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

by Vowron Prime

  “Take this, you bastards!”

  Edana crushed the trigger. Forty Meteor Mk III air-to-air missiles erupted from their berths, drawing erratic paths as they danced through the air toward their assailants. Some were shot down. Most were not.

  A satisfying explosion painted the sky with fire. Then another Hasta erupted. And another.

  “Eighteen bogeys down!” she shouted, full of pride as Reaver tore through the smoldering wreckage of the enemy.

  “Edana, you’re a legend!” someone shouted.

  She smiled. “I can’t let Magnus steal all the glory now, can I?”

  But her elation was short lived. Her smile vanished when the remaining two Hastas emerged from the clouds, dead ahead. There was no time to react. Edana froze in horror as one of the craft collided with Reaver, shearing off its starboard wing.

  Sirens blazed within the cabin. The gunship spun madly, careening out of control.

  “Critical damage sustained: Aft tail stabilizers. Critical damage sustained: Starboard engine,” the ship’s onboard AI called out, displaying a heatmap of the ship. Several sections now shone bright red. Fires erupted through the cabin.

  Onboard extinguishers kicked in, turning the black smoke into a trail of white that spiraled as the gunship fell through the sky.

  More sections continued to flicker from green, to yellow, and finally to red.

  “CIC Command, this is Reaver. We are going down. I repeat, we are going down!”

  To her surprise, it was MC who responded.

  “Blow payload and retreat hypersonic. I repeat, eject. We can’t afford to lose you, Edana.”

  “Copy that, Machine One. All hands, brace for emergency hypersonic flight!”

  Edana pulled a massive lever at the center of the cockpit. The portside wing and its engine jettisoned from the ship, as did the damaged tail fin stabilizers. The massive howitzer and the 40mm artillery cannons fell free, along with two of the scramjets.

  An enormous parachute deployed, restabilizing the ship, though without its engines, it continued to fall.

  The remaining scramjet engines ignited, and with a series of shrieks and groans, the lightened craft shot through the sky, propelled by their awesome might.

  Accelerating at a rate of ten Gs, the gunship’s core hull and its crew were long gone before the Hastas could launch another attack. Pursuit wasn’t even a question—built as short-range fighters, their enemies simply lacked the capability to follow such a fast-moving craft.

  Reaver—or what was left of it—had escaped.

  “All units, this is Machine One. Reaver is out of commission. I repeat, we no longer have air support,” MC reported as he dodged the Trilnyth’s strikes. The lizard had somehow smelled him despite the illusion field strapped to his back, switching to close combat right after losing its weapon. MC and Krar were having a helluva time getting a hit in on the absurdly quick enemy.

  “But she did her job,” he continued, “the skies are now wide open for artillery bombardment. XAM operators—annihilate them.”

  Until now, the chariots covered the sky, effectively shielding the ground units below. Unlike Reaver’s direct fire arsenal, artillery relied on ballistic force; they’d have done next to nothing against the chariots’ heavy armor. But against the vulnerable, fleshy soldiers below? That was something else entirely.

  “Roger that, Machine One. Artillery, firing for effect.”

  Mushroom clouds erupted in a ring around MC’s position, incinerating the hordes of creatures with the supremely bad luck of being there at the time. MC assessed the battlefield just long enough to confirm that the tides were turning. He couldn’t afford to slack off; he had a Trilnyth to kill.

  Luckily, a solution happened to land in his lap just then.

  “Machine One, you have incoming! Three of the remaining chariots are charging their main guns. We believe they’re aiming for your position,” a CIC operator shouted over comms.

  “CIC, I need you to give me a—shit,” MC paused to deflect a vicious lizard claw. The Trilnyth was too close and moved too quickly for his Vulcan cannons to aim at, but that’s why Krar was there. He fired a missile right into the beast from point-blank range, sending the enemy flying.

  “Come again, Machine One?”

  “I said, tell me when they’re about to atta—”

  “Now! They’re firing now!” Nina shouted.

  “Thanks, princess.”

