Chapter 257 49.3 Alliance Raid?

SHEN

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Despite all of her efforts to keep herself going, Shen felt like she was about to keel over after doing yet another round of healing for both Maruki and Shade. With their tank doing his best to take all of their damage and injuries onto himself, he was starting to sustain more injuries than her [Fixit] could manage to heal. With each [Fix] and [Keep Working] she gave him, the enemy only upped their attacks to eat through her efforts. She was even starting to stack her [Moves] in quick succession just to keep up, only for Maruki himself to do something stupid and jump headfirst into the enemy's embrace knowing that she could always heal him back up to full once she was done thinning out the crowd.

Truly, she was starting to understand just why Lady Guidance was harsh with some of her instructions in regard to healing.

"Stop that!" she scolded the tank as she raised her wrench up high and gave the man a thorough beatdown of raw healing. "Ya're makin it more difficult for me to heal ya!"

"But I have to help with the war effort, Shen!" Maruki unapologetically yelled out. "Shade cannot defend himself alone against this amount of enemies, and we cannot afford to let any of them overwhelm the two of us and get to you!"

Shen preened. A part of her knew that she really shouldn't, knowing that she was the only thing realistically keeping them afloat at the moment, but her bruised pride swelled with joy at the recognition.

"D-Don't gimme that praise! Ya're still taking too much damage!" Shen admonished the tank, pushing through her blushing cheeks and pride. "I don't want either of ya dyin on me! And I don't care if-"

[*BOOM!*]

Before she was even finished with her rant, Shen flinched as a massive explosion of black and green enveloped a different side of the crater beyond them. Everyone stopped fighting, even most of their enemies as they all looked and stared at the anomaly.

"W-What was that?!"

"Another set of intruders?!"

Shaking her head, Shen quickly found herself breathing out as she took the opportunity to give both of her defenders a shot at healing. Getting to work, Shade was visibly more injured than Maruki, cuts littering his body right as she gave him a firm whack of her [Manifest].

"Thanks, Shen," Shade breathed out, his voice strained from pain and exhaustion. "Also any idea on what caused that explosion?"

Shen breathed out for a brief second, wiping away the beads of sweat forming on her face as she replied, "Dunno. Don't care. Can we just focus on stayin alive?"

"What in the world are you all staring at?!"

And just like that, the tense peace was broken by the sound of the Head Intellect screaming her head off. Shen had thought that the woman was rather nice, if simply intense, but seeing her order people around like it was nothing only cemented the fact that her being nice to her back in the administrative building was nothing more than a lie to let her guard down.

"They're recuperating already!" the intense woman barked out. "What're you all doing gawking at that explosion?! Arrest these foreigners and leave the worrying to me!"

As if spurred on once more, the enemies surrounding them seemingly got their second wind as they renewed their attacks. Thankfully, while a lot of them were obviously Somatics, almost all of them didn't seem to have a power actually useful in combat. From what Shen could glean while doing upkeep on her companions, the enemy Somatics usually had powers more useful in other things like looking at stuff or finding out about stuff. It was why some of them began targeting her in the first place, with some of them pointing out that she was the only one keeping the two fighters in her group going despite all of the attacks they'd thrown at them in the first place.

"Of course, Head Intellect!"

"Arrest them!"

Letting out a tired sigh, Shen quickly made herself scarce as she hid behind Maruki and Shade's capable bodies once more. She might've had some offensive capabilities now, but she knew well enough that she shouldn't waste her precious energy trying to fight. Currently, she was more useful fixing her companions' bodies, and that was what she intended to do anyway.

"Here's ta another hour of nonstop action..." she weakly chuckled to herself as she raised her wrench at the ready. "I won't give up though... They would've never given up if they were here."

Even if both her companions were to fall, Shen would refuse to lay down her [Fixit]. Shizu wouldn't do so, and she intended to do the same. Besides, she had a feeling that the explosion from earlier meant more good to them than to their enemies.

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VESPER

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"What in the world is this now?"

Vesper felt like her head was about to explode as she used her [Oversight] to try and determine what exactly caused the explosion. She had been well aware of the second group of foreigners climbing out of the crater hours ago, but she didn't think that they've broken through this quickly with the number of Academics she had stationed around the blast site. She would've expected them to take their time and try to escape, but instead, they marched head-first into danger, slowly making their way to their friends that they currently had surrounded.

"Khh.... What're they doing..."

Walking away from the general area of fighting, the Head Intellect did her best to hide herself from view as she panted and clutched at her chest. The pain radiating from her heart was a pain to deal with along with her migraine, but she didn't care. She needed to see what in the world was happening to her city, and she would use any and all resources she had available at her disposal.

"Ngh... Where are the reinforcements?" she whispered to herself, her [Manifest] quickly shifting views back towards the administrative building. "What's taking them so damn long?"

Unfortunately for her, what she was in the building was far from what she wanted. Inside the conference room, all of her Intellects were arguing about the proper response they should take in this emergency. Without her keeping them leashed and on track, they all devolved into what was equivalent to a pack of Vermes wriggling and flailing about with no sense of rhyme or direction.

"Damn bastards..." she growled out, her nostrils dripping with blood as she gasped. "Do I really have to do everything here?"

Dispelling her [Oversight,] Vesper stood up, her knees almost buckling with how weak her body felt. Gone were the days when she could realistically fight some of her battles. Instead, she was forced to direct and lead, hoping that those under her were competent enough to follow basic common sense and not pause in the middle of combat to gawk at a recent development.

"That explosion's most certainly caused by an enemy Somatic," she angrily mused as she slowly made her way to the nearest unoccupied Academic. "They're getting closer... those three will certainly get our prospective captives freed as soon as they get here."

Using her cane, Vesper carried her body towards her destination, the hapless Academic quickly saluting to her with a practiced stiffness.

"H-Head Intellect!" the poor girl yelped out. "Can I help-"

"No duh, you can help," Vesper growled out in sarcasm. "Go to the administrative building and shout at the Board of Intellects for me. Tell them they're bickering won't do anything to solve the situation."

"H-Head Intellect?"

"What? Do I have to give a script or something?" she groaned, her hand going to her temples as she tried to massage away her headache. "Fine. Tell them this ad verbatim then:" she then took in a deep breath before she shouted, "Stop fvcking around and send reinforcements to the blast site!"

The poor Academic flinched, but she quickly saluted at the orders she received with a stern look on her face. "A-Affirmative, Head Intellect!"

Vesper could only watch as the Academic bolted out of her sight, hopefully coming back with some good news as opposed to more problems down the road. She really didn't want anything more to think about this, especially with the enemy now possibly knowing about Project D's existence before it was even ready to be deployed.

"Have to ramp up development once this is all over," she growled as she hobbled her way up toward the place where the Somatic-caused explosion occurred. "It'll only be a matter of time before Vestyge or Kattleyna will try and take advantage of this situation..."

She couldn't help but grit her teeth in anger. Between the Republic and the Empire, surely, this was the latter's fault. If she had her way, she would deploy her innovation right there and then and turn that backwater into a smoldering pile of glass. Unfortunately, it was far from ready. And with the enemy seeing what they had planned, there was a chance that they'd be able to create countermeasures for her innovation.

"Which means I have to create more redundancies..."

Shaking her head, the Head Intellect looked up at the pillar of light erupting from her pride and joy. There will come a reckoning for this slight. Of that, she was sure of it.

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