BECMI Chapter 456 – Down The Hole
The walls were silvery steel, shot through with bands occasionally gleaming with power pulsing through them and looking rather dangerous to touch.
The disruption fields that tried to snap up and ensnare us were destroyed by due application of Sundering attacks to the base of them, magic Weapons chewing up the duralloy columns that had come out of the ground and hewing a couple gaps through the fields. The local force field was shorted out with Argent feedback, blowing out the emitter and necessitating its replacement before it could achieve perfect coverage again.
There were sensors in the ground, but everyone was flying or on a Disk, and Catleya’s strumming was warping its projected sensors around us, making it impossible to see us despite cameras that looked disturbingly like eyeballs tracking back and forth frantically in the magical Darkness.
Thus we went up and over the wall with only a short stop, while lasers fired blankly into the Darkness and were snuffed, plasma blasts were drained fully and invisibly into Lightning Rod Shields, and lightning fields short-circuited as they were haplessly drained down, too.
“Duracrete foundation here,” Thor muttered, tapping a heavy boot down. “Any problems?”
“Crystallized stone with advanced plastics is just kind of magic-resistant stone.” The interior of the walls had five different pillboxes, with the one in the middle currently recessed into the ground and giving off the feeling of being irked and not knowing quite what to do. “All clear below us?” I asked.
Sif, Thor, and Molniya gave me thumbs-up, so Primus reached down with Shape Stone at IX and a point of Immortal Power to surpass mortal limits and wrenched the very artificial stuff open with reduced area, but inviolate domination. Mounds of the time-defying material, something which could endure for a thousand times longer than the toughest of stone, pooled out of the way unwillingly to the sides as a circle started descending around us at about a foot a second, a lid closing back up above us as the floor was moved to the ceiling.
We descended about sixty feet in a do-it-yourself pit before the hands all pointed ahead and to the left, and our little hemisphere of approach stopped and opened in that direction. A couple breaths later, a wall flowed away in front of us, and I glided down into a thirty foot wide, twenty foot high hallway, big enough to fit some impressive equipment.
There was a buzzing noise in the air, the ambient light sources began to wink on and off distractingly, and Sif sniffed once.
“Pumping flourine into the air,” she murmured, and I deployed a Splash Guard Hexar shield, which rapidly began to bubble and hiss as it drew the destructive chemical reaction in the air to itself, neutralizing the effects of the attack.
Dama Adama pointed to the airlock at the end of the corridor, and we all headed that way, wondering what was behind the molecularly-hardened durasteel there that could probably bounce a railgun shot.
But not a Disintegration beam carving through the middle of it.
We were greeted by a fusillade of lasers and particle beams, which harmed the Hexars in front of us not at all, pushing out into the face of a couple wheeled bots with twin-mounted las-cannons and particle beamers unloading into our faces.
Helos and I gestured, force fields collapsed and fed back into their emitters, and sparks lit up the area as feedback crackled and snapped over the bots there. We both knelt down, Thor and Molniya cleared our heads with casual hops, and the duo promptly crashed into the things rather loudly. Duralloys squealed in disbelief, circuits cracked and crashed, and then scattered bits of bots were tumbling on the floor, power sources cloven, limbs removed, and otherwise in a sorry state.
With little fanfare, we kept going.
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Enhanced gravity area countered with Reverse Gravity neutralizing the effect completely.
A vacuum chamber was ignored via Adaptation and exited without too much hurry.
A cloud of nanobots able to scour clean anything that didn’t belong there was fried with a Swarmbane Lightning Bolt that slagged every single one of them, no exceptions.
Locked doors were charmed open with Password spells, then were jammed by punching adamantine Weapons through their closing mechanisms.
Service lift shafts we jumped down, ignoring the direction of the gravity trying to throw us up and out, or send us crashing down, or drop the lift on top of us. Gravity emitters were damaged with Shard spells or Sharding cuts from Weapons or Bows, and down we continued.
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The bots that pranced into the room this time were sprightly and bereft of additional accoutrements.
They also happened to be sized perfectly to each of us, and were wielding identical weapons to our own, sort of.
The cyborgs, fleshbots, and organ-reapers of the higher levels had been gruesome pairings of meat and metal that had proven to be very tough indeed, but not capable of overcoming our magical edge and the skill of Apex humans who could ignore the paralysis beams and energy discharges of the attacks they used.
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This was a bit different.
“Mirror-bots,” I informed the others, as the bots on the other side automatically lined up opposite us, leaving me facing one of the shorter ones with a weighted metal staff in hand, the ends crackling faintly with a power field.
“They’ve been taking notes!” Sif grinned fearlessly, because her opposite number was wielding a vibrosword, not the plasma blades the earlier cyborganic things had preferred to wield, and thence found out our fire and lightning resistance was perfectly effective against such things.
“I trust all of us know how to beat ourselves?” Thor asked, spinning Mjolnir without any concern as he eyed his bulky mechanical counterpart.
“They can’t replicate magic, even if they know our style. Just bend physics and dare them to imitate it,” Dame Adama smiled confidently, striding forward to confront her own mechanical opponent armed with what looked like a power sword and shield. It matched her actions to close to the fight.
