The Wyrms of &alon

168.2 - Childhood's End


I released my barrier as Pel sped through the intersection, while turning my head to watch the behemoth stagger through the fading forcefield, shattering the remaining pataphysics. I watched the shares dissolve in my wyrmsight as they fell to the ground.

We exited the intersection, and sighed with relief, though it was premature.

"Holy crud…"

Creatures flooded onto the intersection left and right, fleeing heat rays. Two of the flower-ships flew overhead, mowing their energy weapons down the street. The lasers fried the fungal monsters, blackening them into crumbling cinders. The horde shrieked.

One of the lasers lopped off a chunk from the top of the six-legged behemoth, which then turned to face them and roared.

Valves opened on its back, releasing swarms of bat-things that fluttered up to the flowers. Protective forcefields enclosed the flowers to repel the attackers, only for the bats to explode, spewing spores and pataphysics every-which way. The flowers swerved away, following down the same street as us.

The flowers' energy shields sparked and hissed as they zoomed ahead of us, with the fungus in pursuit not far behind them. The shields sputtered for a second, and then gave out altogether.

More creatures poured in from out of the alleyways. Chunks of fungal architecture broke free from the mycelium to join the battle.

In moments, the flowers were drowning in fungus. The swarm leapt from one to another, covering them so thickly, I could hardly see the silver surface underneath. Weighted down and damaged, the two aircraft veered off to the sides and dipped below the buildings' rooftops, out of view. A second later, there was a massive explosion. Blue and white fire geysered up from the next street over, flaring through the alleyways.

&alon had told me she'd been attacked by the Scary-Shinies; that they were the reason she'd appeared to me beaten and bruised in the dream where we'd first met.

I guess this was what she meant.

Higher up in the air, dozens of the flowers broke through the lower reaches of the wyrm army, shrilly roaring as they flew. They strafed their heat rays across the city, slicing through entire structures. Chunk of office buildings and skyscrapers came tumbling down. Fungus-riddled high-rises ignited, greeting the morning with towering explosions. Walls of glass and steel took their last bow and then crashed into the street.

Suddenly, a scream broke through the sky directly overhead. Blistering heat stung my back spines, which then rose in shock as I looked up.

"Angel's breath!"

A heat ray had pierced a high-rise just a half a bloc ahead of us, cleanly beheading it. The rest of the building shrugged as it sloughed off its crown.

I heard my family's screams.

"Drive!" I yelled.

I mustered my plexuses.

Filaments of blue and gold winked into being around the car, which I curved around us in a protective shell that flared to life right as the office building toppled onto the street. Massive debris clouds roared out from the impact.

I screamed. "Go straight! Don't stop, no matter what!"

I tightened my grip on my body, digging my claws so deeply into my hide, it hurt.

The engine snarled. We sped ahead, the ground flicking past us faster and faster. The debris thrashed across my barrier.

We were gonna hit the dust cloud head-on.

Almost instantly, we broke through the dust cloud, the ruined building emerging from it like a sheer cliff. I set my forcefield into a spin a split-second before we hit the wall. It whirled like a spherical drill, obliterating office furniture and structural beams, or at the very least knocking them out of the way as we punched through the building. I fed more of my power to the weave to bolster it against the building's inertia.

Now that I was reunited with my family, I no longer had any reason to hold back.

We burst out the other side of the building after about ten seconds of feeling like we were driving through an urban woodchipper. The debris around the car sprayed out in all directions as we plowed into the other side of the dust cloud. A couple seconds later, we made it out. The coast was clear.

The L85 roared louder. We raced ahead of the cloud.

The Expressway was just a couple blocks away!

Wyrms descended from above to chase the flower squadron. Other squadrons zipped around, attacking any wyrms in sight. Even some golden-eyed wyrms—transformed human beings—joined the flight, flying up from where they hid in the city.

None of us were safe.

Overhead, a flower collided with a passing military aerostat. The aerostat splattered like a bug against the flower's shields.

