Re: Intense Struggle Season 2! (Round 2: Infinity Express)
02-10-2011, 10:37 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Drakenforge.
Karen’s hand hovered over the door control panel, ready to incinerate the electronics and lock the door. She hesitated. If she were to die, not only would that not stop Charlie, but the round would end. And if the others were going to decide to come help, she felt that this time she would need it. As she crossed the car, she thought of how best to tackle Charlie. It’s true that she had spent some time wondering about this since she first saw the machine. She had a few ideas. Increase her strength, empower her sword, take the heat high enough to melt through its armour. Her sword wouldn’t survive the fight, mostly because she was going to use it as a bomb. Storing so many fireballs in reality doesn’t have the same effect. The limit now was already fit to bursting, if she hit it with any more, it would destabilise. And most likely explode.
It was just a theory at the moment. She knew the dangers of testing out an idea mid-battle. But she was willing to risk everything for this fight. She knew that if she wasn’t then she would die. In a horrible fashion too.
Dying in battle… While painful, it did seem the most appropriate for her. She could imagine herself calling any other type of death boring.
She felt the train buckle, and slammed into the window, which now seemed to be the floor. The train kept twisting, and at that point she realised that the train had derailed.
Her heart began pounding. How was she going to fight Charlie when she couldn’t keep her footing, or even knew which side of the train her feet were currently on?
Why was it a good idea to derail the train anyway? The only thing it achieved was that the train would never reach its destination, whatever that was.
Karen flicked into her own way of dealing with gravity, and manoeuvred into the centre of the car where none of the chairs would beat her over the head. Every so often, she would see something outside of the windows, far in the distance. She assumed it to be the track they had until recently been following.
She could already guess who had done this. No, she was in fact certain it was Lloyd, even if Sarika also had the idea. She pulled herself towards the end of the car, and rotated with the train so that she could read the red message flashing on the door control panel.
“Warning: Breach in next car detected. Breathable atmosphere is leaking at an alarming rate. An engineer has been alerted. Thank you for your patience.”
As she finished reading the warning, the train buckled, and the car she was currently in managed to bash with the front car. She was launched sideways and cracked her skull off of the window. As the splitting pain cascaded through her head and her view darkened she swore, before everything went black…
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A day out was something the Renoir family rarely experienced. Colette didn’t care about it, she was just happy to have both her parents with her at the same time. She could have been sat at home having dinner instead and been just as happy. Her father, Antoine, was an author of fiction, and spent much of his time gathering information for his next book. He had amassed at least four best sellers, and was part way into his final book in the series. Colette had enjoyed them immensely, having inherited her father’s love of fiction. She did have trouble with some parts of them, mostly when they involved modern day or futuristic involvements. She preferred fiction set in fantasy than in sci-fi, but her father liked to mix both into one. She stared into his dark brown eyes, and he smiled. Her mother, sat next to him, gave him a nudge and pointed out a park that was passing by in the window.
Colette’s mother, Renée, was a soldier. Staff Sergeant Renée Renoir. She had blonde hair, which was in stark contrast to her fathers’ and her dark hair. It was a constant shade of pure gold that she usually kept tied back. Today she had changed it to flow around her shoulders. Colette respected her mother dearly, but loved her just as much. Her father told stories of her whenever he could, because her mother didn’t view heroism the same way as civilians. Colette understood that, but knew her mother was a very strong person, in mind, body and heart.
As the monorail sped through the city she just gazed at her parents sitting across from her as they held hands and chatted about something trivial. Her father motioned to her, palm upwards. She laughed, and placed the back of her hand onto his palm.
As her father’s warm hand embraced hers, a terrible shriek filled the cabin. His eyes widened in shock, and she saw her mother twist with inhuman speed. The cabin was twisting, and Colette’s stomach turned with inertia. The next thing she knew, the window was showing a large portion of the sidewalk, her mother was embracing her without her even realising she had left her seat, and her father was standing with his back to her. And then everything went dark…
“My parents” Karen muttered, not fully understanding why she could even think so clearly, “They died protecting me. And this is the last thing I remember before waking up in the hospital.”
