Chương 56: (Rewritten) Ch. 55 - Xenocide Act I; Preparation

Ch. 55 - Xenocide Act I; Preparation Available now! The Landmine Foot, signed by none other than samurai Road Rash himself! Get it before the stock runs out! The Landmine Foot, with actual explosive charges*! *parental supervision recommended – JoysNToys, special sale of a functional replica of Road Rash's new foot, designed by fans from his Twitch chat.

Wings… Later, I told myself. Don't count your chicken nuggets before they're served. Big battle ahead of us. Hmm. We'd want to prepare for that.

"Tynea, do you need more drones right now? I'd like to focus on fighting gear."

"We're controlling one hundred and twenty-eight drones. I would prefer to have another eighty, but they're not absolutely necessary. Ypsilon and I should be able to track sufficient Antithesis units to locate their nest before it grows out of proportion." I sat back on the quad, listening to the springs squeak as I went through our points math. We had 342 points on the counter. Leah at the very least had to stay mobile, so she'd need a turret for her ATV.

I could fight on my feet, and go faster than on wheels, but only with extra fuel for my metabolism to keep up. Okay.

"Leah?"

"Yeah?"

"Wanna gear up? Turret for your ATV."

"And you?"

"Ah, I'll be fine a little longer. I won't be riding my ATV for this battle. I'm fast enough, after all. I'm also going to be fighting to kill this time, instead of screening them for you or setting up traps and killzones." Leah took a moment to puzzle out the strategy.

"So you wanna make it a running battle, with me on my ATV?"

"Yeah. And you'll need a turret for your gun, right? Not a good idea to try and drive one-handed in the forest, I think," I said wryly. She chuckled.

"But why? I'm sure nothing will go wrong." Leah got off her quad and studied the rack.

"Gimme a couple minutes."

"Sure. How many points are you planning to use for this?"

"Well, almost all of them? I'll try to leave twenty for emergencies, but it is going to be expensive."

"Automated turret, plus weapon's gonna cost, I guess. Alright, we'll rebuild the buffer in seconds once we engage anyway." She nodded at me, and I left her to her thoughts, as I turned to my own vehicle. I would take this first battle on foot, and maybe a few others after, too. But with my limited oxygen capacity, that wasn't going to last. I'd need to travel and fight from the ATV, eventually. Which meant I'd need a turret myself at some point. Or did I? Leah only had two arms, but I had a tail, too.

No reason not to put weapons on it, right? And actually, no reason not to also have turrets. Yeah. It'd still have to be designed in a way to accommodate my tail. Maybe smaller turrets to the side instead, leaving the middle space free? But that would mean no space for baggage. There's always baggage. Focus. The ATVs were temporary anyway.

"Okay. Weapon on my tail first." More than one weapon, even; my tail was pretty long, and strong. The biggest issue would be my light weight. I'd have to be careful not to unbalance myself… Right, I'd solve the issue with the turrets once I got a feel for how tail weapons worked. That made the most sense. A glance told me that Leah was still busy deliberating at her ATV's rack. What else did we need? Ammo? I still had twenty rounds of the twenty mil, and a fresh load of the darts. Leah…

also had nearly a magazine left over. We'd—"Tin-Tin!" Ah, was she done? The, what did she call it? Cozyname? What a cute idea, seriously! Anyway, it ushered a smile onto my lips and joy into my heart. A happiness I saw mirrored on her face when she noticed.

"What's up?" I said, beaming at her. There was that soft look in her eyes again that made me all mushy, and this time she initiated the hug, which, of course I had to squeeze her for. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. She sent me a ping with her aug, a message that included three display models. The first one was an attachment for her ATV that looked like a… rollbar?

It actually was a rollbar, a slim one that reached a little higher than her head, and was fixed to the quad in multiple places. It had some crash cushions for her to bang into, too. But unlike a mere rollbar, this one had rails attached that reminded me an awful lot of industrial robot gantries. The second model showed the turret, how it attached to the rail system that would allow it to travel wherever it had the best firing lines from.

It wasn't very large, in fact, I thought she could easily have three of these on the rail working in concert. The weapons would have to be relatively small and light though. And speaking of which, the third file contained multiple models. Weapons all, the cheapest of which was marked as the actual purchase. It followed the Warforge aesthetics, but notably, it had several unoccupied slots all over it. The other models appeared to be… upgrades of this base model, actually.

Some of those slots on the base model would accept an additional barrel for grenades or slugs, targeting sensors, and even some kind of launch-battery. For a swarm of micro-missiles perhaps, or smoke grenades? The projected ammunitions were all kinetic, probably to take advantage of my catalog, and it looked like all of them even had variable smoothbore barrels similar to the one mounted to her main weapon.

"Oh, you're planning ahead aren't you?" I grinned at Leah.

