3.2 - Rivals (revised)
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
3.2 - Rivals (revised)
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
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The rest of the school day was basically school-like. It was shaped like itself, and was broad as it had breadth; it was just as high as it was, and moved with its own organs, and oh God I was bored.
It wasn't anything that was wrong with the last class of the day in and of itself; English was fine. It was a subject I was good at, even. And it wasn't that I had anything against Antony and Cleopatra. Even bad Shakespeare is pretty damn good, and Antony and Cleopatra isn't bad Shakespeare. But our teacher - Mrs. Kensington, an interesting-looking woman with an impressively aquiline nose - seemed bored. And when the teacher is bored, the class is going to be boring.
Things got awkward during roll call. Mrs. Kensington had a casual sort of approach to classroom management, and she made small talk to some extent during roll call. When she got to my name, she paused. "Taylor Hebert?" she asked. She seemed to take note of my eyes, then, and the hint of a smile touched the corner of her lips. "Any relation to Annette Hebert?"
I blinked. "She was my mom," I said.
Mrs. Kensington nodded. "I was one of her students at Brockton Bay University. Good woman."
I had no idea what to say to that, and I really wasn't comfortable being singled out. People were looking at me now. "Thank you," I said after a moment.
After that, she seemed to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in calling on me for answers or to contribute to the class discussion - not interesting discussion or questions that allowed for anything but the most basic understanding of the play, though -- and once again I had no idea how I'd even lived before I could form mental partitions.
It was a relief when the final bell finally rang announcing the end of school at 2:15. I got up from my desk, loaded my books into my backpack, and headed out the door. … at which point Mrs. Kensington called me back, wanting to talk about the homework requirements for her class and making sure that I knew that she did not accept late work of any kind.
Fifteen minutes later, I was finally on my way to find a spot to transform.
[Hey Vicky,] I sent telepathically as I searched for a conveniently empty spot, [I'm on my way to the South Brockton Marina. I think there might be a Jewel Seed there. Want to come along?]
[I can't make it], she replied, [Sorry, Taylor. Dean promised to take me out to dinner tonight to apologize, and we're meeting at the mall beforehand.]
[Oh. What did he do? If you're okay telling me, that is.]
Vicky's laughter rang through Taylor's thoughts. [You didn't even notice, did you?]
Okay, no, I had no idea what she was talking about. [Notice what?] I asked.
[He was totally staring at your chest like the whole lunch period, Taylor.]
I blinked. [What.] My thoughts flashed back to lunch. And yes, I'd noticed Dean staring at my chest, but it hadn't really connected that he'd been doing that. Come to think of it, hadn't Gallant done the same thing on New Year's Eve? Why had he been doing that? … Oh, that was probably it. [Maybe he wanted a better look at Raising Heart?] I suggested. [She's really pretty, and I could see how someone might get distracted by her.]
I'd never actually heard a mental facepalm before, but Vicky made a sound in our telepathic circuit that was about what I'd imagined it would be like.
[What?] I asked.
[Never mind, Taylor.]
So. No help from Vicky. That was fine. It was disappointing, but I could still do this.
Wait. Dean had been staring at my chest.
Dean had been staring at my chest. I blushed as I suddenly realized what Vicky had probably assumed, and my embarrassment was equaled only by my bafflement; the idea that a guy could find me attractive was so alien that it almost hurt, and … no. It was way more likely he'd been looking at Raising Heart, and even if he hadn't been, I didn't really like the pretty boy look.
I tried to ignore the tiny, bitter voice in the back of my head that seemed to ask, 'Are you of all people really in a position to be picky?'
I called my dad on the way to the marina. He was still at work, and the conversation wasn't long: I told him where I was going and what I'd be doing there, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't like the idea of me being a hero, but… I need this, and I think he understands that much. Or at least I hope he understands, because if not this is going to get uncomfortable and awkward.
I flew up to the South Brockton Marina a little before 3:00 pm. The marina was a few blocks away from the south ferry station, about where Downtown met the bay. The ferry hadn't been running for years, but there were boats that could take you where you needed to go if you didn't want to take a bus. It was expensive, but it was faster.
A lot of them worked from the marina.
The neighborhood around the marina was a mix of blocky commercial buildings and brownstone rowhouses and a very few old Victorian homes that had been converted into businesses more often than not on a gradual slope that went down to the water. It was full of leafless, frozen trees and well tended bushes and hedges. The neighborhood should have been beautiful, but with the thick, still mist that hung over it, it looked more haunted and desolate than anything else. There was almost no activity on the streets; occasionally a car would drive past or a small group would emerge from a building and go directly to another building. But no one walked alone, and there were few who ventured out at all.
The marina itself was surrounded by police tape, and PRT vehicles filled its parking lot. I could see shapes moving in the mist all in groups, and floodlights had been set up throughout the marina, but the light scattered through the fog, and it only seemed to wash out the area all the more.
I landed a good twenty meters away from the marina's entrance on the other side of the street. The second I landed I activated Wide Area Search and set a group of sensor spheres combing the area. Then I went to the crosswalk, waited for the signal, and walked at a normal pace toward the pair of PRT troopers who were on guard at the gate.
They spotted me when I was about halfway across the street. "You can't be out here," one of them called. He had a somewhat familiar and very darkly timbred bass voice that seemed to make the air buzz when he spoke. "This whole area is under lockdown."
I held up my hands to show I wasn't holding a weapon. "It's okay," I said. "I'm a hero. I'm here to help."
I was close enough to make out faces now, and beneath the helmet, the trooper who spoke had a face that could have been carved from granite and a dark, immaculate old time handlebar mustache. Raising Heart brought up his name on my HUD: Sgt. Rodríguez. Where had I seen him before? … Oh, right. He was at the PRT building that one time. Front desk, I think.
"Well," Rodriguez said, "If it isn't Gundam Girl."
"Starfall," I corrected.
"Starfall, right," he said. "Jensen, have you met Starfall?"
His fellow trooper shook her head. "I haven't had the pleasure, Sergeant," she said. She sounded like a soldier.
"Starfall, this is Jensen. Jensen, Starfall." Then he gave me a considering look. "You think you can do something about all this?" he asked, gesturing to take in the whole neighborhood.
"I hope so. I'm going to try."
He nodded. "I'll pass it up the line. If the Director gives the okay, you're free to act as you see fit. Careful, though; no attacks today, but things have been a little tense since a pair of capes broke the cordon other day. The folks upstairs think they might try again, though I couldn't tell you why. Maybe there's something in one of the boats they need, I don't know."
"Thanks, Rodriguez," I said, and I meant it.
He smiled, and it looked weird seeing that face smile. "Thank me by getting rid of the problem."
"I'll, um, do my best."
He reported the situation, and then there was a long delay filled with awkward silence.
"So," I said after a couple minutes of waiting, and my voice sounded strange in the fog; it echoed weirdly. "How's… um, things?"
