Update + Ch. 141 – Drop Dead Gorgeous

"It's just another manic monday!"

– Raoul 'Renegade Ralph' Moulinette

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Beneath the softly swaying boughs of paradise on Earth, Leah twitched as I tickled her nostrils with the tips of my antennae.

She'd stopped kneading my ass unconsciously half an hour ago, and, according to Tynea, had passed her last dream phase. She was coming to, very slowly, as the sleep-inducing chemicals and medicine-adjacent samurai bullshit released their hold on her biology.

So, I'd decided to welcome her into the waking world. Playfully. I was still marveling at having an impish side, but I absolutely loved Leah's reactions. The wry amusement, or the spellbound enchantment that sometimes hit her. Absolutely addicting.

With my fluffy tail wrapping around her shoulders and cushioning the back of her head against any sudden twitch-based bonking, I leaned above her on my elbows, gently pinching my antennae's stems with my thumb and index while the fluffy tips wiggled around across Leah's face.

She scrunched her eyebrows and my floofers fluffed across her forehead. She turned her head, and my ticklers tickled her ear. She mumbled, and I giggled. She finally woke when she sneezed, blinking with sleepy disorientation.

Leah's boot-up sequence included the kneading of her remaining natural eye, rubbing of her nose after a yawn, and a contented smile as she stretched hard enough I could hear her spine pop.

When she relaxed again, one of her hands rested on my lower back, just above my tail's root, and just beneath the Second Wind's parachute pack. Her attention arrested mine, though, as her eyes twinkled up at me. Even my antennae had stilled. Mostly. Sort of. They were still irrepressible puppies, after all.

Blushing a little from being so intensely held in Leah's focus, I cast about for something to say.

"Aside from being drop dead gorgeous, what do you do for a living?"

Chuckling, she grinned widely. "Been a while since you dug up one of those."

"I knooow," I whined and ducked my head against the side of her neck. It didn't stop her from chuckling more, but at least she patted my back and squeezed my shoulders with her other arm.

"I think I know what I'm gonna do with my limbs, Tinea."

"Oh?" I asked, lifting my head excitedly. I could all but sense Leah having come to some sort of conclusion against all the pain and helplessness she'd gone through.

"Yeah," she sighed in a relaxed way, "it only took me realizing that I didn't have to consider all my limbs as one, just because I lost all of them at once."

Nodding, I agreed. That made sense, and I was well aware that that's exactly the kind of corner one was likely to think themselves into.

Leah continued, looking past me at her outstretched arm, "I miss my natural arms. Having lost them, and having artificial arms, is particularly offensive. It's like an ongoing wound, and I think forcing myself to accept the artificial crap is just…being obstinate."

"To a degree where it'll stop the pain from scabbing over?"

"Yeah."

"And your legs?" I asked. I did rather like the dancing, rolling gait the prosthetics gave her, and it wasn't lost on me that she'd noticed my appreciation. Maybe that had made a difference?

She smiled at me knowingly, and I supposed I hadn't exactly tried to hide my thoughts. "I want to experiment with my legs. See what kind of samurai bullshit I can work into them."

"Any ideas?" I prompted her while I settled my chin on my hands, on her boobs. Yummy, warm softness just had a way of making the day, didn't it?

When she lifted her head so she could keep looking at me, I bunched enough tail underneath it to be a fluffy pillow.

"No particulars yet, but I'm thinking mostly defensive stuff for the city. I don't intend to be fighting Antithesis from anywhere but inside my pod, after all."

"A mix of lethal and non-lethal, then?"

"Probably. I'm a bit worried about protecting the littles—weapons are equally dangerous to intruding corpos and cute littles, but I'll need some nonetheless. Some tools as well. We'll see."

I hummed. "Say, what about that white mist you have on all your Warforge items? Can you weaponize it?"

Leah's eyebrows shot up with intrigue. "Now that's a hella nasty idea."

"Um!" interjected Ypsi through a video call. Her unbelievably cute, demure little girl avatar was kneeling politely on a sitting cushion, clothed in a deep, vibrant burgundy cross between a Japanese kimono and a princess dress. She lifted a finger. "It's very possible! And there's different versions too. For different enemies! To fight the Antithesis, the spiders' vapour generators can make a chemical base aerosol that'll flow down the mechs' legs. It's super bad for organics."

"Super bad, huh?" Leah giggled.

Ypsi nodded energetically. "Yup! It makes them melt! It's the opposite of acid, which just makes them burn, and the burned layer can end up sealing and protecting the tissue beneath from more acid. But bases are a lot more, um, mean! Because the liquefied skin and muscle flows away, and now the chemicals can go deeper. It's great against melee crawlies."

"Oh dear," I whispered. Holy fuck. That was blighted. Leah only seemed more intrigued. I supposed she had personally experienced plenty of reasons to employ aggressive defenses.

"Yeah! But, um, there are less killer variants, too. More appropriate for humans."

I chuckled wryly. I sure hoped so—there weren't many people I could think of who deserved that level of horror.

