A Sinner's Eden-Chapter 173 - EVO

***Tirnanog***

***Magnus***

There was plenty to say about what could have been.

Was Zach’s blatant last-second teleport a trap? Very likely. But who, if not the speedster, could escape a trap?

Was it smart to teleport yourself to an unknown location? Hell, no. But who, if not the teleporter, could find a way back if things went south?

Would some more preparation and research be helpful? Maybe. But who to send, if not the guy who trained like a maniac to catch up with all the monsters of this world?

Those thoughts went through my head as I activated this fantastic apparition.

No matter how many preparations I could have taken, I still would have been woefully unprepared for what awaited us on the other side.

The first thing to happen was the air explosively escaping my lungs, combined with my chest expanding as if it wanted to burst apart. My vision was taken! I couldn’t see anything as the water in the air turned to mist and my ears popped. It took me a few precious moments to understand that I was somewhere in a vacuum and had experienced a rapid decompression!

Only a moment later, my vision cleared up as the gases around us thinned out.

On top, this new environment had very low gravity. By then, the damage was done, and my legs were helplessly fumbling for the ground, which was no longer beneath my feet. The shock of the violent arrival caused me to push off the ground, and now I was floating freely.

Once my mind caught up with what was happening, I covered my mouth, nose, and ears with my filaments to keep the remaining air inside.

Astra and I were at a receiving platform, a twin to the one beneath Thich City.

Surrounding us was a moon-like landscape. A path led up to a house-sized transparent dome with a large entrance door.

Left and right of the path were more bodies than I could count on the fly, discarded like trash.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Astra contacted me via UI.

‘It’s obviously the monster’s lair,’ I answered.

Astra hooked her long filaments into some sort of railing fence which lined the path to each side, then pulled herself towards it until she had a good grip with her hands. Another set of filaments went around my ankle, and a moment later, I was tucked down from where I had been floating several metres above the ground.

With time, I would have probably drifted to the ground on my own, but the gravity was so low that it would take a lot of time. Some of the bodies around us seemed almost suspended in mid air.

‘Long filaments are a blessing, aren’t they?’ she stated smugly.

‘It’s a blessing for any guy to have a woman at his side,’ I admitted while I scanned the floating bodies around us. With a grimace, I noted that the whereabouts of all the children who had been abducted as test subjects were no longer a secret.

Astra looked up and pointed at a struggling figure who was drifting high above the bodies. ‘Is that Zacharias?’

I squinted and nodded. ‘He must have reflexively pushed himself off the ground upon appearing here. Just like I did.’

‘Do we try to get him?’ she asked. ‘Just so you know, if we do get him, I will need some extra attention once we return.’

I shook my head and pointed at the entrance to the dome. ‘Let him croak like the cockroach he is. Slowly, and fully aware of his inevitable demise. We go for the true culprit behind all of this. And you will get all of my attention anyway.’

‘Tirnanog?’ Astra looked up to a jewel of a planet floating in the starry sky above. One half was covered in white, while the other seemed a blue and green paradise with several continents floating amidst a giant ocean.

‘Likely.’ I pointed at our destination. ‘Unfortunately, no time to spare!’

We pulled ourselves along the fence, approaching the dome grip by grip.

Who would have thought that having adaptations for diving would also come in quite handy when it came to exposure to a vacuum? Freezing to death was still a problem, but it would take a lot longer than in the movies. Without any gas to actively transport heat away from the body, we would only lose as much energy as we could radiate off.

So, turning into a piece of frozen ham would take quite a while. I was much more concerned with how long we could hold our breath. A few minutes, according to the last time we tested our underwater mutation.

We reached the dome and, strangely enough, the door opened for us without prompting. Recognising it as an airlock, we went inside, and the door closed.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then the ceiling came down, pushing at us as the whole chamber rotated. There was no way to tell what was going on without windows, but it felt like we were moving and being accelerated. At the same time, what I now deemed to be some sort of elevator refilled with gas.

A few seconds later, what felt like normal gravity was being established, and the door opened, though I had a feeling it wasn’t plain old gravity, but the artificial kind which was induced by acceleration.

I stepped into some kind of alien command centre. The large room was filled with consoles and holographic displays showing all sorts of things. From what looked like maps of the world to depictions of Tirnanog’s creatures with DNA molecules next to them. Advancing further into the room, I gripped my spetum tightly while I tried to make sense of it all. Gaia’s story of Tirnanog being a giant petri dish for her enemies was becoming ever more believable. Till now, I wasn’t certain whether I believed her, but all of this was one giant point in her favour.

‘Gaia, are you in chat?’ Astra asked, doing something we should have probably done right away.

Our only answer was silence.

‘Maybe too far away,’ I concluded after a few seconds.

Gaia couldn’t have helped much against what came next anyway, because a creature entered the room through one of several corridors leading out of the room.

It was a little larger than a human and standing on three legs, lacking the bilateral symmetry which was natural to many of Earth’s creatures and even Tirnanog’s lifeforms. The torso was surrounded by an array of smaller arms with four fingers and there was a single, larger arm coming out of the centre. Above it all were two mouthless heads, each with a single eye and some glass-like gem on the forehead.

