Ch. 73 | Disaster 4

Oba managed to turn his head slightly.

Narun stood frozen halfway through a step. Bereth's arms were trapped against his sides. Tomas shook violently on all four legs, unable to move any of them.

“Fuck. I can't fucking move,” Bereth forced out through gritted teeth.

The hooded figure walked past them casually. It didn't hurry or even look at them. It simply passed through the middle of their formation and continued deeper into the building as if they weren't worth acknowledging.

Oba followed the hooded figure with his eyes until it disappeared into the smoke, then turned his attention back to the masked woman. One of her hands was still raised, fingers spread slightly apart as if she were holding something invisible between them. The pressure pinning his body in place suddenly made a lot more sense.

Telekinesis.

That had to be what he was dealing with. He was almost entirely sure of that.

Oba had trained against telekinetics before. Courtesy of the eight squad. As much as he hated to admit it, telekinesis was very tricky to deal with. They could easily push people around, throw objects, put up barriers, sometimes restrain one or two people if they were particularly strong, but trying to hold an entire group at once usually spread their concentration too thin and their control started to slip. Meaning that this either was something completely different or that he was facing someone of extremely high level.

Even during training exercises with the Eighth, Oba had never been completely sure he could handle them in a real fight. Now he was going to have to face the danger head-on, with training wheels off. Based on what he saw, the stranger wasn’t any worse than Vice Captain Rex, maybe better even. With each passing thought, Oba could feel his chances of survival waning.

All that fucking training, and for that ? Only to get butchered by the very same ability I had extensively trained against, in some dark corridor while on my first mission as an officer, no less.

Oba thought bitterly as he bit his lip.

“Everyone relax,” He said, forcing the words out through the pressure crushing his chest. “She's holding four people at once. She can't keep this up forever. The second she lets go, spread out and hit her from different sides.”

Narun looked toward him and let his shoulders slump, soon followed by Bereth, who stopped wasting energy pointlessly fighting against the pressure.

Even Tomas seemed to settle once Oba gave them something resembling a plan. That was good. Panic was manageable as long as people still had something to occupy their minds, and if the woman really was a telekinetic, there had to be a limit to her ability to control multiple objects…

The pressure vanished before he could finish the thought.

Oba stumbled forward as his body was suddenly released, but Tomas reacted faster. His hooves slammed against the tiles and sent him charging down the corridor before Oba had even recovered his balance.

“Tomas, wait !” He shouted uselessly.

It was, however already too late.

Tomas lowered his head and drove straight toward the masked woman, antlers aimed squarely at her chest. She did not attempt to dodge. She merely turned toward him and closed one hand.

Tomas jerked in the middle of his charge.

For an instant, Oba couldn't understand what had happened. Tomas's body was still moving forward, legs scrambling beneath him, but his head had stopped dead as if it had struck an invisible wall. The sudden difference in momentum twisted his neck violently, and before Oba could even manage to let out a single shout, the space around his skull seemed to tighten.

A wet crack echoed through the corridor.

Tomas's head collapsed under the pressure.

Blood and fragments of bone burst across the nearby wall while the rest of his body carried forward on momentum alone. It managed another stumbling step before folding beneath itself and sliding across the floor, leaving a dark streak behind.

Oba couldn't take his eyes off it.

One of Tomas's antlers had snapped loose during the impact and skittered across the tiles until it came to rest beside his boot. Only a few minutes earlier, Tomas had been laughing at Bereth's stupid jokes behind him. Now his body lay several meters away with almost nothing left above the shoulders.

The corridor went deathly quiet.

Whatever confidence Oba had managed to instill into the others disappeared with Tomas.

The masked woman slowly looked across the three remaining men.

“Who's next ?” She asked calmly.

Bereth released a shaky breath that turned into something resembling a laugh.

Oba looked at him.

He was smiling, but the strain in his face made it obvious what the smile was hiding.

“Me.” He replied with a smile on his face. ’’Wouldn't want to miss out on a date with a pretty woman.”

“Bereth, don't—”

The invisible pressure released them again.

Bereth moved immediately.

So did Narun.

Narun charged straight down the middle of the corridor, armored shoulders lowered, while Bereth leapt sideways. His claws caught the wall, and he ran along it, using the surface to circle around behind her.

All the training they had been through clearly wasn’t for naught, as even without a word between them, Narun and Bereth had executed their maneuver in perfect sync.

It was a security force classic. Rush your opponent from two sides, force them to look away, and then one pulls back, uses the other as bait, and circles from behind. It was the go-to method of approaching a superior opponent when outnumbering them, and for a good reason—it worked pretty much every time.

Oba tightened his grip on the knife and started forward as Narun charged straight down the center of the corridor. Bereth had already taken to the wall, claws biting into the surface as he scrambled sideways in an attempt to get behind her. For the first time since Tomas died, Oba thought they might actually have a chance at making it out of this alive.

She turned towards Narun, ignoring both Oba and Bereth.

A slight movement of her hand was all it took, and Narun's right leg stopped dead in the middle of his charge while the rest of his body continued forward, his own momentum wrenching him violently around the trapped limb. He barely had time to cry out before the invisible force tightened around his knee and began twisting.

The armor plating buckled first.

Narun's scream echoed through the corridor as his leg twisted at an angle no leg should ever bend. Bone punched through flesh, followed by a spray of blood as the lower half of the limb finally gave way. He crashed onto the floor and skidded across a few feet, clutching uselessly at what remained of his leg.

Oba faltered.

That moment of hesitation almost made him lose track of Bereth.

The weasel had reached the wall behind the masked woman and launched himself from it, throwing his entire body toward her back with his claws extended. She still didn't turn to face him. Instead, her free hand shifted almost lazily to the side, and something near Oba's boot scraped across the floor.

His eyes dropped toward the sound.

Tomas's broken antler was rising into the air.

Several smaller fragments lifted with it from the pool of blood surrounding Tomas's corpse. For half a second Oba mistook them for pieces of shattered tile, until one rotated in the air and he saw the wet white surface beneath the blood.

They were pieces of Tomas's skull.

Oba looked up just as they shot past him.

Bereth was still airborne when two of the fragments drove into his face. His scream broke into a strangled howl as both shards buried themselves deep into his eye sockets, knocking him off course and sending him crashing shoulder-first onto the floor.

He rolled once before coming to a stop, both hands immediately flying to his face. Blood streamed between his fingers while he writhed across the tiles, his claws scraping uselessly against the floor.

Oba found himself backing away before he'd consciously decided to move.

Tomas was dead. Narun was sprawled on the floor, missing half a leg. Bereth was screaming with pieces of their teammate's skull buried in his eyes, and the woman responsible for all of it still hadn't moved an inch from where she'd been standing.

It was so one-sided that you couldn’t even call this fighting, it was more like slaughtering.

The realization settled over him with an eerie calm that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. That nagging feeling he’d had from the moment they entered the corridor had been right all along. If anything, it had underestimated just how fucked they were.

This wasn’t a fight we could win with some special coordination.

There was no pattern he could exploit here, no limitation he could see. Whatever space existed between them seemed to belong to her. She could stop a charging man without touching him, twist another apart from across the hallway, and turn the remains of the first into a weapon to be used against the latter, and for all their losses they hadn't even managed to make her move.

The opponent was far too strong to be overcome by some gimmick. Worse still, they had already run out of those by now.