“I tell you anything you want, just heal me” the asshole former governor says to me after I put up a void shield and cut off his Exchange access.
“There is a zero percent chance that you get out of here without talking.”
“I want a guarantee!” Bloody spittle drips down his chin.
“I wanted you to be a decent Human, then you sold your city out for slaves, just so you could be a pampered slave. You really are a douche.” I’d spit on him, but I’d rather melt him to the floor.
“You could have avoided this by just listening to the governors. Yielding to experience.”
“Look what that’s earned you. For treason, I sentence you to death.” Two more bolts and the sentence is carried out. Much to my chagrin, the new Governor is awake and shivering, watching me execute the conniving treasonous asshat.
“Governor, you have nothing to fear from me. From this anyway.” I throw a few tangible credits on the floor. “For the mess. Also, we’re at War, so maybe cancel Founder’s day.” I blip out before I get a response. Two more to go, but after the fight with the Phaseblade, I forgot where they were.
Before that fight, I would have thought that the more powerful the enemy, the longer the fight, every time. Now, some realization hits that he would have killed me if all I had was short-ranged teleportation and shoddy martial arts. That was a warrior for life, his motions were short, precise, and quick. I just have aether coming out my ass, and a rare magic type to boot. According to my AI, having Space-Time and Void (or Dark) as my paired aether affinities, is beyond rare, and with S-rank power, I’m just a big dirty cheater. I’ve been told to practice my time spellforms, but being told to just go out and fuck with time seems a bad idea. Though, it would be a good way to level parallel minds. Damn this stupid war.
I follow my wave of aether again and find the two extra spots, places I visit regularly, but hidden. I am absolutely not murdering anyone in the Meat Man or Betty’s place. Those were placed to hurt me specifically. These nasty cat shits are just tapping glasses of tables to see what breaks. Me is the answer. I’ll break and commit genocide. Hitler, Stalin, Penny. Maybe some African and Waziristan potentates and warlords in there, but they don’t make a lot of history shows about them.
\Admiral, DE CMD Casey, targets confirmed. No time for marine action ashore. Charging Galilei, Warping Alaris, Titania, and Mab to engage.\
/Copy Commodore. Enemy Officer neutralized, possible dead trigger download./
\Understood. Recommend comms cut with daily sync, possible Exchange cut\
/Copy Commodore, well advised. The theater is yours. Out./
Great. I hope that the enemy battle group wasn’t alerted, but the best I can expect is having them flatfooted and unprepared for heavy fire from our cruisers. I’ve got at least fifteen minutes for Galilei to charge, and at most 40 minutes for the bombs to run out of energy. Best start clearing Ash, and Nopopolis (a name a grumble about constantly).
The City of Ash is the largest city on Astoria if you don’t lump the three boroughs into Aelea, my Capitol City, and the most likely location for additional bombs beside the moon they were being put into mines. I teleport hundreds of kilometers to what is essentially ‘New Scotland’ to check on bombs. With a burst of aether and some searching I find more than a dozen. Shit.
Most of the ones I find are stashed in a container or in a piece of equipment. The few I find in government buildings and key infrastructure areas are being monitored or are on some stupid bastard that gets teleported to space. I should probably ask if they know about the device, or just space the device, but I’m not really in the mood to chat or be charitable.
The last location in Ash appears to be a plantation house? I teleport above it and hover to scan the area again, finding many of the bombs within the house, or perhaps beneath it. Great, there’s probably a fight for me in there too. I enter the building and see several people who start yelling at me in Russian. Before I can reply with what I’m doing here, and who I am, someone raises a gun at me.
Teleporting my remaining pulse pistol and my plasma saber, I start shooting and blipping and slicing my way around the room. I avoid getting shot as much as I can, but my personal shields take half a dozen rounds anyway. Why everyone here is using conventional bullets is beyond me.
I do my best to overlay my aether sight on top of my regular vision, but it’s hard to tell exactly what everything is. Is that a bomb, or a person with poor aether manipulation. Is that a massive cluster of bombs, a hugely powerful aether user, or a power source? I should probably check those out regardless. I blip to the largest concentration of aether and find two Herrat guarding a suitcase.
I lunge for the case and space it, relying on my armor to block one of the strikes as my saber takes up another. My shields manage to slow down the blade, but it screeches against the re-enforced, enchanted Kevlar-like weave of my suit. Fuck! These blades must be spelled to break shields or something, because a tier 3 energy shield should have stopped that sword cold. I put a three round plasma burst into the belly of the warrior I crossed swords with as the other blade slides of my back.
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I blip behind, swinging my raised saber down into the back of the knees of the man I had crossed swords with and put another three pulses into his head, finally breaking his shield as he keels back from the pain in his legs. The movement from the other guard has me ducking beneath his guard mate, hearing the sword slice into flesh that is clearly not mine.
I try to dilate space between me and the sword and odd things happen to the dead man while I kick the body toward the legs of the other Herrat. When he leaps over his friend, I compress space to close the gap with my sword positioned to skewer him. His catlike reflexes save him from my blade, but not the overcharged pulse that my pistol is holding, blowing out his middle like a shotgun blast from a zombie game. Tough bastard is still conscious an seems to be calling for backup. I take his head off and search for more aether traces. While I would like to keep spacing these bodies, I don’t know how many more fights I’m getting in today. Time to jam a galaxy fruit in my maw.
