My focus shifts to my coins as my legs bring me ever closer. The skeletal ghost quarters shiver and pulse like they’re straining on the edge of breaking, while the regular ones sit like concrete pillars against my arm. I flex my fingers and toss the beacon to Illumisia, who snaps it out of the air with her teeth. If I hadn’t been on the receiving end of a whole ton of bites that didn’t even break the skin, I might be worried about her breaking it.
Instead, the thought barely crosses my mind. I fill two of the regular ghost quarters with projectiles, then connect thin strings of consciousness to two skeletons. Dark awareness clings to them like long strands of boiling tar, and I can feel them fade away to the back of my mind. Still there, but not center stage.
It’s a really strange sensation splitting my focus this many ways, but it feels weirdly natural. Almost like how I’m always controlling every part of my body at once, now I can somehow add other things to that web of unconscious awareness. There’s not a doubt in my mind that it’s thanks to Pearl’s portion of the rewriting that went down, but from how she’s reacting to what I’m doing, it doesn’t seem like she meant for it to happen.
“How did you do that!?” She asks excitedly and smacks my cheek with a tiny open palm. “That’s a shellraiser thing! I’m not even giving you awareness right–oh my gosh, I must’ve somehow given you the ability to do this! Wow. I didn’t know I could do that.”
I raise an eyebrow without taking my eyes off the ever-approaching smears. “You didn’t know what you were doing when you raised me from the dead?”
Peal vigorously shakes her head. “Oh, gosh, no. I’ve never done anything like that before. To someone who wasn’t a shellraiser, I mean–I helped a lot of kids solidify their electrical connections and make goo for themselves. Shellraiser kids, obviously.”
“Obviously.” I repeat with a chuckle. “So yeah, I can use the awareness on my own now. And a little more in addition to it. What happens if you give me awareness now?”
“I have no clue! But probably either something really cool, or really weird and painful for both of us. Or nothing! Nothing’s always an option.”
“Let’s hope for cool or nothing, then. But not now. Is it better to try it when we’re completely safe, or only risk it when we’re in real danger?”
“Dunno.”
I roll my eyes and blink as the awareness shunts information into my brain. The things are shifting around now, and they’re all pointed in my direction. If that isn’t a sign that they’ve noticed me, then I don’t know what is. But I still can’t get a real look at them, which hopefully means they haven’t gotten a good look at me.
Electricity crackles in the air. White-yellow coalesces on one of the blobs in the distance, and snaps of static sound out in an orchestra of charged particles. I flick one hand up and throw up a movable shield, consuming a skeletal quarter which my bracer instantly refills from my inventory.
But I’m a little faster than I remember. So the shield, which I’d set to move at my maximum sprinting speed from before the change, actually slows me down when I run headfirst into it. I screw my face into an expression of disbelief, then slam my palm into the shield to force it to speed up. It surges forward as a torrent of electricity slams into it, arcing all over it in a blinding burst of light and sound.
I raise a hand to protect my eyes, then grimace and look away as it becomes too much to even slightly look at. The lightshow lasts for maybe five seconds in total, but it leaves behind arcing bolts of electricity that dance over my shield like slinkies down a set of MC Escher stairs.
Pearl peeks out from behind her hands and sets her mouth in a thin line. “That’s shellraiser technology, all right. And from how it hasn’t even cracked your shield, it must be set to capture instead of kill. Um, that doesn’t mean you can just get hit by it, in case you were wondering.”
“No, I was not wondering.” I crack my knuckles as I jog behind the moving shield. The sound’s a hell of a lot louder than before. “Not in the slightest. Your awareness range still beats mine by a shit ton, so do you have a bead on what these things are? Beside shellraiser tech.”
“Nope. They don’t look like any of our tech–all rubber and metal and thin wires–but they’re definitely using our weapons.” She leans a little closer to the still distant things and narrows her eyes. “They’ve even got some good optical cloaking tech on them. If I was weaker, I wouldn’t even be able to make them out.”
“Then why’d you wait to tell me?” I ask. And get silence as my answer. “Pearl? You alright?”
“Oh, I’m fine, I’m just trying to find an explanation that doesn’t make me look like an idiot.” She says sheepishly. “I kind of though that since Ilumisia said this was your test, that I couldn’t help at all. But I’m a part of your powerset for the foreseeable future, so it’d actually be a worse test if I didn’t help you. And by the time I reasoned that out, you kind of already shielded an electrical burst.”
“You’re right. That is a dumb reason.”
Pearl huffs and pinches my earlobe. “Jerk. Do you want my help or not?”
“Definitely want the help, thank you. So, what’ve you got? Any obvious weak points, or am I running towards a trio of armored weapons with nothing but my bare hands?”
