Sometimes she really didn’t get Seras. They had only known each other for a short time, but it had been an eventful and trying week down here in the labyrinth. In normal circumstances that wasn’t enough to get to know someone, but down here it felt like she had known Seras for months. With little else to do but talk and walk most days down here it was easy for them to fall into a comfortable sense of familiarity.
And what Athena was coming to realize more and more was that Seras was a woman of contradictions. She was remarkably open for someone of her background, talking her ear off about this job or that target. Until you realized that while Seras talked a lot and seemed to trust too easily, she was also closed off. Almost impenetrably so.
For example she’d talk at length about the Volta job, the one that got her blasted out of her own reality. She’d talk about rockets, the history of space travel and the growth of space born industry. She’d talk about the goals of the job, the various corporate rivalries and policies driving the conflict, and even some of the corporate wars and weapons of mass destruction.
But she never mentioned her crewmates who were with her on the job. Logic would dictate that they were unimportant to her, just some professional mercs doing a job. Except when Athena tried to push the subject Seras shut down and refused to talk about it.
Given her trusting attitude and rough but friendly personality, Athena found it inconceivable that she wasn’t close to them in some way. So then what happened between them?
It showed in other ways too. She claimed to be a bad person, a cold-blooded killer. And yet time and time again she was risking life and limb to protect Athena from monsters. And then when Athena did the one thing she could to help, Seras got all stone faced and refused to talk to her more than necessary.
At times it almost seemed to Athena like Seras was fighting her own nature.
Two hours had passed since they awakened the aberration and the golems. That was nearly enough time for Athena’s wounds to go from dead burnt skin to a red raw rash that hurt constantly. It was still too soon for her to use her immortality ability, but just the passive healing she had was enough to repair what would have been a debilitating and life alternating injury for a normal ranker.
From her conversations with Seras about her ‘auto-repair’ racial trait Athena was far faster at healing unless Seras chose to use multiple bronze rank monster cores, and even then she was still faster.
Normal healers were faster though. They could just fire a bolt of life energy and infuse vitality into their teammates. The only advantage over them Athena had was the extreme range and effect of her ability. No normal healer below silver rank could have helped Seras, but Athena could.
Athena often wished she had gotten different abilities, or different essences. It always came up at her lowest moments. The deep-set loathing and fear she had for her own essence abilities. But around Seras, Athena was actually just a little thankful for her powers. If she wasn’t down here with Seras then the Outworlder would have long since died, not from any one thing, but all of them.
Seras couldn’t get bronze rank cores faster than she took damage. Maybe if she were bronze rank, or at least had her full set of essence abilities and all the weaponry she could ever want.
For the first time in her life Athena felt like her abilities were vital for their struggle, rather than a more cumbersome, less useful healer.
Her upbringing told her that it was a rather toxic mindset to have and led to many various bad mental conditions like co-dependency or a misvalued self-worth. But for now it was nice to feel useful.
She glanced down at the stump on her arm, knowing what the cost of her ‘usefulness’ was.
It still looked wrong, to glance down and see no hand. Like she was seeing some sort of poor illusion or like she just needed to look harder to see her arm was really there. That was good though. If they could get through this nightmare and find a priest of the Healer then everything would be fine.
It was rare, but sometimes a person internalized the wound too deep, and that could shift their own mental image that the soul used in the process of healing. It was already concerning that it hadn’t healed with her first use of her immortality ability. The ability was supposed to work on missing limbs, but maybe she had taken too much damage, or maybe it wasn’t strong enough for this.
Athena was so lost in her own contemplations that she almost missed Seras’ hand blocking the way forward. Athena paused and looked around cautiously.
They were already on their third ‘asteroid’ thing, they had moved fast and used Seras’ teleport nearly every minute as it became available. But even with that they were still concerned about the golems finding them. Seras had said it would be odd if they didn’t have some form of magical tracking or detection. Seras had racial trait that made her immune to tracking, but Athena didn’t.
Seras caught her eye silently and pointed downwards, Athena glanced down the ridge they had recently teleported up and saw a single golem a dozen or so meters below them.
It was the one with the saw blade on its hand, and it was standing on almost the exact spot where they had been before. Seras was also looking down on the abomination of metal, she turned towards Athena and tapped her on the face, right below her left eye, and then at the golem.
Athena tilted her head to the side, consciously exaggerating the movement so that Seras could see she didn’t understand.
Seras frowned, and then the pupils of her eyes widened, nearly obliterating her grey speckled iris, then it contracted until it was a point smaller than the tip of a needle.
Athena own eyes went wide as she finally understood what she was getting at. She looked back over the ridge and activated her own vision power. [Eyes of the physician] were a strange and often nauseating power to have, but more and more Athena was realizing the advantages of them.
