138: The Old Bait and Switch (Patreon)

“And that was the second time I got crabs,” Mass Driver said as they trudged through the sun-dappled forest.

“Cool,” Plagius said.

BOOM!

Natalie ragdolled backwards as an armor-piercing round shattered against her helmet, transferring all its momentum into her head and neck.

“Oh my god!” Plagius flinched as Nat went flying fifteen feet into a nearby tree.

The tiny Tinker slumped to the ground before shakily climbing to her feet, both arms raised above her head in victory.

“See? After you get used to it, it’s kinda fun, right?” Mass Driver said.

“Whoo!” Nat whooped.

Normally the impact would’ve mangled her brain and/or broken her neck, but between the super suit locking up to prevent her neck from moving, and the ring absorbing internal injuries, she was perfectly fine getting knocked around a little bit.

“That makes seven for Hardcase,” Moonlight Flash said, adding a tally to the scoreboard “five for Paradox, four for Chemestro, three for everyone else except Mass-driver, with none.”

“I win!” Nat cheered.

“Screw this, I can’t just sit here and wait for something to try to kill me! I’m getting that thing!” Plagius tried to chase in the direction of the bullet, but stopped short when Mass Driver’s hand clamped down around his neck.

“Hold your horses.” Mass Driver said, showing no effort as the young super struggled in his grasp. “It’s a trap. We’ve been over this. The longer we can keep them in the ‘testing our defences’ phase, the further toward Chicago we can get before they start laying it on thick. Don’t escalate until they do.”

“Now,” Mass Driver said, looking towards the rest of them. “They prioritize targets by who they believe is the easiest to kill, or a high value target, which means they’re gonna try to pick Hardcase off first, followed by Paradox, Chemestro and then everyone else.”

“Hardcase, you should probably get back in your mech now that we know who they’re prioritizing. Chemestro, they think you’re a high value target, play defensively.” Mass Driver said.

“Right,” Chemestro nodded before he glanced over at Sin-Eater. “Go ride with Hardcase. You’re more valuable as support than a frontliner.”

“Oh thank god, I don’t have to walk anymore,” Sin-Eater slumped over.

“Why would they think I’m easy to kill?” Perry said.

Mass Driver glanced over at Perry, looking him up and down. “Probably because you’re a Tinker, and their information on you is dated.”

“How far from Chicago are we?” George asked.

“Well, we were about a hundred and twenty miles from Chicago when we went down, been walking at about five miles an hour for four hours… so a hundred miles?” Perry said with a shrug.

“It seemed like a lot less when we were flying,” Plagius muttered.

“We’ll stop at five, before it starts getting too dark.” Mass Driver said, looking at his watch. They’ll make a sneak attack around three A.M. when everyone’s either asleep or totally exhausted.”

BOOM!

A nearby patch of foliage exploded violently. Perry thought he’d seen a streak of black from above an instant before the explosion.

“Ah, right on time!” Mass Driver yelled over the explosion. “They’ve started shelling us to make sure we don’t get any rest! This should keep up off and on for the next ten hours!”

Perry gave him a thumb’s up, and George tapped him on his shoulder.

“Moonlight Flash and I are going in the transport!” He shouted over the explosions. “Our enchantments need to rest!” George said with all the urgency of someone going inside because it was raining.

“Okay!” Perry said, before glancing at Plagius, who was rocking back and forth, skin pale, staring straight ahead, the stress visibly mounting on him. Hmm…that kid is gonna be the first one to crack. He needs something he can fight. Catharsis.

“Hey,” Perry called, catching up to George. “Can you or Moonlight Flash do me a favor?”

“What do you need, Paradox?” George asked.

“Do either of you have a spell that attracts monsters?” Perry asked.

George frowned for a moment, then shook his head. “I’ve got something that can locate the enemies around us and teleport them to our location. Would that work?”

“Yeah, just give me a moment,” Perry then ran over to Mass driver and Chemestro, pointed out Plagius’s state and convinced them it was worth potentially rocking the boat with the Replicators.

“Alright, go for it.” Perry said, returning to his cousin.

A pulse of magic flowed outward from George like a sonar, before latching onto dozens of things at once.

George scowled, holding his hands apart as reality warped around him. On one hand were all the tethers he’d made to all the enemies around them, and on the other was their current location in spacetime.

CLAP! George clapped his hands together, causing a wobble in spacetime that Perry could feel through his Attunement.

Replicators filled up the area around them, no less than a dozen of them, making the local area saturated with deadly ten-foot-tall robots.

