Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 43
🕑 Added 2023-05-29 11:59:39 +0000 UTCAlbert listened his mother’s voice on the phone, trying to hear the voice on the other side as well but failing, all the while his expression grew increasingly worried. He thought about what not having the gem meant in the grand scheme of things. It was, and they all knew it, a possibility none of them had planned for. Which was bad, especially because his grandpa had even warned him in the past about the dangers of tying something as powerful as time travel to a small item that was so easy to lose.
Before his mind could produce any more outlandish scenarios, Samantha hung up the phone and turned to him, staring at him in the eye. She was dead serious when she spoke.
“I know what happened.” She said. “The Quadrangle told me, believe it or not.”
Lloyd chuckled dryly. “The building talks to you now? It never talked to me back in the day.”
“It never did before.” She replied dismissively. “That’s not the point. I know what happened. I know who has the Hazegem; and he’s coming for us now.”
She unlocked her phone and showed them what was on the screen. It was a map of the area, with three important locations marked with colored dots and tags. One of them, at the edge of the screen, was the CARF. Another, to the top, was the Quadrangle. The last one was their current location. Between them and the CARF, closer to the CARF but moving rapidly, was a red dot – the color usually reserved for hostiles.
“PsyOps.” They said in unison.
“Yes.” Samantha nodded. “The Quadrangle used its satellite access to track his location after he mysteriously appeared on the rooftop of the CARF amidst a vortex of stray time-attuned mana. It’s been tracking his movement since.”
“Well,” Lloyd sighed. “I guess we know who has the gem now.”
“He must have stolen it in a temporary future timeline. Which means that our mission failed.” Albert said.
“It doesn’t matter now. He’s coming here to kill us, and we need to be ready.”
“We will,” Said Lloyd with a grin. “We will. Follow me.”
There was no way to know how long the time jump had been, but if what the Quadrangle said was correct, it had been the full 11 hours. At the current pace, PsyOps was going to get to their house in less than a hour, flying at great speed across half a state to get to them, which meant that there was no danger of yet another time jump. There was a storm forming right on his path too, which was bound to slow him down a little, but it was unclear by how much.
None of this seemed to bother Grandpa, who walked briskly towards a little door in the back of his house while dangling and playing with a set of keys neither Albert nor Samantha had ever seen before. He unlocked the unassuming door and invited them in, to a dark staircase leading to the basement.
He turned on the light as soon as he was done descending the stairs. Samantha’s eyes grew wide, and her expression concerned. For a moment, a hint of a frown made even more line appear on her face before it turned into a thin shadow of a smile. Surely she liked what she was seeing more than she let on.
“What the fuck is all this? Dad, where did you get all this stuff from?”
There was a whole arsenal of weapons from the late eighties and early nineties amassed in crates and stored haphazardly on top of crooked wooden tables. The ground beneath them was dusty and full of spiderwebs and wood clippings, but the weapons were all clean and well maintained. Among the various pieces of ordnance Albert recognized there were also other things he clearly did not recognize, but which Samantha remembered being prototypes developed at the Quadrangle during the years her dad was in command.
Lloyd smirked. “I might have taken a bigger severance than I officially declared. No biggie. Ah, there ought to be some sort of mental dampeners we can wear too. Let me get to them.”
Samantha rolled her eyes. It was definitely a biggie but she couldn’t deny that it did work in their favor. Besides, she had her doubts she would still be in her position of power within the military for long after this all blew over, assuming it even could blow over with her still alive and not dead and buried under the rubble of this very house.
“Shit. No mental dampeners.” Lloyd complained. “We’ll have to shock and awe, bois.”
“No shock and awe, dad. We need to get Albert to safety, that’s all that matters.”
The old man chuckled. “Why? Walls are reinforced, weapons are loaded. We are impenetrable.”
“I wouldn’t say impenetrable. You have no idea what PsyOps is capable of. Still…” Sam examined the weapons. “It’s the best we have. We might be able to keep PsyOps busy for a while, but we’ll never be more than a deterrent.”
“It’s okay either way. Even better, I can go all out without shame now that I know I’ll die.” Lloyd winked at her. “There’s an escape tunnel, leading straight to the sewers. Right there.”
Samantha turned to her son, and looked at him like he was her son for the first time today. She put her hands around his shoulder and squeezed.
“Albert, listen to me. You are the only one that matters, okay? Don’t mind us. You have your system, your… quests. You have time travel. You’ll figure out a way. But you can’t do that if you fall under his control, you hear me?”
Albert nodded. She was treating him like a little kid, and he should have hated it. He should have hated the condescending tone, and he would have, in the past. Not now. Because he could see that it was not condescending, it was worried. She was worried for him. Scared. And all she thought about, in the end, was him. He knew what was coming next.
“So, you get into the fucking tunnel, and you run, you hear me? You run and you don’t look back. Your system will cough up a quest to help you. I hope, at least.”
With the heavy lid leading to the tunnel open, she basically shoved him down the hatch without waiting for his response. He looked back and hugged her tight, and for a moment her eyes glinted in the faint light of the basement as if they were wet, but when Albert blinked she was already gone, and the lid was being closed shut behind him, not even letting him say goodbye.
As he descended the stairs, Albert wondered why the system had been so quiet during all of this. Why it had given him no quests, no hints, and no help whatsoever. Had it abandoned him? Or was he supposed to be ready to deal with the deranged man who wanted to kill him and his whole family after the measly ‘training’ the system’s daily quests had offered?
He pondered about what to do as he descended. There were no places he could teleport to, right now. Well, there was Elvenhome, but—
An explosion above ground almost sent him tumbling down the slippery steps of the ladder. He rushed down as fast as he could, hearing the muffled sounds of gunshots and another single explosion come from above, before total silence and the blood in his ears was once again all he could hear. As his mind adjusted, slowly new sounds began to make it to the forefront of his awareness, things like the dripping of water, or the vibration of the nearby metro trains running on their underground tracks not too far from here.
He thought he could even hear the traffic on the big road above his head as he stalked the tunnel leading… where? All he could see was a cylinder of cement and rusted metal, with a rivulet of water he couldn’t divine whether it came from the smaller pipes jutting out of walls or from behind. He had never bothered turning around, instead moving as fast as he could without full-on running in the first direction he saw after landing in the tunnel proper.
There were whole more minutes of silence. Then the shriek of metal, far away. Not a moment had passed without Albert thinking about what to do. He could teleport to Elvenhome, the idea sounding like the most reasonable thing to do every single time he repeated the thought process again and again.
Yet, no matter how many times he came to the same conclusion, never did he act on it. It was just not a good enough solution to his dilemma. What was he supposed to do then? What about his mother, what about Lloyd?
It was unacceptable.
The echo of footsteps.
Fuck it. Fuck everyone. Telling me to run and hide... I know mother only has the best intentions. But I’m not a little kid anymore, am I? I need to face danger, or I will never be able to stand on my feet. It’s time to grow some fucking balls.
Albert stopped walking and turned around. The echo of footsteps grew closer. PsyOps was on his tail. He had been feeling the psion probe whatever minds he could find and homing on him like he was a beacon in the night.
Albert knew he could not outrun him. He could not hide from him. And he only had a limited window of time once the psion caught up to him to act before his mind defenses crumbled. The skill that protected him was still at a low level. But he had cards to play. He could win. He did win once, after all. Although he knew that he had also lost. Once, at the very least, maybe more times in more timelines.
Now it was time to finally settle the score.
