GRAVITON DENSITY REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS
LOCALIZED REALITY COLLAPSE IMMINENT
At that moment, Fulgent felt her body fill with heat much in the same way it did each time it had reacted to her father’s reality-bending up until then. However, there was no surge to lash out. The voidfire instead rose to the surface, coating her body in a shining, crackling second skin, just as the gravity well’s influence reached her.
Her mind was racing, the current split-second dilated to the absolute extreme of her body’s processing capabilities. The options laid out before her were limited… But they were options. She could try to jump away and likely need to decouple a limb to escape the gravity well. The second option was to initiate an anchoring reaction and face the near-guaranteed fate of total burnout in the process. The third option… It would have to do.
“Graviton Redistribution Engine: Disperse.”
Outcome prediction:
Wide-area graviton density increase.
Gravity well expansion halted temporarily.
Calculating expansion halt duration before burnout…
17.62348100695 seconds.
Proceed?
“Proceed and send a zero-latency distress signal to Ouroboros.”
Affirmative.
Like the spring within a clock, Fulgent’s perception of time began to unwind as every scrap of available energy was routed into her third arm. Instead of the usual whine, there was a strange, backwards screech, like the cry of a gigantic bird of prey. The black bead between Iorzan’s hands suddenly stopped growing as gravity around him weakened, and gravity in a cone behind Fulgent rapidly intensified. The old man saw this - he knew what was happening, and it only made him laugh.
“I must admit, I am impressed, but we both know you cannot halt it for longer than my biomass can maintain it!” he exclaimed, fully confident in his suicidal plan.
A second passed.
Two.
Three.
Four.
A nearly perfect wedge shape of crushed-down dirt was forming behind Fulgent.
Six.
Her feet were sinking into the ground.
Seven.
Sparks of lilac leapt across her body and chittered up to her third arm in a continuous stream. Grains of black sand began falling from her skin.
Eight.
The head of a spectral dragon came soaring over the Iktha line, a heap of crumbled metal in its teeth.
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Whence the words thundered from his maw, a geyser of lilac fog erupted from the mouth of Ouroboros. As though a volcano erupting, excess energy overflowed and vented through his voicebox, swirling about his hunched form. The pyramidal projector in his left shoulder glowed with a blinding light, and bending to its arcane manipulation, the fog conformed to the shape of a dragon’s head easily thrice as large as him. The dragon sneered, its mouth gaping wide like the gates of hell itself.
His sensors detected a burst of Hawking radiation from the crater. “The old man can make micro-singularities?” he wondered, but the thought was washed from his mind by the deluge of voidfire that coursed through him at that very moment. It would be fine. Fulgent could handle it, if a singularity were to develop she could produce an anchoring reaction.
In all fairness, the exoskeleton’s pilot didn’t flinch or take a single step back, but rather brought the suit into a low stance as if to grapple with a charging beast. With a thought Ouroboros ignited his thrusters, exploding forth to the ear-splitting noise of the sound-speed barrier shattering.
It was not a moment before he collided with the gilded exoskeleton that he felt a break in the flow of his inner fire, a zero-latency distress call carried on the waves of the cosmic ocean. Fulgent. There was no message - it was instant, a momentary scream for help. He understood.
Ouroboros knew he wouldn’t be able to change direction on a dime - even he wasn’t exempt from the laws of momentum, at least not without a graviton redistribution engine of his own. His draconic projection crashed into the exoskeleton, its colossal jaws closing shut and crushing the machine’s plating like an empty stimulant can. It was at that moment that he adjusted the direction of his thrusters, pulling upward in a near perfect ninety-degree turn. He wanted to let go of the exoskeleton before he got too far off the ground,, but he couldn’t - his pauldron was already open. To close it would crush the exoskeleton completely and kill the pilot.
Thus, he simply cut power to the module with the intent to re-engage it immediately afterwards. The black-stone pyramid on his shoulder flickered and stopped glowing, briefly throwing sparks before its glow died and the spectral dragon-head faded.When he allowed energy to continue flowing into It, the light flickered on for a split-second before fading again. Instead of being funneled into the projector, much of the energy was routed to his processing centers. His perception of time slowed to a crawl as an error message flashed through his head.
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ERROR: “Aegis Shesha” Primary projector module inoperable.
Engage auxiliary projector module?
Alongside that message, an image of the dragonhead ornament on his left knee flashed through his head.
“Confirm.”
Engaging auxiliary module…
Rerouting power…
“Aegis Shesha” Auxiliary Projector Module:
Please assign an activation phrase.
He didn’t have time to think it over, thus he used the first thing that came to mind. The auxiliary projector was part of the Dragonrider System, and it was on his leg.
“Register activation phrase:”
“Rider kick.”
Activation phrase registered.
Engaging auxiliary projector module...
His colossal power output once more had a place to go. His perception of time returned to what he considered normal. The crumpled-up wreck of an exoskeleton hurtled past him as he ascended and spun into a nearly one-hundred and eighty degree turn in order to fly over the circular line of Iktha soldiers that surrounded the crater, and in no more than two or three seconds, he was on a diagonal downward collision trajectory with the source of that Hawking radiation burst.
It was the old man, his hands clutched around a black bead no more than half a millimeter in diameter. The air around it in a half-meter radius was distorted and strance, as if reality itself was collapsing as the nascent singularity ripped at its creator’s flesh - it had eaten a hole into Iorzan’s bare chest, his ribs and some of his organs bare for the world to see.
