It's. Technically. May. So I win. Ish. Finals fucked me and this one took forever. But it's summer now, so we should be good. If you think this entry was worth the wait, please consider becoming a patron. There are numerous benefits, including deleted content, information from my personal notes, and the right to have me critique your story, or write one for you according to your specifications.
Ryan scanned the theater to see who
else had been eliminated. All four
members of Ours is the Glory were still there.
Sad Cake Binge Gaming was still there, except for the Lyfe Jay had
killed earlier. Phoenix was missing its
Clypeus. All of We Rise as One and Dying
Gravity were gone.
Ryan thought about going back into
virtual reality to watch the rest of the match, but there was something the
lobby had that virtual reality didn’t: food.
Ryan had left his plate of pastries on the table down there, and he
needed to get back down to them before anything happened to them. He couldn’t let those go to waste. He left the theater and headed for the lobby. As he walked, he pulled his phone out of his
pocket and pulled up a stream of the Battle Royale match.
Breach-bot’s technology allowed a
more cinematic streaming experience than you could get from any other game. Ryan held his phone’s microphone up to his
mouth. “What’s going on with Unbroken,” he
asked. He held his phone up as he walked
downstairs. The screen showed him a
beautiful view of the fight. Breach-bot
was framing the shot for him. Breach-bot
piloted the camera anytime anyone streamed Breach. He was a talented little director and showed
every viewer a different version of the broadcast, depending on what he
expected them to like.
Even though it had been a few
minutes, he chose to start Ryan’s playback at the moment he had died. Breach-bot’s frame showed silhouettes of the
remaining members of Unbroken, in stark shadow from the bright light of the
fireball that had claimed Ryan and Joss’s lives.
//////////
Like everything Jayden saw through
Dash’s eyes, the explosion happened in slow motion. First, thin streaks of fire shot like bottle
rockets over the wall Avaggdon had made.
A cloud of dark gray smoke billowed up after them. A fraction of a second later, the cloud
ignited into a fireball.
“Fuck,” Sophia said, slowly. Not really.
Really Jayden was hearing her more quickly. Dash’s perception of time was different from
everyone else’s. To everyone else, he
was fast, but to him, it was everyone else who was slow. Every second felt like ten to him, allowing
him to run, dodge, shoot and think faster than anyone else could ever hope
to. Sophia’s voice was deep, and she
seemed to take ten seconds to say that single word, yet Jayden had no trouble
understanding her, and so long as he was in Dash’s body, it was easy to match
the speed of her speech himself, ensuring that he’d sound natural to her.
“We need to retreat,” Jayden said.
Before turning to run away, Mitch
tossed a bomb at the wall. It fell at
the wall’s foot. Mitch held onto the
detonator as he ran. In the likely event
that Reigning Fire lowered the wall to pursue them, they’d get a nasty surprise. Hopefully, Mitch’s three remaining bombs
would be enough to destroy the dam.
Sophia gave herself a speed boost. She was the slowest of the three, even after
having her speed increased. The other
two had to slow down to avoid leaving her behind. Jayden looked over his shoulder. Ichaboth had flown over the wall and was
chasing them. Behind them, the wall
lowered. Ichaboth blocked Jayden’s view
of the other two members of Reigning Fire, but when Mitch detonated his bomb,
their monstrous slow-motion shrieks proved it had managed to harm them. The shockwave even damaged Ichaboth as it
impacted him, blowing him forward.
Jayden could capitalize on that.
He pulled out his mini-flamethrower and ran up to Ichaboth.
As he approached, Ichaboth reshaped itself
to try to envelop him, yet it did so with a listlessness that made it easy to
avoid. Jayden fired his flamethrower
into the monster and dashed away from it before it could retaliate.
He ran with his team for several
seconds, then dashed back to the Ichaboth, and shot it again. The monster retreated. Jayden could have pursued it, but it would
have made it back to its team before Jayden could kill it. The monster ran back to his teammates. Huel-drark wasn’t among them. He probably hadn’t split off from the rest of
the team as part of some stratagem, so there was a good chance Reigning Fire
was down a teammate. Had Ryan managed to
take Joss down with him? If that turned
out to be the case, Jayden needed to buy Ryan a drink or something for managing
that. Once you were down a teammate, you
weren’t likely to win a Battle Royale match.
