Chapter 41.3: Perimeter Defenses

Penny pushed it all out of her mind and set her sights once more on the runaway guard. With a grimace she passed his companion, who still stared wide-eyed at the scene. Leaving him there would probably come back to bite her, but that lock-kneed idiot wasn’t the immediate threat.

She spun the rotary loader in the bottom of her pistol and slid an electrocution slug into the barrel. An ordinary bullet could hurt, maim, or even kill a target, but more than likely, he’d be able to press through a few shots before dropping. Electrocution slugs on the other hand had a knack for incapacitating on the first hit, even if that incapacitation wasn’t final. Trouble was, she’d already fired off enough rounds that it was hard to tell where any particular type of bullet was in the loader. Damn it. She’d really have to think through that issue when she got back to her…

The thought of her lost shop only infuriated her further.

Penny bit back a scream, raised her left pistol to height, and cracked off a couple shots to throw the little, running bastard off-balance. He danced right into the sights of her other pistol, and she pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, and a red flash burst from the muzzle.

Shit, Penny thought. That muzzle flash should have been blue.

The asura’s foot hit the second steel disk a heartbeat before a shower of embers burst from his shoulder, setting his tunic on fire and throwing him to the ground a few feet back.

OK, so that round had been incendiary, but with the second pylon beginning to rise, it didn’t really matter. Penny felt her hair standing up again.

The guard rolled on the ground to extinguish his burning clothes and arm as Penny reached him. He laughed, “We’re all dead now, bookah! There is no—”

“Shut up!” Penny drove a foot into the side of his face. She kicked him again, and he was out.

Thinking for a second, she kicked him a third time. That one didn’t solve any particular problem, but it felt good. Beside her and the unconscious goon, the pylon rose slowly from the earth, just like its twin.

She turned to assess it. How the hell was she going to stop these things from electrocuting them all—or whatever they were supposed to do? She looked back at Minkus and the norn, hoping they’d come up with something.

Thirty yards behind her, Fjornsson hammered on the cylinder with his greatsword, unleashing a flurry of strikes that turned his mass into a blur. Sparks flew off the squat structure at the end of his swings, but it was unclear which were generated by the device itself and which were the result of his slashing. Though the shell of the pylon showed little sign of wear, the norn had successfully shattered a couple of its glowing, red panels, giving Penny a distant glimpse of the white light generating inside it.

That light didn’t stay inside it, though. A small aura of crackling energy grew out of each panel, shattered or not, and spreading around the cylinder toward the others.

“Anything?” Penny called.

“Does it look like it?” The norn yelled back, through panting breaths.

The flaring glows grew near to a ring, sparking white inside and out as the weapon reached the fullness of its charge. This was going to be really bad. They could try to run, but Penny wasn’t sure they’d make it far enough. There was no way of knowing the effective range on these things.

Minkus moved closer to the norn, avoiding the wilder swings of that huge blade. “Crusader, I think it’s time to—”

It happened faster than Penny could see. The emissions of the four panels touched, collapsed back into the pylon, and burst in a flash of light so violent it pushed the world out of her field of view. For several moments, all was white.

Then the world pressed in again, coming into relief and then color, starting at the edges of her view and moving back in. But it stopped, around a single sphere of blinding brilliance, smack in the middle of the scene.

The dell was back in view, almost as green as it had been. The bluffs, the topping treeline—everything. Even Minkus and Yult came back into view. And between them all was a sphere of sparking light that raged behind a rippling layer of iridescent blue. Yult was a few steps back from the pylon and the dome of energy encasing it. Minkus stood next to it, hunched and wincing, his hands balled up in fists at his sides, and quickly Penny understood. Minkus had contained the blast; he was containing the blast. “Gods…”

Penny heard Minkus’ voice, distant and strained. “Crusader,” he said, “Maybe— well, please get the guard. And go. Maybe going— going would be good.”

An acknowledging grunt followed, and Fjornsson lumbered toward the terrified guard who was now knocked back on his rear.

Penny released another awed curse. “Biggie,” she called, “ that’s you, right?”

“Yes, I— I’m holding in some kind of energy. I must be, Penny— it hurts to hold it.” Despite his words, something like a smile touched his lips. “Would you maybe handle the other one?”

Penny blinked. Gods, she’d forgotten about the pylon right beside her. “Right. Yeah. Uh— hold on.” She needed a plan, or something remotely like one.

