Yosi was getting a headache from the battles going on. She could feel the explosions and death filling the Cage. It was one of the side effects of being connected too long, so said Maya. She could feel herself melding with the device, as if she could only push a little bit more, she could reach some other plateau of control.
As it was, she was barely managing the mana that was being spewed out from the death and destruction of so many people. Normally, it would have become ambient mana, but every last drop was needed to power the Cage and the weapons that were firing upon the enemy. It was a constant effort and she was exhausted.
The murmuring of people around her was also a distraction. She was supposed to be in a control room, but many others had joined in the last few hours, pushing and shoving their way in to see what was going on. The newest arrivals were Asoltolia’s guards whom were being side-eyed by Sanchez’s guards who were supposed to watch over Yosi.
Yosi ignored the two groups and concentrated on the fight before her. Big Bertha had pulled more energy than they expected and some design faults had shown themselves. The big gun to win all wars was destroyed, nearly killing those that were near it. Rushed jobs, she figured.
This whole battle was a rush job and it was showing it. There were too many dead, too many miscommunications, and now she watched as Asoltolia and her people were rushing out into battle without informing Canton or Sanchez about their moves.
Heat filled the room and the smell of cooked meat followed. Yosi gagged and turned to see that the human guardians and spectators were nothing but smoking ruins. She stared for a moment and then saw one of Asoltolia’s guard reach for her.
She moved into action, slicing with her talons and summoning a pistol. What was going on? Betrayal? The one thing she had learned on the RSH was that one had to be always ready for an attack.
The pistol barked in her hands and the guards cursed, one of them crying out in pain. Shields flared and pain exploded across Yosi’s body. She fell to the floor, tried to summon the Cage to do her bidding, but was struck by something hard.
“We’ve got her,” one of the guards said harshly. “She killed Tasvank.”
Yosi snarled and tried to scratch, but she was pinned to the floor. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something that was terribly familiar. A slave collar.
“No!” she cried and began kicking and biting anything she could reach.
The collar snapped around her neck and the world went white.
***
“Move to evacuation points,” a dull mechanical voice said. “We’ve been betrayed and not in the good way.”
“The hell?” Canton muttered. What was a good betrayal? “You heard the alert. Abandon everything and get to the evac points.” A holographic map displayed the location of the doorway that would open to allow them to return to Earth.
Maya Sullivan was Tier 2 and she overpowered everyone from Earth. So it wasn’t too hard to determine who the betrayers were. The aliens. Asoltolia and her minions.
Canton cursed the stupidity of Maya and hurried his people out. There were still plenty of Fleshies out there and trying to disengage from them was going to be a nightmare.
Then again dying was not on his agenda.
Canton cursed again and checked his railgun.
***
Maya spat blood onto the ground. “Well, this isn’t apart of the plans,” she said, staring down Asoltolia’s blade.
“If you want something, be strong enough to take it or be strong enough to defend it.”
“Or be an asshole and backstab someone while they’re occupied.”
Asoltolia grinned. “It’s all apart of being a SIL in the Integrated Multiverse.”
“Being assholes? Figures,” Maya rolled her shoulders.
“You have plenty of faults, Merchant. But your bravery is not questioned. It will be an honor to kill you.”
“Is that supposed to make me happy?” Maya growled. “Because it’s doing the opposite.”
“I will make this quick and clean,” Asoltolia said.
“I prefer it dirty.”
Maya fired her railgun.
***
The orcs and crows and what was left of the Infantry were battling against Asoltolia’s troops. They came in on some kind of hovering ship, dropping them into battle and fleeing back.
Emilia crouched over the tesseract pack like Gollum over his ring. She dug into the mana that was swirling around the pack. She needed everything it could put out.
Explosions peppered her with grit and gore, the screams of the orcs and crows filled the air, along with the cries coming from Asoltolia’s troops. They weren’t all that higher level than the orcs. They were the cannon fodder sent to deal with them.
They were all cannon fodder, Emilia realized; they were all ants beneath the boots of giants. The fight between Asoltolia’s troops and the remaining orcs and crows meant nothing in the greater scheme of things. What mattered was the battle between Maya and Asoltolia.
Emilia cursed and redirected the mana flows to protect Maya.
“Fuck!” she cried, tears welling in her eyes.
***
The first hit sent Maya sprawling, the second blasted the breath from her chest, and left her wheezing on the ground. What surprised her was that she was still alive.
“Oh, crap,” Maya muttered, tossing aside the shattered railgun.
“Your little mage can’t keep protecting you. We trained those sad little creatures,” Asoltolia said.
Mage? Ah, Emilia.
