Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

GRIFFIN TUCKER VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

MT DISCOVERY, PROVINCE OF ARAGONIA

“We’re coming up on quite a few tensa signatures, so be alert,” Kismet said urgently in Griffin’s ear. “I’ll map out the area and get enemy locations painted out in your HUD.” Griffin immediately complied as he ran behind Jessaline Braedes, the woman who’d been sent to find him specifically.

She was probably leading him to his death and he was blithely following along simply because it seemed to be expected of him. Only I could get myself killed by being too scared to confront this woman about being scared about fighting a bunch of monsters, he thought. She’d taken charge so quickly, that he felt himself almost automatically following her since she’d shown up. Maybe I’m just that desperate for human contact.

Kismet finished her mapping job and Griffin’s HUD lit up with a 3-D map of his surroundings using all his sensory data to fill in details about his surroundings he’d never be able to access with his senses. His HUD showed that the tunnel they were currently sprinting down full-tilt would take a turn to the left in a hundred meters or so, then would pitch sharply upwards and open out into a huge cavern. That’s where the craziness was happening.

Kismet’s mapping was showing a battle playing out in real-time between four city-bus-sized Plasma Cybercentipede Mothers and four… well, Griffin had to guess that they were Reborn.

The Reborn had gathered in a knot in the middle of the cavern and it seemed to Griffin like they were having a tough time of it. Two of the Mothers were on the walls, blasting at the Reborn with plasma beams while the other two harassed them from much closer with steel-sheathed mandibles and toxic spray. The sounds of combat echoed down the tunnel and they were already coming up to the bend to the left. In just a few more seconds, they’d be in the thick of it with the rest of them.

“Kismet! Can I use my DEEP Suit with my Adaptable Conjuration? Fuck it, no time; it works or it doesn’t!” Griffin pumped tensa into his Adaptable Conjuration graft, a long-shot idea forming in his mind, and was surprised to see a progress bar pop up and make itself transparent.

The Desiccator

You have used your Adaptive Conjuration graft in combination with the DEEP Suit in synergy to create a new weapon: The Desiccator.

Desiccant used: Diatomaceous Earth

Delivery System: Explosive Warhead

36%

The progress meter was ticking up quickly enough that he thought the weapon would be ready by the time he got to the cavern. They sprinted down the last little bit of tunnel before it turned sharply upward and Jessaline held a hand out to her side and a rifle as big as she was materialized out of the air right into her grip.

The weapon looked like a science fiction sniper rifle with runes engraved along the barrel and an enormous sight affixed to it. She didn’t bother running up the incline in the tunnel, but held her other hand out, shooting a grappling hook just like Batman and zipping up the tunnel at speed. Griffin realized just how far he had to go using his legs.

Kismet’s map showed that the cavern ahead of them was roughly S-shaped due to a huge mass of stalactites and stalagmites that had fused into one massive glob of stone over the millennia. The floor was wildly uneven as it was mostly a forest of stalagmites, though the embattled Reborn had managed to find a clear area to fight in.

The scene was straight out of a video game or an anime. There was even battle music. A strange buzzing filled in a background drone with a low hum that persisted even above the occasional explosion, gunshot, and other bizarre (presumably magical) sounds. Jessaline was already gone; he’d lost sight of her as soon as she’d zipped up her grappling line.

Kismet spoke in his ear as he ran up the tunnel, the sounds of combat getting louder. “Your best bet is to remain on the sidelines and provide support. This is a professional team at work and you’ll be more of a liability than an asset. If you try to join in, I can’t guarantee what will happen.”

“How reassuring,” he muttered, marveling that he wasn’t out of breath.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling the effects of his run combined with the long hike through the tunnels. He didn’t think his heart could beat any harder, but he kept surprising himself because with every meter he drew closer to the tunnel opening, it felt more and more like it would burst right out of his chest. But he didn’t think that had anything to do with the run itself.

His Advanced Targeting System was already marking the Mothers on his HUD and he could see that the group he was rushing to save seemed to be taking care of themselves very well without him. He caught sight of Tolochi, the ginpaari that had ransacked the room he’d been staying in for the last few weeks.

A strangely organic-looking cannon was protruding from his shoulder and he was blasting a line of glowing water at the Mother that was threatening the group most closely. He also seemed to be commanding a trio of flying drones that shot beams of orange-white light at the Mother, though they seemed to be fairly ineffective beyond providing a distraction. That wasn’t the most eye-catching thing that was happening though.

The entire party had gathered themselves in a relatively clear patch of the cavern floor and Tolochi was on the outskirts, blasting away with his shoulder-mounted cannon.