  MC activated the energy dampener, shrinking its surface to just barely cover the front of his suit—and not a moment too soon. An awe-inspiring amount of energy flooded the barrier, superheating everything its deadly fingers touched. The very air around them turned into plasma, the normally invisible barrier red-hot as it roasted under the onslaught.

  Preoccupied as he was, he failed to notice the dampener’s vidsphere filling with blood faster than ever before, quickly overflowing its gory container.

  The downed Trilnyth struggled to its feet after Krar’s attack. Seizing the opportunity, MC imprisoned the enemy in an enclosed rock structure.

  The Trilnyth punched through immediately, but MC had been expecting that.

  “Game over, asshole!”

  As the headache crushed him and the dampener was about to burst, MC unleashed the torrent upon his hapless foe. All at once. An obscene amount of both laser and microwave radiation assaulted the massive lizard.

  Its armor deflected the vast majority of the energy, but the three juicy brains strapped onto its back weren’t so lucky. Their armor was lighter. Light enough that they vaporized into a pink mist, bringing down the golden barrier surrounding the beast.

  Since the chariots were gracious enough to continue their barrage, MC swept the deflected beam across the battlefield, roasting every mutated Zevan and werebeast in the vicinity, before pointing the flood of energy back at a chariot, melting its weapons. The remaining chariots shut down their beams before he could do any more damage. Too bad.

  MC took a knee as blood rushed out of his facial orifices; deflecting such tremendous energy came with a cost. The suit’s autodoc kicked in, pumping him full of painkillers. The pain barely registered.

  What mattered was that the Trilnyth’s shield was down, and though it attempted to flee as fast as it could, it was generally a bad idea to play tag with someone who could teleport. MC grabbed Juri’dur’s head, pinning the abomination in place long enough to activate the relocator.

  Then he went to town, severing bits of brain, heart, and organs before fusing rock and dirt into its mutilated corpse. The Trilnyth crumpled, but MC wasn’t done. He decapitated the lizard, then split its head into halves, fourths, and eighths. He did this for each part of its body, before relocating the tiny pieces deep into the earth, hundreds of yards apart.

  If anything in this universe could survive such a complete and total annihilation, he’d happily swallow a lead bullet.

  Krar floated over as he sat down to recover. “We have prevailed,” the hovering alien reported. “The horde is in full retreat, as are the remaining hovertanks.”

  MC nodded, utterly exhausted. “All units, this is Machine One. Fallback to Sanctuary. We’re done here.”

  With a series of hops, MC teleported with Krar away from the field, taking up a position next to the main battle tank at the defensive perimeter their troops had built around the nearby hill.

  MC relocated the tank through its portal back to Sanctuary. After each squad had reported they were safely through, he deactivated every teleportal he’d set up in the underground tunnels, leaving the one behind them open as an escape route.

  “Well, then,” he said, surveying the smoldering battlefield, “I’d say that’s mission-fucking-accomp—”

  “Magnus, Sanctuary is compromised! Shit! Shit shit shit!” Nina panicked.

  “Slow down. What happened, princess?”

  “Nova’s—the Legatus. Fuck! Magnus, it was a trap. The Legatus fucking booby-trapped Nova’s family. They were in the medbay when they ju
st… exploded.”

  Dread froze MC’s veins.

  “How is that possible? I thought I told you to have the techs check them out!”

  “We did!” Nina said, her voice trembling. “Our engineers scanned their pods in the portal room while I literally restrained Nova from running in there. They checked them four times over, but they found nothing. The bombs were inside the captives. Magnus, Sanctuary’s in chaos. You need to get back here. Now.”

  MC’s heart skipped a beat. “Nina, are you all right? Is Nova… Is she all right?”

  Silence.

  Nina took a deep breath. “I’m okay. I was in the CIC. But Nova… Magnus, she was right next to them when the bombs went off. I don’t think she made it.”

  Fifty-Five

  MC returned to a Sanctuary drowning in confusion and chaos. Emergency lights cast the vast space in a hellish crimson glow as damage crews scrambled in every direction, their flashlights strobing chaotically.

