Amaranthine

CHAPTER 38- Defensive Action

Nick whipped towards the cottages. He’d told Gwyn he was going to check on Kevin, and she’d split off towards the refugee apartments. He wanted to stay with her, but he knew she could do a lot of good there. Nick just felt a little responsible for the teenager that had been his team’s first Altered pickup.

He felt a lot more prepared now, having swung by the ready room, easily dispatching the troopers there and grabbing his blastrings. If he’d had these to begin with, Frostie wouldn’t have lasted a fucking second. He had to start keeping them in his room, but decades of depression still made him antsy about keeping lethal devices within arms reach.

Whenever he saw a tac-suited baddie, he took them out. He found the burst of pleasure he got each time wasn’t quite so noxious when the bastards were invading the only fucking place that had felt like home in years. Still, he noticed that after a few, they were watching the trees.

Connected somehow, definitely. Taking down that Altered is gonna be a bitch, fuck, what if he can use any of those bodies as a primary?

Watching or not, BREAST MAN was specialized to be a night predator, and even those that saw him rarely had time to get out more than a scream, quickly cut off. Coming up on Kevin’s cottage, he found a strange scene. A trio of the invaders laid outside the door, just inside where Nick could feel Kevin’s rejection field.

Creeping forward, Nick checked the invaders, finding them to be cold as corpses. Just in case, he jabbed each through the temple. He gently knocked on the door, then forced it open, the lock no match for his strength. He put a single tentacle through first, and was pained but not surprised when the hot pain of a knife slashed through it.

He grabbed the knife, and yanked open the door, finding a fierce, wild-eyed Brittney Peach on the other side. She stared at him, a whole lot of emotions passing across her face all at once.

HOWDY, PRETTY LADY

Hey, it worked once.

Brittney let out a manic laugh, then dropped her guarded stance and bent down to hug him.

“What the fuck is going on!?” she sobbed, pulling him inside, her eyes never stopping her scan of the treeline.

ATTACK

PROBABLY

ELEVATED RACE

“Are we safe!?” she asked, “Is everything under control!?”

NOPE!

She sobbed.

BUT IT WILL BE.

GWYN AND I KILLED THEIR TRANSPORT.

WE ARE CLEANING UP

THE OTHERS THAT GOT IN.

Brittney schooled her expression, although the tears kept coming.

“Okay,” she sniffed. “Okay. What should be do?”

STAY HERE!

I THINK KEVIN’S FIELD KILLED THOSE DUDES

“What!?”

I DON’T THINK THEY’RE REAL

CONTROLLED

SOMEHOW

Brittney boggled at him, but they both had to shrug. Bullshit was Bullshit.

“I can help then!” called Kevin, popping out from behind a corner. Nick had known he was there, but figured the kid deserved to be up to speed, provided he could read the hat from there.

“No!”

NO

“I can! I can kill these puppet guys! I wondrr if it’d work on characters…..”

NOT THE TIME

FOR EXPERIMENTS

“Then when is!?” Kevin asked. “AEGIS is under attack! This is an emergency.”

Nick hated that the kid had a point. He hated more he was considering ways to transport him around.

“Honey, no,” his mother pleaded, placing her hands on his shoulders and looking him in the eye. Nick could see the teenagers resolve shake under the fear and pain in his mother’s eyes.

SHES RIGHT

STAY HERE

KEEP HER SAFE

WE WILL LOOK INTO THIS AFTER

Kevin gritted his teeth, jaw set, but nodded.

These guys aren’t the real threat anyway, we’ve got to take out the leaders, Nick thought, banishing the regret of not being able to bring along a mobile kill field.

GONNA GO HELP

STAY HERE

HUNKER DOWN

PROBABLY THE SAFEST PLACE ON BASE

Brittney nodded at him, thanks on her face. He went to leave, and noticed the door hang off its hinges, and turned back around.

UH

SORRY ABOUT THE DOOR

Gwyn came up on the two refugee apartment blocks, drawn by the sounds of gunfire. A small army was assaulting each, held at bay by a different teams of Altereds.

Warhawk stood resolute in the entrance of one, covering behind her indestructible wings and peeking out to pour pinpoint death out of her handguns. Bullrush wreaked havoc in the enemy lines, men flying up into the air cartoonishly as he bucked them off of his horns. Thoughtless held entire groups under thrall as Sawscale tore through them.

In front of the other building, Bulwark had set himself up in front of the door, and Gwyn wasn’t aware of anything on earth that could move him when he was dug in like that. That left his temporary partner free to deal death with speed, impunity, and a terrifying grace.

The Black Swan danced through the horde of enemies, her glowing sword reaping a biblical toll. Gwyn watched her bring an upward stroke full through a man’s torso, putting the blade perfectly in position in front of another man’s gunbarrel, deflecting his spray even as she brought up her own antique pistol, one shot turning his chest into a red mist.

