Altered - Book 2: Chapter 2

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Author's Note: Here's chapter 2 of Book 2, everyone. As always, a big thanks to my readers and Big Closet for your continued support. ~Amethyst.
 

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 Chapter 2: Rude Awakening

As soon as I had gotten instructions from Vice-Commander Carpenter and ended the call, I started trying to wake Poppy. Usually, that would be difficult since Sprite bodies enter a state of hibernation to conserve energy when we sleep, making it hard to wake us up. Fortunately, though, my girlfriend had also been roused by the loud and insistent ring tone of my comm crown and hadn’t quite settled back to sleep.

“Moonlight, are you awake?” I inquired, sending my thoughts to my Unicorn companion even as I gently shook Poppy’s shoulder to rouse her and reluctantly told my girlfriend, “We need to get up, hot stuff, there’s an Incursion happening.”

-Yes, my Maiden. I do not seem to require much sleep, even when in my physical form, so I have been patrolling your dormitory while ethereal,- Moonlight responded even as Poppy looked up at me sleepily.

I had the feeling that it had more to do with the fact that it was Moonlight’s first night staying in the stables, and she worried about being too far away in case I needed her, than any lack of a need for sleep, but I let that go for now. We had more important issues to deal with right then. “Okay, can you please come join us so I can teleport us all to Vanguard Tower? We need to hurry.”

-I will be there in but a moment,- she assured me, making me think that she was either already in the dorm room or had been staying very close by.

While she was telling me that, Poppy tried to shake off her drowsiness as she murmured, “Incursion? Mmm…okay, let me grab my stuff.” With that, we both scrambled wearily out of bed to put on our chokers and for Poppy to put on her comm crown as well.

Once we had left our little house, the others proved more difficult to rouse. At least, that was what I was fearing, and since time was of the essence, I decided to use drastic measures to wake them all quickly. As soon as I was out of the little house situated on the empty bunk, I turned up the volume of my voice projection app on my comm crown as high as it would go and called out, “Everybody, wake up!”

Sure, a quick splash of water to each of their faces probably would have had Ainslee, Kelly, and Karen all up in a hurry, but there were good reasons not to wake them that way. For one thing, creating water for me to manipulate like that is advanced elemental magic that I had only recently learned from Captain Monroe, so I didn’t have the best control over it yet, and it still took a lot of mana and concentration for me to do. We did not have the time for me to fool around like that, and doing so would probably tire me. I needed to conserve my energy for teleporting people and gear, and the clock was ticking; every moment wasted was one that we could be in Rio, saving lives.

Another good reason not to do so was that if I had decided to wake them that way, I probably would have gotten them, their beds, and half of the dorm room soaked. Emergency or not, that probably would have made my sister and friends not very happy with me. This way was much quicker and didn’t risk having anyone pissed off at me, at least, not when they realized the reason behind the rude awakening.

For now, though, they were understandably upset with me. “Lily, what the fuck?!” Karen snapped as they all glared at me from their respective beds. “It’s five in the morning for fuck’s sake! I swear, if this is some kind of drill…”

“Not a drill,” I said after turning down the volume on my voice projection to something less than a parade grounds drill sergeant. “There’s an Incursion in Rio de Janeiro, and we need to get to the tower so I can start moving teams and gear. Every second counts, girls, so get geared up so we can get moving.”

The words had barely left my mouth before everyone scrambled to grab their DS-4 chokers from their nightstands, put them on, and hop from their beds to the floor. Getting dressed was as simple as pushing a little bit of mana into our metal chokers to release the armor stored inside the connected pocket dimensions. Our skintight armor quickly materialized over our bodies, and that was all that we had for gear. Kelly, Karen, and Ainslee would have to grab weapons and any other gear they needed once we got to the tower.

Once I was sure that everyone was armored up and present, I mentally tagged Moonlight through our connection, then the others, and pictured the location within Vanguard Tower that I had been instructed to bring us to in my mind. A moment later, we appeared in a gathering area on the thirtieth floor, at the very top of the tower. Most troops would be gathering in the sub-basement level that sat beneath the tower, and the entire grounds of the surrounding compound, which was the mobilization area that hosted both the underground transport hangars and the armories. We had other orders, though; we were being assigned to the first response teams.

The first response teams were based on the top floor of the tower, in the massive saucer that topped the tower and was reminiscent of the Space Needle that used to be in Seattle. The floor was easily large enough to hold two professional sports stadiums and housed the first responder barracks, their armory, the Pegasus stable, and the aerie for the Gryphons. The rallying area that we appeared in was at the very center of the floor.

The scene was carefully conducted chaos as we materialized. People in the same DS-4 armor that we wore were scrambling to grab weapons from the armory, while others saddled up their mounts. Both the aerie and the stable had open-air exits to allow flights for training, exercise, or to board the two high-speed mounted-personnel carriers that they usually used, but today everyone would be gathering here to make things easier for me to organize the transportation.

Forty-seven minutes was as long as a Breach would remain open, and that isn’t a lot of time to organize a response for somewhere halfway across the world, but these people knew what they were doing and moved like a well-oiled machine. Since those personnel carriers would take over an hour to get from Amethyst Harbour to Rio, even going at top speed from beginning to end, we were going to have to count on me to get us there while the other personnel transports were in flight. There was a Vanguard base in South America that could deploy troops to the Incursion sight as well, but they were probably fifteen minutes away, and if everything went well, we could probably beat them there using my teleportation.

