Executor Rising: A GameLit/LitRPG Adventure (Magnus Book 2)

by Vowron Prime

  “All right, I have access,” she said a few minutes after connecting her own mobile terminal. “I have locked in Earth’s coordinates and begun charging the transit gateway.”

  “Excellent. How long are we looking at?”

  “I bypassed the charge rate limiters, so it should be ready in three hours.”

  The room’s blaring alarms also shut off, though that was more for their own peace of mind, given that the base was already alerted.

  “Nice work. Don’t you need the exact locations of the targets to teleport?”

  “That will come later, once the wormhole is established. Once stabilized, we can pull in almost anything from your world, so long as it fits within the wormhole.”

  “Convenient,” MC replied, activating Midar to sense the walls surrounding the room. He set to work reinforcing the adjacent walls, ceiling, and floor—completely filling in both of the room’s entrances, sealing the hemisphere in a cocoon of rock and metal.

  He didn’t stop there. Teleporting outside, he continued to fill in the two hallways on either side of the central room, reinforcing the material as he went. He’d walk some distance, turn the hallway behind him into a solid mass by pulling material from the floor, ceiling, and the surrounding rock, before teleporting to the other hallway on the other side of the control room. By the time he’d finished, it was as secure of a bunker as he could possibly hope to make it, fortified with dozens of feet of material where hallways once were.

  There was even one location where he’d relocated an entire section of a hallway to join some other hall—remodeling the floorplan of the facility in the hopes of confusing their attackers. Like a game of king of the hill, just that the hill happened to be an interplanetary teleporter.

  He returned to the teleporter to see a panic-stricken Nova furiously manipulating her holo-terminals.

  “Your remodeling efforts have not gone unnoticed.”

  “Yeah, between the blazing sirens and the blazing sirens, I somehow got that impression. So, what are we looking at?”

  To be on the safe side, he deployed the stealth field around Nova and himself—no need to let any potential eyes see what they were up to, just in case Dyn monitoring tech was better than Nova asserted.

  “I am bringing up the surrounding camera feeds… At least the ones that you haven’t yet turned into rock.”

  A holographic projection sprung up above the white console, giving them true 3-D imagery of the major rooms and corridors. MC circled the imagery, taking it in from various angles.

  As expected of an advanced alien race, their response times were even better than humanity’s very best. They already had lasers and plasma torches burning through the walls MC had set up, and their rate of progress was more than a little disturbing. If left to their devices, they’d break through in less than thirty minutes.

  Luckily, the bombardment from the right-side corridor was a lot less. For whatever reason, the cameras showed only one laser from that end, and despite the lesser amount of material in the way, they wouldn’t breach that side for at least another hour.

  Not that he was going to let them continue on their merry way.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Magnus, be careful?” Nova actually paused from furiously manipulating the controls to lock eyes with him.

  Even without the parasite being hard at work, it wouldn’t have been easy denying the warmth and happiness that swelled within him. Who else on this planet would care one iota about his wellbeing?

  He smiled. “Just who the hell do you think I am?”

  MC appeared in the outer hallway, a dozen yards behind the team of tripod drones, where he eviscerated them wholesale, fusing them into the bedrock below. The lone Ultimator that accompanied them soon met the same fate. He still had to take his time on those baddies on account of their obscene regenerative capabilities, but now that he’d learned the trick, they really didn’t seem all that fearsome anymore.

  With the enemies dispatched, he re-formed the melted section of wall, undoing the enemy’s progress before filling in more of the corridor, just in case. After confirming that there weren’t any more hostiles in the immediate area, he teleported back to the control room, then out to the other entrance, downing the enemies on that side in similar fashion.

  It quickly became a routine. Of killing. Of dismantling. Of killing.

  He’d take the encroaching enemies out, then return to the control room. Minutes later, they’d send another wave, with greater numbers. That happened a few times until they called off the attacks entirely. They must have realized that cramming more troops into a confined area was suicide, given that they’d no doubt been analyzing his abilities the entire time.

  While MC appreciated the break, it didn’t take a genius to realize that they were up to something. Even with conserving his energy, he was burning through his headache pool quicker than he’d have liked. It wasn’t yet a migraine, but if this kept up, he wasn’t sure he’d last another couple of hours.

  “Magnus, we have a problem!” Nova exclaimed, even as she continued fiddling with the computer. “My people are trying to reestablish control of the teleporter from a secondary control room. There is nothing I can do from here; they have a higher override authority.”

  Odd. There hadn’t been any secondary control room in the blueprints of the place. Could it have been a recent addition?

  “So you need me to go take them out? Show me how to get there.”

  She brought up a projected blueprint of the facility—it seemed the control room hadn’t been the only addition. There were several hallways he didn’t recognize; having committed the floorplan from Sareen’s crystal to memory, he could spot the differences. Of particular interest to him was a large two-story room he’d have to cross to get to the other control room. A room that had a single entrance and a single exit on the opposite side. The perfect chokepoint for an ambush.

  “Smart move. Rather than tunneling through the walls to fight on our terms, they’re forcing me out into the open. If they succeed, they’ll shut down our teleport and take me out at the same time. If they fail, they still lure me out, where they have a shot at killing me.”

