Gazetteer helped me immensely with this chapter, because of course she did, and I'm a useless idiot.
*****
Chapter 6: The Arkology (VI)
"
What the shit!" I screamed as I once again tumbled uncontrollably through the emptiness of space. That was a statement, not a question.
The screaming was a good thing, honestly. I was still alive.
Bright stars against the aurora borealis across all of space spun so fast across my vision that they became faint lines. The temperature in the Empyrean's forcefield - previously kind of comfortably cool - suddenly rose to sauna-like temperatures. Alarms and alerts of different sounds and pitches and tempos began ringing in my head, and holographic pop-ups with different warning icons flashed in my field of vision. A bar on the top of what could generously be called my holographic UI - colored blue with the glaring exception of a transparent fraction on the right - began flashing red frantically as the digits at its center dropped rapidly in value. The female voice in my head, slightly distorted for some alarming reason, filled me in:
<Warning: Shields at 60%. Auto-repairing minor damage to shields subsystem.>
Holy crap, it took our two-fifths of my shields? What the hell was this stupidly powerful shit?
"
Artemis!" came a familiar voice that I could barely process in my head. It was Scarlet over the radio, but at this point in time, while fighting down the nauseating urge to hurl, I mostly
thought it was
probably Scarlet. "Artemis
!"
I struggled to regain control of my Empyrean. It wasn't actually very hard; I thought about it, and energy pulsed from the wings of my suit of armor. It took a moment, but I finally stopped tumbling through the vacuum, regaining my bearings. I reflexively flinched away from the
Fortune's Wings - the asshole who had smacked me - as soon as I saw it. Of course, my Empyrean interpreted "flinch away" as "fly half a mile backwards within the space of a breath", which was just as well. But I need not have bothered; actually taking a good look at the ship, I realized that I had apparently been knocked out of the range of its lightsaber.
"Y-Yeah!" I gasped to Scarlet, wondering whether or not I actually wanted to throw up from that spin. I wasn't sure I actually felt vertigo - I most certainly would've felt it if I were back on Earth or whatever - which actually somehow made it worse. Like, my body expected something there, but the lack of a physical response made my body feel like it was in limbo, which somehow made it feel worse. "Yeah, I'm here!" I briefly wondered what vomit in space would look like.
Even across the radio, Scarlet actually sounded relieved. "
Oh, good," she exhaled. Then, with a hint of frustration, like a very angrily chiding mother: "
I told you not to get too close! You can't rely on that thing missing again."
About that. "Well, it
didn't."
"
...What?"
Machine gun fire was being directed towards me again. My vision filled with angry orange lines from the
Fortune's Wings' turrets as I darted away and created even more distance between myself and the ship. "It
didn't miss. It hit me in my goddamn face."
There was a very notable pause, and I could almost hear Scarlet blink over the radio. "
...Okay," she replied blandly; I had a feeling that she thought I was bullshitting her, for whatever reason. It's not like I had
wanted to be hit in the face with a lightsaber. "
Well...don't let it do that again."
Taking a good look at the
Fortune's Wings, I also realized the giant lightsaber it was swinging from its giant robotic arm - I was still having trouble getting over how ridiculous that was - was not
actually a lightsaber, at least not in the sense that plasma or whatever was spewing from it. Rather, I had been deceived by its smouldering edge, glowing an intense red with heat. In other words, the damn thing was a giant soldering iron shaped like a giant sword. Wielded by a spaceship. For some reason. It not being a real lightsaber would have been disappointing, if I had any room to consider that. Instead, all that was going through my head were unhelpful facts about the properties of metal from my classes and internship, that superheating steel or whatever wouldn't improve cutting power, and should've only made it more fragile.
I had, however, been shot at days ago with a
lightning gun. The last two weeks here had taught me that my common sense and applied knowledge was not necessarily held in high regard by this part of the universe. So not being hit by that heat sword was
probably a really good idea.
No time to think that much about it; gunfire and missiles were still coming at me from in ludicrous amounts. The good news was that the
Fortune's Wings had decided our ship wasn't a threat, and was no longer firing missiles in her direction. The bad news, of course, was that the machine gun fire and missiles were all pretty focused on me.
