Mistrunner 2 - Chapter 65 - Mark Two (Patreon)

Mira had no idea what she was doing. The leaders of the tribes of Nova City are all proud people, and they don’t take too kindly to being manipulated. Even I didn’t realize how angry they would be when Gunther laid everything bare. I wish I could deal with her myself, but there’s no way they’ll let her escape alive. If I just had a chance to explain, to reason with her, we could take the whole city for ourselves. Pity that the others will never leave her alive long enough for that conversation to happen.

Nora Lancaster

I knelt in a shadow, waiting impatiently for Time Bomb to take hold and begin its spread. Since creating the Ghost, I’d made a few adjustments to its lethality – before, it was limited to incapacitation – but the tradeoff was that it took even longer to ramp up. The problem was that the fuel – my pool of Mist – was finite, and though it could be stretched quite a bit by my skills, it would always eventually run dry. That was the great limiter of my Ghosts.

The first time I had used Time Bomb, I’d knocked dozens – maybe as many as a hundred – Enforcers out. Since then, my power had grown immensely, and so, I’d adjusted the Ghost to utilize the resources at my disposal. It was difficult getting everything to stabilize, but I’d had plenty of downtime over the past few months. The result was the perfect tool for my situation, and I was eager to see it sweep through the army of Operators arrayed between me and the ramp down to the Garden.

Aside from increasing the power consumption, ramping up the damage required that I adjust the incubation time as well. Otherwise, the Ghost would unravel into uselessness. So, even if my every cell was screaming at me to act, I had no choice but to sit back and wait for Time Bomb to do its thing.

The minutes ticked by, one after another, and by the time an hour had passed, I could tell that the Operators were getting just as restless as I felt. Already, they were sending small groups out to search for me; likely, the surety in my chosen direction had begun to waver, and they’d started to consider the possibility that I’d opted to go to ground and wait them out.

But by that point, the damage was done.

They didn’t know it, but after an hour, Time Bombhad already become widespread. If there was a single Operator who hadn’t become infected, I would have been surprised. At best, a few of the stronger members of the mismatched army might’ve possessed defenses sufficient to resist infection, but even that seemed unlikely. I’d seen what Nova City’s Operators called defenses, and they were woefully insufficient to the task of rebuffing the efforts of a true {Mistrunner}. Even Helen Stone, as limited as she was, could’ve torn through most of what passed for a Mistwall in Nova City, and she didn’t have some of my most potent advantages.

No - I didn’t think anyone would escape my Time Bomb unscathed.

If the city hadn’t been so deserted, I might’ve worried that it would infect civilians, too. But the range wasn’t wide enough for that when two-thirds of the population had already fled the city.

Still, I needed to remember how dangerous such a Ghost could be in a densely populated settlement. If the deaths of a few silo workers had left me grief-stricken, what would I feel if I accidently killed an entire city? I wasn’t sure I could handle something like that, so, as I knelt in the shadowy alley, I vowed to keep Time Bomb on a tight leash.

I pushed those thoughts from my mind as I focused on the situation at hand. I felt confident in my ability to hide, especially when my potential pursuers had no idea I was around, but there was always the possibility that someone could see through Stealthand Camouflage. And I needed to remain vigilant so that I could combat such an unlikely occurrence. Still, a person can quickly grow accustomed to even the most stressful situations, and I was no different. As the first hour spread into the second, I found my mind wandering even further afield. When I noticed it, I took great pains to wrangle my thoughts into some semblance of control, but it wasn’t easy, and it certainly never lasted long.

With the absence of any impactful stimuli, my mind automatically settled on the future. Or more importantly, what I would do after my mission was complete.

Before my most recent foray into the wilderness – and the subsequent fight against the soul-spiking spider – my every thought was dominated by plans for revenge. I rarely thought of what might come after, mostly because I’d somewhat assumed I’d end up dead in the attempt to bring Nora and the Specters to their knees. I certainly wasn’t suicidal, but I also wasn’t anything close to perfect. At some point, I would mess up, and it was only a matter of time before one of my many mistakes bore lethal consequences.

But against all odds, I’d survived, and so long as I could get through the thousands of Operators between me and my goal, I felt confident that I would make it through mostly intact. So, I was increasingly cognizant of the fact that I had no real, concrete plans for what might come after that. Sure, there were vague notions of adventure, of a life spent delving one Rift after another, but that wasn’t a plan. Not really. It was more like a child’s fantasy – heavy on intent, but light on meaningful details.

I’d have probably kept going along that train of thought if, at that very moment, my Ghost hadn’t completed its incubation. In its first incarnation – which was the product of months’ of work on its own – Time Bomb was meant to glitch out a person’s cybernetics to such a degree that it would incapacitate them. And in that endeavor, it had been incredibly effective, even killing a couple of the Enforcers who’d been its first victims. And that had given me the idea of ramping up the lethality.

