Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 66: Night Raid

***Monolith***

Giant mole didn’t know who the hell he was messing with, Monolith thought, trudging down the road toward Franklin city, his shredded pants fluttering around his ankles.

Off to the left, he could make out the inter-city train, a speck in the distance, heading northeast towards Washington city. If it were going the opposite direction, Monolith might be able to save some time by hitching a ride back to the city.

As it was, Monolith didn’t want to visit Washington City. That place was stuck up.

Click.

Monolith froze, glancing behind himself.

An ant the size of a Volkswagen clicked its mandibles together, its antennae tasting the air for Monolith.

Monolith hadn’t sweated since he’d Triggered, and that was probably the reason why the ant hadn’t latched onto him already. Monolith didn’t smell like much more than glass, and ants were very scent oriented.

But didn’t mean they couldn’t see him.

Monolith could kill the ant. It wouldn’t even be that hard. He could kill the next one too, and the next. But the thousandth?

The scary thing about ants was that they didn’tstop coming. Especially if you pissed them off.

The forager looked like it was alone, but there were always thousands more where that came from.

Monolith turned around and ran.

Click, click click!

The insect’s jaws snapped eagerly as it began chasing the running prey.

All I gotta do is break line of sight, goddamnit, then it can’t track me! Monolith thought as the crunch of gravel and skittering legs followed directly behind, slowly gaining on him.

***Perry***

“Ugh,” Perry said, laying on the floor, fully suited up. His armor was not designed with comfort as a top priority, so sleeping in it was…less than ideal.

Nobody was leaving their armor except to pee, though. It was that bad. Hardcase was lying back in her opened cockpit, giving the side of the wall a thousand-yard stare.

“I like the welding foam.” Perry grunted. It was a tinker-tech invention: a foam embedded with thermite that would fill a space with solid steel.

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Natalie breathed.

They’d spent the last sixteen hours patching holes and repairing damaged wiring, and their initial enjoyment of working with the novel substance was quickly replaced with anxiety-riddled boredom, waiting for the next assault.

And the assaults kept coming.

Silverfish, mutated fish who’d taken to the sky, floated across the tracks and had done some serious damage.

Their natural defence mechanism was to turn their reflective surfaces in such a way that the entire school was focusing light on a threat. A big enough school of silverfish could actually vaporize a human on a sunny day.

The fiber optics embedded in the Mk.4 were able to disperse this attack well, so Perry had tanked attention while they whittled the school down, until it scattered in every direction, reforming a few miles away.

After that was an ant nest full of millions of little ankle-sized black ants which kept trying to plant a fast spreading fungus on the train’s armor that would’ve rotted it away in a matter of minutes.

The later train cars were still passing through the ant’s territory, but Perry had been switched out after a couple hours of scraping them off the side of the train. It was somebody else’s problem right now.

Then there were the ‘trees’.

Trees that had formed a low arch over the train tracks. They had crowded in around the tracks, and the lieutenant had given the them order to set the trees on fire before they went through, as they were suspiciously close and absent the last time the train passed through.

Sure enough, the ‘trees’ erupted into shrieks of pain when set on fire, and began flinging shards of wood at the assembled supers, which bounced off armor and hyperweave, dealing little damage.

There was a kiosk set up alongside the tracks, seemingly staffed by a man whose legs disappeared into a pit in the ground.

He waved, and they waved back.

Nobody fell for it.

The attacks were so consistent, so regular, that Perry was currently trying to sleep in his armor. The armory had long since been unfolded and the officer in charge waved them through, her only task keeping nonhumans from entering.

Need to work on the interior padding with sleep in mind, he thought after he finished his soup, lying back with his armor opened up around him. He could snap it back closed at a moment’s notice.

“Night you guys,”

“Night,” Natalie said, pulling the top of her cockpit down.

“Night, Perry,” Heather said, closing the escape pod’s shielding down around her.

Nobody was taking any chances.

Perry took a deep breath of fresh air, checked the status of his O2, then closed his armor. It wasn’t designed to keep him breathing indefinitely, but it could last a few days straight without needing a refill, on account of his Spendthrift Perk.

Perry thought it would be hard to sleep in the claustrophobic confines of his armor, but he was out like a light.

Motion was what woke Perry up.

He was sleeping soundly in the confines of his armor, when suddenly his gut lurched like he’d been yanked sideways at his speeds.

