Slumrat Rising

Truth lay in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling. He felt like he had all these words inside of him, but they were so jumbled together that he couldn’t possibly get them all out. He wanted to tell the sibs that-

He didn’t remember how old he was, but if he closed his eyes he could see it like he was still there. Mom had turned the water as hot as it would go, scalding hot, and she put little Harmony’s hands under it and held them there and he screamed and Truth yelled and tried to get him out and Dad smacked him into the toilet so hard he couldn’t see straight for two days.

He could close his eyes and he was right there. He hated it there. He hated it more than anything. So it was all simple. What does he have to do to make sure that he and the sibs are never there ever again?

He wanted to explain to them that he had a little rule, so ingrained that he didn’t need to think about it consciously anymore. If he wasn’t sure what to do, he asked “What would Dad do in this situation?” And then he did the opposite.

Truth wanted to explain that there was a growing part of him that craved power for its own sake because power would keep him from being there again. A part of him that wanted to see people afraid. Scared of him. Because then they couldn’t hurt him. But being someone who proved their strength by bullying others was what Dad would do. And he always did the opposite of what Dad would do.

But if he wasn’t strong, wasn’t capable, who could protect the sibs? Because that was the other lesson of that day. The strong did as they pleased, and the weak could only suffer. Until they got strong enough. Sleep was a long time coming.

The next day, Truth was called in by the Captain.

“Everything work out with your brother and sister?”

“Yes Ma’am, your suggestion worked perfectly.”

“Good. I have never found the need for such indulgences, but it’s good to know they exist. Ready to earn some of those credits back?”

“Yes, Ma’am, I surely am!” The incense was as good as advertised, and Truth loved watching his second aperture fill up. But poverty was a recent memory and one he was eager to put behind him. He wanted all the cash.

Sophie and Vig would never go back to the slums. He wouldn’t allow it. He needed the credits. And if the Captain had a job for him, he would gladly do it.

“I checked. You are drop armor certified, correct?”

“Rated Expert with Orbital Drop Armor, yes, Ma’am.”

There was a muttered noise that sounded suspiciously like, “Of course you are.”

“Well. Others are just “qualified” on it, so you are going out to train with them. Maybe be one of the instructors; I’ll check with the trainers. We got an op coming up, and guess who’s going to be dropping in from on high?”

“Is it me, Ma’am?”

“It is.” She got serious. “Procedure says that you get a minimum of a month on non-combat duty after heavy combat. Unfortunately, I don’t have many drop armor-certified mages of any level, so here we are.”

She looked him dead in the eye. “I swear you will get every credit and every scrap of elixir I can get for you, Corporal. I’m not leaving a single credit on the table. But you have to go. This is a bad one, Medici. Real bad. They have a lot of our people in conditions where it might be better if they just died. It’s going to be one hell of a big op. You need to be totally prepared.”

Truth took a deep breath. Thought about how well the sibs were doing. How healthy they looked, and how awesome their futures were going to be with all the friends and family points he would earn. He thought about how comfortable the apartment was and how plentiful the food.

How nobody was making them scream.

“Starbrite has given me everything, Ma’am. Everything. Some bastards touched our people? I will fall on them like the wrath of God.”

The orbital lifter had ferried them one hundred kilometers straight up. They stood at the boundary of the planet and the terrible, consuming void between the stars. Truth could see a big slice of the world from up here, but not the whole of it. The sun shined around the world's edge like a golden rind, leaving most of the planet dark. Cities glowed in the night, some like little dots, others like spreading mold extending pellicles across some unattended leftovers. Each of the ten drop-capable combat magi loaded their mottled gray armor with a bolted-on payload. The helmets were sealed to the full-body armor. Pressure tested. Spell reinforcement tested. Camo tested. Payload tested. All green. They jumped.

The mission was both delicate and urgent. A terrorist band known as The Sons of The Dragon had been extracting larger and larger “taxes” from some of Starbrite’s suppliers in a less than fully stable country. These suppliers delivered crucial metals and alchemical reagents to Starbrite, things that either couldn’t be found in Jeon or were too polluting to feasibly mine. These “taxes” had been tolerated- just the cost of doing business.

That all changed when the Sons of The Dragon started kidnapping people. More importantly, they started kidnapping Starbrite’s people. Every person on this island other than the hostages was a terrorist. A torturer. A murderer, a kidnapper, and a bandit. The pre-mission briefing was very clear. They all had to die. No quarter whatsoever was to be accepted. The Captain had spoken quite calmly when she mentioned that more than twenty of the hostages were female. Their conditions didn’t need to be detailed.

Just because you could swap in a load of spells didn’t mean you knew how to use them in a fight. The Sons of The Dragon might have been a poorly trained, poorly disciplined collection of bandits armed with decommissioned military junk, but they did know how to fight. They enjoyed it. A civvie, even a Starbrite civvie, in Materials Acquisition or whatever, stood no chance. Truth was going to enjoy washing the island with blood. Some people didn’t deserve mercy.

