SIS B4: Chapter 108: Radio Shack and Stairway

"Sup, Uriel," Crusher greeted Daz.

The family dinner of last night had come and gone and right now Daz was meeting up with the Titan on his sister's suggestion.

While Greg and his men had found the trace that could lead to the people behind the kidnappings, Crusher was supposedly the best person to bring with him.

Rose suspected her Ember of Clarity could prove to be exceedingly useful and he was inclined to agree.

Daz nodded at her. "It's nice to see you too, Crusher."

She shrugged as she hoisted her hammer that was easily the same size as his entire body over her shoulder.

"We gonna get this show in the road then?" she asked.

"I don't see why not. Do you know where we're going?" Daz asked as he summoned Hamson and got atop it. "Also, can you fly?"

"No clue and no but I can do this," she said with a grin.

Crusher then shrunk her hammer down to the size of a keychain. It even had a little hoop attached to the end of its pommel which Daz didn't recognise.

She shoved her index finger into that hoop and then spun it around so quickly it looked like a blur. The next moment, she shot off like a rocket.

Daz quickly flew to her position, a good few miles of distance away.

"Well," he said upon finding her with a big smirk on her lips. "That was impressive."

"Wasn't it just?" she replied. "I added a fuckton of weight to the head of the hammer. Enough to lift me off my feet and send me flying. Took literal weeks to perfect. You've got no clue how many buildings I ruined by getting the trajectory wrong, haha."

"I can only imagine. Well, we've got to go that way for about 600 miles," Daz said as he pointed east.

Crusher nodded then spun the keychain version of her hammer again before quickly disappearing.

Daz frowned. "Not as much banter as I would expect from her... I wonder what's wrong."

He knew she'd failed her semester one goal. That was more than evident since she was still the same three-metre tall woman as she was more than half a year ago.

'Maybe that mattered more to her than I first thought. I sort of enjoyed the nonsense she would say off the cuff... It's... odd. Ellie, Crusher, Greg... even me. This apocalypse sure has a knack for making people change,' Daz pondered before he gave chase.

***

"Is this really the place?" Crusher asked as she narrowed her eyes. 'Seriously? A radio shack in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere?'

She saw Daz nodding. "It's incredibly likely."

"What makes you so sure?" Crusher questioned. 'He always so confident of himself, the lucky bastard. Wish I could be like that.'

Instead, she did damn near whatever she felt like that seemed interesting to try to find a meaning to... anything.

He turned to glance at her with those cold and dead grey eyes of his. "Greg and his men were able to follow some suspiciously-acting people coming out of Fort Home a few days ago. They had to keep their distance since we're under the assumption they're Truthians. Due to that, they couldn't get a great description though no one who's gone in there has come out."

"Suspiciously-acting?" Crusher asked.

"Yes. A few of Greg's men who specialise in telling the unordinary from the ordinary with their skills noticed these people trying very subtly to befriend citizens that frequented the cemetery. Specifically, citizens who had lost their entire families," Daz explained.

"Huh... Seems like a stretch," Crusher noted.

Daz nodded as he continued, "A small lead, I know. I got Rocky to lend me a hand though. His second personality, Red, has told me there's a 97.5% chance of this being a Truthian base of operations in our territories. Rose has cross-confirmed this with her guesses. We couldn't figure out why they were targeting such a specific group of our citizens though."

Crusher pursed her lips. That was a lot more effort than she'd have put in to find the truth of that matter, that was for sure.

Hell, she didn't even know people were going missing until Rose had told her this morning over the phone.

'I wonder why I even have a general title,' she thought. 'Sure, I have my misfits but I'm hardly a military leader.'

"So what's the plan? I could also go full Titan and squish the place under my foot before they have the time to cancel my powers or turn me to ash," Crusher suggested.

Honestly, she didn't value her life much. Even after her talk with Mu, she still felt the same.

The strange man had alleviated some of her mental stress though her mindsets hadn't shifted even an inch. Maybe that was the problem, she felt.