But the flashback did not, as Karen expected, end. She noticed her eyes were opening, showing brief and hazy images. Her head turned, and saw the dark wreckage of the monorail’s cabin interior. She was horrified by the sights of blood dripping from bodies torn apart by the metal framework. But that paled in comparison of what she saw on the face of one man hanging from above her.
He was grinning
He was certainly dead with the piece of pipe sticking out of his head, but his grin…
It was evil. There was no way someone would smile through the crash and die with it on their face. She tried to move, but her body was caught on something below her. Whatever it was, it was warm. Had she landed on somebody? Then it dawned on her.
Where were her parents? Her head turned to see her mothers face behind her.
“Thank the lord… you’re okay. Sweetie, are you hurt anywhere?”
“Momma” her mouth uttered weakly. “No, I’m fine. But you’re hurt!”
She could see that her mothers head had impacted rather hard. Shattered pieces of glass where stuck in her hair, which was now tainted red by blood.
“I’ll be fine. Momma’s tough. Have you seen,” She winced once with pain, “Your father?”
Colette’s head turned around to look again, but she couldn’t see him anywhere.
She focused again on her mother, who was already growing pale. Her mouth was covered in blood, and her breathing was really ragged. Colette knew about that kind of injury, it meant that there where wounds on her internal organs, most likely her lungs.
“Listen… to me. Your father and I, we loved you, so much.” She said through ragged, forced breaths. Colette’s vision was blurred by tears, but she didn’t have the energy to wipe them away. She felt her mothers arms wrap around her and she embraced her back. She begged her to stay, she begged her not to die. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to lose her mother. She was scared.
Karen hated every moment of the memory. Repressed or not, she didn’t need this kind of memory in her head. It was depressing. And heart breaking. She could feel herself choking up inside and just willed herself to get back to reality. But instead, darkness enveloped the vision, replacing it instead with one of just speech.
“Colonel.” Spoke an unknown male voice, around mid age.
“Gentlemen.” Replied another, around the same age, but with more gruff to it.
“You’ve run the idea by me before, so we can skip to the chase. Renée Renoir was a fine soldier, and I feel honoured to have served with her. Her death, and indeed the death of her husband sadden me dearly. However, you can imagine the shock I had when you told me that even their daughter was suffering a horrible fate. Now, I don’t know how you learned of our research into the VR set, and I don’t care. Colette… she deserves the chance at a life. I approve of the use of one. I’ll get a team of programmers, engineers, and anyone else you need to get this done.”
“Thank you Colonel. You have no idea what this will mean to her in the long run.
We’ll begin tests as soon as we can. If she synchronises correctly she should never notice.”
“But what puzzles me is how she’ll cope. You can’t fake another several years in school.”
“We have thought about that… unfortunately, nothing comes to mind. In the VR portion, we’ll have her hospitalised for some time. During that time we hope to gather enough information to build her future with.”
The gruff man sighed.
“I pray to god that this works. She lost both her parents, fell into an irreversible coma, and yet this is all we can do. I’ll keep in touch.”
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Karen’s eyes finally opened, and the first thing she did was punch the nearest hard surface. She finally understood why she had hated her life after the loss of her parents.
She wasn’t an emotionless husk as she had believed for so long. It was the world around her that was lacking humanity. A VR set where she could enter a VR game…
The idea would have seemed like idiocy a few hours ago. But she knew that reality didn’t follow sense anymore. She tried to remember the early days after waking up in the hospital, but it was mostly a blur. She’d blamed it on her emotional state since that was what the doctors had told her, but really she just couldn’t “feel” anymore.
A military VR set… Pain would be allowed, even though she never caused more than a bumped toe to herself in the VR world seeing as she spent nearly every hour of her life in Legends of Fate. And society hadn’t cared. She thought they saw her as a lost cause and were leaving her alone.
She had to admit, it made her a perfect contestant. Her consciousness had fused with her online character, or maybe her character had fused with her whole body. She wondered about which reality was true, but deemed it unnecessary. She bit her tongue, feeling the distinct pain. Yes, this was her reality now. No matter the past, she had to move forward in the present. But thinking about it, what did her life mean to her now?
