Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “Are you planning to come over and act on that? Come alone, or we’ll blow up the entire dam,” I responded, edging the knife ever closer to the chthon’s neck. Knobbly as its skin was, I was certain it had a jugular to pierce; one of my underlings quickly centered the tub under it.

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  That didn’t sound like a yes, so I slit the chthon’s jugular. As I suspected, its blood drained into the tub, and the chthon spasmed for a few seconds before going limp. I was hoping it would scream out in agony, or at least gurgle, but I suspected Hyperion had some sort of security cameras here. If so, it made it easier to get our point across.

  “That’s one death. If we kill everyone else, we’ll have more than enough magic to wipe your little factory off the earths,” I said.

  Dead silence on the line. I moved the headset a few inches away from my face just to be on the safe side. Luckily, Hyperion didn’t growl at us again.

  “So, are you going to come out and fight me like a good girl, or are we going to kill more hostages?” I asked her.

  More silence, matched only by the quiet that had settled over our group. I could hear the blood draining from the dead chthon into our admittedly tacky receptacle. Funny story about that – Aux had always told us that ideally we should store sacrificial blood in ornate, jeweled urns; it had been disappointed whenever we insisted that would bankrupt us. Sigmar, on the other hand, told us to use whatever was handy so long as it was easy to clean and didn’t contaminate the product too much. I suspect Aux had simply been greedy for treasure.

  “You know what? Fine. I’m going to take pleasure in ending your life before I deal with the rest of your so called ‘coven.’ Meet me at the top of the dam, if you have any courage left,” snarled Hyperion before hanging up. That was easier than expected, until I realized I needed to fight her.

  “So, you think we can knock her off the dam?” I asked my underlings. Not much of a response. I looked at Clarence, who so far seemed to have a good grasp of the situation. He winced for a moment, and then spoke.

  “It may be very difficult to muster the force required,” he claimed. “Hyperion is enormous, and I would estimate her weight at a minimum of one ton. Her armor is probably going to laugh at any conventional weapons we toss at it, so what I’m thinking we need to do, for want of better terms, is push her really hard.” Even I burst out laughing at that.

  “Charlotte, you should promote this guy! He’s got a way with words,” said Terminal once he’d recovered. Then, he shrugged. “We’ll probably only get one chance before she figures out what we’re trying to do, so we need to maneuver her as close to the edge as possible.”

  I heard a distant thud that I couldn’t immediately account for.

  “You don’t have much time. What kind of munitions should we give you?” he asked me. I thought it over for a moment.

  “Let’s go with a spear. It needs to be something I can push with, but it can’t be too heavy because I’m a bit smaller than Hyperion.” No laughs. As much as executing your underlings for not laughing at your jokes is a bad idea, it sure tempted me.

  “Should we prepare any enchantments?” Clarence asked.

  “Anything you can do to boost my speed and durability will help. As far as Hyperion knows, she’s getting an honorable one-on-one duel, and I may have to keep the illusion going for a while.”

  A brief silence, as we considered how I might be best augmented to deal with this crap. Seriously – for all I knew, Sarah was still bleeding out. I couldn’t exactly check to see if she was getting the medical treatment she needed, because Hyperion was about to summon me forth, and probably had the magical prowess to kill us all if we couldn’t off her before she realized what we were trying to do.

  “You know what? Screw a fair fight. Terminal, have you still got that titan battery?” I asked.

  “Fresh as the day it was made, Mistress!” It irritated me when Terminal called me Mistress; knowing him, it wasn’t coming from the proper position of respect and deference. But he immediately produced the battery for me to inspect, so I let it pass.

  “Is there a way to make that thing explode in such a way that it only hurts Hyperion and doesn’t have much of a blast radius?” I continued, admittedly at a loss for how best I could describe such an effect.

  “Well...” began Terminal, before he trailed off. Had I finally stumped him?

  “It wouldn’t really be an explosion, but if we somehow can jinx Hyperion’s armor to absorb all the energy from the battery, the excess buildup will probably kill her. I’m not sure how you’d manage that-”

  This was my opportunity to cut him down to size.

