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Edge 153
🕑 Added 2023-12-13 18:42:00 +0000 UTC153 – Break-in
“Interesting,” Albert said, stopping for a moment to look around. He licked a finger and measured the air. “I am reading a faint electrical energy signature hidden by all the other mess. I wonder how any generator could have survived all these years.”
Trailing behind him were Lina and Scrappy. Despite both of them being fairly high into B-rank thanks to their powers, they were struggling to keep up with him. What from a distance had looked like a large, but not too imposing mountain, was proving to be quite a challenge to climb.
“How far are we?” Lina asked, leaning against the frozen rock to recuperate. She didn’t seem to mind the cold against her bare arm.
“Not too far.” Albert said.
“Really?” She complained. “Why don’t you convenience us up?”
Albert smiled as if he was talking to a cute, if whiny, child. “I want to be well rested when we reach the door. Come on.”
“And what about us?”
“We’ll stop to eat and recuperate before trying to enter, of course. Now, you ready for the last stretch?”
She groaned but began to walk before he even started walking, gaining a small lead that would disappear as soon as he set off himself. Beside him, Scrappy was watching with an amused expression.
“You’re not complaining.” Albert stated.
“Of course I am not!” She said. “The view is nice, the company is nice and the weather…” she trailed off, looking at the ominous clouds building up in the distance. The low rumble of thunder echoed on the far-off cliffs of other mountains. “The weather could be better. But I like the rain, now that I don’t feel the cold anymore. I like it a lot!”
“Me too.” Albert said with a sigh of longing, remembering times of the past. “I always used to find gloomy weather nice and cool to look at, but I got disappointed every time I got stuck under the rain and all I could feel was the cold. Now that I can finally enjoy it without having to deal with the cold or the wetness, well, I love it!”
He set off, the young-looking catgirl walking on her little legs beside him in silence. Both of them enjoyed each other’s company, taking in the glow of sunset far away, the howl of the frigid wind and the occasional snowflake melting on their skin.
It wasn’t long, at their pace, before they came across the bunker door. By then the light had faded into twilight, and night was approaching quickly. They were all some degree of tired, with Lina having suffered the worst from the hike, and Albert made a quick camp close to their target.
Thankfully the bunker door was built into the stone of the mountain at the far end of a small outcropping, offering some natural cover on top of having solid concrete overhead. Redirecting the winds and the rain with a subtle application of active Power under Jeff’s direction did the rest, creating a small bubble of calm in the middle of a brewing storm. Soon, the roar of fire spread orange warmth on their skin. Even though they didn’t suffer the cold, the heat was most welcome, a balm for both soul and body.
The next morning they were all standing in front of the thick slab of concrete, fresh and rested.
“Yeah,” Albert touched the rusted metal wheel. Inside, the thick metal rods embedded in the concrete were untouched by the elements. “I am reading a lot of energy inside. And a lot of movement. We might have to fight.”
Jeff, begin mapping.
Lina nodded, hands balling up into fists. After her power evolution she had ditched her old, chipped sword because now she could summon both a sword and a spear with only a thought using her Skysworn Justice skill. It left her looking quite naked and bare, despite her armor, but looks could be deceiving.
Likewise, Scrappy also looked quite harmless in front of the thick door. But she too could become deceptively dangerous in the blink of an eye, disappearing from view and conjuring claws and teeth of shadow given substance.
Of them all, however, the most harmless-looking was Albert. He was dressed in tactical armor from the present time, but had nothing else in the way of weapons. His posture was relaxed, his gaze wandering distractedly around settling first on the door, then on the stone of the mountain itself. His face was focused, but his loose hair and unkempt beard were not intimidating at all.
However, all the people present would agree in an instant that he was the most dangerous of them.
“Ready?” He asked.
After seeing the girls nod, he approached the bunker door. A wave of energy passed through the concrete, slowly spreading around the nearby rocks until it was too faint to detect. As it did so a virtual map was being created in real time in Albert’s visual field, showing a 3D render of the nearby sections of the underground structure.
After explaining what he was about to do, Albert shared the map with the girls. They gasped as a foreign entity appeared in their visual field all of a sudden, but recovered quickly. Scrappy was naturally adaptable, much more so than a normal person was, and Lina had already experienced something similar with the goggles back at the explosion site.