Sergeant Rodriguez shrugged. "Not bad, not bad at all. Jensen and I were just talking about my retirement party before you walked up."
Jensen nodded in agreement. "We've got a lot planned. It's gonna be a hell of a party, Sergeant. It'll be hard to fill your shoes when you're gone."
Rodriguez smiled. "Twenty years on the force, I figured it was time for something new."
I blinked. "You don't look that old," I said.
Rodriguez laughed. "I'm not that old," he said. "I'm only 40. I signed up at 20. What can I say? I was young and stupid."
"And now you're just stupid," Jensen said with a grin.
"Et tu, Jensen?" Rodriguez asked.
He didn't look 40. But 40 was about my my dad's age, and that seemed plenty old to me. "Oh," I said. "What are you going to do, um, after?"
His eyes shone. "Gonna open up a cigar shop. Always wanted to run a cigar shop. Rodriguez's Fine Cigars." He gestured to his mustache. "Think this'll do for a logo?"
Jensen rolled her eyes. "Whatever you say, Sergeant."
The radio chirped again. Rodriguez spoke into it and nodded a few times. "All right, Starfall," he said, "You're good to go. Try not to break anything."
My thoughts went immediately back to Myrddin at the museum, and I couldn't quite stop myself from smiling. "No promises," I said.
"Oh, hell," Jensen muttered as I floated into the air, "This better not be another Collateral Damage Barbie situation…"
Collateral Damage Barbie? What was that supposed to mean? I dismissed the thought as unimportant.
It wasn't long before one of my sensor spheres found something. I immediately stopped Image Training and repurposed the Image Training partition into tactical analysis. Within the mental illusion, a command bunker took shape around me with a holographic map of the area styled after the map tables you see in movies set in World War 2. The neighborhood around the marina hadn't been completely charted by my Sensor Spheres, but a good chunk of it had. A grid settled over it, and coordinates assigned to the X and Y axes like that Battleship board game my dad and I used to play when I was younger. The A and B rows covered the marina and the water. The disturbance one of my Sensor Spheres had found was on a rooftop above C9; I was floating above C4, and I tried very hard to resist making the mental pun about how that was an explosive place to… fuck. Okay, I guess I wasn't actually better than that. I'd thought I was, but I wasn't.
The disturbance my Sensor Spheres had found was a dome. Small. Ten meter radius. It covered the roof of a two story brownstone rowhouse and the roof of the one next to it, and the space inside was… weird. I could see into it no problem, but the air inside it had a strange purple shimmer to it. I didn't actually take my body over to look at it in person; what was the point when I was already there with the Sensor Sphere? But as far as I could tell and as far as Raising Heart's sensors were telling me, it was an empty bubble of distorted spacetime.
[What am I looking at, Raising Heart?] I asked.
[I believe it is a Time-sealing Force Field, Master,] Raising Heart replied.
[A what?]
[A barrier. The flow of time is altered within. Such barriers are often used on Non-Administrated Worlds to conceal magical effects.]
I blinked. [Do you think that whatever is causing the fog is inside?]
[It is possible.]
[Can I break into it safely?]
[Unknown. It could be a trap. If you attempt to breach it, recommend that, you do so from minimum 100 meter distance.]
I raised an eyebrow. [How am I going to break into a barrier from a hundred meters away?] I asked.
[With extreme prejudice, my Master.]
I rolled my eyes. [We'll finish our search of the area. If we don't find any other sign of magical activity, we'll come back and have another look. In the meantime, I'll leave a Sensor Sphere to keep an eye on it. Sound good?]
[All right,] Raising Heart said.
Time seemed to pass very slowly as my other spheres explored the area. One minute. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Finally, just as I was about to turn my attention to this temporal force field in full, I heard gunfire through a sphere at H4. Raising Heart quickly triangulated the source of the sound based on when it reached the other spheres: it was coming from F5. I kicked off the nonexistent platform I'd been standing on in midair and shot off toward the source.
I landed in the courtyard inside the large corporate building that took up the majority of F5 on my grid: Cross Applied Technologies. It was a six story building built around a central courtyard. There was a definite design to the layout, but I couldn't quite figure it out. Something to do with how the colors were arranged. The windows along the ground level had been smashed, and four young men -- skinheads -- lay sprawled on the bricks.
I landed amongst them and had Raising Heart do a quick check of their vitals; three were unconscious, but the fourth was dead. There was no sign of… wait. Above me. A Sensor Sphere shot upward to get a better view, and that was the only reason I wasn't surprised when a man was thrown bodily through the window.
I caught him almost out of reflex, making sure to arrest his movement as slowly as I could instead of just standing at the bottom of his expected trajectory. He wore a black-painted breastplate with a v-neck, a blood red shirt, black slacks and black domino mask.
"VICTOR!" a woman screamed from above me.
Oh, shit. I'd just saved Victor's life. Victor, of the Empire Eighty Eight. A fucking Nazi. I dropped him reflexively, and he landed ungracefully but unharmed.
On the sixth floor, a woman in a skintight red bodysuit was scrambling to avoid the attacks of an amorphous monster, mostly black and dark purple, but with the faintest ugly iridescent sheen, like an oil slick in midair. Further inside the building, a girl in a red and black robe orbited by a whirling cloud of desks, chairs, cubicle walls, chunks of glass and office supplies was bombarding the monster with portions of her cloud.
The creature glared at the girl in the robe, its glowing red eyes narrowing balefully. Then another head sprouted from its shoulders, this one turning to follow the woman's movement.
Raising Heart labelled the woman and the girl on my HUD a second after I recognized them; Othalla and Rune.
Nazis. I hate these guys. Guy and girls. … Maybe it's just as well I didn't say that out loud. I kind of suck at witty banter.
The monster shot a dozen lances made of its own protoplasmic mass at Othalla, and I hesitated. I didn't want to let a human being die if I could stop it, but… could I really save the life of a Nazi? A Nazi? …
... and I couldn't just let her die. Even with everything she and her fellow Empire Eighty Eight Neo-Nazis represented, she was still a human being whose life was in danger, and I had the power to save her. I hesitated, and then I swore loudly and launched myself up into the air; I accelerated and then decelerated again so quickly that I could feel the G-Forces even through my barrier jacket, but I made it just in time to save Othalla's life, extending my hand and forcing a brilliant pink barrier into place between her and the dozen or so pseudo-tentacles.
They hit my shield with surprising force, each impact send a spray of murky, oily matter onto the floor and walls to the side of my shield.
"Who…?" Othalla started to ask, turning to look at me.
I shook my head, holding my shield as the monster send another bombardment of pseudopods. "Shut up and get to safety already," I snapped.
She ran. Rune bombarded the creature with desks and computers to distract it, and I took the opportunity created by the monster's distraction to call up a dozen Divine Shooter bullets. The creature seemed to sense my spell, and it immediately shot up through the ceiling, going through the ceiling panels and into the vents like the intervening material wasn't even there.