  “Better get on it. The rest of you should look into some sort of mass driver thing. I’m going out to talk with Hyperion now.”

  Woe to me, for when it was time to assemble for the siege, I had shifted out of my “work” clothes into my real work clothes...which, because of the extreme demands of physical combat were dull surplus army fatigues from some long-forgotten war. Not exactly stylish, but I would’ve relished the opportunity to meet Hyperion in today’s accounting outfit. The pretty pink cardigan and floaty skirt would’ve thrown her for a loop, and her supposed strict code of honor may very well have lead her to give me more time to scheme.

  “This is the maniac who has taken over my dam and threatened to wipe out my loyal subjects in the valleys below?” she would’ve bellowed, and I would’ve laughed at her disbelief, perhaps curtsying demurely to further confuse and dismay her.

  Wait, did I just actually hear those exact words? Did I just curtsy? I need to spend less time thinking about what to wear and more time thinking about how to hurt, or at least harry Hyperion.

  As promised, I met the titan on the top of the dam. In a less dangerous time and place, I might’ve taken some time to appreciate the view of the valley, the artificial reservoir on the other side, the solid concrete separating the two. Now, though, I had to figure out how to get Hyperion close to the edge, down by a river, and you and I both know how hard that would be. We were standing almost at the center of the dam!

  The first thing I noticed about Hyperion was just how enormous she was. When it comes to height and weight, I am mundane and average. But if you copied me and forced the clone to stand on my head (ouch?), Hyperion would still be at least a foot or two taller. I don’t know what kind of body she had under the impressively polished and detailed plate armor she was wearing. Its proportions, though, were likely somewhere between that of a fruitful mother perhaps expecting her seventh child, and the dread shoggoth, which while still fictional, was on its way to becoming a real and deadly threat entirely due to the efforts of well-read magicians with poor impulse control. I couldn’t see a single inch of flesh under Hyperion’s armor, and it lead me to wonder if there was even any woman inside of it. For all I know, Hyperion could very well be her suit. It was obvious I wasn’t going to be harming her during our duel.

  “The terms I ask of you are very simple,” I informed Hyperion. “We’ll fight to the death with no interference from either side. How does that sound to you?”

  For the first (and hopefully last) time, I heard Hyperion laugh.

  “Very well, little girl. Disposing of you will be as effortless as rendering an image of a three dimensional object. Your subordinates should say their prayers.” Hyperion lifted her sword. I jumped back a few inches expecting her to immediately lash out and was surprised when she didn’t.

  “Are you already attempting to flee the fight? I will cut you down!” she shouted. Then, predictably, she lunged at me, swinging the broadsword in an enormous arc that would’ve cut me in half had I not ducked. I lashed out at her leg with my spear, and while this might’ve knocked a human over, the spear just harmlessly bounced off Hyperion’s armor. I needed to strike harder to disrupt her balance, but odds were I couldn’t. But it didn’t matter, since my
goal was to stall for time. It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to get Hyperion over to an edge without putting myself precariously close to it myself. If I could force her to retreat or otherwise herd her, I wouldn’t have this problem.

  Another huge sword swing disrupted my train of thought. Against the likes of me, Hyperion could dictate the movement of the fight as she pleased. About thirty seconds (and many swings) later, I figured out that she was trying to drive me back to the wall of the control center, where I could easily be skewered or smitten into submission. This would not take me anywhere near a drop high enough to kill Hyperion, and unless (chop) I could think of something (zing) to change this (slash), I probably only had a minute before I lost all my maneuvering space and got myself unceremoniously killed. The one advantage I definitely had with the spear was its range and its overall shape – even with her towering shield, Hyperion couldn’t cover her entire body, and there would always be somewhere I could poke at.

