Chương 65: Ups, Downs

No money for a face mask, not even for goggles. Should've bought them ahead of time. Alas, I was poor then and was poorer now. I gulped down a bunch of air, then closed my eyes, pinched my nose, and walked forward into the swarm. A thousand thousand little wings buzzed around me. A thousand thousand feet — hooked, bristled, furred, smooth — latched onto me, crawling along fabric and underneath loose clothes, trying but failing to wedge themselves beneath my bullet vest.

A thousand thousand tiny critters, and all their attention was on me. And I didn't feel much at all. Hm. People always made being swarmed by insects seem like a fate worse than death. I'm more afraid of accidentally squishing them. They too weren't here of their own volition. They too deserved a level of empathy. I wish I could see them. I wish I could inspect them. There have got to be some interesting never-before seen species here.

A quarter of all described species on earth are beetles; I wonder what cool kinds I could find on an alien world? Then the biting and stinging started and I quickly revised my previous resolution. Needles and jaws failed to pierce my skin in most places, feeling more like aggressive stabs of a pen nib, or unfriendly pinches. [Vampirism I] plus 196 points in Body made the mundane bugs quite ineffective. But this wasn't earth. Something stung me in the thigh with what felt like a hypodermic needle.

Another thing was pulling on my eyelid, the entire strength of one beetle contending with the enhanced force of my Orbicularis Oculi. I swatted both. But more were always forthcoming. Whatever poisons were making it into my system were equally as distracting as what other minor damage they tried to inflict. Uncomfortable. But not debilitating. Better channel [Elasticity] to make my skin more elastic. Harder to pierce that way. Then, I heard it.

The noise-canceling headphones were probably my best purchase since coming to this whole damn region. The swarming and buzzing of insects was muted to a pleasant pitter-patter. Sudden loud sounds were removed entirely, letting the rest of the everyday noise filter through unhindered. It was an odd experience, walking purely by sound. With [Proprioception] I knew exactly where each part of my body was in space, like looking at a wire model from the outside.

I'd lived in this bunker for a week, had plenty of time to create a mental map of the place that was accurate down to the inch. Combine the two, and I felt myself move into the common room with an unusual sense of surety. There were the bug nets. There was the dirt. The tunnel-hatch was three steps to the left, buried about… fifteen inches deep. That was when I heard it. The clack of a footstep behind me. One, then two, casually disregarding the insects swarming about.

It couldn't be Truffles, not just because he would be writhing from all the insect stings, but because Truffles didn't wear any shoes. I relaxed my muscles, pretending to be occupied with swatting bugs off as it got closer. Closer. Then, a heavier step— I stepped into the threat, grabbed the wrist that had been going for my neck, and blasted the Fowl clone's head off. His body twitched, then hung limply in my arms. There was the sound of clapping coming from above.

"Bravo, Samantha. Simply marvelous. You are quite the killing machine."

"Pactmaker." Of course there's more.

"How's it feel, knowing I could kill you with all eyes closed?"

"Terrifying. I am positively shivering over here," he said from somewhere else. Two Fowls? The Pactmaker rarely risked more than one clone at a time. He was limited in his resources; the clones were finite, and eminently valuable. I pointed my Lucky 7 at who I guessed might be the real one.

"And yet, why do I feel that you are a manageable threat? Is it because you must be running low in your coins by now? Is it because I can see the exhaustion on your so-enhanced body? Is it because after all this, once again, I've caught you all alone?" I flicked a fat bug off my cheek and shifted my aim to the left.

"Didn't you say my friends were my biggest weakness? I beg to differ, but even if you were correct, I don't see anyone friendly here." [Delivery time: 1min 24sec] The system counter popped up in front of my eyes even while they were closed. The minimap too. More accuracy for blind Samantha.

"You're being purposefully ignorant, Samantha," Fowl said from the right.

"Your so called 'friends' already did the damage. You didn't spend all that money on yourself, did you? That would be so selfish, so unheroic."