She hadn’t cared about it before. She lived in Legends of Fate because it was fun, exciting, and soon became her reality. And then Coal came into the mix, helped reshape her personality back together, and became her only friend. If she ever wanted to get answers, she needed to-
Suddenly, she remembered what she was doing in the first place. She had bigger fish to fry, and how long had she been out?! Her spine tingled. She gripped her sword and lashed out behind her. It connected with an unseen force, a large heavy one. It pushed with so much force Karen was forced backwards into the floor, which was now a vertical wall.
Charlie had snuck up on her during her brief KO session.
“Thanks for being a gentleman and letting me sleep, you mechanical bastard.”
She opened her free palm, five fireball spells ready to launch. They enveloped Charlie’s metal, showing her exactly where he started and ended. Its right claw was gripping the blade of her sword, and it was positioning its left to point in her direction.
Karen had forgotten whether it was a flamethrower or a gun that was encased within it, and she couldn’t see due to its high-tech camouflage. The train car changed direction again, and Karen seized her opportunity and wrenched herself free as a jet of flame nearly scorched her body. She dropped towards what would have lead away from the other group had she not been knocked out, and she saw that the door was torn open, the edges bent like something had squeezed through. But in place of the door, a light blue sheen acted as what she assumed was a barrier to decompression.
She landed on the wall that surrounded the torn open door, and slapped her left hand against her sword while activating a spell from her Cleric class, Bless Weapon. A faint light emanated from her palm and enveloped the blade. the main characteristic of the spell was to allow it to cause more damage with every hit. She didn't wonder about how that worked out outside of the game, but she trusted it would help. As an upside, she was assuming that it would keep the sword from shattering a little.
She was about to put on another buff when Charlie began his assault, its camo switched off for the moment. It repeatedly tried to smash Karen with its massive steel claws, but Karen was managing to bash them away each time with her sword. The massive vibrations from each hit reverberated through her arms, but she knew that was a small price to pay. Charlie had the advantage of managing to keep stable with its legs firmly holding on, but Karen had to concentrate on what angle the train was twisting towards so she could work out where to balance herself.
As she exchanged hits with Charlie's heavily armoured limbs she began to wonder just how she was going to do any damage. It was the right time to do so, so she noted that her sword was barely scratching the surface of the steel. Fire wouldn't do much against it either. She didn’t have any good lightning spells either, her forte was fire alone. She guessed that she'd need a lot more heat to get anywhere through that kind of plating. Heck, she guessed even a blowtorch wouldn't do much against Charlie. She still had a lot of things to resort to, but a lot of them would not only take away a lot of her combat ability in the future, it would put herself at a lot of risk. Then again, she wasn't going to need her biggest attacks if she managed to take out the biggest threat to the group’s freedom.
Charlie decided to switch to its flamethrower, forcing Karen to use up some of her magic reserves to freeze the spout until it was covered by a large block of ice. While it tried to figure out what was stopping the flames she quickly slid underneath the hunterbot, aided by the fact that gravity was now pulling her in that direction. She suddenly remembered his tail, however, and almost got stabbed through the eye by it as she went by. She leapt to her feet, gained some distance and tapped into her Cleric class again. This time: haste. It improved her reflexes and speed by a noticeable margin. Charlie didn’t turn. It simply stood there as its tail pulled back into-
Karen charged forward, swinging her sword as she went. She didn’t give Charlie a second’s time to charge its laser before slamming her sword into its tail. It was a lot easier to hit that its claws as she found it to recoil instead of sending her sword backwards in return. She began to realise that Charlie didn’t have a blind spot, or an obvious weakness. He was the mix of boss monster and player, incredibly strong but unpredictable. She buffed herself again with Striking, a spell that increased her damage output and lessened the brunt of the recoil of hitting a heavy sword on hard steel. Charlie kept as it was, piercing at her with high speed lunges of its tail. She countered every strike, and was constantly moving forward to attack again, only to be warded off once again by his tail. She backed up, aware that the tail laser could charge at any point. But she was running out of options. Her body would give out before even its tail did. She needed a lot more power, even with the buffs she had on her she wasn’t doing much at all. Using her sword now, it would have to be sitting on it to even do much. No, for her plan to work her sword needed to pierce Charlie, far enough in for it to stick. She wasn’t going to achieve that, but the alternative would leave her open.
