“See me gone?” The corpse twitched its head to the side, dripping blood out of a mouth’s corner. “Should His Excellency wish so, you may yet see your desire come true. But I believe you are running ahead of yourself.”

“Not in the habit of running, unlike you,” Ratcatcher told him.

“Girl, your buzzing is amusing, but your delusions are tiresome. You mistake cancer for coryza. Pleasure aside, there was no point for me to stay and kill you then. But now my hands are free, my purpose accomplished, and I shall see you broken, despoiled, and turned.” Hustler responded.

“And what purpose may it be?” Wivin asked, holding out a hand to prevent the Ratcatcher from answering. “Your master is rotting, his army scattered, and that hierarchy of yours is being wiped out as we speak. You are alone, Hustler. Whatever allies you might’ve found, all will die here once the Governor arrives.”

“Well, it is a good thing he won’t be coming,” Hustler laughed, his voice echoing from the walls. “Do you think me foolish, servant of a false deity? No, the little Abel is very busy; for you see, I am not as lonely as you might think. And wiping out the hierarchy? Allow me to enlighten you on the difference between the yapping of a stray dog and real actions.”

Something shook above. A piece of stone fell and a deafening scream pierced the air. More and more trembles followed, and Ratcatcher saw explosions happening above, their crimson flashes sparkling through the poisonous veil and disappearing on the wind. It soon intermingled with the faint hissing of an energy shield. The barrage continued, growing more distant, and a piece of metal fell from above, landing on the ground several meters away from the group.

It was a piece of the Avenger’s pyramid hull. Energy orbs got smashed after a shell had bypassed the shield, damaging the mighty transport and tearing a chunk out of it. The edges of the torn metal still glowed red, overheated by the napalm and shelling unleashed by the complex’s defenses.

“I admire your initiative in destroying the pipes, but alas, I have accounted for it and can’t allow it. So your soldiers had to go.” The machine twitched, clawing at Wivin’s shield, producing an unbearable hum with each touch. “My partner believes fate itself has brought you all here. He wants to wait and meet you. Me, on the other hand...”

“Into the left tunnel,” Wivin said in a calm voice. All emotions disappeared from her voice.

Ratcatcher moved, in part dragged by the Trolls, in part reacting to pure instinct. Augustus stomped on the marionette, silencing the laughter coming out of it, and Wivin turned her shield upward, blocking an incoming shell threatening to land right at the woman. The accuracy with which the attackers had made this shot boggled the mind. Not only had they fired at their exact location despite the swirling clouds, but the enemies had also calculated the correct arc.

Twice. In artillery tactics, there is a method of landing two shells at a target at the same time. Vasily once explained it to Ratcatcher, and when she refused to believe him, he brought up a terminal and educated her on the use of mobile artillery. The cannon crew fired their first round in a higher arc and fired their second shot in a lower arc, thus ensuring the approximate simultaneous arrival of a deadly loadout. The regular, unaugmented soldiers used this trick to nail several warlords in the initial wars against the Reclaimers, before scientific breakthroughs made cheap power armor widely available. Wolfkins preferred to block on instinct, and when fired at from beyond their field of vision, they often missed the timing, and several of them had found themselves captive after eating an intense precision barrage.

Wivin’s shield blocked the first faster-than-sound shell, glowing from the strain and deflecting the shrapnel away from the group. A fraction of a second later, another shell hit, partially exploding against the shield but penetrating it with a large enough mass. Hustler didn’t come out to gloat; somehow the man, or whoever was firing, had used the image sent by the cameras to calculate the countymeister’s whereabouts and lobbed two anti-personnel shells at her.

The shield exploded in sparks, getting overloaded by the sheer impact, and smoke rose from Wivin’s back. She got hit in the shoulder; her left mechanical arm snapped, and the biological arm disappeared. The shell exploded at her legs, leaving the Troll’s visor cracked and filling the bleeding wound with shrapnel. Her soldiers acted professionally, never wavering in wielding their shields, and this saved the worker’s and the trainees’ lives from being flung away. Augustus rode out the impact, ignoring the scratches left by the shrapnel on his armor.

“Lead,” Augustus said, and a Troll nearby nodded, giving space for the instructor to charge ahead.

