Chapter 149: Chapter 145

It was the first time the emergency call was used, calling me away from an administrative meeting with Gwen and Desdemona. After Eva’s interruption, I immediately spawned a teleport beacon and ported over to the designated waypoint. The comm bead I spawned and equipped was a bad idea. Hearing my young soldiers screaming and on the verge of panicking rattled me, even with the mental locks I put on myself.

 

Through time dilation I saw the troopers around me barely keeping their wits together as they held the tunnel entrance to some massive room beyond. Some were hugging the wall and shooting into the room, others dragging along comrades who had been impaled…not…melded somehow…with objects or even each other. The faces of the wounded were fixed in varying degrees of anguish. At least, those whose faces were clear to see. Blood stains led towards the teleport beacon, likely where some troopers had already teleported other casualties over to Ix.

 

Flashes of lightning-white light made the desperate scene look like it was playing out in stop-motion jerkiness. Only a small part of me registered the slowed-down voice of Sarah in the private comms trying to brief me.

 

My locked stats kept me from going insane or breaking down into hysterics, but that only allowed a cold anger to rise to the fore as I saw the faces of my most loyal followers in such despair. Perhaps it is irrational, but I felt very, very offended at the notion that someone or something had the audacity to hurt them. I’ve been with most of these kids since damned near the beginning, and have gotten used to their cheery smiles and utter faith in me.

 

Seeing them in pain, seeing them in tears… Someone would be paying for this.

 

A crack of lightning hit just in front of the entrance, and the console identified Edward and a few others being sent flying. I caught a glimpse of new codes from the lightning’s very brief appearance, and whatever the hell “EldritchDamType=VoidArc” is, I’m glad the Sardaukar armor’s protective glyphs managed to diffuse a huge chunk of it. I’m not going to bury any of the closest people I had to a family today if I can help it.

 

I reached out with remote pickup to arrest the troopers’ fall, deleting the new lines of debuff that afflicted them after the lightning strike. As I carefully levitating them to the safety of the teleport beacon, I began walking, eager to repay with interest the agony whatever threat it is caused my 1st Company. Sarah’s words were pieced together, and the cold anger increased when I heard that there were a few troopers trapped in the room beyond.

 

“How dare you.”

 

My feet sped up and I finally saw the eldritch threat. A floating ball of lightning rose from the multi-storey high room, ringed with console lines, some familiar, some not. I picked out a timer count down before another blast of lightning shot my way. Time dilation helped a bit, but it was mostly me spawning a cube of Tiberium in front of me that kept the bolt from hitting me. The cubic meter of green crystal glowed as it fully absorbed the energies, but otherwise didn’t gain the “MeldHex” line that the troopers did.

 

I spied a few other troopers on catwalks and at the bottom of the room. Still alive, thankfully, but I didn’t know how long that’d last.

 

Which means, this…thing needed to go, pronto. A gave its stats another glance to find a clue about what exactly I was dealing with. 

 

What the hell is a Jessup-Allande Anomaly?

 

Agh, nevermind. Priorities Sev, priorities.

 

I used remote pickup to hurl the Tiberium cube towards the so-called Anomaly, but the thing blinked out of the way, leaving a harsh thunderclap as it displaced the air. 

 

So it’s sentient enough to register threats? Fucking great.

 

Controlling the cube once more, I changed its trajectory and quickly spawned another cube just in time to block another lash of eldritch lightning. The sentient lightning blinked towards me, stray tendrils of energy arcing out to zap concrete and steel as it hovered above the catwalk just a few yards before me. It didn’t stay for long, as I sent the first cube towards it and forced it to blink some more, while I stuck to my second crystal construct for safety’s sake.

 

Streams of Tiberium shards shot out from the entrance behind me, as some troopers lent their firepower. They did diddly squat, and it took a short, time-dilated second of thought for me to figure out why. The shards were too small and going too fast, passing right through the thing before they could drain anything more than a fraction of a fraction of the eldritch energies. Like ice cubes traveling too fast through a wall of water to cool it down.

