It's one thing to decide you're going to establish a perimeter, a sensible thing that sounds a lot like the right thing to do. It's another thing to figure out how, on the fly, with monsters pouring through a hole in the world and screaming people running in every direction and not a lot of time to think. Your attention is drawn yet again to the thought of the scout drone, scurrying away out of sight, but you bite down hard on the tail end of it. You're a rookie, you don't get to have gut feelings or hunches of any stripe. You have to do something, now, and above all else stay the fuck out of Florence's way bcause she definitely doesn't need you cannonballing straight into what she's dealing with.
"I suggest a higher vantage point," MD chimes in, cool as a cucumber. What higher vantage point, climbing a build-? That's it! You throw down your backpack behind a rusted mailbox and rush forward, scrambling up over the hood of a truck emblazoned with the construction company's logos and over to the roof of the trailer. It's not a lot of height but it's enough to remove yourself from the chaos a little more, to place your mental map of the place over the crater it's become and think.
It's a corner lot, high buildings that weren't as badly damaged hemming it in on two sides. All fenced off once upon a time, but that fence is pretty much toast now, good for nothing but scrap metal. The people are running to the road. The monsters, for the most part, are going the same direction. Some of them are climbing, but it slows them down, and that makes them sitting ducks - the nightmare-crow breaks off before your very eyes, a focused flap of its wings sending a rippling arc of air slicing into the back of an unsuspecting monster like a sword-slash. It peels away from the wall it was climbing and goes plummeting back into the rubble with an unearthly screech. If she's got that covered then all you have to worry about is the road-facing sides. But what're you supposed to do about it? You can't be everywhere at once, and the anxiety builds in the pit of your stomach like icy fingers digging cruelly into the meat and nerve.
But you don't have to be everywhere at once. When you're too overwhelmed to move, that's what the blades are for. You can feel them, a phantom-limb tug at the back of your mind, and when you stretch out your arms you feel them move with you. You breathe deep, the air rasping in your throat and echoing in the confines of the helmet. Just use the blades. Focus on the blades. Focus on what they can do. You screw your eyes shut and remember your drawing, the smooth arc of gleaming arrowheads, the way they flickered into position with a thought at the storage unit. You open your eyes, splay your fingers and throw out your hands.
The blades go sailing away, and for a heartstopping moment you expect them to go rocketing out of sight like your first feeble attempt to direct one. Instead they turn almost at right angles, burying themselves in the rubble and earth along the perimeter of the incursion zone like golden fenceposts. More than one worker jumps at the sight of them, and then probably proceeds to get a very wrong idea about who's come to help them, but you definitely can't spare brainpower to think about them so you force yourself to focus on the bigger problems. MD scans again, the signal originating from you but bouncing off and propogating from the blades nailed into the ground, and where it sweeps over people it marks them in cool blue-white outline. The human body is well-catalogued in MD's databanks, after all. The monsters take longer, just a hair, but it must be a lifetime by the standards of a machine like MD. The scans don't penetrate deep, don't stop to uncover any specifics because there's simply no time. They get far enough to determine 'not human', outline in red and move on. The pulses don't reach far enough to tag Florence or her pets - probably for the best, IFF quibbles about the monsters on her side are a distraction you can't afford.
Your brain is nano-augmented. MD said that, didn't go into specifics but that has to be how all this works, right? You don't know if it can read minds but the blades seem to read intent well enough. Just as you're scanning the perimeter you've staked out you spy a man fleeing, bent almost double and arms over his head like he's expecting a hail of machine-gun fire next. A monster is in hot pursuit, a snarling, slavering thing that you decide is some kind of overgrown komodo dragon for lack of anything else to compare it to. It's gaining on him fast, scrabbling clawed limbs devouring the distance over the broken ground, ready to set upon him in only moments. But he crosses the threshold first.
