There were quite a few ships hanging over Gerrick Four. It was a world with a high population and a decent average power level. Usually we didn't send ships like ours to handle that kind of planet. It was inefficient when a single warrior worth five thousand points or more can handle things on their own. Even more so when the preservation of the souls inhabiting this place isn't any kind of priority.
Everyone of actual importance had to be busy If they had this many of us on contract for one planet.
Anywhere else, it might have made more sense to send us in. Keep the infrastructure intact, gather some slaves, and steal anything of value. However, This place belongs to the Galactic patrol. Most of the universe considered them our main rival for supremacy over the known universe. For about as long as King Cold was gallivanting around and back when this enterprise was practically a one alien operation, the Galactic Patrol has been there to try and stop us. In a lot of ways the rumors were right. The Patrol is our greatest rival for domination of the universe.
But being the biggest and strongest toddler on the playground didn't mean you could do anything but annoy the adult in charge. They can't match our technology, they can barely keep up with our warriors, and they can't even think of challenging anyone actually part of the Cold Clan. From what I've been told about it, there was a time when people at large thought it was a much closer contest, and it was true they were stronger than they are now and we were weaker.
There was some kind of big space battle, an ambush meant to bring down King Cold while he was distracted protecting his first born son. He was supposed to be distracted enough for some big players to come in and take him out. See they didn't understand at the time what that family is capable of. Legend has it our glorious if now retiring leader simply looked up at the video feeds from his flagship, and waved a hand.
Problem solved.
Most of those educated on the subject didn't consider it much of a contest after that.
Either way though, whenever we ran across a place owned by the defenders of the universe, we tended to be less careful with the locals. Most thought it was supposed to be some kind of example.
Could have been two days at worst for a solo operation to come in and take care of business. If they couldn't bother diverting a single attack pod that meant something was going down. Somewhere else. A campaign maybe? A system of worlds working to protect each other with a few defenders well above expectations could take a while to crack and its not something we'd be clued in on unless we were going to be a part of it.
Doesn't matter to us. We're here anyway.
It was the beginning of the second week of our time on Gerrick Four. The Diligent Frost had been assigned twelve sectors of the cityscape covering this world, or roughly 3 percent of the planet's surface to secure at our leisure.
We've managed about half of that, taking out most of their anti-air capabilities and leaving their defenders without support and heavily outnumbered.
All in all, a great start and one that's left our group well ahead of the curve.
I was stalking through the tunnels underneath the city proper, roughly eight miles below the "surface" of Gerrick Four. I had figured from the moment I decided to start descending that I would be attacking the slums, the less fortunate and more easily forgotten. I thought that I'd be seeing mass evacuations of people trying to get below, the rich trying to dig themselves into the muck for another moment of life. I'd felt things along those lines happen before.
I was delighted to be wrong. The deeper I go the more wealth it seems has been invested into my surroundings. More concrete, firmer foundations, and more weapons installations and hidden traps every few hundred feet in some place. It was all machined rock and smooth edges. Very well maintained, and all bathed entirely in darkness for the past two miles. That was where the trouble was. The surface was the easy part. This planet was a fortress. There was a steady trickle of people heading downward, but many of them were defenders looking to regroup. I made sure many of them never got the chance.
Apara was taking a break for the day. She broke her legs in several places after getting too close and making too direct an attack on one of the many bunkers between here and topside. The explosives wouldn't have been as bad for her if the space wasn't so enclosed.
She had been furious. I had been laughing.
At the moment I was scurrying along the ceiling, my energy matching that of the local vermin species. They were like large furred crabs, and they made a habit of scuttling in the dark places and scavenging what they could of the carrion. They seemed to like me, and had their own means of tracking my position. As I followed a platoon of soldiers using hand held lights and whispering amongst themselves, I couldn't help but wonder at how. Was it a scent? Body heat? Or were they just that good at sensing energy? And they could sense energy. The creatures scattered whenever it fluctuated past a certain threshold.
This group I was stalking were painfully average as far as their strength was concerned. Only a few over two hundred battlepower, with most hovering around 150. IF they could coordinate in an open field they might be a threat to me.
"Wan secre greb valinor?" One of the soldiers at the lead of the pack whispered. They had been speaking in another language for as long as I had been following them. Or in code. The mood of the nearly forty souls moving through the darkness was solemn, but not without hope. If nothing else they seemed determined to fight to the end.
