บท 12: Bad Vibes
Fifteen minutes after they'd defeated that first mecha-gorilla Henri and Walder found themselves facing off against three more of the metal monsters.
Henri and Walder ducked into doorway while finding off the attacks from the metal monsters. Fortunately, for the two guildsmen the doorway was too narrow for mecha-gorillas to just charge through.
Henri was able to use her explosive rounds and sharpshooting to force the creatures into a firefight with both sides keeping their distance. This resulted in a stalemate because the monsters, or who or whatever was controlling them, were appearently smart enough to stay in cover. Meaning Henri couldn't really get a good shot off.
Walder ended the stalemate by pulling out a little crystal and steel cylinder, pressing both bases on the cylinder till it had been compressed into a disk and then throwing the disk into the mecha-gorilla side of the hallway.
"You might want to hold on to something…." said Walder.
Henri frowned, and then did as her husband suggested. When in a firefight, words like "duck, look out, get into cover, or hold on," weren't to be treated lightly. You did as told unless there was a clear reason not to, and then asked questions later.
Henri braced herself against the wall and activated the magnets in the soles of her boots just for good measure. One second she was wondering what exactly Walder had done now, then the very next second she was more than a little annoyed at the man.
Getting your breath stolen away was less fun than movies and music made it sound. The device Walder had thrown imploded and when it did, it suck all the air out of that section of the powerstation, creating a vacuum so strong that an unaltered human might not have been able to withstand it.
All Henri was able to hear was the roaring air rushing past her ears and the thrum of the blood in her veins momentarily losing its mind and desperately trying to escape her body. If the tunnels weren't built so solidly, they likely would have collapsed and if they weren't already clean, any dirt or detritus on the floor or ceilings would have been sucked away.
She ended up being quite glad she'd activated the magnets on the heels of her boots, because for one terrifying second she felt the suctioning force pull her body towards it, making her slide backwards into the wall she'd been bracing herself against.
Henri endured the strange force, relying on the sturdy walls to keep her body from being dragged towards whatever baleful thing her husband had created.
She heard three mournful, mechanical cries, and instantly knew that the mech-gorillas had met their end.
The danger wasn't over though, just as the suctioning forced had begun to lessen, there was an explosion, so loud and deafening and energetic that it brought concrete powder and metal fragments raining down over Henri and Walder's heads.
"F****! Just what the flying f*** was that?!" said an even paler than usual Henrika.
Walder shrugged like a chastened child.
"Er….It was nothing big….Just a small singularity grenade."
Henrika heard the boy's words and his words created a thousand trains of thought within her head. All these thought immediately collided with one another, and Henri was thus struck dumb.
Henri was left thoroughly incapable of speech, which was just as well, having been raised as the sheltered daughter of a clan, she didn't know that many expletives.
She'd ended up dropping out of the heroes academy before the time for her long-term internship on a galactic battle vessel had come, and thus was never afforded the chance to properly learn how to cuss like a sailor.
(Internet chat boards and social media were a close second in learning how to swear properly but as everyone knows it takes being around actual sailors to get a proper education in swear words.)
When she finally regained her power of speech, Henri found that she didn't know what to say. Asking if the man knew that he'd nearly killed them both would be pedantic and unnecessary. Walder's chagrined expression already said he knew how much he'd screwed up.
After an uneasy few minutes, where Henri hurried checked to see if the graviton levels had reached a point where the authorities managing Nabrok would notice, Henri decided to leave matters as they were. From the look on Walder's face, she very much doubted that he'd be using the black hole-based explosive devices again any time soon. At the very least he'd know better than to use them in close range.
Though knowing him, that probably meant she could look forward to eventually seeing the man make some kind of singularity missiles or bullets, in the near future….Assuming he hadn't already made them.
Henri was once again reminded that her eccentric husband was quite the scary individual, only a madman would make a handheld version of the kind of doomsday weapon the stellar governments used as deterrent measures.
Miniature nuclear devices were illegal in two-thirds of the galaxy and for good reason. Miniaturizing a weapon of mass-destruction didn't make it safer, only an idiot or a mentally-unhinged person would think that.
Walder cleared his throat, thankful for the darkness around them, and the dark hue of his skin, because otherwise the young woman beside him would be able to see just how furiously he was blushing.
Since he was more scared of looking awkward and further embarrassing himself than he was of scared of anything that might be wandering around the powerstation, Walder immediately rushed back into the fray.
Diving towards a tunnel in search of a nice distracting battle.
