“Should your time come, stand unwavering in the void of the heartless. Steel fast, for blades may shatter, armor be pierced, but our souls shall sing above the raucous roars of the malevolent.”
–First Champion of the Valkyries
Asqualia Research Center (ARC), 11:47 pm, Friday night. One week after Drenar's Awakening...
Shouts.
Screams.
The sound of combat is muffled and distorted in the manner of a scratchy analog radio, badly tuned into reality. Pain shouldn't be an existential element to existence, either, and a woman obscured by debris in an ongoing battle groans, trying to get her bearings…
Get up! Get up, the fight is still going, wake up Joey!
She’s trying to get up, but her limbs ache and her head hurts. She forces her eyes open, past a layer of grime and dust, and the world is still dark. She can still hear the clang of steel, the supersonic crack of autobow bolts firing through the air distantly. Her vision is an utter mess, it's all blurry and unfocused. She reaches for the tangled mess of her vibrant red hair, dulled by dust, and sees a trace of blood. There’s a feeling of nausea that threatens to overwhelm her. Her training kicks her into gear.
Concussion! Oxotane Mirazine, quick, before you pass out! Her hand reaches out to her alchemical hopper kit, and she hears the whir of metal and windings, and an alchemical canister pops into her hand. She fumbles with the opening and activates a charge of mana through her hands, priming the fluid to a slightly citrus color. She dabs half the application on her wound. Nothing else hurts this bad, and she’s got no idea what happened, other than a support pillar collapsing down on her.
She maneuvers her hand through the tightly confined space–the pillar barely missed her, she was just under the hollowed-out I-beam segment, any closer and it would have likely crushed her under its weight. She gulps the potion and winces–it tastes like burnt blueberries, but it’s not the worst she’s had. She can still hear combat ongoing, indistinct, and shadowy blurs. Whatever’s going on, she’s dead useless if she can’t see or think straight.
The potion activates and she feels the pull of injured tissue, and a cooling, soothing sensation from the source of the concussion. The nausea fades and her vision comes back into focus as the concoction heals the injury, one of a few specialized chemicals she carries for serious trauma like this.
“Shit, the Valkyries are here! Valosterla, we can’t hold this position, they’re cutting through us and we can’t slow them down!” It’s not a voice she recognizes, and they’re close by, on the other side of the pillar.
“Stand and fight until they’re dead! I want that damn journal, throw bodies at the problem until I tell you to!” The voice of utter malice and lack of humanity carries in the room like an oozing dread, and Joey’s lavender eyes widen.
Val is still alive. But where are the others?
There’s the clang of metal, and a shout of pain.
“Hits different, huh bitch?!”
Drenar’s still alive!
“Tsunderebolt!” There’s the crackle of lightning and the sonic boom. A blur of white and blue energy slams into an indistinct figure just on the other side of the debris, and sends them skidding backward. A teenage girl with black hair and azure blue eyes comes out of the ball of immense plasma energy, holding an autobow primed with crackling bolts energized with plasma. “Welcome to a night of unforced errors, Val!”
Julia! She scrapes her way past twisted metal and broken mana crystals, and sees her arcanist staff just in front of her, and she grabs it with one wrenching motion. She lets out a gasp of pain; she’s cut up and bruised, but functional.
But before she can do anything else, someone comes up from behind her and lifts her swiftly to her feet–wavy brown hair and blue-gray eyes, light freckles, someone she instantly recognizes even though she’s only known her a short time. “Joey, Joey are you okay?!” the girl shakes her shoulder, and she nods weakly. “I thought that pillar had crushed you!”
“It almost did. Ugh. Hi Angela, you’ve got good timing, are we winning?”
“You mean is everyone alive? Yeah!” Even with the chaos of the battle and the errant close-shave of an autobow bolt, Angela still can manage a sardonic smile, and she’s got a lightly enchanted sword in hand–it’s seen use, Joey notes grimly. “Are you good?”
She firms up and grabs her staff and slings it before picking up her discarded autobow, just under a pile of debris. The weapon is still intact, and her alchemical bolts are still loaded–ammo purposed for punching through armor. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world–duck!”
Joey grabs Angela with lighting reflex before a fireball sails at head height past them, and impacts into the far wall in a blast of intense light and heat, even at this distance. Joey sees the offending soldier trying to aim a disposable wand at them at a lethally stupid close range and she flings a cartridge of alchemical foam at his arm, sending his aim high. The foam expands and locks him in the yellowish material, utterly immobilized. He tries to grab a pistol off his side with his free hand, fighting against the restrictive foam. She drops the crossbow to grab her compact staff off her hip and clicks it to full length in a split second. She swings mightily just as Angela puts up a defensive barrier around her. Her skin prickles from the field of protection and she smashes her staff down on his arm, breaking it and Angela lassoes his pistol with a silvery kinetic grapple, stuffing it in a holster.
