Madalena burst out into the bright night before hole in the forcefield closed again.
The boomhammer vibrated in her hands like the steering wheel in one of those 80-year-old cars Tito Phillip liked to fix up in his spare time.
Which was to say, it wasn’t a comforting feeling.
How many hits did it have left?
If she could time it right, would the biggest boom it could make be enough?
Probably not from what she had seen.
Kuya Cal hadn’t exaggerated.
Demigods were dangerous opponents to put it mildly.
She clocked the hole through the building in front of her.
“Crap.”
Her angle was all wrong.
Glass shattered.
She ran through the empty floor.
Good, good.
The people had evacuated.
Helped that the enemy had focused on her building.
Walls parted for her.
A few splinters got in her eyes and mouth.
Bad habit that.
She closed the latter with a conscious effort.
Too used to wearing a helmet with a faceplate.
The building suddenly shook around her.
Night turned to day.
Every unbroken window in the area exploded.
She had a clear sight line back the way she had come.
Dark smoke and fire fell past her view along with what could only by chunks of her home’s upper floors.
They didn’t have a self-destruct system.
It was their home.
The bunker and the lower half of the building should be able to handle it.
As for Jennie and her tito and tita?
They had armor.
Enchantments.
An emergency teleport, if not for whatever the demigod was doing to interfere.
Compartmentalize.
A skill she had developed in the fog.
The good times after that had dulled it, but a raging battle around her had a way of forcing her to get back on the bike like her dearly departed father, loved the man, but he was the strict sort that saw skinned palms and knees as good building blocks for character.
Forward.
Eyes forward.
She couldn’t do anything better than the people already back there.
All she could do was what she had promised.
Keep the demigod busy.
Hopefully, some of the other heavy hitters would answer the call she put out into the comms.
Although, the static she got in return wasn’t promising.
Madalena sprinted, leaping through the broken window.
She tracked the demigod’s flight through the hole in the buildings in front of her.
Her hammer strike had sent him on a mostly flat trajectory toward the street at a gentle slope.
Harpies screeched above her.
It was her first look at the wing-armed women in person.
They looked off.
It took her a second to realize why.
Their wings were too small for their human-sized bodies.
The file said they could only glide or do glide leaps without using their inherent magic for full flight.
Threnosh interceptors zipped through loose harpy formations.
Force blasts and micromissiles versus spells and talons.
Above them silhouettes of the skyships were revealed by the flashes from their weapons through the clouds and smoke.
“Can any one hear me? Suiteonemiades is on the field.” She crashed through a window, sprinting through to the other side in seconds. She leapt higher this time, hoping to track the demigod’s path. She cursed. It was dark and she was really missing her helmet with its very helpful systems. With it she could send an estimate of the demigod’s location with a look and a cybernetic thought. Without? “Ah, putang! I think he landed just north of the cemetery. Maybe near Trion Towers.”
Sudden guilt flooded her.
The buildings she had gone through had been empty.
People had fled to the shelters.
Most of the larger towers had in-building bunkers like the one in her home.
She tried to remember if all three Trion Towers had one each.
Golden light erupted in the direction she was looking.
A great cloud of dust erupted, billowing out to engulf the surrounding area.
She shielded her face, holding her breath and peering through slitted eyes shaded by her arm as the debris cloud washed over her.
All their shields meant nothing against the demigod.
Her only hope was that most of her people had reacted as they drilled and gotten to the bunkers.
She really should’ve known if there was one in each Trion Tower.
It was hard to see through the cloud and the darkness without her helmet.
She thought she could see the looming towers.
Except—
One, maybe two, looked a lot shorter than the third.
“Trion Towers… are down. Emergency services standby. Demigod threat is potentially still in the vicinity. Wait for further information.” She was talking into the void for all she knew.
And sometimes, it answered back.
Which wasn’t usually a good thing.
“Copy that, Mad One. Star Rayna moving to support. Sit tight. Multiple reinforcements in bound on position.”
“Wait! Don’t! Demigod on site!” She thought fast. Who could fight him? “Where are my cousins?”
“Comms lockdown. We can’t get anything in or out. Going through gear like pancakes on free stack night super-boosting just to get through. We’ll lose contact in a minute, maybe two. Figure another 10 to set up new gear. So, if you’ve got any requests—”
“Weapons! Armor! I’ll settle for a helmet! And tell everyone not rated for demigod combat to pull back. I’ll try to keep him busy, draw him away from the towers. South! Toward the memorial.”
