Chương 82: Back again

In the region around Suez, pandemonium reigned supreme. Lasers flew at the same height as Custodians and jets. One murderous robot breached the dimensional membrane, splashing into the water on two large legs. All systems nominal. Time to kill. The robot knew that it was the directive and the directive was it; and this time, the directive declared its mission as critical, and that efficiency would be paramount.

Snuffing out the life of biologicals wasn't quite as effective as making them truly fear for their lives first. That fear created potential energy, energy which was syphoned off by its new Mk. 17, 145 fear-converter, and stored in its Mk. 89, 421 battery tank, keeping the unit mobile. It was a marvel of technological engineering. It was the pinnacle of specialist forces.

Towering above the normal creatures that wandered these strange lands, it rose from the water, lasers swinging, missile pods calibrating ballistic vectors to shoot those pesky things out of the sky— Scrunch! A gigantic, unstoppable force met it from a blind spot in its sensors. The offending vehicle hit it with the ponderous speed of 5 glips per mobulon — a pedestrian speed, the danger only made up for by its mass. Initial estimates put the seafaring vessel at around 188, 000 Higg-units.

This was a threat, massive, dangerous, unstoppable. This unit was already dead, but if it reported this threat to the greater network, maybe it could still contribute towards finding the optimal way to slay this titan. And as the giant robot was ground into the silt below, a bone-shaking honk shattered its vulnerable sensors to bits.

In the following days, the captain of the SS SeaFair swore up and down that there hadn't been a hundred-ton murderbot mech in his way until seconds before his ship entered the Suez canal, and that arguably, local authorities were both to blame for this incident, and needed to reimburse his company for losses incurred by delays. The minor blockage of the canal was removed by the end of the week. A day after that, operations resumed as normal.

+++ Rebecca Polluck had this ephemeral idea that all she had to do was eat the kaiju squid's brain, immediately replace it with a replica of her own, and then all would be well. Whether it was due to mimic instincts or a life of half-remembered facts from biology class, she knew to simply follow the direction in which the cables bundled together to reach the central controller of this giant thing. Halfway through consuming the car-sized motherboard, she felt an electric tingle resolve into a message.

It was less language and more morse code via electroshock therapy, but she'd eaten enough brain to convert it into approximate English vernacular.

"Major appendage #3 has lost 34% of ablative plating on the x-pos axis," what felt like a damage control system bleeped disinterestedly.

"Response recommended." Oh. Hum. Well. Turn it away, I guess? The world rumbled. Rebecca Polluck, level twenty-ish Custodian and currently in control of a Kaiju, immediately face planted on the nearest highway, destroying ten years of work the effective unions of France had fought so hard not to do. Congestion of the roads was a problem for future Rebecca, as currently she was dealing with congestion of the mind. A dozen signals just like the one before jerked her back and forth.

"Damage report: Sensors 3, 412-3, 719 offline," bleeped the targeting array.

"Damage report: Tearing of muscle-polymers in major appendage #2, #4, & #5," blooped the motor controller, grating whatever went for ears in this form of hers with an awful volume. The automatic damage repair system had a much more pleasant response, likely because it was a dumb automatic system happy to just do its job.

"Deploying nanogel to restore mobility. Nanogel reserves at 89%. Estimated time until critical reserves: 0455 combat plixors." Alright, alright! Let's take this one… one plixor at a time. Activate, uh, standing-up procedures. Every tendril blared into her ears at once.

"Error: Could not resolve 'standing-up procedure'. Reason: Has the incorrect format." Oh, right, I guess I don't think at my leg to push me up, I just do it. Fuck it, manual control time. Should be easy peasy. At that moment, Rebecca realized that she had no legs. She had eight tentacles. And beyond that, she'd gotten so used to rolling around as a slime that walking was… difficult. I can't stand up. I can't stand up! Oh great, the one time I get to control a kaiju and I just crippled it.

"Threat detected," blared mister targeting array.

"Threat detected. Assault-class mimic organism spotted on intercept course. Response recommended." Uuuh, that tells me nothing. What class am I?

"We are assault-class Mk1412," said my left forward tendril while my rearward tendril added: "Recommend memory defragmentation. Priority: Urgent." Alright, I just got called an idiot by a robot's left leg. Also, apparently I'm being charged by a kaiju, one that I can't just slither inside without likely being dissolved by the mimic's insides. So, I have to fight it manually. Great.

