Ch. 144 – Brainf*ck Go Brrrr

"What's the rating on them?"

"Sir, they're city killers, both."

"Both of them? Even Heavy Metal? I get the Battlepoet—we've all seen the recordings. She could drop enough bombs to unmap New Montreal if she wanted to. But Heavy Metal?"

"Yes, sir. See those cylinders in the mechs there?"

"Certainly."

"Those, sir, are dimensional tanks. We're familiar with them from some of the older Vanguard. They mean that we don't know if or when she'd run out of ammunition. But considering how many of them she's got plugged into her logistics, the conservative guess is that she has access to enough materiel to shell a few cities to rubble, too."

– Sergeant Brathurst, advising the financial command of Home Legions Ltd.

⁂

"I am battle-ready!" chimed Chrysaora Plenum in my virtual ear.

I hurriedly stuffed the last of my Foodie's Sacred Satisfaction Burger, Tinea's Exotic Minerals Dope Edition, down my throat and leapt to my feet with all the energy of a caffeinated cartoon chipmunk. "Ready!" I hollered.

Leah, who'd stayed with Dolores at the map and continued discussing our deployment while I'd fueled my metabolism, gave me a thumbs up. I could still see the tension in her; the conflict between the nearly desperate need to just get home to right the violation of having been ripped away; and the responsible correctness of sticking around to protect the locals, to farm points for our future. But it was a sidelined thing which she refused to give any attention.

I supposed that having the end in sight made it easier to bear.

Dolores, too, looked my way.

"If you could step just outside the grove before you turn on your leaf blowers, that'd be great, Battlepoet."

I might have stumbled just a bit, and Dolores's satisfied smirk marked her proverbial missile's splash. The surprise of getting hit with my new moniker—which I hadn't even told anyone present about, short-circuited my processes.

"Uh."

One of Leah's eyebrows rose. "Battlepoet?"

"It's all over the news, Heavy Metal."

Leah's other eyebrow rose. "Heavy Metal?"

"That one isn't," Dolores smugged. "I just made it up."

"What?" I wheezed. Not for the first time, I lamented my brain's failure to requisition efficacious vocabulary.

"Oh! I know this one!" Ypsi interjected via the hologram projector's speakers. "The older samurai often give the newer samurai their names! And Leah doesn't have one yet. But, um, you don't have to accept it if you don't like it."

"Hmmm…?" Leah tilted her head with squinted eyes.

"But! Even though Heavy Metal isn't on any news or streams, it's being used in more than a few forums already! Maybe it's just a, uh, snug fit?"

"Seems to suit the combat hardware you're going for," Dervish added with a thumb's jerk outside, where the walkers were parked.

Leah slowly nodded. "Sure. I'll take it."

Dolores, awkward as ever beneath all the social scripts' aid, happily clapped her on the shoulder. "Popped my newbie-naming cherry, you did."

With a heavy, put-upon sigh, Leah let her shoulders drop. "Of course."

I wondered if she didn't secretly love the attention. She wouldn't be so effortlessly familiar with the dozens of antique skits the lonely vigil's keeper kept throwing at her if she wasn't into the same scene, would she?

It was kind of exciting, discovering this entirely new side to her that she'd kept…very, very private. And it seemed like I wasn't the only one seeing it, either. Dolores ceaselessly found kindling to feed the shy fires of Leah's almost intimate humor.

Or maybe Dolores just couldn't help herself and kept poking the dragon where she was ticklish? I couldn't quite tell.

"Anyway," I muttered, still coming to terms with being addressed by my pseudonym so suddenly, "yes I'll go outside."

Dervish clapped her heels and threw a weird fist-to-chest salute. "For Super Earth!"

I just stared before I waved back confusedly, while Leah groaned into her palms.

Nerds.

Itching with impatient, burger-fed energy to get underway, I ignored all of that, turned around, and speed-walked my way through the leafy tunnel—only to halt in the middle of my step the moment the landscape opened up in front of me again.

Even just after dark, it was exactly as magical as the first time we'd stepped out of the forest, especially with my upgraded eyes. Colorful, buzzing meadows for kilometers, a peaceful wooden walkway curving through the scent-laden vista, and off a few hundred meters to my left, a green sea of tall grasses gently swayed in the breeze.

But the metabolic charge of the ultra-nutritional space burger rode me too hard to really enjoy the serenity. My state of mind was just not compatible.

So, I hopped onto Daddy-Long-Legs instead, bunched my knees, and kicked off into the night with everything my one-and-a-half legs could manage.

The rushing wind triggered my nictitating membranes' substituted blinking reflex as surely as it excited my adrenaline gland, and before I knew it, I was whooping as the Second Wind's motors tossed me high into the sky.

"Tynea," I yelled even as the jets' tanks ran empty seconds later and the engines sputtered, "I'm gonna want me some capacity upgrades for these things!" Getting to stretch my metaphorical legs for only seconds each time I hit the gas was just not acceptable!

