Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 10 - The Problem with Dervishes (Patreon)

I’ve seen dozens of worlds fall. Some were stripped of every resource they had to offer, then abandoned. Left with a dead world, the people had no choice but to become refugees. In other cases, one faction or another chose to destroy a planet simply because they couldn’t stomach their enemies winning. I don’t want that for Earth, but I don’t know if I can stop it.

Alistaris Kargat

I sat with Patrick, sharing a tasteless meal of travel rations as we both stared at the Mist lamp we’d deployed. The blue-tinted light flickered, bouncing off the crystalline walls to cast everything in a subtle, azure glow. Finally, I let out a sigh and asked, “So, any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” Patrick admitted, fidgeting with one of his cybernetic arms. He had the thing open and had shoved a screwdriver inside. “I was kind of hoping you’d figure it out, if I’m honest.”

I gave him a smirk. “Also, don’t you think you should do that kind of thing in a more optimal environment?” I asked.

“What?” he asked, a little confused. Only a second later, comprehension dawned on his face, and he said, “Oh. This. Yeah, it would probably be better if I had a proper workshop. But I’m not really doing anything major. Just adjusting some of the servos because I noticed a glitch in the articulation of a –”

“That sounds pretty complicated.”

“It’s not. Besides, it relaxes me,” he stated.

“If you make a mistake, the whole arm’s going to be useless,” I pointed out. “That would stress me out like nothing else.”

“Coming from the girl who makes bombs in place of meditation…”

“That’s different.”

“Yeah, because if you screw up a bomb, you’re not the only one affected. If I mishandle one of these servos, one of my fingers stops working. I think ‘different’ is probably an understatement,” he said.

“I suppose that’s fair,” I admitted. “But seriously – any ideas? Because I don’t know if bullets are going to do much against balls of Mist.”

“They might die if you destroy their crystals.”

“They might not, though,” I pointed out. “I mean, there’s a chance that this place requires specialized equipment.”

“The Crutacaans were mining it.”

“Yeah. But did they go this deep? I mean, there’s every chance that there was a cache of Rift shards outside. They could’ve focused on mining those, and probably left when the cache was exhausted. After that, they would’ve just had to wait for it to reset,” I explained. In fact, that was how most Rift mining operations worked. Few aliens bothered conquering the entire Rift. Instead, they took the easy pickings, then exited the Rift and let it reset.

And while that was much safer, it very much limited the profitability of even the most Mist-dense Rifts. If Patrick and I could afford to stay in place for more than a few weeks, we might’ve used a similar strategy. However, if we did that, we’d inevitably have a fight on our hands. Worse yet, if we weren’t careful with the timing, there was every chance that we’d exit through the Rift aperture and find an ambush waiting on us.

No - our only viable strategy was to go in, conquer the Rift, and get out as quickly as possible. Otherwise, we’d end up facing a strong enemy without the benefit of preparation. It had nearly happened after my first Rift, and I had no interest in revisiting that kind of risk.

Besides, the way back was blocked now that we’d entered the palace, so the choice was taken out of our hands.

“I think I might have an idea,” Patrick said. “But I’m not sure if it’ll work.”

“We’re not sure anything will work, Pick.”

“True.”

“So? What is it?”

“Okay, so you know how I’ve been fiddling with your old scattergun, right?”

“I’m aware, yes.”

“Do you know it works?” he asked.

“Not really,” I admitted. “Mostly, I just pointed it at stuff and squeezed the trigger.”

He sighed, and I could tell that he was about to start a lecture. I had no interest in listening to that, so I cut him off by saying, “Just the high points, Pick. I don’t need to know the fine details of Mist circuitry or whatever it is you’re about to explain.”

He actually looked a little offended at that. I’m not sure if that offense was based on me not being interested in what amounted to his life’s work, or if he couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to know every tiny detail about the aforementioned Mist circuits.

Still, he said, “Whatever. But don’t come crying to me when you don’t know why your guns aren’t working.”

“I will do exactly that. Why else would I keep you around, if not to fix all the stuff I inevitably break?”

“I thought it was my rugged good looks.”

I laughed. “Pick, you’re a lot of things, but rugged really isn’t one of them. Pretty would probably be more appropriate.”

“Even with this?” he asked, gesturing to the metal half-dome that covered the left side of his face.

“I told you about that lady I saw one time in Nova, right? Her whole face was like a golden mask,” I said. I’d seen her on Bourbon Street, and she’d been working as a prostitute. “In fact, I think her whole body might’ve been like that. People liked it, though. She had a bunch of clients, from what I could tell.”

“Are you suggesting that I should replace this with a golden mask and go into prostitution?”