Something began rattling Perry around inside of his armor like a child with a ken doll.

Perry’s startled scream didn’t even reach his own ears. He felt his vocal chords vibrate, but there was no sound, and he was still getting shaken around inside his tin can.

There were flashes of bright light, but mostly it was dark with the occasional glimpse of something pink.

In the course of his blind thrashing, Perry felt a huge object that seemed to be stuck to him, plastered across half his armor, sticky, and big. It was what was shaking him around so bad.

Perry shoved against it, turning his thrusters up to max in a bid to escape the grasp of whatever had him.

Perry felt his inner ear protest when he tore away from whatever had him at dangerous speeds. Perry couldn’t see where he was going, but it felt like he’d jetted forward a couple hundred feet before he came to a sudden, violent stop.

HP: 4

“Gah, what the hell was that!?” Perry demanded, prying himself out of whatever he was stuck in now.

It was dark, and Perry couldn’t make out where he was or what he was doing. Perry turned on his armor’s floodlights.

I’m in a tree.

Through a tree might be more accurate.

Crack! Perry pried himself out, shattering the hapless hardwood as he regained his footing.

Went through a boulder, too.

Perry scanned the surroundings and spotted the train.

There was a…shape on top of it.

A hunched over figure bigger than the entire traincar was revealed by the train’s floodlights, shoving its face into the armor, while supers silently flew around it, hitting it with soundless bolts of lightning, energy blasts, and heavy arms fire.

It reminded Perry of a nature documentary from the sixties, with a bear eating honey while the bees buzzed around it angrily.

Perry got a hint when a massive pink object shot out of another hole in the armor, then the creature shifted its weight, revealing massive claws taller than two men standing on top of each other.

These claws effortlessly ripped the traincar’s lauded armor apart, allowing the anteater to shove it’s face in further to get at the passengers.

I almost got eaten…Heather and Nat were in the same room!

What are you standing around for!?

Perry blasted into motion, dirt and fauna scattering behind him as he launched forward.

LDisintegrate.EXE

Perry shot the anteater’s head with a large Disintegrate, dropping 15% of his charge on one blast.

The creature that had been shrugging off energy blasts slumped to the side, most of its brain turned to ash, revealing a tongue covered in struggling people, and pulling the traincar off the rails with it.

The entire train screeched to a halt as the building-sized traincar pulled it’s connecting cars off the rails.

Shit, that’s not good. At least I can hear now.

The massive anteater had some kind of noise cancellation superpower which had drastically delayed the response time while it raided the nest.

“Hardcase, Wraith, where are you? Tell me you’re alive,” Perry said into his comms.”

“Still alive, still locked in the escape pod.” Heather said. “Something up?”

“I dunno where I am, but it’s dark as heck, and everything’s…fleshy?” Hardcase said.

“Okay, Hardcase, don’t freak out, but you may be…in a stomach right now,” Perry said, joining the surrounding supers as they dove into the rescue operations, turning the shopping-mall-sized creature onto its side to give themselves access to its stomach.

“What!?” Hardcase and Wraith demanded simultaneously.

“We’re working on getting you out,” Perry said, pulling his sword off his back and sawing through the stadium-sized animal’s tough skin while the other supers held the limbs out of his way.

“I’m coming,” Heather said over the comms before cursing. “Everything’s sideways!”

“Things got a little derailed,” Perry said. “You should be able to find plenty of holes in the armor. This thing was tearing apart reinforced steel like a termite mound.”

Perry paused in the middle of his work, his skin going cold.

The anteater had targeted the living quarters. Most of the supers were either in its stomach or trying to rescue those who were.

The train was damaged, derailed, and stationary.

Everyone was exhausted, with very little sleep.

Highly distracted.

If I were going to ambush the train, I would do it now. Perry thought, his stomach sinking.

A flash of light out of the corner of Perry’s eye caused him to leap to the side as the ground exploded with shrapnel, pinging off his armor.

A nearby Energy User howled with pain.

Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop!

The floodlights on the train burst in rapid-fire as armor-piercing rounds snuffed them out like candles, plunging the entire site into pitch black darkness.

Perry turned on infrared and ran so as not to present a stationary target.

“Replicators!” Perry shouted into his comms, spotting the distant flare of jets as a replicator Dreadnaut began disgorging dozens of the machine warriors.