At least, for a while, it was. But after about half a minute of dodging and weaving and trying to figure out
how I was going to
swordfight with a spaceship, the gunfire and the missiles abruptly stopped. Four glowing lines - red this time instead of the blue lines the missile contrails had formed - suddenly jettisoned themselves from the
Fortune's Wings' side. The shapes creating those red lines were larger than the missiles this time, and in fact looked dismayingly familiar...
"
The Fortune's Wings
is deploying Empyreans," Scarlet helpfully announced, a moment after I'd come to that same conclusion. "
I count four. Be careful, your Empyrean is of Antecessor make, but I have no idea how well it'll hold up."
Meaning we had no idea if it would just blow apart on the next pass. Did Scarlet want me to dogfight, four on one, against the flickers of light blazing toward me, trailing angry red flame? Because that was what it seemed like.
Having someone actually believe in you, even out of necessity, for the first time in your life shouldn't have felt this terrifying.
The day was getting worse and worse by the minute. I had no idea how to fight with a sword, and I just had the snot smacked out of me when a
spaceship hit me with a sword. The extent of my knowledge in this regard could be summed up as "hit the other guy very hard". But I tried to remain positive. I had - supposedly - the superior Empyrean. And I hadn't survived two weeks of this crap to go down now.
So I got ready to charge, sword ready...
...When four staccato lines of orange fire - one from each of the approaching Empyreans - suddenly whizzed right past me. Several of those bursts of lines of light struck my shield, bouncing off with a distinctive electric-like
hiss as they snapped by. Once again, I instinctively tumbled away, trying to dodge, yelping as I panicked and ineffectually dodged a hail of bullets from four different Empyreans spreading out before me to flank me from four different directions.
Oh, I thought almost blankly, too exasperated to actually be angry anymore as I once again spun uselessly in my Empyrean.
Oh, this is great. They have guns. Friggin' guns
. I have a goddamn sword
.
I did the proper thing: I started flying away, fleeing once again like a total pussy. "Scarlet!" I cried into the radio.
"
What is it?" came Scarlet's reply; she has the grace, at least, to sound genuinely concerned at my distress.
"
They're shooting at me!"
There is a moment's pause. Then, in a tone that did not lack a hint of incredulity: "
Well, then, shoot back!"
"
I don't have guns!"
There was a pause. "
Oh. Oh
." I half-expected to hear Scarlet's heart sink to the pit of her stomach, but she actually seemed to have things together despite the very obvious bad news of "we have
even less weapons than we expected". That, or the long electric-hiss of another stream of bullets bouncing off my shield - another cluster of flying metal - had masked any such sounds. "
Um. What do
you have?"
"I have a
sword."
"
Then go cut them down."
Despite the urgency of dodging bullets, I actually almost paused for a moment. I wasn't sure if Scarlet was being sarcastic or unreasonable, or if she was actually trying to get me killed after all. But with the power of all my limited experience, I could safely declare that typically speaking, in a game of rock-paper-scissors, "sword" did
not actually beat "machine gun". "
I have a sword
, Scarlet!" I shrieked back.
"
And you're flying faster than the other Empyreans can hit you!"
I blinked for a moment before turning back. Streams of bullets were still flying after me, but the fire was growing increasingly inaccurate. I was no longer hearing consistent snaps of bullets bouncing or disintegrating or exploding against my energy shield. And the Empyreans - those streaks of red lines marking their contrails - suddenly seemed much further away, at least compared to when I had started fleeing from them mere seconds ago.
I glanced at the graphics encompassing my vision - a series of holograms functioning as a UI - and a bar stretched across the top of my field of view. The blue within it had shrunk to roughly sixty percent when I got hit by that stupid giant heat sword, and despite the amount of gunfire that had bounced off them, my shields - at least I was
assuming that bar was representing my shields - did not really drop much, hovering roughly around where I had last seen it at: Sixty percent.
Huh, I thought to myself.
My engines and shields are pretty powerful.
Actually, I had no idea how well my engines and shield compared to the baseline in this weird corner of the universe. For all I knew, I was up against the equivalent of a Corolla. But I desperately wanted to be optimistic, especially when - for just a moment - a wave of green light from the aurora borealis grazed me arm, there went a cold shiver down my spine, and my arm felt weird and bad and
wrong.
