Chap 124: Suffocating
The five Sentinels had waited over forty-five minutes. They were unable to venture past the disc-shaped land toward the light at its center. Not only was there no gravity beyond that point, but Zod had confirmed there was no oxygen either. Worse, Miko had stood in the same spot for nearly an hour, unable to teleport. Her time was just as wasted as her teammates’, who sat on the ground like traffic cones.
But losing their sanity from boredom wasn’t the only thing at stake. Stopping the Harbingers from wiping out all life on the planet was non-negotiable. Unfortunately, the Harbingers had already vanished beyond the light. The stagnation killed any progress toward their goal—until now.
A short tremor rippled across the ground, shaking the five Sentinels with sudden hope. Zod and Miko broke off their conversation and stepped back from the edge. Kie, Tee, and Saeda sprang to their feet in an instant, scanning the surroundings.
Tee summoned two swords and blurted, “What was that?”
Her question barely faded before the next phenomenon struck. A deep boom resonated across the endless vacuum. Every molecule in their bodies vibrated with anxiety at the troubling realization. Why was sound able to travel across a vacuum?
The enigma filled their heads with unease as they turned away from the light. Their shadows shrank as dimness spread everywhere. In a heartbeat, they spun back around—swords drawn—to face the gleaming light source.
Something shifted in their minds as they noticed the light no longer forced them to squint. The floating spills of lava scattered across the infinite space now shined brighter. Yet still, nothing in the distance hinted at the Harbingers. They were too far away.
With the dimmed light, Tee hoped to search for the Harbingers again, but she never got the chance. The ground jolted forward so fast she glimpsed the back of her own head before her soul snapped back into place. Her gut dropped, and she braced herself with one leg thrown backward to keep balance.
The vast vacuum itself seemed to move. Her eyes widened as hovering lava spills zipped toward her face. She leapt aside to avoid colliding with the burning matter—or her teammates, who did the same.
In that moment, she felt like the windshield of a jet racing through a storm of rocks. The lava spills might as well have been stones, ready to shatter her fragile glass body in a single hit. Every vein in her body jolted from the heat brushing across her skin and clothes.
The blasts through her nostrils grew loud just as everything froze to a standstill. The ground no longer shook, but the trembling sensation lingered in her legs. She blinked over her pounding heart to confirm it. When another layer of darkness swept across the entire void, she knew it wasn’t over. All around her, the glowing lava spills cooled into solid, irregular rocks.
Her eyes widened when tight pinches exploded across her back. She turned away from the light at the same moment her teammates did. Her brows twitched at the sight of an army of diamond-shaped rocks hovering above the ground—like a sheet of raindrops frozen mid-fall, each one about the size of her body.
Shrills of different pitches rang out one by one. Green glowing eyes appeared on the rocks, shining like glow sticks in a stadium of millions. The rocks themselves began to turn green, their diamond edges smoothing as their bodies started to morph.
Tee tightened her grip on her swords and glared at the long spikes forming and reaching toward the ground. One creature’s exposed brain and abdominal muscles froze mid-transformation—because her sword tore straight through its body and burst out its back. Purple blood splashed across several glowing green eyes, triggering a chorus of shrills. With long, sharp arms and shorter legs, the entire army charged forward.
With a war cry, Tee dashed ahead alongside her teammates to meet the creatures head-on. Shrieks and glowing eyes winked out with every whip of their swords. Brains were sliced apart, limbs severed, and splashes of fluid filled the silence between screams.
The blood didn’t burn, and that only pushed the Sentinels to move faster. Motionless green scraps scattered across the ground behind them. As the team spread out, they each unleashed genuine damage.
All of Tee’s teammates had their swords glowing, and she didn’t need to look to know the brightest belonged to Kie. His flaming swords were insane. Hers didn’t glow, but jealousy wasn’t what fueled her.
Wasting her energy on something that wasn’t the Harbingers only fanned her anger. Her black-filled eyes with a fiery dot flickered on and off. But unlike her teammates’ blue flickers, hers went unnoticed.
Energy rushed down Kie’s arms and erupted from his blades with every strike. His swords sliced through the creatures easily, but the energy waves that burst from his swings did the real damage. They zipped through the air, cutting down everything in their path for several feet. He kept his swings horizontal to avoid carving dents into the ground. As a result, his swords cut down one monster at a time—while his energy waves took out four times that many.