It was a clever and inventive idea on Seras’ part, and she came up with it so swiftly too. Layer by layer Athena peered through the different compartments of the golem to search for any weak points in its design. If it worked on Seras then it would work with a golem.
She saw metallic joints, running fluids, and wires running the length of its body. But it was what she saw below all the machinery that sickened her. Because deep within its chest, methodically convulsing to move its oily blood was a biological heart. It had wires and rods plunged into it, and she could even see a whole section that had been removed and replaced with ticking gears. Its head had a brain, but it was cut up into three segments, all separate from each other save for the metal spikes hammered through them.
Throughout the whole golem Athena could see parts of a mutilated humanoid body mashed with grotesque machinery.
It wasn’t like looking into Seras’ biomechanical anatomy. Hers had a sense of polish and precision that appealed to Athena’s sensibilities. This mangled thing was a twisted mockery of Seras’ anatomy.
It was like the one time she had used her ability on the undead. It wasn’t just a dead body that moved. It was a perverse mockery of life.
She swallowed down her revulsion and tapped her heart, and then tapped three different spots on her skull where the segments of impaled brain laid in the abomination.
Seras nodded and held her hands out, blue lines and sparks appeared between her hands and took the form of the strange rifle weapon Seras had brought into this world.
She took in a single deep breath…
~~~*~~~
..and Seras squeezed the trigger.
[Structural reinforcement] hardened the bullet, and [control bullet] made sure it flew true. With such a clear path to her target it would have been an embarrassment for Seras to miss her mark.
Aura of ruin has inflicted enfeeblement on Converted Builder Golem.
The golem staggered back, it stumbled back and tripped on one of the strange bush things. Seras didn’t let up, she activated [Limit breaker] and then teleported down onto the fallen golem. She slid the bolt back and materialized a new bullet in the chamber from her pocket space.
Bang!
This one was aimed at the second spot Athena had pointed out on its deformed skull casing.
Aura of ruin has inflicted enfeeblement on Converted Builder Golem.
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The Golem jerked, and it tried to raise its saw blade like arm towards Seras, but something about her shots had disrupted its motor process because all the limb did was flop about randomly.
She slid back the bolt again and fired on the third spot.
Bang!
There was no third instance of enfeeblement. Seras felt its aura fade away as the golem lost power. It was dead.
In the time after their initial scramble to get away Seras had been mentally kicking herself for all the mistakes she had made in that fight. Down here in the labyrinth she had been discovering the synergies in her powerset, but one moment of panic had caused her to forget everything she had learned.
Magic was still new to her, and it changed many of the ways she fought. Seras would need to drill and train her new abilities once they returned to the surface.
She reached out and chanted the incantation for her looting power, “break, and fuel my rise.”
Pieces of the golem vanished, and the pounding in her head abated. The repeated rapid use of teleport had depleted her mana pool, and were it not for astral wellspring refilling her reserves she wouldn’t have been able to teleport as often as they had been.
And then it happened
(Gama)G=qvt/////000xx468761ingram\\\\561641671%@#811977
[fallen]dfgh%%!|&87LFT1
[enemy location]71991768)
(8)&^%[broadcasting coordinates]
It was a huge block of ceaseless gibberish that assaulted her brain, she could feel it flowing in without end. It was a netjacking. A focused attack on her own systems through her net connection. It had been a long time since she had something like this happen to her. On Ruin trained techies and jackers could exploit a person’s constant connection to the net to attack their internal augs. Or an aggressive ad trying to get her to buy the latest cyberschlongtm.
Instantly firewalls, adblockers, and malware hunters activated, but even she could tell that was over kill. This all lacked the focused pain in her temples that signified a jacking. It was the weakest, most ineffectual jacking she had ever seen.
Her eyes went wide. “Shit,” she cursed!
It wasn’t a netjacking at all, but it was something that had triggered her defenses. It was an unencrypted message being forcibly pushed through her net port and into her systems.
Obviously she wasn’t the intended receiver, it was a weird fluke that her hardware could even pick it up. But that just meant she had to be on guard for the real recipients. The other golems.
Of course they had a way to communicate, she hadn’t even considered the idea that something could have wireless communications on Pallimustus. The best they had were water link chambers, and Seras had little good to say about those from what she had seen.
She didn’t have time to wait for teleport to become available, she and Athena needed to be gone yesterday. She ran up to the cliff and jumped, she grabbed a hand hold halfway up and used it to pull herself up the rest of the way. “We need to run.”
Athena didn’t balk or hesitate, she just turned and pointed. “That way,” she directed, pointing up the hilly incline that would bring them in range of the next asteroid just above them.
