Ebenezer wrote:"I'm sorry" Ebenezer nodded to Yui, tears welling up in his eyes, "I thought I could come to the academy and everything would be great, but the reality couldn't be anything further from it."
Malcolm wrote:Desiree raises her hand. "How long did we have again? I heard less then an hour..."
Malcolm then raises a brow. "Then how the hell were we supposed to flee in the first place? Even if we had a working vehicle here, it would need to reach like half the speed of sound and maintain that for an hour. That's on a straight path, any hills, bumps and curves will slow you down, so it's even closer to the speed of sound."
"We have to try!" Denis clenched his fists bitterly, closing his eyes: "I don't care how hopeless it is! I'm taking the first car I see and start driving south, putting as many mountains between me and the Crystal as I can!" He pointed at you and the gathered crowd:
"And if you have any sense, you'll go with me! It sure as hell gives us a better chance of survival than outright rushing towards our doom!"
He stared, angrily and bitterly at the crowd. Harvie, Brax and Yui didn't move. Lily looked on the verge of tears but held her ground and clumsily clutched her rifle harder, using it as a ward.
Denis' eyes narrowed as he scowled: "Fine then!" he only took a handgun with him, as he angrily marched out of the armory, hiding his face behind the hazmat suits full-face gas mask.
Yui slowly exhaled, more to calm her own nerves, you thought. Then composed herself and released a small smile again:
"Alright. Lets get to work." she put on her own gas mask, then fastened her white-and-red fox mask, just over it. The masks long fox muzzle actually fit relatively seamlessly over the gas masks protruding air filter, couple with the hazmat suit, it made Yui seem like some sort of old demon from the Japanese folklore.
Harvie narrowed his eyes and looked at her sideways: "...why do you still have that? The Festival was yesterday"
"For intimidation." Yui said in confident monotone, checking her rifle.
"...the eye holes on that mask look real narrow, can you even see anything in that thing-" Harvie began skeptically.
"For intimidation!" Yui repeated again in monotone and marched out.
Buzzy wrote:Buzzy pulls an additional Vector from the wall and pulls the bolt back aims it, rests it on her hip and generally familiarizes herself with her firearm, what firing modes does this Vector have?
Upon closer examination, the Vector seems to have 3 firing modes, easily selected with a flick of a switch under your thumb:
- Single round,
- 3 round burst
- and Full-auto.
The clip is some sort of non-standard, extended variant, with 50 bullets in the clip.
The Vector has an invisible laser pointer, that can be seen in its reticle, but the word 'Invisible' has a different meaning, when it comes to Eishi and their Blacklight spells.
Buzzy wrote:She dips back into her mallet space and this time, you hear the distinct sounds of her fiddling with something big when she pulls out the M60. She holds the 10kg firearm to her hip, strapping it over her shoulder just like the vector for a moment as she gets intimate with this firearm as well. Checking its cover, pulling its bolt...
It seems the M60 also has an extended drum magazine, housing about 120 bullets.
"So many movie one-liners..." Braxton snickered, feeding a line of bullets into his Negev "So many one-liners I can make..."
"Ugh..." Lily resisted an urge to roll her eyes.
"Ehehehe." Braxton giggled.
Julie wrote:Desiree thinks. "... The portal they have? I mean, they won't let themselves die out here for this, would they?
"....No...... they wouldn't..." Yui fell into thought, as if realizing something: "...this is interesting... on the camera feeds, the enemy was clearly setting up barricades and a defensive perimeter, as far as 500 meters away from the portal. Its not something the can abandon quickly or instantly."
She looked up at you: "It makes me think, they intend to stay at their post, on the perimeter, when the Pentagram activates. And since the Pentagram will cover the entire globe... they will be inevitably caught in its effect... that means..."
"...its not a simple destructive spell." Harvie finished, his expression growing dark.
Yui nodded "Its just a hypothesis but..." the girl looked down, her voice coming off muffled through the mask: "...I think its something else."
"...not really keen on finding out what that is." Harvie shivered "...those monsters killed 4 million people, just to secure a foothold. Whatever their Pentagram does, its not gonna be for our benefit."
