(Rewritten) Ch. 132 – The Decennial Memorial

Bear Grylls counts among humanity's oldest, and strangest samurai.

We don't know where he was born, nor the circumstances of his initiation to Vanguardhood. We don't even know his real name, or his age.

We do know he likes to drink his own pee, no matter how much his AI begs him to buy juice boxes. At least he filters it.

We also know that he has industrialized the roast-spitting and barbecuing of Antithesis to an impressive degree. He does not eat them, thankfully, nor does he sell them for consumption, except as charcoal fuel-briquettes.

There is not a human alive who doesn't know his signature salt-over-elbow flavoring of the briquettes before every sale.

– Excerpt of a Samulyfe article on Bear Grylls, authored by NastLomai, 2055

***

Baie-Comeau was a private little village situated on the shores of one of the largest rivers in North America, the Saint Lawrence River. (A since-forgotten corporation had once attempted to buy the river and rename it to Poutine Passageway™. The corporation went bankrupt years before humanity figured out that water and profit did not share sentences with the Antithesis around.)

The collection of idyllic, generational houses lay almost six hundred kilometers, or a little more than three hundred sixty miles, northeast of New Montreal. It had a small boutique hotel hanging above the water that served as a rest stop for the ultra-rich and their yachts. The inhabitants were mostly self-sufficient, grew their own food in cellars full of compact synthfarms, and only occasionally made a trip to Quebec City or New Montreal to buy tech with the money the hotel generated.

Around a hundred families lived there, and Dolores was in fact not the first samurai to be selected from this remote place, but the third. Perhaps…that was to be expected from a small village with a tiny footprint and a lot of guns to protect it, surrounded by aliens on land and in water.

Few non-samurai could claim to have taken out Antithesis nests—that was something only the larger mercenary companies might manage. Yet this tiny village had done so thrice, and thrice it had resulted in a new Vanguard.

Ten years ago, like clockwork, the Antithesis had built a nest too close for comfort, and once again, the village sent out a group of twenty volunteers to burn it down.

Dolores was the reason they'd survived that attempt. Twenty unsuccessful adults had crawled home, bruised, beaten bloody, skin clawed to shreds. Grinning madly. When Dolores turned around and walked into the forest again to finish the job, she'd done so as a Vanguard.

Just like the two samurai before her had done.

But unlike those two, she'd decided to stick around after she'd destroyed the nest. It hadn't been a popular choice with the village. After the first samurai had 'betrayed' them by leaving, the inhabitants had developed a serious chip-on-the-shoulder towards the samurai as a whole.

When the second crusade led to yet another samurai, they'd noticed a pattern instead, and their pride subsumed their antagonism and grew to include the discovery of what seemed to be a foolproof way to make Vanguards instead. They gently encouraged the second samurai to leave as well, so that ten years later, they'd get another chance.

The third round, with Dolores being chosen, cemented the attitude. The village celebrated, proud of having contributed more to humanity's survival than some metropolises.

Yet Dolores did not follow suit and leave.

If you stay, they shouted, then there might not be a fourth!

Yes, she answered, but why should I have to leave home if I want to protect it?!

Three years of arguments followed. It became stressful enough that she'd begun to regret her decision. The slow alienation drove her selection of upgrades. She'd moved out of the shared houses, turned her body into something closer to a statue than a living human.

Entirely inured to weather and wear, she'd taken up her vigil on a plinth she'd placed in the quietest corner of the village: The Decennial Memorial, a small graveyard to honor those who'd died during the previous two crusades. The place her mother rested, one of three to die in the second, twenty years ago.

Her former neighbors had finally come to their senses after she'd been the only one fast enough to save a toddler who'd snuck out at night, somehow without anyone noticing until the kid started screaming.

By the time Dolores was welcome again, she'd already lost her emotional connection to the others. She had become comfortable in her vigil, always connected to the Mesh on top of her pedestal. Her machine body simply remained at rest in the real world.

