Chapter 615: Interlude (1/2)

Roca ducked underneath flailing tentacles, punching the ground as she did so. The graviton generator in her forearm howled as it dumped 25G's of gravity into the ground. The earth leaped up in a torus around her, the bedrock cracked and shattered, and the air boomed out in displacement.

The Dwellerspawn facing her erupted into chunks of biomechanical armor and gobbets of flesh even as she lunged forward, stomping one foot forward to add in the kinetic shock as she brought her hands together in a clap that exploded the air out from in front of her. The shockwave knocked down Dwellerspawn, blew smaller ones into chunks, and flipped a car that had been hidden end over end for nearly two hundred meters.

”ROCK N ROLLA LOCK IN ROCA!” she bellowed out.

Alarms were ringing in her head. Her close quarters weapon was offline, she was showing cracks across the warsteel Mark-V, her heat was up to 70% and her slush was at 60%. Her mass bladders were down to dregs, her bioware endocrine system was running on fumes, she had cracked skeletal structural members as well as damaged muscular systems.

She ignored it as she grabbed a flatworm, ripped the spines from its back, stabbed the flatworm with its own spines before tossing it to the side, and hurled the spines into the air.

The Atrekna missed the spines, busy keeping its shield up to stop the 20mm rounds from hammering it apart. Three missed, the rest of the dozen hit it in the back, erupting from its chest. It wobbled for a second, the phasic shield dropped, and the 20mm rounds chewed it into hamburger.

”Chronotron levels rising, Roca,” Ishiro t-linked.

”Get ready!” Roca snapped over the linkage. She could see it, the hazy, indistinct illusions of something slowly manifesting, feel the prickle of chronotrons on her skin, see the sparkling at the edge of her vision.

She grabbed another Dwellerspawn and ripped it in half before wired reflexes took over and she bit its head off. Her mouth flooded with acids as she chewed it, letting the grinder at the back of her throat rip it up and push it into her mass bladders.

The Atrekna hit the phasic construct as hard as they could, desperate to get something, anything, in between the six lemurs and their own bodies. Half of the Quorum was down already, one of them having got too close the ground and grabbed by the lemur who just ripped it in half.

The phasic construct locked in, reaching back despite the interference provided by the lemurs themselves, the sats in orbit, and the munitions going off near the black ship. It hummed, began to break apart, and started throwing sparks and arcs of phasic energy and pure golden chronotrons.

Right before it exploded it managed to bring through the target.

A new species, one tailored by the Atrekna in hopes it would be able to take on the lemurs.

Uplifted from a highly developed primate, it walked on two legs, had no tail, opposable thumbs, was an omnivore, and was covered in hair. It had binocular vision, capable of operating under a yellow sun and in up to 2.5G's.

The Atrekna had uplifted their minds, enslaved them with psychic energy, and created war material for them to learn to use.

The Ancient Ones and the Young Ones smirked as the entire area, two miles by three miles, suddenly filled with the slave species and their war material.

They also realized that there was only two lemurs left, not six.

They blinked, wondering where the other four had gone to, when the machine exploded. Phasic and temporal energy rippled out, blasting into the Atrekna, washing over the slave species, covering the entire area.

The wormhole wasn't closed yet when the machine exploded, the half-real phasic construct collapsing under the strain.

Everything in the field was sucked through the wormhole. The slave race pulled back to their home world, the Atrekna sucked through the wormhole, but worse, oh so much worse...

The lemurs came along for the ride.

The field flickered and danced, the exploded in golden and purple energy. When it cleared there was nothing left but grass and torn up dirt. Steam rose from the dirt, the grass did what grass always did, and the smoke slowly cleared.

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Mbutu felt the t-link adjust, felt the odd echo feeling it got with long distances, but ignored it.

The Atrekna was quick and clever. Twice it had gotten behind Mbutu and fired off a barrage of phasic energy the first time, phasic enhanced pebbles and a couple pinecones the second.

None of it had done much more than mar the Mark-V Warsteel extrusion armor he was wrapped in.

Another time Mbutu had moved forward to the Atrekna's location, sure he'd be able to close with it and kill it, only to discover that the Atrekna was a clever phasic hologram over a land mine built by infusing a rock with phasic energy. It had gone off underneath him, throwing him into the bushes, and the Atrekna had blasted a tree with its power, dropping it on him.

None of it had damaged the armor, but Mbutu was starting to feel bruised inside the armor as he slowly moved through the forest and stopped.

There was an industrial complex in front of him. He could see the eddies of phasic energy swirling in the parking lot where the Atrekna had hurried across. An open bay door twinkled with phasic energy and Mbutu knew that the Atrekna had opened the loading bay to vanish into the industrial complex.

Mbutu knelt down, scooping up a few handfuls of dirt and putting them in his mouth, letting the built in grinding plates rip the dirt apart so it could be compressed into a slurry and deposited in his mass bladders.

His primary nanoforge was still acting up and he took the time to do a factory reset on it. It would take ten minutes to cycle, but he hoped that the slush levels and the templates would be good to go afterwards.

The cars in the parking lot got highlighted, telling him exactly what he needed from them. He began drooling, knowing that the super-capacitance gel, the superconductor wiring, the molycircs, would all do him good.

Endosteel, it does a body good, he thought to himself as his onboard systems showed him the vehicles that he could quickly and easily scavenge for much needed complex materials.

I'm hungry and that Atrekna isn't going anywhere. For some reason, it wants a fight, Mbutu thought to himself.

He moved forward, into the parking lot, keeping one eye on the industrial complex.

The Atrekna watched as the big lemur moved into the parking lot where the vehicles were. As she watched the black chitin shivered like jelly and suddenly was absorbed by the lemur's skin. The lemur was large, covered in thick hide, skeletal extrusions, and dense muscles.

She nodded to herself as she watched it rip open the hood of a ground-car and start pulling pieces off the engine. It was strong enough to twist endo-steel and hyperalloys like taffy. She watched as it crouched down and began eating wiring, circuitry, and other parts.

She sat down on the phasic platform only a few inches above the ferrocrete. The lemur was content to graze among the vehicles and she was tired and her energy depleted. She used her psychic powers to lure some small vermin to her, grabbing them and lifting them into the air as she tilted her head back. She dropped them whole into her mouth, her teeth grinding them up even as she swallowed.

Psychic potential snapped away, absorbed by her nervous system, with each death, giving her a much needed replenishment of her psychic abilities even as the vermin's body provided her with needed nutrients.