The rose-and-stone insignia within the Doorway’s innermost recess had taken on a glow in a shade of purple that burned the eyes. Krahe moved from the doorway, but willed Barzai to take form as she did, watching through his eyes even as she mounted Rocinante. It suddenly felt harder to breathe, her heart seed to skip a beat, and an enormous pressure took hold within her skull, a deep rumbling drowning out all other sound. The insignia's glow spread out, like the crack from a hamr-strike against hardened glass, only to blossom out into a yawning hole in the world. Krahe briefly, ever so briefly glimpsed a swirl of rainbow colours inside that gap; the statues ca alive, their eyes burning with unearthly lightning, and the ruin’s door slamd shut. There was no sound; only that deep rumble inside her head, and the intensifying sll of ozone, and the taste of copper.
As Krahe rode away from the ruin Barzai took off from his spot, landing on Rocinante’s rear. Suddenly, it all stopped. The rumble, the sll, the taste, as if the world had snapped back to normal. Through Barzai’s eyes, she could see the statues had fallen silent once more, and were now inert; the left statue’s arm just tumbled to the ground and lay there.
Nothing happened for a good five seconds, but Krahe just couldn’t help herself. Part of her wanted to go back, to see what the doorway might have done or summoned, but she made the more reasonable decision to keep her distance and observe for a few minutes.
It was barely a few breaths, not more than twenty seconds, that the door opened once again.
A strange shimr, by her estimate so four ters tall, erged from within; it obviously looked like active camouflage, and an extraordinarily advanced example of it. She nearly lost sight of the figure for a mont, despite knowing it was there. Four humanoid figures followed closely behind it. These figures were not people, nor were they evoy, saurians, or in truth anything else Krahe had encountered on Zastreon. Their semblances were most akin to the more abstract designs of combat robots that she had encountered in her past life, including various attached weapons; blades of liquid tal, so type of energy projector, rotary cutters, one had disproportionately small hands and wielded blocky pistols. The shimr and the robots all moved in unison, with the latter scattering about the entrance, clearing the surroundings. The shimr moved aside from the door, while the robotic figures scattered around it. To Krahe this was obviously an ambush for so kind of pursuer. She sent Barzai over in raven form to observe from closer, seating him atop one of the statues.
A bulge shifted across the invisible giant, towards the ground. Krahe glanced it as a sar of red and black, then a person erged from the sar; a young man with very pale skin, wearing a black bodysuit streaked across by segntation lines. He had red, straight hair so long it almost reached his knees. Glancing about, he looked at the sky, his surroundings, yet didn’t seem to notice Krahe, so transfixed he was with the environnt. The rumbling noise and pressure inside her head returned, as did the sll of ozone, albeit for only a short mont, and then it was gone; in response, the redhead moved to hide behind one of the statues.
The youth’s presence weighed disproportionately heavy; the air twisted and turned around him, dust and blades of grass floated of their own volition, and Krahe found her gaze t with a resistance when it landed upon him.
At the micro-instant she glanced at him, he stared back, raising one finger to his mouth to suggest silence. The reason behind that suggestion imdiately revealed itself when, in his wake, half a dozen bizarre creatures sward out of the ruin. In silhouette, they appeared human, but their skin was grey and their flesh lded with machinery, grown over it in a seamless manner. Tubes, cables, armor and chanics lded with their bodies, but they all shared the trait of no eyes. Or rather, all their eyes had either been covered by silvery tal, as if it had been splashed-on, or torn out of their skulls altogether, leaving abyssal caverns that dripped white fluid that Krahe recognized, or at least assud to be synthetic blood. All carried similar weaponry to the robots; weapons blatantly using alien technology, but in familiar form factors. Pistols, swords, one had great heavy gauntlets with pilebunkers, another had a bulbous glove with five jewel-like “eyes” on the back of the hand.
So were clicking their tongues, while others released dull, thumping sounds from so module or other, all clearly trying to compensate for the loss of their sight. They collectively whipped their heads and weapons in the direction of the invisible giant, but it was too late.
All at once, the redhead’s chanical companions set upon them. Streaks of rainbow lightning erupted from three lenses on one machine’s hand, while another spun up and swung out its spinning cutter like it was on a string, rcilessly sawing at its target’s arm at the shoulder. Only the robots’ ranged weapons were truly alien to her eyes, and even then, it was easy to guess they were perhaps so kind of alien plasma accelerator or sosuch. The pilebunker-wielding cyborg charged at a puppet with a crackling chainsaw-sword attached to its right arm and an empty, albeit oversized left hand. The redhead’s hair had begun floating, with a glow like the reflections of a pool on the ceiling, and, in concert with him, the robot reached out its left hand, and the pilebunker-wielder stopped. Well, his head did. His body continued on its course, grotesquely swinging forward a short distance; the head remained fixed in space, while the body thrashed. Then, the head popped like an tomato squeezed in one’s hand. Every so briefly, Krahe could swear she saw a ghostly red hand around that cyborg’s head.
Surprisingly enough, the blinded strangers held their own for quite so ti, clashing with the four robots and only losing one of their number, the man whose head had been crushed by that invisible force. The firepower leveled against them simply didn’t match the injuries they were sustaining, suggesting abnormal toughness. Moreover, both lee strikes and projectiles seed like they didn’t want to strike them. They bled a great deal, scattering white every which way, because swings and shots that would have killed them simply veered off-course. Streaks of rainbow scythed through the brush and gouged pits into the earth. A brief, errant burst of fire from one of the robots was enough to cut down a thick-trunked tree.
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