The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Cameras there, there, and there. Cheap set up, not even moving, fixed arcs of coverage. Fooling electronic eyes wasn’t all that hard, especially at night. Now, the vibration sensors they’d planted in the ground could have been bad, but they weren’t counting on a master lightfooter invisible after taking a sip of a Potion coming in across them at thirty-five mph, using an eight-foot branch as an easy vaulting pole. She cleared the ten feet of fence and barbed wire without a problem, hit the ground, rolled to lose the momentum smoothly while sliding smoothly out of the arc of coverage as the branch dropped to the ground on the other side of the fence.

The smell here was bad, enough to make the eyes water... no wonder so many of the people went masked. There was bad shit in the air. Happily, her Diamond Vajra was filtering out the fumes from the breathable air, so all she had to worry about was not stepping in the caustic shit lying in pools on the ground. Since staying an inch above them was totally fine with her, she began to slide through the shadows towards her goal... a walled compound set slightly off from the other buildings, which her Compass was pointing directly towards.

The condition of these buildings was pretty bad, with badly applied paint trying to cover up the rust from caustic materials and fumes. It was all a big freaking accident waiting to happen... and maybe that was entirely the point.

Well, they wouldn’t still be pumping if their plans were complete, she thought, and looked at the unsteady ladders on the sides of the things, and wondered just what she might find up top.

She touched the metal, feeling the turgid mass of the chemicals within - this was one that stored their fracking chemicals - although she was pretty sure whatever this compound was, it was a bunch more than a fracking compound, and no way was it ‘cheap’.

She shimmied up the ladder like a monkey, grimaced at the sight of the rust on the top of the tanks, and slid across it very carefully, tremblesense letting her know just how badly these tanks were having it from the stuff down below.

Well, maybe she could end their suffering...

She pulled out a strip of testing paper, and calmly and carefully unsealed the monitoring hole at the top of the plug in the center of the tank. She waved the strip through the fumes that wafted out thickly the instant it was unplugged, and quickly put the cap back on.

She studied the mélange of colors stealing across the testing strip, her lip rising as the strains and mixes of elements revealed themselves to her.

Yeah, no fucking way this wasn’t pure industrial waste being shoved deep into the land. Gods knew what the long-term effects of this shit were...

But those combinations of Energized hydrocarbons and other excitable stuff could be enticed to do other things...

She pulled out her field kit from her Masspack, staying in the shadow of the plug as it deCompressed and became visible. Knowing right where everything was, she opened it up, put the side holders out, the main holder back, picked up an empty syringe vial, and calmly began to sprinkle some rather energetic oxides together in them, stirred them together in the prescribed pattern of two-four-three ratios forwards and back with the aquae that would carry them, and when the grey-silver mixture was sparkling properly, stoppered it.

She calmly closed up the field kit again, re-stowed it in her Masspack, and pulled three vials of Alchemical Fire out of it in return. She deftly punctured the seals on all three vials with the syringe, and the syrupy red stuff slumbering inside turned an interesting color of pink... and began moving a lot more excitedly.

A paperclip made a decent hook, holding the first vial upside down, exposing the seal directly to the toxic fumes coming up from below, the cap barely askew.

Smiling, she turned and broke into a sprint.

She reached full speed well before she reached the edge and threw herself into the air. Covering the sixty feet between the two tanks was not at all difficult, as she discharged her Focus to help her slide through the air twice as far as her arc of travel should have allowed. She hit the rusting top of the next tank, slid across it smoothly, and skated right up to the center plug.

She wrenched open the monitoring cap, and repeated the trick with a second vial, then raced to the next one to do the third.

If she had the corrosiveness of that stuff down, it was about ten minutes or so before the seal was eaten through, the plug popped, and some volatile stuff tailor-made to have puppy-kittens with that toxic sludge was going to meet its ideal amour, and there would be fireworks, and many children running about happily...

------

She was over the side of the tank, down its ladder, and moving through the compound with the sureness of the invisible not worried about being seen, the scentless not being sniffed, and a lightfooter not being heard... especially with the celebratory fire going off in that compound.

Trusting in her triple array of Skills (and a really good Stealth modifier), she clawed her way up the fifteen-foot block walls and popped her head over the edge.

Six werewolves, and six of the unnatural slime-skinned things with smooth heads and no lips.

All of the werewolves were in hybrid form, with two of them absolutely massive in size, had to be massing nearly as much as bears. Damn, took Levels in Greater Werewolf, they did!

Without clothes restraining them, the malformed and mutated nature of everything there was apparent. The werewolves had lesions, mismatched limbs, distorted musculature and bones, spikes, multiple tails, enlarged tusks or fangs, eyes actually glowing, oversized talons, and similar popular mutant additions to themselves.

The Aberrants had combinations of scales, leathery hides, spikes, and rubbery flesh, none of which looked healthy. Arms were sometimes just tentacles, bones all optional, but fearsomely clawed, just like the needle teeth lining their lipless mouths, and their empty black eyes.

