S-2 shouldered its rifle at her order and dashed down the corridor firing.
“Shit!” Sam cursed and took off after her droid, who was, for all intents and purposes, following her exact instructions. "I really need to focus on how I order these tin cans around more before I give them instructions!" She admonished herself as she ran, shouldering her rifle.
Rounding the gradual bend in the hallway, one of Sam’s hexagonal shield projections flared yellow but didn’t shatter. The metal slugs the shield deflected pinged off the wall behind her as she ran. Ignoring the minor distraction, Sam looked at the waist-high dome-shaped turrets. Two were on the ceiling, and the other two on each wall. Wondering why none were on the floor, Sam used Identify on the ceiling-mounted one.
Hyperlite Security Turret [Level 70]; Hostile; Affinity: None; Loadout: Ballistic Rounds.
Seeing the battle through her glasses was fascinating. Readouts about power levels and weak points highlighted each turret and S-2, who was half her distance from the armory. Each ballistic and magical round fired from the turrets was tracked in real-time as they sped down the corridor. She could even see the direction the gun barrels were facing, and small red arrows lit up at the corners of her vision if they were directed at her.
Trying not to be distracted by the overwhelming amount of information flooding her vision, Sam cast Override on one of the ceiling turrets.
Time slowed for Sam the instant she directed her spell at the turret. Even the lightning-fast mana lasers slowed to a crawl. Sam, of course, knew time wasn't slowing down; instead, her brain was speeding up. A glance at her stamina and mana reservoirs showed them dropping precipitously. Feeling there was something important about what was happening, she nevertheless pulled her attention from the slow-motion action she was seeing and focused back on her energy-intensive spell.
Sam’s mind dove into the turret through a magical link her spell established with its CPU, quickly finding the node she needed to override to turn it on its allies. Unlike when she reprogrammed the droids, whom she had already defeated and disconnected from their controller, this turret was still powered up and controlled by the presence she felt trying to 'ping' the droids. She ignored the presence, instead focusing on the turret’s control node.
“Initiating purge protocol,” a synthetic voice sounded in Sam's head as a blast of feedback assaulted her mind, making her lose concentration. The connection between her and the turret was broken, and time sped back up. The spell backlash was so significant that Sam stumbled and would have fallen had S-4 not grabbed her by the arm until she steadied herself.
“I’m good. Go!” Sam said to the droid, who immediately resumed its attack.
Resuming her sprint toward the turrets, Sam reached a hardened blood barrier that Lupie and Nul were hiding behind with S-2.
“Smart move, Lupie!” Sam said, ducking behind the chest-high barrier of hardened blood.
“S-2 requested it,” Lupie replied honestly.
“Oh really,” Sam was impressed with the droid’s tactical thought process. She listened to the steady thunk of the ballistic rounds against the barrier and the sizzling sounds the magical lasers made when they struck the blood. An acrid smell of burning blood was starting to permeate the air around them.
By now, all the droids were at the barrier, taking turns firing their rifles over the edges and sides. Sam took a moment to check everyone's overall status. She was most interested in how S-2's core was holding up, so she checked its stats.
Arcane Mana Core
Classification: Powerplant
Quality: Pure
Condition: 97% Functional
Magical: Yes
Functions: Power any mana engine up to level 57 before experiencing stress degradation.
Enchantments: Absorb Magic
Capacity: 15,237mu of 17,245mu
Supported Abilities: Light Mana Rifle: Single, Burst, and Concentrated Beams; Nanoweave Short Sword: Energize Edge
Location: Slotted in Multifunction Hyperlite Attack Droid designation: S-2
“Wow, S-2 has used over two thousand mana units already,” Sam thought. She was pleased the core only degraded three percent. Moving her focus from the core readout, she checked S-2’s frame damage since the droid led the charge and probably took the most hits.
Multifunction Hyperlight Attack Droid [Level 65] designation S-2
Damage: 34%
Power: 88.36% Remaining
Nanite Solution: 64% Remaining
Repair Status: Sufficient reserves for 100% repair.
