again and then released a shot.

  That energy blast went through a Sandwalkers arm, spraying blood everywhere. Then he alternated hands again, sidling down the decline of the engine chamber toward that huge, brutish mutant still lying on the floor.

  Yellow orbs of crackling energy zipped through the air, smashing into Sandwalkers. But he could only drop them with every second or third shot, and they almost moved faster than he could use his abilities.

  He went for the lightwave next, using both hands for the same power. It worked the way he wanted it to—at least to buy him a few more seconds.

  The brilliant, strobing flashes pushed back the wave of Sandwalkers. They shrieked and scattered away from him, clambering over the power generator and the control consoles lining the engine chamber.

  Then Max turned his attention to the monstrous mutant sitting up on the floor. He slid along the wall, wincing at the pain in his feet, and disintegrated enough to send two energy blasts at once into the Sandwalker. It didn’t do much beyond bringing the thing’s Health down to 76%—and apparently make it angry.

  Now the mountain of strained muscle and bulging, pulsing veins lifted itself from the ground with a low growl. It even sounded different than the others. Max disintegrated again and managed to hit the thing’s chest twice more, but the mutant rushed right through the bursts. A gray, mottled arm like a club hurtled through the air and swept Max aside with the back of a meaty fist.

  All the air was knocked out of Max by the blow as the Sandwalker sent him flying across the room toward the power generator. He slammed onto the floor and slid across it, his back striking the top coil of the generator with an echoing ring.

  Despite the ache in his chest and back now, he reached out and caught the next massive coil rising in a huge arc above the generator’s base, which kept him from dropping right down into the Sandwalkers trying to scramble up toward him.

  Hanging there, he disintegrated again and waited as long as he could for as many of them as possible to climb up onto the generator. Then he deactivated his skates, gripped the coil, and let off another energy current.

  Every mutant who’d climbed toward him felt the massive jolt. Those at the bottom of the generator dropped to the floor, while those closest to Max were thrown from the lower parts of the row of coils. None of them took full damage to whatever Health they had left, but at least five of them were below 40% now.

  Max swung himself through the looped coil and landed on the generator base, hissing at the pain in his feet; he had to have at burned himself in some way.

  Moving through t
he huge coils over the generator base—which made him think of walking through the ribcage of some giant animal’s carcass—he fired energy blasts at every new Sandwalker face pressing itself against the metal rings. It bought him enough time to take out six more of them.

  Then the generator was covered again in mutants, snarling and shrieking and snapping at him through the rings. Switching back to the energy current, he managed a two-handed shot coursing through the generator rings. Three more Sandwalkers went down under the force, and more orbs of life energy fluttered into him.

  Metal groaned behind him, and he whirled around to see one of the huge Sandwalkers literally ripping one of the coils from its setting.

  Max didn’t have time to attack or even jump away through the coils, because an enormous hand wrapped around his ankle and pulled.

  Max went down with a thud, then he was swiftly yanked off the generator and tossed across the floor. He landed on his stomach, skidding farther on the Qirinian chest plate, and scrambled to get back to his feet.

  Before he could fully stand, a weaker mutant rammed into him and knocked him flat on his back. It leapt atop him and would probably have started trying to eat him if four more hadn’t rushed in to join it. They fell on top of each other and on top of Max, who felt like he couldn’t breathe beneath all the weight and the limbs crushing his shoulders and his legs. The chest plate was strong enough not to cave in on him, but now he couldn’t move his hands. They were pinned to the ground, the Sandwalkers scrambling around on top of him for better purchase. He disintegrated anyway, wondering how he’d get off a good shot when he was stuck like this.

  A growling shout escaped him, and he tried to lift his hands to take aim. But instead of the energy blasts coming from his palms, the chest plate of Qirinian himirini glowed a bright yellow for two seconds before erupting into the pile of Sandwalkers on top of him.