"For example, poison gasses that asphyxiate"—Appropriate my ass—"or airborne paralytics that just disable." I…wasn't actually sure if ye olde Geneva Conventions would've had an issue with those, but I could see such zone control being very useful.

Leah asked, "Can the upgrade switch between those options?"

"Yup! And they can go back to the cosmetic vapor. And invisible, scentless and tasteless ones for sneaking into enemy bases, too!"

"I do like that," I added, "considering that whoever kidnapped us would have such bases."

Leah nodded. "That seems like a very reasonable upgrade, Ypsi."

"Oki! I'll earmark it!"

"And you, Tinea? Have you sorted out the recordings?" she asked me.

"Yeah," I answered and linked an edited clip of our battle.

It was a strange thing I was testing, in the effort of better mastering my Quanta. I'd always just sent messages and packages, but this time, I was hosting the file and let Leah access my brain. Servers were a perfectly normal thing in the Mesh and networks in general, but it was…an experience to be one myself. To sense automated thoughts actively routing data in lieu of switches and data cables.

It helped drive home the fact that the Quanta was, as much as it was me and part of my brain itself, still a machine. A calculator that could be controlled and managed. Not a foreign thing I was helpless against.

"The clip's a list of stuff that went wrong. I've summarized our mistakes, if that's fine?"

"Sure."

"Okay." I let the clip play. "So, the biggest issue we ran into was the ambush by the Twenty-Eight."

Leah jerked when she saw the creature's maw break through the ground right beneath Daddy-Long-Legs, but I'd cut the clip before that horrible moment of hurtful echo of tearing metal. There was no need to retraumatize her, Memory Seal or not. Instead, sensor readings popped up, and Leah relaxed with a heavy breath.

"These are the readings of the tremor sensors in your spider's legs," I continued. "Do you think you can catch the signs of the digger's approach?"

A small frenzy of mental activity chased itself through my brain as she skimmed back and forth across the recording. There were several spikes in the graphs' lines, and Leah quickly put things together.

"The indicative ones are the ones where all the legs felt the same quakes at the same time, aren't they? The explosions and such are all traveling waves coming from known directions, but the Twenty-Eight came up right in the middle, and that meant the legs all sensed its vibrations in the same instant, and there was no known cause for the spike."

"Yeah."

"But…those vibrations, even the spike, they're so weak. The explosions hundreds of meters away were louder. The recoil of the cannon was deafening. How'm I supposed to even notice anything below that?"

I smiled at Leah's plaintive tone. "I don't think you should even try. Preparation would've covered you, and that was our first mistake."

"...I suppose we didn't bother setting up the battlefield, huh?"

"Nope. No extra sensors, which you would've needed to catch that ambush in time. No contingencies if we needed to flee. We barely chose a viable playground, and that was it."

"But…I'm a samurai. Shouldn't I not have to worry about that stuff?" Leah grumbled.

Grimacing, I sat up. "And that was my biggest mistake. I let myself get lazy like that when, really, I know better."

Leah kept silent as she studied me and digested my words. Her hands went behind my butt and pulled me forward onto her belly, and she tented her legs so I could rest my back against her thighs. The wing arms made that a little awkward, too.

I let the dappled sunlight playing over her face distract me for a little while, until Leah asked, "We overestimated the Hatchet, didn't we?"

"Yeah. It's still only Class I, even if it cost a lot. And honestly, that's another problem I should've noticed immediately. I used to not make such dangerous assumptions."

"Before you…crossed the Atlantic?"

"When I was still fighting, yes. There's a part of me that wants to treat being samurai as a completely separate thing from my childhood experiences. But," and the words were battery acid on my tongue, "fighting is fighting, and the training isn't irrelevant. Even if I want to see no connection between this and that, even if the strategies for fighting Antithesis are different, just admitting there is one hurts."

Leah tipped me over on top of her and hugged me tightly. Her metal arm was hard against the back of my skull where she tucked me beneath her chin, but I appreciated it nonetheless. It wasn't like I was gonna bruise, and I loved being loved. It was a special thing, special enough to lift my mood no matter what.

Sighing contentedly, I highlighted the early parts of the clip and continued, "I allowed myself to fall into unprofessionalism, and we suffered for it. I didn't advise you the way I should have, and there was much we could've done, beyond seeding sensors, to ameliorate my initial lack of presence before I could get properly mobile."

"Even if we were pretty low on points?"

"Even then. The simplest advice would've changed the entire flow of the battle by itself: A Hatchet should never stop moving, not even when shelling positions kilometers away. That alone would've rendered the Twenty-Eight's attack useless—they're siege-breakers, not ambushers. They're meant to break fortifications from below, and Daddy-Long-Legs just isn't that."

"Huh," Leah mumbled. I could hear the gears of thought and learning turn in her head, absorbing the military concept and building on it for herself. "I really wanna upgrade my fleet of mechs, don't I?"

"I'd say so. I have a few ideas too, if you wanna hear them?"

"Shoot."

"What do you think of a proper main battle tank? A real heavy beast."

***