“Shit!” Heather said over comms, grunting with effort as she pried her way through the battered sideways train.

“What do I do?” Hardcase asked, her voice carrying a hard edge.

“Your compass still work?” Perry asked, scanning the surroundings and locating the distant ocean, orienting himself.

“Yes!”

“We cut the monster’s belly on it’s east side. Cut your way out of the stomach and head east, bring as many people out alive as you can, and be prepared to be greeted by heavy assault when you clear the stomach. You might be able to take shelter under the claws. I’ll try and flank them when you emerge and give you time to head for the train.”

“Roger,” Hardcase said as Perry flew up and away.

Every tiny blue light was the jets of a single replicator descending upon the train from above. Each one of them was about twenty feet tall, easily capable of pasting a human sans weaponry, with bunker-shaped heads where they housed their sensory parts.

They were identical to the one he’d fought on the beach.

Except they weren’t missing most of their limbs and critically low on battery.

They were armed.

And there were at least fifty of them.

Shhhhit. God, I hope the Mk. 4 can handle this.

MDisintegrate.EXE

Perry waited until they started firing at Hardcase emerging from the anteater’s stomach.

He lined up a shot and took one down by ashing it’s center mass.

The rest of the replicators scattered with inhuman speed, dodging Perry’s next two shots.

Their attention shifted to Perry’s distant form instantly, and Perry was swatted out of the sky like a gnat as a bullet the size of his head caught his torso and flung him a half a mile away from the train.

I need a way to deal with inertia pasting me inside my armor, Perry thought, coughing as he pulled himself out of the furrow he’d buried himself in, putting his jets on full to get back to the train. In heartbeats, rather than minutes.

“I’m out,” Hardcase said, “Heading for the train. Whatever you did got them to break off their assault. I’ve got at least a dozen with me.

“No problem,” Perry said, wincing as he ran his hand over the massive dent in his chest-plate.

“Shit, nevermind! They’re tearing my mech apart!” Hardcase shouted as the Replicators regrouped with the speed and coordination only they could boast of.

Damnit, Perry thought, putting on speed, tearing through the air to arrive only seconds later. He looked down and saw Hardcase and a dozen supers warding off fire from all directions.

Perry aimed an-

HP: 3

“Gah!” Perry’s brain caught up as he pried himself out of crumpled steel. He looked around and realized he was inside the train, and there was another massive dent on his armor, this time on his helmet. He’d been literally shot out of the air by the massive cannons of the dreadnaut.

So hard it nearly broke his brain.

Okay, so flying is a no-go.

Luckily he’d been propelled into the train.

What about hardcase!? Perry thought, prying himself out of the tortured steel and glancing up at the hole in the ceiling.

“We made it to car seven, heading for the armory!” Hardcase shouted over the comms “Heavy Metal made a tunnel for us to get there, but she’s exhausted and losing a lot of blood!”

“I’ll meet you there!” Heather said over the

Car seven? Perry thought, glancing up at the signage posted all around the sideways car.

I’m in number two.

Thus oriented, Perry began flying full-speed through the massive halls of the train.

Boom!There was an explosion that rocked the traincar around Perry’s flying form.

“Shit, they’re pouring out of the armory! Little ones the size of chihuahuas and about half as mean!” Heather said over the radio. “I’m backing up towards Jerry’s office!”

“Roger!” Hardcase shouted. Perry mentally changed his course.

A flash of blood-covered skin in front of Perry caused him to tumble out of the way before he pasted the other guy.

Perry whipped around and spotted Conductor Walthers pinned under a section of steel jutting out of the wall.

Melt.EXE

Perry liquified a narrow section of the steel and peeled the rest of it off the overweight conductor. The man’s leg and scalp were bleeding where they’d been damaged, and he moved with a limp.

“Paradox, right!?” the conductor shouted.

“Yessir!” Perry responded.

“Get me to car fourteen if you wanna live!” He shouted, grabbing the collar of Perry’s armor and shaking him a bit.

The armory was between them and car fourteen, and according to Heather, it was disgorging enemies, likely from some kind of intrusion missile targeting the room specifically.

A ghost of a plan formed.

“Yessir!” Perry said, slapping a Bargand’s Favor on the conductor’s receding hairline, where it mixed with the man’s blood.

Perry needed his human cargo to be a bit more…durable.