The warehouse ceased to exist in an instant.
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
The world ruptured beneath screaming cannonfire as massive iron rounds tore through the building from the outside. Stone walls exploded inward. Wooden beams shattered like brittle twigs. Entire sections of the ceiling collapsed at once beneath fire and pressure.
The Red Maw ships had intentionally targeted the structure the moment the fighting inside stopped.
'They knew? But how?'
That realization barely crossed his mind before the ceiling came down. Then—nothing. The rubble stopped. Pihla's voice echoed through the minds of everyone in Strike Team Seven simultaneously.
"Don't panic."
The collapsing warehouse was frozen mid-destruction.
Stone.
Wood.
Metal.
Dust.
Everything suspended around them inside a massive telekinetic sphere. Rubble hovered inches above heads while shattered debris floated motionlessly in the air like pieces trapped inside a painting. Pihla stood at the center with one arm raised lazily. Her blonde ponytail fluttered slightly from the strain.
"Honestly," she sighed.
"Couldn't they have waited till after we had left the building?"
Pihla was a Saint of the cognitive class and possed the Trait 'The Hermit.' Unlike Emma's dominion over time, Pihla ruled over thought itself. Her first Resonant allowed her to read the minds around her. Thoughts, cogitational impulses,cerebration hidden beneath words.
Her second Resonant allowed her to force her own thoughts into others. Suggestion. Manipulation. Mental domination if necessary.
And her third—
The authority to impose thought upon reality itself as dominion, telekinesis born from willpower. If Pihla decided something should move— reality obeyed and it moved. It didn't matter what it was.
Pihla flicked her fingers.
The floating debris blasted outward in every direction as the telekinetic barrier dissolved. Strike Team Seven burst from the collapsing warehouse—
Only for another volley of cannonfire to immediately scream toward them.
Pihla's eyes widened.
"Oh, come—"
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Emma's eyes narrowed and The Wheel Of Fortune turned. He stole the time from the cannonballs' trajectory.
The moment of their firing.
The moment of their flight.
The moment of their impact.
All of it compressed into nothing. The cannonballs vanished from existence before they reached the halfway point.
Pihla stared.
"Show-off." she muttered as she slammed both palms together.
The ground exploded upward beneath telekinetic force, launching enormous clouds of dirt, stone, smoke, and dust across the shoreline. Simultaneously she projected thoughts outward into nearby minds.
They were hit.
Direct impact.
Nobody survived.
The illusion spread instantly. Pirates shouted in triumph, automatons paused momentarily.Even the rhythm of incoming fire slowed. Pihla grinned.
"Boom bitches."
Emma ignored her while extending his temporal field around the team once more. The world slowed. Sound deepened unnaturally and falling ash drifted like snow.
Emma looked at his team. Seven Enforcers, all alive, all shaken, all waiting for orders.
"The plan has changed. We withdraw to the ships."
One of the men frowned.
"What about the artifact?"
"Secured."
"But did the ships even survive though?" Another operative—a young woman with soot smeared across her cheek—asked.
Emma looked at Pihla who sent out her thoughts towards the ships and projected them among the rest of the team.
"Captain—we've withdrawn to secondary coordinates. Awaiting extraction."
'Good.At least the ships survived.' Emma thought.
"For now," Pihla muttered, clearly hearing his thoughts accidentally.
Emma glanced sideways.
"Stop doing that."
"You think loudly."
Emma observed the shoreline rapidly.
More pirates were arriving from the ships and moving towards the ruble.
And worse—
More automatons. They emerged from shattered buildings and dockside alleys in unnatural silence. Patchwork skin. Mechanical joints. some with grotesque facial expressions, others without facial features at all. Some carried blades. Some had modified apendages. One massive figure dragged a large trunk with it casually.
Emma immediately recognized the Presence radiating from several of them.
Saints.
Weak Saints.
But Saints nonetheless. Pihla noticed too.
"Where are those things even coming from?" Pihla wondered out loud.
"I don't know." Emma responded while one of the operatives cursed quietly.
"Captain…what's the plan? Should we hold them off while you and the vice-captain get to the ships? " One of the operatives asked with unease.
Emma answered instantly
"Pihla and I will hold them off. The rest of you retreat."
Several members of Strike Team Seven immediately protested.
"What?"
"We can still fight—"
"No," Emma interrupted bluntly.
Silence.
Then the young woman shook her head.
"Captain, we can't just leave you—"
"You can."
Emma's voice was flat.
"The thing I faced inside the warehouse was a Saint. Pihla struggled against her opponents as well."
Pihla crossed her arms.
"I handled mine perfectly fine."