Yet the singularity didn’t grow - somehow, if Ouroboros’ sensor arrays read the local graviton density correctly, Fulgent was expending the void energy generated by an anchoring reaction in her body to suppress the gravity well. Even from dozens of meters above, he could see specks of black sand falling from her body, and he knew why she sent that distress call.Her body couldn’t handle the strain. Had she allowed the anchoring reaction to take place normally, she would’ve suffered total burnout.
Once more, his mouth swung open.
Once more, he bellowed the activation phrase.
Once more, he split his full power output between the Absolute Defense Array and his thrusters.
“RIDER KICK!” the Dragon-headed Serpent howled as he rode a pillar of voidfire down from the heavens, his left leg extended. The dragon-head on his left knee snapped open, exposing a pyramidal projector nearly identical to the original. Glowing lilac cracks spread across its surface as the spectral dragon’s head enveloped Ouroboros’s left leg, its sneering visage staring directly into the black bead as if its constituent void energy already knew what was to come.
A fraction of a second later, his armored foot crashed into the pitch-black pinhead of compressed space, and his descent was halted in its tracks. There was no thunderous impact, he didn’t drag his target out of the crater with sheer momentum. For a moment, a brief moment, Ouroboros was faced with an immovable object, a hole in the fabric of reality itself. He felt an immense flare of void energy building, an anchoring reaction so potent it would utterly cripple him were it not Dragonrider Casement shouldering the strain
He held it back, for just a moment so that he could stare into Iorzan’s face. To him, it was more than enough time. To Iorzan, it was not even long enough to get more than a passing glance at Ouroboros’ split-down-the-middle visage.
Whirr-clack.
The dragon’s shimmering jaws snapped shut around the microscopic black hole, and all within the crater was consumed by a blinding flash of light. There was a deafening noise, a mixture of stone cracking and flesh ripping.
The light faded abruptly, as did the singularity’s pull.
There stood Ouroboros, his armoured left foot through Iorzan’s chest, pinning him to the inside of the crater. A noise somewhere between laughter and a death rattle gurgled out of Iorzan’s throat as he stared up at the so-called Serpent of the South.
Blue bubbles rose between broken teeth as he tried speaking with his one intact lung. Clang. He was cut short when his head exploded, ruptured from within by a fist-sized sphere of metal spikes that disintegrated into dust within seconds.
Ouroboros turned towards the source of the noise - it was Fulgent, of course. She was visibly struggling to stand; her body was covered in lightning-shaped streaks of burned-out flesh, and at her feet was a pile of black sand up to her ankles.
“You look fuckin’ monstrous,” she struggled out, staggering towards him. Her gaze briefly fell upon her father’s mutilated form, but immediately rebounded back to Ouroboros. He ripped his foot out of Iorzan’s chest with the intent to carry Fulgent out of the crater, only to notice the plating over his left foot was gone, and the plating above it was turning to black sand by the second. Even the up until then impervious blackstone casement around his right arm was visibly cracked. It didn’t matter.
He reached out to offer up support and Fulgent gladly took it, placing much of her weight on him. Ouroboros willed the thrusters on his legs to ignite, and though they sputtered and spat noxious smoke, they carried them both to the edge of the crater. He allowed his right arm to take the brunt of the landing.
Crack.
The force of the landing shattered the casement around his right arm, exposing something other than Apeiron underneath as chunks of it fell to the ground. Gone was the man-sized siege engine of a gun - in its place, there was an ivory-white, statuesque arm. It had grippers not unlike Apeiron’s, folded away at the top and bottom of its forearm, and its palm had an aperture in the middle. Besides this and its aberrant surface, the limb looked… Normal.
Weakened as she was, Fulgent took the landing well enough, holding onto his left for support, but otherwise remaining upright.
As for the defensive line of Iktha warriors, it was still intact - it had just widened as the crater expanded. It remained intact throughout the duel for a few reasons - these reasons being all those rampaging through the camp and thus keeping the other clans’ forces busy. Well… A portion of them.
Though very few noticed during the commotion, a substantial portion of the other clans’ fighters had actually left the camp. The obvious reason for this was to escape the slaughter inside their own walls. The true reason was a falsified distress call, which soon became a true distress call as the soldiers sent to investigate were attacked in a way that ensured they would be able to send a distress call.
This ambush had been orchestrated by none other than the walker squads that had escorted them to the camp. Instead of attacking the camp directly, the two fastest among them went ahead and formed this ambush to distract as much of the enemy forces as possible until the larger and far more powerful walkers in the escort force could arrive.
And arrive, they did - no sooner than right after the duel was over, but they did arrive, all six of them, unceremoniously smashing through the camp’s walls and tearing down tent after tent in an ironclad march towards the crater.
The tallest of the walkers - a lanky thing about a quarter as tall as Amalgam - stomped up to the Iktha line. Its hand-like feet were covered up to the knees - or perhaps elbows? - in blue-tinged mud, and its clawed hands were not spared the carnage either. Its head was less of a head and more of an open-backed grinder, its mechanism filled with gore and fragments of metal. Even so, its head turned to look over the line, quickly focusing on where Ouroboros and Fulgent stood. From a jury-rigged speaker on the walker’s chest, there blared the hissing voice of a perfectly calm Builder-caste.
“Skull-53, reporting in. Sincerest apologies for the delay, though I presume the operation has been successful.”
Immediately afterwards, Ouroboros heard that same voice in his radio. “Are the warriors in this line allies, or are they to be terminated?”