Up top, all around the two high commanders of Clan Kintu, were the renewed sounds of battle. Squads had already dispersed into the Pod forest. The Clan Squads would deploy and probe for weaknesses once they got far enough away from their underground egress point. From separate points he saw different weapons lance towards the giant crab. Most were from his, a few others were not.
Good, he wasn’t lying, a small force, probably fairly elite.
The giant crab dropped lower and hunched over its legs, the repeaters shifted from firing streams of repeating lasers to firing all barrels at once in concentrated bursts of energy. Man-crab hybrids dropped to the ground out of the four widened ports on the big crab.
“What do you think of him Leanne?”
“Rude, cautious… Surprisingly confident, whether that’s from him being good or being crazy, I’ve yet to conclude. Perhaps both. It's odd, he's odd." She squinted off across the crab, "they didn't come with a lot of Humans."
“He doesn't act like a Native, otherwise there is something else.”
"A secret between the three of them. Her confidence was greater than 90%, in current circumstances anything >90% was considered actionable.
He motioned his head a fraction of a degree. What about his companions, Leanne had known the Clan Head for a long time, she caught the meaning.
“The woman, ‘Yuma’ he called her. She’s a typical Native, she doesn’t miss much. It is also likely she can hear us now.”
“You noticed that did you?”
“I don’t miss much either.”
“No, you do not, even as a child. What about the other man?”
Leanne turned her head to give new sets of orders as well as updates to preexisting ones. Lee waited patiently, he knew this was how she best processed a thought.
Through gritted teeth, “Apologies Clan Head, I’m unable to give you a satisfactory answ-”
He cut her off with an upraised hand, “We’ll find out when Yosef rejoins us.”
He studied the woman named ‘Yuma’ as she peeked around a corner and ran, dragging her companion away mid-conversation.
"Sentinel, I will operate a roaming HQ; I want those legs cut down."
And she was steady again, "Aye Clan Head," and off.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
It was a bad idea to stay down here. This was a mistake.
He realized this when a particularly solid, energetic mass of electricity caught up to him. He was frozen for the first hundredth of a second. Then a burning pain entered that frozen moment.
It was too much electricity and it refused to give up its structure and disperse into his cells. Instead, it wanted to use him and move his electricity with it.
His conscious mind was still frozen at that moment as he stumbled and caught himself against a Cryo-Pod pylon on his way to the ground. Jack was able to breathe as the coiling mass traveled down his arm and into the pylon, the pillar freshly booting up in a splash of streaming and blinking multicolored lights.
All he could remember was sensing something, a memory maybe. All he could recall of that was white.
The snakes of electricity had quickly charged up the nearest Cryo-Pods, new ones were now catching up to him in quick slithers. He had wanted to study them, but maybe from afar. He needed to move faster.
Two, quicker than their cousins, writhed past the pillar he had stopped behind to try and sense a path ahead. The profiles of the dormant Pods were no longer visible through the background electrical radiation filling the space. Newly charged Pods only made the problem worse, a lensflare-typee effect reflected in his Affinity each time he looked directly at one of the Pods go online.
The snakes passed by him and one of them paused. He swore it paused. For a fraction of a second, one of them paused. He averted his eyes, he remembered how he could feel Yuma’s stare. Both snakes continued into separate pillars.
Shit shit. He forced himself to keep moving. He wasn’t going to be a toasted, twitching body like that Clan member.
----------------------------------------
It was difficult keeping ahead of the erratic electric snakes. He wasn’t able to slowly stretch his Affinity to tease out the proper path. He couldn’t move that slow. One advantage he had was the cycling low-yield sun of rotating intensity that made up the giant crab’s electrical profile, it acted like a lodestar. In exchange, it washed out and blinded his ability to sense anything else in that direction.
He also tried to keep close to uncharged pillars in case he got hit again. No Allocation level was needed to know that losing consciousness down here would be fatal.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Jack was losing ground to the snakes and he knew it. He picked up his huddled sprint and turned a corner, dead end. Worse yet, the pillars that blocked him off from every side were already flashing, fully charged. He turned and saw a snake slither towards him.
He wasn’t going to get hit again, he couldn’t risk being taken out of commission. He activated his shield and Bashed it back. He didn’t have time to give his Bash any extra juice but he caught it square and it swam backwards through the air.
Jack didn’t waste time to look at it as he sprinted off another direction, weaving his way through the Pods.
“Shit,” the snake was after him, bypassing a few closer and dormant pillars.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Yuma saw the Cryo-Pods awakening all around them, she couldn’t imagine it would be anything good.
There. Tule and Korl were near the base of the big crab, fighting against the crab-men positioned to stop them. She saw Korl dodge behind a Pod to have it intercept a burst of laser from the giant crab. It was more cautious with its energy usage.
Before she looked away she saw Tule cut down two crab-men with a slice then manage to catch another’s attack on the flat of his blade. Tule's free hand reached out and, with difficulty, he clenched his fingers. His fingers snapped open as he flung his grip towards the attacking crab. A scream and rip of jagged metal tore off of the Pod next to him and drove deep into the crab’s brain.
