Edcrab
Veteran Incompetent
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End of the last chapter! Now all that remains is the epilogue :O Hope it'll live up to people's expectations...
“What is it?” Nesthilius stared at the display. Their scanners hadn’t picked that up in the preliminary examination!
One of his generals waved a hand helplessly. “Some kind of Synth, we think-”
“Have the Zealot kill it! We can’t afford to stay in orbit any longer!”
This was true- the Arcadimaarians expressed little interest in their foes, but their oracular methods had divined an approaching threat- no doubt some of the monstrously huge, vacuum-dwelling Synth that had claimed so many spacecraft. They might have to leave at a moment’s notice.
The general watched events unfold, and he swallowed. “The Combine unit appears to be highly resilient, lord… perhaps if we dispatched the Domarian fir-”
“Shut up and do as I say!”
Quarir was launched into the air- he eventually hit a building, sliding down to the ground in an ungraceful heap of pained limbs. The Zealot was saving him for later…
An amplifier gauntlet- the fingers fiery with psionic projections- slashed across Forty’s faceplate.
This had no effect- undaunted, the Zealot let loose a horrific combination of blows, striking his attacker repeatedly.
Apparently unharmed, Forty lazily drew his fist back and punched the Arcadimaarian so hard that he bounced off the ground.
Pyotr- contriving to act both hurriedly and stealthily- helped Nuri up. “It appears that the Fortieth shares the resistances of his Synth relatives. Make haste, Nuri Daekkler- regardless of the identity of this conflict’s victor, they will come after us.”
She could only nod. While Xenians and the servants of the Combine shrugged off telepathic intrusion, she couldn’t- her head throbbed, and she felt both physically and emotionally fatigued.
With surprising agility for one wearing so many robes and so much armour, the Zealot regained his footing. He drew a hand back a hurled an energy bolt at the Combine’s commando- Forty barely flinched.
Supporting the human, Pyotr led Nuri towards the rubble where Quarir lay. He did not respond to gentle prodding, so Nuri actively kicked the prone Domarian in her frustration.
With a grunt of exertion, the Arc smashed his lightning-white palm into the chitinous breastplate. It cracked, and a strangely mournful sound erupted from the demi-Synth.
“Hah!” The Arcadimaarian sneered, “Nothing can hope to face m-”
Forty hit him in the face. “Your desire to engage in conversation is not mutual.”
The Zealot’s lip was split, his nose pulped, his face cracked like china. Squinting in concentration, the assassin brought light creeping across his shattered visage- and when it faded, he was whole again.
“Uh, this might not be as one-sided as we thought,” Nuri swallowed. She slapped Quarir’s cheek repeatedly, urgently trying to revive him.
The Zealot had poise and finesse- while Forty was distinctly mechanical, his joints clicking and scraping as he parried and riposted. But the impression was that the Arcadimaarian was inefficient- despite moving slower, the Benefited human managed to block every blow and still find time to respond.
Forty managed to catch the Arc’s fist- twisting it cruelly, the Elite hurled the Zealot over his shoulder. Before they’d even hit the ground, Forty’s hand had removed his pulse cannon from his back and was blazing at the plummeting enemy with both barrels. The vast ammunition chains trailing from the weapon clicked through at speed- a solid wall of ballistic obliteration screamed away from Forty.
The Zealot managed to land on his feet- hands raised protectively, the Arc prepared to deflect the volley.
“If Quarir Nalore does not awaken,” Pyotr said, “we will have to carry him.”
Something exploded with a harsh snap- the Vortigaunt looked at the battle, and saw that the Elite’s pulse weapon had been broken in half. The Zealot’s psychic projectiles had finally found their mark.
Expending so much latent psionic energy that even Pyotr felt its effects, the Zealot formed both hands into a cup and smote Forty with a blinding, thunderous discharge.
Forty staggered- his shoulder was smoking, and a tiny crack had appeared in his lone viewing lens.
“And so it ends!”
The Zealot leapt, gauntlets alight.
“I AM PERFECTI-!”
But Forty caught him, cutting him short, picking him out of the air.
Eye aglow, the Elite placed both his hands on the side of his adversary’s head- and squeezed, holding him at arm’s length.
The Zealot shrieked in agony- there were cracking noises, and the cries rose to a womanish pitch.
Nuri felt her insides lurch. Blood was already flowing from between Forty’s fingers.
With a twisted, inhuman cry of triumph, Forty killed his adversary- the Zealot’s head finally caved in with a wet, blubbery pop.
Fumes rising from his torso section, Forty’s shoulders heaved in harmony with an inner rhythm that had little to do with his breathing. Hands awash in gore, the Elite turned.
