Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Stealing Constructs

Celex held up a hand and the two of them paused.

The ribbons had retracted back into his body, so he appeared mostly human. His wild rainbow hair billowed around his face in line with the confusion of competing gravities.

With one large leap Celex sailed out into the gap between the broken chunks. He sailed forward for a good few meter before being tugged sideways and then down. Adam watched his trajectory in fascination as he landed heavily on another large rock. There was no time to comment on the strange mode of travel as a swarm of void creatures spilled forward towards Celex. He blasted the first wave with a discharge of golden energy, but his glow was left dim afterwards as he began to recharge.

The swarm did not wait.

Without conscious coordination, Adam and Sunny linked arms, leaping together into the void between the rocks, and for a moment their feet were suspended thousands of Kilometers over the glassy blue surface of irus and her thousand-mile deserts of waving blue dunes.

Adam's stomach lurched as the second Gravity well caught them, and they floated down into the midst of a full raging battle.

Celex took a blast of void energy to the upper arm just as they got there. The clothing he wore on that side singed away, and a black mark was left momentarily on his skin crackling with orange energy, but he waved it off, roaring as he ran into the crowd.

At this close range Adam had his spear out, and together with Sunny, they crashed into the flanking lines at Celex's back.

Adam skewered one of the creatures through the chest.

It clawed at the shaft of his spear, beak opening and closing rapidly before falling away.

The creature flopped slowly to the ground to be trodden on by its fellows as more came forward.

Adam could see what remained of the Kree in these void creatures. They had beaks and feathers and wings, though they didn't use them for more than short periods of time, but that was where the resemblance ended.

Somewhere along the line the void sickness had taken them and now, shards of bone grew from their bodies cutting into their skin and sticking out of their backs in strange looking spines. Some of them were missing eyes, while others were growing a confusing array of horns that made no logical sense, or followed any natural pattern.

One lept at his face, and Adam speared it through the guts. Something hit him hard from the side, and Fealty hummed in anger. He lashed out with his right leg catching the second Kree that hit him in the sternum with a powerfully placed kick. He ducked to the side as void beams blazed around him. Overhead two jets cut by trailed by several void fighters. The silent vastness of space was interrupted by thousands of beams of burning gold and orange light.

Celex ran ahead of them, and Sunny and Adam followed, leaping to the next platform where the void creatures were already waiting. They had cleared much of the upper platform of the void creatures, and Sunny was just finishing off the last one . She raced forward pulling her spear back with one hand and skewering it through the chest, at some point during the movement, she had also retrieved a hatchet from the front of her armor.

Adam didn't know when she had gotten that weapon, either she had made it, or she had built it.

From the flash he got before the blade met flesh, he could see shining silver steel, and pulsing blue power running along the end of the blade.

It came down on the void creature's neck severing its head clean from its shoulders with enough power to send the head spinning upward with enough velocity to escape their gravity. Adam watched the head spin a few times, before it was caught by another gravity well, falling and bouncing twice before rolling across the underside of another large chunk.