They run into Truthseekers Corporation forces less than fifteen minutes later. A fact that makes it clear that Revenant’s suspicion of their takedown of the ambush site not being left unnoticed was entirely correct.
To be honest, Virtue - their vanguard - survived only thanks to a particularly lucky coincidence. Namely the fact that the enemy sniper tried to blow her head off with a laser sniper rifle.
And after hearing a short list of examples of weapons commonly used by the Truthseekers Corporation security forces, Revenant had her keep not only a Golden Bulwark on standard but also permanent light-refraction field in front of herself.
As a result, the red beam was deflected by an invisible refraction field, carving a long vertical burn in the wall to her side.
They promptly withdrew behind the edge of the corridor, Golden Bulwark stopping the relatively weak gunfire that followed the initial sniping attempt.
“How many did you see?” Revenant asks Virtue a moment later. She is the closest to the edge of the corridor, if only to respond if the enemy tried to push them with a grenade.
“That’s the fun thing, I haven’t seen anyone.” She replies, while glancing back at him. “There is some large structure up ahead with more open space around it, but I didn’t get to see much detail. I saw some professional looking metal barricades and a second later, I was almost shot to death.”
Great. A fortified position of the Teal Alpha, blocking their way forward. That was just great.
“Humility, those guys aren’t stupid, right?” He asks just in case. The robot shakes its head, probably wondering what it was about. “Decay? How does this look to you?”
“They should have hidden themselves better for a sneak attack.” Decay replies while scratching his head nervously.. “Or just wait until we get close to go for a multikill. So… they are trying to halt us while giving another group of their soldiers time to go around us, catching us between the hammer of that group and an anvil of the fortifications up ahead and forcing us to surrender.”
Yeah, that was exactly Revenant’s opinion on it. The Truthseekers must have had at least some degree of communication network set up, especially with how advanced their tech was supposed to be. Just a lot of ground to cover, leading to their initial response unit taking time to reach Revenant’s group position.
This implied that the enemy commander knew that he had something unique in front of him or her. But why shoot Virtue, the only one that showed their individualities during the clash? Unless…
… crap. They probably had sensors scattered around the ambush sites, too well hidden to be detected during the brief looting event. Put there to give them detailed intel on any group that managed to overcome the ambush.
If they detected the light refraction field they knew that Virtue wouldn’t be killed by the sniper, but it sure as hell looked like an actual attempt to kill her. Very convincing.
If they could detect a light refraction field, despite Virtue shaping that particular Super Move of hers to make it invisible to the naked eye, they also had to put some microphones around. Conclusion? They knew that Humility was among them, because Revenant referred to the AI with its name.
They just can’t catch a break, can’t they?
“Decay.” He then says calmly. “I think that we’re going to have to pull a New Orleans.” Decay whistles, while Virtue gives him a worried look. “The first part of it. For now… Clockmaker, you got that recon drone going?”
One part of the additional equipment they got from the checkpoint was a small reconnaissance drone. Clockmaker was busy making sure that it was successfully connected to her cerebral implant to be able to see what it saw.
Turns out that the programming languages changed a bit in the meantime, and the programs simply weren’t compatible. That’s why Clockmaker was busy rewriting them. Didn’t stop her from walking alongside them and being attentive to her surroundings.
She was a bit scary.
“They’ll shoot my baby down!” Clockmaker is horrified. “We’ve… we’ve barely met and I already love it and…” Revenant gives her a tired look. “... alright, alright, we found two either way.”
She decided to sacrifice her ‘baby’ at Revenant’s orders surprisingly quickly. And, just as she suspected, even with Virtue’s invisibility cloak and the drone’s small frame, it got melted down by the sniper.
But not immediately.
“It’s some sort of… bridge, I think.” Clockmaker reports seconds later. “It doesn’t fit the surroundings at all, so it might have been a normal bridge from the planet that just got put in there. Together with some empty space around it to justify a bridge being there. Empty, flat walls and a ceiling. Err… I counted at least twenty soldiers with some really high-tech looking armors and a variety of weapons, two big ones in something resembling a carapace, hard to say at the distance,and some guy in weird clothes behind them all.”
