Mistrunner 2 - Chapter 58 - Boil

Usually, I am a straightforward person. I don’t like traps or convoluted plans. But for Mira, I need to step out of my comfort zone.

Nora Lancaster

I could feel the spider’s searching tendrils scraping against the back of my mind, but so long as I maintained concentration, its efforts remained futile. Or so I hoped. I had no way of knowing for sure – in fact, I was certain that this creature was something wholly unique to the Rift. And that surety led me to believe that the octavangians had never ventured this far into the space station.

Or perhaps I was underestimating their technological advantage. Maybe they had some way to cut the giant spider’s mental attacks down to nothing, and I was just doing things the hard way. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last, either. For all my strength – and I felt confident in my power – I still didn’t know enough about the universe to prepare myself for every eventuality. Usually, I just blundered my way through, trusting my high attributes and the power of my skills to see me through to the other side.

Eventually, that wouldn’t be enough, though. I needed to be better. I needed to learn more. Otherwise, I’d run up on something too strong to fully resist.

But that day had yet to come.

Staggering to my feet, I took aim with my R-14 and let loose with a hail of three-round bursts. Most thudded home without even leaving a mark, but it only took me a few seconds to realize that the area around its joints was far more brittle than the rest of its crystalline carapace.  So, I focused my fire, sending an entire magazine of rounds to tear through the middle joint of its frontmost right leg.

It let out a screech that was accompanied by a mental sledgehammer of thought that shook me to the very core of my soul, but I’d already tasted its best attack, so I was well prepared to endure its latest efforts. Still, it wasn’t pleasant, and the shock threw my aim wide. With that small opening, the gargantuan spider skittered forward, its sharp legs piercing through the carpet of bodies at its feet as it closed in on me.

I grunted as I regained my composure and, marshalling my own courage, raced forward to meet it head-on. Not the best tactic when my lone advantage seemed to be range, but I’d already determined that I could empty a hundred magazines into that creature, and it would still keep coming. No – I needed a different plan, and I thought I had a good idea what to do.

I just had to survive long enough to make it work.

As I sprinted toward the huge thing, I was taken aback by just how large it was. If it was smaller than a tank, I would have been surprised. But fighting a huge monster wasn’t really a change of pace for me, so I ruthlessly shoved the blooming fear into the back of my mind where it couldn’t affect me. Things had begun to get crowded back there.

I raced forward, firing one three-round burst after another. As powerful as the R-14 was, it proved an ineffectual weapon against such a formidable foe. It had happened before, and I knew it would happen again. The reality was that it was too versatile a weapon to really pack the punch I needed. Even with my modifiers, which were significant, it could still only do so much.

The Pulsar was better, but its fire rate, especially slowed down by Empowered Shot, was incredibly slow. My pistol, Ferdinand II, was even more versatile than the assault rifle, but it didn’t lack stopping power. Instead, its tradeoff came in the form of ease of use. If I wanted to get the most out of it, I needed the proper ammunition; couple that with the fact that it was slow to reload, and it was only as good as my preparation dictated.

And I was woefully unprepared for something like the spider.

So, while I vowed not to repeat that mistake going forward, future me couldn’t help with my current situation.

The scattergun wouldn’t do much good, either. Sure, it might stun the monster for a second or two, but by itself, it just wasn’t powerful enough to make much of a difference. That was something I’d need to change, and soon. I couldn’t afford to carry weak weaponry meant for incapacitation anymore.

With that, I was down to my nano-bladed sword. The weapon had proven extremely effective at cutting through even the most durable materials, and it had the advantage of never running around ammunition. Certainly, the blade required a small trickle of Mist to maintain, but for me, it was negligible to the point I often forgot about the slight drain.

But like each of my other weapons, it came with a downside – chiefly, it required that I get in close. With the spider, that would mean getting in range of those sharp legs and whatever other natural weapons it could bring to bear. I wasn’t so naïve as to think that its physical tools would be any weaker than the mental attack to which I had already been subjected.

No - it was a monster, and monsters were built to kill.

All that had coalesced into a series of strengths and weaknesses that drove me into what probably looked like a reckless charge. It wasn’t. I had a plan. I could only hope that it would work.

I covered the ground in the space of a second or two, and when I drew close enough, I dropped into a slide that took me under the monster’s crystalline carapace. Clearly, it hadn’t expected as much – probably because most of the area was covered in the corpses of the alien thralls – but there was just enough open space for me to enact my plan.

As I slid forward, I retrieved a demolition charge from my arsenal implant and slapped it against the spider’s black carapace. It stuck, and I let my momentum carry me along the creature’s length. When I reached its backside, I used one of the corpses to halt my momentum so I could pop up and continue running. By the time the spider managed to skitter around to face me, I was twenty feet away and sprinting for all I was worth.

