Chương 64: 55: The taller they are...

The hundred-foot-long metal rod struck the ground like a titanic railroad spike, its needle-like head going through rubble, soil and bedrock like a hot knife through butter. It kept going down and down and by the time I stopped pushing it had gone thirty feet into the earth. Letting go of its rounded, yard-thick top, I floated back and swept sweat off my eyes with a brief application of force adjustment while I caught my breath.

Though it was heavier than a main battle tank, weight was not the issue; fully rested I could have tossed around a locomotive. The most difficult part was what came after the physical work. Bracing both physically and mentally, I lay both hands on the two-foot-thick body of the rod and reached into the brightly shining material with my powers. Force Adjustment was applied first; to amplify the bonds between atoms holding everything together, then to diminish any forces blocking subatomic movement.

Done slowly over the course of a minute, the effects spread through the entire mass and settled, stable enough to remain for several hours. Proximakinesis came next, just as spread out and gripping every bit of metal within, opposing any movement. The moment the dual enchantment was complete the silvery metal started to cool rapidly. That was expected - the whole point of the second enchantment, actually. What wasn't expected or wanted was the frost catching on top of it, building upon and covering the surface.

Frowning, I set a fourth effect, one to repel water. That got rid of the ice and prevented more from building up... for about twenty seconds. Then even more whitish, very cold ice started forming and it took me a moment to realize it was dry ice, solidified carbon monoxide. It took several adjustments to the second Proximakinesis field to ensure other types of ice wouldn't cover it any time soon.

"Yo blondie, are you done yet?" Liz shouted to be heard over the sound of metal cutters, welders and other machinery used by both people and Jerry's drones in a frantic race to get the giant gun ready in time.

"You're wasting time!" As hail Mary plans went, ours was really the longshot to surpass all longshots and none of us had any other ideas for killing the titanic demon laying waste to everything twenty miles North of the city's ruins.

"Good things come to those who wait!" I shot back, then winced at my own stupidity and just flew down to the older woman. The bitchy brunette had already finished forming the second metal rod with her metallokinesis and was halfway through the third, but just forming the things was hardly enough.

"You heard your boyfriend," she sniped back, giving me a nasty smirk.

"If we don't get the gun ready by the time that thing is fifty miles away we might never get another chance."

"It's ninety tons of silver, not a two-pound sword to be enchanted with a minor effort," I shot back, too worried about other matters to get really upset.

"More to the point, all it takes is one mistake to turn it into ninety tons of exploding atoms and then we'd all be dead." Or at least they would be; thanks to Focused Invulnerability I'd only be wishing I was.

"And Jerry is not my boyfriend." Liz sneered but said nothing. We were working together out of necessity more than everything else and if not for Julia's leadership of their group she might not have helped at all. Unfortunately, we needed the help. Jerry could create metals but his limited magic was better spent actually building the weapon and the more things the rest of us could do to help the more he had to work with.

Thus except for the occasional sneer or glare we tried our best to each finish our part without "accidentally" killing each other. One giant rod of enchanted silver became three, then two rows of five in a half-circle facing the distant form of a lightning-crowned monster that shook the earth even from such a huge distance. xxxx The more than battleship-sized turret stood finished, an enormous machine whose only purpose was to deliver sufficient power in sufficient concentration to hurt Mot's demonic form.

It was not as powerful as the nuclear strike the Army had already attempted; even with days to work on the design, even with the best materials magically provided, even with Dr. Beth's healing and energy potions restoring him every time Jerry burned his own power to nothing to craft each individual component, he could never have made something that powerful. But if everything went just right, maybe he would not have to.

Falling back to his wheelchair and being fussed over by a redheaded sorceress, the pale, shaking, completely exhausted magical engineer inspected his ion cannon one last time. Four hundred tons of superconductive coils generating electricity approaching petawatt levels through a trick of his powers. An only slightly smaller free electron laser and electron beam array, the former to blast a path through the air, the latter to deliver electrons accelerated to near the speed of light through said path.

Another five hundred tons of machinery to aim and turn the turret, augmented by his robotics skills to work much faster and with greater precision than normal - not that they'd need it. Two thousand tons of magically-reinforced armor that could stand up to small nukes, just in case something slipped through their other defenses. By the standards of modern technology an utter monster that could drill through small mountains. By itself, not nearly enough for their needs.

