Aura Overload

14 – Cries of the Predator

As he sprang to his feet, Hector unloaded his magazine on the closest reaper; at the same time, he poured three aura into a Speed Boost. The bullets, designed to penetrate and then fragment, tore large sections of the creature’s back into hamburger, and it screeched, leaping up into the branches, giving Frederick some breathing room. The thing’s cry was like some kind of industrial whistle, echoing through the forest, loud enough that it triggered the automatic noise-dampening feature on Hector’s helmet.

He dove to his left, dodging the first of the converging reapers, rolling through more acid. His poncho absorbed most of it. The stuff in the mulch wasn’t as bad as the fresh droplets falling from the trees. Even so, the armor on his legs and arms sizzled. The second reaper slid to a halt, spinning to face him, but Hector was already tracking it; as he rolled, he’d slammed a new magazine into his rifle and was already firing.

Again, he tore chunks off the reaper, and again, it darted away, screeching like a dropship turbine, weaving between trees to block Hector’s fire. Frederick’s gun blazing told him the kid was still alive, and when he spun to check on the third reaper, he saw Frederick chasing it with bullets as it, too, loped between trees, using low-hanging branches to swing itself up out of sight in the dense, acid-coated leaves.

“Wait,” he said into comms, then, louder, “Hold your fire!” Freddy, chest heaving, breaths ragged through his helmet’s filter, stopped shooting, and Hector jogged close and put his back to the kid’s. “Wait for them. Use your stunner on one.”

“Which—” Freddy heaved in a couple of ragged breaths. He was hurt, but Hector didn’t think too badly; besides, the kid had Royal-class nanites. He tried again: “Which one?”

“Any—” Hector didn’t get a chance to explain more; the three reapers acted together, coming from three different angles. None of them seemed particularly hurt, the result of their incredible regenerative flesh.

“Argh!” Freddy grunted, lifting his arm and firing. The reaper dodged the electrified darts, but Freddy tracked it and fired again as it got closer. It spasmed and collapsed, arcing electricity, and Hector fired another Speed Boost, this time using four aura, and summoned his Aura Blade.

//Corpus vivum pathways strained—nearing critical limit and aura overload.//

The message was harsh and automated, part of the aura system that Evie didn’t consciously manage. Hector knew he was pushing his luck; he hadn’t recovered from the fight with the first reaper. His pathways were still raw, and now he was forcing the same amount of aura through them. He had to move faster than the reapers, though; the window for victory was slim.

As Freddy’s target convulsed, Hector sprang into action, twisting and spinning on his right foot, narrowly avoiding a trio of slashing claws. He ignored that reaper and leaped at the one charging Freddy’s back. It was intent on its target. Reapers were proven hunters, cunning and clever, but nobody knew how sapient they were. Did they hold grudges? Did they hunger to see a foe suffer? Some said yes, but nobody knew.

Whatever the reason, the reaper was fixated on Freddy, and when Hector charged, it didn’t notice. As it drove its claws into Freddy’s back, sending sparks and smoke into the air—his active shielding straining to rebuff the attack—Hector struck again and again with his Aura Blade. He had to do massive damage in order to offset the thing’s regeneration. In fact, his first swipe was an attempt to sever its head, but it was too tall, and it reared back, disrupting his aim.

Hector carved a groove in its shoulder, then he redirected his efforts, aiming to slice the spine with several brutal hacks. The monster fell, thrashing, but before Hector could take its head, the reaper he’d dodged landed on his back, shrieking and driving its long, black claws into his shoulders.

Freddy fell, gasping, his breath ragged in their comms; for some reason he’d opened the channel, but hadn’t spoken. Hector could see the situation spiraling out of control; none of the reapers were dead, and the stunned and wounded ones would recover in seconds.

The thing about Hector was that when things spiraled, when he was really in the shit, he grew calmer. Maybe that was part of the reason he had a red aura; it was just a part of his personality that when his life was on the line, when the situation seemed insurmountable, he didn’t give up, and he certainly didn’t panic.

He had a handful of knife-like claws digging into his flesh, so he started there; with the last gasps of his Speed Boost, he flicked his Aura blade through the reaper’s wrists, sending it flopping back. It still held him with its tail and lower legs, but Hector had created enough space to twist his torso and drive his blade up through its elongated, fang-filled maw into its brainpan. It instantly convulsed, releasing him and flopping to the ground.