Malcolm wrote:"Come to think of it... Why did they destroy this place for a foothold? It's very far north, so the blast will have to trave the entire planet to reach the south. Bring it out in a uncharted location nearf the equator, and you have free reign. Heck, most people here died with the belief the eishi are our allies, bring this thing in as a 'new long distance blast' to kill Chimaera, we wouldn't ask a thing. We'd even gather closer, to see this thing at work."
"There's only one Portal on Kepler, that links to the Eishi homeworld." Yui began "Its right here in Sideris. They couldn't have done this anywhere else."
The girl shifted her weight, trying to adjust to the hazard suit:
"Someone on the Eishi homeworld specifically requested that our most high-ranking military officials gathered in Sideris today," Yui said stiffly, you could hear the bitter frustration in her voice, regarding the situation:
"Then, our leaders were all killed in the initial blast... at least, the leaders of our Northern Command Post. It ensured confusion in the chain of command... and the initial explosion wiped out any military forces that could respond to this crysis in time." Yui looked at her palms.
"...then, they brought in a Mana Crystal... housing roughly 1 million Mana." she looked at you: "Its a ticking time-bomb, in in of itself. Its a WMD.
No one, in their right mind, would ever allow an unstable, unpredictable Artifact like that, to be dragged across our globe. Certainly, nobody would allow it to be portaled into Sideris, a densely populated city.
And I suspect no one would allow a Category 6 Pentagram to be openly and officially painted anywhere on our globe, without at least someone sneaking a peek at it, and discerning what it does."
The girl bitterly looked at the floor "Pentagrams of this size, take weeks to prepare in advance, maybe months..." her fists clutched:
"...there were traitors in our midst... traitors in the Academy... Someone knew...
Someone drew this giant Pentagram, in secret, around Sideris, without anyone finding out... the only ones who knew - were the ones involved."
She took hold of the birdge of her nose, or, rather, the fox' muzzle of her mask:
"There were traitors in the Academy. Probably humans and Eishi alike... unbelievable." She quietly swore under her breath.
"Alright, lets not waste any more time," Braxton emitted an eerie crack from his neck, tilting it at a weird angle "Its a bit of a hike back to school, we should jog while we have the stamina." With that, he secured his weapon better in his arm and broke down a sprint down the hall.
Gathering in front of the bunkers main blast doors, sent a chill down your spine. An eerie red substance had seeped in, collected at the fissure between the double doors and on the floor before it. The viscous liquid bubbled and faintly hissed, when you tried listening to it, and the remains of Christabels dissolved pencil still lingered on the floor.
"We're not gonna get flooded with this goo, when we open the doors, right?" Brax swallowed.
"What if-... what if we're caved in, on the other side!" Lily called, panic seeping into her voice.
"One way to find out." Yui pulled a heavy lever with both hands, visibly straining her muscles, and you heard the heavy grinding of machines in the walls, as the blast doors shook and loudly parted, screeching against the floor.
On the other side, was darkness.
It took your eyes a few moments to adjust, before you realized it was just night-time on the other side. An artificial night. The clock on your data-pad clearly read 7:21 in the morning, but the ash from the explosion was so thick and so heavy over the sky, it completely blocked out the sun, plunging the outskirts in complete darkness. Only the red substance faintly glowed on the floor.
It covered the entire cave that led out of the bunker, and as you took your first steps on it, the substance crunched under your feet, as if you were walking through super heated glass shards, that were rapidly cooling.
A small piece of the substance fell from the ceiling and onto Braxtons strap that held his rifle over his shoulder. The strap hissed and dissolved in seconds, prompting Braxton to swear, just barely catching his gun as the strap fell on the floor, bubbled and melted.
"Son of a bitch." The boy's voice came out as a loud echo through his hazmat suits mask.
"Stick to wireless communication from now on." Yui's soft voice quietly echoed in your Data-pads earpiece "We can remained more silent this way."
You haven't heard her voice through her mask at all, it seems she was whispering but she came through clearly through your earpiece.
Stepping out of the cave, a truly horrid sight came into view. The once green hills have been scorched black, turned to blast lands of hard rock and ash, with occasional rivers of bubbling red flowing through here and there. The skies were dark, where a heavy layer of clouds hung low, oppressively above you. And in the distance, the graveyard of Sideris stood, the black and gray skeletons of its skyscrapers crumbling and cracked, standing in defiance, as a testament to the millions of lives that were snuffed out in seconds.
