章 76: Forsaken Garrison, Pt 3
With your powers heightened and your every being at the ready, you double back towards the entrance towards the psionic creature closest to you. Its normally probing psionic static becomes shrill as you also sense its energies heighten.
There's no mistaking your intent after all - you're clearly going after it, and so it prepares for you defensively. It pulses outward at you in quick succession, as though to slow your advance. But its energies crash against your psionic defenses and melt away without doing any damage to you.
At least, as far as you can tell.
You slip two of your short bolts from your forearm quiver and orbit them around your head using your Telekinesis. Then you charge them up with a good amount of raw energy, ready to Telekinetically fling them at whatever's in your path.
But just as you step halfway through the tunnel back to the entrance, the creature ahead of you stops emitting psionic static. Even more worrying, all the psionic creatures everywhere else in the facility stops emitting static altogether. It hardly matters how many more steps you take forward - none do a thing.
You're astonished even further when you get to the entry room and find it devoid of any creatures. In fact, you're absolutely certain that the closest one was here only a moment ago, just outside of the range of your Ultrasense.
And yet it isn't anywhere near you. There isn't even a hint of psionic energy in the air, or anywhere in the facility. You take a few steps around the room while keeping your guard up, but find nothing at all.
It takes a few long seconds before you start wondering if your mind is playing tricks on you, or if there's something else here scrambling your psionic senses. All kinds of theories pass across your mind, on whether these things have a superior cloaking power, or if they're psionic beings at all. Maybe the whole facility acts as a kind of psionic reverberation channel… thing. If such a thing even exists.
You shake all those ideas off quickly, realizing that perhaps this is part of these creatures' nature. None could possibly be some random occurrence, or a reflection and warping of your own psionic energy. You had sensed motive and movement and malevolence earlier, just barely weaving through their energies. And there's absolutely no mistaking them.
These things must be real - and whatever they're doing isn't good.
Just as you come to that conclusion, your Ultrasense kicks off - something is coming at you from behind! Something incredibly fast and dangerous. Alarm bells pretty much ring in your head as you sense an ultra-dense Telekinetic power slice through the air. It's as potent as the TK claws that Noir creates, but much larger and longer.
You roll forward and to the side just in time, as the Telekinetic scythe cuts through the air where you just were. It cuts into the curved desk nearby and bisects it in half with a shrill SKREE. The sight of the wrenched metal makes your eyes go wide as saucers.
You can't help but itch at your throat, imagining what that power could do to your body.
Then you instinctively spin towards the source of the Telekinesis, and launch your own Telekinetic attack. First you push outward with a burst of pure TK energy, then fling both your bolts right afterwards. But they do nothing but clatter on the wall at the far side of the room and tumble down to the ground.
None of your attacks hit - simply there's nothing there to hit, just empty air. You stand there glancing in every direction, confused as all hell. You literally felt its existence right at that spot… but then it vanished again the moment its TK scythe flew at you.
Your Ultrasense alerts you to another incoming scythe, again from behind you. You evade by side-stepping just in the nick of time - it's close enough that you can almost feel it sweep past, as it cuts decisively through the air.
Seeing as it missed you, the power itself dissipates quickly, almost as quickly as it arrived.
But again, nothing where it originated from - nothing physical anyway. It's clear now that these psionic creatures are fully incorporeal and have no physical bodies. And now that you think about it, you can barely discern the shape of their psyche, not like any other psionic being you've come across.
The only thing you've been able to see thus far are their psionic projections, whether they're the static pulses or these TK scythes. Normally, you'd see people activate their energies, weave them into a power, then launch said power.
This time around, the only thing you truly sense is the launching of the power. Somehow, the weaving of it takes a miniscule amount of time, or is part of the launching itself - you can't exactly tell.
In other words, you only sense their actions in the moment and none of their intent.
You Telekinetically grab your forlorn bolts, bring them back to you, then slide them back into your arm quiver. There's no point in using Telekinesis now, not against something that has no physical being. Which is kind of a relief - at least now you don't have to waste any more energy in that sense.
Instead, you pour those energies into a medium-level Telekinetic barrier - one that wraps around your body like a skin-tight suit of armor. Judging by how much energy the scythes carry, your TK armor ought to be enough to stop a few of them in their tracks.
Not that you want to test it out - you'd rather evade than take a single hit.
You hardly get a moment to collect yourself as another TK scythe comes at you. Thankfully your Ultrasense is more than enough to determine where it comes from. The many layers of psionic senses within simply allows you to see where the energy gathers, how it's woven, the shape it takes, the speed it travels, the arc of its trajectory. You also see slivers in time where you're bisected, though you're more interested in the slivers where you get away cleanly.
And with your Fortify running at its peak, you're able to get away from these attacks with relative ease. You leap and evade and roll and side-step every single attack that the Phantom throws at you.
A part of you celebrates the fact that you could possibly do this all day long, that your powers are more than enough to counter its invisibility. More than that, this creature clearly doesn't have the strength or the ability to do any kind of damage to you.
"No," you argue with yourself. "You can't do this all day long."