"Impact imminent," mister targeting array blared. Her body shuddered while the damage control system frantically bleeped, "Hull damage. Hull damage." Aaaah, why now, why me? God fucking dammit, I just wanted to be a giant robot for one day. Move, fight, do the worm, do something!"'Do the worm' recognized?" The tentacle controllers sounded as confused as Becca felt.

"Why do you know how to dance?" she asked, to which a central memory array responded."'Do The Worm' listed among 9, 431 rituals of species #17. Presumed purpose: religious and/or ritualistic purposes, morale boosting, enhancement of local magical rituals via emotional induction."

"Oh, alright then," Becca snipped as her body shuddered again.

"Well? If you can't do anything right, can you… do the worm at the enemy kaiju?"

"Engaging in 'Do the Worm'. Tendrils, acknowledge."

"Tendril #1, ack."

"Tendril #2, ack."

"Tendril #3…" There was a moment of silence.

"All tendrils accounted for." Her body rose and fell in wave-like motions. An external camera which she finally gained access to showed a train-length pink worm still partially covered in camo colors imitating the bottom of a riverbed busily cutting her limbs off. It had coiled around tendril #3 in a tight knot before turning the parts of its body facing the limb into gigantic many-teethed saw blades. Becca squished it, causing the giant mimic to spasm uncontrollably.

But by the lack of response of her limb dripping nanobot fluid by the gallon, as well as a lack of any reports from limbs #4 through #8, it had already caused massive damage. I've got two legs. Which is just enough time to punch back. Macarena! Mamba! Now, grab and floss it! Swan dance on its corpse! Headbang, headbang, headbang. Do we have a horn?

"Horn controller, reporting all systems functional."

"Blow it away at 120BPM. And get a radio antenna onto on, uh — crap, what's a good french frequency." She checked her system.

"102. 3 FM?" To the outside observer, the murderbot kaiju squid robot had seized up, toppled over, and was moments away from being dissected before it engaged in a truly apocalyptic dance. Cars jumped in place with every beat of its horn, glass shattered, and mimic blood gushed down subway entrances like a river of oily tar. From the inside, all Rebecca could hear was the riffs and screams of heavy metal, only occasionally connected to the outside by the occasional eldritch warble-scream. THIS IS AWESOME!

DUN DUN-DANANANA NEOOOWWW-WAH! [You have killed: Mimic Titan-slayer] [Soulcoins: 548->2548] [Congratulations! You have reached level 22] [Congratulations! You have reached level 23] [Congratulations! You have reached level…] The notifications went on and on, but Becca could barely hear them. All her sensors were pointing skywards as she watched the oncoming rain cool her overheating systems, relishing in a post-cathartic bliss. I think I've figured it out. I want to be a magical kaiju girl. And the cool thing?

I just proved I can pull it off. +++ Uvo knew exactly how hard it was to maintain the status quo. As a child, his father had been obsessed with keeping a 250 square meter house clean to the point of picking up individual crumbs that landed on the floor by hand. It was a system of absolute order, and order cost energy to upkeep even when no one was trying to torpedo it. Now, forty years later, he was an associate with experience as a system engineer and a field tech.

And he was acutely aware of the scale of energy and effort that went into maintaining the AI system day by day. The amount of souls it needed to keep pace with growing threats were growing faster by the day. For every Custodian there were a hundred people in the background ensuring every service and item they needed would be available. Yet, demands were always increasing, and more Custodians were as necessary as more specialists in the background grinding away at the millstone of scientific progress.

"We can't keep up with manufacturing to meet demands, and keep the same level of quality," was the consensus of his boss, co-owner and founder of Light Mechanics Novelty Tech & co, and various industrial giants in the society sphere.

'Giants' was a relative term. Compared to the sheer scale of the mundane world, their yearly output was barely a blip.

"It's not a question of manpower," he told his fellow associate Ming. They were sitting in a common room after hours, a can of beer in each of their hands. The table was covered in takeout. They each had no families left to care about, and currently, the company compound seemed like the safest place to be. They were watching some news on a much too small TV, channel 666, for society news only. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"If it were, we'd have fixed it like that," Ming said with a snap of his fingers to emphasize his point.

"Scaleability is definitely the problem; scaleability of magical resources, of magical experts, of R&D. We're working with entirely new branches of chemistry and material sciences here, requiring entirely new production methods."

"Not everyone can have a laser gun." Ming idly stabbed at his fish and chips with a plastic fork.

"But maybe everyone can have a really weak, cheap laser gun. Like an emotional support flashlight. Food for thought."

"Not a good idea, not now." Uvo sighed.