Of course, that applied to them too,
but if they could destroy the dam, that wouldn’t matter.
Unbroken ran until they were sure
Reigning Fire wasn’t following them, and then stopped. “So that was a bust,” Sophia said. “Where do we go from here?”
“Not much has changed,” Jayden
said. “If anything, stealth has gotten
easier for us. We’re headed for the
dam. Hopefully we can get to the top of
it without Ryan.”
“I’m not sure we should be headed
toward an obvious landmark,” Mitch said.
“Other teams may have had this same idea.”
“All the more reason not to waste
any time getting there,” Jayden said.
“We can’t let another team destroy the dam before us.”
//////////
“Not much has changed,” Jay
said. “If anything, stealth has gotten
easier for us.” That statement made Ryan
realize that knowing they were safe was enough, and there was no need to
continue watching. He turned off his stream
as he entered the ballroom. A dozen
television screens scattered around the room, each with a group gathered in
front of it, showed footage of the match.
Before doing anything else, Ryan walked over to the couches where his
team had had their strategy discussion.
His pastries were still there. He
grabbed them and shoved one into his mouth.
Each of the twelve TV screens had a
smaller screen above it that indicated which version of the stream that screen
showed. Breach-bot normally made a
custom stream for every viewer. Most of
the time, someone would watch a stream on their own phone or computer. When that happened, Breach-bot would use the
information on those devices to figure out what content would most interest
them, and how they would most enjoy having it shown to them. At a party like this, though, people wanted to
watch the game together, which meant they had to be looking at the same
stream. Because there needed to be multiple
screens regardless, having different version of the stream on each TV was a
compromise. Each stream was set up to
conform to a different set of tastes. There
was one set up for fans of each of the remaining teams. Epidemic’s was in the corner. Three middle-aged couples watched that screen
intently, along with a handful of other fans.
Unbroken’s screen was next to it.
It had a few fans in front of it.
One of them was cosplaying as Dash.
No doubt it would be a pleasant surprise for them if Ryan were to stop
by. Ryan started to go over there, but he
stopped in the middle of the room. He
should go get some punch first.
Sad Cake Binge Gaming had a large
crowd in front of their screen, though they were paying less attention to the
stream than they were to the eliminated Lyfe, who was mingling with his
fans. Pheonix’s screen had a lot of
people in front of it, including two members of We Rise as One. The screens for Ours is the Glory and
Reigning Fire were on opposite sides of the hall. Ryan was pretty sure Ours is the Glory’s
screen was a bit bigger than the others, and Reigning Fire’s was a bit smaller. Luciana Turner, the CEO of Thunderware, and
her husband, were watching the Ours is the Glory stream.
The other streams were organized
around interests other than specific teams.
Two screens were dedicated to the General
stream, the one Breach-bot constructed to be viewed by default, without making
any assumptions about the viewer. Another
pair of screens was dedicated to the Cinematic
stream. This one was like the General
stream, except in Cinematic,
Breach-bot was instructed to sacrifice realism for entertainment. He could alter the lighting in an area, speed
up and slow down the action, and alter the order of events, all with the aim of
making the stream more entertaining. He
would also replace the player’s in-game chat with dialog fitting the personas
of the characters they were playing.
Many people found the existence of Cinematic
mode abhorrent, but the crowds in front of those two screens testified to the
stream’s popularity.
For those who couldn’t stand the
thought that what they were watching was anything less than the pure, unaltered
truthful light of truthfulness, Realistic
used non-cinematic filmmaking, wider, blander shots, no color alteration, and
minimal cutting. Only one screen showed
this version. Three people were watching
it.
Ryan headed toward the less crowded
of the two Cinematic screens, punch
and pastries in hand. There were two
couches in front of this screen, both full.