She nods, and her levity bleeds into seriousness. “They’re all about the size of the corpsedragger, but they don’t have obvious heads. Each of the bodies is a turtle shell of hexagonal metal plates and rubber between them, and when the one in the middle attacked you, it retracted a plate to do it. So all the weaponry and important circuitry command stuff is stored inside the shell.”
“How about legs? They got anything I can tip over?”
She squints, then shakes her head. “I take back the turtle shell comparison–they’re like two turtle shells pressed together on the bottoms to make a big oval. The bottom one has a hexagon open and looks like it’s spraying something on the ground to levitate, but I can’t make out if it’s regular air, water, or some kind of magic. And… it’s going for another attack. I’d put up another shield just in case.”
Another skeleton shatters, and another shield pops up between me and the first one at Pearl’s recommendation. The flash of electricity comes a second later to my awareness, but before it’s even fired, I can tell there’s something different about it. This one has the same white-yellow as before, but there are arcs of deep red in there as well.
“If that was capture mode, is this kill mode?”
Pearl shrugs. “Wait a second and we’ll see. But my bet would be on kill.”
I’ll take that for about as close to confirmation as possible. I slow down a little and make sure I’m properly positioned behind my shields, then cover my eyes as the blast rips free of the thing. It’s a little slower than the first one, with red shot through the yellow-white in short, visceral slashes. They entwine more and more until they finally hit my shield.
One second the electricity is mixed, both in the blast and on my shield, and the next it’s all one uniform shade of violently electric red. It hangs on my shield for a split second, condenses down to a sphere the size of an orange, and chunks of magic start to fly. The attack rips through my shield with merciless efficiency in moments.
It takes all of a breath for my shield to shatter completely. It leaves my mind like an item violently crossed off a checklist, and I reattach threads of awareness to two more skeletal coins in a burst of unease and… frustration. No fear, though.
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“Looks like it’s a combination attack.” I say with far more confidence than I expect. “The first one traps you, and the one after it springs the trap.”
“I completely agree.” Pearl says, but there’s hesitance in her voice. So I keep silent to let her think. “But if the follow-up had some trap in it, then why did it even bother with the trap in the first place? It wasn’t that much slower than the first one.”
I nod. “Yeah, it’s a little weird. Maybe the kill only triggers if there’s enough electricity on someone, and it’s more than one blast can deliver?”
“That could be it. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Just dodge them and we’ll be fine.” Pearl smiles and makes a biting motion with her hands. “The corpsedragger was faster, and your body’s a whole lot better than it was then. This’ll be easy peasy.”
“Hope you’re right.” I say with a hint of a smile.
Glass blurs by as I speed up to get close enough to actually see the monsters, sidestepping half-assed electrical blasts all the way there. The things are exactly how Pearl described them–all steel and rubber, with a few wires poking out through missing hexagonal plates. Glassy lenses glint from all of their sides, making it look like they can see all directions at the same time–including above and below them. Except… well…
They’re boring. Like the kind of shit you’d see on a low-budget sci-fi that thinks ‘faceless robots with blinky lights’ equals scary. These just look like bland hexagonal plates mashed together without any care for aesthetics or practical use. The fact that the weapons are hidden inside of them, and have to be revealed through sliding plates… it’s just screaming ‘terminal malfunction’.
The one that fired electricity at me flashes yellow lights. The one on its left–a little bigger and chunkier than the middle one–responds with a cascading whir of panels that shift open to expose uneven chunks of bright pink stones clanking about inside of glass spheres. An electric current surges through the spheres, arcing bolts of lighting connecting them together as the chunks dissolve into a slurry.
“Oh, come on! That’s a complete waste of electricity and technology!” Pearl exclaims. “Just make the crystals liquid in the first place! Then you can use it as a fluid and send it to whatever part you want instead of wasting it on a bunch of baubles!”
Weird thing to get annoyed over, but I mean, I can kind of get it. This is her thing, apparently.
“What’s the fluid for?”
Pearl crosses her arms and huffs in annoyance. “Making shields. It’s made from precious stones and a very specific coral extract from the deep seafloor, then condensed into a solid at room temperature. All they’d have to do is cool it a little and it’ll be a liquid. So much easier to work with.”
“Shields, huh. How strong are they?”
“Won’t even matter. The liquid’s not cold enough to make them. Just throw projectiles at them until they explode.”
Okay, that might’ve been the plan, but now that she’s said it… it sounds a little shortsighted. Especially if these things are, like, a little platoon of robots. The shooter retreats behind the shielder as pink slowly starts to condense in the air around it, and the last one lines up behind the shooter. It hasn’t done anything yet, but its lights are glowing ever so slightly green. A green that spreads to the other two, slightly tinting their own colours.
“Pearl, can you see if there’s an open panel on the one in the back?”
