Disciple of the Dead (Seraphim Revival Book 3)

by Jacob Holo

  “What about warriors?” Tesset asked.

  “Haven’t come across any.”

  Jack cut his way through a sealed security door and pushed the glowing edges aside, revealing a wide domed space. A control tower sat in the middle and merged with the high ceiling above. A barren metal field separated him from the tower.

  Turrets sprouted from the tower and the dome walls in metal blisters. A dozen armored aircars hovered nearby. Hundreds of Outcast warriors in assault armor crouched behind heavy barricades or levitated around the tower with flyer packs. They carried everything from anti-personnel carbines to high-powered anti-vehicle lasers.

  Every gun was aimed at him. The Outcasts knew exactly where he’d go.

  “OH, F—!” Jack began.

  Twenty-seven crimson lasers and over two hundred projectile weapons fired at once. The security door melted like wax. His barrier shimmered around him as explosions flung him back.

  Jack struck the far wall and fell into soft, heated metal. He dashed to the side, desperate to put anything between himself and all that firepower. The shooting stopped as soon as he cleared the now-oozing doorway.

  “I can’t… believe… I’m alive!” Jack panted. He shook molten goo off his hands.

  His stealthsuit was a charred mess stuck to his skin. Blood trickled from the old wound over his eye, and he wiped it away before it blinded him. His blood glowed bright blue.

  “Jared, a little help here!”

  ***

  “Coordinates confirmed.” Jared pulled above the Vigilant Sentinel. He flared his wings out and rocketed down, crashing feet first into the rounded surface.

  Particles of red energy gathered in front of his fist and coalesced into a solid blade of energy. Jared stabbed the chaos dagger into the Sentinel’s outer hull, jammed his free hand into the glowing tear, and peeled back the armor.

  Smart keels within the Sentinel’s hull attempted to maintain the fortress’s structural shape. They fought vainly for a few seconds before Jared ripped a patch of reflective armor completely off the hull.

  Jared checked his targeting coordinates and re-verified Jack’s position. In direct contrast to most seraphs, and especially the standardized Earth Nation designs, Jared had customized his with two forward-firing railguns mounted in the head. He armed these now and selected ammunition types and firing parameters for maximum penetration.

  The twin railguns spewed a continuous stream of hyper-dense kinetic bolts. These projectiles pierced through corridor after corridor, armor layer after armor layer, each bolt crudely drilling towards Jared’s intended targets.

  Two hundred bolts per second blew through the roof of the control tower dome in a continuous metal sleet. The stream of fire shredded turrets, troops, and vehicles with indifference.

  Jared adjusted his angle, raking the Outcast lines with fire.

  “Goddamn, that’s loud!” Jack said.

  “Incoming archangels!” Yonu shouted.

  Jared ceased fire and looked up. Twelve fold points spread out far above the Vigilant Sentinel, each a delicate ring of refracted light. At the heart of each ring was an archangel, reflective plated armor gleaming like silver, chaos shunts burning with blue fire. They spread their large twin wings and dove towards the planet.

  “Jared, I can handle what’s left!” Jack said. “Don’t let those archangels get close!”

  His accelerated mind analyzed the surviving forces. Over a fifth remained.

  “You know your own limits.” Jared pushed off the Vigilant Sentinel and flared out his six wings. “Tesset, keep close to Jack. We’ll handle the archangels.”

  “Understood.”

  The edges of Jared’s wings blurred with red light, and he shot up through the wispy high-altitude cloud cover. Yonu fell into formation, and they both sped towards the approaching archangel squadron.

  Beneath them, the Vigilant Sentinel’s massive frame broke through the same clouds, continuing its slow ascent.

  “Jack, we’re running out of time,” Jared said.

  “I’m working on it!” Jack shouted. “Whatever happened to pushing this piece of junk out of the sky?”

  “That was before archangels started showing up. We need to deal with them first.”

  The squadron of archangels broke into two groups of six. One group held back with rail-rifles drawn. The other drew their chaos swords and charged straight at Jared and Yonu.

  Jared docked his rail-rifle and retrieved a double-edged sword from the opposite wing cluster. The edges ignited instantly with red fire. Yonu pulled her own sword out and lit it with blue energy.

