Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 47 - The Rules of War (Patreon)

Templars are just people. We have hopes and dreams, flaws and fears just like everyone else. The only difference is that we somehow managed to peek behind the curtain. For many of us, that is the source of those fears.

Frederick Connoly

For a brief moment, I panicked.

There’s something primal about the feeling of falling. It didn’t matter if, by all accounts, I could survive a fall from basically any height. No – the most primitive part of my brain was convinced, if only for a second, that I was about to die. But then, reason reasserted itself, and I came upon a different problem. Sure, I didn’t think I was going to break my neck upon impact, but I had every reason to believe that it would still be disastrous. Even if I didn’t injure myself, falling into that Mist shield would certainly alert anyone who was paying attention. And that would cause almost as many problems as falling to my death.

But I had been in so many lethal situations that the panic quickly became survival instinct, and in that moment, I grabbed hold of all the Mist in my immediate vicinity, and shoved against it. And just like that, my fall came to a sudden halt. I hovered in mid-air for the briefest of seconds before I lost hold of the Mist and resumed the fall.

I tried to recapture whatever magic I’d managed to bottle with that first attempt, but without the panic coursing through my mind, I was frustratingly unsuccessful. So, I quickly shifted gears and manipulated the Mist to use Teleport, which took me back to the wall, where I used my previous tactic to adhere to the surface.

For a while, I just hung there, my heart beating out of my chest as I tried to calm myself. Then, another explosion of Mist swept over me. This time, I was ready for it, though, and as soon as it passed me by, I slapped my hands and feet against the wall, steadying myself before I could fall more than a couple of feet.

Like that, I descended. It wasn’t comfortable, and each wave of Mist sent panic to flood my mind. But I soon discovered that I could inoculate myself against it with a hastily built cocoon of my own Mist. It wasn’t perfect. Indeed, the pulse of hostile Mist ripped huge chunks from my makeshift armor. However, so long as I kept my focus intact, I could repair the damage before it caused any problems.

Still, it was extremely uncomfortable, and it required every ounce of attention to keep myself from falling. Without the effects of [Multi-Mind], I wouldn’t have managed it at all. Even with it, the strategy required constant focus.

Fortunately, I was well used to that sort of thing.

For the next few minutes, I continued my descent, one tedious inch at a time, until I finally found myself withing a few feet of the Mist shield. And only a couple of feet beyond that was the surface of the drill, which was more like a giant ship than anything else. Regardless, I knew I had to time things perfectly, or I would, at the very least, be detected. Considering I was on a stealth mission, I wanted to avoid that.

So, after I settled myself in the wake of the most recent pulse of Mist, I manipulated the shield to allow for passage, then dropped to the surface of the drill. Once there, I pressed myself flat, letting the shield close.

But even that was difficult. The shield was a powerful one, and holding back the Mist had felt like trying to hold back a tsunami. I’d managed, but only just, and even that much had left me a little rattled. Clearly, they’d upgraded their technology. That told me they were serious about protecting the drill, as if I didn’t already know that.

In any case, I started slithering across the surface as I searched for a way inside. And after a few more minutes, I found just such an entrance, which presented as a small hatch that was obviously meant for emergency access. That was perfect for my needs, so after spending a few seconds infiltrating the system, I commanded it to slide open. Once it did jus that, I slipped inside, climbing down a ladder and, after casting my senses around to ensure I was alone, dropped down to a corridor.

And just like that, I was inside.

Now, I just needed to search for the captive team, then figure out how to disable the enormous drill. After that, it was just a question of doing what needed to be done. Hopefully, I could accomplish that while avoiding any unnecessary fights. After all, with how many people were supposed to be onboard – Adjudicators and mystics alike – I didn’t want to bring any undue attention to myself. I was powerful, but against that many, I didn’t think I would fare very well.

So, with that in mind, I wrapped myself in as much Stealth as I could muster, tamping my aura down along the way, and crept forward. The corridor itself was the expected plastisteel, but there were hundreds of rooms along the way. A quick look inside told me that I’d stumbled upon the largest collection of Rift shards I’d ever seen. They were all low-quality shards, no bigger than my thumb, but there were so many of them – literally hundreds of tons – that I didn’t think their relative weakness was such a problem.

I shuddered to think how many credits the Gamoris had invested into the drill. It wasn’t long before I discovered what all those shards were for, when I stumbled upon a Mist engine that was a hundred times bigger than the one that motivated the Leviathan. And there were dozens of them, too, with a bunch of alien workers of all sorts of races shoveling Rift shards inside.