Evolutions needed a big change in mindset according to the leading research on the subject. Still, that was easier said than done.

Daz seemed to consider her suggestion seriously before ultimately shaking his head.

"If this place truly is the base of our citizens' kidnappers, I don't want to risk killing any civilians," he said.

"Okay, so what's the plan then, Uriel? You go in cock first and ask politely for them to explain everything?" Crusher joked.

Shockingly though, he nodded. "More or less, yeah, but without the polite part. I want you by my side to search for anything... odd. If they cancel your powers I'll murder them all instantly. How does that sound?"

"You're legit planning to go in and ask questions first, kill later? Isn't it usually the other way around?" Crusher asked dubiously.

Daz chuckled faintly. "Just like you, my friend, I am hardly ordinary. Let's go, shall we? I suspect they already know we're here. My instincts are giving me slight hints of danger."

Crusher sighed and helplessly shrugged. "You're the boss, Uriel."

She followed his lead when he jumped off of the cliff the two of them had been using as a vantage point.

While midair, she shrunk her hammer as much as she could before she popped it in her mouth and just swallowed the thing.

'I'll be fine if I get turned to ash. Uriel's a weird cunt but he keeps his promises. Don't want my precious Crusher to get destroyed though,' she thought before she heavily impacted onto the ground.

She pried herself out of the dirt as her mind noticed something. 'I care a lot about this hammer, huh? More than most things at least.'

"I can see your souls," Daz said to the open space in front of the radio shack, spooking Crusher a bit.

'Wait, he can see souls? Shit. Just how much do I not know about this guy?' she thought.

His face was without expression and his words cut the air deeply. "Disable access to the system or try to turn my companion into ash and you will all die within seconds."

He had been carrying a briefcase with him since they had met up in Fort Home. Now Crusher knew why. He had opened it only to reveal that it had contained 50 thin, long needles that shimmered in the sunlight.

"I believe I can move these faster than you can destroy them, so let's have a civil discussion, shall we?" Daz suggested a bit menacingly.

'Are there really people here?' Crusher wondered before she focused her Ember of Clarity onto their surroundings.

Low and behold, she was able to sense about 12-17 people no only in front of them, but entirely surrounding them.

'Interesting. I wonder what it's like to lose access to the system?' Crusher asked herself.

She had been out of town when the large-scale attacks across New Earth had happened and she'd never actually met a Truthian before.

Honestly, she kind of wanted to experience what it was like to... to not be Crusher anymore. Like she was so many months ago.

It almost seemed like a lifetime ago now. She couldn't help grin at that thought. 'How much I've grown yet how little I've grown.'

She glanced at her king, the man she vowed loyalty to but didn't really give a shit about. 'He evolved twice on his own, once more with a token. I only evolved once... I got an Ember before him but I can feel it. He has five Embers now, not four. Sneaky bastard earned a new one. Man, there ain't shit special about my big dumb ass.'

Crusher then felt herself shrinking, oddly enough.

"What a shame," Daz said as he shook his head.

She noticed his halo had disappeared and his hair and eyes were shifting from grey to a dark brown.

The next moment, his needles flashed through the air so quickly that even she could barely keep up with them.

15 bodies with holes in their foreheads appeared, all wearing priest robes, Crusher noticed. The shrinking of her body also happened to stop at the same time.

She quickly returned to her normal towering form and Daz's brown hair shifted back to being grey while his halo reappeared.

'... I want to know what it feels like to be the old me again, honestly. That was interesting,' Crusher thought.

Daz shook his head. "I'll send off their souls later. For now, let's go inside, shall we?"

"... Sure," Crusher answered.

Normally, she wasn't one to speak so little but her talk with Mu last night as well as her recent reflective thoughts had her in a more ponderous state than usual.

She followed Daz and ducked down to enter after him since the radio shack's door was only about two metres tall.

"Empty?" Daz asked as he picked up some papers on a nearby desk.

"Anything important?" Crusher questioned absentmindedly as she looked around with her Ember of Clarity.

