Descend- Bursting Out: A litrpg adventure

by David Burke

  Jay was strong but there was no way he would be able to deal with this creation of hers. He would have no choice but to give himself to her. Otherwise she would destroy the entire ship. If she couldn’t have what she wanted then no one would.

  Just like Abigail Fanning had learned back in high school, you might think you won prom queen, but if Jasmine wasn’t happy, no one was happy. She still laughed thinking about how they had all screamed when she set off the fire sprinklers and drenched them all in the gymnasium with the doors locked.

  It was no longer high school. The stakes were higher and Jasmine was going to win it all. The Forlorn were closing in but from what she had learned most of their armada was destroyed. Now, she would either be the queen of the humans or she would be the queen of the Forlorn. It didn’t matter. Today was her day.

  Chapter 39- Deja Vu

  Jay was thrilled when Huong told him that they had a plan. He glossed over her concern. Once they explained that the plan depended on him being able to power up the ship and the spatial jump drive they had created he felt confident. The progress made on the tenth floor and what he had learned about creating a network of power made him believe it was possible.

  It didn’t hurt that he had unwavering confidence in Ava’s inventions and Huong’s ability to make it all work together. He had the best wives and was once again struck by the reality that he hadn’t done enough to deserve this. All he could do was keep fighting for a future for his wives and children.

  The sixth floor was crowded now with the two hundred and sixty-eight humans left from the original hundred thousand of the experiment. Well that and more than three hundred children now. Many of whom were his. Oh and the sleepers, but they didn’t count. They weren’t evolved humans and they still hadn’t decided on the best time to awaken them.

  Either way, they were all working and striving to accomplish their tasks. Jay had worried that the inclusion of more men into the group would cause a disruption, but surprisingly, the little display of his power that they had seen quashed any disputes about who was in charge, at least for now.

  Truthfully, he needed the men anyway. Even at their relatively weak levels after some quick refining they would be able to generate power for the ship with their own harems. As Mia was always pointing out, redundancy in any technological system was a good thing. Even in their own bodies they had organ redundancy.

  A telepathic message from Amelia on the command bridge broke up his musings. “You have to get the rest of the people through now. The Forlorn are here. So far it is only fighter ships but they are bombing the hull of the ship. If we don’t get moving soon, we may not get moving at all.”

  “Okay, I will…”

  Screams broke up what he was going to say. Apparently Jasmine had decided to make herself known. He didn’t know how she had figured out that they learned to split the leviathan and leave her behind, but she must have. Otherwise why attack now.

  Messages started coming in from Meikiyo, Trina, and Jessie. Streams of Forlorn were breaking into their staging area on what they knew as the sixth floor. The fields of vegetation were being cut down by bursts of the decaying weapons that Forlorn used. Crawlers, flyers, spikers, juggernauts, and all sorts of the monstrosities that they had fought against were coming for them.

  Once upon a time Jay would have leapt into action immediately, but the truth was that he trusted his wives. Even the other fused who hadn’t been made wives yet were powerful and while none of them were close to him, they were all amazingly strong. They would let him know if they couldn’t handle things.

  So for now he focused his energy on getting the rest of the survivors through the spatial gates to the crew sections of the Ark 2.0. That was what they were calling the portion of the leviathan that they had equipped for flight. It was exactly that, a second chance for humanity out amongst the stars. Maybe they weren’t human in the same sense as when they had come on board but they were still the children of Earth.

  Now these children were about to say goodbye to their mother. They would be leaving the nest, but there wasn’t any choice. The Earth wasn’t habitable and likely wouldn’t be for tens of thousands of years. Certainly not with any degree of comfort.

  Then a psychic scream ripped through Jay’s mind. It had to have hit everyone as he heard, “Where is he?”

  The voice was unmistakable, its psionic signature practically oozed out the instability of the mind that had created it. Jasmine was back, and just at the wrong time. Somehow though this seemed fitting.

  Jay had spared her at one point when they were forced to flee deeper into the dungeon. Her actions at the time had shown her to be no friend of theirs. He now realized she had been manipulating them and him for the entire time that she had been with them. Her power made that almost like breathing for her.

  She had deserved death then but he had lacked the will to do so. He was a different man. Once again they were fleeing from the Forlorn. But this time not deeper into the dungeon. Now they were taking the big step out into a broad universe. Now he needed to put an end to this threat once and for all.

  Yet, he hadn’t received any warnings from his wives, so he didn’t know where she might be. Then as if on cue, he got a message from Amelia on the command deck. “She is attacking one of the clamps that holds our portion of the ship to the rest of the leviathan. If she ruins it, we won’t be able to manually disengage.”

  “Show me where,” Jay replied and then waited for her to send him a visual image of the layout leading to where she was. When you were dealing with a structure the size of the moon, you couldn’t just go wandering off, even at super speed.

