Collide Gamer

“Blast it.”

Scarlett pointed her palm at the gestation pod. Electrical currents and mana flowed down a path of runes and circuity, finding its venting point in the crystal pane integrated into the centre of her hand. A beam of electric might ignited the air, leaving an incandescent streak. The finely calibrated sense-extensions of her visor’s oculars compensated for the spike in brightness before it occurred, synchronized flawlessly with the systems of her limbs.

The skin of the bubble seared. Water was turned into steam, then began to leak from the gap. The opening shot of the technomancer was immediately followed by a devastating charge by Lyndell.

Measurement tools in her field of view first read the sudden and inexplicable drop of magical activity. It was the warning signal every time Lyndell utilized her own runes. Neither she nor Hailey yet understood how the primordial Lorylim created mana vacuums at will nor did replicating the symbols she created yield the same kind of result. Esotericism like this was confusing.

Whereas humans created their magic by sending mana forwards, Lyndell created hers by making her own mana collapse into empty patterns. Mechanically, it was the difference between making water move by pressurizing a tank versus depressurizing the area it was desired to flow into. The outcome was the same in most cases.

Anchors of thorned roots kept Lyndell upright as outstretched hands gave way to a red stream of heat and destruction. The hole that Scarlett had punched into the membrane ripped open all the way, the skin of the bubble peeling back as it was dried to a crisp in an instant. Water turned to steam, obscuring the view.

Warning signals blared in Scarlett’s interface. Her claws spiked in heat, before slicing through three projectiles of water. Then, Abzu himself appeared from the cloud. The maw of the dragon was wide open. He was truly small for a creature of his kind, yet still twice as large as a grown horse. His maw, filled with human hands and curved teeth, could easily snap her in half.

Scarlett bent unnaturally on the rotating joint of her right leg. The god of order flew past her, a serpentine creature of claws and scales. The technomancer pulled her left leg up with all the force her crafted limb could muster.

Electricity arced around the leg as it broke the sound barrier. Physics bent around magic, the forces of reality and esoteric empowerment intertwining and coming to an agreement on how the meeting of impossibly strong metal against impossibly strong scales could occur without causing the combustion of the air by pure friction.

Abzu’s serpentine form bent around the impact. For a brief second in time, the god was as if frozen, then he was launched towards the ceiling. Voltage strong enough to kill a man in a glimpse crackled in his path, the magic of the technomancer leaving its trail.

Freshwater flowed from within the veiny carpet of bodies, forming a cushion that the sandstone-coloured dragon landed against. For all of his apparent beauty, the god was broken. His head hung limply and his now open eyes were milky and empty. Languidly slow, he opened his maw, bellowing forth a cascade of water crystal clear and filled with filth.

Scarlett remained still, forcing her defensive protocols to remain inactive. Why exert her own stores when a second dragon was already shielding her with her body?

A wall of molten rock and obsidian, Nathalia turned the dragon breath into vapour against her heated scales. Forcefully cooled magma shattered and fell to the floor, when the hit dragoness leapt at Abzu.

Scarlett’s tail swished behind her as she walked. It was a new and enticing way to express her impatience, while her gait remained calm. Every footfall was a calculation, while two divine dragons clashed beneath the dome. The zombified incarnation of freshwater fought the animated cataclysm and the world quaked under their might. Original content can be found at NoveI-Fire.ɴet

Not so did she. A battle that would have been too fast for her to follow two weeks ago now was subject to active analysis. In this battle between gods, she made herself relevant through technology and the power of will. “Stop fucking hesitating.”

Lyndell did not avert her gaze from the fight. “I know I cannot harm her. I accepted and read the guild invitation.”

“Then why are you not intervening?”

“Why aren’t you?”

“I’m waiting for the correct time to strike.”

“It is now – strike it.”

Scarlett raised an eyebrow and pointed her hand at Abzu. Between curled claws, the rune within the crystal pane glowed and then fizzled. ‘What?!’ A spike of rage was immediately wrestled down by her pragmatic mind. She connected to the archives that she and John had carefully created regarding every piece of intel about ancient Akkad that they had managed to extract from Ehtra, Metra and Momo.

