Point of Documentation: Demetri Albatross, Captain of the Mayoral Guard
Albatross stood on the turret of a main battle tank, looking over a canyon below them. The hundreds of soldiers at his sides were all nervous. More nervous than he had ever seen any of them till this point. He couldn’t blame them: the nerves on his end were also frayed and burning. He hated the idea that he had been left on this cliff’s edge with barely any standing orders to his name. ‘Defend the chokepoint’ had been all he was told. No place to fall back to, nowhere to regroup.
The fires on the valley below him raged at the half-point from them and the entrance of the canyon. The man in charge of their division had set them up on this cliff to give better firing lines. In truth, it also gave the commander an easy out if things went bad. The tanks were all facing the canyon, and most of the emplacements were too.
The first shouts echoed through the camp as the scouts spotted movement at the mouth of the canyon. Gunners ran to their charges; machineguns, cannons, and tanks alike. They even had a couple mortars to use. All of them were manned and soldiers prepared to lay down fire when they came close to the fires. The heat drew them in, and so did the sounds of the people who made them earlier. Echoes of lifeforce, the division’s quack claimed.
A swarm of Voidlings, the name handed down to replace the name they had given them colloquially: Demons. It was run-off from the nearby battle and all they had to do was hold them. And when they finally got to the fires, that’s exactly what they did.
The pressure in the air from the cannons and tanks firing and pre-claimed targets in the crowd caused Albatross’s ears to pop under the pressure. His recent illness from the strange radiation they leaked making his body feel weaker and operate slower made it so these pressure waves were tyrannical in their affect to knock him off balance. It took him a moment to right his aim and rifle.
When he looked down at the iron-sights of his rifle, he stood in shock for a moment. There were so many more voidlings than he remembered being there. Not hundreds: thousands! They swarmed like ants towards whatever goal they might have had. A scream from his side made his attention draw before he even fired a shot. There, wrapped in mandibles and spikes, was a Voidling. It was ripping its way through the division’s rear, coming from the forest behind them.
Albatross’s pure fear colored the landscape, the nightmare playing out before his very eyes. The memory of this time, a time that haunts him to this day.
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Captain Albatross opened his eyes slowly, the adrenaline fading away. His friend and medic, Chacel, was giving him a worried look. One that Albatross was quick to wave off. “I’m fine, what’s the current status?”
Chacel gave a frown and stepped towards him. “It’s amazing how quickly your race can slip into a dreamlike mediation, but I wouldn’t recommend it with–”
A hand shot out and formed a wall between Chacel and Albatross. “Enough,” came Albatross’s voice. “We can have this conversation later, and I’ll see your damn quack. I need an update on the squad we sent in. Has squad Blue-Collar arrived yet?”
The sigh that escaped Chacel’s mouth was one that had obviously been done before from the lack of reaction on Albatross’s part. “Yes, they just arrived. It seems like Mr. A handed off the lookout post and departed his position. Mr. C also left shortly after Ms. Cadence.” The dwarven woman gave a snort at that. “Do they really all go by letters and nothing else? What strange men…”
The center screen at the end of the large room flickered to a bird’s eye view of the forest from above. One of the soldiers below called out “Blue-Collar’s familiar is transmitting. Signal at 70%.” As foretold, the screen had a light filter on it that made viewing anything in extreme detail on it hard. However, they had a live coverage of the scene about to unfold.
Albatross nodded and leaned forwards in his chair. As he did this; small squirrel climbed down from the rafters and settled on Albatross’s shoulder. It gave a yawn before clearly speaking in English “You two should have woken me up if we’re having a show. It’s not often assets are pitted against one another in more than simple duels or bouts.”
No one other than Chacel and Albatross seemed to even notice the Squirrel speaking, of which neither seemed all too surprised. “Handler,” Albatross said softly, “I didn’t think you took pleasure in the carnage of the non-cored. Because that’s what’s mostly being brought to bear on their side.”
The squirrel named ‘Handler’ gave a sigh of annoyance, like a mother tired of their child’s ineptitude, and pointed to the screen. “The presence we all feel is under that building. As much as you want to tell the woman that you’re going after the man down there, we need to eliminate that emission. It’s just going to make the small base that this is a shaky foundation at best.”
The two soldiers shared a look before nodding. Chacel spoke first. “While I do agree with the ‘Greater Good’ idea, I still lobby for saving the man as well and making that a priority.”
Handler seemed to agree with this, a nod of the head confirming it. “Yes, I do agree with making it a priority no higher than the main goal. I’ve heard from another handler that the man in duress is a 2nd-Grade Void-Core. Which would make him the fourth 2nd-Grade this town has produced. While far behind the other cultivation zones we’ve been growing, seeing such a bump up in power is… odd.”
The only 2nd-core user in the room, Albatross, looked at the screen with a pensive look. The confusion that Chacel was showing on her face was soon squashed as Albatross spoke again. “Madam Vertruse of Blue-Collar is the only other 2nd-Grade I know of. You’re saying this man came out of the blue, tripped no warning when he entered from an active core, and just shot up to 2nd-Grade in less than a week? No one has done that since–”
“--The Founder, yes.” Came the curt reply from the squirrel. “It seems we have another Outlander with a blossoming core. A mostly ignorant one at that, and one that hasn’t had any training at all from what I’ve heard so far.”
