“Cole! COLE! Shit, Roxy, I think the apes must have poisoned him. Get over here! COOOLE!”
Howie screamed in Cole’s ear, shaking him out of his meditative state. He could feel the man scrambling for his AIFAK and had to push Howie’s hands away. Nutmeg was barking in panic, and even Besson was standing over him.
“I’m fine, Howie,” he mumbled. God, his mouth was dry. He reached up to grab the tube of his hydration pack on his plate carrier and stopped. His hand was black. Not like the quarter black on his mom’s side that he’d started the day with. Like, black black. Like, black hole black. The darkest, emptiest void from which no light reflected. Except for where glowing snakes of phosphor coiled around his forearms like Howie’s dragon tattoos. He rolled up his sleeves further, and it seemed like the discoloration went almost to his elbows and then stopped.
Roxy ran up, pulling her medic bag off her pack as she slid into the dirt next to him. “Jesus, Cole, what the fuck is that?”
“I think it’s my class evolution,” he said. “It looks like the star I touched while I was meditating.”
Howie grabbed Cole’s wrist, pulling it toward him and turning it around. He even pulled out a pen light and shone it directly on Cole’s palm. Nothing. It was like it simply ate the light. He looked up at Cole. “Cole, what did you do?”
“Nothing! Same as my last divergent evolution. I walked the path in the woods that I chose, came to a clearing, and touched the thing. I went for the bouncing bullets, like you said.”
Roxy prodded him in several places on his arm. “Can you feel this? Does this hurt? What about this?”
“Yes, no, and ouch. It’s definitely my arm, Rox.”
She dropped it. “Manifestation?” she asked Howie.
“Got to be,” he said, nodding. “Though, this is really early to see one.”
“Is it permanent?” asked Cole.
Despite his protestations, Roxy continued to poke and prod. “Should dissipate outside a Lewis Field. A few of the high-level Kickers have them. They can get pretty extreme. Songbird is basically a werewolf when he’s on-mission with his team. He got the callsign ages before he manifested his class, obviously.”
Artian perked up at that. “Ah, like in Twilight?”
Roxy winced, probably not wanting to touch that particular can of worms. “Check your analyzer, see what it says.”
Cole fished the device out of his pocket and touched the back plate. It illuminated immediately.
Level 14, 78%
Primary Class: Meteoric Valkyrie(3)
Secondary Class: Arquebus Engineer(1).
New Meteoric Leap functionality detected: Thrown weapons or projectiles with excess kinetic energy after striking a marked target will now change vector toward a nearby marked target 1 time (plus 1 time per additional evolution). The attraction of projectiles and thrown weapons toward marked targets is increased.
Manifestation detected. Analyzing… Classifying… Generating name... Accretion Wraps — Kinetic energy manipulation manifestation. Thrown weapons or projectiles fired by you gain 1% additional kinetic energy per meter as they travel away from you for the first 66 meters (10 meters per Acuity)
Strength 3.8
Dexterity 4.5
Acuity 6.6
Resilience 3.1
Speed 5.2
Intelligence 4.5>
“Physics is fucked,” said Cole, handing up the analyzer.
Howie read the updated entry, eyebrows climbing higher as he scanned. “Wait, so not only do you have homing bullets that use excess energy to bounce to other targets, but they actually get faster after they’re fired?” He handed the Analyzer back down. “No one likes a show-off, Cole.”
“You’re not going to need a team much longer,” said Roxy. “You’re going to turn into a one-man army.”
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“I’ll always need a team,” said Cole.
Nona made a gagging sound somewhere behind Howie, and Besson immediately scrunched up his face and turned around so that they wouldn’t see him laugh.
CRACK
A sharp report echoed off the badlands, and Cole perked up. “That was one of my tripwires,” he said, grabbing his rifle. “Roxy, with me. Howie, Besson, overwatch.”
Cole dashed to the west approach, where a puff of smoke was rising on the breeze. Looking over the improvised wall with his rifle, he centered his scope on a small dust cloud a couple of hundred meters down the slope where he’d placed his early warning trap. He couldn’t see anything on the trail itself, but there were so many twists and turns on the ascent that anything approaching them could break line of sight easily. But he caught a whiff of dirty fur and metallic water on the wind. It was the same way the ape monsters had smelled. They were tracking them. Or maybe Artian. Either way, he made a decision.
Cole burned one of his meteoric leap charges and launched himself straight up in the air. Once he reached the apex of his jump, he arrested his momentum and fed that kinetic energy into his magazine while he scanned the approach. He almost missed the ape slinking back down the hill, its fur blended in so perfectly and his ability still hadn’t been able to pin it down. If his Acuity hadn’t been through the roof, he never would have seen it. But once he noticed it, his ability outlined it in red.
