12 Miles Below

Book 6. Chapter 27: Falling off cliffs for profit and nostalgia

Rocket launcher aimed at our face, with gods know what loaded on the inside. Worse: He didn’t even have the decency to monologue anything at us.

On the other hand, we were just about ten seconds away from leaping right into his ship, so it makes sense he wouldn’t bother to give us any kind of speech.

Inside the comforting safety of the soul fractal, free from the more chaotic emotions, I had plenty of time to consider the situation.

He’d opened up the hangar doors this close up to the enemy. Whatever was in that rocket launcher, I didn’t want to find out face first but it also couldn’t be dangerous enough that he’d feel safe opening fire at us this close up.

Possibly an occult spell of some kind, and given it’s his first attack, likely made to drain shields.

Plan in mind, I opened up comms and yelled out to scatter, then burrowed my feet deep into the ground in order to break my current speed and bolt left.

The two other knights and Sagrius all followed suit, each racing a different direction.

Drakonis fired not a moment after that. A rocket exploding out into the world, far too fast for my regular sight to catch it and exploded right where we’d all bolted out of the way in… a generic explosion.

Baited. Damn him.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I screamed out as I was thrown off my feet, then landed against the rocks, crushing through them like five hundred pounds of metal and human would when catapulted off into them.

No shields triggered from Journey, the explosion too weak to deal damage, and the rocks clearly losing the battle against flying ballistic armor. I felt far more annoyed that I had even ordered to break off the attack when he’d had nothing up his gauntlets to show for it.

The airspeeder was turning around, about to trigger engines forward, with Drakonis tossing the rocket launcher off his shoulder, not even bothering to reload it. His helmet scanned through the damage inflicted. We were scattered, which meant his occult blast to drain shields would only hit one of us at best so that was off the tables for him. With the turrets already turned to where Fido was, they wouldn’t be able to track around to us before we all regrouped. So this had just been a ploy to build space.

The engines turned and roared out, fighting against the sluggish airspeeder, trying to force it back on a trajectory the autopilot wanted. Drakonis was about to go back into the hangar bay when his helmet finally passed over me.

Then it snapped back, staring me down, and I could swear I saw realization dawn over him even from under that helmet. Calculation followed, then that spark of settling onto a new last second scheme.

His hand reached out to me and I felt an occult lash catch on. As the airspeeder pulled away, he yanked me straight forward with a twist of his hand.

Father had been my ‘second in command’ during the negotiations. He’d seen me as the leader of the clan knights, and now he had me separated. If I were in his boots, I’d also try to quickly assassinate the enemy leader with a free chance.

“You little opportunist.” I hissed with malicious glee, “You picked the worst target to try this on.”

I let myself get yanked right off my boots and straight at the open hangar bay.

Midway, I reached down to my legplates and unhooked my armguard, occult glowing around me.

As I soared straight into him, he showed he wasn’t an idiot with eyes bigger than his stomach. He had a plan.

The lash cut at the moment my speed and trajectory were more or less set in stone. His hand glowed and one of those occult bombs was launched straight from him.

It expanded out right before me, then imploded in right as I soared past it, the implosion sucking in all occult and power around. Journey’s shields flatlined. And the airspeeder itself had it’s own shields begin to flicker, sucked away into the imploding occult.

Like before, I felt myself yanked out of the soul fractal for a second or so before occult returned back to power, letting me dive back in. The rest of the armor’s systems all worked without issue, HUD showing no errors other than the shields mysteriously vanishing.

The occult bomb exploded behind me, the implosion complete. It knocked me even faster into the hangar, landing hard against the metal flooring, skidding on my shoulder up until I smashed into a crate, the debris covering me up completely under rubble.

Journey’s shields were drained, sure, but the armor wouldn’t have bothered to use them for small explosions like this anyhow. Even occult powered, it wasn’t enough to deal with golden era armor.

