The Fall Under Beacon, Pt.6
As Obaz hung up the call, Laera leaned past the still-stricken Sophia to address him. "How's Helena? Is she hurt bad?"
"About as hurt as anyone can be." Obaz muttered. "She seems intent to go on with Calciter's help, however. They aim to disable the dispersal device and assist Khiver directly against DeCello."
"Is that wise? She should probably fall back... and what about Steven?" She added.
Obaz shook his head. "It is her choice... and we shall see him after the mission. There is work to do."
With that said, Obaz picked up the pace, reaching the lower landing and beginning to unscrew the plate beside the vault-like panic door leading down to the Depthys labs. Rita stood beside the device, arms crossed, waiting. "Why have you not done this already?"
Rita, her helmet back on, crackled through the speaker. "My tools were made here. As such, DeCello ensured our systems were hardened against anything I could do to get past it."
As Sophia descended, she nearly stumbled the last few steps, and Laera caught her. Laera helped Sophia get her balance, asking; "Easy now, easy... you okay?"
The blonde shoved her off much to her surprise. "Don't touch me. Just because you won't grieve for him doesn't mean you can capitalize on mine." She hissed, and Laera's shock was immediately crushed under an explosive anger.
"You think that's the only reason I ever help you?! Why I always cheer you up, watch your back, hear you out?! I'm just as upset as you! Regis was my friend too! He tried to hand me the reins as leader of this team shitshow, did you know that?" As she circled Sophia, she gestured to Obaz. "I'd have done the same for them as I do for you, but Regis made it about his dick and Obaz wouldn't so much as budge. My only other teammates, my best friends for years to come were your ex and a goddamn brick wall!"
Sophia shoved Laera into the wall, teeth bared. "Obaz isn't some unfeeling rock! You know that! Just because I care about him too doesn't mean you can take out your envy that way!"
Obaz watched the door open once cracking the lock, pushing his mobile locker's hovering bulk past the threshold. As he turned to address the girls, he was cut off before he could begin when Laera punched Sophia in the face -drawing blood as she turned aside, their auras still spent from fighting Regis. She looked at Laera with a rattled expression, awestruck.
"Yeah, I don't get it. I don't get why you can love them and not me, but I also don't care! I never expected you to, all I've ever done is try to be what you needed me to be, someone who supported you. That sure as hell doesn't mean I have to agree with everything you say, so don't you tell me what I think and what I feel when you don't know the half of it!"
Sophia looked ready to retort with something just as enraged, but she and Laera both stopped when they heard the security door close again. Obaz and Rita were gone, and the massive vault-like barrier clanked and groaned as the locks re-engaged. Sophia swiftly dove for the handholds on it, yanking with no success. "Obaz? Obaz?! What the hell is this?! You can't just leave us here!"
"What do you think this is right now? A field trip? An exam?" Obaz said through the door. "I have explained again and again what we are doing and what it means. We are preventing the darkest possible turn the future of mankind may take. The importance of this task is so great I am willing to kill for it, and you are both in the idst of a petty squabble." The sound of his fist impacting the door and vibrations caused Sophia to jump back slightly. he continued.
"You have done enough. Evacuate. Help the city, for all I care, it certainly needs all the hands it can get. You are no longer wanted here." His footsteps quickly receded, Sophia pounding on the door and shouting after him all the while.
As Laera turned away from the door, Sophia grabbed her arm. "Where are you going? He needs us still! He's making a mistake! Rita didn't agree to back him up!"
"Do you really think he needs us? Or is this about him needing you?" Laera said, ripping her arm away from the girl's grasp. "He's not made of cardboard. While this whole thing wasn't something he could do alone, this much is something he can. You can go and fuel that delusion of yours all you want, but I'm done being treated like garbage for having a heart. I'll help Helena and Steven's end, and when we're done, I'm getting them the hell out of here."
Laera began climbing the steps, and Sophia clenched her fists. "You're just going to abandon him?"
The pain in the glare Laera gave when she looked over her shoulder was palpable. "He abandoned me first. This is the second time... but you wouldn't remember that. Not when it doesn't appeal to you."
Laera crested the first landing, the only thing to follow her up from below being the sounds of a hammer smashing the wall beside the panic door.
