Dagnoths, apparently the otherworldly walking war machine was called 'Dagnoths'. At least that was what Wilder assumed as the bulky armored creature thunderously intoned that word again and again while it advanced on him and his comrades, attacking with a ruthless and graceless, unsophisticated fervor.
Maybe it was saying something else. Maybe it was actually telling the Traveler in Red that it was going to kill him.
A flashing stream of unidentified light particles from the thing's weapon punched into the side of an abandoned, half-rusted cargo trailer parked alongside the boulevard and the trailer erupted into a hot, acidic rain of vaporized metal.
Wilder hastily decided it really didn't matter a damn what the thing was saying.
The impact from the scorching beams of Wilder's light beam pistols against the Arbiter's armored body created resonant, low-pitched metal clangs as a radiating cascade of white-hot waves, resembling the effect of an arc light, scattered from off the collision points. Light beam weapons were an offshoot of particle beam weaponry, utilizing nuclear-enhanced laser beam technology. The high energy beams used subatomic particles to damage the target by disrupting its molecular structure. The elaborately etched exoskeleton of the squat, elephantine cybernetic alien rocked from the physical punch from the light beams, but they did little to slow the creature's steady forward momentum.
He was shrugging off the hits as quickly as they happened.
Murshipaz and Oerdyke had each fully extended the telescoping photonic battle-javelins they carried to their full length, each javelin topped by a teardrop-shaped stone inset into the weapon's scythe-shaped, claw-ended crown. Photonic javelins were old Emperium Guard infantry weapons that generated an electrophotonic force pulse capable of blasting a basketball-sized hole through a meter-wide wall of solid granite. The javelins were elegant, but lethal devices, remnants of a time when the Emperium's military forces were more swashbuckling and urbane than as cruel and brutish as they'd later become. It took exceptional skill to wield the devices and those trained in their usage were considered among the upper echelon of fighting men. To their credit, Murshipaz and Oerdyke were elite among those elite soldiers.
Not that it made much of a difference, given the current circumstances. The blasts from the battle-javelins were rocketing into an invisible wall of spinning, free-floating atoms surrounding the attacking Arbiter, this monster called Dagnoth, and dissolving, simply fading away to nothing.
The Traveler in Red's mind raced... The confrontation was swiftly devolving into a debacle for the human defenders; there was little to no chance they possessed anything remotely powerful enough to affect the totemic armored golem. It would advance against the battling trio, breach their meager defenses and it would kill them relatively soon. But the one thing to their advantage was the unanticipated weapon that was Wilder's intellect.
Back on planet Earth, while he had been a normal man, Adam Wilder had been a Doctor of Physics at the Harbeckke Institute for Dream Research in Laurel, Maryland, where he had worked for a dream research project called OUTLAND. Wilder had headed the fledgling "theoretical chaos environments" division where he and his team had developed action-models of alien environments that presented scenarios of physical geographies with characteristics outside the accepted parameters of known science. Dreamscapes. Otherworlds. Alternate Realities. Extradimensionalities. In the course of developing various logical systems that were mathematically sound, Wilder had learned to consider these impossible hypotheses not only possible, but probable.
Wilder's agile mind stumbled upon the fragment of a plan based around an errant concept... It was obvious the relentless humanoid cyber-tank was surrounded by a mobile protective field and yet the creature's feet touched the ground as it walked and it could physically interact with the world around it. That meant the field could be manipulated. Otherwise, how could a creature that could not be touched by assaulting subatomic photonic energy touch anything around itself? Logically, there was no way without the cyborg running the risk of the field rebounding upon itself and repelling its own atomic and molecular structure, thereby destroying the cyborg itself by smothering it or crushing it or condensing it until the heat from its compaction combusted it.
The answer had to be to hack the protective force field. So, how to do that? Either create a tunnel though the field or make the field porous. The amount of electrochemical or photonic force the three of them could create with their combined weaponry was far too small to punch a hole through the protective envelope, so... recondition the field's surface phenomenon. Adsorption and disassemblage. Pull the field apart by reversing its collective atomic valences so that its component ingredients repelled one another. And that they could do... they'd use the photonic battle-javelins.
In the few moments the Traveler had spent furiously strategizing a counter-attack, the metal-carapaced, mobile assault-cyborg had targeted a gang of illegally-armed civilian opponents who'd gathered together to confront it. They bellowed, braying curses and threats at the rampaging alien powerhouse. The group wore ill-fitting, stolen tactical trauma armor and carried scratched and pitted, transparent riot shields for protection. The angry quintet of young street hooligans, low-level thuggish criminals brandishing stolen militia armory weapons, had fired a fusillade of laser-blasts at The Arbiter so incandescently wild the very concrete and asphalt of the street melted and ran like tarry mud.