What Drakonis had banked on, was that I’d be too stunned to protect against a decapitating blow. All he had to do was stab into the bundle of broken crates, and my unshielded armor couldn’t do a thing to protect me from it.

Problem with his plan - I could see in a complete sphere around me. The soul fractal had only flickered off for a second or two at most, and I’d long since learned how to dive back into the Winterblossom Technique in an instant.

So I could perfectly see him rush my position, his blade swinging down on me. And more importantly, right where that swing would go through. An occult dome expanded right at the point of impact, knocking his blade backwards as the Deathless hadn’t anticipated any kind of resistance.

“My turn.” I hissed, and exploded back into action, crate and debris getting tossed from my leap. The armguard glowed with deadly edges, sweeping right for his exposed chest, his blade still way up from the earlier knockback.

I connected hard against his armor. The shields flared up, then shattered against the dozen occult edges lining the guard. At the same time as they flatlined, I got blasted up against the wall by a weak area of effect shockwave of power. His panic resort.

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“That’s getting real annoying now.” I muttered, getting back on my feet, patting the dust off my shoulder and arm. Maybe that’s how my own enemies constantly felt fighting against me, seeing me slip by near death or outright death again and again.

Okay, I could see why Avalis had been so unhinged near the end of it all.

Drakonis didn’t bother to listen. Instead, he’d turned tailed and raced straight through the crew compartments, sealing up the bulkhead doors along the way.

“Pipeweasls and their natural habitat.” I said as I brushed the rest of the crate remains off my armor. “Cathida, any way you could hack these open for me?”

“Plug me in. Journey might be able to do something.” She said with a verbal shrug. “But I’d get your blades out to handle the doors the old fashioned way just in case.”

I got up to the door, hand reaching out to the console. A few button clicks and terminal commands later, I had it set for receiving mode. Cathida confirmed she’s got a connection secured, but they didn’t want people opening up doors from this side if the other side confirmed lockdown protocols. She’d give it a try. We had some of the viral anti-security measures Wrath armed us with, but this would be the first live testing for those.

The airspeeder on the other hand stopped chasing after Fido. I could tell because the movements felt more manual again instead of the autopilot set, we weren’t circling something either. So Drakonis had gone to the cockpit and begun making moves.

And those moves were taking us away and out of the battlefield.

Uh oh.

My longsword lit up in my hand and I slammed it into the first doorway, beginning the cutting procedure, all while I hissed out curse after curse. This wasn’t the first time I was getting dragged away on an airspeeder, but last time I’d felt pretty confident I’d win so long as the airspeeder didn’t run into a mountain wall at full speed. Not much place a slaver could run to when the world is a giant freezing wasteball of nothing for several hours in every direction.

This time around, I had no idea where Drakonis was taking me and he was behaving as if he was ferrying a feral animal in the hangar bay.

To be fair, the slaver was acting very much the same way, right down to the screams when I finally got through their last doorway.

But Drakonis seemed a little more smart with his plans, so there really might be some kind of contingency he had setup in case the clan knights got onto the airspeeder.

I got past the first doorway, going through a small chamber section with a stretcher and other medical supplies, and further past that was the cockpit airlock doorway. Don’t know where he was going, but pretty soon I was turning the ship around after I’d dealt with him.

My blade sank into the doorway, and then I heard a clink on the other side. Occult edge on edge.

He’d been behind the doorway, and tried to cut my longsword’s tip off. Except my sword had a groove down the center, making the occult edges the most raised ones. So the sweep of his blade hadn’t hit the flat edge, just the sides.

I still had to take the blade out because otherwise he’d rectify his mistake the next swing and try to stab through the flat edge instead of sweeping through it. “Dagger it is.” I said, reaching down to my boot, drawing out the trusty old thing with a quick flourish before I sank it right into the doorway.

Messy work, but in a minute or two I’d have the door opened up. The dagger was too tiny to completely cut the door by itself, I had to jam my hand in a few inches to get all the way. Did make it completely safe from Drakonis trying to cut through it, I could tell from the panicked way he was looking around the cockpit for something he could do.

