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[X] Assume you won't be able to get back into the basement after this. Have Luyu's team free the prisoners at once.

You look around the circular room. Its sinister symmetry is mostly destroyed by the prisoners being freed, leaving scraps of their restraints across the floor. "That other basement's going be a shooting range, Luyu. I need you to extract them now."

Mirareki looks at you. "I need to–"

"Go."

She springs back up through the hatch and runs for the sealed level. Several Luyus follow her up and begin to lay directional mines and other defences. You stay down in the symmetrical prison room, ready to assist Reizay, and maybe connect an exit. You shouldn't really watch over everyone's shoulders, but you can't help but switch the feeds on.

In the basement below the elevators, the two Luyus are giving rapid orders. Their weapons never stray from the dark corridor.

"Seal that inner door," they snap. Two of the Nyxian combat engineers run forward and begin to fill it in with blast foam. Others move around to each cage, fixing small shaped charges at points across the bars. Others spray each prisoner with quarantine resin, masking their tattoos and sealing in any contamination behind smart semi-liquid that lets only breath in and out. Outside, the Nyxian drone and helmet feeds show several Nephilim gunship-equivalents circling around, dropping gracile forms akin to spiders and birds that begin to move on the facility. The Nyxians outside are pulling back without engaging to avoid giving away their positions.

Back in the symmetrical room you move over to one of the walls and check the material. You'll also need an exit. You could climb back up and cut through above, but that might well expose you to fire from the Nephilim column or fliers. Preferably you want to exit from the far side of the facility.

Nephilim material won't cut to standard nanos. You can't use a big enough shaped charge or it'd fry the prisoners still down here. You think for a moment and then have an idea.

"Luyu! I need a torch built around one of those River Cores."

One of them on the upper deck looks down at you. "You're going to fry yourself if you use it down there."

"You have another way out?"

"Guess not." She does something to the fabricator and then drops you a large gun shaped torch with an intimidating shield. "Set your aura for maximum reflection and your visor for blast flash."

You aim the device and begin to cut. The chamber lights up with acrid daylight and the shield and your own protection can't stop the heat on your skin getting uncomfortable, then painful. Upper dermal layers begin to send alarm signals and the closest prisoners start gasping. But you don't stop, there's no time.

The wall gives out just before the torch does. As it falls apart in molten, glowing pieces a chunk of the wall follows suit, revealing sandy soil on the other side. The disassembler should work on this stuff. You spray the inside down, empty your sprayer and look at the rate the soil is being converted.

This is still going to be tight.

"Reizay, I need your spray."

She pauses, distracted, and tosses it to you, heading to the next set of prisoners. Several are free now, climbing out after Luyu to spray on armour and arm themselves with guns pulled from her fabricator. Mirareki has left some kind of machine with them, like a winch, and set another up at the elevator. You don't have enough time to figure out what they're doing.

On the feed from the previously sealed room, there's noises coming from behind the sealant.

"They're all attached." Each squirming prisoner has a filament of resin attached to the cable Mirareki has attached to them. The Nyxians hook on themselves. Nobody has time to climb.

"This is going to hurt." Luyu says. "Sorry!"

Everyone braces themselves. There's a series of pops as the shape charges go, deconstructing the cages to individual slats, and the winch starts, dragging the prisoners and several chunks of the cage structure upwards. It's an ugly crush, but shouldn't be fatal..

A beam of nothingness tears through the sealing foam over the inner door and cuts one of the Nyxian sappers in half. Luyu doesn't hesitate. One of her rakes fire back through the hole, the other grabs the woman's head with its queue. Black out smoke and gunfire pops as the winch system yanks them out, their tactical sleeves inflating but not quite popping at the impact. The Last Luyu screams as a null beam cuts her arm off, then grabs onto the last prisoner and lets the winch yank her upwards.

The chamber below floods with black. Drones in it go offline.

Mirareki is already sprinting back to cover as the package erupts out of the shaft, almost knocking her down as it's yanked around the corner. She rolls, sprints, and one of the Luyus grabs her on the way past, the whole package of prisoners and sappers and Luyus ending up in a comical heap behind the barricade.

