I looked at my Band, and noted the signal had dropped. That was a big surprise. Unfortunately for the thaumaturgic static, it didn’t block Marktells. You needed an actual full-blown Ward to do that.
And I had six other Bands I could shunt it through anyways...
-My Queen, I have confirmation of Warp Sorcery on the community guards, and judging by the way the locals are tearing open their doors and charging for me with guns blazing and magical spikes sticking out of their souls, everyone around is afflicted. A Juris alert is probably a good idea.- He knew our line had been cut when my video feed went down, of course.
-Notifying,- he /replied smoothly, his mind working as he danced through the system with the ease of long experience. -That Tactical team you worked with before.-
-That’s not bad. Make sure you cc the Umbrans and Coronals. You know how they love this stuff.- At which point I also /copied to Sir Dorval and Philius everything I was saying, startling them in the middle of whatever they were doing.
Me, I was booking for the Merschoen residence, as an array of slugthrowers, lasers, gyrockets, ion beams, needlers, and a few fusion grenades were being sent my way, to the dismay of all the landscaping about.
I could have gone down that sinking drive to the main doors, and hewed my way through the durasteel. Instead I blew a bolt from Paten through the armored glass, fractured it, and with complete disregard for the fact that a wise person does not dive through or onto razor-sharp shards of steel-hard glass, I dove inside as the wall and windows behind were coming apart with heavy fire from the neighbors.
The riot doors were starting to come down over the stairs going down. I flipped and drove Chalice down into the motor, right through the floor, shorting it out. The slats of durasteel stopped half-closed as I continued sliding over the floor, smashed my way through the railing, over the riot doors, and was over the edge of it and slithering down like a snake.
The butler down there was waiting for me to come, but the first thing that came over the edge was Paten, who put a bolt into his forehead before the rest of me followed, and his riot gun discharged into the ceiling, making a mess of the drop-tiles as it did. The maid, her eyes twice normal size, held the trigger down on the modified fusion torch, and some fourth state of matter sprayed up and caught me as I came over.
The next shot blew her cranium apart in white, blue, and purple, and the flaming spray went up to the ceiling, leaving a trail of ash behind it as everything in its path was carbonized... except for me, as I was immune to fire and simply had a bit redder gold on my skin.
I didn’t even bother to get up, going down the stairwell as if it was a slide and pulses of hard light and gyro rounds blew apart around me, trying to track me as I zipped down faster than gravity, throwing off their aim. I face-planted against the wall upside down, standing on my head as I whipped both arms out.
Mrs. Merschoen tried to Blink away from the shot coming for her, and found the dimensions locked down. Her Soak took the first bolt, which drew a bloody path across her cheek, and she shrieked at me as she promptly dumped an Energy Blast out at me.
My Interdiction was up in full, which was probably really annoying someone, but my Null itself I kept local.
Warpfire blew past me and the wall, and absolutely shredded the ceilings and floors. Steel beams melted and blew away, the hovercars in the garage over there counter-exploded to add to the fun, the ceiling lifted away in blue-purple flames and totally trashed the upstairs.
Well, she isn’t just a Six Psi, pulling that out of her ass, I thought, as the unmarked wall behind me protested at the lack of support starting six inches away from me, surrounded by twenty feet of nothing to either side, and the upper floors collapsed.
Mr. Merschoen was gasping at his unresponsive arm, where a Shard from Chalice had pierced right through his shoulder and rather messed up the nerves there.
I turned my feet and swiveled as the last of the energy blast swept past me, feet coming down, locking with heavyfoot, torso following and facing them, still shooting Paten.
Her Inertial Armor took part of the hit, but the Sun Shots flared, and she gasped as the feedback coursed through her brain, holes popping up in her gut and chest as banefire’d bolts detonated.
The telepathic attack was incredibly powerful. A normal person’s brain would have melted right there. It came out in a wave, and unfortunately Mr. Merschoen stumbled in the path of it. His cerebral tissue became steam, and his head exploded nastily as the wave rolled over me, overclocked as she sensed my resistance and spent the power to overcome it –
Yeah, my Null took care of it. But before then, she wasn’t driving her power into an unmoving wall. She was driving herself into an unmoving wall with THORNS.
She screamed as the feedback tore through her mind and body as her telepathic attack was rent apart, and her psyche with it. Brain tissue blew her eyes right out of her head, and she fell over, not very happy with me and how her new life of Great Ubah Powah had turned out.
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“You killed my Mommmmyyyyyyyy!” a young teenaged girl screamed as she rounded the corner, clutching a heavy laser in her hand. If I couldn’t see the magic nails sticking into her, making her nothing more than a puppet, I might have felt a little guilty when Shards, a Bolt, and hard light crossed paths, and the cute kid went flying back without her head on her shoulders, punching lines of hard light through the ceiling.
The building behind me collapsed with a roar, deciding it had had enough, while the glowing spots the pulsed laser shots had dotted across me rapidly faded. I was basically immune to most hand weapons, although gyros could give me problems once they blew, and if there were enough of them.
I faced the hallway to the sleeping wing, and the subfloor beneath it.