I looked down at the lumb in question, just in time to see it
ripple. I could somehow see my arm through the gauntlet it was enclosed in, and the gauntlet, and the void beyond, distorted over each other like a reflection in choppy water.
The gauntlet was fine. It was built for this. Probably.
Maybe. My arm though, somehow simultaneously protected and suddenly vulnerable, twisting in place, a string plucked by an unseen hand. I couldn't stop it, or even move my arm at all. I could barely feel it moving to begin with, for all that my eyes were telling me. Then, for one horrible, gut-churning moment, it was just gone. The panic receded sharply as the arm came back, crazed vibrations finally stilling, and going back to being a normal-ass arm.
Oh, I thought with a kind of fear that was different from my blind panic of a moment ago, watching as my arm slowly still from where it was wavering through what passed for time and space here.
Oh. This must be the voidwaves.
I'm so royally screwed, I thought, helpfully.
If I didn't get out of here soon, I was going to melt through a wall or something. Or through the fabric of the universe, more than we all already had. Could that happen? Because, at this point, it
really felt like it could happen If I didn't kill these enemy Empyreans in front of me, and fast, I'd be dead.
I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to wake up in this strange place with no idea what was going on, only to spend days for people to try to kill me with bullshit sci-fi weapons. I didn't ask to be messed with by a space Roomba, to be shot at with space missiles, to escape by the skin of my teeth only now to have my body at the mercy of some reality-warping space bullshit. I didn't ask to be shoved into a suit of sci-fi armor so I could kill other sci-fi armors and a ship that had been trying to kill us ever since I saw it.
I was
pissed.
So maybe,
maybe it was understandable that I focused on a vindictive thought, and suddenly the engines of my Empyrean were propelling me at brain-melting speeds at the four enemy Empyreans trying to close in on me.
My charge, a change from flitting around just trying not to die, must've surprised my pursuers because the four of them suddenly split up, darting in different directions. No matter; I was closing in fast on one particular Empyrean, its speed almost painfully slow compared to how fast my own engines were throwing me across space. As I closed the distance, the Empyrean before me was no longer just a flitter of glowing red thrusters leaving a fading trail of light, but a humanoid shape, a person whose four limbs were elongated by long, slender pieces of armor.
Gunfire crisscrossed around me. That didn't matter either; at this speed, most of it trailed uselessly behind me, and the few lucky shots that did land weren't enough to burn through my shields. One or two rounds were not even causing the bar at the top of my vision to dip discernibly. The part of my brain that still wants to apply reality to any part of this situation is annoyed by the lack of any measurement more granular than that.
Most of me, though, was focused on closing in on my chosen enemy Empyrean, miles between us vanishing in seconds. I swiveled and spun - first left, then right - to avoid her desperate gunfire. I felt like an actress for some old martial arts flick, despite being about as aerobically accomplished as a cardboard box and never having flown a plane in my life. I hadn't even been able to last more than a single round of dodgeball back in middle school. So whatever it felt like, I must have just been spinning around in a flailing, awkward circle,and probably not like some Chinese kung-fu master, dodging gunfire from a Japanese plane on a WWII battlefield or whatever the hell my mother said about it. But being able to move around by
thinking made things a lot easier. And I was feeling pretty invincible, regardless of how uncool I looked. The other Empyreans were moving too slow; while they were more agile and less sluggish, they were nonetheless slower than the missiles that had tried to kill me all those minutes ago, the ones that I had been outflying. In fact, the one I was closing in on was already attempting to flee, choosing to fly from me instead of shooting.
Too late. The Empyrean was transforming from a distant stick figure into a real person. I could see the faded green of the Empyrean's wings and boots and gauntlets, the bright red trail of light spewing from its engines. I could see the person in the Empyrean, a woman in a weird skin-tight high-tech one piece swimsuit, showing off her skin where they were not encased by Empyrean gauntlets and boots. Brunette hair fluttered behind her as she twisted around to look at me with wide, fearful eyes, betraying the kind of panic of someone who had underestimated their enemy. Her ears were definitely non-human, instead fluffy and sticking out from spots close to the top of their heads, although examining that wasn't quite my top priority, nor was I given much of a chance to do so; seconds before I could swing my sword at her, she suddenly
vanished, and I shot right past the place she should have been.
