PsychoCIDE

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Jungle

The truce holds by a thread. The throne revolves and some monarchs are easier to deal with than others. One morrow, some time in the future, the crown will settle upon the brow of one black Prince or another and at his side will be an equally terrible Queen. Mark my words we will soon be back in the old days and up to our lips in blood.

-Monsignor Sul Chi Tevanna, Letters to the College, Penned PA 296

"KaBOOM!" I shouted as the world went dark. My words dropped flat into the featureless void that wrapped hot and claustrophobic around me.

The deafening fusillade of ultrasonic arrows was gone. The tortured cracking of wood and roar of a swelling inferno vanished from my ears and for 1.241 seconds there was nothing but the pounding of my heart, the sweltering heat of the Jupiter Impeller in my hand and the empty infinity.

Dimension shifting was always a weird experience. Of course my physics professor would have been quite irritated at my use of the words.

"The Distortion Shield simply wraps you in a bubble of curved space, you are not leaving our dimension, you are just hiding in a little mouse hole for a few seconds."

Daniel Alster's words, one of my few complete memories of my time in seminary, echoed in my ears as the world popped back into existence. Wondrous chaos everywhere. The jungle was afire for kilometers in every direction and everything within a hundred meters of the impact point was simply gone. A dozen glowing craters stippled the land where I had been just moments before.

The jump I had started just seconds before the barrage had hit was coming to an end and in 2.93 seconds I was going to impact the ground at 89 kilometers per hour.

Plenty of time.

I swept my eyes across the horizon and saw what I was looking for. Falling like Icarus from the heavens were the bloody remnants of my foe. She had been concealed high above the battlefield in the cloud banks hidden behind an enchanted shroud and her thousand arrows had come down upon me with little warning.

That being said, 'little warning' was more than enough for one of my talents. When she had drawn upon the spirits of Air and Fury to loose the killing volley the entire sky had shifted ever so slightly, like the chest of a man drawing in a deep breath.

Had I merely been good, those few seconds would have been enough time for me to leap out of the primary impact zone and activate my D-Shield. Since I was one of the best, it was also enough time for me to discern the center of the "breath", draw a bead on my attacker and fire off an impeller stream.

There was an immense satisfaction in watching the bleeding pieces of her fall like rain onto the jungle below. The extra draw of the cookiecutter attached to my impeller had cost me a few more precious quants than I would've liked but the effect was worth it. That lovely barrel accessory had twisted the relativistic stream of liquid metal from a micron thin line into an expanding spiral. From where I stood the impeller stream was more than capable of carving my name on the moon. At 9 kilometers from the impulse point it had passed through the supernal warrior's enchanted mail and many layered wardings without even a hint of resistance.

"Kill Confirmed: Baroness Illuvia Karosham Devasti, Storm Waker of the 6th Order"

The ground rushed upon me as my squad burst into cheers over the communication net. Devasti was a big gun on the other side. She wasn't the toughest in a straight up brawl but she was fast, impossible to detect and the destructive power of her Thunderclap Arbalest was second to only a few.

With the Storm Baroness down and out the Wyld Hunt only had three Nobles left on the map. The rest of their host were all common supernals and while a horde of redcaps and trolls was not to be disregarded they were not a threat on the same level as The Peers.