“Twenty Endless, the Seekers’ cloned regular soldiers.” Humility comments. “Two Perfects, their supersoldiers. And one regular member of the Corporation to run the show. There is simply no way we can fight through that.”
“How bad are the Perfects?” Revenant asks. They are running out of time, but just in case…
“Fairly sure they can fight me and Onslaught in melee.” Humility replies. “She might get a good shot in if she catches them off-guard, but with all the visible changes to her body while she activates her individuality, they’ll probably be on-guard.”
Well, crap.
They arrived here through a tunnel that was connecting to another one, right before the bridge (which was to the right side of the intersection in front of them). Unless the Seekers trusted their sniper enough to keep them pinned in case they decided to turn left and retreat that way…
… two enemy pursuit units, one for each corridor to make sure that they were perfectly trapped. What were the chances of each of them being comparable to the size of the group in front of them?
20+2 felt like an oddly round number. Might have been Seekers standard unit. Best case scenario the other unit was split in half for two approaches, otherwise…
“We’re doing New Orleans.” Revenant announces, while pointing at the wall behind him. Decay nods. “Clockmaker, make sure that he doesn’t dig too deep.”
***
“That's ‘New Orleans’?” Humility comments less than a minute later. “I must say that it’s rather… outside the box, but…”
Decay chuckles at it. Onslaught actually lets herself laugh at it, although quietly. Yeah, even Revenant has a brief smile on his face. It’s a good pun. Hopefully intentional.
Decay rapidly aged the wall where Revenant told him to. Not the whole wall, though - he aged away the edges of an area large enough for them to pass, and then everything behind it, to create a tunnel.
Once it was large enough, they all stepped inside, before letting Virtue use her individuality to weld the wall back together. Leaving nothing but the briefest of lines denoting where the cuts originally happened.
Since the walls in general were heavily uneven, finding it out wasn’t going to be easy. The Seekers were going to spend a while suspecting Virtue of hiding them with her individuality or them all trying to backtrack and hide somewhere.
A while. They were still on a time limit. The enemy was going to find them, but in the meantime…
In the meantime they were busy walking through a narrow mess, a corridor full of sharp edges, half-unmade construction elements and so on. Virtue was walking alongside Singularity, cutting off whatever stuck out badly enough to block the passage of their loot platforms. - and, naturally, the seven resurrection tubes that were their most important possession.
“We used that trick when Broadcast, Aegis and Valiant cornered us in New Orleans.” Revenant replies. Quietly. “The tunnel wasn’t as long, but… it should work.”
The idea was to go around the corner of the bridge hall (for reasons that were going to become obvious a bit later), then go up. With Singularity and Virtue allowing them to fly a level or two up, before finding another tunnel or hallway and go on from there.
It ended up working like a charm, leading to some brief bout of confusion among the Truthseekers staff present at the area and an intensive, frantic search throughout the area. Less than an hour later, things happened.
***
Tezar CU-75’s massive frame walks into the large hall. It’s, honestly, intimidating. Its damages were repaired, with speeds that would make Clockmaker impressed. Then again, the transhumans were masters of engineering.
Having to maintain the remnants of their fleets with little more than scrap, duct tape and genocidal spite did that to people.
The Seekers troops garrisoning the bridge let him and his two companions approach. Although it was clear that the situation was rather… nervous, the Endless holding their hands on their guns at all times.
Two transhumans stayed behind by the door. One of them resembles a centipede even more than Tezar, the other looks like a giant spider made of some white metal, with a really big gun turret on the upper body.
Those guys really acted like the humanoid form was holy water to them, hmph.
Tezar advanced to the middle of the bridge, stopping right in front of the barricade. A moment later, someone emerges from behind it to confront him.
Middle-aged Asian man. His clothes are… they look like some stereotypical depiction of clothes from a High-Tech Culture Of the Far Future from some older sci-fi story. The sort that gives those people colorful robes with no considerations for making them grounded in logic, by, say giving them pockets.
Behind him, the two Perfects. Towering humanoids, wearing armor that appeared so seamlessly merged with their body that she isn’t sure if it’s really supposed to ever be taken off.