Taking a deep breath she muttered a word.
“Berserk.”
Her heart thumped hard. She felt her circulation increase in speed as her heart began to pound faster and faster. The skin on her hands began to tinge red, her breathing became ragged. To actually feel this ability work in reality, she realised what was happening. Her blood was moving at inhuman speeds, her muscles were getting a lot more oxygen, but she needed to breathe harder to fuel it.
It didn’t leave much for her brain, and turned her into a fighting machine. That was the part she regretted had to happen, she lost her sense of survival and took too many risks. She’d had to resort to it before, and every time she came out with more wounds that she cared for. She prayed that this time would be different. The tip of Charlie’s tail glowed so she gripped her sword with resolve and began pelting him with more attacks. Each time Charlie tried to hit her; she swung her sword into the tail, rocking the mechanical appendage around. She noticed that now, she was actually dealing damage. A small part of her warned her not to get cocky, which went mostly ignored. Next, she focused on one of its hind legs. At that point Charlie deemed it necessary to turn in the tight space just as the car began to roll sideways. As Karen leapt to the ceiling, which was now the floor, she had a clear view of Charlie’s back. She kicked into a sprint and brought her sword over her shoulder, feeling it connect with Charlie’s back she forced it to move through the metal instead of just smash into it and carved a deep gash through the steel. A brief sense of elation swept over her, but was quickly banished as gravity turned against her, and Charlie’s left claw smashed into her side. Her sword took the brunt of the hit, her quick reflexes saving her life, but it was enough to interrupt her rhythm and leave her at the far side of the car. She immediately repeated the assault, this time from the front. Charlie’s claws weren’t as intimidating as before as every strike left a dent or cut into the metal work. Charlie’s flamethrowers were beginning to thaw, but had yet to work yet.
It decided to swap to active camouflage, but Karen covered it with a blanket of fire, expecting to blind it. Normal vision, thermal vision and night vision would be useless to the machine now, and Karen expected it to be unable to see her. Unfazed by the flames she went in for the kill, only for Charlie to pinpoint where she was somehow and lash out. It wasn’t perfectly on target, so Karen guessed it wasn’t relying on sight, but on something else. It never occurred to her that her increased heart rate, combined with Charlie’s heart beat sensor was giving him a constantly accurate position of where she was. Nevertheless she recklessly kept on trying to fight Charlie, occasionally gaining the upper hand only to be driven back again. She took her chances, made a move that her Rogue class benefited which involved an intricate series of flips and jumps, eventually ending with her kneeling on Charlie’s back. She had a split second, maybe less. It was enough. Her sword lit up, not with just one or two fire spells. At least three dozen heated up the blade in an instant, her magic causing the heat to climb to over four thousand degrees Celsius. It plunged into Charlie; however, it depleted a lot of her magic reserves. As soon as it was stuck in, she froze the parts that touched the sword, rapidly cooling them. She knew it would be stuck in, twisted the hilt and separated it from the blade. Before Charlie’s tail could smack her off she jump gracefully and landed near the undamaged entrance of the car.
Karen gripped the heavy staff. It was, in fact, her Witch staff, finally released from its long slumber combined with the blade of her sword. She had fused them together for ease of access. It was what her prize was for maxing out both levels. Most people went for swords of pure element, like lighting and fire, but she thought they were pretty stupid and matched people who loved to show off. Charlie tried its best to grab the sword, but without a hilt it never got a good grip on it. That, and the metal had fused with its back. She contemplated attacking while it was distracted but she was suddenly distracted herself by the door behind her sliding open.
“Karen listen I know I shouldn’t be here but there really was no choice there’s a bomb and I need to get it off the train but I can’t open any of the windows and even if I could it might just kill me and I need your help!”
The sound of Sarika’s breathing-uninterrupted plea for help forced Karen to come to her senses, shutting her berserk off. Karen turned to look into Sarika’s goggled face, contorted with worry, black briefcase in her hands. Karen had a smirk on her face.
