Chương 43: 38: Light the Beacon

Emergency Recharge +1, Enhanced Electrical Engineer +1, Enhanced Armorer +1 Jerry ignored the skill-up notification, wiped the sweat off his eyes with a sleeve as grimy as it was drenched and tried to concentrate. This had been his fifth use of Emergency Recharge in a row and the wave of energy flooding his body was no longer sufficient to stave off exhaustion.

Worse still, the burning, bone-deep ache and emptiness that got stronger with every use made his arms shake, his every breath hitch, his thoughts churning on slower and slower. It was one thing to academically know the skill cost a lasting reduction to his maximum mana and stamina, quite another to feel himself carved out piece by piece until only a hollow shell was left. He clenched his fists and focused on the work; none of them had the luxury of taking a rest - not that it would help in his case.

He created some more copper instead and fabricated it along with broken pieces of wood from a wrecked house into more of the tower's exterior shell. The thick, gleaming red-brown cylinder was edging upwards inch by inch, already twice as tall as Jerry's power armor had been. It was his largest work to date, three and a half times his maximum mana capacity put into it. More than ten times what his armor had cost, even though he'd recycled said armor to cut down on the fabrication cost of the required electronics.

And if his calculations of the battlefield's geometry were right... BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Yep, right on schedule. Magical lightning struck his tower the moment it rose high enough to clear the surrounding buildings - mostly an old theater that had yet to fully collapse, in whose (metaphorical) shadow Jerry had chosen to start his project. Several gigajoules worth of electricity formed blindingly bright arcs powerful enough to vaporize a quarter-ton of steel combined, or to completely slag a main battle tank.

The enemy wanted to destroy Jerry's work before it was completed. The brunet Arcane Engineer smirked as he barely felt any temperature difference in the plating under his palm. The enemy was not going to get their way; not this time. He did not need to look up to see there were only some minor scorch marks where the titanic bolts had struck, he had no use of his half-blinded eyes or aching ears to finish the project.

The design was firm in his mind, the work was done by his magic, so he closed his eyes and shaped the next layer of material. More copperglass-diamondoid laminate formed, curving inwards and splitting before forming moorings and a ring with pure diamondoid ball bearings as the basis on the turret. The outer highly conductive layer having to be finished before the steelglass scaffolding and internal components slightly complicated the turret's design but it was necessary for obvious reasons. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Another few gigajoules worth of electricity struck, absorbed by the outer layers of the tower like water poured on dry sand. Copper was already a very conductive metal, the third most conductive natural material on Earth. The glass-like copper alloy Jerry was using was almost as good a conductor of electricity, but an even better conductor of heat... and was thicker than any power cable ever built. Trying to damage it with electricity was extremely hard.

Normally, such enormous amounts of current would have concentrated on the plating surface and caused some damage anyway, which is where the diamondoid filaments came in. Those had much higher conductivity than the copper, providing millions of tiny pathways for the current to follow through the bulk of the plating. They essentially served to absorb the electricity and spread it throughout the tower. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Whatever heat was created by the passage of enormous amounts of electricity formed far more evenly in the network of filaments across the tower's mass, then was transferred to the extremely heat-conductive glass-like copper alloy. Vaporizing a ton of steel was one thing. Trying to do the same to three hundred tons of armor specifically designed to minimize electrical damage and ground the vast majority of the lightning strike harmlessly? Jerry cackled and wished the bad guys good luck. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Because all those features of the armor? Those were before the enhancements from Jerry's skills. And unlike mundane material properties that the bad guys could ignore whenever they felt like it - because magic - those were backed by magic too. Ignoring the continuing barrage had already become easier since Jerry's eardrums had burst, so he continued with the deeper parts of the design, intent to teach the invaders why all your defensive emplacements shouldn't rely on a single design, no matter how effective. BOOM!