At every turn, her blade was exactly where an opponent would be, and her body was exactly where their attacks weren’t. If she had possessed superspeed, perception abilities, or some sort of time shifting, Gwyn could have understood, but she knew she didn’t. The director moved quickly, but not supernaturally so. Her eyes constantly moved, reading her opponents and the battlefield, and her body reacted perfectly, putting her exactly where she needed to be inflict the most damage while remaining unscathed herself.

Still, law of large numbers. It looked like The Black Swan was as good as the legends implied, but she was still one woman. Wait, no, Gwyn noticed a flashing mandala, only active for an instant, followed quickly by another.

What is Samsara doing? She wondered, then finally noticed it was literally raining men.

“Yeesh,” she thought, a fierce smile spreading across her face as she joined the fray. These pieces of shit hadn’t known who they were fucking with coming here.

She directed a botspear through two men standing foolishly close together, and detonated a cloud in the middle of another cluster, tearing the invaders apart.

Could kill ‘em all, she thought, already wrote the bio-target code. Millions of tests. As many failsafes as I could think of.

Growling, she rammed another projectile through another man that turned to face the new threat. She shook her head.

Nope. Can’t be a Faro, she created a whirling blade of bots, slicing through a line of men. Not like I need to, anyway. Christ, maybe if I could get fucking laid B-man, I wouldn’t be contemplating potential omnicide so hard.

With a crash like an entire storms worth of thunder, an enormous figure slammed into the ground in front of her, crushing a good few of what must have been its colleagues, because this guy was no Guardian. Gwyn actually recognized him from the Altered bodybuilding circuits, her dad was into that shit and was always sending her links. The giant went by Gigaton, and he had some fuckin’ opinions about regular humans.

“Don’t know if you can hear me, Myriad, but sorry about your dupes,” he rumbled, eyes locking onto Gwyn. Another tiny, and disturbingly muscular, man popped out from behind his neck.

“They’re sending the fucking nerds out to fight us!” Munchkin yelled, laughing as he brandished his lollipop. He was a known thug of the ER, and the fact he had a nasty black eye and was missing a tooth meant he had come up with someone that packed a punch. Gwyn grinned.

Only one person out in the city tonight that fits that description.

“Just the ones that can fight,” she countered as her ‘bots began to swarm around her, lifting her into the air. “You’re about to get real well acquainted with the bitch who really gave you that shiner.”

Her ‘bots resolved into a tall, sleek mechsuit that she had been dying to try out. She directed one hand to beckon at the muscly duo, while another cloud of ‘bots formed a blade in her other gauntlet. Gigaton roared, the ground shaking beneath his charge.

Gwyn knew better than to think she could fight on the same level as a melee brawler like Gigaton. So she let her ‘bots do the fighting. Swan had an archive of training and combat footage, and Gwyn trained an AI model to pilot the suit, mimicking the master combatants unique multi-discipline style.

The flat of her blade caught Gigaton’s outstretched arm, gently redirecting him past her body while it streaked towards her real target. Munchkin cursed, barely raising his lollipop in time to take the strike, then he was flying through the air towards Director Swan.

Good fucking luck, idiot, she thought, swinging the blade down and barely missing Gigaton’s Achilles tendon as the surprisingly nimble Altered danced out of the way. He grinned at her, clearly proud of something, but as Gwyn’s free hand rearraged into a blaster, she couldn’t fathom what.

He crossed his arms to take the blast head on, and Gwyn frowned when the flash cleared and his arms were reddend, but whole. She let off a few more blasts as she advanced, keeping him on guard. She found out the hard way his flesh was tough enough to block her blade when her swing stopped dead on his forearm, no more than a trickle of blood visible before his free hand slammed into her suit’s chest.

Unfortunately, that’s where Gwyn was, and her bell was well and truly rung. Fortunately, she wasn’t really piloting the suit, and its arms moved on their own to parry the next strike. She was on the defensive now though, and looking around on sensors, everyone else had their own problems to deal with. Without any way to really hurt the guy, she was stuck parrying and delaying, until a coruscating blue-white blast of energy hit him just below the right armpit.

He coughed black blood, staring straight at her boyfriend and the gleaming tentacle he shot straight for the giant’s temple. Gigaton’s reflexes were insane, and he managed to dodge the lethal blow.

“Fuck this,” he rumbled. “Shard was wrong, we weren’t ready.”

Quickly crouching, he leapt away and out of the fight.

Gwyn looked at her boyfriend, already shredding more of the troops, hissing in glee.

Alright, that’s it. I’m fuckin’ him tonight, I don’t care if I have to shove a tentacle in while he’s asleep.