  Then he had it and was off. Time to end this.

  When he arrived he found a large open space the size of several football fields and hundreds of feet high. The clamp mechanism itself was larger than a skyscraper and under attack from some massive new type of Forlorn.

  Jay paused for a second but couldn’t detect Jasmine anywhere. The monstrosity was doing its job though so he couldn’t wait. He scanned it and to his horror realized there were two humans inside of it bound in some sick forced fusion. The male and female halves bound together. That was why this was so powerful. It was distorting gravity around it and had a storm of metal fragments all around it.

  Another flashback hit him. This was the same monstrosity that future him had fought. If he understood the message from the future correctly, he had been able to defeat this monster but it had cost him everything.

  That was okay. Jay smiled. He wasn’t that future self. That had been based on a future where he had been afraid to embrace power. Now things were different. He was more comfortable in his skin and fused with eighteen others, each who made the whole more than it was before.

  So he surged forward. He distorted the mass of all the objects flying around him. And dodged around their paths as the gravitational field being controlled by this monstrosity tried to keep up. It never even had a chance. He was too strong, too fast, and his subconscious mind was now equipped to handle all the details that his waking mind could never keep up with.

  “I grant you mercy. You have my apology that I wasn’t able to reach you before she did this to you,” Jay said as he landed on the chest of the creature. He batted away its arms as they tried to crush him. Again, he was just too strong. Then he sliced open their exosuit keeping their organic bodies trapped inside, forcing them to perpetually engage in what should have been the most intimate of acts.

  Jay looked down on them in sorrow and then ended them with a single stroke of his PSI blade. He might have been mistaken but he could have sworn that tears of relief had been running down their faces.

  He suddenly became aware of a presence behind him, actually two. Jay turned and saw Jasmine. At least it used to be Jasmine. Three quarters of her beautiful face was still there, but one eye and a quarter of her skull had been converted to a silver metallic form. One of her arms was organic and the other Forlorn technology as were both of her legs
.

  The armor that she wore was a sick mockery of her feminine form. It exposed what it shouldn’t and drew the eye to where it shouldn’t go, while not offering any actual protection in the middle of her body. Not that Jay was stupid enough to think that metal armor was what she was relying upon for protection.

  She was a combination of technology and slutty appeal which Jay found rather jarring. It was as though all human finesse had been lost to her. Behind her there was another figure. Whereas Jasmine exuded an aura of quiet danger, this figure practically broadcast the feeling of violence.

  It was an eight-foot-tall male figure bound completely in a set of shining armor that clung to it, skin tight, showing off muscles just as clearly as Jay’s B.O.B. armor did. Except this figure had a visor pulled down and flashing red like some kind of Cylon. Yet there was something oddly familiar about it.

  “Who’s your new boyfriend?” Jay asked

  A rich, wicked laugh bubbled up out of Jasmine. “Oh silly boy, you are my boyfriend, my king, my right. He is just a fill-in until you get housebroken.”

  Even as she spoke, Jay felt her power hit him. With Iron Will and Awareness over three thousand, he still felt it. That didn’t seem possible. She had grown in power far more than should have been possible. Something was very wrong.

  Jay stepped back. For the first time today, he felt a crack in his confidence. “Jasmine, you know you are ill. You aren’t thinking straight.”

  “Oh, no. I’m thinking exactly the right way. The way I always have. I admit I didn’t see it at first. But you distinguished yourself pretty quickly. Those other guys never really had a chance. You are the alpha male, the one that all those others can only dream of being. And the alpha male needs the queen at his side,” Jasmine replied.

  “We can never be together, Jasmine. You have hurt too many people I care about,” Jay said. He kept trying to use her name to try to humanize her but it wasn’t working. She kept staring at him and he felt her power trying to burrow into him.

  “You only say that because those sluts have confused you. I don’t blame you. You’re only a man. They flashed some skin, and brought you under their spell. But once you know the bliss of joining with me, you will never want another. Even then though, I am such a kind wife, that I will let you keep some of the others as pets. You can use them to vent your needs on if I’m too busy,” Jasmine said. Her voice was taking on a sing-song quality and he almost felt like she was hypnotically moving her head side to side.

  This was going to end very badly unless he did something. He hated to attack a woman, but Jasmine wasn’t really that any longer. So he surged forward again, his PSI blade arcing down at her. She didn’t even move. He must be too fast for her to even perceive it.

  But then at the last instant, impossibly, his PSI blade was stopped. It hit down on another PSI blade. This one in the hands of the male warrior behind her. So there was another guy with a PSI construct skill. That wasn’t too out there he figured. But Jay was far from a one-trick pony.

  He backed up and the figure followed. They rapidly exchanged blows. Whoever this was he was fast, and good with the blade. Jay could tell that he was faster but for some reason he wasn’t being able to access all of his speed. Something about Jasmine’s power was interfering with him.

