Luca DR
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Edge 154
🕑 Added 2023-12-15 14:12:15 +0000 UTC154 – Gore
Albert stared at the sign painted on the concrete wall. The letters were quite well-preserved, which went against what he believed would have happened after so much time had passed. It didn’t matter much, but his brain seemed to fixate on the tiny detail for longer than it actually was.
ßALIGNMENT BIO-RESEARCH FACILITY
COMMAND CENTER – ELEVATOR à
Jeff, where to?
The AI initiated a scan. Behind, the rest of Albert’s team were growing restless. In the end, his mind concluded on its own that it actually did make sense for the letters to be well preserved because…
“There are no atmospheric agents degrading the paint, and what little light comes from the corridor is not enough to do any damage.” He said out loud, more to fill the silence than anything.
Rather, it was impressive that the lights, electricity and generators survived all these years at all. The pain was nothing in comparison to that mystery. One he didn’t need to solve, though, so he put it out of his mind.
Instead, he found the sheer weight of the silence oppressing. Not only him, but the whole team did.
They could hear no sounds in the narrow passageways carved in the stone of the mountains, save for their own heartbeats, their steps and the rustle of their clothes. In the distance the neon lights flickered, and occasionally the sound of a faulty light strip cut the silence like a clicker monster.
However, despite the many red dots populating the minimap, no monsters could be heard. The thick concrete simply swallowed all sounds, so that no machines, no electricity and no beasts could be heard disturbing the dusty air.
After what felt like an eternity but must have been less than ten seconds, Jeff had plotted the quickest route towards where the energy signature of the core fragment was strongest. Pathfinding around all the corridors didn’t look like an easy affair, but Albert didn’t miss the opportunity to poke some fun at his AI’s expense and was quickly reminded that he should at least show some restraint in front of his teammates.
“This way,” he said in a scoff, and took off.
Towards the Bio-Research facility.
The remaining functioning lights were infrequent but painfully bright. Close to them, the faint halo of Albert’s strange sword melted into their harsh, white light until the sword was nothing more than a faint outline of geometry against the bright, almost reflective smooth concrete.
“I think I can hear something.”
Scrappy’s ears swivelled, homing onto something only she could hear.
It wasn’t much later than the rest of team could also hear what she was hearing. It sounded like dozens, hundreds of moving bodies. The vibrations were enough to make the corridor shake.
“There is a concentration of red dots.” Lina said, looking up at her minimap.
Albert would have chuckled at her inexpert use of the technology, but his eyes were fixed on the same dots she was looking at. Behind a door, something disturbing was barely contained by the thin plates of steel and the feeble locks.
“They sound… huge.” Scrappy said.
“And there are so many…”
“We have to go through.” Albert added. “We need to fight. Are you both ready?”
Nods.
“Let’s go.”
With a kick, the hundred-kilogram steel door literally exploded into the room. The slab of metal, propelled by force as well as the literal bending of the rules of the universe, careened right into the body of the first monsters that awaited them beyond the threshold.
There was no time to witness the carnage. There was no time to take in their otherworldly appearance. Their bodies, huge and mangled, discoloured and translucent, somehow kept alive on nothing but anger and mindless rage by whatever energy had created them millennia ago.
None of that went through the heads of the three humans stepping into a room of chaos.
Scrappy promptly disappeared into the safety of her parallel dimension of the shadows, where she could not be hit by stray monsters and claws. Here and there she popped back into the prime material world, delivering devastating blows to the masses of muscle and chitin, exploding limbs and showering the room in white gore. The herd was not thinned in any visible way.
At the far end of the room a glow of magic swept the area. Twin weapons materialized in a flurry of wings, and Lina began to carve a path of carnage through monsters that were cut down like they were made of gelatine. B-ranked or not, her powers were truly terrifying, and they were growing by the day. Already she seemed to have outclassed even Scrappy’s latest jump up in power, although a fair comparison wasn’t really possible due to their very different kits.
Suffice to say, in a close environment filled with many weaker monsters, Lina felt right at home.
Still standing at the entrance of the room, somehow unperturbed by the mass of writing monsters and sharp stingers, stood Albert. He rolled his shoulders and took a stance, holding his luminescent blade in a way that would have made any and all teachers of weaponry cringe and cry out in pain.
However, it was the right stance for this particular weapon, a weapon that worked best when used wrong. It wasn’t all that hard once Albert learned to let go of his preconceptions. Of which there weren’t many. He had never been a sword guy.
A grin appeared on his face as he stepped forward. The monsters finally took notice of him as he allowed his presence to spill forward and into the room, and all hell broke loose.
The room exploded in chaos. Lights, colors and shadows. Monsters exploding, being rent to pieces, burning, being shoved against the immovable concrete walls with enough force to be turned to pulp.
