Quantum shift, p.15
Quantum Shift, page 15
part #1 of Phase Shift Series
“Trap?” Jonas asked, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Max and I are going to lure them to you…at least I hope.” He turned to the others. “He and I are going to go spring the ambush they’ve used the last two times. We’ll kill a few of them, just to get them riled up, then we’ll bring them back here. You guys will set up in the bleachers and make a cross-fire, so that when they come in, you can basically catch them in a kill box.”
“They’ll overrun you before you can make it,” one man objected. “We’ve been fighting these things for a week. They’re hard to kill and fast. They’ll tear you apart before you can get back here.”
“No, they won’t,” Annalise corrected. “You haven’t seen Troias in action, yet. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She pointed up at the bleachers. “You can’t have us set up like that, across from each other. Bullets ricochet, and people miss. We’ll end up shooting each other. It’d be better to have those of us with rifles set up at the other end, where we can take them out as they come in the door, with the shotgun and pistol crowd down lower, ready to handle any of them that slip past you and Max.”
“I’ll trust you to figure out the best way to set it up, then,” Troias shrugged. “You know guns and shooting way better than I do. All that matters is that you guys are ready when Max and I come through that door.”
“I should probably go with you,” the graying man offered. “I used to teach here; I know the school really well. If you get lost…”
“What are your Facets?” Troias asked him. “What do you have over 2 magnitude in?”
“Air’s my highest,” the man replied. “3.1 in that. I’ve also got Life at 2.4; I was a biology teacher.”
“So, you’re fast, smart, and heal well,” Troias nodded. “You can come along, but I’ll want you to stay back and be ready to run back to tell the others when we start heading this way. If you guide us there, I can find my way back.”
The man bit his lip, hefting his rifle, but nodded. “Good enough,” he agreed. “Name’s Zachary, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Zachary,” Troias grinned, shaking his head. “Now, let’s go see about killing some dogmen.”
Zachary led the trio through the halls, and Troias made sure to mark the turns well, noting a landmark at each turn. It took them about a minute before the former teacher paused and pointed at a wide set of stairs at the end of the hall. The corridor ahead formed a ‘T’, with hallways leading off to the left and right, while the stairway was directly ahead.
“This is where they attacked last time,” he whispered. “They waited until we were on the stairs before they attacked, coming from the classrooms on the right and left, as well as down the stairs. If we hadn’t been watching carefully, they might have cut off our retreat.”
“Seems like they could have done that by hiding in the classrooms we’ve passed,” Troias pointed out. “It sounds like they weren’t trying to kill you, just to drive you out.”
“That’s possible,” Zachary nodded. “It fits the available data, at least.” He looked at the big man. “Last time, we only killed two or three of them. I know you say that our guns are working better, now, but even so, I don’t know if we can handle thirty.”
“We can,” Troias said confidently. “You’ll see the difference. I’ve probably killed almost that many myself today.” Zachary stared at him and shook his head a little disbelievingly but hung back with his rifle ready. Troias and Max moved cautiously forward, Troias with his glaive held forward, Max with his ears back and his head held low. The dog obviously sensed something that Troias didn’t; hopefully, that was a good sign.
They’d gotten up four stairs when howls burst around them, and a veritable sea of dogmen came bounding down the stairs. Troias heard the crack of Zachary’s rifle through his earplugs, loud but not ear-shattering, and he watched a dogman tumble down the stairs with a ragged hole in its chest. Another crack, and a second dogman yelped as a bullet passed through its shoulder.
Max wanted to charge, but Troias was aware of the trap and called the dog to him, backing hastily down the stairs into the hallway they’d come from. “Go!” he shouted to Zachary, who had his rifle raised for another shot. “Tell the others!” Zachary’s face was troubled, but Troias glared at him, and the smaller man ran back the way they’d come. Troias turned back to see dogmen hurtling down the hallways from both sides, far more than the thirty he’d been warned to expect.
He hefted his glaive and stepped away from Max, clearing a space to work. As the dogmen charged forward, he swung the glaive in a wide arc, trickling power into it. The heavy blade chopped completely through the wall of flesh, bisecting three of the dogmen in a single sweep. He arrested the blade before it could slam into the wall on the other side, reversed it, and swept back across in a wide backhand that cut through two more of the creatures. Max was busily ripping at limbs, his fangs tearing out hunks of muscle and severing tendons with ease. He didn’t bother finishing the creatures off; he simply darted around, disabling one after another.
