Project Divinity

Chapter 39: Break-In

Subject 259 had reached the rendezvous point within only a couple of minutes, their... vehicle... extremely good at the job of transporting its occupants quickly from place to place.

She contemplated the building, reduced to its bare bones during the months the Outsiders had been roaming the earth. Was it a good place to die? It would be vastly preferable to being kept alive indefinitely inside some sort of torture device by her master so it really didn't matter.

She felt an odd bit of melancholy. Life had not exactly been kind to her but having to find out what lay beyond the veil was still terrifying. According to her master only eternal torment awaited his creations, though she was certain he only said that to make horrible fates like 202's more palatable.

In this melancholy she looked at the cyborgs that would share this fate with her, both her slaves and her jailers. All three of them were mostly humanoid in shape, each seven feet tall and built like walking fridges. 259 wasn't particularly tall, only about 5'6”, so the creatures loomed over her.

Creatures, she thought of them as, because thinking of them as humans would have been too cruel. Oh, they had been humans at one point, vat-grown clones with no souls. They had no impetus, no drive to do anything but exist and vegetate, and 259 supposed that was a small mercy. Her master could have just as easily done this to kidnapped humans with lives and families.

But even if they were soulless automatons, what had been done to them was cruel nevertheless. They had been lobotomized, taking away whatever drive they might have had before, their brains partially scooped out and replaced with electronics, turning them into robots running on mostly fleshy hardware.

Their legs had been amputated, replaced wholesale with metal limbs that would never tire, never rot off from overuse. Their arms had been modified to hold enormous weapons, though the forms this took varied wildly.

One cyborg with implants in its head that made its face look like a metal skull carried a massive ranged weapon the size of a machine gun. It wasn't a machine gun, though. It was far more devastating than that.

Another had bionic enhancements, with a head like that of a praying mantis and two enormous chitin-covered claws for arms, each lined with dozens of spines it could launch if enemies didn't have the courtesy to step into melee range.

The third was the most concerning to 259. It wore a helmet reminiscent of Roman gladiators and one of its arms ended at the shoulder, having been replaced with a tangle of metal tendrils that looked a little like an upturned tree and undulated like a jellyfish. Half of these tendrils were meant for grasping, some lined with barbs, some with suckers, while the other half held probes and syringes inside, capable of injecting a variety of substances and extracting yet more. Its other arm was a robotic limb with hydraulics in its oversized hand, the better to hold a subject in place while the tendrils got to work on it.

It was a horrid thing and 259 woke up many a night terrified, imagining waking up in its grasp after having displeased their master one time too many. But no longer.

One way or another, it would end today.

**

“Carlton,” Elaine muttered, “what do they want in Carlton?”

Carlton was one of the many tiny little villages in New York State that was close to their base but to Elaine's knowledge it was so tiny and so close that it had been cleaned out pretty much right after operations for Project Divinity had begun. While her and her then much smaller squad had cleaned out Gaines, Marcus had taken care of Carlton. Marcus was a bit of a dumbass but he wouldn't have left any Outsiders alive here, so whoever was sneaking around their base and had led them here, they most likely weren't Outsiders.

“We have tracked its movements to a house a couple feet North of you,” Clio said into their communications channel.

“Oh goody,” Cassie said. “Landmines and tripwires, I'm guessing?”

“None that I can make out by scanning the area,” Clio said, “but be careful.”

“Time to show why I earn the big bucks I guess,” Elaine said as they reached the indicated house.

She drew earth magic to herself, the Winds flooding easily to her feeling of apprehension. She hadn't lied to Cassie, she was sure they would be fine, but they were still walking into what could be a fight. Worse, it could be a fight against complete unknowns who had managed to elude Jeanne and the mermaids. And who had very clearly led them here now.

But Elaine put all that aside and focused on her spell. She sent out tendrils of earth magic that crisscrossed the entire area around the house, then let them ripple and twist, providing enough disturbance for any landmine to blow up prematurely.

It was a trick she'd used in Afghanistan a couple times while her squad mates had been distracted. Nobody in her squad had ever even been injured by a mine and she took no small measure of pride in that. Of course, having used this spell many times before let Elaine appreciate just how much stronger her magic had become, the spell that used to take well over a minute to cast before now taking mere seconds.

But nothing happened. The earth clearly rippled before their eyes but no explosions shook the area, no suspicious metal canisters came up to the surface. She had merely ruined a perfectly good lawn.

“Maybe they just want to talk in peace,” Elaine said.

“All the way out here?” Cassie said dubiously.

“All we can do is try,” Elaine said and then stepped a bit closer to the building before calling out: “We are part of the US Army! If you want to come out and talk, we're willing to talk! If you've been holding out here, we can help you!”

No response.

“Summon your sword,” Elaine said quietly. “We're going in and I'm not sure how much use that rifle of yours is gonna be in tight quarters.”

“I haven't done any training for home invasions,” Cassie said. “So a crash course would be super useful.”

“For one thing, when the good guys do it we call it a MOUT, or a military operation in urban terrain,” Elaine said with a bit of amusement in her voice, then paused and added: “The British call it FISH and CHIPS, by the way.”

