Chương 267: Volume 2 - Chapter 82 - Malthezar Oranis II

Don't look at the soldiers who don't stay dead, Don't count their eyes or the holes in their head. They'll smile at you sweetly and wave from the path, And walk through the fire to deliver their wrath. You can shoot them and break them and burn them to ash, Yet they'll rise with the morning all covered in dash. They don't cry for their fallen, they don't mourn their dead, They fill up the spaces with new-old ones instead.

The Emperor's cursed don't sleep like we do, They don't dream in the dark and they don't feel it through. If you see soldiers who don't die the same, Close your eyes, little darling, don't dare say their name. Because death is a door and a door can be used, men who walk through it come back more confused: A little less human, a little less right, A little more something that comes from the night.

So don't look at the soldiers who won't stay in the ground, Don't follow the ones who don't make a sound, Don't ask why they're smiling, don't ask why they stare— Some doors only open. They never close from in there… — [Excerpt from: Information submitted to the UHF Cultural Intelligence Archive with the comment "About us (?)". Origin unknown. Recovered from civilian correspondence, Stellar Republic, Kethara Sector, PFC 844.] They filtered in from three different angles, low and quiet, converging on the narrow strip of shadow behind the building Drim had flagged before the opening strike. Duke was already there, of course—a massive, still shape pressed against the wall, his armoured plates shifting subtly as he adjusted to let the others slot in around him. Drim was crouched at his shoulder, one hand resting on the wolf's flank, and said nothing until all six of them were in.

"Twelve inside, minimum. Six on patrol—here, here, and looping back through here." His fingers moved across the snow in quick, precise lines, drawing out the rough shape of the outpost as he did so, stones—he had likely picked up in anticipation of the rundown—dropping into position where the enemies were suspected without pause.

"Three, maybe four at the monitoring station. East building." He looked up once to check for any conflicting information, but when he received none, kept going.

"Three teams. Ash, Thea—structures on the left flank. Betel, you're with me and Duke—generator side, then the station. Seltz, Vytalis—the patrols. Pick them up before they complete the loop." A single circular motion of one finger to indicate the patterns.

"No alarms. Full clear, then we're homefree. Questions?" He waited exactly long enough for someone to speak, and when no one immediately did, that was that: Briefing concluded and back to work.' Efficient… I like it,' Thea thought. She glanced at Ash, who was already looking back at her with the same neutral, evaluating expression she'd been wearing since the locker room. One small tilt of her head—" you have a preference?" Thea gave a minimal shrug—" you lead, I'll read you."

Ash's chin dipped once, and that was the entire conversation and leadership question solved.

'I already like working with her a lot. So easy to deal with,' Thea thought with a smile, and pushed off the wall to follow her to their AO… The outpost's interior was more cluttered than the exterior had suggested—stacked supply crates, a pair of prefab shelters pushed up against the main structure, several narrow corridors formed by the gap between two buildings that the patrols were using as a natural turning point.

The lighting was low and uneven in this place, concentrated mostly around the monitoring station and the main doorways, which left long stretches of genuine dark between.' Good… Should make stealth even easier for us.' Ash moved through the space like she'd already memorized the entire layout, which maybe she actually had—Thea had seen her doing her own read of the sightlines in the snow during Drim's briefing earlier.

The most important thing that Thea realized almost immediately upon starting to follow Ash around more closely, however, was that Ash moved distinctly differently to Seltz. It took Thea a moment to place exactly how, because the surface read was similar enough—smooth, unhurried, nothing that drew particular attention to it—like an Infiltrator should, really. But where Seltz moved like he was trying to leave no evidence of existing at all, Ash did something quite a bit more deliberate than that.

Her steps landed with just enough weight to leave the kind of prints that belonged in an active outpost. The slight drag of a boot heel on a turn. The natural, slightly heavier footfall of someone walking a familiar route without thinking about it. She specifically chose to leave traces —just the right ones, the ones that said " someone who works here walked through recently," rather than the conspicuous blankness that a completely silent approach left behind if you knew what you were looking for.