Confused, I willed the wings of my Empyrean to pulse and drag me to a stop, so I could turn around and look back at whatever it was that had just happened. Turning around, I could see the red contrail I'd left behind, complete with dramatically sharp turn to bring me to my current position. I followed along the fading trail, retracing my path, and...
there. Sure enough, my opponent was now below me. She had, at the last moment, tucked herself into a dive, and I'd overshot her.
It wasn't that her Empyrean was faster; my
reactions were slow.
My scowl was interrupted by a sudden and consistent series of loud zaps, and I yelped and also began a dive, throttling towards my opponent; in the few seconds where I had stopped to see what was going on, the other three Empyreans had retargeted me. I had been a sitting target for just a few moments, and a good stream of bullets had struck my shields. They were still holding, but the blue bar at the top of my display had noticeably decreased from my mistake. It was still holding over half, but not quite like the sixty-percent-ish area I had previously left it at. I could take a lot of hits, but I wasn't invincible.
Again, I started catching up from the Empyrean fleeing from me. This time, I was a bit more ready for those sneaky maneuvers when she twisted away from me. This wasn't to say that I was reacting on the spot, but now that I expected it, I actually
saw her turning away rather than her suddenly seemingly turning invisible. Every time she banked away, my reaction times got faster; I turned almost as she turned, stopped overshooting her by too much, and for a moment - for just a heartbeat - she leveled out, maybe to regain her bearings, and I flew at her and swung my super long black high-tech space sword.
And felt a whole lot of nothing as I shot right past her.
She didn't dodge at the last moment. She had not escaped from the range of my sword. I simply missed: I shot past my opponent with less than a few feet to spare, and swung an entire second too late. Hell, I had been closing my eyes when I did it.
Okay, I admit it, that was embarrassing. Still, give me a break; I had never swung a sword or even played baseball at this point. You can thank my mom for that.
Didn't matter. I could try again. Once again, I caught up with my fleeing target, and as I did so, I saw the
Fortune's Wings in the background. In fact, the gunfire directed in my general direction seemed to have faltered, as if the other three Empyreans were no longer shooting at me quite as fervently. I didn't have time to pay attention to that, though; after several seconds of an intense chase - if our swirling across space on powerful space engines could be called that, anyways - my opponent suddenly turned around to face me, her engines flaring with what felt like actual propellant instead of my energy whatever, and she was suddenly charging towards me, having drawn a sword from somewhere. It looked like a typical medieval sword, albeit one that was shorter and thicker than my own long, relatively thin blade. The blade was grayish in color, save for dark spots across its blade that looked like wear and tear, or even some kind of decay.
We were going to try to hit each other midair, then. Mid-
space. Whatever. Compared to me just trying to hit a moving target, my self-defense instincts flared as I saw something darting towards me with a sword. Or, really, less "self-defense", and more "I'm actually trying to block a basketball flying towards my face instead of just trying to hit a flying pinata". It doesn't matter; we charged at each other, the distance between us disappeared, and we swung our swords at the same time, like something out of a
Game of Thrones trailer at Best Buy.
And I was actually feeling pretty good about myself for that one split-second, as if I was for that one moment actually a really cool space samurai. At least, until the blade of my sword cracked upon impact.
It was one of those things that you felt more than you heard. Like swinging a stick against something, and then
feeling that distinctive
snap inside what is actually a solid object, the feeling of something not meant to split vibrating through your hands. Stunned, I was still for a moment, almost oblivious to the Empyrean flying right past me, gripping tightly onto my sword but kind of too afraid to actually look up to see if I had somehow shattered a magical space blade.
After a moment - too long a moment, honestly, considering that it took bullet-zaps to bring me out of my dread - I finally managed a look up towards my only weapon. The good news was that it wasn't actually
shattered. The bad news was that there was a large spiderweb of cracks centered around the spot where I
think it made contact with the enemy's own sword.
Are you kidding me? I thought, stomach dropping.
Isn't my sword supposed to be super powerful? How in the hell did her
sword put a crack in mine
?
