Data file R-5: Breakers/Critical Strikes

  [A “breaker” is the logical extreme of a fighter amping their concussive shots with power crystal weaponry. It launches a shockwave of excess energy through a target, often shattering armor and opening a kill opportunity. Rasil’s Q-3 recon pistol, being an explosive stun weapon, was designed for these attacks, and has been known to score breakers on roughly 80% of its hits.

  Most using a breaker or similarly extreme flows will direct the energy in a unique way or with a specific technique, leading to special attacks called critical strikes. A critical strike can be virtually anything, but it is often a rarely seen final technique that reaps far greater destruction than an ordinary attack.

  Additionally, at the request of Queen Sophia, critical strikes in this archive will be marked and named when fired. For example: [Twin Rail Beam].]

  ***

  Flameye had bailed decently fast after the scuffle in Flash-flood Tunnel, having fully teleported with no trace, and Alyssa and Rasil were left in silence with no more racazoids pursuing them. Rasil still checked the area where Flameye had stood, his hands combing the walls, hoping to locate any visual cues or residue. There was nothing. “Can you sense Gears?” Rasil asked Alyssa quietly.

  “Not yet," was the reply. After a second, she closed her eyes and corrected, “Faintly now.” Sure enough, when Rasil opened a door out of the corridor, he saw Gears standing there, waiting for them.

  “Did you find Flameye?” Gears asked.

  “Yes," Rasil answered.

  “And did you learn anything we didn’t already know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Care to share that information with me?”

  “Only when we’re out of this tunnel," Rasil pressed.

  “Please, I’m fine,” Alyssa said. But even so, as Rasil shoved Gears aside, lightly, and walked through the doorway, Alyssa trailed just behind him. She was no longer panicked, but the level of unease was visible. Rasil didn’t blame her for feeling scared after that battle. After all, not many people would get launched by Flameye, and even fewer had to land in raging waters with racazoids trying to drown them.

  “You know I’m fine, right?” Alyssa insisted. Rasil gave a smile they both knew was fake. Fine wasn’t quite good enough for them. A success meant victory; anything less was a scuffle through which nobody could feel assured.

  ***

  At the racazoids’ main stronghold, Flameye was similarly mourning his failure. Surrounded by the dim light of the torches upon the walls and the dreadful ashen wind that constantly billowed through the air, he stomped back and forth beside his throne. “How could I fail?! I can’t even die!” he roared in anger, an almost confused growl in his voice. Upon hearing his attitude, the nearest racazoid trooper shifted slightly away from him, pretending it hadn’t noticed.

  “Maybe it IS all the drama," Flameye wondered. “I do tend to give him too many opportunities; I wait for him to get up when I knock him down...” He kicked the ground aggressively and reconfigured his talons when they broke. “Or maybe, we both lost, and I just took a single step back while he took two. Yes, I shouldn’t change the way I fight! I just need to recognize a good situation for a good situation. He may have learned, but I get infinite tries! I am immortal!”

  ***

  “He’s immortal now?” Sophia gasped, raising a hand to her mouth. “How?”

  “The Shadowbane Amulet," Rasil replied, pacing across Sophia’s bedroom. “I can’t give exact details, but let’s just say that the time energy wasn’t destroyed when I broke it.”

  This time, Gears interjected. Standing just outside the door, he said, “The Amulet’s power is coursing through Flameye, repairing him constantly, like chimera, but unending.” He pulled out a data file and read from it as he added, “I translated several lines of racazoid speech from the tunnel, and they’re calling him ‘The Chimera Wraith.’”

  “Fitting," Rasil cut in.

  Sophia sighed before asking, “Did we give him what he always wanted while trying to stop him?”

  Rasil shook his head and replied, “Actually, no. He seemed to feel the pain of every attack, and it’s frustrating him to the point that he may make novice mistakes. Gears, check previous data on Flameye’s behavior and cross-reference it with racazoid movements currently. Find a difference we can exploit.”

  “If he’s more fragile mentally, then I’ll focus the troops on stalling until we can deduce the full power of these chimera racazoids," Sophia finished before pushing Rasil and Gears out of her room and calling in Jason.

  Gears slipped down to his lab to focus on his research, while Rasil headed back to the throne room. He stepped through the door into the expansive space and looked around. Without Sophia, there were few people present, just the occasional guard patrolling here or there. However, a certain mercenary just happened to walk out from behind a pillar.

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  “Alyssa," Rasil called as he ran over to her. “I wanted to thank you for your help down there. I wouldn’t have made it alone.” Alyssa shrugged, averting her eyes.

  “Well, it was a job, Rasil.”

  “A job in which you helped.”

  “You are strangely grateful for someone who didn’t win the fight.”

  “But I did?”

  “No, you didn’t," Alyssa stated firmly. “Flameye got stronger, and despite your own increase in skill, he went from failing against you to matching your blows in minutes. You don’t know how to counter him.”

  “Do you?” Rasil asked. Realizing how that sounded, he quickly interjected, “I mean, I’d like to hear any advice you might have, because I trust you’ve been at this longer than I.”

