Chapter 51.1: One Last Hurdle

Every step through the winding halls of the complex pushed Penny’s patience—with herself—one step closer to shutdown. As they jogged, Jinkke swore up and down that she remembered the way in and out of the claustrophobic labyrinth, something her brother had previously taken care of. He’d managed to see them through it seemingly without problem, with a confidence that was new to him but endearing. But he couldn’t help them now, or ever again.

It was thoughts like those that wore on Penny, more than she ever planned to admit. Minkus had led them to Ventyr and the scholar. Minkus had done the reconnaissance with Wepp. Minkus had driven them to this place out of his unyielding concern for other people. Minkus had healed an insane attacker, he’d spared Kikka’s life, he’d come after Penny when no one should have, and he’d saved her life when it would cost him everything—when it did cost him everything.

Every damn thought led back to him, and every thought of him led back to that. Penny had temporarily escaped that trap while working out how to extract the golem’s magic reservoir and get everyone moving again, but now? Now she had nothing to focus on but another stupid footfall, and another, and another. She desperately needed something to work on, to think about, to solve, just to stop thinking about… him.

“Are we almost out of this place?” she complained.

Jinkke threw back an exasperated glance, then set her gaze ahead again. “If you see another junction ahead, then no, we have at least one more turn left, and we are not almost out. Are you done acting like an unrelenting progeny?”

Fjornsson grunted behind them, adding something to the exchange, but Penny paid neither him nor the burden he carried any mind. If she did it would inevitably send her down the same thought path, and she couldn’t do that.

Penny just had to keep the argument going. “Maybe I’ll stop asking when we finally—”

“There.” Jinkke cut her off, pointing forward as they rounded a turn and passed into a larger hall that Penny immediately recognized as the central corridor. At the end of the broad stretch, she could see the tangerine glow of late afternoon sunlight on the world outside.

Jinkke slowed, putting up a hand for quiet. “We aren’t alone.” 

Between them and the main entrance, Penny spotted what her friend had seen: movement. Two small, fat-headed silhouettes scurried across the backlight of the outside world, from one side of the hall to the other.

Penny had half a mind to sic the norn on whoever these scampering obstructions were right then. But that would mean him putting down… No, she couldn’t deal with that.

“I’ll handle it,” she said, quieting her steps as she slipped ahead of the others. Her back still ached where the electrical burns remained, and Fjornsson hissed something, but she was already gone, leaving the other two to slim their profiles against the wall.

Penny slid up closer to the wall herself as she quickened her pace. With the dim lighting in the hall, not everything was silhouettes and backlight to her, but the asura ahead would certainly have better visibility than she did.

As she closed the gap, she saw no further sign of the pair, but she did spot an open door in the northern wall of the corridor, roughly where she’d seen their figures disappear into the shadows. On tiptoes, she danced across the hallway and pressed her back against the northern wall, slipping a pistol free of its holster and checking the loader. Only a couple of shots were readied, but Penny could now hear the pair rifling through some equipment inside the small room. With her luck, it would be some kind of armory. Either way she only had moments.

With a shrug, she spun into the open doorway and screamed, leveling weapons at what- or whoever was inside.

The room actually was a small weapons locker, and at the sound of her wild cry, the two, bickering inquest technicians leapt in opposite directions, also wailing. One, holding an energy weapon, began firing shots in a panic. The walls, which had been lined with a strange combination of melee weapons and magitechnical rifles, exploded in a random pattern of broken steel and magical fireworks, blowing the other asura back out the doorway and into the hall.

Penny screamed a curse, and spun back out of the way, pressing herself into the wall again as chunks of gear shot out into the corridor as well, trailing wisps of colored smoke. In hindsight, it might not have been the best plan, but it had worked.

Things quieted inside, and the technician in the hall rolled over. Seeing Penny, she yelped faintly and tried to pull up the energy rifle that was pinned beneath her hip. It gave Penny just enough time.

Minkus hadn’t left her mind. He seemed to hover just beyond the immediate dangers, which put the thought of killing this frightened, little person just out of reach for her. Instead, though, she had another idea. It seemed that those asuran rifles could be as much an asset for her as they were for their bearers.

She took aim and put two shots through the body of the asura’s rifle. The weapon exploded in a ball of red light, blasting the technician back against the wall with enough force that, conscious or not, she stopped moving. That was enough.

The others caught up as she checked on the asura still inside the weapons closet. He hadn’t been as lucky.