She became the local guardian, mysterious because nobody really knew what she was capable of after their relationship had soured. The strange hate the villagers had had for her flipped into an equally strange respect, and from there, into an even stranger quasi-spiritual worship. She'd decided she was perfectly fine ignoring all of it.

Dolores found new friends online, and became a distinguished Nerd, one who'd mastered some truly obscure games. When she'd shared pictures of herself on her plinth with a few of them, head down and face hidden in the shadows of her cowl, holding her deceptively simple scythe that could cut through swaths of Antithesis with a single swing, they'd gone digging. And digging. It took them months, but they did find the fifty years old game about guilds at war and the specific class within, and they'd baptized her the Dervish.

It suited her.

Years passed, and Dolores waited. She regularly hunted any Antithesis within hundreds of miles to gain strength, and at the start of 2057, she'd finally unlocked her first Class III catalog. No longer did the moniker of Dervish merely suit her; she embodied it now.

She'd also marked the month on her virtual calendar. She'd had a feeling that time was up, and that there'd be another, bigger nest. She might've even hyped it up in her mind.

But, she supposed, such is the occupational hazard of Nerds everywhere.

Shortly after dawn, a huge mass of Antithesis pinged Dolores's remote sensors, fairly far to the north of Baie-Comeau, traveling at an average speed of five miles an hour. Trundling along, conserving energy perhaps. They were heading her way.

One nest you wanted, she snorted to herself, not for the first time in the last two days. A global invasion you get.

Her trusty AI assistant counted them and sorted them by model. Several hundred thousand Ones, twenty thousand Threes, a quarter as many Fours, a thousand each of the Fives and Sixes, and several hundred of a variety of double digits.

I estimate they'll arrive in roughly eighteen hours, Adymra said in his smooth baritone and arabic accent. He'd adopted it after it became clear how much Dolores enjoyed exploring the sunkissed vistas of old Egypt oases—online. She was a Nerd, after all.

"Just before midnight."

Yes, Dolores.

"Likely casualties along their path?"

None.

"Anything else of interest?"

Several more nests's worth of Antithesis that'll join the march.

"We'll let them come, then. The more the merrier."

Apropos of merriment in numbers, you won't be fighting alone. I've detected two additional Vanguards coming, presumably to deal with the Antithesis. They'll be here in less than twenty minutes.

Dolores saw them. Three spider mechs racing down the defunct highway, well ahead of the alien horde, covered in weaponry. Including a heavy Class II main armament—something that could wipe out a village if the owner was careless. She decided that she needed more information if she wanted to be certain of no such chance.

Her passive sensors couldn't penetrate the mechs' skin, but Adymra played a video of an injured, winged girl samurai dipping underneath the biggest of the mechs. He also loaded schematics of the spider that showed an integrated piloting pod. It seemed about the right size to fit the girl without her wing pack.

"Two Vanguards? I see only one."

Instead of answering, he played another recording of the mechs and the flying samurai fighting an offshoot of the horde. The central mech was moving with the organic chaos of a human pilot rather than the sharp precision of a drone, even though the girl was clearly not in the pod.

Dolores hummed. "I see."

She was curious about her prospective visitors, and her passive sensors were too insensitive. They weren't even Class II.

Her active sensors, however, were a different beast entirely. She kept them dialed all the way down so they wouldn't be noticed, and pointed them at the spiders. Then she slowly increased the wattage until the blurry picture of the vehicle's insides gained definition.

There were indeed two women inside the cramped quarters, stacked on top of each other and resting. The top one had obvious non-human features. A long tail wrapped around the shoulders and arms of the bottom pod's occupant, with plenty left to spill across her abdomen. Huge antennae that combed the air above the sleeping girl and twitched every few seconds in her dreams. Weird, spidery, arching alien arms that were unusually hot…

"Ah." The heat was being produced by extraordinary fast growth. And the complicated, non-standard parachute-slash-jetpack setup wrapped around those developing limbs explained the "wings" from the recording.

