“Come on, really?” Piper says, trying the key again, trying the handle again, desperately hoping she just turned it the wrong way. “You can’t have changed - it’s been, like, eight hours, come on, Annabeth!” She’s getting panicked, and, how appropriate, the temperature has dropped at least ten degrees in the past fifteen minutes. “Please?” Piper hears herself beg.
The door swings open and Piper lets herself hope for a half a second. Then she sees the stony look on Annabeth’s face. And Piper’s heart drops.
Annabeth holds out her hand, and Piper looks at her, confused. “The keys,” Annabeth clarifies, “even though they don’t work anymore.”
When Piper’s hand brushes Annabeth’s as the cold metal falls from her fingers, Annabeth’s stoicism fails and she hiccups like she always does when tears threaten.
Piper takes the chance and turns on the charmspeak. She puts all her power, all her effort into it. She’ll win this one. She has to. “Vacate the demigod, Nyx,” Piper thunders, “or you will die.”
Destiny, 1,300 words, Part 2/6 Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
A story of survivors outside the walls of the Last City.
Warning: Minor gore
More Destiny fics here.
Read on Ao3
The Awoken man died. Kamon hadn’t expected it to die. He lay down on the earth and belly crawled to the body, inspecting the wound. Deeper than it had first appeared, lower too. Yes. Dead.
Kamon-9 logged a secondary objective. Primary would be killing the Captain. Secondary would be the man's dying wish. A fellow survivor deserved as much.
A Vandal shouted behind him, a fatal mistake as Kamon snatched the dead man's machete and whipped it into the beast's neck, ether sups splitting with a hiss.
He was standing now, above the cover of the logs. The Captain looked at him, looked at his face and his eyes. Kamon wasn’t one to hide, couldn’t hide, even if he wanted to. His engineers had made sure of that.
The Captain sniffed cockily before calling his underlings to action. Kamon took the opportunity to breathe, metaphorically at least. One Captain, three Vandals, one dead so make it two. Four Shanks, four Dregs. Easy.
Three clips left on the rifle, six rounds in the handcannon tucked in the back of his belt. Should be plenty. He had a knife in his boot in case it wasn’t.
Still… he had no idea how much spare ammunition the two dead men at his feet had, or where and when he would be able to get more. No point wasting. He pulled algorithms from his recent thoughts, recalculated the exact positions of the enemies around him, judging distance based on the sounds of their footsteps, their quiet ether sups, the whirring of the Shanks’ drives.
He was moving before the Captain uttered it’s last garbled syllable.
He grabbed the Dreg nearest him by the neck, rammed his durasteel knee into its ribs. Something inside it shattered, he felt it give. He tossed it aside and put a single shot through its temple, a feat of extreme control and precision for a bullet coming from an auto rifle.
Two of the Dreg’s brethren rushed him, snarling vows of revenge. The closer one was larger than the rest, stronger. He slammed the butt of the rifle into the skull of that one first, ducking below the blades of the other. The larger one crumpled, so he fired on the second, bullets tracking down from the collar blade to the abdomen. Less than half the clip was left. No time to reload.
Two Shanks came next, spitting tiny balls of arc energy from their canons. He let one hand fall from the rifle, and with it snatched up his knife. Shanks didn’t take bullets, Shanks were simple. A well placed rock could down one, their only danger was when they fired back. He could see their targeting in their eyes though, recognized it. He sidestepped most of the shots, knew a few would hit, expected them and braced. Kamon’s subroutines checked for damage to vitals while he brought the knife into the glass front of the closest Shank. They decided if he could swing a knife like that he probably hadn’t taken too much damage. His subroutines had some sass. He liked them that way. Kept things lively.
He shattered the face of the other Shank and stepped aside as it crashed and exploded, flinging little bits of shrapnel around him. They scratched against his clothes, he would have to check for damage later.
The Fallen stopped coming. He had left an impression. They waited for him now. Even the Captain had shifted so there was a tree partially in between himself and Kamon. It was like an invitation for him to decide the outcome of the battle now.
He graciously accepted.
Stowing the knife and rifle, he grabbed the handcanon from the small of his back. Six shots, five targets. Easy.
Shot one met a Shank, blew it apart. Kamon skirted the logs at his feet, headed for the two Vandals behind trees to his left, found only one.
He shot it dead, bullet to the throat, and put his back to a tree, searching for the other. It had no doubt gone invisible. Would it attack soon or wait, hoping he had forgotten it? Should he take the chance to shoot the two remaining Dregs, or wait out the Vandal?
He made his choice to the song of the Vandal’s blade, spinning right as the knife dug itself into the tree that had been his cover. He put two shots into this one, praying he hit something vital. He did, and the cloaking dropped with the corpse.
Captain, roaring to his right, a Shank and two Dregs, somewhere behind him. He would prefer to handle the lesser enemies first…but he wasn’t the one to decide anymore.
The Captain charged through the undergrowth, finally fed up with the pest murdering its minions.
Two shots went into the shields. Had the shield not been there they would have gone into its head. His handcanon was spent. He tossed it aside in favor of the rifle slung over his shoulder, backpedaling as he grabbed it to keep distance from his target. He unloaded what was left of the clip. It tore through the shields, but the last shots that should have been deadly lodged in the armor of his assailant instead. It was enough to make the Captain falter, and in those few moments Kamon ran for the largest trunk, took cover behind it, reloading without looking. A whirring to his left revealed the other Shank, which he dispatched quickly but with more shots than it should have taken. His subs unhelpfully noted the overkill and he fought the small flutter of frustration that rose from that.
Pause. Think. Listen. The Captain paced, slower, behind him to the right. It was wounded but its shields would return quickly. It wasn’t sure exactly which tree he hid behind, and it couldn't smell him, him made of metal not flesh, so it was checking every feasible trunk. That gave him a few seconds more. The two remaining Dregs whispered to his left, back at the fallen logs the bodies of the men lay behind.
Plan: shoot the Dregs, swap for a fresh clip, his last, kill the Captain.
Easy.
He sprinted in a flurry of dead leaves from the forest floor, made for the Dregs. Saw the first, shot in the direction of its abdomen. Missed at first but walked the shots up its body, getting a few in its neck. The other rose up from where it had been crouched over the body of one of its comrades. He unloaded nearly the rest of the clip into that one’s chestplate until it went down on top of the other.
He dove over the logs as fire from the Captain’s shrapnel launcher sounded. Some shards caught him in the back, his subs warned him of danger, possible lasting injury, but he was still moving, nothing had stopped functioning. Not yet.
He swapped the almost spent clip for the fresh one, allowed a half second pause to be thankful for how perfectly the plan had gone so far, thankful for how well it had worked.
He turned and poked only his head and rifle over the logs, sighted the Captain and emptied the clip.
It died.
The bullets dropped the already weakened shield and tore through the armor, one after another. Some missed, but more did not, and finally the beast fell.
He strode over to it, knife pulled from his boot and raised slightly, just in case, just in case it lived.
The life hissed out of the Captain like a shattered ether sup capsule. It was over. He assumed it was over.
Which is why he was surprised when he felt an impact at the base of his skull. His subs screamed FATALITY and everything around him vanished into white.
That time of night when the stars are out and it’s warm and dark and you can hear the wind and it feels like it’s just you and your gay fanfic left on earth
