I used flight to bound forward and help guide my running more than I flew on my own. I tried to get some air, raised up my forcefield, and used my aura.

My forcefield has always been something that took one good hit and then took a bit to recharge. Here’s hoping it still takes one good hit, and the recharge is what suffers from my being down here.

She swatted me, not even with the blade, and sent me careening.

Flight helped kill the worst of my momentum, but the landing was still a hard one.

I looked back, and she was gone.

“How’s our progress?” I called out.

“Slow!”

“We need to hurry it up!” I called out, my volume lower as I floated toward the center of the working group. If the group above buckles, she’s going to single out this group, and we don’t have the firepower to stop her.

I looked up, straining to see reality on the far side of the cracks. I only saw what might have been the Nemean Titan. Another omnipresent threat that was impossible to pin down. If he got down here, he wasn’t going to teleport back up to fight the next big threat. He’d be down here for good.

Pickaxes dug into the crystal surface. People with bombs stood by, ready to put them into the holes. Chunks ranging in size from my fist to a small dishwasher had been pulled out of the hole.

“Dig what you can,” I said, looking down at it. “I’m going to fly up and get my laser cannon. I’ll see if I can’t drill it a little deeper. Then you let me get clear and you bomb it.”

“Alright,” one man huffed.

“After that, we might have to evacuate you guys,” I told him. “What we’re doing got all of their attention.”

“We noticed. A couple hundred of us died up there,” a woman said.

The words were chilling. My nod stiff.

I flew away, to get my gun and to hurry this along. We didn’t have all night, or anything close to it.

My flight was more horizontal than vertical, as I struggled to pull up and away with my power dampened.

I saw Rain, carrying on to his destination. He saw me. People who were moving from landed helicopters to work sites looked between us, maybe finally realizing what I’d been struggling to convey in my speech, what Naphtha had struggled to convey about how this place worked.

There were people inside the ‘computer’, like Rain, and there was us, hacking at it from the outside.

But it was connected to all of us. Chunks of broken crystal littered the area, and those chunks showed reflections. Stuff I’d seen inside the computer. I could see that Rain saw them too. That the civilians were taking note, their attitudes shifting imperceptibly.