You know, it’s been a loooong time since I’ve seen a mind like yours. Many secrets. Some shame. Most have become One. Don’t worry, you will die Separate.
You’re in my mind.
Slower than I thought. Oh? You were burning IQ Allocation? Well, you’re a quick thinker aren’t you? You know they never recorded this ability… I kept it a secret from them. Well, for a while at least. After I fried the third researcher’s brain into a sloppy stew you’d think they would have put me back under Crypto-Purgation. But no, they had me pick the minds of their rivals, their coworkers, their lovers. To twist them, control them, do things… Terrible, wonderful things. They called it Mind Hunt, but I prefer my original name for it… Mind Rape.
With that, a burning, tearing sensation rippled outwards in his brain from the cluster of neurons that had been hijacked and controlled Jonah’s hand. He tried to stop it but nothing he tried could hold it back. He would not lose. Not in his own mind.
He felt small parts of his brain burn out as he lost contact with them. He debated his counterattack but as he lost more and more brain function he burned the yet unaffected area’s IQ-Nano to give him an edge. The dilation helped him harness his meager defensive Psi to push back and try to shore up his resistance to the Psy invasion. He managed to stop the simultaneous spread in all directions. It barely slowed down the overall attack but he did feel the Brother was being forced to narrow his Psy-attack vectors.
Jonah recaptured the pathways he could, preemptively cut off pathways that were a lost cause, destroyed his own brain functions. He felt himself start to drool. He just needed to buy time until Tule finished his fight. He was confident that he could then fix himself at a Terminal. If he even remembered how to use his portable after this.
You’re a clever one. I’ll enjoy plumbing the depths of your mind. Oh! You know so much.
Get out of there filthy Psy.
Jonah didn’t know what to do.
Don’t know what to do grey-hair?
He was reading his mind, Jonah isolated his thoughts deep in a fortified and defended portion of his brain. He rooted through it. He tried to gain control of his hand over the HandPad.
Locked down tight isn’t it oldie?
He managed to gain control of his index finger on his other hand. In a fraction of a second he maxed out its internal capacitors and a wrist-wide beam of standard red laser burnt the finger to blackened Nano-ash as it clipped the Psy-User’s shoulder.
Jonah seized the break in the brother’s attention. His hand shot down. Stopped. A centimeter away now. So close.
I’m going to hurt you for that. I’d feel bad but you started it.
The brother’s renewed offensive was brutal. Cleverly crafted defenses were trampled through by sheer force. Fortified positions were overrun. Traps were shattered against the ferocity of the Psy-User’s Hunt.
Jonah felt his eyes burning, drops of blood speckled the inside of his goggles.
Dammit. Where was Tule?
He heard the tap-tap-tap of footsteps.
Finally!
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Jack turned the corner and saw something, a man spottled by black, sickly looking mushrooms with his hands spread towards someone, Jonah. Jonah was shaking, his hand hovering just above a HandPad. Jack immediately accelerated to a sprint, Leanne was slowing him down. He unclipped both belts and layered on more speed, “sorry” he whispered back as she dumped to the floor. She’d understand and if she didn’t, well, Jonah was in trouble. She’d have to deal with it.
This longer internal consideration did Jack no favors as he heard Jonah cry out, in a rush he drew his knife and threw it at the creature. The running throw felt awkward, the spinning blade agreed as it hit it the creature in the head, hilt-first.
Shit. Surprise was ruined, charge right down the pipe. He pulled a clawblade from his belt. Jack leapt through and cleared the shattered doorway in a flash, 10 feet separated him the creature before two things happened that he witnessed in slow detail. Another creature, this one half formed from the wall that was to the side of Jack, was small with beady, malice-filled eyes. It was only half-formed in verticality as it threw a large fist-sized glowing-red mushroom cap at his back. Jack was already swinging downward. Despite his swing being augmented with electricity he felt the missing ‘snap’ from his Hack Mod. The second thing he saw was the first creature, the one he was swinging at, turn and with wide Human-looking eyes it shifted away from his strike. Time reasserted it’s dominion and the separate actions joined together in a flash.