The group followed, with Wivin in the rear, after hearing more screams from above and watching how the napalm bombs littered the walls, unleashing hellfire below. They stepped up in the dark and long tunnel, and Augustus’ armor squeaked. It was a faint sound, almost deafened by the explosions on the canyon’s floor. Ratcatcher’s ears caught it, and the girl saw fissures open on the smooth surface of the instructor’s armor.

Each fissure had a diameter of less than a centimeter, and they squeaked again and again. The sound emitted by them was reflected off the tunnel’s walls and then collected by another set of organs inside the biological armor, processed by a biological computer, transcribed at last into a map, and sent on the HUD of everyone in the group.

Artificial echolocation, perfected through bioengineering. They moved on through the pitch darkness, and the tunnel made several turns, leaving parts of the passage collapsed. Augustus broke through these natural barricades, never leaving the group too far behind to avoid breaking the communications, and they started spotting disarmed mines and booby traps masquerading for pieces of stone.

Ratcatcher dropped close to the countymeister and ignored all attempts to shoo her off. Wivin’s cellular regeneration had already started working, pushing out splintered metal and dissolving broken bones to reform them. The girl found the sight of shifting flesh, cauterizing veins, and meat hungrily sucking in spilled blood to be unsettling. She pushed through the disgust and bandaged the wound on the move, feeling the wound shifting underneath her fingers.

“I’ll live,” Wivin said in a calm voice, deactivating her emotional device. “Ludwig! Pain clouds my judgment; you are in charge.”

“Yes, Countymeister. Keep the Iternians and the faithful in the center!” another Troll said, his voice amplified by the loudspeakers. “Proceed through the tunnel to the facility! Once inside, we’ll split up, take over the place, and escort the civilians to the nearest settlement.”

“It won’t work!” Edward interjected. “With the enemy controlling the artillery emplacements, we’ll be sitting ducks outside.”

“Who said you’d be leaving the facility so soon?” Ludwig asked without turning his round helm. “We’ll take you to the safe room first.”

“Sure, let’s go into one place that is bound not to be trapped,” Esmeralda said sarcastically. “Think, sir Crusader! The enemy got a drop on you, on us! They want us inside, meaning they are either confident in their ability to control the place, or they think they can. Delusional maniacs they may be, let’s assume the worst.”

“Let’s,” Ludwig agreed. “Iterna and the Oathtakers will retake the complex and eliminate any resistance. Trainees, consider yourself hired as an auxiliary force.”

“Does that mean we get paid?” Rowen asked.

“I’ll figure something out about that. You will be compensated,” Ludwig promised.

They caught up with Augustus as the man stopped short of reaching the exit. Ratcatcher checked her watch; they walked for a good fifteen minutes, keeping a steady pace but never moving too fast to be ambushed. She saw a yellow light at the end of the tunnel, and the instructor sat in the middle of the passage, busy disarming several anti-personnel mines. It confirmed her suspicion; Hustler didn’t let the worker escape on a whim; he used the poor man to gather his victims exactly where he wanted to. The instructor raised a hand, asking the group to halt, and the twins hurried to take their position at the fore. Neither raised a rifle; shielded by the crusaders, the brother and sister used their powers.

“Watch out!” Edward cried out on the call, and his icon blinked, showing that the boy suffered a nosebleed. “Shamblers are coming to life above us.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The ceiling shook in unison with the roar of a revving engine. A tip of the spinning drill showed up above Augustus, and two Trolls darted to him, taking it on their shield as the man leaped toward the group. Surrounded by falling ground, its treads annihilating the stone and the drill ruining the shields, the Oathtakers’ transport carrier landed in the tunnel, shattering a Troll’s hand when the man failed to toss aside his shield.

Ratcatcher heard of them. The machine’s main compartment resembled a cylinder mounted on three wide treads. It was big enough to hold over a hundred soldiers—over two hundred if a commander threw away all security and crammed people inside. Rows of weapons nestled along its sides, unusable in the confines of a tunnel. The mines exploded, failing to even scratch the armored belly.

“Our new friend has presented us with some of your own beauties; thank her very much,” Hustler’s voice whipped at them. “Turn to mush by the drill of your own engine, Oathtakers!”

“Like hell we will!” Vasily roared and broke forward. He weaved away from Augustus’ hand, his grenade launcher secured on the back. A terminal appeared on the trainee’s forearm, a brother to the terminal he had used so disastrously during at their training in the desert. Thrown into fury at his failure, Vasily enlisted in all possible espionage courses, polishing his technical skills, and tinkered with the standard-issued remote hacking tool.