What followed was a comprehensive list of every processor and servo on S-2's frame, each with its own damage report. Sam ignored all that; she was genuinely impressed the droid wasn't more damaged, considering it was the sole target as it dashed down the corridor ahead of them. She was glad her Loot skill gave her nanite solution, too, now that she knew that was how the droids repaired themselves. She was a little worried about having to repair them mid-battle, but that was thankfully not the case.
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Sam saw that the other three droids were barely down a few percent. Lupie was fine, but Nul hadn’t left her head yet. A couple of pokes at her void slime hat woke up the little asshole who somehow slept through the entire ordeal.
Sam sent a couple of messages to the group, and then she and Nul disappeared.
***
Sam appeared behind one of the turrets and immediately fell to the metal tiles below. She now understood why they weren't mounted on the floor as she stared up at them, just out of reach of her physical attacks.
Before she could think anything else, though, she doubled over as a wave of nausea washed over her, threatening to force her into disgorging her stomach contents all over the clean metal floor.
"How the hell can you use that skill over and over?" She asked Nul, who was teleporting behind each turret and shooting them with void bolts, laughing maniacally the entire time.
Sam's recovery from her first use of Void Step was not going as planned. She planned for her and Nul to teleport behind the turrets and do as much damage as possible before teleporting back to cover. Then, they would repeat the process as many times as necessary until the turrets were either down or figured out their tactics.
But instead of smoothly executing that carefully thought-out spur-of-the-moment plan, Sam found herself on her knees in agony from the residual effects of using her skill. “It’s like my insides didn’t all wind up back in their proper place,” Sam groaned inwardly as magical and ballistic projectiles continuously impacted her hex shield. "That was nothing like going through the Void Tunnel. Using Void Step was more akin to the first time she forced the transition into becoming a Technogog Arcana. It felt like every cell in her body was torn apart, then haphazardly stitched back together in the blink of an eye."
“Oh, this sucks,” Sam said, forcing herself to her feet. Retrieving the rifle from her back, she aimed at the closest turret and fired a single shot. A concentrated beam of hot violet mana blasted out of the barrel of her rifle, but it didn't even kick back into her shoulder. The beam struck the turret in its side plating and punched right through, leaving a thumb-sized hole edged with molten slag in the side of the turret.
"Holy shit!" Sam exclaimed, studying the cherry red rifle barrel glowing from the intense heat of the blast. She quickly realized what she did wrong. Seeing her mana had dropped nearly five thousand points and feeling the familiar headache associated with using that many mana units at once, Sam thought, “I didn’t try to regulate the amount of mana I dumped into the shot. I need to remember this thing is tethered to me.”
Just then, one of the metal slugs managed to get through her shield to slam into her chest. Sam lost feeling in her lower body for an instant when the bullet passed through her chest and shattered her spine. It was a strange feeling to lose all sensation from a severed spine only to regain it in the same heartbeat when her Rebuild skill kicked in.
Focusing back on the battle, Sam decided to end it quickly. She hoped that the turrets' controller would remain hidden behind the closed door of the armory for a little longer, allowing them to recover before moving on to the next room.
After scanning with her glasses and finding no mana core in the turrets, Sam did what she always did and went into overkill mode. Ignoring the mana headache, she switched her rifle to solid beam mode. She arced it across one of the ballistic turrets, slicing it entirely from its mount. The kill message came right after.
Your party has defeated Hyperlite Security Turret [Level 70]. Bonus experience is awarded for defeating an enemy 10 or more levels above your own.
Two more kill notifications came back to back after the first when Nul and the droids with Lupie took two more turrets down. Another beam of superheated mana from her rifle quickly ended the final turret, and then there was silence.
At Sam’s insistence, the party retreated far enough back to be out of the direct line of sight of the armory doors before they recovered and repaired.