As the world sped up and Hector’s edge in speed faded, he fell on the reaper and hacked his smoking, crimson blade into the reaper’s neck—once…twice…three times and the head rolled away. Another reaper shrieked a horrible, echoing cry, and Hector staggered to his feet, spun, and leaped on the one with the severed spine; it was already struggling to its hands and feet.

The creature hissed and growled, thrashing and rolling, dragging Hector through the acid-soaked mulch—the remains of half-decayed leaves, bark, and other once-living matter that the acid had chewed up. The reaper bit and clawed; Hector held onto it with one arm, one elbow locked with its topmost arm, and the other stabbing again and again.

His Aura Blade was up to the task, punching to his bloody fist with each stab. He yanked it sideways on the way out, doing maximum damage. Hot blood covered him and the creature, and, distantly, in the corner of his mind, Hector realized that the reaper’s blood didn’t react to the acid; it didn’t sizzle or melt away and where it covered his torn armor and flesh, the burning sting faded.

Mathews’s voice cut through the shrieking, prioritized by his audio implants: “Is that you, Hector? We can hear the shrieks from here!”

Hector ignored the query, and maybe Mathews got the clue, because she let the question hang.

It was a hell of a scrap, the kind that woke a person up in the middle of the night years later, but Hector prevailed. His blade saw him through, doing more damage than the reaper’s healing could cope with. It lost consciousness, and Hector finished it, removing its overlarge head with several more hacks. When he looked up, scanning for the final reaper and Freddy, he found them both.

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Freddy was sitting at the base of a tree, the reaper was in his lap, four sets of claws still gripping the kid’s arms and shoulders, but its head was gone—blasted away by a wide-barreled plasma turret that had deployed from the bulky shoulder armor on Freddy’s left side.

“Full of surprises,” Hector said with a grunt as he pushed his hand against the reaper. “I’m taking this one. You take that one. We’ll harvest the third one to split with the team.”

Freddy’s winged helmet—covered with gore and dirt—turned toward him. Hector thought maybe he’d argue, but after a moment, the kid put his armored hand on the reaper’s charred neck-hole and Hector felt the potentia start to flow. Nodding, he did the same.

He wasn’t being greedy; sure, he wanted the potentia, but he and Freddy both needed a mental boost, and nothing beat a potentia infusion. Draining a reaper? He’d need a solid night’s sleep to match that kind of restoration. More than that, it would help with his pathways, clearing up the inflammation, smoothing out the scars, and allowing him to use aura again far more quickly. Nobody could argue with that necessity.

Even though he was already on his knees, braced for the rush, he almost passed out from the hot waves of euphoria that rolled through him. He’d scraped similar amounts in his old life, but he’d been in a skin that was built for it, with comparatively massive pathways. As the potentia continued to flow into him, he shook, his eyes danced with starbursts, and his ears rang with an almost music-like quality.

Obviously, it was a risk, making himself vulnerable like that, but it was only for a few seconds, and Hector’s gut told him that any reapers in the area would have jumped into the fight; they seemed to be more than a little cooperative. Are they pack hunters?

The random thought was the first signal to Hector that he was done; the potentia wasn’t flowing any longer, and he blinked his eyes, focusing on the aura system’s update:

//98 potentia gathered. Potentia available: 148.//

Mathews spoke into comms again: “Freddy? Hector? Status?” Her voice was clouded by static, and Hector had a feeling they’d be losing contact soon.

“Alive. Moving soon. Unclear comms—minimize traffic.” Straightening up, his thoughts rapidly clarifying, he activated his private comm channel with Freddy. “You good?”

Freddy’s response came quickly: “I will be. Nanites are working on my wounds. Nothing keeping me from walking.”

As Hector stood, he glanced at his mini-map and his countdown timer. They still had four kilometers to go before they reached the bloom field, and the timer was down to eighteen hours and change.The fight had been brutal but quick.

//Have you thought about using some of your potentia on the Reaver archetype I mapped?// Evie asked, as though he couldn’t feel the stuff burning in the back of his mind, begging to be used.

Not a good time or place. When we get out. He punched his thumb into the safety on his breastplate, twisting the trigger for the nanite injector housed within. He felt a stab in his pectoral, then a wave of tingling numbness as the bugs got to work. Exhaling, he waited for the burning throbs of his puncture wounds to subside. Two more doses before I need a resupply.