The nearest blade strikes, wrenching itself from the ground and zipping into the monster's shoulder. It staggers, screeching, momentum halted as the pain becomes all it can think about. It looks like it didn't go deep, maybe only halfway - and then, just as quick as it came, it's gone. Wrenching out of the new wound, trailing toxic green-black ichor, reversing course and planting itself neatly back in position. It's like magic, a little miracle that elicits a soft pant of amazement. The monster probably isn't too pleased, but if it thinks twice about trying to go that way again then that's all you need. You straighten up, planting your feet more securely on the roof of the trailer, and extend your hands like a conductor gesturing for the orchestra to ready up.
The system, however it works, can tell which blade you want to move. You don't know if it's tracking your eyes or hooked straight into your thoughts but when you gesture to rip a blade out of the ground and hurl it at an oncoming monster it's (usually) the one you want. The blades seem more effective when you direct them yourself, flying faster and biting deeper to make up for what you undoubtedly lack in accuracy. Tunnel-vision helps, abstraction too, the fleeing blue blobs become less of a factor as you focus on attacking whatever red blob gets closest to the line. It still just feels like buying time, treading water, hoping that each passing second is the one when the rest of the team show up even as the present seems to stretch on infinitely. You'd shout a cursory directive to the workers like 'run past this line' or 'get past the swords' but even that much spare brainpower is something you can't afford. They could be growing wings and taking off for all you know.
There's a glassy, tinkling, shattering sound. It's synthesized, there's no way you heard the actual thing from this distance, but it gets your attention and gets you looking in the right direction just like the real thing. You're just in time to see a pseudo-bipedal, crocodilan thing with gold dust glittering between its teeth, shards of the blade it just crunched like rock candy dissolving as they fall. All of a sudden you're aware of the new additions to your HUD; a lightly-drained circular power meter and a line of six arrowheads, one gone dark. "(shitshitshit)" you hiss, flexing your hand frantically in what your stress-addled mind sees as a 'make a new blade' gesture. The darkened arrowhead on your visor begins to fill up with colour again, more glassy tinkling faintly audible somewhere behind your head.
"Alert: nanite reserves are limited. Please attempt to preserve nanite constructs where possible."
Yet another meter appears just below the power readout, colour-contrasted so you can tell them apart. It does not help the stress but you can't hold it against MD. Instead you focus on ripping the next-nearest blade out of the ground and sending it hurtling into the croc-thing's side, punching deep with a high-pressure spray of alien blood and a hideous scream. You keep on gesticulating, the movements rapid and frantic, wrenching the blade out only to plunge it back in again and again until the big bastard finally keels over.
Doesn't actually fix anything. You're pretty sure something slipped through while you were preoccupied. Can't rightly say it made you feel better either. You put the blade back where it came from, a soft ping of haptic feedback informing you that the lost blade has been replenished. You fling it down into the hole in the perimeter, but before you can even pretend to be relieved you hear yet another kshh of a blade breaking. You whip your head around - looks like one monster managed to catch it with a massive mantis-like claw while it was still embedded in another, breaking it off like a shard of ice that rapidly dissolves into sand and smoke. An arrow on your visor goes dark, begins to refill even as the reserve meter drains. Your teeth are clenched so hard your jaw's starting to ache, the live-wire of adrenaline burning a hole through the base of your brain. Nothing's simple, nothing's ever simple. You can't hold this perimeter alone, not the way your head's already throbbing like a prelude to a monster migraine. You frantically rip out two blades and stab both offending monsters in the back at once, but that just gives a couple more the chance to slip by. You swing your whole body around, air singing around your claws as you slash your hands to the side and send the blades shooting into the backs of those monsters, and you can't even spare the time to make sure they're all the way dead. You have to put them back, have to maintain the perimeter, god why did you give yourself this job you're no good at it.
