Mission: Hiding in the cornfields 2

Reaching the edge of the city took quite some time, if I had visited before I could teleport there by simply fixing on the aura of the place, after all aura was unique to the individual or thing, but I hadn't been her after gaining the ability to sense aura so I had to blink and teleport my way across the city. True masters of aura could read the entire history of a place in the aura and even get a glimpse of the future of the building. I was far from that level, but if I wanted to spend the time I could create an enchantment that could do the same, it just wasn't feasible at the moment for me to spend weeks on something like that. I would probably do it sometime, if I ever had a few quiet weeks.

Reaching the outskirts wasn't the end of my journey, the next step depended on Amanda and her armada of smaller snakes. I had her spread them out as far as possible and begin search the grounds while I used my chokers AI to scan for transmissions. Sadly there either wasn't anything for me to find or the people were under orders to maintain radio silence. My choker AI informed me, that the ABB had gained a new parahuman, presumably a bomb tinker, so there was a possibility that she had created something using transmission waves my choker couldn't catch. Waiting for the snakes to finish searching a sector was boring as hell, so I busied myself finding an enchantment to hone the sensors to pick up weaker signals in a wider range. Basic electromagnetic waves were to easy, so I started adding graviton sensors as well as basic magic and light sensors. To get the sensor arrays I repurposed 2 phones from Amanda's stack and enchanted their sensor to hell and back with the precision of light and this way managed to create sensors that could pick up waves of dimensional energies. Pretty good for something made on the fly and without and tools. It wouldn't hold as long or be as strong as my normal stuff, which meant it would probably last years and could endure being crushed by a tow truck. Fragility was relative if you worked at my level of craftsmanship.

After doing that, my snakes still hadn't found anything so I teleported back to base and got enough material to create another 100 staffs of regeneration. Teleporting back I wasn't surprised to find nothing had turned up so I settled down atop Amanda and started working on producing as many staffs as I could, leaving the scouting to Amanda and the choker AI.

It took until I had finished 98 staffs for something to be discovered, other than the 5 different drug plantations and 3 meth labs the choker AI marked on a map of the area and the search party had already reached the other end of the bay, it was typical that I would start searching in the completely opposite direction. One of the smaller snakes had discovered that one of the normal looking barns actually had an underground complex hidden beneath it. A very populated underground complex if I didn't miss my guess. I decided to finish the full 100 staffs of regeneration and scouting the entire area before doing anything drastic. And a good thing I did, because I discovered two more hidden exits, one hidden so well that only the low humming of an emergency exit sign registered to my choker AI. Probing the ground with snakes I discovered that this was the least guarded entrance and ordered Amanda to send in a scouting force.

What they found after passing a long dirt corridor was horrifying. Apparently the architect of this complex though that the best place to hide a top secret entrance was in the back of the main prison, a prison filled with young females in varied conditions, from very bad to horrifying. Someone had tried brain surgery on those girls, someone lacking any and every training for the task. The floor was littered with the dead and dying. I had to call this in, I couldn't, I didn't know what to do, if I used my staffs they would attract the attention of everyone there and I couldn't defend that many people by myself. But did that matter, in the end it didn't, I had seen, experienced what I thought to be the worst humans could do to each other, but those girls, some barely more than children had experienced worse. I had chosen to do everything in my power the moment I took this mission. Today, I wasn't Benjamin Nightcastle, sarcastic and selfish, who only cared for his sister, the boy who would see the world burn if it served his purpose. Today I was Desu, the villain with the Code of a Hero, a Hero of her own story and so I went into the unknown, blinking ahead as fast as I could.

Choker AI helped deciphering radio transmission and gathering every scrap of date available before blocking any signals in the immediate vicinity. I hoped that the security inside the base was flimsy enough to use some kind of transmission instead of pure hardwired alternatives. A few seconds could make of break this operation. I also ordered the choker AI to send calls for help and support to any and all law enforcement agencies operating in the city and even those in the next closest cities. I knew those would be picked up by the organizers of this place as well, but I hoped for a few minutes of delay. Amanda wasn't only in charge of scouting, 100 of her smallest snakes where each given a staff of regeneration and assigned an injured. The rest was to serve as scouts and distractions while the guardian snakes had another task altogether. They were to sow chaos in the upper layers of the base.

