The vault was surprisingly orderly for a scavenger sect’s headquarters. Rows of stacked steel canisters filled the main room, polished and glimmering in the dim lighting strips hanging from the ceiling. Shelves lined the edges, each with orderly cylindrical containers stacked upon them.
Nothing inside the vault was locked. Jace pulled open a canister with ease, revealing a set of tightly-packed steel coils and exposed machinery that had to be valuable.
He opened his backpack. There wasn’t much room inside, and he had to make it count, but no way was he just leaving behind a potentially valuable material from a special vault.
But first, the keycard.
Only moments after he stepped into the vault, klaxon began blaring. Blood red lights flared in the hallways outside, and the vault door tried to slam shut. The damaged shield generation panel sparked. But the door only moved a few feet before it fell off its rails and topped inward with a deafening bang.
“Keep an eye out for guards,” Jace shouted over the rising and falling pitch of the klaxon. “But keep looking. Any idea where they’d keep cards?”
“Some place easy to access,” said Lessa. “No sense in leaving a card in a hard place to find when they’d need to access it often enough.”
Jace glanced side to side, but the opening half of the room didn’t have anything worth taking—no obvious sign of a technique card.
He and Lessa sprinted into the back half of the vault, separated from the front by a simple chain-link barrier, and turned in a circle. A repeller-field floated in the center, holding up a coil of coppery wire.
“Rune-solder!” Lessa exclaimed, then snatched it up. “Copper wire alloyed with resonance scale—that’s dragon scale to you! It scripts the best runes, and we won’t have to keep scraping old metal into place if we wanna fix up or enhance your cards.”
“It’s rare?”
“Yes, now put it in your backpack! We’ll worry about what we can do with it later!”
He held the pouch open, the main pocket, where the accumulator nodes still waited. She tossed the coil in. It took up about half the space he had left.
Along the edges of the back room were Aes cells, and for a moment, Jace contemplated taking a few. But he couldn’t reverse discharge them and take their Aes, and they couldn’t provide a steady enough stream to power a starship. Starcoals still let off orders of magnitude more energy than Aes cells, and faster.
But having a few on hand would always be useful. He snatched up a pair marked with the common tongue symbols for “pure”. They had the same spelling, just different-looking angular letters. Py, Ura, Ren, and Err. He tossed them in his backpack, taking up another quarter of the space he had left.
“Cards, cards, cards…” he spun around in a circle.
“Jace!” Lessa exclaimed. “Behind you!”
He dropped instinctively, and just in time. A pair of scavenger guards ran into the hallway, and the both fired plasma blasts. One struck the door and exploded into a hailstorm of sparks, but didn’t do any real damage, and the other seared into the vault. It chewed through the chain link dividers and blasted over Jace’s head, then struck the wall behind him with a thud. It scorched a hole in the stoutsteel.
Lessa leaned around the side of a canister and fired a shot back. “I’ll cover you!” He first blast grazed the guard’s side. “Find the card before Wielders come!”
Keeping low, Jace darted across the storage vault. He ran his hand along the wall until he reached an insert of metal drawers. He pulled one open, revealing a stack of blank technique cards, and he plucked them all up and stuffed them into the remaining space in his backpack.
More technique cards filled the other drawers. They were all common grade, and made for metal-aspect Wielders—poor ingredients for imprinting, and for techniques he couldn’t use. No sense in stealing them, unless he wanted to cause the sect a headache.
When he reached the bottom third of the drawers—demarcated by a thick line of blue tape—he found different cards. They were all some variation of [Technique Card: Broadcast Narra Clearance Code (Common) (Curse) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Shield, Pure)]. They type of clearance code changed. Narra, Trennea, Mass Haven, and more. Each had to correspond to a different planet.
As he understood it, anti-hyperspace torpedo nets were an advanced variation of Shield-aspect techniques, so it made sense that it’d work with a shield aspect, but thank god it also worked with pure Aes, otherwise he’d be in trouble—and probably, most of the Brakmen Sect, too.
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Why they were a Curse type? He couldn’t say for certain. But Shield-users tended to scale with Resistance, so to counter that and open the gate would have to be a technique that used Potency—a Curse.
And then Jace pulled open a drawer in the center. It had a velvet bottom and a pristine, newly-minted card in it. He pulled it out and lifted it up, then stared at it until a tag emerged: [Technique Card: Open Ifskar Hypernet Gates (Rare) (Curse) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Shield, Pure)].
A piece of tape fastened a paper note to it, which read (roughly): Original. Please make copy before removing.
