Reincarnated Into Destiny Universe - Volume 1 Chapter 2 City Bound Updated

Isaac watched as the ghost turned around and investigated the source of the disturbance. ‘Holy Light Loaded Luck, is this for real? Am I really in the Destiny Universe as the main character? Man, this is gonna be so much fun! Absurdly dangerous and possibly immensely difficult? Almost certainly, but still wicked fun!’

Isaac tried feeling for the Light, within his body, but wasn’t able to detect any thing that might fit the bill. ‘Oh well, I did just get here so perhaps my expectations were a little high.’ Isaac looked over to his right and saw a massive building spanning for several miles in each direction clearly functioning as a wall, albeit a severely worn down one. He got to his feet and immediately began running towards an open door at the wall building’s base, just as his ghost turned around to instruct him further.

“…hey, wait, I mean yeah keep going. Although, you could give me a signal or something before you just run off.” His ghost complained.

Isaac reached the open door and rushed through, up the stairs, and onto a platform running atop some piping. He paused for a moment before continuing, to let the ghost catch up.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got the right idea but you should know that this is fallen territory and really not safe. We should be very careful, until we can get the the City. Come on, I’ll show you the way out. First, hold still, a moment.”

The ghost scattered into light particles and disappeared. “Don’t worry, I’m still here. Now let’s get going.”

“We’re gettin gone, Mr. Ghost Guy.”

Isaac followed his ghost’s directions, until he came upon a platform with a closed storefront type shutter door blocking their path. By this point, the light had gradually diminished and was now gone entirely. His ghost rematerialized providing the only light in the room.

“Stay put, for a second. I’ll try and get us some light.” The ghost flew up towards the ceiling and approached some machinery that was installed there.

“Another one of these hardened military systems…and a few centuries of entropy working against me.” The ghost entered the machinery and darkness returned, once again.

After a few short seconds of darkness and the sounds of Fallen skittering about, the humming of long dormant machinery coming to life, preceded a series of ceiling lights dispersing the darkness one after another.

“They’re coming for us! Let’s move!” The ghost came flying back out of the machinery and towards Isaac’s location, while a handful of Fallen Shanks chased after him.

Isaac couldn’t help but feel a bit giddy at the prospect of finally being able to engage the Fallen, even if he couldn’t access any abilities at the moment. His heart rate rose ever so slightly, as he turned around and saw the shutter door rising. He sprinted towards the opening door and slid underneath, after which the door began to close.

“Over here, I found a rifle! Grab it and let’s go!” The ghost returned to Isaac and dematerialized once again.

“Aye, aye, Captain Ghost!”

Isaac, after grabbing the rifle, approached the connecting hallway and turned left and turned left, once again, at the end of that corridor. “Ummm, Ghost, let’s say I were to come across another weapon and wanted to use it, without giving up this one, is there a way for me to carry extra weapons?”

“Ah, yes of course, Guardian. The armor you’re wearing, like all Guardian armor, can detect most types of weapons and can cause them to stick to wherever you place them. This is made possible by manipulating the Van der Waals Force.” The ghost explained.

“Ahh, I see. Thanks, Space Ghost.” After slapping the rifle across his back to verify the ghost’s claims, Isaac looked down the hallway, with his rifle to his shoulder, and proceeded onwards. He noticed a light shining down in the center of the hallway that seemed to be coming from an opening in the ceiling. Approaching carefully, he placed one foot down purposely and then another, waiting for a reaction after each one.

After the second step, two Fallen dropped down through the opening. Having anticipated this, Isaac began firing into the Vandal on the right, before it could even hit the ground. Controlling his weapon, he carefully moved his line of fire up to the Vandal’s head and witnessed the Ether rising from its broken armor, signaling its death. The Dreg on the right, after seeing this, immediately rushed forward and slashed at Isaac’s abdomen. Isaac attempted to leap backwards to avoid the blow but still ended up with his armor slashed open. Not giving the Dreg a chance to continue his attack, he adjusted his grip on his rifle and smashed the butt into the Dreg’s face. He then resumed emptying the rest of his clip into it, until it fell down beside its comrade.

Isaac grabbed up all of the weapons, placing the Vandal’s Shock Blades on the sides of his lower legs and the Shock Rifle across his back. He then placed the Dreg’s Shock Pistol on his right hip and the Shock Dagger on his left hip. Feeling much more confident about his battle readiness he began, once again, moving forward.

