Chapter 385 - Far Future Ch. 95 – Brain Food (1/2)

As a psion attached to an Umbran Striker Team was hurriedly arranged to rendezvous with Kaylee Rantha, one of her sisters across town was standing in a parade line.

Jensa Rantha had reached Six and Charisma 30, and popped open her Reincarnation to find out whose soul she had inherited basically as soon as she could. Her Talent had been Eagle-Eyed, which was +4 to Perception checks related to sight, doubling to +8 at Ten. It was a mighty Talent for an adventurer just about all ways you looked at it, and Ranthas being adventurous combat-heavy sorts with all kinds of visual prowess, they all expressed great envy of her.

She'd found she had been a twitchy, paranoid addict whose Talent only made him sensitive to the shadows and suffering of those around him. He noticed everything, and it was all bad, and he just wanted to shut out the world, play games, and ignore the reality he was in.

His incredible Talent just made him notice more of the subliminal shit in the games designed to manipulate those playing...

He died when the fucking wilders had come down and made his nightmares a screaming reality he couldn't escape from.

She had taken out her rage on some duracrete walls for a couple of days, and then went straight off and joined the Juris, crashing through the Academy in record time and promptly starting a zealous crusade against all sorts of the shit plaguing this damn town.

Because she could see it all.

Her first day on the job, she shot three dops walking by her, so confident they were invisible. By the end of her first week, she had shot ten of them. The Dop Squad went ape-nuts over her ability to see them, and recruited her simply to locate them so they could be tracked down secretly, their connections shown, and then those connections further tracked.

She shot a dop acting as one of the Politae support staff who helped run the Juris systems, someone who had compromised many Juris operations in the past, and her reputation was made. Stone-cold fearless, a VERY intimidating gaze, and combat skills that terrified all her instructors meant she was very, very wanted for special duties, and when she wasn't on them, she was out in disguise, somewhere, moving through the mass of humanity, hunting down all the terrors and evils that had terrified her in her last life... and quite legally as a Juris, putting them to rest.

This time, she had been called off important duty for some other important duty. A trade convention was being held, bringing in officials from half the mega-cities on Janus III, and they wanted her looking over the delegates.

Duke Parablum wanted her looking for more than that.

So, she was drawn up in the honor guard assigned to meet the envoys from Pitchral, a mega-city on the far side of the Warp Zone plateau. She watched as their shuttle touched down with professional skill, the ramp extended in the back, and the delegates strolled down in their fine robes and expensive chrome and escort bodyguards, enjoying the pomp and ceremony as the live band struck up their city's anthem.

With typical Rantha overenthusiasm, she had looked at everything. Ranthas had more color cones then humans, and their vision extended up and down below visible light, as well as into parallel spectrums. It was a lot of information to judge and process, and Jensa had made it her everything to be able to read and understand all that she could.

In particular, she had met and seen all kinds of humans and genotypes thereof, all the inherited bloodlines, and multiple kinds of environmental adjustments and their effects on people. She could read body language and muscle movement like an open book, and her Spot the Opening was so keen she could identify the weaknesses and openings in a fighting style in almost an instant, making her one of the very best fencers among the sword-crazed Ranthas.

One of the creeps coming off this shuttle was dead, two of them were neo-dead, and the rest had a sheen to them that said they weren't human anymore.

Only a spectrometer coded to look for the peculiarities would have seen them.

-Terminate all of them!- she /relayed to Umbran Agent Calgren, disguised as a flunkie in civilian garb off to the side.

He blinked, looked over in his head, out her eyes, and then looked up into the sky, tapped his ear, and said a couple short words.

The 'Terminate' message came up in all the Juris helms, the entire delegation was painted red, and the self-defense cannons on the top of the building behind snapped around and glowed.

The bodyguards and envoys didn't have any time to react. Remarkably used to making snap judgements (and obeying difficult orders), the Juris snapped down their firearms and simply opened up on the lot of them.

Jensa blew out the heads of the two neo-dead, and their skulls exploded, the greenish psychoactive fluid within in place of their brains spraying everywhere. Her soulsword snapped up in diamond silver, and drove straight through the skull of the vice trade delegation minister, flaring with a Sun Strike, and then she rammed her head into the hilt to set off another one, just for good measure.

The man's head exploded from inside, and an alien telepathic cry faintly skittered on the edges of everyone's brains, matched by the sudden and explosive detonation of the shuttle and crew aboard it behind them by four banks of plasma bursts unloaded into it.

Impaled on her soulsword, the fungoid, swollen brain-form of the cerevore, three short clawed limbs lengthening and shrinking spasmodically as it was lifted in the air, was visible to everyone. It naturally didn't fit into the skull of the dead man it had been riding in its natural form, and a soulsword through the nexal was a good way to disrupt that kind of thing.

She held it over her head, and the nearest six Juris promptly unloaded on it, blowing the stony, fungoid body to bits and pieces in a flurry of bright light and sound.

One second later, the alarm was going out to the Umbran and Coronal detachments in Pitchral, as well as the soldiers recruited from there, and the Janus Prime trainers active there. They didn't know how long they had before the shit hit the fan, but it wasn't going to be long...