What he unleashed at the vehicle didn’t simply override its defensive software and stop it. The surge of virus code had killed the generator outright, turning the machine into a husk of dead steel. Ratcatcher didn’t need to be in the cabin to visualize how the shamblers within stumbled, trying to follow Hustler’s complex command with their stiffened fingers, trying in vain to restart the engine.

“And for my second trick!” Vasily closed the machine and punched at the stopped drill. It didn’t bulge; not even a dent appeared in the diamodite-coated alloy. The trainee retreated, shaking his hand. “It… didn’t work.”

“Step aside, one-trick pony,” Jumail laughed, pushing ahead. The power armor covered his legs anew, and four of them closed on the drill, pushing the machine on. The fifth arched above the weapon, punched through the viewing screen, and threw the grenade inside, blowing up the crew. “Thanks for saving our bacon. I’ll take it from here.”

The Malformed pushed the engine backward, sliding it across the ruined part of the tunnel and driving it straight into the damaged white growing hall, devoid of all vats and colored yellow by lights. The invasion left the floor ravaged; splashes of blood, torn pieces of dead bodies, and traces of gunfire marked every wall; several walkways above the hall lay on the ground; and crimson colored the entire observation platform.

Elina told them about these facilities a bit. Artifacts of the past: once these production facilities littered both the Reclaimers’ and Oathtakers’ lands. Even Iterna had some. Back when the Extinction had destroyed the fertile soil, humans used the growing vats to produce a bland, tasteless, but highly nutritious paste. Once grown, the workers then turned the paste into pocket batons or, with the addition of water, into soup.

This formula, with its relative simplicity, saved millions of lives. However, in interviews, those who grew up during the days of shortage and still lived often admitted that they would rather be kneecapped than ever eat this rubbery food all day ever again.

“This time a spider got caught in the wet!” Hustler’s voice laughed from the speakers on the walls.

The group had entered the hall, and Wivin turned to shield Ratcatcher with her body as explosions thundered behind them. The exit collapsed in an avalanche of stone as bright flashes emerged from the small tunnel the stopped engine had created. In unison with it, the doors leading out of the hall slid in place, and round airlocks’ sluices in the wall opened in full.

A green substance poured out of them, scaring Ratcatcher that it might be acid. She calmed down, hearing no hiss as the sticky and oily substance started spreading across the hall, encroaching toward the group gathered in the center. A Troll stepped closer and touched the slimy substance with his armored fingers.

“Nutrient solution,” he reported.

“And one that serves as a good conduit!” Hustler said. The Troll recoiled as an electric current ran across the surface, creating several hissing bubbles. “See, I know that power armor can withstand an obscene amount of energy, often rendering the user impervious to lightning. The question is, for how long? Let’s flood the entire room and stress test it!”

“Let’s not,” Rowen replied.

He pointed his palms on the floor, took a single breath, and an invisible wall surrounded the group, pushing them closer together. The sensation didn’t last long; it washed on the floor, gathering the liquid. Rowen’s breath grew harder, and the teen plucked every drop of the nutrient solution, sending it rolling backwards with his telekinesis. When focused on an individual object, his power could create an impressive force. Dealing with a small pool took a toll on his stamina.

Rowen didn’t panic or hurry. He kept moving the mass back, returning it the way it came, bisecting it into several sections, and turning them into streams suspended in the air. Once done, he pushed it back into the ventilation system, flooding the surrounding compartments and airways, and clenched his fists. The sluices imploded inward, their metal parts sucked inside the airways, sealing them for good.

“Plan B, then,” Hustler said, and the large door on the other side of the hall swung open.

Shamblers in full combat gear stood on their knees, rocket launchers aimed at the group. They fired at once, ignoring Carlos’ shots that hit several of them in the heads, cracking and splintering the plates. Carlos moved in a blur, shooting two rockets out of the air, but the rest, over a dozen, kept closing in, refusing to veer off course.