The dense refined aether in the tender flesh sends a surge of energy and power as I greedily devour this sumptuous fruit. I space the two cats anyway, especially if I can stuff ten more of them in my face without. Sure, that’s going to cost me around 3k credits, but It is worth it if you can handle the aether infusion.
The traces I see coming from the next room into the hall make me want to trade places to the other room, so I do. To my surprise, I see a familiar face: tall platinum-haired bitch.
“Ahh, Penny, I was wondering, when . . .”
I shoot her guards and they are not wearing the same level of gear as the Herrat, so they die on the first burst. Then I spray [Nightmare Napalm] at Platinum, as she deserves to hurt a little. It splats on her personal shields and slides an inch or two before it starts to eat the shields.
“Just straight to execution? No time for monologue?” Figures she would buy gear from the Herrat in exchange for harboring them.
“Harboring the enemy, and treasonous assault.” I hear movement from the other room and I barely have time to point my pistol at the door before another Herrat bursts in. He throws a scimitar-like sword as soon as he sees me.
Are you fucking kidding me? I immediately push space perpendicular to the blade, making it miss me by a hare, when I feel the pulse of aether and fall to the ground and shoot up into my attacker and let space rebound while I swing my blade at his legs. The cat sidesteps into my blade, attempting to turn it away with his wrist guard. Watching the saber bite into his harm and hearing the hiss is satisfying, but he yanks his arm away and pulls my sword with it while swinging his caught blade at my neck.
I have no choice but to blip away, so I aim above, anchoring my suit with my ripple drive and turn on the afterburning plasma vortexes on my boots. Before I can put more than a few seconds of 50k degree gas on the cat, I get shot from the doorway. Watching my shield flash yellow, I let go of my ripple drive and let the next shot carry me towards Platinum, who is trying to wipe off the void from her decaying shield. Deciding to help, I fire a pulse burst into her shields and spray more napalm to keep her warm.
Being on a ballistic trajectory in a fight is a bad place to be. While I can do the math and react in time to shoot someone, veteran combatants have already programmed the hotkey into the movement centers of their brain. The Phase blade dashes to meet me, and just as I’m about to blip, he throws a blade toward the doorway, anticipating my move. I actively push aether into [My Will Be Done] to shift my blip past the cat men and into the hall. I pump the guy in the back full of pulse rounds until he starts to fall and then start charging the pistol to burst the next cat into the room. Before I can, the Phaseblade launches the man over his head, letting momentum pull the blade from the cat.
That was brutal, and pretty fucking cool. I seriously don’t have time for this back and forth shit, and my saber is inside that room somewhere, so time for a gambit. I thumb the tattoo on my right forearm and spin the spell selector with aether to energize the improved [Sunder] spellform that I had magically tattooed on my arm because of Primus benefits. I summon another plasma saber, but one of the new fancy ones that doesn’t have a physical component to the blade, just energy. Sadly, it just slows my opponents blade instead of stopping it. They definitely are enchanted to resist, repel, or break energy barriers. One benefit I do see is that the blade is scorched from the non-magical plasma that is contained by shaped shields on my blade.
He forces me down the hallway, leaving me to swing frantically trying to slow his blade with mine as I send pulse rounds into his shields. I finally see an opening for a kick to the knee, which makes him pause enough that I swing my saber down in an attack, he catches it on his blade temporarily but the plasma starts shaping around the blade. The cat shoves me back and strikes at my pistol arm. Hoping that my enchanted Titan Steel pistol will hold against the repeatedly temperature stressed blade, I use it to deflect the sword from cutting off my arm. The blade breaks as my poor pistol crunches.
Momentarily stunned by the breaking of his blade, his focus is, for once, not on me. I raise my right arm, having charged a spell with mana through the last thirty seconds to a minute, and enact the spell.
“[Disintegrate]”
He begins to move, but it was an instant to slow as a portion of the beam clip his cheek and ear. I blip back to the door that Platinum was in as the skilled warrior rapidly disassembles into constituent parts. That spell is gross.
I pick up the rifle I was shot with that goon ‘B’ was holding, and my old plasma saber on my way to check on Platinum. She is a half melted husk of a person, still somehow alive with that much missing material. I end her suffering with my plasma blade, and mourn the loss of my pulse pistols. I own and operate a weapons manufacturing firm, but I can’t seem to keep my pulse pistols on the shelf. Sure, they’re one of the most powerful energy pistol that can still be considered tier 2, but fuck’s sake, I could use some spares right now. I sell them for a mint, so I shouldn’t complain too much.
/Ivanka, DE Penny, Platinum bitch taken care of. Report./
\Copy. Cat presence moderate on Asphodel. Moiriax system severely compromised.\
/Shit. Well, shields fail in 20. Be off moon./
\We need more time or evac Penny.\
/I can’t recharge them remotely. As soon as the cats took them, those charges were always going to detonate./