"Shoot!" I commanded, and the glowing pink bullets rapidly perforated the vent and punched holes clear through to the ceiling. It was a mistake. The second I'd used up my bullets, the monster was on top of me again, slamming its mass against my shield even as the pseudo-matter that had splashed off my shield reformed into a solid mass headed for my back. I noticed it thanks to having a Sensor Sphere hovering outside of the building, and the ensuing explosion of the tiny independent mass against my shield blew a large hole in the floor beneath me and broke windows all the way down to the first floor.
I only fell a few feet before I caught myself, but it was enough for the monster to take advantage of my distraction: it weaved through the bombardment of office furniture that Rune was sending its way and hit her like a freight train. She tumbled head over heels through three or four different cubicle walls and landed with a tremendous crash; her cloud of debris fell to earth a second later. I couldn't tell if or how badly she was injured, but if she was still alive, I needed to take care of this monster right now before it could kill her.
"Shooting Mode," Raising Heart said, reconfiguring herself from a staff to more of a spear with a tuning fork head.
"Divine," I began, charging the attack I knew would be able to put the creature down. The spell circle appeared and spun beneath my feet as energy condensed into a ball of pink light just in front of the tip of Raising Heart's tuning fork.
The creature slammed into and then through the floor in an effort to break my line of sight, but a second sensor sphere was already on the task; my targeting reticule was fixed upon the thing's amorphous mass. "BUST…" and that was as far as I got before it shot beneath me. It was too fast, and the range was too close. I couldn't react quickly enough to reliably hit it, and I didn't want to level the entire building if I could avoid it. I needed to open up the range.
Dozens of independent bits of pseudo-matter floated into the air from where they had been splattered across the ruined sixth floor of the building. "Divine Shooter," I countered.
We both moved at the same time. I'd never been in a real dogfight before, and to be honest, I wasn't sure if this counted or not; I zoomed up into the air to try to gain the distance I needed, and the monster followed close behind me, a cloud of pseudo-matter bits gathered around its form like my Divine Shooter bullets… holy shit, was it imitating me? Had I taught the creature that trick?
I did a half roll so I was upside down relative to the ground and then pulled a quick descending half-loop, pushing my speed as fast as I dared in a populated area. I was trying to disengage, but the monster followed me every step of the way. We exchanged fire as we flew tight corkscrews around each other in a flight path that took us on a complete circuit of the neighborhood, pink and black-purple explosions rippling in our wake. Even as I flew, something felt wrong. I was just a little bit clumsier than I should have been, and my spells were costing me just a little bit too much mana. I didn't really know what was going on, and it wasn't enough to actually hurt me much in the fight, but it had started…
It had started when I caught Victor.
Victor. The skill thief. Oh, crap. Did he have magical potential? If he did, then his stealing my spellcasting skills could be very, very bad. And then another thought occurred to me, and I felt a shiver of horror creeping down my spine: was the drain permanent? Was I going to have to start learning magic again from scratch?
In that moment, I wished I hadn't caught him. I wished I'd let him splatter on the pavement. There wasn't anything I could do about it now, though, except… [Raising Heart, can you take over for me? I'm having trouble with my spells.]
[All right,] she replied. I felt a shift in our mental connection. She was still doing most of the work skillwise in any case, but now she was back to doing all of it, and my spells were instantly back to their full levels of efficiency, and the math flowed easily through my mind once again, even if I couldn't quite grasp it the way I was used to.
And still the Jewel Seed monster was right behind me. God this was annoying. I knew I could escape and open up the distance, but I was afraid if I went as fast as I would need to, I'd do some major damage to the neighborhood. Unless… "Raising Heart, can you reconfigure for melee combat?"
"That is a sub-optimal use of my abilities," she replied.
"Can you?"
"Yes," she said. "Stand by." Her structure reconfigured itself into something unmistakably weapon-shaped, and a blade of solid pink energy extended out from her like a glaive.
I immediately cut my acceleration and spun around, bringing Raising Heart down in a vertical slash that caught the monster just before it would have collided with me. The energy blade sheared through the creature's pseudo-matter body with only a little resistance, and it fell apart in two halves that went around me to either side.
One of those halves held the Jewel Seed, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't get another chance if I guessed wrong.
"Shooting Mode," Raising Heart said, reconfiguring back into her tuning fork-tipped configuration.
"Divine Buster!" I called. The attack charged, motes of light gathering into a sphere just in front of the tuning fork section, spell circle whirling beneath my feet with secondary spell circles around Raising Heart's body.
The two halves of the creature were bubbling, launching protoplasmic tendrils at each other, trying to reunite.
My shot hit the uppermost half and erased it from existence. The bottom half hit the ground near the entrance to the marina with an ugly sounding splatter.
I couldn't see Rodriguez or Jensen from where I was, but a bunch more PRT vehicles were approaching the area.
The bottom half of the monster bubbled, and it launched itself and a good twenty floating pieces of its mass straight into my shield; the force exerted proved too much, and I went flying backwards into and through the wall of the fishing supply shop that was just across the street from the marina.
Damn it, if only I had some way to bind the monster, to keep it from moving, like some kind of…
The creature continued to bubble, its body visibly regenerating. I went through my options for beating it in my head, and it all came back to the same thing; I knew what I had to do, I just needed to be able to fire the damn shot!
Suddenly, something slammed into the creature from above; the ground shook, and a cloud of debris sprayed up into the air. It cleared after a second, revealing the creature trapped beneath the remains of a yacht, seemingly stunned and unable to move. Then Rune floated down from the roof of a nearby building standing on a platform of cubicle walls with a distinctly satisfied look on her face.
It bought me the time I needed. I leveled Raising Heart at the spot where the yacht had crushed the creature to the street, and I fired off another Divine Buster. "JEWEL SEED SERIAL XXI! SEAL!"
Both creature and yacht were destroyed in the ensuing blast of pink light. … and so was a good section of the street.
Oops.
Rune looked me over. "We make a pretty good team," she said with a grin.
Damn it. She had to go and make it awkward. "Yeah, no," I said.
"What?" she asked, as if she genuinely had no idea why I'd be uncomfortable. "What's wrong?"
"You mean besides the fact that Sabrina the Teenage Nazi thinks we make a great team? Nothing at all!"
Rune scowled at me. "Fuck you, too," she snapped. "It's not like I wanted to…" she immediately stopped talking when Othala and Victor came jogging up.
At that moment, the time/space barrier on the rooftop at C9 fell, and all I saw through my Sensor Sphere was a momentary impression of movement before a cloud of darkness covered it, blocking its sight. I maneuvered another Sensor Sphere to get a look at what was going on, and I caught a glimpse of a rolling black cloud before that Sensor Sphere went dark, too.
"Don't try to take the Jewel Seed, Starfall," Victor said.
My heart rate increased in anticipation of a fight -- I wasn't sure if it would be with the E88 capes or with whatever was causing the cloud of darkness that was coming this way. My brows furrowed. "How do you know about Jewel Seeds?"
