(Rewritten) Ch. 112 – Disorder

The view rattles, slips, and falls. The camera hits the ground hard, the lens cracks, artifacts tear the view.

It tumbles to a stop with a plastic tock. The device's digital stabilizers work to clear up the picture, rotate it by ninety degrees, and remove most of the glitching.

The curious observer observes part of a nondescript road. Trash, dirt, and all kinds of alien bodies litter the asphalt. A lot of dead alien bodies. Smashed, squished, shredded, shattered corpses of Antithesis.

Suddenly a new wave of green-and-black shapes covers the view, eerily silent in their presence. Only the clicking and scraping of their claws can be heard.

From the left, faint sounds become audible. Music? Yes, music. It's distorted, played by overtaxed speakers.

Gas, Gas, Gas!~

It's coming a little closer, getting a bit louder.

I'm gonna step on the gas!

A whole lot louder. It's so loud that the microphone of the camera goes tinny.

Tonight I'll fly~

It's properly blaring now. The ground vibrates.

And be your lover~

The ground is shaking and the camera has a difficult time keeping the picture stable.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!

A horn blares, tires squeal.

Then, in a split-second eternity, a white Japanese truck—horn still blaring—crashes into the view from the left and plows through the horde of aliens.

The music mix drops and switches tracks. The moment continues to draw out, unnaturally so. Aliens go flying in slow motion, plant matter is crushed, and the truck hasn't lost an iota of momentum as it violently parts the onslaught.

Deja vu, I've just been in this place before!~

Something intangible seems to snap and the truck races off to the right in a flash.

The music recedes a little. The doppler effect makes it sound duller than it really is.

Higher on the street!~

Crushed corpses hit the floor and it's very apparent that their state matches the previous carnage. That truck has, indeed, been here before.

More squealing of tires, the music rapidly gains volume again, and the truck returns. This time its grill is pointed right at the camera.

And I know~

A moment before the camera is smashed, the observer gets a clear view of the customized number plate.

It reads: THE ISEKAI TRUCK

It's my time to go!~

The observer twitches in surprised sympathy, as tinny squealing and crashing signals the violent end of the camera.

– Recovered recording of Isekai Truck in battle, fellow samurai and best friend of Road Rash, July 2056

***

"Hold on tight, Tinea!"

I sure fucking did. There was a new energy in Leah's voice. Something explosive, something angry.

Something that promised retribution.

Daddy-Long-Legs hopped forwards a meter or two, then started running again, with that regular lurch from the leg that had been ripped away. My hands clenched on the edge of the cot as we swerved, went a little sideways. My stomach rebelled, my tail tightened around Leah and her crash couch as Leah's spider abdomen ducked out of the line of fire.

Through my scouts, I saw the alien turret rotate to our rear, aiming past the cabin.

The lights inside went from soft gold to an alien black that had the little hairs on my nape stand on edge. I shouldn't have been able to see anything. Instead every last detail of the living space stood out in stark detail. My shoulders hunched. There was a sense of primal viciousness to it, like a predator's hunting gaze.

A sudden, all-encompassing static charged the air. Black lightning flashed from the one-oh-five's turret across the outer skin of the spider. We went weirdly weightless.

My sensilla fuzzed and frizzed, then, almost gentle in its finality, the tolling gong of the cannon's fire stroked across my antennae, down the back of my neck, along my spine, all the way to the tip of my tail.

Daddy-Long-Legs lurched, and didn't lurch. It was like there were two of him, two of us, and the other…copy? Potential? The other us-but-not went flying with all the force and more, only to shatter and cease existing moments later. Like a mirage.

I wanted to rub my eyes, but I found myself locked in place. I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. And I couldn't tell if that was all me, or if I was being held there. Something was hinky.

It, the thing that maybe held me, disappeared when the black light reverted to golden.

Part of me tracked the flying shell, and part of me tried to replay the last few moments.

What had happened, exactly? There was a black light. And then…

Uh.

There'd been a black…

What was I trying to replay?

Huh?

Oh, the shell. Right.

It had flown across the kilometers, towards the Twenty-Eight, like a normal shell.

Uh…

…

Why wouldn't it have been normal?

N… Nevermind.

And then it exploded a tenth of a second away from the Twenty-Eight. It turned into a black, rotating whirlpool of strange smears of light that…bounced off the alien and dissipated as it clanged away into the sky.

…Fuck?

I zoomed the drone's view in and looked closely at the dense bone-plate we'd hit.

Ah, we did do damage. Good.

The bone's surface was off-white and kind of glossy. Like polished diamond, but bone. It looked stupidly dense. It looked like it would be uncomfortable to touch with how dense it was, like it might bruise me just from how immovable the material would be.

But in the center, there was a pure white scar, a whirled galaxy starburst.

Not very deep though. A centimeter? Two?

"Load another, please, Ypsi," said Leah. She sounded like she was half annoyed, half disappointed. Pissed that the Twenty-Eight wasn't gone, but trying to keep it out of her voice.

Oki! Um. You used it wrong, though!

"Oh?"

Yeah! The Disorder has a charge! You can trade that for mass and energy. Shoot it through softer material to prime it, then it'll be stronger by the time it reaches the Twenty-Eight! It's why I gave you this one. Tippy-toppy-peak of Class I! Annoying to use, but it's good against big enemies in a line.