None of them were identical, none of them were symmetrical. She couldn’t recall seeing anything like them before, but it didn’t really matter to her.

Mutated werewolves, some with advanced Racial Levels. Fine. She was going to have the small advantage of surprise.

What she could do with surprise was going to be quite lethal to them!

She pulled herself up on the wall and crouched there, listening to them talk in Aklo.

The human flesh they were eating was barely seared, if at all; they seemed to prefer it raw. She noted the brand of beer they were drinking, resolved to look into it and never drink it herself, and waited, blowing her first Inspiration for Supreme Cleave, the Archer Stand Thrust, Vexing Flanker, Whirlwind Attack, and Adaptable Flanker.

Feats she simply hadn’t had the time or opportunity to really be able to practice flared to life in her skull.

Tiktiktiktiktik...

------

Ten minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the seal on that vial of modified alchemical fire was eaten through, and glowing pink stuff touched oxygen, whooped, and jetted out of the vial, popping the rest of its seal off and heading down into the toxic mass below.

First there was a poof of flame in the distance.

She took one breath.

Then there was a blaze of fire heading into the sky in interesting colors, and the BOOM of the explosion rattling everything around and sending everyone in front of her to their feet, instinctively closer together, all to gape at the fireball going off up into the sky.

Of course, it meant they were under attack, but all their eyes were in that direction.

Her Vajra cut through the blast of the wind as she jumped and came down behind the Aberrants.

The second vial, perhaps jostled by the first, released its load, the fumes intersecting above and winding down past as they ignited in sympathy, the puff lost in the greatness that followed.

Perhaps they were ready to move, but that second explosion flattened them down despite themselves, and they could only tense and wait to see if there was another one, given the pattern.

Meanwhile, Sama landed right in the middle of the Aberrants, turning visible as she launched her attack, and killed them all with a blur of neck-level crosscuts.

Improved Flanking she already had, gave her +4 to Hit when flanking. Adaptable Flanking meant she could choose any square she threatened to flank a foe from. Vexing Flanker meant she picked the square her flanking ally needed to be in... and she counted as her own ally.

Net effect, +4 to hit, which bought off both Precise Attack and Power Attack, which normally could not be used together... unless you had a weapon that could be used two-handed with finesse combat, which a soul sword most certainly could, and could access a certain Grandmastery of the sword, with the requisite supporting Masteries. The two penalties offset the flanking for a nice +10 to damage, leaving her with a mere +14 to hit, ignoring 2 points of Dex/Dodge, Armor, and Mystic Defenses each with Ways of Water, Fire, and Storm.

She had Cleave Mastery to /2, Improved Cleave, but Supreme Cleave required a Feat to get before Five. Being able to take a step between Cleave targets also meant that she could get the sixth Aberrant into her Whirlwind as soon as she killed one, took off its head in a golden swathe of light, and continued the blurring butterfly pattern through the rest of them in a flurry of blows that took less than two seconds to execute... and then she was charging the werewolves crouched and staring at the fireballs raging up into the sky.

They looked transfixed and admiring at the sight of so much destruction, and given how fast their companions had died, there was no alarm coming from them, not that the roar of the explosion let anything else be heard.

She needed to take out the bigger guys by surprise.

The closest one to her was one of the smaller guys. She blew by him, hacking right through his head for double damage, and Tremble straightened out and settled in for the Spirited Charge that emulated an impaling spear, granting her the x3 damage on the charge.

The glowing golden sword erupted out through his chest, and Sama blew the Sun Strike, sending radiant death through his chest cavity to make sure any non-standard physiology died regardless... and incidentally made it easier to pull off her Sword on the rebound as she Finished him with a glorious crit.

She stepped, Refocused, and Hewed into the second oversized werewolf there as it turned a shocked and deranged face on her, human flesh still dangling from uneven fangs, all that extra wasted crit damage singing out and depositing itself through the werewolf’s hide and up under its ribs, deep through the lungs and heart and out the other side.

Three down, and the instinctive howls of alarm were going up, although nobody outside the walls was going to hear them as the third tank of gunk went up.

A normal werewolf loomed to meet her, and Sword Beats Fist triggered as he came in. She looped her cut, and a furred arm went flying as she slid by the lunging jaws, continuing the strike to chop him halfway through, including his spine, at the waist.

The female werewolf howled at her, grabbing a massive spiked chain that moved in a manner suggesting it was magical (yay?) and lashed it out at her.

Sama went down as if her center of balance was somehow about at her ankles, the chain hissing by above her, then straightened back up and shifted Tremble up into the Archer Stands Thrust as the fifth one leapt at her.

Her body didn’t waver as the werewolf drove himself down Tremble’s blade, his mass and claws driving her backwards across the ground as if she were a statue.

She guided his muzzled head to the ground, then simply charged the female werewolf, who was also a good seven feet tall and whipping that chain about in both her claws, while the slowest-to-react werewolf looked to be in the middle of ripping out of his clothes and changing to wolf form.