“All right, these are the true guardians of the crystal shard,” I said confidently. “We beat them, we get our prize.”
“Then what the heck are we standing around for? Let’s knock some rock heads!” Jezz beamed.
“We each take a corner,” I suggested. “Jezz, you’re on my side. Red, you’re on Gerald’s.”
“Sounds like a plan!” Jezz said, giving me a thumbs up, while Red looked absolutely terrified.
“Hey,” I called out, walking up to him and offering him my Thunderberd and a couple mana restoration vials and healing potions. “You got this. I know this is bigger than anything you’ve faced in the branch, but you got Gerald at your side. I heard the two of you talking back there. It sounds like you trust him, and I have a good feeling he trusts you, too. So let’s work like a team and finish this.”
He tried to calm down, dropping his shoulders with a sigh. “You can keep the healing potions. If one of those giants attacks me, I’m dead anyway.” He took the weapon and the mana restoration vials. “But… optimism. I know Jezz is very big on that. So I will swallow this fear of colossal titans and do what’s right for my country.”
I smiled. “Gavori is waiting for you on the other side. Let’s go. Break.” I ordered my team to move into formation, but the titans weren’t patient. One of them, the only female-looking one among the seven, swung her fist over her head, and was about to throw whatever was in it at us.
I heard crunching—she was breaking something inside her hand…
When she lunged her arm forward, my team dispersed. Large chunks of crushed rock hurled our direction, my feet fighting to dodge each one. Without time to summon my reflector shield, I was stuck narrowly avoiding each projectile. But luckily my team and I managed, and I watched as Jezz leapt into the air, and transformed into her wolf form.
Without skipping a beat, she dropped her feet on the statue’s arm and dashed toward the statue with her insane speed. Gerald and Red each went to their positions, getting ready to strike. I on the other hand picked a statue and readied myself too, my machine gun locked and loaded. While Jezz was on my side dealing with the female titan with her ice breath, I was tossing grenades at the long-bearded, bald-headed one, forming a weak spot under his rib cage.
The bald-headed titan roared in anger as my grenades exploded chunks of stone off of him. I could see the fury in his eyes as he swung his fist at me, his movement stiff and slow. I retreated to the nearest bridge along my path and noticed the stone hesitating—he refused to attack me while I was standing on the bridge, and he was probably protecting the temple from sinking into the volcano.
In fact, all of the titans were dedicated to protecting the temple, which confirmed that the shard was inside.
This was perfect! I ordered my team to fight along the bridges, telling them what I observed. After that, I aimed my blaster at him, firing off a hot round to bring him down. Unfortunately this asshole had a back-up plan, his chest starting to heat up as veins of bright red branched from its center.
All of a sudden, cyber beasts began to circle us…
“They can teleport objects into the subrealm!” Red shouted.
Well, that seriously complicated things. But I didn’t forget our ace card—we had a war machine in our team.
Gerald went to work immediately. Until now, I had no idea he could fly. The juiced up human machine levitated in the air, hidden among the gray clouds. Then just as quickly, webs of electricity bolts dispersed like lightning shooting down from the sky, striking the cyber beasts and frying them to bits. The air was filled with the smell of blood and scorched level 100-150 monsters, Gerald putting them down without breaking a sweat.
His power was commendable, effective, and down-right scary.
"Nice work, Gerald!" I complimented, the titans not liking that one bit. In fact, they all turned to Gerald, all seven of them trying to annihilate the strongest member of our party. The titan with the glasses opened his mouth nice and big, shooting what looked like a fucking laser beam out of it.
I froze, thinking that Gerald was sniped for sure, but from within the clouds the beam charged right back, attacking the titan with even more intensity. It was then that I realized that Gerald was not just a war machine, he was a fucking force of nature…
Okay, all warnings aside, being overclocked wasn’t all that bad. This was cybernetic augmentation to the extreme—I’d seen Gerald fight, but not like this. What I’d witnessed before was child’s play compared to the work he was putting in right now, and I could feel victory in the fucking palm of my hands…
The titan with the specs was out of the game, Gerald’s reflector knocking his head clean off his shoulders. From the impact of the shot, his body fell back, his collapse like an earthquake underneath our feet. Great, one down, six more to go.
As they were distracted with Gerald, I capitalized. While another one of the titans started to summon backup, I finished up with the one who had a gaping hole in his side. I summoned my bots, six of them, then downed a mana restoration potion. “Let’s go speed tap.” I zoomed as close as I could to the titan and triggered my sonar pulse. With the damage my grenades had done, I was able to tap into it a few times in one ST wave, and the statue crumbled to the ground.
Great, five more left—correction, four more left. Jezz had just finished off the female titan, the corner of my eyes catching her limb less decapitated body dropping to the ground.
Gerald finished the second wave of cyber freaks no problem, but this time, the fae council got creative. They noticed they were losing, and needed smarter players on the board.
Five fae arcane mages were summoned into the sub realm. They looked at each other lost and confused, and then terrified when they saw Gerald descending on them.
“Holy shit! It’s the human war machine!” the woman with the red hair cried out.
“Lucyna’s titan guard?!?” Another one said.
But before Gerald could even notice them, one of the statues snatched him from the air.
“Shit, Gerald!” I cried out, but he had it under control—he unleashed an explosive blow that decimated the statue’s arm. But the chunks that exploded were falling above the center temple. One of the titans jumped over the temple, protecting it with his body, and all I could see over my head was a huge pair of eyes staring darkly at me.
The fae mages scurried in panic. I couldn’t blame them. They were whisked away from their homes and taken here to fight a great battle. Little did they know, they were defending the dungeon core’s shard for the High Council. But the statues needed to get their ducks in a row, so the statue hovering above us looked at his warriors, his eyes glowing bright blue.
All of a sudden, the cavalry stopped abruptly. They stopped stumbling over each other and straightened up, pulling out their respective weapons.
Hold on, was he mind-controlling them?
If this was true, I had to ask myself how Gerald couldn’t be mind-fucked. Could it be because he was human? Was Red and Jezz in danger?
“Close your eyes, Red!” I heard Jezz cry out, confirming my suspicions.
Hell, four against nine—even with Gerald on the team, this wasn’t going to be easy.
Immediately, the mages spread out, one of them coming for me. The red-head was a master of wind—my god damn weakness. I had problems fighting Lanette, and this chick was much faster than her. My reflector shield came handy this time, as well as my cyber bots.
The battle was fierce, and between the red-headed wind mage and the titans, I was playing more defensively than offensively. The titans were incredibly powerful, each blow sending shockwaves through the ground and leaving massive craters in their wake. They continued to summon monsters to add onto their annoying obstacle course, making fighting the mages one on one even more difficult. Seeing as they refused to summon more fae mages, I assumed they wanted to limit the number of people who knew of this place for security reasons. And I’d bet my bottom dollar that they planned on killing them once they were done using them as their pawns.
I on the other hand didn’t want them dead. They were involuntary tools for the High Order. So I ordered my bots and my team not to kill them. Knocking them out was enough, Red doing a great job with that with his water powers.
He cut off their oxygen, rendering them unconscious. Red was another Sonic in our team, nearly matching Jezz’s speed when he rode the waves of his water trait.