 

This was wasting time…

 

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A few tweaks in the console and I shattered the cubes, wreathing myself in a fog of powdered Tiberium while the explosion of the first cube grazed the Anomaly. A psychic shriek filled the air as the ball of lightning momentarily quivered in place before blinking to cleaner air space. 

 

I grinned at the behavior, and at the changes in its console stats. This time, I spawned more cubes, and sent them flying in the air before obliterating to create more Tiberium clouds. As an added measure, I also filled the tunnel entrance with the glittering green haze, to ensure that the Anomaly didn’t end up too close to the troopers.

 

More bolts were hurled at me, but the crystalline fog did its job in robbing the attacks of any eldritch power, rendering them into normal, mundane lightning arcs. It blinked out of the way of more explosions, but the living lightning was getting cornered as I cloud after crystalline cloud detonated in the air.

 

An attempt was made by the Jessup-Allande Anomaly to blink down the room, so I saturated the ground level with even more powdered Tiberium, stopping it from getting anywhere near the wounded troops. It was herded into a ceiling corner, shaking violently in its trapped place. Its console lines didn’t change, but their values were depleting. 

 

I had more pressing matters to attend to, so I quickly ended its existence. 

 

The Anomaly had nowhere to go as a line of Tiberium cubes were flung right at it, and it burst with a loud crackle and pop at the direct contact of three cubes flying into it. Its console lines vanished, signaling its demise. It wasted forty-six of my seconds, forty-six of my wounded troopers’ seconds.

 

I took a quick glance at the entrance to find most of the wounded already teleported to safety, so I jumped down to the bottom of the room to see to the remaining casualties.

 

Some were half-fused to machinery or concrete walls. Some had melded with each other at impossible angles. The console lines treated the merged victims as singular objects, possessing the full properties from both entities. For better or worse, the thick lingering cloud of Tiberium powder did nothing to affect the fusions. All were alive and apart from their clear agony, their vitals were not deteriorating too much. Some console changes ensured that they didn’t drop any further.

 

Spawning heavy-duty healing emitters and training them on the trapped victims, I dealt with the more complicated cases first. Those like Rebecca and Allie whose bodies were mostly fused to inanimate objects, I had to render unconscious so I could slowly peel and then quickly regrow their bodies, especially the important bits like brains and hearts. It was time consuming, but console tweaks kept the troopers stabilized. 

 

Then there were cases like Colin, whose face was melded with Gina’s arm. I have no idea how he still lived with a forearm in the middle of his skull, but after separating the arm, I went through the peel-and-heal process again, carving out chunks of forearm from his head and neck and letting the wound heal up immediately. His face returned, confused but whole, and then I moved on to the other cases like his. The trickiest case was the newbie Henry, who had his upper torso mostly melded with a pillar. The concrete-filled organs were still functioning, so I had to carve away the fused material layer by layer from the outside in, taking care that the organs regenerated properly.

 

By the time I was done with the serious cases, the other troopers had returned to help with the easier ones. Painkillers were administered before any fused parts were severed. Arms fused to the wall, torsos with catwalks running through the lower half, the back third of the head stuck to a desk… All were quickly separated to free the rest of the body, and the healing rays restored them to completion, thankfully free of any eldritch bullshit. 

 

The healed soldiers were sent out via teleport beacon for further observation and rest, and I ordered the rest of the troops back for decontamination and rest. I turned my attention to whatever this facility was supposed to be. Most of the environment was mundane, though the metal plate in the center of the floor was mildly tainted with supernatural energies, but it was the devices above it that were really saturated in eldritch stuff. 

 

Well, not so much now, with the fading Tiberium haze having drained most of the potency, but the lines on a stalactite-looking contraption made it clear that it was the catalyst for spawning something, while a radar-dish thingy had mutative properties and an array of metal tines were…transmitting sentience?

 

Wait, so the Anomaly had a human mind in it?

 

I turned to the terminal stacks connected to the device and frowned at the lines around it. 

 

“Imbue.Type=Possessed”

“Possessed.ID=C.Jessup”

“Possessed.Str=0.4472”

 

With a sigh, I got to my comms. “Eva, give me a beacon to an empty lab in Tleilax, then tell Madison to meet me there with a team as soon as she can.”

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