Jack plowed through the mass of crabs and stood in the center of the group, looking it over.
“This is it?” He had been expecting more, a lot more. Maybe there were more people taking the other route.
As he walked he considered it mixed news. On one hand there weren’t nearly as many people as he hoped and they hadn’t even managed to even start the Run. On the other hand, well, he was finally here.
After learning what was ahead of them, he walked over and pretended to look over the Terminal as he surreptitiously pressed the AI disk in his chest pocket against the glass-like material of its screen.
He had hoped he wouldn’t have to insert the disk, especially in front of all these people, and to his relief, he was right. He didn’t think he’d be able to raise his Personnel Level with this Terminal without plugging in the AI-disk, but the close contact was enough to give it some access into the local system to start working on neutralizing the defenses.
The Electro-Web, as he called it, was still pretty juiced up but he could tell that its power was decreasing in minute amounts as he walked towards it. His Affinity told him that. It also told him that he could probably handle what remained.
Most of the other individuals were busy fighting crabs.
In the short walk from the Terminal to the Web he idly noticed the other Humans’ Skills firing off. There were bursts of flaming liquid, strange firearms that shot various things into the now reformed wash of crabs, thin tendrils of acid that whipped and bubbled the chitin it came in contact with.
A jet of pressurized blood was fired out of a fingertip, extended the length of a straightened claw-blade, as it cut a line through a number of crabs.
He liked that Skill. He’d have to remember to ask the woman how she managed to develop it. He saw the acid guy’s face, no need to ask how he got that skill.
There was another woman that drew his eye, a large one, pretty close to his size, performing an awkward-looking and oddly-smooth pivoting motion that readjusted her stance as she brought some sort of light shooting cannon to bear on the rushing crabs.
He glanced around, more than 20, not many more though. This whole thing would have collapsed long ago without the light-shooting woman.
Overall, they were doing a decent job against the crabs. It made sense that the only the Humans that were good at fighting and staying alive ended up making it here. He imagined that a fair amount of luck measured into that as well.
Was this the extent of their “elites” or were the Labs actually this barren? Maybe most Humans didn’t want to risk it? There was no way, or time, to know the whole truth.
The electrical current was still a lot, he was glad he didn’t just walk into it from the start. As it was he just felt hot as it dispersed its attempts into his flesh. The charge instantly and completely sealed and healed the wounds he had picked up from testing his Skills on the way here.
On the way to the Run he had been practicing deploying his shield with internal charge instead of having to run the Zappa to get it to activate. At normal levels of cellular charge the best he could manage was about 3 seconds. It improved in tiny increments each time he did it, he could tell that the overall capacity and time he could hold it could and would grow much longer as he used it.
The 3 seconds depended heavily on his drain rate which was primarily influenced by how much blocking he had to do with his shield.
He was way over normal charge right now. Those zapps he had been getting from Yuma must have helped.
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Kala almost yelled to the idiot to not walk into the electric net but held her tongue, this time because she had an inkling that the oddball was actually the man everyone had heard over the speakers, Jack.
Figures that the dickhead would be late to his own party.
All about being a Cryo-Pirate was being a good judge of character, even if she didn’t Allocate that much to EQ. She knew herself so even though she wasn’t completely sure how she knew, she trusted her gut.
Uller and Jonah were near speechless after the man had released the Terminal and calmly walked into the Electric Grid Web.
By Jonah’s measure, the level of confidence confirmed his first suspicion, this was definitely Jack.
Tule and Korl both instinctively, if not consciously, knew who he was. In between picking off the remaining swarm they watched the electricity course into him then fade into intermittent arcs.
Tule was looking at the man’s companion, a small woman with loose curls of black shoulder length hair and gauze wrapped around the bottom of her face. Her eyes were slightly larger than normal and filled with a flinty-hard look. Strapped across her back was an old rifle, the like he had never seen before, and in her hands was a comfortably held bladeclaw.
There was a lot to read in his eyes but, of course, very few were paying attention.
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Jack looked like he was struggling to handle the jumping current roiling through his body. It hadn’t died out, it just wasn’t able to build back all the way back up before he processed. She could tell all this because his jaw was locked tight and his shield was deployed.
She turned from him towards the group.