But what damned the creature in my eyes was the violet, almost latex-like skin.

Wary, I pointed the tip of my spetum at the thing, right before I was hit with what felt like a mental attack far beyond anything I experienced before. My spine tingled as my precognition went amok.

I could barely withstand the mental pressure and fell to one knee.

-- Go back. Kill all the powerful subjects in your group. --

A part of me wanted to fulfil the command without question. But my sub-personalities’ refusal to do the thing’s bidding snapped me out of it. This was similar to the psyling’s attack, only much more focused on a single mind.

“No,” I replied. “You are going to answer some questions. Whatever you are.”

-- Refusal to comply is not an option. Go back and kill all the powerful subjects. The experiment must be reset! We order you! --

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

I winced as the thing needled me with another mental command, causing one more sub-personality to go nuts and forcing me to dismiss it for a new one.

For now, I was resisting the mental attacks, but was it worth the risk? What if the monster was capable of more? Even now, I could feel it digging amongst my sub-personalities, trying to figure out why I wasn’t jumping to do my duty. It felt similar to Vanya’s ability, but a lot more foreign.

The decision was taken away from me when Astra tried to nail the alien with one of her javelins, which the alien caught with its main arm.

Flash stepping forward, I tried to stab the thing, but it parried with the javelin it just caught.

A kick sent me into one of the consoles, which was sturdy enough to withstand the impact, much to the misgivings of my hips. My spetum went flying as I somersaulted over the device and landed hard on the other side.

Then the thing moved in an almost floating fashion out of the way of another javelin as its legs skirted over the ground. It turned out that the main arm could pose as a fourth leg as the javelin was dropped, and then the alien reached for something on its back.

What came forth looked too much like a gun for my tastes, so I decided to unload with everything I had. Screaming, I discharged an arc of electricity at the alien and charged. ƒrēenovelkiss.com

The electricity made it twitch, but it withstood the attack far better than a living thing had any right to.

It was still enough to allow me to get in its face and cleave my bone axe through the thing’s right head, shearing off half of it in a vertical line.

Bringing the axe back up, I chopped again, but this time my opponent blocked with the strange gun it held.

The axe head shattered upon impact and caused the creature to stagger, so I drove the remaining shaft into the monster’s arm and twisted the gun out of its grip.

For a moment, we stood facing each other in a stand-off while I fumbled with the weapon, pressing buttons which were hard to reach. It felt like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than one or two seconds before the alien realised I had no clue how to use the weapon. Probably some kind of bullshit safety feature!

It kicked me again, sending me sliding along the floor, and then it fled towards one of the corridors.

Astra tried to stop it, but a bunch of her filaments were torn with ease, and she was tossed aside. She landed a stab with her spear, but that didn’t seem to inconvenience the monster in the slightest.

Growling, I got up and dashed after it into another room, quickly catching up.

The alien took another device from a central pillar. It was a disc which it operated with a few of the smaller arms while it looked up at a large orb floating beneath the ceiling. The orb was a shifting mass of thin rings, reminding me of the spatial drill teleporter. There was no way this thing would get away after the horror show I had seen outside. There was no way this thing was not somehow connected to what was going on here.

Gritting my teeth, I kept going and threw myself at the alien, intending to bring both of us down to the ground.

Then the room warped around us, and we were somewhere else. A lush jungle, but I had barely time to process it as I was far more concerned with getting the disc-like control device for what seemed to be a personal teleporter!

The alien moved another ring on the device, and we were suddenly in a plaza with dozens of people around us. The sphere was hovering above us, coming with us on each jump.

Another shift, and we were in an icy, barren landscape.

My opponent didn’t like that very much and stiffened as we rolled over the ground, but not before it shifted one of the inner rings on the device.

The world warped, and I found myself once more in a place with lots of people who screamed at our sudden appearance. Scrambling footsteps moved out of the way as I finally managed to wrangle the control unit out of the alien’s arms.

Forming a fist, I extended one of the blades which were hidden inside my armour and stabbed it into the alien’s chest. It went in so well that I decided to keep going Freddy Krueger style with all the speed I could muster.

Going manic, the alien rolled around, throwing me off before it fisted me with its main arm.

I rolled and sat up, watching my opponent warily as it tried to get back to its feet, but faltered. Then it dragged itself away from me.

Getting up, I sheathed the armour blade and flexed my fingers as I approached the enemy.

Something in my hips was seriously busted up, causing me to hobble on the left side, but I was still faster than this thing. I formed a flat palm with my hand and rearranged the magnetic fields around it, causing the air to warp around it and electric discharges to dance around my arm. Much like what Astra tried to do on her failed experiment. It took a little preparation to get it going, but this was a version which wouldn’t blow up in my face uncontrollably.

When the alien sat up to face me, I stabbed my arm deep into its torso, right behind its main arm, where my Second Sight told me was an especially concentrated area of electromagnetic activity. Measured by this thing’s biology at least.

“Happy first contact, mother fucker!”