"Yeah, you got me. I'm like spiderman but with worse PR. So what, you're jealous that I'm aspiring to be a good person?"

"Heroism doesn't happen out of habit, dear Samantha. You cannot make being a hero a job. It is postscriptive, an exaltation of an act with symbolic weight in hindsight. Acting towards that end destroys the thin veneer that you are indeed a selfless actor, replacing it with an insecure, clout-seaking mess of a person." I could hear the sneer in his voice.

"When I called you a killing machine, I meant it as a reductive statement. Not more, not less. Custodians are built for murder, and you are in the most literal sense made out of humanities' collective nightmares."

"Mommy issues."

"... what?"

"I'm made of ninety percent arms, which in turn are made for a hundred and twenty percent hugging. If being hugged is your personal nightmare, then sorry to say, but this whole farce of yours is quite motherless behavior. Unless you just don't like spiders? In which case, that's totally fine! Everyone is allowed to have personal preferences."

"... I am going to turn you into mulch now." Ooh, he lost his cool there for a moment. I smiled, because an unnerved Pactmaker played into my hands. I was under no illusions that beating him in a straight-up fight would be difficult even if I could see him. With my eyes closed? Yeah, no shot. But stalling was about to pay off. [Delivery time: 0 sec] Sorry, cool alien insects.

The candle appeared in my hands and, having read the instruction manual during his frankly unimportant monologues, I found the on-switch and tossed the thing into the air. There was a sudden surge of heat. Within seconds, every bug on and around me was sucked away, drawn to the small sun above as if by an unbending law of physics. The smell of burnt chitin filled the air. [Congratulations! You have reached level 36] [Body +5, Sense +3, Mind +3, Soul +4, Free Stat Points +1] And after enduring all this abuse, I even got a level. I opened my eyes— And there was my sister. Lily. The hole in her face and the cold, dead look in her eyes were as much of an illusion as the rest of her body. She wasn't real, and yet I couldn't take my eyes off of her. He knows her face. He knows where I live.

I stood there, paralyzed, as one part of me tried to figure out how this happened, why this happened, when this happened. Rage. Then grief. I felt them in turn, then in a mix, a royal jelly of emotions so laden with the experiences of the last few days that I wanted to vomit.

"Hey, psst," A pixie-sized hand poked me in the cheek.

"Forehead-guy just said there's lots of danger incoming." The ground rumbled. Somewhere in the distance, past the firing slit of the bunker, there gleamed a wall of metal. The murderbots were coming, seven days worth of neglect mere minutes away from crashing on this empty position like a wave. It didn't matter to me, not emotionally.

"I'm the danger."

"What?" The Pactmaker was going to receive his reckoning for this. And then I had to disappear. Just me existing was a threat to Lily, Mom, Dad, to Addy, Becca, Orianna… everyone. Maybe if he kills a human the system will finally mark him as a threat to humanity. There were six clones. He was jamming my communication via the system from somewhere. Maybe it was the crystal ball clone #2 was holding. Maybe it was the big wooden staff of #3, or the frankly ludicrously oversized spellbook of #4.

Numbers five and six were cloaked, not revealing whatever their gimmick was. The more I stared, the more unique gear I noticed, gear none of the previous clones had been wearing. The difference was staggering, like the mage equivalent of civilian versus full combat gear. But that was fine. I was a spring, coiled and ready to do violence, and he was all clutter and bling. The crack of the tinkerer's turret's laser was the starting shot that set everything into motion.

I leapt out of the hole, straight at the clone with the spellbook. He looked surprised that I dared to enter into melee when he could reasonably kill me with a single swipe of its hand." Faewind," he said, immediately gaining distance and dodging the first acid glob of my Goop Gun." Echo," I said in riposte, a second one immediately falling after, but with aim adjusted for the new trajectory."