  The archangel gun-line fired a continuous salvo of high velocity projectiles at the two Alliance seraphs. Several shots hit, striking Jared’s barrier in brief flashes. Each impact sent a jolt of scorching pain through his mind.

  Jared reared back with his chaos sword and sped straight at the lead archangel. He and the archangel swung almost at the same moment, and their swords met in a snap-flash of competing energies.

  The archangel’s blade shattered, and Jared cut through its chest, liquefying the reflective plates. He pulled the sword out the archangel’s back, leaving two uneven sections in his wake. Thick blue fluid pulsed out of its wounds, slowly turning black as the fluid’s absorbed chaos energy dissipated.

  The clash had taken only a fraction of a second, but to Jared’s chaos-infused mind, every microsecond had been a separate discernible incident, and he was capable of comprehending and reacting to each of them almost instantly.

  Two more archangels swooped down on him, their swords held high. Jared shot up with a quick burst of speed, flew past one, then swung into the second archangel. Their blades met, but this archangel’s weapon held.

  Jared jerked to the side, spun, and slashed through the archangel’s wrist. Fluidic transfer lines, artificial musculature, and endoskeletal struts offered no resistance, and he pulled his sword free with a spray of hot conductor fluid.

  Jared hewed the archangel’s chest with a quick diagonal stroke. Another archangel came at him from behind, and he dropped down faster than the archangel could track and fired his forearm-mounted cannon.

  The beam of white plasma cascaded off the archangel’s barrier and threw it into a wild spiral. Jared swooped up, cleaving through the archangel’s waist as he flew past. Legs and torso floated lazily away from each other. He looped around and headed for Yonu.

  She floated amongst a sea of severed limbs, shorn wings, and expanding fluid clouds. Her unblemished seraph dueled with an archangel, their swords clashing and spitting energy.

  Jared pumped a cannon shot into the archangel. His beam pierced its barrier and struck one of the wings. Armor melted and the wing warped, sending the craft into a wild tumble.

  Yonu cut it down. She formed up with Jared, the archangel splitting in two behind her.

  Another rail-rifle volley sparked against the two seraph’s barriers. Jared grunted from the sudden feedback. In the cockpit, burns formed on his true body’s skin.

  “Close and engage.” Jared and Yonu sped towards the last six archangels.

  Unlike the first group, these were armed with rail-rifles, fusion cannons, and conformal missile pods. They still had swords, allowing them to engage seraphs at close range, but that was not their primary function.

  So it surprised Jared when they turned and ran. Veketon’s archangels did not feel fear as far as anyone knew. They fought hard and fought intelligently, but they did not run from a fight.

  Not unless ordered to, Jared thought. His overactive mind worked through the possible explanations.

  “Ahead of us,” Yonu said. “Second archangel squadron folding. Looks like they’re trying to link up.”

  A fresh squadron of twelve archangels pulled away from their fold distortions and shook out into a line abreast.

  Jared checked their entry coordinates. They’d entered the system safely clear of the planet’s gravity well. Too safely. If the enemy wanted to aid the aeri
al fortress, they would fold in as close to the Vigilant Sentinel as possible.

  Therefore, that was not Veketon’s goal.

  Jared nodded grimly.

  “We’re being led away from the Sentinel,” he said. “Fall back to it, now!”

  Jared turned around and accelerated towards the planet surface. Beneath them, the Vigilant Sentinel rose through the rapidly thinning atmosphere.

  “Jack, the Sentinel is going to be fold-capable soon. What’s your status?”

  “Delayed! It’s taking me a while to kill all these jerks!”

  Jared detected several long range threats in addition to the eighteen archangels above them. Twelve orbital weapon platforms were shifting their orbits and converging on the Sentinel’s expected position.

  “Things are getting worse out here, Jack. Hurry it up!”

  “I’m trying!”

  A pair of fold points spasmed open halfway been Jared and the Vigilant Sentinel. Ripples of light expanded around two lithe human shapes, one nearly all white, the other nearly all black. Instead of wings, large halos spun behind their backs at high velocities, disjoined from the main body. Patterns of arcs, circles, and moon phases scrolled up the legs, forearms, sides of the torso, and within the halo-wings.