“Reborn identification incoming,” Kismet said in his ear again, “this Enhanced System Access is nice.”

On his HUD, Griffin saw Tolochi’s name suddenly pop up above his head along with a label and level indicator—he was a level 8 Arboremissary, whatever that meant—and then above the heads of all of the combatants.

Holy shit, he thought as one particular name stood out to him, he’s a Vasilias! Does that mean we’re like…related? Or something?

Xander Vasilias had been identified by the System as a level 14 Gravity Knight. He was currently leaping almost ten meters in the air with something that might loosely be described as a hammer while light itself warped around the weapon like it was behind a lens. The Mother he was leaping at had its mandibles wide open and was scissoring them so quickly the blades blurred. It was very much a Thor meets Lovecraft kind of battle. There was even a bard playing a badass solo on a guitar-like instrument.

Griffin turned his head, skidding to a stop because he didn’t want to see a man get scissored to death by a city-bus-sized cybernetic insect. He ended up seeing one of the Mothers crawling along the cavern wall coming up on the combatants’ blindside, one of the lenses on the front of its head already starting to glow with growing energy.

“Hey!” He yelled, starting to run again, “Hey, there’s another monster!” He couldn’t make out what the others were doing at the moment, but his shout was drowned out by a BOOM that sounded like a bomb going off.

He'd missed it when he’d turned away, but apparently, the Vasilias guy had completed his suicidal leap without getting shorn in two and had hit the monster with his hammer. The boom was the impact his hammer made on the metallic face of the Mother.

The monster screamed as it was knocked back, fluids leaking from enormous cracks in its chitinous exterior; Griffin’s DEEP Suit automatically deadened the terrible din to safe levels but the monster’s scream still felt like steak knives were getting shoved into his ears.

“Are you going to fire your weapon?” Kismet asked.

She was riding shotgun on his left shoulder, but of course, Griffin couldn’t feel her weightless body. He did notice that her avatar was her own DEEP Suit and felt distinctly flattered by the gesture. Kismet’s words reached his awareness and he realized that his Advanced Targeting System had already marked out his targets.

“Holy shit, that’s a lot of targets. Aren’t there only four monsters?”

“You’ll note that there are multiple target zones on the monster. Your Advanced Targeting System is truly advanced!” Kismet said. “It’s hooked into the Enhanced System and it’s feeding you real-time vulnerability-focused targeting data. You’ve got lots of targets because the System has determined that your new weapon is particularly effective against the monster, so don’t be shy with whatever ammunition you need to use it!”

Griffin had to hunt through menus in his HUD to find his new weapon and figure out exactly how to use it—the Adaptive Conjuration synergy had done most of the work for him so it was a bit of a discovery process to get to the menus which had the weapon details.

As he was desperately reading through instructions, he heard a reedy, scholarly voice proclaim, “Attack, my Infinibees! Attack!”

The odd shout distracted him from his reading in time for him to see a cloud of fist-sized bees fly straight toward his chosen target, making a nearly ultrasonic buzzing noise as they went. The bees attacked the Mother with a concentrated effort. Their stingers dripped with acid that left little smoking pits on the carapace of the Mother wherever they stung it. As they did, Griffin noticed a new textbox in his HUD that had settled itself into the lower left-hand corner of his vision.

Combat Log

Target, Plasma Cybercentipede Mother, has gained condition Acid Burns causing additional Acid damage until it is neutralized. Time until neutralization: 60 sec…

“Any time now Griffin,” Kismet said in his ear, interrupting his reading.

“Right!” Griffin said, refocusing. “Sorry! I’m just about to figure out how to use this damn thing.”

Meanwhile, the bees swarmed the Mother, stinging it over and over. Each time they did, the Combat Log showed the neutralization timer reset, but the bees alone weren’t doing enough damage to the monster to kill it, merely distract it. The two Plasma Cybercentipede Mothers on the cavern walls were still blasting at the group with torso-thick beams of ten-thousand-degree plasma. The plasma wasn’t hitting anyone, though it carved deep furrows into the stone floor that glowed red with heat and made footing treacherous.

Griffin couldn’t pay any attention to them because he’d finally gotten into a position where he could fire his Dessicator weapon at the Mother and he knew how to use the weapon.

“This is a really bad idea!” Griffin yelled as he sent the commands through the System to activate the Dessicator.

The DEEP Suit reacted immediately, building struts into the armor on his shins out of tensa it consumed from Griffin’s relatively full tensa pool and then leaning him at just the right angle. His arms were left free, but he could feel more construction happening on and around his back, further anchoring him to the spot. Finally, the DEEP Suit created a two-meter-long sand-colored Desiccator cannon on a swivel mount. He was now a human turret. He chose one of the many targets along the Mother’s length and fired.

