The Machine God

Chapter 275

Hold the Gate

Alexander watched the Nightmare watching him, while behind him people started to wake.

Droney beeped.

“I know, buddy. Just convince them to leave. I’ll buy you time.”

Droney beeped again.

Alexander laughed. “I promise I won’t go through the gateway. I’ve learned my lesson.”

Droney dropped away from his shoulder and zipped toward the pods. Behind him, the sounds of confused groaning and coughing started to fill the room. Then Droney’s voice erupted at full volume, shouting in the wizard’s language with the confident authority of a fake spirit familiar that had recently threatened a gate guard with eternal consequences.

Screaming followed. Understandable. Naked people waking up in pods in a room full of crawling runes and a cracking magical barrier barely keeping out a creepy monster would have questions. Droney didn’t seem interested in answering any of them.

His second mental thread processed the cacophony while his first stayed locked on the gateway. Droney was repeating a few phrases in rotation, probably variations of ‘get out’ and ‘move’ and ‘up the stairs.’ Somewhere in the middle of it, Alexander was fairly certain the little drone used the wizard word for bitch.

He didn’t turn around.

Because the little girl had started to change.

Her body twisted, the shape losing cohesion. Her shoulder stretched upward, elongating into a tendril of dark smoke that reached for the upper right corner of the barrier, where the prismatic light had already begun to crack and fade.

Alexander looked up at the gap. Then he exhaled.

His Domain burst outward. Behind him, the evacuating prisoners screamed louder as his presence washed over them. Droney shouted louder still.

Alexander tuned them all out.

He gestured with his cybernetic hand and conjured a crackling sheet of lightning to fill the gap between the wall and barrier. The tendril reached the electricity and pushed against it. Wisps of smoke burned away on contact, curling upward and dissipating, the same way the thing’s flesh had burned against the prismatic barrier.

The girl’s head snapped to the opposite corner. The upper left. Another gap, widening as the runes on the wall beneath it dimmed. Her face deformed, stretching sideways and upward, features smearing into a long ribbon of smoke that shot toward the opening.

Alexander gestured with his other hand and filled that gap too.

The Nightmare continued pressing against the newly formed lightning barriers simultaneously, grinning through its own steady destruction with teeth that hadn’t changed shape even as the rest of it had.

More gaps opened. The prismatic barrier was dying faster than he’d be able to reinforce it.

Alexander stopped trying.

He drew deep from his Core, and conjured a solid wall of lightning that stretched from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, into the small gap between the prismatic barrier and the gateway.

The Nightmare recoiled. Its smoke form pulled back from every point of contact simultaneously, retreating behind the gateway.

Then it pressed forward again. Testing. Probing the wall the same way it had probed the barrier, which continued to break down.

Alexander held it. The lightning crackled and snapped, burning away wisps of smoke wherever the creature touched. It worked.

But it wasn’t free.

He could feel the drain. It wasn’t an immediate problem. His reserves were deep. But where his Core could usually recycle Electrokinesis within the body, the wall was pure expenditure. Energy out, nothing back. He was certain he could sustain it for a while though. At the rate it was consuming his reserves, maybe thirty minutes.

But it wasn’t a permanent solution. It was a dam with a timer.

The Nightmare seemed to realize it too. It pulled back from the wall entirely, the little girl’s form reconstituting behind the gateway. It tilted its head, studying the wall from top to bottom. Then it looked down at the floor.

Hyperawareness screamed.

A pin-thin tendril of smoke shot up from below, stabbing through a gap between two sheets of lightning where the current arced rather than filled. It speared toward his leg.

He threw himself sideways. The tendril missed by inches, passing through the space his knee had occupied.

The Nightmare rushed the wall. Its entire form dissolved into a wave of dark smoke and crashed against the lightning like a tide. Most of it burned on contact, wisps curling and blackening. But the wall wasn’t solid. Lightning arced between points. It filled space, but not all space all the time. Threads of smoke pushed through the gaps, thin as needles, hundreds of them, reaching past the barrier and into the room.