“I leave for ten minutes and you somehow find a bomb. Honestly, you guys are a real handful.”
Karen’s hand hovered over the door control panel, ready to incinerate the electronics and lock the door. She hesitated. If she were to die, not only would that not stop Charlie, but the round would end. And if the others were going to decide to come help, she felt that this time she would need it. As she crossed the car, she thought of how best to tackle Charlie. It’s true that she had spent some time wondering about this since she first saw the machine. She had a few ideas. Increase her strength, empower her sword, take the heat high enough to melt through its armour. Her sword wouldn’t survive the fight, mostly because she was going to use it as a bomb. Storing so many fireballs in reality doesn’t have the same effect. The limit now was already fit to bursting, if she hit it with any more, it would destabilise. And most likely explode.
It was just a theory at the moment. She knew the dangers of testing out an idea mid-battle. But she was willing to risk everything for this fight. She knew that if she wasn’t then she would die. In a horrible fashion too.
Dying in battle… While painful, it did seem the most appropriate for her. She could imagine herself calling any other type of death boring.
She felt the train buckle, and slammed into the window, which now seemed to be the floor. The train kept twisting, and at that point she realised that the train had derailed.
Her heart began pounding. How was she going to fight Charlie when she couldn’t keep her footing, or even knew which side of the train her feet were currently on?
Why was it a good idea to derail the train anyway? The only thing it achieved was that the train would never reach its destination, whatever that was.
Karen flicked into her own way of dealing with gravity, and manoeuvred into the centre of the car where none of the chairs would beat her over the head. Every so often, she would see something outside of the windows, far in the distance. She assumed it to be the track they had until recently been following.
She could already guess who had done this. No, she was in fact certain it was Lloyd, even if Sarika also had the idea. She pulled herself towards the end of the car, and rotated with the train so that she could read the red message flashing on the door control panel.
“Warning: Breach in next car detected. Breathable atmosphere is leaking at an alarming rate. An engineer has been alerted. Thank you for your patience.”
As she finished reading the warning, the train buckled, and the car she was currently in managed to bash with the front car. She was launched sideways and cracked her skull off of the window. As the splitting pain cascaded through her head and her view darkened she swore, before everything went black…
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A day out was something the Renoir family rarely experienced. Colette didn’t care about it, she was just happy to have both her parents with her at the same time. She could have been sat at home having dinner instead and been just as happy. Her father, Antoine, was an author of fiction, and spent much of his time gathering information for his next book. He had amassed at least four best sellers, and was part way into his final book in the series. Colette had enjoyed them immensely, having inherited her father’s love of fiction. She did have trouble with some parts of them, mostly when they involved modern day or futuristic involvements. She preferred fiction set in fantasy than in sci-fi, but her father liked to mix both into one. She stared into his dark brown eyes, and he smiled. Her mother, sat next to him, gave him a nudge and pointed out a park that was passing by in the window.
Colette’s mother, Renée, was a soldier. Staff Sergeant Renée Renoir. She had blonde hair, which was in stark contrast to her fathers’ and her dark hair. It was a constant shade of pure gold that she usually kept tied back. Today she had changed it to flow around her shoulders. Colette respected her mother dearly, but loved her just as much. Her father told stories of her whenever he could, because her mother didn’t view heroism the same way as civilians. Colette understood that, but knew her mother was a very strong person, in mind, body and heart.
As the monorail sped through the city she just gazed at her parents sitting across from her as they held hands and chatted about something trivial. Her father motioned to her, palm upwards. She laughed, and placed the back of her hand onto his palm.
As her father’s warm hand embraced hers, a terrible shriek filled the cabin. His eyes widened in shock, and she saw her mother twist with inhuman speed. The cabin was twisting, and Colette’s stomach turned with inertia. The next thing she knew, the window was showing a large portion of the sidewalk, her mother was embracing her without her even realising she had left her seat, and her father was standing with his back to her. And then everything went dark…
“My parents” Karen muttered, not fully understanding why she could even think so clearly, “They died protecting me. And this is the last thing I remember before waking up in the hospital.”