“You,” Forty breathed. “You are all that remain!”
He took a step forward-
-and vanished, swallowed by a beam of light that seemed to leap from the ground and into the sky.
Quarir blinked groggily. “Tha’ was matter tran’ferer,” he slurred sleepily.
Nuri relaxed on seeing he was awake. “You mean… you mean like a teleporter?”
“Indeed,” Pyotr looked to the heavens. “However, it appears that Arcadimaarian acquisition devices lack the accuracy of Combine teleporters.”
Charlie- mind burning with questions and psychic collateral- screamed at them from the pile of debris he had been thrown atop of. They couldn’t hear him- there was too much noise.
A Strider- its arrival long overdue- smashed a wall aside, and its distortion cannon consumed the three survivors in reality-warping oblivion.
Project Forty…
Forty’s head snapped upward, his lone eye glowing a deep red.
“Sir?”
You are to be decommissioned.
“But why? I am the greatest combatant humanity could ever produce!”
That much is true- but you are volatile, the Advisor continued. Uncontrollable. Dismissive of instruction.
“I have achieved so much!” Forty was furious at his masters, even as he worshipped everything they stood for. “And I can do so much more! I shall tear this ship apart from the inside! Kill everything within!”
You intend to demolish this craft alone? Eliminate all two-thousand personnel onboard? Despite lacking your pulse cannon?
“You know I can do it!”
Yes- we believe you have a great enough capacity for violence. Very well- we accept your proposal.
“Anything for the greater glory of the Universal Union.” Forty bowed.
We will take the death of the ACS Glorious as proof of your willingness to serve. Go forth for the betterment of us all.
“Why would they ask us to escort the Zealot?”
“Perhaps,” the guard joked- as was his right, as a higher-privileged assignee- “command expects him to express displeasure at failing his mission.”
There were laughs- and they might even have been tinged with humour, but they were to please the senior officer that made the remark, as was expected of them.
The phase bay doors opened. They were impenetrable- two-inch platanicrete with a magnetic seal that could resist a megaton of pressure- but they’d opened.
Forty stood in the doorway. He stomped forwards, and his hands grasped the necks of the closest soldiers- he twisted them simultaneously, hurling their broken corpses aside in a perfectly symmetrical double murder.
The officer knew, as the fusion pulses of his men’s rifles pattered harmlessly off the monstrosity’s armoured hide, that he was already dead.
Forty ran towards them, revelling in doing what he was made to do.
“We can’t stop it!”
The tactics analyser- for the first time in its long service- was displaying the interior of the ship.
“It plows through everything in its path…” the general stared, disbelievingly, at the delicate crystal display. Every squadron, every unit, fell before the Combine killing machine they’d mistakenly beamed aboard.
“Send the Guardians,” Nesthilius ordered, but his general’s cowardice was contagious. “They are machines- they will resist it, it is unarmed-”
“We did! It punched through their torsos and crushed their hearts! Nothing damages it! It cannot be stopped!”
Nesthilius looked to the command balcony- the usually sedate tier was a hive of panicking machinists. “Open the airlocks,” he bellowed, “disconnect portions of the ship- I don’t care about losses, just keep it away from here!”
“The controls aren’t responding, lord! Everything’s dead!”
“And soon, you will be.”
The grand oracular- the vast screen that could cover the observation window on command- flared into life. On it, the distinctive avatar of the Traitor Mainframe glowed, looking down on them all, its eye at the centre of a swirling vortex of angular shapes.
“I have crippled your systems,” Maintonon informed them. “The Guardians will ignore further commands, the defence fields will remain inactive and your engines will not start.”
“How can you…?”
“You made the mistake of angering three factions- and I do not count Earth among them. The Combine detected your transmission- but its obsession with your presence- and that of another entity- allowed my signal to utilise their own transmitters without impediment. I drowned your scanners with ghosts- there is no impending Combine threat, but your haste to retreat brought one aboard. And now you will die at the hands of their finest invention.”
Nesthilius stared. People screamed, controls flashed golden- the Sunspear was in chaos. On the tactics analyzer, the Combine commando’s blip moved at a constant speed, pausing only to obliterate those that came too close.
“The Combine sees you as a great threat. You followed my signal in your arrogance, in your blind desire to impede me- and it is has been your undoing. I and my ally have had to do surprisingly little. You, gentlemen, were my malign contingency.”
Maintonon terminated the connection.
Behind Nesthilius’s fear-stricken form, the main blast door began to buckle under a sustained assault.
