Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 155 – Scouting Outpost

They collect the second circle thrasher corpses, and Emily burns the rest with a blanket of fire as they load into the truck to continue towards the outpost.

They run into a small group of sand stalkers before reaching the outpost, but Emily doesn’t even need to leave the car as she drives past them and they follow, lining up clear shots for the rest of the squad in the back.

The outpost is almost invisible until they drive within a kilometre of it, at which point the horizon distorts and the small, twisted black mark Emily could see stretches into a small cluster of buildings, sunk into the sands, barely protruding.

“There she is,” Crackshot says a few moments later, nodding at the buildings. “There are small outposts like this one all along the border, and low rank squads like ours are paid to watch the arrays here. Stop one hundred metres out, we need to identify ourselves.”

“Okay.” Emily nods, her eyes scanning the lip before the buildings, spotting several moving figures peeking over with barrels levelled at them.

She slows the car smoothly, coming to a halt at the determined distance to let Crackshot open the door and hop out.

“Squad Advac reporting for Silver Moon’s shift change,” he calls, stepping forward and holding his arms up.

Nothing happens for a few moments, before one of the mercenaries ahead scrambles up from their perch and starts towards them, closing the distance.

“Signature check,” he calls out, holding his rifle towards the floor but keeping his finger hovering beside the trigger as he gets within arm’s reach.

Crackshot holds out his signature, letting the other mercenary tap the card with a burst of his own mana, reading their contract.

“Contract confirmed,” the mercenary says with a small sigh, relaxing his hand on his weapon and turning to wave at his comrades.

Everyone ahead of them relaxes, turning their weapons away and moving from their defensive positions. Crackshot climbs back into the truck beside Emily, and the mercenary from the outpost walks to the back of the truck to hop in, joining them for the last leg into the outpost.

“Oh shit, I see you ran into those birds,” the man says, kicking the pile of dead thrashers and stalkers half blocking his entrance. “Surprised you had it in you, Crapshot.”

“Tsk,” Crackshot clicks his tongue in distaste, turning to glare at the new face. “My squad dealt with them easily. Though, we wouldn’t have had to if you’d done your job. Slacking before handover are we, Fuckface?”

“Don’t expose me like that!” the man cries dramatically, reaching up to pull down the cloth hiding his face. “You’re making me look bad in front of the newbies.”

Emily glances in her rear-view mirror and sees the man has clear skin, soft features, and a dazzling smile that he’s flashing the rest of her squad.

“The names Fairface, D rank. It’s a pleasure to meet you all, especially you, ladies.”

He winks at Emily in the mirror, so she pushes down on the accelerator as they crest the lip into the dip the outpost is sitting in, lifting the transport’s rear wheels from the sand for a moment before they drop back down with a thud. The seated members of her squad are all surprised as they’re jostled in their seats, but none of them fare as poorly as Fairface, whose feet leave the floor for a moment before he drops face-first into the pile of corpses.

Everyone but Emily breaks out in laughter as the man pushes himself up, his face red with embarrassment and monster blood.

“Good job,” Crackshot says with an appreciative nod, earning a scoff from Emily as she looks around the outpost for a convenient place to park.

She spots a few similar transports tucked between two squat, sand-coloured buildings, and rolls the truck in next to them, taking the key and tucking it into her belt without any argument from Crackshot.

Fairface quickly leaves with his tail between his legs, using the excuse of gathering his squad to return to Bastilo.

“All of these outposts follow a standard configuration,” Crackshot explains, showing them around and playing the role of a responsible leader.

Emily only half listens as they pass through the food and ammunition stores and the small living spaces. Her interest is fully piqued when they enter the central building though.

Inside is a twisting, three-dimensional metal structure covered in runes and several magic crystals, curled around a small, raised platform in the centre.

“This is our node of the tracking array covering no-man’s-land,” Crackshot says, gesturing towards the structure pulsing with mana and the second circle mage sitting on the platform inside it with his eyes closed. “We’ll rotate tasks with the other three squads here, but there must always be a mage watching the array, and someone else with them to quickly alert the outpost to any sightings. That’s the most important rule when on outpost duty.”

