Angel Sword

We took what cover was available.  Filtration systems the size of four-story buildings were spaced out around the ‘room’, pipes big enough to drive a truck through feeding out of those systems into wall, floor, and ceiling.  The domed ceiling high above us, accommodating the structures, and concrete fences were set here and there to ward employees away from dangerous parts of the structure.

*

I could see the robed suit orienting, a sword as long as two eighteen wheelers stuck end to end pointing our way.  Before, it had glowed like it was metal fresh out of the forge.  Now it was white.

*

The sword became a beam, as wide as the aforementioned trucks.  The Wretch took the hit, and my forward flight was arrested, stopped.

Hold strong! I thought, as the Wretch absorbed and deflected the incoming fire.  It wasn’t large enough to block everything, and some of the beam scattered, hitting the filtration system.

Hold, damn it!

When the world had ended, the mind controlling entity that had seized us all and coordinated us for one phase of the attack had used me for this purpose.  To take a hit from Scion.  It had been almost absentminded.

The beam from the mech suit’s sword tapered off in the same instant my instincts told me to get the fuck away.  I rolled off to the side, and the Wretch flickered out and died a moment later.

*

More importantly, that glowing sword was pointed again.

*

Forcefields were raised- I saw Sarah’s purple one, two others.  They didn’t last three seconds.  The sword’s beam cut a furrow into the ground, sliced into the wall, and caused a fifth of the lighting in the room to go dark as it shredded wiring.

*

The warrior angel with the glowing sword pointed the weapon at me.  I flew down and away, using pipes for cover-

And it reversed its hold on the sword, gripping pommel with one hand and handle with the other, sword pointing backward and past its own hip.  The beam tore into the water filtration structure, taking out a good chunk of it.

A feint.

*

The sword had taken out a good quarter of the filtration structure to the right, and the amount of water was startling as it sprayed out at high pressure and massive volume.  The group that had climbed further up the same structure, Ashley and Capricorn included, were having to fight to keep their positions as pipes dipped and previously horizontal sections became precarious slopes.  On the ground, capes were running through the water or even dropping low to let themselves get carried by the flow, where the geyser banked off the wall to the floor.

*

The warrior angel was there, twisting around, sword poised.  With the heavy object and my momentum wrapped up in swinging it, I didn’t have the option of getting out of the way.  Not unless I wanted to drop it.

And I wasn’t about to drop an electrified power cell into shallow water that some of my fellow capes were sloshing around in.

The sword plunged, striking the Wretch.  I released the cell, in hopes it would reach the halo’s range.  Not enough, with the sword’s impact driving me and the Wretch down in the moment before the Wretch gave up.

*

The warrior angel moved, using both hands to raise and level its sword.  Aiming at the other structure, where Sveta and Rain were.

I flew to intercept.  To do it, I had to take a beam from the halo.  I pushed out with my aura, in case the pilots were actually in the craft, and took the hit.  As I put the warrior angel between myself and the haloed one, the angel with the halo used thrusters and flight devices.  The air reacted violently around me as it lunged, keeping me in its line of fire.

Even following the length of the sword to try to disrupt the continuity of incoming fire, I wasn’t able to avoid the beam’s continuity.

By the time I got where I needed to be, I wasn’t in a position to use it.  The beam fired, cleaving into the water filtration structure that my teammates were using as a stage to fight from.  The beam cut through the upper segment, raked along the side, and then swept along the ground, toward capes who were wading through water.  Some got hit.

*

The one with the sword drove its weapon into the center of the other structure.  People slipped, fell, grabbed onto railings, or slid along pipes and then leaped down into the water below.  Not a good leap, when the drop was thirty or more feet and the water wasn’t that deep.

*

The sword that impaled the filtration structure glowed, then fired.  The entire room shuddered, and every single foothold, catwalk, platform, and box on the structure was jarred, knocked down a peg, or made to fall.

*

The warrior angel wasn’t using its sword to blast anymore, only to swing and chop at cover.  With one swipe, it knocked the catwalk down.