Chương 218: Kentucky Windage (01/18/2016)

DATE: Monday, January 18, 2016 LOCATION: Gladsheim Pyramidal Complex, Antarctica LOCAL TIME: 3: 31 PM PST (Coordinated) The descent bays forcefully ejected their payloads. Inside his haptic cradle in the Mojave, Randy's servos locked his joints, simulating the gut-wrenching weightlessness of absolute freefall. He plummeted out of the Lazar dropship and into the freezing, star-studded void of the exosphere. He wasn't alone. When Randy adjusted his optic feed, the sky was completely choked with iron.

Thousands of carbon-black Vanguard and Heavy Assault chassis were in freefall around him, dropping in perfect, silent unison like a massive metallic rainstorm against the edge of space.

"Terminal velocity reached," the system chimed.

"Uh, Actual?" AJ's voice cracked over the party net, tinged with genuine gamer panic.

"The LZ is still a solid sheet of glacier! We are falling toward a closed door!"

"Hold your drop trajectory, SR," Marcinko's voice barked calmly over the macro-net.

"Red Cell is on the clock." Randy watched the altimeter on his HUD spin violently downward. They were screaming toward the absolute white expanse of the Antarctic ice shelf at over a hundred and twenty miles per hour. There was no hole. There was no cavern. Just two miles of impenetrable, frozen mass rushing up to meet them. Ten seconds to impact.

"Any second now, Red Cell!" Jessie Betters yelled, her Avatar tucked into a rigid aerodynamic dive directly below Randy. Five seconds. Then, the ice simply stopped existing. Directly below the first wave of falling Avatars, the Element 115 core imploded. A localized singularity tore a microscopic hole in reality. Space-time violently folded inward, and the two-mile-thick ice sheet didn't shatter—it was sucked into itself.

Millions of tons of ancient blue ice, glacial rock, and subterranean earth were instantly ripped into a shrieking, bending void. The ground vanished, leaving a perfectly sheared, two-mile-deep tunnel plunging straight into the Earth's crust. The first wave of Avatars didn't even have time to adjust. They dropped straight through the residual spatial distortion of the implosion. The friction of hitting the dense subterranean atmosphere superheated the air around them.

Randy's optic feed was momentarily swallowed by a roaring corona of orange plasma and vapor. The temperature gauges on his HUD spiked from absolute zero to a simulated two-thousand degrees in a fraction of a second. They punched through the plasma fire and the sulfurous cloud canopy, and Gladsheim finally opened up beneath them. The scale of the cavern was staggering.

At the dead center of the prehistoric, fern-choked jungle sat the monolithic Gladsheim pyramid, surrounded by a glowing circular moat of liquid mercury.

"Scouts, talk to me!" Randy yelled over the roaring wind simulation.

"LZ painted, Raider One," Jesse Tucker's voice came back, perfectly calm.

"Heavy anti-air battery tracking your trajectory. Adjusting Equilibrium." A massive, glowing green circle materialized on the subterranean jungle floor in Randy's HUD. Translucent red cones rapidly intersected the airspace directly below him. Randy fired his localized thrusters, violently jerking his two-ton chassis fifteen yards to the left mid-fall. A searing beam of telluric resonance energy sliced through the airspace he had just vacated.

"Tagging an Arianni heavy-armor column on the east causeway," Billy Tucker transmitted over the party net.

"Impact in three. Two. One." Randy didn't brace. The two-ton Heavy Assault Avatar hit the hyper-compressed basalt like a meteor, shattering a pristine marble colonnade. The chassis immediately bled the kinetic energy into a flawless, forward-rolling somersault. Randy came out of the roll in a full sprint, eating up the ground with terrifying lateral quickness.

"Off the leash!" Randy roared. The Arianni infantry on the causeway raised their etheric rifles. Randy didn't aim down sights. The Equilibrium Algorithm thumped rapidly against his index finger. He squeezed the trigger. The heavy fractal cannon fired localized acoustic pressure waves. The front line of Schutzstaffel-clad soldiers simply exploded outward, their bodies rupturing under the concussive force. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road.

Please report it. PING. PING. ⁠+150 FS. Party Multiplier: Active. ⁠"AJ, Jessie, form up on Randy," Jesse ordered.

"Anomaly breaking from the central pyramid. The wireframe can't render it." Through the smoke of the shattered causeway, the air temperature plummeted. The sulfur smell in Randy's rig was instantly overridden by the sharp tang of ozone. A figure stepped out of the smoke. It looked like a tear in reality shaped like a man, leaking iridescent, dark pixels. Instantly, Randy's Equilibrium HUD melted down. The translucent red telegraph cones turned into a chaotic, spinning kaleidoscope.

Inside his glove, the aim-assist algorithm became a frantic, erratic vibration. ⁠ERROR: SPATIAL TELEMETRY CORRUPTED. ⁠"HUD is scrambled!" Randy shouted, switching to manual optics. AJ's Vanguard chassis dropped its shoulder, sprinting violently to the right to flank the entity. He cleared fifteen yards in two seconds and raised his rail-rifle. AJ's visor framerate dropped to single digits. The visual feed tore, freezing on a single frame before violently snapping forward. He wasn't flanking.

He rubber-banded back to his exact starting position, his Avatar stumbling.

"I'm dropping frames!" AJ yelled. The Aesir raised a single, iridescent hand. A massive, crushing weight slammed down on Randy's chest plate. ⁠WARNING: GRAVITATIONAL ANOMALY DETECTED. ⁠ ⁠CHASSIS LOAD 400%. ⁠ Randy tried to execute a backward roll. The servos in his Avatar's knees shrieked, showering sparks as the two-ton machine crashed hard onto its hands and knees, pinned to the basalt floor.