“Sounds like a plan. We can really open up on the bastard out there. As for the rest of it… sorry, can’t do anything about warning them off until we get new ge—”
The skyship’s comms officer’s abrupt silence fueled the pit in Madalena’s stomach.
Loud beeping jolted her.
Red lights blinked above.
A large crate dropped like a rock before the anti-grav unit activated, bringing it to a soft landing on the rooftop a few feet from her.
Basic armor.
Threnium and nothing else.
Better than shorts, sports bra and t-shirt.
Modesty was a secondary concern when people were dying, but she preferred fighting fully covered.
Ripped clothing revealing cheek and cleavage wasn’t her thing.
The helmet was what she really wanted.
The instant she slid it one and the seals hissed shut was glorious.
All the dust and particulate matter in the air was annoying.
“Do you copy, Star Rayna? Received package.”
Nothing but static.
No weapons.
That meant they didn’t have anything woman-sized that they thought could hurt the demigod.
Fair.
The skyship back in California had failed to bring him down with her huge weapons.
She had her hammer and however many hits it had left.
After that?
One last big boom.
The HUD flashed, struggling to detect the divine energy despite how powerful it had to be.
She changed the parameters, telling it to look for heat sources.
Several.
Most on the roads.
One in the sky.
All moving towards Trion Towers.
“Fall back!” she shouted into the all channel. “Do not engage!”
Silence.
A golden demigod strode out of the dark debris cloud.
Lightning sparked behind him from cut power lines across several city blocks.
Silhouettes of broken towers loomed behind him like megaliths from a long-dead civilization lost to time.
“Marking target!” She highlighted him in her HUD with a cybernetic thought and a silent prayer.
…
The heavens split.
Her helmet went silent to save her ears.
A spear of light exploded down from on high with a sound that silenced the rest of the battle.
Twinkling stars streaked to the ground, trailing smoke in their wake before swallowing shimmering gold in gigantic flowering blooms of orange and yellow.
A steady staccato followed as a stream of metal, interspersed by blinking tracers, poured down like a waterfall.
Through it all forcefields and sigils on the nearby occupied buildings flashed to life, preventing collateral damage.
Golden beams lanced out from the devastation as the demigod leapt from the cratered street.
Protection held, then buckled.
Redundancies failed in turn.
Madalena could only watch with mouth open, eyes wide as entire buildings began to collapse.
Great chunks had been sheared off or simply vaporized from existence.
The demigod blasted the stream of arm-length flechettes.
His golden beam continued on to the Star Rayna.
Shields erupted in the clouds.
Another barrage of missiles swallowed the demigod.
The golden sphere surrounding him peeked through the dense smoke while the beam only intensified.
Another orange and yellow flower bloomed.
This time high above them.
Like a whale struck with a harpoon, Madalena watched as the skyship turned away, seeking higher altitude.
As if satisfied with the result the demigod ceased his beam.
His golden eyes shined in the dark smoke, finding hers despite the distance.
As if in accusation.
“This is all because you betrayed your word,” they seemed to say.
In response, she grit her teeth, tightened her grip on the boomhammer and gathered her legs beneath her.
Before she could leap, sparks from dozens of broken power lines suddenly flared.
They flowed around the demigod before either of them could react.
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A crackling web of electricity surrounded him like a cage where he floated.
Madalena traced the thin yellow-white lines down to a rooftop a few blocks north of the demigod.
The mage, for he could be nothing else, wasn’t dressed for battle unless his shorts and t-shirt were enchanted.
Attire for a hot and humid Manila night with the rainy season just around the corner.
The young man, for she didn’t recognize him because of the distance, had likely been enjoying the night with friends, a girlfriend? A boyfriend? It didn’t matter.
It should’ve been a safe enough night to enjoy with good food, drink and people rather than be in a battle for yours and others’ lives against a literal demigod.
Suiteonemiades shattered the electric cage with a burst of golden light.
Thin beams coalesced from it, streaking for the young mage like a monster’s claws.
He leapt away, riding yellow-white lightning like skates as he attacked rather than retreated like he should have for a mortal in shorts and a t-shirt had no business taking on a demigod.
Lightning crackled.
Gold flashed.
The young mage’s remains drifted away in the wind to mingle with the rest of the swirling ashes.
Hooves thundered against asphalt.
A storm of metal, this time from ground level, heralded by booming bellows.