That’s when I snatched the detonator from my arsenal implant and pressed the appropriate button. A cacophony of sound erupted behind me, followed by a wave of force, and even from more than twenty feet away, I was thrown from my feet by the shockwave that followed the explosion.  I flipped through the air, adjusting my trajectory after activating Balance, but even so, when I landed, I couldn’t stop myself from tumbling over a mound of corpses.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, but when I did, I felt something wet hit my head. A second later, I was showered with raining blood and viscera – the remnants of exploded corpses.

I couldn’t help but gag a little.

But I knew the job wasn’t finished, so I summoned my BMAP and, when the rain of gore ceased, I sighted in on the spider – noting that it was still very much alive, if a bit dazed – and let loose with a bombardment of artillery.

In seconds, the chamber was filled with the sound of one explosion erupting after another, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t dare. I kept going until I’d emptied the first cannister, exchanged it for another, and spent that one as well. However, when I reached into my arsenal implant, I was horrified to see that I’d used every bit of the BMAP’s ammunition.

“Crap,” I muttered, hesitating for only a second before I exchanged the weapon for my Pulsar. It wasn’t long, but it was just enough that the proverbial dust settled and revealed that the spider was still on its feet.

I took aim and cycled through the familiar steps of using a series of Empowered Shots. Each time I fired, the resulting shot took a chunk of black crystal out of the monster’s extraordinarily durable carapace, but the battle had taught it a lesson concerning the necessity of protecting its most vulnerable spots. So, it twisted and turned, preventing me from affecting any lasting damage.

As I emptied that first magazine, I knew my plan had failed. My demolition charges could bring a building down, but apparently, the explosion had done little more than stagger the creature.

Well – that wasn’t completely true. A web of cracks had spread across the thing’s glittering black carapace, but it was still a long way from defeat. I knew that because, with a sudden burst of speed, it darted into range. It was all I could do to avoid its slashing mandibles as I leaped to the side. But it had no intention of letting up. Instead, it stabbed down with its spear-like legs, forcing me to roll this way and that, lest I end up impaled.

It was a losing tactic, though. I couldn’t remain on the defensive.

So, after dodging one stabbing leg, I rolled forward, exchanging my Pulsar for my scattergun, which I quickly used to send a cone of lightning to envelop the spider in its entirety. It screeched as the electrical current raced through its body, locking it up for the critical few seconds I needed to extricate myself from its grasp.

But I didn’t run away. Instead, I gathered my legs under me and jumped, once again exchanging one weapon for another – this time, the scattergun for my nano-bladed sword. When I landed, I had to activate Balancejust to keep from tumbling from the sleek surface. Doing so drained a significant portion of my Mist, but I couldn’t worry about that right now. Instead, I took the sword in a reversed two-handed grip and jabbed the blade into the creature’s cracked carapace.

It didn’t go as I expected it to, and the blade skidded off the surface, barely chipping it. But I wasn’t going to give up at the first failure, so I flared Balance and struck again. And again. My Mist drained at an accelerated rate, but, after the fourth attack, the strategy bore fruit as the blade finally sank deep into the monster’s thorax. It was just in time, too, because it had finally recovered from the scattergun attack.

It bucked, trying to throw me free, but my grip was like iron.

When I’d first leaped atop the thing, I’d intended to plant a series of demolition charges. If one didn’t do the trick, then a few had to, right? When one explosion wasn’t sufficient, increase the number until the target does down. But as I hung there, I thought better of that plan.

The demolition charge had done almost nothing. It just wasn’t strong enough. So, expecting a few charges to pick up the slack was too optimistic for my taste. Instead, I chose to use the one skill I had yet to employ.

When I had first obtained the [Mistwalking] skill, I’d thought it was limited to infiltrating various systems. However, I’d soon learned that it was quite a bit more versatile than that. When I’d discovered Ghosts, I’d come to realize that I’d only scratched the surface of what was possible. The only limitation was that it didn’t really work on any living thing that lacked a Nexus Implant or cybernetics.

So, why did it work on that first spider I’d encountered in the Rift? That it had suggested that these creatures were not natural. Perhaps they were some form of advanced robotics. Or maybe a sentient race of super spiders who’d gained access to Nexus Implants. I had no idea. But what I did know was that if one spider was vulnerable, then it stood to reason that they all were.

So, clinging to that bucking spider’s back, I embraced Misthack, and to my eternal relief, the familiar prompt bloomed on my HUD:

Initiate Misthack? [Yes] or [No]

Frantically, I chose the affirmative option, and the prompt changed:

Misthack Successful. Options:

· Reboot System

· Overcharge

· Disable Cybernetics

· Upload Ghost

I chose Overcharge, and once the ability took hold, the monster locked up, giving me a few extra seconds to repeat the process. This time, I chose to upload a Ghost, prompting the appearance of another menu:

Upload Ghost. Options:

· Time Bomb (Mk. 2)

· Seizure

· Confusion

· Boil

I spent a good portion of my free time working on expanding my repertoire of Ghosts, and that effort had paid off in the form of a continuously evolving arsenal I could employ in a wide variety of situations. However, until recently, I’d ignored one very important option: lethality. It wasn’t an oversight – not exactly. Instead, I’d simply fallen into the rut of seeing the [Mistrunning]skill as one devoted to utility. It was great for information gathering, incapacitating enemies, and infiltration, so I’d gotten into the habit of narrowing my focus to those facets of the skill. After all, I already had plenty of ways to kill; why would I need to explore lethal options with [Mistrunning]?