  He turned toward Nova. “Will taking the command center out be enough?”

  The winged angel shook her head, handing MC her palm-sized terminal. “Take this with you. It will let us stay in contact. Once you arrive there, I will guide you to connect it to the local terminal on-site. I can disable it from there.”

  “You got it, boss,” he responded, sticking the terminal inside his armor’s chest pouch.

  A handful of short teleports put him just outside the large two-story chamber, the din of the alarms grating on his ears. For whatever reason, the facility was built like a maze of white, tunnel-like hallways with the occasional room jutting out from one of them. Not the most efficient architecture, but then again advanced aliens probably had other priorities with their base design.

  “I’m at the choke point.”

  He put a hand up to the wall adjacent to the room’s closed doors and briefly activated ground-penetrating Midar.

  What he saw did not instill confidence—eight Zevan-shaped figures, and four larger ones that were likely Ultimators. Two were hanging off the ceiling just inside the entrance. Finally, he counted about two dozen drones, all holding microwave emitters.

  The first thing he did was reach out with the relocator, but unsurprisingly found it blocked. In fact, relocation was impossible within the entire room, nullifying his “drop the ceiling on the enemy” tactic. Likewise for the floor—the barrier extended into the ground far enough that even if he relocated what was below, the floor would likely hold. The Dyn-trained Zevan mages clearly had better control over their barriers than their medieval counterparts. This was the first time he’d seen them shape it into such a complex shape.

  “Will you go through it?” Nova replied over the terminal’s comms system, the anxiousness evident in her voice.
<
br />   “Hell no.”

  Screw that.

  His unique abilities let him come up with tactics no one could possibly expect. So they wanted to force him through a kill zone? No fucking way.

  He’d be a fool to play their game. Instead, he backed off about twenty feet from the door and relocated large amounts of rock into the hallway leading up to the chamber, completely filling it in and trapping their forces inside. The enemy seemed to enjoy their choke points, so it only seemed fitting to choke them inside one.

  With the stealth field active, he then relocated a tunnel around the room, burrowing into the rock, completely bypassing the supposed room. The control room was the obvious priority, so he bored his tunnel directly to it using the map on Nova’s terminal to guide him. In what was now almost a habit, he filled the rock in behind him as he progressed, surrounding it in his stealth field to prevent the enemy from pinpointing his whereabouts.

  He closed the distance within minutes but stopped abruptly when he found the relocator blocked. A Midar ping confirmed the presence of a few entities within the circular room. A relocation attempt proved that some of them were Zevan mages, along with a handful of Ultimators. It was the same deal as the other room—the mages had completely covered the room, including about five feet of rock in all directions surrounding it.

  Changing tactics, he burrowed his way into an adjacent hallway protected by a lone Ultimator and a handful of drones. Their microwave emitters assaulted his barrier the instant he burst through, but the energy dampener was no longer just a shield. He activated the relocator, shunting that energy right back at the drones.

  The Zevan mages burst like balloons filled with green gelatinous goo, their innards splattering all over the immaculate hall. But the drones and the Ultimator remained unaffected. The tripods fired some kind of green bio gel out of what looked to be a shotgun-like flechette weapon.

  Dozens of goopy projectiles tore through the air, threatening to end him. Yet MC acted with a near-supernatural reflex forged from years of battle. He teleported past the projectiles, completely bypassing the attack. A good thing, too—hissing sounds from behind indicated that the stuff was highly corrosive.

  But whether they had been expecting the move, or if they simply had godly reflexes, both the Ultimator and the drones reacted instantly, hurling themselves backward. The cybernetic juggernaut extended its massive metal arm at him, which shifted and warped, turning into what looked like a rifle barrel.

  It didn’t do much good.

  With the Zevan barrier mages now dead, MC paid them no mind. He simply relocated the enemies into the Ultimator before relocating the mutilated wreckage into space.

  The Ultimators inside the control room were still alive and well, but that wouldn’t remain true for very long.

  He brought out a handful of .30 cal rounds and relocated the door into oblivion, hurling the rounds into the air with his cybernetic left. Yet just as they left his hand, he relocated them in quick succession, giving them both speed and spin to turn them into rifled bullets.

  They tore through the air to impale one of the mages, downing his barriers. That was enough to expose one of the Ultimators, which he relocated just like he did the bullet, hurling it across the room at the other Zevan mage. The mass of metal utterly crushed the poor Zevan, which ruptured in a shower of green blood.MC teleported back out of the room to safety, then bisected the torsos of every enemy in the room with a single relocation, sending their lower halves into space. The drones were out of commission, but he knew better than to assume the same of the Ultimator, who even now crawled its torso over to a weapon, its frame liquifying and shifting to compensate for the damage.

  So he split the asshole into thirds before sending each part a thousand miles away, deep within the planet. Perhaps overkill, but there was something to be said for peace of mind.

  When he entered the room, only corpses greeted him. Some mechanical, others organic, but all equally dead. He sealed the entrance behind him, then called his favorite angel.

  “Nova, I’m in position.”

  “Already? That was fast—I didn’t see you on the sensors until the very end.”