The battle cry of the herd.
Five of them.
Each taller at the withers that a small car and not much thinner in width.
Back-mounted machine gun-like weapons spat a ferocious storm of finger-sized darts. Their fingers, not human ones. Like fat foot-long sausages with a deadly tip and powerful enough to punch through thick steel.
The demigod almost looked sad for a moment before he swept his hand across the herd warriors.
A lazy gesture.
One that gave Madalena a bit of hope.
The brave warriors, immigrants to her world but willing to fight and die to protect their adopted home, called forth their spells and Skills to block the cutting arc of golden energy.
They combined their abilities to create an ethereal aura, sending a giant version of what looked like a primordial progenitor of their people ahead of their thundering charge.
The black giant left a trail in its wake. A glittering road of its hoof prints as it galloped off the road and into the sky.
The herd warriors followed without hesitation.
Ammunition expended, they pulled out glaives and lances that weren’t that far off in size when compared to street poles.
One final bellow.
Their best Skills and spells.
The primordial crashed into the demigods golden sphere with thunder that belied its ethereal nature.
The warriors struck next.
Madalena flinched, eyes closing involuntarily against the sudden flash despite the faceplate of her helmet automatically darkening.
The demigod remained unblemished despite the growing cracks in his golden bubble.
More people arrived in quick succession.
They fought briefly.
Seconds at most.
Enough to launch an attack and then die, leaving nothing but ashes.
She froze under the sudden deaths.
So callous and empty.
The way he wiped them from existence without expression, barely a blink of his eyes.
A blazing comet fell on the demigod.
A blur of elementally wreathed fist and feet danced all over the golden sphere.
Another golden flash.
Bei, Threnium armor melting layer by layer, flew away almost as fast as she had arrived. An orb of burning golden flames twinkling over the horizon.
“Stop attacking one by one!” Madalena cried out.
Empty pleas thrown into a black abyss from which there was no escape.
The silence on the comms was her only answer.
Cultivators stepped across the sky.
Once again she couldn’t tell if she knew them without the IFF functional.
They struck in a coordinated dance of death, seeking to exploit the cracks Bei’s furious assault had expanded.
One was noticeably smaller than the others. Either young or very old.
She despaired to realize that she may never know as the demigod dropped his sphere only to pull them into a trap.
Only one side’s strikes did damage.
Madalena finally acted. Moving before conscious thought. Leaping on superhuman leg muscles. Upper body wound back like a spring, boomhammer trailing behind.
She unleashed the energy equivalent to a few hundred kilograms of explosives on the demigod’s raised arm.
Light blinded.
Burning heat washed over her despite her armor.
Only her superhuman body allowed her to survive the concussion wave.
The demigod smirked as she fell down to the rooftop some several dozen meters below.
“I wouldn’t try that again.” He made a show of examining the large round shield of golden energy on his arm. Cracks spider-webbed across its surface, but seemed fine otherwise. He gestured at the boomhammer. “The containment mechanism is cracked… well, all of its mechanisms are cracked. You can see it yourself.”
True enough. The Threnium shell had chipped, revealing the blue glow of the power source.
Which suited her just fine.
Her life for his was a winning trade by all her metrics.
She flipped a large AC unit with the butt of the long handle and leapt behind it.
Whipping the boomhammer around she said one last prayer.
Please, Mighty Jesus, help me…
----------------------------------------
Southern California, Summer 2055
Bright sun.
Breeze.
Warm, but never truly hot.
Coastal regions tended to be the best places to live weather wise.
If said region wasn’t in line for hurricanes and typhoons.
Candyslyn loved running in such conditions.
Why, it would’ve been her pleasure to just spend hours running all over the place.
That was purpose enough to hill her horned head.
Monsters?
Sucked, but she could out run or out jump them.
Not very many things had the blend of speed, agility and leaping that she had.
War?
Sucked even worse… although they hadn’t dealt with much worse than the rare harpy air raid.
That’s what they were dealing with now as she was in the middle of her morning circuit around the inside perimeter of the outer walls.
Harpies rained fire with spells and explosive weapons.
A new wrinkle had been added.
Monster bombs via golden portals overhead.
Countermeasures meant the portals failed to open inside their territory, which was very good.
An even newer wrinkle were the people… er… outworld invaders that had also come through the portals.
They were different and strong.
