167 – Weeding out some cultists
<span style="font-weight:400">People screaming in terror and the scent of burning flesh greeted me as I swapped ces with my drone. With the other ces now under control, I could handle over-watch even while ying around with Cain.
<span style="font-weight:400">I pulled the memories my drone kept into my mind and quickly ran through them, processing them all in a matter of half a second. Then, I was up to speed on everything and my mask of a frightened damsel in distress slipped on.
<span style="font-weight:400">At least my drone didn''t overy it, even showing somepetence and some guts. That meant Cain was less likely to lose his shit when I started opening the cultists up from balls to brains with butchering knives.
<span style="font-weight:400">I tightened my grip on the knife already in my hand, feeling its grip with both my fingers and aura. It was made to chop vegetables, not for poking people to death, but it would do. I wasn’t nning on ying fair, after all, I just had to keep my cheating hidden enough that Cain wouldn’t suspect it.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Nice throw,” the man in question said, his eyes not leaving the burning door frame as he kept careful watch of it. The moment a new cultist’s vague outline showed up behind the mes, he fired at them and I heard the body m into the ground a momentter. “Forgive my manners, Miss. It seems in all this it has slipped my mind to introduce myself. I am Ciaphas Cain.”
<span style="font-weight:400">His eyes narrowed in suspicion and snapped over at me, searching for any hint of recognition or whatever else. I gave him none, giving only an uncertain smile.
<span style="font-weight:400">“E-“ I started, then coughed into my hand as if the thickening smoke was choking me. <i><span style="font-weight:400">Let’s not give him my real name, as real as ‘Echidna’ is, anyway. </i><span style="font-weight:400">“Emilia.”
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain gave me an encouraging look, likely taking my stutter for my sanity hanging on by a thread in all this. We <i><span style="font-weight:400">had </i><span style="font-weight:400">just killed three people, after all. A regr woman in my ce would have been close to fainting … or at least, the ‘me’ from Earth would have been. I had an inkling that the humans of this time had been forged into sterner stuff by all the atrocities they’d weathered.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Nice to meet you,” he said, shooting off another bolt and catching a sneaky cultist right in the eye as it tried to mber over the broken windows. “Now let’s just hope we get out of here alive enough to continue our conversation. We will need help, and for that, we need to destroy whatever it is they are using to jam ourmunications.”
<span style="font-weight:400">I gave a jerky nod, putting on my best ‘resolute’ expression as I poked my head out to watch the entrances. Honestly, my ears worked better for tracking them. These guys were stereotypical aneshi cultists wearing outrageously idiotic clothes, and I was pretty sure they had more drugs flowing in their veins than blood.
<span style="font-weight:400">A dozen of them were still ambling out there, grabbing weapons from the van and such while one of them was up on top, handling a pretty sizablesgun attached to it. For now, he was just leaning over it, but at any moment he could decide to start sending bullets into the cafe by the dozens every second.
<span style="font-weight:400">Instead, six of them came rushing in through whichever hole they could find in the outer wall. They came through the still smouldering door, jumping over broken windows and making new holes on the few still intact windows.
<span style="font-weight:400">As they did, I wrapped the young couple huddling in one corner and the waitress up in a ‘notice-me-not’ kinda psychic shield. That had the intended effect, and all the lunatics ignored them to charge towards us in the back.
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain managed to st another two of them into the afterlife, but then three grabbed pistols and started waving them around at us. The design was unfamiliar, but I could tell those firearms used the old school gunpowder and lead bulletbo, not some futuristic energy weapon.
<span style="font-weight:400">He ducked back, and a pair of bullets came thundering through the door just a heartbeatter. I winced as they bounced off of metal cupboards and pans, making sure to deflect them off of the two of us in a way that wasn’t too suspicious.
<span style="font-weight:400">A woman came rushing towards them, having jumped over the lingering mes and the ming remains of her fellow cultists. The other five stayed back, apparently happy to let the woman wearing a fulltex bodysuit and moving like a feral dog try her luck against us.
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain shifted back, putting a cutlery table between himself and the door as he kept hisspistol aimed at the opening, ready to st holes into the woman the moment she came through.
<span style="font-weight:400">Sadly for him, it would have been for naught as the woman pounced, practically flying through the door frame as her drug-empowered muscles had propelled her with almost supernatural strength.
<span style="font-weight:400">Sadly for her, my kitchen knife jammed into her stomach mid-flight, and by the time I pulled it out, she had a deep cut down to her navel. Her momentum carried her onto the table, but her guts were already spilling out, so she was in no state to actually continue through with her attack.
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain still shot her face off with asbolt though, just to be sure before he sent a weird look my way. I stared at my bloody knife, my best horrified expression on my face as I put a little shake into my arms. I <i><span style="font-weight:400">had </i><span style="font-weight:400">just gutted a human, which most regr people tended to react badly to.
<span style="font-weight:400">There was no time for words, or panicking though, as the other five cultists reacted to theirrade’s death by throwing themselves at the two of us. Screams,ughs and <i><span style="font-weight:400">giggles </i><span style="font-weight:400">apanied them as they came.
<span style="font-weight:400">Two ran by me quickly, pouncing on Cain who wasted no time sting them into smouldering corpses, but while he did that the other three followed through.
