Chapter 78: Forsaken Garrison, Pt 5
Your pained Surge sweeps through the three Phantoms around you, blasts away their meager defenses, and stuns them a great deal. You can just sense a sense of despair and agony course through their beings, which they do their best to diffuse and redirect and compartmentalize.
But your assault is too strong and they are far from equipped to handle it. Their entire psyches are flooded with your own emotions, causing them to flounder and flail as they attempt to deal with it.
Not that you're any better off - you're practically on your knees cradling your right forearm protectively while sobbing and screaming and cursing uncontrollably. Blood splashes all over your clothing as you hold your arm tighter to your body. But no matter how hard you try, the pain simply will not abate.
Tears stream from your eyes as your scream echoes throughout the mock hangar - the agony you're experiencing is simply quite a great deal to bear. It's beyond anything you've ever felt in your life…
Some small part of you cuts through the pain and realizes that if not for your subconscious Surge, the Phantoms would be literally tearing you apart right now. Alarm bells sweep through you, telling you to get a hold of yourself as fast as you can, to get back on your feet and finish the fight.
The moment they regain their senses is the moment your life ends.
You do your best to tamp down the pain by breathing in and out rapidly through tightly gritted teeth, but find very little luck in doing so. That burning, withering, stabbing sensation pulses up your arm in constant waves, interrupting every thought you have.
A thought pulses through your mind like a bolt of lightning, cutting through everything else in a flash. This gives you some reprieve, though it's short and very temporary. Still, the idea itself takes greater hold of you.
Using your Telekinesis, you take hold of your severed arm - the one that's lying on the ground surrounded by a pool of blood. You bring it back over to you and attempt to line it up with your forearm, as though placing it back where it belongs. You find it difficult, considering how much your whole body is trembling and shaking.
With a yelp, you place the two ends back together, which causes a sharp ripple of pain to sweep through you. But you hang on despite that, and hold them together as steadily as you can.
You breathe deeply through your nose as you do your best to steady yourself, then weave an inordinate amount of energy into a Merge. You wash your arm with those energies, specifically at the point that it has been severed.
Though the pain makes you want to rush this, you do your best to mind Babbage's lesson and allow your Merge to do its work without your interference. And by doing so, you can feel your arm stitch itself back together. You can practically sense your own atoms and molecules binding to each other by the thousands, all along where your arm had been severed.
You feel your bone calcifying, your muscles reconnecting, your skin patching. Painfully. It's like each and every single particle in your arm, right where it's severed, is screaming. You do your best to ignore it all and push it away as you concentrate on keeping your Merge powered up and active and uninterrupted.
All the while, you're gritting and gnashing your teeth while groaning and moaning and cursing under your breath. This time, it helps.
In the end, after a dozen excruciating moments, your arm is back together and whole. Pain still radiates from it as though it's still severed, but thankfully it's far duller than before. Something also feels somewhat off, as though the join itself is weak.
When you clench a fist, some small sharp pains shoot up your arm, and it seems as though you're using up a great deal more effort to make the fist itself. It's clear that your attempt has been imperfect, and you may have to fix it some more in order to get it just the way it was - but you don't have the time for that.Not right now, anyway.
Right now, you need to focus on more important things.
Blood pumps through your body as you shakily push yourself back up and on your feet. At the same time you spin up your energies and refill your weakened Ultrasense and Fortify. They need to be restored as much as you can if you're going to be able to fight at all here.
You also expend some of your energies in rebuilding your Telekinetic armor and even reinforcing it slightly. The last thing you want is for it to get blasted apart that easily again. This trio is much more potent and skilled than the last one, and so you've got to adjust accordingly.
As you build yourself back up, you sense the three Phantoms also recovering alongside. Each one takes apart your Surge and deals with them a myriad of ways all at once. They compartmentalize some of it, some they dissipate, and some get re-woven into other thoughts and emotions in an attempt to dull them. They each also pulse outward with their own Surges, but with just enough energy to push the effects of your Surge back, to delay its effects.
But the end result is the same - though they aren't overwhelmed by your attack, they hesitate because of it. Their intrinsic natures are permanently changed, and knowing that seems to give them great pause. Perhaps it's also because you're exuding pure vengeful thoughts with such potency that it's almost a Surge on its own.
A silver of fear forms in the air, shared by all of them. No doubt, they expected you to die just now. Instead, they found themselves heavily disrupted.
The three do their best to circle you, or rather keep you in the very center of them. Though they still seem to encompass the area around you, they seemingly swirl around at speed. All of them are half a dozen meters away from you, almost exactly. They neither move further or closer and do their absolute best to keep you at that distance.
No matter which way you move, they move accordingly. And so rather than continuing to maneuver, you simply stand still.
