My mapped-out path would have allowed me to return to the surface quickly, but the saboteur cultists in my way were worth the delay. The first group I encountered was setting a seismic disruptor only a few tunnels away from Justin and his new bodyguard. I stared a bit longer than I should have, and an ad eagerly popped into my vision.
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Roughly the size of an oil barrel, the disruptor unfolded long, chisel-tipped legs and drove them into the stone floor beneath it. Once deployed, a sharp hum filled the air and the cultists began to run away. Floating at the roof of the darkened tunnel, I watched this process before shaking my head and flying in to intervene.
The seismic disruptor was my first target, and I simply bashed through it to shut down its dangerous effect before it could collapse the mine. Already, dozens of thin cracks had spread from its base into the nearby cavern walls, and a fine rain of dust was pouring from each.
My noisy demolition of the machine got the cultists’ attention, and several produced long mono wire knives and sprinted toward me. With a calming breath, I actively remembered my purpose on Midnight and restrained my response.
The first delf to reach me slashed at me with his glowing blade, and I calmly swatted it out of his hand, before driving my fist into his midsection. The delf doubled up before going limp and collapsing to the floor in a heap.
I did much the same with the next three cultists to charge me before the last two figured out who I was. They looked at each other and then bit down hard, before falling to the floor dead. I sighed. Dead cultists were annoying, but unavoidable. So long as they died by their own hands, I would be able to spin it in the press.
With Justin’s comms device, I left coordinates for a priority security pickup. Then I used cabling from the emergency lighting system to tie the hands and feet of the unconscious cultists and left them there. On the way out of the mine, I stopped another five times to deal with cultists. They were all trying to install seismic disruptor units, and I hurriedly destroyed each.
My quick intervention was not enough to fully prevent damage from the swarming cultists, and at least two tunnels on my map collapsed.
After arriving in the main entrance hall of the mine, I stopped to stare at my map for a long moment. I couldn’t be sure I had cleared out all the cultists, but I was confident there weren’t many left, and all of them had been above the level I’d left Justin on.
An idea clicked in my head and I pulled up the cult’s social feeds on Justin’s comm unit. Their recklessness made access laughably easy. Desperate for glory, they’d made all their actions public, commoditizing the chaos for their followers. The feed was a jumble of shaky videos and self-important manifestos, but it was enough to pinpoint their movements.
One live feed showed a group setting explosives near the CFO’s building—exactly as I suspected. Another showed two cultists preparing to sabotage a cultural site across the city. I noted their locations but prioritized the CFO. If he wasn’t dead yet, he would be soon.
I hurriedly disabled a series of explosives the cultists had set, meant to collapse the mine’s entrance, then flew out into the primary external compound. The power plant was already smoldering, smoke pouring from a hole in its roof. The cult’s first target in the mine compound.
Of their three primary targets in Lithtin, I found myself able to secure two. The mine and Justin Lee himself, CEO of the House of None affiliate. Their CFO was across the city, and I had to simply hope his security forces had been better vetted than Justin’s.
Given the situation at hand, it was doubtful that they had been. I had to assume cultists had infiltrated there the way they had with Justin’s team. Which meant if I left, it would almost certainly be to chase down a corpse. Defending the mine, one of Midnight’s primary income sources and notable historical locations, was simply more important. The CFO could be replaced, and preventing the cult their publicity win mattered to my campaign more than the poor delf’s life.
With that mental calculation, I focused on protecting the mine. Standing outside the demolition warehouse was a small squad of cultists armed with thick, black rifles that glowed from deep inside their barrels. Linear cannons.
I made a mental note to avoid damaging the weapons, they were worth a small fortune each. The weapon acted as a miniaturized atomic accelerator, firing a beam of energized atoms at roughly the speed of light. The weapon’s effect was part laser beam, part energized kinetic strike.
Technically they could run out of ammunition, but the atomic packages it fired were so small it would take hours to deplete a single magazine, and even then the laser function would still work. Their major vulnerability was charge. It took a massive amount of power to operate the delvish weapons, and each was built around a vacuum energy reactor, a device that drew power from a tiny tear in the fabric of space time at its core.
All of that technology and expertise combined to create one of the only ranged weapons that could reliably penetrate my armor and modified flesh. My skin in particular was harder than most metals, but could be easily penetrated by a linear rifle.
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My fists made contact with the first delf before he knew I was coming. He had been guarding a small side-door, and was alone. I landed in a slide of pebbles and hooked the delf in the gut, making him retch and gasp as he fell. That secured me the entrance door to the warehouse but got the attention of a delf on the roof. They floated out and down, robes whipping around their grav-belt, and linear cannon pointed my way.
The line of dusty light that blasted from their weapon sizzled as it cut through my armor, body, and then the ground behind me as I launched myself into the air and tackled the delf around the waist. With a quick twist of my hands, I broke the delf’s belt and caught him as he began to fall. I wrenched his rifle free and looked down, gauging the distance to the ground before I let the cultist fall.
He screamed, then went silent when he landed and both legs broke. The delf slumped against the warehouse wall, dazed but not unconscious. I glanced at my wound, a thin line cut into my abdomen, then tapped the delf on top of his head with two fingers. Just hard enough to knock him out, but not enough to kill him.
I authorized the starfish suit to perform what it insisted was urgent repairs on my spinal cord, then flew through the open door of the explosives warehouse. It no longer mattered when the suit would pop out one of my vertebrae, as I could use the suit’s gravity control features to compensate for the damage.
