Pariah #1: New Arrival: Perils of Azure City by Void Read Free Book Online

semblance of order and Pariah didn't need to look to know they would be filled with all sorts of contraband. At the back end of the room was a set of stairs leading up to what she presumed would be the managerial offices.
    More pressingly there were men dotted about the room, still stunned by her flashdiscs. The majority of them - if not the whole lot of them - seemed to have been busy dealing with the crates before her arrival. Many had stripped to their waists, revealing lean, tattooed torsos. Mercifully, only few of them seemed to be armed. In the centre of the room a tall and handsome black man seemed to be ordering them about, trying to rally the surprised thugs. His voice seemed to be that of the guy who had called through.
    She assessed the situation even as she hurled herself towards the nearest of the armed men. Those with guns would need to be the first to go, then she'd go for the leader.
    'Tyrone! We need to get the boss!' yelled one of the thugs, furiously trying to rub some sight back into his eyes.
    'Fuck the boss,' called the leader - Tyrone, it seemed, 'Get her! Will someone turn on the God damned aria, already!'
    Pariah took the first man down in short order and lifted the nearest crate to her with her telekinesis before flinging it in the direction of the next armed man. She judged the shot just right and the man was out of the fight before he was ever really in it.
    The men that weren't armed grabbed whatever tools they could find and tried to close down with the flowing heroine, running at her from all directions.
    Pariah unclasped her cloak and enveloped it in her power, bunching the material up into a long taper and flying it around her. It glowed with her power, coiling and moving as if it had come to life. She had practised this technique many times before and it made her cloak her most trusted weapon.
    She sent the cloth out at the first man to reach her, wrapping it around his arm and pulling him off balance towards her. As he fell, she span a kick in to his face and was already sending the glowing taper out to the next goon, ensnaring his feet and pulling him over.
    It was like a well-practised dance. Pariah used her telekinesis to wield her cloak as a weapon, while also making it like a living partner to fight alongside her, and it was poetry in motion as she whirled about the overmatched thugs.
    As Tyrone watched the heroine pummel his guys, he felt his fear rising. It had all happened so quickly. One moment he was ordering the next shipment of Rapture to be unpacked, then the next thing he knew there was an explosion of activity as some kind of force of nature tore through his people.
    It was shock and awe.
    He could see they had no hope of winning in a straight fight, so he ran away from the conflict and towards a workbench near the stairs, 'I'm going to turn on the aria, keep her busy!'
    Pariah watched the man run but couldn't break through the press of attackers. She would need to deal with them first. As she punched out the lights of a man to the right of her, her cloak struck a man to the left of her as if it were a striking cobra. As both men fell to the ground she noticed the last of the armed men drawing a bead on her. The cloak rapidly uncoiled from its tapered state and instead spread out as a blanket in front of her.
    The main reason that Pariah made such use of the cloak was its nano-bonded properties. Though the weave was extremely thin, the bonding in the cloak could not be separated. That meant that when she combined the cloak with a wave of force to hold it in place, she effectively had a protective shroud from bullets or blades.
    She heard the shots and saw the telling indents in the taut fabric where the bullets were impacting, but her make-shift wall held firm. When the man stopped firing, she fired the blanket out at him, wrapping itself around his arms and pinning them to his sides. Knocked by the collision and unable to arrest his fall, the man fell back and knocked his head