Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

the Chixzon’s body and go after those nodules and delete them…and to his surprise there wasn’t a backup in place to prevent it. Within a few minutes he had them all destroyed and no other biological interference was popping up as a team of Clan Saber Esquires finally caught up to him.

“Take him,” the Saiyan said, and when a Calavari reached down to pick him up he took off in a blur past several other Clansmen, running across the walls at some points to get by them as he moved to the head of the line and raced to catch up to the others that he was still in battlemeld contact with, and he knew that several of the Chixzon were already dead through their own efforts and not Star Force’s.

That meant they had to continue moving quick if they were to capture any more, but the few secrets this Saiyan…whose identification was Nathen-2562…had managed to pull out were already transmitted out through the battlemeld indicating where some of the sensitive technology in the city was located…along with the Chixzon city sitting in the bedrock below it that was going to be hard to get to.

That was when one of the warships in orbit opened fire again with a cutting beam, vaporizing sand and rock as it cored down through the surface alongside the Kiio city until it was just above where the Chixzon city was supposed to be, for it wasn’t showing up on any sensors. Down through that explosively evacuated conduit a number of mining drones were sent, along with a few that went down partway, then chewed into the side of the chamber to link up to the Saiyans in the city.

Nathen got there first, as the others were still engaged with the Chixzon up here, and he slid past the mining drones and fell down the main conduit all the way to the bottom where he flew to a stop and dropped in a hero landing on the semi-molten rock as the drones dug 5 additional new tunnels that were only a few meters wide each as they searched for the city that was supposed to be nearby.

The Saiyan reached out with his senses, Essence-enhanced them, and found the minds of the Chixzon nearby…which he redirected the mining drones towards and rode one of the small conduits behind one, floating above the outstream of chewed up rock that was being transmitted via shield conduit to a collection terminal at the bottom of the main shaft, then being elevated through it by other support drones, otherwise they’d be digging and dumping the rubble in the very pathways they were trying to open up.

Nathen sensed his drone getting close, but none of the Chixzon were aware of its exact location or they chose not to be there when it bored through the stealth sheathing that surrounded the hidden city and the drone popped out into some sort of support infrastructure, tearing through a myriad of equipment that had to be signaling alarms as it was destroyed.

The Saiyan pushed by it as soon as he had an opening and took off in a blur of Saiyan 2 speed and strength as he shot and punched his way through the first door in his path, delaying him 4.3 seconds, after which he was mostly in the clear as he hunted down the nearest Chixzon minds enroute to the mainframe he had seen in the other’s memory.

Nathen took two more down with his Saven psionic, which was the equivalent of a mental flash bomb he transmitted into their minds, followed up by a quick 4 or 5 series of punches into their bodies with his fists and the corresponding stun blasts leaping off his wrist-located weapon packages. He had to delay enough to disable them, but couldn’t waste time, for the mainframe held a lot of information the Chixzon knew they had to destroy, but its redundancy was critical to them, so they’d built it without the ability to delete everything in a single button press.

Nathen came across 3 more Chixzon and subdued the first, but the next two came in a pairing that actually put up a fight, delaying him another 26 seconds, but after that it was just a matter of running and busting through doors until he got within telepathic range of the Chixzon in the mainframe…which he then threw every Psionic he had at them to buy a few more seconds before he could get inside.

Saven, Orren, Ju’nu’bo, Wequay, Saniso, Leechas, Kop’ni, and Vado when he got close enough. He had to distract and suppress the 9 of them long enough for him to physically get there as they were wiping one memory cube after another with alarming speed.

His intervention stopped that, causing one of them to lash out violently with his shoulder spikes and accidentally cleave the arm off another as his vision was no longer working due to Nathen’s intervention. All the Chixzon were telepathic, so they had some resistance to his powers, but Ikrid was far superior, and with all the other upgrades that came in the other psionics there was no way one could resist the mind of an advanced Archon…but hacking the minds of multiple targets was very hard, which was why Saven and some of the battlemeld technics were designed to interfere with multiple targets without actually hacking into their brains.

They were a ‘throw in your face’ attack that didn’t require any follow-up, and Nathen managed to get all but one of the Chixzon in a state of disarray, but the last saw or felt what was happening to the others and just started trashing all the equipment within reach and not bothering to actually delete anything.

It took Nathen another 18 seconds to break inside, at which point his head was hurting from the sustained attacks on the now 13 Chixzon in the mainframe, with more coming in