Like never before, recall warnings were blazing through the entirety of Jarvick’s suit. Systems override kicked on and cleared all other missions in queue for one thing and one thing only.
Code Black.
Ascension headquarters were under attack and all personnel were to return with the expectation of great threat.
“What the?”
Their headquarters, even if found, were on the twenty-fifth floor, hidden deep in the layers in the unique capacity shared only by keystone floors. The keystone’s spatial overlay, something even spatial researchers were confounded by, was foolproof. Even if someone knew the location of their headquarters, actually getting to it should be theoretically impossible without going through half a dozen security checkpoints via secured transit gateways.
His private transit key activated a warp at the nearest waylay station on the thirtieth floor where he’d been operating. Within the protection of the suit, he barely even registered the strangeness of spatial discombobulation as he teleported.
Barely hesitating as he leaped from the receiving transit gateway, he pushed the suit to its limits, mind twisting in knotted loops as he tried to make sense of anything.
Things made even less sense as he arrived where the first checkpoint should have been but wasn’t. Instead, only a crater leading into bottomless oblivion. Others stared as he did.
“Little Bird to… everyone, what… is this?” he asked over local comms.
“A hole.” He recognized Tabby’s voice, though she lacked her usual arrogance. “A very large hole.”
“Has anyone… descended?” His voice shook less than he expected yet more than he’d like.
“No,” Dahlia responded, shaking her head from the other side of the massive hole.
Gritting his teeth, Jarvick stepped off the edge and dropped, blades shooting out of his forearms and cleaving giant swaths from the wall as his boosters did everything to control his speed. He’d be no use to anybody if he arrived at headquarters in the form of a pancake.
The hole kept going, and the chatter continued ahead.
Then it cut out.
And he kept falling.
And falling.
And falling.
At first, a tinge of danger, subtle, then suffocating, validated the still-blaring Code Black warning. Then the subtly disappeared, and there was simply overwhelming power.
By the time Jarvick reached the end, he was a shaking mess of quaking nerves and barely contained thoughts. The descent provided far too much time to consider just what in the world could have done something like this.
So to find Elder Abellar standing with James—though the younger man looked different and was clearly the source of the calamitous aura, Jarvick still made him out—his thoughts all collapsed and he was left asking one word, “What?”
Just standing near James made his entire suit scream conflicting warnings about escaping danger. The powering enchantments were bleeding energy as they tried to keep Jarvick sheltered from just the presence of James’s rampant energy.
Elder Abellar looked relieved to see another friendly face and gestured toward Jarvick, giving him a signal not to approach. “It’s as I said. Expansionist spies infiltrated our compound, kidnapped your sister, and all disappeared without a trace.”
“There’s no way that’s possible,” Jarvick muttered absentmindedly, still in the midst of trying to process. Those words were apparently not the right ones, as both James and Elder Abellar regarded Jarvick.
James turned back to Abellar, but the latter’s eyes refused to leave Jarvick, filled with great scorn. “You hear that? ‘There’s no way that’s possible’, my great friend Jarvick just said.” James circled Elder Abellar, his arms behind his back. “So one of you is lying, it would seem. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder…”
For a brief second, Jarvick caught up to the situation and understood the words he’d just spoken had contradicted Elder Abellar. Horror filled him as he met the elder’s gaze, wrathful.
But even more unsettling than that, Elder Abellar was trembling.
Then Elder Abellar gasped as his entire chest simply ceased to exist and a pyre of flame eradicated all that was left.
“So that was a waste of time,” James muttered as he wiped his hands on his pants and turned to Jarvick. “If it’s impossible for the Expansionists to infiltrate as spies and your recently departed elder was lying to me about my sister’s sudden disappearance, I have to assume your faction as a whole is to blame. So I’m sorry, my great friend Jarvick, but you had better help me find someone that knows something, or everyone without answers will have to experience a fate similar to your lying elder here.”
Jarvick didn’t think about his life, rationality, or preservation when he overrode his power suit and slammed both hands together into the ultimate weapon the second generation suit could equip, the Megacannon.
This man had declared war. His reasons didn’t matter. Jarvick couldn’t stand by and do nothing.
The attack exploded forward, but the golden light of the damned protective totem deflected the attack as if it meant nothing. As Jarvick channeled more power into the beam in hopes of overcoming that seemingly impenetrable defensive totem, James stepped forward calmly, causing the beam to obliterate everything to either side of James in a long path.
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When James reached Jarvick, he raised a hand and crumpled the megacannon, turning the energy inward.
“Goodbye, my friend.”
The suit exploded, and Jarvick was no more.
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“Alright, everyone! Who wants to be my party members? I’ll probably need two to four, but we’ll play that by ear.”
Ivy’s audience of exhausted, angry, and hopeless slaves regarded her excited proclamation without comprehension.
“It’s only standard, you understand. I could probably escape on my own, but—”
Suddenly, there was a lot more interest. And derision. And disbelief. But at least people talking over one another to offer help or talk her out of it or stop the others from getting their hopes up meant they were engaging with the discussion.
She could work with this.
She waited until the hubbub died down a bit, then spoke up with force. “First, I need some information. As those of you who watched me appear in a flash of green light may have guessed, I’m new to this place. So, fill me in. Where are we, who are you, who’s in charge, and who do I need to punch to get us out of here?”
