“They must have disabled the Al-field and done something to Zac,” the doctor said slowly. “I have a funny feeling they’re trying to hijack the ship!”
“Spawn of sha bi, the pair of them!” Lydia cussed. “I never trusted those two!”
Her hugging protection suit began to shimmer, than transformed around her, turning into some sort of flexible suit of medieval armor.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
We heard a noise coming from below, as if someone was running up the tunnel.
Arachne shook her hands. Lots of little silvery spiders ran down them and dropped into the precipice below, instantly weaving a thick cobweb which blocked Evyl’s way. Tirelessly the spiders kept adding new layers to the trap.
“Grey, Cherub, I’m gonna delay and swathe her,” Arachne turned to us. “We need to—”
The familiar flash of purple light glinted below. Evyl hadn’t let go of her Lash of Void – and she was about to use it.
Alice saved me. She shoved me aside and pinned me to the wall, covering me with her own body from the purple cat o’ nine tails which shot out of the tunnel, growing dozens of new lashes. One of them entrapped Arachne and dragged the woman down before she could even scream out.
“Incarnator, run!!!”
We had no other option. I had no idea whether Arachne had survived the fall – but what I did understand was that any delay meant our death sentence. If Evyl was desperate enough to use her Azuric weapons against her own friends, she would have no qualms whatsoever about finishing us off.
Cherub lay face down next to me, motionless. Thick rings of smoke rose from his body. Was he dead? Or just stunned? I had no time to find out.
Then it suddenly dawned on me: this was a perfect opportunity to escape while the Possessed Ones sorted out their mutual differences. If Zac had lost control over some of his ships’ systems, we could just try and flee it.
“Miko, give me the rundown. How do you get out of here?”
“Option one: by unblocking one of the airlocks. Option two: by using one of the escape pods.”
The way to the airlocks was blocked: both by Evyl and Arachne’s cobwebs. That left us with only one option.
“Alice, follow me!”
I grabbed the weregirl by the hand and drew her up the shuddering hexagonal corridor. Luckily, the entrance to the technical level was very close – and we’d managed to reach it before Evyl caught up with us.
“Faster!”
It felt very strange trying to move up and down the listing corridors whose walls and floors kept changing places. The ship constantly reared up, performing some truly crazy aerobatics which threw us every which way. Finally, Alice switched to her animal shape and flung me onto her back, her sharp claws allowing her to quickly climb the rearing surfaces.
The sealed doors of the escape chamber turned out to be literally under our feet. It was Miko who unblocked them. We dropped down, hitting one of the launch pads. The pods’ rounded noses stared silently down the narrow holes of their launch silos.
Miko promptly handed us the full launch checklist. The pod opened up like a seashell. Alice and I wriggled our way in onto its springy bed, both of us. We simply didn’t have the time to activate another one.
In a few touches of buttons, the ancient machinery shut the pod close, encasing us in its impermeable protective cocoon. Numbers on a screen flashed red, commencing the countdown. I felt the pod move as it turned up and round, preparing for takeoff. Then came the hissing noise of the diaphragm of the airlock sliding open. I heard a soft popping sound; then the growing acceleration pinned my body to the bed.
Chapter 14
“Launch successful.”
I HEAVED A SIGH of relief. We were off. The pod had cleared its launch pad and was now rocketing through the sky in direction unknown.
I had mixed feelings about leaving the ship. I was hugely relieved about having escaped the two mad Technomancers, Gnarl and Evyl, but I was also upset I’d failed to help Zac. Still, the few earlier confrontations I’d had with those two had shown me that I had nothing to offer against them, not yet. I could have tried to seek help from the ship’s crew, I suppose, but unfortunately, I had a very vague idea of the balance of power within the Possessed Ones’ camps. I doubted very much that Gnarl would have gone on a rampage like that without having some allies within the crew.
Was Arachne killed by the Lash of Void, or had her black armor protected her just like my wingsuit had, saving me over Fort Angelo? What had happened to Cherub and Zac? It was unlikely I’d find that out any time soon. Having said that… stranger things happen at sea.
“Grey, I’ve managed to tap into the pod’s control systems. It has a manual steering option. I’m sending the picture to the screen...”
The pod’s shell cleared up, turning into a transparent viewing screen. We were dashing along a sloped trajectory, leaving a fiery trail in our wake. The eagle-eyed Miko had highlighted Avenger’s shimmering outline clearly visible against the backdrop of the clouds. It seemed to be turning around as if to follow us – but our pod was speeding away, rapidly increasing the gap between us.
“Miko, what’s this thing’s mission radius, do you know? D’you think it could get us to the Roc’s nest or maybe to the Monolith?”
“I don’t think s— Watch out, Incarnator! We’re under fire! Dodge her!”
A bright dot shot out from the ship and unfolded in flight, becoming a large fiery net following in our wake. Before we even got the chance to get properly scared, it dropped upon us.
