[M][Namek] The Tempest

[Kaden]

Light and heat washed through the hallway as the combined blasts of a dozen alien soldiers erupted from the main engine room. The forms of the aliens inside the engine room faded from sight, both natural and supernatural, as their blasts neared. It was a formidable offense accompanied by an equally formidable display. To a normal person, it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime scene. That, sadly, was not the case for anyone present.

Both Loch and Sophia leapt backwards, darting around the hallway’s nearest corner. Kaden steeled himself, fighting every natural urge in his body to do exactly the same. Instead he braced himself, the soles of his sneakers squealing against the polished metal floor. Throwing both hands in front of him, the courier conjured forth a shimmering barrier of ki. The barrier was, initially, roughly the size of the courier himself, large enough to shelter a single person comfortably. Spreading his arms wide, Kaden drew forth his energy, commanding it outward. In an instant, the barrier expanded to cover the hallway in its entirety.

As the alien’s assault crashed against the courier’s defense a deafening explosion echoed through the confined space. While the sound itself would have been enough to cause Kaden to wince, his body was suddenly wracked with pain; having drawn so much energy so quickly was not something he had been physically prepared for. His hand clenched at the scar on his chest, an intense pain radiating from it.

Kaden did all he could to push the pain from his mind as he turned his focus back to the engine room. With the courier’s curtain of ki blocking off the hallway, the explosions had nowhere to go but back into the engine room itself, turning on the soldiers who had created it in the first place. While turning the attack around hadn’t been Kaden’s intent, it certainly worked out well.

“Sophia! Loch! Your turn!”

Casting a glance over his shoulder, he saw both women step back into the hallway, each one bracing themselves for combat. With a wave of his hand, Kaden dismissed the wall of energy he had created, allowing his allies to shoot forward at startling speeds. As he watched them lead a counter-offensive, Kaden suddenly found himself dropping to one knee, his legs suddenly not supporting his body.

Initially the courier thought he was just too tired to properly support himself. When he realized he was neither short of breath nor in an unprecedented amount of physical pain, he realized the ship itself seemed to be shaking. It felt as though there were explosions rocking the ship. Though that wasn’t particularly surprising, the effect it seemed to be having on the ship itself was troubling to the courier. Certainly, if they had a chance to avoid crushing the city, and anyone still within its limits, Kaden would prefer to exercise that option.

Within the engine room proper, Loch and Sophia took the aliens by surprise. Leaping from the settling smoke of the alien’s own attack, both females came barreling forward with lethal strikes to the nearest soldiers. Most of the aliens, like those in the Namekian village were loosely robed. The robed aliens created a front-line of sorts. Behind them were a couple aliens who actually looked to be equipped for combat, wearing heavier armor and the alien’s take on scouters.

The first blow came from Sophia, the faster of the two females. Sailing through the air, she drove both feet into the face of the closest robed alien. Kicking off the soldier’s head, the ex-priestess flipped backwards in a high arc, extended both of her hands as she did. Before she had even hit the ground, Sophia unleashed a concentrated volley of energy at her target, knocking him to the ground and quickly ending his life.

The acrobatics of King Kai’s pupil served as a perfect distraction for Loch to close the distance to her first target. The steel of her sword flashed as the blade cut towards its first victim. The point of the blade was driven deep into the abdomen of the nearest soldier, rending its robe as easily as it did its flesh. As she turned towards the next alien, Loch gripped the hilt with both hands, pulling the blade free through the dying alien’s side instead of back out the way it came.

The next few aliens fell in similar fashion: Loch displaying her skill with a sword and Sophia proving too agile for the aliens to land a hit on. Between the princess’ blade and the ex-priestess’ blasts, the robed aliens fell quickly enough. With them out of the way, the women turned to the armored aliens. The as they had in the village, the stronger aliens had simply been using their underlings to observe their opponents.

Loch made the first move, swinging her sword in a downward arc as she stepped forward. The two armored aliens split in different directions to avoid the blow. Following the strike, Loch turned to her left, picking the alien as her target. As the intended target landed from dodging Loch’s first attack, it stumbled backwards as a blast of ki crashed into its chest. Sophia dashed forward in a commendable display of coordination.

With a quick nod to her ally, Sophia lobbed another orb of ki at the alien. Prepared to meet the second assault, the alien batted away the blast, but was left defenseless as Loch followed up. The pommel of the princess’ sword crashed into the alien’s face. The disoriented alien swung an arm in futile retaliation, but quickly regretted the action as the offending arm was cleaved clean from its body.

Before the armored alien even had time to cry out in pain, Sophia crashed into him with the weight of her body once again behind her heels. Driving the alien to the ground, Sophia glared down at her opponent from atop its chest. Placing an open palm in front of the alien’s face, there was only a moment’s pause before the girl’s hand erupted in energy. Looking up from the now-lifeless body of the alien, Sophia realized she had lost track of the other armored soldier. She wouldn’t need to look for long, though.