"Mandy stop fussing, I'll be OK," he reassured the redhead who sported a half-annoyed, half-worried expression on herself.

"We really need you to put everything in that heat resistance spell now."

"But what about other defenses?" she demanded bossily, giving him her best 'how-dare-you-suggest-I'm-fussing' glare.

"What if something gets through?"

"We'll manage," he gave her his best reassuring, overconfident smirk. Hopefully, he was too exhausted for his real emotions to show.

"We got him exactly where we want him; too far to get to us quickly, but still within our range." More like within a third of the range limitations imposed by the curvature of the Earth, but he didn't dare risk any more delays. With every step the bag guy grew a little bit larger and thus tougher.

"I'll hold you to that, you jerk," she fumed.

"If you die, I'll find a way to bring you back only to punch your stupid face in." Then humanity's first true sorceress turned around and practically stalked up to the gun as if the multi-thousand-ton turret was something she wanted to crush underfoot. Fortunately, what Mandy knew of technology he could juggle without touching... and he wasn't the one with the telekinesis.

"She's never going to forget, you know."

"But she'll probably forgive me, if we survive." Think of the devil and she'll shall appear, Jerry thought and looked up at the cheerleader he'd once had a crush on. Way, way up. Out of all of them here, Maya had changed the most. It was telling that even with the fate of the world at stake his thoughts went to her appearance first and her powers only after he had to mentally kick the stupid part of himself back into gear.

"Was the experiment a success? Can you enhance the gun as we discussed?" Then again, when you see someone to whom the best cosplays look like amateurish copycats and fakes... Stolen novel; please report.

"I don't like thinking of our best defenses as an experiment... but yes." Lips pressed into a thin pale line, piercing blue eyes narrowed, she stared at the fruit of their work as a wave of glowing red magic spread from Mandy to cover it entirely.

"Are you sure this is going to work?"

"I've run the numbers," Jerry reassured her.

"At two miles tall, with the resilience of steel-""Steel is a serious low-ball, in my opinion," Maya interrupted.

"Its breaking length is four miles, he's already half that height and he can walk on his legs just fine. Either he's wasting an enormous amount of power to prevent his body from collapsing under his weight or his baseline toughness is a lot more than that."

"And what if it is? This was our only option." If he'd seen anything about Maya was that she'd try for the perfect result, the best she could do at any moment. But 'perfect' was the enemy of 'good enough' and nobody had come up with a better idea.

"Better to risk it than not try at all. However tall and big he might be in this form, Mot is still one guy and I choose to believe he is not so far above us our combined efforts won't do something."

"OK." The blonde's tired frown slowly inched into a tentative smile.

"I'll do my best to make it happen."

"We all will," he agreed.

"Now remember; you must enhance resilience and apply that cooling effect on the turret before you increase conductivity and thus peak power otherwise-""Yes, yes, I'm not a total idiot!" she waved him off and ran to contribute her own enchantments. Technology leveraged the world and harnessed existing forces to do things man could not achieve with his natural abilities alone.

If the forces he had to harness went beyond mere physics, well, if they were lucky physicists around the world would survive to study and complain about it. And with a bit more luck than that, Jerry might even live to receive those complaints. xxxx Old man Dallas was huffing and puffing on top of the enormous cannon's barrel, a material halfway between golden light and honey dripping from his hands and seeping into the seamless metal as if it were a sponge.

Force Awareness reveals a subtle, almost imperceptible change to the entirety of the titanic turret, a change that slowly grows the more the old hunter's face turns red and his breaths turn into huge, uneven gasps.

Unlike Mandy's blatant spell forming a reddish curtain over the material that obviously alters its relation with heat in a way that makes no physical sense or my additions that alter fundamental interactions in a very physical and comprehensible method, this addition is invisible and intangible and yet there are hints if one looks hard enough. There is this strange sensation of depth added to the material, akin to two mirrors standing side by side and reflecting each other except the addition is real.

I see it in how photons interact with the barest hint of slowness with the material, feel it in how the weight of the turret itself seems to flicker between normal and multiplied between fractions of a second without actually impacting the physical world as it should, smell it in how the oiled ball bearings of the turning mechanism seem to be more... pungent than they should have been.