Shield, greater shield, anti-caustic —" It hit the shields, stopped, then sagged through them both after its inertia was bled off. The clone's gurgling screams as the acid slime ate through its eyes and then brain shocked the other Fowls. I am so sorry. I'll try to make it quicker for you.

"Fan out!" yelled the crystal ball Fowl.

"She's more dangerous up close!" Good to know. Revealing that was either a misstep, or a feint. Either way, the fact that the many Fowls were following the order implied that there was some truth to it. But how were they going to hit me from that far away?" The Fowl with the staff pointed it at me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I threw myself twenty feet to my left, only for the ground I had just been standing on to explode.

When I landed, a baseball-sized glob of glowing red light blasted into my lowest left arm, breaking bone. I bit back a scream, shooting a glare at the cloaked Fowl whose hands were stretched out towards me. Tattoos glowed from fingertip to past his elbow, fluttering his cloak while small beads on his arms turned into baseball-sized projectiles. I sidestepped a rain of the red balls until I could put the bunker between me and the ranged casters.

Alright, the staff will instantly kill me if he hits, but I can't ignore the balls either. One of the two has to go. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Rico, distract mister balls for me. Can you do that?" I handed him a razor blade which Rufus had glued to a metal wire wrapped in cloth scraps. The result was a pixie-sized cleaver. Rico's eyes grew wide and he cackled with glee.

"Ooh, ye-hes, can do."

"On my mark," I said, splitting off a body double for each of the other Fowls, and vaulting the bunker.

"Now!" Shots came in and Samanthas scattered, each of them bearing handfuls of weapons at the wizards. Not wanting to get exploded or worn down, they engaged in evasive maneuvers, turning into birds, ants, or casting that faewind spell again to make some distance. All my body doubles held their fire, making it impossible to detect which was the real one by whether their attacks were effective or not. And, as I thought, they couldn't discern real from fake within seconds in battlefield conditions.

They did not have my eyes. Staff-Fowl dashed backwards, running in parallel to the front to maintain distance. I rushed him down. Here on the ground, I was the queen of speed.

"Dammit," he hissed as I latched onto his shield. A dagger came down on his neck. He blocked it with his staff, then blocked another coming from the other side. The second dagger dug through the palm of his hand, inches away from his neck, again. He cried out, the knife already turning to dirt in the same moment as he pointed his staff right at my chest— Except I tore it out of his hands, the wooden thing sticking to my hands without budging an inch.

From there, pushing a prickler through his shield was all it took to turn him into a smoldering sieve. I'm sorry. The moment he died, his skin sloughed off, revealing an older man in his 60s with military fatigues. A recently created clone, very recent. Little wonder, casualties and war zones mixed like cookies and cream, and there were enough people with magical potential down here for him to have his pick.

Before I could complete that thought, mister cloak jumped down behind me without a sound, thinking himself sneaky.

"Even without your magic, you're quite the poor illusionist," I said, ducking under a swing of his fist.

"All these crutches just to prop up a mediocre wizard."

"Don't you dare talk to me about crutches," hissed the cloaked man in the pactmaker's voice. I dodged another swing, only for his cloak to billow forward and grab my upper two arms. The thing was alive, and what more, its grip was like a vice. A pixie-shaped blur sped past it, cutting me free. For a moment I thought Rico had come to my rescue.

Then I realized he was stuck to one of the magical balls like an insect splattered against a window, and just so happened to have bounced it right across my opponent's magical cloak. I tried to pull the shoot-past-shield trick again, but this Fowl kicked me away before I could. And as he stepped back, the ground beneath him chirped and exploded. My spider mines, the last half-dozen, were buried under the sand, shepherded to sneaky locations through the underground tunnels by Truffles.

No channeling sadness yet, Samantha. Three left. Crystal ball Fowl hadn't done much besides try to call out what I was trying to do, and failing since I could turn on a dime, changing my angles of approach quicker than she could talk. A generic Fowl was trailing the lion's share of my body doubles, ignoring them in favor of running at me in the shape of a rhino. Mister tattoos was freed up too, and he was already sending more balls hurtling my way.