In front of that, there were some beanbags. Ryan plopped down onto one of those.
On the stream, the three remaining
members of Phoenix were fighting Epidemic.
Ryan bit a pastry open and squeezed its chocolate filling into his mouth. The screen showed a close-up of Phoenix’s
team captain, playing as Tharthan Azotum, a twelve-foot muscular tank of a
humanoid who wore intricate white armor and wielded a glowing white Warhammer
large enough that even he had to hold it two-handed. His teammate, a Canticum, sang behind him, empowering
him with her magic song. Tharthan
charged at Epidemic’s Mog’Inub, his hammer in the air. Behind him, his other teammate, Terraemotus,
who could manipulate the ground like Avaggdon could, stomped, causing the
ground below Tharthan to shoot upward and launch him into the air. He flew forward pulling his hammer back for a
strike. He landed on Mog’Inub and slammed
his hammer into one of her countless eyes. He dropped to his knees and grabbed the
now-blinded eye’s lower lid. He was
right to do so. Mog’Inub began to shake,
and rock from side to side, trying to force its foe off its body, but the
monster was less mobile than he was strong, and he maintained his grip. Terraemotus tried to summon forth spikes of
earth to pierce the monster, but Epidemic’s Avaggdon was plugged into the
ground, and held it in place. Ichaboth
rushed toward Tharthan and settled on top of him. Breach-bot cut to a tight shot of Tarthan’s
face, smirking. He pulled out a
cleansing light and crushed it. The
explosion of light summoned shrieks from both Gray Fungi, causing Ichaboth to
shrink to a fraction of its former size, and making Mog’Inub fall limp. In a panic, Ichaboth expanded, which, because
he was a cloud caused him to rocket upward.
The camera shifted between Terraemotus
and Avaggdon as they abandoned their psychic battle over the ground. Aveb-heth, Epidemic’s support character, fled
into the woods. Terraemotus summoned a
wall to stop Aveb-heth from escaping, while Tharthan Azotum charged Avaggdon as
it slowly waddled away. He smashed his
hammer into the monster. A huge chunk of
the soft creature’s flesh was ripped away.
Canticum, while continuing to sing, charged at Aveb-heth and grabbed her
by the neck. The monster squealed and
kicked as Canticum spun around and tossed her into the wall. Tharthan took another swipe at Avaggdon, but
the monster jumped out of the way, only to be impaled by an unexpected spike
from Terraemotus. The spike pinned it in
place, and before Avaggdon could plant itself to remove it, Tharthan smashed it
to pieces.
Tharthan dashed over to the wall,
where Aveb-heth had just stood up. She
ran to the left, but Tharthan caught up to her in a single stride and grabbed
her, throwing her against the wall. He
leapt forward and smashed her head in.
It splattered, spraying the area with infectious fungal juices. Terraemotus lowered his wall, and Phoenix
looked around for Ichaboth. He was
nowhere to be seen.
Breach-bot cut to Ours is the
Glory. They were in a cabin. Max’s Ocillo stood in front of a brown
leather couch. Armigeri stood beside
him. Their Terraemotus was behind the
couch, connected to the ground via a hole he’d torn in the flooring. Nullum was outside, visible through a large window
that reminded Ryan of the glass walls of Max’s mansion. On the floor, a Terran Navy Admiral, was tied
up and gagged with dark blue, glowing rope.
Was that the Admiral from the mission briefing? The cabin was wrecked from a fight. The remains all four members of Dying Gravity
were scattered around the room. That
team’s Lyfe was impaled on Max’s sword.
Max was speaking. Perhaps he was really talking about something
else, but dialogue Breach-bot assigned him for the purposes of Cinematic mode revealed that Ours is the
Glory had been sent to capture the same man Ryan’s team had been sent to kill. It seemed they had actually bothered to do so. They intended to take their prisoner to a
rallying point near the dam, where they expected an Iron Star ship to be ready
to pick him up.