As soon as we appeared, I ordered, “Kelly, Karen, and Ainslee, get geared up in the armory ASAP and then get back here so we can get moving as soon as I have a place to ‘port to.”

Two minutes later, I received a live camera feed from Vice-Commander Carpenter via my comm crown, along with a message telling me that it was the closest feed to the Breach that they could come up with on short notice. It looked like a CCTV camera feed, and it looked like panicked pandemonium over there already, as people ran toward the camera as quickly as they could, and old-style ground vehicles and hover-jets completely ignored traffic laws in their rush to flee.

Well, damn. It had only been around five minutes since the Breach had fully formed and stabilized. I was a little surprised that they were able to find anything close to the Breach in such a short time. It wouldn’t put us very close to the Breach itself, but it was probably the best that we could hope to get between the EM surge that accompanied the opening of Breaches, killing any electronics in the area, and the destruction that the Titans would be causing as they spread out from the Breach and the epicenter of the Incursion.

A moment after that, while I was still ingraining the image in the feed into my mind, my teammates returned, fully geared up. Over their body armor, they each wore gun belts with pouches that likely held spare magazines, bullets, and condensed mana clips for the standard-issue Desert Eagle Mk XXVI handguns holstered on their belts and the M7 Punisher high-powered assault rifles that they had slung over their shoulders. Karen also had a large field medic’s bag on her back for her role as the team's emergency medic. She may not have started her nursing program at the University yet, but she did at least have first aid training and a crash course she had gotten last week on field medicine.

Good, they had all gotten standard gear that they had become very familiar with during our group training sessions with Sergeant Vale, though I did notice that my sister had some of the grenades that Sergeant Vale had her using during our most recent training session as well. The Desert Eagle handguns were fifty caliber, and they were probably using the special loadout for those: armor-piercing shells with enchantments that would cause a magical explosion on impact. While they wouldn’t do much against a fully shielded Titan, they could serve as a distraction or be used to attack weak spots once the Titans’ energy shields were depleted.

The Punisher was a purely magitech weapon, though. While it looked bulky for an assault rifle, it was based on damaged or destroyed Titan weapons and had proven effective enough in combat with them that it became standard issue for all Vanguard troops who could reasonably carry one. Honestly, it was intimidating and looked more like a small cannon than an assault rifle, and rather than a round barrel, it was diamond-shaped. It used condensed mana clips, or if the person using it was desperate, they could feed mana into it directly. The weapon fired bursts of destructive violet colored magical energy that packed a lot more punch than the enchanted ammo for the Desert Eagle, but the downside was that it was a bit of a mana hog and could go through those clips fast.

As for the extra gear, Karen’s medical kit was standard for field medics, and if she ran across anyone with injuries that she couldn’t handle with that kit, Moonlight would be with us to provide healing. Kelly’s grenades were like larger versions of the enchanted bullets for the Desert Eagles. They were regular high-explosive grenades, but enchanted to give a bit of a magical kick to the explosions and pack more punch against the magitech defenses of the Titans. Between the gear and our combined abilities, I was hoping that we wouldn’t do too terribly out there, especially after our Incursion simulation training sessions.

Not that we were going to be allowed to get close to the action if we could avoid it. After all, I had been given strict orders for my team for this mission. We were not to approach the Breach under any circumstances, something that I was more than a little disappointed in, given that Kelly and I were both chomping at the bit to go through that Breach and rescue our mom, something that I believed Vice-Commander Carpenter knew all too well. I tried to tell myself that we would get our opportunity during the Incursion that, if the Oracle Lindsey Dimas was correct, would happen in Rust Ridge, Australia, on Saturday, October 26th, when we would launch a counterstrike against the Titans.

No, we would have to wait nearly two months, and as much as I wanted to rush in and save Mom now, I knew that Vice-Commander Carpenter was probably right, and our orders were sound since we were still raw recruits who had no business in a pitched battle yet. This time, our orders were for me to focus on transporting first response teams and to keep myself energized with as much flower nectar as I could drink between trips, because teleporting so much was going to play havoc with my energy level. While I was doing that, the others would help secure the transport site, cover my ass while I worked, and set up medical tents for the influx of injured civilians and casualties that we were bound to see by the end of this operation.

By the time that my team had their gear all sorted and joined me, I was already gathering as many people and their mounts as I could in a sphere that was a little over twenty feet in diameter. My effect range had increased by a significant amount with how much I had been pushing the ability lately, but when we were talking about regular-sized people and mounts like Gryphons and Pegasi, that still wasn’t a large amount of space. I was going to need to make a lot of trips to move all the first response teams, plus my own.

I counted myself lucky that I could still tag Moonlight while she was ethereal as I concentrated on tagging everyone around me for that first trip and focusing on the video feed from my comm crown. I needed to hurry; I could already see the distant figures of Titans through the video feed, and they were getting closer with every moment. Every second I tarried was an invitation for a stray shot to disrupt the feed or something, and we would have to waste precious time waiting to acquire another jump point for me.

People’s lives were at stake; I needed to do this now. I called for everyone nearby to crowd as close to me as they could manage and mentally tagged everyone in my range as quickly as I could with the strange sense of special awareness that came with my ability before I felt the strain from pushing myself beyond my limits and triggered the teleport, wanting nothing more than to be in that place immediately. No sooner did we appear than a burst of violent violet energy struck a hover-jet trying to flee the Incursion, less than a block away, causing it to explode. Seconds after that, someone shouted, “Incoming!” as the shit hit the fan.