Jace sprinted through a hallway, holding his Whistling Blade down by his side and keeping his head low. He ducked under a loose, sparking clump of wires, then raised his arm to shield his face when a puff of steam blasted out a pipe in the wall.
The factory’s main lights flickered, reflecting off the angular, hexagonal walls of the hallway. Klaxons blared, and red emergency lights shone all along the hallway. Workers raced the opposite direction, holding their hands above their heads to shield themselves from falling sparks and debris. All of them had bright blue skin and wide black eyes (all the way across the sclera too), and a pair of glassy horns poking out the tops of their heads.
Jace ducked aside, letting one of them pass. The man’s grease-stained overalls were too big for his malnourished frame, and his cheekbones jutted out like rocks. The crest of the Herdings Shellbuilding Sect glimmered on his breast pocket.
Once the bout of workers passed, Jace continued down the hall. He vaulted over a stack of crates and slid under a fallen beam. His stoutsteel vambraces scraped along the floor, and his coat whirled in the wash of a ventilation grate.
The hallway spat him out on a perforated platform of hardy metal. Over the past four months since he’d arrived (and three and a half since the Battle of Celacor), he’d learned that it was called stoutsteel—a hardy resource capable of withstanding most impacts.
The platform was a small viewing outlook at the top of a maintenance stairway, with low railings on all sides and a control panel at its very front. Jace had been practicing reading the scripts of the galaxy, but this was a factory in Phélese space, and they had their own set of low-scripts and runic scripts. None of which he had spent any significant time studying.
But he wasn’t here to learn their languages. Ahead was the main Aes-condensing reactor. It had a central glass sphere, where magenta light swirled in a cyclone pattern, with hundreds of tubes and wires and dishes strapped to its sides. Girders attached it to the walls and wires held it in place, reducing its jittering.
But now that the Starrealm had begun an orbital bombardment of the factory planet, the Aes condensers were growing unstable. They didn’t have much time before the factory went up in a massive explosion.
Jace reached up to the side of his head and tapped a small earpiece clipped onto his ear. A tiny wireless transmitter. “So…uh, now that I’m seeing it…I have no idea what we’re doing.”
“Kinfild said you’d say that!” Lessa chirped back through the responder. “Kinfild? It’s Jace, he’s—”
She cut off, and Jace heard Kinfild’s voice faintly as a background crackle. Something gruff and annoyed.
“Alright, alright, I’ll let you fly the ship in peace!” She yelped softly, and a burst of static shot through the transmitter. “It’s getting hairy up here!”
“If you helped me out, it’d be faster!” Jace groaned. He ran to the platform’s front railing and leaned on it. “How do I get Aes from this?”
“It’s like a…massive jumpstart accumulator!” she said. “Pulls Aes from the Split and condenses it. But instead of feeding it to a hyperdrive, it condenses it into a physical power! Which is what they put in the plasma shells, so that any old human can ignite it.”
Jace clenched his eyes shut. “But then it’s plasma-aspect.”
“Not when it’s pulling it out…yes, yes, Kinfild, I’m getting to it! There should be six accumulation nodes, which have pure Aes in them. Grab them, stick them in your bag, then get out!”
“Yeah, I got that when we came up with the plan!” Jace said. “But what do they look like?”
And don’t just say big silver balls.
“Big silver balls?” Lessa paused. “I dunno, Kinfild, what do they look like?”
Called it.
“Kinfild says they should look like a pearl necklace wrapped around the vent at the top of the main sphere!” Lessa said hurriedly. “A big wire running through orbs the size of your fist.”
“Got it.” Jace nodded. “I see them. Just—”
Before he could finish, a beam of magenta plasmafire blasted over his head. He ducked behind the control panel on the platform and adjusted his grip on the Whistling Blade. Blasts of plasma bit into the metal, and a basket of sparks washed around him.
He risked a peek out the opposite side of the control panel. Three Phélese soldiers marched up the stairs, pointing plasma rifles. They wore black doublets, scarlet cumberbunds, and tall conical hats with a horsetail sprouting out the top. [Level 11 Phélese Soldier] read the tags above their heads.
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But they had bolt-action rifles, like most foot-soldiers Jace had encountered. (He’d encountered a few with outdated muzzle-loading plasma rifles, like a musket, but they were few and far between.)
He activated his hyperdash card to close the distance between himself and the soldiers, then slashed upward with his Whistling Blade. The cutting edge screamed and grew white-hot, and it sliced straight through the closest soldier’s chest.
He hadn’t received any more formal training in the months after the Battle of Celacor, but he’d been running Vaults as often as he could. It offered a limited return the higher he climbed (he’d only advanced to level twenty-two), and at this rate, all it did was improve his skill in a fight. No new foundation pillars, no new technique cards.