  “Thrones!” Yonu shouted. “THRONES!!!”

  Veketon’s white throne descended towards the Vigilant Sentinel. He held a portal lance in his left hand, the shaft’s continuous script burning with blue fire.

  “Jack, incoming throne!” Jared shouted.

  “Well, crap!”

  Quennin’s black throne turned towards Jared and shot straight at him. She held a long chaos glaive with both hands, her vent-like shunts radiating black energy with a ghostly green nimbus.

  “Deploying reinforcements,” Seth said, his voice impossibly calm.

  An intra-gate formed near the thrones, and seven seraphs poured through, Seth in the lead of Knight Squadron. Almost immediately, another two full squadrons of archangels folded in and swarmed over Knight Squadron. The other eighteen archangels waiting above now dove into the atmosphere, heading for Jared and Yonu.

  “We need to regroup with Seth,” Jared said. “Follow me!”

  “Right behind you.”

  Quennin flew out to interdict them. Yonu fired her fusion cannon, but the beam splashed off the throne’s barrier.

  “Run home little seraphs,” Quennin said.

  “Traitor!” Yonu spat. “We’re not leaving until Veketon is dead!”

  “And I will not let you harm him!” Quennin flew straight in, chaos glaive at her side, black armor gleaming in the sunlight.

  Jared charged her and swung with all the speed and power at his command. She countered, glaive clashing against his sword in a flash of black and red energy.

  Blistering pain danced up Jared’s arm. Transfer lines overpressurized, bursting armored skin open and leaking fluid into space. Yellow warnings lit up in his mind, cautioning that his forearm’s main endoskeletal struts were cracked in three places. Internal systems closed off the ruptured lines and bypassed the damage.

  Jared pushed the pain out of his mind and raised his arm for another strike.

  Quennin slashed across with her glaive, and Jared barely brought his sword down in time to meet the attack. Sword met glaive with terrible force, and he tumbled back from the throne.

  Yonu dove in. Quennin drew her glaive upward, and the two smashed against each other. The impact threw Yonu’s arm wide, and Quennin sliced across, cleaving through her forearm and clipping her shoulder.

  “Yaaahhhhh!!!”

  Yonu’s horrible scream filled his ears. But even as pain must have wracked her mind and burns savaged her body, she did not lose discipline. She pulled away with a burst of speed, granting Jared the time he needed to come to her aid.

  Quennin saw him coming and spun her glaive, blocking the attack and forcing his sword high. With her free hand, she lunged with long talons edged in chaos energy.

  Three fingers struck his chest, cutting shallow grooves through his armor. In the cockpit, three lines sizzled across his true chest. His i-suit reported deep burns and automatically extended nano-cilia to repair the wounds.

  Jared jerked away and crash-launched every munition in his inventory. Thirty fusion torpedoes and sixty tactical seekers blasted out of his conformal pods in one tremendous salvo and detonated.

  The ordnance bloomed into a small sun and flung Quennin back.

  Jared and Yonu regrouped, keeping their distance.

  Quennin emerged from the fading explosion, her throne undamaged.

  “Those archangels are getting close,” Yonu said, her voice quiet and shaky.

  “We still need to reach Seth.”

  But despite their weakened state, Quennin did not attack. Instead, she turned sharply and accelerated towards the Vigilant Sentinel, the edges of her halo-wings burning with urgency.

  “Someone get over here!” Tesset shouted. “I can’t stop them on my own! They’re going to kill Jack!”

  ***

  Jack cut through the Outcast warriors in a whirlwind of sword swipes and crackling blue energy. He sprinted past them, their hewn bodies still slumping to the ground. He didn’t have the hypercast buffer because there was no buffer! The hypercast traffic of the entire fortress had been faked!

  Vek beat us again!

  “Tesset, what’s your status?” Jack shouted.

  “Not good! Get out here NOW!”

  Emergency airlocks had sealed off his seraph’s “dock.” Jack cut through one and pushed past it. Air blasted into space. Once free of the door’s wreckage, he ran past mangled sections of the hull and climbed towards his seraph’s perch.

  Out here, huge sections of the hull were missing. The blackness of space gave way to the wide dome of the planet below and the long lens of the galactic core above.

