(Rewritten) Ch. 127 – Situation Change!

Digitalist's youthful avatar excitedly waves his chrome arms around and screams into his trendy, ultraNeonRGB, virtucast microphone. He's a rather successful streamer, garnering more real views than bots. It shows in his high-quality equipment, a kit suited to offering professional Deep Dive entertainment to his audience.

"Ladies and Gentlemen! We have news! News indeed! Of fresh, fresh samurai blood! Check this out, recorded only minutes ago through the cameras of New Montreal's very own spy sats!"

A ten second clip plays, showing a view zooming down through a hole in the clouds.

Three larger-than-life spider mechs are gunning it past barriers of broken Antithesis bodies, throwing glowing tracers everywhere. One of the spiders has a huge cannon on top of its thorax, aiming at a large target at the edge of the video. A true monstrosity, and chat spams BugChamp emoji. Dozens of viewers subscribe at the same time and kick off an automatic, celebratory HypeTrain™.

But instead of the cannon firing, the clip ends with a strange, unsatisfying fizz. Subscribers unsubscribe, Chat scrolls with the typical inane comments and dumbassery, but also questions about whom the mechs belong to. Theories about Dakka being a brain-jar'd samurai, more theories about every spider being a different samurai, and yet others about them all only being automated drones.

In seconds, each of the mechs is analyzed in great detail by a thousand non-experts, and the purpose of each protruding tool or weapon guessed at. Ideas compete and start a flamewar. The tagged location of the clip in the ass-end nowhere of Canada is presented as hard proof for more than twelve equally idiotic suppositions.

Digitalist does not, of course, have the answers. Instead he works his art and distracts his audience with a second clip.

"That was not all, my dears, oh no! On the same battlefield, we have another fresh candidate! A pretty one, too!"

A very cute brunette wearing what seems to be black, subtly glimmering stockings and a skintight teddy of the same material swoops through the air and plants a pair of stakes in the back of a far bigger Eleven. Chat cheers as explosions tear the aerial Antithesis apart.

Suddenly, a great, big ball of water hides the new samurai, and Chat boos the visual obstruction of the Pretty One. Then Chat tears itself apart in a frenzy over the new moniker. Digitalist couldn't be happier. Subscriptions are skyrocketing again.

Meanwhile, explosions rip through the water and steam occludes the view for a few seconds. Eventually everything clears up and Chat watches as the Pretty One is revealed again. More flamewars over the name. "She's got huge antennae. Obviously, she should be called Brainwave, idiots!" gains supporters.

This author does not care of course, and has their own designs on Tinea's samurai name.

Ahem. Anyway.

The Pretty One is revealed, and her glimmering teddy flakes off scale by scale and reveals skin. A lot of rosy skin. Chat likes that. Chat likes that a lot. Digitalist looks at his ticking numbers, and likes it a lot, too.

Chat boos again when, just as certain particulars would have been uncovered, the Pretty One grabs a top out of thin air and puts it on with very economical, even mechanical, motions. Remarks are made about the complete lack of the previously displayed grace. More ideas and theories are spun, and more flamewars started. Chat loves nothing more than being a burning dumpster fire, after all.

When the Pretty One equips thoroughly unearthly gear and creates a show for the ages, of rockets and bombs and light and thunder and many, many dead aliens, Chat goes uncharacteristically silent.

It doesn't last long.

– A livestream, trailing just behind current events

***

The height of Leah's eyebrows' climb up her forehead was proportional to the number of missiles and smart bombs zooming across her scanners.

The nice walking war crime is on the warpath! yelled a cheery Ypsi, and Leah chuckled.

"Perhaps," she said wryly, "I should learn to expect Tinea's proclivity for mass murder on the battlefield."

Lana's laughter reminded her that she had virtual guests, and Ypsi's reassurances notwithstanding, that she still wasn't comfortable with exposing the littles to the disturbing effects of her recoil dampener. But as her girlfriend turned the dawning sky bright as noon, she figured maybe that was a useless worry and she wouldn't have to use her cannon at all.

Tinea's rainbow streamers ignited, and a river of parts assembled itself into missiles and bombs as they tumbled along Tinea's new…skirt? Forcefield? Aurora? It did shimmer like one. And electromagnetism was clearly involved. Leah smiled at the stunning sight.

Beautiful colors for a beautiful girl, huh?

A veritable storm of explosions converted the miles-wide clearing into a scorched graveyard, and fires flashed high as the temperature rocketed several hundred degrees up. Leah saw water boil through the heat haze. Steam rose to patch up the cloud cover, and sank to the ground again in colder spots where it created a dense fog. Small tornadoes sprung up and whirled in circles between locations of more extreme temperatures.

Local weather generated by our battle, she mused. She frowned as she realized that bits of burned plant matter rose in the hot air. Some of that stuff might be radioactive from the tiny fission warheads of her 20 mm gatling guns, she wasn't sure.

The tornadoes turned into ash devils, and they were strong enough to pick up bigger pieces of dead Antithesis, including some weird, round shapes that niggled something in Leah's memory. Ypsi interrupted her and highlighted the airborne grapes.

Um, Leah! Those are nest seeds! The fires aren't all hot enough to burn them up, and the winds will carry them away and make more nests downwind!

"Oh, shit. Do we burn it all, or stop it from moving?"

Jora yelled "Language!" and Lana shushed her gently. The girl quieted down, but grumbled about it all being unfair. Leah snorted to herself. She'd gotten too used to not watching her words lately.

The second's easier! We have cryo grenades for your 75 mm mortars. Five points each! And another for teleporting them into the magazines. That'll be, um, around three hundred points altogether? For the entire battlefield.