Indeed, it was with a rather startling level of confidence that all of the party hopped forward to confront their doubles, even Iatro. The Healer had no need to hold back against Constructs of any kind, and that included robots with organic brain circuitry.
Therein followed a lesson of why you don’t confront Apex humans in a magical universe with mechanical opponents, including ones who should be able to mirror your moves and out-move you with your own style.
Thor started with an off-foot blow that should have whipped him off his own feet with his lack of balance. Mirroring it sent his double tumbling half to the side, its Hammer crashing down wide, and then, instead of just crushing down, Improved Versatile Strike applied to a Profound Weapon clove a splitting wedge through the shoulder of the thing instead of just pure blunt trauma. Servos and gears split, its right arm spasmed, and it couldn’t keep pace with only one hand as, still off-balance yet anchored with Crystal Heavyfoot, Thor backcut it and sliced its head off, then grabbed its active arm and immobilized it with pure brute strength before spinning around Mjolnir’s haft and plunging the long handle hard down into the revealed stump of its neck, precisely targeting the crystal matrix inside its bulk of a chest with the physical contact and shorting it out.
Sif kind of just fluttered, and the flicker-quick movements of her opponent somehow looked slow and very mechanical in response. Swords crossed, skirled, but only one could ignore physics as it changed direction as if it was weightless, Sif in an impossible position as she cut, cut, and cut.
The vibroblade went keening away, sliced clean through and feedback ripping it from the bot’s hand. Then Dirre removed its egg-like head, the graphics of the eyes winking out, and Sif shrank it to dagger-size before driving it down into the neck stump, finishing just as fast as Thor did.
Crackling shock and disrupting weapons were beating on Impervious or Indestructible shields that utterly ignored their ability to rend metals and other rigid defenses, magical Weapons crashed against shields and reinforced armors, spitting at the force fields and collapsing them with great speed as Smites manifested, blowing through technological defenses with great speed.
Dame Adama simply led her opponent into identical cuts at one another’s shields, carving through her opponent’s in three Smiting cross-cuts while her own utterly ignored the spatial-shearing field around the bot’s blade. Then the bot had no shield and only the stump of an arm, and Dame Adama drove her blade right through its duralloy torso into its processing core and deftly shorted it out in mid-strike.
I watched Iatro somehow bend and wrap up her counterpart until it tore its own arms and legs off trying to twist around to strike at him, its much greater strength availing it not at all against a Moon Dragon Master with that much ki. Catleya spun into a bladedancing spiral against her opponent, ignoring physics that sent the bot careening out of balance and control during its spin and carving through it as it sought to keep its balance.
Even Chardon, Arbor, and Jian, despite not preferring melee, were more than competent enough to handle their opponents… and not at all ashamed to use magic through their weapons or Smites to simply overwhelm the bots with the power and fury of their attacks.
Me, I popped its force field with a snap, and as it froze for a moment with the feedback ripping through it, a Rusting Grasp riding the end of Dread as its Spear punched through the bot’s torso and turned all the delicate circuitry inside into powder. My opposite barely managed to get into a proper stance before it locked up and froze in place.
Primus tossed the shell of it against Haki’s opponent, knocking that one over on its side just in time for Haki’s Mace to explode its duralloy skull and send a jolt of Holy deconstructive energy sizzling through it, ashing all of its most delicate components at once. Its most critical circuits gone, it spasmed and went still.
Shardings flicked out, and the opponents of the slower combatants came apart violently and without shame for the help.
“Command Center,” Dama Adama said, her own Ring Adept stuffing the power sword into her Masspack. Darkmoor tech could certainly rig up a power supply for it if needed. All the intact power weapons followed forthwith!
We’d come across writing on the walls in a script that seemed to owe more to computer notation than to organic writing, but there had been actual numbers and characters at a few points.
We hadn’t come in contact with any living thing, however, the cyborganics being just programmed meat without any form of sapience or a soul, the life they had that of a virus or bacteria, just a process in an artificial object.
The fate of anything living was unknown, as we hadn’t managed to visit all of the buried base’s chambers yet, concentrating on getting to whatever was controlling stuff down here.
The great central shaft of the base had been blocked and broken up, resulting in our needing to move around it at several points, but that had only added to the fun and variety of the defenses this place was throwing at us.
Karma came from all sources, after all!
The great double doors ahead were sealed, and were definitely blast doors, reinforced with force fields that could probably defy a nuke.
Two Argent Ruptures, not so much. Except it had four layers, so Helos and I had to crack them twice, blowing out recessed emitters with wild spark showers and melting exotic elements that went hissing down the duranium portals in front of us.
Probably waiting for us to Disintegrate a path forward, as we had done at several points, the controller was probably a little bit surprised when Catleya’s Password sang out, sinking into the audio receptors and doing fun Heartsong things to the computer processes.
With a quiet and welcoming hiss, the double layers of the heavy door recessed up and down with casual speed, and left the control center wide open to us.
Video monitors on every wall, some of them showing us, obviously connected to biotech organic circuits to foil our extant Vampire’s Veil, our Invisibility to Technology otherwise down at this point. Banks of computers and holographic displays encircled the central seat to the place, which was… occupied.
And guarded.