“If you kill me, you can’t use the Cage,” Maya said. “Its not like a bike you can steal. I am the Cage. It requires me to keep it running.”
“No need,” Asoltolia said, idly cleaning her blade. “We have the Class Two reptile. She can control this Cage as well as you can.”
“Yosi.” Maya felt her heart do a slow and painful thud. They had captured Yosi?
“As long as we feed it mana and control the reptile, then we can use it as we want,” Asoltolia said. She grinned at Maya. “The Sword of the Universe will reward me greatly for this. Access to a yet incorporated universe? A new Tier 2 planet?”
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“That douchebag. You betray me for that douchebag? You could have become wealthy as all hell. You could have set up your own empire in some other star system. You could have moved everything to some other place and I would have purchased every damn thing you could have produced to protect my world.” Maya snarled. “Instead you choose servitude under some murderous asshole?”
“You barely understand-“
Dimensional Poison Antidote
Progression 25%
Maya could feel the Cage again, just a whisper, just a hint of it at the edges of her senses. She gripped onto that feeling and rode it right down to where it grew stronger. She clung to it and like pulling a loose thread, the blockage began to unravel.
Information poured into her mind in a split second. All the pain and all the damage the Cage was suffering hit her, all the voices, all the mana, and all the swirling madness contained within hammered her head.
Canton and the remnants of all the combat forces were trying to hold the evacuation zone. Asoltolia’s troops swarmed them, their organization and higher levels making mince meat of the forces gathered there.
Yosi was being held in some kind of white box. It covered her entirely, from head to tail, beside her were the arrogant looking Asoltolia guards. They made gestures and Yosi followed their lead. They had made her into a puppet.
The Flesh Army was in retreat, their head mage Black Horizon killed all those that tried to escape the jagged hole they had created. Retreat was something they did not do, but they were an unstoppable wave.
Asoltolia was swinging her sword and Maya dropped to her knees. She felt the crackle of energy as the blade hit the mana shield protecting her.
Maya followed that thread of mana back to its source. Emilia lay panting over the tesseract pack, blood dripping from her nose and ears, but managing to weave and rebuild the mana shield around Maya. How had she learned to do that?
The world was in slow motion. Maya dug her hands into the Cage itself, the ground shifting and molding around her. She could feel the power flowing through the components and devices. She could feel the power coming off of Asoltolia, her troops, and the weapons she had allowed them to bring into the Cage.
She had fucked it all up. She had been stupid and she had set herself up to be screwed by Asoltolia and her people. The grief and rage hit her and Maya dug deeper into the Cage.
It was not all lost though. She had to save the people with her. They were the best that Earth had to offer. They needed to survive and they needed to get back to Earth.
Her control was still sluggish and sloppy, but Maya forced her will upon the Cage. She pulled up walls separating the soldiers from Asoltolia’s people. She locked down doors and warped the very Cage fabric to close off the power room and it’s wealth of tesseracts. That was wealth they would never get their hands on. She tried to reach for Yosi, but the very air around her resisted her attempts. She could not move her, she could not save her.
Protective walls around her began exploding as Asoltolia smashed through them. Maya gripped onto the power coming from Emilia’s tesseract, she gripped it and strengthened it.
A bubble of mana enveloped all. A sphere of condensed mana that sizzled and burned all that tried to touch it. Maya gripped it tight and she could feel Emilia understanding what she was doing. Together they wrapped and hammered the shield into shape.
She could feel it, the two hundred orcs, one hundred and twenty crows, fifty two humans, and seventy of Asoltolia’s troops were wrapped in chains of mana. She could halt them all by creating individual shields around them. The power churning out from the tesseract was beginning to diminish. Soon it would empty.
Maya hacked at the open wound of the dimensional door that Black Horizon was still keeping open. She tried clawing it, tearing it down, slamming mana into it to build somekind of barricade, but nothing worked. She abandoned the idea and moved toward getting her people out.
Everyone had been fitted with a tracking device. It was the failsafe they had in place just in case things went tits up. Which it definitely had done. The tracker was not only connected to the computer systems of the Cage, but also to the teleporter.
Every bit of her Dimensional Awareness and Dimensional Threshold came into play. She hammered at the wall of reality, of the Multiverse; she drilled mana into it and pried at it. When brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.
Maya felt heat and the very fabric of the universe began to shudder at her hammering. She redoubled her efforts and she suddenly felt the world beyond the Cage open up. It was Earth, she realized.
It took only one thought, one moment to trigger the emergency evacuation order for the teleporter to activate. The fighting and dying of soldiers ceased as they suddenly vanished from existence. Sucked into a void and deposited back onto Earth.