Seras ran and Athena chased after, “I don’t know how, but they’re using a dimensional substrate transmission system to communicate. It’s what we use on my world, I didn’t think anyone on Pallimustus was advanced enough to do this, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“So if we kill one the others know?”
“Yeah, though I don’t know why I’m only just now noticing this. It’d be smarter to just link up and maintain instantaneous communications.”
“Maybe they’re worried about people like you who can hear them,” Athena suggested.
Seras frowned, she wasn’t convinced by the idea. “Maybe, but honestly the fact that I can has to be some huge fluke. If they used any other means of wireless communication like radio or something else then it wouldn’t happen. It’s like a deaf person trying to sign to a blind one. And that’s ignoring the fact that these things are speaking in a way my systems can just barely decipher.”
Athena opened her mouth to suggest something else, but in that moment Seras picked up another signal. It was the only warning she got and it saved both of their lives.
(Epsilon)-///o=pdo
0000626876178 [target found]…
K=nnt%% [ambush strategy canine]
Seras jumped on Athena, tackling the taller woman to the ground. Seras heard the air rush out of Athena’s lungs with a wheeze, and the uncomfortable cracking of what she assumed to be ribs. But it was all a fair price to pay to avoid the energized whip that scythed through the alien foliage of the asteroid.
This golem was also mostly humanoid, except it had an opaque red dome where a skulls crown would have been. Its jaw was permanently fixed in a gaping maw, almost giving the impression of a person screaming silently. And its arms were replaced with the long red energized whip cords it had tried to kill them with.
Seras didn’t hesitate. She pushed off from the ground, careful not to further hurt Athena, stepped forward to shield Athena’s prone form, and tossed forward a fist sized object at its face. She then activated her [structural reinforcement] and braced herself for the next part.
BANG!
The grenade exploded right in the golem open jaw, the magically charged munition blasting part of its head clean off. It was a critical blow, but Seras didn’t escape uninjured. Using a grenade in such close quarters with no cover would have been a stupid move for anyone less durable than Seras.
Cuts from the shrapnel shredded her smart skintm and left her looking like someone had taken a buzzsaw to her face. And that was with her essence ability reinforcing her artificial limbs.
Her pounding headache grew worse as [reinforce metal] devoured her meager mana stores.
Mana has reached -7%. Converting power stores into mana.
Seras watched in alarm as her energy cells drained of power, losing six percent for every one percent of mana. What a shitty conversion rate!
She reached out towards the fallen whip golem, “break, and fuel my-, Fuck!”
Her incantation was cut off midway as a flames danced across her skin once again. Seras turned to face the flame spitting golem once again, and in her haste she almost missed the third golem ambushing her.
“Seras, down!”
Without hesitation she dropped to the ground, just missing the twin blades whirling through the air. Seras rolled over fast before the flame golem could roast her a third time, she pushed herself up into a ready stance as her eyes darted around the battlefield. Two golems, one with flames, one with blades sticking out of its wrists, and one dead golem to drain.
The dead one was dripping with oddly bright red colored oil, or maybe some other kind of fluid. And there was a crashing sound in the bushes.
She darted to one side, careful to just around the flame golems seeming range of attack, the blade golem lurched forward and charged her. Seras waited until it was just in front of her before she put her foot down hard and killed her momentum while summoning her rifle. The blade golem stopped just as fast and was already slashing down on her, but it was so focused on her that it entirely missed the fourth golem to enter the fight.
This one was a torso attached to a giant rolling ball that rolled as it moved. It would have looked cartoonish if she hadn’t seen the red raw flesh of its torso with rusty metal arms haphazardly strapped to it. The torso wasn’t some mechanical approximation of flesh, it was real, festering, mutilated flesh.
Suddenly the red fluid seeping out of the whip golem made sense, it was blood.
They weren’t golems, they were cyborgs. Like her, and also not. They were the creation of some twisted mind that cared little for aesthetics of the health of the subject. Strength and power were the sole goals of these creations, and it showed.
In the blur of combat Seras’ mind conjured the image of the Westend villagers trapped in a cage, bound for destinations unknown, then the hand off point in the shaft, and then the outpost.
This was what become of the kidnapped villagers. They were made into these… abominations.
“
Seras couldn’t say why, or how, but her outburst blasted through the same substrate that Net data traveled through. The same one the golems used to communicate. Of course her body came with ways to talk to the net, but usually in controlled ways, like texts or net searches. This one was different from that. It was the net equivalent of screaming at the top of your lungs on every channel.
It was so ‘loud’ that the golems actually froze for a moment. Once again they paused and stared at her in confusion. Just like when they had seen her for her biomechanical nature.