In front of it, a man adjusted his tie, smiled, and walked into nothingness.
“What is it?” Nesthilius stared at the display. Their scanners hadn’t picked that up in the preliminary examination!
One of his generals waved a hand helplessly. “Some kind of Synth, we think-”
“Have the Zealot kill it! We can’t afford to stay in orbit any longer!”
This was true- the Arcadimaarians expressed little interest in their foes, but their oracular methods had divined an approaching threat- no doubt some of the monstrously huge, vacuum-dwelling Synth that had claimed so many spacecraft. They might have to leave at a moment’s notice.
The general watched events unfold, and he swallowed. “The Combine unit appears to be highly resilient, lord… perhaps if we dispatched the Domarian fir-”
“Shut up and do as I say!”
---
Quarir was launched into the air- he eventually hit a building, sliding down to the ground in an ungraceful heap of pained limbs. The Zealot was saving him for later…
An amplifier gauntlet- the fingers fiery with psionic projections- slashed across Forty’s faceplate.
This had no effect- undaunted, the Zealot let loose a horrific combination of blows, striking his attacker repeatedly.
Apparently unharmed, Forty lazily drew his fist back and punched the Arcadimaarian so hard that he bounced off the ground.
Pyotr- contriving to act both hurriedly and stealthily- helped Nuri up. “It appears that the Fortieth shares the resistances of his Synth relatives. Make haste, Nuri Daekkler- regardless of the identity of this conflict’s victor, they will come after us.”
She could only nod. While Xenians and the servants of the Combine shrugged off telepathic intrusion, she couldn’t- her head throbbed, and she felt both physically and emotionally fatigued.
With surprising agility for one wearing so many robes and so much armour, the Zealot regained his footing. He drew a hand back a hurled an energy bolt at the Combine’s commando- Forty barely flinched.
Supporting the human, Pyotr led Nuri towards the rubble where Quarir lay. He did not respond to gentle prodding, so Nuri actively kicked the prone Domarian in her frustration.
With a grunt of exertion, the Arc smashed his lightning-white palm into the chitinous breastplate. It cracked, and a strangely mournful sound erupted from the demi-Synth.
“Hah!” The Arcadimaarian sneered, “Nothing can hope to face m-”
Forty hit him in the face. “Your desire to engage in conversation is not mutual.”
The Zealot’s lip was split, his nose pulped, his face cracked like china. Squinting in concentration, the assassin brought light creeping across his shattered visage- and when it faded, he was whole again.
“Uh, this might not be as one-sided as we thought,” Nuri swallowed. She slapped Quarir’s cheek repeatedly, urgently trying to revive him.
The Zealot had poise and finesse- while Forty was distinctly mechanical, his joints clicking and scraping as he parried and riposted. But the impression was that the Arcadimaarian was inefficient- despite moving slower, the Benefited human managed to block every blow and still find time to respond.
Forty managed to catch the Arc’s fist- twisting it cruelly, the Elite hurled the Zealot over his shoulder. Before they’d even hit the ground, Forty’s hand had removed his pulse cannon from his back and was blazing at the plummeting enemy with both barrels. The vast ammunition chains trailing from the weapon clicked through at speed- a solid wall of ballistic obliteration screamed away from Forty.
The Zealot managed to land on his feet- hands raised protectively, the Arc prepared to deflect the volley.
“If Quarir Nalore does not awaken,” Pyotr said, “we will have to carry him.”
Something exploded with a harsh snap- the Vortigaunt looked at the battle, and saw that the Elite’s pulse weapon had been broken in half. The Zealot’s psychic projectiles had finally found their mark.
Expending so much latent psionic energy that even Pyotr felt its effects, the Zealot formed both hands into a cup and smote Forty with a blinding, thunderous discharge.
Forty staggered- his shoulder was smoking, and a tiny crack had appeared in his lone viewing lens.
“And so it ends!”
The Zealot leapt, gauntlets alight.
“I AM PERFECTI-!”
But Forty caught him, cutting him short, picking him out of the air.
Eye aglow, the Elite placed both his hands on the side of his adversary’s head- and squeezed, holding him at arm’s length.
The Zealot shrieked in agony- there were cracking noises, and the cries rose to a womanish pitch.
Nuri felt her insides lurch. Blood was already flowing from between Forty’s fingers.
With a twisted, inhuman cry of triumph, Forty killed his adversary- the Zealot’s head finally caved in with a wet, blubbery pop.
Fumes rising from his torso section, Forty’s shoulders heaved in harmony with an inner rhythm that had little to do with his breathing. Hands awash in gore, the Elite turned.