"That turret looks an awful lot like it could replace your robot arm. I like it! Looks solid," I said and gave her a thumbs-up. Her lips curled in satisfaction, and she confirmed the purchase.

Purchased: 20 pts x 1; 13mm High Explosive Cartridges, magazine of 200 30 pts x 1; Class 0 Rollcage, customized 35 pts x 1; Class I Mark II 'Wrath' Warforge Technologies Sensorium Module 90 pts x 1; Class I Mark II 'Hatred' Warforged Modular Smoothbore, base 145 pts x 1; Class I 'Patron' Warforge Technologies Modular Autonomous Emplacement, magazine-based kinetic Total cost: 305 Remaining points: 22"Done." She turned to her ATV and watched as Ypsi warped the rollcage directly onto the ATV.

Leah gave it a few solid jerks to make sure it was properly fastened, and waited for three items to appear on its rack. The first was the rail carriage base for the turret, which grabbed onto the rail as soon as she held it close enough, where it took a trip around the cage to calibrate itself. The second item was the turret arm, which attached itself to the carriage the moment it raced by, calibrated itself as well, and then settled into a folded position.

That left the weapon in the rack, with the sensorium already installed in the form of multiple camera lenses and a scope. The whole thing was decorated with golden filigree and white highlights that, you guessed it, exuded white mist. Once Leah had checked the weapon over, she put it back onto the rack and gave the turret the go command. It automatically engaged the weapon via a threaded slot, worked every joint from stop to stop, while integrated graspers unloaded and reslotted the magazine.

And then it stilled, facing towards where we knew the Antithesis were grouping up. Leah turned to me, hands on her hip, and said, "Ready!"

"Neat! Let's go try it out, then!" Ten minutes later, we arrived one hundred meters away from the mass of Antithesis that Tynea had described. She'd been collecting more video data on them along the way and was evaluating it in real time. Multiple facts stood out: One, they'd heard us coming, and even knew where we were.

So far, the big uglies were keeping the little uglies tightly grouped around themselves, but every few seconds, a model One would dive-bomb us, or a model Three would try to jump us, only for Leah's turret to shred them in split-seconds. It had taken up position at the top of the roll bar, and swiveled wherever the sensors of the weapon picked out a target. Two, there were an awful lot of Fives, those nasty, toxic, quilled fiends.

They were the most directly dangerous Antithesis present, and there were nineteen of them. Three, there were twelve Sixes, and they were being pretty loud for Antithesis. I was able to hear them from twice our current distance, which told me that they were corralling all nearby Antithesis to themselves. I suspected I'd find similar at the other locations where the aliens were gathering en masse.

They might not be the most dangerous here individually, but they were controlling the smaller units, which served to make deadlier packs. Four… points! We hadn't even begun the fight yet, already were we racking up points. Enough to buy fragmentation grenades to take out clumps of Antithesis, and extra magazines for the horseshoes in preparation for the Fives' quills.

"Do we want to prioritize the quill-throwing bastards?" Leah asked.

"Pump them full of twenty mil before they can make themselves a problem?" I nodded decisively.

"Yeah, I'm going to go for them with my opening shots…if we're the ones taking the opening shots, anyway. Might be a little, uh, hard to sneak up on nearly two hundred Antithesis, especially since they're already aware of us." Actually…

"Hey, I could dash in real fast, take a few of the big ones out, and run back here with the horde in tow. If you grab their attention then, you could just drop grenades as you let them chase you. I'd split off, try to make them lose sight of me in the trees, and then hit the big ones again from the side. Rinse-repeat, until either I run out of breath and get on my own ATV to join you, or we kill all the Fives and Sixes. In which case I'll also use my ATV, I think."

"Sounds like a plan. Wanna station your ATV further away, then? Somewhere it won't actually be buried in the horde."

"Right. I'll be a few minutes, then." She waved with a smile, and I kicked off, back towards where we came from and a little sideways. I heard the occasional gunshots from Leah's direction as she continued to kill Ones and Threes, and hurried along until I found a nice little hill with a tight copse of trees between which the tan quad mostly disappeared from view. From there, I hotfooted it past Leah, whom I gave a high-five as I ran by, and dashed another hundred or so meters towards the Antithesis.

I stopped just before I got line of sight on the aliens to let my skin and hair adapt to the colors around me, then I slunk another meter forward until I gained a direct view of the mass of aliens. This close, the constant, monotonous drone of the Sixes was… numbing. They weren't varying their pitch at all in their unchanging summons, but squads and single units were constantly trickling in to join the larger congregation. And there, quills a wetly shimmering green, were the Fives.

Ugly monstrosities covered in wet neurotoxin, so much of it and so concentrated it was pricking at my antennae from a hundred meters away. A kind of sick hatred rose in me at the sight of them, especially when I remembered the single Five that had engaged us at the facility. Oh, mere twenty mil murder wasn't going to do it for them, no no. I wanted something real nasty. Something even bigger.