Machina Arcanis: Two Worlds Collided

TUChapter 5. Torched the Wicked

TU5. Torched the Wicked

A few moments earlier, Tachyon had been crouching on top of a paint-stained mat, a can of paint, epoxy, and primer resting in the trolley beside her.

She hummed a melodic old tune to herself, scraping the loose flakes away with a paint scraper. Taking a blowgun, she blew the dust away and wiped the area down with surface cleaner, revealing the white, shiny surface underneath.

“Now, let’s make you pretty again!” she chuckled, treating the massive ship as if it were her own baby.

She dipped the brush into the primer and began to apply careful strokes, trying to achieve an even layer of thickness. She wasn’t exactly a master at this yet. But when hell was literally an eternity, she figured she’d be the best painter of all time in less than a century.

It was the blaring red lights and the sudden, piercing alarm that shattered her harmony.

Tachyon bounced to her feet, almost collapsing as the ship violently recoiled from an impact.

“No! Those ugly Furies!” she groaned in sheer exasperation.

According to emergency protocols, the safest place for the passengers was the living quarters, located deep within the ferry’s hull and equipped with multiple escape routes. The souls aboard were already well aware of this; she had drilled the safety introduction into them before their takeoff.

“Go to the muster stations!” she shouted, limping frantically through the scrambling, panicked crowds.

“Where is Aeacus?” she mumbled to herself, not seeing the old man anywhere. He must still be on the top deck, that thought shook her.

After ten minutes of sprinting, or as close to sprinting as her legs would allow with such great difficulty, she found the pathways entirely blocked. Terrified souls crowded both the elevators and the stairways leading to the star deck.

The bombardment outside continued. Violent commotions echoed from every corner of the ship, sounding like one continuous, terrifying scream.

In practice, the ship's artillery should have stopped the ambush long before the Furies could sink their sharp claws on the hull of the battlecruiser.

Tachyon’s face drained of colour. “It can’t be—Waaaaah!” she screamed, buffeted by another shockwave. This was far worse than any standard ambush from the wrath of the Erinyes.

“The safety hatch!” Tachyon snapped, slapping both hands against her cheeks to focus. She was the one who had specifically designed this emergency passage in the event of overcrowded stairways.

“Ouch!” she hissed. That slap was a little harder than she had intended. She rubbed the prickling pain from her cheeks.

With newfound resolve, she hobbled toward the hull section that housed the overhead hatch. Grabbing the lever, she pulled hard. The compartment panel slid open, and a set of stairs dropped down with a metallic creak.

She reached out for the hovering ladder. “One, two!”

She leaped. Her fingers caught the edge, and her own weight pulled the mechanism down. The legs of the ladder slammed into the deck with a loud clank.

Slowly, she began to climb. Abruptly, another explosive shock rocked the ship. Her leg slipped. Her chin and chest slammed brutally into the metal rungs.

The pain burned, her vision swam. She gritted her teeth, blinking back the tears and sweat stinging her eyes.

“Come on!” she growled, pushing through the agony and hobbling to the top of the stairs.

Finding the rotating lever, she forced it a full hundred and eighty degrees. The hatch hissed as the seal broke. Heaving and huffing, she threw her shoulder against the heavy door, pushing it upward.

The hatch swung to the side and crashed onto the flat deck floor. Tachyon poked her head out to witness a massacre.

Swarms of Furies were flying overhead, bat wings flapping with disorderly malevolence. At the far end of the chamber, a desperate battle was taking place. It was too hazy and too far away for her to understand exactly what was going on.

A cowering woman and child hiding underneath a table, a mere ten steps away, “Over here!” Tachyon shouted, waving frantically at them.

She glanced up. The swarms of Furies shifted and rolled toward the other end of the chamber, taking the fight directly to Aurora and Aeacus. Meanwhile, another group of ravenous beasts dragged out other souls, their unnaturally long tongues wrapping around arms and legs, carrying the screaming victims away.

The wails of the kidnapped souls echoed in her ears. Her knees grew weak, trembling violently.

Tachyon snapped into motion. “It’s clear now! Trust me, please!”

The woman nodded, scrambling out from under the table. Fresh blood and debris were scattered across the deck floor — the gruesome remnants of the slaughter. She shoved her child forward, and both broke into a run.

