Luck Stat Broken: Rise of the Khan-Chapter 55 - 51: The Unseen Variables
Elias pressed his back against the rusted shell of a collapsed billboard, trying to slow his breathing.
His scry-dampeners were completely fried. His cybernetic eye was throwing a cascade of red error codes across his vision. Below him, navigating the flooded concrete of the 101 Highway, a P.A.C.I.F.I.C. Hound-Drone swept its blue search-laser through the mist. It was a dog-sized quadruped made of matte-black plating, designed specifically to track blood trails.
Elias was bleeding from a shrapnel graze on his ribs. It was only a matter of seconds before the Hound caught the scent. He reached for his combat knife, calculating the angles for a drop-assault that he had a four percent chance of surviving.
He tensed his legs to jump.
A shadow detached itself from the girder directly above the drone. It wasn’t a monster. It was a rusted, two-hundred-pound engine block, released from a jury-rigged pulley made of fraying climbing rope.
The iron slammed into the Hound-Drone’s chassis. The machine collapsed with a horrible crunch of snapping servos and shattered glass, pinned flat to the asphalt.
Elias blinked, his cybernetic eye whirring to adjust.
Two figures dropped down from the rusted scaffolding. It was a man and a woman, dressed in layered rags, their faces smeared with ash to cut the glare of the acid rain. They didn’t have Auras. They didn’t have high-tier weapons. The man held a sharpened piece of rebar, and the woman held the frayed end of the rope.
Kael stared at the crushed drone, his hands shaking slightly around the rebar. "That was a perfectly good engine block. We could have traded that."
Elias stepped out from the shadows, holding his empty hands up. "Former Corpo. They just took my squad in a repulsor-transport heading for the Sepulveda funnel."
Mara wiped wet ash from her eyes, looking from Elias to the ruined drone. "You owe us a pulley and an engine block, cyclops. How do we stop the transport?"
The transport hold was freezing and smelled like rubbing alcohol and ozone.
Will forced his eyes open, fighting through a skull-splitting headache. The heavy magnetic manacles binding his wrists felt cold and absolute. A constant, low-frequency hum emanated from the metal, suppressing his mana.
[Warning: Mana at 2%.]
[Stamina: Critical.]
He glanced around the dim, windowless hold. Maddie was strapped to the bulkhead, still encased in the hardened grey Bio-Polymer. Tyson was chained to a medical gurney, unconscious. Don lay on the floor plating, a crude pressure-bandage wrapped tightly around his bleeding thigh.
Sitting across from them were Kross and Vane. The two specialists had removed their faceless bug-helmets, revealing aggressively average, clean-shaven faces. They tapped on haptic displays on their wrists, ignoring the prisoners entirely.
"Biometrics uploaded to the Board," Kross noted, his tone conversational. "The heavy is stabilizing. We’ll need to sedate him again before offloading."
"Understood," Vane replied. "I’m routing the transport through the lower access tunnels. The acid rain is stripping the paint off the hull."
Will tested the manacles. They didn’t budge. He was completely cut off from the System.
Then, he felt a localized prickle of warmth against his collarbone.
Ash.
The baby phoenix had suppressed her thermal signature to zero, appearing as nothing more than a fold of fabric to the Corpos’ scanners. Following Will’s last, desperate mental command, she crept down the inside of his sleeve. Her tiny talons scraped against his forearm.
She reached his wrists, wedging her small head against the locking mechanism of the magnetic cuffs.
Will held his breath.
Ash didn’t have the world-breaking power of the Leviathan. She was a Level 1 baby phoenix. But she was stubborn. She clamped her tiny beak onto the locking pin and began to push her tiny core to its absolute limit.
It wasn’t a sudden, melting burst. It was a slow, grueling burn. The iron of the cuff began to heat up, turning dull brown, then cherry red. Will bit his tongue hard enough to taste copper as the searing metal scorched the skin of his wrists. Ash puffed her silver-and-gold feathers out, trembling as she poured every ounce of her Level 1 fire into the lock.
With a soft, metallic pop, the internal mechanism failed. The slag gave way, and the heavy cuffs released. The magnetic suppression field died.
Ash let out a tiny, exhausted peep. Her heat completely spent, she collapsed limply, tumbling into the pocket of Will’s jacket like a warm stone.
Will kept his hands perfectly still, resting them on his knees as if he were still bound. He felt the sluggish, agonizing trickle of his 2% mana returning to his core.
It wasn’t enough to summon his greatsword. It wasn’t enough to manifest his bow.