<span style="font-weight:400">The first came at me as I shuffled back, lunging with a machete poised to run me through but I swayed out of its way. Making sure Cain was upied, I nced over, seeing him grappling with thest cultist. Good, he was distracted.
<span style="font-weight:400">I kicked, my boot crushing the idiotic cultist’s knee as his lunge went wide, then I nted my knife in his kidney. Tearing it out, I pounced on thest cultist.
<span style="font-weight:400">This one had a gun, a pistol he had been trying to use on Cain, but the man had used the cultist he was grappling with as a human shield. The indecisive cultist just kept his gun trained on him, not firing, but swung it about as the guy I’d stabbed in the back copsed, groaning in pain.
<span style="font-weight:400">I grabbed one of his legs and telekically yanked it out from under him, causing his shot to go wide as he fell on his ass while I ducked behind a cupboard in apparent terror.
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain was done with the man he’d been grappling with, and pounced on hisspistol, bringing it up before the guy I’d tripped over could recover. A secondter, the man was sporting a fist-sized hole through the chest.
<span style="font-weight:400">Cain heaved a deep sigh, and if not for the shaky hand he used to steady himself on a table, he would have copsed. A brief inspection with my aura told me he had gotten pretty beat up in that brawl, with half a dozen bruises forming all around his body. Thankfully, nothing broke or ruptured, so I wouldn’t have to sneak a heal on him.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Miss?” Cain asked, and I poked my head up over the table while trying not to snort as I caught some of his thoughts. He forgot my name already. “Are you injured?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“No,” I said, making myself sound a little absent, as if I was shell-shocked from the fight still.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Good,” he said, stumbling over to the door and taking a quick peek out. For now, no other cultists were following in, but there were still a dozen of them outside. “Can you stand? I’m afraid I won’t be able to do this alone. I’ll need all the help I can get if I am to help us escape these lunatics.”
<span style="font-weight:400">He snatched up a gun, winced as the bloody grip fell into his palm, then flipped it around to hold it by the barrel. I stood up, wary as I could make myself look, and looked between him and the gun before grabbing it gingerly at his encouraging nod. I let my aura flow over the gun, flow into it and feel every moving part inside until I was intimately familiar with how exactly this little gadget worked.
<span style="font-weight:400">It wasn’t quite what I remembered firearms working like from earth, but even simple ‘slug-throwers’ — as they called firearms that shot solid projectiles and used chemical propents — had advanced some in the time that had passed. Thankfully, whoever made these didn’t even have the dreadfulck of even a smidge of artistic talent every single Imperial gun manufacturer had. Meaning, it wasn’t just a damned brick with a grip on it and a hole at the end to spit bullets out of, but a proper, handgun-shaped pistol.
<span style="font-weight:400">“You know how to use it?” Cain asked, his gaze flickering back to me for a moment before he returned to peering out the open door. The mes were spreading and a thick smoke was clouding the air, obstructing both his view of the cultists outside and vice versa.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Y-yeah,” I said, removing some blood stter that might have caused problems with them clogging up the trigger. I had five bullets left in the mag. That’d be enough if the rest didn’te running back, which I was pretty sure they’d be doing the moment we shot up the ones outside.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Good,” he said, though I felt a hint of suspicion in his tone. Paranoid fucker that he was, he was wary of everything and anything that didn’t perfectly fit the mould. “We have to strike before they do. … follow after me, and try to not shoot me in the back.”
<span style="font-weight:400">It seemed to physically pain him to have someone unknown with a gun <i><span style="font-weight:400">behind </i><span style="font-weight:400">him, but he still went on ahead, slipping over to the side and behind the counter with hisspistol trained on the windows. He tugged up his shirt to cover his mouth and nose, eyes squinted as they reddened from the smoke.
<span style="font-weight:400">I went after, slipping to the right with my own gun held steady in my hand. I also mimicked the bodily reactions to the smoke he showed, seeming unharmed by it would be an easy way to clue someone in that something was wrong with me.
<span style="font-weight:400">The three humans huddling around were still alive. The waitress fainted sometime ago, while the young couple was doing their best impression of a statue. A faint mental nudge came from one of my mind-cores and my attention snapped over to what my aura was feeling about a block away.
<span style="font-weight:400">One of the other vans filled with cultists was parked right outside what I felt inclined to call a tiny mall and while I had managed to make most civies run and hide away, the lunatics stumbled upon some that had been too stubborn to be herded away by such faint mental nudges. Now, I could keep up the act, but that would make me a colossal hypocrite.
<span style="font-weight:400">I had told Val not to y with his prey when innocents could die as a result, and now I was close to repeating what he had done myself. Oh well, not quite. I could cheat.
<span style="font-weight:400">I teleported the numbskull who thought keeping watch over his cart of cabbages was more important than running away from a van full of drug-addled lunatics armed to the teeth with weapons away a few blocks, dumping his dumb butt down in the middle of an empty park with his cabbages raining down on his head. Then I repeated the same with the few others who the cultists were likely to stumble across.
<span style="font-weight:400">Just as I was done with that, Cain fired off a bolt through the smoke, his bolt of condensed energy shing through the obfuscation and snuffing out a life on the other side. Not any life either, but the life of the cultist who’d been manning their gun emcement atop the van. The rest only had regr weapons.
<span style="font-weight:400">They would be easy prey.
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