She was a bit unfocused but she was also aware that she was here to assist him, not to be the big lug of muscles that did fuck-all while he finished up the entire job on his own.

Daz shook his head. "Scripts for the radio show that used to be hosted here. Nothing that matters or even relates to the Truthians."

He then stroked his chin. "I should set up a radio show network after this war is over."

"For propaganda?" Crusher asked with a chuckle.

"No, I'm against that stuff. Why lie to the people when I can just do what the lies would state anyway? The news programmes border on propaganda enough as it is. I think we could use more culture. Maybe invest in people with musical classes like Fiona and broadcast their work. Could always dig up the songs and albums from before the system's coming too," he suggested.

"You're in charge, not me. By the way, there's a staircase behind that," Crusher said as she pointed at a large mechanical recording device of some sort.

"Huh. Well, I don't have the arm reach to move it quickly and I don't have the time to find the legitimate way to open it. Crusher, would you mind?" Daz requested of her.

She shrugged but a smirk was on her lips as she said, "Nah, I don't."

Approaching the machine, she slammed her left hand into the machine's side, digging her fingers into the metal. It caved in like paper mache, so great was her strength.

With one hand, she ripped the thing clean off of the floor which it was bolted down to. She tossed it aside making one hell of a mess.

Daz smiled wryly. "Maybe I won't revitalise this particular station. Anyway, seems the entire floor, machine and all, were able to slide back into the wall then to the side. Intricate."

"System bought?" Crusher asked.

Daz shook his head. "No, looks distinctively Earthian in design. Probably a bomb shelter of some sort. Plenty of paranoid people around with the money to have something like this made back then."

Crusher nodded. "Yeah, you're not wrong."

She then stretched and cracked her spine before asking, "Downwards, Uriel?"

He nodded. "Downwards."

***

At the bottom of the stairs, Crusher was once again impressed by just how frighteningly deadly Daz could be even with the threat of having the system stripped from him and possibly being turned into a pile of ash.

"How can you be so chill right now, Uriel? There were at least, what, 40 dudes in that room," she inquired as she pointed with her thumb to the chamber they had just exited.

"Ah, it isn't exactly public knowledge, is it? It's no secret either really, but I'm immune to being turned to ash. Several of my skills also cannot be removed from me. Unless there's a cardinal down here, I'm unkillable," he explained as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

"You're an odd dude, Uriel," Crusher claimed as she held the back of her head with both of her hands.

He shrugged. "What's truly odd is that these people are still attacking me. They are clearly some sort of advanced spy unit of the church's. Their robes are sleeker than the usual ones and they refuse to speak. Half of them have daggers or knives too."

He then frowned as he added, "Mother Danielle knows I can't be turned to ash. It is why I suspect she hasn't launched a full-on invasion yet, only choosing to order a devastating sneak attack on our major cities."

"Shit, that sounds fuckin' awesome. How'd you do that? Uh, the permanent skills shit, I mean." Crusher was beyond intrigued by such a thing.

She'd seen and done a lot in this new and ever-changing world but she'd never heard of a power to avoid what the Truthians could force upon seemingly anyone.

"Stars of Eternity. How I get them, I won't reveal." He gestured to the walls. "They have ears."

Crusher nodded. "Fair 'nuff. Now, this looks hella like a boss room if ever I've soon one."

"Perhaps," Daz answered as his eyes glowed grey, giving her the chills a bit.

It looked pretty cool, she had to admit but it was also kind of intimidating for some reason. It was like he could see right through her with those eyes of his.

Well, in a way he could since he was supposedly able to see souls. That thought still creeped her out a bit.

'Not too unlike my Ember of Clarity if you think about it,' Crusher thought.

"There are 143 people in the next room. 71 on either side and one right in the middle. Exactly 142 people have gone missing since the disappearances started happening," Daz said as his gaze turned down-right icy.

"Well then, let's go greet the boss, right? It's gotta be the one you said was in the middle," Crusher said. "Not that I can do much, really."

"You've been plenty helpful with finding that staircase," Daz countered. "And yes, let's."