The cannon fired, pressing him into the stone cavern floor until he was buckling under its weight even with the assistance of the struts. The Desiccator fired ten spinning spheres filled with explosives and diatomaceous Earth in ballistic arcs at the Mother.

Most of them missed because the Mother chose that precise moment to notice Griffin and start powering toward him. Most, however, isn’t all, and two bombs struck it on the side, exploding in a cloud of fine powder. The explosion wasn’t one of those movie explosions, but rather a “real life” one: no dramatic fireball and much louder than it had any right to be. The explosion was so powerful he felt the pressure wave from the explosion in his chest.

The Mother screamed in high-pitched agony as the explosions cracked its chitinous exoskeleton and then forced diatomaceous earth into its wounds. The Combat Log showed that he’d caused a condition in at least one of the Mothers that caused it to take far more damage than it normally would.

Combat Log

2 x hits on Plasma Cybercentipede Mother with Dessicator. Minor damage. Target gained Extreme Dehydration condition.

Duration: 20 sec

Effect: Extreme Dehydration causes damage vulnerability to all sources of damage in the target and anyone who enters the zone created by the blast.

It screamed, but it didn’t stop charging him. “Abandon the Dessicator!” Kismet yelled in his ear. “We need to get out of here!”

“Yeah, let’s do that!” Griffin agreed, panic edging his voice as the Mother’s plasma lenses started glowing and pointing right at him. He activated his 3-D Movement by glancing up at his HUD and flicking a mental command to the 3DMVMT button.

3DMVMT_ON

At the same time, he deactivated the Dessicator. It didn’t take nearly as long for the weapon to be abandoned as it had to be created: once it was no longer being supplied with tensa, it simply disappeared. The 3-D Movement module turned on and he started feeling the mounting headache that would blossom into full-on migraines as a result of low tensa.

“I’m nearly out of tensa!” Griffin yelled, frantically selecting an anchor point for the 3-D Movement module.

“Then you should use your Ten Star Vortex Technique to refill as soon as you can,” Kismet advised, “but prioritize escape!”

A bar of plasma blasted out from the Mother’s main lens, striking right where Griffin had been a moment ago.

“I hate thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!” Griffin screamed.

The 3-D Movement module finished reinforcing his back and then jerked him from his feet and propelled him up and away along the path his HUD highlighted. He’d chosen an escape route that would essentially just ring him around the entire cavern, figuring the 3-D Movement would take care of it for him, completely forgetting how terrifying it was every time he’d used it.

He had escaped the one he’d injured—for now. The problem was that he was now headed at top speed toward one that was firing a beam of plasma at the little group of people who’d come to rescue him. He hoped that they’d come to rescue him.

Griffin had a great view of Xander Vasilias—the guy with the hammer-like weapon—whaling on the giant monster he’d already hit with titanic hammer blows, systematically cracking its carapace and then blasting its gooey innards out. The Mother still clinging to the wall fired its plasma beam at the man but Tolochi intercepted the plasma with a stream of glowing water that—shockingly—stopped the plasma beam at its point of impact and sent up a cloud of steam. A sudden, scorching solo ripped free from the woman playing the guitar and impacted the monster like one of Xander’s hammer blows, but the creature didn’t go down.

Griffin rounded the S-curve in the cavern and lost sight of the group. He saw that he’d be out of sight for a few seconds and quickly checked his System menus for something that would be useful. There was that Dread Consumption graft… but he didn’t have any idea what it would do in combat and that worried him enough that he told himself, I’ll only try it if there’s no hope—I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Now hurry up and think!

“Kismet, do you have any suggestions?” Griffin asked, still zipping along through the air at breakneck speed along his Reality Twine lines, “I’m either going to throw up from motion sickness or something’s gonna eat me. I don’t wanna get eaten while I’m throwing up!”

“Cancel your route and do an emergency landing! And you’d better hurry because you’re coming back up to the curve.” She was right, they were almost all the way there and then it was only a couple more swings before he was going to be swinging directly into the throat of one of the monsters.

He quickly modified the route to take him back down to the cavern floor and felt his stomach hit his throat as the DEEP Suit complied instantly. It shot a line from his hip and his right side and he was pulled down at a sharp angle. He slammed into the ground, missing his footing and rolling at high speed until he fetched up against a stalagmite, breathing hard and doing his best not to throw up. Another explosive BOOM echoed through the cavern and, shortly after that, another ear-shattering screech. Griffin stumbled to his feet with a grimace of pain as the mother of all headaches threatened to split his skull open.