Emma ignored her and continued.
"I'm sure even you could feel the Presence's of several saints among the legion approaching us. Pihla and I can hold our own but the rest of you cannot face them. You are simply not strong enough. An argument can be made that you will make up for your shortcomings with teamwork and equipment. But that will only take you so far."
That landed harder than intended. The team exchanged glances. Some looked down. Others clenched their fists. No one argued.
Because he was right.
One muttered quietly.
"…Damn."
Emma raised his hand. The artifact box materialized in his palm, then flickered i the hands of each of his operatives, and vanished again. The rest of the team looked startled then looked to their leader for answers.
"I have created temporal pockets. The artifact is stored in all of them. If anything happens to Pihla or me, the box will appear with the rest of you."
Pihla smiled slightly.
"Do you understand your roles now?" Emm asked.
The young woman nodded slowly.
"Yes, Captain."
"Then go."
They moved.
"Your such a softie." Pihla's voice echoed in his mind.
"Shut up." He responded.
She laughed as she and him stepped foward together to clear a path for the rest of them.
The beach was chaos.
The Red Maw Pirates surged first.
Dozens upon dozens rushed through smoke and ruined docks wielding crude Flow-enhanced weapons. Axes. Rifles. Harpoons. Artifact grenades crackling with unstable energy.
Individually?
Most were irrelevant.
Mundanes.
Awakened.
A handful of Vortaries.
But combined with numbers, artillery support, and Saint-level automatons they became dangerous. Especially because the pirates clearly did not care about friendly fire whatsoever. Another cannon volley screamed overhead.
One pirate looked up in horror.
"WAIT WE'RE STILL HER—"
BOOOOOOM.
The explosion consumed him and six others instantly.
Pihla blinked.
"Wow..."
Emma sidestepped a rifle round while slowing localized time around himself. The bullet drifted sluggishly past his face.
"They are remarkably unconcerned with casualties."
"That's one way to put it."
Pihla waded into the second wave.
Her first Resonant activated—mind reading. The pirates' thoughts flooded into her consciousness. Crude. Violent. Desperate.
Kill....Take...
She pushed deeper.
T...eo...a... ar...tif...t...he masters...
'The Masters? The hell are they saying?'
She tried to find more—
Then a Saint-level automaton crashed down before her. It was eight feet tall with a porcelain mask and twin blades.
It's presence alone shattered nearby stone and warped the air slightly. Weaker people nearby were instantly killed by its presence.
Pihla grinned.
"Oh finally."
The automaton lunged.
Pihla didn't move.
She merely thought.
The Saint abruptly froze mid-step as telekinetic pressure crushed down from every direction simultaneously. The ground beneath it imploded.
CRACK.
The automaton resisted. Pihla's eyes sharpened.
"Oh?"
The construct forced itself upright slowly despite enough mental force to flatten buildings. Then its thoughts touched hers. Not words.
Noise.
Hunger.
Broken fragments of commands. Pihla recoiled slightly.
"Gods that's disgusting."
Mind-reading had dangers. To touch another mind was to expose yourself to it. Normal people already carried enough filth inside their heads but these things?
Worse.
Their thoughts resembled rusted machinery soaked in grease and blood. Corruption that would consume her is she was careless.
'Well now I know that aside from that pseudo Presence they are nothing but animated corpses. Stil, ew.'
The automaton attacked again.
Pihla's second Resonant activated instantly.
A violent mental pulse exploded outward and invisible force smashed directly into the construct's consciousness.
The automaton halted.
Then collapsed motionless as Pihla destroyed the strings that were holding its scant mind together, in ther words, leaving it brain dead.
Pihla rubbed her temple. Then turned and skewered two pirates with her naginata and throwing them meterers away and knocking away ,many others with the force of her throw.
"Ugh."
Emma cut through three approaching pirates with accelerated sword strikes before asking:
"Problem?"
"Their minds are awful."
"That is not surprising."
"No, I mean genuinely awful. Yuck!"
Another automaton emerged beside them wielding a cannon-like artifact fused directly into its arm and fired. Emma stopped time.
Emma kicked it back toward the automaton and surrounding pirates.
BOOOOOOM.
Pihla laughed loudly.
"Oh? So you can have fun."
"Focus."
She projected her own thoughts outward—a wave of pure psychic force that crashed over the advancing pirates. They stumbled. Their eyes went blank. Their bodies crumpled into unconsciousness.
Those who resisted—the Votaries, the stronger-willed—pushed back with all thier might.
She hit them harder.
Thought after thought, compulsion after compulsion, until their minds collapsed under the weight. One of them—a massive Vortary with a scarred face and bloodshot eyes—reached for her throat.