-------Gore, do not read if squeamish----

Reaching the hidden door inside the prison, I was relieved to see it slide open soundlessly. The snakes assigned distraction and scouting duty where the first to enter and the rest of followed quickly. If I hadn't already seen to much blood and death today I would have puked again, but there was nothing in my stomach. This time the rotten stench of decaying corpses, the dried rivulets of blood and the low moans of pain, like armies of ghost begging for release, only made me gag for a few seconds. My snakes weren't hobbled by sentimental things so they, under the meticulous command of Amanda went to work, healing and scouting the place. Even the few woman who hadn't been hurt that badly were healed by the overpowered blasts of healing caused by those near death. That way we could save on healing staffs, which was needed dearly, because this was only the first and biggest prison cell. Altogether there must have been more than 300 hundred people down here, mostly woman who had probably meant to be sold as sex slaves, but had now mostly been used as experimental subjects, but there were others as well, elderly, working class men, children of all genders and ages and even a few toddlers.

It was like someone had simply collected every human they could get their hands on and repurposed this base into a research facility. Even more horrifying were the corpses, dozens of them, all had died during failed brain surgery or been simply left to bleed to death like they didn't matter after they had fulfilled their use. In the last cell in the back were the successful experiments and with that I mean they survived the implant of something that gave very low amounts of electromagnetic waves. Some victims here had been mutilated in such a way I could barely see where they had once had eyes or ears. Whoever had done this was enjoying this, they purposely sabotaged themselves to increase their victims suffering. Those sutures hadn't been done to heal the wounds, they had been done to increase the pain the victims felt in their last hours before they were allowed to slip into the sweet embrace of death.

I felt the light react inside me and suddenly I knew what I had to do, I ordered Armanda to block the stairs to this level while the guardian snakes were sent out to eliminate any opposition. Just in case they found more victims each gained a staff bearing snake as a companion for this mission. The remaining small snakes without other duties where to guard any and all passages to this place with their lives while I did the hardest task. I would remove what I could only assume to be bombs from those peoples heads. That day was the first day I prayed, not to god, there were no gods, but to the light, for it to guide me in my task, then I collected my carving knife from Armanda, made sure the choker AI was still blocking all transmission and moved to the first implanted victim. The entire skin of his face had been removed at one point, then someone had taken out his eye and put a bomb in the socket and melted his own skin with heat to close of the hole. I had no words to describe such a ghastly sight, but I knew what to do. I had to cut away the scrap, the burned layers of skin, fat and muscle, then carefully extract the bomb and then allow the regeneration staff to do its job.

Suddenly my world expanded by an immense margin, I suddenly understood that there weren't only dimensional energies like the light, which would allow you to bend and reshape the rules of reality. Aura also contained soul energy and life energy, soul energy was what gave not just consciousness but the ability to surpass our inborn limits. If you have ever heard of mother lifting cars of their children you know that the human body was a marvel in itself. Previously I had thought such people simply channeled dimensional energies by instinct, but if they really did that the would burst from the inside and even if they survived they would die from the radiation absorbed with those energies. But with soul energy it made sense that humans could burn part of their inborn energy to gain a temporary boost in resistance against dimensional energies and life energy, which ever human build up over the duration of their lives could heal them. Normal humans could only use those energies instinctively, it would cost them dearly, reduced lifespan and susceptibility to illnesses were only the most common side effects, and most would never do so in their entire lives, stopped by their bodies desire to preserve itself. Those that never used it would eventually reach a limit and start giving away the excess. Free life and soul energy would mix and create Spiritual Energy, an ownerless form of power formed from life and the possibility of surpassing life itself.

This mixture, the essence of life and the possibility to surpass my own limits was now flowing through my veins freely. From one moment to the next my thoughts cleared, my heart steadied itself and my hands stopped even the most minute trembles. I could now control my body and mind in ways I couldn't have imagined before. I was like an old typewriter which had been rebuilt into a quantum computer. Everything about me had improved drastically. I would win any sport or intellectual competition I entered, I could sense the lives of the people around me, even the ABB soldiers desperately trying to get through Amanda, I experience every bullet, every grenade they threw at her with her and joined her in coordinating two guardian snakes to distract the guards of a well defended room at the middle of the base, only for two more guardian snakes who had hidden in the shadows to slink foreword. I watched and agree to Amanda's decision to send in scouts, which were promptly annihilated by explosions of ice and lava, the next scout were twisted in space, scattered as glass or simply ceased to exist. I returned most of my attention to my body that was working on the third implanted victim right now, saw just how much easier the work had become, now that I could feel exactly where the damage had been done and how to avoid sensitive areas while my body worked with the precision of an atomic clock.