BOOM! BOOM! Diamondoid coils thicker than Jerry's thumb shifted and wrapped around a vacuum tube twelve feet long. Electromagnets powerful enough to crush a tank like a beercan were set in a frame of tungsten-scandium-aluminum alloy that could barely hold them in place. The brunet could not afford to work with any significant safety margins and the device was not meant to work for more than a few minutes but even so every bit of the physical reinforcement provided by his skills would be needed for this. BOOM! BOOM!

BOOM! The principles of his energy weapon were fairly simple. An electron beam would be produced, electrons accelerated to 0. 99999998 the speed of light. The beam would then pass through immensely powerful electromagnets set every quarter inch, forcing the beam to take a sinusoidal path. This undulation of highly-relativistic electrons would produce photons with each "vibration", photons only infinitesimally faster than the beam.

This in turn would cause a self-amplified spontaneous emission of coherent radiation going in the same direction as the electron beam. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Finishing the turret, repairing the minor damage from the constant lightning bolts and checking his calculations several times over followed by adjustments to the design took three more uses of Emergency Recharge, burning down Jerry's maximum stamina and mana to only a fifth of what it normally was.

By the end he felt chewed out, spit into a pan and fried, then cast into the fire but he'd done it! He'd finished the whole thing with magic and time to spare... so why not add something more? Wasting no time to consider the potential life-threatening ramifications, the artificer and nerd reached for some of the rarer substances in the soil and bedrock his powers had tapped for materials.

Only thirty grams per ton might not seem like much but a ten-yard cube of hard-packed earth was nearly three thousand tons so he had enough. And this last addition might not be a robotic or armored anything but it technically was both an electrical system and an energy weapon. As every nerd who'd ever played tabletop games knew, being technically correct was the best kind of correct. xxxx xxxx At first I thought Jerry had been building a super-powered lightning rod.

Drawing the fire of all of the enemy's lightning towers, for however long his creation lasted, would be great. I could carry both him and Mandy away faster than anything else could intercept us. That impression lasted until the barrel of the turret started taking shape. Curiously, whatever he was building it was going to be slightly more destructive than just a lightning bolt, but I had no idea how it would work.

Unlike the lasers in his armor for which I had easy reference points in dozens of common appliances, peeking through the exterior layers with Force Awareness gave me zero insights. I did recognize individual components such as the electromagnets, but nothing about how they were put together made sense. Why was most of the device just a repeatedly looping cell phone charger? Where did its power supply come from? Why were that many electromagnets stuck to a giant vacuum tube?

Whatever the principles that thing worked on, they were either things we'd never been taught in high school or so altered by Jerry's own magic as to be unrecognizable. But whatever its purpose might be, Jerry believed his weapon would make a difference. He wouldn't sacrifice so much to build it otherwise; I could tell he was screwing himself up in order to keep going, a tactic I was both very familiar with and hated with the fury of an exploding sun. It was something I'd seen Cheerleaders and other athletes do.

Something many did in their search for glory or because others tricked or coerced them into it. A real blast from a past I wanted to forget. Jerry was putting himself through it to save others and to defend the world against monstrous invaders instead. In that moment, in my eyes, he was a hero. And that meant I could do no less, because if I did? All his sacrifices would be for naught. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The enemy had not let up when the lightning towers had proven ineffective. Imagine an entire stadium full of enraged football fans charging at a referee that had just tanked their team's chances of winning the championship in an obviously, painfully wrong call he refused to retract... except the raging throng is made of monsters hungry for human flesh.

A rudimentary count through superhuman awareness told me there had to be twenty-five thousand monsters slowly pushing their way through the ruins, destroyed cars, craters and raging fires to get at us, with more of them arriving from the city's center every minute. With the army in retreat, every monster the enemy had or could make on short notice would be attacking resistance pockets now and of all the human teams I knew of, Mandy, Jerry and me had the most direct firepower.

