Chương 66: Endings and Beginnings

For a moment, the whole chamber was entirely silent but for the droning of computer fans and the almost inaudible whine of countless electronics.

Dozens of computer screens displaying anything from casualty lists to the abnormal weather across five states, from several towns being hastily evacuated to desperate rescue operations in a stormy sea were all ignored as every occupant in the hastily set up and overworked command center focused on one of the larger displays relaying images from a high-altitude recon drone.

The image of a completely devastated region, with countless fires, smoking craters, piles of rubble and chasms across the ground that were clearly visible from nearly twenty miles up were largely ignored. Teeming masses of what looked like countless ants crawling across the terrain but were actually man-sized monsters or worse were similarly of little interest; everyone had seen those time and again over the past few days.

What had everyone's undivided attention was the humanoid form on the upper part of the screen, one that took up a not-insignificant portion of an image that covered four hundred square miles. The mountain-sized figure was crowned by actinic glare as lightning played over its horns, distorting the image significantly, and a very recent flash of fire and dust that covered most of its head.

Yet despite the poor image quality, everyone from the lowest analyst to the most decorated general present watched with bated breath as the titanic humanoid stumbled, teetered dangerously forward, then crashed upon the earth with enough force to make the ground visibly shake and deform under its stupendous bulk.

"I'll be damned!" someone whispered, sounding deafeningly loud in the silence.

"They really did it. They really killed that monster!" The rising tension finally snapped, the room exploding in yells of triumph, curses, questions and comments of all kinds, a cacophony of emotion given voice as silent dread gave way to loud relief.

"Silence!" an older voice rang with authority, cutting through the chaos with the weight of both rank and experience. These were military men, used to obeying such commands, so even under such pressure and despite loss after catastrophic loss they still got into a semblance of order in seconds.

"Their weapon is still firing," the general noted and indeed thin but blindingly bright beams of light were repeatedly cutting across the image, from the ruins of the city to the toppled titan. There they repeatedly cut into the titan's head, blasting away tons of mass with every shot.

"Shit!" The exclamation drew everyone's attention to one of the lower-ranked analysts poring over the drone's images with a dozen different filters to extract every last bit of data possible.

"Err..." The weight of dozens of stares from superior officers and the stress of the situation had the man freeze at his faux pas.

"What is it, son?" the older general asked patiently, his calm tone cutting through everyone's stress once more.

"Sir! Despite injury to the back of the skull that shattered the target's equivalent of the occipital bone, thermal, seismic and ground-penetrating radar readings show the target still has a heartbeat, sir!" The analyst pointed at some of the filtered images and several of the officers present showed interest but not comprehension.

"The target doesn't bleed as we do so it's unlikely to die of blood loss and it's still showing involuntary reactions to the energy weapon's shots. In addition the injury is getting smaller." That last bit everyone could grasp just fine and another round of curses filled the room. They'd seen how some of the monsters could recover from extreme wounds. Why wouldn't the enemy's superweapon share that ability?

It had practically every other ability lesser enemies had shown and quite a few they hadn't, the better to ruin everyone's day with.

"How long?" the general asked.

"Sir?"

"How long until the monster recovers?" he clarified for the analyst.

"We saw that the energy weapon could injure it, slow it, but not really stop it. They saw it too, which is why they used that missile that's going to make all our lives even more interesting in the coming days." The general could already see the impact on international relations a missile that could hit anywhere on Earth in eighty seconds with zero warning would have. Thank God it would be mostly the politicians' job to defuse that particular mess.

"I... I am not sure, sir," the analyst hesitated, other analysts poring over the data and patterns he'd noted and coming to their own conclusions. Despite all their intelligence-gathering over the past week they still knew nothing about how the enemies' biology worked - assuming biology was involved at all, a conclusion many scientists and analysts were still strenuously objecting to.

"The wound is filling in at a steady rate but... we have nothing to compare that creature to, no benchmarks. It might be half an hour or it might be just a few minutes."

"I see," the general scowled at the screen for a few seconds, then made his decision.

"Get me a secure line to Air Force One," he ordered a communications officer even as his mind grasped at all the data the analysts could give him.

"We need to hit them again while we still can." Because when an enemy bastard was down you didn't wait for them to get up; you shot them in the back. xxxx Falling from Heaven is not nearly as painful as surviving the impact. I did not recall who'd said that but they were very much correct. Being invulnerable to the impact itself had by no means protected from indirect hazards, so I got to experience a serious redout first hand.

For those that aren't pilots or like to memorize trivia as a hobby, that's when a pilot's blood pools in their brain due to rapid deceleration resulting in, you guessed it, red-saturated vision, nausea, lots of not so dry heaving, super-migraines or the occasional loss of consciousness. Fun! Every other time my ridiculous levels of resilience and control of force had protected me from such things so the symptoms had caught me by surprise.