After taking a couple more right turns, he face stabbed another Slick Willie wannabe, who had dropped from the ceiling. At the end of that corridor, a left turn revealed a room with a broken wall. On the other side of the wall, was a much more open area with various machinery enclosures, with an attached walkway leading off to the left.

Just as Isaac reached the broken wall, a handful of those damnable ceiling monkeys dropped down and immediately opened fire on him. Isaac took cover behind what was left of the wall. He made the most of his newfound partner. The ghost hovered overhead keeping track of and reporting enemy locations to him. This allowed him to come out of cover, at the most convenient time, already aware of where to aim.

Less than three minutes later, Isaac had cleared the machinery platform of attackers. He headed down the left side walkway, which crossed an extremely deep chasm with a very high ceiling. Walking across this walkway, in real life, made the enormity of the wall unavoidably apparent and managed to give him butterflies for a couple of seconds.

“There are more up ahead! Let’s keep moving forward!” The ghost directs Isaac.

“Will do, Scooby Doo.” At this point, Isaac had all but given up on names that might make sense and was now just being silly.

On the other side of the walkway, Isaac takes a left into a hallway twice as wide as the others, with square pillars running down the middle. “Guardian, watch out! Trip mines!” The ghost warns him. Trip mine lasers crisscrossed the hallway, on the right side between the wall and the pillars.

Isaac stood back a safe distance and shot out the trip mines to clear the way. Moving forward to the next pillar, he took out a Vandal and a Dreg, before encountering even more trip mines. This time he went around the pillar and was fired upon by a Dreg coming from behind the last pillar in the hallway. The Dreg attempted to take cover again but Isaac pulled out his Shock Blade, rushed past the pillar, and stabbed the Dreg in the neck. Another Dreg, surprised by his sudden attack, stalled for a second too long. While the Dreg was attempting to retreat, Isaac ran after him, hip fired a couple of shots into his back to stagger him, and then ran his blade through and out of his chest.

Moving on to the next room, Isaac and Ghost cleared out the next batch of ceiling monkeys, before heading through a doorway to the right leading into some kind of tunnel with caged fans positioned at certain junctions. As they stepped through the exit into the open air, several abandoned facility buildings could be seen with twenty foot shipping containers lying sporadically around them. A massive support tower holding several spacecraft and couple of towers in the background, with three spheres each seemingly skewered on a central pole, were also visible.

“This was an old Cosmodrome. There’s got to be something that we can fly out of here.” Ghost informs Isaac.

Isaac proceeded forward, until suddenly a bright red light shot up into the sky. As it slowly drew an arch across the sky, some type of energy fluctuations could be seen in the sky and soon a Fallen Ship emerged from that fluctuating energy. Once the ship was through, the energy dispersed and the ship moved over the unoccupied land between the buildings and dropped off a dozen Fallen.

“What are Fallen sh.i.p.s doing this close to the surface? No time to waste, let’s move.”

“I’m gettin ‘er done, son.”

Isaac and Ghost, still using the same strategy, pushed their way forward, until all of the newly arrived Fallen had been defeated. Upon reaching the other side of the Cosmodrome, they set their sights on another building to the left. As soon as they had cleared the group of Fallen coming out of the building, Isaac felt a strange but pleasant sensation spreading throughout his entire body. Every cell in his body seemed to be reinvigorated.

“Ummm, Ghost, what was that just now? It felt like my entire body was being flooded with some foreign energy.”

“Oh, right. Well, there’s not much time but the short version is that as a Guardian you are able to manipulate the Light and as your ghost I’m able to draw light from foes that you defeat. That Light energy gathers inside your body and at a certain threshold upgrades your physiology to be more capable of manipulating that Light energy. We’re almost there, however, so let’s get out of here first and I’ll explain the rest later. I’m picking up signs of an old jump ship. That could be our ticket out of here.” Ghost explained.

Isaac and Ghost moved through the building, while clearing out Fallen along the way. They eventually reach a wide open roofless room, with a jump ship suspended in the air by various cables. A Fallen Captain and his crew are sitting on and around the ship.”That’s the ship. Clear them out!”

