Chapter 9

Elsie Eillenheart

Elsie took stock of her surroundings. They were in a weapons room. She saw one of the Railgun turrets she saw before, folded and inactive. A pocket door made of steel separated them from the corridor.

Like spiders, the sirens crawled through the ceiling. Their claws on their slimy wet appendages cut through the metal with ease like paper. Elsie’s eyes widened in abject horror. They were mutating before her very eyes.

The mutation was slow, but she clearly saw their fins warping into legs. Sooner or later they’ll be able to walk rather than just crawl on the ground.

“D-do you see that?” Elsie pointed at the crowd of sirens while tugging Sixty-Six’s sleeves.

“See what? The horde of vermin coming down on us?” He snarled, “Of course I do.” The elf was growing more agitated by the second, which was a far different reaction to the rest of his brothers who were calm and collected, who were helping Leylon set up a wind barrier again, keeping the sirens off of everyone.

“For the love of-ergh,” She bit down her annoyance, “They’re mutating! It’s slow but I can see little limbs sprouting out of their bodies!”

The elf’s mouth gaped open but quickly closed it in an attempt to recollect himself. “We need to go through the door to reach the bottom floor,” Sixty-Six was about to bark orders when Elsie stopped him.

“Can’t we just make a hole on the floor like we did a few moments ago?”

“I don’t want to cause more damage to the infrastructure,” Sixty-Six explained, “Some flooding should already be present on the last floor. I don’t want it to spread.”

She looked back at the sirens watching their every move. A fear creeped up in her spine, trying to paralyze her from action. If Elsie succumbed to indecision here, she would inevitably become a corpse in the water.

“Alright!” She pumped herself up, tapping her cheeks, “Let’s do this!” The red mana on her arms coalesced into something brighter. It formed into a glass-like substance with a crimson sheen to it.

As if on cue, the sirens from the ceiling rained down upon them, but Leylon’s wind barrier redirected them, making it nearly impossible to attack his teammates. “Let’s go!” Sixty-Six roared. As a group, Leylon, Elsie, and the elves moved in a tight circle with Sixty-Six constantly supplying Leylon with mana, while the other elves protected the unprotected spots of the barrier. Elsie led the front, charging her mana-formed gauntlets, ready to shatter the door.

She raised her right arm, and in a haymaker stance, hit the door, but right before her hand made contact with the door, the mana forming around her arms evaporated like water on a boiler.

The wind barrier Leylon erected also dissipated into dying mana particles. It was as if something blanketed the entire area and just asphyxiated the mana in the atmosphere.

“Wha-?!” Her exposed hand thumped against the steel door, nearly breaking a few fingers in the process.

Elsie recognized what was going on. All the mana in the air was being neutralized. It was like a magical EMP. Turning her head back, she noticed Leylon’s head drenched in sweat. She felt his anxiety and fear skyrocket as his mana circuits were unresponsive.

The elves tried to fire their runic pistols, but all she heard was incessant clicking; it was like they were bled dry.

Her own body felt dampened by the spell, like someone had placed a heavy wet blanket over her back.

“What just happened?” Sixty-Six looked over his pistol, not quite understanding what just happened.

“It was Eleanor’s Anti-Mana Spell. She didn’t factor us in, dammit!” Elsie knew about Eleanor’s greatest spell, the Anti-Mana barrier. It had two effects. One, it would blanket the area with a barrier designed to act as artificial anti-mana, essentially drowning the natural mana, rendering it useless.

The second was a smaller barrier, which would render those Eleanor viewed as allies unaffected by said spell. Unfortunately, if they aren’t close to Eleanor, they would be affected by said spell.

That’s the current problem Elsie and her team found themselves in.

Elsie’s hand had a bleeding bruise from the punch she gave the metallic door in front of her.

“The hole is in the engine room,” Sixty-Six said grimly, “We need to get there as soon as possible.” He took out a key from his tiny traveling bag attached to his hip and some extendable daggers, handing his brethren, Leylon, and Elsie each one. “Cover me,” he said brazenly as he focused his attention to a terminal next to the closed pocket door.