The replicators responded instantly, unloading their oversized machine guns that made fifty cals look flacid while sprinting towards the treeline.

Dragol’s Kinesis.EXE

(2/3)

Perry grabbed all the Replicators and pulled them inward, preventing them from fading into the woods.

“Plagius, time to do your thing!” Perry shouted over the comms.

He glanced over at Plagius, who was backing away from a Replicator swinging at him with a single crushing fist.

“I can’t drain a robot!” Plagius protested.

“How do you know!?” Perry demanded, struggling to keep the Replicators from running away. They had identified him as they source of the disruption and were hitting him with both armor-piercing and chaff to obscure his vision. The contant rattling mixed with white-out conditions were making it extremely difficult to keep his focus on Dragor’s Kinesis.

Perry clenched his teeth and focused only on what he wanted the spell to do. All other concerns were secondary. He couldn’t afford-

Nope, can’t think of that.

Perry heard the sound of fighting and cursing form both Mass Driver and Plagius, the only way he had to mark time. It was maybe fifteen seconds of frantic combat before Perry heard anything definitive from his teammate.

“Hey…HEY, it works!” Plagius shouted in the midst of the whiteout. “HOLY SHIT, IT WORKS!”

Perry used Dragor’s Kinesis to force all the chaff to the ground, and witnessed Plagius cackling like a madman, leaping to the next robot, his drainer energy swirling around his hands.

The robot picked up a rock and threw it at Plagius, but Perry made the rock go careening off target, allowing the drainer to hit his target.

After that, it was just a matter of Perry, Mass-Driver and Chemestro keeping the robots from running long enough to feed them to the woodchipper that was Plagius.

Once the fight was over, Plagius stood at the top of a pile of defunct robots. “Whoo!” He shouted to the sky, electricity brimming behind his eyes. “This is great! We should hunt Replicators more often! When do you think they’ll attack again? You said three AM, right?” he turned towards Mass Driver, but the ancient super just scoffed and shook his head, walking away.

Until five PM rolled around, the entire team had to suffer through Plagius spontaneously moonwalking through the Replicator bombardments.

It was better than him cracking under the pressure, anyway.

“Hey, Paradox” George contacted Perry over a private channel.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t do that multiple times a day. Frankly I’d prefer not to do it again at all. It was a lot of effort to take down a handful of disposable pawns.”

“Don’t worry, I think we gave Plagius a taste for the great outdoors,” Perry murmured, watching the Drainer bounce between trees, riding the high of being packed with the power of a dozen Replicators.

By tomorrow the vast majority of the power would fade, but based on Plagius’s hypothetical retention rate, he should have about 6% the power and durability of a single replicator tacked on to everything he’d already accumulated.

Not bad for a single day’s work.

More importantly, he’d lost his fear of the implacable army single-mindedly bent on wearing him down and killing him.

That could be its own problem,Perry mused, studying the drainer working off the high.

“So, what was that spell?” George asked.

“What spell?” Perry asked.

“The one you used to pen all the replicators into close combat so Plagius could have his cake and eat it too. It felt strange for a telekinetic spell.”

“Dragor’s Kinesis.”

George spluttered over the comms. Perry wished he could’ve seen the spit-take, but the mage was resting inside Boomer at the moment.

“That spell is dangerous!”

“Don’t I know it,” Perry muttered.

“Alright, it’s five o’clock, Mass Driver said, glancing at his watch. “let’s make camp. Moving around in the dark is a terrible idea. Did you guys bring a tent?”

An explosion tore apart a nearby tree and showered Mass Driver with dirt and shrapnel.

“A really strong tent?” He clarified.

“Tadaa!” Natalie said over the comms, opening Boomer’s cockpit to reveal the interior. “Here’s one of the surprises!”

At a push of a button, the passenger chairs and command console tucked themselves away into the floor and walls, leaving enough space in the cockpit for nearly eight people to lay down, as long as they were sardined in.

Nine people if Nat slept on top of someone.

Bonus.

“Boomer is a tent!”

***

Command Re-evaluating threat assessment…

Paradox: demonstrated reality-warping unknown abilities commonly attributed to the super-type known as ‘Mage’ and a 475% increase in combat effectiveness since last record. Comparing to older records of Paradox and known growth pattern… Exponential growth pattern most closely related to a Drainer identified.

Assessment, Paradox: Tinker/Mage/Drainer,  High Kill Threshold, high KPS, Growth-type. Unknown abilities. Threat Assessment: STAGGERING. Recommend immediate reprioritization of tactics to eliminate organic threat to Primary Mission.

Deploy Inheritors.

***12:00AM***

Poke, poke.