Despite the viciousness of their attacks, though, the pair were being steadily pressed back. Troias had to trickle a bit more power into his attacks to hold off the press of snapping jaws and clawing fingernails, and more than one set of hands grasped at Max futilely, trying to rip through his thick-furred, armored hide. Step by step, they gave ground, until finally Troias spun and, whistling for Max, began sprinting down the hallway toward the gym. The dogmen seemed to freeze for a second before loping after him, baying and snarling. At first, Troias was worried that the creatures would find it too easy to catch him, moving as they did on all fours, but the pack snapped and snarled at one another as much as they did at him, their arms and legs tangling and slowing each other down, and he was easily able to keep ahead of them.
He watched his landmarks carefully as he raced back toward the gym, almost missing the locker with the pink heart on it but managing to skid around the corner ahead of the pack. As he neared the doors to the gym, he shouted, “Incoming!” and slammed them open, dashing through and running toward the back of the gym, clearing the shooting lines for the waiting ambushers.
As the first members of the pack burst through, howling in triumph, Troias heard the sharp roar of Annalise’s rifle, and the lead dogman tumbled to the ground, the back of its head completely gone. The creature behind it pitched forward as well, as her round continued through the first dogman and slammed into the second’s muzzle. That, he guessed, was what she meant by a “through-and-through”, and he could see why she was worried about it. A second roar took out two more of the creatures, and suddenly the gym was filled with the bark of gunfire.
Troias hunkered down, watching as the barrage tore into the onrushing dogmen. Some slipped past the door, and he and Max moved forward to meet those, easily felling them. As the mass of creatures kept pushing in, though, the gunfire simply wasn’t enough to hold the bodies back, and more and more began spilling through to engage Troias. He was forced to move forward to meet them to avoid getting flanked, which limited the ability of the shooters to hold them back even more. There were dozens of dogmen, and they were flooding into the gym in an unstoppable wave.
Troias pushed aside his fears and concerns and focused on the enemies in front of him. His mind relaxed, his vision expanded, and nothing mattered to him except the next strike. He choked up on the glaive’s haft, giving him less power but more speed and allowing him to strike with the butt spike. The silver blade whirled as he chopped into his opponents. A low kick crushed one creature’s ankle, and as it fell, he slammed the butt spike through its forehead almost casually. He flicked the creature behind him as he dropped the blade forward, stabbing into another’s heart and flinging the corpse to the side.
Still, it wasn’t enough. More creatures were coming in as the gunfire slackened, and Troias dropped even further into his mindless state. Silver energy filled him, and he seemed to swim in it, letting it fill his muscles and sharpen his vision. The creatures appeared to be moving in slow motion as he whirled through them, his glaive cutting through the creatures like they were paper. One clamped onto his forearm, and without thinking he smashed that elbow into it, hearing a sickening crack as the blow shattered its neck. He felt the creatures clawing and biting ineffectually at his skin, but he ignored them and spun the glaive as if it were weightless, every blow felling multiple attackers.
The press of bodies seemed to slow, and he stepped forward, taking the fight to his enemies. The dogmen charged forward without thought, and he cut them down without emotion. They were obstacles, challenges to be overcome, and nothing more. He met their ferocity with his own, and the creatures began to falter as they neared him, their faces drawn in fear as they didn’t even attempt to protect themselves. For the first time, the pack moved backward instead of forward, and with that retreat, they opened themselves back up to fire from the shooters.
Only a single rifle spoke, though, as Troias kept moving forward, chopping and crushing the pack members with brutal efficiency. Whatever force had been driving them was broken, and the dogmen began scrambling to escape instead of to attack. Troias didn’t notice, lost in his trancelike state, striking viciously at every enemy in sight, until at last, his glaive swept through the neck of the last creature, and as its head fell away, so did the void filling his thoughts.
Troias gasped and fell to a knee as sudden exhaustion swept over him. His muscles trembled and shook, and he could barely hold up the glaive, much less swing it. He felt empty, as if something had been drained from him, and he had to fight an urge to lay down and go to sleep.
Troias dutifully thought about his stats and was shocked to see that all his Facet magnitudes had dropped below 1, even his Spirit Facet. Since those magnitudes were a measure of how much energy he had available within him, it was no wonder that he felt so drained; right now, each of his Facets was well below the human norm. Still, he could feel the exhaustion starting to pass already as his Facets ticked back up; apparently, he was regaining his energy at a decent pace. Probably shouldn’t do that too often, he told himself.
Ren told him.
Troias decided to hold off on checking out his new ability and instead rested quietly for a minute. He felt a hand on his shoulder and glanced up to see Annalise standing over him, looking concerned. “You okay?” she asked softly.
“Yeah, just a bit drained,” he nodded, rising a bit unsteadily to his feet. “That took a lot out of me.”
