389: Out of Sky (Patreon)

The mouths tumbled down toward them, at first in an uncontrolled mass of sharp teeth and frantic wings, but quickly they found their bearings and the jerking lines of their fall became smooth and controlled.

Some used their newfound freedom to reverse course, rising back up to the nearest monkeys and launching themselves in suicidal charges, but the monkeys were ready with javelins, stabbing and screeching, and the few who’d turned back were soon falling once again, now poked through with holes.

As to the rest, they just kept on going the direction they’d been sent. Right down at him and the others, spreading as they came.

The others, in the few moments they had, reacted with varying levels of alacrity. Maverick stared for a moment, then the dog set his mechanical feet more firmly amongst the spines which braced him as all his guns twisted to aim upwards and set back to rattling and booming.

Marlowe just growled and raised his hands, his head tilted as he looked up.

Serrin rose slightly above them, though he kept under Sora’s green shield of air, and readied his spear. Junko just stared up, eyes wide and mouth slightly open, looking an awful lot like a teenage girl staring at a couple of hundred vicious flying mouths coming right at her. Lucky for her, Yue was close at her back, with energy gathered and he knew she’d be planning to do something useful.

It was one of those moments Nicolai knew well. When a fast-approaching threat, to which there was no agreed-upon answer and no time to come up with one, went from being distant and somehow remote to right in your face, trying to bite your nose off. All of a sudden, the mouths were amongst them, letting out oddly deep, dog-like growls.

Then there was nothing but the thuds of them hitting Silver, cries and yells and mad growls and endless gunfire.

Serrin struck a speeding mouth from the air with a slash of his spear then darted backwards just in time to avoid the simultaneous charges of more than a dozen of the things, who lunged through the space he’d occupied.

Nicolai didn’t bother with evasive action. He remained where he was, flying a couple of metres above the others, on the left while Serrin had the right, keeping his speed and direction matched to the dragon. About his shoulders his gunlimbs snapped and twitched in all directions, and each twitch ended in a moment of stillness where they would spit out a bullet, and each one caught a mouth dead centre and pitched it from the air. Aiming was watching through his cameras, its focus on those mouths that came for him.

Nicolai felt almost envious as he gazed down at the others, seeing how Marlowe was surrounded, taking hits from mouths lunging in and biting down on him—in some cases, breaking their teeth on metal, in others, sinking sharp fangs down to the bone. Aiming, sensing his feelings, let a single mouth through its cordon of bullets. He tore it out the air with a slash of his briefly unsheathed hand talon.

Maverick was rolling and dodging further down the dragon’s back, guns firing indiscriminately at anything mouth-shaped. Some were still getting through and coming at him.

Yue and Junko were protected. The Cultivator had simply formed a shield around them, but mouths were gathered over it like some kind of strange mould, clustering and biting mindlessly.

His left hand twitched, playing out the desires of his subconscious through the Spectral Claw, snatching and slashing at mouth after mouth. He had it clearing the ones around Marlowe.

He judged that the group was purely and perfectly distracted. Now was the perfect moment to attack them, the moment he would choose.

So, when the monkeys hurled their javelins en masse, he was ready. Threat Analysis scanned every missile it was able to in any way detect and validate, in that first moment, the monkeys’ surprising discipline in loosing all at once proving quite a boon.

This time, there were many more Tier 2 javelins, and four Tier 3 javelins. Yet Nicolai knew that each monkey had only thrown one. Three of the four Tier 3’s must be illusions. Nicolai could only presume creating illusions of these stronger attacks was difficult for them, since they hadn’t bothered in the first wave, but here they had found the perfect moment.

The Modules were making progress on teasing out the Tier 2’s illusions, but they had yet to crack them and were even further off determining a way through the King’s illusions. Nicolai had no choice but to treat each of the many javelins as real. He took aim with his assault rifle, one-handed, and did the same with the M99, and over his shoulders his gunlimbs writhed as they squeezed bullets into place, yet considering the number of projectiles he and the Modules realised that they didn’t have enough guns.

He needed to shoot all of them at least once, and even bringing the number down a bit with a flash of his shoulder-mounted laser that caught every javelin he had direct line-of-sight on, piercing through the ones that were fake, there were many more concealed behind the blanket of mouths and mundane javelins that choked the air, visible to him only through drones and Soul Sense.

