The walls were studded with emitters, dozens of them, similar to the one we had bypassed to enter. At its peak, this place would have been utterly unassailable, walls within walls within walls, funnelling movement into dead ends of yet more walls.
Instead it was silent and unnervingly so. Jack had flitted on ahead and the rest of us advanced slowly, as silent as possible given Tower's clumsy gait and the echoing metal crash of Ashton's exosuit.
"Another one," Jack said, audible before we could even see him arrive. "Another wall, ahead. It seems she has some power online, but not enough. It's struggling to keep on."
In a few moments it came into view, a glittering emerald in the dark, but as Jack said, fluctuating and rippling, as though irritated by its lack of power.
What interested me more was the individual on the other side of it, a woman with a shaved blonde head who might be mistaken for dark-skinned with the amount of sweat and dust caked to her. The tunnels were humid, and I imagined showers were of low priority for one hiding out.
"You!" she yelled at us, fully audible through the wall. "You did this! Leave this place NOW!"
"Miss, please consider that you are an unregistered Exhuman. We are here to negotiate your surrender and return to society. You will have a place in New Eden where you can live comfortably," Jack said.
"New Eden? What is that supposed to be, a fancy garden? Are you supposed to be Satan?"
Jack paused, caught off-guard. "Miss, how long have you been down here?"
"I don't owe you any answers. Now go away!"
"Miss, New Eden is a new facility constructed a few months ago by the XPCA to house Exhumans in peace. Please, I encourage--"
He was suddenly behind me as where he stood flooded with green light from the walls. I rocketed backwards on my pack several feet to stand beside Ashton as more walls appeared, seeming to fade into life. From each arm, I fired, and the explosions on the walls were just out of synch enough to be disorienting as the blasts rocked us alternating left and right.
But I had destroyed the emitters nearest us, and though walls appeared before and behind us, none bisected where we stood.
"There are dozens of them, I do not possess the ordinance to destroy them all," I shouted.
"Jesus Christ," Tower yelled over the ringing in his ears. "Karu, what the hell!"
"I saved our lives," I said, even as the walls began to sputter around us. "Make yourself useful and beat down these walls.
"Or DON'T and GO AWAY." the Exhuman screamed at us. But despite the blasts, Tower was more inclined to listen to me over her, and stagged for a moment before building speed as he had before, bouncing back and forth off of two of the green walls before and behind us.
"They make a noise," Jack yelled. "Before they turn on. Listen for it. And stop deafening us so we can as well."
"The beam would have killed us. Does nobody appreciate that being alive is a prerequisite to hearing, as well?" I asked. I looked to Ashton but he remained standing, utterly unreadable behind his faceplate. What had happened to him? Was he simply muted, cracking wise within his helmet where nobody would hear? It was not in him to utterly shut up.
And yet he remained as a statue while Tower finished building up speed and slammed into the barrier. He did not even fully stop, pinwheeling through the air into the next barrier as the first melted into green nothingness. I took the moment to disable the emitters with microrockets to prevent their reactivation as we moved forward.
"You're asking for it," the girl warned. "I'm not gonna be responsible for what happens next."
"You are Exhuman filth. You have never been responsible," I informed her.
Suddenly all the walls disappeared except for the one closest to her. I listened and as Jack said, there was a distinct noise. A distorted wailing, like a train in a distant tunnel...or perhaps that was just the environment coloring my perception. Regardless I saw we had only moments to act.
"Jump!" I shouted, acutely aware the others were likely still deaf. "Jump!"
I did. Jack did. Tower was still in the air as he built up speed for the next wall. Ashton...did not. And so when the beam emitted at ankle-height, it sheared utterly through his exosuit, separating the bottoms of the suit's feet as though cleaving the soles off a shoe.
He rocked, suddenly unstable, and as the rest of us landed, we joined him in falling over on the surface slicker than ice.