“I imagine so,” she nodded, looking around. “This place looks like a demented butcher’s shop.” Troias glanced around and couldn’t help but agree. His glaive had severed limbs, decapitated dogmen, and even bisected creatures in every conceivable way. Blood lay in thick, deep pools all around him, filled with chunks of viscera, heaps of flesh, and twitching, severed body parts. He’d even managed to cut one creature in half from head to groin, and the two halves had basically emptied the body’s contents onto the floor. He felt his gorge rise for an instant but forced it down, swallowing hard.
He turned and looked at the men behind him, all of whom were staring at him in undisguised awe. “Holy hell, boy,” Jonas whispered. “That was the damndest thing I’ve seen in my entire life! How the hell did you do that?”
“With some difficulty,” Troias admitted, taking a deep breath and sighing in relief as all his Facets except Air, Fire, and Life finally crept back up over 1 and the bone-deep weariness faded to simply being tired. “I’ll need about ten, fifteen minutes to recover, I think, and then we can go hunt down any of the dogmen still in the building.”
“More?” one of the men asked. “You must have killed sixty of them, right there! That’s gotta be all of them in the entire town!”
“Fifty-two,” Zachary corrected, and the others looked at him strangely. He just shrugged. “I counted. I figured we’d all be telling this story over and over back at the station, so I wanted to get the numbers right.”
“You guys helped,” Troias pointed out. “You killed a bunch of them before they even got to me.”
“Sorry, I should have been clearer,” Zachary corrected. “You killed 52. The rest of us killed twelve, all combined.” He shook his head. “And I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to handle thirty.”
“Do you still think there are more of them in the building?” Annalise asked dubiously. “I can’t imagine there’d be many left after this.”
“There’s at least an Omega out there,” Troias told her. When they all looked at him blankly, he added, “Kind of like a boss creature in a video game. Bigger, smarter dogman that gathers the others to it. That’s why there were so many of them here.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Zachary demanded in an exasperated voice. “Have you done this before, or something?”
“His totem seems to know just about everything,” Annalise spoke up. “He’s never explained how, and I’m not sure I really want to know.”
“I got lucky with him,” Troias admitted. “But, yeah, he told me that this many of the creatures probably means there’s an Omega here.”
Any ideas where one might hang out? Troias asked silently. Or two, I guess?
“Or two,” Troias added tiredly out loud. “So, we’ll recover a bit and Zachary will help us find them.” He glanced at the former teacher. “Is there a place that’s harder to get to from the entrances? Someplace that you have to go through a lot of the building to reach?”
The man frowned. “The machine room, maybe?” he suggested. “You have to go up to the roof and back down to get there, so that students can’t just sneak in.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Troias sighed. “And I’ll bet the path there has a ton of dogmen on it.” He glanced down at Max, whose muzzle was stained bright red with blood. Apparently, the dog had been following along behind Troias, finishing off any of the dogmen he had just wounded. “At least we’ll have an early warning system,” he said, patting the dog’s head fondly.
“We’ll make you a dog person, yet,” Annalise chuckled. “At least, Max will.”
It took Troias almost twenty minutes until his Spirit Facet had regenerated enough for him to be comfortable with. While he was resting, he went ahead and took a look at his new ability, getting a surprise as he did so:
Ability Unlocked!
New Ability: Weak Battle Trance
Facet: Spirit+
Cost: 0.1 per second, special
By using this ability, you use Spirit energy to channel all your unlocked Facets at once, gaining bonuses to all combat
skills connected to those Facets as follows:
Force – Combat Damage
Air – Movement Speed
Earth – Defense
Fire – Pain Resistance
Water – Attack Speed
Life – Healing Rate
Death – Attack Skill
Each attribute is boosted by the equivalent of one-tenth
of the user’s Spirit ability modifier (currently 0.39) per
second at a cost of 0.1 from that Facet’s magnitude.
If any Facet drops to 0.1 magnitude, the energy will
be drawn instead from the Spirit Facet. If the Spirit
Facet drops to 0.1, the Trance cannot be maintained
and will end immediately
Facet Level Up!
Your Spirit Facet has gone from Level 0
to Level 1! You need 289 XP in this
Facet for the next level.
Please note that, as a Spirit Warrior, you
may not advance any Facet more than
two levels above any other.
Troias read the Battle Trance notification again, trying to parse out how it worked. Basically, all of his combat abilities went up by some amount – he thought that it was as if his Facets were all improved by that 0.39 number, but it could also have been that everything went up by 39%, and the description wasn’t really clear – and in return, each of his Facets dropped by 0.1 per second. Once they got to 0.1, the energy came from his Spirit Facet, instead. The math was way too complex for him to figure out without pencil and paper, but…
Whoa, leveling the Facet did that much? How does leveling a Facet even work? It doesn’t look like it made my magnitude go up.
Well, that’s useful, he thought with an inward grin. I’ll have to do more of that, I guess.
Ren laughed silently.
