Shifting, seeing in the HUD that he had plenty of room for such a maneuver, Simon spun to his right, bringing the sword around in a glittering arc. Using all the power that the servo-motors and actuators in his armor gave him, Simon slashed the demon into halves.
The fourth Darkspawn threw itself at Simon’s chest and knocked him backward. Other demons fired Grapplers and cluster rifles.
“Warning,” the soft feminine voice inside his helmet said. “Incoming.”
A bright flare lit up his HUD as he fell. “Rocket!” he warned the others. If they made a reply, he lost it during the conflagration that followed.
Twenty-Four
T he rocket slammed into the wall to Simon’s left, barely missing two of the Templar entrenched there. The explosion knocked the Templar and the Darkspawn horde to the ground.
Simon heard nothing of the explosion. The armor’s automatic dampers cut in, muting all the outside noise. For a moment, his world was total silence, but he was buffeted around by the concussions.
Landing on his back, thrown back across the ground nearly twenty feet, Simon hurtled against an overturned tube car and came to a sudden stop. Slightly disoriented even with the armor’s defenses, he looked at his hands, making certain he still had his sword and the Spike Bolter.
When he looked up again, three more Darkspawn were headed for him. Flames clung to two of them. Simon’s hearing was already steadily returning as the onboard systems compensated for the auditory onslaught.
“Did anyone see where that rocket came from?” Derek demanded.
“No,” Simon answered. He gathered his feet and vaulted over the heads of the Darkspawn. Swiveling to his left, coming around in a tight arc, he pointed the Spike Bolter into a demon’s face and squeezed the trigger rapidly. Four spikes knocked the demon back in stuttering steps. It was dead before it hit the ground.
The second Darkspawn managed to lift a sword to block Simon’s blow. Shifting, Simon brought his right leg up and down in a heel strike that caved the demon’s head in. Another demon hammered Simon’s left wrist with a rifle butt, knocking the Spike Bolter free.
Giving ground, desperate because the Darkspawn were coming for him again, Simon gripped the sword hilt in both hands. He swung and parried, feeling the sword once more become a natural extension of himself.
As he fought, he thought of Leah, hiding somewhere in the shadows, defenseless and alone. She wasn’t the only one whose life would be like that. He remembered the people who had lost their lives on the coast. They had died only minutes from achieving freedom. He also thought about the people he’d seen hiding in the wreckage of the city, living as best as they were able and turning to preying on strangers.
Simon knew his father had trained all his life to prevent such things from happening. But it had happened anyway.
Breathing hard in spite of the augmentation of the armor, Simon finished the last of the Darkspawn confronting him just as another rocket ripped through the air. The female voice in his helmet warned him again.
This time, though, Simon tracked the rocket back to its source. “Mark target,” he told the onboard computer system.
“Target marked. Designation confirmed.”
Immediately, crimson crosshairs formed around the demon nearly a hundred yards farther down the tube tunnel.
Unfortunately, the Darkspawn wielding the rocket launcher had a better view this time. The rocket struck one of the Templar and left him lying in a pool of twisted and slagged metal.
Rushing forward, Simon scooped up his fallen Spike Bolter and sped for his quarry. A knot of Darkspawn blocked his forward progress. Only a few feet in front of them, Simon leaped into the air. Without the armor he could have performed such a maneuver, but with it, the move was even stronger.
Simon sailed a few feet over the heads of the Darkspawn, flipped, and landed on his feet hard enough to crack the cement floor underfoot. Even flipping through the air, the HUD had remained locked on the target and kept Simon oriented.
He ran, feeling the actuators and servos kick in, adding their own response to the sheer, naked strength that drove him. Adrenaline pounded through his system, and he knew better than to let it take over. But he didn’t have much choice.
All the years of practice he’d had in the armor hadn’t prepared him for how he felt while he was using the full prowess of the armor. Despite the practice he’d had, he couldn’t control his body.
He wondered if his father had suffered from the same reactions. Had Thomas Cross suffered from the enthusiastic anticipation that he now felt? Somehow Simon didn’t think so. His father was the most competent and complete man he’d ever known.
But he’s dead, isn’t he? The thought tore through Simon’s mind like a palladium spike or a Prayer of Conflagration. He felt his heart accelerate again. He wasn’t afraid to die. It was what he’d trained to do his whole life.
And yet…
“Accessing stim kit,” the armor’s onboard entity said. “Standby for anxiety alteration.”
“No,” Simon said, knowing that he just hadn’t acclimated to the suit and the situation. No one could have truly prepared for this. Anxiety, under the circumstances, was understandable. “Override programming.” He added the password.
By that time he was closing on the demon with the rocket launcher. The Darkspawn glared at Simon as it struggled to feed another rocket into the breech. A demon stood nearby, this one armed with a flexible curved horn hooked to a blob of reddish-purple moss on its back.
The horn started spewing liquid fire and smoke in Simon’s direction. In the next instant, intense fire covered him.
Even with the special armor, Simon knew he couldn’t last long. The NanoDyne tech hardwired into the armor as well as the spells weren’t inexhaustible. The defense systems dropped on the readout, spiraling downward now.
The HUD automatically switched from light-multiplier mode