“You,” Forty breathed. “You are all that remain!”
He took a step forward-
-and vanished, swallowed by a beam of light that seemed to leap from the ground and into the sky.
Quarir blinked groggily. “Tha’ was matter tran’ferer,” he slurred sleepily.
Nuri relaxed on seeing he was awake. “You mean… you mean like a teleporter?”
“Indeed,” Pyotr looked to the heavens. “However, it appears that Arcadimaarian acquisition devices lack the accuracy of Combine teleporters.”
Charlie- mind burning with questions and psychic collateral- screamed at them from the pile of debris he had been thrown atop of. They couldn’t hear him- there was too much noise.
A Strider- its arrival long overdue- smashed a wall aside, and its distortion cannon consumed the three survivors in reality-warping oblivion.
---
Project Forty…
Forty’s head snapped upward, his lone eye glowing a deep red.
“Sir?”
You are to be decommissioned.
“But why? I am the greatest combatant humanity could ever produce!”
That much is true- but you are volatile, the Advisor continued. Uncontrollable. Dismissive of instruction.
“I have achieved so much!” Forty was furious at his masters, even as he worshipped everything they stood for. “And I can do so much more! I shall tear this ship apart from the inside! Kill everything within!”
You intend to demolish this craft alone? Eliminate all two-thousand personnel onboard? Despite lacking your pulse cannon?
“You know I can do it!”
Yes- we believe you have a great enough capacity for violence. Very well- we accept your proposal.
“Anything for the greater glory of the Universal Union.” Forty bowed.
We will take the death of the ACS Glorious as proof of your willingness to serve. Go forth for the betterment of us all.
---
“Why would they ask us to escort the Zealot?”
“Perhaps,” the guard joked- as was his right, as a higher-privileged assignee- “command expects him to express displeasure at failing his mission.”
There were laughs- and they might even have been tinged with humour, but they were to please the senior officer that made the remark, as was expected of them.
The phase bay doors opened. They were impenetrable- two-inch platanicrete with a magnetic seal that could resist a megaton of pressure- but they’d opened.
Forty stood in the doorway. He stomped forwards, and his hands grasped the necks of the closest soldiers- he twisted them simultaneously, hurling their broken corpses aside in a perfectly symmetrical double murder.
The officer knew, as the fusion pulses of his men’s rifles pattered harmlessly off the monstrosity’s armoured hide, that he was already dead.
Forty ran towards them, revelling in doing what he was made to do.
---
“We can’t stop it!”
The tactics analyser- for the first time in its long service- was displaying the interior of the ship.
“It plows through everything in its path…” the general stared, disbelievingly, at the delicate crystal display. Every squadron, every unit, fell before the Combine killing machine they’d mistakenly beamed aboard.
“Send the Guardians,” Nesthilius ordered, but his general’s cowardice was contagious. “They are machines- they will resist it, it is unarmed-”
“We did! It punched through their torsos and crushed their hearts! Nothing damages it! It cannot be stopped!”
Nesthilius looked to the command balcony- the usually sedate tier was a hive of panicking machinists. “Open the airlocks,” he bellowed, “disconnect portions of the ship- I don’t care about losses, just keep it away from here!”
“The controls aren’t responding, lord! Everything’s dead!”
“And soon, you will be.”
The grand oracular- the vast screen that could cover the observation window on command- flared into life. On it, the distinctive avatar of the Traitor Mainframe glowed, looking down on them all, its eye at the centre of a swirling vortex of angular shapes.
“I have crippled your systems,” Maintonon informed them. “The Guardians will ignore further commands, the defence fields will remain inactive and your engines will not start.”
“How can you…?”
“You made the mistake of angering three factions- and I do not count Earth among them. The Combine detected your transmission- but its obsession with your presence- and that of another entity- allowed my signal to utilise their own transmitters without impediment. I drowned your scanners with ghosts- there is no impending Combine threat, but your haste to retreat brought one aboard. And now you will die at the hands of their finest invention.”
Nesthilius stared. People screamed, controls flashed golden- the Sunspear was in chaos. On the tactics analyzer, the Combine commando’s blip moved at a constant speed, pausing only to obliterate those that came too close.
“The Combine sees you as a great threat. You followed my signal in your arrogance, in your blind desire to impede me- and it is has been your undoing. I and my ally have had to do surprisingly little. You, gentlemen, were my malign contingency.”
Maintonon terminated the connection.
Behind Nesthilius’s fear-stricken form, the main blast door began to buckle under a sustained assault.
In front of it, a man adjusted his tie, smiled, and walked into nothingness.
