Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 52: Playing Dead (Patreon)

Okoro waved to one of his people, and a few seconds later a lad made his way over to us, so lanky that even his armour couldn't hide it — a Finger-Lightning.

"Hale?" I called. "Work out a comfortable distance and put a hole in the bastard. No showing off, though. This isn't a competition; I want a sure shot!"

The demon looked awful. His left arm was gone at the shoulder, and in its place a half-charred, half-melted stump hung from his armour. His right side was blackened with soot, and his right leg, judging by the way he limped, wasn't in order either: he kept his weight on the left and swayed now and then, though not like a drunk mortal, but in a more controlled, purposeful way. He was clearly on stimulants and painkillers, but I didn't like that purposefulness.

So as not to keep losing drones, which had turned out to be surprisingly dim for an AI, evidently one of the reasons the spherical drones were so cheap, I ordered them to steer clear of the area and watch the demon from a distance at maximum zoom. At that range, he turned into a cluster of pixels and blended into the wasteland, so we needed a live operator to keep track of him.

We checked the demon's route: he was heading for the nearest large heap of scrap.

Our Fingers settled on five hundred metres, and we picked a bit of high ground to one side of his route. Once they were in position, I ordered a drone to come at the demon from the opposite side, so that he'd turn his back to them. Finger Qi has one big drawback that offsets its range and accuracy. Before the real shot, the cultivator projects a beam that feels out the target. The delay is a fraction of a second, but on the receiving end, the sensation is unmistakable. For every cultivator, without exception, it's a signal to move. That's exactly why I wanted to catch him mid-throw, focused on his technique.

Hale and her temporary partner flew to their position, keeping low behind the wreckage so that the demon wouldn't see them. Okoro and I allowed ourselves a bit of fun and flew closer too, though we kept out of his direct line of sight. I personally took control of the decoy drone and flew it straight at the blurred pixels, which quickly resolved into the scorched figure of the battered demon.

I went right in his face, rather cheekily, and forced him to take cover behind a metre-and-a-half chunk of metal. Hale immediately reported that she could see his back. I ordered them to ready their ultimates and sent the drone on its final mission.

Points worked at shorter ranges, but they could steer a projectile in flight. I doubted a cheap, dim lump of plastic was manoeuvrable enough to dodge, but I jerked it right anyway when the demon leaned out from behind the metal, hurling a spike while holding on to the wreckage with his other hand.

The moment was perfect. Even if he felt it, he didn't have time to react. Purple protective projections flared up behind his back, and Hale's red beam came out just below his right collarbone, from a red-hot hole in his chest plate. The blue-violet beam didn't come from his chest; instead, a web of bright discharges ran across the demon's armour and gathered into an even brighter arc between his horns.

Despite all that, his thin spike flew straight into the drone's camera. I lost contact and had to take control of another drone. Okoro and I didn't wait, though, and took off on our boards.

The demon lay on his back, twitching. Whether it was death throes or jammed servomotors was unclear.

Okoro and I flew in closer, as close as we dared, and aimed our scanners.

"Unbelievable!" Okoro said. "Good instincts!" he praised me.

The demon was alive. Either it was some peculiar cultivation, or he'd been a fifth-stager… I doubt that.

"Would you be so kind as to disable his remaining arm?" I asked.

Okoro took a small steel ball from his spatial pocket and threw it at the demon's elbow. The ball came down like a cartoon anvil. The armour crumpled, and the arm bent at an unnatural angle.

"Shall we take him back to the portal?" Okoro suggested, nodding toward the temporary base.

"We'll use the emergency one," I said. "Let's not interrupt the technicians. The more drones, the better."

"I'd rather not spend my portal time," he said.

"Hale!" I called. "I need a portal ring."

"And what about…" Okoro hinted.

"And how are we going to split it right now?" I asked. "Besides, he's a Point, a swordsman at most. Do you need a sword?"

Okoro was a Mace and fought with a pair of hammers.

"I'll gladly take the lot if you don't need it," he said.

"You'll owe me," I agreed easily, put my board away and jumped down to the ground, immediately correcting myself. "Unless it's a pendant."

It was a ring, so without further ado I took out Old Chen's sword, cut off the demon's hand and tossed it to Okoro.

"You can peel the shell off yourself. For now, help me lift him. I don't want to spend portal time either."

This time I handled the launch and the drop-off of the demon myself, so we managed it in three seconds, team identification included.

By the time we got back to the ‘tin can’, there were nearly a hundred drones in the air. The map of my zone was shedding its fog of war and filling in with detail: craters, furrows, dust-covered mountains of scrap. There was no particular breakdown, only radiation background data and the ‘hottest’ chunks of metal noted. No humanoid movement had been registered in the zone.

That didn't mean there was none. The drones could see the surface, heat and movement, but they weren't fitted with the powerful scanners that could penetrate the flattened or fused hull of what had once been a starship.