Another dozen cultists were inside the large building, in the act of stealing mining explosives. Ignoring the guards, I first went for the delves hauling crates. They had a small hovercraft with an open bed inside the warehouse, directly in front of the heavy loading doors.
Two bulky delves moving large crates stopped and turned to look at me. In unison, they pulled off their robes and turned to face me, both wearing engraved suits of power armor. I scowled and glanced to the ceiling, where several cameras blinked at me, working on emergency power.
Power armor came in many forms under BuyMort. Some of it was rudimentary, mere battery-powered splints moving armored plates to cover the body. On the other end of that spectrum were nanotech enabled superstructures drawing energy from subspace.
The delves were well-equipped and well-funded. Their power armor wasn’t relic class, but it was high end enough to represent a real threat to me. As they approached both delves activated their gauntlets, which hummed with mono wire claws. Raising into the air didn’t help me, as both my aggressors were equipped with anti-gravity tech too, and simply followed me.
In the half-second I had before the fight began; I took a little time to think. It wasn’t a grand thought process, just a simple realization.
I was equipped for destruction. My starfish suit kept me alive, allowed me to move with total freedom, and to demolish nearly anything with an atomic structure. The suit’s capabilities were enhanced and complimented by my crystalline colonies.
My Stone Skin patch had changed my body's structure to ensure I could withstand multiple gravities worth of force while moving, and multiple atmospheres of pressure. The Aimed Shot patch had upgraded my reflexes to allow me to move at enhanced speeds with accuracy, even in disorienting environments like open space. And the Power Blow patch had enhanced my strength. That didn’t just mean advanced destructive capability, it meant advanced control too. Precision demolition.
The first power armored delf arrived and slashed at me with his mono wire claws. I swept to the side in a blur of motion and slapped his belt. The metal shattered and dropped the delf to the stone floor three stories below. He landed with a grunt and his claws went out. I kept moving to avoid the incoming barrage of linear cannon fire from several of the other cultists.
Finding my way through multiple beams without contacting any of them was another manifestation of my Aimed Shot perk patch. It had upgraded my operating system in a structural manner, and I was capable of far more complex flight than I had been without it.
My remaining flying opponent came at me from below, trying to catch me off guard. I dropped down and flicked him on the head, activating my breaker gauntlet. His helmet shattered, and the delf dropped with a grunt. His armor protected him when he landed, but he was out like a light. His helmet slowly reformed from the neck of his armor while I moved to deal with his partner.
Even without an antigravity belt, the other power-armored delf was dangerous. He leapt onto my back and began clawing at my midsection desperately. I responded by headbutting him, but not before his mono wire claws had done serious damage to both the suit and myself.
Blood seeped from the slits in my armor as the suit’s central core sparked and spit out chunks of metal. My own repairs could wait, the suit worked on fixing its core first. Enough damage there and it would cease function entirely. Flying back up, I dodged and weaved the linear cannon fire while picking my first target.
The delf couldn’t respond fast enough, in spite of seeing me coming, and he gasped as I landed in front of him. Another restrained punch in the midsection was enough to knock him out, but the hapless delf was cut into a dozen pieces as the other cultists turned their linear cannons on me.
I had to take a moment and appreciate the safety mechanisms of Justin’s mine. None of their explosives detonated while being carved into and apart by the fire of linear cannons. Still, footage of the attack was spectacular, as vivid dusty beams of light cut the warehouse apart in wild swings.
Bits of the roof collapsed, cultists were hit by friendly fire, and the entire structure was made unstable by our battle. I calmly and carefully knocked each delf out, until the last one realized what was happening and took the easy way out. Of the original dozen delves inside, only five survived the assault. Still, none of them died by my hand, and the footage would show that.
I searched for more cultist activity once what was left of the demolitions warehouse was secure. A quick aerial sweep told me the surface of the mine was clear, and I turned to bolt for the CFO’s position. The flight across Lithtin showed me what I had expected to see. The cult had focused their efforts on Justin Lee and on me.
While there were attacks in the streets of the delf capital city, they seemed limited to major population centers, cultural gathering places, and buildings of historic note. The attacks were spread out, and by my count just over two-hundred cultists had been employed to perform this attack.
Which meant they were out of members. Whoever the cult’s leadership was, they weren’t down there in the streets wearing robes and attacking random delf citizens with long knives. They were secure, watching and hoping their goals would be met.
Those goals had to be connected. They wouldn’t spend the majority of their remaining cultists trying to kill Justin Lee simply because he was my friend. My assumption was that the dawn attack was meant to seriously destabilize the House of None by killing its leadership in one fell swoop.
Already security forces were mobilized, securing entire blocks of Lithtin and arresting or killing cultists. I helped as I worked my way across the city toward the CFO’s building. Security hovercraft flitted above my head while I was on the ground and below me when I reached the stalactite building my target was in.
The entire structure had been carved from the naturally occurring stalactite, and featured several external portals, mostly for vehicle entry. I found a balcony and entered. What had once been a palatial estate for a single wealthy delf family had been transformed into a workplace. Offices with glass paneling and open meeting rooms dominated the building, but I found no delves until I reached the higher floors.
There a battle had clearly been fought, with dead delves and still-burning slashes in the stone walls. At the end of a long trail of battle, I found the CFO in a panic room, dead. The delf had a long silver-bladed knife in his chest that projected an image on the ceiling from its hilt. In great house style long-form delvish, it read “The House of None will never rule.”
I stood in the abattoir for a long moment, sighed, then left to go back and help the rest of the city.