Isaac begins firing on the Dregs, after taking cover. Two Dregs go down, shortly afterwards. While switching cover, Isaac takes down a Shank, with his Shock Dagger, and targets a Vandal, with one of the three Shock Grenades he picked up on his way here. He opens fire on the now stunned Vandal.

Once the Vandal is down, he empties the rest of his clip into a Dreg that was also caught in his Shock Grenade explosion. The Captain, at this point, gave up on firing at Isaac’s covered position and began pushing forward. Isaac, using the information provided to him by his ghost, ran out of cover hip firing at the nearest Dreg.

Having taken a few hits during his reckless rush, he finally understood what taking damage in this world felt like and even those few hits were pretty damn painful. The Dreg he was firing at went down, as he passed the broken machinery his victim had been standing beside, he turned to the right, grabbed his Shock Blade, and brought it downwards into his next victim’s neck. Isacc could see the Captain closing in and shrank down behind the machinery for cover. He took aim at another Shank that was trying to creep up on him,  shot it down, and waited for his ghost to give the signal.

Once the Captain was close enough, he planted a Shock Grenade exactly where he had been hiding and crept around the corner while still crouching. The Captain came around the corner at the same time that the Shock Grenade exploded. Isaac popped out of cover firing his Shock Rifle at the Captain. The Captain, being disoriented by the sudden assault, could only watch, as Isaac brought his Shock Dagger across his neck, before falling to the ground. As Isaac was turning around, he witnessed, from the corner of his eye, a hand sized white dodecahedron fall to the ground before disappearing.

Seeing Isaac focused on the Captain, a final Dreg attempted to press the advantage. But the fight was too short and Isaac pulled out both of his Shock Blades and blocked the Dreg’s slash with one, while skewering the Dreg’s midsection with the other. In the same moment, he knocked the Dreg’s attacking arm aside and sliced his neck open, sending a final spurt of Ether into the air.

“Good work, Guardian! Now let me see if I can get us out of here.”

The ghost disappeared into the ship, attempting to get it running. Isaac picked up the Captain’s Shrapnel Launcher, placed it on his back, and turned around to watch the room’s entrance. After a few seconds, another crew of Fallen were approaching the doorway. This squad was being led by an Archon.

“Ghost!?”

“Almost got it!”

Isaac took out his last Shock Grenade and threw it into the doorway, while immediately drawing both his Shock Rifle and Pistol and opened fire on the squad reaching the doorway. The Fallen were forced to stop for only a brief second but by the time the first Fallen set foot across the threshold Isaac was being transmated into ship.

Being transmated was an incredibly strange sensation, for Isaac. It felt at once like he was the same complete and whole body he had always been, while simultaneously feeling like being painlessly scattered into a billion pieces.

Isaac found himself in the pilot’s seat of the ship he was just standing under. He watched as the ship slowly broke free of its restraints and turned its nose towards the busted hole where the roof would normally be. The ship flew out of the building and towards the City.

“This ship is pretty old so it’ll take us nearly an hour to get back to the City. So do you have any questions I can answer…actually hold on a minute, why is it every time you address me you keep using different made up names. You really are strange, not at all like the stories I’ve heard from other ghosts about when they first awakened their Guardians.”

“Eh? Who are you calling strange? You’re floating, talking, dematerializing ball of scrap metal whose apparently super picky about what name he’s called.”

“Why you…scrap metal…I…*takes a deep breath despite not having any lungs*…Okay, look I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. Let me explain your current circ.u.mstance. The Earth, a long time ago…”

“Actually, let me stop you right there. I don’t think this is the best use of our time, how about you let me ask the questions I’m most curious about and I can find out the rest later?”

“…Umm, okay, fine we’ll do it your way.”

“Nice! Now let me see what is this Light energy you were talking about earlier?”

“Well, first of all I don’t really know anything more than what your average person would know despite being made directly out of the Traveler’s light. The light is a source of energy that allows people and even machines to accomplish feats that would normally not be allowed by the laws of physics. Guardians are people either alive or dead who have the ability to wield the light like an extension of their own bodies. A ghost, being made entirely out of Light, not scrap metal, is capable of bringing those with this ability back to life and guiding them on their journey to help fight the darkness. The darkness is the mortal enemy of the light and has many servants that threaten any form of life that they encounter.”