“No!” I said. Then I noticed his smirk and crossed my arms in annoyance. “I’m just saying that it doesn’t make me love you any less, idiot. You know that.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, sure. But counterpoint – you’re really cute when you’re annoyed, and it’s extremely easy to tease you. So, yeah.”

I rolled my eyes. “Weren’t we talking about something else?” I pointed out, trying to change the subject.

“Oh. Right. So, I think I can take the scattergun apart and use some of the other parts in my storage to make what I’m tentatively calling Mist anchors.”

“You can’t just put the word ‘Mist’ in front of another word and think it makes any kind of sense.”

He shrugged. “Everyone else does it,” he said. “But whatever. The name isn’t important. The function is what we care about.”

“And what is that?”

“So, the scattergun doesn’t really create lightning. Instead, it agitates the ambient Mist. That electricity you see isn’t actually electricity. It’s more of a side effect of the effect traveling through the air.”

“Looks like electricity to me.”

“It’s not though. When that effect hits someone or something with concentrated Mist, the agitation causes a chain reaction, which in turn creates the stun-like effect.”

“Or death. For a non-lethal weapon, it kills a lot of people.”

“It does have a bit more kick than I expected,” he admitted. “But that just works in our favor. So, what I’m suggesting is that I take the gun apart, then use the pieces that agitate the Mist along with some other parts to create these little…anchors. One won’t do anything, but if we put them in a circle, they’ll create a web that will hopefully disrupt Mist. If those things are like you described, then there’s a chance we’ll incapacitate them.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“We throw every other weapon we have at them. Something is bound to work, right?” he remarked.

That sounded more like my kind of strategy than his usual plans, but given what we were up against, I couldn’t really come up with anything better. I said as much, adding, “May as well give it a try. What do you need from me?”

“Uh…just…I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but I just need you to be quiet and let me work,” he said.

“Wow. Just tossing me to the side like that. I see how it is.”

“Mira, I’m not –”

“Kidding, Pick. Totally kidding. Do your thing.”

He looked like he still wanted to apologize, but then thought better of it. Soon enough, he’d summoned his armor, from which he began to extract the scattergun he’d built into the suit. Like the rebuilt Dragon, it was intended to deploy from within the armor, so it took him a few hours to completely detach it. When he did, he tossed it onto the ground and started to dismantle the weapon.

As I watched, I had mixed feelings about what he was doing. I’d used that weapon countless times, and it had seen me through some tough battles. Now, it was being used for spare parts. Even if everything worked out the way he thought it would, the loss was still poignant enough to twist my stomach into knots.

How, then, would I feel when I had to replace the Pulsar? Or the R-14? The BMAP still had a lot of life left in it – in fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever outgrow it, considering that, with that weapon, the shells were far more important than the platform itself – but most of my arsenal would soon be discarded in favor of more powerful models.

“I think I’m way too attached to my guns,” I muttered to myself, though my voice was low enough that Patrick couldn’t hear. Or maybe he was just too invested in his own project to notice, which wasn’t abnormal. In that way, we were more than a little similar.

In any event, as Patrick worked on the Mist anchors, I busied myself with exploring my new senses. I’d slowly grown accustomed to using them, but I knew I’d yet to plumb the depths of what they had to offer. Being able to see auras was one thing, but I had to wonder if there was more to it. It almost felt like I could simply reach out and manipulate the Mist directly.

Which was absurd.

Everyone had to use skills. That was the whole point of the system.

But then again, was that the case with mystics like the Templars? Was that their secret, that they had adapted to manipulating the Mist without the buffer of the system or a Nexus Implant? I suspected that was the case, but I wasn’t sure. And in any case, I wasn’t one of them. I couldn’t do the things they could do.

Yet.

That was the word that kept popping up in my mind. I couldn’t do it yet. But who was to say what would happen as I continued to progress? After all, I felt certain that I had reached a higher level than just about anyone else on Earth. My uncle might’ve been of similar level; he’d killed a lot of people, and he’d once intimated to me that he’d spent quite some time hunting powerful animals as well. So, there was a good chance that he’d evolved his class, too.

But he wasn’t a {Mist Warden}.

Even as a {Mistrunner}, I was special. Few people were afforded the opportunity to acquire such a class. I knew that much. So, given the rarity of the base class, how uncommon was its evolution, especially when the requirements had been so high? I suspected that the number of people whose kill count reached into the millions was fairly low. There was even a chance that I was wholly unique.

So, who was to say that becoming a {Mist Warden} hadn’t set me on the path of attaining mystic-like powers? Freddy had said that, eventually, I would go down that road. Perhaps I’d just jumped ahead a little.