One of the group wielded an antiquated, scatter-launch rifle-cannon that fired a streaming, hypersonic barrage of gamma-irradiated titanium pellets at the cyborg war-machine. The pellets impacted Dagnoth's imperceptible energy shield, each spherical ball shattering into a dozen lethally-radioactive flying fragments that fell onto the boulevard, sticking into the street like knife blades.
Dagnoth's response was to point one massive, mightily muscled, metal-plated arm, and the very flesh of the arm quickly undulated, shifted and reconfigured into the shape of a very large bore weapon's muzzle. The weapon chuffed hollowly and emitted a blue-black bolt of superheated concussive force with an intensity that tore the very limbs off from the five defenders' torsos even as their bodies flew back, punching partially through the walls of the building behind them.
The bodies burst like rotten fruit under the dreadful force of the impacts.
Wilder signaled Murshipaz over to his side even as the Arbiter unleashed a wide-angle scatter of blast rays. The man ran a few steps and then threw himself over a pile of broken plastic palettes as the coherent light rays peppered the area, charring to ash everything they touched. Oerdyke provided the distraction of cover fire and followed in a loping, zigzagging run that put him behind a tight formation of ring-banded, external power conduits at the support column of a heavily damaged nearby building.
"Give me your javelin," Wilder instructed, exchanging the javelin for one of his light-beam pistols. Mushipaz didn't hesitate. TheTraveler examined the weaponized power-housing at the head of the metal staff, popped open a palm-sized panel at the side of its narrow neck, and reached into a pouch on his tunic's belt, removing one of a pair of tiny circuit boards he'd salvaged some time past, and then began to tug at a trio of wires inside the weapon head.
"What are you doing?" Murshipaz asked breathlessly, one eye on Wilder and the other looking around cover at the approaching cyborg-golem.
"Whatever it is you're doing, do it a damn site quicker," Oerdyke snapped grimly as he unleashed a pair of energy blasts at The Arbiter.
The Traveler in Red quickly and wordlessly performed some mental calculations, making assumptions about the photonic frequency, timing and rate of fluctuation in Dagnoth's protective force field and primed the processor housing on the circuit board, connecting the wires he'd pulled, before forcibly inserting it into a thin space in the javelin head.
"You don't even know if those things are compatible," Murshipaz said.
"You know, you're probably right about that," Wilder muttered distractedly, ignoring the man and continuing to reassemble the weapons housing. With a loud 'clack' the housing sealed shut and Wilder blew out an anxious breath as he caught Oerdyke and Mushipaz's questioning gaze.
"Here we go," he said.
He extended his arm and depressed the inset trigger switched in the slender body of the javelin's staff. White and then orange light sputtered around the head of the javelin, like the writhing body of an angry snake, and then coalesced into a semi-solid crescent shape that pulsed and then flashed soundlessly outwards in an uneven streak towards the massive cyborg killer...
Dagnoth screamed. It was a ferocious and infuriated sound that issued not from the staggering cyborg, but from an unearthly place unimaginably far away, from across the cold expanse of Time and Space.
The air and the ground on which The Arbiter stood turned silvery-white and gravity itself appeared to cancel as spiky plumes of dirt and dust erupted upwards from the ground, rising high into the air around the armored figure. Currents of superheated air formed in the immediate vicinity and rapidly swirled in a circular vortex that extended further and further away from the target. In a few seconds, a massive shockwave lashed out in all directions, slamming to the ground anything and everything it touched.
Then the shockwave reversed, imploding. The battle-javelin was wrenched from Wilder's grip by an irresistibly powerful force and, as it flew towards the center of the blast-zone where Dagnoth's silhouette punched and clawed at the empty space around him, it melted into a chrome smear of melted slag.
Half a block away, the front door to the abandoned courthouse shuddered and then blew inwards from the force unleashed by the concussive shockwave.
The sound of something hollow popped at an incredible volume, bringing an involuntary scream to the throats of all three men, and then, abruptly, The Arbiter was simply gone, disappeared.
The ensuing quiet was almost painful.
"Do not ever do anything like that again, you kruge-fargling madman," Oerdyke panted angrily as he unsuccessfully tried rising from his knees.
"That might actually be pretty good advice," Wilder breathlessly admitted, trembling as he leaned unsteadily against the wall next to him.
* * *