NOVEL NEXT 2.15 Swarm Storm
The bugs had blot out the sun, and the party panicked in the shade. More scouts converged on the car and Salazar swung the steering wheel side to side, dodging what he could and running over what he couldn't. His swerving kept the trio rolling on their backs until Phanya found her footing, using all of her "tactical knowledge" to ride the turbulent vehicle like a wave. Just in time for a bug to tumble through the jitney's gap and land right in front of her.
It looked like a giant locust at first glance, as long as Phanya's thigh and just as thick around the midsection. But even without seeing many insects in person they knew it looked wrong, somehow, as if the parts didn't quite fit properly together. Some limbs were a bit too short and its abdomen was a bit too long, forcing the insect to constantly adjust with twitchy movements. It was a horrible thing oozing with anguish and hunger, just like the thick substance oozing out from under its chitin.
With a hiss the bug reared up and lurched at the tallest threat in the room, Phanya. She moved to stomp on the bug, but as her attention shifted away from keeping her balance the car lurched sideways and slammed Phanya against the wall instead. She managed to catch the bug by the thorax and held it at bay, its legs scratching her arms and mandibles snapping madly at the air.
Phanya's panicked whimpering snapped Tapper out of his disorientation. His friend was in danger! Autonomous responses from his ARM feat took over and Tapper flipped over, all six limbs propping him up with an inhuman contortion. In one fluid motion Tapper sprang from the floor, grabbed the bug out of Phanya's hand, and slammed it to pulp on the ground.
[Swarm Scout lvl 1 defeated! +1 XP for participation]
With the danger gone Tapper regained conscious control over his body. He saved his friend! And then Tapper realized his hand was dripping with bug guts, and he squealed. "Ahh! Always with the biomatter! Why are organics so slimy?" Kakisi heard one of the words he learned to associate with food and popped out from his hiding space, always eager for a snack.
"Where are the weapons on this damn thing!?" Salazar shouted, slapping the dashboard with one hand to get everyone's attention.
"We don't have any!" Ricky shouted back, as he strained to keep his balance against a counter ledge. "If we did, we would've used them on you!"
One of Salazar's goggles swiveled to glare at Ricky, but he just scoffed and said, "Hey you, give me direct access to the sensor modules."
Ricky looked around, dumbfounded. "How am I supposed to do that?"
"Not you, shut up! I'm talking to my AI," Salazar snapped back, before he tilted his head to the side and continued talking to his digital assistant. "Yes, I said direct access, we'll need to improvise some pest control. Yes I know the mobile emitter won't be enough, just use the main projector. Stop complaining and make it work, then!" A small dome on the ceiling of Salazar's car flipped open and a camera extended on a multi-jointed arm, similar to the laser cutter Ricky used. Only this one strained to point at Salazar and stretch across the gap, and with an electric whine it projected a holographic array of buttons and levers all over the jitney's dashboard.
Salazar let go of the wheel to stretch his arms and crack his knuckles with one practiced motion. Then one hand returned to the wheel, and the other started dancing over the hologram. "I need to focus to do both," Salazar explained, but before he could say anything else the roof suddenly rattled with the sounds of a hailstorm. Everyone shared looks of mutual acknowledgment: that wasn't hail, it was a landing party. "So you kids better hold on and fight them off!"
Lights and sounds popped just outside of their metal shelter and stunned bugs started to tumble past the windows, but that only lessened the tide of chitin. Bugs crawled through any gap they could find and the occupants struck out wherever they could reach. In the cramped quarters they could reach just about anywhere; but Tapper, Phanya, and Ricky were nearly fighting back-to-back and anything that threatened one of them distracted the others. The scouts weren't a real threat individually, and although they were holding the swarm back the scratches were starting to build up.
Until the bugs suddenly abated. The sky still looked deeply overcast, but in the vacuum of silence it felt as if they were now in the eye of the storm. Everyone heaved with breath and looked wildly around, ensuring that the wave of scouts crashing against the jitney had failed. Or maybe that the wave had simply pulled back before the tsunami, as Phanya feared.
"They're… planning something," Phanya panted. Surely they weren't that smart, but the supernatural instincts from her Commander subclass reading of the battlefield screamed that a new volley was coming. "What weird skrat can these bugs do, Sal?"
"I smell ozone!" Tapper shouted. He had also been straining his sensors, even if that meant sorting through the overwhelming scent of bug guts, and Salazar snapped to attention at his words.
