Chapter 887: The Hunters Become The Hunted [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 887: The Hunters Become The Hunted [II / Bonus Chapter]

In the command module, Carver Briggs was halfway through his fourth cup of coffee when the screens flickered.

He frowned and set the cup down.

“Kessler,” he said. “What’s that?”

The blond woman at the drone station was already tapping frantically at her controller.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice climbing as her fingers flew across the controller. “Something’s pulling at the cloak from the outside, boss… It looks like spatial interference, like someone’s peeling the whole dome apart with their bare hands… That’s not supposed to be possible… The seller swore this tech couldn’t be touched by anything on this planet short of the Council itself, and…”

She stopped and stared at her screen. “Boss, I’m losing contact with Drone Four and Seven. And…”

One by one, the little glowing icons on the screen blinked out.

Twelve drones became eight, then three, and then there were none at all.

Briggs snatched the radio off the console and jammed his thumb down on the switch.

“Perimeter, this is Command. Talk to me, what are you seeing out there…”

The only answer was a long hiss of static.

He tried the second channel, then the third, and every one of them gave him the same empty crackle, as if something out there had reached into the air itself and pinched it shut.

Kessler slapped the side of her monitor like a mechanic kicking a dead engine.

“Come on, come on… We paid more for this dome than the whole camp is worth, you stupid thing, so work!”

The screen stayed dark and Briggs stood up slowly.

Through the window of the command module, he watched the shimmering dome of refracted light that had kept them hidden for two months flicker, ripple and then simply fall away like a curtain dropping, leaving the camp bare and exposed under the open night sky and beyond it, the jungle had gone completely silent.

There were no frogs, no insects and no birds… nothing at all.

The young man with the buzz cut had gone pale.

“Boss,” he whispered. “Why’s it so quiet?”

Carver Briggs stared out at the dark, silent trees, and for the first time in two months, he felt something cold crawl slowly down the back of his neck.

The silence broke all at once.

CRRRRACK!

A tree the width of a house split down the middle on the eastern edge of the camp, and out of the wound in its trunk poured roots… hundreds of them, thick as a man’s arm and pale as bone, writhing across the flooded ground like a nest of waking serpents.

They hit the first row of shelters and went straight through the composite walls.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

The roots punched in through one side and out the other, coiled around the steel frames and squeezed, and the prefabricated shelters folded inward like crushed soda cans with men screaming inside them.

“CONTACT EAST!” someone howled. “CONTACT… what the hell is that?!”

On the eastern edge of the camp, a tall figure stepped out of the trees.

Lara walked through the dark completely naked, completely unhurried with her black locs swaying down her back and her staff blazing a furious brilliant green.

Every step she took, the ground beneath her bare feet bloomed with moss and vines that crawled outward toward the camp like a living tide, and above her, the branches of the canopy bent down toward the light of her staff as if bowing.

A soldier in grey armor swung his rifle toward her and opened fire.

BRAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

A wall of vines erupted out of the ground in front of Lara and swallowed every bullet with a wet crunch.

She didn’t even glance at it… The woman raised her staff and pointed it at the man, and the vines lunged.

They wrapped around his rifle, his arms and his legs and yanked him off his feet and hoisted him twenty feet into the air, where he dangled upside down from a branch, screaming with his rifle still hanging uselessly from one strap.

Lara looked up at him with her jade eyes cold and bored.

“You’re in my forest…” she said simply then she kept walking.

On the river side of the camp, two of the armored hover-trucks lurched off their pads with their engines screaming, swinging their roof-mounted turrets toward the water.

They never got to fire.

A sharp cold wind came howling off the surface of the river, and riding it, standing on a skimming disc of solid water that she’d pulled up from the river like a surfboard, was Captain Leona.

She crouched low with her cornrows whipping behind her with the quartz conduits on her leather bracers blazing blue, and she swept both arms forward.

’Tidecutter!’

Two blades of pressurized water burst from her palms and sheared through the air in glittering crescents, slicing clean through the turret barrels of both trucks.

SHHHRK!

The barrels clattered into the mud as the truck drivers stared at the stumps of their guns.

