Massive Disaster III-21 (Patreon)

(MY BAD, THIS IS 21. I FORGOT I HADN'T FINISHED WITH 20 AND MISLABELED IT. IT WILL STILL STAY UP AS I'LL BE DONE WITH 20 IN AN HOUR OR TWO)The blue crust was still stuck to his hands. 

Granted, the shit laked off in thin layers whenever Zedd scraped at it with his thumb, but it stayed stubborn as hell under the nail beds and only time and effort that would leave his hands raw was enough to get it off. Oxidized MELD always did that—fused to skin like it thought it belonged there. Should’ve worn the gloves. 

Also, should’ve switched the delivery line before the rest of the stuff he used on Dev’s own personal tune-up got too warm. Should’ve—whatever. 

It didn’t matter anyway, because it was too late now. He knew how to make something that could get the stuff off, and it’d only take a few more hours to whip up some more of that solvent. D-ding. His omni-tool chose that moment to ping as he was already looking down, rubbing the spots of blue off his wrist.

Nina Herra ♥︎

He blinked at the name like it was something he hadn’t seen in a while, even though they talked just a couple days ago. Whitefall’s timezone sat six hours back, annoying given that despite being to the North of New Abraham, it was more to the North-East than anything else. Either way, that meant late-afternoon for her, was prime chaos hours for him. Weird enough timing to make his index hesitate over the answer key, still crusted over thick with dried nano-biofluid.

Then the call picked up and there she was. Hair tied like she’d lost the fight with a brush and given up halfway. Hoodie slipping off one shoulder, room behind her looking like a library exploded and decided to stay. Real books, too. Fancy ones. Whitefall U always had that thing where rich kids pretended paper meant rigor. 

Never mind half of them couldn’t spell "logistics".

“Yo,” he said, already tilting the angle as he moved back to position himself in a corner away from everything else going on. “Shouldn’t you be elbow-deep in capitalist nonsense right now?”

She gave a dry snort and shoved something textbook-shaped off her lap. “Was. Business ethics. Real attention-grabbing stuff. I got up to ‘moral imperative of stakeholder satisfaction’ and decided it was either drop the class or commit a small act of terrorism.”

“Window’s not that far down.”

“First floor still counts if you land on your face, papito.”

He huffed a laugh and tried to casually tuck his MELD-covered hand under his opposite arm, but unfortunately, he didn’t work fast enough.

Her eyes narrowed immediately. “Okay. What the hell is that shit on your hands?”

“Testing something.” He didn’t blink as he kept his face relaxed, casual, well aware he hadn’t exactly let Nina in on all the genetic engineering he had been getting up to. It wasn’t that he was worried about her reporting him for doing something illegal in civilized space… it was more… 

Well, she had a temper when it came to dangerous things. Playing God was probably on that list. “Prototype substrate. Stabilizer compound. Y’know. Lab things.”

“Mmhmm.” As flat as that hum was as it left her mouth, Zedd could tell she wasn’t buying it but she didn’t push, which was kinda their unspoken thing. 

Don’t lie outright, and I won’t interrogate. 

Gray space. They lived there.

She tossed the pad aside and leaned closer, chin propped on her palm. “Anyway. Guess who just locked transport for December.”

That word hit harder than it should’ve. “Back here? Home?”

“New Abraham, baby. Ten days, maybe eleven if the port office keeps being this useless.”

His face did something involuntary as he burst into a smile he knew was sappy. Something warm and stupid that he immediately tried to kill with a cough. “Yeah? Full stretch?”

“Full stretch.” Her smile softened. “Even talked Professor Kimura into letting me submit early.”

Zedd swallowed around a response that wanted to jump out too fast. He felt his voice slipping out of neutral. “Cool. I’ve, uh. Got something for you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You mean an actual gift, or like, a half-functional grenade you think counts as art?”

“I’m still deciding.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he thought back to what he was halfway through working on in his expanded garage, ignoring the low, too-familiar thrum of discharge behind him. 

“Should I be worried?”

“Always.” He allowed her another smile, one a bit more controlled.  “Christmas, though. You’ll like it.”

Her face shifted, just slightly, that tilt she got when something was about to sting. “You hear from Kira?”