Joey is deceptively strong for her size, and her opponent screams in reaction. A blunt hit to his jaw and temple put him out of commission, moaning from a fractured jaw and likely a fractured orbital bone. Angela grabs the fallen autobow and unloads on Talons soldiers who are engaged with a few determined defenders whose spell barriers are failing.
The Talons' spell shields aren't strong enough to withstand the deadly force of the bolts and two go down, clutching at penetrating wounds–autobow bolts could be stopped by heavy armor, but not Kevlar wrap. They both scurry to cover and Joey lands another sweeping blow at a distracted soldier that topples him, then a follow-up blow breaks his ribs. A foam canister keeps him locked in position, and the pain ensures he stays put.
“Zameren and Piers are pinned down, clear their flanks!” Angela shouts out and points to a few Talons soldiers firing from cover, past the row of consoles surrounding the crystalline tree that constitutes the heart of the mana core reactor. She and Joey sweep through them, smashing and flinging with ferocity. There's a shout of appreciation from someone who has been hiding behind a broken display, and Joey presses forward, flinging an acidic canister at an armored knight who is trying to swivel a heavy rifle at them.
The canister bursts open on his armor plating, sizzling, and smoking. He screams and scrambles with the clasp, getting the breastplate off before trying to grab his hastily discarded weapon. Angela has already closed the gap and whirls gracefully with her longsword. The biting edge slashes through his underarmor, and then she kinetic blasts him into the wall in a crumpled heap of man and metal. He groans from the overwhelming assault, and Joey locks him in place with the foam she is now in short supply of. He won’t bleed out with the wounds covered, but he sure deserves death for what has happened here tonight.
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“Where's Drenar?!” Joey shouts over the diminishing gunfire and recoils when a stray round flares her barrier. Angela has uncanny control over her defensive telekinetics to protect them so decisively, and Joey launches a fire bolt at the offender and pierces through his barrier, already weakened from a prior assault. He pats at the flames and drops his weapon, screaming.
“Drenar’s fighting the demented Disney princess bitch!” Angela points to the far side of the room where the messy-haired teen with green eyes is facing down a monster the likes of which the world could use less of, locked in a deadly battle of the mighty blade of the Valkyries against that emanating dread of her crimson greatsword. His face is locked in focused fury as he finds an opening, pierces Val’s armor, and lances into her side. Val swings wildly and misses–Drenar uses a massive telekinetic blast from his palm to shove her backward and she stumbles into a debris pile, snarling with fury.
Most of her men are now down for the count or dead. A few of the brave defenders of Asqualia are badly wounded. Joey grimaces–she knows these people, but the danger is still present in the room in the form of defiant Talons soldiers who are reinforcing the room and firing a withering barrage of autobow bolts. Angela reinforces her defensive barrier and shields Joey while they dive to cover near the damaged shielding of the mana reactor, ducking low to avoid the fire.
“Leave the upstart youths to me! Anyone who kills them, who isn’t me, will die screaming!” Valosterla roars. There are several other shouts, then the sickening thwack of autobow bolts piercing through soft flesh, and the crack of a high-powered rifle intermittently.
“You were saying, Val?”
Nick! There’s my favorite oversized iguana with wings, and in one piece!
Nicholas DeShandrea hops out from his vantage point, autobow held in a readied state. He's covered in grime and spider viscera, but otherwise fully functional. And he's pissed off for the first time since she's known him, and all that anger is aimed right at the woman whose armor appears almost painted in blood.
“Valosterla Roshanikov, your men are being routed. We offer you this chance to surrender unconditionally this one time only. Throw down your arms, and have your remaining men do the same. This will be your only warning.” Joey sees Levine Dillenger advance into view, dark hair marked with a trace of silver, dressed in his tactical armor and holding his marksman rifle at a readied position. Angela hops over the debris, and all of them close on Valosterla.
“Guys! We need medical help up here immediately!” Kyle bellows out from the second floor, and she turns her head to see him supporting one of the mages from arcaneering. His red hair is bloodied, but he’s alert and moving. She turns back to glare at Valosterla, who is bloodied, beaten, and towering over her opponents in her ebony armor and protective crown, her hair looking like a bloodied mane, and her ruby red eyes exuding hatred. Joey despises this porcelain-looking doll of a woman being an utter monster beneath that exterior. She is mighty tempted to plug several bolts through her.