Emily steps forward, reaching out to place her hand against one of the arcing beams of metal and feeling the mana running through it, rising from the ground.

We’re on another mana vein?

She resists the urge to start analysing the array for now to avoid interrupting the mage currently using it.

“Impressive, isn’t it,” Crackshot says proudly, as if he was the one to make the array himself. “That’s it then. We’re still off duty since we just got here, so make yourselves at home for now and report to the mess hall in six hours, please.”

Emily ignores the please, tacked on at the end as he glances at her, and turns around, heading straight for her small personal room with the rest of her squad hot on her heels.

***

A few days into her deployment, while sitting in the centre of the detection array, Emily comes to the disappointing conclusion that the node, as Crackshot called it, is only a single piece of a larger whole, without enough information available for her to reverse engineer it.

She immediately returns her focus to meditation during her long shifts watching the array, leaving a few of her cores to break down the odd, abstract feedback it delivers to the user in return for the large area it covers.

A week after arriving, her cores alert her to an anomaly in the data, igniting a small spark of excitement in her chest.

“Something’s coming,” she says as her eyes snap open, startling Demo awake from his nap sitting beside the door.

“What?” he asks, blinking the confusion from his eyes and standing up alert, ready to race out of the room. “Report?”

“Large single target, low mana density,” Emily quickly simplifies. “Crossing the detection range roughly eight kilometres out into no-man’s-land at a medium pace but angling to cross the border to our east.”

“Got it,” Demo turns and runs out of the door, heading to grab Crackshot as Emily further analyses the results, closing her eyes and focusing on the array again.

It appears to be… underground. Is it a sandworm?

Less than a minute later, Demo returns with two members of Snake Nest’s Venoc squad in tow, one of them a first circle mage.

“He’ll take over for now,” he says hurriedly, with a note of tension in his voice. “We’re being sent to check on the anomaly.”

“Okay,” Emily says, slipping out of the array and leaving it to the other mage.

I hope it’s a worm.

Demo leads her into the swirling, sandy winds outside, pulling down a pair of goggles to protect his eyes as Emily covers her face with her scarf. They head straight for the transports, climbing into their truck and finding the rest of their squad already waiting for them, checking on their weapons.

“Please head towards where you saw the anomaly,” Crackshot says, clutching a small silver plate with a brown earth crystal in the centre. “The guys from Venoc will guide us when we’re closer.”

Emily nods and starts the car, accelerating out of the outpost’s crater with a light thud before racing out into the desert with a small stream of machina flowing through the steering wheel and pushing the vehicle’s engine to work harder. Sand sprays behind them, and a tense silence settles over the squad.

“Adjust five degrees right,” Crackshot finally says after a few minutes. “We shouldn’t be too far off now.”

Emily turns the wheel, scanning the horizon and trying to see through the blistering sands obstructing her vision. A minute later, Emily starts to ease off the accelerator, slowing the truck down without a word from Crackshot.

“What are you doing?” he asks, looking over at her with confusion. “We’re almost on top of it!”

“Exactly,” Emily says, stopping the transport entirely and turning the engine off. “We’re almost on top of it.”

She opens the door before her squad leader can question her, slipping out and setting her feet on the ground. Mana immediately erupts from her, forming into a massive glowing brown magic circle at her feet.

Thought so.

Emily clearly sees a massive shape carving a path through the sands deep below ahead of them with her detection spell. She crouches, placing both of her hands against the sand while pouring out more mana to form a second, more complex, magic circle over the first.

Her squad all climb out of the transport and set up around her, glancing at her massive spells with awe and waiting for her to finish her casting, whilst scanning their surroundings nervously.

“What’s she doing?” Demo calls to Crackshot, pressing his back to the truck, clenching a grenade in one hand and his pistol in the other.

“I don’t know,” the squad leader yells back. “Just make sure nothing surprises us!”