The question almost made him flinch, memories of his first friend in this new mixed life flickering back. Zedd’s eyes dropped without meaning to, fingers flexing open then closed. “Not lately.”

About a full month now, he didn’t say. Not like he’d checked. Not like he’d almost hacked Alliance mainframe just to ping her file. “Probably in blackout,” he added, like that explained anything for her silence. “Jungle rotations. No signal.”

“Zedd,” she said gently, and that was worse. “They’re just in Rio.”

“Rio has jungles.”

Her look didn’t shift, just deepened. “They have extranet access. Dev told me they should be getting at least ten minutes a day.”

He rolled his eyes but didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Silence filled the gap where something real should go.

Then the sound flared.

ZZZZT-THUNK.

Too loud. No way she missed it.

“What was that?”

“Holovid,” he said, voice calm. Too calm, idiot.

She tilted her head, eyes narrowed like a very pretty brown-skinned hawk. “Since when do you watch holovids mid-work?”

“I multitask. Very modern of me.”

ZZZZT-THUNK.

Her eyes narrowed at the sound of another discharge and this time, Nina leaned forward, now downright squinting at the projection. “Why are you wearing goggles?”

Fuck.

Zedd’s hand went straight to his face, like maybe if he moved fast enough the goggles would vanish mid-reach. No such luck. His fingers bumped plastic. Blue-tinted, still snug against the bridge of his nose. “Uh… uhh…” It stalled there. Whole brain stuttering like someone’d yanked the power mid-boot. “I was cooking?”

The silence on Nina’s end lasted exactly one second. Just long enough for disbelief to wind up a punch. Then the Spanish hit like a truck—words snapping sharp, hot, half his translation suite refusing to bother. He caught mentiroso, cabrón, hijo de something, and then it all blurred together into verbal artillery. 

Creative phrasing, per usual. She always did curse with more flair when she was tired.

“Love you, call you back,” he blurted, cutting the call before she could land a kill shot. “…Yeah, I’m gonna pay for that later,” he muttered.

“Sounded like it.”

Zedd twitched so hard he damn near elbowed the wall. Caleb was there, leaning casual, arms folded, half a smirk creeping across his face like it had nowhere else to be. Silent movement, of course. Rebirth had done that—turned him into a fucking ninja. He had the goggles too, just like everyone else in the lab, but they didn’t do much to hide the amusement sitting in his eyes.

“It’s fine,” Zedd said, flicking his omnitool into idle. “Nina’s just mad I’m not hanging on her every word during business ethics week.”

Caleb gave him a long, pointed look. “So you lied about cooking.”

“Shut... the hell up.” Zedd sidestepped, darting his eyes over to the main attraction. “How’s Winters?”

The building was too clean to be old, too quiet to feel safe. The original setup had been a storage lot—farm equipment, hydro rigs, boxes of fertilizer maybe. Zedd had gutted it months ago. Reinforced the walls, calibrated the fields, layered in psionic dampeners and reactive baffles. Not for safety, really. For containment. The kind of place you built when you knew someone was gonna screw up and didn’t want that mistake spreading.

Far end of the range, Dev was already bouncing on his heels like this was his birthday, goggles on crooked and grin wide. Adele stood next to him, calm and clinical, stylus tapping against her datapad like she was trying not to roll her eyes. Kai Leng was a shadow in the corner, unmoving. Even he had goggles on. Good.

And at the center, Scot.

He stood alone, tall as hell, tension racked straight down his spine like a metal rod had been welded there. Shoulders tight, feet set. Breathing deep. Every inhale measured. Every exhale like it had to convince him to stay put. From behind, Zedd could see the effort coiled in him. The don’t screw it up looping beneath his skin like a second pulse.

“He’s made it through four targets,” Caleb said, voice lower now, keeping pace at Zedd’s side. “Output’s going up. Precision’s lagging.”

Zedd hummed, watching the stance, the way Scot’s weight shifted—too stiff. The MELD had pushed his baseline up, sharpened the connection points, but it wasn’t natural. Caleb had affinity. Born talent, raw and messy. Scot was the opposite—psionic brick wall jury-rigged into a laser pointer. Nothing about it moved easy.

Still, the trade had worked. Hyper-focus in exchange for generality. Give up the shield and sword, become a sniper cannon. Not subtle, but effective.