Truth activated the special stellar ray gathering formation in his pack. A ghostly explosion of superimposed triangles, circles, and a cube that seemed to exist in at least four dimensions sprung into being above him. Invisible and vast- the lines and sigils unpacked into a mystic dragnet that harvested vastly more energy from the upper atmosphere than he could possibly hold himself. Instead, the energy was held in the formation, using the unreasonable amounts of stored energy to help fuel the spells to contain that energy. They also went into expanding the net, only stopping when it was dozens of meters wide. The other nine magi did the same.

The suits were hitting terminal velocity, falling fast as their enchanted armor slipped through the air without a ripple of noise. The landing zone was marked with a little ten-pointed star on their visors, sitting on the edge of a continent. As they fell further, the star seemed to drift left, slowly settling onto an island. The island grew, dominating a channel that ran between two cities.

It got closer, fast. Truth could see the whispers of anti-air defenses now. Tactical curse barrages waiting to be triggered by too-big objects in the air. Bound spirits and devils, ready to cling to airborne targets and scream their location or shred apart their targets as needed. Then there were the things Truth really hated. Oversized, turret mounted, box fed, optically aimed, and manually operated anti-air needlers.

They shot needles the size of his index finger at three fucking thousand rounds per minute, and they mounted four together with one trigger. Twelve GODDAMN THOUSAND finger sized, cursed to all absolute fuckery needles, with enough power behind them to blow a hole the size of his ass, through his ass. And that was before the prick manning the needlers started running spells on them.

The island was flying towards him now. The waters were mined. The air was sealed. The only way on was with the permission of the Sons of the Dragon or be so small that you completely evaded their air defense network. Even then, the Sons weren’t worried. A shower of assholes trying to parachute in would be spotted fast and cut down faster. Starbrite PMC knew all that, of course. Which is why Truth and the rest of the squad were dropping in from the edge of space in heavily camouflaged, turbulence-erasing drop armor. The ten combat magi fell to treetop height when the first payload detonated.

One hundred kilometers of free fall for a heavily loaded, armored adult. The kinetic energy was terrifying. The enchanted suits of armor absorbed the energy just as they were designed to, letting the soldiers land light as thistledown. Those same spells made a simple but effective conversion of the stored energy. The horrific fireballs that bracketed Sons of the Dragon defensive points spoke to just how hideous that kinetic energy was when transmuted into thermal energy and amplified by spells.

People didn’t just die. They evaporated. Turned into blast shadows on whitewashed walls. Those “fortunate” enough to be partially around a corner melted in part and merely burst into flames for the other. The air in their lungs flashed into brief fire, smothering them before they could scream. Sandbagged artillery and anti-air positions were turned to glass and twisted metal. Scavenging the least bit of that kinetic energy, the spelled backpacks carrying the primary munition detached from the drop magi and launched ten meters straight up. At this point, roughly 3/4ths of a second after touchdown, the main payload detonated.

The gathering formations had each dragged a small sea of cosmic rays down from the upper atmosphere, where they were at their strongest and most wild. Those rays were channeled into the large packs each drop-magi was carrying. The packs held carefully padded and insulated glass jars. Sitting inside each jar was a rough parody of a child, formed of mud, herbs, and dung. Its skin was carved with dozens of tiny scratches- spells, sigils of power, and if you stood back far enough and squinted, they formed something greater, too. Truth didn’t know exactly what it was, but they creeped him out.

After the clay mannequins were placed in their jars, the alchemists had, with aching care, added various herbs and leaves to the jar and then filled it with some foul-smelling poison. They fed the poison through a tube, filling up from the bottom of the jar all the way to the top. “Important not to let it splash.” They explained. “And you really want to minimize contact with oxygen. Until it’s needed.”

The sea of energy caused the poison to burst into lightning and a fog of sickly gasses. Cosmic rays, lightning, and poison were all cleanly absorbed into the clay child. Who opened their eyes and screamed with brilliant golden light streaming from every orifice.

The packs disintegrated under the shearing power of the cosmic rays. The energy streamed out, connecting the mud children into a ten-pointed star and forming a blazing decagram over the island's heart. All the dug-in anti-air systems. All the buried demons and reinforced army surplus spell bowls buried under thresholds. All the charmed monsters guarding the waters around the island. All destroyed. Even the main wards for the central fortress itself shattered. Then the spell went to work on the people.

Each spell aperture was a miniature star and a well in the soul. A place to hold and refine the cosmic energy emitted by the vast dominions and principalities in the stars. They were a person’s strength. Their identity. It would take something truly enormous and terrible to stir that energy up. Push it to the point where it was in revolt, requiring every scrap of your strength and focus to keep that raging power contained within you. To keep it from blowing your chest apart like a frog that had swallowed a grenade. Naturally, the more powerful and advanced you were, the more stellar energy you had inside yourself. The more energy, the stronger the resonance with the great working. Truth saw secondary blasts popping off before he had even drawn arms.

Truth activated the spell cannon built into his armor and drew his machete. He promised the Captain that he would strike like the hand of God. And God had never been merciful.

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