  He felt sluggish and it was growing. Jay realized he needed to put an end to this. So he time skipped towards her. Cut the head off a snake and the rest would die. It didn’t matter how fast this warrior was. Jay wasn’t just moving fast; he was skipping through time. There would be nothing for the enemy to react to.

  Yet again his blade hit another PSI blade just an inch from Jasmine’s neck. Somehow the enemy warrior had anticipated it or wait, had he moved through time like Jay?

  “Who’s your friend, Jasmine?” Jay asked.

  She laughed again. “You thought you were so clever. Always being one step ahead of the rest of us. Getting your little messages from the future. Well, I’m the queen. I figured it out. I sent back a message to myself. You remember that last message you received. Well, my future self was smarter. She piggy backed on it.”

  The fight with the creature was intensifying. Jay blasted the ground out from underneath it but it floated overhead. Their sword blows landed with thunderous power and even the A’snkarnt metal couldn’t stand up to it.

  “That doesn’t answer who your little friend is here,” Jay snapped back.

  “I told you, he is a fill in until you give in and accept your place at my side.”

  Jay stumbled and felt the bite of a PSI blade cut his hand off. The pain was sharp and sudden but then gone. He looked down and watched as his hand regrew right before his eyes. Bong-Cha’s power saved him in more than one way.

  He realized that he wasn’t alone in this. He had eighteen other parts to himself. This creature might have his base powers and Jasmine might be able to make him feel sluggish but she couldn’t take from him what was already a part of him. He simply needed to embrace the power of a harem.

  At an emotional level he sent out a cry for help to each of his fuses. Wife or not they all felt him. One by one they responded. He prohibited them from coming here. A hostage would make this situation impossible. He just needed them to lend him some of their strength.

  He couldn’t take it fully but having merged with some of them, overlapping their very channels. He knew that he could receive PSI energy from them even at a distance. His reserves swelled and his mind cleared. He moved faster and with more purpose. Perhaps even more importantly, they reminded him that he had something worth fighting for.

  Jasmine had nothing. She was alone and had corrupted or destroyed everything around him. He remembered the last chance he had given her at the end and how she had thrown it back in his face. She wanted control. Manipulation was in her blood. Well she would get no more chances from him.

  Jay focused again on his battle with what he now suspected was a clone of himself. He was now keeping ahead but that wasn’t enough. This wasn’t a battle between Jay and himself. He possessed within him the powers of all these others.

  In an instant the clone was suddenly dragged down to the ground, its body made impossibly heavy by an application of mass. A fine line of disintegration power then took its head from its shoulders. It was almost anti-climactic but it couldn’t have ended any other way once Jay remembered who he was. He was far more than just Jay. He was the sum of all his fuses put together.

  He lashed out at Jasmine and forced her to stumble back. Gathering PSI, he yelled, “I pronounce judgement on you. You have killed your fellow humans. You have sought to make this your personal playground. Your reckless disregard for the suffering and loss of life can have only one punishment. I declare that you shall feel the grief and suffering of all that you have hurt before.”

  He leveled Samantha’s judgment power on her so heavily that he pushed past the need for her acceptance. Jasmine screamed as her mind was flooded with the suffering of all those she had hurt. Not just here, but going back to her childhood. It broke the remnant of her fragile mind and her hold on Jay disappeared.

  Freed up he didn’t hesitate but instead leapt at her and sliced her from top to bottom and then lashed out with fire burning her before further separating the molecules of even the ash. Relief and sorrow settled in on him. It had had to be done, but she still was a final reminder of his early failures as a leader.

  Now though he felt peace. The flow of energy from his fuses ended. They could sense he was no longer in any danger. He caught his breath for a second and said to them all, “I’m coming home, save a seat on the bridge for me.”

  Chapter 40- Where to Now?

  Artificial gravity negated any sense of lift-off but the monitors still showed that they had pulled away from the ruined shell of the moon which had acted as a crust to the leviathan for so long. Only a quarter of the ship was leaving. The command and crew quarters along with some of the storage areas including the one holding the sleepers.


  Even reduced so dramatically in size the Ark was still massive. It still had a surface area of just less than six million square miles. Inside of it there would be living space for hundreds of thousands of humans or even more if they could learn to alter the inner structures.

  Gone were the dungeon floors and similar effects which had been created for the experiment. Now it was just the cold metal, flashing panels and such of a spaceship. It certainly wasn’t as inviting as their home on the sixth floor had been but on the other hand they were free now.

  “So where to, captain, oh my captain?” Amelia asked.

  Trust his first wife to know how to break him out of his own thoughts. He didn’t immediately answer the question but instead looked over at Charlotte who was operating one of the control stations. The irony was that the A’snkarnt ship was meant to be run by a very few people but when Huong and the others had fitted a command bridge it was more in the flavor of Star Trek. Apparently, Jessie had insisted.