But Tower was still whizzing through the air like a cannonball, and the Exhuman's face turned ashen as he flew at her only barrier. Then he, too, was slipping on his feet, after he smashed the last wall and landed with a bounce, her last defence crackling away before her.
Before it could fade, she bolted, a new wall appearing behind her in time to catch the spray of laser fire I loosed in her direction.
But as more barriers went up between us, the one under us faded in color and intensity. It was already larger than any other we'd seen, extending a fair way down the path we had come, and it seemed to struggle for its size. I braced myself and thrust both wrist blades into it at once, where they felt as though catching on something for only a moment, before burying themselves into the rock beneath. The same sensation as clipping a bone when stabbing someone.
"She's struggling to keep them up," Jack said, already on his feet, and watching as Ashton righted his suit on its newly-shortened feet, stumbling only slightly with the aid of the auto-gyros. "She only has sufficient power for a few at a time."
"If she continues to yield ground, we will eventually come across her generators, and then she will be without power entirely."
"Which means we'll win," Tower said.
"Which means, she will be desperate," I clarified. "To back a beast into a corner is to ensure a fight. And an Exhuman is a beast more dangerous than any other."
"We have a job to do," Jack said, serious despite his smile. And so we did.
But she did not make it easy; she understood her circumstances as well. She no longer yelled for us to leave, no longer held back. Instead her barriers disappeared and reappeared around us constantly. Tower could no longer safely launch himself at them for fear of them disappearing before him and reappearing inside him. More than once, sliding on the frictionless planes, I had to deploy my jetpack to pull myself or others out of harm's way only moments from bisection.
Yet all the while we made progress. More emitters destroyed, more ground ceded, more steps closer to the generators which powered the nightmare machines, and to her downfall.
I could see we were approaching the finale. A collapsed tunnel, and in the very end of it, her living area and workshop. It was still a ways down, not visible in the dark with naked eyes, but the end was in sight.
She knew it as well, and rather than fleeing she began to make us work for each barrier between us and our goal. We began to see more and more of her, sweat carving lines in the silt on her face as she held her ground more stubbornly.
And she made us pay. I lost a wrist-mounted scattergun and the barrel shroud of another, jerking my arm away from a wall which nearly caught it. Jack was less fortunate and had lost an entire hand discovering that some emitters could project at angles instead of simply straight across the tunnel, his bandaged stump bleeding as he cradled it.
Ashton's exosuit had sustained the most damage of all, though he had managed to avoid any catastrophic hits, instead of being smooth black metal, it had been seemingly hacked at from many angles, rounded parts cut smooth, exposed defunct inner workings visible. It was even more sluggish than before, but still moved.
Overall, as a battle of attrition, we had won. None of us had died or been disabled, and she was out of space. Jack would have his regenerator and we would have her head.
Or so I had thought as we began our final advance, destroying yet another set of emitters in the wall, leaving us with just a single green barrier and a girl panting and exhausted behind it.
"I tell you again," Jack said, his voice curt from stims "surrender and you won't be harmed. Or else we will have to kill you."
"You come in here, you chase me, you destroy my tech, and you expect me to just turn myself over and believe you that it's going to be okay? How stupid do you think I am?"
"Immeasurably so if you believe that fighting us will provide a better outcome," I said. "Jack's offer is one you suspect of death. Mine is a promise of it."
She stood, panting, listening, hunched over slightly beyond the final wall. Her workshop and home were thirty feet away, the generators somewhere amidst the running machinery. "Fine," she said. "Fine. Take me in then."
The barrier dissolved into nothingness and all five of us stood immobile for a time.
"Well...come out then," Jack said.
She held out her wrists in a 'cuff me' gesture. Jack appeared next to her in an instant with cuffs in his single hand.
The absolute idiot.
She grabbed his bandaged stump and squeezed blood from it as the emitters thrummed with energy. Though he screamed, he still had the presence of mind to move himself with his powers.