Miko leaped high, slicing through the floating rocks, and landed in a crater several yards away. She no longer needed to wield two swords like her teammates. Dismissing one blade, she zipped around in a widening circle with a single sword held out.
The cooled lava spills—now just chunks of rock—were no longer a threat. The floating stones bounced off her, delivering painful knocks to the creatures outside her sword’s reach. She kept expanding her circle, and the creatures that touched her blade filled its center. No pity crossed her mind. They were creations of the Sealed Bond, not real beings.
Saeda had only her two glowing swords. She couldn’t blast energy balls, lash flaming waves, or move with super speed. But it didn’t bother her. Tee was in the same league—or even lower, since her swords couldn’t glow. That alone was motivation to keep going. Not that she would call her effort “moving forward.” Why waste energy advancing when the creatures willingly came for their own decapitation?
The loud spanks came from creatures being slammed into one another for miles. They were the result of Zod’s energy blasts. Unlike Kie’s thin, slicing waves of annihilation, Zod’s energy didn’t leave his swords in sheets—it burst out in short, powerful pulses.
But in the vacuum, while he was suffocating, the blasts from his hands came out continuously. That constant force was what pushed him toward land like a rocket engine.
Then a realization struck him as he analyzed each burst coming through his swords. The blades were hindering his energy output. Whatever allowed Kie to channel waves through his weapons didn’t apply to him.
He dismissed his swords and stretched his arms forward, palms open. The blasts erupted again, and he held his breath to maintain the stream. Spinning on his feet, he released a full three-sixty long-range attack.
Tee and her teammates dropped to the ground as the wide blast spun over their heads, sweeping past like water gushing from a massive rotating sprinkler.
Zod’s energy blasts didn’t burn, and neither did Kie’s flaming energy. But the sheer force felt like a thousand metal punches delivered at once. For fifty feet in every direction, the monsters had their bodies torn apart by the obliterating impact. Purple blood exploded outward and rained down on the teammates crouching below.
Another tremor rocked the land. The gleaming light source dimmed again, plunging the void into a deeper layer of darkness. Zod faltered, losing enough focus that the blasts stopped pouring from his palms. Once the ground stilled, his teammates rose to their feet. In the distance, brighter eyes pushed through the thickening dimness, charging toward them.
The cleared space Zod had carved out shrank under the incoming swarm. The shrills grew deafening as some creatures dropped to all fours. Spikes jolted from their bodies, forming extra legs to increase their speed. Their skin tore apart to reveal gaping mouths lined with razor teeth.
Saeda concluded they were having panic attacks from the intensifying darkness. Fine—she would put them out of their misery.
The five Sentinels held their ground, but the sudden tightness at the tops of their heads was troubling. Was their super sense warning them about something above?
The Sentinels stepped back, blinking rapidly. The creatures continued morphing into distorted versions of themselves, as if grabbing their eyeballs by hooks. The disturbance shoved the earlier warning out of their minds.
“What the freck?” Tee gasped.
In the next blink, she was slicing through the heads of her teammates.
A spike stabbed straight into her heart, and her arms nearly locked up. But the purple blood spraying from her blades confirmed these weren’t her real teammates. Still, her muscles tensed, ready to halt in a split second if she ever misjudged. The tension slowed her down, letting creatures get dangerously close with every cautious strike.
Meanwhile, after seeing multiple clones of herself, Miko grew concerned. Were that many strands really sticking out of her hair, or were these things mocking her? She resisted the urge to check her reflection in her sword and instead cut through her own duplicates. But when it came to her many teammates, she zipped anxiously around them. Which one was the real Tee, Kie, Zod, or Saeda?
A stronger tremor shook the ground, slapping the thought of another three-sixty-degree blast right out of Zod’s mind. Seeing so many copies of himself was depressing enough—he truly did have his parents’ features. His clones looked furious, and their faces kept flashing into his mind, dragging up every moment he’d bottled his anger while letting his parents yell at him like he was a fridge mat. Man, he wanted to destroy them all.
With every Tee clone Kie decapitated, the pumping organ in his chest tightened. Why did it only happen with her clones? He gripped his swords harder to fight through the discomfort, but it was becoming unbearable. Any thought of checking his holo-map vanished with the vibration on his wrist. The beeping that followed was the distress signal. And moments later, his ears picked up four more signals at different distances.
Saeda had pressed hers first to avoid slicing through her real teammates. The idea came to her after noticing the disturbingly precise details on thousands of her “teammates.” If she could compliment shapeshifters, she would. They had the freckles, hairlines, and expressions down perfectly. She doubted she could ever paint them with that level of detail.
