Chương 196: The Sidearm

Felix had been counting the flashes. Seven, since the burned man had appeared on their side of the camp. Seven times the glow had built beneath his skin, seven times the air had cracked with light, and seven times the man had vanished from one place and reappeared in another. Always at a spot he had previously touched. Always with his palm. From above, circling in owl form through the smoke and firelight, Felix could see the pattern clearly.

The man would press a hand flat against the sand or a piece of wreckage or even tag Annie and himself, and that touched location became a tether. When the glow reached its peak, he would vanish and reappear, then snap back with a second glow a short time later. Not true teleportation. Something closer to a teleporting blink followed by a recall. A network of anchors laid out across the battlefield like traps waiting to be sprung. He'd been mapping them throughout the fight, and he'd noticed a critical detail.

The guy couldn't reuse an anchor. The fight had been going well before the burned man arrived. Felix and Annie had been working together against the Brute, as Felix had come to think of him. A towering man with muscles that moved like knotted rope beneath his skin, fast and strong and durable in the way that made every hit feel like punching stone. But there were two of them and one of him, and Annie in her spinosaurus form was devastating. They'd been wearing him down. Coordinating.

Felix would charge from one angle while Annie lunged from another, forcing the man to choose which threat to face. Then Flashman had appeared in a burst of white light on the southern edge of the camp, burning and limping and trailing blood, and everything changed. He was injured. Badly. One arm hung wrong and his skin was blackened across his torso and neck. But the man fought as if his wounds meant nothing.

He would flash into position behind Annie just as she committed to an attack on the Brute, driving a fist into the back of her leg or raking across her flank before vanishing again. Every time Felix tried to press the advantage, the man would appear at his side, force him to disengage, then disappear before Felix could retaliate. It was maddening. And it was working. The Brute had stopped losing ground.

Annie roared something that Felix was fairly certain translated to creative profanity, then charged the Brute head-on. Full commitment. Jaws wide, MetaMetal scales rippling across her body in a wave of gleaming silver, claws tearing furrows in the sand. The Brute didn't dodge or retreat. He caught her charge. Both hands clamped down on her jaws, one on the upper, one on the lower. The impact drove him backward, boots carving deep trenches through the sand as he absorbed the momentum of a charging spinosaurus.

His arms shook. His legs bent. But he held. Then he twisted. Annie's head wrenched sideways, and her body had no choice but to follow. Fifteen tons of dinosaur stumbled, balance gone, feet scrambling for purchase in the loose sand. The Brute shifted his grip, planted his feet, and spun her. She slid across the sand on her side, momentum and mass working against her now, claws scraping uselessly as he redirected all of her force into a wide, grinding arc. Once. Twice. Three times.

He released at the apex of the spin and she went airborne. Not high. But enough. Felix's talons tightened on nothing. Annie was in the air, helpless, limbs flailing, unable to maneuver. He needed to help. He needed to— Below, Flashman knelt at one of his anchor points, panting, head bowed. Then he looked up at Annie's arc through the sky. A deep red flash erupted nearby, vivid and sharp, completely different from the man's own white glow. The weapons conjurer.

The Tier 1 that Felix had been tracking on the periphery of the fight, the one who had been arming the surviving militia with swords and shields. A blade materialized in the air directly in front of Flashman. A long, curved, cruel-looking thing. He grabbed it, and began to glow. Felix folded his wings and dove. Flashman vanished. Reappeared beside Annie in the air, sword already moving. He drove it into her left eye with both hands. Annie's scream split the night. It was the worst sound Felix had ever heard.

A roar of pure agony that shook through him even at this distance, even in this form. Below, the spot Flashman had just occupied was empty. He would return to it. He always returned to where he'd been. Felix had watched him do it seven times. Flashman began to glow again, still hanging in the air beside Annie for a fraction of a second. Felix was already racing toward the anchor point, wings tucked, falling like a stone. His body began to ripple. The glow peaked. Flashman vanished from beside Annie.

Felix's form exploded outward. Feathers became skin became mass, bones thickening, limbs extending, weight multiplying a thousandfold in the space between one heartbeat and the next. An owl became an elephant, still carrying every bit of the dive's momentum in a body that now weighed several tons. Flashman reappeared at his anchor. Kneeling. Panting. Struggling to stay upright. He looked up, sensing the threat. Panic twisted his features. A deep red enveloped him as the conjurer reacted, desperately fast.