  In between those two visual cues, a white throne flew straight at him.

  “There you are,” Veketon linked.

  Jack tried to shout an obscenity, but his lungs were empty.

  Veketon landed on the Sentinel, sending a tremendous shudder reverberating through the fortress. Jack grabbed hold of a twisted section of wall to regain his balance. He stared into the throne’s face, into the eyes of its white mask.

  “A pity it ends so simply.” Veketon raised his portal lance. The tip shone with terrible blue light.

  But before he could plunge the lance into the fortress, Tesset materialized behind him. She raised her rail-carbine’s bayonet and brought it swiftly down on Veketon’s primary halo-wing.

  The blade sparked against the halo-wing as if it were a grind stone, throwing Veketon’s thrust off course. The portal lance stabbed into the Sentinel several decks below Jack’s position. Veketon pulled the lance free and swung his weapon in a wide reaching arc.

  Tesset dashed back, but the tip of the lance grazed her rail-carbine. Arcane energy flickered outward, and the rail-carbine blew apart in her hands.

  Tesset! Jack’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.

  Veketon thrust sharply. The portal lance skewered her hand and bored through her arm, scattering pieces of armor, artificial musculature, and energized conductor fluid into space.

  “Aaaahhh!!!”

  Jack heard her scream over their hypercast link, and he wasn’t the only one. Seth broke off from the archangel swarm and dove towards the Vigilant Sentinel, but there was no way he would make it in time. Veketon reeled back for a killing blow, even as Tesset’s seraph faded from view.

  But before Veketon could strike, Jack’s seraph tackled him from behind, shocking Jack and everyone else. He hadn’t had time to call it in, and yet the seraph was exactly where it needed to be, wrestling this terrible foe away from Tesset.

  The white seraph held onto one of Veketon’s halo-wings and pulled him violently back, then grabbed the portal lance. Fountains of barrier energy erupted around both hands, and Jack felt his seraph’s pain as surely as if it were his own
. He saw what it saw, felt what it felt.

  The berserker seraph flared its wings, fired them at full power, and drove Veketon into the Vigilant Sentinel’s warped side. The immaculate white throne sank into the hull, halo-wings spinning and shredding through level after level. Veketon struggled to free himself from the wreckage.

  Come on, buddy! Jack mouthed.

  The seraph turned to him.

  It smashed a giant white hand into the hull next to Jack, fingers digging through armor as if it were soft butter. Jack ran onto the hand, and his seraph pulled him to the opening cockpit.

  Veketon freed himself from the Sentinel’s hull, drew his lance behind him, and charged. He swung, but the seraph caught it as Jack jumped into the cockpit.

  The lines between seraph and pilot blurred. The discord between their shared minds and disparate bodies dimmed to nothing. They were one and the same. The seraph was Jack, and he was the seraph.

  Jack held the portal lance tight, heat and pain scorching his palm. With his left arm, he summoned a long sword of blue chaos energy and slammed the blade against Veketon’s lance, knocking it away. With both arms free, Jack let the flows of chaos energy converge over his right forearm, forming a large kite-shaped shield of energy.

  “Now now, Vek. Be a good boy and fight fair.”

  Throne and seraph floated across from each other, circling above the Sentinel’s ruined core.

  “You know, I actually prefer it this way.” Veketon spun the lance and readied it behind him.

  “Then show me what you’ve got!” Jack charged. He slashed his huge energy sword down, and Veketon blocked with the lance. Wild energy sparked from the contact point. The two weapons ground against each other, neither possessing the advantage.

  Jack pushed in and stabbed Veketon with edge of his shield, but only grazed the throne’s armor. Veketon rotated the lance in a tight arc, shoving Jack’s attack away and bringing the lance edge around. Jack fell back and blocked with his sword. The two weapons clashed again and released a powerful shock wave. Huge chunks of the Sentinel’s hull tore loose.

  “Behind you!” Tesset shouted.

  Jack spun around to find Quennin diving at him, chaos glaive held high over her head. He flared his wings and pulled away. The edge of her glaive ricocheted off his shield as she passed, and she landed heavily on the Sentinel before launching herself again.