I know where we can get more guns. Cyberwarfare sent over a proposal. Nicolai digested it then accepted. While Aiming guided his gunlimbs, and Nicolai fired the rifles he held, Cyberwarfare lunged through the Local network right into Maverick’s suit through one of the number of weak points it had uncovered over the day.

The Module didn’t take the suit over, or at least, didn’t appear to. It dug through the various AI modules the suit was already running: rudimentary and outdated consumer-grade versions of Threat Analysis, Aiming, and Cyberwarfare, three combat-ready agents guided by a struggling control unit. It only took a moment for Cyberwarfare to dig into their code, find the important parts, core them out, and then the Modules were able to use them as puppets. Behind a mask of his own AI’s the Modules spoke to Maverick, in tones Psychology judged sufficiently dire as to bring about the desired response with speed.

In the dog’s ear his threat analysis model screamed about incoming projectiles while via his eye-lenses painted red targeting indicators across the sky. The aiming model asked to switch from user-guided mode into a reflexive defensive targeting protocol. The cyberwarfare model didn’t do anything, because so far as it was concerned everything was fine.

As would pretty much anyone when faced with their personal AIs talking about huge immediate threats and offering a way out, the corgi accepted. Just like that, Nicolai and the Modules had thirteen more guns.

Not particularly good guns, most of them. Aiming was now splitting its attention across them all. But since all that was needed was to tag each javelin once, they served.

For a moment, the snapping of Nicolai’s arms and gunlimbs and the corgi’s many guns was unified, all a part of the same unit.

Nicolai’s focus settled fully on the Tier 3 javelins, of which there were four. He’d flashed the laser at one and proven it was false. He’d tagged two with his own weapons, and one with one of Maverick’s. Of them all, that was the only one where the bullet didn’t simply pass straight through—instead it impacted, but did little more than dull the red energy glowing bright around the projectile.

He dropped his assault rifle on its strap to grip his M99 with both hands, swung it into place and fired again and again. The first and the red energy gave a sharp flicker, two more and it was gone and the javelin transformed into splinters, flung across the sky.

All the while, flying mouths were coming at him, as Aiming was unable to keep them back with the gunlimbs, but the Spectral Claw took up that role, darting and spinning around him. He’d gotten better and better at controlling it without needing to move the fingers of his hand, directing its movement through will alone. It was still a surprisingly difficult thing to do, even after all this time and practice requiring deliberate focus.

The javelins were dealt with, the mouths little more than a distraction, and there was even some good news. It’s easier to work out the Tier 2 and 3’s ripples when they attack, one more like that and I may work something out, reported Threat Analysis.

But the threats kept coming. Three missiles were on a wailing approach, all coming together, and Nicolai knew the dragon would struggle to pull them apart before one could get dangerously close.

‘Serrin, with me,’ he said over Local, knowing his voice would be crackling in the Hornet’s helmet. Cyberwarfare reached again, making use of the environment in Serrin’s skinsuit to help catch and direct his attention.

Serrin spun, wings flipping him round to face Nicolai, questioning. Nicolai pointed at the missiles as he flew over, drew Serrin with him as he moved toward them.

‘Do as the dragon does,’ he said, extending his Soul Sense while beneath them Silver’s own surged out like a dam breaking. Serrin joined him, Soul Senses winding out together. They both had Symbiotes that increased the length of their Soul Senses, but even so they didn’t have quite the dragon’s range, and it reached the missile on first approach while their Soul Senses were forced to pause, but in only seconds the missile had closed further, come into their range.

There, working alongside the dragon, Nicolai felt its will far more clearly, and the Modules clustered tight in his mental space as they all focused intently on what the dragon was doing. It immediately became clear this was barely even what one would call a technique, it felt… simpler. To the dragon, the missile was just a kind of loose knot, and all that was needed to pull it apart was a little consistent worrying at it with the teeth of its Soul Sense. This was simply one of those things that a dragon knew how to do.

In spite of how simple it appeared, he quickly discovered that in practice it was far from easy. But he didn’t even try to understand, left that to the Modules. He set himself to watching what the dragon did then simply copying it, moment to moment. The dragon ignored him and Serrin both, and he felt irritation and confusion from it, but when the pair of them successfully shoved one of the missile’s strands out of place, that changed. Still, he was surprised when, as the first missile tumbled apart and their Senses shifted to the next, the dragon began to guide him and Serrin both, making spaces that were obviously for them to fill.