As more heat rays cut through the city's sporestacks, I noticed a change: the explosions had stopped. Yes, nearly everything in sight was one fire to one degree or another, but the sporestacks were no longer blowing up like fireworks every time they ignited. Even the wyrms' spore-breaths had been affected. The breath weapons' frontmost portions exploded, while the rest of the spore cone them simply burned.

&alon must have been changing the spores' chemical composition on the fly. I guess this meant my spores came in both explosive and non-explosive varieties.

I made a note to myself to figure out how to do this with my own spore breath at some point. I did not want to end up blowing myself to smithereens.

Finally, the Expressway's onramp came into view. Fungus grew like ivy on the mag-lev highway's red trellis, and many of its barreled roof's glass panels were either cracked or simply gone, but, all in all, the thing was still intact! Amazingly, some of the screens were still playing ads, though most of the screens that hadn't been completely busted just displayed a "technical difficulties" filler screen.

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But, they were still working!

"Go, Pel!" I yelled. "Go!"

In a past life, I might have struggled to pick which of the two on ramps to take, however, this decision was an easy one; Pel took the ramp that didn't have a fungus tree growing on it.

The car jostled in the on-ramp's curve. Gears and hydraulics went to work shifting the orientation of the L85's wheel orientation as the mag-lev took hold, removing all of the pressure of my car bearing down on my underside beneath it. Then we went through the banked curve, and for a brief moment, my world tilted on its side.

I brought back my windshield forcefield all over again, locking it in place as the L85 flattened out onto the Expressway.

We zoomed ahead at high speed. The passing cityscape became a blur. Off to the side, the heat rays beheaded another high-rise. The section of monorail track the building had been supporting fell like twigs.

I looked straight ahead.

"Fudge."

We had company: my wyrmsight alerted me to clusters of fungal aura up ahead barreling toward us at tremendous speeds.

Thankfully, as fast as they were, my mind was faster. Speeding my thoughts, I slowed time and then used my powers to fling the fungus creatures over the railings on either side of the Expressway. Some of the buggers hit the streets, but most of them crashed into adjacent buildings.

Suddenly, Yuta's spirit stirred within me. "Genneth, use me! I'll strike them down!"

I mean, if that's what floats your boat…

I let him manifest, a flying ronin with his kanakatana in hand, swirling with black, gold, and blue.

He launched ink-arcs sheathed in force. The passing ships' force-fields flickered, but did not break. He flew up after them and struck, jumping, diving down, plunging his psychic blade into the shields from above.

The shields glowed brightly, and power sparked and unraveled. The threads of blue and gold unspooled from Yuta's kanakatana.

"Yuta, get back!" I yelled. "It's not working!"

He flew back toward me. "But—"

"—I'm wasting power doing this! C'mon already!"

Nodding, Yuta flew into me and vanished.

I guess these things weren't gonna be easy to take down.

Bellowing of wyrmsong from overhead made me look up. Through the slightly slowed time, another flower-ship shot its heat ray down at a wyrm. The wyrm dodged with a corkscrew dive, leaving the red beam free to continue on, right into the section of the Expressway a couple seconds in front of us, just around the next bend. The laser cut through the road, along with the trestle supporting it from below, and not even DAISHU's idiot-proof redundancies were enough to compensate for the damage.

Almost immediately, three things happened: first, the severed series of electromagnetic fields generators died; second, the supporting trestle belly-flopped onto the Bay down below; third, with a groan, the bridge buckled and heaved, yawning downward at either end.

I sped up my thoughts, projecting a thought-net underneath the car as the glass-paneled ceiling over the road started to come apart. The section of road around the bend tore free from the rest of the Expressway and crashed down onto the streets. Electric current spilled out from the tear, filling the gap with sparks. The Expressway fell out from underneath us as we barreled forward.

Then, tightening my coil, I let time flow.

I pushed my powers to the fullest.

I screamed. "Up! Up!"

We rushed into the gap. The car's weight pushed down on my thoughts as if I was holding it in my hands. Hoping to make us glide, I lifted up and pulled back. But the car didn't glide—no, it flew. We rose, racing ahead, up and up, while the Expressway crumpled beneath us. We kept climbing, and my exhilaration turned to panic.