"I can't move!" Jessie screamed, her Avatar locked in place, the rotary cannon dragging on the ground. Randy fought the crushing gravity, dragging his heavy fractal cannon up to aim dead center at the anomaly's chest. He pulled the trigger. The localized acoustic wave erupted from the barrel, but a dozen yards from the entity, it hit an invisible wall of spatial distortion. The blast violently curved into the vaulted ceiling, raining shattered concrete down on the pinned Raiders. The Aesir didn't hesitate.

It stepped forward, its iridescent blade humming. AJ's chassis was cleaved cleanly in half. His audio feed cut to static instantly. A second later, the Aesir brought the blade down on Jessie's rotary cannon, slicing through the weapon and her Avatar's reactor core. Randy looked up just in time to see the blade swing toward his visor. CRACK. The screen went pitch black. The haptic feedback in Randy's rig instantly died, leaving him sitting in the sudden, suffocating silence of his Mojave trailer.

He blinked, sweating through his tactile suit. A heavy, blood-red notification flashed in the center of the dark visor. ⁠SR WIPE. PARTY PENALTY APPLIED: -5, 000 FS. ⁠ ⁠RE-SYNCING. QUEUING HEAVY ASSAULT CHASSIS. ⁠"Damn it!" Randy slammed his fist against his armrest.

"That thing is broken! It's dropping frames and curving shots!"

"Don't rage-quit yet, Raider," Jesse Tucker's voice piped into the lobby comms, perfectly calm from the digital twin overlay.

"I have the telemetry from your wipe. I see exactly how it works." The pitch-black screen shattered back into the exosphere drop bay. Randy, AJ, and Jessie were locked into three fresh chassis, the absolute zero of the exosphere bleeding back into their neural weaves.

"Dropping in three, two, one," Billy called out. The bays opened. The three Avatars plummeted back through the two-mile ice rift, screaming toward the causeway.

"Listen to me," Jesse said as they fell.

"The spatial warp isn't a shield. It's a gravitational lens. It bends the trajectory of everything that enters the radius. Billy, tag my exact coordinates on their raw optic feeds." A glowing green chevron materialized in Randy's visor, hovering thirty yards to the right of the Aesir's position on the causeway below.

"Raiders, do not aim at the anomaly," Jesse ordered.

"Aim at my green chevron. You're aiming at me."

"Kentucky windage," Randy muttered, the athletic telemetry flawlessly catching his Avatar as he impacted the basalt and rolled to his feet. The Aesir turned toward the new drop, raising its hand to re-engage the gravity well.

"Trust the math. Aim at me!" Jesse yelled. Randy didn't wait for the gravity to crush him this time. He swung his fractal cannon away from the Aesir, lining his iron sights directly on Jesse's floating marker. AJ and Jessie locked onto the opposite flank.

"Mark!" Billy yelled. Randy squeezed the trigger. AJ and Jessie fired a microsecond later. A hypersonic rail-slug and two acoustic pressure waves erupted. As they entered the Aesir's radius, the spatial distortion caught them. The projectiles violently banked inward, riding the invisible curve of the Aesir's own defensive field. They bent a full ninety degrees, bypassing the frontal distortion entirely, and slammed directly into the back of the anomaly. The entity shattered into a cloud of raw ozone. PING.

⁠+50, 000 FS. Boss Eliminated. Party Multiplier: RESTORED. ⁠"Never doubt the Scouts," Jesse said smoothly.

"Keep aggro on the Arianni. Red Cell needs the courtyard clear." Even through a hundred feet of hyper-compressed basalt, Gordon felt the rhythmic, concussive thumps of the SR party's heavy weapons vibrating the floor. Inside the inner sanctum of Gladsheim, the silence was absolute.

"Nexus, Red Cell Lead," Gordon whispered over the encrypted sub-channel, his Avatar pressed flat against a monolithic obsidian pillar.

"Past the outer mercury wells. Pushing into the central hyperbaric infrastructure." Gordon and Shughart moved like heat mirages. Their diamagnetic cloaks bent the ambient light, rendering them as faint shimmers. Acoustic dampeners in their magnetic boots swallowed their footfalls. A pale green waypoint hovered at the end of a long, vaulted corridor of Roman concrete. Gordon's athletic telemetry smoothed into a predatory glide. He rounded the corner and halted.

The hyperbaric core room was dominated by a towering, cylindrical reactor pulsing with deep blue light. Guarding the access terminal were two massive heavy infantry. They wore archaic brass deep-sea diving suits modified with etheric tech. Thick, pressurized cables connected their suits directly into the telluric grid of the floor. Shughart double-clicked his comms, raising his suppressed rifle. Gordon raised a hand, signaling no. Gordon's Equilibrium Algorithm hummed to life.

Translucent red cones fanned out from the two guards' brass visors. Because they were tethered, their movement was rigid, creating a narrow, three-foot blind spot directly between their overlapping fields of view. Timing it perfectly with the guards' synchronized head-turns, Gordon stepped into the gap. His stealth chassis slipped through the overlapping red telegraph cones. A fraction of an inch to either side, and the light-bending properties of his cloak would graze their optics.

He crossed the room in total silence, stopping directly behind the heavy guards at the main terminal. Gordon unspooled a braided data-spike from his Avatar's wrist. He slid the spike into the brass data-port.

"Nexus, spike is in," Gordon transmitted.

"The Aesir's gravity manipulation has been secured."