Book 17-18.1: Resistance
For the hundredth time today, Brilliance—Ericka Stevens—cursed heavily. Out loud, in her head, under her breath…it was something she hadn’t really done until after her Alteration. The first time she did so heavily was after she had been captured, and subsequently subjected to imprisonment, though thankfully not any kind of assault or torture. Her cousin, Speedrun—Arthur—wasn’t as fortunate as she had been during their stint as prisoners of war.
And it was war. Those soldiers made it quite clear. A war of conquest. Unprovoked.
She and her cousin had only been home for a couple of days when everything went to the Abyss! And now, here she was, separated from Arthur, simply because she was at school. It was around lunchtime when the news broke out, and classes were suspended. While she was on the school bus headed home, she witnessed a rift open inside an alley.
They were at the outskirts of Altalon District, the northwest part of Neo Prism City, and her home was in one of the boroughs near the centre. School was closer to the northwest, though, and the rift popped out in between her home and school. Almost as soon as it stabilised, she saw huge red apes march out. The sight sent shivers down her back, made her have cold sweats, and the burning hate flowed within her veins. The bus driver didn’t notice the creatures immediately, but it soon became a moot point when the apes marched out into the main street. Pedestrians screamed in surprise, and the daemons reacted to the noise by roaring and pounding their chests. The driver squeaked and jerked the steering wheel, which almost caused the bus to collide with a car going the other way.
Ericka bit her lip, leapt off her seat and pushed towards the exit doors.
“Miss, what are you doing?” the driver yelped.
“Open the door, but keep going,” she answered curtly, though she kept her face averted from the bus’s security camera.
“No…”
Boom!
An ape smashed into a vehicle behind the bus and overturned it. Amid screams of pain and fear, as well as the screeching sound of tearing metal and asphalt, Ericka yanked the door lever open and yelled, “Go!”
The driver gaped, but reflexively jammed his foot into the gas pedal. The bus jerked forward, swerved to avoid a stopped car and straightened out before escaping down the road. Ericka ignited the spark within her chest, flinched as she experienced flashes of unpleasant memories, then started to glow.
White light came from her heart and shone through her flesh and clothes. Gravity lost its hold on her, and she floated a couple of inches above the pavement. The light attracted the attention of the daemon troop, and she darted upwards by a dozen paces. She released a couple of beams that struck the lead apes, but they were blocked by a red aura that appeared an inch above their fur. The beam smashed the aura, but consumed its kinetic charge in the process. The other beam struck a different area; hence, her attacks were neutralised.
ROAR!
The beasts’ screams pushed her back, and her muscles seized. She shook it off a couple of seconds later, but by then, only the fact that she was flying saved her from being mauled. She darted higher in the air and kept her distance from the buildings around the road. Most of the tenements weren’t more than five storeys high, and the street was about ten paces wide. She was afraid it wouldn’t be enough, but she was equally frightened of flying above cover. It would expose her to other flyers and shooters beyond the immediate area.
Whoosh!
“Ah!” Brilliance screamed as one of the apes leapt towards her. Its humongous fingers missed her foot by a couple of inches, and she flew just above the tallest tenement. From there she spotted a pair scaling the side of the building. She shot them with her beams, and this time, she aimed them to land in the same spot.
Bang! Bang! GRAAH!
The blast tore a chunk out of the ape’s upper arm. Brilliance felt sick to her stomach, but she shook it off. No time to be sick or distracted! More of the creatures poured into the street, but only four paid her any attention. She blasted more beams at the lead apes while she scooted away from them. Converging beams weren’t something she used often, but she had practised the technique. She aimed at the ape’s torso rather than a limb or the head, since it was more likely that she would hit than miss. She aimed for centre mass, but she hit slightly to her right, which carved a furrow along the daemon’s side.
Whoosh!
“Ack!” Brilliance yelped as a brick slammed into her leg.
She wobbled in the air and fell a couple of paces to her left, then she jerked and spun to avoid another projectile. She caught sight of an ape as it ripped a chink of concrete from the side of a building.
“Ahh!”
She dove down and avoided getting brained by the thing. But that brought her perilously close to another ape as it jumped.
She kicked a beam into the ape’s face just as its meaty hand grabbed her ankle. The blast must have blinded or startled the cretin, and she escaped a mauling. No choice. She was too low in the ground.
She darted straight up twenty paces, juked to and fro to dodge the flung bricks and stones. Once she was more than fifty paces above the ground, she retaliated by firing several convergent beams at the nearest beast. The beams all focused into a single point, and the ape couldn’t dodge completely out of the way. She blew a whole chunk out of its side and exposed shattered ribs and broken organs in the process.