So I shot him with my Pricklers while running away from the charging Rhino. Barrage after barrage of lasers hit his shield. He didn't notice anything amiss until well after he was already sweating a waterfall. I'd gotten upgrades for my twin babies as well, the last of my ivory spent with one on each. Prickler #1 [Minor positive attribute: Heat generation - Generates additional heat on target, causing overheating.] Prickler #2 [Moderate positive attribute: Heat multiplication - Multiplies target heat by a small percentage with every hit.] [Minor negative attribute: Lazy - Rate of fire reduced by 0. 75x] The shield was my target, not him. Ergo, it was scalding at this point, turning it into an oven. He needed to lower the shield, then recast it to dump all the stored heat, but he couldn't do that until I was out of ammo.

And if I didn't just shoot them at the same time, but always one while Moe was reloading the other one, the stream of fire could go on for a very long time. Which was of course when everything went wrong. Rhino-Fowl caught up to me, forcing me to dodge in a way that interrupted my stream of fire. In the same moment, Cloak-Fowl flew out of the dust cloud surrounding him in the shape of a bird, rising higher and higher with one leg missing, yet determined to throw himself in my path at the most inopportune moment.

I vaulted the rhino. Tattoo Fowl un-cast, then re-cast his shield. Crystal ball Fowl was screaming something nobody had the time nor ability to concentrate on. And then the artillery bombardment arrived. The murderbots were here. First came the whistle of solid shells, then Cloak Fowl exploded mid-air. House-sized globs of plasma fell left and right, showering the bunker in melted stone.

The somewhat sentient Custodian turret was firing ordnance skywards, followed by explosions and the sound of missiles being launched. A triple staccato of tak-tak-tak sounds came from the automated machineguns in the bunker. In the not-so-far distance, murderbot grunts returned fire. I needed to hide. With a pair of eyes on the sky, I jumped into the nearest trench. Shuriken drones were falling like raindrops. It was a bullet hell, a percussion tune of high-explosive ordinance. Something grabbed my broken arm.

I didn't even look up. One shot of my Lucky 7 loaded with surprise cored the Fowl with the magical tattoos in front of me like an apple.

"Kill him… please…" he croaked, as my arm turned to dirt and sloughed off. All the while I was screaming, trying to focus on Addy, on going back up to my friends and family, on anything but dying in this godsforsaken trench. I stayed there in the trench even as the earth shook and cracked apart. It took minutes for the bombardment to peter off. By then my ears were ringing and my whole body shaking. One of my human eyes was bloodshot from the overpressure of a near miss.

When I looked up, all I could see were system messages. [You have assisted in killing: Murderbot Grunt] [You have assisted in killing: Murderbot Assault variant] [You have assisted in killing: Murderbot Minesweeper] [Congratulations! You have reached level 37] [Body +5, Sense +3, Mind +3, Soul +4, Free Stat Points +1] [Soulcoins: 1->375] Oh, right. I helped reload and oil the Custodian turret.

Shakily, I rose to my feet, only to realize that I was looking at the edge of a giant, unending cliff not three feet from me. A landslide had taken a large chunk of the area with it. Where the bunker had once stood, there was just rubble and open cables sticking out of the ground. The Custodian turret stood at an angle, its upper cannon and missile pods slagged. But the murderbot assault had faltered. I could see smoke rising in columns miles behind the front line.

Someone must have flown over and taken out their artillery and their reserves while we were busy being smashed to bits. And there, to my far left, stood three Fowls. Mister Rhino and Misses Crystal Ball were the only ones left I recognized but another one stood behind them. A hidden seventh Fowl. Quietly, sneakily, I felt Rico return from his ballistic trip across the globe.

"Hey. Psst. That's the one," he said.

"He's real. I can feel a shitload of fae debt on his shoulders." A shock ran through my beleaguered body. It was all I could do to try and not mischarge any of my spells with anger. I gave him a short nod and stood up straight, pointing my Lucky 7 straight at him.