"Oh! I see. Thank you, Ypsi."

The giddiness was back in Leah's voice, any disappointment blown away.

Mm! The Class II version is nicer. No priming!

"I'll bet."

Ypsi teleported the second shell into the loader for another twenty-five points, and Leah reversed our course. We were moving away from the highway again, but we were lining up to hit several Fourteens.

I stayed silent, just absorbing everything that was happening. Something had unsettled me, and I couldn't put a finger on it. It was disquieting, and I didn't know why.

So, I just kept my eyes open. Watching. Learning.

Leah either hadn't noticed whatever was off, or she already knew and it wasn't dangerous. That let me settle a little, gave me the patience to observe.

We'd made a major tactical error earlier. We were occupying a mobile vessel, something designed to be fast and deadly. But we'd stood still, and worse, hadn't even mitigated the risks of doing so with proper precautions. Sneaky as the siege breakers were underground, just a few sensors scattered around would've still increased our chances of sensing its approach.

But we hadn't even thought of that. And Leah had paid the price.

I was too experienced to make that kind of mistake. But…I also hadn't really seen any action for longer than I'd been alive by the time that I crossed the Atlantic.

Couldn't realistically blame myself. It's not even like we had had the time to prepare properly. Racing home wasn't just a question of wants and wishes, it did actually affect the mental stability of Leah. She needed to be home. If we wanted to prepare for a mission like this, for all the things that could go wrong, that would take…weeks, probably.

Should I have asked Tynea for hand-holding? Probably. Being reticent about it only endangers us. I sighed at my willful resistance against that thought. The heart and the mind did not concur. But then she didn't offer either. Is she even allowed to?

The light suddenly switched from the comfortable and soft gold, to an alien, threatening black, and the hairs across my nape crawled. My whole body tensed, as if something truly deadly was staring me down.

Huh?

I felt like I'd been here before.

I rapidly switched to the camera of a nearby drone. There was nothing I hadn't already seen, at least not in visible range. Our tremor sensors didn't pick up anything either.

No. This…trepidation came from us.

My mental eyes looked at our mech. Black lightning slithered across the outside of Daddy-Long-Legs. We were still moving, but slowly and deliberately. Lining up the best shot. Leah had a plan, I felt the tension in her body ratchet up with every motion.

The thousands of tiny stars across the spider had also all tinted an eerie black. I thought I'd go blind without the illumination, but instead, everything was excruciatingly clear. Like I had no choice but to see it all.

Shivers scraped across my spine, and then there was a low, rolling chime-slash-gong as the cannon went off.

What a peculiar thing.

It was as if a big, furry paw gently dragged itself across my back and along my tail, to the very tip.

Then the recoil hit. No, it didn't.

Or did it?

Huh? Oh!

A ghostly copy of us and of Daddy-Long-Legs flung away, and it seemed to absorb all the recoil and more. It was thrown several dozen meters clear of us. But before it could hit anything, it just shattered and dissipated, like a mirage.

…

Mirage?

Huh?

I'd…thought this before, hadn't I?

I'd thought…what?

Uh.

My brain scrambled for something. I'd just… Something was off. Not for the first time.

Right?

I could feel the loose ends in my head. In my Quanta. What was I thinking about?

Oh!

The shell! Leah had fired it only a few dozen meters away from the closest Fourteen, and the Quanta helped me remember the details.

The esoteric grenade had cleared the barrel and jumped the short distance like a perfectly…normal…shell…

Weird.

And then the fuze ticked down microseconds before the projectile would've hit. Its internal machinery engaged, and the chaotic-mass generator spun up. It created a disordered ball of ultra-dense artificial mass, designed to shred space with its uneven distribution of stressors.

The projectile's spin turned the ball of writhing gravity into a frantic whirl, the air around it whining like a jet turbine. The gravitic whirlpool only grew more violent as it flattened out into a disk, and then it hit the front of the first Fourteen.

Instead of bouncing away, it ate a tunnel into the monster. It ripped its flesh and bones into itself, and the more it consumed, the faster it spun. I could see something light up at the very center of the twisting mass.

Half-way through the huge alien, an energetic cone grabbed the atmosphere behind the projectile. And then it shoved with a violence that tickled my endorphins.

I recognized the pulse. That was quite similar to the supra-pulse of my own micro-missiles' Javelins. And just like those Javelins, this projectile suddenly tore a line across the entire clearing, far too fast for even the Quanta to track.

It intersected with the right hindquarter of the Twenty-Eight.

I jerked when Leah howled with glee as one of its legs was ripped right off. I looked at her and I found a strange sort of satisfaction, a mean gleam in her eyes that I really didn't like. It stuck sideways in my heart.

Panic twisted my insides. It wasn't right.

It wasn't like her, either. I saw the twisted vengeance of an abused victim seeking satisfaction in torture. Only mean-spirited, corrupted blackness waited down that road. I'd seen it as a child. It created a bitterness that lashed out against the wrong targets.

I'd been one of those targets very often. Tears sprang into my eyes.

No.

I couldn't let her fall like that.

***