My PortaCon was getting inundated by text messages. The console buzzed in my hazmat suit’s stomach pocket like an angry hummingbird.
I pulled it out and tapped it awake. Multiple chat threads were colliding on the screen.
Ani: Genneth, are you seeing this!?
Heggy: What the hell is going on?
Suisei: People appear to be panicking. We ought to convene a meeting.
Jonan: Where? The usual?
Heggy: People, get your asses over to the conference room, on the double!
Well, that answered at least one question: what was I going to do?
I walked off as fast as my failing legs could carry me. My doppelgenneth had returned my body to me right in front of the elevator on the first basement. During the short ride up the elevator back to the ground floor, I activated the news app on my PortaCon to watch the footage from the beginning, and kept watching it when the elevator doors opened up onto Ward E and I rushed out into the hallway. I glanced at the footage every couple of seconds, my view darting back and forth between it and my surroundings.
Practically every console screen I passed was tuned in to the madness. Shock and disbelief was everywhere, even on the faces of nurses and physicians who had become fully desensitized to the Green Death’s horrors. The reactions were profound. The plague and its victims were forgotten as people clustered around the nearest console screens, doctors and nurses gawking alongside their patients.
I’d gotten accustomed to the despair and all the broken hopes, but this…? This was terror. It was the morning’s chaos all over again, only worse—if that was even possible.
As I ran, I was forced to conjure psychokinetic anklets around my feet to anchor myself to the ground with downward force. Without them, I’d have been knocked over by all the people who were running down the hallways. The plague victims lingering on the sidelines watched in confusion, having already forgotten what all the commotion was about.
I watched more of the footage on my console. After a minute or so, I felt an urge I’d never felt before: I wanted to destroy a television. I wanted to rip the consoles off the walls and smash them against the floor, and then shred the remains to smithereens with claws of psychokinetic fury.
It was hard to keep myself from trembling. Terror drove me to ragged breathing, filling my hazmat suit’s confines with the sweet, tangy, acrid stink of my breaths.
Within my suit, I clenched my three-fingered hands.
This can’t be happening, I thought. This can’t be happening.
A new time-traveler had arrived in Elpeck, and unlike Yuta Uramaru and his retinue, everyone knew who this newcomer was.
Mordwell Verune, 250th Lassedite.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, it seemed he now had Lassedicy itself in the palm of his hand. Or, should I say, claws?
Andalon appeared beside me, flying low to the ground. “What’s going on?” she asked.
To say, “people were freaking out” would have been the understatement of the century. Screams and even a couple of shots of (non-lethal) gunfire broke out in Ward E’s reception area, and pretty much every ward’s reception area as Vernon Marteneiss’ troops tackled the moiled public’s panic.
I looked Andalon in the eyes. “Remember how scared the Lantor Incursion made you feel?” I said. My voice was barely above a whisper.
She nodded.
“Well… that’s how I feel about this.” I pointed at the console on the wall. “That’s how everyone here feels.”
Suddenly, my console furiously buzzed in my grip. I had to coat it with a bubble of psychokinetic force to keep the thing from dropping out of my hands as I fumbled to keep my grip on it.
Heggy: ROOM 268 268 NOW
“Angel’s Breath…” I muttered.
Now I was in full-blown panic.
Was something wrong with me?
The legendary lost Lassedite had been found—apparently, he’d time traveled into the future, and was on his way to becoming a wyrm, too—yet, that didn’t get half the rise out of me as Heggy’s text message had.
Pel would have called it a bad omen.
I ran as quickly as I could, apologizing brusquely as I pushed off strangers to thrust myself forward and headed to the nearest elevator. Though I could have probably used my powers to leapfrog up the stairwell to the second floor, I didn’t want to risk getting caught. Thankfully, using my powers to press the up arrow on the elevator button from four or five yards away was much more subtle, and I got away with it with ease. Lucky me, the elevator doors opened almost as soon as I’d reached them.
During the several seconds-long elevator ride, I sped up my thoughts to come up with a plan for dealing with Lantor and the associated loose ends. I settled on giving a doppelgenneth the job of figuring out how to make a “safe zone” inside Lantor, and then, with any luck, get to work on making that safe zone. The idea was to have kind of beachhead within Lantor that would fall solidly under my control while also keeping the rest of the Incursion at bay. My hope was to use such a safe zone to mount future expeditions into the Incursion.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
But I could worry about that later.
As I arrived at Room 268, I really wish I could have said that I had anticipated what I found, but I hadn’t—not quite. The general idea of what was happening? Yeah, I’d considered it. But, as they say, the Norm is in the details, and hindsight is 20/20.
In life, people often talked about “worst case scenarios”. That was understandable. We wanted to guard ourselves against any unfortunate possibilities that might come our way. While you could plan for as many contingencies as wished, you would never be able to account for every possibility—and, if, by some miracle, you had, you would never enjoy the peace of mind that ought to come with it.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Really, worst-case scenarios were just the tip of the iceberg. They were the horrible problems we could anticipate.
The ones we couldn’t, though? You better watch out.
“Letty…” I said, hissing through my teeth as I came to a stop.
“Hello, Dr. Howle,” she said, wiggling her fingers at me. The movements caused what remained of her pinky finger to drop off, leaving that hand with three wyrm claws.
The transformees had broken out of Room 268—literally. The solid metal quarantine doors that should have been obstructing the entrance to the antique room’s foyer had been blasted off its frame. It currently lay against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. Back at the room’s entrance, stumps of metal extruded like broken teeth from the slits in the floor from where the doors had risen up.
Letty Kathaldri stood at the head of the pack. Though I say, “stood”, she was actually floating a foot or so off the ground, with her hospital gown billowing beneath her. A short tail hung down, in between her legs. Its tip twitched pendulously over the vinyl floor.
