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Ch. 68 Downtime

Penulis: Jon Klement
last update Terakhir Diperbarui: 2025-05-31 21:14:44

Tenochtitlán had moods. Underdenver felt like it was always bracing for a fistfight. Dust Bowl had that scratchy, cursed pressure crawling down your back. But here?

Here it breathed. Slow. Low. Almost at peace.

And somehow, that made the grief sharper.

We’d won, sure. Temporarily. For now. But every win seemed to cost blood. Mont’s wasn’t even dry in my memory yet. Every time I saw one of the Lizzes glance toward a hallway, I could tell they expected him to walk around the corner. Every time Spitfire flicked her tail, I half-expected her to fly off after him.

But he was gone. Dust Bowl had claimed him, and this world kept moving.

We needed the pause. Even the hardened ones. Even me.

The briefing room had gone quiet after Marta dismissed us. The lights dimmed. The sounds of the city—such as they were—felt a hundred feet away.

Rachelle was the first to stand. “I’m taking the kid and the dragon for a walk.”

Spitfire perked up. “I prefer ‘wings of the apocalypse,’ but sure.”

J nodded sole
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  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 80 Finding X

    “Well, what do you think?” We were all assembled in the new base’s cafeteria, eating and enjoying a bit of down time. Mitch, Bob, and J were kicking Dr. Schnell’s butt in a game of poker, with Dr. Schnell threatening to quit, explaining that games of chance did not truly test one’s intellect because there was too much…well, chance. We all looked up when the Lizzes entered. One of the Lizzes had dyed her blonde hair brunette. It was a striking difference. “Very nice,” Dr. Schnell said. Compliments like that were uncharacteristic for him, but seeking to disengage from situations he didn’t like, such as the poker game, was not. “You look so different!” J exclaimed. One of the Lizzes (I couldn’t tell if it was Liz-1 or Liz-2 because they had apparently abandoned the convention of Liz-2 wearing a 1980’s style headband, but it was the one who was still blonde.) smiled at J and said, “Thank you, J. That’s the point.” The brunette Liz also smiled and said, “You all can call me Jane now.

  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 79 A New Base of Operations

    I stood at the entrance of the new base, feeling a chill creep down my spine. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered in a way that made it seem like the walls were breathing. The place was old, crumbling, and heavy with secrets. I didn’t just look old, it smelled old, like dust, incense, and something else I couldn’t place. It was definitely not the kind of place I would have chosen for us, but with the whole mess we were in (Control in the middle of a civil war, S.H.A.D.E. and us forced into a fragile alliance against the Neurovores, and Mr. X still MIA after that vetala ran off with his body) this was what we had to work with."Smells like someone's been cooking ancient scrolls in here," Liz-1 muttered, half-joking as she paced down the hall, her boots tapping lightly against the stone floor."More like the smell of bad decisions," Liz-2 replied, sounding more serious than usual. Her eyes darted from one shadowed corner to another, clearly on edge. I couldn’t blame her. This pla

  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 78 Lines of Fire

    Night had fallen, and Sigma-Red glowed like an open wound in the desert floor. The red dome pulsed with a rhythm that made my teeth itch, humming some cosmic lullaby meant for horrors older than physics. The Nazca Lines stretched beneath our boots like giant circuit diagrams, humming with ambient power. The time had come.We approached low and slow. Rachelle and I led the front, Liz-1 and Liz-2 flanking, Jonie and Schnell behind us. J stayed close to me, Spitfire perched above him on a crumbling ridge, wings tight with tension."You sure about the anchor points?" I asked J."Cross-referenced with Schnell's readings. They're triangulated around the breach dome. If we knock them out in sequence, we might destabilize the structure.""Might?""The math says yes. The fact that reality here is unraveling says maybe."Fair enough.We split into teams.Schnell and Jonie took the north node. Liz-1 and Liz-2 the south. J and I the east. Rachelle and Spitfire held overwatch. No room for errors.

  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 77

    We walked single-file under the wide, pitiless sky. The Andes rolled behind us like a stone ocean, but ahead, the desert was flat and endless. Dust hissed around our boots. Heat shimmered like mirages off the sand.The Nazca Lines stretched across the basin like chalk runes drawn by giants. You didn’t notice them all at once. First, it was a strange curve in the gravel. Then a bird too perfect to be coincidence. Then more: a monkey, a spider, a human with outstretched arms. It was eerie the way they revealed themselves. Like they’d always been there, waiting for someone to pay attention.We were two days from breach."This place is insane," Rachelle muttered, adjusting the strap on her rail rifle. "I keep expecting a voice from the sky to start narrating.""If it does, I’m quitting," Jonie said.Spitfire soared above us, a glinting silhouette against the sun. She dipped once, then twice. The all-clear. No drones. No scouts. No Neurovore constructs yet. But the land felt... infected.S

  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 76 Burning the Map

    Argus’s blue eyes blinked softly as the last of Mont’s journal pages were scanned into its archives. The machine intelligence—cool, clinical, but not entirely devoid of personality—had become eerily still since announcing the Sigma-Red timeline.Six days. Then breach.The lab was quiet but tense, like a held breath before the plunge. Everyone was moving with purpose—checking weapons, syncing comms, calibrating rail rifles and EMP grenades.Everyone except Schnell.He stood by the Neurovore’s dissected remains on a sterilized slab, leaning in with surgical fascination. J hovered beside him, handing over instruments with the solemnity of a priest.“Here, scalpel,” J said."Danke. Look at zese neural filaments... fascinating," Schnell murmured. “Zey shimmer in response to electromagnetic induction. Zis species does not simply transmit signals. It sings to itself.”“You think they’re intelligent?” J asked.Schnell gave a crooked smile. “My boy, zey are more than intelligent. Zey are strat

  • Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders   Ch. 75 Argus

    We rode an unmarked cargo hauler down into the bowels of the Andes. The exterior was camouflaged in mud and moss, a holdover from its time as a smuggler vessel in the post-Y2K black markets. Now, it answered to no one, just one of many scavenged assets in the counter-coup’s patchwork fleet. The trip from Tenochtitlán to the Lima outskirts had taken us under the jungle, through abandoned mining shafts and forgotten rail systems Control hadn’t touched in decades.J had been quiet the whole trip. Not sulking just thinking. Spitfire curled on a seat beside him, her head resting on his knee. Every now and then, he’d scratch behind her ears, absentminded. I’m not sure she would have allowed anybody but J to pet, caress, and scratch her like a pet dog. I’m sure she would have felt condescended to and disrespected. But she allowed J. And from her body language, I think she enjoyed it.“You holding up?” I asked, lowering myself onto the bench opposite him.“I was thinking about whoever left us

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