//If you use all those nanites in the next eighteen hours, you’ll suffer heavy organ damage.//

That’s what synth-livers are for. Hector grunted, stooping to hold out the cylindrical scraper Mathews had given him, pressing it against the third reaper’s corpse.

“You’re a hell of a fighter, Hector. I could use a guy like you on my side.”

Hector looked at Frederick, wishing he could read the kid’s face. “I am on your side.”

Freddy stared at him for a long minute until the scraper beeped, and then he nodded, clambering to his feet. “We should hurry.”

“Not yet,” Hector said, gesturing to the bloody corpse at his feet. “Smear this blood all over my back. Something in it stops the acid from reacting.”

“Oh, yeah?” Freddy looked at his armored fist, coated in reaper blood, then reached up and ran it along the beads of acid coating low-hanging leaves. Nothing sizzled. “Damn, that’s a good thing to know!”

While Frederick got to work, Hector continuously scanned the area. His aura was slowly replenishing, and his pathways had recovered nicely thanks to the potentia infusion, but he and the kid couldn’t keep up fighting like they’d just done, especially with a time limit hanging over their heads. Something in his gut told him they might not have to, though. “I think it was a pack or a family unit.”

“Huh?” Freddy asked, scooping out a fresh handful of gore from the downed reaper’s bloody neck stump. “The reapers?”

Hector nodded. “They’re predators. Their territory—”

“Would have to be pretty damn large!” They kid took Hector’s idea and ran with it. “And they wouldn’t work together like that if they weren’t part of a pack!” Freddy thumped him on the shoulder. “Like wolves on old Earth—maybe there aren’t any more in these woods!”

“Yeah.” Hector looked down over his blood-smeared shoulders and arms. “Done?”

“Yeah. Slime me up, boss—need to save my batts after that plasma blast.” He sounded almost exuberant, and Hector knew he was riding a post-battle rush, enhanced by the massive dose of potentia he’d just scraped.

While he got to work, spreading blood and viscera over the kid’s shoulders, Hector asked, “You ever scraped that much potentia before?”

“Um…” He hesitated, then lifted his polymer-covered shoulders in a sort of shrug as he continued, “Not directly. You know how it is for us—Royals, I mean. I’ve been getting infusions since I was a kid—sometimes more than what we just took in.”

“And you didn’t use it.”

Freddy stiffened. “My aura’s not like yours. I can’t summon a blade like that, and the one I can summon takes like ten seconds to form in my hand. I tried to do my Mirror Defense, but it’s not exactly easy to make happen when you’ve got a reaper trying to chew your faceplate off.”

Hector slapped his backplate. “All set. Let’s move.”

As they loped along, their boots squelching in the mulch, Hector kept his senses alert, but his mind wandered. He remembered his early days with the Invicti, and how many of the other recruits had objected much as Frederick just had; they’d had the aura systems and levels to go with them, but they hadn’t had the expertise—or the raw instinctual prowess that Hector had been born with. Sure, he’d had to work for his skill, but he wouldn’t deny that certain things seemed to come easily to him.

When Sass asked him how he formed his blade so fast, he’s reflexive quip was always, “Practice.” That was true—to a degree—but even as a recruit with a fresh system, his blade had come to him more quickly than many of the instructors’. People waved it off, muttering things like, “He’s a red, what did you expect?” Reactions like that weren’t honest, though; Hector had met other reds who couldn’t do what he did, and his final mentor in the Invicti had been a silver who was even faster.

He snorted softly inside his helmet. Like I always said, aura color doesn’t mean shit.

//Maybe not on the individual level, but the averages support—//

I wasn’t inviting a debate.

Freddy’s voice came through comms, rescuing Evie from more of Hector’s one-sided theorizing: “Nothing’s moving out there. Those damn reapers screamed bloody murder during the fight. You think they scared everything off?”

“Hope so.”

“Two more klicks.”

Hector glanced at his mini-map. “Yep.” Two more kilometers, then a run back through the nightmare forest. With luck, he and Freddy would harvest enough potentia for everyone to get some levels, and he, being only level seven, would gain more than most. He already had enough potentia to transition to the Reaver archetype and buy a level or two. And after a bloom harvest? He wasn’t even sure, but it would be good.

He glanced at his countdown timer: 18:17:22.

Plenty of time.

Even as the thought crossed his mind, Hector looked for a tree to brush his knuckles across; no sense jinxing things.