Sell you a Bridge chapter 268

June 5th 2016 The Moon 7:00 PM EDT

The  energy from all the guns was...a lot. Like, an absurd amount of power.  Even in void form my brain whited out from the input. I felt like my  head was full of tv static, and I had to work hard to force myself to  stay aware between the pain of my power use and the overload of the  energy. Which was weird when I was thinking about it because I had no  brain. I wasn't even sure what was hurting. Though I supposed that was  always true. Brains didn't actually have nerves in them and couldn't  feel pain in any case.

Whatever the reasoning I could feel  both sensations, energy and agony, coursing through me and growing by  the second. The contrast made them both more intense, and it was almost  impossible to ignore them, but I knew I had to keep my wits. If I lost  my cool I'd shift back, either from getting lost in the power or from  blacking out in pain. Either would spell disaster, as aside from not  collecting the points I needed I'd be taking physical form in the middle  of huge clusterfuck of powerful energy attacks.

I held on  for what felt like hours, but was probably a few minutes under the  barrage. Eventually though I just couldn't take it anymore and  officially signaled to my friends to stop. They slowly let off the  pressure, allowing the energy to dwindle, and as they did I felt the  pain in my head begin to climb. The less the energy was there to take my  mind off it the more I slowly lost my grip on consciousness. The pain  was becoming unbearable. The energy finally bled off and I triggered my  shift back to solid form with a muted scream.

There was a  burning smell as I reformed, slamming into the ground a smoking mass of  twitching ghost devil. I groaned aloud, somehow managing to stay  conscious, but unable to form any coherent words, or even sounds that  weren't just garbled grunts of agonizing torment. It took a few seconds  for my brain to reboot enough to actually rasp out a very soft. "Ow." I  had a brief flashback to the blackout I'd had when I absorbed that  lightning bolt and wondered if maybe it would have been smarter to slow  play this plan, despite the strain of keeping up void form for too long.

I'd  gotten so excited to help Zee I'd jumped the gun, like I always did  when I found a convenient solution. I saw a path ahead and charged down  it without looking, usually headlong into a tank of hungry sharks. I  shook it off and stood up on wobbly legs. At the very least this was my  own power, which had never really damaged me. A bit of pain was  unfortunate but not the end of the world, and I hadn't done anything too  reckless. I closed my eyes to check my points. Eleven million. More  than I needed by a solid million points.

I'd keep them for  a rainy day in case I needed them for a perk or wanted to build a  construct that could swat a city like a fly. Regardless though, I had  enough. More than enough actually, and plenty left over to open up a  shadow portal back to Julian's place. I somehow doubted we were going to  make it back to the door out in the sea of tranquility. Before I could  summon the portal though, I felt a shudder in the floor as something hit  the wall on the other side of the room.

I turned to  Tommy, who was wiping blood from his nose. "Sorry kid, some kind of  dedicated scan. The Collector has plenty of tricks up his sleeves. I'm  guessing he had some sort of conceptual defensive wards on this place,  they were probably just set up to activate sparingly. Even for him it  would be tough to output that kind of energy. Conceptual effects are  notoriously difficult to produce repeatably. Either way, I did what I  could but he found us out. He's coming for us." He sounded grim at the  prospect.

I could certainly understand the sentiment. I  wasn't feeling amazing right now either, and while I didn't know exactly  what he would send I was guessing based on the robots from earlier it  wouldn't be simple to deal with. I turned to my friends. "Alright,  anyone who has any tricks, smoke em' if you got em'. Jim, any chance you  could arrange for a ward that'll keep them out like theirs did to us?  If you can buy the time I can set up a portal for us to use to get back  to the Nightside directly from here."

My mentor shook his  head.  "I don't think so. I mean, I can try, but I can't promise  anything I can set up that quickly will be able to hold off the robots I  saw earlier, and that's assuming that he doesn't have anything else to  throw at us, an assumption I'm not at all comfortable making. I'll do  what I can in either case." With that, he turned back to the door to the  moon base chamber and rapped his cane on the floor, beginning a long,  slow chant of muttered syllables as he began to weave together magic.

I  turned to Artemis and Wally. "The two of you have some sort of  lightning trick you do together, and robots run on electricity. I can't  know for sure it'll do much, but I figure we might as well swing for the  fences. Can you two set up for a ranged assault once they get past  Jim's barrier?" There was no if involved in this, just when. Jim was  amazing, but we didn't have nearly long enough and this wasn't his  territory. Artemis just gave a solemn nod, dragging Wally off to set up  for a series of lightning based bow attacks mixed with a bit of cosmic  super force.

