Rise Of The Worthy [LitRPG System Apocalypse]

I stand transfixed staring up at that mass of uncomfortable power as people and metal crash around me. Some poor sap skids across the catwalk and screams all the way down to a heavy thump at the bottom of the hangar. Somebody dives down to get them, carried by magic that swirls around them in a chilly whirl to keep them airborne. Screams and slams echo through the hangar one by one by one until they overlap so constantly that I can't discern one from the other.

Still, that name hovers atop the hangar; unmoving inside of its mass of magic in a way that brings too many questions into my mind. Lament makes a noise down at my feet and seems to stir from his blocking-induced stupor. Seconds rip painfully by as the speaker gets to his feet and groans like he just woke up with the worst hangover of his life.

"Urngh… sorry…" he murmurs and tries to shamble towards the mech.

I put out a hand to stop him. "Whoah, there. Call, tell him he shouldn't be moving."

"Why not?" Call asks. "If Lament can't stop the mech, how are we supposed to stop it without giving you away?"

I glance upwards once more while Lament weakly struggles against my arm. "Can you see what I'm seeing?"

"No," Call says instantly. "Oh, um, unless you're talking about 'Speak' being on the roof. I can see that. But speak won't interfere; she's just here to watch and make sure we don't do anything weird."

The mech slams an open-palmed hand down on a speaker as if to emphasize Call's dumbass excuse for non-action. Poor woman trapped underneath gurgles out a horrible scream, and then the mech simply closes its fingers. The lower parts of a pair of legs and upper parts of a torso fall to the catwalk with wet splatters and a scream that gets infinitely louder as golden light rushes in to plug the horrible wounds.

All I can imagine is Noland watching me, March, or Ursula get utterly obliterated in a fight he could end with a flick of his wrist. It's so damn implausible I could laugh. Instead, it just hardens my resolve.

"Please tell me you're screwing with me."

Call shakes his head loud enough to hear through his mic. "If Speak determines we're not going to be able to handle it, she'll step in, demote everyone here on the spot, and then bring us all in for… for… uh-oh."

I grit my teeth. "Is that last word supposed to be 'questioning'?"

"It is."

Damn it; another bullshit roadblock popping up at the worst goddamn time. I grab Lament by the shoulder and spin him around, summon a purification coin as discreetly as possible, and shove it into his hand.

"Ooh, warm…" he trails off woozily. "Thanks, Call. I was feeling kind of cold."

His gauntlet unfolds for a split second, taking the coin in to touch olive-toned skin that I barely get a moment's glimpse of. Before he can get too attached to the warmth I flare the spell, spilling purifying salt into and all the way through his armor. His head snaps straight upwards, followed by a deep inhalation that must fill his lungs eight times over. Each passing moment grows his magical field a little further.

Metal creaks under the weight of his magic. "Fresh… so fresh…"

He flexes his fingers one by one. Each distorts the air around it ever so slightly, leaving an afterimage that pulses like a beating heart. Speak's tag up above finally moves ever so slightly in reaction to Lament's… honestly unbelievably recovery. Hell, I can't believe it myself; purification's not supposed to work like this for people I don't consider my ally.

"Thanks. That must've cost a lot of your salary for a remedy like that," Lament turns to me and pats my shoulder. A warm breeze passes straight through Call's armor and lodges itself on my shoulder as a gleaming handprint. "I owe you one."

"You owe me one?" I say to nobody and flick my hand at the mech. "Kill that thing for me."

Even though I don't get a single word out, Lament seems to get the gist of things. He cracks his knuckles, leaving behind tiny sparks like sound effects in his afterimage, and extends his bubble of annihilation until it covers half of the hangar. Speak's nametag slowly moves out of the way, but the writhing mass of magic surrounding her doesn't relent to Lament's annihilation. If he notices that fact, he doesn't make a scene of it.

"Okay, everyone! Step back!" he barks. "I'm going to contain this thing, and my friend here is going to deal with the heart while it's incapacitated. We're counting on all of you to deal with the thing's death throes if it decides it can live on without the reactor to sustain it!"

Cheers of confirmation erupt from all over the hangar. Even the medic who'd tried to mercy kill the old man joins in from outside of the hangar proper. I don't know where this confidence is coming from considering the last simple punch nearly knocked Lament's lights out, but if I'm the 'friend' he referred to, I don't think I'll have time to ask him about it. Not while he's breaking into a sprint towards the–shit!

I summon a shield against my skin and sprint after him. Call's armor slows me down enough that I barely gain any ground before Lament so perfectly places himself exactly where he'd gotten conked before, thrusts his hands to the sky, and concentrates his aura to just contain him and the mech in a long oval.

"Go!" he cries as the mech's hand crashes down on him. "I've got this!"

Metal screams against annihilation and shears away in chunks. It's not the concentrated sanding like the last time this happened, but there's something… more to it. The magic itself is stronger, like a wind full of sand that would scour away everything in its path, but it barely damages the mech's inner workings after it devours the outer metal.

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He knows something I don't.

"Pearl, why's he fine now?" I ask and jump at the mech's open ribcage.

The reactor beats loud and sporadic like a heart going into cardiac arrest, leaking so much radiation that Lament's aura can't even shear away the stuff right next to it. Pearl seriously considers my question for the six steps across metal ribs it takes me to get within the reactor's extreme danger zone.

Then she sighs and shakes her head. "I couldn't tell you. My best guess is you purified something that was keeping him weak, but there's no reason for him to have that. Or any reason why your purification didn't purify the annihilation field. Should we kidnap and interrogate him later?"