But the flashback did not, as Karen expected, end. She noticed her eyes were opening, showing brief and hazy images. Her head turned, and saw the dark wreckage of the monorail’s cabin interior. She was horrified by the sights of blood dripping from bodies torn apart by the metal framework. But that paled in comparison of what she saw on the face of one man hanging from above her.
He was grinning
He was certainly dead with the piece of pipe sticking out of his head, but his grin…
It was evil. There was no way someone would smile through the crash and die with it on their face. She tried to move, but her body was caught on something below her. Whatever it was, it was warm. Had she landed on somebody? Then it dawned on her.
Where were her parents? Her head turned to see her mothers face behind her.
“Thank the lord… you’re okay. Sweetie, are you hurt anywhere?”
“Momma” her mouth uttered weakly. “No, I’m fine. But you’re hurt!”
She could see that her mothers head had impacted rather hard. Shattered pieces of glass where stuck in her hair, which was now tainted red by blood.
“I’ll be fine. Momma’s tough. Have you seen,” She winced once with pain, “Your father?”
Colette’s head turned around to look again, but she couldn’t see him anywhere.
She focused again on her mother, who was already growing pale. Her mouth was covered in blood, and her breathing was really ragged. Colette knew about that kind of injury, it meant that there where wounds on her internal organs, most likely her lungs.
“Listen… to me. Your father and I, we loved you, so much.” She said through ragged, forced breaths. Colette’s vision was blurred by tears, but she didn’t have the energy to wipe them away. She felt her mothers arms wrap around her and she embraced her back. She begged her to stay, she begged her not to die. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to lose her mother. She was scared.
Karen hated every moment of the memory. Repressed or not, she didn’t need this kind of memory in her head. It was depressing. And heart breaking. She could feel herself choking up inside and just willed herself to get back to reality. But instead, darkness enveloped the vision, replacing it instead with one of just speech.
“Colonel.” Spoke an unknown male voice, around mid age.
“Gentlemen.” Replied another, around the same age, but with more gruff to it.
“You’ve run the idea by me before, so we can skip to the chase. Renée Renoir was a fine soldier, and I feel honoured to have served with her. Her death, and indeed the death of her husband sadden me dearly. However, you can imagine the shock I had when you told me that even their daughter was suffering a horrible fate. Now, I don’t know how you learned of our research into the VR set, and I don’t care. Colette… she deserves the chance at a life. I approve of the use of one. I’ll get a team of programmers, engineers, and anyone else you need to get this done.”
“Thank you Colonel. You have no idea what this will mean to her in the long run.
We’ll begin tests as soon as we can. If she synchronises correctly she should never notice.”
“But what puzzles me is how she’ll cope. You can’t fake another several years in school.”
“We have thought about that… unfortunately, nothing comes to mind. In the VR portion, we’ll have her hospitalised for some time. During that time we hope to gather enough information to build her future with.”
The gruff man sighed.
“I pray to god that this works. She lost both her parents, fell into an irreversible coma, and yet this is all we can do. I’ll keep in touch.”
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Karen’s eyes finally opened, and the first thing she did was punch the nearest hard surface. She finally understood why she had hated her life after the loss of her parents.
She wasn’t an emotionless husk as she had believed for so long. It was the world around her that was lacking humanity. A VR set where she could enter a VR game…
The idea would have seemed like idiocy a few hours ago. But she knew that reality didn’t follow sense anymore. She tried to remember the early days after waking up in the hospital, but it was mostly a blur. She’d blamed it on her emotional state since that was what the doctors had told her, but really she just couldn’t “feel” anymore.
A military VR set… Pain would be allowed, even though she never caused more than a bumped toe to herself in the VR world seeing as she spent nearly every hour of her life in Legends of Fate. And society hadn’t cared. She thought they saw her as a lost cause and were leaving her alone.
She had to admit, it made her a perfect contestant. Her consciousness had fused with her online character, or maybe her character had fused with her whole body. She wondered about which reality was true, but deemed it unnecessary. She bit her tongue, feeling the distinct pain. Yes, this was her reality now. No matter the past, she had to move forward in the present. But thinking about it, what did her life mean to her now?