“Come, come!” Tachyon urged, lowering her voice as the child reached out and grabbed her palms.

“I’m so scared,” the child cried, snot and tears staining her face.

“It’s fine! Look, just climb down there, and you’ll be safe!” Tachyon forced a comforting smile, quickly ushering the child down the open hatch.

“Thank you!” the lady breathed out, her voice shaking.

Tachyon moved to follow them, pushing the hatch closed—

“Wicked!”

A sharp, high-pitched bellow erupted mere metres away. Tachyon’s hair stood on end. She spun around to find a vile creature looming far too close. Its long, grotesque tongue slithered unnaturally, foul drool dripping onto the deck.

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“Come with us!” the crone hissed, whipping its tongue at her.

Tachyon leapt out of the way, crashing hard into the ground. The impact knocked the air out of her lungs. Swallowing a cough and thinking quickly, she pushed the swinging hatch fully closed to protect the passengers below.

“WICKED! WICKED! WICKED!”

A couple more beasts joined the first, surrounding her from three directions.

With vicious snaps of their tongues, they yanked at her arms and legs. Then, the Furies took to the air, dragging her up with them.

“No, please—No! I don’t wanna go!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs.

However, her crying wails were entirely drowned out by the hideous, giggling laughter of the swarm. The star deck, where the battle still raged, faded into the distance. Even the massive battlecruiser was getting smaller and smaller beneath her.

The abyss would soon claim her. It was so cold. So incredibly dark. Tachyon blinked tears from her eyes, gritting her teeth to suppress her sobbing.

“EMPYRION!”

A blast of flame, fanning out with immense reach akin to the enormous wings of a Phoenix, exploded in the sky.

In the epicentre of the blast was Aurora, propelling her flight with powerful thrusters of concentrated flame.

The dark swarm split into three groups: two flanking Aurora, while the one holding Tachyon attempted to break away.

“It’s futile, vile creatures!” Aurora hollered. Her body emitted a blinding, silvery ray of light — she was fury.

She flung her palms backward, chanting the powerful infernal incantation. The sheer force of her explosive thrusters shocked the sky as Aurora spun into a whirlwind of flame. With a controlled flicker of her palms and fingers, she shifted mid-air and crashed directly into the oncoming swarms.

Screams of burning agony filled the air as the beasts met their harsh demise. Another group retreated, letting out a terrifying, ear-piercing shriek of irritation.

“Empyrion!” Aurora chanted once more.

She surged forward, transforming into a relentless maelstrom of flame that hunted down the remaining attackers. Aurora’s raw arcane power easily overwhelmed their naturally heat-resistant hides, instantly incinerating the shrieking beasts into drifting clouds of ash.

“Empress?” Tachyon screamed as loud as she could.

If they dragged her any further, it would be too late. Aurora pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, momentarily disoriented by the location of the sound.

It was a deadly dilemma. Time was ticking. The Empress had to attack the kidnappers now, but a wide blast risked perishing Tachyon along with them. How large of an area of effect did she need to hit the target in this darkness, from this distance?

With her two fingers raised, she made a micro-adjustment, aiming carefully as she fell toward the churning river below.

“This must be it—Empyrion-Fire!” A single, incredibly precise line of inferno sniped through the dark. The three Furies holding Tachyon imploded into an explosion of ash and flesh.

“Yeah! How about that!” Tachyon cheered, feeling the beasts' grip vanish. “Oh—”

She suddenly realised she was now free-falling directly into the river.

A raw, desperate scream tore from her throat as she plummeted. The atmosphere in the abyss was unnervingly thin, offering almost no air resistance to slow her descent. Instead of a rushing wind, there was only a breathless void that allowed the terrifying gravity to yank her downward at a sickening, unnatural speed. Her cheetah tail, ears, and clothes barely fluttered in the dead air. Below her, the dark river churned with tormented wails, countless spectral hands breaching the surface and stretching upward to welcome her into their cruel embrace.

“Help!” she cried out as she plunged into the dark water.

The liquid splashed loudly around her. The sheer sense of suffocation, a feeling she had almost forgotten existed, gripped her lungs as cold hands began pulling her down. They wanted her to become part of the hatred.