Seras cast out her hand towards the fallen golem, “break, and fuel my rise.”
Mana streamed out from its magic matrix and added itself to her own pool, the pounding in her head faded away. Light blue lines traced themselves along her skin as Seras set herself against the three golems.
Running would have been smarter, but right now she was too pissed to be smart. That’s the thing about Seras; she wasn’t some cold blooded and silent merc. She tried, she really did, but it was against her nature. It got her into troubled more times than she could count, and when she was calm she always tried to play it safe, but when her metaphorical blood was boiling liker now it was hard to remember all the rules for survival.
Some internal process must have decided that she was still an enemy despite all the signs that she was like them, because they lurched forwards in unison. Seras turned her gun on the one with a meat torso and unloaded into it.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
That was all she had time for before she needed to move again, Seras ducked under the blades of one golem and stepped past it, coincidently moving it into range of the jet of flames from the flame golem.
The rolling golem she had shot up barreled into her and just barely managed to leap over it, just like the tunnel charger from way back when. It hit one alien tree things and knocked the whole thing over, root and all.
That’s when the last golem found them. This was mostly humanoid, except for the glowing arbalest that took up its entire right arm. It fired at her, then the winch pulled the cord back and another bolt materialized out of magic and fired again, and then a third.
The modified arm fired faster than a normal crossbow, but slower than a bow. Which meant it was a slug when compared to her revolver. Seras summoned the pistol into her and fired three rounds, each one at a bolt. One shattered, the other was just deflected, and the third she missed entirely even with control bullets.
The bolt buried itself into her shoulder and punched her back with the wasted kinetic force. As Seras staggered back two razor sharp blades went for her neck, she got an arm up to take the blow, but just barely.
The blades went through her synth-flesh with ease but stopped completely as they were wedged into her titanium alloy bones. The golem jerked back trying to free its blades, but Seras had twisted her arm to better catch the blades.
She saw the rolling golem barreling for her again and made a snap decision. She planted her feet in the ground, widened her stance, and twisted with all her might. The blade golem was lifted from the ground and swung right into the charging golem. The Golem’s blades came loose as it knocked into the torso of the rolling golem and Seras leapt up to narrowly avoid the jet of flames whooshing for her back.
As she twisted in the air she felt her wounds vanish, and heard a cry of pain from Athena. Seras didn’t have time to worry about the condition of her companion, Athena was going to take her injuries regardless of what Seras wanted, the only thing Seras could do was manage the wounds she took.
A bolt whizzed by her head and pierced the stone of the asteroid, Seras raised her gun and fired rapidly. Each one placed on the arbalest arm in hopes of breaking something. Nothing broke, but it wasn’t wasted ammo.
Builder golem has been inflicted with [enfeeblement]
Builder golem has been inflicted with [enfeeblement]
Builder golem has been inflicted with [enfeeblement]
Success on all three shots, and the other golems had been accumulating [enfeeblement] as well. All according to plan. Seras had one magically enhanced grenade left, to get the best use out of it she would need to group up her enemies while also being quick enough to get free of the explosion. That’s where [enfeeblement] came in.
At first the condition didn’t seem all that useful to her. What was a slight reduction in speed and power compared to a power that just did damage like Dustin’s burning blood affliction? The answer was that it was both more and less useful than straight damage. In ordinary conditions it wasn’t really that good, better to just kill something quick and be done with it. But in a long battle, or against a more powerful foe she couldn’t drop easily [enfeeblement] came in clutch. As a fight went on her foe would be getting weaker and slower, while Seras didn’t. Seras didn’t get weak and tired, she was a machine, so as her opponent got weaker the gap shrank.
Not great for opponents of her level of strength, but for those above, along with [limit breaker] and Seras could see just a hint towards how her powers might develop. In a way it made sense, since when had anything in her life not been a constant struggle against powers greater than her?
Seras was leaping and dashing around the battlefield, constantly weakening the golems with well-placed shots, all while trying to get at three grouped together so that she could drop her last grenade.
She was close to deciding that just two golems would be worth the effort when she felt a change in the air around her. New auras blanketed hers and the golems’, they felt hostile and vengeful. And along with the auras a new ‘message’ came in through her net access.
She hazarded to call it more than static, as the frequency had no words to it, but it was too harmonic. Too… musical. It almost reminded her of the old recording of marine life that communicated in high pitched chirps and whistles.
In all the noise only one thing came through in a way her system and translation ability could decipher.
That was all the warming she and the golems got before a whole pod of Star Gliders descended upon them. Nearly fourteen, all bronze rank, and many had raw looking scars and clipped/missing fins. And they looked pissed.