  I felt something cold and binary (?) flow over me and reasoned that some enchantments were coming online. Out of curiosity, I stabbed furtively at Hyperion again and connected directly with the shield. The recoil vibrated awkwardly in my hands, but as I retracted the spear, a jolt of electric current wrapped itself around Hyperion’s armor and flashed for a moment. She paused briefly, and although I couldn’t see a face under her helmet, I figured she would at least look emotionally (if not necessarily electrically) shocked if she could. I was going to find my benefactor after this to make sure they got a promotion. I launched another attack, this time more enthusiastically, and was rewarded with a bigger jolt and enough current to make Hyperion briefly stumble. The third time I tried to electrocute her, though, she neatly stepped back. If I could keep this up-

  Nope. Instead of trying to cut me in half, Hyperion brought the blade of her broadsword down on the shaft of my spear, neatly slicing it in twain, negating my range advantage and mooting my electrocution enchantment. No point in trying to fight anymore. I threw the remaining half of the spear at Hyperion and made a dash for the control center.

  “You god-fearing coward!” Hyperion shouted. She tried to follow me, but her armor slowed her down enough that I could easily outpace her at a moderate jog.

  Someone was waiting for me as I reached the door – Terminal! He was holding the titan battery and grinning like a child about to eat a chocolate bar.

  “Better duck!” he said to me. I did one better – I neatly dropped and rolled, since I hadn’t exactly stopped running by that time. He lazily threw the titan battery at Hyperion’s sluggishly approaching form. It lazily sailed through the air and landed on her right sabaton, where it stuck with a surprisingly wet splat. Hyperion immediately stopped and bent down to remove the battery, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t remove it -

  “Super glue,” Terminal explained. “Lucky that it landed on the sticky side, am I right?”

  Hyperion now looked less like she was trying to claw off the sticky battery, and more like she was having a seizure. If I strained my eyes, I could just barely see little bursts of magical energy coming out of the battery’s contacts, and the titan’s already red and shiny armor was beginning to glow ever brighter-

  And then Hyperion exploded. Against my better judgment, I grabbed Terminal and pulled him to the ground just in time for a half-melted shoulderpad to fly over us and embed itself in the wall.

  “Gee, Charlotte! I had no idea you felt this way about me,” he smirked, before standing and dusting himself off.

  “Try not to be so cavalier about it. Sigmar would’ve had my head if I hadn’t protected you,” I responded. I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about saying that, but something told me I was still quite a ways down in the pecking order from Terminal. Had I let Hyperion’s shrapnel deal with him, Sigmar may very well have put my head on a pike. Thinking about impalements reminded me that I needed to check on Sarah. Hopefully, the medics would be patching her up about now.

  I took one look at Hyperion’s smoking remains to assure myself they wouldn’t melt through the wall of the dam or otherwise damage it. It looked like most of Hyperion’s body had shot off into the distance, landing either in the reservoir or in the valley. Less cleanup work for me. I dashed for the lobby.

  Sarah was still impaled by the receptionist’s spikes, but it looked like the medics were ready to try moving her. It was just her good luck that the casualties were otherwise so low; without the care of the medical team, she would have expired by now. I positioned myself as close to her side as the medics would let me, which admittedly wasn’t all that close since they were actively attempting to practice medicine.

  “Sarah’s lost a lot of blood, and we need to operate on her stomach as soon as possible,” one of them explained to me. “If we’re quick, she should pull through. But she’s going to be in recovery for quite a while.” This was an acceptably optimistic appraisal of the situation, but it still meant I was going to have to go weeks, or even months working directly with one of her subordinates. Now, Sarah had a good eye for talent, but I highly doubted any of her administrative underlings had the near-magical (or perhaps actually magical) proficiency that she did.

  Just then, I heard a small poof, and Sigmar appeared on the floor next to me – this time sans cape.

  “I hear that Hyperion has been slain, and that the dam is now under our control, and...” he began before spying Sarah’s awful plight and trailing off.

  “Lady, how did you manage to get spiked?” I wasn’t exactly sure what emotion I was hearing in Sigmar’s voice, but it immediately struck fear into my heart. The medics grimaced.

