tetrahedral_connection

Being a Warlock, Quartz-6 found himself thinking, often involves creating tranquility amidst violence and disruption. It was one thing to casually reach out and tweak the nose of pre-Collapse conventional physics, doing so while taking fire from time-travelling organic robots and attempting to reload a heavy machine gun at speed was quite another.

Each flavor of the Light had its own feeling. Solar was a deep breath, a stoking of the bellows. Void Light was a draining sensation, filling with emptiness. Arc was the anticipatory silence between the lightning and the thunderclap. A Warlock knew all these as well as he knew his own heartbeat, or synthetic equivalent thereof. With training and experience, he had learned to call on any of them at microseconds’ notice. In moments such as this one.

Wind ripped at him, snapping the hem of his duster behind him as his channeled Light tried to slow his momentum. He sought the elastic balance at the center and found it, and the tempest around him quieted. Bright sparks of discharging Arc light flickered in a halo around him, mirroring the pain-data radiating out of the center of his back. The blow had caught him mid-consultation with his ghost, blindsiding both of them and sending him careening into the Vex-constructed shaft he had been peering down. Releasing a breath that was equal parts meditation and exasperation, a last pulse of Arc energy cancelled his descent completely. Quartz’s armored boots clicked quietly to the machinated floor of the Vex construct, and he turned his visored face upwards toward his assailants.

The other use of a Warlock’s tranquility, he mused as Vlora and Rook-4 gunned their sparrows into the gap to follow him, was not immediately murdering one’s fireteam when they did this every single time.

He didn’t need to see the faces beneath their helmets to know they were grinning back at him.