The second tumbled into wisps of Oma, and they moved almost as one to the third and last, by then worryingly close. They took it apart, he and Serrin already far smoother than they’d been in the first, and he felt a faint thrill of satisfaction at learning, improving, succeeding.

There were two missiles more on the way but they were no threat; the dragon had proven it could handle two easily enough.

Nicolai glanced back towards the dragon where he saw Junko looking at him. He’d felt her, too, and experienced a jolt of surprise when he did. Whatever Symbiotes she was using worked more deeply than he’d realised. She was there in the dragon’s Soul Sense, assisting it or working with it in some other, deeper way.

The battle was shifting. They’d weathered the rush of the mouths, of which there were only a few dozen left flying around, and this latest batch of missiles.

‘I’ve got them,’ cried Maverick as Nicolai and Serrin flew back over, sharing something over Local.

He’s found a method of seeing through the Tier 1 illusions and tagged the real ones. Cyberwarfare had apparently been observing as the dog constructed it. Maverick was already back to spraying rounds, and now his shots were hammering only into living Tier 1 monkeys, rather than their illusions, bodies dropping wherever his guns lashed. Likely to be quite bad for the monkeys’ morale, but Nicolai didn’t bother to join in. By this point he saw the Tier 1’s as a minor threat, and if Maverick was willing to spend his ammo on them, he’d leave the dog to it. At the least, reducing the number of bodies in the sky should make it a little easier to detect the Tier 2’s and the King himself.

As he came closer, he heard Junko yelling. She was leaning to the side, pointing frantically down, gesturing to Yue. ‘They’re eating him!’

Down under Silver’s legs were clumps of writhing mouths, and blood ran in red streams over his silver scales. More of them clustered around the wound on his tail. They formed an accompaniment to the lampreys, who remained stubbornly stuck on the dragon’s Soul like big fat leeches.

The dragon seemed larger, slower, bulked out and weighed down under the miserable burden of his many vicious attackers, and there was a sense of deep tiredness emanating from his Soul, a sluggishness visible in his movements when he reached with a taloned front paw to scratch and paw with little effect at the mouths where they clumped on his underbody, mostly in difficult-to reach-places like armpits.

Regardless, when the next two missiles came whistling into range, the dragon’s Soul Sense lunged out with a sudden fury and pulled them apart.

Five more missiles glittered in the distance, and these five came all together. They’d be here within a pair of minutes, and for once Nicolai honestly wasn’t sure what would happen when they arrived. Even if he and Serrin improved far more than seemed likely at pulling the things apart, he doubted they and the dragon would be able to work fast enough to stop all of them.

A wave of javelins erupted from the monkeys all around, but this time the King’s own attack came from a clever angle. It was launched from directly below the dragon, while Nicolai was floating above it. He only saw it through one of his drones.

His jets screeched and his wings beat as he flung himself to the side, looking to get an angle. Tagged two Tier 3 javelins that came into view with his laser, revealing both as illusions. But in the half-second it took for him to get further down and sideways, the real one crossed the intervening distance.

Silver let out a roar of pain as a Tier 3 javelin thudded into his chest, punching deep through the scales. Nicolai heard a similar, mirrored cry from Junko. Nicolai was starting to think being a dragon was nowhere near as fun as one might’ve suspected. All that mass made an unmissable target.

I have it! cried Threat Analysis, sharing its data. All the Tier 2 monkeys released ripples as a matter of course—tiny ones from their Souls and from simply generating their illusions. These ripples were almost identical between the real ones and the illusions. But, at a specific wavelength, there was a tiny, tiny flaw. Some kind of imperfection in whatever method they used to create their illusions, only noticeable due to a vast amount of pattern analysis of what was effectively spiritual data.

Nicolai took aim while tagging all of the Tier 2 monkeys with targeting data, conveying it to Serrin, Maverick and Marlowe. Marlowe ignored him, busy setting up some kind of rappelling system that he’d been digging around in his pack for, attaching it to one of Silver’s spines. But Serrin rose up, taking hold of his own M99, and Maverick immediately shifted to start targeting the Tier 2’s.

While Tier 2’s screeched in sudden shock and panic, Shields breaking under heavy rounds, then their bones and flesh following suit, Threat Analysis was focused on the King. The Module was determined to ferret him out no matter what, saw his methods as a direct challenge.

It was harder to find the flaw in his illusions because they couldn’t even be sure what were his illusions, as the King did not make copies of himself but blended in with the Tier 1’s and Tier 2’s. Other than waiting for the next attack, if it came, Threat Analysis was at a dead end.