That raised a dangerous question, but Albatross let it hang in the closet until it was ready to be let out. He didn’t even want to know if the Outlander knew about the Founder or not.
A chime rang out from one of the consoles below and a soldier turned to yell up at the two people above. “Rounds inbound from the South. Confirming impacts.”
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Point of Documentation: Madam Vertruse, Blue-Collar
The coloring was all wrong. No matter how many times she tried to get these flowers to grow, they always ended up with an acrid coloring that spoke more of rust and rot than beautiful crimson or budding pinks. She knew she shouldn’t get so hung up on the finer details of how they grew, but to see them come out in such horrid colors and smells was more than her tender heart could take. Her displeasure was shown by the marked scowl on her face as she observed her fetid children.
Another member of the squad approached her as she was thinking. She turned and laid her eyes upon the man. He was a well-kept gnome-ish man that walked with the same gait that a businessman on his way to a very unimportant meeting would. His eyes went from her to the bed of flowers that she was tending to. They grew up and over the hood of the vehicle that was parked before a gate.
“Madam, we’ve secured the checkpoint. Rounds have been heard firing by command. We expect them to land any minute now.” The gnome said this all in a curt and business-like manner that made him sound as if he was making a deal and not transcribing the moments before a show of violence. He even raised a small cloth to his nose and wiped it as he finished talking to seal the image.
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Madam Vertruse’s scowl transferred from her flowers to her comrade, a lingering distaste obvious in her look. She didn’t hate the man, but core-users always made her flowers bloom better. He’d make a much better plot than a soldier, and her vicious nature was not lost on the man. And yet he still treated her like a simple business partner. She scoffed and waved a hand towards her bed of flowers. They receded into the flesh of the bed and revealed what was underneath it. The barely-recognizable form of a man locked in an eternal scream as the flowers sprouted from his flesh on command.
A click of her tongue and she refocused on the man. “Very well. Have the squad prepare to assault the compound in earnest.” The man bowed and, not even seconds later, she heard the heavy reverberations of the rounds landing a few hundred meters away from her. The ground shook and the plants around her all cried out in fear of being destroyed.
She grit her teeth at their cries. That was the drawback of her powers: she could hear each and every plant that was near her and their thoughts. She couldn’t block them out, and they could talk a lot depending on what they were. She had gone insane early on in her transformation before she had become accustomed to it. Nowadays it was like static in the background of an old holo-box. Usually. Yet, when this many plants cry out all at once, it breaks through that mental training and resistance and begins driving her insane all over again.
The squad of five moved farther along and at a quick run towards the main building. They had a few squads of non-cored with them, but they were not a concern to maintain speed for. They’d catch up eventually. In the meantime, Madam Vertruse would cultivate more gardens and see if any of the rabble had an unactivated core.
As they moved in, the rest of the force moved up behind them. The area that was past the gate and down a wooded road was a large lawn with a circular termination to the road in the form of a looped driveway. In that driveway, under the arch that read ‘.... Re..nal Hosp…”, was an armored vehicle with a turret. She wasn’t one of the more military leaning people in the assault, so she had to reluctantly defer to the gnome and his ruling of it being ‘a really bad thing’.
The fighting started almost instantly upon clearing the tree-line. The round that had come in from the artillery had removed the center-top of the facility from existence and had shaken off a large amount of the surrounding walls. The upper floor and middle were in shambles, but the first floor was all but untouched. A hidden machinegun ripped into the lawn they were crossing from the left of the first floor. It didn’t score any direct hits, but one of their numbers stumbled when a stray bullet hit his leg. They took cover behind a destroyed fountain as the hail of bullets continued. Powers or not, bullets could kill if you took enough of them or the wrong one in the right spot.
Vertruse looked back to the tree-line to see the Guard had caught up to them. One of their mechanized-guns walked up on its four squat legs, taking some of the fire from the smaller arms as it did. The two men behind the shield seemed unworried about being shot at as the metal ate most of the rounds flung their way. When the gun came to a rest at the very edge of the forest, it lowered slightly down and the men behind had to crouch to not be shot. Once it was lowered, however, the heavy-machinegun ripped into the location of the enemy’s gun.
Now very much distracted; the Blue Collar squad had their more anti-Voidling oriented member, a 1st-Grade woman with long brown hair in braids and a robotic eye, pop up from the cover. She produced a bow from her bag and knocked an arrow. Her aim on the armored vehicle, she began charging up some kind of attack that drew in all the surrounding Void-Energy like a vacuum. It was wildly inefficient due to her low Grade, but it was a powerful ability used to take down Voidlings at range rather than getting close.
Vertruse poked her head up over the cover to see the hatch on the armored vehicle close and the turret began turning towards them. She cursed and broke from cover to cast one of her abilities at the vehicle. She concentrated and cast ‘Wall of Petals’, an ability that creates a three-meter by twelve-meter wall of cutting petals. She doubted it would stop a shot from the armored vehicle, but she hoped by losing sight the shots would go wide and buy time.