Clockmaker displayed a holographic image of them that her drone baby caught earlier on. Decay and Revenant complained (almost simultaneously) about Seekers clearly being inspired in their armor design by ‘Excalibur Warframe’ from some ancient game those two weebs once played.
She never played it, so she cannot say if they were correct in their assessment. But they probably were.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I am Enlightened Hao Yunqi.” The man says. Loudly, but his voice and tone are… calm. Almost oddly calm, despite facing a towering engine of destruction like Tezar CU-75. It’s also in English, thankfully. “I represent the Board of Directors of the Truthseekers Corporation. You wanted to parlay, transhuman, and invoked the old treaty. Speak what you must, and then leave my sight.”
Wow, those guys really love each other. Just as Humility said. They apparently came to blows (enough to have a full-blown war, drawing in their numerous allies) over the Alliance remnants raiding Seekers’ facility in order to steal their research data so that they could construct themselves a Transcendent Cybernetic Intelligence.
The fact that the Alliance failed to do that on their own despite their supposed intellectual superiority to baseline humans (that the Teal Alpha technically represented) must have hurt.
Genocidal folks also being a bunch of fucking hypocrites. Pfff. What else is new?
“I’M TEZAR CU-75.” The transhuman bellows back. “I REPRESENT REAR ADMIRAL ASENA FC-12 OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE MECHANIST HIEROCRACY. I’M IN PURSUIT OF A GROUP OF HUMANS THAT I TRACKED TO THIS POSITION. I DEMAND ANSWERS ABOUT THEIR WHEREABOUTS AND STATUS.”
“And you honestly think that I owe them to you?” Hao Yunqi replies, calmly, tilting his a bit to the side. “The treaty you invoked forbids me from shooting you and your lackeys here and there. Because you stated your will to negotiate. But tell me, subhuman, does delivering demands count as negotiating to you?”
Big oof. She doesn’t like the s-word, then again in this particular case it was an intentional slap in the face over the opponents’ belief that they are superior to humans. That, well, that she can stomach.
“DON’T YOU HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS AS IT IS, ENLIGHTENED?” Tezar replies. Did the s-word hurt the transhuman? If so, it doesn’t make it known. “DO YOU WANT TO MAKE US YOUR ENEMIES AS WELL? THE DISTANCE BETWEEN OUR FORCES MIGHT BE SIGNIFICANT, BUT… WHO KNOWS FOR HOW LONG?”
Are the transhumans expecting to retreat in this direction? That would be… well, it would end with a lot of deaths. But most of the people dying would totally deserve it.
“We are already enemies.” Hao Yunqi replies, crossing his arms behind his back while looking at the transhumans with a faint smug look of superiority. “You invoking a brief armistice for the purpose of diplomacy doesn’t change that. I’m going to throw your words back at you - don’t you have enough problems as it is to try to open another front?”
“I ASSURE YOU, ENLIGHTENED, THAT YOUR PREDICTION OF OUR RESPONSE TO THIS MATTER IS ENTIRELY INCORRECT.” Tezar replies. “FOR WE HAVE OBTAINED A BLOOD SAMPLE OF ONE OF THEM. IT CARRIED MAJORITY OF THE GENETIC MARKERS OF THE PURE.”
Eh?
Enlightened stands there, the smug look on his face suddenly frozen in place. He didn’t expect that.
Looks like someone’s decision of trying to grab the shiny new test subjects just backfired on them spectacularly. She would have laughed at that if it wouldn’t betray her position.
“THE MOMENT THIS INFORMATION SPREADS… AND LET ME INFORM YOU THAT ASENA KNOWS ABOUT IT ALREADY… YOU’LL HAVE ALL THE LOCAL SURVIVING TRANSHUMAN FORCES GOING AFTER YOUR THROAT.” Tezar continues. “WHERE ARE THE PURE, ENLIGHTENED? HAVE YOU TRIED TO RECONSTRUCT THEM? DID YOU GENUINELY THINK THAT YOU’LL BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS?”
“You’re delusional.” Enlightened wakes up from the stupor. Despite being handed the shit sandwich of this magnitude, he stays calm. At least outwardly. Did those guys get rid of those emotions as well? “The Dominion of the Pure destroyed all their genetic data before their last stand. The researchers responsible for creating them are long dead, and the Commonwealth made sure to bury their knowledge. If you said that you’ve encountered a surviving populace of them swallowed by the NIGHTMARE/RAINBOW it’d be much more believable than those pathetic lies about some half-baked Pure copies.”