The file on Abzu was long, among the longest, filled to the brim with legends. Fallen husband to Tiamat, Abzu had been killed by the hands of two of his three oldest children, Enlil and Anu. This act of murder caused the first madness of the goddess of chaos, ending when Marduk, god of knowledge, bound her, leading to the creation of the Sumerian city states and the eventual rise of the Mesopotamian empires. Traumatized by the loss of her husband, Tiamat would go through periods of madness forevermore, crafting new children from her own flesh and even devouring the remnants of her husband in a fit of grief.

‘I do not need the history files,’ Scarlett cussed, scanning byte by byte through the text until she reached the part where they speculated on what powers the god of order may have had.

He who had died hundreds of years before even Metra was made had been said to have the power to order every fight like a river that flowed only one way.

“Only one of us can attack him at a time,” Scarlett hissed.

“It appears that way,” Lyndell agreed.

The ceiling finally gave. Dragons broke out into the open sky tumbling around each other as molten wings and membranes made of human skin beat. Scarlett and Lyndell chased immediately after, appearing atop the dome just in time to witness the intertwined dragons slam into the Great Lakes.

The water closed above them.

‘Nathalia knew him,’ Scarlett thought. Her files said nothing about that, but the redheaded goddess was, for every bit that she loved her, a braindead bimbo when it came to sharing matters of her past. ‘She’s stupid and arrogant, but she’s not so utterly incompetent she wouldn’t have stopped me if she thought we couldn’t deal with this.’

The lake beneath them smoothed over.

It was utterly incomprehensible to see a body of water this large stop in its entirety. What should have been rushing down the Niagara Falls became as motionless as a glaze. Where the dragons had disappeared beneath the surface, the water began to rise. In its heart, an orange glow began to manifest.

The collapse of a cavity bubble made the hill of water shrink. Ripples were frozen in magic. Scarlett’s oculars failed to penetrate the waters. Switching to heat vision painted a clearer picture, one of Abzu attempting to drown Nathalia at the bottom of the lake and of Nathalia pushing back.

Scarlett took a look at the building they stood on top of. Not her style of architecture, but the destruction of it was still a waste. A waste that was, now, unavoidable. “Anchor us.”

“As you desire,” Lyndell answered. Black roots shaped runes down her half-exposed calves. A deep purple glow and the benevolent pull of supportive gravity magic underlined her obedience.

Then, the earth shattered.

Untold tons of rock and debris were catapulted in the air by an explosion of water, gas and molten rock. The lakebed rose up from the sheer volume of Nathalia’s counterattack. Between two gods, there was no such thing as reasonability, only the raw clash of power against power. The Niagara Falls had one last hurrah, overrunning with magma, before the raw force of it all turned the cliff into a shattered slope.

New cliffs were created and swallowed up by magma as the volcano rose. Nathalia’s molten form, draconic and yet vaguely humanoid, sat at the heart of the caldera as it went higher and higher, a sea of bubbling lava surrounded by a rim of obsidian spires.

Above, Abzu stretched his wings, halting what had been a tumbling ascent. Steam was forcefully turned back into water, gathering in the sky like a second layer of the firmament. Red and black below, white and blue above, the dragons glared at each other from a distance.

Among all of this, Scarlett stood cross-armed on a flying shard of rooftop. The back talon of her left foot tapped alongside her heel. They were upside down, her and Lyndell, standing here in forced passivity.

Both dragons bore the marks of injury. Nathalia’s incandescence was diminished. More of her body was rock than was usual, the flowing streams of magma that connected her skeleton of obsidian flowing slower. Abzu had lost an arm and the right side of his head. Both had been replaced with black Lorylim matter, revealing the rot that gave the god new life in full.

‘If it can even be called life,’ Scarlett thought. Had it not been for the presence of his power, she would have doubted that this was anything more than a visual imitation. ‘Guess she spat out what she devoured and used it to craft him?’

“Can you shield us?” Lyndell asked.

“Yes,” Scarlett answered.

The mass of water in the sky fell.

After a cataclysmic eruption, what little remained of the original landscape was destroyed by a biblical flood. Magma and freshwater mixed, creating vast pockets of porous stone and steam. In this land of apocalypse, the two dragons met once more. Claws gouged out human flesh and magma, as teeth ripped away everything. The two creatures of legend mercilessly tore into each other.

Scarlett fuelled the mechanisms inside her shoulders and thighs, projecting a Mana Barrier just large enough that Lyndell could find purchase in it as well.