Then the door flashed green. “Got it.” Cathida said. “Get your dagger out of the way, and I can open it up.”

Following command, I took the blade right out and let the doorway unlock and open itself. Both sides slid into the recesses of the ship, revealing a startled Drakonis on the other side, still tinkering with the system panels. We were traveling pretty fast at this point from what I saw through the windows.

The door got halfway before getting caught against some of the cut pieces that ended up not flush to the doorway path while I’d been trying to cut my way through.

“Scrap.” I hissed, then grabbed both ends of the door with my gauntlets to finish the rest. Journey was easily capable of crushing the two sides past the cut sections, metal grinding away until it was wide enough for me to get in.

In theory.

Problem was that there was an obstacle on the other side, who’s blade slashed right through the vertical slit. Drakonis had given up commanding the ship, trying instead to keep me from getting into the room.

“You really think that’ll stop me?” I told him.

“No.” He admitted. “But I don’t need to stop you for long.”

Well that was ominous. I grabbed hold of the sides again, and he tried to step up to slash at me. Occult pulsed out of me, and three mirror images stepped right through the wall, blades whistling down on his head.

He began a desperate fight against three phantoms that kept respawning faster than he could defend and counterattack against. They almost got him, forcing him to use that area of effect shockwave to reset the fight back to the start.

Annoying, but it did give me all the time I needed to crush the metal walls into the sides and widen up the gap so I could walk through. He might be able to dissolve the occult images, but he couldn’t do much more to the actual me without overcharging the knockback and breaking everything inside the cockpit.

Something passed through his look, his helmet snapping up to meet my gaze. “I hoped for more of you, but you’ll do.”

Then lifted his blade, gave a short Undersider salute of some kind, and slashed the controls behind him, cutting off all the mechanical systems, making our trajectory more or less unchangeable. And that direction was right at one of the larger onyx glass pillars.

Okay, so that’s his big plan. Go down with his own ship.

“You’ve gone off the deep end.” I said, approaching. “An airspeeder exploding around us isn’t going to kill me. Armor can tank that hit, even without shields.”

I’ve seen it resist a few hundred thousand pounds of pressure from the cave in, back at the sunken temple, burying Winterscars under. They were perfectly fine, just unable to free themselves. A crashed airspeeder would be easy enough to pry free from.

“Plus, those pillar things are going to cave in like ice against airspeeder shields.”

There’s a reason the saying goes like that. Ice absolutely gets smashed out of the way against an airspeeder, Teed basically saw ice as nothing more than a bump that’ll eat away speed and nothing more. “Scrapbrained scheme, zero out of ten, don’t plot things again.” I ended my judgment with a blade pointed right at his throat. He had no shields from the armguard hit I got on his chest earlier, and he couldn’t possibly move faster than I could, especially backed into a corner like this.

“I don’t want you dead.” He spat, then looked behind him at the approaching pillar. “I want you out of the way.”

The autopilot systems kicked into gear, performing preplanned movements. Specifically launching every missile the airspeeder had left at the pillar. They flew right into it, exploding the whole thing in one giant firework of melted black glass as the rest of the structure shuddered - then began buckle on itself, sinking down into the ground. Further and further instead of piling on itself like it should have.

Then I realized what Drakonis had been after, especially as I saw the sections of the onyx pillar that weren’t broken down simply fall down into the mist it had been hovering over.

A moment later, our out of control airspeeder raced right into the pillar, slamming headfirst against what was left of the black glass, crushing through as our speed bled away and glass shattered before us. I could feel the speeder run over nothing to push itself off the ground, and so it fell straight down even as it burrowed through the shattering onyx pillar twenty times it's size.

When the airspeeder broke through to the other side, clear from all the debris, what I saw in the cockpit wasn’t the large fields of silver flowers and occasional pillars.

It was a straight free fall, one entire mile up in the air.

We were falling down into the strata below.

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