The creature moved as Jack’s swing came down with electrically-augmented speed. His clawblade missed its skull and carved off its arm at the shoulder. Jonah’s hand dropped down on the Pad and the inner door at the end of the corridor quickly opened. Beyond it was a harsh red, pulsing glow. The delicate balance between the decaying and regrowing mushrooms that filled the hallway was broken as they started to die faster than they were able to replace. The oversized explosive mushroom cap thrown by the little brother exploded behind Jack launching him down the hallway. The Psy-User slammed two fists out and the force hammering Jack multiplied sending him deep into the red glow at the center of the complex.
Jonah slumped to the floor, hand still attached to the Pad. He had full control of his mind now, whatever that was worth. He hurried to rebuild broken neural connections. He utilized everything he knew and some things he had forgotten and operated on instinct. No technique, no matter how esoteric and unorthodox and unscientific, was left unused. When he reached a dead end he became aware of another intelligence guiding and fixing alongside him, connecting branches he couldn’t figure out how to solve and speeding up his own efforts to reconnect sections of his brain he was capable of fixing himself. It felt haphazard but underneath there was a complex intelligence to the patterns reforming themselves in his brain. It found the knowledge cache of the energies that Jonah knew. It found an extremely exotic one. It tested a new theory. Jonah was deep in the building, beyond the limits of his knowledge on the brain.
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Despite his best efforts, Tule was on the defensive. The sometimes explosive, sometimes acidic, and sometimes other malicious effects on the caps stopped him from regaining the offensive. As well, the fighting arena was getting too crowded. The ‘big brother’s’ bodies varied greatly now. Some came up to his waist, others to his shoulders. The new technique the brothers had developed was explosive caps growing on the face of the clubs. The explosive backblast would knock him into other clubs and more explosive blasts. He had no doubt that without his hardened carapace skin he would have been split into chunks by this point.
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One of the bigger shroom-capped clubs struck his lower back and launched him out of the middle of the crowd. A acidic glowing green cap sped towards his face from the other side of the arena. Tule saw half of a body in the wall, there was no head, neither beady eyes, nor follow up shroom bomblet. He caught the acid bomblet on his forearm and detached the melting layer of chitin-flesh into he face of the big brother’s nearest body. His blade flashed in a complex weave of lightning fast strikes against the little brother’s undefended half sticking outside of the wall.
He heard a muffled boom from somewhere outside his mushroom arena followed by a shrill, pained scream. Good. A cold malicious glee at causing this shroom-man-thing pain brought a flash of hot excitement through the coldness of his mind.
Without looking he jumped up and backwards, over the heads of the big brothers. He caught a view of the full arena before a club caught him in the ribs and sent him flying into the other wall. His midair return slice erupted small mushroom clouds of spores in the middle of the undulating mass of putrid mushroom flesh. There was nowhere to move anymore. He expertly carved into the arena’s wall of mushroom stalks and planted his back between the outcropping. Defending from one direction was the only way forward. He sliced where he could, blocked with the flat of his blade, and carved into the wall behind himself when he could. Tule had learned to block with the flat of his blade and not slice through clubs that would fall into him. Even after separating the explosive caps on them were still active for a period of time. He was still in a losing position but it was better than being hammered on all sides.
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Even with the reminder that some of his skills were erased by his Body Recomposition when his knife landed hilt first, it was impossible to completely account for the speed lost in his Hack.
Between the spinning and the pain of his back that was turned into a semi-charred mess of meat and unstable, exposed bone he saw what he was flying toward. A shard of deep, blood red surrounded by a transparent case.
At his speed and rotation he shouldn’t have been able to make it out but when he locked eyes with it something beyond Human, beyond alien, even beyond the concept of ‘One’ he had been exposed to lingered in that evil-looking shard. It wasn’t cold. It was terrifying. An ant would have an easier time understanding a Human than he would of understanding… whatever it was.
Completely alien and utterly foreign. It communicated emotion but it was beyond emotion. He was utterly incapable of deciphering any of it. He slammed backfirst into the transparent shell with a choked scream that turned into a deep howl. His battery's case compromised and exploded. It cracked the glass and Jack felt the foreign shard leap into his exposed back and start breaking down his flesh into mush simultaneously as the huge electrical explosion healed and reformed his back in an instant.
This happened in split second before the concussive energy of the blast launched him away from the cracked glass. His back underwent multiple cycles of decay and electrically stimulated regrowth. He found himself launched partially back down the hallway he had just been launched down and skidded to a stop at the halfway point. The red glow in the center of the room had disappeared. Instead, now, glowing-red flowed down veins and up arteries. In front of him was a newly appeared small creature holding another explosive cap.