Such thoughts occupied my mind until, hours later, Patrick finally finished the first anchor. When he did, he gave a little cybernetic fist pump of celebration as he said, “Nice! I think this is going to work.”

“You didn’t before?”

“Uh…mostly. I mean, it was better than a fifty-percent chance I was on the right track,” he said. Before I could respond, he went on, “But the real variable is whether or not the crystal dervishes are built the way we think they are.”

“They are,” I said. I’d spent more than a little time studying the odd creatures, so what I had described was accurate. “Still not sure if the Mist is holding them together or if it’s just a byproduct of something else, though. Banking on the former, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was the latter.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Eh, it can be,” I stated. “Think about how boring the world would be if you already knew everything. A surprise here and there is what keeps us on our toes.”

“You sound like you want them to be different than what you expect.”

I shrugged. “Maybe I do.”

But then again, I definitely didn’t want to put Patrick in any more danger than absolutely necessary. For my part, I felt confident that I could deal with whatever came my way. Unless it was another situation like the irradiated Wildlings that had nearly killed me what felt like a lifetime ago.

After shaking his head in bemusement, Patrick went back to work. The next anchor took a little less time to construct than the first one, and the one after that was even quicker. However, the speed with which he could build them leveled out after that, and the next five took a collective ten hours to put together. I utilized that time by diving into my collection of Ghosts, where I fiddled with the structure of some of the older ones.

That was what I liked about Ghosts. No matter how well-built they were, there was always room for improvement. They could always get a little more efficient. A bit more powerful. Or quicker. So, there was always something to chase, which was good for me because I tended to achieve my training goals at a prodigious rate. In any case, that occupied me until, at last, Patrick announced that he’d finished.

I looked down at eight metallic cylinders, each with tiny legs. “That’s it?” I asked.

“Do you have any idea how complex these things are? Plus, look at those legs – they stick, Mira. Like, I can deploy them on the walls!” he exclaimed, clearly excited.

“I could have given you some sticky paper I use when I’m making my demolition charges,” I offered.

“But…but the little legs…”

“I think they’re…uh…very nice.”

“Don’t patronize me,” he muttered. “I think they’re awesome.”

“They are. I was just joking. You know me. I’m famous for my jokes.”

“You’re famous for killing millions of people.”

“They were robots. They don’t really count.”

“According to the system, they counted,” he pointed out.

“Well…um…whatever. I don’t care. Robots aren’t people. Besides, your little anchors are great. Really good job. Nobody else could have built them like you did.”

“You’re terrible at this,” he said. “You do realize that, don’t you?”

“I’m serious!” I said, picking one of them up. “Very well put together. Sturdy. Like you want your anchors to be, I guess.”

He sighed and shook his head as I continued to extoll the virtues of his anchors. Eventually, I got the picture and let the compliments peter out, and we set off to find a place to properly deploy them. We couldn’t go too far into the palace, or we’d run the risk of attracting the dervishes’ attention. Even so, we soon found ourself at an intersection that Patrick declared was perfect for our purposes. So, I helped him deploy the anchors – one at each corner, then two more each on the ceiling and floor.

Once everything was in place, we both stepped back, and he activated it.

Immediately, the world came alive with swirling Mist. The tempest was contained within the rough boundaries created by the anchors, but even from ten feet away, I could feel the agitation of the Mist affecting me. It wasn’t pain – not precisely – but it wasn’t comfortable, either.

Patrick had it worse, though, and I could see his cybernetics twitching more violently with every passing second. Finally, he deactivated the trap and let out a relieved sigh. “Well, that’s a little stronger than I thought it would be.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“Drains me pretty fast, too. Running that thing for thirty seconds takes as much Mist as running the armor for an hour.”

“That much?” I asked. I knew that his cybernetics – which, apparently, included the anchors – were incredibly efficient because of his skills. So, the fact that the trap drained him so quickly was further evidence of the power at play. Hopefully, it would be enough to take care of the dervishes.

“It’s not as efficient as the armor,” he said. “Which I think is expected, considering that I spent months working on the mech suit, and these anchors are the product of a few hours.”

“Almost a day, really.”

“Not the point, Mira.”

“Sure. I know. Just pointing it out. Don’t want you to be too proud of your little invention. Can’t have you getting a big head, you know?”

He sighed. I giggled. And after that, we went over the plan of attack. It wasn’t complicated, but we wanted to be on the same page. So, once we’d worked out the kinks, Patrick hopped into his armor, and I set off to find the first dervish.

I found it only a few minutes later.

So, from as far away as the hall would allow, I took aim with my R-14, activated Execute, then Empowered Shot, and let loose.