Even so, the area under visual control was spreading beyond my scrap fields, which meant it was time for the other groups to leave the temporary base. They scattered once command allowed it. Okoro wished me luck, and we were left on our own, if you didn't count the dozen technicians below. They didn't hold us back from active operations, but they did force us to be more methodical and to secure them.

The technicians did the same, hanging cameras and sensors all around so we could see what was going on there while we were tearing about the wasteland. The plan was that at the first sign of danger, they'd jump straight into the portal the drones were coming out of and close it behind them.

I'd thought of leaving Voss and Zola to protect them, but they were more useful with me. So I sketched out a route that spiralled outwards from the ‘tin can’. That way we could give the technicians the best security possible.

In essence, it was tedious work with scanners. We scanned every heap of scrap large enough to hide in. We found nothing alive. Nothing that resembled batteries, and plenty of things that were obviously ruptured spatial pockets. In other circumstances, that would have made us dig in; as it was, it only fuelled our irritation at the missed chance to help ourselves.

Within a kilometre of the base, Mardal found a melted chest plate with no body. We couldn't even tell whether it was ours or demonic.

At the three-kilometre mark, Voss found a pod buried in the ground and covered with dust from another blast. The beacon was silent, but it was one of ours.

The braking engines and formations hadn't worked. It had slammed into the ground almost at a right angle and gone in nearly all the way, and the hull had crumpled; the pressure had crushed the passengers despite all of them wearing armour. The spatial distortions pointed to damaged pockets. On the scanners it looked horrific, like a metal shell with an assortment of filling squeezing out of it. Two like that, and four intact…

Near the hatch we found a name, partly scorched but legible: Steadfast. For some reason I'd thought they would be Strom's colleagues from the High Velocity.

I stopped Kon before she started cutting the hatch open.

I could feel the thought of looting hanging in the air between us. There could have been good pendants in there. No one voiced it. Everyone felt awkward.

I said nothing, just marked the coordinates on the map with a note about the dead, their number and their ship.

"We're moving on," I ordered.

No one objected.

For all the enormous amount of scrap, there weren't that many bodies. There were still some, both ours and the demonic ones. The demonic ones finally sated our greed a little. We picked up a couple of rings and one fine pendant.

A couple of times the spiral took us into areas of elevated radiation, but nothing like what Bao had described, until we reached a stretch that showed up on the map as a smudged blot several kilometres across.

Two wrecks lay side by side and, by the look of it, had been a single whole before the fall. The drones didn't go in there, since the radiation caused communication dropouts and messed with their antigravs Needless to say, my team didn't want to soak up radiation either.

I decided to pop in myself, use my armour's resistance, and get back out quickly. It wasn't the sort of place I'd have chosen to hide in, but it had to be checked. Especially the middle, where a rift between the wrecks opened onto the ship's cavities.

"You're not following me," I said, reassuring the team. "I'm talking about surprises. If anything goes wrong, I'll just run."

"And what if there are demons in there?" Mardal asked.

"How long have we been flying around here?" I asked. "Either they've taken such a dose that only a capsule will help them, or they're out of our league."

I put my board away and went in with the Monkey.

My interface squealed about elevated radiation levels and rising danger. About eight hundred metres from the wrecks, the comms started dropping out, but I had to keep going.

The two pieces of the ship lay next to each other like a loaf broken in half. They were no bigger than a ‘tin can’, but they'd survived in better shape, even though the rear section had a round breach from which heat poured out. That was most likely the source of the radiation. Between the wrecks ran a chasm some thirty metres wide, filled with debris that had spilt out of both halves: beams, plates, torn cables, pieces of internal partitions and the remains of armoured bodies. On both sides of the chasm, the crumpled and fully exposed cavities of the ship gaped open.

That was what I aimed my scanner at. It glitched against this background too. The wrecks felt aggressively dead. Here and there were distortions of various kinds, but nothing I'd linger for. I'd almost decided I was soaking up a dose for nothing and ought to turn back when something in the left half caught my attention.

Too many bodies: a good two dozen armoured demons lying on the floor. None of them moved, but portal batteries were also registering in the middle of that hall. Big ones like those in the ‘tin can's’ portal room, smaller…

And none of the bodies touched one another, as if they'd been laid out across the floor. They hadn't piled up at the lowest point, the way they had in the aspic lake.

My insides went cold, and I belatedly realised I'd been looking in that direction for too long. I slowly turned away. The radiation wouldn't let me check precisely whether they were alive; the readings were contradictory. And though I had no doubt left that the demons had decided to use the radiation as cover, I had no intention of going in there to check. I did, however, have to decide: try to leave quietly, as if I hadn't worked anything out, and perhaps take something in the back, like the demon Hale and the other Finger had shot, or get out of there at full tilt.