Massive Disaster 4-23 (Patreon)

Rain hammered the cityscape, each drop pummeling everything beneath the cloud cover with intensity that was a near-match to the combat on the ground. 

To make it worse, the sound of thunder, gunfire and explosions blending together in a din of disaster. The wet sluiced over the broken skyline, carrying ash and blood through the streets of the once pristine Providence.

Arc crouched on the shattered edge of Colonial Commerce Bank's rooftop, white hair somehow not plastered to her skull even as her flight suit was soaked through. Even still, the cold was nothing compared to the voltage thrumming under her skin. 

The woman’s steps were a glide as she carried herself from rooftop to rooftop, floating between buildings even as rain turned the surfaces slick and treacherous. As much as she would like to, to fly was to risk being a target. Yet it called to her all the same, as the storm-charged air sang with ions, her body a living lightning rod as she felt the pull of electricity. 

Damaged power lines, overloaded batteries, whatever was in reach; stolen current coursed through her body, her hair floating behind her despite the downpour.

A dropship rose above the building line, the main gun of the black and yellow vehicle swiveling toward her position. Arc didn't even try to dodge. No, the woman planted her feet and thrust both hands skyward, accumulated electrical charge erupting from her palms.

The bolt was barely controlled, but she didn’t need it to be. 

In an instant, it struck the dropship's hull and a tight smile spread across her face.

The craft's shields flared and died, explosion after explosion tearing its fuselage in cascade failure. The dropship listed sideways, its engine pods spewing black smoke as it crashed into the financial district three blocks south. 

Yet, she wasn’t done. Far from it.

Down the block, she could see them; Eclipse troopers that thought the storm gave them cover as they established their sniper nest in the building at the far end.

Wrong assumption.

Born Marilyn Uzuri, she had gone to school studying atmospheric systems on alien planets, focused on the uniquities of what made a planet livable rather than simply habitable.

Arkadia IV was one of those, a planet with powerful lightning storms that could last days. 

The residents had learned to know the storm but very few of them feared it.

Newly purple eyes went wide, unfocused. 

She saw it, felt it, electric potential flowing through ionically-charged air, making contact with vulnerable, conductive flesh. It moved through power lines, through wet metal, through the rain itself in patterns that made perfect sense as she raised her hand.

Fingers spread, she murmured words in her fathers language and closed her fist.

Lightning didn't strike from the sky.

It arced from the power transformer across the street, bending through the rain in ways that violated physics, slamming directly into the sniper nest with a CRACK-BOOM that shattered windows nearest the impact. Two Eclipse heavies flash-fried inside their armor, metal glowing cherry-red before fusing black. The third tumbled from the window, smoking ragdoll spinning twenty stories down to pavement that painted itself red.

Her breathing stayed even, controlled, even as the proximity alert in her ear pinged a warning from her combat VI. She could see it through the display in her goggles, not that she couldn’t feel them coming already. Hostiles in the stairwell, four signatures moving fast up concrete steps that would channel electricity perfectly.

Arc placed her palm against the wet metal railing, feeling the connection complete itself through rain-slick steel.

"Shouldn't have come up here."

The charge flowed down the railing.

Not a bolt.

A torrent of chain lightning.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Six blocks west, the sound of lightning striking the ground sounded through Meridian Plaza, rolling thunder mixing with the rain that fell on ruins.

Ruins Ana Eisenhardt had just created. 

“I… I-I didn’t m-mean…”

A chunk of the plaza choked her tears, dust in her eyes and throat, grit that was once ferrocrete coating her bodysuit and hair. “I didn’t m-mean to!”

She hadn’t.

Blood Pack had civilians running as they’d gunned them down without mercy. An entire squadron in the plaza entrance and barely two dozen people left, more falling by the second.

She'd reached out, trying to create barriers, trying to protect. But her hand had twitched, adrenaline spiking through psionic channels, and reality had answered by erasing the mercenaries into blood-painted craters.

And half the building toppling down with them. How many…

The dust cloud from the vaporized Blood Pack squad — thick crimson and cloudy gray — hung in the air, mixing with rain that turned the floating particles into a choking paste. Ana wiped blood from her nose, trying to ignore the black spots creeping in her vision. 

She knew how many lives she had saved but how many more… how many people could have possibly been left in those floors, still alive, still waiting for rescue?

Rain mixed with the tears running down her face, hands shaking as her nerves felt scrubbed raw. Psionic overdraw, was the term Commander Victors used. A neat and tidy way to describe the way her body ached like she'd been turned inside out and reassembled wrong.

"Ana! Ana, answer me, dammit!" Mateo's voice crackled through her comm, distorted by static, thunder and so-much intereference. "What did you do?! You have to stop! Just stop!"

"Can't," the words scraped out of her throat as she forced herself to bite down on a mouthful of dust. Her eyes flicked to the right, crimson glow spiking as she saw them. 

Another squad moving through dust clouds that tasted of pulverized concrete and the bitter blood of aliens and monsters. "Too late for soft, Matty. They don't stop,” the former terrorist muttered — half to herself, half to her twin — as she raised her hands.

The color of fresh dark blood shimmered against storm-dark air as power built in her palms, entropy waiting for direction.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Eight blocks east, the street erupted.

A TITAN burst through asphalt and water mains, three legs punching through the surface in a spray of debris and superheated steam. Mateo was already there when it emerged, silver hair whipping in the downdraft from its stabilization thrusters, body moving at speeds that left him nearly unseen to all but mechanical eyes.