"Currently, all the pressure is on the top dogs who are staunchly against releasing magical tech into the mundane world. Call it the stubbornness of the old, call it greed, call it whatever — they're focusing the internal pressure on one point: themselves. And they've proven they won't budge." He took a sip of beer.

"Now, say you release schematics for a laser gun, make it open source. All it requires is a couple engineers and eggheads, precise, advanced manufacturing — oh, and a rare earth we've so far only found in asteroids. Now, suddenly the entire world needs that rare earth. Demand soars, prices go up. And us, who're already struggling to cover our own demand, now have one-hundredth of our previous raw resources available.

We'll go broke simply because we can't afford to pay a thousand percent more in raw materials where other, bigger companies can. And guess who owns us?"

"The top dogs." Ming nodded wisely.

"They'd throw away their own powerbase."

"There are some who don't have big companies, or who are invested in stuff that doesn't work at scale. Potions, personalized magic items." Uvo waved him away.

"But something does need to change, or the inventories of magical items will be ground down to nothing long before nine years are over." Ming was looking deeply into his beer can, as if he'd lost his keys in there.

"Nine years. You believe in that prophecy?" Uvo shrugged.

"There are more convergence events every day. They don't report it, but I've been keeping track. Now shush, I wanna catch this bit." The TV was showing an assembly of the great houses of wizards, witches, and various magical and non-magical intermediaries. Alexa Cawl with her stranglehold on blue spirit grass farms. Joneston & Joneson, who carefully bred and selected rare woods delivered to the various wandmakers. Big names for rather normal looking people.

They were assembled at a rectangular table, opposite of some lawyer-looking corpo types. The corpos had a tight grip on their folders filled with proposals and contracts. The top dogs were chatting, leaned back, barely hiding smiles and hushed whispers. Two orders, magical and mundane, ready to clash, kiss, and crash horribly. A tale as old as time. The society was being asked for concessions by representatives of companies and countries to loosen old accords.

Mainly, the topic was sharing patents and magical knowledge. The ability to teleport objects and people across the globe was the most consequential technology since the invention of the atom bomb, or perhaps soft-serve ice cream. Today, they were starting with small requests: The recipe for dogwatah. No one would give an inch. The society may be scattered, but in this they were unified.

"Denied," said Alexa Cawl, looking bored out of her mind.

"Denied," said the representative of Joneston & Joneson. The next person in line was a witch, an old crone that seemed to fashion herself after a fairytale monster of old. She wore cobwebs on her floppy witch's hat, and furuncles on a face with more folds of skin than a Shar-pei. Her smile was bespeckled with gold, silver, and wood.

"Seventeen liters of water from the Baikal lake. One tablespoon allspice. Seven ounces of cocaine stolen from a freezing homeless person. Brown sugar, two standard one-kilo packs. Mix and boil over low flame, then add copper shavings until the water turns clear again…" Everyone sat with shocked stares as the old woman rattled off the exact production method for the most widely spread upper within the society.

In the background, some people were taking notes while others were likely running off to clear things with their superiors. Uvo swallowed.

"I didn't know dogwatah had cocaine in it."

"Neither did I."

"This is a precedent alright. Consider the floodgates cracked?"

"Oh, they're wide open now. Pandora's box." Uvo and Ming looked at each other.

"We might be out of a job soon."

"Fuck." +++ Some people thought there was money to be made even during an apocalypse. The last thing Hanna Mary, news anchor, journalist, mother, needed was money. After the debacle with the coral mimics in Chicago, she didn't feel safe in her home city. So, she'd followed her college-years dream and emigrated to Paris with her entire family. Paris, the city of love. Paris, currently a battlefield. Channel 5 News of course thought it was a wonderful coincidence, that she was here with her entire camera team.

And while they recommended she evacuate the area immediately, it was left unsaid that foregoing this golden opportunity for some truly unique shots would not bode well for her career. They were live. It was too late to do anything about her makeup, or the red marks under her eyes.

"T-this is—" Her voice cut out with a sob. She looked away from the camera.

"Ah, to hell with it. Look at what they've done to the Eiffel Tower!" Hanna pointed at the distant tower. Its top quarter was missing, the rest of the metal glowing red-hot like a candlestick. She was going off script, but screw it, she needed someone to hear this.

"I've always wanted to visit ever since I saw it on a postcard as a little child. Now I live here. The Eiffel Tower never really became 'just another part of the skyline' for me. You think you know what it's like just from imagining it a thousand times a day, but you don't. It smells of paint. It creaks and sways. When you're standing underneath it, the entire thing feels less like a structure and more like a living being.