Outside, Nullum snorted like a bull
and looked around. The rest of Ours is
the Glory abandoned their conversation and looked out the window at him. Something startled Nullum, and he leapt
backward, his long, reptilian tail crashing into the window and shattering
it. He was staring at something in the
distance, but the others couldn’t see what.
Max walked toward him. “Easy,
boy,” he said, holding out his hand.
Armigeri left the cabin through the front door. Nullum screeched and bucked backward. “Eas—” Max began. Nullum turned around and jumped into the
cabin through the broken window. Max dodged
to his left, toward the front door, and Terraemotus dodged to the right, toward
the back of the cabin. The camera panned
to reveal the cause of this disturbance.
In the distance, Spukee’s maggot-infested raven. Nullum stampeded through the room and crashed
through the opposite wall, blowing a massive hole into it. As he ran into the distance, the building
creaked, and before Max and Terraemotus could stand, the building fell on top
of them, not killing them, but trapping them under the rubble. Outside, as Armigeri ran away from the raven,
Sord appeared behind him and stabbed him in the neck. This broke the fear debuff, but right as
Armigeri turned around to retaliate, a hole opened underneath him and he fell
in. Sord flew off, and Spukee flew into
the hole. Spukee wasn’t normally worth
much in combat, but if he was alone with a single victim, out of sight of
everyone else, he received a buff that made him much more powerful.
A circular wall of earth shot up
from the ground around the buried Terraemotus and flew outward, forcing the rubble
away from him. This worked, until a wall
of force appeared in the path of one part of the wall of earth reflecting it
and the rubble it was carrying. The rock
and rubble hurdled toward the still-buried Terraemotus, striking the creature,
damaging it heavily, and launching it into the air.
Spukee’s fear effect lost its grip
on Nullum, and the beast turned around and charged toward the rubble of the
fallen cabin. When it reached it, it lit
it on fire. That wouldn’t harm Max,
because members of the Legion of the Iron Star were immune to fire, but it
might help clear the rubble. The beast
then turned its attention skyward, in search of a Pickcei to assault with its
fire breath.
Terraemotus lumbered to its feet and
also headed toward the rubble. There was
a close-up shot of Max struggling beneath it, and then another close-up on a
small section of the rubble moving to betray his location. Terraemotus summoned a pillar from the ground
at that spot. Max was lifted into the
air, along with the small portion of the rubble that happened to be right on
top of him. Some of that fell away, but
he was still trapped under what remained.
Sord appeared near the pillar, on the opposite side from Nullum. Terraemotus made a spike shoot out at Sord
from the pillar, but the creature ducked below it. Nullum charged the other side of the pillar,
managing to knock some rubble off the pile.
Sord darted out of the way of that too.
Nullum stepped back a few paces, preparing another charge. Spukee emerged from Armigeri’s hole, cackling
and holding the creature’s helmet. He
flew toward Nullum.
“Nullum, close your eyes!” Terraemotus
shouted. Both Nullum and Terraemotus did
so. Spukee summoned another raven, but
neither of them saw it and it faded away after a few seconds. While Terraemotus’ vision was obscured, Sord teleported
away from the pillar and appeared above him, then stabbed him through the top
of his head. By the speed of his
reaction, that must have been what Terraemotus was expecting. He reached up, grabbed Sord, and broke the
Pickcei over his knee. The fairy went
limp. Terraemotus tossed his remains
aside.
With one final heave, Max forced the
last of the debris off himself. He stood
and looked around, drawing his sword. He
saw Nullum below him. “Hold on, boy,” he
said. He jumped onto the beast, settling
in his saddle and riding away from the rubble.
He rode his steed around the clearing, keeping his eyes skyward. He hadn’t found anything by the time Terraemotus
made it back to where they’d been.
“Brother, I think they have
escaped,” Terraemotus said.
“I don’t want to give up yet,” Max
said. He searched the clearing for a few
minutes more, before letting out a cry of frustration. He rode Nullum back over to Terraemotus, and
conceded the fact that the Pickceiz were, indeed, gone, then lamented that
their mission to capture the Admiral had been thwarted. He had, of course, not survived the collapse
of the building he was in. They had a
fresh conversation about what to do. The
subject of the dam came up. Apparently, Unbroken
hadn’t been the only ones to speculate that it could be destroyed. “It would be an impressive thing to
accomplish,” Terraemotus said.