The threads converged. Reformed. The smoke gathered itself into a rough shape on Alexander’s side of the lightning.

So Alexander dropped the wall.

Every scrap of power he’d been spending on containment went into a single bolt that punched through the reforming shape. Smoke exploded outward, scattering against the walls. Fragments burned and curled where the lightning touched them.

The shape pulled itself back together.

He reached behind him and tore one of the empty pods from the floor with Metallokinesis. Then he drove it through the Nightmare’s center like a cannonball. The smoke exploded, torn in half, the two pieces drifting apart.

Both halves reformed. The girl’s face appeared in one. The grin in the other.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Alexander ripped a metal alloy plate from the ceiling and slammed it down on top of the creature, driving it into the floor, then pressing with the full weight of his Metallokinesis. The metal groaned as he forced it flat.

For a second, nothing moved.

Then smoke burst from beneath the edges. It rushed toward him across the floor, closing the distance before he could react.

Something wrapped around his ankle. Thin as wire and strong as cable. His foot was yanked out from under him and the ceiling came rushing toward his face. He hit it hard enough to dent metal. Then the floor. Then he was moving sideways, dragged through the air toward the wall.

Alexander growled. Lightning erupted from every surface of his body. The tendril around his ankle burned away. The smoke filling the room shredded under the sustained discharge, fragments blackening and dissolving.

The rest of the creature reformed near the gateway. An abstract shape now. There was no girl. No face. Just a dark mass with teeth floating somewhere inside it, still grinning.

Alexander hovered in the air, breathing hard. Droney had gotten everyone out of the room itself, though the slowest were still struggling to climb the stairs behind him at the end of the hall.

“Fuck it.”

He flooded the room.

Lightning poured from his Domain in every direction. Not targeted bolts or shaped walls or careful barriers. Raw, sustained, overwhelming electrical discharge that turned the air itself into a conductor. The Nightmare pushed against it, smoke churning, tendrils reaching and burning and reaching again.

Alexander reached out with both hands and poured more power into it.

The grin held. The smoke thinned. Tendrils that reached out dissolved before they extended a meter. The dark mass shrank.

More.

The grin wavered as the mass collapsed inward, losing form, losing cohesion. Smoke burned faster than it could reconstitute. The teeth separated, drifting apart in the electrical storm, each one dissolving individually.

The last wisp of smoke burned away to nothing.

Alexander cut the lightning. The basement went dark except for the light coming from the gateway and the dimming runes on the walls.

A dark residue smoldered on the floor where the Nightmare had been. It smelled like nothing he could name.

He let out a breath. “That was easier than I expected.”

Movement at the gateway drew his gaze.

Something hung upside down from the top of it, fingers curling around the edge. It looked like a monkey. Matted fur over a body made of packed dirt, with a face that split into the same impossible grin.

It flipped over, dropped, and burst through the gateway.

Alexander exploded with lightning again.

The monkey tore through it. Flakes of dirt burst from its body and evaporated in the electrical field, but the core held together. It was denser than the smoke. The lightning stripped its surface but couldn’t reach what held it together underneath.

It stabbed toward him with an arm that elongated into a spear, the tip narrowing to a point that reminded him of Annie’s technique.

Alexander caught it with his cybernetic hand. The impact drove him backward through the air, Metallokinesis fighting to hold his position. He grabbed the thing’s head with his other hand and discharged the gauntlet entirely at point-blank range. His palm erupted with lightning.

Its head disintegrated. Dirt and dark energy scattered between his fingers.

It kicked him in the side.

The impact was stronger than expected. Alexander hit the wall hard, the breath driven from his lungs. His ribs screamed. The headless thing lunged after him, reforming as it moved, a new head bulging from between its shoulders.