So, over the following months, I’d spent countless hours combining the underlying structure of Overcharge with the potent Ghost. The simple goal was to ramp up the lethality of the Ghost, but as uncomplicated as the idea might have been, the implementation had proved to be an absolute pain. Sometimes literally, because creating an uncooperative Ghost often resulted in a blinding headache. In fact, those headaches were as responsible for the progression of Pain Tolerance as my more gruesome injuries. But I had persisted, creating one incarnation after another until, at last, I’d built something that worked, albeit not in a way I had expected.

Overcharge was built to harness the ambient Mist in order to create a sudden, sharp surge of energy that could incapacitate or kill its victims. Doing so was incredibly Mist-hungry but commensurately effective. However, doing that on the massive scale that came with Time Bombwas problematic in that it would completely drain the ambient Mist before the effect had spread past a few people. So, I’d had to get creative with how the effect was applied, and I’d stumbled upon a tiered approach.

During the lengthy incubation period, the Ghost would steadily drain a small amount of the ambient Mist, fueling the initial leap from one host to another as well as banking a good portion for the upcoming surge. However, instead of a single shock, Time Bomb would create an escalating series of miniature charges that would detonate once everything had reached maturity. That way, the Mist requirement was spread out over hours, rather than a singular instant.

Even so, balancing the time requirement with Mist consumption and the necessary delay needed to maximize the number of people affected was insanely difficult. Still, after doing the math, I knew it would all work out, so I kept at it until, at last, I’d created a masterpiece of mass death.

As I watched, my first victim began to convulse. The men and women around her reacted quickly; some backed away while others scrambled to help. But there was nothing any of them could do; most had long since been infected, and it was only a matter of time before they shared her fate.

Sure enough, only twenty seconds later, the second victim was beset by a Mist-induced seizure. Then, a few seconds after that, a third. Then a fourth. Exponentially, the effects of Time Bomb spread until whole swaths of the mismatched army fell into violent convulsions. Some managed to resist, but the escalating nature of the Ghost’s effects rendered their resistance moot, and they soon fell before its might.

The first victim died after five minutes, but that event set off a chain reaction as waves of Operators were overcome, their systems overloaded with Mist until their bodies gave out. Before long, the kill count had reached into the dozens. Then the hundreds. Finally, more than a thousand had fallen.

It took almost an hour, and only about half of the Operators outright died. However, the survivors might have been worse off than the slain warriors. Most were comatose. Others were crippled, their cybernetic enhancements smoking, their circuitry destroyed by the overload of Mist.

Barely a dozen had completely resisted the effects.

That was a manageable number.

In other circumstances, I might have felt guilty. After all, I was far from comfortable with mass murder, especially when my opponents were entirely incapable of fighting back. What I’d just set in motion was a mass execution. Or an extermination. But any notions of guilt I might’ve harbored were cut off by the simple fact that they’d positioned themselves to kill me. They didn’t care that they’d amassed thousands to kill a single person. They weren’t concerned with fighting fair. And because of that, I couldn’t be bothered to do so either.

No - my conscience, in this instance, was clear.

I summoned and raised the Pulsar, used Empowered Shot, and squeezed the trigger. My target – a massive man that must’ve been seven feet tall who had the aura of a leader – took the round directly in the chest. However, I was shocked to see that, although he was sent sprawling to the ground, he rose only a second later, completely unharmed, save for a bit of burned flesh I could see through the resulting hole in his combat vest.

So, I fired again, hitting him in the head as he pushed himself to his feet. The round slammed into his face, charring the flesh and tearing the skin away. The momentum of the shot sent him flipping backwards, but when he rose again, I could see the gleam of subdermal armor that had been exposed by the latest attack.

By that point, the other eleven Operators had set their shock aside and stirred themselves to action. Two shots weren’t enough for them to pinpoint my location, but I knew a third would probably do the trick. So, I retreated down the alley and leaped up to grab ahold of a low-hanging ridge in the building’s façade. Hauling myself up, I repeated the action. Once. Twice. Three times until I reached the roof. Then, I sprinted across the expanse and, once I reached the edge, harnessed the entirety of my Constitution attribute to leap across another alley to land on the roof of a neighboring building.

I repeated this tactic four times until I had relocated almost a hundred yards away. Then, I focused on the Operators stranded in the midst of a thousand still-twitching corpses. They hadn’t been idle, but with no means of locating me, they could only do so much. Still, the Operators were well-equipped professionals, and they’d erected a portable Mist shield.

However, after Time Bomb had sucked the area dry of ambient Mist, the shield was much weaker than it normally would have been. Even from more than a hundred yards away, I could see the telltale flicker of a Mist shield on the verge of collapse.