I remember sitting at a cafe afterwards, eating a crêpe, trying to align my souvenir tin Eiffel Tower with the one in the distance… and now I won't be able to do that ever again because they cut off the tip, and the giant stupid robot that did it is standing there in the distance, doing The Charleston Dance!" She took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Where was I?"

"Say something positive," Johnny, her cameraman, hissed. But she couldn't think of a single positive thing to say. All the positivity was sucked away, leaving only a manic terror.

"Paris is under attack by murderous robots. So many metropolises are. It's a tragedy, people are dying, history is made on the rubble of symbols we thought were eternal. But nothing is eternal, everything stops and dies, and someday, I'll die, and you'll die and—" There was a boom as something whipped through the air and crashed into the side of their news truck. Everyone hit the ground with a yelp, like more recent government broadcasts on what to do in emergency situations had taught them.

They didn't teach her how terrifying being in said situation was, or how to do her job properly during one. Slowly, Hanna peeked over the hood of a car she was hiding behind. There was a person-shaped hole in the news truck. Two armored legs hung out of it. Oh god, are they…" Estoy bien!" The figure shot an armored thumbs up. And then emerged from the hole, and suddenly Hanna wasn't sure that they were wearing armor.

They looked like a giant walking mantis with three-fingered hands in place of the classic mantis forelimbs. Their antennae twitched this way and that as they rubbed their face." Ay." Out of the corner of her eye, a second figure approached, this one clearly more human. She wore a tattered dress with a short, frilly, colorful skirt straight out of a cartoon. The skirt seemed to be repairing itself in front of her eyes. Also, she seemed to be glowing, almost radiant with the color of the sun on a summer day.

"Parsnip, dammit!" she yelled.

"Don't try to freaking parry bullets! And Becca, stop dancing, now's not the time. I don't care how difficult it is to replace the nervous system of a robot kaiju, you look ridiculous!" They argued for a brief moment. Then the second figure hopped over to Hanna's crew. She only realized that she was being offered a hand to get up when the smiling figure spoke.

"Hey, uh, anything broken? Got an internal organ squished? I can give you a bandaid. It helps, I swear."

"Uhhh," Hanna Mary uhhed. The girl pulled her to her feet with a frankly bottomless well of strength.

"I'm fine."

"Good. Is that camera still rolling? Hi Mom, I'm doing fine—" A giant bird with feathers that seemed to be made of metal swooped past them, flying low.

"... Oh, goddammit. HEY! THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE? STOP!" The two Custodians ran off. Hanna was left frazzled, her hair now as ruined as her eyeliner, and not sure what she was supposed to feel.

"The hell just happened?" Johnny asked. On instinct, she turned to him. He was still holding the camera.

"I… don't know." But she was feeling better. More optimistic. Happy, almost.

"Who the heck is that spidery hero?" +++ Seventeen days. Seventeen days of saving people and of mortal combat, of herding civilians, Custodians, and giant birds. Seventeen days of using public bathrooms and subsisting on a mix of granola bars and dogwatah. But we did it. We won. It just took seventeen days of straight soul-grinding work. The teleporter dinged and we stepped out, breathing fresh Madagascar air, and feeling no less ragged for it.

There was dust in every nook, machine oil in my eyes, and my skin had long since turned coarse with battery acid and plasma burns.

"Uuuugh," I groaned. I felt the most ragged of all. Who knew that coordinating Custodians and co. was so much like herding cats? Everyone had a quest they wanted to do, a place they wanted to visit, a person they needed to check on first. And through it all, we had to fight hordes of murderbots, murderbots that hid under rubble and targeted masses of civilians on purpose. That last part was… really not fair. I needed a better permanent shield so I could jump in the path of lasers more frequently.

[Extra lives: 2]"We're alive," Orianna said.

"We're alive!" The vampire broke out into a fit of sharp-toothed giggles.

"Of course we are." Becca's voice was as robotic as ever, making it impossible to discern her state of mind from her tone.

"We got a lot of lives. And lost them. And gained them. And lost them."

"You were a kaiju."

"I was!" Becca seemed so happy. Good for her.

"Man, I learned so much about… everything while eating that thing from the inside out. And somehow, I'm still hungry."

"I'm famished. Let's go to Caspers."

"Right now?"