At a hundred and fifty, he didn’t hit the commando so much as move through him — meat, metal, all of it torn loose in a blink. The man became a weightless thing pinwheeling into a storefront, glass coughing out mannequins and shredded armor in the same breath. Gray eyes dilated as the world slowed, the second muzzle flashing bright as he shifted trajectory mid-sprint.

The rounds passed through the space where he'd been, striking the TITAN's leg armor in showers of sparks. He was on the gunman before the brass had even kissed pavement, rebuilt muscle punching straight in — armor, bone, lung — until there was open air and wet heat on his fingertips.

Blood sprayed across his silver suit as he spun toward the third target, but the TITAN's plasma cannon was already tracking. The beam lanced down, carving a molten trench through the street that missed Mateo by a meter but turned his nearest opponents into vapor.

“...ishouldbemorecareful.” The hurried words spilled out of his lips, but he was already gone before the last syllable left him.

A ghost of fury tore down the block, blurring limbs carving through Batarian slave troopers dragging a family from their sky-car. Not a fight. 

Execution. 

Fifty deaths in half as many seconds.

He wondered how many it would take, how many deaths until he and his sister knew peace?

Until humanity knew peace.

Unfortunately, this moment was not a peaceful one.

A snap of bone as necks broke, the wet crunch of his reinforced foot shattering ribcages, choked gurgles as gloved fingers tore open throats; the ghost was gone before the first four-eyed corpse painted the pavement.

The blur darted towards the next block, eyes on a little girl trapped inside a crashed skycar, the autonomous vehicle likely knocked from the sky when the attacks began.

Without a thought, he rushed toward i-

“Aaaaahhhh!!”

Heat seared across his back, vision going white as a scream ripped out of his throat; a raw sound, wordless agonized pain cut short as momentum carried him off his feet and into a building wall. Something in the suit absorbed most of it (the blast, the shove, even fire) but it still burned, still rattled him spine-deep.

Impact bled momentum away as he hit reinforced concrete hard and he felt his spine rattle twice as hard.The super-solder lay there unmoving, smoke drifting upwards from the exposed and burnt flesh from his back, as slow, wary footsteps neared his body.

Black-and-yellow filled the corner of his vision — close, too close — shotgun throat aimed dead center. "Got you, you little—"

The alien's head disappeared in a spray of bone and brain matter.

Ten meters behind where the headless invader fell to the floor, the enhanced shock trooper stood with someone on his shoulders; a little girl, no older than ten, pulled from a smoking sky-car and bleeding from a shrapnel wound in her leg.

 “It’s okay,” he said with a grunt, voice tight through gritted teeth. “I got you. Just hold on.” 

He’s faster than the pain. He had to be.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Six blocks south, the gunfire echoed through Providence Transit Hub where Patrick Rostow — Designation: Alloy — waded through Blood Pack assault teams. Nanite-infused skin shifted dull metallic gray wherever rounds hit, absorbing energy that would have torn apart normal flesh, even shielded. 

His flesh was not normal.

No normal flesh could do what his did.

No normal body could tear off a heavy weapons emplacement with just bare hands, and use it as a club that pulped skulls and sent broken bodies flying. Their blood painted the floor and stained both him and his weapon, Alloy discarding the thing as it began to fall apart after the last of a dozen armored enemies fell to him.“Who will pay for my cleaning?” The man grunted, the joke making him shake his head. His humor was not one his new teammates understood, most of them thinking him quiet or maybe even stupid. 

No, he just liked to think as much as he liked to kill.

His thoughts scattered as another enemy rose behind the barricade they’d set up to hide from his slow but steady approach.“HUMAN!”

A red-armored Krogan charged his way across the terminal floor, the brute of an alien a foot taller than him, its eyes red with rage that sang of stimulants, 

"You're big," Patrick grunted, voice a low rumble that went unheard beneath gunfire. "I like big."

He didn't dodge. 

The Commander had not designed him to be one who did such.

He was a heavy weapon by nature of existence, a tank in the words of Victors himself.

The tank met the charge head-on, impact shaking the entire terminal in ways that would have registered on a seismic sensor. For heartbeats, they strained against each other, two mountains of enhanced muscle locked in stalemate. Then Patrick drove the brute backward, lifted him off his feet, slammed him into a reinforced concrete support column.

The column cracked as fractures raced up toward ceiling joints. 

The brute didn't get up.

A blur slipped past his vision, silver but slower, as Patrick's battle raged on, concrete chunks and twisted metal scattered across the many streets that connected the financial district to the transit hub. Rain washed blood from both locations toward storm drains that couldn't handle the volume.

Heat shimmer rolled in from the breach, carrying the stink of scorched ferrocrete. Outside, a gunship drifted into place like it owned the sky, chain gun spooling with that jagged whine Alloy had heard too many times to mistake. 

It was aiming to empty the terminal of everything living.

Almost everything.

The man known as Alloy was unmoving as he stared back at it, skin shifting more and more until he stood there as nothing more than a man of steel. Round after round slammed into him, each one a hammer-blow he felt in his ribs even through the nanites. Heat built under the plating, the stink of scorched metal crawling up his nose. 

He stood there anyway, weight sinking into the floor, vision tunneling on the gunship’s nose as if nothing else existed. “Hn.” 

Patrick thrust a hand to the side and gripped tight a heavy turret from where the thing had been quick-bolted to the floor. The thing strained and groaned, metal begging for him to let go, but nanite-enhanced muscles had no mercy as they tore several hundred kilos of military hardware free from the ground.

Alloy stared at the gunship as its weapons began to spin for another volley.

“Find peace.”

He flung it.