Chapter 102 Hundred and two
Dropping silently from the spatial folds were shapes I recognized, and some I didn't. There were dozens of the towering, featureless Null-Sentinels, their limbs rippling like ink. But landing behind them were entirely new horrors Void-Weavers. They were multi-legged, spidery entities composed of jagged black glass, weaving nets of localized anti-gravity that deleted anything they touched.
"Here they come!" Tank yelled, revving his trike.
"Wolves! Revers! Paladins! Hold the line!" Dax commanded.
The most impossible alliance in the history of the wasteland engaged.
It was a beautiful, terrifying symphony of chaos. A hulking Sun-Guard brute charged forward, swinging his thermal-hammer not to kill, but to act as a physical shield, absorbing a Void-Weaver's anti-gravity net. As the brute's golden armor began to pixelate and dissolve, Sienna vaulted off his massive shoulders, driving her twin phase-knives directly into the Weaver’s geometric skull, shattering it into static.
"Move, Mia!" Dax yelled, grabbing my hand.
We sprinted through the center of the melee, dodging grasping, featureless limbs. A Null-Sentinel glided into our path, its arm extending to format me.
Before Dax could swing his knife, a searing bolt of golden plasma hit the Sentinel in the chest. It didn't kill the entity, but the kinetic force staggered it just long enough. Captain Reyes and the Paladin Commander laid down a suppressing crossfire, using their useless weapons as sheer concussive battering rams to keep the Nullity at bay.
"Go!" Reyes shouted, reloading her thermal-cell.
Dax and I burst through the shattered glass doors of the Citadel lobby.
The massive, marble-floored atrium was dark, lit only by the emergency strobes. Huddled behind the heavy reception desk were Leo and the Code-Born kids.
"Mia!" Leo yelled, his sapphire veins pulsing brightly as he saw us. "We saw the sky! What are those things?"
"The original owners of the system," I said, sliding behind the desk and ripping the heavy access panel off the lobby's main security terminal. I pulled a spare interface cable from my rig and jacked it directly into the port on the back of my neck the hardline jack I hadn't used since the night we first broke into the Citadel.
It was a dangerous, unfiltered connection. The raw data of the Red-Queen flooded my cerebral cortex, making my vision white out for a terrifying second.
< ARCHITECT. SYSTEM OVERWHELMED. THE NULLITY IS INJECTING DELETION PROTOCOLS INTO THE PLANETARY CRUST. >
"Block the protocols!" I shouted aloud, my hands flying over the physical keyboard of the terminal. "I need you to route all remaining power to the courtyard! We have two hundred Paladins out there shooting blanks. I need to give them teeth!"
< INSUFFICIENT SUB-ETHER RESERVES TO COAT ALL ALLIED MUNITIONS. >
"Then we don't coat the munitions," I gritted my teeth, feeling the Origin-Code in my blood synchronize with the kids hiding behind me. "We coat the atmosphere."
I looked at Leo. "I need the battery, kid. All of it."
Leo didn't hesitate. He grabbed the hands of the younger Code-Born, creating the circuit, and placed his glowing hands flat against the terminal glass.
The surge of Origin-Code hit my brain like a freight train.
I didn't project a Phase-Shield to protect the city. I inverted the projection. I fed the raw, chaotic sub-ether frequency directly into the localized gravity of the courtyard outside.
"Executing protocol: Neon Rain," I whispered, blood dripping from my nose.
Outside, the air above the plaza suddenly shimmered.
It began to rain. But it wasn't water. It was liquid Origin-Code glowing, iridescent blue droplets of sub-ether energy.
As the Neon Rain fell, it coated everything. It coated the rusted chains of the Revers, the golden armor of the Sun-Guards, and the barrels of the Paladins' plasma rifles. The Origin-Code didn't just touch them; it temporarily bonded with the physical matter, weaponizing the entire courtyard.
"Look at the guns!" the Paladin Commander yelled in shock.
He fired his plasma rifle. Instead of a standard golden bolt, the weapon discharged a searing, sapphire streak of phased plasma. It struck a Null-Sentinel square in the chest. This time, the kinetic force wasn't absorbed. The Origin-Code ripped through the anti-matter geometry, shattering the entity into a million harmless pixels.
"The Ghost gave us bullets!" Jax roared, swinging his gear-axe as the rain hissed against his leather cut. "Push them back into the void!"
Empowered by the Origin-Code, the combined army of outlaws, bikers, and corporate knights tore into the Nullity swarm. The courtyard became a blinding strobe-light of blue phase-fire and shattering black glass.
Dax stood in the lobby doors, watching the tide turn, his chest heaving. He looked back at me, still jacked into the terminal, keeping the Neon Rain falling.
"We're holding the ground," Dax said, his voice grim. "But it's just a drop in the bucket, Mia."
He pointed his knife up through the shattered ceiling of the lobby.
The black rift in the sky was widening. The two Sunburst Dreadnoughts had been completely erased, and now the massive, central command ship of the Nullity a geometric nightmare the size of a small moon was slowly descending toward the planetary crust.
"They aren't here for a ground war," Dax realized, the horrifying truth dawning on him. "They're just going to drop their command ship on the city and overwrite the entire grid at once."
I pulled the jack from my neck, gasping for air as the connection severed. The Neon Rain outside began to slow, the Origin-Code reserves rapidly depleting.
"If that ship touches the ground, Coldwater is formatted," I said, leaning heavily against the desk. "We don't have a Void-Drive to shoot at it this time."
Dax looked out at the courtyard. He looked at the massive, severed upper half of the Prime Forge we had destroyed, and then at the colossal, dead chassis of the Avatar of Sol lying in the mud.
The Speedrun King’s eyes lit up with a terrifying, impossible idea.
"We don't have a bomb, Ghost," Dax said, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his scarred face. "But we have a ton of spare parts. And you're the best mechanic in the world."