“No time for introductions, either move now or we’ll let you figure it out, out here with the crabs.”
The first, Jonah had already been moving and was dragging Eilien behind him. Kala saw Uller quickly follow and directed her men to pile through behind him; she covered the last of her team’s trip into the Run with her stepping, shifting momentum, she changed her weight and distribution smoothly back and forth as she directed streams of hardened light down the various paths into the rebuilding swarms.
The cannon’s imminent withdrawal encouraged the rest of the hodgepodge “elites” to quickly follow.
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After the groups had passed the Web they found themselves following at a sprint as the group tried to keep up with Jack and Yuma.
The defenses were nullified, but well, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. That also didn’t solve the problem all the crabs coming behind them. The sheer mass of numbers and the electrical resistance of their outer shells meant that until the electrical trap came fully back online they would continue to chase them through the Run.
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Instead of any of this happening, the net stopped building electricity entirely.
Jack could feel the current now, moving through the walls, drawing away from the Web and past their group.
He looked to Yuma who was squinting into the distance, she turned and met his gaze, she was picking something up too.
“Get ready for anything!” Not entirely sure to whose benefit he was shouting. His cells were still well overcharged by this point so the Zappa remained in his pocket.
The current through the walls started as a trickle then exponentially built until most of their group could pick up on it at the edge of their senses. It continued building until everyone could see it as a wave of static electricity that washed over the walls.
Only Jack could feel it flow down the corridor into the far distance.
“Turret up top! It's far!” It was a good warning but also the man’s last.
It was the flame liquid guy and the green static beam took an eighth of a second to punch into his body and pop him like an overfilled balloon. The flammable-liquid that had been stored somewhere in his body ignited as it met the errant ripples of static electricity flowing through the corridor. The flame-liquid continued its outwards explosive trajectory and stuck into and onto those next to him.
Two had fallen to the ground screaming as the liquid instantly melted their exposed flesh to the bone. A third stopped to help his friends and joined them in death to the pursuing swarm.
In under a handful of seconds, four Humans were down.
It was a good opening move he found himself begrudgingly giving credit to the SI.
“Behind my shield!” He had been talking to Yuma but the group maintained their pace as they reformed in a line behind him.
Either he was a really good leader or no one else wanted to be next in line to get hit by that thing.
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It was bloody and more of it was crab than man so it was good. This was a true test that would herald the Clan to greatness or destroy it entirely. Every time a calamity had fallen upon the clan they would struggle and reach new heights.
The First Awakened Elder, The Betrayal of the Three, the First Restoration, the Old Cryogenic Wars, the Middle Age of the Labs, The People’s Revolution of 1,000,000 Cycles, the Second Restoration; the list went on. These were the Labs of his Honored Ancestors who fought and scrabbled and managed to survive the cycles of barbarism to reach to new heights.
Now he was the Clan Head on the tail-end of a long age of degradation. Fewer and fewer Bays had been coming online, the accursed crab was growing in strength and intelligence, the irrecoverable losses of Nano. It would stop. He would stop it.
“Clan Head! Scouts have detected a cannon far ahead of us giving off a radioactive signature, we don’t have anything that can outrange it.”
He looked towards the front of their formation. He had seen what had happened when someone had been hit by it, he recognized the technology. Gruesome. His smile turned slightly more grim.
“Who has the Clarabin force shields?”
“Squad 6 and 12.”
“Send them up, single-file behind the shield with another two squads reinforcing them. I want our best shots following with Electro-Thermic rockets.”
They really had pulled out all the stops, the Kindu Clan was an ancient one, and an ancient clan’s weapons stockpile was nothing to scoff at.
With an approving eye he reviewed his Head Guard, his personal guards. Four of the 8 were elite variants of their primary warrior build, the Shield Guard. The other four were split into two Lancers and two Sharpshooters.
Of the 134 they started with, nearly 80 of their battle-group consisted of Shield Guard. Bodies focused on strength and endurance, skin modifications directed towards durability and resistances, paired with a heavy, if slow, armor selection. They carried large two-handed shields alongside a scattering of different throwing items, from javelins to instant bombs.