Worse still, we tended to act in the open and be obvious about it; it was only natural the bad guys would want us gone. The only reason we were still alive was that the monsters couldn't fit through the narrow, bombed streets quickly enough. Another peek at Jerry's work showed me the new tower's internals slowly filling up, nearing completion. Too slowly; Mandy was already being pushed back and I'd maybe last a minute more. Unless I missed my guess, we only had to hold the line for a couple of minutes...

a minute longer than we could last. Unless... Math had never been my strong suit before, but superhuman Vigilance and Agility came with an instinctive grasp of spaces, angles and geometry. With that, a new plan took shape at superspeed and a split-second later I was charging at the closest clump of monsters. A dozen wights turned to paste at my supersonic arrival but I paid them and their several dozen friends little heed. I touched the ground and focused instead.

The second rank of Forcefield Creation allowed for the application of a force effect over several cubic yards of volume and allowed for slightly more complex geometric shapes. I went for a dome, as thin as I could make it. At the thickness of less than an inch, several cubic yards made for a large enough dome to include me, Mandy and Jerry and his tower. In that volume, I amplified gravity selectively, by a factor of sixteen. But a single field, a single effect would not be enough.

It would only slow monsters at best. Thus I burned a vast amount of energy, nearly half my remaining stamina, to make it lasting and independent of my active support. The effort floored me, the equivalent of trying to hold my breath for an hour while sprinting. It was worse than being burned by the demons' draining breath, more exhausting than anything I'd previously done. It was something I had to push through, because none of us had time for me to be gasping like a landed fish while being poked by wights.

So I spared a second to obliterate the nearby monsters then layered a second field over the first. It was something I'd never tried before, not on living enemies. But most of the enemies weren't really living, were they? Animated corpses, skeletons held together by molten iron and magic, shaped metal and fire, mindless flesh warped by sorcery; most of them were basically drones and if they were drones. The second field reduced the integrity of all non-living enemies by a factor equal to the increase in gravity.

The very forces holding their bodies together reduced immensely. It was the same thing I'd done to shatter magically-reinforced steel like cheap clay and its effects on the monsters were dramatic. The moment they tried to cross the dome, every bit of them touching it, suddenly gained a mud-like consistency for as long as they were touching it... then the increased gravity hit the weakened portions like a hammer.

They basically melted between one step and the next, the entire horde staggering into disarray by the sudden shift of the battlefield dynamics. Unfortunately, the second dome would only last for as long as it was maintained by me and would either follow me around or fail the moment I moved. I could not maintain two entirely separate fields at the same time and the fields had to overlap exactly to work as they did.

So no matter how much it would suck, I burned through most of the rest of my stamina to make the second field permanent too. It nearly knocked me out then and there, my enhanced resilience and regeneration letting me cling to consciousness by the skin of my teeth. I lay there on the ground, gasping feebly as darkness clawed at the edges of my vision, trying not to smirk as wave after wave of monsters died to the invisible dome because my every muscle felt like cramping and that included facial ones.

Then a demon slammed into the dome, staggered, and went through. Unlike the undead and metal Stymphalian chickens, it didn't turn to goo... the second field did not affect him because he was alive enough to count. The thing loomed over me, then kicked me in the gut. Then the chest and the head. I tried to respond but I was utterly spent. At most I could lift my own weight, sluggishly fly around, but the demon would have none of it.

He grabbed me by one leg, slammed me to the ground, stepped on me then started swinging its too-long, clawed arms as I struggled to little effect. Little by little I recovered, caught my breath. I might be running on fumes but I was no less tough than I'd ever been and the demon could hurt me only so quickly against my regeneration. He must have realized it too, because he stopped swinging, grabbed my leg again and pulled.

I tried to fight again as soon as I realized I was being dragged towards the dome but my muscles would not cooperate and at this point Proximakinesis was not strong enough to break the demon's grip. He touched the dome and slowed down, grunting again, finding it difficult to walk through the increased gravity field while also carrying me. Then a bolt of flames so hot they were purple blew its head to bits.

"Come on, May, get out of here," Mandy said, standing over my prone form and blasting every demon that tried to cross the dome.

"Jerry is about to push the button and things will get much hotter here in a moment."

"His phallic cannon tower doesn't have any buttons," was the best thing my very exhausted brain could come up with and I only noticed I'd spoken out loud after the fact.