I would have liked to prep more, but I was  forced to throw out any thoughts of arranging our defenses when the wall  was ripped away by a huge, bulky robot that had to duck to get through  even the massive gap it had made. Once it was in the room I was able to  see that the thing was about twenty feet tall, and I gulped slightly at  the aura it was putting off, because it was pretty obvious it was  different from the others in more ways than just visually.

Visually  though, it was pretty distinctive. Aside from being twenty feet tall,  it had other key differences. Firstly there were no legs, the bottom of  the machine rolled in on tank like treads that ate up a surprising  amount of ground. I would have expected it to lack mobility, but the  torso was made of a series of overlapping metal plates that allowed full  mobility at the waist to offset the stationary base, hence the bending  over to get inside.

The shoulders were heavily plated with  thick riveted steel, and the red glowing eyes were set into a block  head bisected by a jagged line separating top and bottom, allowing for  the effect of sharp metal teeth when the top and bottom of the head  separated from each other. One arm was topped with a huge double headed  axe blade, and the other with a spinning buzz saw. The red eyes of the  massive robot glared down at me with a malicious gleam, and I swallowed  hard at the sheer size of the thing.

There was a massive  flash of lightning as Artemis fired her arrow, Wally charging it up with  the speed force before she loosed the attack. There was a massive flash  of crackling electricity as a purple lightning blast came blasting  across the room and smashed into the robot as it was stopped by a web of  arcane symbols courtesy of Jim's earlier casting. The robot took the  blast head on, being driven back about ten feet and tearing up the floor  of the moon base, but otherwise seeming not to be effected other than a  scorch mark on its chest.

I cursed and turned to yell to  Artemis. "Focus on the smaller ones. I can deal with the big boy!" I  wasn't actually sure I could, but with the current amount of points I  had I could do some serious damage even without relying on my power  directly. My head was still smarting and I was pretty sure telling any  lies to the world was out, but I had plenty of inherent gifts and tons  of fuel to use them with.

I shifted into my shadow form,  and once I did I called up a massive amount of dark energy, creating a  shadow construct and merging it into myself, making a massive shadow  version of myself. Once I was up to size with the robot I reached into  myself and shifted back. I almost staggered at the drain of points  needed to solidify something the size I currently was, but luckily I  could actually do it since my body was partly ectoplasm in the first  place. Even during the fight with the Monkey Prince I hadn't been able  to become physical again after I'd upsized like this.

When  I became physical again, it was with a view of a robot of pretty much  equal size to me, albeit much wider. I conjured Tartarus in one hand and  an Abyssal Alloy tower shield on the other. Seeing all my friends  standing around at a height that barely reached my knees was...shocking,  but pretty awesome. This was something I'd really looked forward to  try, and now that I was happening I was geeking out a little. I wasn't  sure if the extra points allowed it or I had just changed that much from  all the training and the whole sphere of the gods trip, but either way,  the fact that this was now and option amazed me to no end.I triggered  my armor to keep me safe and increase my power passively, though I  couldn't fuel the demonic power augmentation right now.

I  poured in some points (thank the gods I had them to spare because my  brain was slag and my actual power use wouldn't be an option for another  few hours probably) and sparked up the lancer configuration on  Tartarus. The huge robot let out a buzzing roar as its head levered  open, mouth parting like a bear trap, and a whistle of steam billowed  out at my face from inside it. I raised the shield, absorbing the  superheated mist (which was fucking neon purple for some reason.

Despite  the strength of my Abyssal Alloy I could feel the shield begin to  soften, and I had to reinforce the damn thing by compacting the  structure with more ectoplasm. The cooling frost of the ectoplasm and  the condensing of the metal into a smaller area undid the softening  effect, actually seeming to have improved the shield as I smashed it  down to buckler size with a hefty expenditure of points. I wasn't quite  low enough to break the ten million mark and defeat the purpose of  coming here, but I was getting close. I needed to create the portal or I  wasn't going to have the points to throw us all that far soon.

I  tanked another blast of steam, and the new condensed shield was able to  hold up fine...until the axe blade smashed into it, driving me back a  step even in my armor. This thing was strong as fuck, and I felt my  concentration shake a bit. With a quick grin I dipped back and created a  clone. I left it in my place as I flickered through my shadow form and  used the points from the larger me construct to make the duplicate. I  checked the progress of the portal and grinned. It was done. I dropped  us all through it, watching in amusement as the robot demolished the  shadow construct clone I'd left behind. Mission accomplished, now for  the hard part.