You spare a glance to the centre. You really shouldn't have, but you can't help yourself. Florence is running herself ragged in there. The rubble is littered with bodies but more just keep coming. You think she's injured - hard to tell at this distance, but there's a rip in her trouser leg, and if your mind isn't playing tricks on you she seems to be moving a bit slower too. You make a noise behind your gritted teeth, something wordless and plaintive. She's the vet here, if she hasn't called then she must not want you there. You need to solve your problem, and short of asking MD for a miracle you don't-
A thunderclap and the sizzle of burning flesh draws your attention. There's another monster in the field, and it must be one of Florence's because you've never seen something like that show up on the evening news. Its shape can only be described as orbular, an absolutely rotund and paradoxical mix of cat and mouse with soft, tawny orange fur and ears that come to slight points. Its eyes, absolutely gigantic orbs of bright green, have a strangely vacant and distracted expression. The charred corpse at its feet seems forgotten. Its stubby little tail waves slightly. Its paws are such afterthoughts you wonder how a creature built like this can even move. Your answer comes when another monster pounces, both foreclaws hissing down toward it like a furry balloon just waiting to be burst, and it simply... flops over and rolls away. You'd say it curls up into a ball, but there is no getting more ball-shaped than it already is.
It rights itself, ears rotating as it looks up almost curiously at the monster it so narrowly avoided. The crackle of orange lightning around its fat little body comes only moments before the second, resounding boom and another monster drops dead, charred to perfection. The blobcat, seemingly satisfied, falls over on its back and stares at the sky.
You don't have the slightest idea what deep, dark corner of the cosmos Florence pulled that thing from, but you don't care either because you have an Idea. An Idea that might be bad, might be ruinous, but it also feels like a much better shot at pulling through this than standing around doing what you've been doing, so you leap at it before you have time to realise that all of your ideas are bad ideas. You leave all six blades on 'autopilot' and leap from your perch, stumbling and scrambling to right yourself as you hit the asphalt. Your breath comes in harsh pants, one eye is forever on the steadily draining meters in the corner of your vision, there's another kshh as a third blade is broken, but you've committed now and clearly dying has done a lot to break down your barriers of self-preservation.
You stop dead, standing over the huge plush cat-thing, and realise only belatedly you didn't think about the possibility of startling it and getting your ass shocked for your trouble. It turns its head (via a neck that only theoretically exists somewhere in there) and looks up at you with those big green eyes, vertical pupils expanding into wide dinnerplates of darkness as it adjusts to your shadow falling across it.
"Prrp?" it says.
Good enough. You scoop it off the ground and it's about as heavy as you expected it to be. The part that startles you is the... for lack of a better word consistency of it. You kind of expected it to be flabby and yielding, like grabbing a ball of dough, but while there's definitely some resistance and implied muscle it- most of all it just kinda reminds you of a plushy or something. Something that defies the boundaries of simple biology because it was designed to look and feel appealing first and foremost. You would love to appreciate it in more detail, but right now you're in the middle of an incursion event and the cortisol is spiking like two lumberjacks are sawing off your brainstem.
"I need to borrow this!" you call out across the battlefield.
"You what-!?" Florence replies, her voice cracking.
"Thank you!" You tuck the furry beast under your arm like a football and run away before she has a chance to protest. With your free hand you call up a new design document, your blades specifically, and recall them all before another one breaks and spoils what you have in mind. It doesn't take long to sketch out what you want, 'scratching' the lines directly into the digital canvas with your claws, and MD wastes no time making your vision a reality. Filaments so fine they're barely visible to the naked eye snake out from somewhere on your back, gleaming brightly like wires made of pure light wherever they happen to catch the sun just right through the oppressive cloud cover. Nanotech spider-silk, and you with a wide web to spin. Once you're satisfied that there are enough connections and the filaments will hold up to some scrutiny, you gesticulate to either side of yourself and send the blades zipping back into sentry positions where you left them.
You set the alien critter down on its hindquarters. Technically by the arrangement of its paws you can tell it's sitting up, but its silhouette has not become any less spherical. The little beast may just be non-Euclidean, but no time to worry about that. Instead you consider the high-tech alligator clip looking things in your hands, and the creature before you. It meets your gaze with a completely vacant expression.
"... fuck it here goes-!" you say, and clip the wires to its ears.