Jace grinned, then ripped the note off and stuffed it in his pocket. “Less, I’ve got it! And I’ve got no more room in my backpack!”
She leaned around the side of a canister and fired a plasma blast, nailing a guard in the chest and flinging him down the hall. Two more guards rushed in from a doorway at the end of the hall. They took his place.
“Great!” She spun back around the edge of the canisters and pulled back the bolt of her rifle, then slid a strip of plasma shells down into the magazine. “Now we can get out of here. Care to take their attention? At least, absorb a little bit of it?”
“Of course.” Jace’s cards would’ve come off cooldown, and now more than ever, he needed the hyperjump. With his current Aes supply, he could launch himself to the end of the hallway—behind all the guards—and attack them that way.
He drew his Whistling Blade again, then activated the card and launched himself as far as he could. Aside from scaling with Aes output, his card also scaled with Resistance, which he had plenty of.
He flashed down the hallway and emerged behind the remaining three guards. At this point, he was in position to kill them, but most of them were [Level 9]—or close. Even if he only cared about consuming Aes, which he didn’t, killing them wouldn’t award him with much anyway.
So, instead, he struck one on the back of the head with the pommel of his sword, then gripped another’s head and slammed him into the wall. He slumped down, unconscious. The third guard spun, activating the vibrating bayonet on his rifle, but Jace sliced it off, then slashed through the rifle’s magazine. The plasma shells detonated in an arc along the sword’s path, flinging the guard into the wall.
By now, Lessa had sprinted down the hall to join him. “You remember the way out?”
“I hope so. I—”
The door at the other end of the hallway hissed open, and four more guards ran out, rifles raised. At the center of their formation was a man in full teal armour and an orange cloak. [Level 30 Aes Wielder – Soul-Circle Opening – First Stage] read the tag above his head, and immediately, Jace’s stomach dropped.
Either the Wielders had something to Kinfild, or Kinfild escaped, or the Wielders had simply come to address a break-in to their vault.
Jace hoped it was the very latter.
He and Lessa jumped back into cover, hiding behind the stairway door and wall. A barrage of plasmafire surged past, sparking against the angle of the wall or melting away the corner of the bricks.
The Wielder stomped and conjured a technique card, then crushed it in his grip and activated it. Metal shards speared up from the ground, each about an inch in length, then swirled around the Wielder’s fists. A fortification technique.
“Time to run!” Jace hissed. He spun, then jumped down the stairs two at a time, before taking the last five of the flight at a leap. He swung around using the banister to help, then took the next flight.
Lessa was right behind him, holding her rifle in one hand and using the other to help swing herself around.
Footsteps pounded on the perforated steel above, sending clumps of dust raining down on them, and bolts of plasma seared through the stairs as the guards shot straight downward. Jace ducked to the side when he saw the silhouette of a guard pointing his rifle downward, but it still singed his hair.
“What level did we land on?” Lessa asked.
“Uhh…Three? No, four? The symbol with the little cross-shaped squiggle in the center of it.”
“Three!” she replied.
They took the flights down as fast as they could. They outpaced the guards, leaving the older men in heavy armour behind, but the Wielder persisted. When they reached the fifth floor, the Wielder reached the landing only a half flight behind them. He had encased his legs in scrap metal shards too. They glimmered all different shades and hues, like miniature lizard scales, and more joined them, ripping out of the scrap brick walls before joining the technique.
When they reached the fourth floor, he was only a quarter flight behind them. He activated another technique card, then clenched his fists and raised his hand.
The stairs ahead of them curled upward, forming a wall.
It’d stop any normal intruder, but Jace sliced through it with his Whisling blade, leaving only a five stair jump to the door—then they’d be on the third level.
He took a deep breath and launched himself across the opening in, then took the last few steps to the door.
It hissed open, revealing the third-floor hallway they’d started in. Lessa jumped right behind him, but the Wielder activated a third technique card. He punched his arms forward, launching the metal shards off his arms like shrapnel. They speared toward him and Lessa.
She would’ve made the distance, but a shard caught her in the shoulder, and the impact drove her forward and off-balance. Jace lunged forward and caught her wrist, and, with her help, hoisted her up.
But more shards were coming.
He turned his back to the wielder and tucked in his arms, letting his backpack and its sturdy contents absorb the blow. Shards glanced off the accumulator nodes. One sliced through his bicep, and another through his upper thigh, but overall, he was unharmed.
And so was Lessa.
“Go!” he hissed, then pointed to the hallway. They both sprinted through the open door.