If you cannot wield a hammer, Khan’s voice whispered in the dark, a cold and vicious rasp, wield a needle.
Outside, the transport’s repulsors whined as the vehicle accelerated through the ruins.
And then, the entire world lurched.
Tons of rusted concrete and iron signage collapsed directly into the transport’s path. The vehicle’s automated collision-avoidance AI locked the repulsor brakes.
The sudden deceleration threw Kross and Vane hard into the bulkhead. Their haptic displays shattered against the metal.
Will moved.
He didn’t summon a weapon. He scraped the absolute bottom of his dry core, his veins bulging darkly against his skin as he forced the last two percent of his mana into his right hand.
[CRITICAL MANA STRAIN: Warlord Intent Corrupted. Construct unstable. Physical backlash imminent.]
He didn’t care. The violet light sputtered like a dying engine, forming a crude, jagged brass knuckle that looked bruised and unstable.
He drove his fist directly into Vane’s jaw.
The construct shattered into dull shards of mana. The raw kinetic feedback traveled straight up Will’s arm, dislocating his ring and middle fingers with a sickening snap. Vane’s head cracked against the hull, and he slumped sideways, out cold.
Kross recovered instantly, drawing his shock-stave and swinging the crackling tip toward Will’s chest.
Will ducked, feeling the static charge singe his hair. He forced the last drops of his mana into his left hand. A three-inch shiv of dense, flickering violet light sparked into existence between his fingers.
He stepped inside Kross’s guard, absorbing a knee to the ribs that stole his breath, and drove the violet shiv directly into the unarmored joint of Kross’s elbow.
The construct snapped off in the joint, dissolving a second later. Kross dropped the shock-stave, letting out a sharp grunt of pain. Will grabbed the Corpo by the tactical vest, ignoring his screaming, mangled hands, and drove his forehead into the bridge of Kross’s nose.
Kross went limp, sliding to the floor.
Above them, the ceiling of the transport sparked. A cybernetic hand punched through the maintenance panel. Elias didn’t just rip the wires out. His cybernetic eye spun furiously as he jammed two metallic fingers directly into the transport’s diagnostic port.
[Hostile Override Detected] > [Bypassing ICE... Warning: Neural Feedback.]
A thick stream of blood ran down Elias’s nose as the corporate firewall fought his wetware, but he used the split-second delay to rip the thick bundle of power cables completely out of the roof.
The transport’s repulsors died instantly.
Gravity reasserted itself. The multi-ton vehicle slammed into the flooded asphalt of the 101 Highway at forty miles an hour.
Will was thrown against the ceiling, then the floor, as the transport rolled. The rear doors blew off their hinges with the force of the impact, letting the Bile-green rain pour into the dark cabin.
The vehicle finally ground to a halt, upside down and groaning under its own weight.
Will crawled out of the wreckage, his shoulder screaming in protest. His charred, broken hands were practically useless, so he dragged Don out by hooking his forearms under the unconscious sniper’s jacket, pulling him into the mud.
Elias dropped down from the overturned hull, wiping the blood from his upper lip. "Will. You’re alive."
"Barely," Will gasped, spitting a mouthful of blood into the rain. He touched his pocket with the back of his wrist, feeling the faint, rhythmic heartbeat of the exhausted baby phoenix inside. He looked up at the rusted overpass above them. Mara and Kael were peering over the edge, holding the frayed ends of the ropes they had used to drop the debris.
A metallic scrape echoed from the transport.
Vane pulled himself out of the wreckage. His face was a mask of blood from where Will had punched him, but his corporate training held. Instead of his shock-stave, he drew his sidearm. It was a pneumatic Captive-Bolt Pistol, a heavy, blocky tool designed for executing trapped assets at point-blank range. He leveled the heavy iron barrel squarely at Will’s chest.
Will had no mana left. He couldn’t even close his ruined hands into fists.
A glass jar shattered against the side of Vane’s helmet.
Kael had slid down the concrete embankment. He didn’t have magic, but he had a mason jar full of battery acid scavenged from a ruined car. The corrosive liquid splashed across Vane’s tactical visor, eating into the composite glass with a furious hiss.
Vane dropped the gun, clawing blindly at his melting visor. It was the only window they were going to get.
Inside the crushed transport, the structural stress of the crash had cracked the grey Bio-Polymer encasing Maddie. The Vanguard ripped her arms free of the crumbling foam with a guttural roar, snatching her heavy halberd from the floor plating.
She vaulted out of the wreckage, her boots hitting the wet asphalt, her dark eyes locking onto the blinded specialist.
The Faction was out of the cage. Now, it was time to collect.