The effect is immediate and dramatic. The once cuddly creature is wreathed in a crackling, blindingly bright corona of orange electricity and the nanocables conduct that charge through your blades just like you hoped they would. The blades are less of a target now that they're remaining still, but as you whirl to inspect your handiwork (hands over your 'ears' before you remember you're wearing a helmet) you see your makeshift cattle fence repelling monsters all up and down the perimeter. The lightning orb seems to have a limit to its output, spread out that far the individual jolts aren't killing anything, but the bright lights and loud noises and searing pain are enough to drive the pack inward. You let out a harsh sigh of relief and sag, instinctively patting your makeshift battery on the head as if in thanks-
BZAP "ah, fuck!" You wrench your hand back just as quickly, dead nanites crumbling away to expose bare skin. The skin's still tingling and smarting by the time the glove is restored. The creature is unaffected, staring up at you with pupils so wide there's almost no iris left. You wonder, briefly, if you've created a monster.
And then, for once, everything goes rather quiet. The endless torrent of monsters seems to cease, the ones trapped by your fence instead turning to look at something. A shadow crawls across the rubble beside you, rising higher and higher and higher, and your stomach slowly plummets into an endless abyss as you straighten up and turn to face it.
That scout drone wasn't just sneaking around. And whatever it was trying to do with the annihilation platform before, it was capable of much worse. Before your eyes a simple excavator, long abandoned in the rush to escape, begins to warp and twist and change. Rippling, flowing tendrils of nanomaterial threading through it like a fungus, devouring unnecessary material and rebuilding it stronger as it just seems to grow and grow and unfold and stand up. Bright warning-yellow slowly consumed by slithering skeins of silvery-black and bloody scarlet as the nanite colony transforms the heavy machinery into what you can only describe as some kind of hulking biomechanical mech. The glass cabin is long gone, absorbed into the main mass and repurposed into a lamp-like eye in the centre of the 'torso'. The hydraulic arm becomes one massive, trunk-like, 'overmuscled' crushing arm, the bucket splitting and shifting into a gargantuan, grasping claw. Even the monsters seem terrified of it, shrinking as far from its looming shadow as they can without pressing against the electric fence. You try to find the breath to- to what, you're not sure. Scream at Florence to get away? Berate yourself for letting the scout go in the first place? You don't get to figure that out, because the massive robot's arm comes crashing down like a fucking building falling over and makes the rubble bounce like an artillery barrage. You go sprawling flat on your face, thunk goes your visor on a chunk of concrete that probably would've brained you otherwise. You're wreathed in a cloud of choking concrete dust when you rise, smothering even more of what faint light reaches this godforsaken lot. Your 'fence' seems just as rattled by the impact, sparks popping dangerously off the filament, but you don't have time to worry about that now.
The massive mech-thing's rearing back for another strike. It takes a step, BOOM. It takes another step, BOOM. Each footfall makes the rubble rattle and vibrate. Each thunderous impact seems to jar your very bones. The crimson light cuts through the dust and you could almost swear that this is somehow a reunion. Like the drone that killed you somehow survived getting splattered by Paragon and now has returned to the scene of the crime to finish the job. With your fucking luck you can't rule it out.
You bring your hands together and desperately will the nanoforge to spool up, a seventh blade coalescing from glittering dust between your palms. MD calmly warns you about exceeding your operational limit or something, but you're not listening. You don't have the luxury of caring about anything except finishing the blade, honing it to the sharpest point yet, and hurling it at the mech.
chnk. It sticks in the armour and stops dead. Your outstretched hand trembles. You wrench it back and throw again. chnk. No more effective. You back up, grimacing in terror beneath your visor, shaking your hand frantically as you artlessly throw the sword against the implacable war machine again and again and again. You might as well be throwing a dart at a wall. There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, even slow it, as it draws that massive arm back and curls its iron fingers into a fist for the punch that'll turn you into paste.
"What did I say about fucking it up?"
You're only dimly aware of the source of the voice, of movement beside you. A shape in the dust, brushing past you even as the massive mech fist comes hurtling toward you and your life flashes before your eyes a second time-
Two fists collide. One wins. Decisively.