‘I cannot overcome the mental block to attack,’ Scarlett thought. There was a part of her that was seething at that fact. Her mind was her own and she refused to let it be controlled by anything, especially enemy magic. “No one controls a Thorne,” she stated. It had been a while since she had felt this cold and merciless. John had put warmth into her life. Battle took that out of her. She enjoyed it. It was a break from all of these codes of conduct and societal expectations and a return to the brutal truth of the universe.

Those that wielded their resources most effectively won. Everything beyond that fact was just the luxury the victor afforded to themselves or others.

“I have a way to temporarily avoid the effect. It only works for me,” Lyndell revealed.

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing,” Scarlett stated.

The two women exchanged a glance. Barrier and gravity magic were undone simultaneously and they leapt into the battle of gods below. One was a goddess of her own right, the other a human that kept pace.

In fact, once they made contact with the ground, Scarlett pulled ahead. Claws hammered on unstable stone, a staccato of metal and will. She swerved around explosive steam vents and pools of black water, crushed the skull of a half-formed Lorylim that had survived the repeated, apocalyptic spells, and then leapt into the fray between Abzu and Nathalia.

Had the zombie dragon been capable of it, perhaps he would have been surprised when Scarlett slammed her clawed palm against his face. There was no empowerment in the gesture, just the raw strength that the uniquely crafted limb had from being attached to the world’s strongest technomancer.

Scarlett had found the workaround for the god of order’s power – she just had to let her automatic response routines fight for her.

The slam was weak compared to what she could muster. It was strong enough to make a difference. Abzu’s momentum was slowed by the impact. Nathalia gripped him by the long neck. She twisted midair, stopping only for a moment to adjust her aim before hurling the enemy at the ground.

Where Lyndell waited.

The primordial Lorylim was a pillar at the centre of a seven-struck circle drawn by mycelium. Three-dimensional weaves accompanied the silent movements of her lips. Her eyes were half-closed, not focusing on the descending dragon until the very last moment.

An alien shockwave went through the Illusion Barrier, as if Nia had suddenly manifested among them. A disorienting pain behind Scarlett’s forehead accompanied the temporary numbness of her limbs. As quick as it came, it ebbed away, leaving behind only a gap in her magic senses. A void in the mana of the space that was suddenly and artfully filled.

A pillar of ice engulfed the god of order in an instant. So powerful was this frost that sound was chilled by it, the hissing of steam vents and raining of water coming to a stop for two whole seconds.

Nathalia flew by Scarlett, who held onto her superheated comrade. Her limbs and synthetic fibres withstood the heat of her presence and the technomancer swung herself on the back of the goddess of volcanoes while she dove at the frozen enemy.

Abzu’s body shattered into a hundred pieces. In that instant, Scarlett felt the restriction on her mind lift. Throwing both arms to the sides, she commanded the reinforced plates to snap up, revealing additional conduit crystals along the length of her forearms and lower legs. A myriad of voltaic lasers crackled outwards from the redhead, striking each shard of frozen god that her aiming protocol had marked.

Nathalia landed in a rain of Lorylim matter and melted ice. Scarlett jumped off her back and landed next to Lyndell. “Good job,” she told the gothic woman.

She did not respond immediately, instead weaving a lightning bolt to fry the last shard of the god that had gotten out of the attack. “That was less difficult than anticipated,” Nathalia reported. “I remember him stronger.”

“Did you have a fucking plan there, by the way?”

“The plan was to win. I beat him before.”

“That’s a shit plan,” Scarlett cussed out her ally.

“I knew you would come up with something.” Nathalia reverted from her draconic form to the humanoid one that Scarlett was used to. The damage she had taken was more apparent in it. Bruises covered much of her, both of her horns were broken, and a streak over her side glowed, a lack of scales leaving the lava exposed. “I trust you.”

Scarlett blew air out of her nose. The ventilation system of her helmet moved the air out, while the speaker system transformed it into a metallic sound. She had deliberately chosen a slightly corrupted audio transferral. It was more likely to break spirits. A worthwhile consideration after this war.

“Let’s go look for survivors in the surrounding barriers,” Scarlett instructed. “I’d hate to only bring bad news to Emrik.”

“You have a kind heart under all that steel,” Lyndell remarked.

Scarlett just rolled her eyes at that compliment.