Letty had definitely been eating well. She was taller than when I’d last seen her. Her purple scales had spread up her limbs and neck and the sides of her face. Two fleshy horns crowned her head in a wicked V, beneath which her wispy gray hair hung in clumps. A row of black spines had broken through the back of her gown, and continued down to her tail, getting smaller as they approached the tip.
I immediately thickened my wyrmsight, knowing I would need it. I breathed in sharply as the blue and gold filaments of her levitation weave came into view. They swirled around her in a sphere.
She really did look like a witch, now. She could give Mami Losiro a run for her money.
With a name roughly meaning “Mother Elkhorn”, Mami Losiro was a horned witch from Polovian legend who lived in the woodlands in a house with ravens’ wings. She was ambivalent and fickle. In some stories, she gave magic boons to woebegone princesses. In others, she stole away misbehaving children when the clock struck noon.
And she wasn’t alone. The other transformees of Room 268 stood behind her, and at her side. They, too, had developed since I’d last seen them. Bethany was at least eight feet tall, with much of it coming from her elongated, lizard-like torso. Yellow-green scales dotted her arms and neck. She stood behind Letty, as did Kurt.
Flanking Letty were Nathan and Maryon. The shapes their transformations had given their upper bodies belonged on gorillas, not people. Their arms were massive, and columnar—Nathan’s scaled in black; Maryon’s, in pale blue. Their fully developed claws splayed out on the floor, glinting slightly in the light of the ceiling’s cord-hung fixtures. They used their arms like legs, leaning forward with their actual legs dangling beneath them, suspended several feet above the ground, alongside their growing tails.
On its own, these opponents would have already made for a nightmare scenario. But—just my like—it got worse. The hallway filled with dangerous transformees was also dangerously thick with people. The ones furthest from 268 were mostly bystanders—healthcare workers, one and all.
I bet they’d been drawn by the shouting—and, boy, was there shouting. It came from all sides: from the troublemakers, and the peacekeepers, and the people on the sidelines.
In between us and them stood two and a half rows of Vernon’s finest—quite literally. Rather than the familiar black-armored troops, the soldiers in the hallway were those white-uniformed of the variety I’d seen standing guard in front of the garage entrance to GL; the elite guard. Their guns were long, slender, and streamlined, with barrels too thin to fire bullets—at least, any kind of bullets I’d ever seen. At the moment, they were holding position in a demented munine standoff, their rifles pointed at Letty and her crew.
Recently—recalling one of Heggy’s explanations—the army had been training elite troopers to use the new heat ray weapons technology.
Could that be it? Were these those troops? Were those heat rays in the white soldiers’ arms?
I really, really did not want to find out.
Behind it all, I heard mournful crying.
Checking my wyrmsight, I saw a lengthy form of violet and ultramarine energy lurking behind Room 268’s walls. Every couple of seconds, it shook.
That had to be Werumed-san.
I suppose it was a silver lining that the mascot from Hell hadn’t been roped into Letty’s scheme. Then again, from the looks of things, he seemed to be the source of the weeping—it looked like he was sobbing his guts out—and I strongly doubted anything good would come from that.
“Genneth!” Heggy yelled.
Turning, I saw Dr. Marteneiss step away from the crowd, toward me. She nodded at me, and then looked off to the side as more footsteps arrived on scene.
Turning around, I saw Dr. Derric come out from around the corner.
“What’s going on?” I hissed.
“That’s what… I would… like to know,” Jonan said, panting for breath. He coughed and wheezed.
Heggy glared at us. “What’s it look like?” she said. “They’re mountin’ a break-out!”
Jonan stepped forward, and his eyes nearly burst out of his head when he saw the quarantine door leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the hall, all battered and bent, presumably when Letty’s psychokinesis had ripped it out and sent it flying.
Jonan pointed at the soldiers. “Why aren’t they shooting them?”
“Haven’t you been watching the news, Dr. Derric,” Heggy said, “the transformees have powers. Dangerous, psychokinetic powers.” She shook her head. “Trust me, the last thing anyone wants is for there to be a firefight.”
Groaning in fear, Andalon floated close and tugged me by the arm. Her touch sent cold rippling through my limb. “Mr. Genneth, you gotta do something! I don’t want the wyrmehs fighting!” She kept glancing at the transformees with a worried look in her eyes.
Sighing, I stepped forward.
“Wait,” Jonan said, reaching out to grab the back of my hazmat suit. “What are you doing?”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “Ideally,” I said, “I’m about to bring this standoff to a peaceful resolution.”
Shaking him off, I elbowed my way toward Letty and the others as far as I could. It helped that the small crowd of horrified onlookers parted in front of me.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of our men in uniform.
One of the soldiers turned to face me. He pressed something on the side of his helmet, and the darkened, data-filled visor on his otherwise flawlessly white helmet suddenly became see-through. He glared at me.
He was probably scowling at me, too, but I couldn’t see his mouth beneath the rebreather unit he was wearing.
The soldier in the middle of the row in front of him spoke up, addressing the transformees. “I’m only gonna say this once more,” he said, “get back into your rooms, now! General’s orders! One word from me, and we fire.”
I figured that guy was the leader.
The soldier who glared at me touched his helmet, darkening it once more as he turned to face forward, following his commander’s orders.
But then, my hopes were dashed to pieces when Letty’s expression lit up in a grin. “No, no, it’s fine. We can start now.”
“Will you tell us what we’ve been waiting for?” Nathan asked. “We could have been out of here by now!”
I shivered as Letty pointed a skeletal arm right at me.
“I was just waiting for the guest of honor,” she said.