Lately, though, I’d begun to see that as the mistake it was.

To rectify the issue, I’d been spending most of my downtime working on a very special Ghost, and I’d only managed to complete its construction right before we’d entered the Rift. Called Boil, its purpose was just what that name suggested – it was supposed to take hold of the Mist in someone’s body and agitate it to such a degree that it would literally boil them from the inside.

Like most Ghosts, it had limitations that I’d had to balance against the strength of its effects, and in the case of Boil, I’d chosen to limit the range to only a couple of feet while ratcheting up the lethality to an absurd degree.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to test it yet, but if it worked, I hoped it would cut the fight against the spider short. So, I selected that Ghost and, as it uploaded, I held my breath.

At first, the effect was unnoticeable. However, after only a few seconds, the spider’s furious bucking ceased, and the shock caused by the sudden cessation of movement nearly sent me toppling from its back.

That’s when I felt the carapace start to heat up.

Until that moment, the smooth surface had been cool to the touch, but over the next few seconds, it slowly grew warmer until I had no choice but to fling myself away, lest I be burned to a crisp.

When I landed, I did so in a roll that took me across a carpet of bodies, and I quickly found my feet, fully expecting the creature to attack. But it remained completely rooted in place, its only movement coming in the form of a subtle shudder. That tremble became more pronounced with every passing second, eventually turning into a vibration so rapid that the edges of the spider looked blurred.

Then, a series of high-pitched whistles filled the air, and I saw billowing steam erupting from the cracks in the spider’s carapace.

That’s when it exploded.

I barely had time to register what was happening before the carapace shattered into a million pieces of black crystal. I was close enough that the shockwave swept me from my feet – a good thing, too, because an instant later, the air was filled with flying shrapnel. Even on the ground, I caught more than my fair share, but if I’d have been on my feet, I would have been shredded.

I probably would have survived, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant. And besides, I didn’t want to spend another booster to repair my infiltration suit.

It took another moment before I was bathed in another shower of gore – this time stark white meat and milky blood – but I barely cared. I was too relieved that the fight was over.

I sat up and took a deep breath. The smell of burned meat assaulted my nostrils, but I welcomed it as the herald of victory it was. Once I managed to gather my thoughts, I turned around to look for Patrick. I didn’t immediately see him in the flickering lights of the ruined space station, but when I did catch sight of him more than a hundred yards away, I let out another sigh of relief.

He seemed okay.

Obviously rattled, and more than a little frightened, but okay nonetheless.

My bones creaked as I pushed myself to my feet, and I ran my hand through my gore-slick hair in disgust. “Ugh,” I muttered. “That’s nasty.”

But as gross as it was, at least I’d survived. The spider couldn’t say as much, that was for sure. Arduously, I climbed over the carpet of corpses as I made my way to Patrick. He was clearly too stunned to move from where he’d been crouching behind a mound of bodies that had fallen next to one of the walls of cubicles. When he saw me, though, I could see him relax.

It took me a little while to cover the distance between us, and when I did, I asked, “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“What? Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No.”

“Uh…can you use a different word?” I asked.

He fixed me with a glare of disbelief before saying, “No.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “Don’t be like that. It wasn’t so bad. You should’ve seen the tentacle monster I had to fight at the end of my first Rift. Now that was –”

He interrupted me by saying, “Mira.”

“What?” I asked.

“Just shut up for a second, okay?” he pleaded. “That thing was horrifying, and not just because it was a spider bigger than a hovercar. Do you have any idea how close I came to losing it?”

That’s when I realized that the soul attack hadn’t just been directed at me. It had hit Patrick, too. And he clearly hadn’t fared any better than I had. Perhaps he would have succumbed altogether if I hadn’t pushed through it and fought back. If that had happened, his mind – or soul, maybe – would have been shattered.

“Right,” I said, not really knowing how to respond. “We should probably find somewhere else to rest, though. Because this…probably isn’t the best place to relax.”

He let out a shuddering sigh. “Fine. Let’s go, then,” he muttered, obviously still rattled. I didn’t blame him. He didn’t have my advantages, and so, he would obviously be affected to a much greater degree.

Maybe it had been a mistake to bring him along after all.

I reached out, offering him my hand. He took it, and I hauled him to his feet. Then, we set off toward the edge of the huge room, looking for somewhere that wasn’t covered in corpses so we could rest and recover. However, when we reached the other side of the chamber from where we’d entered, I saw an enormous crate that agitated the surrounding Mist to such a degree that I knew we’d found a jackpot of Rift Shards.

More importantly, I saw a formless prism directly behind the crate. It seemed we had completed the Rift after all.