'That's actually super smart,' Thea thought, watching Ash's feet for a half-second too long, almost walking into the nearest building's wall by accident before catching herself.' Leaving no discernible footprints like Seltz is its own kind of footprint, in a way… Useful for open-terrain, no doubt, but inside an Outpost like this? Ash's approach is probably way better, no…?'

She filed that train of thought away for later inspection—drawing up a plan for when to use what seemed prudent after the DM—and then immediately started trying to emulate it. It didn't go well at first.

Her natural inclination and instinct kept pulling her back more toward Seltz's style—suppress everything, leave nothing—and every time she tried to consciously reintroduce weight into her steps it came out wrong, either too deliberate or landing in the wrong part of the stride. She caught herself overcompensating twice in the first minute and had to consciously reset both times, all the while trying to not stomp around like a complete idiot and give away their positions.

But she kept at it regardless, and after a few minutes of paying extremely close attention to how Ash's weight distributed through each step, something finally started to click. Not perfectly, of course—not yet—but enough that she stopped feeling like she was actively fighting her own feet every time she moved.' Alright… Slowly getting the hang of this.' A big help on this was that they didn't need to talk en-route. That was the thing about Ash that Thea kept coming back to, because it kept surprising her.

Thea had never been particularly good at working with people she didn't know. Like on a professional, mission-centric level, she could get the job done—sure. But she'd not really be making any friends along the way, or be gifted most-pleasant-to-be-around awards. She was aware of this about herself in the same way she was aware of most of her own shortcomings by now. It was simply a natural result of new people meaning new variables, and new variables in the middle of an operation meaning lag time.

And lag time naturally meant problems creeping up that didn't need to exist, but were basically impossible to avoid unless you were a social genius like Corvus or Kara. That was just how it worked. Except it wasn't working like that at all right now. Ash would angle slightly to one side and Thea would automatically take the other. When Ash raised two fingers and pointed left, Thea was already moving there.

When Thea tapped her own ear and then pointed at the gap between the shelters—" someone's in there" —Ash redirected without breaking stride, and they folded around the position from both ends at the same time without Thea having to spell it out.

"Infiltration brain," she ultimately decided." We both just have it. That's gotta be it..." It made things very clean in their team. They came in from both ends of the shelter at the same time. Thea took the left—a narrow gap between two stacked supply crates that opened into the shelter's back half, tight enough that anyone inside would have their sightlines naturally oriented toward the main entrance on the other side.

She slipped through it and killed the first one before he'd registered the movement, the quiet crack of the Gauss swallowed almost entirely by the shelter walls and supply crates. She was already shifting before he had fully hit the ground, moving to the right to clear the angle on the second, and found him already turning—not toward her, but toward the sound of something on Ash's end of the shelter. She took him out while he was distracted.

The third was slightly further back, half-sheltered behind a support column, and had gotten far enough through realizing something was wrong to have his hand moving toward his hip. Thea crossed the distance fast—throwing out her current movement training to sprint—and took the shot at close range, then held her position and listened attentively. Ash's side had gone completely silent.

Thea came around through the middle of the shelter and found the other three Stellar Republic Soldiers already down—two near the entrance, one further in who had clearly tried to back up from Thea's side and run into Ash's second pistol instead. Ash, meanwhile, was holstering one of them with the same unhurried efficiency she applied to everything, her eyes already moving to the shelter's exit and whatever came next. Two seconds, maybe three. Six enemies. Not a sound that had carried.

Thea exhaled through her nose and fell back in beside her to head to the next location.' This must be what Isabella felt like on her first DM, huh? This squad is ridiculous…' Thea caught glimpses of the other teams in the gaps between structures. Seltz and Vytalis had the patrols—she spotted them once, briefly, as she and Ash crossed an open stretch near the supply buildings. Seltz was barely visible, just a shadow in her peripheral that her Perception flagged as friendly before her eyes fully resolved the shape.

Vytalis was easier to track, ironically, because his armour's camo was doing its job almost too well —her brain kept trying to correct for him and finding nothing easily discernable there, which was its own kind of tell once she knew that Seltz had been around. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.' Note to self: [Eyes of the Void] do not work on camouflage… Interesting,' she noted absent-mindedly. It made sense, in a way.