He fired down. His rounds made a concussion wave almost as bad as Howie’s 20mm cannon as they rocketed away from him, accelerating as they went. They trailed a small, flaming tail like a meteorite as they descended. Two of the five rounds he fired struck the ape, blowing it almost in half at the midsection. Red blood splashed across the dusty orange chalk of the landscape, and the creature sprawled, unmoving. He almost wished there had been two, so that he could test the bounce. But one scout was bad enough.
“Remember what I said about showing off?” asked Howie over the radio.
Cole lowered his fall speed to the minimum as he dropped back down to the deck, a small ring of dust and debris blasting out from where he landed. “We’re not waiting for the occlusion,” he said over the radio. “We’re moving out now.”
Besson met him as they landed. “Are you sure?” he asked. “We’ve got the high ground. It’s defensible.”
“I don’t know how many of them there are,” said Cole, “So I don’t want to let them pick where, when, and how they engage us. We force them to chase if they want us. Give them opportunities to make mistakes and for us to gain initiative.”
Besson nodded.
“Nona,” called Cole. The woman approached. “I want you to hang back. See if you can get a count on what’s coming for us. Can you do that?”
She nodded. “I’ll link back up by nightfall,” she said. “Sooner if I think they’re going to attack.”
Slinking and spotting was her wheelhouse, now. And she’d always been capable of acting independently. But Cole was glad to see she was coming back around to applying her talents in a way that kept the group safe instead of putting them in danger. Even if her soul wasn’t bifurcated, she would still be a half-alien with one foot in the world and one outside of it. Though she’d earned her place on the team in Vael, this was her first official mission as part of Cole’s team. She still had a lot to prove, but she was trying.
“Alright,” said Cole. “Sorry if anyone didn’t get some downtime. Grab your kit, grab the loot we’re taking, and leave the rest. We’re out in five mikes.”
The pinnacle camp turned into a flurry of activity as equipment was returned to packs and loot was dispersed. Howie came over to him with several items that he’d already analyzed.
“What you got?” asked Cole.
Howie held out the white velvet cloak, first. “Prismatic cooling cloak of natural camouflage,” he said. “Reduces effects of heat and once per day you can change the color to match your environment. Reduces the effect of detection abilities.”
Cole quickly swapped it for his own and burned the innate ability. A ripple of chalky red-brown stained the material from the shoulders down to the hem, mimicking not only the color, but the texture as well. This must have been how the apes had so easily circumvented what he’d thought was a foolproof tracking ability. He’d have to take into account that more enemies might have methods to stymie his class abilities as they faced stronger monsters. He balled up his previous cloak.
“Artian,” he called, tossing it over. The man had only an overcoat, nothing to protect him from the harsh sun of the floor. He took it and draped it around his shoulders.
Howie handed him several magazines of 7.62 ammunition, next. They were hot to the touch and hissed softly, expelling trace amounts of white vapor. Cole eyed them.
“Concentrated steam bullets.”
Cole raised an eyebrow. “Steam?”
Howie grinned. “Like hollow-points on crack. They penetrate, and then…” he pushed his palms together and then spread them apart while making a whoosh noise. “Extra damage against anything already hot, since it just makes the steam expand faster.”
Cole swapped one into his rifle and cycled the chamber. Lastly, Howie handed him what he took to be a shotgun, at first, until he realized it was actually a bolt-action rifle with side-by-side barrels. “I know you were looking for one of these to test your Tinker theories about proc chances. I don’t know if this is exactly, what you’re looking for. But hey, you never know.”
“I’ve never seen a double-barreled bolt-action before,” said Cole. “I’ve seen break-action elephant guns with side-by-side rifle barrels, but never something like this.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Howie. “Get a load of this baby!” he said, pulling out what looked like a flintlock pistol with five fanning bores the size of shotgun shells.
“What, in the ever-loving fuck, is that?” asked Cole.
“Something for when you wanna fuck those five guys in particular,” said Howie, grinning from ear to ear. He pointed to each of the barrels. “I’ve got frost in this one, fire in this one, air in this one, lightning in this one, and a regular, good ol’ barbed buckshot from Roxy in this one. Whatever I hit is bound to be weak to something.”
“Howie, what’s your strength enhancement metric?”
“Zero point one-five. Why?”
“Even if you ignore the fact that firing five 12-gauge rounds at once would snap your wrists like toothpicks, anything that gets close enough to you for all those shots to hit already means you’re fucked six ways from Sunday.”
Howie waved him off. “You worry too much.”
Putting aside the bizarre configuration for the moment, Cole accepted the side-by-side rifle and strapped it down to the side of his pack. Pretty much everyone else was ready to move, so he waved Besson out ahead of them to scout with Nutmeg while he took the rear-guard position. His new cloak might give him the edge against any apes looking for revenge. Though, they might be able to see right through the ability since they possessed it themselves.
“Alright,” said Cole. “Let’s beat feet and get the fuck out of here.”