A surprisingly potent torrent of energy erupted from the depths of the engine room, cascading down upon both Loch and Sophia. Cries of pain echoed off the metal walls as both females were thrown to the ground. While the humans had been busy taking down the pen-ultimate alien, his ally had used the time to take a more tactically-sound position from which launch a counter-attack.

Most of the engine room was filled with a variety of computer-like consoles. The walls of the engine room were made of modular panels of metal, designed to be easily pulled apart to allow access to the machinery beneath should repairs be necessary. Most of the engine room space was filled with large pieces of machinery, half of which didn’t appear to be functioning at all. Whatever the machinery was for, the remaining alien didn’t seem concerned with its operation as he darted between them, lobbing energy attacks at every available interval.

Under sustained pressure, Sophia and Loch suddenly found themselves very much on the defensive. The alien was versed in ranged combat, able to keep his opponents off-balance with quick strikes. Obviously he was attempting to set the two up for something, but what it was never actually came.

From the door of the engine room, a powerful wave of energy surged through the room. The cerulean blast washed over the machinery in its path unhindered; a cry came from the alien hiding in the depths of the room as the blast reached him as well. There was no explosion or eruption as the energy subsided. In the aftermath, the beam had corroded away the metal and machinery that had been in its path, terminating at the largely melted remains of the armored alien.

“Nice of you to join us,” Sophia said in between breaths. Both she and Loch took a moment to collect themselves.

“Is it commonplace for the men of this land to leave the work to the women?” Loch turned to Sophia.

“Depends on the man,” the ex-priestess replied, casting a wary eye at Kaden.

“Sorry, sorry,” the courier apologized, though his tone sounded significantly less than sincere. “I would have been here sooner, but I got in touch with one of the teams on the ship. Well… they got in touch with me, I suppose. Regardless, we gotta get a move on.”

“Get a move on with what?” Soph asked.

“So we’re in the main engine room right now. That other team said there are four smaller ones, each one controlling… uh… what are they called? It starts with an ‘a’… it means, like, ‘extra’.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Auxiliary!” Kaden snapped his fingers in triumph. “There are four auxiliary engine rooms. Apparently a ship this big needs a lot of engines. Go figure.” Meeting Sophia’s glare, Kaden cleared his throat and moved on to the parts that actually mattered. “So the other teams wants to bring down the ship and are planting a bunch of explosives. We’ve got about an hour.”

“Sounds as though we should use the time to secure an escape,” Loch mused.

“That was my first thought, too, but here’s the problem. Down on the ground, in the city that’s, like, directly below us, there’s some serious shit going on. Someone’s fighting down there. Someone strong enough for me to be able to sense from all the way up here. I can’t say I know who it is, but it feels familiar. It’s not an alien, I know that much.”

“And you don’t want to drop a giant alien ship on an ally,” Sophia finished the thought with a nod. “Hard to disagree with that. How are we supposed to help, then?”

“Well this is the main engine room, right? I thought there might be something we could do here to… I dunno… move the ship?”

“We’ve the time to at least look,” Loch replied. “Though I cannot imagine how we’re to use technology such as this…”

Kaden and Sophia exchanged a troubled glance at Loch’s words. She was definitely right. The aliens no doubt had trained engineers to attend to the ship’s engines. What were they supposed to do in an hour? Less than an hour if they wanted to be off the ship as it crashed into whatever happened to be below. Lost in his thoughts, Kaden found himself pacing the perimeter of the engine room.

Though not situated on the exterior of the ship, the main engine room was as close as it could safely be. It made sense that monitoring the main engine would require being as close to it as possible. Had it not been for that, the courier may never have felt a familiar sensation tugging at the back of his mind. As he neared the far-end of the engine room and, by association, the exterior of the ship, the courier could feel an odd flow of energy. Willing energy into his eyes, he cast a curious glance around him and gasped at what he found.

“This is crazy…” he found himself talking to himself. “It… huh… a machine…”

“What are you mumbling about?” Sophia asked.

Hearing Kaden’s surprised words, the girl had come to investigate. She found her ally staring at the wall of the engine room, clearing gazing at something either within, or beyond, in a way only he could. When there was no response from the courier, she reached out a waved a hand in front of his face.

“Earth… well… Namek to Kaden?”

“Gah!” Kaden recoiled as Sophia’s hand passed centimeters from his face. “You surprised me.”

“Apparently. Care to fill me in? You seem pretty interested in something over there.”

“You won’t believe this, Soph. This engine is crazy. I didn’t realize what this thing was doing until I got close enough to feel the energy outside the ship. It has this huge… uh… energy vacuum thing. It’s sucking in the ambient energy around it and using that to power the engine. When the energy from the engine is expelled to keep the ship in the air, some of it gets sucked back in and it just makes this loop. I can actually see it.”

With an outstretched arm, Kaden pointed to a flow of energy outside the ship and traced the path that it followed as it was sucked into the ship, processed through the engine, and then expelled back out once again. To Sophia, of course, it just looked like Kaden was tracing meaningless patterns in the air. While not all the energy got recycled back into the engine, Kaden imagined it was an amazingly efficient system for keeping the ship idling.