  “I have, yes," she replied. She looked back at him, giving his whole body a once-over, down to his stance. Her own eyes gleamed for just a flash before the moment passed, but something had made her shift into a more confident posture herself. “If you want, I actually do have some things to show you.”

  ***

  Gears and Helios, meanwhile, were already down in the lab. While Gears took notes on Rasil’s full report, Helios sat atop one of the pivoting desk chairs, spinning it in a circle. “Wheee...” he quietly cheered. Gears looked in Helios’s direction and chuckled. It definitely hadn’t taken any time for Helios to be at home in the base.

  “Hey, Helios," Gears asked, “Have you ever studied time energy movement?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “It seems to move on its own, without any influence, but the data keeps contradicting itself before I can find a pattern in how exactly it chooses where to go.”

  Helios landed on Gears’s shoulder and reminded him, “Flameye creates time energy in his new form, right? Just track data on where his energy goes when he gets hit with a breaker, or overloads from an attack. Exhaust of any kind doesn’t just vanish.”

  “Great ideas.” Gears started inputting the numbers into his files. The calculations started to run for a moment, before a beeping noise emanated from one of the file drives. Gears growled a bit and pulled the file, only to find another contradiction. “Except the air’s too diluted because of chimera! How am I supposed to find Flameye’s movements if I don’t figure this out? Racazoid deployments could easily be decoys, so I need more viable information.”

  “As rain washes down a mountain toward its shed, so do our plans wash away," Helios mourned poetically. His attempts to sound poetic rarely had any value to them, but...

  “What did you say?” Gears asked.

  “As rain washes down a mountain—”

  “Toward what?”

  “Toward its watershed, why?”

  Gears took a tense moment to answer, as he was rethinking his approach. When he had finished pondering, he crossed out an earlier failure on his notes and brought up the info he had on weather movements. Then, he said, “I know exactly how to tell what Flameye’s planning.”

  ***

  Rasil pointed his gun at the training target and fired. Sure enough, his bolt landed about five feet from the edge, swerving as if it couldn’t hold together. A repeated volley only battered the surrounding area with no clean hits. “Well then, I see what you meant about the range of your pistol," Alyssa noted.

  “I need to be close to hit anything; my aim wasn’t good to begin with.”

  “So, you chose power and breaker frequency over distance, which I can certainly respect,” she thought aloud, “and more than work with.”

  “How?” Rasil wondered while pacing the practice range. Alyssa answered with a silent smile, and pulled him by his arm until he was at his optimal close range.

  “Fire three bolts, rapidly if you can," she commanded. Rasil nodded and brought his gun to his side before swinging it in three slashes like a knife. Each slash launched a bolt that smacked the target aggressively and shook the floor beneath it.

  “Use your electrosense, as I showed you a few minutes ago.” Rasil did so, and noticed a glowing trail of energy behind his swings, invisible to normal sight. “You see, every shot from stun weapons, Q-4 or lower on the piercing scale, leaves an absurd amount of exhaust energy in the air after the crystal releases its stored energy. Your ancestors called it the natural ‘breath’ of the crystal inside the gun, and my dad taught me to siphon it. Mercenary technique.”

  “Could you show me?”

  “Certainly," she waved off as she walked up to the target. “Fire at me.” Rasil hesitated, but aimed his gun and struck again with one charged bolt.

  Alyssa took a deep breath when she saw the bolt leave the barrel, and ducked. The bolt passed her, and she reached with her own gun to meet its trail. She proceeded to siphon from the energy exhaust. The red energy of the bolt spiraled back toward her gun, the tendrils of light using his own bolt as a battery, and by the time she was done with the lightning-fast movement, the bolt had dissipated, its energy completely charged into her gun. “See? All crystals emit roughly the same energy, so I siphoned yours to take advantage of your blow.”

  “Is that why you’re never nervous a firebolt might hit you?”

  “Yep. Since this has become simple for me, I instinctively charge up from things that graze by me, and return the force combined with my own.” To illustrate the point, she swiveled to face the target, and burned right through it with a rail beam. “Never treat your potential as your power; treat it as the combination of your power, and your opponent’s. Make Flameye’s new beams help you, and you’ll be able to stop him, for real this time.”

  Rasil stepped back and took it all in with a pause. Though Uncle Marcus had brought these things up, it had never clicked... She had just helped him to complete the one aspect of his training he never understood, and in a few simple minutes, she had even taught him basic electrosense.

  Where had she been all of his life?

  ***

  “Is the chimera tower almost complete?” Flameye asked one of the racazoid troopers organizing the construction. He was met with an assuring nod. “Good. The projector should be ready to fire soon, and when it does, Rasil will never be able to stop me.” A nearby racazoid biter giggled with excitement before being silenced with a glare. Flameye didn’t much appreciate his soldiers taking precious time away from their work without request, even to support his gloating.

  Gloating it was, and he knew it well. Yet, even if Rasil beat him once, he didn’t doubt that he could eventually win this fight. “A matter of time," he chuckled to no one in particular. “And time will be mine to control when this is over. Embershard, that wretched city, will learn to fear the Chimera Wraith.”