Maya laughed as she felt blood flowing down her face. She touched it and realized her vision was blurred and fading.
Dimensional Threshold XX
Dimensional Awareness XX
She and the remaining troops couldn’t defeat Asoltolia or the others. They would die here if she released them.
Maya looked at the troops, at Tender, Emilia, Chu, and Anisa who were all trapped in their little bubbles of mana shields. At Asoltolia who was trying to fight to get out of her own. It was all linked together, they were all entwined. If she let one go, they would all be let go.
She could feel the rest of Asoltolia’s troops rushing toward them. She was barely holding on as it was. Soon Asoltolia’s mages would be here and with their power, they would peel apart the shields and kill them all.
Damned if I do or damned if I don’t.
Her grip was slipping. Her mind was becoming foggy. She had to act now.
Maya gripped the Cage and pulled it, closing the distant between her and the tear in the Cage. She watched as Asoltolia’s eyes widen as she saw the hole suddenly grow larger and larger.
A moment later they were through and into the RSH.
***
“Risky move,” the System said as Maya flopped onto the floor of her living room.
Maya looked up and blinked, not feeling like bantering as she normally did. “I’ve killed them all,” she said. “Chu, Emilia, Anisa, the orcs and crows and humans.”
“You’ve also lost your Cage,” the System added.
“Thanks,” she replied. “I needed that. Why am I here? I remember someone saying I wasn’t welcomed back.”
“I was busy then. I’ve got a free nanosecond to talk with you,” the System replied. “I’m done with this phase of maintenance, things should return back to normal in the RSH.”
“Oh, thanks. After we’ve been struggling to keep the Cage afloat and keep the Flesh Army off our backs? Now you say maintenance is over?”
The System shrugged. “My timetable of events are not dictated by your actions.”
“Sure seems like you’re fucking with us,” Maya said. “Flip off the mana when we’re being attacked by the Hiveship. Turn it back on after we’ve just got our asses kicked.”
“All coincidence,” the System replied.
“So what? What’s all this then?”
“Just giving you a heads up. The fabric of the RSH is reforming and that takes a bit of time. A lot of weird mana stuff will be taking place for the next few days. The rules aren’t as rigid as they once were.”
“What does that-“
***
Maya was falling, she could feel the tesseract slowly begin to drain. Its last bit of mana flowing out, but suddenly behind it was something else. Like a glowing string tied to the end of the last of the mana, it glowed and flared as she grabbed onto it.
Power filled her. Essence mana. So elusive but now suddenly there when she needed it.
Maya grabbed onto the power and pushed it into the failing shields. She wrapped it around the men and women and beings she had pulled into the RSH. She hammered it around them and built them a house of it, a stone house where no wolf would knock it down.
Energy crackled and burned and the air itself seemed to light on fire. Hundreds of figures fell to the ground and bounced, essence mana crackling around them. Maya felt her broken bones shift and pain lance through her body. She breathed in metallic air and the dust of the RSH as her eyes adjusted to the early morning light that suffused the plane.
She staggered to her feet, feeling as if every nerve ending on her body was on fire. She dug into her inventory and summoned the last weapon she had. A yellow pitted crowbar appeared in her hand, a copy of one she had first used when she arrived into this place.
A figure lay not far from her, eyes wide and staring. She shuddered and flailed, her body shivering as the last of the protective shell faded around her.
“Sullivan,” Asoltolia said, her voice was rough and strained. “What… where?”
“Welcome to the RSH,” Maya said. With the fading energies of essence mana, she poured it into the crowbar. The marsani copy burned a brilliant white and Maya shoved it into Asoltolia. The high grade armor was paper. It smoked, it burned, and it barely resisted the crowbar.
The mercenary commander arched her back and screamed as mana burned her from the inside out. A few seconds later it was done. Notifications flashed before Maya’s vision, but she brushed them aside.
“What the hell was that?” a familiar voice asked.
“Chu?” Maya turned to see the soldier staggering toward her.
Maya looked at the scores of men, orcs, and crows who were unsteadily rising to their feet. She did it. She had brought them all into the RSH. The last ditch effort had worked.
“Well, don’t gawk and act the tourist, we won’t be here for long,” Maya said. She willed the Cage threshold to appear.
Nothing happened.
She tried to feel for the Cage. There was only a vast emptiness where she had once felt the Cage. It was a limb that was missing. Maya frantically tried to reach for the Cage, to feel it, but there was nothing there.
She was cut off from it.
“Shit,” she muttered.
“What’s that over there?” Chu asked, gesturing at the horizon.
“The Flesh Army,” Tender stated. “Several thousand of them.”
“Double shit,” Maya muttered.