"Right now." Orianna turned to me, contemplating on how impolite not asking me to third wheel their date was. I waved them off. Orianna left with a bounce in her step that was almost manic while Becca cycled through many minor iterations of her body. They had both leveled a bunch. [Orianna, The Orb-Bound, Lvl 39] [Rebecca Polluck, Hungry Hungry Mimic Queen, Lvl 42] Is that why they're happy? Or maybe… Right. It was their first time risking their lives in such a big deployment.

All the uncertainty and anticipation of this day had been answered. The training wasn't for nothing, the pain wasn't for nothing. We were alive. We chose the right path. Courage. It was a good thing for a magical girl to have. Right after competence, and a chin-up attitude. For me, the right path led straight to the shower, then bed. I probably wasn't going to sleep all that much. There was still no message from Addy.

Between worrying about her and the flashes of what I'd seen in the field, there was enough material to keep me awake for weeks. The door to our dorm clacked open to the sound of keys. Keys in my hand. Right, I just walked here and opened the door. Two steps in and I realized I wasn't alone.

"Sup?"

"ACK!" I ducked, flung myself to the left, casting [Echo], [One Moment], [Illusory Double++], and grabbed my holster— [Adelaide, Undying Defender, Lvl 45] My brain froze. There she was, sitting on the couch, not a care in the world.

"Oh. Hi. Hi, Addy." She cocked a brow. The brow was somewhat scorched. She'd seen action too, and not just a little action either.

"You look like shit." That shook me awake.

"I've been through some of it."

"You're also buff. Toned." She ate a chip, washed it down with some water, and licked her lips, eyes practically eating me up as her gaze hiked up and down my body. Languidly, like an animal on the prowl, she pushed herself off the couch and me onto the ground. Addy straddled me, legs to the left and right of my hips, one arm beside my head, another brushing through a rough patch of hair.

"Are you… okay?"

"I. Yeah. More than. After I got banished and I fell down and I got ambushed by wizards and then beat them off and then fought murderbots and then fell off the side of the Cauldron and then learned to dance, transform, play chess, I tried to come back straight away, I really did, but you know it goes, nothing's ever straight with me and haha, that's a sex joke. Sex jokes! Hilarious.

I feel like I'm doing too much and that everything I'm doing is either going to be for nothing or is going to have way more of an impact than I could ever guess, but never in the way I wanted it to, because haha, all I wanted was to get people to stop being at each other's throats and apparently now a wizard wants to kill me and — oh my god, Addy, the pactmaker is called Murl and we have to deal with him or I'll never sleep soundly again." She shushed me with a kiss, just a quick peck on the lips.

Then she went up, pecked my forehead. It was an unusually gentle gesture for Addy. Not as forward, but with undertones of intensity.

"Don't worry. It's handled. You're back. You're okay. That matters. I have something I want to tell you in private, but that can wait. We're going to bed. Together. We won't be sleeping much. But before that, we're taking a shower."

"Also together?" The shadow beneath me turned into a pool. We fell through. Suddenly my back wasn't to the floor, but to the wall tiles in the shower, distinct by their clammy coolness and regular patterned joints. It was pitch black, except for Addy's eyes which somehow reflected the lights like two yellow precious stones.

"Oh," I said, half out of shock as my hands grabbed and found Addy in the same position as before, but lower.

"You don't want to?" she whispered.

"No! Nono, I'm loving it," I whispered back.

"But, like, I'm still fully clothed."

"We can change that." I blinked dumbly at her face as I felt her pull my shirt over my head. With her teeth. There were her eyes again, glowing in the dark, watching, peering into my soul, and accepting everything I was. For a moment, everything was perfect. Then the showers turned on, and we shrieked as ice-cold water soaked us from head to socks, slipping and collapsing all over each other.

"Aaah!"" Shit! Ouch, sorry."

"That was my boob. Ow."

"I know. Sorry. Sorry. Where's the stupid door handle…" One of us tugged the handle. And found it glued shut. A pixie sniggered, laughing growing more distant.

"GODDAMMIT RICO!" The door didn't open. And though the coolness of the water was a shock, with our levels of Body it wasn't too uncomfortable. With how much we were bumping into ourselves in the dark, it started to become fun.

"I love you," I said, hopefully speaking with Addy's face and not the side of her thigh.

"Prove it," she said, smugness radiating off her even in the dark.

"What is this, a test?"

"Yes. And I expect you to pass with flying colors… Sam, why do I feel two of you?"

"Don't worry about it. It's just an illusion."

"Sam. Sam, this isn't funny. It's not fair. Sam, wait!"