Camo wasn't anything that bended the Truth of the universe—it just used human pattern recognition to fool your brain into thinking that nothing was off with what you were seeing—entirely different things, in principle. Ash and her waited for a few minutes at this exact spot—keeping a watch for the patrols that would catch them on their next leg if they went too early—but didn't hear or see anything further from the other team.

The patrol route came up empty on the next scheduled pass, however, which meant that problem was likely handled. They waited one extra pass just to be sure—still no patrol—then continued on their way. Drim, Duke and Betel she saw once, on the far side of the outpost near the generator housing. Duke was the giveaway—even with the camo armour, something that size was just really difficult to hide, and Thea's Perception caught him easily.

Then they were gone behind the next structure, and Thea filed them away and focused back on her own task. The monitoring station was the last real problem Ash and her had to take care of.

One set of guards inside, another one seated, backs to the door on the outside, which should have made it simple—except that the door was on the lit side of the building, and there was a third set of guards Thea's initial scan had noted as further along who had apparently changed their minds and were now lingering about eight meters off to the right, not quite facing them but close enough to make the angle very annoying.

The biggest problem, however, was that the guards sitting in front of the door on the outside were wearing Heavy armour.

'Shit,' Thea cursed internally, recognizing the plating immediately.' My Gauss can't handle that. Not without [Penetrating Shot], and I am not burning Focus this early into the DM if I can help it…' She stopped—Ash paused beside her right away. Thea looked at the Heavies, then at Ash, then back at the Heavies, and made a small gesture that she hoped communicated " Can you deal with this?" Ash studied the station for a moment. Then she tipped her chin toward the Heavies—a single, small nod.

"Handled." Then she held up two fingers, pointed at the second set of guards lingering to the right, and pointed at Thea. Then held up three more, pointed at the interior of the station beyond the Heavies—the other guards inside without Heavy armour—and pointed at Thea again. Thea read it immediately.

'The sound of Ash going through Heavy armour at this range is going to carry inside… The others will hear it and move. I need to take care of the ones on the outside, then be through the door and on the ones inside before the Heavies falling registers as a threat.' She looked at Ash, looked at the second set of guards, looked at the door and did the mental calculations.

'Gotta be fast, then… Could be tight. But it should work.' She nodded and double-checked the mag inside her Gram—not that she was worried of running out, but mere habit. Ash nodded as well, then held up three fingers, counted them down with slow deliberateness, and on the last one they both moved. Thea went wide on the second set of guards, taking the angle that kept her out of the direct sightline from the door, and hit them fast enough that there was no time for it to become complicated.

Two quick shots, the ferromagnetic projectiles piercing through their helmets like they didn't even exist and splattering their heads onto the nearby wall before they even had a chance to know what was happening. She was already pivoting toward the entrance when the first muffled, heavy report from one of Ash's pistols reached her—dense in a way that her other pistols hadn't been, the kind of sound that moved through walls —and she was through the door before the echo of it fully finished settling.

The guards inside were already reacting—their training apparently better than Thea had expected—as their heads came up right away at her entry, one of them already half-risen from his seat with his hand going for his weapon. Not to her, of course—to the sound from behind her, from the Heavies going down and their loud armour clattering onto the barren-rock floor of the outpost, the noise arriving just ahead of any understanding of what it truly meant. She didn't give them time to develop that understanding.

She shot the first guard who had reacted before he could manage to half-clear the holster. The second was further back and had the presence of mind to duck sideways behind the monitoring console—smart instinct, wrong cover—and she put the shot through the gap between the console's display and the table it was mounted on before he'd finished moving. The third one had lunged for her, the moment she had entered the room.

Unfortunately for him, she had already been sidestepping him before she'd entered the room—before he'd even realized she existed nor committed to his lunge—[Glimpse] pinging the movement a half-second ahead of it happening, a faint pressure at the edge of her awareness that her body had learned to just respond to without waiting for her brain to catch up.

He hit empty air where she'd been supposed to be standing if she hadn't moved early, momentum carrying him forward and off-balance, and she brought the Gauss around and ended it cleanly with a triple-burst into the chest and one final round into the head to make sure he stayed down, before he'd finished stumbling—instead simply crumpling like a puppet with its strings cut. She held position for a moment afterward, scanning the area visually and listening past the low hum of the monitoring equipment…

But she only heard the settling quiet of a room that had briefly been loud in a small, contained way and was now simply still. She came back out through the door into the cold and found Ash already waiting, the largest pistol Thea had ever seen still in hand—the silencer on it genuinely massive and still trailing a thin thread of smoke into the mountain air.