Alexander was already moving. Even as he bounced off the wall, Metallokinesis seized at every metal surface. Ceiling plates. Wall panels. Floor sections. All of it ripped free and collapsed onto the creature from every direction simultaneously.

Metal screamed and deformed as it compressed around the Nightmare. The mass crumpled inward, smaller and smaller, until the creature was trapped inside a ball of crushed alloy the size of a boulder.

It began to ooze. Dark mud pushed through the gaps between the compressed plates, slow but relentless.

There was more movement beyond the gateway. In the distance, across the dead landscape on the other side, three figures were sprinting toward him.

Alexander didn’t hesitate. He shoved his hand forward, Metallokinesis seizing the compressed ball, and launched it back through the gateway with every ounce of force he could muster. The metal ball cracked the sound barrier before it finished traversing between realities, trailing a shockwave that rippled through the air.

It hit the lead figure dead center. The runner’s upper body disintegrated on contact while its legs continued sprinting forward. The metal ball hit the ground, then bounced, and kept going.

More shapes crested hills in the distance. One humanoid. One on four legs. Then three together. Then more.

Alexander stopped counting. He wiped blood from his nose from where his face had been introduced to the ceiling.

Could he handle them? Probably. Could he handle them and have enough power left to get away clean before Artensah and his ships arrived? Questionable.

He glanced around the room. There was enough metal to create a makeshift barrier, but it wouldn’t hold. Smoke and dirt or mud were the first of these elemental nightmares, and neither would be stopped by anything less than a perfect seal. Who knew what the oncoming ones were made of.

A lightning one would be nice. But he was probably not that lucky.

That left him few options. And only one that left him without regrets, at least temporarily.

Alexander held out both hands toward the gateway and drove his Will into it.

Resistance fought back immediately. The System’s presence crashed down from every direction, the same weight he’d felt at the top of the tower when he’d accidentally declared himself the Machine God. Except this time it pressed back against his Will, pushing him out of the gateway’s metaphysical architecture.

Alexander pushed harder. Power cycled through his Core, all of it focused into a single point of intent. Lightning erupted from his eyes. The walls, floor, ceiling, and pods groaned as the remaining metal around him vibrated. The gateway fought him. Layer after layer of suppression gave way, denser than anything he’d felt even when he’d been tearing open the gateways to the Cultivator and Beast Worlds.

The first Nightmare reached the gateway.

Alexander roared. His Will slammed against the System’s resistance like a battering ram. Metallokinesis, Electrokinesis, Technopathy, Animachina, all of it unified through the Machine God and driven into the gateway with everything he had.

The resistance spiked. For a single, terrible moment, the System pushed back harder than he could push forward.

It was stronger than it had been any other time he’d faced it.

Then something fractured. The resistance cracked down the middle, half of it simply withdrawing, fading into the background.

It almost felt like it was letting him win.

Alexander’s Will crushed what remained. Power flooded the gateway. Ownership clicked into place with a sensation like a lock turning in his chest. He didn’t read the notification. Didn’t need to. He activated the option to seal the gateway.

Black plates materialized from the edges of the gateway. They rotated inward, closing over the aperture in overlapping layers, slicing through the wrist of the lead Nightmare.

The limb flopped onto the floor.

Something slammed into the other side of the gateway. The plates shuddered.

Another impact. Harder. Then a thump.

Thump.

Thump thump thump.

Alexander stepped back from the sealed gateway. The impacts continued, but the aperture held. He stood there, breathing hard, hands at his sides, and listened to the Nightmares trying to get through.

Then a hissing sound drew his attention down to his feet.

What should have been a hand had become a small pool of acid, bubbling and eating into the metal floor.

He blew out a breath and headed for the hallway. He borrowed one of the pods, sending it into his ring for Augustus to study when he finally went home.

At the base of the steps, one emaciated man had given up trying to climb, and was instead staring up at him with wide eyes as he approached.

Alexander came to a stop and held out a hand.