I had just completed the thought in my head when a voice spoke in my head:
<Warning: Structural damage detected in melee system. Warning: Void-burst oscillator not active. Would you like to activate the void-burst oscillator?>
I knew what an oscillator is, but I had no idea what "void-burst" was supposed to mean, other than the void being the green glowing aurora borealis space around us that was supposed to eat us. On the one hand, under the circumstances, activating it seemed like a
really bad idea. On the other hand, under the circumstances - circumstances being "I'm being friggin' shot at again" - I was out of anything resembling a good idea. "Activate void-burst oscillator!" I shouted.
Lines of green light began to run down the blade of my sword. I watched, startled, as light seeped through the seams of the recently-formed cracks, and I suddenly started fearing that this sword was going to just explode in my face.
Which was of course what happened, except not in the way I expected.
There was a burst of intense light, and I screamed as I shielded my head with one arm, too shocked to even have the presence of mind to throw the
exploding thing away from me. Not that it would've mattered if it
had literally exploded, but it took me a moment to realize that I wasn't dead yet. Then it took me another moment to slowly turn an eye towards what I had been sure was a sword-shaped bomb.
My sword that was now
super long and
glowing right now.
Some kind of powerful green energy was bursting from the hilt of my sword, volatile and waving, not at all unlike the licking of flames or the flow of a river, but largely streaming away from the sword's guard in a straight line.. A
giant straight line, thick enough that I could no longer even see the cracked blade of my sword within this flowing beam, long enough that I couldn't quite see where it even ended. I tried staring down the flowing green streams of light; it momentarily struck me that the stream looked almost startlingly like a concentrated aurora borealis, like the voidwaves around us multiplied by a thousand. Distance was almost impossible to judge here, but my absolutely unsubstantiated guesstimate put the pillar of light in my hands at half a mile long.
Then I paused. I had a different sword. I had energy coming out of my sword. I had
half a mile of energy
coming out of my sword.
Okay. Let me correct myself:
I have a
goddamn lightsaber.
Screw the
Fortune's Wings and its knockoff heat sword bullshit. I had a
real goddamn giant lightsaber.
I turned towards my enemies, only to realize why I wasn't being consistently shot at throughout the time I was marveling at my new weapon. The Empyreans were fleeing from me, except not in the way they previously scattered; rather, they were now seemingly in full retreat, flying back towards the
Fortune's Wings. So
that's why I previously saw the ship; the enemy Empyreans were leading me back towards her.
In the meantime, I had another concern: The voidwaves around us were very obviously getting brighter. Previously, I could see the stars past its glow, but now, it was nothing around me but a haze of green with shades of blue and purple that hid any hint of the night sky around me. Furthermore, the aurora borealis was beginning to consolidate into noticeable shapes. Where the voidwaves around me had previously formed an indistinct haze - like if I had been stuck inside a large, fluffy cloud - the light around us was beginning to move in something that really did look like waves. Formations not unlike the curtains of an aurora borealis began to form, dividing us across space.
Not that I knew the first thing about voidwaves beyond Scarlet having told me it was Extremely Bad Super Duper No Bueno Holy Shit, and that getting your arm stuck in one
sucked. But this was becoming a very real concern, in part because while I didn't actually
see my body ripple through my armor again, I could feel - deep in my guts, deep in my
bones - reality beginning to shift around me. Something was happening with my innards, because I started feeling nauseous, like all the stuff in my body had started rioting. As if instead of my existence being plucked to ripple like a harp string, it was
reality. As if I was stuck in something like an earthquake, except instead of the earth, it was the
universe.
I probably wasn't describing things correctly. I've never really listened to my instincts. They've always been kind of shit. But right now, putting aside that I was having some kind of physical reaction to whatever was happening, my instincts were telling me that this was bad, bad,
bad.
I'm not sure if the other Empyreans were feeling the same, but their machine guns fire had largely turned into potshots at this point, attacks of opportunity rather than an aggressive offensive. The
Fortune's Wings joined in the fun by firing yet another wave of missiles; after having withheld its missiles, perhaps its crew felt safe enough to start shooting at me again now that their Empyreans were, by all indications, returning to the ship and out of the line of fire. The bright glow of bullets and missile contrails flew right at me, passing through one of those giant curtains of aurora borealis light...
...and then they disappeared.