“Reason enough by itself to do it,” Max
said. He dismounted Nullum and allowed
Terraemotus to mount him. Having the
slower Terraemotus ride Nullum would allow them to make better time.
The camera cut to the fleeing Cloun
and Spukee. They were both badly hurt. They’d lost their Lyfe during their encounter
with We Rise as One and Unbroken, and so neither of them had healed since that
first match. They knew they wouldn’t be
around much longer. Their conversation
was about how to go out on a suitably amusing note.
“We haven’t done anything to the
Gray Fungi, yet,” Spukee said. “They’re
easy to find, what with the trail of mushrooms they leave everywhere.”
“Yeah, and they’re pretty powerful,”
Cloun said. “It’d be awesome to take
them down a peg.”
“Definitely. Let’s do it.”
//////////
Unbroken was now close enough to the
dam that it seemed to loom over them.
Jayden couldn’t see any way of making ingress, but it was the dead of
night now, and the dam was still far away.
Besides, there had to be some way in.
Near the top of the dam, evenly spaced from end to end, were artificial
waterfalls flowing down the dam’s surface and into a pond at the base of the
structure. There was a one in a million
chance those waterfalls were just decorative, but far more likely, their
passage through the dam was being used for hydroelectric power. If the machinery to do that was in the dam,
there would have to be a way inside so it could be maintained. Considering the waterfalls were near the top
of the dam, that way in probably was as well, meaning that what they were
really looking for was an elevator.
Accordingly, Jayden was leading his team to the far east side of the
dam, which he calculated was the most likely place for such an elevator to
be. The west side would have been
equally valid but was farther away.
Jayden smelled something. He stopped walking. Crap. “Spores!”
he said. The rest of the team stopped as
well. An Ichaboth emerged from the trees
to their right and flew toward Unbroken.
They activated their masks. Jayden pulled out his flamethrower and ran
toward the monster.
“Has Reigning Fire been following us
this whole time?” Sophia asked. It would
be a strange thing for them to do. Jayden
blasted the monster with his flamethrower as soon as he reached it, then dodged
back to avoid a counterattack.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Jayden
said. “Maybe this is the other
Ichaboth?”
“Epidemic’s?” Sophia said. “Their Mog’Inub isn’t around.”
“Maybe it was killed.” It would make sense for Ichaboth to be the
only Gray Fungus to escape a lost battle.
This Ichaboth didn’t retreat from Jayden’s
hit and run tactic like the other one had.
On the contrary, it was barreling toward the rest of Unbroken. Mitch tossed a red disk onto the ground and
it unfolded into a flame-throwing turret.
He used his jetpack to jump onto a nearby tree. Sophia stayed near the turret, and Jayden
retreated to her side. No other Gray
Fungi seemed forthcoming, so grouping together to tempt the Ichaboth into braving
the turret’s damage was worthwhile. It
wouldn’t have any way of knowing about their masks, so it probably thought it
would have a significant chance of infecting them and gaining itself a crop of
new allies. The turret fired on the
Ichaboth as it enveloped them. The
creature’s shriek was horrible, and it was hard for Jayden to suppress the
instinct to cover his ears. They weren’t
taking hit-point damage, so the monster must have been trying to infect
them. Sophia tossed a damage-boosting
buff at Jayden, who turned on his flamethrower and ran outside the Ichaboth. He fired on it, his flames glowing blue with
the power of Sophia’s magic. Ichaboth
shifted to envelop him. Jayden ran laps
around the monster, just barely avoiding its edge. The whole time, the flame-throwing turret ate
it from the inside.
It was shrinking. Soon, it realized that possibly infecting
Sophia wasn’t worth taking more damage from the turret and it flew toward Mitch.