Emily tunes them out, letting a small smile curl her lips as she releases a pulsing wave of vibrations through the ground that startles her squad.

“What the fuck!” Thrashereye cries, his namesake widening in shock. “That’s a fucking worm call!”

Everyone turns to look at Emily with horror.

“Correction,” she says calmly, not raising her voice and using a light flex of mana to be heard instead. “It’s a worm scream.”

Everyone but Emily stumbles as another vibration shakes the loose sand beneath their feet violently, this one originating from somewhere ahead of them. However, the shaking only grows worse, knocking Demo and Thrashereye to their knees.

“What’s happening?” Crackshot cries in panic, looking at Emily for an answer as he steadies himself against the truck.

“I hit the worm with a nasty vibration that, if my calculations were correct, should have essentially burst its eardrums,” she replies, dispersing the spell beneath her feet and rising to stand at full height, staring at the sand ahead of them intently. “As I said: worm scream.”

As if on cue, the ground bursts before her eyes and a dark, thick pillar rises into the sky in sync with a screeching cry. Everyone’s eyes immediately snap over to the hulking beast protruding over twenty metres from the ground, despite the sand and wind limiting their vision and only revealing a shadowy tower to everyone but Emily.

She’s able to make out the slick, dark green sheen of the sandworm’s robust skin, and she even catches a fleeting glimpse of the beast’s beady eyes and toothy maw through the initial eruption of sand.

“Just stay back,” Emily says calmly, stepping forward without even activating her lightning connection. “It’s only first circle.”

The worm lets out a second wailing screech, writhing from side to side in distress. Emily blocks the cry with her earrings as her squad behind her clamp their hands over their ears.

She raises both her hands out on either side as she slowly approaches the creature, pouring mana into two magic circles, one bright green and the other a crackling orange.

The monster spots her after a few moments and identifies her as the source of its agony before releasing an enraged shriek. The wide, heavy body of the creature falls headlong towards her, blowing the sand obscuring it away and giving the group a clear view.

The worm’s thick, scaled skin has a slick layer of moisture coating it, and the top of its head, that’s quickly closing the distance to Emily, opens into a gaping hole lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth. There are a few small, beady eyes half-covered by wrinkles of skin around the creature’s mouth.

A few shots ring out as Emily’s squad mates shoot at the approaching worm, but the beast doesn’t even flinch as the bullets dig shallow holes into its hulking frame.

Emily slowly brings her hands together, unconcerned about the mass of flesh about to crush her. The two magic circles she has prepared follow her gestures, sliding in front of her and overlapping, the twisting runes and arcs of mana from each spell slotting together perfectly.

The moment her palms touch, the spells erupt, and a powerful wave of superheated wind billows out, twisting the squad’s view of the worm. The worm is knocked back and the moisture on its skin evaporates immediately, creating a thin mist of scorching vapour.

Cracks spread and the beast’s skin flakes off in large sheets, exposing the flesh beneath to the burning heat. The worm’s head is reduced to a smoking, half-cooked mess before it even gets to release another scream, and its body slumps lifelessly on the sand with a shuddering thud.

Advac squad stare at the creature in disbelief as Emily nods with satisfaction and calmly walks over to the fresh corpse. She crouches down and picks up one of the dried-out sheets of skin, bending it between her hands until it snaps and crumbles.

Whoops. I knew drying it up would kill it fast, but this exposed skin is useless to me now. I’ll have to harvest its back half.

She glances back as her squad approaches curiously to check out the dead worm.

“So, how would you normally deal with a worm corpse?” she asks Crackshot.

“We wouldn’t,” he replies, staring at the corpse in disbelief. “We normally avoid sandworms because they’re such a pain to kill, and it’s not like they’re that commonly spotted in the first place. Let’s just grab some meat for now to refill our stocks. We can move the rest in better weather with help from the others.”

“Got it,” Emily agrees with a small nod, turning and walking around the beast to strip it for food and materials.