And then, at precisely the same time, suddenly reappeared in a million other places at once. They traveled on at a million different angles and directions all around us for a moment, and then they disappeared again, only to reappear somewhere else.
The bullets and missiles being fired at me were seemingly being teleported at random all over the place. It was like watching some kind of epileptic fireworks display, except
you were in the fireworks display, and instead of burning magnesium, it was bullets and missiles flying and teleporting in different directions. It felt like space itself was being fractured, that reality was folding on itself, that straight lines were no longer just straight lines, but bent across our surroundings like refractions from floating, teleporting mirrors.
A number of bullets bounced against my shield from different directions. A missile hurtled past me like a meteor on its way to end the dinosaurs. One of the enemy Empyreans was hit by a missile, disappearing in the explosion. Two more struck the
Fortune's Wings, from behind, leaving burning craters of jagged steel in their wake. One of them flew right into the half-mile-long angry beam of my lightsaber...
...And vanished completely. No explosion. No teleporting away to somewhere else, not that I would've been able to tell. But it seemed to have simply vanished into the energy. Actually, now that I thought about it, in our little section of the universe where bullets and missiles were being teleported around like we were in some kind of funhouse mirror world, the fact that my lightsaber was completely straight and cutting through the bullshit was surprising.
I gave my laser sword a swing. I have expected parts of my blade to just scatter, for parts of the giant line of energy to suddenly reappear in other places.
It didn't. It remained a straight, giant, long-ass line. And the missiles that had just so happened to be in the path of my energy blade completely disappeared.
I gave out a startled laugh. Actually, I couldn't tell if the laugh - just two sharp breaths that came out of my throat - was a weak laugh of relief or evil sinister cackling. But after being shot at by guns, after being shot at by lightning, after being shot at by more guns, after being shot at by missiles, after being shot at by missiles, after being shot at by
even more guns, after thinking I didn't have a chance in hell to survive all this bullshit with a
sword...
I now had a
goddamn lightsaber.
The
Fortune's Wings was now giving off a white-ish glow in the distance before me. Its profile throbbed a little, pulsing with energy, and I wondered whether this was the effect of the voidwaves on the ship, or perhaps even something else. Still, the fleeing enemy Empyreans were starting to get close, and I couldn't have that. I had a
lightsaber, and I hadn't even tested it on anyone yet. So I charged, blazing a path towards my enemy. They fired, of course, missiles and machine guns and everything else I had come to expect by now. But with the speed of my approach, the missiles were going wide, and what few machine gun bullets that did hit my shields simply snapped and evaporated, taking almost nothing off my shields.
Within a mile of the enemy formation, I brought my lightsaber into a swing. Actually, I wasn't
swinging the lightsaber insomuch as I was kind of holding it out and letting my forward velocity take care of everything else. It was good enough, though; when I passed the
Fortune's Wings with half a mile to spare, the beam from my lightsaber caught one of the enemy Empyreans. And as I flew away from the enemy, there was no explosion, no debris, no nothing. Just empty space where my giant lightsaber passed through.
I laughed. I'm pretty sure this one was an evil cackle. The sword had not failed me. I was close to untouchable. I could destroy them. I could evaporate these asshats. I swung around for another go, indifferent to the hail of enemy ordnance that couldn't hurt me. Again, with my sword outstretched, I gave the
Fortune's Wings another pass, this time slicing through its hull. I misjudged its distance; instance of cleaving it in half, I merely cut a deep gash into the vessel. But that scar in the ship simply remained there for a moment before beginning to glow with red-hot light, then suddenly burst into flames as something exploded within the ship and fire erupted out of the scar, twisting metal along the way. The ship listed, its engines faltering a bit, although not quite going out yet.
"
Yeah!" I laughed, pumping my fist, relishing in the sadistic victory over someone who couldn't adequately fight back. It felt like I was an adult beating up a child, given the disparity in power between our equipment. I didn't care; if this was a child, she had been biting my arm one too many times and deserved a smackdown. "That's what you get for trying to shoot me up, you bitch!"
My radio crackled. Actually, my radio had been crackling for some time, but in my adrenaline high, I had kind of filtered that out. "...temis...! Ar...
Artemis!"
Ah, yes. In the chaos and confusion and ear-pounding blood, I had completely forgotten about Scarlet.