Mitch flew away from the monster,
boosting himself toward another tree with his jetpack. Ichaboth followed him and enveloped him. Mitch launched himself up to a higher branch,
but he was followed and re-enveloped. The
Ichaboth’s maneuverability surpassed his.
Jayden dashed toward the two.
Sophia followed but couldn’t keep up with them. Jayden reached Mitch and Ichaboth in seconds.
Moving fast enough that his presence
might not be noticed before he could get a hit off, he ran to the tree Mitch
was flying toward. He didn’t climb as
fast as he ran, but he still reached the branch before Mitch did. Mitch landed next to him, and Jayden shot at
the approaching Ichaboth. The creature screeched
and recoiled. He leapt after the creature
and blasted it as he fell to the ground.
Mitch followed him down. Sophia
caught up to them and threw a speed buff at Mitch. She missed.
Ichaboth swerved downward,
enveloping Sophia. Jayden dashed over
and blasted it. The monster was small
enough now that he couldn’t hit it without harming Sophia, but that was an
acceptable loss. The creature didn’t
flee. There wasn’t much of it left to
flee. As it shrunk, it moved upward to
envelop Sophia’s head. Jayden blasted her
in the face to get at it, causing her to reel backward and fall on her back. “Fuck!” she shouted. The creature wasn’t even able to follow her
down before the last puff of it was incinerated.
Sophia took deep breaths. She stood up.
“One percent,” she said.
“Fuck,” Jayden said.
Sophia took a deep breath. “It’s alright. Potion.”
She used her anti-infection potion and was restored to normal. For now.
If they encountered Reigning Fire again later, her not having that
potion would hurt them a lot. Hopefully,
though, their plan with the dam would work, and that wouldn’t be an issue. Sophia got everyone healed up, and they resumed
their march.
//////////
The remainder of Sad Cake Binge
Gaming had an easy time locating Reigning Fire.
The fungi left a gray scar in their wake. Finding them was as simple as flying high
into the air and looking around for that scar.
They found it at once. Actually,
they found two such scars, but one ended with a dead Mog’Inub, so they knew
they wanted the other one. The
Mog’Inubless scar outlined a straight-forward path from a spot near the center
of the valley to a spot near the dam.
The Pickceiz flew to the end near the dam, and there Reigning Fire was. Xig’zah hopped from tree to tree, Avaggdon
lumbered along the ground, and Ichaboth flew above them, keeping an eye on
their surroundings.
“Where the hell is Huel-drark?” Spukee
asked.
“He must have gotten offed,” Cloun
said.
“That sucks.”
“Maybe it doesn’t suck that much. Without his cannon, Ichaboth is the only one
who can hurt us while we’re up here.”
“Dude, we’re like, super injured. We’ll die to a second of Ichaboth exposure.”
“Oh, right. Crap. Who do you think offed him?”
“Oh, right. Crap. Who do you think offed him?”
“Doesn’t matter now. Could have been anyone. The better question is: How do we prank these
clowns?” All three of the remaining
characters had trivial ways of escaping a pit, and none of them could shoot
projectiles, so Cloun’s reflective wall would be useless.
“That’s a hard one,” Cloun
said. “I think your raven is the only
thing they’ll be vulnerable to. Maybe we
can set up some kind of hazard to scare them into?”
“That could work. I’m not sure how we would set one up,
though. Maybe there’s something
hazardous around here we could take advantage of? Like that pit with the tentacles?”
Cloun nodded. “Yeah, like the pit. Maybe we’ll even be able to find it
again. Split up and search?”
“Sure. Meet back at this exact spot.”
They explored the area. There was a pond back toward the center of
the valley, which Reigning Fire had already passed. In not-quite the same direction, there was a
hill with a small cave in it. Breach-bot
showed Spukee exploring the cave. He saw
something inside, and Breach-bot cut to a close-up of his face, lit up with
glee. He rushed back to their appointed
meeting place. Cloun showed up a few
minutes later. The camera cut to a wider
shot as Spukee explained what he’d found in the cave, then cut back to the
tighter shot as Cloun sprung up higher into the air, chuckling joyfully. The two agreed that they’d found their hazard. Cloun zipped back over to the cave while
Spukee zipped down toward Reigning Fire, deliberately attracting Ichaboth’s
notice as he flew through the tree line.