It’s time to execute the plan, even if the circumstances were a bit crazier than they realized. Then again, pretty much everything that they’ve gotten involved with thus far turned out to be crazier than they realized.
This meeting had to end before the Corporate guy mentioned Humility’s presence in the area, making Tezar suspect that the Pure being remade might be done by another branch of mad scientists whatsoever.
It’s a bit taxing to do this at such a range. There is a big risk that they would realize… if they were allowed to think about it. It was risky, but… the risks they took were calculated, and Revenant was damn good at math.
An Endless steps out from behind the barricade, and starts walking away from the group. Towards the tail end of the bridge. He walks loudly enough to draw attention.
Hao Yunqi’s eyes squint, the man half-turning back to look at the soldier. He realized that something was wrong about it. He didn’t order the Endless to walk away. And they were all programmed to follow his orders to the letter.
“Wait, you aren’t one of…” He almost managed to speak the words. Except…
… that’s when Tezar CU-75 saw a few strands of long, straight, blonde hair sticking from under the helmet of the soldier that was walking away from the area. The ones that were made to be visible just enough for the transhuman to notice… but not visible enough to make it feel like a set-up.
They looked like an honest mistake. A slight failure in a disguise attempt. Even the Seekers could make such a mistake.
The hair resembled the one of Virtue perfectly.
If Tezar CU-75 didn’t have his own load of anti-Seekers biases he would have realized that the Corporation would have to be composed of a bunch of fucking donkeys to let the woman the transhumans most likely pursued to participate in the meeting, disguised or not.
Regretfully, while he might have been smarter than an average human and capable of separating his feelings from his mental processes… but all the intellectual preconceptions and biases were still there.
When the chips fell, he acted accordingly to them. And assumed that the enemy was bullshiting him and attempting to recreate the Pure as a part of their mad science. Which was, to be honest, entirely in character for the Truthseekers.
As a result, Hao Yunqi failed to finish his words before Tezar’s scythe went after his head, the nearest Perfect grabbing the blade in the nick of time before their superior officer lost his head.
Yunqi’s clothes might have made him look like a clown, but he acted fast, leaping behind the barricade while the two Perfects engaged Tezar in melee combat. They were fast, and armed with something that oddly resembled short lightsabers
Some sort of plasma-blades, if she remembered Humility’s swift summary of their typical equipment. Also some handguns, targeting the weapon emplacements currently outside of their blade range.
They were fast, precise and deadly. Enough for Tezar to be clearly in trouble.
His teammates and the Endless soldiers were busy firing at each other, the spider-like transhuman’s armament turning out to be some heavy autocannon that shredded through several barricades and the soldiers behind them… before the sniper melted its barrel with a well-placed laser beam.
Virtue made the decoy Endless dive behind the barricade before letting it vanish without a trace. Her job here was done.
The fight was cool enough, but she really has to leave as soon as possible. She had her teammates to catch up with. She might have been watching the scene through a small hole in the wall concealed with her individuality (giving her a good line of sight was the point of having Decay make the tunnel circling around the bridge hall until half of it), but… ricochets were a thing.
She catches up with the rest twenty minutes later, the group leaving behind obvious signs of where to go and Virtue managing to move lightning fast with some hardlight platforms she controlled like a vehicle.
***
“So, how was it?” Revenant asks when she arrives from behind the corridor curve, clearly tired. “Did the transhumans show up or did the Seekers find the tunnel?”
Right. She was supposed to stay behind for up to two hours… or until it becomes apparent that the Seekers found the tunnel. Then (before they opened the door up) she was supposed to tail out of there.
She wouldn’t arrive until at least an hour later if she hit the time limit.
“The transhumans, including our friend Tezar.” She replies. Revenant appears briefly surprised by it. “Tried to make a diplomatic meeting with the Seekers led by some ‘Enlightened Hao Yunqi’. I sabotaged it with my illusions and made both sides come to blows before sneaking away in the commotion.”