But Simulations noticed something else. The monkeys who had been clustering around the lampreys’ tails and feeding power into them were largely gone, having been killed by Maverick, yet the lampreys remained just as strong. There was something else still empowering them.

That was all Threat Analysis needed. It was able to shift its spiritual scans from wide to focused, aiming at the precise area the King was hiding, and there at last it was able to puzzle out the minuscule ripple leakages, run its pattern analysis.

There was the King, lurking amongst the tails, watching the battle and feeding energy into the lampreys. Able to properly observe him for a beat, building off the flaw it’d found in the Tier 2’s, Threat Analysis found exactly what it had been looking for.

The Module clicked its findings into place and their target lit up. The Monkey King was invisible but that didn’t matter, not anymore, Nicolai sighting through his M99 at the red glow Threat Analysis painted the King in.

He squeezed the trigger and the King caught a .50 cal round in the chest. The monkey's invisibility burst, Tier 3 Shield flashing. An instant later and the King burst out from its nest of lamprey tails, streaking downward in the form of a Tier 1, surrounded by a group of five more illusory Tier 1's.

The King could’ve had a hundred more illusions, and it wouldn’t matter. Every momentit released tiny ripples all possessing that minute flaw. Nicolai kept shooting, joined by Maverick and Serrin. The King’s Shield cracked and blood sprayed, death ripples rolling out.

But what fell was a Tier 2, and arriving at the same time came powerful ripples of a different sort. Teleportation. The Monkey King had swapped places with one of his Tier 2’s, having it take the killing shot for him.

They found it again, reapplied the targeting indicator, and resumed shooting. All around the surviving monkeys were turning to flee, dropping down and streaking towards the cover of the houses below.

They’d lost more than half their number, and Nicolai was surprised they hadn’t broken earlier. He suspected it was something to do with the Monkey King. Until it had been threatened, the other monkeys had remained steadfast in their assault. Some kind of effect had been broken when it was forced to flee.

Its Shield broke again and it swapped places with another Tier 2, and then vanished into a building below, leaving no sign of its passing but for the sneer curling Nicolai’s lip. Never a pleasant feeling, to see an enemy get away. He’d have to see if he could pay it a visit on the trip back.

Back at the dragon, Serrin was turning to resume his attack on the lampreys, and Marlowe was already there.

The bald man had gotten his rappel sorted out and was down on Silver’s left side, punching lamprey after lamprey. His strikes were surprisingly powerful, spiritually speaking, detaching lampreys with only one or two blows. There were some Symbiotes there too, in his fists. And Nicolai realised that if Marlowe had been able to fly, they might well have dealt with this far more easily.

He lent his own assistance, floating over to strike at lampreys with the Spectral Claw. They were noticeably weaker now, without the monkeys assisting, though the increasing distance between Silver and the compound they’d sprung from seemed to be a larger factor.

With each one that was struck down they came back slower, and Silver was starting, for the first time since the early attacks, to be cleansed of all the ugly hangers-on.

The next wave of missiles announced themselves with their droning wails. Five all together. Nicolai and Serrin were ready, and sent out their Soul Senses with the dragon’s. They took apart the first two, the third, barely managed the fourth, and the dragon felt different this time, sleepy and sluggish, drained by blood loss and spiritual damage.

The last missile was right up close, filling their vision like a sun, a twisting, roiling mass of angry energy that reached a peak as it sensed its closeness to its target.

Nicolai and Serrin dove down in the same moment, twisting in response to a message without words from the dragon. They arrived at its back as Silver tilted and shifted his entire body, pulling a chorus of surprised yells from the others. He’d managed to twist and get the entire bulk of his body between his riders and the missiles, when it went off.

Lines of light punched through the dragon’s wings, gouged holes in its Soul, came up on its Soul Sense and blew it away in tattered streams. The dragon’s great spiritual wings puffed away, its body went limp, and it began to plummet.

[Author Note: Struggled a bit with this one, I actually planned this whole dragon fight thing to be 1 chapter, instead its 2 and this one is 1000 words longer than they're meant to be lol. Not sure if I just underestimate how long it should be or failed to stick to the plan or maybe a bit of both. I'm working out new methods of doing stuff, navigating from scrivener to obsidian etc, improving my ability to dictate which is very good for my tendons but it becomes even easier for me to write way more than I intended, I think in the long run ill be a lot more productive but for now it's a bit difficult >_<]