Collide Gamer

Inkaryl cut through the air with a merciless howl. It was not the mind within the weapon, that alien yet familiar sentience of a highly enchanted weapon. Rather, it was the simple sound of a six-bladed mace cutting through the air at extreme speed.

The man at the receiving end of the swing grinned, raising his arms in a cross. He caught the descending mace below the bladed head. A second of smugness was wiped off his face as bones cracked. The extreme weight of the mace continued its downward trajectory and crashed into the man’s face. Shattered skull fragments and chunks of brain matter scattered into the air.

John would freely admit that the tactile feedback of the enacted violence scratched a special itch.

He loathed having taken a life though.

“Fucking moron!” One of the other members of the goons shouted. His sideway glance was immediately interrupted by the necessity to dodge a halberd’s swing.

Metra could have effortlessly recovered her stance and went for a stab. Instead, she leapt further down the corridor, breaking through the wall of human meat that separated her from the deeper recesses of the complex. The Tzitzimimeh had not shown herself yet. Intercepting her would be preferable.

‘Everything that keeps the situation controllable,’ the Gamer thought, as he filled the gap Metra had left behind.

That goon proved to be more skilled than his previous comrades. These men and women may have been dragged up by Ernst’s power, but their talent varied wildly. Some were moronic enough to believe they were every bit as guaranteed a fair fight as Ernst was – a reality that was currently being checked.

The two forces slammed into each other, two tidal waves of violence that were entirely different in character. On one side they had the grinning maniacs, driven mad by the sudden transition from the order of the mundane world into the possibilities of the Abyss. They wore very little, if anything at all. Men and women alike threw themselves at the challenge. On the other side were the combined forces of the Austrian elite and the Gamer’s harem. Though their camp had its own split, they were all the same serious fighters, wishing to protect what they and their ancestors had carved from the Abyss.

John kept swinging Inkaryl in wide arcs. The attacks kept his opponent at a distance. He was studying the pattern carefully, then charged into an opening. An opening that John had graciously given him. Immediately, he let go of Inkaryl. The weapon would land wherever it would land. Without the weight of the weapon, the Creator Puppet could swiftly respond with a flying knee.

The man’s eyes widened in surprise, but he wasn’t without his own tricks. His aura flared. A blue-purple flash beneath his skin was perfectly timed with the impact of John’s knee. The attack slowed down, taking the supernatural bite out of it. Gritting his teeth, the goon took the impact on the cheek.

‘Defensive Upset,’ John thought, before he was re-introduced with the aggressive version.

The hurled fist caught him in the side of his stone and metal body. He had hoped that it wouldn’t work on a body fashioned from an artificial extension of his consciousness. A baseless assumption, since it had worked on Claire. The fist broke the expensive outer layer of the carefully crafted golem. Metal and silicate burst under knuckles.

Swift and terrible, John caught the side of the man’s head with a sweeping grasp. Before he knew what hit him, the goon’s skull met the cave floor. There was a concussive crunch, but nothing so visceral as the previous execution. The man went limp, knocked out.

A woman immediately took the spot as his opponent, a familiar one clad in lightning. An explosive fist struck him in the chest, throwing the Gamer back. Had this body had lungs, he would have had the air knocked out of him.

Midair, he aimed at the leader of the former prisoners and unleashed an Elemental Bolt. It had the bright silver-gold mixture of light energy. It was fast, but not fast enough. The short woman plunged down to all fours, coiled up like a lightning cat, then pounced.

Moira in all of her armoured glory appeared between them. The Gaia-blessed shield took the impact of the clash. A shockwave rippled out between the opponents, causing knights and goons to stumble a step away from the centre of the corridor. John felt the moving winds on his face.

“FINALLY, I GET TO TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!” the aggressive woman shouted, gripping the side of Moira’s shield. She made it a pure contest of strength, one in which she was doing quite well. However exactly the rubber banding of Ernst’s Innate Ability worked for his goons, it had variance based on who it was dragging up.

A clawed hand gripped the electric woman by the throat, prying her away from the shield. Her human bits covered in nothing but a synthskin bodysuit, Scarlett appeared like a gorgeous warmachine. “It’s been three days, how could you build up this level of vitriol?” the bloodsoaked technomancer asked, her voice relayed through the hidden speaker integrated into the visor covering the entirety of her face.

Its length and integration with the antenna replacing her ears gave Scarlett’s head a birdlike silhouette. Her arms and legs were bulky compared to her torso, thighs and forearms especially so, but did not deviate enough from her base shape to distort her overall form notably.

The woman pushed some response past her clenched teeth. John was too far away to catch it, but he did catch Scarlett’s response. “Fucking idiot.”

The red claws tightened further around the woman’s throat. The lightning aura around her went crazy, a desperate attempt to get her out of this situation. A smirk on the woman’s face betrayed the confidence she had in her lightning.

Scarlett was no mistress of generating voltage, but she was perfectly capable of manipulating currents. The wild storm of electric arcs were bent into a singular point above Scarlett’s left hand, before uselessly channelling into the ground. The aggressive woman continued to amp up her powers right up until the lack of oxygen finally cut short her consciousness.

The redhead said nothing. Her face was hidden. John knew she was thinking about giving it one more clench and ending the nuisance forever. The Voidmarrow integrated into her uppermost vertebrae glowed, spreading the impossible, black light down the column of her exospine. An empowered motion of her arm sent the woman flying towards John’s position.

“You punks are lucky I love a merciful man,” the bloodsoaked technomancer stated, before throwing herself back into the wider chaos.

