Project Divinity

Chapter 19: Big Damn Heroes

The first Abigail noticed that something was wrong was when she felt the unmistakable sensation of an attack striking her Symphonic Sanctuary. Her shield being hit didn't hurt Abigail but she could tell whenever something struck it. But her defensive barrier being hit wasn't what concerned Abigail. It was where that attack had come from. It had been a gunshot and it had come from behind her.

When she turned around to see who had taken a shot at her the song she'd been singing died in her throat, instantly weakening everyone around her, and she stared in horror at the camp soldiers. Red haze was curling around them, their pupils were dilated far enough that their irises were invisible and drool was leaking out of their mouths. They were slumped forward and twitching like mad but the grips on their automatic rifles were firm enough.

“Don't shoot!” she called out, aimed both at the mad soldiers and at her fellow cadets. They couldn't just hurt these people. They were only being controlled by this monster. They had to be disabled, not killed.

Abigail took a deep breath and readied a space spell. It was a new kind of magic to her and she'd only used it a little so far but just like any other magic she'd bought it felt right to use. Even so, space magic was far more abstract than light and fire and so it was more complicated to accomplish anything of note with it. She'd used it to teleport some thralls into Elaine's fire tornado before and that had worked well enough but the only reason she'd dared to use that had been because it had been an offensive spell. She wouldn't have dared to use it to teleport allies for fear of accidentally forgetting to take part of them along for the ride. On the thralls, however, that hadn't been a concern. If she'd fragmented them or scrambled their composition she wouldn't have shed a tear. These people in front of her, however, were still alive, still human, and she didn't dare to teleport them far away. So instead she tried to work with gravity. She increased the gravity in the area around the attackers, exerting more and more force on their bodies until they were forced down to the ground, the red haze failing to keep them upright.

This was good enough to neutralize them but it wasn't a solution. Unlike the thralls the haze didn't coil tightly enough around these soldiers to yank them this way and that but the corruption had still seeped deep enough that they were breaking their own bones trying to fight against the pressure holding them down. She needed to do something, needed to get rid of that red haze. She'd seen powerful magic burning away the haze but she couldn't very well set these people on fire. It would free them of the haze, certainly, but it would also kill them. Of course there was one party member who had a skill capable of dispelling the haze without endangering the people controlled by it but she was on her own mission currently and the skill that allowed it was way too high level for Abigail to borrow, if she even could borrow skills over that kind of distance.

And so she did her best holding them down, exerting just enough pressure that they couldn't rise but weren't being crushed either. She knew she wasn't much help to the front line fighters this way but that couldn't be helped. This was just as important.

But focused as she was she'd forgotten that stopping her singing had also dropped her barrier. And as the red haze wafted around her and the others the weaker members of Project Divinity began twitching as well.

**

“They've stopped attacking the swarm,” Faye said.

The redhead was sitting inside her God-Machine, Flidais, named after the Irish goddess of the hunt whose soul powered the mech. Her and the other members of Project God-Machines were standing by, waiting for the Superhero Squad to deal with the cannon fodder so that they could swoop in and take the fight to that Red Rider, keenly observing the battlefield to wait for their opening.

Their leader – and Faye's boyfriend – Jacob hadn't liked staying out of it and leaving the fighting to another group but all of them had seen the logic behind it. The God-Machines were very susceptible to being bogged down by numbers and so having someone to take care of the swarm was extremely helpful.

Except, the back line of the Superhero Squad wasn't doing so hot. They were...

“They're being attacked by the camp soldiers?!” Elena asked, shock in her voice.

“It's that fucking red haze,” Jacob said. “It's twisting their minds.”

“Guess we should give them a hand, huh?” Faye said.

“What do you want to do?” Elena asked. “Kill those soldiers?”

“Of course not,” Faye replied. “But if they can't kill the swarm, we can.”

“I thought us being unable to deal with groups was the whole reason we're sitting on our asses here.”