Inside the flaring cloud of electricity locked in Minkus’ magical barrier, Penny could still make out the pylon. Those red, translucent panels, now purple through the shield, pulsed in time with the energy fluctuations throughout the dome. One of them was still purple, anyway; the other two she could see had been knocked in, nothing but empty holes where Yult’s sword had shattered the glass covers. She snapped around to the pylon behind her, which had also risen from the ground to its full height, and a thought popped into her head. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was better than nothing.

Uncomfortably Penny stepped back, raised both pistols at the pylon, and unloaded every shot.

Several rounds tanged off the steel sides of the device in directions Penny had no interest in tracking. A few struck true, punching through two of the red panels and leaving webbed cracks in their wake. Penny flipped the pistol in her right hand and smashed its butt through the rest of the shattered glass, clearing a path to what she hoped would be the machine’s delicate, breakable innards.

She leaned forward to get a look inside it, but leapt back even faster, flailing a now shocked hand in the air. She barked a curse, but there was no time for calculating.

Slinging the pack down from her shoulder and rummaging through it for just a second, she yanked out one of her small, puck-shaped explosives. “Gods, this better work.”

She jammed the bomb into the hole and lunging away as she heard the device clink down inside the cylinder. She threw herself against the earth, hands over her ears.

Seconds passed, and nothing happened. The pylon buzzed and crackled, its pitch continuing to ramp.

“Penny?” Minkus called, the strain in his voice worsening. “Was that supposed to do something? Because it— well, nothing happened.”

“Damn it!” she barked, realizing immediately what had gone wrong. She hopped up from the dirt, grabbed another explosive and a match, struck the match, lit the fuse, and rammed the second puck into the pylon right behind the first. Then she ran like hell, flailing the hand she’d managed to shock yet again.

She’d barely gotten ten yards away when the pylon blew, hitting her like a charging bull and launching her off her feet. She landed in a heap, the wind knocked out of her, and a fine rain of magitechnical debris fell down around her.

World spinning and ears ringing, Penny inched herself up to her elbows and knees to glare back at what was left of the pylon. Its top was blown clean off, leaving a bent tube protruding from the ground and ending in a frayed bloom of steel and circuit-work.

The ring in her ears was like the gods-damned temple bells of Balthazar, but Penny thought she heard something at a distance. The clanging resolved into something like speech, but it was difficult to understand—damn, everything felt difficult to understand.

Minkus, she suddenly realized. The voice was Minkus. He was only feet away from her, holding his head between his hands and staggering still toward her.

“Penny,” he asked through a pain-puckered expression, “Are you alright?”

She nodded, in a bit of pain herself. “Not dead. Not yet.”

“Excelsior. Can you get up? We— we really need to go. I can’t— hold it.” 

“Oh gods.” He was still holding that dome, trapping a massive electrical discharge inside it. He didn’t just sound pained now; he sounded ragged.

Penny dragged herself to her feet, scooping up her bag of gear—Minkus’ bag, actually—and tottered off alongside him toward the treeline.

A ways ahead of them, the norn was already most of the way there, toting two figures with him: one under each arm. They had to be the guards. She hadn’t even thought to look for them after the explosion, and those two idiots were the whole reason she, Fjornsson, and Minkus had— Minkus!

She snapped around to him, then to the glistening dome still standing fifty yards behind them. He was still holding it there.

“Biggie, what are you doing? You plan to keep that thing up till the gods come back?”

He didn’t look up. All his focus seemed divided between the stress of the magic and their progress toward the trees. “Do you think we’re far enough?”

“Hell if I know,” Penny said, “Does it matter? How long do you think you can keep this up?”

“Well, probably a little—”

“Gods, just drop it already. We’ll be fine.”

“Alright.” With a sigh, Minkus’ tension lifted, and the blue dome melted under a sizzling expanse of raw electrical energy that shot out in all directions. It faded into empty air somewhere between the two pylons.

“Looks like they were meant to work together,” Penny observed, rubbing at her burnt hand. Gods, it was starting to throb. “You could have done that a while ago.”

Minkus nodded, breathing in gasps, and he pushed on toward the trees.

Penny, however, took a moment to gaze back at the pylons. One was now a useless shaft of scrap metal she’d left for these Inquest jerks to find on their next patrol, which she knew wouldn’t be far off. The other pylon, though? It still pulsed a current into the air: enough to cook any unlucky soul like a Wintersday ham.

She touched the back of her hand and winced. They hadn’t even gotten inside the building, and she already should have been a ham. Vindication or not, she was liking this less and less.

“Watch out for more pressure plates,” she called to Minkus. “I bet those weren’t the only two.”