Escaping the area where DeCello had deployed the gas was slowly becoming less and less likely. Despite the condition of the building, Khiver's ways out had all been blocked off by security gates while he'd ascended the floors. Khiver's constant advantage had been an allowed capacity for recklessness; his rejuvenation being so powerful that he could eat whatever anyone dished out. Now, though, on top of being outmatched for once, he couldn't afford to let this suit of his crumple. His ego had inflated over years of being impossible to kill, even planning had taken a less-than-delicate turn when he knew he could turn something vague into a victory with some elbow grease. The revenge he'd been working for, the responsibility he was finally taking for his mistakes of years past... he just might fail here at the end.
DeCello had caught up to him, Khiver barely turning quickly enough to avoid a hooked blade aimed for the soft plating at the neck. Another flare of light in the gaps of DeCello's armor, and he his swords were streaking through the air, Khiver able to only deflect a few amid the myriad. The dings and dents and scratches ever-deepening in Khiver's armor were piling up, the display in his helmet cracked further. He clenched his teeth, thrown backwards, scrambling to try to get to his feet but failing for a moment.
"I'm starting to think you came up here just to treat me to a laugh, Khiver." DeCello's voice crackled, stepping deliberately with menace after him. "All the snark, all the confidence, only to be outright pathetic when push came to shove. You can hear it, right? You're positively cracking my funnybone. Ha. Haha."
Khiver slipped in some of the debris, moving back even further. DeCello sighed, in no hurry as he pursued. Only once he heard a much different crunch under his foot did he pause; As Decello looked down, he saw ice forming around his foot, having stepped on one of Khiver's Dust marbles. Khiver took his revolver and shot three more he'd placed around the floor -one at DeCello's other leg, and two at both his own, before fitting one of his gun extentions to the revolver.
DeCello managed to free one of his feet before the first slug struck, given astronomical force from the gravity dust the gun extension lent the shots. Khiver would've been thrown back by the recoil if not for having frozen his own feet to the ground -and he took advantage of that by firing another four of these rounds, concrete and tile kicked up in a torrent from the force of the passing projectiles, DeCello holding his swords up in defense as he was thrown back.
As the dust settled in the hall, Khiver flipped the gun in his hand to smash the ice on his feet while he got a speed loader ready for the rounds. The smoke ahead parted as a sword flew through the air, shattering the extension on Khiver's revolver and knocking the gun itself out of his hands to bounce down the hall. DeCello, with heavily dented armor at the arms and chest, roared as he cleared the dust himself with a downward swing of his second blade, Khiver diving backwards with nonexistent grace as the swing cut through the ceiling and the floor. It took crab-walking backwards to dodge as DeCello came headhunting, swing after swing of the blade rending the surfaces above and below him.
Khiver gained enough speed to turn to the side and make a cartwheel backwards into a way to get to his feet fully, sprinting towards his revolver, hearing DeCello closing in faster than he could recover the weapon. Khiver threw a door open as he passed it, DeCello barreling through with no difficulty, but the fraction of a second he couldn't see past it prevented him from noticing Khiver as he turned around to hurl a fist into his chest, the included impact of DeCello running straight into it taking him off his feet to land on his back. The boot of Khiver's inferior suit stomped down on DeCello's chest twice, but he was warded off when DeCello managed to slam his arms into the ground hard enough to help propel him up to a half-stand.
Again, Khiver tore off down the hall, scooping up his gun as DeCello gave chase. Before Khiver could get much further, DeCello activated a burst of speed, tackling him and plummeting through layers of flooring and electrical wire as they struggled.
"Stop running, Helena... oh man, if I ever see another flight of stairs in my ife, it'll be too soon..." Cal wheezed, unable to keep up without grabbing both knees and lurching to catch his breath. This was the only time Helena actually acknowledged him.
"Are you honestly tired already? This is life or death! We have no idea how long that waveform thing'll take to charge! Get your ass in gear, Shmots!"
Xi sidled past Cal as he caught his breath, and the two continued even as Cal said he would catch up. Once ascending to where the tower had been collapsed into the main branch, they stopped to inspect the damage.
The tip of the tower, the molten slag that had sprouted like an ugly flower with the turret gun's destruction, had broken through the walls of dozens of rooms. The tower itself had snapped partway up at where the invasion started, being the twenty-ninth floor, but between there and the thirty-third was where the top had actually ended up, standing slightly more upright where it was embedded in the main branch than its lower remainder. Jumping the gap in the floor, Helena and Xi ran to where the tower had struck deepest.
The tower had fallen through hard enough to reach the system, but not damage it much by appearances. The cylindrical Dispersal System looked like a massive vent like this, spaces like exhaust ports occasionally winking with the glimpse of something that must have been rotating inside. A low hum and obvious sparks were coming from the device. Helena and Xi looked at each other for a second. "How do we break it? You work here. You've gotta have some idea."