Revenant nods.
Oh, the chances of it getting to happen were low. Extremely low. Revenant didn’t expect the transhumans to still be on their tail, and the chances of them getting a diplomatic meeting right in front of Virtue were abysmally small. But…
They prepared for that, just in case.
Revenant might be smart but he isn’t one of those omniscient anime masterminds that somehow managed to predict everything twenty steps ahead of them. He knows that better than everyone.
He circumnavigates the issue by finding himself smart and intelligent lieutenants. The sort of people that know how to make correct decisions without him to think in their stead. Letting him focus on the bigger picture.
He also explains to them all the circumstances surrounding the next step of the plan, so that when shit hits the fan they can improvise correctly. Or so that they know when things went way too much off the plan so that they can drop everything they were doing and focus on saving as many of their assets from the chaos as they could.
Virtue knew that she was supposed to stay back and see if the Seekers would find the tunnel a bit too quickly for their taste. And that she should also be on the lookout (thanks to her small and concealed hole in the wall) for the transhumans or any sign of them still being around.
Like, say, the Seekers garrison freaking out more than expected, or her (she had good hearing) overhearing their leader getting a report about their presence in the area. This sort of thing.
When Virtue asked what to do if both sides just randomly popped up in front of her, Revenant thought about it for a while, before asking Humility if the Corporation and the Alliance hated each other deeply enough to come to blows over a smallest provocation.
The AI answered ‘most likely yes’. Leading to Virtue being allowed to start a war between two hostile forces at her own convenience.
Revenant didn’t bother describing this eventuality in detail. The situation could play out in a million different ways, with different numbers on both sides. Not to mention numerous other factors that could go into play.
What if, say, the Enlightened in charge of the Seekers forces was kidnapped by Visitor before the war broke out between the two groups? They weren’t even nearly as hostile back then.
So, he left the details to her own judgment. And you don’t become an SS-Rank villain without having a lot of skills and experience.
This time, it worked.
“But we have a bit of a problem.” Virtue then reports. “You remember the blood sample thing? Well, here’s a fun and confusing fact. Unless Tezar was bullshiting Yunqi, the test came out positive.” Revenant actually stares at her in silence for a few seconds. Even Humility just froze there. “He mentioned that they found most of the Pure genetic markers in it.”
“Wait.” Revenant asks while glancing at Humility. “How’s that possible? We’re normal humans, unless I missed something important.”
“I don’t know.” The AI replies. Uh-oh, Virtue decides. If the AI is confused about it, it’s… not good news for them all. “There is a possibility that Tezar was bluffing in order to make the Corporation think that they are much more serious about it than they actually are, but… he would have to be insane to waltz right in front of the Seekers and try to bluff them like that. Especially so far from their base and nearest potential repair facility.”
“So, a failed bluff?” Revenant replies, while looking at the AI questioningly. “But even you say that it was out of character for the mechanists. So…”
“Wait!” Clockmaker cuts in. “I think I know! It’s like the individualities themselves - the path of least resistance!”
“Eh?” Revenant, clearly, didn’t get it. Since he didn’t, no one else did.
“Metahumans like us can get stronger, faster and smarter than normal humans, right?” Clockmaker decides to elaborate. She’s fairly used to those reactions and needing to explain things to people afterward. “Not to mention healing faster. The sort of Charles Atlas Superpower mechanisms that your Mastery is an amplified variant of. Now, what if Visitor’s bullshit tried to break the laws of physics as little as possible in the process of reconstructing the characters from our comic?”
Virtue is still busy trying to figure out what she meant when Revenant suddenly makes the ‘I’m so done with this’ face. Uh-oh.
“It would transcribe those improvements into genetic code.” Revenant replies, his voice dry. “Using the genes that were already kinda there, in Mankind as a whole… or perhaps among the numerous groups that he swallowed and dropped onto this planet for its sick little game. Each of us probably has a completely different genetic make-up, making us all genetic hybrids of who knows how many human genetics. Including, for those who improved themselves far enough in one field or another, the genetics of the Pure.” He sighs. “You know, a part of the Transhuman Alliance. The sort of people that the entire Human Space wants dead.”
Well. Fuck.
***
New day, new character.
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