Comms chatter had managed a burst of frantic descriptions at the onset of the old American’s attack, but had fallen mostly into silent static with the occasional cry for help.
Thus, people like her, messengers, runners and such. Those that could move fast or cover great distances quickly, whether through class Skills or unnatural, unethical procedures like her or powers like her partner.
It wasn’t her choice to partner with Jes Morningstar.
The young man was barely legal to operate in high danger areas, but he was safer than most.
Which, made him overconfident.
He had always been coy about his abilities.
Some sort of field that made physical objects slide right off his skin no matter the hit angle.
She had seen that steam-powered nightmare of a golem, as tall as a house and filled with malevolent intelligence in its soulless pits for eye, shower Jes with barbed darts. Tore armor and clothes, but left nothing on his skin.
Thus, she ran with a half-naked teenage boy, technically a man, delivering messages and updates all along the northeastern portion of the wall.
Jes skated across the street on bare feet as if it was slick ice and not rough asphalt.
Give him enough straight space and he could outpace her easily.
But that was theoretical.
In practice, city streets meant turns and obstacles.
Her hoofed legs were superior in nearly all practical environments.
“Race you back, Candys!” Jes laughed.
He didn’t remember it, but he had knocked a few bags out of her hands back when she had only been in Southern California for a few weeks about 7 years ago.
He was a punk then and… well, not much had changed in that regard.
A circuit completed meant straight back to Ranger HQ with the messages they had collected from the wall.
Most of the fighting being at the wall didn’t mean that the interior had remained untouched.
A few monsters and harpies continued to slip past the defenses even with the skyships and interceptors providing a protective umbrella.
The streets were mostly empty, so they only had to worry about those things and the occasional person thinking it was an exciting time to maybe try to get a few levels when they should be sheltering in their home or in one of the emergency shelters.
They made good time.
From the foothills in the northeast to HQ in minutes.
It helped that they could travel in a mostly straight line.
“Messengers!” A ranger she didn’t know beyond a somewhat familiar face bellowed, barely giving them time to slow down. “Message for Ranger Captain Aims. Be careful. He’s not responding. But, then again, no one’s responding, huh?”
“We just—”
The ranger cut Jes off.
“Listen here, king of kings, no time for water breaks. Drink on the run or slide in your case. Besides, I thought you never got tired?”
That was true.
Jes bragged about it seemingly once an hour.
The ranger leaned forward, beckoning with a crook of his finger.
“No risks, kids. Deliver the message. Confirm the captain is alright and get back here safe and sound.”
She took the envelope from the ranger and tucked it into her bag of holding.
“Say… if you run into any insurmountable threats… just bail.”
With that they were off.
Ranger Captain Aims didn’t live that far away.
5 miles was nothing to her.
Half way there a finger tapped on her shoulder.
She half-turned and almost tripped with a shout.
A smiling young man ran with blurring legs, keeping up with her long, loping strides with ease.
“Hail and well met! I thought I felt people running fast.”
Handsome enough to set butterflies in her stomach erupting up her throat.
Golden eyes that seemed to shine in the sunlight.
Perfectly sculpted body.
Lean and long-limbed.
The essence of speed.
She felt, knew instinctively.
“I am called Ekraiades and you may bow.”
He was shirtless and barefoot.
The only things he had were a white man-skirt splattered with wet red, a belt with many pouches, a messenger-style bag slung across his broad chest and a curved blade, also splattered.
So much the abs—
Her eyes widened.
“Now, now. No need to fight just yet. First, what’s so important that— yoink!”
His hand blurred.
She felt a tug on her bag of holding.
He ripped the envelope open, read it, crumpled it and tossed it over his shoulder before she realized she had been pick-pocketed.
“Hmm… seems like we’ve got the same destination in mind. I’m supposed to run interference, but I can’t resist a wager. How about we bet it all on a race? First one there wins!” He exploded forward, leaving them behind.
“What the fuck was that?”
Because the comms weren’t working properly, Jes had to shout over the wind.
She didn’t reply because what could she say when she had no idea?
They found the ranger captain’s home literally broken.
Jes cursed, rushing in before she could grab him.
The speedy young man was nowhere in sight as she searched warily, straining her ears and pulling deeply on the instincts of pronghorn antelope she had been mixed with by the nightmarish eidolon.
Jes emerged with full hands.
One of the ranger captain’s legendary revolvers and a handful of what looked like a couple of flesh-colored grubs drenched in tomato sauce at first.
