Page 163 of Stars in Umbra
For a moment, only the whisper of wind traced across the upper deck.
Then a proximity sensor flared. A siren wailed. Doors split open.
A unit of Stygian soldiers poured out of a doorway, weapons raised, their boots hammering against the carbon steel floor.
They had zero time to blink, just as Mo came at them.
He became motion, a blur of obsidian and heat, blades igniting from his suit’s gauntlets, his celestial force amplifying each devastating strike.
He crashed into them like a divine hammer.
A blade to the collarbone. A spinning kick to the throat.
A guard screamed. Mo silenced him with an elbow that crumpled cartilage and bone.
He carved through the first squad like parchment, their limbs falling before their cries could echo.
Within seconds, five lay broken in a bloom of crimson and scorched armor.
Above him, Rina dropped like fire through smoke.
She landed with a dancer’s grace and a killer’s focus, her Sable armored suit flowing like second skin.
She moved with eerie stillness between shots, her body liquid and smooth.
Mirage fed her combat telemetry through an encrypted neural line.Three to your left. Silenced weapons. Close quarters.
She ducked into the shadows, rolled into a flank, and dispatched them with two double taps and a palm blade buried under the last one’s chin.
Her breath never changed. Calm. Deadly.
Around them, security klaxons rose to a shriek.
Steel gates slammed shut.
It was too late.
Rina reached into her hip pack and triggered a nanite dispersal bomb, tossing it toward the locking mechanisms.
The micro swarm hissed like a thousand metal locusts, dissolving controls and disintegrating gears with acid-laced corrosion.
Doors peeled open in molten submission. Mo surged ahead, unrelenting, moving through the opening like a flame through dry brush.
The deeper they plunged into the facility, the more intense the resistance.
But Mo was elemental now, divine fire wrapped in mortal form.
Gunfire curved around him, moving so fast that he was a blur of spectral, glowing radiance, putting off his attackers with millisecond shifts in his trajectory.
His enemies attempted to aim. He was already inside their lines.
A blur. A shadow. A reckoning.
One soldier whimpered, crawling from the fight, prayers for his life a broken litany. Mo let him go, having no desire to earn a reputation as a deific tyrant.
He rounded a corner and came upon a trio of men, their guns aimed at him.
Their faces were uncovered; he recognized them fromThe Haloed Horn, the hovel in the Trossachs.