“What just happened?” Jinkke asked. She looked exhausted, though it didn’t stop her wide eyes from taking up half her head as she peered into the room.

“It wasn’t me,” Penny said, hands up. She pointed. “I mean this one in here wasn’t, anyway. The little freak just started shooting the place up, and— well, if you get a chance to blow a hole through one of those rifles of theirs, it’s definitely effective.”

“Is there anything in there we can still use?” Yult asked. He peered into the door through a thin cloud of smoke, pulling heavy breaths under the weight of… his load.

Penny shook that away. She couldn’t think about it—couldn’t think about him.

She scanned the room for any weapons still intact. The norn was right; if they could find anything usable before running out into whatever the hell was happening outside—she could already hear the fray beyond the end of the corridor—they had to take it.

All they found were a pair of spears sheathed in a corner and a single energy rifle that must have slid safely beneath a table before the real blasts had started. Jinkke slung her rifle back over her shoulder, in a motion that looked almost practiced, and took hold of the remaining energy weapon before stepping back out into the hall alongside Penny. The norn wrapped a tight grip around the spears as he returned to the hallway on their heels, rumbling something about the years it had been since he’d thrown a spear.

Penny shook her head, loading up her pistols once more, and a too-quick moment later, the three passed out of the fluorescent half-light of that underground hellhole and back into the open air outside. The broad daylight they’d entered under had faded into the dimming light of approaching sunset. The eastern plateau burned like orange firelight under a sun that sank below the opposite clifftop, and shadow engulfed the rest of the broad courtyard. She’d never been so glad to step outside.

All three of them took in the scene before them, some of which Penny had expected to see—yeah, maybe she’d held the flimsy hope that they could escape the place without any further trouble, but she knew that was naive, if not downright vain. Asura, bandits, golems, and fallen bodies of all three persuasions were scattered around the courtyard. Blasts of energy went off in the dusking light, the sounds of more traditional gunshots echoed off the cliff faces, and faint clangs of steel seemed to call and respond between melee combatants somewhere near the opposite buildings. In truth, the situation wasn’t as bad as it could have been—it wasn’t as bad as Penny had expected it to be. Really, the whole thing was kind of sparse. It was still a battle, and thus something Penny had no interest in joining, but with so many of each faction already fallen, the Inquest and the bandits were each down to a dozen or less, and they were scattered around the wide space in such a way each of their clashes almost felt like a separate conflict from the others.

What stopped Penny’s breath, though, was what lay nearest to them, in the middle of the path bisecting the courtyard. Two toppled masses sat maybe twenty yards apart from each other, looking like they’d recently been wagons, whatever mess of upturned, charred, scrap and cargo they were now. Each one sheltered a small collection of fighters, some of whom she recognized, on each side. Yissa and Jindel huddled defensively behind the nearer of the two, the human ducking out to fire off shots while the asura— was she unloading the crates? Ventyr was there, but not with the others. He’d left to engage one of the bandits at the other wrecked wagon, who in turn was working hard to keep him away from a third figure, one that even at this range she recognized: the leader of their group. He gripped her attention not just because he was a bastard, but because he wasn’t engaged in the conflict at all. Instead, he just sat there in the dirt, waving his arms like a puppeteer as streams of angry, purple energy flowed hazily out of the crates at the opposite wagon, over the two combatants, and into his dancing hands. From there the fluorescent haze seemed to condense, funneling on in a brighter thread to something in the collapsed wagon bed behind him.

Over the last hour, Penny had developed a sharp disdain for anything purple, and whatever this was, she already hated it. “What in Torment is that?” she hissed.

Jinkke’s eyes widened, but she clearly tried to keep her head. “Do you mean the tri-directional conflict or the human manipulating an energy strikingly similar to agony magic?”

“Yeah, the second one.” Penny had a hard time infusing the words with the intended snark.

The norn grunted, pushing the two aside as he passed between them, “You can stand here talking about it, or we can do something.”

Even with his load, Fjornsson raced across the half-grassed, dusty gap as though he hadn’t spent the last thirty minutes fighting for his life alongside them. Penny and Jinkke shared a look of complete exhaustion.

“It can’t be for nothing,” Jinkke whispered.

Penny didn’t think she’d been meant to hear that, but she had heard it, and she agreed. From somewhere deep inside her, beneath the turmoil that knotted her gut anew, she agreed.