A regular piece of equipment that was carried by every member of the Shield Guard were snub-nosed repeaters that latched on and shot through the front of the shield to spray bursts of fire through it. The shields themselves weren’t one trick ponies and contained many other other tricks and customizations.
When set up to hold or protect a position with a row of Lancers behind them, they were horrifically effective as their large spears stabbed through the gaps and maintained the line. Facing enemies from a single direction they had no problems holding back and slaughtering the crabs no matter how they swarmed.
A clan did not become ancient by accident.
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Jack’s right arm was shaking after tanking this last green beam. The shield managed to hold well enough but whether or not he himself could resist the pressure was another thing altogether.
The last one had forced him to a stop and he dropped his claw-blade to reinforce his shield arm.
Yuma scooped up his claw-blade and replaced it with his Zappa before the thought had popped into his head. It was so seamless, on her part, that he didn’t have time to give her one of her own questioning eyebrows.
The Zappa squealed electricity into his forearm as he braced for the next one. It was mixed news with the Zappa, it was already losing some of its effectiveness as it was outpaced by his electrical storage and discharge requirements. The entire 6 second charge didn’t even bring him to full charge anymore, it still was close though. He kept the line moving forwards in a steady loping jog.
“Yuma, can you see it charge? Or whatever it does before it fires?”
“I think so.” Not exactly what he wanted to hear but it was good enough.
Thank God he had already recut and generously, very generously, reapplied Medjel over the back of his hand. He had been silently whispering promises to the Medjel responsible for the hard gooey mass over the back of his right hand.
“Now!” Yuma yelled into his ear. He knew it was now because the green beam was already flowing across his shield and starting to diffuse.
“Yuma…” he slowly said as he picked up his pace in the beam’s wake.
“Now I can tell when it’s going to fire off.”
“Yeah me too, when it hits my shield, its firing.” She rolled her eyes behind him.
Yuma could see the build up of the beam, far ahead, but it hadn’t followed consistent timing and once the beam had fired she wouldn’t have enough time to vocalize the warning.
“Excuse me, I think I can help us get closer to it.”
Jack turned his head to the side and saw perhaps the only person in the Labs who looked more hodgepodge than him. It was a middle-aged man with a shock of graying-blonde hair, goggles that had left an imprint on his forehead, now covering his eyes.
At that moment he realized that he didn’t actually know what he looked like. He didn’t know how to start processing the man’s outfit or his own small-scale existential crisis, so he didn’t.
He refocused in front of him. “Yuma, can you talk to this guy?”
Jack absolutely did not want to start intercepting the beams with his body.
He was trying to instill confidence in his blocking that he, quite honestly, didn’t share himself. If he let the beams get into the group he wasn’t sure if they would stay or head back and try their luck with the crabs.
There. He picked it up now, a faint static buzz, that meant he had less than half a second to ground his feet properly and brace, No You Move kicked in as his center of balance dropped.
He couldn’t see the beam fire at all. Only with that early warning had he managed to catch that one at all.
Shit, that one almost made him lose his balance completely even with his Skill kicking in. A distant part of his brain wondered how the beam contained force; Jack was more interested in the new pattern of its attack. The last one had almost knocked him to the ground.
It clicked as he realized something terrible.
It was probing him for weaknesses. He hoped he didn’t have any, or at least any it could quickly find. He heard shouting from the rear, apparently the crabs had caught up.
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“So you think we can blind it?”
“I mean that’s not what I said exactly but essentially, yes.”
The man’s quibbling made her almost miss Jack’s direct way of speaking.
“Well?” Their conversation died as the beam’s static crowded out their words. “So, are you going to do it?”
“Does, uh, Jack think it will work?”
They both turned towards him as he cursed and blocked another beam.
“Uhhhh Mister Jack?” he raised his voice slightly.
“Shit it’s testing me! That last one was definitely probing. Ah fuck even I can even feel the next one charging up. Yuma stack up! It’s gonna be a big one, 5 seconds, maybe less. YUMA, ZAPP ME.”
Jonah found himself holding her rifle with a departing warning glare then she turned away as she started to vibrate herself in place. Electricity arced over her skin.
“Yuma!” She sent the charge into him as he took his finger off the Zappa’s button before it short-circuited his hand off of him, again.
His shield was completely opaque with overcharge.
The beam hit. Hard.