“Ummmm…” Jes looked at her with wide eyes. “What do we do?”
Candys felt the bile rise to her throat.
She wasn’t a fighter.
Never had the desire.
She did want to contribute to the effort and had found her passion in running messages or doing deliveries solo into places others couldn’t without grouping up or using vehicles, preferably armed and armored.
She had seen her fair share of violence and the consequences.
Lots of dead monster corpses oozing blood, viscera and filth.
Lots of injured rangers, sometimes gruesomely so.
A few dead rangers.
“We have to get back to HQ.”
“What about that guy? What if… uh… catches up?”
“I’ll lure him away from you if that happens.”
----------------------------------------
Manila, Philippines, Summer 2055
“How’s mom? That’s good.”
Which was a mild understatement.
His dad was angry, fuming really, he couldn’t remember his dad ever being like that even when he, as a child, did— well, there were many such incidents rooted in the false belief of the immortality of youth.
“Jennie?”
He let the silence linger as he listened for any signs of life in the rubble to be marked for rescue.
One consolation was that moving the debris to reach the trapped people was easy with the tech and magic at their disposal.
He would’ve struggled to do so on his own without risking further injury and death to the trapped survivors.
Removing a few tons of building material in one place to reach a baby could’ve easily shifted things dozens of meters away into crushing an old man.
He took a moment to pick up a car-sized hunk of rubble that his HUD said was safe to move.
A flick sent into flying into the ocean many kilometers away.
“That’s less good.”
His dad had used a lot of words to say that Rynnen’s daughter was in a coma.
15 minutes.
That’s how much the clock had ticked.
How much time that bastard and his forces had over Manila.
They were gone by the time he had flown over.
He checked the places that were important to him often.
Multiple times per hour sometimes.
They had timed things well.
Attacked when he was knee deep in— the less said the better.
A personal horror had replaced an existential one and having had a few hours to think about both, he’d take the latter any day.
Dawn’s first rays peeked over the horizon.
Bei wasn’t fine.
Not in a coma, but she had more broken bones and burned skin than not.
Her armor had melted, fusing with her body in places.
Certain death had it not been for her cultivator-ness and their medical advances.
Bei was alive at least.
Her grandma…
He had found her broken body buried near the outer edges of the crater that had swallowed up several city blocks and the buildings that had once stood there.
It was going to be a nightmare to count the deaths.
To identify the bodies.
In many cases the only thing left was ash.
The ash of things mixed with the ash of people.
Superior eyes couldn’t separate the two.
His dad said something.
“Uh huh— no. I’m staying like I said. At least until every person is accounted for.” He marked a few more breathing people shouting for help underneath tons of rubble. He watched closely as the rescue teams hovered over in their craft and began to lift the rubble. He was ready to intervene at the slightest sign of trouble. “No, Dad. I won’t do anything on my own.”
He had very nearly done just that after he found the remains close to the middle of the crater.
One of the boomhammers had stood like flagpole.
A charred skeleton of an arm, all the way up to the shoulder stuck out like a mockery of a flag.
Madalena was unaccounted for.
His cousin was dead— or so he had thought initially.
His dad had talked him off the proverbial ledge at least for the moment.
The demigod had been looking for hostages.
His dad had been on the list, along with Madalena and Dr. Rufo—
Rage swelled again at the thought.
The doctor was dead.
Cherry had kept the— the body with her throughout the attack.
Kept him safe.
The threads couldn’t be more obvious.
At least Lilah had been in the bunker.
The tower’s collapse hadn’t affected those inside, physically.
“Dad, can we just agree that a proportionate response is… necessary? This is an act of war. Well, they killed civilians. I go out of my way to avoid ‘collateral damage’. I just destroy things. Tanks and planes. Never people. Not even soldiers. I mean, I extended them that courtesy and this is how they repay it? Don’t forget, they probably have Madalena.”
God, for their sake, they better have her and they better treat her—
Nope. Don’t think about that. Hostages only work if they’re unharmed.
It was a naive thought.
They had taken that ranger too.
The gunslinger.
Aims.
He realized he had never gotten the man’s real name.
Not that they were friendly.
It had been years since they had exchanged a word at one of those ranger gatherings.
“Listen, I know where their super secret bunkers are. At least a general outline. Don’t you think it’d be fair that I blow them up like they did this place?”
His dad didn’t quite agree.
But, Eron thought hard on what would be an appropriate response anyways.