There is a ghost of a ghost of a second turret overlapping with reality, and another and another seemingly stretching into infinity as the turret unfolds in ways my new senses can see but my brain can't make sense of. Given how ridiculously powerful the old man's shotgun is, everyone is hoping the enhancement will help even if none of us can tell how it is supposed to work except possibly Jerry. The no-longer-scrawny nerd did take our collective powers into account designing the thing, or so he claimed.

"It is time," Verity says. In the half-hour we'd been frantically working against an unseen deadline the former midget's body seems to have filled out more even as her height grew to nearly match my own. The longer she stood there with her hands in my little sister's shoulders, feeding an enormous river of power into Anne's 'Sanctuary' ability.

"The best moment to employ your weapon is coming up in less than a minute, so you better make sure you are ready."

"How can you tell?" Liz asks the now apparent high-schooler before I can.

"The secret to knowing more than others do is knowing where to look," the taller brunette explains, pupiless black eyes taking us all in like miniature black holes. I'm not sure why I thought of that but now that that image was seen, it could not be unseen; Verity's eyes do look like two holes in the fabric of the universe, drinking in every single photon moving their way.

"And that begins with being watchful. No information will get to you if you don't actually look for it."

"Ugh, that just proves you've never set foot in a high school, no matter what you appear to be," Liz says with disgust and I snort. We could afford to make jokes; with the last enchantments set, our contribution to the plan was over. Electricity crackled through the air as enormous amounts of current moved through miles upon miles of power-enhanced wiring thicker than my wrist. Most of it was silver, Liz's mastery of metal the only reason we had had enough for such a large project, but quite a bit was tungsten.

According to Jerry, despite its much reduced conductivity that metal's insane thermal resistance and high melting point handled very brief, extremely powerful currents better. Well, he was the engineer. The turret adjusted its aim with deceptive speed. It seemed slow, but for a two-thousand-ton construction it moved very rapidly and with great precision. It had to, to adjust to its intended target.

Speaking of the devil, Mot's enormous bulk was still visible despite being fifty miles away, towering over the horizon like a mountain-sized statue. Except this statue moved and for all that it had partly faded into the blue of atmospheric oxygen, the thunderbolts crackling out from his horns made it visible enough.

The intense rain had died earlier after the army's big nuclear strike so the skies were as clear as we could have hoped for; even intense rain wouldn't have stopped an energy weapon of this power but at least with clear skies it would be at full power.

"The moment the weapon fires your sister's Sanctuary ability will shatter," Verity warned me as I felt enough electrons to have tangible weight spin around within the turret's coils.

"What made it so effective in blinding the Enemy to its presence was its foundation of non-violence and preparing for an attack is the limit of what it can handle."

"So Mot will notice there's this glaring spot of opposition in his back and try to snuff us out." It was good to know, though there was one thing about the information that troubled me. I kicked at the mud-covered remains of Destiny's only Mall for a few seconds before asking.

"Why are you telling me this? As in, why me specifically?"

"Your engineer friend has known all along. The young sorceress took one glance at your sister's barrier and understood the entirety of its workings. As for the others?" The girl that was not a girl shrugged.

"Sometimes omissions and obfuscation can be blankets of comfort lots of people cling to desperately in times such as these."

"Not lies?" I could do with some very comforting lies right about now.

"To paraphrase one of your storytellers, lies are the mind-killer. The corruption of creative thought that leads to total annihilation. However useful they might appear to be they are one of the greatest sources of evil in the Cosmos." That bottomless, all-consuming gaze fixed me for exactly three seconds then at the distant lightning-crowned form of the enemy for another four.

"The Mavethans entire philosophy is a lie and you see where it leads."

"That violence is power?" I glared at the ruins of my home city.

"Doesn't seem like a lie right now."

"Stop being deliberately obtuse. Naked force has solved more problems for your species than any other means so far." Then the too-serious midget that had overnight grown into a dead-serious woman smiled at me. It was genuine and bright, like the touch of sunlight after a cold night.

"The lie is that it's the only solution. Communication and cooperation can serve well those who wield them well." I was about to come up with a pithy retort when the turret fired and the world broke.