Appearing out of the light, the wounded man was now encased in full plate armor that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago, medieval and gleaming. Felix hit him like a meteor. The collision blew sand in every direction. The impact jarred through Felix's entire body, a wall of force and noise that obliterated every thought.

He felt the armored figure crumple and bounce beneath him, ragdolling between elephant and earth, and then he was rolling, tumbling, legs flailing without purchase, trunk whipping, trumpeting in pain, sand in his eyes and mouth and ears. An elephant rolling through the desert with absolutely no control, no grace, no plan beyond surviving the next rotation. He came to rest on his side. Heaving. Ears ringing. Every joint aching. For a moment, Felix just lay there.

Then, with an effort that took everything he had, he got his legs beneath him and stood. The armored figure was stirring in the crater of sand ten paces away. Alive. Somehow. The conjured plate was dented and cracked, one pauldron sheared clean off, but the man inside was moving. Trying to rise. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Still dangerous. Felix reached out with Metallokinesis.

Not the broad, sweeping waves that Alexander used to command entire battlefields. A single, focused thread of power, precise as a needle, wrapping around the conjured breastplate. He seized it and pulled. The armored body lurched forward, dragging through the sand toward Felix's tusks. Accelerating. The man inside flailed, feet scrabbling for purchase. To the side, he saw the conjurer panic. Felt the man's Will struggle, trying to push Felix's back.

But Felix had been training his Will against the other members of Grimnir, and a Tier 1 wasn't close to any of them. The conjurer's Will folded beneath his. The armor vanished. Dismissed in desperation, the conjurer choosing to lose his creation rather than let Felix use it. Flashman dropped to the sand, bare and broken, but the momentum Felix had imparted carried him sliding forward across the ground. Felix charged forward and caught him with his trunk.

A full swing that connected with the side of the man's head and sent him cartwheeling across the sand in a spray of blood. He didn't get up. Felix turned, breathing hard, looking for Annie. She was on her feet. One eye ruined and somehow weeping blood instead of being replaced by more metal. The conjured sword piercing her eye broke apart, red stars scattering as it disappeared. There was no time to heal the injury, because Annie's other eye blazed with fury.

The Brute stood twenty paces away, watching them both, rolling his shoulders, looking untouched. The weapons conjurer was backing away, hands raised, red stars flickering weakly around his fingers. Felix settled his weight and lowered his head. Tusks forward. Pawed at the ground, signalling his intent. Annie snarled through a mouth full of silver teeth, then glanced at Felix with her remaining eye. She nodded. They charged together.

Alexander rolled and a pulse of Metallokinesis dragged him sideways through the air, barely avoiding the winged shape that tore through the space he'd occupied a heartbeat before. The biomorph screamed as he passed, mouth impossibly wide, teeth catching the light of the moon, already banking hard and coming around for another pass. He didn't have time to think of a plan. A tendril of sand whipped up from below, thick as a tree trunk, reaching for his legs.

Alexander kicked his flight into a sharp climb, feeling the grains hiss past his boots as the tendril missed by inches. It continued stretching after him. He threw up his cybernetic arm, bolstering it with power as a thin wave of sand carved through the night, aimed right at his throat. It shattered against the alloy, breaking apart, the small particulate matter spraying across his neck and face and still drawing beads of blood. Two of them. Both pressing. Neither giving him a second to breathe.

Something had happened at the ridge. Augustus should have joined the fight by now. The last trailer had dropped through the portal almost half a minute ago, and the plan had been clear. Extract, then support. But Alexander's comms had been a mess of half-understood fragments of conversation, because he hadn't been able to spare the focus to piece together what Talia and Augustus were saying between dodging attacks that would kill him if they connected.

And that was with Multithreading working overtime to keep him alive. He was on his own up here. For now. Another roll. Another tendril. This one faster, splitting into three prongs that fanned out to cut off his lateral movement. Alexander poured more power into his flight and twisted around the attacks, buying himself a few seconds of altitude. Below, the camp was a graveyard.

Fires burning in the wreckage of vehicles and tents, smoke rising in thick columns, and hundreds of bioelectric signatures that had been bright and panicked minutes ago now dark. Gone. He dismissed the flash of undeserved guilt. There was no time for emotion. A stream of combat drones raced past him in tight formation, angling toward the biomorph as he circled below, trying to climb. Not his empowered drones. Talia's.