  “Where’s Nova?” he bellowed, grabbing a nearby engineer with his armored suit’s hand.

  “I’m sorry, Executor, I do not know!”

  “Magnus! Over here!” shouted Nina from the other end of the hangar.

  “Nina, I want to see her body,” MC commanded, teleporting up to her.

  “Magnus, listen to me. All the doors in Sanctuary slammed closed as soon as the power went out. We’ve got engineers melting through the medical bay doors right now, but we can get through a helluva lot faster now that you’re here. Help them!” she cried, pointing to Sarek and a gaggle of techs who’d huddled around the medbay’s blast doors.

  Fuck.

  MC teleported to them, shoving everyone aside. With a single relocation, the door disappeared, fused to the wall next to it. He rushed inside.

  A hellscape awaited him. The blast had ravaged everything. There were no fires, because the very oxygen had been consumed by the blast. With eyes that stung, MC retched and coughed his way across the devastated hospital. He pushed aside melted medical equipment in a desperate bid to find any sign of life. Bloodstains painted the walls and limbs of various sizes decorated the floor. Torsos, intestines, brain matter. All strewn about.

  Why couldn’t I protect her?

  MC’s mind was a chaotic din of disjointed thoughts, but his years of experience squashed any delusions of hope. Deep down in the pit of his stomach, he knew. No one could have possibly survived this explosion.

  Why her?

  MC wailed as he threw equipment across the room in his efforts to uncover the angel’s body. Or what was left of it.

  Why her? WhyherWhyherWhyher?

  Why did it have to be Nova, of all people? Nova—whom he’d grown so close to. Nova—who wanted nothing more than to do some good in this fucked up world. Who’d just begun to stand on her own two feet for the first time in her life.

  He knew why, of course; she must have been over the moon to see her family safe. Even now, he could clearly picture that gentle smile of hers, her expression full of delight to be reunited with her loved ones.

  “Either help or get out of the way!” Sarek’s voice brought him back to reality.

  Apparently, MC had begun staring off into the void in a daze.

  This wasn’t the first gruesome scene MC ever seen, nor even the hundredth. But this one hit him more than the combined impact of every other tragedy he’d had the misfortune of experiencing. She really had become like family in their short time together.

  To have it all end like this… No.

  No!

  He shook his head.

  I refuse to accept this.

  All of this had happened before. On a dark night, decades ago where he’d been forced to watch his family burn. Helpless to interfere as his mother pleaded for him to take his sister and run, even as her face melted.

  But this is different.

  A thought nagged at the back of his mind like an itch he couldn’t scratch. A tiny voice. One that told him that something didn’t add up here. Others may have ignored it, but not MC. Because that very voice had saved his ass more times than he could count, and when it spoke, he listened.

  “Sarek? Where’s her body?”

  The scientist gave him a distasteful look. “How should I know? There’s so much wreckage here, parts of her body could be anywhere! It’ll take us hours to sift through this mess.”

  “The blast killed everyone in this room, but their bodies haven’t vaporized,” MC said, gesturing to an arm that peeked out from under a pile of metal debris. “There should be evidence of her body. Find it. Now.”

  He immediately began relocating the wreckage away, uncovering every body in the room, one by one. The job was as grotesque as one might imagine. The only silver lining was that MC could move the corpses’ fragments without having to physically touch them.

  He started slow. With each limb relocated, his heart jumped a beat. With each body that didn’t belong to Nova, his hope grew. One by one, body parts appeared at the center of the room. A torso, followed by an arm, followed by a leg. Another torso. A head.

  After piecing together dozens of limbs, fitting them together like a perverse jigsaw puzzle, the truth became obvious.

  “Nova’s body isn’t here.”

  The small flame in his heart began to grow.

  “She’s not here!” he repeated.

  “That’s impossible,” Sarek said. “The blast doors sealed immediately. She couldn’t have gotten out.”

  “Except… the EMP went off about a minute before the explosion, remember?” Nina said, taking deep breaths, looking like she was about to throw up—again. Based on her sickly pallor, she likely already had.

