Vol.4 Ch.29 – Another Side, Another Story

Chapter 29: Another Side, Another Story

Esther Silverspark was hiding on the roof of a car park, surveying the area.

She'd reached Buffalo, New York a couple of days ago and since then she'd been busy scouting out the area. She'd thought finding the facilities the Zodiac Knight had spoken of, the ones in use by the Vassal named Caulder, would be difficult but in truth that had been the easiest part of the journey. In a mostly blacked-out city the few buildings that were still brightly lit stuck out like sore thumbs, after all.

The most conspicuous, of course, was the downtown university campus, both it and the nearby hospital were brightly lit nine months into the apocalypse. And she supposed if you had a twisted enough mind it only made sense. The Zodiac Knight had described Caulder as a mad scientist using North America for his experiments. She hadn't fully believed him, of course, but after the fourth encounter with stitched-together cyborg monstrosities she'd concluded that the Knight had at the very least spoken the truth about that.

And if he was the type to take people apart and then put them back together wrong it only stood to reason that he had to get the bodies from somewhere, which was why Esther found it more than a little morbid that the sick bastard apparently had a body shop located in a fucking children's hospital.

She couldn't wait to slit the fucker's throat. But that had to wait. Because while Esther, as an Atlantean, was stronger than a normal human could ever hope to become, plowing her way through this guy's menagerie was too much for her to handle on her own. There was of course the possibility of picking his troops off one by one to whittle down their numbers but that carried the risk of someone catching on to what she was doing and in any case she wouldn't need to handle it alone.

Twice now she'd noticed the cyborgs and Outsiders roaming the streets bringing back civilians to drag into the facility and twice they'd been stopped by a group of rebels hiding out in the city.

From her observations this group of rebels was shockingly well organized, sending out small groups to scavenge abandoned buildings for food and other supplies, each accompanied by at least one mage to either hide or protect them. Most of the time this worked flawlessly, as Caulder's troops weren't as dense on the ground as she'd feared, but whenever a group did get caught another group would strike to save them.

But something was different tonight.

She'd heard the scuffle from several blocks away and as the group came into focus she knew what had changed.

Again a group of cyborgs had caught a group of civilians, but not like the last two times. This group clearly wasn't part of the rebels. The rebels all wore clothing that looked like a haphazard mix of streetwear, urban camo and military gear but these weren't wearing anything like that. They instead looked like a group of civilians that had been deep in hiding and had been caught. And that was the problem.

The rebels were very good at mobilizing to save their own but they clearly didn't have enough boots on the ground to notice normal citizens being abducted, at least not fast enough.

The logical part of Esther knew that letting these civilians get caught was the smart choice. Revealing herself to save a couple straights wasn't worth it. But the real Esther wasn't that cold. If she forsook her humanity to save humanity she wouldn't be able to live with herself later.

Before she could get off her perch she saw a group of rebels streaming in to save the civilians but they clearly weren't enough. This time there were more cyborgs and fewer of the rebels. Clearly they'd rushed to assemble a team, probably letting the same stupid compassion guide them that plagued Esther.

But she also knew this was her opportunity. If she wanted to get into that facility she needed these rebels. She'd been looking for an in with them and this was the perfect opportunity.

**

“Drones deployed,” Julia whispered, a touch of sound magic carrying the words to her allies without her having to raise her voice.

“Drones deployed,” James echoed, talking into the radio connecting them to Marco. Marco was their drone operator, sitting all the way back in their hideout.

The flesh harvesters had been getting bolder lately, systematically raiding buildings to find any survivors in hiding. Julia didn't know what exactly had happened but clearly whoever was doing this was in more dire need of bodies lately. She did know that scavenging had become far more dangerous and every week now they had to rush to get civilians out of the harvesters' grasp.

Getting them out once they went into that slaughterhouse was exponentially harder and so they all fought like lions to stop the civilians from going in there. This time, though, she feared for their chances. The group of harvesters was so much larger than usual and their team was much smaller than what they could usually muster. Two of their scavenging squads had gone dark to hide from more harvesters, depriving them of four capable mages. And Bram would be really useful to have around right now.

But she couldn't worry about that now. She just had to do it.

She rushed forward, trusting her team to make sure nothing would flank her. When she was in range she took a shooting stance, pointed a finger gun at the closest cyborg, and spoke: “Bang.”

The sound waves, amplified and focused down a thousandfold, crashed into the cyborg like a hollow-point bullet, exploding its head like a pumpkin. Immediately the cyborgs not carrying civilians turned on her while the others rushed to get their prey into the facility.