"You're crazy!" Denis called in anger, bewilderment and desperation, as you began pilling out of the cave and shuffling toward the ruins "You're all insane!!!" He screamed, waiting for someone to stop and come with him, but Yui didn't look in his direction.
"You are going to die!!! Don't you realize that!?" Denis shrieked. There was no reaction from Yui. Nor Harvie, nor Vasya, who just stared and shook his head at Denis in disapproval, before moving away.
"Fine then!!!" Denis hysterically shrieked, you heard a trace of tears in his voice "Ebenezer come on, we're getting the fuck out of here." The boy said and broke into a mad sprint down south. He never looked back.
Your eyes were directed forward, toward your old school, a school you barely had a chance to call home.
The Kryugers Academy fared no better than Sideris. Sprinting toward the castle for 10 minutes straight, filled you with dread and anxiety. Gone were the marvelous statues, the court-yards, the farmlands and training grounds. They have all melted into a black metal sludge, indistinguishable from one another. But here and there, the remains of a skeleton were visible on the ground, its bones completely red, as it laid in a puddle of a viscous, scarlet and bubbling liquid, its bones too small to belong to an adult. Only the husks of Sakura trees remained, petrified, glassed, blackened, they stood in silent vigil over the carnage.
The windows in the castle were shattered, sevetal walls and towers collapsed. The majestic front doors were blown in. As you ascended the steps to it and went through the front door, a scene of unspeakable evil came before your eyes.
Several hundred students were in the main lobby, when the blast hit. Their charred and reddened skeketons were now huddled against the walls in a disfigured heap, bubbling inside the acidic red substance, and even the hazmat suits air filters did little, to mask the stench of death and decomposing, charred flesh.
Lily turned away, doubling over, suppressing a vomitting reflex as her body was rocked by silent sobbing. Yui watched the ashen halls and the carnage in silence. With her standing perfectly still, her face hidden under the hazmat suit and the fox mask, it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. You could only imagine what was going through her head.
As an orphan, she practically grew up here. The Academy was her home, in more ways than one. Its students, its faculty of professors, her family. To have it taken away so fast, and so violently, the halls of her school desecrated in such a profound way.
Yui watched in silence, taking in everything, every crack in the wall, every skeleton, every gruesome detail, seemingly comitting it to memory, before the girl sighed, turned, and walked off into an adjacent hallway.
Its ancient walls gray, the rugs and wood charred, the historical paintings reduced to cinders inside their gilded frames.
The entrance to the Forbidden Section laid directly ahead. Its door conspicuously undamaged. Not even singed or ashen. It seems Yui's warning about it being warded off with powerful magic was true.
Walking up to it just like last time, the girl placed her palm on the terminal that scanned both her DNA and military authorization. The screen beeped and lit up green, displaying an access log:
"Welcome. Corporal. Katsura. Yui." A synthetic female voice called from the ceiling, but Yui frowned at the terminal.
"Wait!" She violently whipped her Tar-21 over her shoulder and aimed it at the door, hugging the wall. "Someone's been here!"
"What?" Vasily called, falling in behind her and taking hold of his Vector "Someone from the faculty?"
"Impossible." Yui tilted her head at the terminal "the log says, the Forbidden Section was accessed 15 minutes ago... that's after the explosion decimated the school."
The door slid up into the ceiling and Yui stormed in, aiming down sights and scanning every inch of the corridor beyond. As you rush inside, you soon spot a lone figure, sprawled on the floor. Her legs and a large part of her clothes were stained scarlet red, covered in that vicious red substance. Half of her face was covered in it, and so was her hair.
You didn't immediately understand how this person hasn't dissolved in this acid yet, until you noticed the faint shimmer around her and realized it was an injured Eishi. Her brown hair was turning a horrid red, as the acid seeped into it. Her flowery yukata began seeming eerily familiar, when the figure cough, a raspy, labored breath escaping her cracked, dry lips and Yui's gun fell down from her arms, left to dangle on its strap and the girl yelled in horror:
"POLLY!!!"
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