-Micah Scollon-
Looking down at the spectral bonds coming up from me to Robert, Harvey, and Jean, I couldn’t help but be mildly impressed with Robert: a magical connection that gives you the ability to see where the other is along with push and pull them from a distance was an interesting application of fi magecraft. I could already think of interesting ways we could exploit this with our SteelStar’s mobility. Of course it wasn’t impressive as the WarStar variant Emerald Five Powers model I earned from reaching rank 2 after getting my cursed budget stratum 3 multi-system slot, WarStar’s Bullet Factorium, even with the cursed system slot, WarStar’s Wrathful Intent, used in its system slot formula made me irritable and aggressive while using this account being a con in conjunction to my stratum 3 one doing the same thing.
“And I thought the places we were in layer two were bad… this place is a real dump,” I muttered under my breath as we neared our destination in the traitors’ market. This part of the bottom layer of Netro Road was basically just scifi technic-style multi-story shacks built on top of more multi-story shacks. With a clicking noise from my SteelStar’s voice box, I went to make sure my ammo was all squared away. Power-linking Spirit Bullet Manufactorum was a genius idea, I noted to myself, still kind of annoying that only the stratum 3 multi-system slot and the cursed system slot were named since only ones with a tag like cursed or blessed to it or were it stratum 3 or higher got actually named. It wasn’t like I could complain too much: it was just the nature of system slots and how they were inscribed with names.
“Great chow though!” commented Jean between bites of street food, picking up what I said and giving off mildly-irritating tones of oblivious cheeriness. Leave it to him to not catch what I said but also be stuffing himself in a SteelStar that can barely taste in the first place.
“We’re nearing the target, let’s get ourselves ready,” noted Louella as the six of us neared the pitiful excuse of a clearing around the SteelStar Supremacist's outpost, an artificial blackzone of a converted gang bang. Talk about fitting, I told myself as I filtered out sounds and distant voices with my Ultraviolet Five Powers SteelStar’s Interfacing and noting the locations where these assholes were: I couldn’t get exact locations and numbers but I was getting a good enough estimate to figure out which stack of shacks we should move in from.
“Okay! Let’s do this. I’ll meet back up with you two in a bit. I got to practice my pizza tossing skills.”
“Seriously? Pizza tossing?” I groaned, already started to hate the fact we were relying on Jean to give us the extra verticality needed to infiltrate from above.
“Hahaha don’t be so sourdough about it!” laughed the masked procyon as he tugged on our spectral bond a bit. Fucking puns, of course.
Leaving Louella and Percy to start the distraction, I had Jean follow me, Robert, and Harvey to a good side alley for us to start our half of the operation. Pointing out the ledge I was going to jump to, I counted to three before long jumping to it: half way through I felt a series of pushes from Jean, Robert, and Harvey giving me the extra lift to make the landing. Perfect, didn’t have to use my quantum leap, I thought with an internal grin. With how little I could use my empowerment while in a SteelStar, it would have been a total pain in the ass if I had to waste it now.
Turning away, I motioned to Harvey to tell him it was his turn. With how mobile and highly levelled his SteelStar was, the VoxView streamer didn’t even need any help and was able to parkour his way up. Of course the blackzone manager was another thing: both Harvey and I had to pull him up with our spectral bonds to him while Jean pushed him.
“Sorry about that,” apologized Robert with a pant as he struggled to get up from the rickety alloy sheet roof.
“Do you have to be such a lumbering oaf?” I asked with a frustrated sigh, watching as Jean ran off the sound of fighting not too far away. From the sounds of high-pitched electricity and the tones of shock, both metaphorical and literal, I could pick up, it was obvious that at least Louella was going all out.
“It’s not my fault my model of SteelStar is so heavy. I am a tank after all.”
“Whatever, let’s just get a move on.”
“You know you could be more positive about this,” suggested Harvey as we made our way across the shacks’ roofs to the threshold of the artificial blackzone.
“Yeah, that’s not exactly an option for me right now,” I shot back with a bit more harshness than I intended. Who would have thought having an increased tendency to be agitated would be agitating? I sarcastically thought to myself as I looked down at the makeshift pavilion that Louella and Percy were fighting on. I had to hand it to Percy, he was a skilled wizard: making full use of the ‘passive and mild but versatile’ passive aspect of blue manas on top of being competent in a variety of different spellblades. With how well he was synergizing with Louella, their distraction was a piece of cake, especially once Jean joined in and started wrecking stuff like a wild animal.
“Well let’s try to stay positive anyway!” chimed the VoxView streamer as he hefted his gunlance before following me into the artificial blackzone through a side window.
Taking the chance now that we were in closer proximity to the SteelStar Supremacist, I activated my SteelStar’s second ability, Stealthed Detection, and mapped out the place. As everything was mapped out, including the weapon caches, I followed up with its fifth ability, Expand Search: Wetware, and scoped out the positioning, ranks, and levels of the enemies. Nothing above rank 3 and a bunch of rank 1 and 2 fodder, I noted to myself before shaking my head and trying not to get hung up on the numbers being shown: I was already proof of how much difference a few empowers and attunements could make. I couldn’t forget these were the type of people employing the same tactics as us with similar spellcraft plus some extra underhanded bullshit.