“Not so fast!” bellowed James, punching the ground and causing a ripple in the concrete. The ripple traveled forward, causing the cyborgs carrying the civilians to stumble.

If only Sylvia was here, Julia thought. Sylvia could have used the moment's distraction to snatch the civilians away from the harvesters. But alas, Sylvia was one of the four currently hiding from another group of those same cyborgs.

Instead of Sylvia they had Vitali with her. Vitali wasn't particularly good at saving civilians but he was very, very good at setting things on fire and he used that ability to melt down a breaching cyborg with massive metal claws for hands.

But Julia couldn't watch the spectacle because another cyborg, one of the pesky ones with the chitinous armor, the kind that her sound bullets couldn't punch through, was training something on her that looked vaguely like a minigun, except for the part where miniguns weren't usually made out of meat and chitin and their projectiles didn't usually have fleshy underbellies and stingers.

She knew how much getting hurt by those things sucked and she wanted none of it.

“Marco,” she whispered, completely forgetting that Marco in his bunker wouldn't be able to hear her without a radio. Thankfully he didn't need to hear her to know to help her.

Marco was a technomancer, or at least that's what he called it. Each mage had an element they were most comfortable with and for Marco that element was electronics. Not electricity, mind, but technology. He could slap things together in a way that defied conventional logic. As he'd done with these drones. They were normal drones, the kind you can buy at any high-end sports store, but attached to them were guns they'd looted from the harvesters. Nobody even understood how those guns worked but he'd nevertheless been able to integrate them with his drones, letting him fire the guns even if the drones had never been built with weapon functionality in mind.

The drone he sent to save her was the simplest he had, armed with a pistol with a bottomless magazine. That didn't make too much sense but the thing simply never ran out of bullets. They all assumed it was some kind of 3D printer that used magic as material but either way it worked. The bullets were AP rounds, the perfect compliment to Julia's sound attacks, capable of punching holes into things her magic bounced off of. Three nearly silent bangs rang out from the drone and a moment later the cyborg jerked the gun away, three holes in the minigun oozing green fluid.

But that cyborg wasn't the only thing bearing down on her.

**

Esther was impressed. For being only three mages and a drone operator they were doing pretty well, except they were hopelessly outnumbered even before taking into account the group of skirmishers preparing to strike them from the back.

That's my cue, she thought.

She shook the snatchweaver on her left arm loose and grabbed the Erebos Crystal pendulum it had for a tip. The snatchweaver was possibly the best piece of tech the Atlanteans had ever created, a bracelet with a spool of arachne silk inside it, the silk attached to a small sharpened piece of Erebos Crystal, the unstoppable force of magical materials. In the hands of a skilled user the snatchweaver was a grappling hook, a throwing dagger and a garrote wire all in one. And even among Atlanteans Esther was one of the best to ever wield one.

She threw herself off the building and sent her pendulum at the hospital ahead. The small piece of crystal punched through the concrete and anchored inside it, allowing her to yank herself forward. With a tiny effort of will, so tiny even a straight could have managed it, she dislodged the crystal fragment, the spool inside the snatchweaver rapidly retracting. When she heard the small tinging sound of the crystal striking the bracelet she pulled out her actual weapon.

Her twinblade seemed horribly unwieldy to a casual observer and it probably was to anyone but her. Esther, however, had been training with this weapon since she was five and so wielding a sword that had another blade where the pommel should go was second nature to her.

It fit into her hand perfectly and she immediately gave it a twirl, summoning forth rivers of power and sending them into the sword. Mid-flight she swung the blade through two arcs, each leaving a dawn-colored afterimage hanging in the air, painting an X shape. With another flourish of the blade she sent it hurtling at the skirmishers about to attack the three rebels from behind, bellowing: “Grand Cross!”

The spell didn't strike with the force of a cannonball, no. Instead the light magic cut like a scalpel, bisecting the spindly metal limbs of the attackers before the spell went wild and slashes cascaded along their bodies. The cyborgs fell apart long before Esther had a chance to hit the ground.

And hit the ground she did, her blade spinning like a blender as she descended on the minigun cyborg, hacking it into pieces as she went. At the very last moment she spun impossibly, landing on the ground feet first and taking the twinblade through a careful rotation to make sure she didn't take her own legs off with it.

“Who are you?” the cutie with the sound magic whispered, her voice carrying impossibly well over the din of battle.

“Later,” Esther said as she turned towards the cyborgs carrying the civilians, her French accent coming out to play. “Right now we have lives to save.”