But it wasn't Faye who answered Elena. It was Jacob, a wolfish smile showing on the girls' displays. “The swarm has never been this clustered before.”

Faye nodded. “Exactly. And I just so happen to have brought some cluster ammo.”

“Irish pyromaniac,” Elena muttered.

“Russian sourpuss,” Faye replied, their usual banter.

“Nobody likes cluster bombs,” Elena said, getting more serious. “A couple of them will fail to explode and the unexploded ones are dangerous.”

“Good thing I've got a fire witch in my party then, huh?”

Elena opened her mouth to give a heated retort, then closed it again when she realized Faye had a point. “That... should work, actually.”

“So, 'boss',” Faye asked, the emphasis on Jacob's title as sarcastic as she could manage, 'permission to wreck those fucking jellyfish?”

Jacob snorted. “Permission granted.”

And so Faye leveled her gun at the swarm of Yellow Wraiths surrounding the Red Rider. The gun looked like a very large rifle in the hands of the mech, which made it larger than the main cannon of a tank. The beast could be loaded with several different kinds of ammunition and, purely coincidentally, there was already a cluster missile loaded into it.

Elena hadn't been wrong. Cluster munition was risky. The small bombs that made up the interior of the missile were often duds and the unexploded ones could make the terrain hazardous for soldiers and civilians later down the line. Usually since the Invasion the risk was deemed acceptable as humanity was fighting a war for survival and unexploded bombs in the ground made great deterrents for monsters but in this case they couldn't afford to fire a carpet of what amounted to landmines. But Elena's power had turned out to be surprisingly compatible.

“Ready?” Faye asked as she set her sights on the swarm.

“Yeah,” Elena replied.

“On three then,” Faye said, then fired the missile.

It soared towards the swarm, flying for a hundred feet before exploding into a cluster of individual bombs.

“One,” Faye called out.

Momentum carried the cloud of death towards the enemies.

“Two.”

The bulk of the bombs was about to collide with the swarm of Yellow Wraiths but a few of them were already losing momentum and plummeting.

“Three!” Faye called out.

In response Elena threw an enormous ball of purple fire that caught up to the speeding cluster of bombs in an instant, superheating them and causing an enormous explosion. Dozens upon dozens of Yellow Wraiths were shredded so thoroughly that not even ectoplasm remained.

“All this magic mumbo-jumbo,” Jacob said as he watched the fireworks, “but in the end, a good old fucking gun still does the trick.”

**

One moment Abigail was using gravity magic to hold down the brainwashed soldiers and the next moment she went sprawling onto the ground, feeling as if a mule had kicked her in the side.

That had felt much worse than the last time a shot had hit her barrier. Why did it... oh. Abigail had completely forgotten that her barrier only worked while she was singing and that's she'd stopped doing just that, rattled by the shock of being attacked by her own comrades and too focused on the spell to keep singing. But even so, what had hit her?

She braced herself and looked up to see several members of Project Divinity looming over her, their helmets hiding their features but their posture just like that of the soldiers who had shot her.

She gave them a scan and realized with growing horror that they were all below Level 5, the weakest members of Project Divinity. Apparently what she and the other decently high-leveled cadets felt as an unpleasant sensation had been powerful enough to twist these people's minds.

She opened her mouth to sing a song, trying to give herself time to think, when one of the cadets snapped off a few quick shots at her face.

She flinched, she couldn't help it. The helmet blocked the shots, not even cracking, but the sight of three bullets coming at her face was enough to rattle her, and badly. Even worse, when the cadets had shot her it had rattled her enough to drop the gravity spell and the camp soldiers were getting up again, their eyes rolled up and drool leaking out of their mouths. They didn't look mindless anymore. Instead they looked... hungry, their lips twitching to reveal gritted teeth.

Abigail looked around, hoping other cadets would help her but all the ones who hadn't gone crazy were being attacked the same as her. Some were already bleeding. Either their armor had been weaker than Abigail's or they'd suffered more damage than Abigail had.