Scot angled toward the target lane, jaw clenched. Sweat already threading down his temple. His hands didn’t shake, but there was a twitch to his fingers like his body wanted to recalibrate mid-move. His head tilted, micro-movements barely perceptible as he lined it up.

Zedd watched the shimmer start behind his eyes. Not heat, not visible light. Something heavier. Gravity flexing where it shouldn’t. Color distortion edged in purple. Crackling faint. Familiar now. Psionic field charging up. Neural channeling through a conduit. None of this should’ve worked, but it did, and that still made his skin itch in the best way possible.

“C’mon,” Scot breathed. Not to anyone. Just himself. “Just like before. Just focus…”

Zedd saw it land before Scot even realized. That last half-second where everything just… clicked. Like some inner fuse finally aligned and the energy didn’t just surge—it locked. The shaking leveled out, the ripple around his eyes dropped from chaotic jitter to tight ripple, like heat haze snapping into clean edge. Sound shifted too—hum rising until it buzzed through Zedd’s teeth, not in his ears, in his mouth, behind his molars.

You didn’t hear it. You felt it. The way the enclosed space seemed to pull tight.

Then it fired.

Not clean, not elegant. Still crooked as hell, flickering in and out like a bad streetlamp. But it was there, and it hit. 

Deep violet flash, sharper than last time, way denser. Beam cut out in under two seconds but the air behind it bent like it didn’t wanna stop. The reinforced impact plate took it full on—rang out like a bell and buckled. The metal crumpled inward in slow-mo, glowing like somebody had dropped an arc welder into the surface. No explosion, just a full-force internal collapse.

Real ugly.

Real effective.

Everybody flinched. Dev sucked in air hard enough to make it audible, Adele took half a step back and then stilled herself again, like she was embarrassed she even moved. Kai didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe—if he was surprised, he’d left the reaction back in another life. Zedd didn’t move either. Just tracked the heat spike and wondered when the melting would start.

Scot didn’t stop.

No pause. No breath.

Didn’t even shake out his hands like normal. He just straightened, eyes already flaring again. Second shot hit harder. Third was fast. Fourth was louder. The fifth—the fifth didn’t just damage it, it cut through. Beam snapped the plate clean in two, horizontal line across the frame like someone’d lasered a weak spot and hit it perfectly. Top half started to sag, then gave, molten edge drooling slag as it folded backward and crashed down.

Dev whistled, the guy clearly unable to help himself. “Shit, that’s five,” he muttered, voice way too loud. “Five targets, clean. Bro’s cooking.”

Scot swayed a little, bracing one hand against the barrier like he was trying to pass it off as casual. It wasn’t. The tremble in his legs gave it away. His shirt was soaked down the spine, shoulders pulled tight. But his chin didn’t drop.

“I can keep going,” he said, voice sandpaper-rough as if scraped out his throat instead of spoken. “I’m good. I just… I can—”

Zedd clocked it before the sentence finished. That little glitch in the breath. The hesitation that wasn’t hesitation, just system overload. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to play nursemaid. Limits only mattered once you hit them.

He stepped forward slowly. Didn’t need to announce it because everyone looked his way anyway. Scot turned halfway toward him, visor still lit faint behind the protective tint. The glow from his irises hadn’t gone down. That was bad.

Real bad. You were supposed to cycle down. You had to cycle down.

Zedd studied him. His pupils were locked, glowing but no drift. His jaw was clenched tight, a single vein throbbing at the edge of his temple. The tremor had moved to his fingers now, pulsing against the edge of the firing rail like his body was trying to tell him it was done, even if his brain refused to get the memo.

“I can do more,” Scot said again, firmer this time. He pulled himself upright by sheer force of will, the kind that cracked ribs if you weren’t careful. “I’m stable. I can push it further. The calibrations are holding.”

“Uh-huh,” Zedd muttered, already halfway past him, already reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket. Fingers closed around the hard edge of the black case—smooth finish, fast-snap seal, last three days of him not sleeping packaged into something palm-sized.

“Yeah,” he said, dragging it out a little as he flipped it open. “Before you shit yourself straining, take a break and put these on first.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

Forge Points: 100