They were prisoners from across the Euriste system, a motley collection of criminals, debt-slaves, and kidnap victims. None had any cards, which was an interesting discovery. Ivy glanced down at the glowing rectangle on her chest, peeking out from above her towel. That might be something to conceal, then.
She checked the other mark on her palm, the one she’d been working on without telling anyone, and found it had disappointingly lost its glow. Ivy pressed it against her chest and tried to will energy into it anyway, but nothing happened. Her fledgling experiment would have to be resumed at another time. She had none of the necessary equipment to continue from here.
“I miss my power armor,” she grumbled as she adjusted her towel to better cover her heart card’s glow. “Alright, I’m going to be meditating for the next several hours. Let me know if anyone comes to check on us. It’s been a long time since I consolidated my progress. I was going to wait until I’d be allowed out into the world with my precious ELS, but this seems like a good time to be at full strength.”
Her heart card was uncommon, and that meant that the only thing preventing her from advancing to the next tier was the amount of experience in her class. However, since she knew that experience and lifespan were interchangeable, and the basics of cultivation from Shen Ai, it stood to reason that she could move her own energies around to her preferences.
It was the one thing she could think of that might get them out of this. She’d been counting on having armor and weapons when she decided not to take any of the other cards James or the shop offered, and to advance on her own, but this little trip showed her the major flaw in that strategy.
She had Adversity to improve her abilities in a one-on-one confrontation, and she had Retaliate to make anyone who did hit her regret it immediately, but she had nothing to actually do damage aside from her own body.
Something told her a kick or elbow jab wouldn’t be enough to get them out of this.
So Ivy sat down, leaned back against the wall, and closed her eyes. The gentle vibration of the ship’s steady engines, the ongoing mutter of argument, and the soft pulse of her heartbeat lulled her into a semi-aware state between waking and sleeping.
She mentally replayed the months of exercises she’d done in the shop, then the weeks of intense training, both mental and physical, she’d been undergoing in preparation for her full release of the ELS, and threw in scenes from some of her favorite martial arts movies for good measure.
That should do it.
Now, she just had to figure out how to feed the combination of experiences and her own lifespan into her class.
“Shouldn’t James be the one doing this kind of weird cheat ability?” she muttered. “No, wait, that’d still be too much effort. He’d just ask the shop to do it for him. I’m the one putting in the work. It’s still fair.”
She hesitated, holding all the mental strands she’d been accumulating, trying to test whether she really truly believed that. If any part of her rejected this process as unfair, she suspected it would fall apart. It was her experiences, her lifespan, and her class. No outside power involved.
Yes, this was still playing by the rules.
“Besides, every hero needs to have at least one epic breakthrough before she can conquer, right?” She took a deep breath, lips softly smiling, and relaxed fully into the mutant process she’d devised.
And gradually, it began to work. Warmth built up in her chest where her deck rested, and she resisted the urge to pull it out to look at. She kept her eyes closed, forced down the excitement, and returned her breathing to the same steady rhythm.
When it felt like the power couldn’t possibly stay contained a moment longer, it burst through her in a pulse that somehow sounded like a bell ringing in celebration.
She could feel the options splitting out from her base class like the four stars on a compass, each a direction she could move in. She didn’t have her companion block to read out the specific text, but she could feel the weight of them.
One felt centered, slow and steady to wear away at many adversaries. Another felt sharp and shadowed, restrained but deadly. One carried the weight of honor and personal advancement, and that one called out to her. The last felt close and fast, the closest to the martial artist she’d initially envisioned.
But in the end, she could only choose one, and she needed to make it the one that would help her most right now.
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Demron found himself wishing that his Escape Anchor was still set to that slaver ship. That would be a much better place to be right now. He shifted his shirt uncomfortably, the massive bruise across his chest reminding him every moment of the cost of their retribution.
He hadn’t even minded the girl that much. She was fun, happy in a way that too few people were these days, but he couldn’t forgive her for jumping the line so cavalierly. Laril was right, she had to go. Or so he’d thought, when caught up in his fellow trainee’s rhetoric.
He licked his lips, throat dry. The thudding from above hadn’t stopped. It had only grown stronger and closer. And by now, everyone was suddenly remembering the rumors about exactly why that tiny upstart had been given such a prestigious position without earning it.
Just how powerful was her family?
Demron had assumed, with a single common and uncommon, not even a complete deck, that she’d been a minor branch or lame cousin of someone.
This level of retaliation, and so quickly?
He couldn’t imagine.
What kind of powerhouse would send their scion off with so little but show up with this much force to avenge her?
He wished he could convince himself that this was unrelated, but the dread in his gut was absolutely certain that they’d badly misconstrued several of the cues about this situation.
Why had he gone along with this?
It’d been so stupid. With the cold clarity of impending doom, he could see that now. Never do something you can’t undo without being sure you know all the consequences.
And this was very much something he couldn’t undo.
“Sorry, dad… guess I’m an even worse son than you thought.”
He grabbed the nearest bottle, forgotten as everyone stared up at the shaking ceiling in various states of terror, and started swigging.
Maybe if he got drunk fast enough, he could die obliviously. That was probably the best he could hope for at this point.
“Hey you, I can’t imagine you know where my sister is?” a stranger’s voice called out.
When Demron looked up, he wished he hadn’t.
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