"I think that's the safest bet. Awful question, but, uh, how the hell are we going to do this?"

The radiation from the core dies as fast as it's being made, but that doesn't change the thick coating of the stuff around it. And as far as I know, I don't have any way to safely contain this thing without setting off an explosion that'd do enough damage to count as a war crime. I hazard a glance up at Speak's nameplate just in case.

It… looks like she's getting ready to move in. Fuck.

"I don't know! Even I don't have anything that could do this, and Lament things you're me right now!" Call blubbers directly into my ear. "What could you do and why would Lament have any reason to think I could do it instead of you in this–"

I tune Call out and focus on Pearl instead. She has the look of someone that's coming up with a very dangerous idea, and if my other option is being grilled by the Preservation's version of the secret police, then I'll take it in a heartbeat. Even if that heartbeat is as misshapen and radiation-spewing as the heart-reactor that's just inches from my face.

"If I'm right… your shields should be able to stop the radiation. But we'll have to merge for it, and if we do, you know what's going to happen. Plus, you'll have to be so fast with the shields, purification, and relocation that nobody here can even see what happens," Pearl says hesitantly. "I don't know if we can do that, even if the radiation here should wipe away all the signs of our magic use. AND EVEN THEN we'd have to come up with some reason why Call could keep the reactor safely in his inventory and not give it to Speak when she inevitably comes asking for it."

That's a lot of ifs. Fine with me. I don't need to say a word before my mind swims with newfound awareness and Pearl's consciousness melds with mine, swirling together into one pool of cosmic black speckled with the colours of both of our individualities. Lament's magic leaves behind a sharp enough trail to be far clearer than before. Speak's disgusting magic is even worse. And there's a small… something… at the bottom of the hangar that feels really strange. Almost like it's being purposefully blurred from being perceived at all.

I don't shake off the feelings. Each of them fills a part of my awareness, yet doesn't come close to truly overwhelming my mind. My palms fill with coins, one of which I connect to the city's intangible distance and the heart at the exact same time. I wish I'd had a chance to try this before with something a little safer, but hey; now's as good a time as any to see if this upgrade works the way I want it to.

A thought summons the shields. Two of them is all it takes to wrap around the reactor with the kindness of a warm hug and the unrelenting containment of a vacuum. I inject a purification inside to still the reactor's radiation spewing for just a moment. It's not enough. The radiation just… can't be purified. Because it's slightly alive. Pearl and I grimace at that revelation, but a quick shift from purification to infusion rips the slightly-alive radiation away and seals it in one very dangerous coin.

Lament's attention falls on me. He's noticed, even if nobody else has. It must be the aura. The 'bad air' he commands that's filled with so many tiny magical particles whirling about at breakneck speed to break down anything they touch. Without my enhanced awareness, I would've just labeled him as a destructive class. Now I'm sure he's an elementalist like the horizonguard was.

I turn to him and press my relocation to the shield. It forces the heart to become a target, then with a thought, the city's teleportation array intercepts the relocation signal and reroutes it to the only safe-ish place I can think of; the amusement district where I found Slice. Just hope nobody's trying to settle that place at this particular moment.

The heart, encased in shields, disappears in a snap of unbelievably powerful magic. Lament quietly gasps to himself as I snatch the infusion coin filled with deadly radiation out of the air and send it to my inventory. The air around my helmet whisks up a series of scratching sounds against the side of my helmet that slowly morph into words.

"Who are you?"

The roof explodes before I can get a word out, raining shrapnel and clusters of intangible magic down into the hanger in generous amounts. Lament's neck snaps to glare at Speak–at least that's what I want to imagine–as a pristine white suit of armor decorated with golden accents glides down from the heavens on an artificial sunbeam.

Speak folds her hands together on an obviously pregnant stomach. Even under the armor, I can feel a second life within her. It's… unsettling, to say the least.

"Well done, my lovely children," she says, her voice matronly and full of pride. "That was a really scary mech, wasn't it? But you all came together and beat it all by yourselves! Isn't that wonderful?"

Her helmet clicks, and her faceplate lowers to reveal a rounded face that's absolutely beaming with pride. She's put a lot of effort into her makeup to make it look perfectly natural, and it works. All I can imagine when I look at her is a teacher I had in grade school right before she went away on maternity leave; young, a little chubby, and full of love and life.

But every single instinct I have is telling me this woman is dangerous. And when her eyes land on me… even though they don't change at all… I can't help the shudder that runs down my spine.

"Let's get this cleaned up, then! All together now!"

She raises a hand at the mech and waves goodbye. Magic unlike anything I've ever felt washes over me, complete in its absolute violence, but doesn't touch a single hair on my head. The sound and sensations of the mech behind me crumpling into scrap can't out scream the voice in my head telling me to get the hell away from this woman right now.

Because her magic doesn't just attack the mech. It soaks into it, saturates every single fiber of its being, and utterly controls the damn thing. Forcing it to crush itself into as small a cube as it can possibly become, and then crushing a little more.

Speak claps her hands together near her face and smiles. "There! All done. Now run along, everyone; I'll clean the rest of this up on my own. Things like this don't just happen for no reason, you know?"

The mass at the bottom of the hangar twitches as Speak's magic prods it. Its protective veil fades away, revealing a woman lying on the ground, toolbox scattered on the ground like a mechanical blood spatter.

Lizzie, her left arm crushed and brimming with radiation, struggles to breathe under the pressure.