You're using up a good amount of energy just maintaining Ultrasense - you are expending just enough energy that it negates how much you recharge. Anything you use beyond that will just straight up drain you. Even though the Phantom's pool of energy seems relatively shallow, you realize that it recharges at an alarming rate - far faster than you can.
There's no way you can stay on the defensive for much longer. After all, you only have so much energy you can lean on while these Phantoms seemingly have an endless supply.
Worse, you have a physical self that uses up stamina - a weakness that your opponents certainly do not have. If you continue dodging and evading like this, you're only going to end up exhausted and unable to defend yourself.
And it's at that point that these things will more than likely tear you apart. You don't even have to look at a distant sliver of your future to know that such a death will be excruciatingly painful and horrendously violent.
You evade another TK scythe attack with deftness as you build up your psionic energies for a counterattack. First you pour a portion of them into a Surge, which you pulse outward in every direction.
Though you could instill this one with great amounts of fear or apprehension, you decide to go in the opposite direction. You don't want it to run from you - you want it to make a mistake. Instead, you fill this Surge with focused anger and staggering aggressiveness.
You weave it so the Surge is both acute and dense and short and sweet all at once. It's a singular, powerful punch that blasts outward in every direction, which you hope catches the Phantom no matter where it actually is.
As it sweeps through the room, you sense an intrinsic psionic defense mechanism raise up. It only manifests for a split second, just as the Surge washes over the Phantom itself. In that singular moment, you can just about sense the shape of its erratic psyche, which seems scattered in the room all around you.
Regardless, it's all you need.
You immediately slip into a sliver of your Foresight, then quickly activate your Temporal Acceleration once you have a solid foothold. The world around you slows significantly, or rather your mind speeds up exponentially.
With time at your beck and call, you further activate your Analyze in an attempt to study your opponent with greater clarity.
"Let's take a better look at you," you mutter at the world.
Though the being certainly takes a shape, it isn't exactly logical. It seems almost like a cloud that's bursting outwards in numerous directions… It's made up of a jumble of ideas and emotions hanging in the air. It reminds you somewhat of Crazed, or that Chimera in that its mind is a mix of everything.
But instead of some thoughts vying for domination, this one appears to be more harmonious with its own incongruence. You watch as its thoughts coalesce together instinctively as it mounts a defense in reaction to your assault.
You can just see the patterns and wavings of some kind of barrier, though you note that it's also made with Surge. It forms up to create a wall of solid white noise, more than enough to resist your Surge. Fighting fire with fire, so they say. At least to some degree.
Considering that you can use much more energy than your opponent, your Surge slams up against its defenses, crushing and crumbling it decisively. Of course, much of your own attack is dulled, but you're still able to affect the Phantom itself.
You can feel the anger and aggression you've woven slip into its consciousness and spread through its myriad thoughts. Not only that, but you can sense as the Phantom disperses those emotions quickly, to add them to the myriad other thoughts and emotions floating around.
Doing so causes your Surge to dissipate relatively harmlessly, along with the remnants of the Phantom's defense. The formless cloud that is its consciousness also begins to fade and vanish from your view.
Without anything further to peer into or study, you pull back your Analyze and Temporal Acceleration as you step back from the sliver of Foresight.
And once again, the Phantom disappears from your senses. But this time, you know exactly how to fight it. Or at least, you've got an idea what to do.
"Alright captain slashy," you declare loudly into the room. "Let's do this!"
You sense the Phantom shift restlessly even as you speak, with thin wisps of formless energy slicing through the air. Out of nowhere, it throws a Surge at you from the side. This is a much more focused version of its psionic static, except much more potent and pointed.
Instead of a single heavy emotion to bombard you with like normal, it feels more like a… scattering. As though millions of miniscule emotions are careening towards you, ready to shred you to dust.
Despite how little energy is actually in the attack, you're certain that if you were caught in that, you would be completely shattered - mentally and physically. At the worst, you could become a Phantom yourself - some kind of psionic being that only emits this kind of erosion. At best, you would simply cease to be.
It's potent enough that you can feel your own focus begin to unravel even before it hits you. Not only that, but you can sense anger and aggression woven all throughout the power itself. Clearly, it has taken a part of your Surge and added it to its very being, as though it has adopted it and used it to empower itself.
But none of this worries you in the slightest. In fact this is what you wanted, more or less.
You take the remainder of the energies that you're holding and pour them into a shaped Devour, and place it between you and the Phantom. Doing so immediately catches its Surge, engulfing it with an endless hunger. Their energies clash violently at first, but settle down significantly as your Devour does its work.
And when you boost your Devour with extra energy, you find yourself able to reach out and latch onto those bits of anger and aggression. You're able to bind your Devour to them, further gobbling up whatever it can.
Since those emotions are now laced all throughout the Phantom itself, you're able to completely pull it in along with the Surge that it's forming and flinging. There's a shrill psionic shrieking that echoes around you, as the formless Phantom itself is destroyed bit by bit.
In the process your Devour shrinks and wanes, but in the end is more than enough to completely neutralize the Phantom and all its power. All of them - the Devour, the Surge, and the Phantom - all wink out of existence after a few short moments, leaving you heaving and panting alone in the cold, pitch black room.
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