She looted the turrets before retreating and was happy to see they provided her with more nanite solution that she could use to repair the droids faster than if she were only using her skill. She was able to put the piece of the one turret she cut down into her inventory, but unfortunately, the parts still attached to the wall and ceiling would not go into her storage.
Back out of sight of the doors, Sam checked if anyone had leveled, but none of them had, unfortunately. She asked S-2 if it could level and was surprised at the response: "Affirmative. My level can be improved by updating my software and/or hardware."
“Huh. So, it’s like upgrading a computer by changing out components and uploading a new operating system,” Sam thought. She immediately asked if S-2 could upload into the elite droid’s frame, but it said no, much to her disappointment.
Before they tackled the armory, Sam charged the four droids and gave Lupie more blood. In just that short assault, everyone's reserves were down significantly. Lupie alone used four of the blood sacks Sam provided her. The more she thought about it, Sam realized the wall the Bloodmorph made was extremely durable, so it stood to reason she had used a great deal of blood. Along that line of reasoning, Sam thanked Lupie for the barrier and was rewarded with a beaming smile and a wagging tail for her words.
After the droids and her companion were taken care of, Sam still needed to refill her reserves. In just a few attacks, she used over fifty percent of her substantial mana reserves, proving the enormous mana pool wasn't just for show. She hoped the energy requirements would drastically reduce as she leveled her skills. Otherwise, she would have to start paying much closer attention during combat.
Sam and company returned to the armory doors as prepared as possible. Using her glasses, she found two power sources hidden in the wall on each side of the double doors. Sam decided to keep those as a backup plan in the event she couldn’t open the doors using the pad mounted on the wall off to one side.
Touching the pad, Sam ordered the party to take up positions along the wall, and she cast her Override spell. The small door controller's processor and coding were nothing like the turret or the droid’s. It was a simple switch that could open, close, lock, and unlock. Yet the presence that kicked her out of the turret was still there, waiting for her. The foreign mind immediately tried to purge her from the door controller. But Sam was prepared this time and countered with a flood of mana into the controller, trying to brute force her way into its programming. After a brief struggle, Sam's overwhelming countermeasure won out and forced the foreign presence from the controller's interface. She knew she only managed to gain control because the relative simplicity of the door controller couldn't allow the presence to exert its full power against her.
She filed that information in her "to unpack later" folder of her mind because, with a click and a hiss, the double doors to the armory opened, revealing a massive room roughly half the size of the hanger bay. Dozens of droids and turrets swiveled toward them, and as one, they started firing.
“Take cover!” Sam shouted, taking her own advice and sliding behind one of the enormous support beams dotting the room. She noted that although hundreds of droids were in the room, less than thirty were actively attacking them. The rest were still curled in a motionless ball on the floor. Leaning out enough to fire a couple of shots from her rifle, Sam cast Override on one of the dormant droids, diving into its code.
One of the most surreal feelings Sam had ever experienced slammed into her mind like a weird tickle. The instant she cast Override, she felt herself linked to not just one of the dormant droids but sixteen of them. Sam felt her mind split into all sixteen droids, and it was a…really…really…weird feeling. It was like she was floating in space with trillions of lines of code flowing around her at speeds she should never be able to comprehend. Yet the time-dilation effect of her spell allowed her to read the code and change it with a thought. “This is the maximum number of entities I can control at my level,” Sam realized. She also noted that the foreign presence wasn't connected to the dormant droids. She did detect the droid's basic AI trying to purge her, but it was a fruitless attempt compared to the power of the presence. Still channeling her Override spell, Sam began activating the sixteen droids she was connected to, giving them simple directives: Attack anything that wasn't her companions, droids, or each other.
The instant she broke the connection with the sixteen droids, a mana laser penetrated her shield and struck her in the shoulder. Sam ducked back behind her cover and smiled when over a dozen more mana rifles firing joined the chaos of the lasers and ballistic rounds zinging and pinging around the room. Her new droids were doing their jobs!