His right hand hammered out a series of commands while Salazar muttered curses under his breath, and a new layer appeared over the holographic map labeled "Atmosphere." Exclamation marks appeared all over the windshield, and Salazar's mutterings turned into shouts. He whipped the steering wheel and a crack of lightning struck the ground just outside of the window, deafening and disorientating the trio inside. Salazar's headgear saved his eyes and ears, but everyone felt the car tip sideways as they fell onto the slope of a very wide, somewhat shallow crater.
Instead of steering back up the ramp, and potentially stalling the vehicle, Salazar turned into the crater and used it to build up more momentum. He strained against the bulky, unfamiliar vehicle and fought to keep it from fishtailing as they skidded around the tarmac bowl, coming out the other side at a sharp angle. The added momentum jumped the ramp slightly, giving the jitney just a bit of air that flicked the trailer like a tail. Ricky was unfortunate enough to be standing the furthest back, and the physics trick bounced him against the ceiling and floor.
More lightning strikes, brought to life by the vibrations in the sheer mass of insects in the sky. More insects broke ranks to divebomb the jitney, with a wider variety of physical changes to warn that they were no longer mere scouts. Some had striped abdomens and stingers, who launched themselves with enough force to shatter their own bodies in the attack. Some carried jewel tones in their carapace and exploded with acidic guts, which Tapper constantly rushed to Suck up. Some had glowing abdomens that delivered painful shocks if they weren't squished in time, and after punching down a minor swarm of them Phanya's Knucklebuster gloves glowed with their entrails.
Salazar's eyes swiveled between several different layers of sensor readouts and he constantly adjusted his steering around the worst threats. Sometimes that meant repeating the "crater slingshot" to gain more speed and rapidly change direction at once, and the vehicle gained a sort of flowing rhythm to the maneuvers. Salazar almost grew comfortable with the situation, despite Ricky's complaints about his motion sickness, and for that sin the Glass Eye threw another problem in his direction.
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The base map layer of the hologram, formed from acoustic readouts in ground vibrations, suddenly rippled as if someone had thrown a pebble into a lake's reflection. Tapper looked through a window and saw something outlined in a flash of lightning, too dark to see detail but still impressive enough to leave an impression. Some sort of horned beetle landed on the tarmac that was either magnified by the Glass Eye or much, much larger than was physically possible.
"Mister Salazar, are you quite positive that this is not a Phase Shift Incursion?" Tapper asked.
"Shut up shut up!" Salazar snarled back, whipping the jitney directly into a steep crater to reverse course. But the great horned beetle wasn't alone and other impacts rippled across the map, and Salazar's driving grew more frantic. The giant bugs were slow enough that he could drive around them, but after too many sharp turns Salazar was bound to accidentally double back and cross their path again.
One beetle got lucky and appeared for a brief second in the range of normal vision. Its massive carapace was an equal match to the jitney's size, but its six sturdy legs gave the beetle an advantage on leverage. It brought its horn down against the trailer portion before they sped out of its reach, and although clipping the car couldn't turn it over the bug's attack did make them fishtail. Salazar fought to regain control, and Ricky's attention seared through the motion sickness when he heard muted popping nearby.
The chains were starting to break under the pressure! He moved to grab his gizmo, but stopped. What if it didn't work? It took him so long to get the clockwork just right to make the chains in the first place, could he risk wasting that much time again? More chains popped and Ricky grit his teeth, hating that he had to rely on the exosuit over his own magic again. Instead he just grabbed two ends of the gap and pulled them together with all his enhanced might, hoping to take some strain off the chains.
It also meant that he was facing outside, with a perfectly exposed view of the chaos swarming around them. A lightning strike illuminated the gray static of countless insects, and one massive blot of darkness directly overhead. The bug was slowly descending on the jitney, and although Ricky couldn't see its wings in the dim light he could feel the displaced air beating down on them. "We have another beetle incoming! It's flying, it… it's going to land on us!"
Salazar tried to shake it off, but he was already boxed in by a long crack in the tarmac. Too wide to jump and full of jagged debris, the miniature canyon ran parallel to the jitney on their left while multiple giant beetles closed in on their right. "Don't you luddites have any guns!?" Salazar shouted back at them. "Fucking shoot it down!"