The creature fell for it. it
followed Spukee below the tree-line, joining both of its allies, ensuring all
three of them could see the raven Spukee summoned. They did.
They fled from it, directly toward the cave.
Their
vastly different speeds forced them to split up. Xig’zah sped through the forest, effortlessly
hopping from tree to tree. Ichaboth lagged
behind him. As the cloud moved, he
expanded and rocketed into the air. Avaggdon
waddled far behind the two of them. It
was only seconds before the Xig’zah was twice as far from the raven as he
was. Several seconds later, the spider
was in sight of the cave. Cloun, who was
sitting on a nearby tree, waved at Xig’zah as it passed. Xig’zah was just outside the mouth of the
cave when the raven’s effect wore off. The
spider turned around and charged toward Cloun.
The Pickcei darted into the air and pulled an air-horn out of his
jacket. HONK! Xig’zah probably
realized something was going on, but he didn’t abandon his pursuit of Cloun.
The ground shook. Out of the cave charged a monster with dark
green fur. The thing looked like a giant
green bear, with dagger-long claws and snaggled teeth. It rushed at Xig’zah as Cloun flew into the
air to join Spukee, laughing.
Ichaboth condensed and rushed toward
Xig’zah. Both of them, in turn, rushed
toward Avaggdon, who lumbered toward the rest of his team. As soon as they were close enough, Avaggdon
plugged into the ground and raised a wall of earth between them and the monster. The animal bashed into the wall. It didn’t even shake. The beast tried again, and again, but it
couldn’t break the wall.
Had it been a little smarter, it
might have thought to go around the wall.
Given how thick the wall was, it probably wouldn’t have to go far. Avaggdon and Terraemotus could only displace
a certain volume of earth. Once it
became clear that the monster wasn’t coming for them, Reigning Fire allowed
themselves to catch their breaths.
“Rats,” Spukee said. “Is there any way of salvaging this one?”
“I’m not sure. Not without getting rid of that wall. Should we lead the critter somewhere else?”
“Where? I don’t think any of the other teams are
close enough for that.”
“Rats.”
Avaggdon spun, and two sharp, thin
stone pillars shot up from the ground.
Cloun, who had been facing Reigning Fire and so had seen Avaggdon spin,
dodged to the left. Spukee was impaled. He went limp.
Cloun dashed away. “Crap! Crap! Crap!
Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!” Ichaboth flew
upward and barreled toward Cloun. Spikes
were shooting up all around the fairy.
One shot up just to his left.
Another right behind him. Another
rose directly in front of him, and he crashed into it. Ichaboth was on him by the time he pulled
himself away from the pillar, and it only took a second of exposure to the
monster’s damaging vapors to end him.
The camera followed his drained husk
as it fell. It landed in a tree, startling
a flock of birds. There was a fit of
booing from the crowd in front of Sad Cake Binge Gaming’s screen as it switched
to displaying the general broadcast.
Ryan ate his last pastry as the camera panned back to Reigning Fire and
began to follow them as they moved through the forest, on their way to the dam.
//////////
Unbroken reached the dam before
anyone else. There was an elevator
upward, just as Jayden had hoped. The
mechanism was simple: a platform attached to a metal pole. The platform was at the top, barely visible
in the distance, when they arrived. The
mechanism to summon it had been disabled, perhaps by evacuating civilians, but
it was a simple matter for Mitch to hack the device and re-enable it. In the distance, the platform descended. “And we’re sure there is going to be a way to
burst it open?” Mitch asked.
“Not completely,” Jayden said, “but
even if Breach-bot didn’t build a way in deliberately, some well-placed
explosives might manage it. If we make
any hole at all, the valley floods, and most of the other players die.”
“Everyone who can’t fly,” Sophia
said. “That just leaves Pickceiz and
Ichaboths.”