“Jonah, we have to get to the middle.”
“Is that smart?”
“Wait. Do you see that?”
She picked up speed again, dragging Jonah on a lateral path to the crab.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Jack was feeling more confident with his movements, he was close enough to see the energies coming off the crab’s weapons.
“What?” That wasn’t the repeating laser cannons. It was big and new and aimed right at him. He started sprinting to the side, diverting from his previous idea to head towards the center. Big, huge quantities of energy buildup were rarely a good thing in his limited experience.
He felt it continue to build. He wasn’t sure if it was his hearing or his Affinity’s Sense but it definitely felt like he was hearing something. A low thrum passed through him in waves. He didn’t want to know, he kept sprinting.
It reached a building crescendo and he dove, pulling up his Shield as a blast swept through the the semi-underground space.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
“Now this is what I’m talking about!” Kala was in heaven, harassing the crab-men with a furiously cycling HeLbert.
They kept moving, popping up erratically to let rip new streams of hard-light and other fire.
Mikey stopped shooting, “Mikey! What are you doing?”
Kensey, his best friend, had noticed him stop.
“Uh, something’s happening.”
Kensey stopped at his words, Mikey didn’t say much, but when he did it was usually pretty reliable.
“Scatter!” Kala’s eyes widened.
They all sprinted in different directions as an orange glow quickly built out of nothing from the cardinal ports of the cyborg mega crab. The big thing shifted, altering his height. Aiming.
Once it finalized some process, four concentrated waves of orange concussive force blasted outwards and chopped down a swath of Cryo-Pods.
Kensey turned towards the oncoming force and sent his body into overdrive by burning every bit of Nano he had. It was fatal to do this, always, but that didn’t matter anymore. He had dilated his perception so far beyond in that fraction of a second that it gave him time to spare.
He was able to push past dread and regret and those that he would leave behind, now able to accept the perspective of impending doom. He looked at Mikey. He would miss him, there was no way he could remove the sadness that his companion would feel but there was nothing left to do. He tossed his lightning pistol away from him, it had done good, no reason it had to end when he did.
The thought of a smile passed through him as he was blasted into a chunky paste against the nearest Cryo-Pods.
“Kensey!” Mikey was already sprinting back towards him, past his discarded pistol. He jaggedly pulled out a Magno-Tube. Nothing swirled into it.
“You burnt it all. You fucking idiot. Nothing left.” When a person’s Nano died, they truly died. No trace of them was left, nothing to pass on, except memories. Kensey had said that when he was going to go, he would go all the way.
Mikey didn’t think the idiot would actually do it. Now he had nothing to remember him by except some memories.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
The first thing Jack noticed was his shield was still up. The next was that he was wedged pretty tightly between two collapsed pylons, the angle his shield was resting at was keeping him from being crushed.
The next thing he was getting ready to think about was how exactly his Shield had been deployed while he was unconscious.
This question as to how this it was possible was preceded by an answer of blinding, nerve-scalding pain slithering through him. A snake, an electric snake was inside him, coiling and writhing and leaving his electrical pathways raw. He closed his eyes to fully dive into his Affinity’s Sense.
The snake wanted to move, he let his grasping grip of it go. Newly healed pathways ripped open again as it flowed erratically inside him, it was unsettled, directionless. It coiled in a jagged circle then shoot down his leg. It reached the end and let out a pulse of frustration. Well, Jack thought it somewhat felt like frustration, but as far as immediate concerns, it just meant more pain.
It continued this as Jack tried to find a rhyme or reason to its movements. He tried to force it down his own pathways, it released a pulse that left him having to remember to breath.
He started to imitate its own somewhat erratic and cyclical path, trying to combine the flow with his own ‘natural’ electrical pathways. Through his Affinity he pulled and shifted his own pathways by smidges and small amounts. He took inspiration from one of the charged Cryo-Pods he was trapped between. It contained a rough blueprint of how pathways needed to be adjusted to handle the snakes.
It fought against him but he wasn’t going to let this thing do whatever it wanted in his body.
Once he thought his pathway was close enough to work he tried to snap it into the circuit. Once on the path the snake would continue to circulate through that section; the lessened pain told Jack that he was on the right track.
It fought him on the last portion until he was panting, then as he strained, pushed, and pulled, it suddenly started following relatively calmly within his internal electrical cycle.
The fact that it was cycling only solved the most immediate concern. It was still far too much energy for him to hold but by moving and cycling it through his own pathways it would at least let him function.
He had to get out of here. He shifted and pulled and finally jerked himself out of the trap. He unsteadily climbed to his feet, the electric snake inside moving faster along with him. He paused, reinforcing and adjusting the area through his Affinity.
He stopped fiddling with it, he felt the snake dumping extra heat into his head, he had to keep moving. Every pylon around him was lit up; he dragged himself further along, looking for an uncharged pylon, heading towards the brilliant cycling crab nova in the center.