“It’s rude to stomp into someone’s home and start slaughtering them without announcing your intentions.” Zihan said. Air forced down the long dark tunnel by captive machines made his ear length hair dance in the gentle breeze. Fire Ki glittered in his eyes like the reflection of lights howhere to be seen in the dim length of the maintenance tunnel. “Go tell them that they have to leave.”
Yi Cao shuffled nervously before the tunnel. “And if they don’t?” He asked.
Zihan snorted. “They might try to kill you on sight. Makes the whole thing pretty simple really.” He looked at Yi Cao and studied him in the dim light. “If they don’t, then you kill them.” He said. “You want to be a cultivator? You need to learn to use that power. Better now than when I’m not here to act as your safety net.” He nodded down the hall. “Go on now.” He said. “Get started.” He turned to regard the murky darkness, hands in his pockets. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Yi Cao stepped slowly into the bend in the tunnel they’d been directed to follow. He reached for the pistol as he advanced and pulled it from his holster to hold it at the ready, just as it had trained him in their short exercises back in their room.
Lights flickered along the wall and a moment later Bo Bo’s absurd avatar blinked to life. The smiling face spun lazily, green light flickering as it moved. “I hope they try to kill us.” The thing whispered. “It would be boring if they chose to run.”
Yi Cao scowled but ignored it.
“If they do try to kill you I will direct you in the fight.” The pistol told him. “I suspect my sonar is more effective, in this environment, than your unaugmented eyes.”
A voice rang out as Yi Cao came to the mouth of the narrow offshoot leading deeper into the tangled maintenance tunnels.
“Stop right there.”
The voice was more growl than spoken words. All gravel but made tinny by the construct used to project it over the noise of eight separate mechanisms rattling along the wall of the narrower tunnel. A light flicked on and swiveled up to glare in Yi Cao’s eyes before he held up a hand to block it.
“What’ch’yer want around here?” The voice demanded. “No big people allowed this deep in are t’rritry. You go back the way ye came. Ye hear? This ain’t’ch’yer home.”
Yi Cao opened his mouth several times trying to get the knots out of his tongue. “Get out.” He said at last. “We were sent… we were sent… to get rid of you.” He finished on a lame note, as though he wasn’t really sure what they were there for. He shifted his hands on the Bo Bo’s grip. “So… get out.”
Tiny voices laughed at him, not just from behind the light, but from all around the narrow tunnel, in the vents, he realized, along the top of a machine blinking with little lights. Even behind him.
“Twelve of them.” The pistol whispered in his ear. “More in hiding. I can mark the vulnerable ones when you turn the safety off.” The safety flicked up and down of its own volition under Yi Cao’s finger.
“Or what?” The gravelly voice asked from behind the light.
Yi Cao stood there, mouth agape, before he said again. “You have to leave. I was sent to make you go. The people here don’t want you, anymore… around… around them. You hung one of them upside down.”
Laughter again.
“We done fer bigger folk’n you.” The voice cackled in urdul. “I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere anytime soon.”
A hand fell on Yi Cao’s shoulder as he looked for better words.
“You have no confidence Yi Cao.” Zihan told him. “Let this Young Master show you how it is done.”
The Young Master stepped forward into the beam of light and it swung towards him. “Stop her right thrr ye oversized turd.” The voice growled
Zihan struck a pose, hands on his hips, chin held high, resplendent in red faux leather armor, eyes sparking with power. “You court death, imp.” He replied. “This Zihan’ Beigao’s mercy is the only reason you still live. Take this message back to your people. Leave now with your whole tribe, or I will not remain so merciful.”
Two more lights flicked on along the wall, pinning Zihan from three different angles, one from inside the cage of a machine at head height, the other light hitting them from behind. A figure no taller than Yi Cao’s hand, stepped into the first light and lifted a tiny construct in its hand.
“Or what?”
The figure exploded.
Liquid spattered the light. Bits clung to it, throwing speckled shadows along a wall now bathed in ruby red light.
No one laughed.
“This Zihan Beigao gives you twenty minutes to inform him that you are leaving. Obey, and you shall live. Defy me, and you shall die. To the very last wimpering child among you.” He raised his nose to the light pointing into his face from the vent in the wall beside him, and Yi Cao saw fire Ki dancing beneath the icy expression. That expression jerked suddenly to the side, and Zihan slashed a hand through the air, sweeping flames across a square opening in the wall where a grate should have hung over a narrow air duct.
Tiny figures screamed and there was a bang of explosives that mad Yi Cao jerk and press his hands over his ears, the fingers of one hand still wrapped around his pistol’s grip. The light behind them began to whine before Zihan pointed and a beam of fire splashed across it, illuminating a pair of six inch tall men standing in one of the vents with the barrel of a plasma pistol pointed in their direction.
