Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (4/6)
Overclocked Magick
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! (Usually…) Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
The world flickered black and white, like a succession of stuttering holo-images overlaid with static. It seemed to take a long time for Brax to fall. Tattie screamed on the edge of the fractured bridge, grit and melted asphalt grinding into her knees. Brax thrashed, legs kicking, mouth open in a silent yell. He hit the street below with a sound like pickaxes tearing through mushroom meat.
It took another long, shuddering moment for Tattie to make sense of what she was seeing. The jutting shards of a shattered lamp post had punched clean through Brax’s chest. He twitched, his body pinned like a bug to a board. A thick line of blood escaped the side of his mouth. He was struggling to breathe, his chest broken open, heaving around the mangled metal erupting from his rib cage. Their eyes locked—Tattie’s wide and streaming scarlet, Brax’s dull and clouded—then his head rolled back and he stopped moving.
“Brax, hang on. Hang on, baby, I’m coming.”
Tattie scrambled to her feet, began searching for a way down to the street that didn’t involve a suicidal drop and roll. The remains of the husk patrol were lying useless on the cracked asphalt, but she’d forgotten about the drones swooping overhead, gathering like a colony of incensed, red-eyed bats. Unfortunately, they hadn’t forgotten about her. One broke from the pack and accelerated into a dive, a micro-missile poised and ready to launch.
The missile shot from the drone’s flashing strike chamber and raced towards Tattie with a high-pitched shriek, finally dragging her attention back to the sky. She grabbed at a gutful of power, threw up a hasty plasma shield. The bullet-sized missile rebounded from the bloody mesh, bouncing wide to punch through the window of a tired spa building on the other side of the bridge. It exploded like a micro sun going supernova, throwing a glittering spray of glass and metal into the night.
As the last wrenching sounds of the explosion died in her ears, Tattie’s plasma shield began to crumble. When it sifted into dry vermilion particles and scattered at her feet, she knew her power was spent.
“Shit, not now.”
Tattie reached for her collarbone disc and pushed it hard. She braced herself, expecting the usual flare of scalding power to start grinding through her veins. Nothing happened. She was completely out of juice. Destroying the bridge had been a gamble too far, and now she was facing a squad of missile drones with nothing but an empty Rakkonian bangle and a—
And a knife.
The collar disc had a limit to how much Arcano magick it could draw. It was a safety measure, a precaution against draining herself so dry she could never recover. But Tattie could still dig power out of her body, even if it had to be done the old-fashioned, extremely messy and painful way. She ran to the side of the ruined bridge, ducked behind a shattered concrete column, and swung her bag around so she could tear it open.
She was already running through the sigils she could carve as she pushed the diskette aside and began rooting amongst the bag’s scattered contents. If she cut a Zoran’s Shield into her bicep, she could summon a heat blast that might short circuit the little buggers. Or perhaps a Summoning Snake was the way to go. It would be difficult, cutting a large, precise design across her stomach in such a tight situation, but the power she’d be able to draw would be—
Her hand tightened around something unpleasantly familiar. Something she’d forgotten she had. It was a hard, flat tube, pulsing with a sickly warmth as though it were alive.
Tattie stared at the Arcanostaff in the dim light of the remaining street lamps. She didn’t want to use this thing, could hardly bear to touch it. Everything about it spoke of Rakkone, of Elders leering down at her while she tore at her restraints. It was twelve-hour drills in the rain and never-ending pain that left her muscles cramping for hours into the night. But it might be her only way out. Her only way to get to Brax.
Two missile blasts rocked her back on her heels. Tattie braced a hand against the bridge, riding the aftershocks as fire swelled and rolled across what was left of the tarmac. A huge chunk of concrete, torn away during impact, was swinging over the street beneath the bridge. Tattie gripped the staff tighter, trying not to imagine what would happen if the concrete fell while Brax was beneath it. The tube shivered in her palm. It was impatient to get to work, already beginning to activate.
Tattie stood, took a breath, and reached for the staff with her mind. It was an energetic, quivering force that extended greedy tendrils when Tattie called to it, desperate to reintegrate with the Arcanoforge, the missing piece of itself. It twisted in Tattie’s fingers as they spoke together, using a silent language no other being in the galaxy could hope to understand. The two ends of the tube shot out with a gunshot crack. It began to lengthen, extending from both sides until it was the same height as Tattie, the ends curved like twin cutlasses dripping blood.
Tattie both hated and loved how natural it felt in her grip. How complete it made her. It began siphoning blood from her body, pulling it from her eyes, her gums, the aching beds of her nails. Tattie grew taut with raging adrenaline and a cold, bright fury, so focused on reaching Brax that the agony of biofluid extraction dulled to background noise. Her leeched plasma filled the staff, illuminating arcane sigils carved along its length in a pulsing red wash. It moulded itself to her hand like an augmented limb, cleaving to her tech-tainted blood. The power built quickly, and once the staff began to thrum with overclocked magick, Tattie emerged from behind the concrete column.
Several drones locked onto her immediately. They rose above the hovering swarm, strike chambers cranking into place with fat, metallic thunks. Micro-missiles raced across the sky. Tattie faced them head-on, turning the staff in her hands, spinning it faster and faster until it became a blurred whirl of blood and metal. The escalating magick burned through her body, threading the tips of her toes through to the follicles of her tangled hair with screaming flame. She pushed it out into the staff, using muscle memory born of agony and sweat. When the missiles were moments from making impact, Tattie raised the staff above her head and threw out a huge wave of amplified power, hurling the projectiles away with the force of a Romarlian death wave.
The missiles spun away on crazy, interweaving paths. One fell into the wrecked street below, mercifully far enough away from Brax to prevent his instant incineration. The others all slammed into the Noctarum. A short series of thunderous explosions echoed up the length of the boulevard, punching out shop windows and throwing any husks who’d managed to stand back to the pavement. A huge, sagging hole gaped in the Noctarum’s once elegant roof, and several rents were torn in the walls. Tattie let out a long breath before turning to the remaining drones.
They were already spinning up, getting ready to launch their devastating payloads. Tattie turned with the staff, ducking and spinning beneath the drones as they buzzed about her like angry mosquitoes, each trying to target what looked to their sensors like an agitated, whirling cloud.
“Eat shit, fuckers.”
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Content Warnings
Description of blood, suggestion of cutting/self-mutilation, swearing