  “I’m sorry, Sigmar. If I’d been thinking straight, I... I would’ve thrown the receptionist instead of just trying to save Charlotte,” Sarah whispered, briefly interrupted by a coughing fit. Several of the medics opened their mouths, as if to tell her that she needed to save her strength, especially since she was still bleeding out on the spikes.

  “No, guys, it’s fine. I think I’ve heard what I need to hear. Stand back. I’m going to try something.”

  The medics grudgingly, but wisely stood back. I did as well, since I didn’t want to be in the way of whatever Sigmar was going to do. He opened his mouth, clapped his hands a few times, and started doing some sort of spinning dance that most people only see at theme parks or in movies. It seemed familiar, though, and suddenly I realized that I actually had seen it before, buried somewhere in the second, more theoretical half of Unfathomable Destruction…

  “No, don’t!” I shouted, but it was no use. Sigmar stopped spinning and blasted Sarah with a torrent of blue-hot fire. When I recovered from the light and the heat of the backblast, I looked up to see that the spikes were gone, but so was Sarah, and one of the medics who’d stood just a little too close for his own good. Two others were missing eyebrows.

  “Hey, guys! Check it out! Charlotte’s been studying destruction magic! Nobody else has ever figured this out. What a huge nerd,” Sigmar shouted, before blowing a huge raspberry at me. “If I’d known, I’d have had you purge Sarah!”

  “But... I...” And because I could not begin to grasp why Sigmar had done it, I lost my ability to speak coherently for a few moments.

  “Actually, scratch that. You might recognize the spell, but you’d need a mainframe to cast it.”

  “...”

  “And besides, I can’t have you executing your direct subordinates! That would deny me the pleasure.”

  “...”

  “Had to be done. Can’t have someone who’s that careless mucking things up on the team. One mistake could be your last in this business.”

  “...”

  “What? I’ll pension the damn kids off! Of course, I knew she had children; she wouldn’t shut up about them! Guess I can’t hold them for ransom now that she’s dead.”

  I started crying like a baby then and there. One of the surviving medics r
ushed over in an attempt to comfort me, but what was he going to do? He didn’t even have eyebrows! Out of a thin layer of saline I saw Sigmar roll his eyes and wander off, most likely to torture and murder anyone else who didn’t perform up to par today.

  I spent much of the next few days grieving over Sarah’s pointless death. We couldn’t even give her a proper funeral between her involvement in the coven and her newfound lack of a body. Slowly, and with the help of many gallons of ice cream (I thought only women in half-baked sitcoms ate ice cream to cope with grief), I began to recover from witnessing Sarah’s death.

  However, as I clawed my way back to being able to function, I became aware that my own situation was now very dire. Whether he knew it or not, Sigmar had just dealt his coven a serious blow: vaporizing Sarah was sure to gut our logistics and administrative abilities. At best, I think it would take three or four normal members to pick up on her responsibilities, and between them, they were certain to flub things up at some point and get themselves killed. Eventually, Sigmar would probably figure out that I didn’t actually know how to run a coven and get rid of me. Either that, or one of his pranks might take a turn for the deadly.

  I decided in that moment that under no circumstances was I going to die at the hands of a cartoon platypus. The problem was that I had no idea what I could do to stay alive. I couldn’t just leave the coven – once you’re in, you’re in for life. I used to support that policy. After all, we had to keep people from ratting us out to, if not the police, the general public. I also figured that appealing to Sigmar for any sort of leniency or assistance wasn’t going to work, either. Sigmar didn’t always ignore my exploits, but his erratic behavior and responses made him all the more dangerous. For a while, I couldn’t think of anything. My mind kept going back to that dread moment when Sarah had died, and I began to imagine Sigmar turning his titanic fires upon me...

  And then, after a long time staring at the wall of my bedroom, it suddenly occurred to me just what it meant that I’d killed a titan. To be fair, Terminal dealt the killing blow, but I’d still played my role, hadn’t I? If we could kill one titan with our wits and our magic combined, maybe we could kill another?