In a particularly worrying moment, Albert heard a yelp right before he saw a gigantic statue of ice grow out of a corner of the room, which was too small to fit. He didn’t know what to worry about, the fact that the statue had been summoned at all – meaning that Lina had sustained and redirected potentially fatal damage, or the fact that the statue didn’t seem to care that it didn’t fit.
An oversight of his back when he created the skill.
Surrounding the statue was a hail of insanely sharp ice projectiles that rent flesh and froze the monsters’ ichor in their bodies. Sounds of ice shattering soon followed. The statue kept growing through it all, striving to reach its full size in any way it could. Eventually the statue could not withstand the stress of growing against the concrete of the mountain anymore and the magic gave way, collapsing disastrously.
Albert gasped and dashed towards Lina. A catastrophic failure like this would seriously injure even an A-ranker, after all, and while her magic was way above a nominal B-rank, her body was not.
He needn’t have worried. He found her sitting on her throne, having used her third and final skill to survive the shattering of the ice statue that decimated everything in more than half the volume of the warehouse-sized room. Beside her, statues made of the ichor of the monsters, but also dyed red, were rising from the ground.
Sitting on her throne, Albert saw a shadow of the Lina he met in her mind realm. Contrary to back then, now she was in control of her faculties, and she was deadly. Soon the statues moved as one, seeking any stragglers, killing everything that moved.
Silence fell al last, and darkness followed as all magic save for Albert’s sword was dismissed. Above, a lone neon light still flickered timidly, having somehow survived the carnage. At the other end of the room, an ichor-covered electrical cable sparked.
“Good job guys.” Albert declared.
Scrappy materialized next to him soon after. She wore a determined expression. Albert could not begin to guess what was going on in her mind, but the show of determination was contagious. Soon, Lina joined in as well, flexing her arms, dismissing and resummoning a clean and pristine versions of her weapons. Behind her, wings she had only been able to manifest for short seconds at a time now flexed along with the powerful muscles of her body.
They were translucent and gave off a faint light that echoed that of Albert’s own weapon.
“Thank you,” Lina said, still panting. “Sorry I made you worry. I almost lost my shit when the statue exploded.”
Albert shrugged. “Good call using the throne to make yourself invulnerable.” He surveyed the room. “You made quite a mess. I estimate that you killed…” he paused, and Jeff fed him the exact number. “More than 43% of the monsters yourself.”
She looked satisfied.
Albert looked at Scrappy. “Don’t worry, this was the appetizer. We’ll have plenty of things to fight more suited to your style.”
The girl nodded. “I’ll try harder next time.”
There were a few more rooms like that. The monsters got progressively stronger as they got closer to the source of the magic, and the battles became longer and harder. Lina’s efficacy dropped steadily as both she and her statues were forced to confront every monster they faced instead of cutting through them like they were butter. On the flip side, Scrappy’s hit-and-run tactics while empowered by the realm of shadows began to show their worth.
The girl was almost always able to execute a monster in a single blow by making use of the perfect cover of her alternate dimension, striking at weak spot and becoming more and more adept at morphing into a shadow-attuned cat of war.
Albert kept fighting like it was a walk in the park. After a picnic. Now that he didn’t need to worry about his teammates dying, he could afford to advance slowly, cutting a path with wrong sword strikes that went from the bottom to the top instead, cleaving backwards and occasionally using his sword as a focus point for more complex techniques. He danced and weaved his weapon around, jerking awkwardly to empower many workings of his reality bending Power, creating space for his teammates, covering their rears and eliminating the bigger threats.
Never did he have to move with more than perfect calm and composure. Watching him, it wasn’t like seeing a master or a dancer because he simply wasn’t that good, but it was like witnessing an unstoppable machine. A bored unstoppable machine.
The more they fought, the better they became as a team. Between all of them, Jeff acted as a sort of invisible glue, using the HUD to help the three coordinate together, feeding them important information and providing optimal strategies that made full use of their synergy.
And as each got a better measure of what the others were capable of, they also felt more confident when taking risks and did not have to overextend to cover for perceived weaknesses.
It was Albert who, in the end called for a quick rest. His reserves were dipping below half and he felt a slight pang of hunger, and looking at the girls he could see that they too needed some time off. The monsters had been waiting in the dark for millennia, after all, what difference were a few more hours going to make?
The trio stepped into a service closet room, which Albert secured, and the girls finally slumped to the ground exhausted. Of the three, Albert was the only one clean of all ichor, while the girls were a dripping mess of fluids, bits and chunks of the chitinous monsters.
After a pointed look, Albert cleared his throat and offered to clean them with his magic.
“It’s not an efficient use of my Power but I’ll make an exception.” He joked as the gunk evaporated from their skin and clothes.
The sighs of relief were enough repayment.
While the girls rested, Albert approached one of the many consoles and computers he found in the room. Indeed, even storage closets had plenty of technology, and all he needed was a functional line to access whatever grid was still active in this place.
“Let’s see if we can find any information.” He muttered. “Jeff, if you please.”