"We pay attention," Victor replied. "Do you honestly think Tinker-tech that can give a parahuman a permanent power boost would go unnoticed?" He shook his head. "We nearly died trying to secure it; we're not going home empty handed. Don't try to take it, and we'll let you leave."
"I have a counter offer." I held up a hand. "Divine Stinger." In the blink of an eye, a thousand firefly-sized motes of pink light filled the air around me, and again it took way more effort and way more mana to power the spell than it should have. The math kept slipping, and again I had to hand it off to Raising Heart in order to make it work properly. I scowled at Victor. "Stop that."
Victor smirked. "Stop what?" he asked, and a very faint aura seemed to spring up around him, sending off little streamers of bloody red light.
"Goddamn Nazi skill thief," I muttered.
His smirk widened ever so slightly as the aura slowly brightened. "You know," he said, "I've taken a lot of skills from people, but I never imagined I'd get something like this…"
"Shoot!" I commanded, and flung myself to the side. An instant later, the world went dark. I had a sense of movement in the blackness, of at least one massive creature passing by; I could feel the wind of its passage
The Stinger swarm exploded into motion, filling the air with pink explosions that utterly failed to illuminate the darkness, each a foot across and placed to saturate the area. I couldn't see a damn thing, and I didn't know if I had hit my targets with the attack.
The darkness rolled past us. It moved over the ground like an oncoming wave, and I heard the sound of heavy animal footfalls receding into the distance.
Rune and Othala were down, and Rune was delivering a storm of incredibly inventive pained swearing, but Victor had held up a hand, forming a red barrier that the explosions couldn't penetrate, and a very familiar Midchildan spell circle was rotating around his feet. The shield was almost laughably weak, but I'd stripped all shield-penetration ability out of the Divine Stinger when I designed it to maximize the salvo size.
I got that sinking feeling.
But Victor wasn't the only one throwing surprises my way; the Jewel Seed was gone.
"... What the hell just happened?" Victor asked, and I spoke at the same time, saying, "That did not just happen."
We exchanged looks as if to say, 'we'll settle this later,' and then I shot off into the air in pursuit of the cloud of darkness.
It took me a second to get up to speed, and in that second I saw that the cloud of darkness was just about to round the corner and come into view of the oncoming PRT vans; Armsmaster was at the front of the vehicle column on his motorcycle.
In that moment, a dome of shimmering purple light expanded out of the darkness; I pulled sharply up to avoid it, and every person, every vehicle, and every animal that it touched vanished as if they had never existed at all.
My jaw dropped open. Had … whatever that was, had it just killed all those people!?
I gave the zone of purple light a wide berth. A few seconds later, the cloud of darkness emerged from it, and the barrier fell; everything that the field of light had taken was instantly restored in exactly the state it had been when it disappeared.
"Oh, that is such bullshit," I muttered.
Then I was right on the cloud's tail, firing a full 1,200 strong Stinger swarm into the the obscured area. In response, there was a flare of magic that I could sense even through the cloud; it muffled sounds and blocked vision and almost every sensor Raising Heart had, but it didn't block the ability to sense active magical signatures. I could hear the detonations but not see them, and I had no idea if I'd done anything. Probably not if those two magical signatures I'd felt inside the darkness were shields going up.
Inside my third mental partition, I set about redesigning an alternate form of Divine Stinger; I needed a version that worked against shields. Meanwhile, in the real world, I started bombarding the cloud with salvo after salvo of Divine Shooter bullets; I had to fly them blindly through the cloud, but I was able to plan a flight path for them that would carry them through the entire space taken up by the darkness in short order from the safety of my second mental partition.
Another active magical signature triggered within the cloud, and then a third. I finally got a good fix on its position, and I grinned. "There you are," I said.
I started charging a Divine Buster even as my sensor spheres closed in.
The darkness dropped, giving me a brief glimpse of a group of teenagers riding on the backs of three enormous armor-plated spiky rhino-dog-things: a girl with a bulldog mask, a blonde girl in a black and lavender costume with a ferret on her shoulder, a figure all in black leather with a skull-faced motorcycle helmet, and a maybe-boy dressed in renaissance-faire clothes with a Venetian mask.
"Divine Buster!" I announced, speaking the very right words to trigger the spell as Raising Heart charged the mathematical construct with my mana.
Just as the energy blast bloomed to life from Raising Heart's tip, my arm spasmed painfully and swept straight up, sending the blast straight up into the sky; it was only by sheer dumb luck that I avoided hitting a building with it as it was redirected.
The boy in the Venetian mask started laughing. I charged another Divine Buster, and I got the same result, and this time it carved a savage gouge through the street and erased a fire escape from the side of an apartment building before I could cut it off, and now the boy was laughing even harder.
Okay. No Divine Busters. With a frustrated curse, I called up a couple salvos of Divine Shooter and sent them down at the group. The cloud of darkness returned instantly, blocking my sight and my ability to effectively guide the projectiles; I sent them back on the movement pattern to take them through the cloud as efficiently as possible, and once again the magical signature of a powerful force field sprang up in the darkness.
This was getting embarrassing.
"Raising Heart, let's try the glaive form again," I said.
"Yes, my Master," she replied, reconfiguring herself into something better suited to melee combat, the pink energy blade once more extending out from just in front of a reinforced section that sat ahead of her gem.
I shot down into the darkness. Then a young boy's voice called out as if from far away and underwater, "CHAIN BIND!"
I blinked. Chain what?
There was a flare of magical energy, and something wrapped around my arms and legs, bringing me to a sudden and unexpected stop. The darkness receded as the group inside kept galloping away, and I saw that I was floating in the air with long, glowing green chains wrapped around my wrists and ankles, their other end anchored to the street.
I tried to fly, but the chains held me in place. I strained against them for several long moments to no effect. Then I took a few breaths to calm myself, glared at the receding cloud of darkness, and fired off a burst of Divine Shooter bullets to break the chains free of where they were anchored to the street. Then I took off after the cloud once more, green energy chains streaming behind me as they slowly broke apart into motes of light that were long in fading away.
Another shimmering purple dome sprang up before I could get anywhere close to the cloud and the group that it hid, and this one expanded to many times the size of the one that I'd seen used against the PRT, and once again every person, every animal, and every vehicle it touched vanished into thin air. "Warning," Raising Heart announced, "Space/time anomaly detected."
I flew up to the edge of the field. Shit. Okay. They were going to come out somewhere on the other side. They probably wouldn't go in a straight line, but they didn't need to; the field was big enough to give them plenty of options. On the far side of the field, a huge swath of darkness billowed into existence, covering at least a city block. I flew towards it, sending my sensor spheres to cover the other obvious exists from the field in case it was trick.
The field collapsed, returning every person, every vehicle, every animal it had taken when it was established. The cloud of darkness dissipated a moment later.
