Magnus: Part 3
I couldn’t see any hint of a connection to the energies that Artificers used, so I knew that the sword wouldn’t do much of anything.
Thanks to the suit, I wasn’t short of normal ways to hurt people. I fired off a series of goobots. For all I knew, these guys were important to history in some way I wasn’t aware of.
The gray lines spread out from the bots, covering them in layers of sticky goo. They twisted, pulling against them, finding that they were stuck, then changed tactics.
Except, they were shapeshifters and a race that had the skills necessary to find the Destroy faction’s traps, reverse engineer them, and with rare exceptions, kept the useful parts and not the trap.
One of the Abominators absorbed one of its gray arms into its body, out of the goo, and regrew it below the sticky strands, pulling a blue-gray gun that reminded me of Cassie’s out of a crevice in its body.
At that moment, my implant reported, “Activating network defenses,” as presumably one or more of the Abominators used their implants to attack mine.
Hoping it wouldn’t change history much, I activated a boombot. It shot out, sinking into the middle of them and exploded.
Burned Abominator bits flew in all directions, dark blue fluids leaking out of the bodies. Some of the bits hit the force field and me. Thanks to the explosion, and despite my wishes to avoid knowing, I saw what the Abominators looked like on the inside. Like the Xiniti, ribbons of gray cables and unknown gray structures were strung through them. How that worked with their shapeshifting I didn’t know, but nanomachines would solve the obvious problems.
Speaking of obvious problems, I’d caused one for Magnus. He had to keep me occupied or I’d have time to start hacking the throne or the force field between us. The problem was that if he opened up the force field enough to let his allies (or his controlled tools) in to attack me, he might let in someone who could help me.
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The latter problem was illustrated by Jaclyn who appeared out of nowhere after I blew up the Abominators, and who Magnus only barely managed to stop by putting up a force shield in front of her.
She let loose a barrage of punches, but unable to get through said, “Sorry,” via implant and disappeared back into the battle around us where she’d be able to help.
In front of me, Magnus’ eyes had gone wide as he breathed heavily, mouth opened. It was the face of a man, I suspected, who’d just realized that he might lose.
Figuring he’d expect me to try to break through the force field between us, I started slashing at it.
Confirming my suspicion, he smiled as the force field threw out lines of sparks each time my blade hit it. My Artificer senses confirmed that he’d reinforced all of the force fields.
Not wanting to risk giving him enough time to protect the throne better, I stabbed straight into it.
This time I didn’t concentrate on damage. Instead, I tried sabotage. I’d studied the flow of power and made my target one of the major paths, creating a blockage. I routed the energy toward one of the hot spots where energy pooled from my earlier attacks.
Aware that Magnus would try to unblock the channel, I didn’t stop there. I opened up the path further down, so that it would still leak when he reconnected them.
Around then, he must have realized if not what I was doing, but that I was doing something to restrict the flow of power to him.
He tried to create a force field between me and the throne, but my sword was already in it. It may even be that my rerouting had limited the available power because even though Magnus pushed power into the force field, it didn’t cut the sword in two.
I pushed power into the sword and the sword cut into the force fields that surrounded it. I even drew on the power flowing through the throne for a sip.
At this, Magnus screamed. I couldn’t understand the words if there were any.
I saw the power draw before I realized what he was doing, but I knew it had to be big. I also knew I wanted no part of whatever it was, cutting off the path to him and routing it to the side.
That’s the point where I realized that that power leaking from the hot spots I’d created earlier had begun to collect on the far side. While the throne was holding it in, I knew there had to be a limit.
Whatever this construct was, it could only hold a limited amount of “loose” energy. Since this was weirdo alien technology, I couldn’t guess at how much power it represented, but this thing drew power from hundreds of stars, so probably a lot.
Magnus must have only seen it as lost power that he wanted to use. I could sense him changing the routing so that he could draw it into himself.