He found what he was looking for no less than five minutes later. Running into an eighty mecha-spider that was large enough and fierce enough to withstand more then thirty blasts from the tesla cannon he was trying out….Granted all those blasts were fired with just three pulls of the trigger, but Walder still found it quite impressive.
Henri on the other hand, watched slack faced, as the man ran pell-mell through the halls of the powerstation. Switching through various conventional and unconventional firearms. Including one rifle that reduced one of the mecha-gorilla to ash before the weapon itself also was reduced to ash.
As he held the remains of the disintegrated firearm in his hands, a red-eared Walder would rub the back of his head while trying to explain….
"Well...er...time dilation cannons tend to be finicky things, and if the casing takes any damage whatsoever...well you know….'time' happens."
"...." Henri didn't say anything, because she honestly didn't have anything to say.
Standard disintegration rifles, that worked by interfering with the weak-interaction forces that held together subatomic particles, were known to have similar issues. Which was a big reason why most individuals and organizations tended to stay the hell away from them, even if they didn't ban them outright.
The woman was just glad that the breakdown hadn't happened with that one cannon that shot out miniature suns. She had a strong feeling that they wouldn't have survived that particular toy's malfunction.
If there was one thing that Henri knew, it was that at some point she and her husband would have to have a talk about the weapons he made. The first half would include an exhortation on the importance of safety and using equipment that won't accidentally kill you and your wife, one day...The second half would be a strong encouragement to spread the love and make some cool equipment for the aforementioned wife.
Things went a little smoother afterwards, with the two guildsmen working as a team and clearing out the mechanized denizens of the powerstation.
They made it all the way to the stations core when suddenly Walder's felt a chill crawl from the back his neck to the base of his spine. In that moment his entire demeanor changed, fun and games were over.
"I...uh...You know what? Let's maybe not go in…" said Walder.
"Huh? Why not?" said a puzzled Henri.
"It feels….dangerous all of a sudden." said Walder.
Henri looked at the door that separated them from the power stations core, then she looked the man, her gaze drifting towards the storage device on his hip, a storage device filled with the bodies of countless monsters.
"Grimwald….I don't know if you noticed it, but this is a dungeon world...Safety is in short supply." said Henri.
"I know...but there's danger and then there's 'danger'...and I'm thinking we should either come back later with a bigger group...or maybe you can just hold back and let me just get a peak at what's in there before we go in..." said Walder.
Henri frowned, wondering what could make seemingly reckless and carefree Walder be suddenly reserved. Since neither of his suggestions was entirely unreasonable Henri decided to just go with it.
"Alright, send in your drones and let's get a look at what lies past that door." said Henri.
Walder nodded and sent a smoky nanobot whisper through the gap underneath the door. He frowned at the feed that was being played on his implant.
According to the drones the room was empty, there was nothing there, and beyond Nabrok's baseline for anomalous energy there were no suggestions of anything preternatural. As far as the drones were concerned all that lay in the room was a set of massive generators, and monitoring equipment that all looked oddly rusty considering how clean and well-maintained everything else in the powerstation was.
"...." Walder continued frowning. Despite things looking 'normal' the feeling between his shoulders hadn't gone away.
Even at the height of his old universe's technological advancement there were still beings that could fool even the best technology of the dying galaxy's people. In the end it was found that the most reliably thing that could let a person know when something was off….was their instincts, and the senses of those who'd grown sensitive to certain supernatural phenomenons.
"....It looks like the area's all clear." said Henri. Her expression unreadable as always, with her tone making it sound as if she might slowly have begun to catch the bad vibes that Walder was picking up.
"....Yeah, suspiciously all clear….We haven't even found out where those machines were coming from." said Walder.
Henri and Walder stood outside the door of the power stations core and experienced what it was like to be in a horror movie, aware that the situation wasn't quite right but unable to put their fingers on why.
Walder had half a mind to cut the hunting trip short and have him and Henri pull out of the Nabrok. Henri, on the other hand, had already moved past the stage of wanting to leave and despite her misgiving she felt that they should at least enter the room and look around first before leaving.
"Well,...look at it this way...this isn't a videogame or a b-movie, where helplessness is guaranteed and escape is impossible…. We're armed and if there really 'is' something there we can just bail." said Henri.
Walder reluctantly agreed, though there definitely was something strange about there air around the station's core, so long as retreat remained an option there was no reason not to continue being as bold as they had been.
Walder opened the door of the station and stepped inside, having determined in his own head if worse came to worst, he'd use all the means at his disposal to see that Henri got out okay.
Henri followed Walder with a reciprocal determination, having never forgotten that the sole reason she'd come down to Nabrok with the man, was to make sure her husband's decision to become a hunter didn't result in her becoming a young widow.
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