"I can and will do this all day. Give up Pactmaker." He laughed and slowly clapped, a wry half-smirk teasing at his lips.

"You can stuff the bravado, Samantha. I know you're out of tricks, and mostly out of ammo. Though I will say, I never expected you to take out any of my clones, let alone four." Truth is, I was on my last leg. I could feel the shrapnel lodged inside my body aggravating my wounds with every breath.

"You are pathetic. You can't even be bothered to lift a finger if you can get someone else to do it."

"You would be surprised," he said with a smile.

"I'm not the only person in the society who is leery of the way the system functions. But I am the only one daring to act on that idea. And besides, none of my friends here have offered a complaint."

"I have one, actually." To my, and apparently his unending surprise, the rhino-Fowl spoke up — now in human form. He turned to the pactmaker, a scowl on both their faces.

"I'd like to be paid." The Pactmaker just stared at himself in befuddlement. He really never got any complaints? The Fowl clones were good at hiding their motives then. This much was basically an outright rebellion.

"A clone asking for payment? What, next you'll say you're founding a union."

"I'm a researcher, not a fighter. All of us are. And yet, four of us died for nothing. These clone bodies cost thousands of soulcoins in materials. You know as well as I do that we hate inefficiency." His fist was clenched.

"I've created a spell to block your compulsions, old man. Either you pay me a fair wage, or I disappear for good."

"Oh, alright then." Rhino Fowl was grabbed by the throat, looking on in shock. He tried to fight back, but his hand just glided off the Pactmaker's arm. A scream was torn from his throat as he was slowly transmuted into dirt. The real Fowl turned to glare at the orb-carrying one.

"Any rebellious compunctions?"

"N-none sir," he stammered back.

"Good." He turned to me again.

"And you, put that toy down. Nothing you can do can harm me. I have prepared counters for every one of your moves." It was true. He was shimmering with magical power so hard that even I could pick it up all the way from over here. He had three shields, dragonic scales covering his body, and a glossy rainbow layer coating those in turn. The bastard had pre-buffed himself. Classic wizard move.

"You think you've got me cornered," I said, looking at my system recording window and just seeing static.

"Ruined my reputation, had my friends ostracize me from normal life. Maybe. But I'm not a lonely Custodian." He snipped his hand.

"Right, the soldiers. I almost forgot about the witnesses. Don't worry, I will deal with them once I'm done with you. Their deaths won't be the painful ones." This time, it was my turn to grin.

"I think you misunderstand. I didn't join the academy to be bounced around as the ball for some jackasses' politics. I came because the system told me to, because it told me to lie low and find what's been bugging it, because the system trusts me. And you know who else trusts the system?" The three figures I could see approaching from a mile away arrived with a whoosh of air.

They were flying, one through standing on a pane of glass, another through warbling hoverboots attached to powered armor, and the last one through a glow of joy magic as bright and yellow as the sun, buzzing like a bee. [Custodian Zaya, Maker of Panes, Level 61] [Custodian Max, War Wright, Level 62] [Custodian Ingibjörg, Radiant Buzz, Level 78] A fourth one had snuck along the ground until they were right behind me, invisible until they chose to reveal themselves.

They looked like an androgynous humanoid chameleon with bug eyes and a red cross on their chest.

"Hey, pssst. I'm your medevac," they whispered before looking at my missing arm.

"You need a chrono bandage?"

"I'll live." I handed her my backpack, where the soldiers were stored among so many other things.

"And those people are?"

"Reinforcements," she said, a tongue lashing out to moisten her left eye.

"They're veterans. You're okay now. Just let them do their thing." I looked up, watching the first of the three slapping their radio.

"LT, LT, this is Team Razorblade, target acquired. How copy?"

"Is jammed," said the one in power armor, opening his face plate.

"He's invisible to my sensors. I'm sitting this fight out."