The first few caches were easy enough to destroy: Louella, Jean, and Percy were pulling the outer layers of defense from the building and my mapping meant we could maneuver ourselves around the rest. And the monster-robotics hybrids were a nuisance but at least we were able to figure out where these guys were sourcing the protocols and spellcraft for making their drones. As for the SteelStar Supremacists, the fact they were all avid collectors of SteelStars and criminals meant they were easy to deal with: it didn’t matter if they were competent fighters when they were running around in low level bodies.
“Seriously these guys are such a pain,” complained Robert as he downed another pair of sliding and sprinting enhancing potions to keep up with me and Harvey.
“Maybe if you didn’t choreograph all your abilities,” I replied, rounding the counter and firing off a volley of spell-wrapped bullets from my assault drones and destroying a SteelStar distracted by the fighting going on outside. Boom, that’s what you get for not focusing on one account and using shitty second-rate proxy pods and gear consoles filled with stealthware, I noted as the SteelStar collapsed in a pool of blood, oil, coolant, and other weird SteelStar fluids. “Come on, we got one more cache to go.”
“I can’t help it, I’m using a green model SteelStar.”
“What about your attunement?” You’d think he would have been smart and not power-link a weapon attunement and attunement whose ability is also choreographed. Seriously, how does this guy manage to survive?
“I can’t use it a bunch.” I couldn’t but mentally roll my eyes at thought with the tones of self-loathing I was picking up.
“Your manalogical maladies, I know.”
“Oh yeah, you got PMF and ABS right now don’t you?” interrupted Harvey, gunning down a set of drones before I had the chance to fire my scoperifle at them; at least the VoxStreamer was competent, the rank 3 SteelStar I was picking up that was guarding the final weapon cache was going to be a piece of cake with his help.
“Lesser Sim-ABS but yeah… I still have PMF, it’s being really stubborn to treat.”
“Just get some medication for it,” I quipped as we neared the final weapons cache.
“It’s not that easy you know!”
“Yeah it is, just spend money.”
“You got to spend money to make money,” quipped a silvery SteelStar, interrupting our conversation. A beige-steel model SteelStar? Seriously? How cheesy could you get for being a SteelStar fanatic? Have to give him some credit though… its a WarStar variant, can’t tell if its Technologia of Iron or alloy oldmark, I noted as I tried to sized up the SteelStar Supremacist that was currently standing between us and the last few crates of weaponry and miscellaneous illegal shit.
“Did you seriously have to interrupt me?” I shot back, already aiming all my assault drones and scoperifle at him.
“I saw an opportunity and took it,” answered the WarStar variant SteelStar with a sharktooth grin as his hands extended into long claws, answering my question about what type of model he was: alloy oldmark.
“I swear you are as bad as Jean,” I growled before looking back at the other two and asking if I could solo this guy. With heither Harvey or Robert saying no, I turned back around and made sure that my special rounds were available.
“Are you sure you want to use those?” asked Saltpeter from the back of my hand as he loaded the bullets into my scoperifle on the sly. “It takes us a lot of time to make these.”
“Are your scoperifle probably won’t be able to handle more than one round of them,” followed up Magnum from their personal space-workshop.
“It will be fine, I can just get it repaired,” I nonchalantly replied as I started to channel mana from both my real body and proxy body into this SteelStar’s scoperifle. They were both right: the grand mana density bullet that was loaded into my weapon would definitely fry it on use and probably mess with my mana circtruity a little bit. But with dealing with all these idiots today I was willing to pay the price of some pain and spasms.
As visible mana circruity started to form on my scoperifle from the fact I was using one of the few types of bullets that were hardwired in as the one of the four pinnacles among Spirit Bullet Manfuctorium’s recipes, the SteelStar Supremacist started to panic. Seeing that he didn’t have a backdoor to run through, he went to for a frontal dash. But it was obvious that he was going to do that: tracing his trajectory I fired off a few pot shots from my assault drones to slow him down just enough.
“You guys really need to step up your game,” I told the SteelStar Supremacist as I pulled the trigger: a solid beam of multicoloured light shot out from my scoperifle, spiraling around the elongated bullet. As it tore through the silvery SteelStar like soft scrap metal, I could feel the scoperifle turn to slag as my own SteelStar’s internal reserves were depleted and its integrity started to lower.
“Oh my Micah,” gasped Harvey in excitement. “Now that was a lot of damage!”
“Yeah, but it’s one use,” I replied in frustration, realizing just how fucked up my scoperifle now was: I wasn’t expecting it to completely turn to slag. Fixing this isn’t going to be cheap.
“And that is why we can only make a few of Grand Ascensions’ pinnacle bullets at a time,” commented Winchester with a sigh as he went to making another round with Magnum and Saltpeter’s help. Yeah it was an annoying downsize that I could only have so many these bullets made at a time, but that’s just how the mandala inscriptions panned out. At least I could boast about having bullets that could be considered pinnacle quality from a Grand Magus-grade mandala and were literally attuned with the powers of spirits.
“Yeah whatever, they are still totally worth it at the end of the day… even if I had to repair the guns basically from scratch cause of it.” Or deal with the backlash from using bullets like this while still only tier 5.0 without mandala-wrought safety measures.