Then again, every other time I hadn't decelerated from multiple miles per second to zero in milliseconds, briefly experiencing over a hundred and eighty thousand gravities. By the time I'd stopped seeing double, my entire body had started cramping as a form of protest against further stupidity. Unfortunately, we were far from being in the clear so such inadvisable measures might be required.

After a dozen traps, secret weapon reveals and convoluted plots, I hadn't really expected the giant tungsten bullet plan to work. So when I saw, heard and felt in my bones Mot's football stadium sized heart still beating I wasn't really surprised. But seeing the wound in the back of his head regenerating, I certainly was pissed.

"Oh no, you fucking don't!" Flying up to his stupendous bulk I landed on his back and put to motion the second plan for getting the big guy very, very dead. Namely, the realization that he still counted as just one guy; one single target... to which I could apply Proximakinesis or Force Adjustment on contact as one, however ridiculous his size might be. With him being a living being, technically, messing with forces internally wasn't an option.

But adjusting all incoming forces such as, say, the force delivered by the particle beam cannon on him? That I could adjust by an order of magnitude. Suddenly, where before the incredibly bright beam had struggled to even cut into his yards-thick, super-tough skin, it was now gouging and burning into bone each and every time. The equivalent of cigarette burns on something Mot's new size became a blowtorch slowly cooking his head to oblivion.

The bastard noticed of course, but he couldn't do anything about the gun in short notice; he was struggling just to get up. One minute, two, he'd finally pulled himself together enough to scramble to his knees, even with the top of his head partly reduced to a smoking, smoldering ruin. About half his horns had actually fallen off, his crown of crackling thunderbolts severely diminished. But he did get to his knees and he was slowly, inexorably, getting up. Enjoying this book?

Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"HEY ASSHOLE!" I shouted, magnifying my voice with Proximakinesis vibrating the air around me until my words were loud as thunderbolts.

"WE GOT A SAYING HERE ON EARTH ABOUT THIS SITUATION. THE LARGER THEY ARE..." and then I adjusted his relation with the planet's gravity well, making him nearly an order of magnitude heavier. Sheer size alone was what had made him so powerful; in absolute terms even I was nothing more than a bug to his strength. But in relative terms, for that stupendous body that was several times denser than flesh, too? He might as well be only of average strength, relatively speaking. And people of average strength?

They could only lift their own weight once, not a dozen times over.

"... THE HARDER THEY FALL!" He was halfway to standing up when the increased gravity hit him and he fell. That meant he fell for at least a mile under eight times normal gravity; he struck the ground at twice the speed of sound. The force of that impact exceeded the entirety of my efforts against him until that point, the tungsten bullet included. It caused a significant earthquake, a blastwave as powerful as a nuke's, and cracked both his elbows and knees, cracked his jaw and shattered half his too-pointy teeth.

Worse for him, he fell flat on the ground, without leverage to pull himself up again. With Jerry's beam cannon slowly chewing into his head with my help, we were actually winning.

"Hey Maya, you might want to vacate Mot's backside," Verity's voice suddenly announced from right behind me. Verity's appearance did not surprise me; her changed looks did. She was of a height with me now, a willowy teenager that was obviously superhuman and ever so slightly wrong, whether due to slightly too-long limbs or subtly wrong facial features I could not tell, because her illusion was wavering.

"It's going to be too hot a place in about a minute."

"In about five minutes he'll be dead," I told her.

"Can't whatever the new crisis might be wait for once?"

"I tried telling that to some generals but they didn't believe me," the meddling outsider mused.

"They kinda panicked that I knew their plans and could appear in their most secure installations."

"Figures..." I scowled.

"They're going to try nukes again aren't they? Why? Didn't they fail the first time?"

"They think that since Mot is too distracted to absorb the energy it might work this time," the illusion of a teenage alien shrugged.

"They're wrong, but it's an understandable mistake to make. Ten thousand years of solving problems with violence are not easy to discard despite evidence that most violence isn't going to be lethal to a Mavethan Legate, regardless of magnitude."

"Most violence?" I looked from the projection to the canal-sized wounds on Mot's head.

"Even what we're doing?"

"You did gain power mostly through the same core concepts as the Mavethans. Fighting fire with fire is hard because fire can't usually be burned." Her image flickered and disappeared for a moment.

"Thirty seconds, by the way."

"No, no! He does not get to escape," I spat. Not after the sacrifices we'd all made to defend each other and the world.

"Not something you can change using Mavethan principles," she told me and I suddenly had an idea. A terrifying, possibly stupid idea.