“Serves you right!” she yelled vindictively, even as dark satisfaction flooded her veins. Then she paled when she glanced around. There were more than a dozen plumes of dark smoke scattered all over the district, and she could hear the keening wail of sirens, police and firefighters both. Now that she was above the tenement line, she could hear them faintly. “Oh, no…”
_________
It didn’t take Yuriko more than an hour to reach Neo Prism City from Thornton. It was midafternoon by then, but even so, the skies above the city seemed overcast from the smoke and smog. Almost as soon as she crossed the state line, her smartphone lost connection. She used her message spell to notify Scarlett, who was startled by it, but was able to give a short response.
Communication towers around the countryside had been targeted by the invading force and destroyed. She headed to one of the smoking ruins of a tower. Her perception aura showed her twisted metal and craters, but there were no hostiles remaining. Just corpses.
Broken human forms, daemon dust that stunk of daemonfyre. Muddy red stains on the ground. She smothered the lingering flames, but the heated metal ignited new flames as soon as she let up. With a frown, she quickly incanted a spell that produced a blast of cold air and frost. Steam hissed from the contact points, but the orange-ish metal cooled to a dull grey soon after.
The backlash of using arcana weaving in Astoria made her wince. It was as if someone kicked her ribs as the layer of reality resisted the alteration. Higher-tier spells weren’t welcome, it seemed. This was actually the first time she used one, come to think of it. Minor cleaning spells didn’t count, and neither did messaging spells.
She relegated the thought to her other strands of consciousness while she sped away from the comm tower and headed into Neo Prism proper. She flew in from the west, over a mountain range that acted as a barrier. Thornton was south of Neo Prism, so the first district she came to was one of the dock areas, Jackstone.
The highway that led into the city was jammed with cars, buses, and trucks, all headed away. Panicked faces. Crying faces. Curses filled the air amidst despairing screams. Yuriko sighed. Evacuees. She was no stranger to war nor the effects it had on civilian populations. She continued on, carefully noting the defenders. In one corner, mortal law enforcement held the line. There weren’t any foes at the moment, but the road was thick with daemon dust. There were barricades across half of the street, and behind those lines were paramedics and other support crew. She listened to the police radio and got word of a daemon buildup a couple of blocks away. The police officers gripped guns with whitened knuckles and trembling knees.
Yuriko flew a dozen paces above them. Low enough to be heard and noticed. Low enough to drum up better morale. Her perception aura quickly located the hostile force. There were about forty Crimson Apes and a couple of hidden lizards.
She held out a hand and conjured a full-sized sunblade. She thought to fight using Radiant Flying Swords, but she wouldn’t be as effective without the Ennoia’s core within her Anima. Bladeless Sword’s Invisible Edge would also be augmented by being launched from an actual sword, too.
She dove towards the lead apes, slashed out a couple of Invisible Edges at the flanks. She didn’t do a full swing, but a tiny movement that resulted in an Edge five inches wide. They beheaded two of the flanking apes, and she struck with a midair horizontal spin that resulted in her sunblade bisecting the head from crown to jaw. She pulled back as she sent another two Edges, then did a flyby attack towards her left.
Six apes were dead before the rest recognised the threat, and another six died as they reacted. Everything was slow. She wasn’t playing now, but she wasn’t giving her all, either. It would be a long battle and while she wished she could have covered Neo Prism City with her three thousand sunblades, she didn’t have the reserves or the core for it here. She would make do with what she had.
Three seconds later, and all forty apes were dead. Another second later, and she killed the camouflaged lizards. She was already a hundred paces away, and another hundred above the ground before the bodies fell apart.
She sent tendrils of her Anima perception ranging ahead, looking for more pockets of daemons or soldiers. A couple of blocks away, a small group of civilians were running away from daemonic… hounds? It was a new breed that she hadn’t seen before, and they looked nearly identical to hunting hounds save for the fact that their jaws opened four ways and they had long tongues with barbs at the tip. They shot those things out like a frog, and one speared a running woman at the calf, which prompted a piercing scream and heavy sobs.
Yuriko slashed an Invisible Edge at the hounds, grabbed the woman and her two companions, children who looked under ten years old, and flew back to the police barricade. She dropped them next to the paramedics before she ventured back out, though not before listening to the police broadcast for a couple of moments.
From above, she couldn’t actually see much of the street level, considering how much of a maze the Jackstone roads were. Her Anima perception swept around, sniffing for daemonfyre.
She caught a whiff at the extreme of her range, a hundred and eighty paces away, nearly a couple of city blocks. She flew over the warehouses and came upon them as they marched down the street. Another forty, pentapodded apes. Though the parasites weren’t visible, the way they marched revealed their condition. However, since she couldn’t see them, she couldn’t exactly purge the things.
She slaughtered them, then continued hunting for more.