"I go tracking people like Khiver for Omeghis -I don't design so much as a pen in this place!" Xi retorted, giving the surface of the machine a few test-punches. The surface echoed with impact, but showed little else that said even suit-powered strikes were giving them much headway. "Your guess is as good as mine, Blondie."
As Cal caught up, he jumped the chasm, having to catch himself on the edge of the shattered floor and kick wildly for a moment before pulling himself up. By the time he'd clambered to his feet, the alien glow of the Dispersal system started to increase, causing the two girls to back up. When it made no further change, they relaxed. "Why aren't we whaling on this thing?"
"Because it'll take some serious whaling to even tickle this thing." Helena said, crossing her arms. "If we still had Steven..."
Shmots tried to move things along before Helena could dwell any further. "We're in a military contracting center. Is there not a tank shell room near here or something?"
"This is the main branch, not the armory." Xi muttered. "Keeping the plastic explosives next to the photocopy room would be the height of stupidity. The next closest station we could get something that packs the right punch would be... ground floor, next sub-compound in the south. We might as well leave by then."
Helena chewed her lip as she stared angrily at the Dispersal system. "There's nothing else we can do? If we give up, everybody downstairs'll get cooked..."
They stood uncertain for a moment, wrapped in the sounds of gunfire, Grimm calls, and the growing fires all over the city. Cal looked out one of the intact windows. "What about the anti-air towers?"
Xi looked incredulous. "The shells might be enough, but we'd have to hit the ground floor again to get down there, and carry a shell back up."
Cal waved his hands, then pointed out the window. "No, no, I mean, could it shoot into the Dispersal thing?"
Helena stepped in, now. "They don't shoot at the Main Branch. Do they? That'd be a hell of a design flaw." When she posed that to Xi, the girl nodded.
"But can they turn that far?" Cal asked. Xi tilted her head a bit in thought.
"I guess so? Probably. For them to have cross-sections of fire, they'd have to."
Cal pointed out the window to the one he had been looking at. "You've got the mega-badass combat suit, can you get up there and turn it?"
Helena looked at her too, now, and Xi squinted at him for a moment. "That's another maybe. Even if I can, though, it's not going to shoot without a target it's programmed to fire at."
"So we put one there. Those griffins are going buck wild out there getting downed by the towers, we could lure one in to where it'd be flush to the Dispersal." That idea struck the girls with a total disbelief, but Cal looked hopefully at Helena about it. "You're a huntress! Luring Grimm's gotta be one of your first tactics!"
Helena looked outside herself. Between the fire being laid down by Hank with the SkyAnchor down there, and the remaining towers, the Grimm were dropping like flies... bu they were still trying to get close. The fighting here between the Fang and OTAF was still fierce enough that the emotions must have been drawing them. "It wouldn't be hard to lure Grimm. It'd just be hard to single out just one. If we tell Hank to ease up for a minute, once we've got the tower aimed, it might just work."
There was a pause as the absurd plan actually sank in, as well as the fact they would actually try it. Xi put her visor on. "If this goes belly-up, it's not any fault of mine."
On the other hand, Cal raised a fist. "Alright, team, let's do this!"
"Shmots, you're not actually doing anything in this plan." Helena said flatly. He slowly lowered his hand, but she held up her own gesturing to him. "Actually, you should be the one to give the signal. It's not like she can guess the timing I'm going for."
Cal nodded with enthusiasm. "Leave that to me! What should the signal be?"
"Professor Lybel taught you to do auric sphere-bursts, didn't he?" That comment got Cal thinking for a second. He held a hand out the way Khiver normally did, but nothing seemed to happen at first.
"He said that," Cal explained, "but I don't remember a time like that at all. The only thing that was even remotely like training was when he taught me how not to lose my head when I got mad by shaking my fists-" As he said it, the orb began to form, and Cal stared wide-eyed.
Xi laughed, and Helena peered closer at the thing, a bright light blue. "I guess he did teach you, after all. Shaking your fists? Really?"
"He said it was about bottling your emotions, they way everyone always says is unhealthy. But doing it in... well. Your hands." Cal crushed the sphere, but it had been so small that he only got a basketball-sized result.
Helena crossed her arms again. "Well, that's bright and eye-catching enough. We'll use that. Make sure to stand in eyeshot of the tower, Cal. Xi, get to putting that muscle to use. I'll go and find us a horrible monster."