“Green dot is me. Blue dot is Scrappy, and yellow dot is Lina.” Albert said. “Any questions?”
“I have one.” Scrappy said. “What are all those red dots deep in the mountain? They are moving.”
“Monsters.”
To their credit, the girls didn’t say anything. Instead of fooling around, they focused until they were ready for battle. Lina summoned her twin weapons, a long spear of green stone and a wicked-looking sword of translucent crystal. Shadows enveloped Scrappy’s body for a moment, and she emerged looking different. Twin fuzzy ears twitched on her head, swiveling around and locking in on sounds only she could hear. Her fangs were long and dark, and her hands ended in nails so sharp that they were painful to even look at.
Albert too prepared for the fight. In his hands, a sword of solid light appeared. Yellow, bright and made of thin lines that reminded him of old game models from very old computer games. It would be perfect to dispel the jumping shadows of the bunker corridors, as he could already see that what little lights still worked flickered under the constant jump in tension from a failing generator.
Sword of the Opposite, Jeff helpfully supplied. When used normally, it will do half the normal damage. But if you execute any sword technique backwards, perfectly, it will deal three times the damage a normal sword would have dealt. And it stacks with any buffs you channel through it.
***
“I take it you are all ready.”
Scrappy looked around as they approached the door. All their preparations had taken no more than five minutes, but already she could feel her body shaking with adrenaline and anticipation. Her eyes fell on her companions. Sir Albert was wielding a strange sword, doing practice swings that looked off to her eyes. She was no expert in swords, but the way he was moving screamed wrong to her. And yet, something about the sword seemed nothing but deadly. She trusted that he knew best.
Lina too was wielding weapons. On the way here she had spent a long time practicing and familiarizing with them, and in the last few days she had even asked Scrappy to spar with her. Their spars made them grow closer to each other, and now a sense of bond between the three of them invigorated her as she thought about the challenge she was about to face – not alone but together.
Albert touched the door again. “Nope. Concrete this thick is not going to open with brute force. Everyone, place a hand on the door and close your eyes.”
Scrappy literally jumped to the door and pressed her hand on the hard, cold surface of strangely smooth stone. She was giddy. This was going to be her first real fight since her evolution!
“Scrappy!” A jolt went through her system as Sir Albert called her name. “No cheating. Eyes closed for the teleportation.”
She did as instructed. Then the world vanished from around her.
She was disoriented. Moments flashed by, accompanied by faint voices. One of them she thought she recognized, but among all the screams and wails of pain and rage, it was almost impossible to decipher. “…special circumstances…” it seemed to say, “…through the 36th dimension… if they see they can go… brain damage…”
The other voice was mechanical and odd, as if it was being spoken by a golem through mechanisms and gears. She had never heard anything like that, but in a moment of strange enlightenment she realized that it was synaesthesia that was making her think that.
Then it was over. She couldn’t tell how long it took, but it was over. She was standing beside Lina in a cramped corridor, and Sir Albert was in front of them. His sword was like a beacon in the darkness of the tunnel.
Scrappy’s own instincts immediately took over. Thanks to her new eyes, she could pierce the dark almost perfectly, but she found it hard to see more than a dozen meters away from Albert’s swordlight. The air was stale, smelling of metal and mold. A thick curtain of dust had been kicked up by their sudden arrival displacing the air.
Her shadow whiskers twitched, following the vibrations in the air. Nothing else but them was moving nearby.
Her awareness kept sweeping the corridor, and her eyes went to the map Sir Albert had gifted her. It was bigger than it was before, the green blocks representing the solid walls making a huge maze of corridors and rooms. It was still expanding, but its speed had slowed to a crawl. As Albert took a step forward, the map too changed to update his position and new walls appeared.
Scrappy looked for monsters. The closest red dot was far away from them, two levels down, confirming what her senses told her.
Ahead, writing lined the wall at a bend. Scrappy focused on it, and the letters became readable by way of the same magic that made the map visible to her.
ß ALIGNMENT BIO-RESEARCH FACILITY
COMMAND CENTER – ELEVATOR à
In the yellow, eerie light of Albert’s sword, the trio stepped forward. Towards the flickering caustic white light of some strange device left over from millennia ago.