The Mist engines were connected to giant cables, which I followed through the ship and to their eventual destination, which was the actual drill mechanism. When I’d first heard that the aliens were drilling through the Earth’s crust, I’d expected an actual drill. But in retrospect, that was silly and probably more based on cartoons than I wanted to admit.

The reality was far more terrifying.

It was actually composed of hundreds of Mist-powered lasers, all spinning and capable of focusing on a single point. The Mist cost was absolutely staggering, and the sheer runoff from the operation was responsible for the pulses of Mist that had nearly sent me plummeting down a mile-long shaft.

After finding that, I knew that it wouldn’t be long before the aliens reached the core. When they did, it wouldn’t take long before they got precisely what they wanted from the operation.

Eventually, I discovered their cache of explosives, as well, and I was impressed with the sheer volume of material. The charges themselves weren’t terribly sophisticated, but then again, I didn’t expect them to be. Bombs, at their core, aren’t all that complicated, and there was no reason to veer away from the simple designs that worked. The only real difference was the fuel, and these bombs were made of some Mist-dense substance I’d never encountered. I stole a few dozen – more for academic purposes than anything else – but the rest I left alone.

But just after I turned away from the first cache, something occurred to me. It was just an idea, but I ran with it, closing the door and extending a few tendrils of Mist. Once I felt what I’d expected, grinned.

Personally, when I created explosives, I tended to avoid using Mist as a trigger. Instead, I liked to use mundane detonators. Aliens approached it differently, probably because they were far more accustomed to using Mist for everything. In practice, the difference wasn’t huge. It didn’t make the bombs any better or worse. Just a different approach, but one I’d just realized I could exploit.

Extending as many Mist tendrils as I could handle, I started to drain the power from the nanites that composed the Mist triggers. The first one took about twenty seconds, but each subsequent instance went a little faster. By the time I got to the tenth set, I accomplished my goal in less than a second.

So I went for the next few minutes, disarming dozens of bombs at a time until, at last, the explosives were rendered completely inert. Then, I realized that I could do the same to all those Rift shards, so I returned to the first room and got to work.

It took a slightly different approach, and it took a little longer at first, but once I got the hang of it, I swept through the facility with a vengeance, draining their fuel and removing the lethality from their explosives. Along the way, I also uploaded a version Extermination, which was the Ghost I’d used back in Olympus. There were some subtle differences, largely because I’d been working on refining it when I’d absorbed my Nexus Implant into my core, but also because of the changing nature of my power. The result was that it was far more powerful, and as a bonus, it was easier for me to hide.

So, it was easy to expect it to be quite a bit more lethal.

The other advantage was that the Adjudicators onboard didn’t always wear their armor. As such, they were incredibly vulnerable, and I was more than willing to take advantage of their lowered defenses. They received their own version of Extermination, which was timed rather than reliant on my signal for activation. My reasoning was simple: if the Adjudicators were wearing their armor, any signal I sent would have been blocked. So, as much as I didn’t want to rely on a timer, it was a necessary adjustment.

It did put a time limit on my efforts, though.

One day. That was all I had to complete my mission before the Adjudicators started dropping dead. With that in mind, I continued to work, infecting as many alien personnel as I could while slowly undermining their entire operation. It was grueling work, but I was more than willing to endure.

On the eighteenth hour, I hit my first obstacle when the drill came to a screeching halt. It only took a moment for me to realize that the drill’s workers had probably loaded the Mist engines with inert shards, and to predictable results.

At first, nothing really changed. But then, the mystics made an appearance.

Most of them weren’t very powerful. No stronger than the first one I’d killed on the system station we’d always referred to as the Bazaar. But there were a few that seemed a notch above that. In any event, they couldn’t detect me, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they discovered the issues. When that happened, there was a good chance that they would start looking for a saboteur.

So, my timer accelerated.

I hurried to get as much as possible, but I knew it was only a temporary measure. I wanted nothing more than to simply blow it all up. However, I had no idea how detonating my explosives would react to the bombs already onboard. For all I knew, the result would be an even larger explosion than the one I had created on the moon. Because despite my efforts, I knew I couldn’t disarm every bomb in the drill facility.

And if I was honest, I also knew that I had a tendency to overdo things. On top of that, we’d already gotten deep enough beneath the Earth’s surface that a large enough explosion would do irreparable damage to the planet.

No – I couldn’t risk that.

But what I could do was work to disable the thing. So, with that in mind, I continued my sweep through the facility, uploading my Ghosts, draining Rift shards, and disarming bombs. And when I’d finally exhausted those possibilities, I turned my attention to the laser mechanisms themselves.

Fortunately, they worked off their own self-contained systems, so I spent the next couple of hours uploading a Ghost that would, when the time came, completely disable them while destroying their operating systems.