She hadn’t cared about it before. She lived in Legends of Fate because it was fun, exciting, and soon became her reality. And then Coal came into the mix, helped reshape her personality back together, and became her only friend. If she ever wanted to get answers, she needed to-
Suddenly, she remembered what she was doing in the first place. She had bigger fish to fry, and how long had she been out?! Her spine tingled. She gripped her sword and lashed out behind her. It connected with an unseen force, a large heavy one. It pushed with so much force Karen was forced backwards into the floor, which was now a vertical wall.
Charlie had snuck up on her during her brief KO session.
“Thanks for being a gentleman and letting me sleep, you mechanical bastard.”
She opened her free palm, five fireball spells ready to launch. They enveloped Charlie’s metal, showing her exactly where he started and ended. Its right claw was gripping the blade of her sword, and it was positioning its left to point in her direction.
Karen had forgotten whether it was a flamethrower or a gun that was encased within it, and she couldn’t see due to its high-tech camouflage. The train car changed direction again, and Karen seized her opportunity and wrenched herself free as a jet of flame nearly scorched her body. She dropped towards what would have lead away from the other group had she not been knocked out, and she saw that the door was torn open, the edges bent like something had squeezed through. But in place of the door, a light blue sheen acted as what she assumed was a barrier to decompression.
She landed on the wall that surrounded the torn open door, and slapped her left hand against her sword while activating a spell from her Cleric class, Bless Weapon. A faint light emanated from her palm and enveloped the blade. the main characteristic of the spell was to allow it to cause more damage with every hit. She didn't wonder about how that worked out outside of the game, but she trusted it would help. As an upside, she was assuming that it would keep the sword from shattering a little.
She was about to put on another buff when Charlie began his assault, its camo switched off for the moment. It repeatedly tried to smash Karen with its massive steel claws, but Karen was managing to bash them away each time with her sword. The massive vibrations from each hit reverberated through her arms, but she knew that was a small price to pay. Charlie had the advantage of managing to keep stable with its legs firmly holding on, but Karen had to concentrate on what angle the train was twisting towards so she could work out where to balance herself.
As she exchanged hits with Charlie's heavily armoured limbs she began to wonder just how she was going to do any damage. It was the right time to do so, so she noted that her sword was barely scratching the surface of the steel. Fire wouldn't do much against it either. She didn’t have any good lightning spells either, her forte was fire alone. She guessed that she'd need a lot more heat to get anywhere through that kind of plating. Heck, she guessed even a blowtorch wouldn't do much against Charlie. She still had a lot of things to resort to, but a lot of them would not only take away a lot of her combat ability in the future, it would put herself at a lot of risk. Then again, she wasn't going to need her biggest attacks if she managed to take out the biggest threat to the group’s freedom.
Charlie decided to switch to its flamethrower, forcing Karen to use up some of her magic reserves to freeze the spout until it was covered by a large block of ice. While it tried to figure out what was stopping the flames she quickly slid underneath the hunterbot, aided by the fact that gravity was now pulling her in that direction. She suddenly remembered his tail, however, and almost got stabbed through the eye by it as she went by. She leapt to her feet, gained some distance and tapped into her Cleric class again. This time: haste. It improved her reflexes and speed by a noticeable margin. Charlie didn’t turn. It simply stood there as its tail pulled back into-
Karen charged forward, swinging her sword as she went. She didn’t give Charlie a second’s time to charge its laser before slamming her sword into its tail. It was a lot easier to hit that its claws as she found it to recoil instead of sending her sword backwards in return. She began to realise that Charlie didn’t have a blind spot, or an obvious weakness. He was the mix of boss monster and player, incredibly strong but unpredictable. She buffed herself again with Striking, a spell that increased her damage output and lessened the brunt of the recoil of hitting a heavy sword on hard steel. Charlie kept as it was, piercing at her with high speed lunges of its tail. She countered every strike, and was constantly moving forward to attack again, only to be warded off once again by his tail. She backed up, aware that the tail laser could charge at any point. But she was running out of options. Her body would give out before even its tail did. She needed a lot more power, even with the buffs she had on her she wasn’t doing much at all. Using her sword now, it would have to be sitting on it to even do much. No, for her plan to work her sword needed to pierce Charlie, far enough in for it to stick. She wasn’t going to achieve that, but the alternative would leave her open.