The thieves were gone.
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
3.2 - Rivals (revised)
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
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The rest of the school day was basically school-like. It was shaped like itself, and was broad as it had breadth; it was just as high as it was, and moved with its own organs, and oh God I was bored.
It wasn't anything that was wrong with the last class of the day in and of itself; English was fine. It was a subject I was good at, even. And it wasn't that I had anything against Antony and Cleopatra. Even bad Shakespeare is pretty damn good, and Antony and Cleopatra isn't bad Shakespeare. But our teacher - Mrs. Kensington, an interesting-looking woman with an impressively aquiline nose - seemed bored. And when the teacher is bored, the class is going to be boring.
Things got awkward during roll call. Mrs. Kensington had a casual sort of approach to classroom management, and she made small talk to some extent during roll call. When she got to my name, she paused. "Taylor Hebert?" she asked. She seemed to take note of my eyes, then, and the hint of a smile touched the corner of her lips. "Any relation to Annette Hebert?"
I blinked. "She was my mom," I said.
Mrs. Kensington nodded. "I was one of her students at Brockton Bay University. Good woman."
I had no idea what to say to that, and I really wasn't comfortable being singled out. People were looking at me now. "Thank you," I said after a moment.
After that, she seemed to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in calling on me for answers or to contribute to the class discussion - not interesting discussion or questions that allowed for anything but the most basic understanding of the play, though -- and once again I had no idea how I'd even lived before I could form mental partitions.
It was a relief when the final bell finally rang announcing the end of school at 2:15. I got up from my desk, loaded my books into my backpack, and headed out the door. … at which point Mrs. Kensington called me back, wanting to talk about the homework requirements for her class and making sure that I knew that she did not accept late work of any kind.
Fifteen minutes later, I was finally on my way to find a spot to transform.
[Hey Vicky,] I sent telepathically as I searched for a conveniently empty spot, [I'm on my way to the South Brockton Marina. I think there might be a Jewel Seed there. Want to come along?]
[I can't make it], she replied, [Sorry, Taylor. Dean promised to take me out to dinner tonight to apologize, and we're meeting at the mall beforehand.]
[Oh. What did he do? If you're okay telling me, that is.]
Vicky's laughter rang through Taylor's thoughts. [You didn't even notice, did you?]
Okay, no, I had no idea what she was talking about. [Notice what?] I asked.
[He was totally staring at your chest like the whole lunch period, Taylor.]
I blinked. [What.] My thoughts flashed back to lunch. And yes, I'd noticed Dean staring at my chest, but it hadn't really connected that he'd been doing that. Come to think of it, hadn't Gallant done the same thing on New Year's Eve? Why had he been doing that? … Oh, that was probably it. [Maybe he wanted a better look at Raising Heart?] I suggested. [She's really pretty, and I could see how someone might get distracted by her.]
I'd never actually heard a mental facepalm before, but Vicky made a sound in our telepathic circuit that was about what I'd imagined it would be like.
[What?] I asked.
[Never mind, Taylor.]
So. No help from Vicky. That was fine. It was disappointing, but I could still do this.
Wait. Dean had been staring at my chest.
Dean had been staring at my chest. I blushed as I suddenly realized what Vicky had probably assumed, and my embarrassment was equaled only by my bafflement; the idea that a guy could find me attractive was so alien that it almost hurt, and … no. It was way more likely he'd been looking at Raising Heart, and even if he hadn't been, I didn't really like the pretty boy look.
I tried to ignore the tiny, bitter voice in the back of my head that seemed to ask, 'Are you of all people really in a position to be picky?'
I called my dad on the way to the marina. He was still at work, and the conversation wasn't long: I told him where I was going and what I'd be doing there, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't like the idea of me being a hero, but… I need this, and I think he understands that much. Or at least I hope he understands, because if not this is going to get uncomfortable and awkward.
I flew up to the South Brockton Marina a little before 3:00 pm. The marina was a few blocks away from the south ferry station, about where Downtown met the bay. The ferry hadn't been running for years, but there were boats that could take you where you needed to go if you didn't want to take a bus. It was expensive, but it was faster.
A lot of them worked from the marina.
The neighborhood around the marina was a mix of blocky commercial buildings and brownstone rowhouses and a very few old Victorian homes that had been converted into businesses more often than not on a gradual slope that went down to the water. It was full of leafless, frozen trees and well tended bushes and hedges. The neighborhood should have been beautiful, but with the thick, still mist that hung over it, it looked more haunted and desolate than anything else. There was almost no activity on the streets; occasionally a car would drive past or a small group would emerge from a building and go directly to another building. But no one walked alone, and there were few who ventured out at all.
The marina itself was surrounded by police tape, and PRT vehicles filled its parking lot. I could see shapes moving in the mist all in groups, and floodlights had been set up throughout the marina, but the light scattered through the fog, and it only seemed to wash out the area all the more.
I landed a good twenty meters away from the marina's entrance on the other side of the street. The second I landed I activated Wide Area Search and set a group of sensor spheres combing the area. Then I went to the crosswalk, waited for the signal, and walked at a normal pace toward the pair of PRT troopers who were on guard at the gate.
They spotted me when I was about halfway across the street. "You can't be out here," one of them called. He had a somewhat familiar and very darkly timbred bass voice that seemed to make the air buzz when he spoke. "This whole area is under lockdown."
I held up my hands to show I wasn't holding a weapon. "It's okay," I said. "I'm a hero. I'm here to help."
I was close enough to make out faces now, and beneath the helmet, the trooper who spoke had a face that could have been carved from granite and a dark, immaculate old time handlebar mustache. Raising Heart brought up his name on my HUD: Sgt. Rodríguez. Where had I seen him before? … Oh, right. He was at the PRT building that one time. Front desk, I think.
"Well," Rodriguez said, "If it isn't Gundam Girl."
"Starfall," I corrected.
"Starfall, right," he said. "Jensen, have you met Starfall?"
His fellow trooper shook her head. "I haven't had the pleasure, Sergeant," she said. She sounded like a soldier.
"Starfall, this is Jensen. Jensen, Starfall." Then he gave me a considering look. "You think you can do something about all this?" he asked, gesturing to take in the whole neighborhood.
"I hope so. I'm going to try."
He nodded. "I'll pass it up the line. If the Director gives the okay, you're free to act as you see fit. Careful, though; no attacks today, but things have been a little tense since a pair of capes broke the cordon other day. The folks upstairs think they might try again, though I couldn't tell you why. Maybe there's something in one of the boats they need, I don't know."
"Thanks, Rodriguez," I said, and I meant it.
He smiled, and it looked weird seeing that face smile. "Thank me by getting rid of the problem."
"I'll, um, do my best."
He reported the situation, and then there was a long delay filled with awkward silence.
"So," I said after a couple minutes of waiting, and my voice sounded strange in the fog; it echoed weirdly. "How's… um, things?"