Leona hopped off her disc onto the hood of the first truck, landed in a light crouch and tapped on the windshield with one knuckle.

“Out… now!” she said.

The driver looked at her, looked at the stump of his turret, and slowly raised his hands.

The driver of the second truck had more courage and less sense.

He threw his door open, leaped down into the shallows and sprinted for the trees with his boots splashing through the flooded ground.

Leona didn’t even turn around.

She flicked two fingers over her shoulder, and a thin whip of river water lashed out across the shallows, coiled around his ankles and yanked.

SPLOOSH!

He went face-first into the mud and slid the rest of the way to the treeline on his stomach.

“Second wave’s going to be very bored tonight,” Leona remarked to nobody in particular. “I thought you guys were going to be stronger but then again, what did I expect from poachers like you?”

In the center of the camp, a heavy steel shipping container burst open with a hiss of hydraulics, and out stomped three bipedal combat frames, each one eight feet tall, armored in grey composite plating with a rotary cannon on one arm and a crackling mana-blade on the other.

Their visors glowed red as they swung toward the edge of the clearing.

Standing there were two women.

Maya Da Silva cracked her knuckles with a sound like snapping branches, her olive uniform jacket gone and her heavy pale armor gleaming under the floodlights, and the ground under her boots was already beginning to tremble.

Beside her, Aki stood with her hands loose at her sides and her blue hair stirring in a wind nobody else could feel, and her smile was very sweet.

“Three of them,” Maya said, rolling her shoulders. “One for you, two for me. Second wave or not, I’m not leaving here without breaking something.”

“I’ll take one,” Aki agreed pleasantly. “But you’ll have to be fast, Lieutenant.”

The combat frames opened fire.

BRRRRRRRT!

Maya slammed her fist into the ground.

’Earthen Bulwark!’

A wall of solid black stone tore up out of the mud in front of them, ten feet high and three feet thick, and the storm of rotary cannon fire hammered into it in a deafening shower of sparks and splintering rock.

THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK!

“Now!” Maya barked.

Aki vaulted over the top of the wall.

She landed in the open in a crouch, ten feet from the first combat frame, and it swung its mana-blade down at her head in a crackling arc of red light.

Aki raised one hand.

A flicker of Destruction danced across her palm and when the mana-blade touched it, the blade simply stopped existing.

The crackling red light vanished, and so did the first three feet of the steel arm holding it.

The combat frame stumbled with its pilot staring at the empty stump through the visor.

Aki smiled up at him.

“Sorry,” she said sweetly. “I’m still learning to control it…”

She drove her fist into its chest plate.

WHAM!

The composite armor caved inward under her knuckles, and eight feet of steel and machinery went flying backward across the clearing, tumbling end over end through a stack of empty crates before crashing into the mud on its back with its legs kicking.

Behind her, the wall of stone exploded outward.

KRA-KOOM!

Maya came through it like a battering ram, her whole body sheathed in a layer of living rock and she slammed shoulder-first into the second combat frame with a sound like two trucks colliding.

CRUNCH!

The frame’s legs buckled.

Maya wrapped both stone-covered arms around its waist, roared, and lifted all eight feet of it clean off the ground.

’Mountain Breaker!’

She brought it down headfirst into the earth.

BOOM!

The ground cracked in a wide spiderweb around the impact, and the combat frame stuck there, upside down and buried to its shoulders in the mud, its legs twitching feebly in the air.

The third frame swung its rotary cannon toward Maya’s back however, Aki was already there.

She hopped up onto its arm as lightly as a cat jumping onto a fence, ran up the length of it and landed on its shoulder, and tapped the barrel of the cannon with one finger.

The barrel vanished as the pilot’s horrified face filled the visor in front of her.

Aki tilted her head at him with her blue eyes glittering… Bullying people you were stronger than was a weird feeling but she liked it.

“Get out,” she said. “Or I’ll erase the rest of it while you’re still inside.”

The cockpit hissed open so fast the hinges screamed.

Maya straightened up, breathing hard with the stone sloughing off her arms in crumbling chunks, and turned to stare at the First Princess sitting cross-legged on the shoulder of a defeated combat frame while its pilot fled into the dark with his hands over his head.

