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The sight of Raine twisting, clawing and flailing in that monstrous creature’s grip triggered a flood of emotions he had to ignore. There was no time for panic or fury. No time to feel anything at all. Pilot moved, instead.
He didn’t launch himself or port across that decaying command deck, as the smoky invader might have expected. He reflected himself, moving through extra-dimensions to get there reversed, directly in front of that tall and shining-dark “goddess”.
She had flowed into OVR-Lord’s podium, absorbing and waking the frozen AI. Had all of its memory files and abilities, now, but could not see into extra-D space or react to Pilot's movement there. Right. All of her trouble and none of his own. Just, one moment, Pilot was fifteen feet away, battling a swarm of ferocious Internal Countermeasures. Half a tick later, he was directly beside her, face to face with that delicate, slightly smiling white mask.
Brought his energy blade up and around to sever the arm that held Raine. He was wildly, dangerously overclocked, so the blade moved like tar dripping through floor-grating. Bit in with a vibrating, sizzling Shhh-CRACK!
That was one strike. Next, Pilot fired a shoulder missile, aiming for the locked hatch standing between him and the passage outside. The missile flared slowly to life, seeming to creep from its launch tube, sluggish as Someday. Rocked him backward a bit, pressing him into a blinking control panel. He could sense Foryu moving like peanut butter flowing uphill. Tracked her trying to get to the hatch. Sent a warning, just as V47 took charge of a drone and their mech-suit’s rear defenses.
Beam weapons sketched slow, glowing lines through the airless command deck, weaving a stately, shimmering spider web, most of it centered on him. Pilot’s shielding flared repeatedly, absorbing beam and particle strikes as well as the dark one’s direct, slow-motion assault. His heads-up display went red, health and shield power monitors dropping like rocks.
‘Shields at 60.25% of full capacity, Pilot,’ sent V47, around a jarring internal alarm. Pilot responded on tight-band frequency, saying,
“Increase power to shields and weapons, Vee. I’ll get by on adrenaline. Any more good news?”
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‘Orbital Station and Cerulean Dream have gone to full alert. Sec Units have been deployed, and they are making their way to this compartment, Pilot.’
Uh-huh. He had to ask. Needing to speed things along, Pilot reached into that spindly-dark goddess, using extra-D access to bypass her burning exterior. Sparks hovered and glittered as his energy blade made its leisurely way through her smoldering bicep. Took her an age to react, during which Pilot reached inside, searching for OVR-Lord’s cartridge. Had to be in there someplace, he figured.
Raine was kicking her pink-armored feet as though running through asphalt, both hands prying at the steely fingers that clutched her throat. Red-Blue-Gamma was now an armored sphere, resembling a palm-sized space station armed with a powerful, Balor-class laser. That beam of irresistible force was cutting a slow and determined gash through the invading goddess’s beautiful porcelain mask.
Right-Left-Top-Flip was busy, as well. The small alien had completed a tiny battle-mech. Launching (him? It?) -self off Raine’s shoulder, the Block-World ambassador fired miniature weapons at everything in the chamber that wasn’t Pilot, Raine, Red-Blue-Gamma or the swooping camera drones.
The abandoned command deck glittered with snail-crawling ordnance and finger-tip trails of coherent light. Some he could dodge or deflect, angling his shields reflexively. Some of it hit, jarring and draining the cyborg, leaving dozens of carbonized streaks and small, sparking holes in his plating.
Meanwhile, Pilot’s groping hand encountered the edge of that fanned-out cartridge. But, in extra dimensions, nothing was simple, or quick. The missile he’d fired completed its journey, at last. It kissed the far bulkhead, making no sound at all in that airless expanse. Its nosecone crumpled, then shattered into thousands of lightning-edged fragments. These surrounded a searing fireball that grew at a rose-blossom pace.
V47’s rear-mounted cannons took out three more of those pudding-slow Internal CMs. At the same time, Pilot’s energy blade hacked far enough through the invader’s arm to make her drop Raine, who hung in the air like a drifting curl of bright ash. He caught the small empress, whose own suit-armaments came to sudden life, firing indiscriminately in every direction at once. He sent: “Cease fire, Majesty. Court… that is, Challenge Ball!”
Her reply crossed his heads-up display like a series of trickling pink pebbles.
“You’re… coming… too… right… Pilot?”
Only, there was no time to respond as the hatch disintegrated, and a powerful wave of air moaned its way into the chamber. Foryu was braced in the hole that he’d blasted, gripping tight to its edges with metal fingers and wedged-in feet. There was someone behind her, but Pilot was too preoccupied to do more than scan and file the resulting image for later.
Raine curled herself into a ball again, moving too slowly for his overclocked mind. As the dark one sent a pulse of corrosive energy through his groping arm, Pilot threw Raine into that faltering wind, toward Foryu and safety.
“Foolish child,” sneered the invasive goddess, inside of his mind. “It wasn’t the human we needed. It was you.”