It was too much for her. She felt like she was sixteen again. Terrified, in pain, and overwhelmed and wanting everything to disappear. It was why her thighs looked the way they did. She'd marked herself and the thought she'd done it with reverberated in her thoughts again.

Never again.

Never again would she let anyone else take her agency away.

She wasn't that same little girl who knew nothing about the world. She wasn't a weak, fragile singer anymore. She had power, power to defend herself, power to get everyone to leave her the hell alone.

She knew the people around her were possessed or influenced or whatever. She knew she shouldn't hurt them, knew they were as much victims in this as anyone else. But rational Abigail had clocked out when those things had made her drop to the ground and forced her to look up at them. Rational Abigail wasn't around anymore.

Id Abigail was calling the shots and she knew only one thing:

Never. Again.

Fire magic began crackling around her, determined to burn everything around her to keep her safe.

**

“Professor, are you getting this?” Clio the mermaid asked, her voice coming out of the monitor to Stollos' left.

“Indeed,” he said, staring at his monitor. Even after managing to create a Lacrima he hadn't stopped monitoring the cadets for the necessary strength of will. And as such an intangible quality had a habit of rising in the face of adversity battles like the one at the Ohio camp were most interesting to him. And right now he could see the strength of will of one subject in particular soaring.

Abigail Peterson.

A strange young woman, he felt. She didn't seem like the kind of person to decide to become part of the military, even in the face of annihilation, but clearly he'd judged her wrong. She was determined, driven and shockingly competent. She was also standoffish, introverted and bitter, to the point of having difficulties opening up to her Awakener, but whatever was currently happening to her Stollos could tell it was having an effect.

“97% success rate,” he muttered. “I believe I may have an offer for her once this operation has wrapped up.”

“I fear I must object,” Rachel said, her voice coming out of that same monitor. “Her strength of will is enormous but her mental stability suffered a hit. There's no telling what might happen if she goes through with it.”

Stollos' lips pressed together in a thin line. “You're not wrong. We will see how her mental state shifts after this. It's possible that her stability recovers but her strength of will stays where it is. It's also possible that this is the first sign of a mental breakdown.”

“We should start checking on her,” Clio said.

“I'll do that,” Jeanne said, speaking up for the first time. “She trains on her own quite often. She won't think anything of it if I happen to show up at the training hall.”

Rachel nodded. “That's good. The worst thing we could do is make her feel she's under observation.”

“So, what is happening that made her react that way?” Stollos asked.

Clio took a deep breath and then gave a status report to a group of increasingly pale faces.

**

Before Abigail could let loose the inferno that would consume all those brainwashed fighters around her a sphere of dark magic crashed into the ground right next to her. The sphere unraveled every trace of red haze it came into contact with. And as the red haze disintegrated the cadets and soldiers that had been trapped by it relaxed, their eyes and posture going back to normal.

In shock by this turn of events Abigail dropped her spell and looked up to see Ophelia standing in the center of the dark sphere.

“Get inside!” the vampire called out to the disoriented soldiers. “You can't handle this red haze! You're not helping anyone out here so get inside!” The soldiers hesitated for a moment, clearly ashamed but too proud to do as they were told so Ophelia added: “That's an order!”

At that the soldiers turned as one and ran.

When she was certain they wouldn't be coming back Ophelia turned to the cadets who had succumbed to the effect. “You too. If you have EXP left to allocate, do that. Otherwise you're an even bigger liability than those guys.”

The cadets she'd spoken to, half a dozen members of Project Divinity, hung their heads in shame and trotted after the soldiers.

When they were all gone Ophelia looked at Abigail. “Are you alright? Are you wounded?”

Abigail stared for a moment longer, then got up and shook her head. “N-no, not injured.”

“Just shaken, then?” Ophelia asked.

Abigail nodded.

“Then take a few. We need your singing if we want to make it through this.”

“Y-yeah. And thanks for the save.”

“Always,” Ophelia said. “We're a team, remember?”