  “You really shouldn’t be here, princess.”

  “I, uh, yeah. That ship kinda sailed. But I have to see this. This is our enemy, Magnus. Running and pretending otherwise isn’t going to do anyone jack shit,” she said, forcing herself to look at the mangled corpses.

  “As I was saying, there were two blasts,” Nina continued, “the EMP that took down main power and knocked the CIC offline. Then the entire base rumbled about a minute later. When the diesel backup kicked in, we realized that a bomb had gone off in the medbay. That’s when I called you.”

  “And you’re saying that happened an entire minute after the EMP went off?” MC asked, deep in thought. “With the base offline, the medbay cameras would’ve shut off too, so we can’t use those to figure out what actually happened here.”

  “You think Nova’s alive?” Nina asked breathlessly.

  “I don’t know what to think, princess, but something doesn’t add up here. One thing’s for sure, though: Nova’s body’s missing. So either her body was perfectly erased from existence, or she wasn’t here when it blew.”

  MC turned to Sarek. “I want every vidfeed analyzed when the base comes back online. I don’t give a damn how many people it takes. Sarek, we need to understand what happened here.”

  “For what it’s worth, I do agree with your theory,” the scientist replied, nodding. “This bomb was not an antimatter device. The damage patterns more closely resemble chemical explosives, so if Nova was here, we’d at least have seen some evidence.”

  “But if she’s not here… then where the hell is she?” It wasn’t as if the Legatus had a base on this continent. At least, not that the Resistance intelligence network knew of, anyway.

  MC clenched his cybernetic fist.

  You better be alive, Nova. You have to be.

  Preoccupied as they were, no one noticed Krar and Torneus enter the room.

  “The situation is dire, Magnus,” Krar reported. “The EMP disabled the power control systems, which in turn caused the base’s stealth systems to fail. Morvotal tells me that while the fusion reactor is still online, the illusion generators are down.”

  “So we’re sitting ducks.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Torneus. “Just before Sanctuary’s long-range sensors went down, they registered an extremely strong signal emanating f
rom within Sanctuary itself. I believe that the Legatus’s plan was to ascertain Sanctuary’s location.”

  The pieces were starting to fit together. For one, the hostage rescue had felt too easy. Then there was the EMP, followed by the signal, followed by the explosion. But why was Nova’s body missing? The Legatus’s actions made sense if his goal was to find Sanctuary. But MC just didn’t understand how Nova fit into all of this.

  “So we’re sitting ducks with bull’s-eyes on our backs,” MC replied. “Just great. Let me guess—the Legatus has a fleet of ships headed our way?”

  “Indeed. The Eye in the Sky network has detected the signature of a Tensa capital ship bearing straight for us. Tensas always fly with chariot support, so we can be sure that the enemy will field several. Expect Hasta bombers as well.”

  “Great. Just fucking great. All while we’ve got our pants down, no less and… Oh, fuck no. There’s more?” Torneus’s expression said it all. “Sir, we’ve picked up a number of strategic launches from several sites across the planet. We believe the Legatus is deploying spaceborne energy weapons platforms to destroy our satellites.”

  MC didn’t respond. He didn’t need to; the ferocity of his expression caused the alien to shrink back. MC seethed with cold fury. He cursed their luck. He cursed his own failure to protect someone dear to him—someone who trusted him. And most of all, he cursed the pansy-ass motherfucker who dared to exist in the same universe as him.

  “... annihilate him,” he whispered to no one in particular. “I’m going to dismantle the Legatus. Then I’m going to reassemble his body and repeat the process until he breaks. You’d be surprised how much torture the body can take. It’s resilient. Strong. Unlike the mind. Oh, don’t worry; I’m not going to kill him. No, I’ll just leave him without his limbs. Without his tongue, or his eyes, or his ears. He’ll live the rest of his centuries of life in total darkness. Crippled, broken, and alone. I never thought I’d have to inflict that fate upon anyone ever again, but life is just chock full of surprises, isn’t it?”

  Krar, Torneus, and even Nina all took a half-step back.