  “I took a detour. Tell me where to plug this thing in.”

  Under Nova’s guidance, he found the magnetic socket and plugged in the handheld device. He’d apparently made it with ample time to spare; Nova was able to override the lockdown, letting the teleporter continue to charge in a somewhat anticlimactic turn of events.

  “And I didn’t even have to cut the red wire...” he muttered.

  “Red wire? Our wires are not color-coded.”

  “Never mind.”

  Was he doomed to a future where no one understood his jokes? It sure as hell looked that way.

  As he prepared to depart, MC’s eyes lingered over a weapon that lay discarded on the ground—one of the microwave emitters wielded by the brainwashed Zevan. He picked it up, eyes full of anticipation like a kid on Christmas morning. But it was too good to be true. The weapon was keyed to its owner—he wasn’t able to operate it.

  As if reading his emotions, Nova’s melodic voice chimed in over comms. “I can reprogram the lock, so bring it back if you really want it. Though, with your powers, I cannot imagine why you would desire such a thing.”

  “Y’know, I think I’ll do just that!” He laughed. It’d been a while since he’d handled any sort of firearm, and it felt good.

  Thirteen

  With his mission accomplished, MC proceeded to hollow out a section of wall and enter it before the Harvester reinforcements arrived. He then stopped to relocate massive sections of rock into the room, completely filling the space and destroying whatever technology was in there. No one would use that room for anything related to teleportation again, that was for sure.

  He burrowed back to where he’d sealed off the choke point, confirming via Midar that the enemy forces were all still in there, slowly microwaving their way out.

  They’re more than welcome to try.

  Continuously filling in the hallways behind him, MC made his way back to the central teleporter. With their slow rate of tunneling, he’d effectively denied an attack route to the enemy, allowing him to focus on dealing with the other front from now on.

  Finished with his handiwork, he returned to Nova in the central command room.

  “How’re we doing?”

  “I have been overcharging the cells. It will reduce their life, but the teleporter should be ready within the next hour.”

  “Not like longevity will be a concern for this place, anyway. That is music to my ears.” And he meant it—shaving an hour or more off the charge time would make their lives a hell of a lot easier.

  “Thank you, but we have another problem. The facility’s external sensors are detecting inbound reinforcements. Chariots.”

  “We’re deep underground, though. What good are those here?”

  She brought up the sensor feed, which answered his question.

  “Well, isn’t that cute.”

  They can dive.

  Two magically shielded chariots broke through the surface ice, descending to the bottom of the shallow ocean. The facility’s exterior sensors lasted just long enough to show that they weren’t even bothering to land troops—the alien crafts activated some absurdly strong short-range plasma cutters, melting through the rock and the reinforced hallways he’d set up at a frightening pace.

  That was about all they saw before the exterior cams went dark, having been turned into slag.

  Nova looked over to MC. “What do we do?”

  Good question. His usual tactic of infiltrating within the chariots’ barrier to dismantle them wouldn’t work. In fact, it looked like the emitters had retracted entirely into the body, and the barrier had shrunk to wrap right around the bottom of the craft.

  What could he do in this situation?

  Well, there was always that, but it would suck balls.

  “Magnus? That look. I dislike that look.
”

  He grinned. “You mean the look that says, ‘I’m about to do something incredibly stupid, but it’ll probably save our lives’?”

  “Yes, precisely. Please don’t? You cannot afford to die here.”

  “That would be true for most people. But, see, I’m Magnus Fucking Cromwell, and there is nothing I cannot do.”

  He disappeared right after delivering those lines like the hero of some third-rate action movie.

  MC’s first stop was the section of corridor that was under assault—the one he’d mostly filled, and the same one they’d initially used to infiltrate the facility. The area was deserted, as expected. The heat from the chariots’ plasma cutters already permeated the room, even though they were yet to cut through the rock. They didn’t even bother to start with the exposed corridor—the chariots were carving a path directly to the control room, through hallway and rock alike.

  It was lucky that they hadn’t targeted the exposed cells that ran along the ocean floor; it seemed that they wanted to cause as little damage to the facility as possible.

  At least for now.

  A couple of Midar pings locked in his destination. He paused to take a deep breath. He was no stranger to risk, but this was going to take the cake. Whatever happened, it’d be an event to remember... assuming he made it out intact.

  Bellowing a roar, MC teleported out into the freezing ocean, right in the path of the plasma torch.

  The energy dampener formed into a tiny circular shield in front of him as it took the full onslaught of the blast. The barrier overloaded in half a second, but that was all the time he needed to activate the deflector shield, redirecting the beam right back at the submersible alien gunship.

  By now, he’d come to understand just how strong their armor was, so he didn’t even bother to try burning through it. Instead, he’d aimed the beam directly back at the plasma torch itself, instantly decimating it. He wasted no time teleporting over to the other chariot to repeat the action.

  Yet they either wised up to his tactics, or maybe it was just bad timing, because the superhot jet of flame traced an arc, moving right past the edge of his concentrated barrier onto his left arm. A half-second was all it took to melt his bio-cybernetic appendage into a steaming lump of metal, but the plasma cutter was in no better shape, similarly mauled and useless.