"If you're making crude jokes you're well enough to fly," the redhead told me testily, blasting another demon to bits with the heat she'd stolen from another's body, leaving him a cracking icicle.

"I can't keep this up forever, you know!"

"Should have invested more into stamina then," I snarked back but she was right. It wouldn't break any records but I could definitely fly once more and even the cramps hurt less and less. As the demons became more wary about trying to rush the dome, we fell back to Jerry's Magnum Opus to catch our breaths and see what the big deal was.

"Cover your ears!" the nerd shouted unnecessarily loudly and I noticed how blood was already running down his own. Healing would fix it if we survived but I more than anyone else knew how cold comfort that could be; even if you recovered from it you had certainly felt it happen. My red-headed best friend followed Jerry's advice but I didn't. At this point, anything that could hurt my eardrums would reduce Jerry to chunky salsa in his entirety, covered ears or no.

The beam tearing through the air was as loud and as bright as a lightning bolt. Jerry had his eyes closed, was standing in the shadow of his tower and he still winced and tried to take cover from what portion of the glare diffused through the air. Mandy was basically immune to heat at this point - she was actually empowered by it - so we both stood and witnessed the awesome power of Jerry's fully functional laser tower.

Laser, because I was pretty sure the beam was almost completely monochromatic as well as pulsing so rapidly it seemed continuous to all my senses but Force Awareness. But it was not only a laser; somehow Jerry had free electrons mixed into the beam, electrons moving much faster than in natural lightning bolts. The laser burned a conductive path through the air, not merely ionizing but completely scattering every gas in its path to leave a superheated near-vacuum that let the electrons travel without deviation.

That incredibly powerful laser-electron beam hit the nearest lightning tower like the hammer of an angry giant. Like both a lightning bolt and a laser, it immediately started burning through the solid iron of the tower's frame. Unlike both of those things, it did not stop. It lasted second after blindingly bright second until the tower's frame began to glow. Five seconds in, the tower slightly bent. Seven seconds after that, it started to sag like a candle under the Midsummer sun.

At the twenty-second mark, the tower's middle melted, its lightning-spewing top toppling out of sight. After taking a few seconds to aim, Jerry's weapon started firing at the second lightning tower, with similar results. Both Mandy and I stood there in awe as the greatest threat the enemy could bring to bear was literally melting before our eyes. But as the second lightning tower started to glow an angry red, I saw Jerry's tower begin to smoke.

A peek to its interior with Force Awareness turned my momentary worry into alarm and I quickly flew up to Jerry, reduced the effects of the glare and thunderous roar on him with Force Adjustment, then made him look at the smoke.

"I was afraid this was going to happen," he told me with supreme nonchalance.

"We have about a minute to get out of here before my little surprise to our monstrous friends go off." He shrugged.

"You and Mandy can live with that. Probably." He stared at me. I stared at him. Then I picked him up with one hand, flew up to Mandy and picked her up with my other hand, and flew both of them out as quickly as I was able in my condition. One city block, two city blocks, three city blocks... I felt more than heard the second lightning tower toppling, the tiny shock wave picked up by Force Awareness. A glance back had me straining to go faster because Jerry's tower had begun firing again despite glowing in places.

Ten city blocks, eleven city blocks... Then a tremendous discharge of energy vaporized Jerry's creation completely, did the same to everything within several hundred feet, and turned every monster further out than that into shadows against the nearest wall or the ground. The blast wave leveled what civilian buildings still stood within half a mile and slightly damaged the enemy's iron walls.

In my left hand, Mandy seemed to drink in the glare, every scrape and bruise and sign of exhaustion from the fight we'd been through wiped away. In my right, Jerry's skin seared in places and peeled away, second-degree burns that would have probably killed him if it hadn't been for Force Adjustment reducing the damage by an order of magnitude. It was official; Jerry was a hardcore hero. He was also a fucking idiot for building and detonating a nuclear bomb without telling anyone!