Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

A slow smirk spread over Suri's mouth. We were the fang twins now: like all Fireblooded, Suri had sharp, short, dog-like fangs in place of normal human canines. “You ready?”

“Almost.” I reequipped my helmet and thumped it. “Before we do anything, I bought you some presents. Just give me a sec while I line all these up, and then… HHGGRRBL!”

I gave my best puking impression while dumping all of Suri’s gear from my Inventory onto the ground. A pile of coal-black steel plate armor, a magitech grenade launcher and a stack of ammunition for it, a huge-ass Zweihander sword, two finely worked double-sided axes, and her pack. The equipment clanged and crashed onto the stones from the infinite reaches of hammerspace, and suddenly, I was no longer encumbered. When it was all unloaded, I stepped back and jazzed my hands. “Ta-dah!”

“You bloody legend.” Suri sucked the teetering pile of gear into her own virtual Inventory dimension, freeing up space in the hall. “I missed you, cutie pie.”

“I missed you too, snuggle pumpkin. But thank Rin. She made it all,” I replied. “She and Ebisa have been putting their heads together over the crafting table more and more often, if you know what I mean.”

“You know Mercurions are getting serious when they start crafting together. They’re already practically married.” Suri stared off past my shoulder for a moment as she equipped her new gear. The armor and weapons magically appeared on her body, replacing the rusted chain and torn leather she’d been wearing. My jaw hit the floor and the ‘hard yes’ joke took on another dimension. The armor wasn't revealing - to the contrary, the new set of plate covered everything important and squishy, as armor should. But it was made for a woman, by a woman who loved other women. Rin’s armor hugged Suri’s body in all the ways it should while protecting everything it needed to.

“Very nice. She’s gettin’ good at this,” Suri drawled. She rolled her shoulders and then her hips, testing the mobility. The layered plates hissed as they slid over one another. She examined the new sword next, freezing in place with the rest of us as the roof rumbled overhead.

“Welp, time to go find this bunker of yours,” I said. “What do we know about these Wardens? Paths? Levels?”

“They’re low level enough they ran and hid instead of facing us and fighting,” Suri said. “Dunno what their names are, just how they look. Down in the Dregs, me and the other women they had trapped knew ‘em as the Giant and the Rat. Now that you’re here, we should be able to break through the kill zone and get ‘em. And once we get our hands on those mongrels, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

Chapter 9

The tunnels beyond the makeshift hospital were completely dark. They’d been bombed into oblivion, with craters in the floor and a groaning roof that rained sand down on our heads as the four of us – Suri, Karalti, me, and the unseen presence of Lahvan - crept out into the open.

“Ugh, that burned sugary smell,” I muttered. “They blew the place with nitroglycerin?”

“Yeah. No open flames down here. It's volatile as shit.”

The corridor junction had been blown up hard enough that it was now lop-sided. I knew we were getting close to our goal, because the corpse reek was so overpowering that it drowned out all other scents. The dead bodies of prisoners and guards were scattered everywhere in the straight stretch of hallway before the crossroads. Karalti sniffed curiously at the nearest corpse, then sneezed. “Blurgh. Gross.”

“Not into carrion?” I stopped to survey, sucking on one of my teeth as I flicked from point to point.

“Nope. That’s all Cutthroat.”

The devs of Archemi had been kind enough not to be completely realistic when it came to decomposing corpses. As overwhelming as it was, the stench was only about fifty percent as bad as the real thing. By day three and at these temperatures, a real body would have been as red and green as a Christmas sweater and leaking white goo all over the place. These corpses were relatively normal-looking people who happened to be dead. There was limited bloating or liver mortis, just old blood, pale skin, and splotchy black patches like stains on old leather.

“So, what was this about fifty gun-toting automatons?” I asked quietly.

“Mechanical Turks,” Suri hissed back. “They’re Artifacts the Wardens used to guard the female prisoners. When we broke out, they pulled all of them back here and set them up like a firing squad to shoot anyone tryin’ to get down that hallway. The Turks are controlled by an Overseer, this little floating sphere thing. If you take it out, the Turks go down, but we can’t fuckin’ reach it.”

“The Overseer’s behind the line?”

“Yeah. Three or four rows of ‘em, endless ammo. They’re firing Phantasmal rounds.”

“Phantasmal?” I queried the wiki without thinking. “Hang on.”

Phantasmal (Effect; Level 10 Enchantment)

Phantasmal weapons and projectiles pass through non-magical armor and barriers (walls, floors, etc). They damage corporeal living creatures and incorporeal undead, as well as living construct cores (but not unliving constructs, or the construct’s metal or mineral chassis). Phantasmal rounds pass through most materials to a distance of five hundred feet. The rounds cannot penetrate Bluesteel or any higher-grade material, or magically-warded surfaces, such as walls protected by Protection Geas III+ or Field of Silence II spells.

Karalti hunkered in close. “I can detect them?”

“Save the mana: you’ll need it when we escape from here. The bodies on the floor already signal the Turks’ position well enough.” At the corner junction, the bodies were thrown to one side like a slumped pile of ragdolls where they'd been blasted by flanking fire from the killzone. These guys had been shot from the right. The pileup and the side lean were pretty intense, so the fire had been from relatively close range.

“Got any Darkness tricks that might help?” Suri asked, squatting down behind me. “Something to wipe their