The door at the top of stairs slid shut, cutting off any hopes of a swift retreat. That was only the first turd domino to fall with a meaty splat. Familiar, shining metallic domes slid into place from behind hidden panels in the ceiling of each intersection. I vividly remembered the domes lighting up our attackers at the Lux and I opened fire on the nearest one. Marko joined me an instant later.
Our twin streams of stuttering blue projectiles took out the first dome, but not before it sent out two white energy bolts. To his credit, Miyamoto dodged one of the bolts, but the other hit him square in the chest, illuminating his body from within. More bolts from the other domes pounded into the legend and the walls around him. Miyamoto fell with a shriek of frustration and the body immediately disappeared.
We switched our fire to the next dome and Aria joined in the shooting. A white bolt sizzled into my leg and I screamed. It dropped my Health by a third. Marcy rushed forward to stand between us, her face so pale I was afraid she’d faint.
“The fuck are you doing?” I yelled at her.
A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a crested helmet complete with a horsehair plume appeared in the hallways in front of us. He had a white cape, bronze breastplate, and a large round shield which he used to absorb the bolts flying at us. He held a spear in his right hand that he used to maintain his balance more than anything. The man wasn’t really protecting us, I realized, Achilles was protecting Marcy. She’d moved up to us with that specific intention.
“Sorry,” she said, breath coming in gasps. “Nowhere to run. I think I might puke.”
We managed to take down the second dome while Achilles was slowly pounded into dogmeat. Our aim shifted to the third. The battle was oddly quiet. Neither the white bolts nor our own blue shots made much noise, except when they hit something solid. It was quiet enough, in fact, that we heard voices coming from the hallway to the right.
“Hello?” said the voice.
“Hello?” said a second voice. It sounded familiar.
“Hello?” said yet another voice. Was that Jasper?
“Hello?” said a multitude of voices, a chorus of Jaspers.
“Jasper?” Marko said, continuing to fire.
A swarm of flying Jasper robot heads zoomed around the corner from the right hallway. Each one was about the size and shape of a pony keg. All of them had Jasper’s manic smile, but their round eyes were glowing red.
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Exterminate!” the lead Jasper said, still in its perpetually cheerful voice. Other Jaspers offered their own happy battle cries.
“You are the enemy!”
“Locate and destroy!”
“Annihilate!”
We managed to take down the third dome before the Jaspers began their attack, but that final dome wrecked Achilles. He vanished with an audible pop when a bolt seared into his head. I pushed Marcy behind me and switched my fire to the incoming Jaspers. I wasn’t too concerned at first. Yes, there were a lot of them, but they didn’t have any weapons. Were they going to try to bite us?
As was so often the case, my optimism was unfounded. Weapons extended from the sides of each Jasper as they approached. They had spinning saw blades, jagged knives, and crackling energy prods. A few of them, maybe one in ten, brandished an extended tube with a nozzle at the end. I didn’t like the look of that at all. The Jaspers weren’t very tough. A couple of shots took one down easily. That was the good news. The bad news was their numbers didn’t seem to be thinning out.
“Hello [Victor]!” a Jasper said as it tried to gut me with a saw blade.
I let my TEC dangle from my left hand, summoned my tanto with my right, and sliced it in half. I booted another one down the hallway and had enough room to start shooting again.
“Marcy,” I said. “Find out where they’re coming from.”
“How?” she said.
“Your scouts! The fucking ravens!”
“Oh, right.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
We continued to slaughter Jaspers, and they continued to flood toward us. The coil of my gun started to turn an unhealthy green color, and I remembered the warning about overheating. One of the tube-bearing Jaspers managed to get close enough to set off its weapon. A gout of flame roasted the three other Jaspers in front of it and scorched both Marko and me.
A glance toward the party interface showed we were both down to about half Health with our Matrixes approaching the same. Matrices? Matri? I wasn’t sure. Aria and Marcy had taken a few nicks but were mainly fine, and their Matrixes, I was going with that, were only partially depleted.
“There’s a pair of doors in the hallway to the right,” Marcy said. “They weren’t there before. The Jaspers are pouring out of them.”
“Spawn point,” Aria said. “That’s annoying. We need to kill it before they kill us.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said, smashing a Jasper to the floor with the butt of my gun.
Marko’s gun overheated, its coils a toxic green, and a glob of blue goo oozed out the end of the barrel before it stopped working. He shifted form and pulled out his kanabō. Marko took a couple of steps forward and began swinging his weapon in broad arcs, smashing multiple Jaspers with each attack. It was brutally effective, but they’d swarm or flame him in a minute. Thankfully, Miyamoto reappeared and stepped into the hallway to join Marko, moving so he was back-to-back with the wererat.