The swirling wheels of fire screamed past us. For a brief moment, I did believe that we’d been lucky and that Avenger’s anti-air guns must have missed. But unfortunately, no such miracle had happened.
The next moment, we were on the brink of death. The pod snapped open. The powerful air current invaded it and tried to drag us out. We were saved by the fact that it was so tiny: I clung to Alice and she dug her claws into the reinforced plastic and metal of the pod’s inner casing, crumpling them in her grip. We might have screamed our heads off but you couldn’t hear anything in the ear-splitting roar of our fall.
The earth and the sky rotated wildly, swapping places. The green and brown patches of woods and mountains flashed below.
Then everything went dark as we’d entered a thick mass of clouds which glowed a sinister purple with patches of pale-blue flashing lights.
Our freefall must have lasted all of a few seconds. We plummeted through a layer of purple fog and rammed into some obstacle. I think we’d actually gone right through it.
A deafening crunching sound was the last thing I’d heard before giving up the ghost – again.
“Grey, reincarnate, quick! We’ve lost 50% Integrity!”
I could see myself I wasn’t in a good way. My ethereal body had been ejected from my host’s mangled frame which in turn had been shot out of the broken pod by the impact. My Integrity numbers flashed a warning red.
I was surrounded by an expanse of purple fog permeated by giant flashes of light. It was as if an electric storm raged within its depths. Where the hell were we?
“Follow my marker, Incarnator!”
My clever neural network could find her bearings much better than I ever could. A shimmering thread of light reached through the mist. I found my body almost straight away. Or rather, what used to be my body. Angel shit, what a sight…
Activation No 20...
Repairing the damage to your host’s internal systems...
Current Azure count: 5314/20900.
...I scrambled to my feet and felt my arms and legs. Everything seemed to be in its proper place. It was only thanks to the sturdy jumpsuit I’d received on Avenger that I was still in one piece – literally. The Incarnation process had already healed my disjointed body back together again. Actually, that process had nothing to do with superfast regeneration – it was more like rebuilding the body from a saved copy. I’d love to know how it worked.
Still, I had no
time to ponder over it now. A devastating gust of wind all but swept me off my feet, pummeling my face with prickly sand, dust and little rocks. The visibility was at zero: all I could see was the barren rocky ground underfoot. The rest was consumed by the rapidly swirling clouds of purple mist. What kind of place was this?
“Miko, where are we?”
As she replied, her voice rang with anxiety. By now, I’d already learned to tell apart the emotional overtones in her voice. She sounded very nervous – which meant that the danger was equally real.
“This is bad. I mean, really bad. We dropped into an A-zone. And not just any A-zone, but into one of the areas of anomalous energy activity!”
Only now did I notice that my Azure counter had sprung back to life, its bar rapidly filling. 15 to 20 points a minute! That was a really powerful Azure flow.
Miko activated the map. According to it, we’d crashed right over the giant A-zone, directly onto the region of the weird electric storm I’d seen from that treetop last night.
Oh, great. Just what we needed.
“Where’s Alice?”
“Must be here somewhere, Incarnator…”
Struggling against the gusts of wind, I stumbled along the deep trail of ripped-up earth left by our pod, littered with smashed fragments of its hull and pieces of machinery. Following its path, I finally reached the pod itself, whatever was left of it. Completely deformed, it was stuck half-buried in the ground.
Alice was trapped inside, looking more like a chunk of bloodied meat. Although she was regenerating even as I looked, the damage to her systems was such that even with her abilities it was taking her a while.
Straining every sinew, I tried to help her to get out, bending the deformed metal out of her way with my bare hands.
“Greeeey,” she groaned, impaled on the sharp spikes of exposed machinery. “Storm… Azure!.. Ruuun…”
“This is one of the Transmutation Storms, Incarnator. That’s what we call the zones of anomalous energy activity which produce powerful discharges of untamed Azure. They’re also known as “the exhalation of Daat”. Normally they form in the areas of previous major outbreaks from over the Edge. These places are fatal.”
Transmutation Storms? The name seemed to ring a bell. What was it now… Hadn’t Tara said that her father had died in one of them?
Despite all of my fabled upgrades, I was still laughably weak. Ignoring the blood pouring down my lacerated hands, I tried to get Alice out. Groaning, she grabbed at my hand and pulled herself off the many spikes and hooks protruding from the pod’s smashed casing. For a few brief moments, her body slackened, shuddering. Then I helped her to slowly ease herself out of the trap.
Alive. That was a good start.
“Storm! Azure! Shelter!” she snarled once she’d taken her bearings.
The gusts of wind kept growing stronger. They raised pieces of the pod’s casing into the air and pelted us with prickly dust. One of the bolts of lightning went off right next to us, its wavering bright-blue flash forking through the air. My Azure counter jumped a good hundred points. A soundless shock wave sent us flying, scattering us away from the pod.
“An Azure discharge detected!”