Pihla caught his wrist and slashed him with her weapon before throwing his body away.
Emma fought through the third wave.
The pirates were nothing. The automata were the problem.
They moved without fear, without hesitation, without the need for self-preservation. He stole time from their movements, slowing them, freezing them, cutting them apart.
One of them—taller than the rest, its mask painted with gold—raised a hand.
Light bloomed.
Emma stopped time.
The world froze.
He walked behind the automaton, raised his blade, and struck its neck.
Time resumed.
The automaton's head tumbled to the sand. Its body stood for a moment longer, then collapsed.
Emma turned.
Pihla stood beside him, breathing heavily, her clothes torn, her hair wild.
"I hate these things."
"They are persistent."
A cannonball screamed toward them.
Emma stole its time.
It vanished he then returned the stolen time in the next wave, causing a numer of canonballs to appear in the midst of the attackers.
BOOM.
But another followed. And another. And another still.
The pirate ships were firing more indiscriminately now. Pihla and Emma simply dodged, deflected or cut the canonballs as the attackers around them were torn apart by the bombardment.
' How did it come to this? How did the Red Maw's know about the operation? What are these automatons and how are they linked back to all this? Hmmm, I need captives.'
Pihla turned to him.
"I just recieved a mental transmission with the team. They have succesfully met up with the ships."
Emma nodded.
"We move."
There was a loud boom as Emma and Pihla broke the sound barrier with thier foward acceleration. Some of the Automatons tried to stop them but Emma passed through enemies like a ghost cutting through them without mercy.
Pihla moved beside him like a natural disaster. Telekinetic force hurled pirates and automatons several meters away. Mind blasts rendered entire groups comatose instantly. One automaton tried ambushing her from behind she sensed hostile intent through surface thoughts before it moved. Without turning she raised one finger, the construct was crushed into paste which was then used to blind the others of its kind that lunged at them. At the speed they were moving, only they seemed to be a threat as the pirates and weaker automatons were moving so slow that Emma might as well have stopped time.
Another cannon volley descended. Emma stole the time the balls were fired and released the effect immediately. The cannonfire resumed, only now every cannonball pointed backward toward the Red Maw ships.
The resulting explosions illuminated the shoreline brilliantly.
Pirates screamed.
Pihla stared.
"Okay that was cool."
Emma allowed himself a tiny smirk.
"Now they can't follow us."
Emma grabbed Pihla's hand and accelerated towards thier secondary meeting point.
"Hold on."
He used his third resonant only this time, he stole the time between departure and arrival.
The moment of leaving here.
The moment of getting there.
Both compressed into nothing.
They appeared on the deck of the lead Aerthos vessel. Behind them, the beach dwindled into the distance. Two additional figures collapsed beside Emma and Pihla.
One pirate.
One automaton.
Captured during transit.
Both looked utterly nauseous. Sailors immediately rushed forward, chains in hand.
The pirate immediately began shouting.
"OI OI ,WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT, AND WHO THE BLOODY FUCK ARE YOU LOT?!"
The automaton remained silent as sailors restrained it heavily with artifact-sealed bindings.
The pirate continued yelling.
"YOU SHITSTAINS ARE DEAD!"
Pihla frowned after attemting to read his mind. The sheer degeneracy inside his thoughts nearly made her nauseous. She severed the connection immediately.
"Can someone gag him?"
Instead the pirate looked directly at her and grinned obscenely.
"Well maybe if pretty little thing over there asks nicely—" He made a crude gesture.
Pihla physically recoiled.
"Ew."
The pirate laughed harder.
"C'mon sweetheart, untie me and maybe I'll show you a real—"
One of the Seven slaped a heavy metal gag accross the lower part of his face.
"Oh thank you." Pihla said with a sigh of relief.
"Well in any case, givin his personality, the Inquisition is going to process him beautifully."
The fleet immediately turned away from shore.
THUNK.
The entire vessel lurched violently.
Another impact struck the second ship.
THUNK.
Then the third. Emma's head snapped toward the sea.
Harpoons.
Massive iron harpoons connected by thick chains had pierced all three vessels simultaneously.Several sailors shouted in alarm.
"How did they reach this far?!"
"That range is impossible!"
Then the fog ahead parted and everyone froze. A fourth ship emerged from the darkness. Its silhouette resembled a floating fortress. Black sails, crimson lanterns and ows upon rows of cannons.
And at its prow—a massive iron maw. The flagship.
Behind them the three Red Maw ships closed in rapidly despite the damage Emma had caused them. They had been herded.
Trapped.
Pihla stared at the approaching warship.
"Well, fuck."