Chapter 183: Dogfight

Chapter 183: Dogfight

***Heather***

Yer courtin’ a grim fate. Anya said, her spirit rustling about inside her anxiously. ‘Tis unwise to not be where they believe you to be.

“I know, alright? I just wanna see some demonic trolls before those two get to hog all the fun.” Heather said, kicking her feet off the side of the towering building, watching the battle with a pair of old-timey binoculars she’d freed from an abandoned sporting goods shop.

Heather had gradually lost her fear of heights ever since she’d figured out how to fly, and the likelihood of a troll coming all the way up to the roof of the building and sneaking up on both her and Anya was slim, so this was about as safe as it got.

Heather was kind of disappointed in Perry and Nat, as she critiqued their battle from a distance. They were taking a strategy that was significantly less flashy than she’d been hoping. Where was the bolts of lightning, the explosions? The tracer rounds, the mushroom clouds?

All they were doing was snagging the trolls one at a time with the black netting and squishing them like ants with Hardcase’s cannon, while flying outside the troll’s range.

I mean, sure, that works, but it’s boring. I should’ve expected this betrayal of my expectations from Periclese, but E tu, Natalus?

Heather’s boredom evaporated when an oversized humanoid figure jumped out of a nearby skyscraper and hit Hardcase’s gun, sending them careening away before shooting himself with the cannon and smashing into Perry at bullet-speeds, the two of them crashing into the building and disappearing inside.This chapter made its debut appearance via N0v3lB1n.

“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” Heather muttered, following Boomer’s tumbling descent as his limbs fell away in another direction, still fused into the cannon.

“Something’s wrong,” Heather whispered under her breath.

Boomer hit the ground in a shower of sparks and smashed to a halt against a nearby concrete building, twitching as the mech’s auxillary thrusters seemed to be having difficulty figuring themselves out.

Shit, what’s going on with Perry? Heather thought, getting to her feet, her heart slamming in her chest.

An explosion rocked the side of the building and the bloody remains of a giant were flung out the twentieth floor of the skyscraper in a shower of glass and office supplies.

“NICE!”

...

Why isn’t he coming out?

Heather glanced back down at Natalie, and saw that she’d popped Boomer’s hood for some insane reason and was using her magnetic gloves to slice and dice the encroaching trolls, desperately pushing them away from Boomer instead of just relying on the mech’s damn-near indestructability.

C’mon, c’mon....

Heather turned her attention back to the hole the giant had exploded out of.

An agonizing few seconds later, Paradox flew out of the building, which was good. He went after the giant instead of rescuing her girlfriend immediately, which was bad.

I gotta do something, Heather thought to herself, her adrenaline surging as she held her hand over her stomach protectively. I need to get down there. I need to give her backup, whatever form it takes...without jeapordizing my passengers.

“Can you get that far away from me, Anya?” Heather asked.

‘I’ve got a better idea, miss.’ Anya said from inside her.

***Hardcase***

The inertia of the spin wrenched a strangled yelp out of Nat’s lungs, but it wasn’t quite enough to qualify as ‘damage’, so she was simply dazed a bit as they slammed against a building. She assumed it was a building. The sensors were down and she couldn’t see what was going on around them. She directed her attention to the instrument panel which was still partially up and running.

“What happened?” Nat asked. “Why did we crash?”

AI core compromised by unknown means. Advanced systems are being managed by remaining cores. Processing power limited until AI hardware reboots, limiting flight calculation capabilities. ETA 5 minutes.

“Are the guns working?” Natalie asked, thinking fast. She needed more information to go on.

Of course.

“How about our sensors?”

Cameras are functional.

“Deploy the gatlings and give me manual control over the thrusters and I’ll drive us out of here.”

She didn’t have to fly the thing. The AI helped with the stabilization, so if she tried to go full-manual, there was a good chance it would spiral off and crash again, especially without Boomer’s limbs to help stabilize. What she could do was slide Boomer along the ground, using the thrusters gently to get her out of the danger zone.

ALERT: Enemy may compromise Boomer via physical contact by unknown means. User is advised to prevent physical contact with the enemy until AI core has rebooted.

