13. Nhung
+ CODE

Nhung


Asterisk43.png

When living in your head too long becomes an awful hassle,
There's better uses for a fortified cerebral castle
Like shoring up the claims your friends make on their own demesnes;
But mind somatic tolls on fending other people's brains.

Part of the point was that there was no warning.

If you were going to blow up a Site, you were either trying to keep something in or keep someone out. Either way, you probably didn't want them to know you were doing it. So only a select few members of personnel — not coincidentally, the ones who could initiate it unilaterally or contribute to the triggering decision — received any notice that Protocol DISCIDIUM was going into effect.

Still, she'd had a pretty good idea.

There were precious few reasons why an armed force would attempt to enter 43. There were precious few armed forces which could penetrate its defences effectively. The confluence of these precious qualities was at the fourth sublevel. So when the attackers kept coming, and backup did not, she knew what would logically follow.

She'd sent her people out of their usual mustering point, which centred on a load-bearing member, and had them shelter in groups in the weaker substructures. Those would, ironically, be the most likely to survive detonation of the shaped charges. Then she'd joined the few guards stationed in P&P in what was probably a doomed defence.

The Insurgents were berserkers. They strode into a hail of gunfire without a care in the world, spraying the other end of the corridor with wild abandon. This consistently drove the thin blue line back, back, back, and occasionally the running gunmen passed that line entirely. She had already tripped one into a fire hydrant, kicked the breath out of three, broke two noses and rearranged the vitals of one poorly-strapped jock. All the while she minded where she was standing, and kept the secret floor plan in her mind's eye.

So it wasn't immediately disastrous for her when one of the walls suddenly buckled and burst in a hail of sparks, some substation failing to leakage or sabotage. She'd kept a vending machine between the nearest charged column and their position, and by sheer luck the angle between them and this more moderate disaster wasn't too far different; while the brief burst of flame and shrapnel boiled and perforated a month's supply of fizzy drinks, it didn't flash-fry her or her armed escort. The Insurgents weren't so lucky.

Of course, the ceiling still caved in.

She'd come into this expecting the sky to fall. She had not expected the earth to move; seconds after the explosion, while she was still catching her breath, the tiles beneath her feet gave way and water bubbled up from beneath. There was gunfire in the air again as she fell, so she stuck out one leg and found purchase on the shifting ground, and her three-point landing became a two-point personal apocalypse when that leg suddenly broke like a twig.

She screamed like she'd never screamed before as the Insurgent's boot slammed down on her knee, snapping the limb digitigrade. She used the momentum of the break to lunge at her attacker — the damage would never heal now, she would never kick again, and she would be unconscious in seconds — and pulled his own knee forward. The armoured man stumbled, and dropped his rifle. She seized it, slipped it under his chest armour from below, and blew his jaw out the top of his helmet.

It was not her sort of martial art. But she was also a psychologist, and even as agony overwhelmed her she was mindful of the surviving guards.

I hope you were watching, she thought as the corridor faded to white. You'll need the morale boost if you're going to drag me out of here.

And then a host of wooden bears explosively teleported into the hallway, and collapsed what was left of it.

Nhung.png

Transparent.gif

Delfina

Indivisible

Transparent.gif

Flora

‡ Licensing / Citation
_cc_licenseboxdoctor-ngoillustratedobearwatchon-guard-43tale
page revision: 3, last edited: 13 Jul 2026 21:53
Edit Rate (+10) Tags Discuss (2) History Files Print Site tools + Options
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License