Sergeant Rodriguez shrugged. "Not bad, not bad at all. Jensen and I were just talking about my retirement party before you walked up."
Jensen nodded in agreement. "We've got a lot planned. It's gonna be a hell of a party, Sergeant. It'll be hard to fill your shoes when you're gone."
Rodriguez smiled. "Twenty years on the force, I figured it was time for something new."
I blinked. "You don't look that old," I said.
Rodriguez laughed. "I'm not that old," he said. "I'm only 40. I signed up at 20. What can I say? I was young and stupid."
"And now you're just stupid," Jensen said with a grin.
"Et tu, Jensen?" Rodriguez asked.
He didn't look 40. But 40 was about my my dad's age, and that seemed plenty old to me. "Oh," I said. "What are you going to do, um, after?"
His eyes shone. "Gonna open up a cigar shop. Always wanted to run a cigar shop. Rodriguez's Fine Cigars." He gestured to his mustache. "Think this'll do for a logo?"
Jensen rolled her eyes. "Whatever you say, Sergeant."
The radio chirped again. Rodriguez spoke into it and nodded a few times. "All right, Starfall," he said, "You're good to go. Try not to break anything."
My thoughts went immediately back to Myrddin at the museum, and I couldn't quite stop myself from smiling. "No promises," I said.
"Oh, hell," Jensen muttered as I floated into the air, "This better not be another Collateral Damage Barbie situation…"
Collateral Damage Barbie? What was that supposed to mean? I dismissed the thought as unimportant.
It wasn't long before one of my sensor spheres found something. I immediately stopped Image Training and repurposed the Image Training partition into tactical analysis. Within the mental illusion, a command bunker took shape around me with a holographic map of the area styled after the map tables you see in movies set in World War 2. The neighborhood around the marina hadn't been completely charted by my Sensor Spheres, but a good chunk of it had. A grid settled over it, and coordinates assigned to the X and Y axes like that Battleship board game my dad and I used to play when I was younger. The A and B rows covered the marina and the water. The disturbance one of my Sensor Spheres had found was on a rooftop above C9; I was floating above C4, and I tried very hard to resist making the mental pun about how that was an explosive place to… fuck. Okay, I guess I wasn't actually better than that. I'd thought I was, but I wasn't.
The disturbance my Sensor Spheres had found was a dome. Small. Ten meter radius. It covered the roof of a two story brownstone rowhouse and the roof of the one next to it, and the space inside was… weird. I could see into it no problem, but the air inside it had a strange purple shimmer to it. I didn't actually take my body over to look at it in person; what was the point when I was already there with the Sensor Sphere? But as far as I could tell and as far as Raising Heart's sensors were telling me, it was an empty bubble of distorted spacetime.
[What am I looking at, Raising Heart?] I asked.
[I believe it is a Time-sealing Force Field, Master,] Raising Heart replied.
[A what?]
[A barrier. The flow of time is altered within. Such barriers are often used on Non-Administrated Worlds to conceal magical effects.]
I blinked. [Do you think that whatever is causing the fog is inside?]
[It is possible.]
[Can I break into it safely?]
[Unknown. It could be a trap. If you attempt to breach it, recommend that, you do so from minimum 100 meter distance.]
I raised an eyebrow. [How am I going to break into a barrier from a hundred meters away?] I asked.
[With extreme prejudice, my Master.]
I rolled my eyes. [We'll finish our search of the area. If we don't find any other sign of magical activity, we'll come back and have another look. In the meantime, I'll leave a Sensor Sphere to keep an eye on it. Sound good?]
[All right,] Raising Heart said.
Time seemed to pass very slowly as my other spheres explored the area. One minute. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Finally, just as I was about to turn my attention to this temporal force field in full, I heard gunfire through a sphere at H4. Raising Heart quickly triangulated the source of the sound based on when it reached the other spheres: it was coming from F5. I kicked off the nonexistent platform I'd been standing on in midair and shot off toward the source.
I landed in the courtyard inside the large corporate building that took up the majority of F5 on my grid: Cross Applied Technologies. It was a six story building built around a central courtyard. There was a definite design to the layout, but I couldn't quite figure it out. Something to do with how the colors were arranged. The windows along the ground level had been smashed, and four young men -- skinheads -- lay sprawled on the bricks.
I landed amongst them and had Raising Heart do a quick check of their vitals; three were unconscious, but the fourth was dead. There was no sign of… wait. Above me. A Sensor Sphere shot upward to get a better view, and that was the only reason I wasn't surprised when a man was thrown bodily through the window.
I caught him almost out of reflex, making sure to arrest his movement as slowly as I could instead of just standing at the bottom of his expected trajectory. He wore a black-painted breastplate with a v-neck, a blood red shirt, black slacks and black domino mask.
"VICTOR!" a woman screamed from above me.
Oh, shit. I'd just saved Victor's life. Victor, of the Empire Eighty Eight. A fucking Nazi. I dropped him reflexively, and he landed ungracefully but unharmed.
On the sixth floor, a woman in a skintight red bodysuit was scrambling to avoid the attacks of an amorphous monster, mostly black and dark purple, but with the faintest ugly iridescent sheen, like an oil slick in midair. Further inside the building, a girl in a red and black robe orbited by a whirling cloud of desks, chairs, cubicle walls, chunks of glass and office supplies was bombarding the monster with portions of her cloud.
The creature glared at the girl in the robe, its glowing red eyes narrowing balefully. Then another head sprouted from its shoulders, this one turning to follow the woman's movement.
Raising Heart labelled the woman and the girl on my HUD a second after I recognized them; Othalla and Rune.
Nazis. I hate these guys. Guy and girls. … Maybe it's just as well I didn't say that out loud. I kind of suck at witty banter.
The monster shot a dozen lances made of its own protoplasmic mass at Othalla, and I hesitated. I didn't want to let a human being die if I could stop it, but… could I really save the life of a Nazi? A Nazi? …
... and I couldn't just let her die. Even with everything she and her fellow Empire Eighty Eight Neo-Nazis represented, she was still a human being whose life was in danger, and I had the power to save her. I hesitated, and then I swore loudly and launched myself up into the air; I accelerated and then decelerated again so quickly that I could feel the G-Forces even through my barrier jacket, but I made it just in time to save Othalla's life, extending my hand and forcing a brilliant pink barrier into place between her and the dozen or so pseudo-tentacles.
They hit my shield with surprising force, each impact send a spray of murky, oily matter onto the floor and walls to the side of my shield.
"Who…?" Othalla started to ask, turning to look at me.
I shook my head, holding my shield as the monster send another bombardment of pseudopods. "Shut up and get to safety already," I snapped.
She ran. Rune bombarded the creature with desks and computers to distract it, and I took the opportunity created by the monster's distraction to call up a dozen Divine Shooter bullets. The creature seemed to sense my spell, and it immediately shot up through the ceiling, going through the ceiling panels and into the vents like the intervening material wasn't even there.