THAT’S what happened? In a fraction of a second, Nat’s whole strategy flipped.

“Shit, jettison the hood,” Natalie said, unstrapping herself from the form-fitting pilot seat and running into the back of the cockpit.

BOOM!

The cockpit exploded off and tumbled into the distance, crushing a nearby car, exposing her to the hot summer air of downtown Chicago.

The cameras were working, sure, but they had blind spots right up against boomer’s hull, so she would have to visually confirm there was no one trying to touch the machine.

***Paradox***

“Kill him.”

‘Or else I’ll Kill you’ Diplomacy has failed us, Perry thought sourly as the surrounding trolls began lumbering toward him, hefting all manner of weapons, both high and low tech.

DFT.EXE (Daxer’s Faux Teleportation)

Inside Perry’s armor, a flawless diamond cube had a tiny amount of paste made of Morpheus moth scales and Perry’s blood applied to one side.

That side was struck with a perfectly flat power stone, causing all the Morpheus scales to sublimate into Essence and travel through the diamond, splitting Perry’s image into three and rendering him temporarily invisible.

The trolls weren’t stupid; at least three of the dozen swung their weapons through the spot Perry had been standing, but without being able to see him, Perry had an easy time of dodging aside and relocating, his decoys copying his movements.

A wickedly smart or experienced individual would be able to compare the distance travelled by his mirror images during his movement, and apply it to his Last Known Location, getting his general position, but these trolls weren’t quite that quick on the draw, and he was busy hurting them.

BOOM!

Perry blinked anti-light out of his eyes as a beam of black energy ripped through reality, missing him by a couple feet and tearing a large chunk out of a nearby troll’s thigh.

The wounded troll ignored the wound and used the Tinker thrusters embedded in his skin to leap forward at unnatural speeds and deliver a wicked swing with a blade the length of a sports car through the room, in the general area where Perry was.

Perry leapt over the blade and considered his options.

This is going to take too long to finish them off.

Perry wanted to keep their leader alive long enough to get some answers out of him about the when/where/why/how and especially WHO of their demonic contract, but that would entail killing his dozen elites, and they would be difficult to kill individually.

All at once...dicey proposition. Perry didn’t want to be still stuck in the fight with an empty tank against unknown Tinker rays jutting out of roughly half the individual troll’s skin.

Better move would be to regroup...

HARDCASE!

The thought gave him a mental hiccup as he switched tracks.

I might be able to win, but in the time it took, they might kill Nat. Better to attack these guys from a more advantageous situation.

Missing Boomer’s heavy cannon as backup was particularly problematic.

“Time out!” Perry shouted, holding his hands apart.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.

(0/1) remaining

Click.

Perry replaced their surroundings with a silo filled with aerosolized sodium.

The troll’s eyes widened as the water in their bodies began to violently react with the sodium, becoming sodium hydroxide in a burst of heat. Half of them fell to their knees, coughing out white hot fire as their lungs burned and the fat and oils in their body was converted to soap.

PPP.EXE x3

(0/6) remaining

Three nodules of webbing jumped out of Perry’s hands and exploded into inky black webbing wrapping themselves around the retching trolls and nullifying their regeneration.

In front of Perry’s eyes, their entire bodies shriveled and withered, turning into soap mummies.

The other trolls were already shrugging off the caustic environment, owing to their ridiculously fast regeneration, and Perry spotted Karth levelling Boomer’s primary cannon in his general direction.

Yep, now’s a good time.

BOOM!

Boomer’s canon caught Perry’s invisible shoulder with the bare edge of it’s blast, cutting a hole in the side of the pressurized silo and sending Perry tumbling backwards, slamming his back into the metal just outside the ring.

Perry rode the sudden depressurization and allowed it to shoot him tumbling out the side of the massive silo on a stream of aerosolized sodium.

With a mental tug, Perry pulled the three Perncious Prisons off their victims and used them to patch the hole in the side of the silo before they could chase him.

An instant later, Perry caught his balance and blasted away, aiming for Nat’s Last known.

BOOM!

Behind him, another explosion rocked the side of the metal silo, allowing the trolls to escape, but Perry had already left them in the dust.