The hope was immediately dashed when another cored made an appearance. A 1st-grade Void-Core user cast one of their own abilities on her wall. It made it lose shape and, after a few seconds, it was in tatters and barely stable. Something had eaten it away like a rot.
The other cored individual turned her attention towards Vertruse, attempting to activate something else. However, it was interrupted by the crack of the gun on the armored vehicle going off. While it wasn’t a full on cannon, the gun on the vehicle was powerful. The rapid unloading of shots in a horizontal line started at the far end of its field of fire. It unloaded into the Guard’s heavy-machinegun first, punching holes in the metal and ending the crew of it. It kept sweeping the gun over the woods and firing as it went, blind but suppressive.
Madam Vertruse threw a hand of seeds at the woman who was but a dozen meters away from it. The seeds flew wildly, only one of them actually hitting the woman. In her concussed state, the woman didn’t notice until it had taken root in her abdomen. When she did realize, however, she frantically started trying to rip the vine out of her with some kind of power that made the vine and all her surrounding skin rot and slush off her. She was instantly covered in wilting flowers, scattered over the ground as they festered and wilted.
The armored vehicle was still a concern. It kept swiveling, and the shot from her squad was nearly done. As it rounded on her squad behind the fountain, the arrow they had been waiting for fired true. However, arrows have a time that they need to travel through the aim. So it wasn’t instant, and one last shot rang out from the vehicle. It turned their squad member into a mist above the neck, but the arrow landed true and cracked open the vehicle with a violent and explosive ‘KA-THUNK’. It was followed by a cacophony of screams and curses from those near the explosion. Those who weren’t killed outright.
The firefight continued between the Guard and the members of the bandits from the windows. Non-cored members fighting non-cored members on each side. Blue-Collar fell back to the fountain and tried to regroup and deal with the death of one of their own. That was, until a presence was felt from the same place the armored vehicle was destroyed.
One of the members of Vertruse’s squad, a gangly man who was shot in the leg earlier, looked over the fountain’s edge. A round immediately landed dead center between his eyes and caused the man’s corpse to topple over in a shocked expression. This was followed by a call from the other side, louder than the gunfire around them.
“Come out, Mon cheri. You and you’re little friends behind that fountain. Let’s settle this non-violently.”
With a look to the remaining member of her team, Vertruse rose from behind the fountain to lay eyes on a man in garb that spoke of someone on vacation in the tropics. A floral shirt barely buttoned up, slack grey pants, ballroom shoes, and a cap on that looked more like a bill with no head. The man had a pistol in his hand with a drum-magazine feeding into it. The man himself was a human with pale features and the barest hint of a tan on his neck. His piercing blue eyes spoke of his intent long before his mouth opened. Which it did inevitably open.
“I am Sir. Barnaby. You can call me Barns, mon cheri.” His lax voice was able to carry across the multiple meters between them as if he was just having a casual conversation over tea.
Vertruse raised her chin and looked down her nose at him. The little man dared to confront her with a simple firearm? Was that luck before, or was the man taunting her? “I am Madam Vertruse, leader of Blue Collar and member of the Mayoral Guard. You are hereby under arrest, and we can take you if–”
The man let out a laugh that stopped her in her tracks. She almost felt a short-circuit in her brain of pure rage as he did this, but she held her tongue long enough to listen. “Sorry miss, but no. Let’s have a duel instead, yes?” He waved with his gun. “I’ll be kind enough to tell you what power I have if you do the same.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “You first.” She said plainly.
The man groaned in a childish manner, but his eyes never left her nor shared in the mirth of the motion. “I always make sure the ladies go first, but this time I’ll at least humor you. It won’t matter anyways.” He adopted his dopey grin once more. “I have an offensive set built around guns and weapons. I call it ‘Aim-Bot’. Sinclair, however, calls it ‘Predictive Initiative’. I was quite a shooter back in my day.”
Vertruse stared at the man in confusion, baffled how he could just casually say this out loud. She gritted her teeth, and then let out her tension in a breath. “I have a utility set, mostly built around growing plants. However, I have built it towards offense over the years. It’s called ‘Creeping Grove’, and I’ve branched into other things besides that.”
Barns let out a whistle at that. “A Gardener at war? Plato would roll over if he heard of you.” The confused look from Vertruse must have been plain to see as Barns barked a laugh. “Yeah, guess you wouldn’t know old-Terra history. Anyways, ding-ding, it’s noon.” The man raised his gun towards Vertruse and placed his finger on the trigger.
She had the worst sensation as he did, as if she had just taken several actions all at once and yet hadn’t moved at all. She started to lean to the left to grab at her pouch, but stopped mid lean as she remembered what he called his main power. Her cessation of the lean and additional step away from that hip in a short order caused the bullet that was fired to race past her in the place where her head should have been.
The man whistled again and smiled broadly. “I always love warning people. It really gives me a place to build to, yes? Character growth.” He raised his gun again. “Make this entertaining, if you will.”