“…That was my third one,” Maya said.

“You were too slow, Lieutenant…” Aki said cheerfully.

Maya stared at her for a long moment then, against every ounce of military discipline she possessed, she started to laugh.

’She immediately got some magic and changed… What the hell?! Pfft!’

On the western edge of the camp, the poachers’ last line broke and ran.

A dozen men in grey armor fled toward the hover-trucks parked at the treeline, firing wildly over their shoulders into the dark, and they got about halfway there before a single figure stepped out in front of them.

Valeria Da Silva stood in the middle of the path with her saber drawn and her olive coat snapping in the wind.

Faint golden mana was rising off her shoulders like heat off sun-baked stone, and her feline eyes were cold and flat as a jaguar’s in the moment before it pounces.

The poachers skidded to a halt.

From the back of the group, a huge man shoved his way forward.

He was nearly seven feet tall and sealed in heavy grey exo-armor, the servos at his knees and elbows whining with every step, and both of his gauntlets were wrapped in coils of crackling blue electricity that lit up the mud around him.

“It’s one woman,” he growled, his voice distorted by his helmet. “Go around her. I’ll handle the High Marshal…”

Da Silva looked him up and down without the slightest change in her expression.

“You will try.” She said.

He charged.

The exo-armor’s servos screamed as he came at her like a runaway train, both crackling fists swinging down at her head with enough force to crater a bunker, and Da Silva stepped half a pace to the left and let them hammer into the ground where she’d been standing.

KRA-KOOM!

Mud and lightning exploded upward.

Through the spray, Da Silva’s saber flashed once as the armored man’s left knee servo sparked and died with a sickening grind.

GRRRNK!

He staggered with his whole leg locking up beneath him, and swung a desperate backhand at her face.

She ducked under it, pivoted on her heel and drove the pommel of her saber up under the chin of his helmet.

CLANG!

His head snapped back.

Da Silva hooked her boot behind his locked knee, put her shoulder into his chest and shoved, and seven feet of exo-armored poacher toppled backward into the mud like a felled tree.

THOOM!

She planted one boot on his chest plate and rested the tip of her saber against the seam of his visor.

“Stay down…” she said quietly.

He stayed down.

The others stared at her then one of them, very stupidly, raised his rifle.

Da Silva moved.

FWISH!

There was only a flash of gold in the floodlights, a long sweeping arc of light, and then she was standing ten paces behind them with her saber lowered and her back to them.

Every rifle in the group fell apart in two clean pieces.

CLATTER!

The men stared down at the halves of their weapons in their hands.

Da Silva turned her head slightly to look at them over her shoulder.

“You all kneel and raise your hands up…” She said. “You’re under arrest, do it before I decide to kill you.”

All twelve of them knelt and their hands went up.

…

In the command module, Carver Briggs was stuffing data drives into a bag with shaking hands.

Through the window, his whole operation was falling apart.

Trees were eating his shelters, a woman on a water disc was dismantling his trucks, his combat frames were scattered across the clearing like broken toys and his last squad was kneeling in the mud in front of the High Marshal of Amazonia.

“Two months,” he hissed under his breath. “Two months and now…”

He zipped the bag shut, grabbed his pistol off the console and turned toward the back hatch.

Someone was sitting in his chair.

A woman in a black suit and a long dark cloak was lounging in it with her boots propped up on his console, exactly where his had been an hour ago, holding his cup of coffee in her one hand.

Her left sleeve hung empty and pinned to her side, her black hair spilled over her shoulders, and her purple eyes watched him with lazy amusement over the rim of the cup.

She took a slow sip.

“Hm,” she said thoughtfully. “A bit bitter if I do say so myself but then again, it’s from Columbia so what did I expect?”

Briggs froze.

His eyes darted past her to the front hatch, which was still sealed shut with its little red lock light glowing, exactly the way he’d left it.

He hadn’t heard a door, a footstep or even the creak of the chair, and the pistol in his hand suddenly felt very small and very useless.

He knew that face… Everyone in Columbia knew that face. The old man had spent forty billion credits on it and gotten nothing back.

“…Vespera,” he whispered.

“Hi, Gary~” Kara said brightly.