"What if I didn't? What if I used a different concept than violence?" Jerry had done it, hadn't he? And it had worked very well.

"The nukes would kill you," Verity cautioned me, but even her speaking against it only strengthened my resolve.

"Everything I've done so far wasn't for the sake of power, no matter how some people would tell me I'm just deluding myself." My fists clenched at my sides, my nails biting into my palms as I struggled against the urge to flee, to save myself and fight another day.

"I protected my friends, I helped others, I defended my own life and that of my real family. I did not kill, even when others argued it might be better, because killing should be the last option when everything else has failed!" I looked up at the silvery-blue streaks through the atmosphere. Nuclear warheads, bombs that would be flashy and immensely violent and ultimately only feed Mot and help him regenerate because destruction was all they were just as it was all he was.

Even without that cheat, the blasts wouldn't have been strong enough to destroy a mountain-sized body stronger than steel.

"Tell Mandy, Jerry and my sister that all would have been lost, that there was no other alternative, OK?"

"I will," Verity's image said and winked out. As the bombs fell, I made one final force adjustment to Mot's soon-to-be corpse; I amplified the effects of nuclear explosions by nearly an order of magnitude... xxxx The course of future events was adjusted one final time, not through direct intervention but through communication, information. While many would protest and cry foul, it was not against the ancient treaties, not when the opposition so blatantly broke them.

As nuclear power empowered by the idea of a heroic sacrifice slew the physical vessel of their energies, the Lords of Maveth did not retreat. Far from it; they kept pouring their energies into the world, seeking to drag it into the Hell they had made of their realm. And through them their Master sought to have an indelible impact on eight billion souls, an influence far too horrible for most mortals to even imagine, let alone truly grasp. But such violations also conferred opportunities.

I'm a wheel, I'm a wheel, I can roll, I can feel And you can't stop me turning. Cause I'm the sun, I'm the sun, I can move, I can run But you'll never stop me burning. Come down with fire, lift my spirit higher! I'm the day, I'm the day, I can show you the way And look I'm right beside you. I'm the night, I'm the night, I'm the dark and the light With eyes that see inside you. Come down with fire, lift my spirit higher!

Verity sung as she cast away her guise, the song of mortal composers very much appropriate as the planet sunk beneath her in more dimensions than just one. Reality seemed to shift as she rose through its layers, an optical illusion not supported by facts, a trick of perspective. Earth, Terra, the House of Waters shone like a jewel in the Cosmos, the only place for many a light-year illuminated by creative thought. And yet a blight darkened a growing portion of it, marring what could otherwise have been.

Desist, or be destroyed, she told the Thing crawling through the connection between realms, its many grasping arms seeking to drag the planet into its own realm. [REFUSAL] The response was not in words for the Thing and its kind had long since rejected reason and creative thought. But it did carry meaning, for information is fundamental to and inseparable from existence, and existence was what the Thing was reaching through in its twisted efforts and for that it had to adhere to certain laws.

Desist, lest I blot out your Name from under the Heavens and make of your victims a nation mightier and more numerous than you. [DISSENT] And yet the Thing ensnaring the Mavethans with promises of power if only they would willingly give up their reason insisted on its course of action. It sought to conform the pattern of the world to its own and that Verity would not allow. So be it.

A word was a world was a sword as bright as any star and its Name was Truth and The First and that She wielded against the enemies of Creation. She spoke, she struck, she revealed their falsehoods and the Thing recoiled before rallying, dividing into countless reflections of itself, each one in a different layer of reality.

Twin streams of light reached above, twin streams of power reached below, twin streams of knowledge carried her in all layers of reality, for Truth resides in everything and no time or space was beyond it, her sword brighter than a hundred billion suns striking at the enemy's heart no matter where it was and the Thing recoiled for the second time. The Thing's influence gnawed upon the world, destroying, diminishing and dwindling, wearing everything down to a quickly approaching end.

She laughed, she sung, she danced, her vast being becoming narrower and narrower until any number of her would fit on the head of a pin. Yet Truth was real and its pull reached out to the decaying world until its entirety had been sheltered in a single point, as it had been in the beginning. Rage as it might, the Thing could not touch the everything that had become just one, a single unity standing against its division of space and decay over time.

In the void now surrounding the singularity, the Thing spawned nightmares and dreams of unreality, the plague the world to come for all time. So She became brighter and brighter, the singularity exploding in radiance that swept away the nightmares in a perfect day, and the world was reborn. The Thing was cast out, banished through the opening it had forced into the world.

Verity, whose Name was Truth Triumphant, saw that the connection remained for more than just agents of the enemy had used it, tapped upon its power. Yet ultimately, it would matter not as long as there were those that denied arrogance and mindless violence and put their efforts and thoughts into the things they build.