But the resemblance was too perfect. She needed a way to separate friend from fake. Since the distress signals were far apart, she could tell she was surrounded by clones. She drove one leg into the ground and spun in an epic twirl. With her arms extended, her swords carved through everything within five feet. Finally—space.
Her teammates didn’t question the distress signals. They used them. No longer hesitating, they whipped their swords through anything approaching. With their superhearing, they could pick out the beeps beneath the shrieks. Anything that didn’t produce the signal was sliced to bits, painting the ground in purple blood.
The distress signal only beeped for a few seconds, but that was enough—everything happened at super speed. Their clones also didn’t handle their swords like real fighters—they only held them to complete the illusion. That alone made it easy to separate fakes from the true Sentinels.
The green creatures raced from every corner of the disc-shaped land to join the battle. Thousands died, but three times as many followed. The idea of wasting all their energy on manifestations of the Sealed Bond was daunting. But there were too many enemies, and nowhere to run except into the suffocating vacuum beyond the land. Worse, the creatures refused to take a hint from their fallen.
Saeda could no longer stay still as dead clones piled into a wall around her. She kept leaping to new positions just to breathe. But when she landed during the strongest tremor yet, she nearly sprained her ankle. With the ground refusing to stop shaking, she knew she’d have to think twice before jumping again.
The tremors increased in magnitude. Cracks split across the terrain, forcing Miko into short sprints just to avoid tripping. She could no longer run fast enough to expand her circle. So she summoned a second sword and returned to close-range lashes.
The disc-shaped land surrounded the great light source. The guardians had long concluded it was the fragment—after all, the Harbingers had vanished toward it. Those facts had been pushed to the backs of their minds while fighting the army of vicious shapeshifters, but they snapped back into focus when darkness flashed across the limitless vacuum. They needed no more signs. The Harbingers had gotten the fragment. But were they really going to leave without a butt-spanking goodbye?
The Sentinels twitched as full darkness swept over them. The creatures’ green glowing eyes disappeared in their clone forms, leaving the team dependent on their hearing and touch. The tremors pulsing up their legs felt sharper. The tingles on their skin strengthened into pinches. Even the shrieks vibrated through them as distinctly as any other stimulus.
But as their eyes adjusted to the dimness, they realized it wasn’t pitch black. They couldn’t make out details, but everything gave off a faint glow. The creatures appeared as shifting smudges in the gloom. The white hair on Tee’s clones practically floated above the rest—and Tee was definitely not pleased with the unwanted spotlight.
Another strong tremor hit, and parts of the land rose into hills. The clone army retreated toward the dark horizon, and the team halted their slaughter. Their full attention snapped to the rising landforms—until eight glowing eyes appeared. Massive. Growing larger. Approaching from above the new heights.
All five Sentinels charged toward it, but they didn’t get close enough to make out the titan’s silhouette. A telekinetic force clamped around their bodies, squeezing until they dropped their swords. Then they were lifted high into the air, rising above the uneven terrain. A powerful shove slammed them together midair, the impact knocking their sight out for a heartbeat.
With the five burdens clustered in one spot, the titan focused its telekinetic push on all of them at once. They shot across the land, past the edge, and straight into the vastness of space. The smear of their colors vanished where the light source once glowed.
The Sentinels drifted to a stop, hovering in the vacuum. The absence of land sent a shiver across their bodies. It felt like being submerged in deep water, except paddling was useless in a vacuum. Worse, with no oxygen, they were in a helpless, suffocating state.
Zod, like his teammates, held on to his last breath. He could blast his way back to land, but what was the point if the Harbingers weren’t there? The only logical choice was to teleport back to Primus and call it a failure—hoping the world didn’t end. His eyes popped once the air in his lungs ran out. A deep ache spread through his chest. His thoughts scattered in anguish as he gasped for air.
They all grabbed their necks as the overwhelming pressure rushed to their heads. A burning sensation filled their chests with each unfulfilling gasp. More than once, white flashed before their eyes as if their souls were slipping out of their bodies.
The stinging pain that made them fidget was their cue to ditch that place. But deep down, they wanted to stay and fight. They had no idea how to stop suffocating, nor any clue if the Harbingers were already gone. But the need to fight for the future was stronger than the need to end the pain. That was their chance to take down a Harbinger. It wasn’t game over until they were sure the Harbingers were gone—or another member went down.