“For the sake of everything holy let me shoot them!” His pistol screamed in Yi Cao’s ear.
Yi Cao leveled it as the safety came off and green lines circled his targets. The gun howled with laughter as pins cracked through the air to rip the miniature installation to shreds, cutting a ragged line into the metal sheeting behind it and severing the arm from one of the miniature people as it played across the already burning position.
Something screamed. Something tiny and human. It kept screaming as Yi Cao lifted the barrel of his gun and Zihan turned to address the burning hall.
“I will not repeat this warning.”
Firelight bathed the narrow corridor in red. A pulse of something bright and green spat out of another vent further down and Zihan knocked it aside with a flick of his wrist, too fast for Yi Cao to see. The ball splattered across the wall, melting it in a circle before dissolving into a blast of heat. The Young Master looked in the direction the shot had come from and glared at it before he turned to retreat. “You have twenty minutes.”
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He grabbed Yi Cao’s shoulder as he left, hauled him past the burning sections of the maintenance tunnel while Yi Cao coughed at the fumes. They stopped when they’d passed the corner and Zihan stopped to look Yi Cao over in the light reflected from the flames.
“I don’t think they’re going to leave.” Yi Cao said between coughs.
Zihan smiled. “Of course not.” He replied. “Cultivator diplomacy is about determining who has the biggest dick. It’s never been for de-escalating conflict.”
Something exploded down the hall, making Yi Cao’s ears ring. Zihan glanced down the hall. “Now they’re deaths are on them, if they don’t want to leave.” He looked back at Yi Cao.
“Twenty minutes.” He tapped Yi Cao in the chest. “You’ll be in the lead.”
Small blue people tried to stop them when they moved forward down the hall.
Not small.
Miniscule.
They looked like children’s caricatorues of human beings scrawled on the floor boards in blue chalk, all wide three fingered hands and narrow torsos, fat heads dominated with fatter noses set beneath beady little eyes that were all pupil, mostly naked and covered in what looked like fine blue scales. None of them came up to Yi Cao’s shins, and most barely reached his ankles. A few of them, the leaders, from their actions, wore armor made from spoons, and cups, and the technomancer refuse woven into something that kept them from shattering if they were kicked.
It did nothing to keep them from getting burned.
Yi Cao heard them at the start, advancing on their position. They shouted to one another in a language that was all clicks and whistles, growling just beyond the range of air hissing through the vents. A grenade popped out of one of those vents as they neared the corner, and Zihan shot it with a blast of fire before it even touched the ground. It exploded thirty feet down the corridor, shaking the corridor with the percussive bang and tearing at the walls and floor with shrapnel.
“Go get them!” Zihan shouted over the roar. “That’s an order!”
The oath in Yi Cao’s channels twisted. He leapt for the entrance to the deeper maintenance tunnel, raised his pistol, saw green light flash across a dozen different targets and heard the weapon scream as he unleashed a storm of glittering needles on the little men waiting there, followed moments later by the whoosh of Zihan’s flames, and the pitiful sounds of the tiny defender’s screams.
He shot more of them as they advanced.
Green laser light flickered in the smoke and the darkness and Yi Cao twisted his pistol to rip into the circle until an X appeared over it. An arrow flashed on a wall and he twisted in that direction, spat pins into another circle over a vent that cracked and echoed as his shots shattered across the grating.
“On your right.” Zihan told him. Heat, as a line of fire shot over Yi Cao’s shoulder to intercept a pulse of glowing plasma. The liquid fire burst and Yi Cao stumbled in the shockwave of heat and pressure.
Something screamed and hurled itself at Yi Cao from the dark along one wall, illuminated by green light as Bo Bo screamed in Yi Cao’s ear.
“Kill it! Kill it!”
Yi Cao batted the little blue man out of the air, felt it shatter under his pistol’s barrel, saw it… him… smack into the wall of the tunnel and fall to the floor carrying what looked like a tiny spear dripping pearly fluid from a cracked tubule of glass. It twitched as he crushed it underfoot.
Bo Bo cackled madly in his ear. More green lines swirled across his vision as flames erupted from another tunnel running crossways into theirs.
Yi Cao’s breath came short and fast, tainted with the burning chemical stink of burning steel. The pistol buzzed in his hand as it kicked out another beam of death. Needles glittered as they shattered in the dark of another circle of laser light before it flashed and an X appeared in its place. He swiveled, followed an arrow to unload into another vent swarming with Imyenki, working the gun in slow methodical loops to rip the creatures apart before something in their center burst and the shrapnel bit into Yi Cao’s cheek, his knuckles, his false leather armor.
“Reload!” The pistol howled. “Reload! Reload! Reload!”
Yi Cao fumbled with the button in his holster and heard a muttered. “Fuck!” from the machine before laser light pointed towards a hole in the wall directly in front of him with an arrow.