By the time I’d finished that, though, my time was up. So, I set myself up in one of the rooms containing the inert Rift shards and waited the last few minutes until, at last, the time came. When it did, I signaled the activation of Extermination, and only a second later, I felt an influx of Mist that told me I’d just killed more than a thousand people. A moment after that, I received another wave of Mist that meant I’d killed a host of Adjudicators.

I hadn’t gotten them all, though. And there were quite a few mystics still running around as well. So, I knew that the next part of my plan would still be quite tricky.

With that in mind, I waited until, at last, I felt a deep shudder as the drill came to a complete halt. The lasers had been disabled, most of the Rift shards in the facility had been drained, and the bombs had been disarmed. On top of that, most of the normal personnel had been killed, and a good portion of the Adjudicators were dead as well. I’d already done irreparable damage to the operation, but I still had one part of my mission left.

I needed to find and rescue the captured team.

So, I took a deep breath, then left the room behind and began my search. There were a few possibilities for where they were being held – seven rooms that I’d been unable to access for different reasons – so those were my first targets. The first three just featured locks I couldn’t bypass without setting off alarms, but now that I’d accomplished my primary goals, I could afford to be a little less circumspect. So, I tore through them, setting off the alarms along the way. Unfortunately, those rooms contained nothing but expensive-looking equipment that I quickly and efficiently disabled before moving on.

The next two had been filled with mystics, though with the alarm going off, they’d flooded out of what I suspected were their quarters, and were currently searching for me. Or whatever they assumed was the cause of the alarms. Either way, I found nothing but empty rooms.

However, the sixth door, which had been guarded by a half-dozen Adjudicators that were now dead, was the jackpot. After forcing the doors to open, I stepped through to see what looked like a holding facility. A dozen cells lined either side of the hall, each one guarded by a Mist shield. I walked inside to see that each cell held a handful of humans and a couple of Dingyts.

I’d found the prisoners.

Now, I just needed to free them and find some manner of escape.

First, though, I took care of the first part and sent a dozen Mist tendrils out to deactivate the shields barring entry into the cells. They winked out a second later, and the moment they did, the stench of death hit my nose. I didn’t even need to look to recognize that each and every one of the prisoners was already dead.

Which meant that…

“You are far too easy to manipulate, Miss Braddock,” came a voice from the entrance. I whipped around to see a tall figure wearing all black. A helmet hid his face, but his proportions suggested that he was human. Or at least human-like. That didn’t mean he wasn’t an alien; humans existed on other planets, after all. But after seeing so many oddly shaped aliens over the past months, it was a little surprising. What wasn’t surprising was the huge surge of Mist that quickly enveloped me.

I let it.

I even pretended to struggle, gasping, “Why? What’s going on?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked, stepping forward, his voice carrying with it a reverberation that made it sound far deeper than normal. He flicked his hand, and the Mist encasing my body contracted. My bones creaked under the pressure, and I let out a cry of pain that wasn’t altogether feigned. “They said you were too smart to fall for this all-too-obvious trick. But I knew you would come running to save your allies. That’s what you do, isn’t? The noble warrior. The hero.”

I snorted at that.

“What?” he asked.

“A hero? Me? You need to check your sources.”

He cocked his helmeted head to the side. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve killed as many humans as you have. Innocent ones, too. Do you know what they used to call people who fight like me? War criminals.”

“War…criminal. A curious term,” he said, obviously unconcerned. He was completely confident in the viability of his trap, and I could see why. There were a handful of other mystics standing at the door, and his control of Mist was second only to the goblinoid mystic that had nearly killed me back in the Bazaar.

“I know. Always seemed like an oxymoron to me,” I admitted. “As if wars can have rules. That’s a bunch of bullshit meant to keep the weak from having a chance. The only people who can afford to fight according to some rules or laws are the strong. Everyone else does everything they can to avoid annihilation.”

“Interesting, I –”

At that moment, I flexed my own control of the Mist, tearing through his grip. As I did so, I ripped the Interdiction Blade from the scabbard on my back and brought the blade screaming in his direction in an overhand cut. He reacted quickly, raising his hand and conjuring a shield of Mist that absorbed the blow. However, he couldn’t stop the momentum, which slammed him into the ground. I followed it up with a kick that harnessed every bit of strength I could muster, and when it connected, I felt bones crack before he went flying down the hall to hit his cadre of mystic companions.

I tossed a grenade after him, then summoned my Stinger. Now that I’d established that the people I had come to rescue were dead, I wasn’t nearly as concerned with remaining quiet. I let loose with a barrage of gunfire as the battle truly began.