Jack's hand instinctively grabbed its small head in his hand and punched his fingers into its soft skull before forcing, shoving, throwing massive chunks of his electricity into his fingers. The excess current was reluctantly forced into the creature's skull. It moved to swing the explosive cap at Jack but he covered the cap with his Gauntlet’d hand and squeezed as the explosion was easily contained within the rippling pink substance.
He watched from a strange dissociative state as the small body continued to char and blacken in his unyielding grip. His hand closed as the ashed body crumbled to dust.
He felt hot. Not like he was going to lose control though. Jack dropped to his hands as he coughed up a thick wad of bright yellow mucous.
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Even if she hadn’t been dumped off his back in a hurry she would have still fallen behind Jack’s manic rush. She fired at the creature Jack’s clawblade had sliced. Burning balls of sticky red plasma burned forward and splashed open against the creature. It screamed and whipped its good arm up as the balls splattered against an invisible barrier. Psy. She hated those. It launched a weak mental attack against her. Ineffective.
That had only worked once on her before she pumped Allo into Psi. Her mental defenses were reasonably strong. What most people missed is that Grit and Psi both affected each other. Most people used one of them as a dump stat. She, did not. She continued to fire against the barrier before dodging a Mental Spike aimed at her. Psi let her perceive Psy attacks like ripples in the air of reality. She turned and dove but the second target she had seen throw the explosive mushroom had disappeared. Jonah was hurt and Jack was down… wherever that glowing red hellscape was. He’d be fine, the idiot always seemed to be.
She scrambled and dove as her split second of distraction was followed by the Psy-scum exploding his burning Mind Barrier outwards. She dodged the burning remains and fired off a low shot that caught the creature in the foot. It stumbled to a knee before hitting her with Force Push to her sternum. She skidded backwards as the Security Armored Suit took the brunt of the kinetic strike.
“Mind Ra…” a slice of aquamarine anti-life cut through the creature’s leg, shortening it from a missing foot to a missing calf. It swung its arm backwards and with the Psy-augmented motion launched Jonah across the room skidding to a whumping stop against a group of oversized mushroom stalks.
He wasn’t moving, blood leaking from the edges of the goggles and mixed with copious amounts of drool from his mouth. She didn’t know if he was alive but she wouldn’t get caught by whatever Jonah had risked to interrupt.
She needed to close the distance. She darted to the side as the rippling of a Psy-attack swam past her. The Barrier blocked her shots and exploded outward again. She drew and threw a knife in a smooth motion in the split second after the barrier burst. The pistol was getting uncomfortably hot in her hand. She moved her hand upward at an angle and fired into the ceiling. She ignored the smell of burning flesh from her hand.
The creature swept its incomplete, regrowing arm and caught the blade and spun it into a whirl before launching it back toward her. She could barely make it out and had even less time to tell herself to move as she dove out of the barely visible blade. It carved a thin line down her leg and looked to get caught in her calf before bouncing off the Medjel shell there.
“MIND RAPE!”
Caught you.
Did you now? Hahahahahahahahahahaha
The frustration, the pain, all the unknowable factors that had kept her on a tightrope of anxiety broke free from the cage and released themselves in a twisted laugh. It echoed through her skull.
Shut up bitch! I’m trying to gloat here! You haven’t won, I’ve won!
Have you now? That’s cute. Little Psy-boy, you're just a freak. I bet they had a lot of fun playing around in your broken mind.
The connection nearly slipped before he reasserted control. Leanne didn’t bother capitalizing on the slip to try and wrench control away.
Mind Rape? What a disgusting and pretentious name. I'm not sure which is worse.
He screamed in her head and started trying to dig, Leanne kept him at the outskirts of her mind. The Psi reinforcement of her neural pathways was strong. Another benefit of spreading out her Allocation, while she may not be the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest, she was never lacking in any aspect. Her strength came from using and combining everything she had.
Done trying to ‘rape my mind’?
Even through the non-verbal communication the contemptuous sneer of her words clearly transmitted through.
She didn’t give him any warning but felt him withdraw as the burning plasma above his head finished burning through the mushrooms up there and dropped directly on top of the creature’s head.
It screamed and burnt and twisted before melting down to a charred husk.
A rare thing happened in that moment. Leanne smiled.