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And more, to bring her with him. A short jump, only a few inches as he had no time, but enough to put himself out of the beam. And her into it.
I found myself disappointed when it passed around her, a hole in it her exact size and shape as though the barrier could not harm her. It would have been a fitting end to the fight, and a clean one. But I did not abhor a mess. I fired shock nets at the pair of them grappling over Jack's stump as it splattered blood across them and the rock.
She released him and slipped back through the wall which closed behind her, the shock net catching Jack, who disappeared from within it before it activated. The empty net carried on, slapping against the wall with a heavy thud and the ominous clicking of tasers.
Jack was already moving again, pulling blast charges from his pack and heading for the stone tunnel wall, but at his approach a barrier appeared before him, blocking him from circumventing the main barrier. He appeared further down the tunnel, and then on the opposite side, but everywhere he moved, the walls appeared in front of him, protecting the perimeter without being large enough to weaken main barrier.
"Ears!" I shouted, and blasted the ceiling with a pair of rockets, directly above the barrier.
She hadn't gotten ceiling shields up in time, if she possessed them, and though the whole room trembled at the blast, there was a new hole, only small enough for a child to crawl through above the barrier. A small cascade of sand and rock began to pour through the cracked concrete above us, ominously.
"Are you crazy?" Tower screamed. "No, we already established that. Stop being crazy!"
"It is necessary," I yelled back at him. "She can defeat conventional angles of attack."
"How the heck is that hole gonna help us?" he asked, staring at it, tiny and eight feet up.
As he stared, a grenade flew through the hole and landed at the feet of the Exhuman. Her face went white as it beeped once, and with a desperate gesture, she threw her arms up and placed a wall between the two of them.
I had anticipated such and hadn't bothered with fragmentation or lethal grenades. But the barrier did nothing to reduce light or sound, and so the flashbang was as effective as though she were standing right on top of it. She -- and the others -- screamed as the blast tore through the air and whitened out my visor and audio for long moments.
But I was already moving, taking the blast charge from Jack's flailing arms and deploying it on the rock wall beside the barrier. She could not see or sense me, and so would not block me as she did Jack. But to be safe, I limited my time standing in the emitter's zone as much as possible.
This blast was quieter, relatively, but much more destructive as it shattered a chunk of the rock wall the size of a small closet. The others, still blind and stumbling, screamed as they were pelted with shards from the blast. But it was no matter. The main barrier went down with the emitters on that side destroyed.
With her still disoriented, I had time to line up my shot. The last blast had turned the trickle of rock from the ceiling into a constant tumble, and our time here would be limited. I aimed for center mass and unloaded a single larger round, the sound of the blast echoing around the chamber.
Her hands, which had been up in front of her, groping for anything, flashed green as the bullet impacted them. For an instant, I saw two barriers mounted on her arms, slightly curved, and large enough to cover her torso. Because of course an Exhuman who specialized in barriers would have a personal one. If she were following the standard phases of technopathy, she was well on her way to phase three, wherein her powers would be made mobile and she could unleash them on the world above. If only we had found her sooner, the fight would be over now.
Instead, it seemed it was just beginning, as she felt the impact and blindly lashed out. The room filled with short-lived but vividly bright barriers from every angle. A web of lethal wires. I grabbed Tower and threw him as bodily as I could, making a beam pass through his leg instead of his chest.
She was recovering her vision, and so I deployed another grenade. But as it flew through the air, her hand snapped up and a barrier-beam cleaved through it, cutting off a third of it and rendering it inert. She gestured at me next, and I had to rocket sideways to avoid another beam levelled at me.
And then she grunted as Tower slammed into her full-force and sent her flying into a wall with a crack. He continued to advance until a pair of narrow beams crossed his path, and Jack had to appear and again pull him to the side as she fired more off right at him, even from where she was slumped at the base of the wall.