She'd recalled the rest of the combat fleet now that the camp was largely subdued, dozens of them converging on his position, their upgraded protocols already showing their value. They swarmed the biomorph in pairs, shield-blades slashing at wings and limbs, forcing him to twist and weave instead of charging straight at Alexander. It bought him time. He used it.

"Talia. Status." Her voice came through tight and clipped.

"Augustus has a situation at the ridge. He's handling it. You need to hold."

"How long?"

"Unknown. Hold, Alex." He banked hard as the sand controller sent a ball of compressed sand screaming toward him from above. The man rode his storm like a chariot, scarred face twisted with fury, one arm extended as tendrils lashed out in all directions. The entire desert seemed to respond to him. Every grain within a hundred meters was a weapon. Alexander's empowered drones intercepted what they could, shield-blades scattering the leading edge of the wave, but the volume was overwhelming.

Sand found gaps, grinding against his chestplate, stinging exposed skin, working into joints. He shook it off and dove, pulling a sharp turn that took him east of the camp. The biomorph broke free of Talia's drones. Two of them spun away trailing smoke, sliced apart by wings that had grown blade-edges since the last time Alexander had looked. He was bigger now. Broader.

His skin had darkened to something closer to charcoal wherever the lightning had struck, and the silver edges on his wings caught the moonlight like razors. He was still adapting. Still changing. Every attack teaching his body something new. Hardened strips of chitin or scales or something else growing everywhere the drones cut. The biomorph beat his wings below, pursuing and climbing hard. The controller circled above, riding the sandstorm higher. He needed to change the game.

He hadn't planned to field test it tonight. Not really. Not against two Tier 2s who were actively trying to kill him. Not while flying. Not while splitting his concentration to the limit. But the sand controller was pulling from the entire desert, the biomorph was adapting faster than Alexander could hurt him, and Augustus wasn't coming. Yet. So he needed to buy time. Alexander stretched out his right hand. Metallokinesis pulsed outward from his Core, ready, while he mentally reached into the ring on his finger.

He felt the weapon before it materialized, its shape familiar from weeks of assembly and testing and private experimentation. After returning from New York with a haul of metals, quantum supercomputers, and fabricators, he had faced an immediate conundrum. Besides repairing drones, he needed a real shakedown test of his workshop and his new manufacturing capabilities. And as much as he loved his drones, and he had big plans for their future, it was time to branch out. Add something more to his arsenal of toys.

The problem was that he was no weapons designer. His background precluded him from suddenly creating armaments that weren't just basically bigger drones disguised as weapons platforms. So he'd taken the time to pull apart weapons he had access to. Standard-issue energy rifles. Railguns. Plasma pistols. He studied everything with Technopathy, until he understood the purpose of each circuit, component, or safety feature, and then asked himself a very simple question.

What if he made it bigger and added more of everything? The result was something that a real weapons engineer would have probably refused to consider just on principle, and then reported him to a war crimes council for suggesting such an abomination. It appeared in the air beside him, massive and ungainly, six feet of central housing with three rotary plasma assemblies mounted around it at equidistant intervals.

The central rod alone was six inches across, packed dense with generators, capacitor banks, batteries, and electromagnetic rail infrastructure. Eighteen barrels total across the three rotating assemblies, each designed to cycle through charge, fire, and cool in continuous rotation. The whole thing looked like someone had welded three mini-guns around a cannon and decided that was reasonable to carry around. It required all of his powers working together just to wield it. And only the ring really made it possible.

There was no way he could have snuck it through airport security otherwise. Metallokinesis seized it before gravity could, locking it in place beside him. His gauntleted hand slid into the open housing at the rear, the metal swallowing his arm up to the elbow. Systems connected. Technopathy flooded the weapon's internals, interfacing with all components simultaneously.

Animachina pulsed outward from his touch, empowering the weapon, reinforcing every rail and barrel and joint against the forces they were about to endure. His thumb found the trigger. The sand controller saw it first. The man's eyes widened, storm faltering for a fraction of a second as he tried to process what had just appeared in Alexander's grip. He redirected Electrokinesis from his Core, through the gauntlet and into the weapon.

The world dimmed a bit as his physical senses returned to their superhuman normal, no longer enhanced. It was a fair trade. Capacitors drank the charge, generators hummed to life, and the Sidearm, as he'd affectionately named it, began to spin. Alexander grinned.