Assuming her spell barrier is sufficiently weakened, and assuming she doesn’t just regenerate from the wounds faster than they can dish out the damage.
Why does it not feel like it’s over? Joey thinks worriedly. Something has to be wrong. Val would never surrender. They shouldn’t allow her to.
Not for the people she’s murdered.
Not for the coworkers and friends she’s taken tonight.
“You know what?” she says with steadfast determination and walks over to her new friends to be side-by-side with them. She raises her sights on Valosterla. “It’s better if we don’t take this genocidal dragoness alive. Just throwing that idea out there. She’s the kind that takes advantage of the mercy of the mighty.”
Drenar tilts his head to the side–his messy hair is matted and he’s got a few wounds covered in field dressings, but his green eyes radiate determination. “Hear that, Val? I think one of our team’s got your plan figured out, and I’m inclined to agree. But we’re better than you. You need to answer for what you’ve done here tonight. For Reeves. Claire. Derek. Saul. And too many others. You have to answer to the call of justice.”
Valosterla, still brandishing that abhorrently evil blade, throws back a maniacal laugh that echoes in the massive room, surrounded by determined defenders who all had a bone to pick with her. “Hah! You think–hah-hah–You think you’re heroes? You’re nothing. You’re nothing but children and malnourished lizards and rats. You know how many people I’ve killed, how many self-proclaimed heroes I’ve slain?! I lost count a long time ago. Who do you think you are, when you stand trembling before a goddess?!”
“Oh, that’s easy! We’re the Radiant Delvers!” Julia quips, and Angela groans.
“That title was so five minutes ago. We have got to come up with a new one!”
“We already have one.” Drenar smiles in that sardonic smirk that Joey’s come to associate with him, even in the face of mortal peril. “And I think it’s gonna stick, Val.”
“We’re the Luminaires. The light to shine the way. A beacon to a better tomorrow.”
Joey can feel the mood shift in the room, there’s a massive pull of mana somewhere and every nerve in her body tells her there is immense danger brewing. Valosterla stands there and snarls in rage. There is nothing humanlike about it–her draconic form is bleeding through, it’s a feral maw of deadly sharp teeth that are the product of night terrors and crying children. She exudes malice with each syllable.
“No, Rashalda. The Luminaires are gone. They’re dead and buried, and they’re never coming back! Crosomer never had the will or the strength to do what was necessary, just like you don’t have the strength to do what is necessary here! I just want you to know, it’s been fun tonight, truly. But now, it’s time for you and your upstart friends to die.”
Joey can still feel the danger from somewhere, mana flow is nearby, activating something. Her super sharp hearing can pick up an audible charge building. Val smiles as the others close. She knows she must have a backup plan, they’d beaten them to the power plant first and killed a number of the defenders. Her eyes go wide and she gasps.
That audible pitch is the same pitch before half the south wing became a blaze of shrapnel and deadly debris. She turns to see the lethal explosive primed, adhered to the support strut of the reactor–a critical component. If it’s compromised, it could destabilize the whole reactor and bring it down on top of all of them. Detonator on the strut! she thinks in the blink of an eye.
Drenar goes wide-eyed and moves faster than anyone she’s ever seen. He knows exactly what he’s doing when he instantly sheathes Luminari and throws a telekinetic grapple, prying the deadly device free. The detonator sails through the air, even as Val is in motion, and hits a priming switch subtly blending in on an arcanist activation rod on her hip.
And she’s wearing, in that small window of time before a cataclysm, a feral, manic grin. Even as that monster made manifest is grinning at their probable deaths, Joey realizes two life-altering things.
One, her psionics are now so firmly interlaced into Drenar that her thought reading is now going in the opposite direction, and he can hear her thoughts.
Two, she’d always had a strange intuition for knowing the people who were going to be important in her life long before the reasons became apparent. Now she knows for certain that Drenar, Julia, and Angela are far, far from ordinary, even for dragon-kin. And if they somehow survive this, she’s going to stand side-by-side with them in the coming crisis.
The detonator lands in Drenar’s hand, and he grabs Volkir’s journal off his satchel, fusing the two with the residual adhesive. He’s in pure reaction mode when he blasts the device kinetically at Val, who knows it’s too late to undo her error and goes wide-eyed, a silent scream as light fractures the device at the seams. Angela’s in motion beside her, shielding the gathered team with a barrier of immense strength, and Drenar swerves to protectively cover Joey, shielding her from the coming death.
The world becomes a blast of fire, and the last thing she sees before the flames lash at her and her friends is Drenar, bracing against the inevitable.