While she was distracted with those two, Ashton finally stepped up, though what he was doing was unclear. He seemed intent on charging her with blades extended, but he or his weaponry kept getting caught by stray beams and he would have to dodge or hesitate while he resummoned them. His was a painfully slow advance, given the damage to his exosuit, and I wished he would simply vacate it and run at her with a dozen swords as I knew he was capable. Surely her strained barriers would not protect her from that onslaught. But he did not, seeming hesitant to do more than walk. I shook my head.
With her pinned and contending with the three of them, I slipped away to her workshop. Alien machines and tools loomed here, unfathomable as the rest of her tech. But it was hers, and that was enough to resign it to death. I placed two more charges and synced the detonators. I did not wish to be close when the machines went off...some technopath devices tended to...react explosively.
"Fall back!" I shouted. "Charges placed!"
Jack and Tower were with me at once as my wings carried me down back into safety. Tower flew through the air, kicking the ground as though riding a skateboard, and Jack flitted in and out of being through the shadows.
Ashton did not turn, did not move, simply advanced with deliberate, mechanical precision on the girl now pulling herself to her feet.
His exosuit would protect him. And given how he had been today, I felt little sympathy if it did not. I jammed the trigger on the detonator and felt the shockwave move the air in my lungs of its own accord.
Jack and Tower had been holding their ears, or at least, Jack was attempting to, while bleeding all over the side of his head. Yet still the blast felt even louder than any other I'd yet set off, larger by far than the single charge I'd deployed earlier. I must have been correct about the machines' explosive capacity.
But not correct about their purpose. Because when I turned back after my organs had resettled in their cavities, and the air no longer felt solid in my lungs, I found barriers up and ready, still powered, still functioning, and still threatening Ashton. Through the dark and the cloud of debris, my visor could see them both clearly.
Some of the beams had to have pierced the exosuit's pilot by now, and the fact that the suit was holding itself in a facsimile of its occupant agreed. The rest of us were too far off now, and her attacks were focused solely on him. I watched as one beam cleaved the front of his faceplate off, his hand moving as though checking he still had a nose.
"Exosuit...damaged. Requesting immediate assistance," he said, his voice a disturbing mix of emotionless synth and barely-controlled panic over comms.
It frustrated and infuriated me. How could he be so slow? Why was he not pressuring her? He ambled forward with the same few attacks, predictable and mindless. She was backpedalling from him, a triumphant grin on her face as she blasted him again and again.
"Maybe try something else, you idiot!" I screamed at him. "Use your damn powers! Use the damn training I have instilled in you. Were my lessons for naught?"
He turned towards me, oafish, a hand still covering the crack in his faceplate, and then he turned back to her where she stood, waiting, probably trying to bait him into an area where she could hit him with a strong barrier wall and finish him once and for all.
But for once, he did not advance. He did not conjure his slow-summoned, lazily-floating blades. Instead, the air rippled around him, trembling as though afraid. I had begun running towards him but upon seeing this found my feet slowing and then stopping, unsure what I was witnessing.
The tremors realized into white, pulsating spheres, six or eight of them, around him in a circle and waist-height. A white, wildly-pulsing, vividly-bright orb of light, very nearly transparent in the middle, akin to the halo of an angel.
They drifted slowly away from him, even more lazily than his swords, and in no particular direction, randomly floating and bobbing, changing direction as though blown by invisible winds. Bubbles, almost. But as they drifted away, he created more. And more. Until the dust-choked air of the tunnel was glowing white with the carpet of floating orbs as they roved and bounced, seemingly repelling off each other and off the walls.
Ball lightning, I realized. A rare, hardly-understood meteorological event where electromagnetic fields could become knotted and entangled to create a naturally-sustained sphere of heat, energy, and plasma. They moved silent and spooky as ghosts, just drifting harmlessly around.
Until one reached where she was cowering against a wall. With hardly a pop, the field dispersed as it touched her, and she screamed as the latent forces resumed their normal, unchained lethality.