Barring the ones he’d encountered,
Jayden had no way of knowing which players were left and which ones had been
eliminated, but presuming it was only flyers who had survived, the only
remaining threats would be Sad Cake Binge Gaming, who’d lost their healer,
Reigning Fire’s Ichaboth, who wasn’t much of a threat on his own, and Dying
Gravity.
The platform reached the bottom of
the valley. Unbroken stepped onto it,
and Mitch activated it again. It
rose. Jayden looked out over the misty,
moonlit forest. Not too far from the dam
were the remains of a collapsed wooden structure. Had there been a battle around there, or had
that been that way when Breach-bot created the map? If the former was true, at least one other
team was close to the dam. A bit
further, Mog’Inub’s L-shaped body was lying on its side in a clearing.
Jayden caught some motion in the
corner of his eye. He looked down. In the moonlight, he could just see something
like a patch of mist moving toward the dam.
Was it an Ichaboth, or just a random patch of haze? He pointed it out to the others. “Is that Ichaboth?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Sophia said.
They watched it for half a minute,
but still weren’t sure what it was. “If
it is Ichaboth,” Jayden said, “we’ll just have to work fast once we’re up
there. Once we find the entrance, I’ll
go in alone and search for a place to plant the bomb. You guys stay outside and keep watch. Call if you need me.” He turned to Mitch. “Once I find a place to plant the bombs, I’ll
come back out and lead you right to it.
Once the bomb is planted, we’ll run to the valley wall.”
By the time they reached the top of
the dam, they could no longer make out the suspicious patch of mist. They found an entrance hatch right away, and
Jayden climbed inside.
Normally, splitting up was a
terrible idea, but Dash would be able to get back to his teammates in no time
if they alerted him. That same speed
allowed him to survey the dam’s interior quickly. He already had a likely weakness in
mind. He went straight to the mouth of
the nearest artificial waterfall. There,
he found a facility filled with hydroelectric generators collecting power from
the passing water. They were large,
impressive machines, rusty like Zap’s plating.
“I found a generator room by the nearest waterfall,” Jayden said. He darted around the room, looking either for
something that would amplify an explosion, or an obvious structural
vulnerability. He found neither.
But there would be one below. The generator was in this room, but the water
itself flowed through pipes underneath it.
If the explosives could be placed in such a way that a pipe would burst,
the water would escape into the rest of the dam, and the dam would probably
fail.
There had been a ladder outside the
generator room. As Jayden had hoped, it
led him to a round, bulging wall. Jayden
put his ear up to it. Water was flowing
on the other side. “Mitch, come down
here,” Jayden said. He did. Mitch had three bombs left. He planted all of them, setting them up so
that he could detonate them remotely.
“Guys, hurry up,” Sophia said. “Ichaboth is at the bottom of the dam.”
“We’ve got the bombs planted,”
Jayden said. “We’re coming right
up.” By the time they were up, the
elevator platform was moving down.
Should they destroy it? They
should have done it earlier. If they did
so now, it would doubtless alert Reigning Fire to their presence. Maybe that wasn’t a problem, though. Ichaboth was the only one who could get up
here without it, and he couldn’t take all three of them on at once. “Mitch, toss a grenade on the elevator.” He walked up to the edge where the dam
overlooked it, and gently tossed a frag grenade onto it. The grenade clattered as it fell onto the
elevator. The explosion tore the
platform off of the rail it had been clinging to and sent it plummeting to the
valley floor. Unbroken walked off the
dam and onto the cliff that overlooked the valley. They wanted to get as far away as they
could. If water rushed through the gap
where the dam was now, it could erode the land nearby. Ichaboth emerged over the edge of the cliff
but retreated as soon as it saw them.
Once they had been running for
several minutes, Jayden gave the order to blow the dam. Mitch pressed the little green button on his
detonator. A fireball burst out from the
dam, ripping a hole in it. Water gushed
through that hole like it was emerging from a faucet. As it did, the force of the flowing water
ripped the hole open wider, allowing more water to flow into the valley.
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