The boom is louder than any of the lightning, rattling your teeth in your jaw and shaking the earth beneath you. The dust is just gone, erased, blown far away by the almighty pressure wave that radiates from the point of contact. It's all you can do to stay standing, if it weren't for your visor it might have blinded you. The ground is clear beneath Katarina's boots, the loose rubble blasted back. The mech is staggering in slow-motion, boom, boom, boom go its feet as it struggles to stay upright, chunks of concrete and steel big as cars crunching underfoot like plastic. You can't quite see it clearly, but you're pretty sure there's a fist-shaped dent in its knuckles.
"Then again Florence is babysitting you, so I guess it's half her fault." Katarina shrugs off her jacket, turning to hand it off to you again. "Stand back and let-"
She trails off. You follow her gaze down to the orbular creature you have hooked up to a pair of alligator clips by the ears, blown flat on its back by the pressure wave and seemingly content to vibe in that position for the foreseeable future. It does notice the two of you looking, those big eyes shifting to meet your gazes.
"Brrp?"
"Whhhat the fuck is happening here," Katarina asks.
"No time to explain it's part of how I'm trying to keep the monsters in here so they don't-" you start, babbling frantically to try and get all the words out.
"Changed my mind I don't care, pack up your sex toys and back up so I can work." She turns away from you, cracking her knuckles. The mech seems to have righted itself finally, and it's easy to imagine murder in its scarlet eye as it looms forward and raises its massive fist for another, even stronger crushing blow. Katarina takes a fighting stance rather than try to intercept at all, and you realise with mounting panic that the lynchpin of your bullshit kludged-together cattle fence is directly in the line of fire.
"No! No don't let it punch here!!" you exclaim frantically, waving your arms like that'll help get her attention. She half-turns, confused and annoyed. You gesticulate at the corpulent cat-ish thing. "I need it to power the barrier, I can't move it easily!"
She looks down at it, then back up at you again, clearly struggling with this. The mech doesn't give her a time-out to figure it out. The fist comes rushing down like the sky is falling, shadow swalling up the world around you, you throw up your arms in a cry of panic and Katarina whirls around. There's another thunderous crash and deafening boom, the pressure wave less violent this time but no less impressive for it. The shadow doesn't pass. You open your eyes and the fist is still overhead, trembling like a leaf. Katarina has her arms wrapped around the mech's wrist, shoulder set against it, the nail that refuses to be hammered down.
"Then I guess I'll just move him!"
She moves with a snarl of effort, driving off her back heel and twisting around with a surge of unearthly strength that leaves you stunned just to see it up close like this. She lifts the mech off its feet, hoisting it into the air by its arm so that she can swing it overhead and send it crashing down-
"no not there not there-!"
-on top of your fence. And the street. KRA-KOOM goes the immense mech as it slams down, leaving a perfect outline of itself in the asphalt and the pulverised remnants of what used to be a sidewalk, and you get to hear three simultaneous shattering sounds in your helmet as she wipes out half your blades in one move. The wires snap and orange sparks fly, that half of the charge grounding itself wherever it can as the critter itself continues its best impression of a miniature beanbag chair.
"... you broke my swords," you say in a very quiet, plaintive, and above all Stressed voice.
"Then get some more! What am I, your mother?" And then that's that, she's off to find a more critical area of the mech to punch as it stirs to life and you're not a thing she has to deal with any more. You let out an aggrieved wheeze and crouch down to remove the dangling wires from the alien's ear. You just hope that Katarina showing up means the others aren't far behind. Maybe Jae-yoon stayed to park the car. Do they have a car? Maybe a Mystery Machine, so everyone can pile in the back and go careening around the city looking for the next trouble spot. You're not thinking clearly, it's possible that nearly getting crushed by an excavator on two legs twice snapped something in your brain. But that's something to deal with later.