It didn't take any effort to finish the next few surgeries, even as the cases got progressively more horrifying and more brutal as I got through them all. I was gruesome work and without my newest power it wouldn't have been possible, the damage to the last victims was just to extensive, I had to individually remove threads of brain matter from a bomb witch had thousands of spikes, probably some kind of cluster bomb. The about six year old girl would have spend the rest of her live in a vegetative state if the bomb didn't kill her first, now as I used the last of my staffs to return her to perfect health I knew she would have every opportunity to grow up into a self-assured young woman, she had survived and nothing would break her now. She had beaten the monster, literally.

While most of my mind was focused on Amanda and my bodies movements, a small part of me sorted through the new knowledge I had gained about Spiritual Energy arrays. These arrays were very similar to enchantments, only they were powered purely by spiritual energy, which made them a lot weaker than enchantments on the individual level. But they had their advantages, while aura was personal and passive enchantments could only absorb from the residuals of the closest and most powerful source in the vicinity, arrays could absorb any and all Spiritual Energy. Spiritual Energy was by definition owner less and independent, which meant that arrays could be used everywhere on the planet and have the same strength, while my blink boots for example wouldn't work at all for others until they had emptied out all of their energy and then refilled with a different aura residuals. In essence, Spiritual Energy was transformed to be personal energy when it was mixes with other energies to create aura, which strengthened the mixture but lost the universalism of the original.

The majority of my attention was once again drawn pack to Amanda when a subsequent scouting party found a way into the central room, it was a lab, a tinker lab with medical gurneys and a floor covered in the blood of the prisoners I had just healed. On the gurney itself had once been a body, but one of the traps the scouts had triggered had turned whoever had lain there into sand, nothing remained but the vague form of what had once been a living and breathing human being. On the opposite side of the entrance to the room ware shelves filled with tools and material to create small components, the sides of the rooms where stacked with different chemicals and in the middle of the room stood a female figure in a lab coat with a gas mask. The cape said something, but I was more interested in following the guarding snake as it wound its long body though the shadows on the left of the room to coil behind the capes back and prepare to attack. When the attack came, it was a single millisecond to late, the cape vanished in hole in space, not unlike my teleports, but much cruder and at the same time multiple explosions went of above me. The signal the bomb tinker must have given hadn't reached the bombs down here because the choker AI had blocked any transmission, but the bombs placed in the upper levels had gone of and decimated my snakes and everything useful I could have gained from this expedition.

Not that I lacked material resources, I was flushed, but having other tinkers equipment to study would have been enlightening. At least I had the few bombs I had removed from heads and the few that would have collapsed the entire underground structure. The prisoners had been scared by the explosions, but Armanda and her snakes did a good job keeping them contained where they were.

The lack of guardian snakes, only two had survived by pure chance, could have proven problematic if most of the ABB gangers hadn't died in the explosions, but for now I could manage. Telling the choker AI to easy up the telecommunication blockade I asked it to find out where and when the police would arrive. Three messages had reached me on my radiophone as well, theyread:

'Kid, you alright, everyone got the message, don't engage, wait for backup'

'Fuck kid are you there, call back, we are on our way'

'Kid if you are still alive, we are here'

I send back:

'Ahoy Captain, had to keep radio silence, found a bomb tinker lair, fucking psycho trained her brain surgery on life subjects, hidden entrance is to the north of the big hole, do the slither'

I watched through a scout snake as a squad of officers went close to the hidden entrance I had used, watched as they searched the area with mounting frustration. Finally the leader, a Sargent Raynor but his hand above his head and did a bad imitation of the slither. I sent him a:

'Try harder next time' and sent the scout to lead them into the hidden entrance. Armanda returned at this point and collected the last of the snakes, I made sure none where left behind and erased my footsteps, then I gave a command for the scout to slither ahead and the moment it reached the entrance I grabbed it from the ground, made sure Amanda was secured on my shoulder and teleported out just as the first lights of the flashlights reached the entrance. The police and PRT could deal with the rest, I had an important appointment with my bed.