Tapper looked to his friends for guidance, but Ricky was busy holding the vehicle together and Phanya could only shrug in defeat. "The system literally prevents me from using guns, remember?" They were both exhausted and covered in bug guts, and Tapper nodded in understanding. He had made a promise to protect them, and if he didn't use every tool at his disposal to do so then he would break that promise through inaction. Even if he was not confident in his capacity to use every tool, his sense of Adventure still wanted to try.
Tapper stood up straight and said, "Worry not! Please lift me so I may try something, Phanya." She quirked an eyebrow at his sudden shift in attitude, but braced down on one knee to help hoist Tapper up to the crack in the ceiling. He propped himself on the ledge, aimed his spritzer straight up to the beetle's underside, and tried to remember what it felt like to cast a spell with lethal intent.
"Or even knowing what the spell was would suffice," Tapper grumbled to himself. The complete lack of any record or data from his fight with Manager Fairbanks bothered Tapper, both that he could function while his higher processes were shut down and the notion that he would act so aggressively. But he knew that he had done it, so logically he knew that it was possible, and that will have to be enough. "Here goes. I cast Drill Spray!"
The mana flared up in his chest, threatening to overflow and spill out if he didn't properly shape the spell. But casting a spell with two components instead of one, without any forethought or formulations, was more difficult by an order of magnitude. So many variables he had to calculate, Tapper doubted that any organic brain could ever manage! The quantum fluctuations needed to condense the ethereal energies into physical drills was enough on its own to —
Tapper recoiled from the backlash as the spell failed to form, and the mana building up for it dispersed into the air instead. He was going about this the wrong way, of course he couldn't calculate variables down to the molecular level in just a few seconds. Maybe a dedicated supercomputer could manage that, not a mere bartender. But he couldn't dwell on his failures in the middle of a swarm storm. He needed to feel out the magic, and his idiom generator perked up with a bit of helpful advice for a second attempt.
"As they say, make do until you get due," Tapper said. He felt a little better, and repeated it like a mantra. "Make do until you get due. Make do until you get due! DRILL SPRAY!"
Just picture the magic, don't think about it. Picture a million little drills eating away at the massive bug, ignore the variables that aren't needed, and make it happen. The spell took shape and Tapper barely managed to feed it through his spritzer, erupting into reality as a shower of lights. He instantly recognized the similarities to Ricky's first attempts at casting the Chain spell: these drill bits created by his magic weren't real, physical objects, they were just the concept of such. Mana shaped into drills of light that will vanish from existence the moment that Tapper's spell ends, so he just needed to not let it end.
Tapper focused all of his processor on holding onto the tenuous spell shape, and he almost missed his own light show. The fountain of light points arced upwards, but the storm threw off his aim and he hit the giant beetle on the side instead of its soft underbelly. Most of the drills bounced off its thick chitin like a shower of sparks, but after a second Tapper saw the chitin crack and the beetle lost control of its flight. It banked off to the side for a crash landing, and Tapper collapsed back inside the vehicle with a whoop.
"Way to go, Tapper!" Phanya joined in, staring transfixed through the window.
They watched the giant beetle crash to the tarmac, and to everyone's surprise the storm changed in response to this specific bug. The other giant beetles stopped chasing the jitney and changed course towards their injured brethren, but instead of a rescue the injured beetle reared up on its hind legs in defiance. It slammed down on the nearest healthy beetle, and the swarm broke out with sudden infighting. Even Salazar had to stop the vehicle, so as to not attract the attention of the bugs now rushing past them instead of at them. This was a lucky break for them, if he could just get his bearings and map out a course then they could escape.
"At least there aren't any larger threats than those beasts, should be smooth sailing now!" Tapper said with a happy chime, instantly dashing Salazar's hopes for a quiet exit.
"Shut up shut up shut up!" Salazar quietly hissed, swinging a fist to punctuate every word.
Tapper's ARM Module feat made his body react automatically to the threat and Tapper rolled with the punches. Not quite like an inflated advertising tube, but just enough to ensure that the awkward swings had no chance of actually damaging him. "Mister Salazar, please watch the violence," Tapper chided. He kept his voice gentle to try diffusing the situation, but that only seemed to make Salazar even angrier.
"No! You don't say that! You never say that!" The seismograph map on the windshield was constantly rippling in response to the giant beetles fighting just outside, but it went haywire a split second before everyone felt a minor earthquake through the tarmac. Salazar's ire against Tapper died out against grim resignation, and he sighed before slamming his foot on the accelerator. "See? You've cursed us."