Hefting my Pulsar, I took aim, used Empowered Shot, and two seconds later, sent a round directly into the center of the shield. It shattered into shards of Mist that soon dissipated into nothing, exposing the men and women who’d huddled behind the flimsy barrier. Their reactions were predictable – shock, followed by disbelief, and then replaced by panic – but by the time they reached that third stage, I’d already exchanged my sniper rifle for the BMAP.

They were at the edge of my effective range – the artillery platform could lob its ordinance up to half a mile away, but my accuracy experienced a precipitous drop after the first hundred yards – but they were close enough that I could make it work.

And I did.

The weapon discharged its shells with a series of audible thumps that, only a second or so later, fell upon the scrambling Operators, and to predictable effect.

The BMAP was an incredibly powerful weapon that could topple buildings. In addition, my [Demolition]skill had grown considerably since I’d acquired it, and so too had my modifiers. The combination of the two, as Gala had predicted what felt like a lifetime ago, was devastating.

A series of explosions erupted, bathing the area in rolling waves of flame and overwhelming force that could pulverize concrete. The Operators might have been powerful, and they were clearly well-equipped. However, the BMAP rendered those advantages pointless. Even the giant leader’s high-quality subdermal armor would be useless in the face of six rounds from the BMAP.

But for good measure, I exchanged the spent cannister for a fresh one – noting that it was my second to last one – and sent another volley to finish them all off for good. In the back of my mind, it might have seemed like a pointless waste of resources, but I had no interest in giving those dangerous Operators any chance to regroup. It was better to end them the best way I knew how and deal with the lack of ammunition for my most powerful weapon if and when the time came.

When the dust settled, only charred corpses and a deep crater in the concrete remained of the elite Operators.

More importantly, the way was clear, and nothing barred my descent into the Garden. That wouldn’t be the case for long; more Operators were scattered throughout Bywater, and I knew they would soon converge on the scene of the explosions. Sure, some might see it as a sign to cut off their pursuit – hopefully, at least – but I knew the mentality it took for someone to embrace the lifestyle of an Operator. Most were half-convinced they were immortal, and few were the sort to run from danger.

With my path clear, I descended from my perch, opting to take the stairs rather than climb down the façade. The building was predictably abandoned; anyone who might’ve persisted through Nova City’s exodus had probably vacated the area the moment they saw the Operators amassing.

Over the next couple of minutes, I traversed the killing field I’d created. I left the Operators who’d fallen but managed to survive the effects of Time Bombalone. They were out of the fight, and, although I could harvest a little extra Mist from killing them, I found the idea incredibly distasteful. Of course, there was a part of me that couldn’t help but point out that death might have been preferable to living out their lives as cripples or in a coma.

I silenced that part of my mind, pushing forward with grim determination and, once I’d reached the ramp that descended into the Garden, I summoned my hoverbike and sped away. However, I did periodically stop to throw out demolition charges at planned intervals along the way. I hoped that the massive graveyard I’d created would deter any pursuit, but I wasn’t going to put all my trust in optimism. Instead, I intended to destroy the spiraling ramp behind me.

So, with those stops slowing me down, it took quite a bit longer than normal to reach the Garden. Fortunately, there wasn’t another army in my way, and I quickly sped along, stopping only to detonate the charges I’d set.

With the press of a button, the sound of a series of muted explosions filled the air, and a moment later, huge chunks of concrete began to fall toward the swamp far below. To my surprise, the ramp remained mostly intact, albeit with a few sizable gaps created by the demolition charges. Hopefully, the Operators who’d been scouring Bywater didn’t possess the means to bridge those expanses. Even if they did, it would slow them down.

Like that, all pursuit was cut off, and I had leave to continue on with my mission. Looking up, I noticed that night had begun to fall. Hopefully, by the dawn of the next day, I would have finished with Nova City.

Strangely, I no longer looked upon my mission with fiery determination. Instead, it felt like an obligation. An item to be checked off a list. My resolve to see it through was no weaker, but it was less of a goal and more of a chore to be completed.

And I hated that.

I’d spent months working towards this moment, and I desperately wanted – no, I needed – to enjoy it. Otherwise, everything would feel so pointless.

Perhaps it was.

What did any of it really matter? Sure, Nora would be punished, but that wouldn’t change anything, would it? Not really. Even my own life would go on.

I shook my head and accelerated. I couldn’t let myself get too distracted by errant thoughts. I needed focus. I needed to kill Nora, or else everything I’d done would truly be for nothing. Even if I had become a little disenchanted with my quest for revenge, I fully intended to see it through.

With that in mind, I sped away, hopefully to end things once and for all.