'Now that's a damn pistol,' Thea thought, pulling up next to her.' What is she even shooting out of that thing… I'll have to ask her about it later.' Nothing inside the outpost moved. A few moments later, the squad comms clicked twice. Ash tapped out two clicks in reply. Thea did the same. Then they waited, and five more double-clicks came back in quick succession—all teams, all clear—and for the first time in over an hour, Drim's voice came through on the line.

"Outpost cleared. Good work, everyone." A brief pause.

"Meet at the central area. We'll establish watch positions and hold until the main force arrives." A round of acknowledgement clicks followed. Ash holstered the massive pistol without comment and started moving. Thea fell in naturally beside her, and they crossed the outpost toward the rendezvous in the same silence they'd spent the last however-many minutes operating in—comfortable, unhurried, no need to fill it with anything…

After their renewed briefing—in which they established that they'll hold the outpost for the rest of the mission, starting patrols once Drim called in their success to Command—Duke sat down in the middle of the outpost's open central space with the air of someone who had done this before and found it distinctly satisfactory. Drim was already moving toward the monitoring station with a comms unit in hand that Thea had pointed him towards, Betel falling into a loose perimeter check behind him.

Seltz and Vytalis were already returning towards the northern wall-side to take their assigned watches. Thea let out a long breath, rolled her shoulders back, then walked over to Ash, who had found a section of wall to put her back against and was running a check on the pistols. She watched Ash do her work for a while, thinking about what she'd seen about the other woman in the past hour.

'Four pistols at least,' Thea noted, watching Ash's hands move through the check.' All suppressed, all slightly different—I figured that much from the first time I saw her in the locker, but it's different to confirm during an actual mission. The first three make sense for the Build: Compact, fast to draw, easy to transition between. Standard Assassin logic. But the fourth one…' Her eyes tracked back to it, it still holstered on Ash's left side.

Heavier frame, longer barrel, massively more unwieldy silencer attached to the front.

'Different caliber... Different purpose entirely, really. The other three are for everything that goes smoothly, and that one's for when it doesn't, huh? Just like my Caliburn…' And then there was the thing she'd done with the Heavies. Thea had nearly broken stride when she'd seen it earlier: The brace move.

She'd brought up the smaller pistol's flat against the frame of the fourth, the smaller stabilizing the larger in a way that compensated for the weight differential without costing Ash her mobility or her draw speed. One shot per Heavy, rapid and clean movement between the two, recoil somehow handled through sheer Strength and the geometry of the other pistol bracing against the silencer of the big one.' Badass technique… Probably not entirely necessary, but over extended periods?

That probably saves a lot of burning on the muscles with such a beast...' She waited until Ash had finished the check on her last pistol before she said anything.

"The brace," Thea opened.

"Using the smaller one to stabilize the big one—is that something you built around the weight difference yourself, or something you picked up from somewhere?" Ash looked up. Her expression didn't change much, but something in it shifted toward attentiveness.

"Both," she said easily.

"The big one's built for it—frame has a stabilization rail along the rim that the others don't. But the technique came first, no doubt. Seen plenty of Gunslinger-types do it, as we don't want to let go of our guns, whenever possible." That perked up Thea's ears markedly. She knew from years of gaming that asking someone about their exact Build—or even fishing for details about it—was a hard breach of etiquette and a big no. You simply didn't ask. Everyone knew you didn't ask.

It was one of those unwritten rules so universally understood that breaking it marked you as either very new or very rude—usually both. But Ash had just handed it to her, essentially. That was an open door if she'd ever seen one.

'... Right…?'

"Gunslinger-type?" she said, keeping her tone as neutral and open-ended as she could manage.

"So you're running a Gunslinger Class or something?" She left it sitting there without adding anything to it—vague enough that if she'd misread the intention, Ash could just as easily sidestep it without either of them having to acknowledge the attempt. She'd picked that move up watching the other students during her last Skill Training, the way certain people could ask a question that was simultaneously a question and not a question depending on how the other person wanted to take it.