Mirareki picks herself up and peers back into the hallway. Darkness fills the main hall.

"Do you think it knows we're here?" asks one of the twelve/twenty-four. The one with the red hair you freed first.

"Yeah." Mirareki says.

Tendrils of darkness pour around the side of the doorway.

Luyu triggers a disposable force screen. "Get–"

The corridor outside suddenly becomes very bright.

The heat is incredible, even down here. The mines outside trigger from the heat, and the telemetry of the team in the upper chamber becomes a crazy mess of burn damage. Mirareki gets up, her body armoured in silver nanotech and pushes the whole prisoner package and everyone still attached to it down the hole into the chamber you're in, then pitches forward herself. The Luyu's in that chamber drag themselves and the freed prisoners who were helping with the defence back down as well, their defence auras glowing cherry red as they try to dispense the immense heat that was just the backsplatter of the battle outside.

On the Nyxian drone you can see Nephilim spiders firing into the facility, beams of black and white ripping at unseen targets. Beams of null answer them, slicing through defences and armour.

You still have no sight of the Emim. You're not sure you want one.

The hole in front of you is deep now. "Luyu, do you have another forcefield? Is the fabricator fried?"

One of the Luyus pulls away her melted combat mask and grins at you. Her face is burned, smeared with bits of ballistic gel and fused composite, regenerating as you watch. Like a war with a human face. It's really hot. "Don't worry, boss," she says. "There's river cores in this thing. If it went up the whole facility'd be a crater."

"Okay." You're not entirely reassured. You look down the passage. "I need you to put one of the fusion bombs in the passage behind as many forcefields as you can spare. We need an exit now."

Luyu nods, pulling the correct item from her fabricator with fingers gone clumsy. She curses, her combat sleeve cracking off in patches. Aletta moves to help, and Luyu allows her with only a muttered snarl. You put the fusion bomb on the wall at the end of the disassemble package, set it to full forward shape charge and stage several force screen generators down the passage. Hopefully with them in place you'll only end up a little burned and irradiated.

"This is going to be loud." You say. "Open your mouth if you can."

You turn away from the blast. There's a very bright light, then an incredible wind as the force field generator overloads. Your radiation detector spikes. But when the dust clears, there's sunlight flowing down into the facility.

A few moments later you're pulling yourself through the cooling passage, pulling the line of prisoners behind you. After a few moments you emerge, coming free with several dunes between you and the prison where the battle is heating up "Dark, this is Blade."

"Go for Dark."

"We've got the prisoners and multiple casualties and are on our way out." You look back at your team. Everyone is in bad shape, several without their primary weapons, burned and injured, and you have the line of prisoners you're still dragging.

[ ] "We need you to come and get us." Stay put and try to be stealthy.
[ ] "Meet us next valley over." Get out of there fast.
[ ] "We'll exfiltrate separately." Don't bother rallying up, just head for the exfil point.
[ ] "Escort the rest. There's something I need to do." Head back around and try to get sight of what the Emim really are.

[X] "Meet us next valley over." Get out of there fast.

"We're moving as planned. Meet us at the rally point."

"Copy." Banara says. You cut coms and head down the valley fast, keeping good distance between you. The burning touch of the nuke and the Nephilim weapons has fried most of your countermeasures and you worry about a bomb or a beam. Who knows how good Nephilim capacities are, or how damaged even your skin stealth is against the radiation and fire you've absorbed.

Nothing comes. You have suddenly become an irrelevance. You can't see the battle behind but you can feel pulses of radiation and the hypersonic crack of spatial compression weapons.

The screaming. Something behind you is screaming.

You move from one scrap of cover to the next in irregular, ground eating dashes. Even dragging the wrapped infected, you're moving fast. The battle behind only seems to be intensifying. You access the drone fields but see nothing but a hash of conflicting images. A thick soup of jamming across all spectrums, including visible light.