"Oh, it won't be much of a fight if it comes to that," The buzzing woman said with a strong nordic accent. She was bald, standing there like a polite upside down exclamation mark, hands clasped behind her body.

"Won't you ever so kindly surrender? I am sure your interference in military affairs can be explained at leisure, in a court."

"And if I don't want to?" the Pactmaker hissed, anger written all across his body.

"That is possibly the stupidest rhetoric question I've ever heard." The Custodian standing on glass slammed her hands together. Her panes slammed together, shattering into a million pieces. They didn't stop floating. In fact, the air was filled with a hundred glass panes sharp as daggers, all pointing at him.

"Commander, let's break his bones and toss him in a cell before we move on. Front's not staying quiet for more than an hour." The yellow one held up her hands.

"Rules of engagement, Zaya. This is a human, which makes it a delicate matter. Now, I am Custodian Radiant Buzz, and as the squad leader of Hunter Squad number two of Fort Killjoy, I demand you lower your weapons and—"" Kill beam." Fowl's left index finger withered away and a ray of sickly purple energy sprang from it. It hit the commander straight in a golden shield, first boring through three layers of it, then out the other side, leaving a fist-sized hole in her chest.

She coughed, falling out of the air as her joy was sapped from her spell. In the following moments of shock, I caught her, only to find her eyes glazed over and her body dissolving into powdered dust from the wound outwards. The real Fowl grinned manically.

"Weak. Weak. Useless, petty children. Come at me."

"You son of a—!" one of the Custodians cried. From there, chaos broke out. The air shattered, the ground cracked. I tried to move, but my body would only let me go forward, towards the danger. He was right, I was convinced that no matter what happened, if I had a plan with even a one-percent chance of making someone's life better, I'd do it. It was a strength, of sorts. In some moments, there was no worse strength to have.

Fowl was locked in a duel of mass bombardment with the glass pane woman while the Custodian in power armor was chasing the orb-wielding clone, firing a series of laser blasts while she eeped and eeked out of the way. Everyone was distracted. No one had time to pay attention to a little spider crawling her way towards her prey. A hundred feet. Fifty feet. Thirty. The earth was slipping, entire tons of sand and stone toppling off the hillside and past the clouds of the abyss below.

I aimed, casting [Arms & Arms Proficiency] to ensure I couldn't miss.

"I am quite done with your shenanigans," the Pactmaker said, conjuring a staff out of nowhere and slamming it straight onto the ground." Realm Shatter." Suddenly, I wasn't lying flat on the ground. I was in the air, falling down into the infinite abyss. Clumps and huge boulders of stone were everywhere, as if someone had taken a bite out of a mountain and distributed the pulverized remains evenly in an empty space. He'd teleported the entire tip of the hill a hundred feet to the left.

My body knew where 'up' was, allowing me to right myself, only to have a gust of wind twirl me around, or a solid chunk batter me in the shoulder.

Somewhere ahead, below, above, there was the cloak of a familiar wizard, zipping from solid surface to solid surface. We were hurtling towards the upper layer of clouds, falling faster and faster. Wait for it. Wait for it. There! I took the shot. The wizard flinched. My aim was off. A gut wound was debilitating, but not immediately lethal.

"You damnable little insect. I should have killed you first." He pointed his remaining index finger straight at me." Kill be — erk!" A shadow in the clouds burst through the wall of stone and sand, opening a mouth like that of a gigantic deep sea creature. In one swift suck of air, it swallowed him and a couple tons of stone around him whole. I stared blankly at the space he'd occupied, now devoid of rock, dust, and a wizard that could go toe to toe with multiple level 60 Custodians at the same time. Oh.

That was a kaiju. I hope he's dead for good. I fell past an eye. It took three seconds to fall past it.

There was a realm-shattering burp. It was so loud that I blacked out for a moment. When I came to, there were clouds above, clouds below, and I was still falling. … I'm kinda screwed, aren't I?