'Corvus does that constantly,' she had realized then, with the delayed recognition of someone who had just identified a magic trick after watching it performed a dozen times.' So does Kara. They've probably been doing it to me since our very first conversation and I never even noticed…'

"Yeah," Ash finally said, after a brief moment of silence that had Thea sweating.

"'Hollow Barrel'—that's the name. Only works with one-handed firearms I've got a Favoured-style Passive for. Received [Favoured Weapon: Pistol] as a Passive back in Tier 0. Probably an unlock requirement for it—never actually checked." She shrugged.

"It's neat, but nothing special on its own, honestly. Main draw is that it lets me instantly swap out any of my favoured weapons that are within reach and in my possession with whatever similar type I'm currently holding. Like this." She held up one of the smaller pistols. Then it suddenly simply was the heavy pistol. Thea detected absolutely no movement, no air displacement, no visual tell of any kind—one moment it was one, the next it was the other, like reality had just quietly corrected itself.

She stared at it for a long second." Whoa." That got a dry chuckle out of Ash.

"That's just about how everyone reacts. It's a lot more useful now than it was when I first got the Class—back then I didn't have the Creds to actually build around it properly. Swapping between a few cheap low-end pistols doesn't exactly do much. Now though…? Each of them's loaded with a different ammo type, except for three—those are the same, just so I've got more capacity without reloading. Swap mid-fire and I've basically doubled the mag."

Thea nodded, both of those having been the first two ideas that had come to her mind the moment she'd heard how the Ability worked.

"What happens if you swap at the exact moment you fire?" she asked.

"Like, right as the bullet leaves the barrel—could you swap out to kill the recoil, or get rid of it entirely?" Ash looked at her for a moment with her usual blank expression, then her brows creased together slightly and her head tilted more and more.

"I've… never tried that," she admitted, then looked at the heavy pistol in her hand and raised it towards the nearest mound of snow. The squad comms clicked on briefly.

"Going to fire my pistol—need to check something real quick." She waited for five affirmative clicks—Thea's included, who was already watching the heavy pistol with her full attention—before she fired. The shot cracked out, muffled but distinctly dense, and nothing happened differently. Ash's hand kicked back with the recoil, same as it always did, then the weapon swapped out with a lighter one.

She lowered the weapon, stared at it for a moment, then tried again—firing and swapping in the same motion, a fraction earlier this time. Still the same. The third attempt was earlier still, and the fourth earlier again, each one slightly different in timing, Ash methodically working her way toward something. The fifth attempt looked the same as the rest from the outside. The sixth one distinctly didn't. Thea couldn't hold back a massive grin forming on her face as she watched it happen.

Ash's hand had moved—but only barely, only for the fraction of a second where the bullet was still inside the barrel. The moment it cleared the muzzle, the heavy pistol was suddenly gone, replaced mid-recoil by one of the smaller ones, and the momentum just— stopped. Disappeared with the weapon it had belonged to, like it had never been there at all. Ash's hand finished the motion with almost nothing behind it, a ghost of a kick that died before it could travel up her wrist.

For the first time since Thea had met her, Ash's eyes went genuinely wide. Thea's already were. Ash's head turned toward her, slowly, and she just stared at her. Thea took it as an invitation.

"Did you feel anything in the holster? Like did the momentum transfer to whatever you swapped in, or did the Ability just kill it completely?" Instead of answering, Ash simply kept staring. The silence stretched long enough that Thea felt the first prickle of genuine discomfort working its way up the back of her neck.

She resisted the urge to say something to fill it, to try and work her way out of whatever hole she'd just apparently entered—that had, so far in her life, only ever made things worse rather than better.

"I've had this Class for two years," Ash said finally, barely above a whisper.

"You heard how it works for like a second and immediately found a way to break it…" It wasn't quite a question. Her eyes moved to Thea's directly—the characteristic flinch hit, same as it always did when someone tried to meet her eyes, but Ash pushed through it without looking away.

"What other thoughts do you have about my Class' capabilities, Thea?" She said, inching a slight bit closer as she did so.

"Tell me…"