"
Get back here!" shouted Scarlet over the radio. "
The voidwaves are hitting the oversaturation point!" Her voice sounded garbled, something attributed to the increasingly concentrated voidwaves messing with radio signals.
Regardless, "voidwaves are hitting the oversaturation point" sounded
really bad. As much as I don't like leaving the people who had tried to kill me alone - at least now that I had a means to fight back - Scarlet was still my only ally in this weird part of the universe. More than just the fact that she was my lifeline, I didn't want to disappoint her. Despite the fact that she couldn't fight back, despite the fact she could've fled whenever, she was still here. I really appreciated that. So I looked around, searched for the ship Scarlet was piloting. An icon on my UI allowed me to spot that moving blue spark miles away against the brightness of the aurora borealis, and I immediately turned off my lightsaber with a mere thought and began to make a beeline back towards Scarlet.
Or, at least, I
would've had some strange force suddenly started pulling me to the left.
<Warning: Voidspace-reversion in progress.>
"What the...?" I muttered, trying to compensate for the fact that my Empyrean was drifting leftwards despite the fact that I was very much trying to get back to our avian-like ship. I looked to my left...
...And watched as the arkology - the giant space station I had completely forgotten about - began to stretch and shrink.
The voidwaves around us were beginning to visibly be pulled towards the center of the sword-like arkology. Streaks of green, blue, and purple - previously floating about almost idyllically in curtains of light - were now streaking towards the arklogy, which seems to become distorted as the arkology almost seemed to collapse on itself in what a misplaced three credits in a film class taught me was called a "dolly zoom".
Like a black hole, it was pulling me in. It was pulling us
all in.
The
Fortune's Wings seemed to struggle against the pull into the arkology for a few moments. Then, the glow that had encompassed it - the glow I previously saw when the enemy Empyreans were retreated bacek to their ship - swiftly grew intensely bright. Then, in the blink of an eye, the ship suddenly disappeared into a streak of blink-and-you-miss-it white light, a line that snapped across space for only a split-second, disappearing into the far reaches of the universe.
So yay. They went into hyperspace. Or something. Still, there was something irregular about that line, like the ship had tumbled into their jump in hyperspace. Maybe the damage I did to the
Fortune's Wings meant something after all.
Still, I had more pressing matters on hand. Like how the distorted space surrounding the arkology was sucking me in, and I was suddenly terrified of the idea of being crushed into atomic matter or something. I pushed,
willed the engines to go as fast as they could, going at full throttle. My Empyrean shuddered, its wings flicking this way and that against space turbulence. It's barely enough. My speed was slow compared to how I went to town on my enemies, and the Empyrean was getting slower as the suction of the arkology grew stronger.
I wasn't going to make it.
At least until I saw a metal bird-like spaceship slowly sliding into my field of vision, only a few hundred miles in front of me. Scarlet was struggling with the controls, seeing how our ship was bucking and shaking and fighting against space turbulence the way I was, but I could imagine her twisting the joystick. The ship was beginning to glow in the way the
Fortune's Wings had done moments before it hit lightspeed. And as I watched, the ship slowly began to slide towards a direction that was right in front of me. The garage rig I had been jettisoned from was extended from underneath the ship, giving me a goal to fly for as I pushed the wings of my Empyrean as hard as I could, one arm stretched out to grab onto that garage rig and pull myself in.
"
Get in!" shouted Scarlet over the radio, her voice tight with concentration as she fought against the voidwaves. I had one shot, as Scarlet seemed to suddenly kill the engines on our spaceship, and for just the briefest of moments, it began drifting towards me.
I flew right into the garage rigging with a scream escaping my throat. Mechanical arms instantly caught my Empyrean, locking me into place and trying to bring me back into the hull of the ship. The ship hit maximum luminosity as I heard the engines of our ship suddenly turn back on with a mechanical whine
Then, and a moment later, space around me was engulfed with light as I watched reality dolly-zoom before me for just the briefest of moments.
And just as I passed through the airlock, our ship blasted into lightspeed with a brilliant flash. Which was around the same time I finally passed out.
*****
This finally brings us to the end of the Arkology Arc~ Sorry for taking so long, and thank you so much for sticking with me. >_<