John caught the woman. Flow of oxygen restored, she was rapidly coming back to consciousness. People didn’t usually stay knocked out for prolonged periods, as Archer had taught the Gamer. An inconvenient truth, though it was also accompanied by popular media underplaying how horridly disorienting a concussion was.

‘Gnome, room for one more?’

‘Oh, joy!’ The mental response from the earth spirit was uncharacteristically sarcastic. John turned around to her using her powers to create another hole and stuffing an uncooperative, dazed enemy into it. Rather than watch the fight between Ernst and Maximillian, Gnome had been pulled over to allow them to take as many of their enemies alive as possible. Usually, a regular stone prison wouldn’t have held Abyssals of this level for long. They were using Ernst’s rules against him. The environment could only be manipulated by deliberate action. Magic that needed that environment to function definitely counted as such, but even that came at a greater than usual cost. This meant that, for everyone else, being confined in solid rock was every bit as impossible to escape as it was for mundane people.

It also was very stressful work for Gnome.

John threw out another Elemental Bolt, then conjured an Elemental Grasp. The first struck an enemy in the chest. The second was barely dodged by the fighter, who was then decked in the face by the gauntleted fist of an Austrian knight. With those contributions made, the Creator Puppet dragged his current prisoner over to Gnome. He made sure she stayed down until she was planted in the floor, only her head left above the floor.

Then, he strutted back into the engagement.

The tide of battle was clearly in their favour. Though powerful as individual brawlers, their enemies had the two typical drawbacks of every fighting force intoxicated by early victories: they were undisciplined and thought they were invincible.

The knights ground them down with discipline. Several of these brawlers were more talented fighters than several of these knights. It was clear who had spent the last few weeks training against mostly equal opponents and who was the product of an aristocracy based on power. The knights were not bad, they simply were not as experienced when it came to fighting equal enemies. In the Abyss, fighting someone at parity was a rarity.

That these brawlers couldn’t hold a line was what got them cut down by elemental magic and physical armaments. Knights stepped into gaps, surrounded individuals, and the capped out equalization didn’t protect them from multi-directional attacks. They were no Ernsts, just Awakened with too much power for too little heads.

On the invincible front, they were similarly outclassed by the haremettes. Certainly, his women outclassed even the knights on coordination, but they had no need to bring that to bear. Only a select few of the opponents even had the Stats to try and truly stand up to the leadership of Fusion. For everyone else, the only reason they weren’t instantly crushed was their admittedly skilful usage of Upset in its two forms.

Momo confounded the enemies, flying above on insect wings, switching constantly with the bodies of her hive of Fae Maids. Wherever the true Viscountess of the Midnight Court wandered, her blackened fingers sapped the will to fight off her opponents, making them scream as her Charisma cut deep into their psyche.

Beatrice fixated on one opponent at a time. Her spear was unworthy of her grace, but it was good enough to tango with these enemies. Every engagement was an exchange of wild swings against mechanical precision. Every last one of them ended with the passive maid causing another opponent to collapse to the ground, clutching a grievous but not immediately lethal injury.

Jane put herself in the middle of the enemy cohort. Grinning widely, she was the closest out of all of them to sharing the spirit of the enemy. She was in her element whenever she had to fend off several enemies at once. Her fist stopped against the defensive Upset of one guy, then she narrowly bent out of the way of a potentially devastating swing of another. A swift series of kicks and punches sent both assailants on their backs.

Scarlett strutted through the battlefield like she owned the place. The raw confidence she exuded had no one else bother her or maybe no one else had the guts to fight her again. The bloodsoaked technomancer knew very well how to play the psychological game. Perhaps that was why she charged at the fresh wave of goons just as they came around the corner. The complex had yet more bodies to throw their way, emerging in disorganized waves.

“FOR THE LADY!” Moira bellowed her battle prayer. She slammed her hammer into the ground, invigorating the knights that had pulled back to recover their stamina with divine magic. Then, the Shield Warden threw herself back into the fray, her blessed armament always carried to protect those who found themselves at death’s door.

Ehtra’s wings beat. There was little altitude to be gained in the tunnel. Forward momentum was all she needed to crash back down on the unassuming head of an enemy who hadn’t learned yet that Abyssal warfare was very three-dimensional. The bolt gun loosened from her thigh holster with an audible click. BLAM! BLAM! Ice rounds exploded on the backs of enemies, encasing them in frozen prisons. The pommel of her Astrotium sword crashed into the nostrils of a fool who approached her on unsteady legs. The presence of Lady Vengeance made the sinners jitter.

Most of the people present were not villains. They lacked the stomach to really contemplate what they were organizing here. For them, a little bit of terrorism was just fun and games in a playpen of a world of magic. Faced with Ehtra’s Aura of Judgement, they got the reality check they should have gotten way earlier. Instead, Ernst, Judas and Nyala had amped their delusions, each in their own way.

John observed the situation from a distance. Though he appreciated the chance to enact some base violence, Inkaryl was no precision instrument and he wanted to keep the death toll low. He wasn’t going to sacrifice the safety of his women for it, but he had the luxury of power.

‘Though this is one of the tenser few vs many fights we had in a while,’ John thought. ‘Upset and Perfect Challenge take a lot of the room for error out of things… That technique will definitely be a good thing for the Abyss in the long run. It’ll force us at the top to stay sharp and mindful of our subjects.’

By and large, things were going very smoothly.

A sound reverberated in the air of the cave. It was distant and melodic in a way that made the non-existent hairs of the Creator Puppet stand on edge. A sound turned into sounds. A myriad of chimes all ringing in unison. An unknown conductor pulled the notes into a singular string. John was reminded of standing next to a ringing church bell.

And Metra vanished from his mental landscape.