“I will not!” she gasped.

She scrambled and crawled against the current with all her might. The surface was just within her grasp. She pushed and kicked until her arms and legs were utterly exhausted. The suffocation choked her. The lively spark in her amber eyes was on the verge of dimming completely.

Then, a brilliant blast of flame ignited at the edge of the waves.

A gloved hand plunged into the dark water. The tormented souls scrambled away like cockroaches fleeing a binding light. With a firm, gentle tug, Aurora pulled Tachyon from the depths and pressed the wildren against her armour.

The cheetah gasped, coming back to life, blinking her eyes rapidly. Her hands clamped tightly onto Aurora’s plating as they thrust back into the sky, leaving the hazy river far beneath them.

“I’m alive?” she coughed, water spilling from her lips. “I thought I’d drowned!”

Aurora grinned. “I thought the dead couldn’t die. Hang tight now.”

She surged upward, firing occasional blasts of flame to maintain altitude. Together, they made their way back to the battlecruiser. As they neared, Tachyon looked down at the tattered star deck and the jagged holes in the hull. “My baby…”

Gently, Aurora descended onto an empty section of the deck. Aeacus rushed over to them, a genuine brow knit etched deeply into his face.

“By Zeus! You two are alive!” Aeacus choked on his own saliva. “I mean, obviously the Empress is alive, and Tachyon isn’t kidnapped… but you get what I mean.” The old man let out a breathless chuckle of relief.

“You might have been right to worry! I thought I was entirely breathless when I fell into the river,” Tachyon snapped, her voice still strained. “I could have died twice!”

Aurora smiled at the banter. “Well, it seems your hull needs a major repair,” she said, surveying the damage. The top carapace was filled with punctures and snagged openings, and the star deck was in absolute ruin.

“We’ll bar…” Tachyon collapsed onto the floor, finally catching her breath, her clothes completely soaked. “We’ll bar the star deck for now. I don’t think the Furies will be back after you roasted them into batwings. Though you should’ve at least told us you could fly!”

“Indeed, I didn’t even realise you could fly like that,” Thanatos interjected, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

It seemed to startle the old man; Aeacus blew air through his lips, brushing a hand against his chest as he tried to calm his racing heart.

“It’s one of my prime disciple’s techniques, actually,” Aurora murmured softly, her gaze dropping to her open palm with a bittersweet pang of sorrow. “I never imagined I'd have to rely on it. But I suppose sheer desperation is the truest spark for innovation.”

Zetius’s spacenoid background was likely the original inspiration for that Empyrion thruster technique, she deduced internally.

“Either way,” Aurora said, her gaze shifting to the old man’s shoulder, where crimson blood was dripping and soaking into his fine clothes. “Let me.”

“What do you mean?” Aeacus blinked, shooting her a confused look.

A glowing palm hovered over his gnarly, grazing wounds. Soothing, ethereal leaves floated and drifted around her hand like a beautiful autumn breeze.

“Iasis!” Aurora chanted. A gentle emerald light flashed. Immediately, the gruesome wound dried up and closed, leaving behind nothing but a mere red scratch.

“You can also heal?” Aeacus exclaimed in total disbelief. He patted his shoulder, feeling no pain whatsoever.

“Woah!” Tachyon gasped, pushing herself back to her feet.

“There is still so much I cannot do,” Aurora replied softly, her gentle smile betraying a profound, quiet sorrow. It was the very reason she had descended into this abyssal nightmare to begin with; the Helltide had to be stopped, no matter the cost.

“I could never repay such a debt to you, Empress,” Aeacus said, deeply bowing his head.

Aurora placed a hand on his shoulder and shook her head. “You were a king once, and a great judge of the dead. You should not bow to a mortal,” she reasoned, her voice absolute.

That statement left the Charon scratching his head. He didn’t quite know how to act around her anymore, which brought a loud burst of laughter out of both Thanatos and Tachyon.

“Everyone, let’s get to safety! I’m not comfortable being out in the wide open anymore!” Aeacus grumbled, instantly reverting into a grumpy old man.

With that, the party retreated to the lower deck and began to get to work on their reconstruction plan. The rest of their journey, thankfully, promised to be as smooth as sailing on a calm sea.