Perry peeled his eyes open at the second poke to find Nat looming over him, the interior nightlights of the cockpit providing enough to see by.

She held her finger to her lips.

Wow, that’s pretty brave, Perry thought, glancing at all the other sleeping forms sardined in around them.

Nat reached down to her pants…and retrieved a little notepad and pencil.

‘It’s midnight.’ She wrote before flipping to a new page.

Surprise #2! Boomer is also immune to scanning! The Replicators can’t see inside him, but they can hear inside if they have powerful enough equipment. Natalie showed him.

Well, I totally had the wrong idea,Perry thought, be still, my doki-doki heart.

A bit of movement caught his eye as Mass Driver reached over to grab the notepad.

‘We’re gonna make a run for Chicago,” He wrote, showing Perry.

Plagius, now awake, grabbed the paper and wrote; Y U NO tell us?

Mass Driver grabbed it back and wrote: Always watching. He motioned outside and pointed to his eyes and ears.

George sat up against the wall, along with Chemestro. Sin-Eater was still passed out, snoring loudly. Nobody bothered to wake her because her snoring was providing perfect cover for the sound of pencil on paper.

Plan? George wrote.

Can anyone leave a decoy? Mass Driver wrote.

Perry, George and Midnight Flash raised their hands.

Most rested. Mass Driver wrote, pointing at Midnight Flash. She nodded.

How leave without b spotted? Plagius asked.

Boomer can burrow. Natalie wrote.

Too loud. I can do better. Chemestro wrote.

***

Three Inheritors slipped out of subspace, approaching the mech. These particular ones were nearly invisible to every wavelength, the vast majority of their bodies tucked into an extra dimension, leaving only a monomolecular edge thin enough to slip past all but the most specialized detectors and rend their prey to quivering chunks of organic material.

They surrounded the mech and as one, cleaved through the massive transport, unleashing a flurry of blows to dice it and all its passengers into meat-chunks, no longer capable of endangering the Primary Mission.

The transport dissolved into glittering light, despite registering as real on every sensor that command had been watching with tirelessly the last seven hours.

There was no burst of frustration, no anger. Only cold logic.

Targets have disengaged. Pull back and reinforce the boundary around C-0. Reacquire as soon as soon as possible.

The three Inheritors silently stepped back into subspace and began slipping through reality, aiming for C-0, the last known direction the organics had been travelling.

***2 meters underground***

“This is really weird,” Perry said as dirt, rocks, and tree roots passed through them at a staggering pace.

Chemestro sat crosslegged next to Sin-Eater, who was curled up in her blanket like a caterpillar, still snoring away.

“Do not speak, this is difficult enough, thanks to your armor,” Chemestro muttered.

Perry rolled his eyes and sat down against Boomer’s walls as they continued to sail intangibly through the underground, sailing ever further west northwest, literally under the radar.

Normally, burrowing underground would’ve made enough vibration to bring the Replicators down on them in a matter of minutes, but Chemestro was instead rendering the entire mech and all its contents intangible, allowing the whole thing to slip silently through the earth.

That meant Perry got to experience rocks and dirt literally passing through his brain. Perry didn’t know exactly how Chemestro managed to work his magic on his armor, but he assumed it was possible because he treated his entire armor as a single object rather than trying to tear it apart with a disintegrate.

It brought a few questions to mind: How were all the intangible objects still able to touch each other? Was their tangibility all shifted to the same plane so they could interact with themselves? Would everyone die if Perry gave Chemestro a Wet Willy? These were the important questions.

“How far out are we?” Natalie asked.

“At this rate, another five minutes and we’ll be in the center of Chicago,” Chemestro said.

Didn’t tell her to shut up, Perry groused internally, crossing his arms. Then again, Nat was too cute to get mad at, so Perry really couldn’t find any fault with the discrimination.

Five minutes went by, and they peeked Boomer above-ground in order to get their bearings on the museum.

They came out in the middle of the street. It was nighttime in Chicago, but the street-lamps made it possible for Plagius to read the street signs and pinpoint their location on the analog map.

“So we passed it a bit. we’re here, and we need to head that direction to get to the museum,” He said, pointing off behind them and a bit to the right.

Plagius glanced up and looked at everyone, frowning. “What’s everybody looking at?” He asked, peering around.

“The street lamps are working,” Perry murmured.

HOOONK!

The supers jumped in place as a car horn went off behind them.

“What ye doin’, makin’ modern art!” A man bellowed with a thick Chicago accent, leaning out of his box-car straight out of the seventies to shake his fist. “Get the feck outte de road!”