Taking a deep breath she muttered a word.
“Berserk.”
Her heart thumped hard. She felt her circulation increase in speed as her heart began to pound faster and faster. The skin on her hands began to tinge red, her breathing became ragged. To actually feel this ability work in reality, she realised what was happening. Her blood was moving at inhuman speeds, her muscles were getting a lot more oxygen, but she needed to breathe harder to fuel it.
It didn’t leave much for her brain, and turned her into a fighting machine. That was the part she regretted had to happen, she lost her sense of survival and took too many risks. She’d had to resort to it before, and every time she came out with more wounds that she cared for. She prayed that this time would be different. The tip of Charlie’s tail glowed so she gripped her sword with resolve and began pelting him with more attacks. Each time Charlie tried to hit her; she swung her sword into the tail, rocking the mechanical appendage around. She noticed that now, she was actually dealing damage. A small part of her warned her not to get cocky, which went mostly ignored. Next, she focused on one of its hind legs. At that point Charlie deemed it necessary to turn in the tight space just as the car began to roll sideways. As Karen leapt to the ceiling, which was now the floor, she had a clear view of Charlie’s back. She kicked into a sprint and brought her sword over her shoulder, feeling it connect with Charlie’s back she forced it to move through the metal instead of just smash into it and carved a deep gash through the steel. A brief sense of elation swept over her, but was quickly banished as gravity turned against her, and Charlie’s left claw smashed into her side. Her sword took the brunt of the hit, her quick reflexes saving her life, but it was enough to interrupt her rhythm and leave her at the far side of the car. She immediately repeated the assault, this time from the front. Charlie’s claws weren’t as intimidating as before as every strike left a dent or cut into the metal work. Charlie’s flamethrowers were beginning to thaw, but had yet to work yet.
It decided to swap to active camouflage, but Karen covered it with a blanket of fire, expecting to blind it. Normal vision, thermal vision and night vision would be useless to the machine now, and Karen expected it to be unable to see her. Unfazed by the flames she went in for the kill, only for Charlie to pinpoint where she was somehow and lash out. It wasn’t perfectly on target, so Karen guessed it wasn’t relying on sight, but on something else. It never occurred to her that her increased heart rate, combined with Charlie’s heart beat sensor was giving him a constantly accurate position of where she was. Nevertheless she recklessly kept on trying to fight Charlie, occasionally gaining the upper hand only to be driven back again. She took her chances, made a move that her Rogue class benefited which involved an intricate series of flips and jumps, eventually ending with her kneeling on Charlie’s back. She had a split second, maybe less. It was enough. Her sword lit up, not with just one or two fire spells. At least three dozen heated up the blade in an instant, her magic causing the heat to climb to over four thousand degrees Celsius. It plunged into Charlie; however, it depleted a lot of her magic reserves. As soon as it was stuck in, she froze the parts that touched the sword, rapidly cooling them. She knew it would be stuck in, twisted the hilt and separated it from the blade. Before Charlie’s tail could smack her off she jump gracefully and landed near the undamaged entrance of the car.
Karen gripped the heavy staff. It was, in fact, her Witch staff, finally released from its long slumber combined with the blade of her sword. She had fused them together for ease of access. It was what her prize was for maxing out both levels. Most people went for swords of pure element, like lighting and fire, but she thought they were pretty stupid and matched people who loved to show off. Charlie tried its best to grab the sword, but without a hilt it never got a good grip on it. That, and the metal had fused with its back. She contemplated attacking while it was distracted but she was suddenly distracted herself by the door behind her sliding open.
“Karen listen I know I shouldn’t be here but there really was no choice there’s a bomb and I need to get it off the train but I can’t open any of the windows and even if I could it might just kill me and I need your help!”
The sound of Sarika’s breathing-uninterrupted plea for help forced Karen to come to her senses, shutting her berserk off. Karen turned to look into Sarika’s goggled face, contorted with worry, black briefcase in her hands. Karen had a smirk on her face.
“I leave for ten minutes and you somehow find a bomb. Honestly, you guys are a real handful.”