Thread:FleetCaptainT/@comment-27324808-20180211025202

60

 

 The rift looked like a long scar, jagged, purple, and pulsating in the dark sky.  It was scarred in the sense that a pocket dimension had existed therein for a decent amount of days.  Now torn open, spiderlike Maelstrom creatures with spindly legs and glowing undersides descended out of it, coming through it from their own dimension to infect this one.

 

 So blowing up their mine had slowed the Maelstrom down somewhat, Intrepid thought as he darted to his rocket.  Without their industrial scale breachers, the Maelstrom could not send their entire arsenal of spaceships, tanks, and pirate ships across Unverse.  Instead they sent basically the sent thing, just smaller, and organic.  Each lander was large enough to carry two normal spiderlings, or three mechs, or ten Stromlings on its back.  Their genetic code also seemed to contain rocket science, with the glow in their undersides suggesting some chemical reaction directing thrust downward to slow their descent.

 

 “Think we can make a shield to protect the entire city?” Cyclone asked.

 

 “No,” Kate shook her head, “we definitely don’t have enough mojo for that.  Best save it until we really need it.”

 

 “So plain old basic combat.” Cyclone said, unholstering his weapons.

 

 “Yeah.”  He aimed his rocket launcher upward and Kate her arrows.  The landers with their spinning, articulating legs were still several hundred feet up, but with Imagination anything is possible.  Their weapons hit several of the closest landers, either tearing holes in their armor in the case of the rockets or setting them on fire in the case of the arrows.  Spiderlings and mechs began falling downward in small groups, disappearing behind buildings and trees and out of view as they neared the ground.  Some Stromlings deployed parachutes from their backpacks.

 

 “I wish we had those,” Rover grumbled.  He went to a semi-smashed Stromling that fell close enough and completed the deed.  He raised special binoculars that detected Maelstrom to his face and looked around.  “This is hitting more than we can cover, we need to finish this.”

 

 They turned to Intrepid who already threw the briefcase into his pod rocket and was climbing in, until Kate called, “Wait!”

 

 Distant roars came out of the rift, followed by a dragon, followed by another dragon.  Within ten seconds a line of fifty flying dinosaurs were on a helical flightpath out of one point on the rift toward the ground, then splitting up to cover various points of the sky.  Then another line of dragons spawned from a different point on the scar, corresponding to a different point in Unverse.  From another dimension?  Or traveling between the one they were in?  It didn’t matter, they were all problems.

 

 That’s a problem, Intrepid thought.  In between multilegged landers, spiderlings, mechs, and parastromlings rocketing to the rift was hard enough.  Adding dragons to the equation made a hard job harder.  His neck was still craned upward when someone started banging on his rocket.  He looked over as Kate swung herself over the cabin edge and took a seat at the rear.  “I’ll be gunner,” she said.  This pod rocket didn’t have turrets.  They both knew she meant her powers.

 

 Then another sound came out of the rift that made all else go quiet.  The landers paused their descent, the dragons stopped roaring, and the minifigures watched in silent distress as a trail of fog shot out of the rift, from the same point as the first dragons, and twisted straight to the ground.  The dragons swooped alongside the fog in escort, and Rover aimed his pistol up and fired, spurring the others into action.  Intrepid only had Red’s gun but he fired anyway, just for the sake of resistance, and knowing they tried.  Conjured lightning brought down some of the dragons and an Imagination whirlwind buffeted the others, but the pillar of fog was unperturbed in its path to the ground.  It impacted on the other end of the park and a rippling wave of Maelstrom shot outward, turning the ground black and like a bomb blast trees and statues were knocked down, benches overturned, and water bodies vaporized.

 

 If not for Cyclone and Kate throwing a glistening protective shield in front of them, they would have all been infected when the Maelstrom reached them.  The Maelstrom wave bounced off and went around and over, and a chill surrounded them.  Next to Intrepid, Kate grit her teeth and noticeably trembled from the exertion of keeping the protection active.

 

 Then the wave stopped, the shield dropped, and Kate took a deep breath, then they all nearly had heart attacks.

 

 At the end of the park, megasized and grinning his terrible smile, trunk sized feet planted in the blast epicenter: the Darkitect.

 

 

 

61

 

 “I saw your laser fire on the way down!” the corruption of Baron Typhonus’s likeness boomed sinisterly.  “Did you really think you could stop me?”

 

 “No,” Kate whispered so only Intrepid heard her since they were both in the rocket.

 

 “I heard that!” taunted the Darkitect.  “Now, foolish minifigures - I gave you the choice to accept infection when I first arrived, but you stupidly rejected it!  So now you will all die.”  He tapped his scepter on the ground and a ball of electricity appeared over its crystal, fizzing wildly and bouncing off its invisible containment.  “Only, I have to choose... who wants to die first?”