"Shoot!" I commanded, and the glowing pink bullets rapidly perforated the vent and punched holes clear through to the ceiling. It was a mistake. The second I'd used up my bullets, the monster was on top of me again, slamming its mass against my shield even as the pseudo-matter that had splashed off my shield reformed into a solid mass headed for my back. I noticed it thanks to having a Sensor Sphere hovering outside of the building, and the ensuing explosion of the tiny independent mass against my shield blew a large hole in the floor beneath me and broke windows all the way down to the first floor.
I only fell a few feet before I caught myself, but it was enough for the monster to take advantage of my distraction: it weaved through the bombardment of office furniture that Rune was sending its way and hit her like a freight train. She tumbled head over heels through three or four different cubicle walls and landed with a tremendous crash; her cloud of debris fell to earth a second later. I couldn't tell if or how badly she was injured, but if she was still alive, I needed to take care of this monster right now before it could kill her.
"Shooting Mode," Raising Heart said, reconfiguring herself from a staff to more of a spear with a tuning fork head.
"Divine," I began, charging the attack I knew would be able to put the creature down. The spell circle appeared and spun beneath my feet as energy condensed into a ball of pink light just in front of the tip of Raising Heart's tuning fork.
The creature slammed into and then through the floor in an effort to break my line of sight, but a second sensor sphere was already on the task; my targeting reticule was fixed upon the thing's amorphous mass. "BUST…" and that was as far as I got before it shot beneath me. It was too fast, and the range was too close. I couldn't react quickly enough to reliably hit it, and I didn't want to level the entire building if I could avoid it. I needed to open up the range.
Dozens of independent bits of pseudo-matter floated into the air from where they had been splattered across the ruined sixth floor of the building. "Divine Shooter," I countered.
We both moved at the same time. I'd never been in a real dogfight before, and to be honest, I wasn't sure if this counted or not; I zoomed up into the air to try to gain the distance I needed, and the monster followed close behind me, a cloud of pseudo-matter bits gathered around its form like my Divine Shooter bullets… holy shit, was it imitating me? Had I taught the creature that trick?
I did a half roll so I was upside down relative to the ground and then pulled a quick descending half-loop, pushing my speed as fast as I dared in a populated area. I was trying to disengage, but the monster followed me every step of the way. We exchanged fire as we flew tight corkscrews around each other in a flight path that took us on a complete circuit of the neighborhood, pink and black-purple explosions rippling in our wake. Even as I flew, something felt wrong. I was just a little bit clumsier than I should have been, and my spells were costing me just a little bit too much mana. I didn't really know what was going on, and it wasn't enough to actually hurt me much in the fight, but it had started…
It had started when I caught Victor.
Victor. The skill thief. Oh, crap. Did he have magical potential? If he did, then his stealing my spellcasting skills could be very, very bad. And then another thought occurred to me, and I felt a shiver of horror creeping down my spine: was the drain permanent? Was I going to have to start learning magic again from scratch?
In that moment, I wished I hadn't caught him. I wished I'd let him splatter on the pavement. There wasn't anything I could do about it now, though, except… [Raising Heart, can you take over for me? I'm having trouble with my spells.]
[All right,] she replied. I felt a shift in our mental connection. She was still doing most of the work skillwise in any case, but now she was back to doing all of it, and my spells were instantly back to their full levels of efficiency, and the math flowed easily through my mind once again, even if I couldn't quite grasp it the way I was used to.
And still the Jewel Seed monster was right behind me. God this was annoying. I knew I could escape and open up the distance, but I was afraid if I went as fast as I would need to, I'd do some major damage to the neighborhood. Unless… "Raising Heart, can you reconfigure for melee combat?"
"That is a sub-optimal use of my abilities," she replied.
"Can you?"
"Yes," she said. "Stand by." Her structure reconfigured itself into something unmistakably weapon-shaped, and a blade of solid pink energy extended out from her like a glaive.
I immediately cut my acceleration and spun around, bringing Raising Heart down in a vertical slash that caught the monster just before it would have collided with me. The energy blade sheared through the creature's pseudo-matter body with only a little resistance, and it fell apart in two halves that went around me to either side.
One of those halves held the Jewel Seed, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't get another chance if I guessed wrong.
"Shooting Mode," Raising Heart said, reconfiguring back into her tuning fork-tipped configuration.
"Divine Buster!" I called. The attack charged, motes of light gathering into a sphere just in front of the tuning fork section, spell circle whirling beneath my feet with secondary spell circles around Raising Heart's body.
The two halves of the creature were bubbling, launching protoplasmic tendrils at each other, trying to reunite.
My shot hit the uppermost half and erased it from existence. The bottom half hit the ground near the entrance to the marina with an ugly sounding splatter.
I couldn't see Rodriguez or Jensen from where I was, but a bunch more PRT vehicles were approaching the area.
The bottom half of the monster bubbled, and it launched itself and a good twenty floating pieces of its mass straight into my shield; the force exerted proved too much, and I went flying backwards into and through the wall of the fishing supply shop that was just across the street from the marina.
Damn it, if only I had some way to bind the monster, to keep it from moving, like some kind of…
The creature continued to bubble, its body visibly regenerating. I went through my options for beating it in my head, and it all came back to the same thing; I knew what I had to do, I just needed to be able to fire the damn shot!
Suddenly, something slammed into the creature from above; the ground shook, and a cloud of debris sprayed up into the air. It cleared after a second, revealing the creature trapped beneath the remains of a yacht, seemingly stunned and unable to move. Then Rune floated down from the roof of a nearby building standing on a platform of cubicle walls with a distinctly satisfied look on her face.
It bought me the time I needed. I leveled Raising Heart at the spot where the yacht had crushed the creature to the street, and I fired off another Divine Buster. "JEWEL SEED SERIAL XXI! SEAL!"
Both creature and yacht were destroyed in the ensuing blast of pink light. … and so was a good section of the street.
Oops.
Rune looked me over. "We make a pretty good team," she said with a grin.
Damn it. She had to go and make it awkward. "Yeah, no," I said.
"What?" she asked, as if she genuinely had no idea why I'd be uncomfortable. "What's wrong?"
"You mean besides the fact that Sabrina the Teenage Nazi thinks we make a great team? Nothing at all!"
Rune scowled at me. "Fuck you, too," she snapped. "It's not like I wanted to…" she immediately stopped talking when Othala and Victor came jogging up.
At that moment, the time/space barrier on the rooftop at C9 fell, and all I saw through my Sensor Sphere was a momentary impression of movement before a cloud of darkness covered it, blocking its sight. I maneuvered another Sensor Sphere to get a look at what was going on, and I caught a glimpse of a rolling black cloud before that Sensor Sphere went dark, too.
"Don't try to take the Jewel Seed, Starfall," Victor said.
My heart rate increased in anticipation of a fight -- I wasn't sure if it would be with the E88 capes or with whatever was causing the cloud of darkness that was coming this way. My brows furrowed. "How do you know about Jewel Seeds?"