Elina dropped her shotgun, clenched her palms together, and released the hold. The shockwave produced by her power splattered the teen against Ludwig’s tower shield. She croaked in pain, her armor unable to absorb the entire impact. The ensuing cataclysm ravaged the floor, exploding the stone; wide cracks grew on the walls; and the rockets exploded in the air. The approaching shockwave absorbed both flame and metal and carried them onward, slamming the shamblers into the stone. The crusaders opened fire, tearing the possessed corpses asunder and filling the corridor outside with the stench of spilled guts covered in pus-soaked flesh.

“Bitch, please.” Elina accepted Carlos’ hand and stood on her unsteady legs. “Your rockets ain’t got shit on the Fart.”

“I thought you hated the name?” Ratcatcher grinned and wrapped a hand over her shoulders, handing her back the shotgun.

“Eh. I chose to own the thing that irritates me rather than raging at every Carlos’ joke.” Elina breathed out.

“You are irritatingly hard to get rid of,” Hustler announced. “You remind me of the Birchshell’s seedlings—the same tenacity, the same stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and fall in line already.”

“Well, now we simply must kick your ass. Can’t let down such a great legacy.” Carlos showed a middle finger to a camera on the ceiling and fired at it.

“The only fate awaiting you within these walls is demise.” Hustler continued, his voice fading as the trainees opened fire on the remaining speakers. “Step inside, rabble. Nothing you do can change what is to come, but if a death you seek, a death you shall ha…”

Ratcatcher fired at the remaining speaker, silencing the bastard. Phew, way better. She stepped outside of the hall, ignoring the bloody mess underneath her feet, feeling surprised that no one had shot at them yet. A corridor spreading in two directions, with the turns readily available? A perfect spot for an ambush. The Avengers spread out, securing the zone, and she noticed a terminal in the wall, its display dark.

“Vasily, can you help?” she called. “Time to see what they are even doing in here.”

“Sure.” Vasily tapped on his wrist, trying to activate the thing remotely. Seeing no results, he shrugged, smashed a panel under the terminal, and buried his arms in wires. It took several minutes, but the terminal blinked and came to life, and the boy asked the worker for an ID card, placing it in a slot. He entered the man’s code and called others. “We’re in.”

“Do we have access to the cameras?” Wivin asked.

“Negative, they turned them off. Many systems are offline.” Vasily frowned and summoned a map of the facility, showing them all the energy grid connected to the Oathtakers’ united system. “This can’t be right. It says they are sending power from here into the grid.”

“Are they trying to overload it?” Ratcatcher asked in worry. Unlike in Iterna, an underground energy network connected most of the cities in the Land of the Oath. If the bastards somehow found a way to focus all that energy on a single point…

“Negative, and our allies are not this incompetent.” Augustus pointed at the corner of the display, at the image of a round gear. “See this, Eliza? If a sudden power surge tries to enter the facility, it will automatically shut itself down. The system is foolproof; not even the Numbers have been able to harm the Oathtakers despite such a glaring technical flaw.”

“Not everyone is blessed with an abundance of resources and an intact technological base,” Wivin said. “Instructor Augustus is correct. In my younger days, I tried to overload the terminals in our chapter by draining energy from a nearby nuclear power plant. For testing purposes and to erase my poor grades in literature,” the countymeister admitted. “My attempt had failed, and my teacher had punished me in the most cruel and unusual manner imaginable.”

“Impossible,” Ludwig stated. “Your poems are…”

“Written using a procedural song generator, and I paid an Insectone to write the final ones. None of them are mine; I did them to please my parents and get Mrs. Lice off my back. Literature is not my forte.” Wivin ignored the astonished crusader and asked Vasily to make a record of the interruption on the energy grid for the future investigation. “They’re diverting power from the entire country. It should stop any moment... Yes, see, it is already cut off. To where did they send all this flow, and why?”

“They’re using the power grid left over from the Old World. I will bet my life on it,” Vasily said. “If the map didn’t lie, it went east to the Wastes and then north. No idea as to why, even if they want to blow up something, it won’t work. The Extinction had destroyed most facilities, the best they can achieve is a small puff somewhere. That’s it.” He tapped at his forehead. “It doesn’t make any sense. Whatever Hustler or the Numbers used to get into the system that controls the energy grid can’t be used again. The system will be improved; it is their one and only chance. So why? They can’t do anything with it!”

“All the better for us.” Ludwig shook off the shock of the revelation and resumed his duty. “Madmen seldom create working plans. Let us bring retribution and restore the order.”