Waterstrider

Little Celah, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Thirdmonth, 1634 PTS

The stories say that battles between immortals can last for years of intense combat, each participant so skilled and powerful that it takes them so long to overcome one another. I had doubts about such claims.

At my level a fight only lasted minutes at most. Unless my opponent was firing at me with weapons from hundreds of meters away, I could easily close the distance, bringing the battle to an end one way or another.

This battle was the same. I had damaged my opponent and taken damage in return, though the enforcer could undoubtedly take far more than I. I was bleeding out of multiple gunshot wounds, and grazed by shrapnel in various other spots. I was lucky. Had one of my dantians been cracked, the fight would already be over.

Fighting a martial artist was certainly easier than a Celan war machine. It felt as if I were fighting an entire squadron of soldiers at once.

My mind cleared as I took the moment’s respite to catch my breath. I needed to escape, but a second fight would likely occur outside of the warehouse. I started moving towards the wall while my mind whirled desperately in hope of finding a way out of the dangerous situation I had found myself in. As I was formulating a plan, I heard a voice whisper in my ear.

“Do you need help, Cyrus?”

I recognized the voice as belonging to Rachel. I whirled, seeing nothing around me but the enforcer slowly trying to pull itself out of the aluminum and composite frame of the wall. She was nowhere to be seen, the illusionary body she had conjured apparently having been dispelled. And yet her voice could still be easily heard, as if she stood right beside me. More than that, it was as if she was leaning over my shoulder to speak right beside my ears.

“You may not know this,” she said, “but a squad of Celan gangsters are waiting outside of the warehouse. The only reason they haven’t entered is because the pilot of that enforcer there ordered them to wait. Apparently because he wanted to show off his skill at using the machine and earn merit or whatever.” She giggled. “The little idiot is going to regret that when his superiors see the damage. Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend going outside.”

I paused in my movement towards the exit. As I myself could not think up a way out of the mess of problems I had walked myself into, I was willing to hear her out.

“Do you know a way I can get myself out of here?” I asked, my voice shaky from pain and weariness. Rachel clicked her tongue chidingly.

“You really should have helped me out earlier, you know. Grab the damn conduit, Cyrus. If you do, I’ll teleport you and it out of the district. If you open the containment unit, it’ll be resting at the very center.”

I glanced towards the white machine- the containment unit she had shown me earlier. Directly behind it the enforcer was finishing extracting itself from the office, guns blazing with orange mist as they prepared to fire at me once more. Thick clouds of the glowing smoke poured from dents and scrapes in its armored shell.

She was probably correct about the gunmen outside. It was odd that the enforcer had arrived alone. If that were the case, my odds were essentially null of making it out of the district alive and uncaptured. My choices were to cast myself at their mercy or take a gamble on Rachel’s word.

I had never heard of anything like teleportation technology outside of the portals created by the calculation engines, but in truth I had little idea of the capabilities the more advanced races had. Perhaps Rachel was from some advanced race that lived in another part of the galaxy. With this new potential solution in mind, I turned to the enforcer and began to run once more.

Pain filled my body as I forcibly initiated the water striding steps once more. My overexerted meridians began to slightly rupture, and part of my focus was forced to work on preventing my internal energy from changing state to sanguine. As my techniques used formless miasma rather than sanguine, I would be unable to use them if this occurred.

Slugs whistled by me on either side as I charged towards the enforcer. The armor’s rate of fire had slowed down significantly, which I took as a good sign. Hopefully it had been dealt some serious damage. The blade-wielding arms, though, were lively as ever.

As I arrived before it, one of the oversized weapons flew directly into my path of transit. I dodged to the side, rolling on the ground and returning to my feet as I swerved to the enforcer’s right, where the containment unit lay. As I had anticipated, the enforcer was surprised by my sudden shift in direction, forced to take a moment to adjust.

The unit had appeared very solid and well designed to be tough. The bulk of a multi-ton mech suit crashing into it at high speed did not, however, seem to be something it was designed to withstand. A great deal of its shape was crumbled inwards, and the interface had been shattered to scrap. It took two precise slashes to get the ruined container open. I ripped the plating off with my free hand, haphazardly tossing it behind me.