But his core was decaying, and though he’d seen no warnings yet, he had to be getting close. If he didn’t change something up soon, he’d have a problem on his hand.
Still, there were more immediate problems, even if they were rated ten levels below him. Plasma rifles didn’t care so much about level rating.
He kicked the nearest soldier’s rifle up, and it fired a bolt of plasma up into the roof. The second soldier charged, his bayonet fixed to the muzzle of his rifle. Its blade chittered and vibrated fast enough to saw through most armour. Jace slipped to the side and slashed the rifle in half, then wheeled around with a heavy strike to cut down both guards in a single sweep. His other technique cards
He flicked the blade, the movement incinerating the blood and cleaning the blade.
“What was that?” Lessa asked through the earpiece. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, Less,” he said. “Are you alright?”
“We’re still in the sky, but I don’t know for how much longer. Kinfild is aiming for the northern platform, but you’ll only have a few minutes. Get the accumulation nodes. We can extract the Aes from them later, and you can absorb it once we’ve gotten out of here!”
“On it.” He slid the Whistling Blade into its sheath, then sprinted down the stairs, cycling Aes. He held the blue-ish hyperspace-bent energy close to his core, ready to surge it through one of the pillars and activate a technique card at any moment. He had the Hyperdash and the Expulsion socketed, and his Cleanse clung to a groove in his vambrace, ready for him to swap in at any moment.
When he reached the bottom of the stairway, he arrived on an abandoned concrete production floor. He sprinted across it, jumping over tables and sliding under conveyor belts. An enormous two-storey-tall machine still churned away, imprinting brass sheets with runes, but no one was there to move them.
The reactor at the center of the hall shuddered and rocked. A whip of magenta lightning shot across the room, activating a row of half-finished artillery shells. Their payloads exploded in place, and though they were on the other side of the room, the shockwave still sent vibrations racing through Jace’s chest.
He leapt over a newly-formed crack in the floor, then scrambled up onto a pipe and scaled the side of the central reactor. He leapt from tube to clump of wire, ascending higher and higher. When he was four storeys off the factory floor, he used a hyperdash to cross the distance between an insulated coil and a maintenance platform. He passed through the corrugated floor of stoutsteel and landed on the platform in a crouch.
Now, he stood right beside the reactor’s glass bulb. It emitted a static sound that made his ears ring, and it shone so bright he had to raise a hand to block out the light. The dryer-lint smell of burnt ozone filled the air.
He swapped in his Cleanse card and activated it, removing his cooldowns and giving himself a temporary strength boost. It erased the cooldown of his hyperjump, and he activated the technique again immediately, zipping up to the neck of the glass sphere.
The glass itself was hot to the touch. It radiated the heat of an oven, even in the air beside it, and he didn’t dare touch it.
Instead, he drew the Whistling Blade and jabbed it into a nest of finger-width brass tubes. The blade slid and grew warm, but it gave Jace a grip—and just enough time.
The accumulator nodes were right below him.
He reached down with his free hand and grasped the first silver orb. It had a perfectly smooth surface, save for the opening where a cord ran through the six orbs. Like Kinfild said, a pearl necklace around the feeding shaft of the reactor.
Jace tugged on the orb, but didn’t budge. Of course.
His sword was slipping, and with the sweat running down his arms and beading around his fingers, his grip on the leather-wrapped handle might just give out first. He pushed his feet out to the side and braced himself against a larger pipe, then ripped a loose bolt out from a contraption he couldn’t yet name.
In a blink, he swapped in his Wanderer’s Expulsion card, then, holding tight to the spare bolt, he activated it. He pointed the bolt at a gap between the accumulator nodes, careful not to shear through the reactor’s protection orb, either, then gripped the bolt as tight as he could.
It blasted out of his hands in a flash, then zipped through the air and seared through the node-joining cord in a flash of white.
The chain of fist-sized pearls fell loose, and Jace snatched up one end with his free hand.
The entire central reactor groaned and shifted. He might not have destroyed the reactor chamber, but he’d severed a load-bearing nape of the device.
His eyes widened, and, ripping his sword out from the tangle of tubes, he kicked off and fell back to the platform. His hyperdash wasn’t yet ready, but he could still make it to the ground the old fashioned way. He swung over the edge of the platform and jumped down to a different tangle of tubes, then sprang between chunks of machinery until he arrived at a two-storey drop.
He jumped that drop in an instant, then landed in a crouch in front of the collapsing reactor.
As quickly as he could, he swung his backpack off his shoulder and stuffed the orbs into the main pocket, then activated his transmitter and said, “Lessa, I’ve got the Nodes!”
“Great! Wonderful! Now get out of there before you die!”
“Working on it…”