She’s reluctant for a second, but gives in with a sigh. “Yes. It’s got a little device sticking out of it that’s like a really weak version of a communication array. It’s probably giving commands to the other two, since the programming and construction is so shoddy that they couldn’t fit complex computation and a simple weapon into the same shell.
I laugh and shake my head as I kick a shield closer to the robots. This one’s made to move on my touch, not on its own. Learned that lesson already.
“Yeesh, Pearl, you really hate these things. Are they even worth taking for scrap?”
“No.” She states flatly. “They deserve to be obliterated. Whoever made them bastardized all of our hard work, painstaking research, rigorous testing, and constant upgrades. Almost like they’re laughing at me for trying so hard to make something… good.”
That’s about the loudest ‘destroy the robots’ I’ve ever heard. I tighten my right hand into a fist, then shift and ram my shield with my left shoulder. It surges forward, cutting through the air and creating a slipstream for me to follow. I didn’t mean to do that, but apparently the spell adjusted itself from my want alone.
It shears through the gathering pink like tissue paper. I slightly open gaps between my index, middle, and ring finger to be filled with ghost quarters. Projectiles fill the coins with a simple thought, each assigned a spell to be as immobile and destructive as possible. Might as well completely obliterate them if they’re not worth anything, right?
Electricity crackles on the end of the shooter’s ‘gun’, which looks more like a lightning rod with a hole in the middle. I step back from my shield so I don’t get electrocuted and wait for it to fire, then shield my eyes and jump out from behind it immediately after the flash. Two quick flicks send projectile-filled coins spinning into open cavities on the shooter and the signaler, which detonate into violent maelstroms with a little less than a thought. The awareness–my awareness–really helps with this stuff.
I step back as roiling magic obliterates the robots, scattering metal and rubber to litter the ground and walls with chunks of scrap varying in size from small to minuscule. Some of them let out zaps of electricity when they land, but I pay them no attention. The shielder turns to me and tries to put up another shield, but the thing’s pink particles start forming behind me. Putting me firmly inside of the only thing that could protect it.
“Alright, I think I understand now.” I sigh as I flick another projectile into the shielder. “These things suck.”
It detonates, completely eviscerating the last of the three robots. I expect Pearl to be satisfied with the destruction, but her expression barely changes after the initial half-grin when the projectile tears it apart.
“Yeah, they really suck.” She agrees as Illumisia joins us in a flicker of red. “But they suck with our tech. That means someone got their hands on our secrets, but not on someone who actually knows how to use them.”
“Could mean someone gave them shit secrets.” I offer as Illumisia passes me the beacon, then starts jogging once again. I take off after her a heartbeat later. “Like corporate sabotage.”
Pearl considers that for a good long moment before nodding. “I guess that could be what happened. But it’s not mech science with these things. It’s simple magic circuitry supplemented by electricity, and they couldn’t even figure out the best way to use a really simple barrier fluid. That’s not just sabotage–it’s complete incompetence.”
“Hey, if it means we don’t have to fight full-power shellraiser robots, I’m all for incompetent enemies.”
The look on Pearl’s face says she doesn’t agree. Hell, it says she wished they were competently made for reasons that are lost on me. But before I can get another word in, she leans down and returns to her post as beacon reader.
“It’s moving a little to the left still.” She relays as I fall in with Illumisia. “Either there’s going to be a tunnel in about five miles, or we’re going to have to find a detour.”
Illumisia licks her lips in anticipation. “Understood, Pearlescence. And you, system-born. Did destroying those shoddy machines give you progress towards anything?”
“Highly doubt it, but I guess there’s no problem looking.”
I open my Class Card and take a quick glance over everything, but nothing looks out of place. No notifications, no new items, and no… wait. What the hell is this? How’d my debt go down to two-hundred and forty-one Worth? I don’t remember earning anything at all. And the only other time I got Worth directly deposited into my interface was when I killed the mass grave.
…When parts of it were completely unusable for me, and the system compensated me instead.
Hope spreads through my chest like blossoming warmth. I swipe over to my stats, and sure enough, my Worth has gone up. Only by nine, but it's more than its gone up in days. After applying the reduction from the debt, that means I earned a total of eighteen Worth. Six per robot.
I need to earn four-hundred total Worth to get to my next threshold, three-hundred of which will come from completing the teleporter destroying quest. So I just need to get a hundred Worth from these things.
“Seventeen total.” I mutter to myself with a growing grin. “Minus the three I already destroyed, that leaves fourteen to go. That’s completely doable.”
Illumisia tilts her head to the side. “Does that mean the robots provided you something worthwhile?”
“Oh, definitely.” I confirm as my Pearl-enhanced awareness alerts me to more things far in the distance. Many, many more things. Ghost quarters appear between each of my fingers as I clench them in anticipation. “Leave all this to us.”