“Really?” Cassie said with a note of extreme skepticism. “That sounds like bullshit. Like, 'piss in those boots to soften the leather, dude', bullshit.”

“I'm dead serious,” Elaine said. “It's short for 'fighting in someone's house' and 'causing havoc in public spaces'.”

Cassie paused and nodded his head like a metronome, making her think he was tracing back the acronym in his head, then he said: “Wow that's stupid. So, how do you do a MOUT?”

“Extreme cliffs notes version, check all the fucking corners. Keep your arms close. And if you see a grenade, throw whatever magic you have at it to get it away as fast as possible. Basically, if you've played a shooter, you know what to do.”

“Got it,” Cassie said.

“Last chance to come out quietly,” Elaine called out and when there was no response yet again she summoned up a shield of hexagonal chips of crystal, then kicked the door down.

Nothing jumped out at them and no gunshots rang out, though she didn't consider the lack of immediate violence a good sign.

As they entered the dark building their helmets and CARDs adjusted to the darkness, brightening everything up so they could see. They were standing at the end of a long hallway that led to a large, open room. Along the hallway was only one door, off to the left, and Elaine, her shield at the ready, made her way to it. She entered it carefully, immediately checking out all four corners of the room, and only when she didn't find any enemies did she step into it far enough that Cassie could follow.

The place was run-down. Someone had clearly been using it as a shelter soon after the Invasion and that someone was just as clearly long gone. Elaine didn't know if they'd left the place or died defending it, but she was certain they were no longer around.

She heard a sound from up ahead and muttered: “Clio, anything showing up?”

But there was no response. Someone was jamming their systems. It sure explained how they'd been able to stay out of the mermaids' detection for so long.

Elaine drew Winds to herself and then sent out an air spell, feeling out the air inside the house, looking for any movement. Air wasn't the best magic for this but it was excellent at picking out slight air movements like, say, breathing. And she found it. Four signatures that were calm and relaxed and one that was very nearly hyperventilating. A hostage situation?

One of the breath signatures was moving towards the hallway they'd been traversing and she gave Cassie a quiet update on what she was sensing. Cassie, for his part, was drawing Winds to himself, presumably to cast a wall of ice in case it became necessary.

They stepped back out into the hallway and continued but before they could reach the end a hulking figure stepped into their way. Its head was a grotesque skull mask with glowing green eyes and it held an enormous gun in both hands, its arms impossibly muscular. More telling than any of that though was the sound the figure made when moving. The sound of those mechanical legs was unmistakable. They were dealing with Caulder's cyborgs.

The figure leveled its gun at them and both of them reacted at once. Elaine sent out the crystal chips that formed her barrier and Cassie created an ice wall in front of that in case this was another one of those Darklight guns.

They should have been safe. Except as the cyborg was about to pull the trigger Elaine got a horrible premonition and turned around to tackle Cassie to the ground.

A moment later an indescribable searing sound rang through the building and Elaine's back felt like she had a horrible sunburn. When she looked up bright light seared into her vision for a moment before her helmet and CARD reacted and lowered the light amplification. Elaine stared in horror at a circular hole in the wall behind them. Whatever that gun was, it had fired some sort of beam that hadn't been stopped at all by either of their spells.

She summoned half a dozen swords and sent them at the cyborg, hoping to either kill or at least distract it while she got out of this narrow hallway. She fled into the room they'd searched before, Cassie in tow.

“Any ideas?” he asked.

“Pepper it with swords until it stops moving,” she replied. “They're not that tough.”

“What about the others though?”

At just that moment an enormous figure crashed through the ceiling of their room to land in their midst, kicking up a massive dust cloud in the process.

A moment later a barrage of projectiles shot out of the cloud, directly towards Cassie. Elaine's crystal chips had been vaporized when the other cyborg had fired its gun so she sent out a few crystal swords to bat the projectiles away but before she could summon more swords to attack the figure a massive, chitinous claw reached out of the dust and almost snipped her head off. A second claw reached out but before it could reach her Cassie's sword rang through the air and sheared a massive chunk of the claw off.

“I got this one,” he said as he danced out of the way of the intact claw. “You take care of the laser cannon.”

“Got it,” she said and rushed to do just that.

Part of her mind had been racing with ideas on how to get past that cannon and most of them required her to be alone so not having Cassie along would make this far easier.

She rushed out of the room and saw the cyborg pulling the gun's trigger as soon as she was back in the hallway. Elaine sprinted full tilt at the cyborg as its gun gathered energy and right before it fired Elaine used the Aspect of Liminality she had gained from Ophelia to melt into the shadows.

While the cyborg had shot a hole into the wall that let the light in, the last third of the hallway was still in deep enough shadows to allow the skill to activate and she dove into those shadows, then popped back up behind the cyborg, summoned the sword she'd gained from Cassie and sliced the cyborg apart horizontally, the hands holding the gun and the torso toppling off in different directions, then sliced through the torso lengthwise to make sure it wouldn't be getting back up.

But before she could relax a cluster of metal tendrils wrapped around her from behind, syringes and drills and probes trying to pierce her armor, skin and flesh.