"We pay attention," Victor replied. "Do you honestly think Tinker-tech that can give a parahuman a permanent power boost would go unnoticed?" He shook his head. "We nearly died trying to secure it; we're not going home empty handed. Don't try to take it, and we'll let you leave."
"I have a counter offer." I held up a hand. "Divine Stinger." In the blink of an eye, a thousand firefly-sized motes of pink light filled the air around me, and again it took way more effort and way more mana to power the spell than it should have. The math kept slipping, and again I had to hand it off to Raising Heart in order to make it work properly. I scowled at Victor. "Stop that."
Victor smirked. "Stop what?" he asked, and a very faint aura seemed to spring up around him, sending off little streamers of bloody red light.
"Goddamn Nazi skill thief," I muttered.
His smirk widened ever so slightly as the aura slowly brightened. "You know," he said, "I've taken a lot of skills from people, but I never imagined I'd get something like this…"
"Shoot!" I commanded, and flung myself to the side. An instant later, the world went dark. I had a sense of movement in the blackness, of at least one massive creature passing by; I could feel the wind of its passage
The Stinger swarm exploded into motion, filling the air with pink explosions that utterly failed to illuminate the darkness, each a foot across and placed to saturate the area. I couldn't see a damn thing, and I didn't know if I had hit my targets with the attack.
The darkness rolled past us. It moved over the ground like an oncoming wave, and I heard the sound of heavy animal footfalls receding into the distance.
Rune and Othala were down, and Rune was delivering a storm of incredibly inventive pained swearing, but Victor had held up a hand, forming a red barrier that the explosions couldn't penetrate, and a very familiar Midchildan spell circle was rotating around his feet. The shield was almost laughably weak, but I'd stripped all shield-penetration ability out of the Divine Stinger when I designed it to maximize the salvo size.
I got that sinking feeling.
But Victor wasn't the only one throwing surprises my way; the Jewel Seed was gone.
"... What the hell just happened?" Victor asked, and I spoke at the same time, saying, "That did not just happen."
We exchanged looks as if to say, 'we'll settle this later,' and then I shot off into the air in pursuit of the cloud of darkness.
It took me a second to get up to speed, and in that second I saw that the cloud of darkness was just about to round the corner and come into view of the oncoming PRT vans; Armsmaster was at the front of the vehicle column on his motorcycle.
In that moment, a dome of shimmering purple light expanded out of the darkness; I pulled sharply up to avoid it, and every person, every vehicle, and every animal that it touched vanished as if they had never existed at all.
My jaw dropped open. Had … whatever that was, had it just killed all those people!?
I gave the zone of purple light a wide berth. A few seconds later, the cloud of darkness emerged from it, and the barrier fell; everything that the field of light had taken was instantly restored in exactly the state it had been when it disappeared.
"Oh, that is such bullshit," I muttered.
Then I was right on the cloud's tail, firing a full 1,200 strong Stinger swarm into the the obscured area. In response, there was a flare of magic that I could sense even through the cloud; it muffled sounds and blocked vision and almost every sensor Raising Heart had, but it didn't block the ability to sense active magical signatures. I could hear the detonations but not see them, and I had no idea if I'd done anything. Probably not if those two magical signatures I'd felt inside the darkness were shields going up.
Inside my third mental partition, I set about redesigning an alternate form of Divine Stinger; I needed a version that worked against shields. Meanwhile, in the real world, I started bombarding the cloud with salvo after salvo of Divine Shooter bullets; I had to fly them blindly through the cloud, but I was able to plan a flight path for them that would carry them through the entire space taken up by the darkness in short order from the safety of my second mental partition.
Another active magical signature triggered within the cloud, and then a third. I finally got a good fix on its position, and I grinned. "There you are," I said.
I started charging a Divine Buster even as my sensor spheres closed in.
The darkness dropped, giving me a brief glimpse of a group of teenagers riding on the backs of three enormous armor-plated spiky rhino-dog-things: a girl with a bulldog mask, a blonde girl in a black and lavender costume with a ferret on her shoulder, a figure all in black leather with a skull-faced motorcycle helmet, and a maybe-boy dressed in renaissance-faire clothes with a Venetian mask.
"Divine Buster!" I announced, speaking the very right words to trigger the spell as Raising Heart charged the mathematical construct with my mana.
Just as the energy blast bloomed to life from Raising Heart's tip, my arm spasmed painfully and swept straight up, sending the blast straight up into the sky; it was only by sheer dumb luck that I avoided hitting a building with it as it was redirected.
The boy in the Venetian mask started laughing. I charged another Divine Buster, and I got the same result, and this time it carved a savage gouge through the street and erased a fire escape from the side of an apartment building before I could cut it off, and now the boy was laughing even harder.
Okay. No Divine Busters. With a frustrated curse, I called up a couple salvos of Divine Shooter and sent them down at the group. The cloud of darkness returned instantly, blocking my sight and my ability to effectively guide the projectiles; I sent them back on the movement pattern to take them through the cloud as efficiently as possible, and once again the magical signature of a powerful force field sprang up in the darkness.
This was getting embarrassing.
"Raising Heart, let's try the glaive form again," I said.
"Yes, my Master," she replied, reconfiguring herself into something better suited to melee combat, the pink energy blade once more extending out from just in front of a reinforced section that sat ahead of her gem.
I shot down into the darkness. Then a young boy's voice called out as if from far away and underwater, "CHAIN BIND!"
I blinked. Chain what?
There was a flare of magical energy, and something wrapped around my arms and legs, bringing me to a sudden and unexpected stop. The darkness receded as the group inside kept galloping away, and I saw that I was floating in the air with long, glowing green chains wrapped around my wrists and ankles, their other end anchored to the street.
I tried to fly, but the chains held me in place. I strained against them for several long moments to no effect. Then I took a few breaths to calm myself, glared at the receding cloud of darkness, and fired off a burst of Divine Shooter bullets to break the chains free of where they were anchored to the street. Then I took off after the cloud once more, green energy chains streaming behind me as they slowly broke apart into motes of light that were long in fading away.
Another shimmering purple dome sprang up before I could get anywhere close to the cloud and the group that it hid, and this one expanded to many times the size of the one that I'd seen used against the PRT, and once again every person, every animal, and every vehicle it touched vanished into thin air. "Warning," Raising Heart announced, "Space/time anomaly detected."
I flew up to the edge of the field. Shit. Okay. They were going to come out somewhere on the other side. They probably wouldn't go in a straight line, but they didn't need to; the field was big enough to give them plenty of options. On the far side of the field, a huge swath of darkness billowed into existence, covering at least a city block. I flew towards it, sending my sensor spheres to cover the other obvious exists from the field in case it was trick.
The field collapsed, returning every person, every vehicle, every animal it had taken when it was established. The cloud of darkness dissipated a moment later.
The thieves were gone.
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