“Ahhh, I see. Well,  that wasn’t as helpful as I thought it would be. But anyways next question. Explain all the ways that Guardians interact with the light and the various ends to which they employ it.”

“Well, as you’ve already experienced, a Guardian doesn’t start off with any inherent abilities. Ghosts merely awaken those with the potential to wield the Light. Once a Guardian is awakened, they must defeat many enemies in order to extract light from them. The acc.u.mulated Light is stored in the Guardian’s body, until a certain threshold hold is met. Once that threshold is met it infuses itself into the Guardian’s body thereby increasing the ease with which he or she can wield the Light. The first time this happens it’s more like an initiation and grants you the ability to wield the Light. The first time also allows me as your ghost to offer you subsequent resurrections. Anytime you fall in battle, I can always bring you back so long as you have the light within you.”

“Wait, so does that mean that if I were to use up all of my light, with attacks, you wouldn’t be able to revive me?”

“Ummm, not exactly, it’s different from the light you use for attacks. The light, that increases your affinity for wielding it, uses you like a vessel and eventually reinforces that vessel becoming a permanent part of your body. The light that you would use in attacks charges you like a battery and can be consumed to create the abilities you want.

“The normal distribution of absorbed light is 50/50 and can be altered at your discretion but, once you equip a proper set of Guardian armor, you’ll be able to divert some of that light towards your armor’s ability assistance mechanisms that store and alter light into certain abilities.”

“Hmmm, then what about this notion of enemies having light? If the enemy has Light, why are they enemies? If I kill a servant of the darkness will I get light from them?”

“Very good question, Guardian. You see the Traveler’s light permeates everything within the Sol system. Every planet, asteroid, and speck of dust has some portion of the Traveler’s Light. If you were to travel to the outer edges of the system you would find yourself dangerously close to the darkness. It’s the Traveler’s light that keeps the darkness at bay but, given the current state of the Traveler, who really knows for how much longer. The further you go away from the Traveler, obviously, the less potent the effects but it’s still there to some degree even right there on the edge. So if you were to fight enemies outside the system or in some specially sealed off location, there would be no Light for you to absorb. Life tends to attract more Light than inanimate objects and so killing any kind of life form, even one created or cursed by the darkness, will grant you more Light than trying to squeeze out the infinitesimal amounts of light from within objects.”

“Very interesting. That certainly makes sense of things. By the way, do you mind if I give you a name or do you already have one?”

“No, I don’t currently have a name. Feel free to give me one, if you wish. I am your ghost after all.”

“Alright, how about Polter?”

“Hmmm, Polter? Well, it’s not the most glorious name but I suppose it’ll work. Very well, from this day forward, I’ll be known as Polter.”

‘What the…this mouthy little cunt!’_”Alright, Polter it is then. Tell me, Polter, how do I manipulate this Light into abilities and learn new ones?”

“Seeing as I’m not a Guardian I couldn’t tell you exactly how but, from what I’ve heard, it seems to be a simple application of will at first and, once you’ve become more proficient, imagination. If you try to use something simple, like a melee attack, it should work without too much effort.”

“Nice! I’ll have to give that a try when we arrive. I noticed, after I defeated the Captain, that a white dodecahedron fell on the ground and disappeared. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that would you?”

“Ahh, yes, the engram. You see engrams are a state of matter in which all of the information contained within an object is crystallized into various complex data matrices. Essentially, it’s an object that has been transformed into pure data. Depending on how complex or sophisticated the object is, the engram will appear in different colors. The white engram that fell is from a very simplistic object, the Captain’s helmet, and as such the complexity of its matrices is very low resulting in a white colored engram.

“As your ghost, I’m able to instantly transmat engrams back to your ship. This can be done within ten meters of you when dematerialized or I can scour a recently cleared battlefield for you and pick up anything I find along the way.”

“I see. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I’ll just add that there isn’t much need for you to explain things like the history of the Guardians and the City, unless I ask you. I won’t go into the reason why, at the moment, but just know that it’s not necessary.”

‘What the…this mouthy little cunt!’_”Umm, okay. So there’s nothing else you’re curious about, at the moment?”

“Not until we get to the Tow…City. Uhh, yeah perhaps upon our arrival I’ll see some new things that need explaining but I’m good for now thanks.”

‘What the…this freaking guy!’_”Alright, have it your way.”