Dolores's sensors told her that the bottom lady was only dozing. She had prosthetics for arms and legs, but they did nothing to hide her beauty, or how tall she was. Her crash couch extended itself out of her pod a little to make space for the attached limbs. Dolores wasn't sure why she'd strapped herself in with clearly makeshift belts instead of securing herself fully within the pod, but perhaps the contented smile she wore as her fingers lazily dug into the fur was explanation enough.

Even as she explored the mechs and their weapons with her sensors, she found herself drawn to the redhead lady over and over. That smile. It was magnetic like nothing else. Dolores had seen pretty men and women. The ultra-rich that would sail by in their hardened yachts, they frequently displayed physical perfection. But that smile radiated luxurious intimacy without even trying. There was something so natural about it that money failed to provide.

Suddenly, the sleeping woman's antennae jolted in her direction and her body tensed imperceptibly. Absorbed in her observations, Dolores had cranked up her sensors without thinking, to see better. The red-haired lady's eyes snapped open, her face transformed to instant battle readiness. She had a raptor's eye prosthetic, with a glaring white slit pupil from which wisps of fog poured. Dolores's Nerd gamer heart beat a little faster.

"Ah, crap." Dolores shook herself out of it, breaking her stillness for the first time in days. She yanked her output down. She'd probably rattled them with her powerful scanner emissions.

The lady was properly awake now, her eyes rapidly moving back and forth. Dolores caught the faint rays of active sensors scanning their surroundings for several seconds. Eventually, the woman settled again, sighing and frowning. Clearly still alarmed, but unable to detect any threats.

"Sorry…" Dolores mumbled, then snorted. She couldn't quite decide if she wanted to feel bad about having disturbed them, or pissed about almost getting caught. She was Class III, after all, and her scans had revealed nothing above Class II tech on the mechs or the two women. There was a certain amount of pride involved.

The cute brunette was still asleep. Or did she only appear asleep? The rhythmic, deep breathing of sleep had changed just a touch. It would've fooled a normal human observer, probably. Even with her sensors feeding her a wealth of detailed information, Dolores wasn't certain.

When the redhead climbed to her feet, still enveloped in fluffy tail, and slipped into the bunk to lovingly caress the cheek of the smaller woman, she decided that further intrusion probably went beyond inappropriate.

From what she saw, neither of the two were cold-hearted enough to give no shit about the locals while fighting, and with that, she felt she had no further justification to peep.

Even if the two girls were really, really adorable, smiling at each other like that.

***

"It's gone," I said to my love, whose lovely smile was a much lovelier way to wake up than the sudden deluge of energetic fields that had criss-crossed us and our mechs only seconds ago. It'd been all kinds of weird, too. I could swear I'd sensed some of the bouncing lightwaves get teleported out, along with other energies that felt like electromagnetic radiation, but clearly didn't act like any considering that we were alive, rather than microwaved.

Fucking adrenaline shock.

Leah raised her eyebrows at me and asked, "You felt that?"

"Yep. These puppies aren't for show," I replied pointing at my feather dusters.

Leah grinned at me, twitching slightly when said puppies tickled her ears. Her own fault for being so dang interesting.

"Considering that the scans were decidedly technological in nature, and that we're not getting shot at nor warned away, I'm guessing we'll find a friendly-enough samurai at the village," she said.

I nodded. "Still wanna have that talk? We'll have most of the day until the salad comes."

"Mm." Leah's eyes got more serious. "I really think it's necessary."

"Do we retreat again for privacy?"

Leah shook her head. "That's fine, we can just ask for privacy."

"Okay," I murmured. Leah was too used to having others around her to share my natural inclination to find privacy by removing myself, I supposed.

I studied Leah some more, drinking in her beauty. She looked a lot more relaxed now, after she'd had a chance to rest. I, as well, found myself serene. Tynea's Memory Seal had worked. The pain, the stress, the physical high, it all felt like it'd happened months ago.

It won't be a minefield to sort out anymore, will it?

Which was really great, because I hated having holes in my memories.

***