"Great, we had a perimeter giftwrapped for us and Meteora up and broke it. Leviathan, make sure they don't get through! I'll stay and cover the south side!"
Jae-yoon's voice draws your attention, and the first thought in your head is surprise that they actually have proper superhero names for each other to use on the job. Despite their clear desire for some measure of privacy and anonymity they seemed like such an... irregular op you assumed they'd just shout each other's real names no problem. The second is a swift jab of primal terror as a shape that your mind registers as 'apex predator here to tear you to shreds' brushes past you, Caio's talons growing so sharp the air sings around them as he carves through a pair of insectile monsters, his tentacles growing vicious barbs and bladed ridges as he sends them flailing wildly at every inch of space he isn't covering with his claws. 'Cat among the pigeons' doesn't even come close, he shreds through all comers with a kind of feral hunger that terrifies you just to see it. He isn't shy about snacking, either - he unhinges his jaw and bites an insect-nightmare's head off whole before you can turn away, and you're 99% sure he did not spit it out afterward. The difference between that and the person you talked to yesterday... jesus it's not something you'd like to think about.
Jae-yoon isn't as strong as Katarina, as overwhelmingly lethal as Caio, nor as flexible as Florence, but he's no less deadly and you can see that from only moments of watching him in action. His movements are fluid and graceful, his demeanour utterly confident, his every strike landing with purpose and a meaty thwack of chitin or bone breaking and meat pulverising. His feet find purchase on the broken ground as if it weren't even a factor, his stance holding as he smoothly sways in and out of the path of swinging claws and talons and tentacles. He's on fire - almost literally. The heat haze you once glimpsed has upgraded to translucent azure flames licking along his arms and shoulders, stoked brighter and brighter with every moment he spends in the heat of battle. Crunch goes a thorax beneath his knuckles, crack goes a monster's leg as it folds in half the wrong way beneath his heel, a third attacker he diverts with some kind of technical throw that sends it barrelling directly into another. The two fall to the ground in a tangle of flailing limbs and gnashing fangs, the monsters both briefly distracted squabbling like starving dogs over a bone at the perceived slight. All the time Jae-yoon needs to dip down and pull a length of rebar from the ruins.
He doesn't even give them time to rise. The blue flames surge even brighter around him as he places the tip of the rebar against the topmost monster's back, and drives the heel of his open palm into the end of the rebar so hard that he drives it clean through both of them like a nail. Clearly unsatisfied, he lifts his leg and stamps the protruding few inches of steel even deeper. The flames wink out, he exhales harshly, and the once fearsome creatures are left twitching and dying like bugs pinned to a collector's board. Jae-yoon sucks in another breath, adjusts his collar, and moves on.
You really had no idea just how out-of-your-depth you were, did you? You kinda thought you did deep down, in that 'I know what rock-bottom is' sort of arrogant way, but no. You didn't know jack shit. You're struck dumb by the sight, the sheer casual lethality on display taking your breath away, and not in a good way. Instead you're left standing there like an asshole with half a cattle fence and an orb catmouse you kidnapped like an unattended child at a carnival. You cradle your head in your hands and you feel the promised migraine get a lot more imminent.
You look at the creature in question as if expecting guidance. It's fallen asleep. God you wish that were you.
[ ] Go to Florence. Now that everyone else is here the pressure should be off her now. You can check and see if that scratch she took is needing medical attention. And probably apologise for stealing her monster.
[ ] Go to Katarina. She's going to cause more damage than the anomaly at this rate, and as strong as she is you don't think the mech is something she can take idly. Maybe now that you have a chance to think clearly you can figure a way to take out that scout drone controlling it.
[ ] Go to Caio. Going toward the death blender is a good idea strictly if it's on your side and then only in certain cases, but he's the closest thing you've had to a mentor on this team and there's a chance you'll learn something if you do.
[ ] Go to Jae-yoon. You don't want to leave him guarding a whole flank by himself - your fence isn't that good - and despite his display you can't shake the fear that if he takes a hit he won't be able to just take it, bounce back or hide behind a friendly monster like the others.