"Go ahead—and plant them where you think is best."

Oki!

Leah's tactical computers merrily created and consumed predictions of local conditions, all the while updating Leah on the status of the remaining Elevens—they, and the Twenty-Eight, being the sole targets Tinea hadn't wiped out with her explosive hail.

Leah hummed. "Well, looks like I might have to use my weird gun after all," she said to Lana and the children. "I'd better end the call."

"Is it the puke-making one?" asked Sam with a queasy pinch to his face. Jora looked at him and the expression transplanted itself onto her face, too. As always, the sugar of their immature relationship bubbled through Leah and unknotted some of the tension living in her shoulders. The things that had happened to her over the last few days didn't seem so heavy after all.

"Yeah," she said, smiling. "That's the one."

Sam made a few indecisive expressions. "That was the first time I saw proper black."

Jora grew still and her eyes went wide. Then she bounced excitedly and nodded fast enough for her blonde curls to whip around. "It was! Real black!"

Urgh. Aw, fuck. What do I do now? Leah thought, caught between a rock and a hard place. Ypsi did say it wouldn't harm them…

"Leah?" asked Ypsilon in her adult form, and audible to all. Everybody sat up. The kids knew Ypsilon as the adult who made the most sense, and Sister Lana and her colleagues had developed some real appreciation for Ypsilon's ability to teach.

"Yeah?"

"The more they understand the recoil system's potentiality-shunting, the less adverse effects it will have on them."

"...They're still kids. That'll be a bit too complex, won't it?"

"Then let me correct myself. The more their brain knows how to deal with reality being patched, the less disruptive the process is to their perception. They don't need the technical particulars, they just need something for their imagination to hook into. The brain's very adept at inventing whatever lies it needs, after all. Would you like me to prepare them?"

Leah pursed her lips, and thinking of that time when Ypsilon had taken the initiative to kick out the rage-prone teacher, let out a breath of air. Overprotective as Leah was, she'd never known Ypsilon to make a decision she ultimately disagreed with. They'd always turned out for the better, even the ones that came out of the blue.

"Sure. Please do."

"Okay, Leah," said Ypsilon, and began telling the children an extremely abbreviated tale, complete with virtual animations, about mischievous moth-winged fairies that could control time and space, and how fixing their pranks sometimes made people surprise-vomit.

The corners of Leah's eyes crinkled with amusement at Ypsilon's antics, but, knowing that the battlefield waited for no one, she took stock.

The ammunition stores of her Dakka's machine guns pinged her display and reported themselves nearly depleted, the gatling guns' remained at eighty percent, and the Daddy-Long-Legs's 105 mm main cannon was loaded with another prototype gravitic shell. She started scooting over a few hundred meters to line up enough Antithesis corpse walls for the shell to consume on the way past and activate.

Meanwhile, she considered the Elevens above. She could use the twenty mil twin gatling guns loaded with fission-capable cartridges and shred the flying alien troop transports in a hail of miniature nuclear explosions, or switch to HEAT warheads and hose them down until their brains atrophied from internal fires.

Or she could let Tinea take care of them, which was the original plan and much cheaper, points-wise. Except her missile-launching skirt had gone dim and wasn't lighting up again. Tinea remained quiescent.

What's she doing?

Leah tried pinging Tinea, but received no answer and…ungood worries started gnawing at Leah's guts. The tension was back in her shoulders, and somehow she felt alone and cold.

Like when she was shackled to that bed in the facility. She closed her eyes and shuddered.

Then Leah pressed herself to focus on the multi-limbed perception of the virtual body fed into her brain by her piloting implant, and nudged the Dakka's computers with the twitch of an imaginary muscle.

The death-spewing rotary cannons' servos whined as the gimbal swerved around to reorient skywards. Cameras inside the Dakka's ammunition bunkers showed cartridges marked with glowing green rings being extracted from the belts of its main armament and replaced by HEAT shells with glowing orange tips. Class II high-explosive anti-tank warheads that would violently inject superheated jets of molten metal into whatever the round hit.

If Tinea's not moving and attacking, then I'll do it for her. I've got that power now, ran through Leah's mind, even as the rotating cannons spun up and began spitting an expensive, two kilometer-long trail of tracers into the sky. Her shoulders suddenly dropped in relief. She found herself released from a source of stress that had been a constant. She had power, now. True, threatening power.

Power to protect those who were hers.

And the points for all the sensors and knowledge to catch hidden, deadly diseases. She had those, too.

***

> SITUATION CHANGE!

> Ally engaging Threat 28-1! Ally engaging Threats 11-1 through 6!

> Processing outcomes…elimination of all remaining threats: 98% likelihood.

I was, suddenly. I was present. It surprised me and I jerked. Or rather, I tried to, but I couldn't move a muscle. But somehow, I took a breath. My head felt weird, my thoughts railroaded.

I hated it. I couldn't hate it properly. The hate felt railroaded, too. Empty.

> STATUS CHANGE!

> User recovery exceeding threshold. Conditions met. Disengaging Self -> True-Self Emergency Override.

> VANGUARD PROTOCOLS DISENGAGED!

> COMBAT PROTOCOLS DISENGAGED!

> LOGGING PROTOCOLS DISENGAGED!

– Conditions met. Disengaging Self -> True-Self Emergency Override. –

– Disengaging… –

The vice around my thoughts disappeared, and my emotions inflated. The hate wasn't empty anymore. That was good.

I stopped hating, because it suddenly didn't matter anymore, considering the alarm ringing through my head.

– Warning! Terrain! Terrain! –

***