She flailed and writhed as the first hit her, clawing at the rock to escape, her personal barrier flashing, but ineffective against a forces as pervasive as electricity and heat. Yet as though attracted to her flailing, the other orbs descended, and the pitch of her screams rose until it echoed through the tunnels.
She pulled walls from everywhere, a pale labyrinth of hastily-assembled barriers surrounding her. But the orbs flowed from Ashton like a tide of molasses, bumbling and bouncing through the maze of walls, bouncing off them mindlessly, but filling the chamber. Her eyes went wide as the barriers began to crackle and fade, the tide of lightning death piling high on her walls, as thousands and thousands of them pressed against her walls.
When the barriers did fall, the lightning tumbled forward, like a slow-motion flood. She pressed against the stone, clawing at it for any escape as she screamed for mercy. When the wave crested into her, I could feel the heat of the sudden discharge from here, blinded by lightning of a hundred bubbles of plasma released all at once.
I felt as much as heard the tunnel shake, and my feet found motion again.
"Jack!" I screamed. "Get him out!"
I rammed full-force into Tower, and he rolled with the blow and began flying weightless towards the exit. My wings deployed and though the insane winds of the enclosed space slammed me every direction, I used them to lope along, pushing my running speed even faster.
I heard a crash nearby as Jack reappeared with the exosuit in tow, gasping for air. And then a crack more ominous, and the sound of crushing rock.
I barely had time to look as the tunnel began to collapse in, thousands of tons of rock falling behind us. There was nothing to do but flee, and hope.
Tower was well clear and building up more speed as he flew. Jack and Ashton had fallen out of sight somewhere, and I could only pray for their safety. But my feet were carrying me as fast as they could and still I felt the falling rocks behind me, the ground shaking, the hundreds of proximity warnings flashing on my visor.
At some point, I tripped on the uneven flooring, my wings carrying me as long as they could manage forward before I crashed into the ground with a roll. I looked back, feeling my heart slamming in my chest, my lungs burning with inhaled grit as I scrambled to put feet under me.
The cave-in had stopped twenty feet prior. I had been safe even before I tripped. I fell to my back in exhaustion, lifting my visor to wipe sweat from my eyes. And to breathe. Even the dirt-choked air tasted like relief.
Jack and Ashton appeared nearby, both entirely grey with concrete dust, and Jack's leg clearly broken from where he lay under the exosuit. It had fallen on him, but in so doing had sheltered him for long enough for them to jump out. Tower ambled in later, with a pleasant grin to see us all intact.
"My, but that was fun," I said, wiping my face down as we all sat and recovered.
"Remind me never to do anything fun with Karu," Jack groaned "More stims, please…"
I advanced on the exosuit, where Ashton was still holding his face despite all the other damage and trials. I pulled his large, mechanical hand away to see what damage he had sustained.
I saw a glimpse only of a green-brown eye and black hair matted to a face before the hand insistently returned to place. Or thought I saw anyway. He was having none of it.
"Reading you now, P-Force. Do you copy? Did...did you guys do it?" Colonel Dawn asked. "Is the target down?"
"Yes, mission complete," Jack panted from the ground. "Requesting immediate medical evacuation, please."
"Sure thing. Great job guys. Uh, Chariot, Rito's here for you. Do you want me to send her to you?"
"I'm coming over," he said, but the crack in his helmet made his real voice blend with the synthesized one, and made me wonder.
Watching him stride away in the dark, holding himself as he ambled, something struck me as not right. His hair, his eye, his voice...I wished I had been recording so that I could go over them later. But I could not shake how unfamiliar that glimpse had seemed.
As he departed, he left doubts behind, and I felt robbed of the scenario I had machinated. I had only joined this mission to go with him in a capacity he could not refuse. And yet this whole time, I had hardly been with him at all.
Vexing. Worth correcting.
A younger Karu might have stood by the established rules, but I was no longer she. I ran ahead to catch up with the lumbering damaged suit, and pulled his hand away from the faceplate one more time.