After about half an hour you've crossed over the valley rim and are moving towards the rally point.

"How's the arm?" Atet asks the Luyu who took a null beam strike. She keeps staring at it.

"It hurts." She confesses. "Feels like it's still there but all twisted somehow." She shakes her head. "I saw it go, you know? I saw it hit the floor. I don't know what happened. I've got a combat rated nervous system. I shouldn't be getting phantom limb. I'm starting to get firewall alerts too."

>>I need to check her.<< Atet sends to you. >>Can we stop?<<

<<We're almost at the Nyxian camp, can it wait five minutes?>>

>>I don't know if it can.<<

<<Okay, we stop here. I'll call them.>> You signal everyone to take cover and switch channels. "Dark, this is Blade."

"Dark."

"We need pickup from our present position. We've got many wounded, including several who may be compromised and need restraint or quarantine. Can you come get us?"

"Copy Blade." Banara says, then switches to over the direct link "In Nyx's name. I thought we'd drawn the short straw for this operation. Are you girls okay?"

"Not sure yet."

Atet is bent over Luyu's stump. "I can't find any contamination but the programmable cells adjacent to the wound have changed behaviour. They've stopped regenerating and are doing… something. I can't tell what. I'm going to need to amputate. Disable local pain signals."

"I can't. It's not responding."

"Hold on, I've got a neuro-"

"Just do it. I'll grit my teeth." You look away as a laser saw warms up. After a moment Luyu sighs in relief.

There's a brief silence, with only the sound of the fight behind you. The screaming has got louder. You glance back up the ridge. Why the fuck is it making that noise? You can see Reizay is hunched up next to Aletta, covering her ears. You don't blame her. It sounds awful.

Wind picks up around you and there's a brief blip of static. An anti-dust field preventing engine wash from revealing a flyer. You get a comm ping and decode the countermeasures on a pair of heavy aviation systems moving into hover in front of you, their static fields extended to block the dust. The ramps lower, and you see Nyxian troops inside. Banara at the front, leaning out.

"Get everyone aboard!" she yells. "There's major Nephilim signal incoming on the prison, we don't want to be anywhere near here!" Your team doesn't need to be told twice. The Luyus the still bound prisoners into the lifter's cargo bay.

"Everyone's in!" Banara calls. You drop into one of the jump seats You can see the distorted fog of the battlefield in the distance as the ground begins to fall away.
"G-safe!" The main engine cuts in and both VTOLs rocket off down the valley, gaining some altitude but still staying below the ridge line. The ramp hasn't even had time to shut fully.

The flash is so bright that your vision edits it. A blot of black on the horizon where the battle used to be. Both lifters pull up sharply and snap shields to maximum before the shockwave slams into you. Trees below whip and set fire in a cauldron of dust. A mushroom cloud rises above the prison like a blasphemous standard.

Your tactical readout estimatesa blast yield of five megatons.


One of the commandos approaches you. She's caked in dirt and has several nasty burns now covered in nanotech treatment patches but has somehow managed to keep snow pale skin and luxurious brown curls that spill all the way down her back. You don't think your skin, facing the blast, has been so lucky. Her twin follows with her.

"Thanks." The pair say together, then look at one another. "I'm–" the stop, look at one another. "I'm Miri, Miri Lel. I didn't expect anyone to be crazy enough to come get us."

"Thank the writer for that. She didn't want to leave anyone behind, and we need the data you have on the Emim."

Her expression twists. "I don't even know if what we found was the Emim." She glances back at the subsiding blast over the valley. "Though, horrors strikes me as an accurate name." She pushes her hair back. "Let me get my girls together and check on them. You want a coherent story right?"

[ ] Insist she give you the story right there
[ ] Give her time and go check on Luyu, who's clustered around her wounded body
[ ] Give her time and go check on Reizay, who's sitting in one corner curled up
[ ] Give her time and go check on Mirareki, who's watching the Luyu's from a distance
[ ] Give her time and go check on Atet, who checking the infected prisoners
[ ] Give her time and go check on the Ettas who appear to be meditating