It grabbed my arm, but I spread out my fingers and clawed at the concentration of what I assumed to be nerve activity. The creature stiffened and slowly relaxed before I brought my entire arm up, bisecting the thing’s torso in a shower of violet blood and gore, finally finishing it off.

Then I stood there, catching my breath while I contemplated why the thing's innards would look like jellyfish.

Something pinged off my chest armour, drawing my attention back to my surroundings.

I was in an elongated rectangular hall with lots of things that looked like exhibition pieces. It felt like a museum with many random people in strange clothes.

It wasn’t Earth, since those were certainly no humans. They looked like they were related to humans, but too many of their features were just off. Their eyes sat not right, their proportions were just a bit too different, entering the uncanny valley territory. You know, when something was just similar enough to the human baseline and yet didn’t match. I wasn't exactly thrilled with their appearance.

Nonetheless, most of them looked random, like civilians. Except for the one in some kind of red and grey uniform who had approached me. My eyes went down to where something had pinged off my armour, leaving a small scratch, and back to the gun in the guy’s hands. Well, good to know that precognition didn’t activate when the threat wasn’t a threat.

The ‘security guard’, because that was the only thing he could reasonably be given his equipment, screamed something I couldn’t understand and gestured at the floor. Despite the language barrier, his demeanour left no doubt about what he wanted.

Like hell! I had no time to stick around and find out what was going on with these people, so I showed him the middle finger.

Some universal gestures spanned cultures, and in this case… probably worlds.

The guy shot me again and this time I caught the ‘dart’ which the handgun farted out at me. It was some kind of pressure-driven mechanism.

The guard’s eyes went round as I regarded what I reasoned out to be a tranquilliser dart.

I threw the thing back at him, embedding it far deeper in his knee than it probably should. He went down hard and reached for his knee as if praying to it. Then he screamed like a pig in that strange language of his.

I turned around and applied my full attention to the transport orb’s control disc. Thankfully, the guard’s distracting lamentations quickly faded away, proving the effectiveness of whatever was on that dart. Unfortunately, the distant sound of sirens indicated I would soon have to deal with another form of distraction.

The control disc had ten rings, and the shifts had occurred as soon as one of them was moved. So this was either some kind of coordinate system, or more likely comparable to an old phone dial, where the number combination specified a certain destination.

My eyes went to the orb, which had appeared above a worn-looking and dusty teleportation platform. It had been cordoned off from the rest of the hall with ribbons so nobody would step on it. These people had definitely regarded it as another exhibition piece.

Then I noticed a close-by girl who was huddling next to a glass case with small clay statuettes inside it. She was holding what looked suspiciously like an ice cream cone.

Not thinking too much about it, I hobbled closer to the not-human who was stiff from fright. If I died in the next minute because I was playing around with technology I had no clue how to operate, I wanted at least something sweet in my mouth!

I stole the ice cream cone out of her rigid fingers and lifted the face plate of my helmet just enough so that I could take a lick.

Then I spat.

Well, it was ice cream... but salt!?

Who in their right mind would make salty ice cream!?

I regarded the child who looked like she could faint any second. Her eyes had followed my spit as if it would turn out to be burning acid. Uh, that might be a nice mutation to have.

No! I couldn't get distracted here!

“Barbarians!”

I smooshed the ice cream cone down onto her head, which made the little goblin look like some strange dwarf. Then I turned and hobbled beneath the orb, ripping the protective rope on the way. Judging by what I had seen of the thing, I had to be close enough for the transporter to work.

Once I was right beneath it and certain I wouldn’t accidentally ‘abduct’ any bystanders, I drew in a deep breath and turned the ring I had last seen being moved. It had some resistance to being moved, but once it did, it smoothly clicked into the next fixed orientation.

The world warped, and I was back in the icy tundra, thankfully without any abductees.

Slowly, I let out my breath. “Okay, Magnus. You can do this! You just have to go one ring at a time until you are back where you started. And if a place is not familiar, you reverse and try again.”

Once I put my mind to it, the process of reverse engineering the original setting was easy enough. I missed thrice, appearing in lonely landscapes which I didn't recognise. Thankfully, restoring the previous setting returned me to the tundra with ease. On the next attempt, I found the plaza, which had been cleared out without a soul in sight. I kept going with the same ring because I figured it had been turned twice while wrestling the alien.

I nonetheless almost shat my pants the entire time I was playing universe hopper: fearing I would somehow get stuck and never see Astra again. But on the final attempt, I appeared back in the teleportation room, with the orb hovering beneath the ceiling as if nothing had happened.

Only, there was no Astra.

“Astra?” I called out and quickly walked to the main room after setting the control disc back in its place on the central pillar.

“Magnus!” Astra appeared in the doorway and met me halfway, hugging me. “Idiot! Who told you to teleport away? It tried to figure out where you went, but this room somehow resets the jaunt, making it impossible to track!”

“Really? That is cool!”

She slapped me over the side of my helmet. “No! It’s not if some alien drags off your partner to who knows where! What happened?”

I grinned. “Oh, you won’t believe it!”