In a couple seconds, we were halfway to the tops of the skyscrapers flanking the Expressway at either side.

I quickly corrected course, tugging at the plexus underneath the car, spreading it around like psychic jelly until it completely enclosed the L85 in a glistening bubble. I split my focus into fourths, minding the magic both left and right, and above and below.

Unfortunately, my body decided this was just the perfect time to wine about being hungry. My thoughts turned acrid. Strands of numbness started winding through my body.

"Fudge! Not now!"

I dialed back my strength, hoping it would reduce the strain.

For a split second we crested in true weightlessness.

"Yes!"

And then we started to fall.

"No!"

I swear, I could feel the ground pulling us down.

"No no no no no—"

I willed the power back as quickly as I could. I caught the L85 with my net, though not neatly. It was a violent impact that bumped my underside against the car's underside and nearly flung me off the roof. But we were rising again, and soon, that overwrote all the other momenta.

Now, I just needed to not pass out.

Ugh…

I clenched my claws as I fought back against the mental exhaustion. My grips cut furrows into the roof's red pain, sending off sparks.

But it was no use. I had to let go.

We fell, plummeting toward the skyline, even as we continued hurtling forward toward a rapidly approaching office building.

The unbroken windows on the office building's side reflected the sunrise over Elpeck bay. The turbulent waters shimmered like fire.

I knew pushing myself when I was already at my limits would probably screw me up, and maybe even hurt my family, too, but I just had no other option. So, I did the only thing I could: "Baby steps," like Dana used to say.

Instead of pushing with all of my fading strength, I exerted force in tiny spurts. Directing one to my right yoinked us to the left just in time to avoid pancaking us against the office building's corner. For a split second, we were in free-fall again, but I spat out another tiny burst, flinging us over the water, forward and up.

Wyrms and flowers roared past overhead and around, blasting into one another with unmitigated fury.

I flipped my pataphysics on and off as quickly as I could. We bobbed through the air, like a stone skipping down the steps of a tiered fountain.

Down.

Down.

Down.

There was no way we were going to make it all the way across—but we didn't need to.

There was an Expressway almost directly below us, and better yet, it was also parallel to the direction we were moving in. There was just one problem: it had a roof.

Well, I was already redirecting most of my power to the underside of my car. We just had to risk it.

I hoped it would be enough.

I aimed my skipping-stone car at the Expressway and shunted us downward, catching the car from below with my plexus to further decelerate.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Then we hit the glass. The crash was tremendous.

The car jostled as it came to rest on the EM cushion pulsing up from the road. I gathered my plexus to our right to stop our wild drift.

The car buckled and stabilized.

We zoomed past a ruined cargo truck that had collapsed on the opposite side of the road.

Loosening my coils, I pushed myself to the edge of the roof, enough to dangle my head over the edge, to the window. Seeing me, Jules recoiled, bumping up against her brother in shock.

I heard a thump beside me. I turned: it was Pel, pressed against the driver's-side window, slack-jawed and wide-eyed in equal parts fear and wonder.

Rayph slapped his hand on the other side of the window, right by my head. He made a plane with his hand and flew it up and down, and then banked it to the right.

I nodded, trying to smile. His face lit up, as if he'd just gotten off a ride.

Looking at my wife, I watched her press her palm on the window.

On the other side, I quickly did the same, only to slink back to my rooftop seat.

Neither of us wanted to see the other cry.

High overhead, the deadly flowers roared through the skies, splitting into squadrons, and scattered to the winds. Looking back, I saw others sinking toward the ground, probably near Cascaton Park.

They were landing.

But that wasn't my problem anymore. I had my family to take care of, now.

Away we went, zooming down the Continental Expressway, away from the spreading war. We met the coastline and raced on, away from the flashing lights, for the fires and explosions, away from the living death, run amok. All of it faded into the distance as a great shadow was cast over the land; the morning sun, occluded by one of the vessels up above.

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