This causes even more fear to spike suddenly through each of them, the energies of which they use to fling Telekinetic scythes at you. And although you're able to dodge these with ease, you note that their growing dread also causes their attacks to come faster and faster.
It's only moments later that you find yourself leaping and jumping around again, as they practically engulf you with attacks from all sides. It's a literal storm of blades, all coming for you, or where you were, or where you will be.
It comes to a point where the blades are too densely packed and too all encompassing to evade - you are now inside of a blender.
Determined not to get liquefied, you leap up and out of the way of those dozens and dozens of blades with a burst of your Temperance. Of course, you do more than that - you've got to end this sooner rather than later and simply evading is only going to get you dead.
You weave your energies into another Devour, this time shaping it into a sphere floating in mid-air, right where your body just was. Then you pour the energies of Disintegration right into it, allowing the two weavings to intertwine and combine together.
In an instant, you create a swirling Black Hole which instantly sucks in the incoming Telekinetic scythes. Each of them strike the Black Hole's event horizon, from which point they contradictorily swirl eternally and instantly towards the center of the hole itself.
On top of that, the Black Hole takes psionic hold of the scythes from every level, including the energies that are launching them. It hardly matters how thin they've gotten - it pulls it all in. And with them comes the Phantoms themselves.
They are inescapably pulled towards the Black Hole, bound by their unquenchable, undying fear of you. In fact, because their dread is so high, they're drawn in faster than they can even react. Though you sense them attempting their best to escape their fates, to scatter their being and return to dissipation, there's little they can do.
The Surge of pain and agony that they've compartmentalized burst open as they attempt everything in an attempt to survive the Black Hole. But that only causes more despair to sweep through them. And thus, they're devoured even faster.
All are sucked in at the same time, at the very height of their pain and suffering on every conceivable level, at which point the entire facility goes still.
The Black Hole shrinks and recedes as you withdraw its energies, then you float back down to the ground after being kept aloft by your Telekinesis. When your feet touch the ground, you suddenly realize just how quiet things have become.
The Phantoms around you have gone still yet again, most likely in reaction to your victory here. Also very likely that they're recalculating their strategy so they can attack you again. They certainly now know that you can be cut to pieces, and that you can be overwhelmed.
When they attack next, you're certain it will be with numbers beyond your ability to deal with.
Since you've got a moment to yourself, you rub the muscles on your right forearm in an attempt to massage the pain from it. It helps a little, but you have a hunch that it's your Merge that's caused this light amount of pain. It almost feels like your arm is misaligned by just a tiny amount.
But you pay little attention to it right now - you're more focused on the exosuits that are in the mock hangar. If they're here, it must mean that they were being tested. Which must also mean that these are functional builds, right?
You could snag one of these and get the hell out before things get worse between you and the Phantoms.
But your heart sinks when you see that most of them have been cut apart and destroyed by numerous TK scythes. Though most are still standing, not all are in one piece. Plenty of their inner workings have large gashes in them, rendering them completely useless. Even the most heavily armored one has been sliced open with ease, as though the thick steel protecting it is merely aluminum foil.
When you walk around the large mock hangar, you find little else of use. What few exosuits stood here have been effectively destroyed, and so you find there's no reason for you to linger. With a heavy step and a heavy heart, you head towards the nearest tunnel, which leads to a room with numerous mechanic stations lined around the circular wall.
Half of the stations are empty, while the other half have an exosuit in them. You excitedly move towards the nearest one, only to find the exosuit mostly disassembled and completely unusable. In fact, all of them appear to be in a similar state - either that of repair or construction.
Each of the stations are also lined with all kinds of tools, from manual wrenches to powerful impact drivers and more. There are even tools you've never seen before, which you guess are likely custom-made specifically for these suits.
There's nothing here you could do - you're not technically minded enough to understand how these exosuits work. You could bring back a bunch of parts, but you're unsure if you'd bring enough. Or even the right ones.
When you move away from this room and head into the next, you sense the Phantoms stir once again. Their pulses of psionic static energy rings throughout the facility, reminding you that they're still very much on the prowl.
Once again you sense them shift and move, some faster than the others. They flit down the hallways and corridors and rooms, seemingly headed towards each other. It seems to you that some of them are mobilizing as a group - maybe about a dozen of them.
Worse, where they're gathering is relatively close to you. Either they're attempting to ambush you, or charge you en masse. Neither one certainly wouldn't be any good. You just barely managed against three of them - going up against twelve is a sure disaster.
Of course, you could counter by creating a Black Hole again - with that you could destroy them outright when they attack. But the question is how long could you sustain it? Though the last one only existed for a few scant moments, it drained a great deal of your energy.
You have less than half left, and there's still so many more of them down here. Dozens and dozens of them, that's for sure. Though how many exactly, you just can't tell.
All you know is that if they were to attack you all at once, you would have no chance at all.
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