The interior was a warren of odd tubes through which orange streams of light coursed. Nestled at the center in a small circular housing was a sparkling black object.

“That’s it. You just need to pick it up and get at least twenty feet away from the enforcer, and I can get us out of here,” spoke the disembodied voice.

In response, I reached into the unit and picked it up.

The conduit was reasonably small, roughly the size of a child’s head. It was made of a black, glassy substance that was cool to the touch. It was bumpy, shaped in organic-looking swirls that each ended in small ports presumably serving to dock cables into. Embedded inside of the transparent surface were layered metal plates through which rods passed through in odd angles. Twinkling lines of red and purple coursed like flashes of lightning between the nodes, creating a stunning effect. It seemed like some sort of odd mix of a natural treasure and what would likely be cutting edge technology even to an advanced civilization such as the Staiven.

I tucked it under one arm as I leapt above a sideswipe from one of the enforcer’s swords.

The enforcer’s pilot had realized my plan late, but to his credit he had adjusted quickly. The barrels of his guns had shifted towards me, their slugs continuing to fire on me.

I tore through the warehouse towards the hole I had torn in the wall before, and behind me chased the enforcer. The vast lumbering machine slowly picked up speed as he charged in my direction. I began to move in a zig-zagging motion, putting more strain on my ruptured channels in an attempt to gain distance and throw off the aim of his weaponry. The enforcer was fast, however.

Unexpectedly nimble for a machine of such bulk, the enforcer began shouting once more in Staiven and some other language I didn’t recognize as he continued to chase after me.

I turned suddenly, shifting my direction to an entirely different path. I was nearly backtracking, attempting to ensure as much as possible that the enforcer’s momentum would prevent him from following. This time, rather than aiming my general path towards the open hole I had created and which the enforcer had enlarged, I went for a wall on another side of the building.

“Cyrus, you need to gain distance. Another enforcer has arrived.” I ignored the chattering voice in my ear, annoyed by the distraction. With my current injuries, another combatant could do little to worsen the situation. If I did not acquire sufficient distance, I would die.

In moments I reached the wall, taking a short leap upwards. A blood vessel in my shoulder popped as I executed my torrential downpour once more, carving in three slashes a new exit for myself. Behind me, I could hear a groaning noise as the building shifted on its damaged foundation. I landed on the stone of the landing outside, rolling back onto my feet. The intense motion sent another burst of pain through my body, but I held it in.

This side of the warehouse was, as I had remembered, a small loading dock used as both a place to park aerial vehicles and to load supplies in and out for transit. Merely forty feet past the wall was a railing beyond which the stack ended, leaving a large access pit into the lower levels of the city.

A trio of Korlove shouted as I tore open the wall, frantically trying to point their weapons in my direction, but they didn’t have time to fire before they were shocked by the explosion of debris as the enforcer tore his way out behind me. Slugs accelerated from the barrels of their firearms, but I mostly ignored them, focusing on nothing but running directly towards the railing.

I could feel the reverberation of the air on my skin, feel the rumbling thud of each step the great machine took behind me. My feet flowed like water, and my blood flowed smoothly from my wounds. For a moment it was as if the world slowed down as I was awash with an understanding of the flowing elements surrounding me.

With a great heave I leapt into the air, diving across the final ten feet and down into the depths of the station. I heard a roaring yell behind me, and I laughed with delight.

Below me I could see the glow of the lower layers of the stacks, the layers upon layers of streets and bridges, and at the very bottom, the rocky core that was left of the asteroid the station had originally been constructed from.

But after mere moments of freefall, a flash of yellow light surrounded me and I left Little Celah behind.

Enforcers: [After becoming starfaring races, the Celans soon found that many other races had inherent abilities with which a Celan of either variety could never hope to match. In search of a way to even the odds in interpersonal combat, Celan engineers created mechanical armors of war. One of the elite models of such armors is the enforcer. Armored units equipped with six arms and twelve weapons, Enforcers serve as the ace of any larger Celan combat unit. They cannot be replicated by any other race, due to the fusion of advanced technology and the secrets of flickering miasma that Celan scientists currently hold a monopoly over. It is generally safe to assume that any organization owning a functional enforcer unit has ties to either the Celan government or a Celan organization of similar power.]