Presently, I’ve come to sight see in the Lumomo Fourth colony, gravity suddenly stopped working, and all the lights went out. And I’m separated from Kori and Saratha.
I’m checking my surroundings, but I don’t have any light other than my information device.
Wah… The sounds of what I think are delivery trucks crashing is echoing multiple times, and metal parts and what looks like oil is spread around. At least they’re electric.
Two ton trucks that are uncontrollable at this point run like a pre-schooler playing a racing game, mowing down trees and people before going up.
The silence around me turns to crying, screaming, yelling, cursing, and the sounds of gunpowder guns and explosions. It reeks of iron.
But I’m still okay.
The kid bumping into me deployed the shield over my clothes. This normally deflects stuff like lasers, so it blocks things flying around like empty cans and smartphones.
My artificial Ether Tactical eyes tell me my shield belt’s puny is down fifteen percent. It’s annoying that I can’t recharge it.
I’m now as high as the fourth floor. It’s scary, people down there look like specks. If I fall, I don’t think the shield is going to save me from death.
I try to swim in the air like in a cartoon, but my body just turns and doesn’t move forward. At least let me give it a shot.
Is everyone okay? Kori can stick to walls and move like that, but it’d be hard to drag Saratha with her, so I assume they won’t be able to move in the store.
What about Tortilla Double? If it doesn’t crash into the colony’s walls, the girls inside should be fine.
No, I’m in no condition to worry about others. I need to hang on to something in this zero gravity.
I’ve been in this dark weightless space, but the power could return at any moment. And then I’d fall and die.
I only have my laser pistol. If it was a gunpowder gun, I could shoot and move with the recoil, but not with lasers.
“Waaah! Waah waaaah!”
I look diagonally down with the night vision mode of my artificial eyes, and see a middle-aged man in a suit coming this way. There’s my chance!
“Hey! Don’t flap your arms! Reach out and don’t move!”
“Aaa! Aaa!!”
He’s panicking and flapping his limbs while yelling nonsense, making him turn. Luck is smiling at me in this way, so I have to grab it.
I wait for him to come this way. I want to grab his back if I can. If he grabs me, the situation will get worse, even if I don’t drown.
When it’s time to grab him, it’s his legs that are closer. I’m glad it isn’t the hair.
I reach out silently and just barely manage to grab his ankle between his slacks and shoes.
“Stop!”
“W-who are you!? Help!”
I’m diagonally above him, and he’s moving up faster than me. I want to pull his leg so we spin, and be careful to slow down as much as possible before I throw him diagonally down at a shallow angle.
Now he’s falling somewhat fast, and I’m going not so much up but more sideways.
“Take care! Protect your head and neck! Adjust yourself towards the ground!”
“What do you mean!? Uwaaah!!”
This is a lot better. There’s a good chance I might bump into something if I’m moving sideways.
I could’ve sacrificed him to fly towards a building, but what would happen to him if he crashed into a building at high speed without a shield? Survive by falling down, old man.
Nevermind him, I need to grab something fast. The safest option would be to return to Tortilla Double, but who knows when I’ll get there.
I see something troubling out of the corner of my eye.
I take out the laser pistol and hold it up, as I spin and look at a giant prickly thing.
Is that an urchin? Space urchin? It’s stuck to a building on the… I don’t want to think about what floor it is. I guess I never checked how big they are. It’s bigger than a window on the outer wall. Two meters?
I can only fly sideways along the path, so the urchin was out of view.
Wait, is it okay for a space monster to be in the colony? It can’t be. Why is it here?
I hear a creaking sound, turn that way, and look at the sky projected on the colony. Did a truck hit it? There’s a bunch of stuff up there, but the problem is that there’s a big tear on the projection monitor.
I can see stars. I wish that was projected too.
But it’s not, and I can see spaceships and power armors through the electric telescope on my artificial eyes and long distance sight magic. There’s a bulkhead on the tear and cables of some sort.
The colony’s wall has been breached.
But I can tell with the magic energy sight in my artificial eyes that there’s some sort of magic barrier on the tear. The atmosphere is being held by that barrier, so it’s not being sucked into space yet.
But I can see power armors with firearms and close range weapons, swinging them against the colony’s outer wall.
At first it looks like they’re trying to destroy it, but apparently that’s not it, they’re destroying space urchin. They’re passing through the barrier and entering the colony.
They keep coming in, using bulkheads and cables as paths like fever time at a pachinko machine. Rushing and falling towards the colony.
Isn’t that really bad?
I connect my smartphone and artificial eyes through wireless, and pull up the information about them I downloaded via the server on Tortilla Double… Space urchin mainly eat stuff like space moss, and also feed on electricity and magic elements.
They’re not dangerous in and of themselves, but they can sneak into a colony and destroy core installations like a nuclear fusion reactor or a magic energy reactor, so they’re seen as pretty harmful beasts.
The Lumomo Fourth colony really blundered here, didn’t it? The urchins that came from the colony’s bulkheads were growing there, right? This has to be an illegal structure full of violations.
Come to think of it, can I contact Tortilla Double? I can’t. The small information device is sending a signal, but it’s being blocked by the thick bulkheads between the dock and the colony’s residential area.
I want a stronger transceiver…
Armors and ships have that feature, but the small information device that’s like a smartphone only has the features of a regular smartphone. I should look into a replacement.
I keep spinning while thinking about nonsense.
I’m moving towards the center of the business district. Luckily, I’ve been hitting small garbage, but nothing big.
Unluckily, I haven’t been able to reach anything that could change my direction, and I keep hearing screams of people going up, and seeing quite a few corpses
There’s nothing I can do, they’re out of my reach. In fact, if I could reach them, I would to change my direction.
The smartphone still says it’s out of range, and I’m completely cut off from information. I want to sigh, but considering the situation, that’s understandable if nothing else.
A falling urchin is opening its mouth in a creepy way as it comes this way. At least they can’t move as they’d want either under zero G.
I hold the laser as I practiced, and fire. There’s no recoil, and it pierces it in the mouth, making it stop.
I want to kick it as it falls to head towards a building, but it’s prickly…
So urchin eat people. The information I saw didn’t mention they eat meat.
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