“Get down!” Zihan ordered.
Yi Cao ducked and cradled his head as falmes engulfed the hole.
The stink of burning meat joined the ozone of burning steel, and Yi Cao heard the screams as little men poured from the blazing hole in the wall, hundreds of them, to throw themselves at the two towering monsters killing their way towards their home.
They crushed them, stomping, kicking, putting out the flames that followed the howling little monsters like capes until the hall was dark again.
Yi Cao finally shoved another magazine into his pistol as lights appeared behind a whirling mechanism that blocked their way. Something big slammed into the grating on the opposite side. The construct rocked on its mount, whistled with the strain, then came loose in a whirling storm of broken steel as the thing on the opposite side punched through to rip the engine out of the way and stared past.
A monster, all articulated metal hands and writhing carbon fiber limbs came at them, blank human eyes staring from the pale slack jawed head of the human it had once been while tiny blue men clinging to it writhed around the weapons stacked along its core.
It moaned, and Yi Cao’s gun came up.
Yi Cao lit it up. Light flared between it and him. The needles shattered in sparkling constellations off some field of glass that materialized between him and the monstrous thing only six feet from his face. Zihan grabbed him before the pistol was fully out and tossed him up the hall, back, away from the monstrosity as beams of ruby red light twisted from it, sawing into the sides of the hall in burning red lines, cutting through wire, cutting through stone, through steel, through the cage that blocked it from advancing until it ripped it away within one clawed hand of synthetic muscle and gleaming steel.
Zihan raised a palm and it collapsed on him.
Fire and writhing metallic limbs engulfed the hall. The wall behind them collapsed as the thing barrelled through it, and small blazing sparks leapt from the mechanism to run circles on the floor before collapsing to the floor. Some of them charging toward Yi Cao.
Yi Cao pushed himself away from the inferno. He shot them, burst the little men in ripping lines of needles that tore lines in the floor behind them and spread their guts across the tunnel in sprays of gore that shone black in the firelight, cut them in half, even as a grate dropped open beside him and a team of the things rolled some lensed weapon twice their size into the hall to turn it towards him.
He rolled, and the beam of red light shot past his shoulder, searing his ear, and neck, and cheek, crisping his hair. He emptied his pistol into them. Blew the wheels off their mounted hand gun and emptied his pistol into the vent behind as they scrambled for cover in the killing rain.
Then Zihan was there, lifting Yi Cao by the back of his shirt and hauling him away from the glowing fire. He raised one palm and a beam of flames slammed through a whirling set of blades to ignite something beyond.
It took two turns down maintenance halls before Yi Cao got his feet underneath him. He stumbled along, gasping for air, unsteady and half blind in the darkness beyond the battlefield.
Eventually Zihan stopped and Yi Cao collapsed against one wall, his lungs heaving, burning from the fumes he’d already inhaled.
Zihan checked over his shoulder then studied Yi Cao. The pistol shook in Yi Cao’s hands as he clutched it between his knees. Yi Cao dropped his head rest against the wall and closed his eyes.
“What was that thing?”
“Some sort of slaved technomancer.” Zihan tapped the back of his skull. “Had wires going into its head.”
“I figured.” Yi Cao replied, blowing for air, “I meant, the glass.”
Zihan shrugged, glanced down the hall. “Some kind of defensive technique. Technomancer magic.” he looked back at Yi Cao. “Not much breathable air down there at the moment. Why don’t you hang back. Keep this hallway clear. I’ll press on and finish the task.”
Yi Cao nodded, opened his eyes and held his pistol a little tighter.
“You gonna be alright here on your own?” Zihan asked.
“Sure.” Yi Cao replied. “Sure. Just, soon as I catch my breath.”
Zihan regarded Yi Cao for several moments. Eventually he nodded and smiled. “Soon as the fires die down, come catch up.” He said. Flames flickering along his arms and the once red leather of his shirt flared as the Fire Ki in the boy’s eyes kindled. “I’ll go and clear the way.”
Zihan turned and jogged back down the hall into the flames.
Something banged, and there were renewed cracks of gunfire amidst the roar of flames.
“Level up!” The pistol told him in the silence that followed. Green lights flickered on the wall to show fireworks exploding in jerking stop motion. “You have successfully hit five hundred targets in a live fire drill.”
Yi Cao pressed his eyes closed as a burst of heat washed down the hall.
“If this were integrated space I would also be authorized to issue experience and the Killer I achievement.” The pistol told him. “I recorded five hundred and thirteen confirmed fatalities inflicted in the exercise. New augmentations would normally be available as a result. Well done.”
Flames crackled like poplar leaves dancing in the breeze. He snapped his eyes open and scrambled to look in every direction at once.
“I consider this a promising start to our future adventures.”