After a few seconds of darkness, I saw myself from above, lying face down and almost completely buried in earth and ash. My interface was playing up like it always did after an Azuric attack, flickering and oscillating.
“Grey, I don’t think we’ll survive a direct hit! We need to find shelter!”
Activation No 21… Current Azure count: 4999/20900… I tried to sit up and shook the earth off, peering through the purple mist for Alice.
A tornado reared up right next to me, sucking up rocks, dust and pieces of the smashed pod. To my horror, it began to form a grotesque figure. The pod’s surviving nose became its torso, the swirling debris formed its arms and the dusty twister, its lower body. Howling and dripping pale-blue sparks of Azure, it headed in our direction.
“An Azure discharge! Altered matter! Yellow alert! Incarnator, run!!”
Miko’s voice rang with unconcealed panic.
Alice appeared next to me and grabbed my hand, lifting me in the air while shapeshifting to her feline form. Before I knew it, she’d flung me over her back and dashed away in long leaps against the barrage of sand and ash. Although infinitely stronger than I was, she still struggled to advance. The power of the elements raging all around us was truly awesome; next to it, we were nothing more than hapless grains of sand.
Luckily, the blue bolts of A-energy were still quite far away. Their incessant flashing illuminated the impenetrable purple fog which flowed all around us. We moved on instinct. Several times we had to walk around some enormous craters; at some point, the earth rumbled and quaked as something ginormous the size of a skyscraper walked right past us. A walking mountain? All I could see was the giant’s black angular silhouette which made the earth shudder under his footsteps, his howling and roaring screams drowning out the wailing of the wind.
Finally, the mangled silhouettes of buildings rose from the mist, their crumbled black frameworks reduced to the first few stories. They were empty and dead like a skull sitting on a sand bank. But this was some shelter we could use against the vicious wind and the Azuric lightning.
Not a trace of life inside. The buildings’ inner walls were black and sand-swept, whole stories buried under dunes. Alice kept climbing down through the gaps in the concrete supports until she found a relatively closed-off place where the wind wouldn’t reach.
“Storm. Azure. Lots of Azure. It’s bad! It alters everything. It kills. It revives,” she hurried to explain once she’d shapeshifted back into her human form. “Help me!”
Together we managed to barricade the entrance with chunks of concrete slabs. Not the best protection, but still better than nothing. Alice gasped heavily, casting wary glances around as if expecting something to lunge at us from one of the sand banks formed in the room’s corners.
“Won’t Gnarl find us here?” I asked.
“No. This is A-zone. Storm. Death!”
“Such zones rich in energy outbreaks can change the physical properties of objects, Incarnator. All machinery and equipment instantly go dead here. That’s the state of Yellow Alert. I don’t think Avenger can track us down here. It would be way too risky for a technogenic object to approach this kind of place.”
“Gnarl? Possessed? Ship? What?” Alice asked, pointing a finger upward. I understood what she meant and gave her a quick rundown of everything that had happened, without going into detail.
“Escaped,” Alice nodded, satisfied. “Good. That’s right. Possessed are bad. Broken. By Darkness.”
“Will the storm subside?” I asked her. “How soon?”
“Yes. No. Dunno. We wait. It’s death. We wait. We prepare.”
“Prepare for what? Hey, Alice?”
“For Azure! Dunno.”
I frowned. It was pretty clear that she had no idea what shape the raging Azure rampage might take. The good news was, my A-energy counter was filling up in leaps and bounds: I was already several hundred richer.
“Miko, those things outside, what kinds of creatures are they?”
“You see, the untamed A-energy can unpredictably alter the properties of all matter, dead as well as alive. Those things were made of altered matter. I’m not entirely sure they can exist outside such power storms.”
“So what can happen to us?”
“No data available. The laws of nature don’t exist in these zones. Transmutation Storms bring dead things to life and alter the living ones. They transform the very properties of matter. Plus, they’re frequented by Azuric creatures…”
All this was as clear as mud.
Suddenly my head began to throb. A thin needle of pain pierced my temples. Alice sat up, alarmed. The wind outside howled especially furiously… or was that the wind?
“Grey! Weapon! Your Azuric weapon! Gimme!”
I lobbed the Claw of Helheim to her
, whipped out Fang and reloaded the Crusher. The girl deftly caught the sword and nodded her satisfaction, drawing a figure of eight in the air with the black blade. She motioned me to come close and made me stand at the room’s center back to back with her, as if preparing for combat. With whom?
“Alice, what is it?”
“They’re coming!” she hissed, turning slowly as her intent gaze scanned the walls. “You the Enchanter! Kill them! Azure! Monsters!”
I strained all of my senses, listening in.
Something reminiscent of constant non-stop whisper reached me through the roaring of the storm. A groan – a scream, akin to the howling of the wind. A rustle.
I sensed their presence before I could see them.
The Enchanter (Project Stellar Book 2): LitRPG Series Page 19