Looks like he’s going to focus on opening the door manually, Elsie thought. She brandished the dagger in a protective stance. She wasn’t going to act stupid and charge at the sirens when all she needed to do was protect Sixty-Six.

A siren leapt to her left. She swung the dagger straight to its cranium, pinning it to the ground. Elsie twisted the dagger in its skull and tried to pull it out, but the dagger was too stuck. Unlike the others, Elsie relied too much on bruteforce when her mana was powering her.

That bad habit affected her even now as she watched how her professor and the elves only focused on slashing the sirens’ necks. As she was focusing on trying to take out the dagger, a siren jumped on her waist, slashing at her cheek.

“Hyah!” Elsie shrieked, trying to pull the little monster off of her, but its strength was like a stalwart wall. She felt it wrap its slimy arms around her back, crushing her spine.

Blood dripped from her cheek and her spine was being crushed by a compactor-like monster child. Elsie felt the jaws of death close in on her when Eleven stabbed a dagger into the siren’s back of its neck.

It fell off and crumbled under its own weight like a dying cockroach.

“T-thanks,” Elsie tried catching her breath, “You saved me.”

Eleven handed her back the dagger stuck in the siren beneath her without a word. She glanced back at Sixty-Six, who was manually overriding the terminal controls by hotwiring its wires. “The spell managed to screw with the Vadstena’s AI system, but I’m almost through manually opening the door….and done!”

The pocket door flung open. Flickering lights from the corridor peeked through the opened door.

Everyone immediately dashed through the door, running through the corridor with Eleven at the front. Sixty-Six had his brethren cover his front and back as he fiddled a device he used to pry open the terminal back into his bag.

Elsie’s back still ached from the siren’s attack. Any later and her spine might’ve cracked. She shivered thinking about what could have happened if Eleven was any slower.

The sirens were hot on their trail, crawling across the ceiling and walls like a wall of flesh closing in on them.

As they reached the bottommost floor, Sixty-Six checked his wristwatch. “Hole’s in the boiler room.”

They ran down a set of stairs, with Elsie doing a high jump to catch up. Thankfully, the pocket door to the boiler room was open.

Or more like torn down. The water in the boiler room was dangerously close to overflowing into the corridor beyond the stairs that separated them.

The crew needed to fix the hole as quickly as possible. Elsie gazed over the water that flooded the boiler room. She noticed there was movement in the flood and figured there must’ve been sirens lurking underneath the flood. They needed to move in, fix the hole, and escape from the sirens behind them and avoid the ones in front. The anxiety she felt from Leylon and Sixty-Six was overpowering.

She then noticed a strange burning smell emanating from the water. Eleven, the one in front of the group, rolled up his sleeves. His foot inches away from the flood.

“Wai-” Elsie was going to warn him about something strange with the water, but her reaction, her realization, was too slow.

Eleven’s foot made contact with the water and his body immediately clammed up. Froth formed from his lips, his nerves twitching and contorting as his skin oozed heat.

Electricity.

He was dying from electrocution.

His limpless body collapsed in the flood of death, disappearing into the watery grave.

Elsie’s mouth dropped. Everything else that happened was a blur to her.

CRASH

A shadow tore another hole through the boiler room, twitching violently from the electricity. Elsie saw corpses of sirens, dead from the electricity, fly up in the air.

From the violent mass of water, a tendril of flesh and eyes took shape. From its mouth, it unleashed a black goo to attack Elsie. She ducked, but a bit of the goo fell on her cheek, where her claw wound was at.

She felt the liquid burn at her cheek, but as she tried to wipe off the infernal goo, it disappeared, leaving only a smudge of black on her hand and cheek. “Huh?”

A hand grabbed the back of her coat, dragging her away from the boiler room. “Eleven is down!” She heard Sixty-Six yell out, his grief overpowering her empathic senses, “We need to abandon ship!”

The next crash turned everything black.