My Trembling Domain was naturally up, and fully active, painting the entire area into my awareness. I knew where everyone had been standing, and forewarned like that, there were no surprises. I could see some of the things that were going on right beneath my feet, which didn’t surprise me a bit now that I knew what was here.
The next attack was telekinetic; psionic and magic power were combined to boost the effect to impossible levels for a normal psion. The cone of psychic power took all the walls between me and the kid and shoved them all my way.
The problem was that my Interdiction was up, which expressly did not allow any of that shit to ignore King Gravity. So even as it was coming my way, it was falling to the ground, crashing to the floor, and stacking up into a sliding mass of stuff that I could leap right over as the TK itself parted harmlessly around my Null.
The young man looked both wasted and energized, a true Amourean combination, the signs of excess and the gifts of energy combining to bulge his eyes out, wrap his skin tight to his bones, and also fill him with unreal vitality and Ubah Powah.
Seeing someone jump right through a TK wave that would pancake someone in power armor was a little unsettling to him, however.
“You-you, how?” he screeched, and then dove aside with telekinetic speed, mind moving the body... and falling flat on his face as he did so, instead of just shunting himself aside. He shrieked as he dove down the stairs there, and I shot twice at the motors, jamming the riot doors as he tried to drag them shut, and as they screeched and buckled at the force of their attempt to block me, I bounced off the wall backwards and was following him down the stairs on my backside.
He had definitely tried to Summon something in, and then to pop some dimensions and get out of here, but that wasn’t working. I imagined he had a Magic Jar somewhere to safeguard his soul, and some suitable chump to bodyhop into, and he should have used it. The instant he saw vivic fire, he might get the impression his soul was in danger, and having a Receptacle wasn’t going to save him if I killed him.
If he wanted to get away, what he needed to do was kill himself right now, before I did. But I wasn’t showing vivic fire, so he thought he was unkillable, and he animated the struts and beams of the room to try and stop me.
Null Strikes blasted across the steel whipping at me, dispelling the magic and psionic power pouring through them, and they literally fell apart as the stressed metal gave way. I was pumping non-stop shots from Paten as Chalice carved his little toys and I kicked to my feet. He was gawking and cursing as TK slapped my little Bolts aside constantly, his fevered eyes on mine as he tried to figure a way out of this.
Removing Summons and dimensional transit, along with flight, from a Caster’s arsenal is crippling, especially if they don’t expect it is coming.
If he thought the howling spirits he’d made from the servants and their families, and the cyberzombies done up as sadomasochists were going to stop me, well, that’s what Ghost Touch was for, and Cleave Trains.
Yeah, he’d spent a lot of time and effort building up some reserves, and he’d used the classic Tyrant’s Triad to do so: Charms, Necromancy, and Summons. However, I wasn’t letting him bring in the creatures he’d bound with his Summons, his Charmed people in my way were all dead, and these undead weren’t going to stop me.
He gawked as Chalice became a blur of conjoined arcs and motion, and I bulled through the mass of his sacrifices with Heavyfoot and a 48 Might. Chopped corpses animated by magic and tech blew apart as golden light rent them, and Ghost Touch fed on the angry spirits, dissipating them.
Yeah, undead. Chalice had to go vivic, she had to let them rest.
He saw the unwhite fires, didn’t know what to call it, but recognized that it was eating the Warp energies animating his toys, and knew he had to get out of there.
He dove for a bolthole in the floor, TK already reaching out to jam it closed behind him.
I dropped Paten for my hair to catch, drew Faith, and did a Captain America shield toss as gold light flared around her.
The Buckler had to revolve 360 degrees sideways to spin past the zombies and align itself to the hole, but there was a whole floor of Habberblok devoted to rampaging about and testing out fighting skills, so no worry about the room needed to practice shield tosses.
The golden edge of Faith’s force-extension chopped right over his rabbit hole, and he slammed face-first into it. Just to make sure he remembered the sensation, Faith discharged the Sun Strike I’d left on her, and he screamed as the Corona and Nimbus Flare blew him backwards, reeling.
Faith is my shield, after all.
Half a dozen incorporeal wailing souls blew into swathes of vivus, warring with the necrotic rot and ozone tang of sex and the Warp twisting everything. I tossed aside a hefty corpse made from a fat kid who looked to have been force-fed to death, blew a Sun Stroke through his ball of a chest, and grabbed Paten’s rack, pulled it to bring up a real quarrel, and my hair centered the leyser almost nobody could see right between his eyes, ... which bulged and crossed despite themselves. No, no, he wasn’t using magic...
The pulse laser had the Sun Shot, and he had fire resistance up, but that didn’t save him from the carry effect of the hard light and the discharge, slamming his head back against the wall, venting more Soak, and then the hard bolt took him in the chest.
The future had some hideously nasty explosive stuff, and when Energized, it got even worse. The bolt got past his somewhat distracted TK defenses, and slammed full into his sternum.
This was real, not magical energy. The remains of the cyberzombies were blown past me as I slid back on my heavyfoot, debris pinging off my goldskin, and no, I didn’t stay there to see what was happening. Even as the backblast was sucking stuff back in, I went right with it, Chalice out in front.