“How much can your ravens lift?” Aria said, sending off semi-auto shots to support the main line.
“I have no idea,” Marcy said.
“Could they manage ten pounds?”
“Again, I have no idea.”
“Find out!” Aria said. She tossed our extra TEC onto the floor. “See if they can lift that.”
I had no idea what she was up to and no time to ask. For the moment, I’d switched to semi-auto to keep my TEC from overheating. I aimed for the Jaspers with flamethrowers and was pleasantly surprised when killing one caused it to explode and take out the ones next to it. Miyamoto had turned Marko, placing himself in front and giving the wererat a chance for a small breather. Watching the legend at work was almost worth coming to Anera. His hands and feet worked in concert, shifting stances and strikes so that he never overbalanced, was never out of position.
"Hugin lifted that easily,” Marcy said from behind me. “I don’t know what good that will do. It’s not like they can shoot it.”
“Take this,” Aria said. “Have them carry it into one of the spawn points and set it off.”
“You want to turn my birds into suicide bombers?”
“Fuck yes, I do! Better them than us.”
Marko (Party): Aria. What have we said about grenades?
Aria (Party): Eat my ass, Marko. This is what grenades are for.
Victor (Party): She’s not wrong, Marko.
The ravens took off down the hall, hugging the ceiling, one of them lugging a grenade. The Jaspers noticed the ravens before they went invisible and a few called out.
“Hello [Hugin]!”
“Hello [Munin]!”
“Exterminate!”
As the seconds ticked by, I became convinced Aria’s plan had failed. I was just about to tell Marcy to see if she could get the door open when an explosion shook the floor and sent Jasper parts flying from the right-hand hallway. The flow of Jaspers immediately died down to something approaching manageable numbers.
“Advance!” I yelled to Marko and Miyamoto. “Block the central hall. Aria and I will go right and kill the other spawn point. Marcy, you stay with them.”
I had enough time to see Achilles return to the fight and resume shielding Marcy, before Aria and I pelted down the right hallway, firing off short bursts to clear the way of Jaspers. We reached the corner to the next hallway over and I peeked around. I managed to spot the door to the spawn point before I had to duck back from a spurt of flame. I’d also noticed a nearer door that was blackened and half missing.
“Forty feet. On the left.”
“This is plenty close,” Aria said, priming a grenade.
“How many of those things do you have?” I said.
“Never enough. Cover me.”
I switched back to full auto as we stepped into the hallway and started spraying Jaspers with streams of blue shots. One of them managed to singe my right leg before I blasted it. Aria cocked her arm back and chucked the grenade down the hallway. At first, I thought she’d missed. It wasn’t because she threw like a girl, far from it, the throw just seemed short and wide. Then I understood. She was going for a bank shot. The grenade bounced off the right wall and vanished into the spawn point. BOOM!
The steady stream of Jaspers stopped, and we were able to mop up the ones that remained. They seemed just as happy to die as they were to kill us. I was at 38% Health, Marko was at 43%, and Miyamoto looked a little charred. Aria and Marcy were both still over 80%. I started to sit down for a short rest to heal, and Aria poked me with a boot.
“Loot first,” she said. “Rest later. We’re down to an hour forty.”
The Jaspers didn’t have much on them. Any of them intact enough to loot had a handful of credits, and a few had microprocessors or robotics bits and pieces.
Technomancy Microprocessor
Is it magic? You don’t know! Victor smash!
Oh wait! It is magic! Crafting material.
The robotics parts had a similar description and were also crafting materials. None of us had seen anything to do with crafting before and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Marcy was the only one excited about the parts, so we gave them to her. A message appeared in my vision, but I saw it was an achievement and minimized it unread. I wasn’t in the mood for more snark.
I wandered down the left corridor, curious to see the channel of light Marcy had described. The light was more like a contained beam than water and nearly filled the circular tunnel. I could just make out another hallway on the other side of the beam.
I knew better than to stick anything important into the beam, so I tossed a golf tee toward it. The tee tumbled through the air, hit the beam, and was instantly disintegrated. No flash, no smoke, no ash. It was like the tee never existed. We obviously weren’t going that direction. I returned to the group to find Marcy hard at work hacking the next door. This one didn’t take nearly as long, and it opened with an hour and a half still on the clock.