“Ok. Well, I guess that is kind of interesting, that doesn’t actually help our current situation.”

“I think it might, actually.” Kaden flashed a quick smile at the girl. “Since it uses energy, more energy might mean more power. Enough power and we might actually be able to move the ship. We wouldn’t be able to steer it, but we might be able to keep it from falling onto the city and whoever’s in it.”

“That’s a lot of mights,” Sophia said with an understandable tone of concern in her voice.

“Yeah. It is. But this is a plan based on about two minutes of looking at the engine. The other two possibilities I see are the engine just not absorbing more energy than it needs or the engine overloading and… exploding. Probably.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a plan you would come up with. How are you going to give the engine more energy?”

“About that. You might want to find something to hold onto.”

Thrusting both hands towards the wall, Kaden loosed a torrent of bright blue energy. The ship’s wall began to bow under the force of the blast, but was slow to give way. The groan of metal reverberated through the room as the courier funneled more and more energy outward. A nearly thunderous rending of metal followed shortly thereafter as Kaden let out a roar of effort.

Had it not been for Sophia grabbing hold of both him and nearby piece of machinery, the courier would have been pulled through the hole he had just created. The din of a recorded alien message sounded through the engine room, originating from a speaker system unseen. Seconds later the vacuum created by the differing pressures subsided. The alien’s vessels had apparently been equipped to handle such an event.

Stepping towards the opening he had created, Kaden felt a knot form in his throat. Being as high up as they were, it didn’t seem likely that he would be able to stomach the view. Fortunately, he wouldn’t need to be that close to the opening in order to facilitate his plan. From where he stood, he actually see the device that was pulling energy in from the world around it. It wasn’t a huge amount of energy, though that didn’t surprise the courier. Though there was energy in virtually everything, that didn’t mean it was a meaningful amount.

“Sophia,” the courier said over his shoulder. “I’ll need you and Loch to watch out, make sure no one, like, attacks me or anything. I’ll need to focus for a bit.”

There was a response from the ex-priestess, as well as an annoyed inquiry from Loch about what was going on, but the courier didn’t respond. Closing his eyes, the ki specialist turned his attention inward as he focused on loosing the energies stored within him. He could feel the ki swirling within the seal on his chest, almost aching to be released as he worked.

A warming sensation began to spread through his body as Kaden pried at the seal. Where normally only small flows of energy were allowed out he created wider portals from which to draw his power. There were times when Kaden cursed the seal, enduring the pain it caused him, feeling the limitations it placed on his powers. There were, however, times when he was thankful for it. He knew he could command formidable power and cause considerable destruction; he had no clue what kind of strength would be unleashed should he ever be free of the seal in its entirety. The power to end lives on a massive scale was something that weighed heavily upon him.

As he slowly opened his eyes, Kaden could see the tell-tale signs of his Unsealed powers. From his body drifted wisps of energy, leaking out as though the courier’s physical form was not enough to properly contain them. At his feet, Kaden saw a swirling stream of cerulean ki, licking at the air around him almost as though they were flames themselves. Behind him, both Loch and Sophia were feeling the effects of his power as an almost oppressive weight permeated the air, forcing both girl to one knee as it radiated outward from the courier.

There were warriors whose power created flashy auras and shocking displays of lights and other fireworks. Kaden was not one of those warriors. He couldn’t conjure an aura of flames as most could. He couldn’t command the sky to split and the ground to shake with his mere presence. Though he was capable of such outward displays, his powers did not do so on their own. That did not mean, however, that his strength went unnoticed.

With a wave of his hand, Kaden began to Disperse his energy into the air. He watched as his own ki was swept outward through the hole in ship’s wall. A smile crept across his face as the ki was pulled into the ship’s engines. What effect it would end up having he couldn’t tell, but that was a good sign in his eyes. Taking in a deep breath, he allowed his energy to flow freely from his body, Dispersing his ki en masse.

When he Dispersed his energy, Kaden had been told, correctly, that it looked as those he had wings for but a second before his ki faded into the air. Perpetually unleashing his energy created a similar set of cerulean wings that looked as though they were continuously melting into the air around him.

The ki that was being pulled from the Namekian sky was, like all the ki flows Kaden saw, a white haze of energy. As his own ki began to fill the air, he could visibly see the engine overtaken by the bright blue energy he was supplying. If anyone was going to act as a living ki battery, Kaden could think of no person better suited than himself.

“Oh my god…” Sophia’s voice broke through the courier’s concentration. “Kaden. The ship is actually moving!”

Beneath his feet, Kaden was vaguely aware of movement. That, however, took a backseat to keeping a mental eye trained on his reserves of ki. He had seen what happened to the people who expended more energy than they should, and he wasn’t looking to do that if he could help it. He was willing to do a great deal if it meant preventing destruction and avoiding the loss of his own life, but even he was unsure whether or not he would be able to move an entire ship far enough to make a difference.

“C’mon, Kaden.” He murmured to himself and shook his head free of unnecessary thoughts. “Focus. You can do this… probably.”



He may end up going down with the ship, but he'd be damned if anyone else did.