Stormblood, стр. 37
No way was I going to break now.
I tried to think of the New Vladi mountains. The whisper of snow and wind. My brother’s weight leaning against me. The smell of fresh pine and the taste of vodka on my tongue. The logs crackling in our campfire, embers whirling into the sky. I wrapped myself in my memories, held on to them like a lifeline until the monster lurched out of the darkness, claws hooking around my shoulders as it leaned over me and bellowed in my ears to jolt me out of them, louder than a screeching hurricane, louder than anything in the universe.
The juddering of the armour increased threefold. Tightened around me. My suit boiling, burning against my skin as the screeching spiked into my brain like a needle. Animal growls and screams spewed from my throat, spraying my visor with saliva.
I almost didn’t notice the scratching running down my palms and over the soles of my feet but then I remembered what Lasky had said about internal wiring. I bucked in the cradle as my suit’s inner wires and tendrils fed between my toes, wrapping around my feet and scratching at my soles like raked fingernails. Coiling under my armpits. I snapped my jaw shut as it prodded around my mouth, forcing myself not to scream even as the wires pried my lips open. Curious cables slithered in like playful metal snakes between my teeth, scratching at the roof of my mouth and inching towards the back of my throat. I was exhausted, terrified, shaking, every heaving breath filled with dread for the moment they’d tunnel down my oesophagus and start inflicting permanent damage.
It kept me like that for hours.
It waited until I was on the precipice of passing out before trying something new.
The nightware flipped through fragments of the Reaper War, dragging me through the memories. The pockmarked, scorched battlefields, the Dead Zones where we’d waited in ambush. The towns where we were too late to evac the civilians and found them lying mangled on the streets. The med bays. The rotting corpse pits, stretching through the wastelands, ash raining on their pallid faces. Hellfire thundering down from orbit in the Battle of Lysven. Men in my Battalion screaming as they were vaporized. The stink of ozone, of grasslands burning. The stormtech crackled through me with spitting, furious sparks as the remembered sensations came flooding back, triggering it hard. The whirlpool was dragging me back. My grip weakening.
The videos played on and on and on until it felt like my skull would burst – and then it started up again. And again. Until they slowed, swooping down to focus on a dead Berserker, his bloodied uniform embossed with the Harvest glyph. Except, it wasn’t a Harvester. It was Artyom. My brother’s pale, lifeless face, during a battle five years ago on a planet millions of klicks away.
The Rubix knew me. It was inside my suit; now it knew who I was. Didn’t matter how long I held out. If the Rubix knew, they’d know very soon.
I had to get out of here.
The armour crushed my chest, my spine, growing tighter and tighter, as if it knew what I was thinking. The cradle vibrated against my back, sending bone-shuddering pain scattering up my body. A cold numbness spreading along the soles of my feet and palms, up my legs and arms. An image of the suit’s inner wiring, metal and matte, worming into my flesh like tendrils festered in my skull as my hearing faded. Darkness smearing along the fringes of my HUD, biting off my senses one at a time, ensuring I only saw and heard and felt what it wanted me to.
Sweat clouded my vision as fast I could blink it away. I looked at the red terminal pad connected to the cradle, the peacefully blinking button that would release me. It was a straight shot – a mere metre away. But strapped down like this, a metre might as well be a lightyear.
I still had an iron projectile hidden in the sleeve of my armour. But could I even get close to the right angle from here?
There was nothing more I could lose.
The numbness had reached my armpits like frostburn and was busy inking across my collarbone. I drew a breath around the wires in my mouth. Tried to steady my shaking arm as I aimed with my wrist, barely able to see that red panel. Blinking away as if daring me to miss. I had one shot at this. If I missed, the next few hours would slowly churn my brain into mush.
I reached for the stormtech for the first time in years. Pulled on it to sharpen my focus like it had on the battlefield; let it drench me in calm and clarity. Took a slow, calming breath before I toggled the command to fire.
The missile whistled out of my wrist.
Thudded into the panel.
My restraints popped open and I hurled myself clear of the cradle. Every limb was a numb, dead weight, my hearing gone. The nightware construct burst from the darkness into my vision, clawing and shrieking with the garbled voices of a hundred dying creatures in my face. It drowned me in blackness, filling my helmet with ruptures of ear-splitting sound. I scrambled in a moment of blind panic, unable to find the case and knocking it away with numb hands when I did. When I finally managed to grab the case, I brought it slamming down on the rotten floorboards. The monster construct was sent smashing backwards, as if kicked with a hammer. Chunks of its thrashing body smeared into stuttering pixels as I smashed the case down, again, again, again. Its mangled face shuddered, warped with black static, its outstretched claws peeling back into strips of writhing