"Greb valinor." Their leader deftly answered, his eyes searching through the shadows. What interested me about these individuals is they had some kind of purpose here. They had made this same patrol a few times now, and each time whatever purpose it held had not been seen through.
Between that and this particular brand of gobbledygook they had me interested. The secrecy had me thinking this was either a trap or something they were trying they didn't want us to know about. If it was a trap I wonder if it was specifically for me, or just any warrior who was wandering around here. We had cleared a great many of the installations leading over to this point, but there were a few holdouts as far as three miles up.
There hadn't been any pushes past the outposts this deep, mostly because the higher ups were busy with those left. A few of the ticks had been strategizing well, with our forces relatively split they had a group of heavy hitters come together and gang up on commanders. Jernus and the others could handle two 700 plus opponents easily, even the weakest of our commanders had been at this for a long time. Experience counted for something. The problem was when ten of them rushed at you from positions you thought should have been safe. There hadn't been any casualties from command, but it was close. That was the problem with scouters, they could be worked around.
Scouters are fantastic pieces of technology, but they only have so much range and the farther away you are the more difficult it is to tell an individual apart from someone much weaker.
That was one of the reasons why mine was on a kind of sleep mode. My combat feeds could still be recorded as Belk had made clear he would do, but it wasn't producing light or actively pinging any power levels. It would only vibrate if something important was being ordered.
I was tempted to start picking them off, but disappearances could make them turn around, and while I knew where they were going I didn't have the means of entering unnoticed. After the display with Apara and those ambushes I wasn't of the mind for the direct approach if I could avoid it.
So as far as they were concerned, more vermin than usual was skittering about. The group continued in relative but tense silence interspersed with more conversation in a foreign language. We moved passed markers every 30 yards or so, the signage decked with blinking lights and marking the distance between bunkers. To the side of every sign was a control panel I knew from experience was often used to call down bulkheads and temporarily seal areas off from each other.
Even the thickest ones weren't an issue to break through, but they did slow us down, and whatever material they were composed of made it difficult to get a read with a scouter. People didn't always like knocking down walls with a line of energy blasts waiting on the other side.
We had to have passed hundreds of them before we arrived at our destination, the room opening up to a massive steel wall nearly forty feet tall and a hundred feet wide. This wasn't another bulkhead. It was the entrance to a small fortress. Scouters would have a tough time reading through that, but I didn't. Sensing ki wasn't limited by physical barriers.
And yet I didn't sense anyone strong, in fact the only combatants were the platoon I had followed here. Everyone else dipped from around 70 to 130. Civilians. Or at least non-combatants.
They could be hiding their power level, but if someone had that knowledge here I can't think of why they wouldn't spread it around. This would have been an entirely different siege. I held back, slipping onto the otherside of the lips overhanging the ceilings between each bulkhead as a red light scanned across the room, assumedly drawing over every individual that came here today.
I saw a flash of green shine against the darkness behind my position, and heard a friendly chime as the doors opened with the sound of groaning metal and straining steel. I waited for the sound of bootsteps before I peaked over the side, glancing into a well-lit chamber of lab-coated individuals as they acknowledged the soldiers in their midst. I could smell the disinfectant in the air all the way from my position.
I tilted my head and grinned. This seems important.
In an instant I was calmly floating towards the massive door barring my entry just as it began to close. At first no one noticed me as I stood at the threshold looking inward at the work before me. It was unfortunate that I couldn't see all of it, that whatever science or research and development was unfolding in this facility stretched into dozens of other rooms all filled with scientists and doctors. Who knew what else was there that I just couldn't pick up on?
I heard a scream as an indigo woman looked in my direction, dropping an approximation of a clipboard and an Ipad on the ground, the poor girl pointing at me in terror. My hand shot upward and the door slammed down on me, landing perfectly on my palm and nearly making my elbow bend with the effort of keeping it upright. I took a breath, before energy began to build in my free hand.
"What might you be up to?" I drawled, pulling the limb back.
"Wait!" Someone yelled in desperation, holding up their hands in some meager hope for mercy.
I didn't wait. People screamed, and soldiers tried to direct their own attacks to me. The blast I threw in their direction meeting flesh and bone before expanding outward in a conflagration of hellish flame sticking to every surface it touched.
I let the massive door of their fortress fall behind me as I stepped inside, curious as to what I might find.