 

 He pointed the scepter at a nearby complex and let loose, the electricity arced out and as fast as light, covered the entire structure.  Flame burst over it and in seconds the building fell, each speck of debris staying alight with the destructive sparks until they were demolecularized, and nothing tangible remained.

 

 “A very painful end, as you can imagine, haha!” the Darkitect turned his attention back to the Nexus Forcers.  He tapped a wrist and shook his tophatted head.  “If no one steps forward now, I’ll just kill you all and then infect this planet-”

 

 He was interrupted by an energy blast hitting him in the face, but it came at an angle of depression from above his line of sight.  Another transdimensional rift had opened, and like the one Red had emerged from it was tainted purple from the infected Unverse.  But the spaceship that emerged had shields to protect it.  It was a Venture class painted black and green, moving too fast for any logos to be discerned, but Intrepid could guess what they identified.

 

 “Wish I’d thought of that,” he said, of the shields.

 

 The Darkitect raised his staff to protect himself but the Venture engaged its hyperdrive, and suddenly the Darkitect’s staff began a long, tipping fall to the ground.  His left hand was gone, and there was a large, Venture Explorer sized hole in his face.  Two miles behind him a column of flame erupted over the cityscape, followed by the sound of the explosion.

 

 Despite no longer having a face, a chilling sound still came from the Darkitect, the bending and twisting sound of reconstructing bone, that morphed into a deep roar as dark forces rebuilt his face.  “Arrrghourhghrrrrfffffooools!” he shouted into the air.  “Foolhardy minifigures!”  He spat a toxic goo with bone fragments onto the ground before him, from which spiderlings began to climb out.

 

 But the rift that the first spaceship had exited did not close, and more spaceships, these ones painted in Nexus Force white, came out from it to take various places in the sky.  There were fighting cruisers and transports, the latter from which Sentinel, Venture, Assembly, and Paradox forces began rappelling out.  By the appearance of their uniforms, they were from their own dimension.  Suave Able Cat was one of the first Sentinels on the ground, and Rover ran to meet him.

 

 “Nexus Tower is all clear,” Suave told his colleague, “and then some Future Dimensioners showed up, telling us to come here.  We got here as fast as we could... admittedly, faster than I thought possible.”

 

 The others heard the update on their personal communicators.

 

 As immediately as they showed up the Nexus Force spaceships began firing all means of ordnance, rockets, guided missiles, lasers, artillery at the Darkitect, who defended himself with a shield.  By this time several of the landers had landed and Maelstrom ground forces advanced from their side of the park, and wherever else they landed in the city.  Those ones seemed to ignore passerby, focused only on getting to the park where the Nexus Force had congregated.  This was where they would stand.

 

 Intrepid glanced at the briefcase.  The two minute marker passed as he watched.  “This has to get up there,” he repeated, concerning the scar in the sky, as he watched the battle.  He began launch preparations on the rocket when Kate tugged his arm.  “Look.”

 

 Not only Stromlings were entering through the outskirts of the park.  From the same direction Intrepid, Kate, Rover, Cyclone, and Blade had entered from, the direction from the Talmid’s house, came a group of at least fifty minifigures, armed with a variety of handguns and some basic melee weapons, swords and axes, bats and hammers.  Leading the procession was Red, completely disinfected.

 

 Intrepid’s heart stopped, and he immediately looked for Tiberius.  He was due some credit.  His plan had worked, not at all how it was meant to... but in the end the effect was the same.

 

 “I see we have our first volunteers!” the Darkitect proclaimed, and Intrepid’s heart restarted, radiating a surging pain throughout his chest.  The Baron had turned to face the revived Elistrans as well, and like a magnet his staff flew to his hand, and he pointed it at them.  He was going to kill them all, and kill Red.  Intrepid worked at the rocket faster and engaged the throttle, the main engine roared to life with a cone of flame shooting loudly outward, its crackle drowning out everything but the Darkitect’s terrible laughter as an arc of electricity formed.

 

 He wouldn’t be fast enough to intercept the shot with the rocket, Intrepid thought, he didn’t even know if it would stop it from continuing on, still he tried - but maybe, he realized, with a manipulator he could place himself right in the destructive arc’s path, sacrificing himself to save Red.

 

 And that is how events proceeded to transpire.  A personal unverse breach opened in the air between the Darkitect and the arriving defenders, through which Intrepid emerged.  He began to fall as soon as he jumped out, but his backpack was open and all manners of objects flew out behind him, weapons and models and bricks and clothes, like a pillar of falling objects, some falling faster and others slower, like a lightning rod.  The arc struck the topmost item and worked its way down, vaporizing each one until it struck Intrepid Fusion Eclipse and in a flash of light and a burst of flame, he was gone.

 

 Across the park, Red stopped moving.  Her grip on her weapon tightened, her other first flexed and unflexed.  Her mouth opened into a scream that could not be heard across the distance.  Inside the rocket, Kate shouted, “No!”  Beside her, Intrepid felt like he’d been fatally shot.  In a way he had been.  Future Intrepid was dead.

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