I shall recommend some options whenever you have the points to spare, she said drily.

Pouting as I was forced to bob along sedately beneath a slim, long airfoil configured to let me loiter, I forced myself to refocus on my task.

Three hundred meters up, high enough that I found myself watching a second sunset, I could see the haze of model Ones covering the horizon, a brewing, black storm to precede the marching, digging, burrowing horde. There was already directed movement responding to my presence, entire swarms wheeling towards me.

As auroral streamers of energy grew from the Chrysaora's skirt panels and missile parts began to tumble along them, the canopy above my head unfolded more and more to carry the ever-increasing weight of my arsenal, to convert the force of gravity into forward motion, and thereby, into lift.

During my meal, I had dumped nineteen thousand points into raw materials for almost four thousand interceptor clusters. A design based on the Ripfeather rounds I'd already used so effectively, yet further scaled up, and backed by a charge of high-explosive mixed with flakes of slow-burning alloys.

The heat of their slow, smoldering combustion would warm the air around them, and on their own rising thermals, the undying embers would sit like a cloud of wildfire seeds to be inhaled by whichever creatures were caught inside.

The small bodies of model Ones were particularly susceptible to such tactics.

The rockets assembled themselves as quickly as I slotted the plug-tanks. Welded into weapons by flashing arcs of electricity and electromagnetically launched in dozens every second, they formed a carpet of patient death another hundred meters above me.

Nineteen thousand points invested—and I intended to recoup five times that in a single volley of more self-steering ire than I'd ever loosed before.

The very thought engendered a sideways passion in me, the twisted, god conqueror's bloodlust of I came, I saw, I willed victory, and so mote it be.

I regulated my breathing carefully as I sorted out the siren call of animalistic, anticipatory pleasure. There was a difference between it and what had shaped my childhood—it lacked the heavy sadistic glee, for one—but the glowing coals of it nonetheless sat heavily in my belly. It was too familiar, cousin to my father's heavy, narcissistic greed.

It was undeniable that some part of me relished the prospect of taking it all, with fire and brimstone if I so saw fit—and it found support in Leah's dependence on this attack working out; we had not enough points to match her needs for this battle. I'd swear I smelled damp panties when she told me about how she intended to buy the biggest, meanest mechs ever, to meet the threat of a million Antithesis, if I didn't know that her goop suit was hermetically sealed.

She really just needed a few more points, promise, she'd almost panted.

"I should probably look up that Helldiver thing sometimes," I murmured to myself.

Tynea wryly replied, Also added to the to-do list.

But ultimately, I did not want to be the selfish tyrant beast my bloodlust sang of.

I wanted to be cuddly and lovable and smol. And pretty, like the glittering coat of tiny, shimmery-black scales across my bust and throat hiding my flesh, which was as soft and delicious as I wanted to be, sitting atop the Chrysaora's silken bodice. And as neat as the Auxiliant's tiny bomber jacket would be, once I bought it.

Maybe…there was a place for uncompromising, greedy violence, though. Against the Antithesis, at the very least. This was a war against extinction itself, and half-measures would only see us lose it.

Yet drug abuse ran in the family, and my kin had consumed the drug of violence from the firehose rather than the spoon, and then humped the hose for good measure. I was not certain how much I trusted myself to make that distinction…

Until I found myself absently stroking my magic Fingernail Of Pathfinding, and remembered that the goal wasn't perfect balance, but the will and effort to always find my way back to it, even if I stumbled.

Life was full of lessons, and I couldn't rightly expect to dodge them all. Perfectionism is a thing of arrogance.

Strangely satisfied with the permission to run nose-first into the wall if I had to, I…let myself go. I relaxed, somewhere deep down, and felt my cheeks go rosy with adrenaline-flooded arousal. The scent of kerosene had become a trigger already, and the dense cloud of exhaust above my head just stank of explosive carnage and kinetic fury.

Fizzing, liquid silver at the base of my skull whispered of orgasmic reflexes ready to drown out pain and teased my brain with feathery brushes of go-go-go!

The world went bright as my pupils dilated as much as my insane grin did, and then brighter still as three thousand eight hundred micro-missiles yanked the output of their engines all the way up and painted lines of fire across the sky.

⁂

Thirty minutes earlier, shortly before Tinea chowed down

"Why?" I asked.

You would face the same challenge with any other combat implant designed to provide alternative frames of awareness. Fortunately, the risk of neurological schisms is greatest only as your conditioned reflex responds to harm. Outside of those specific moments, that risk is insignificant to non-existent.

"…Then what can I do? Aside from not getting hurt."

You have some options. You could suppress the conditioning through the use of drugs, and rely only on the Quanta's pain-agnostic logic. Those drugs would be expensive by the standards of the medical catalog, but not as compared to your gear. Repeated use may even burn out that reflex entirely.

"That sounds like it would have far-reaching consequences for my…enjoyment of this body, Tynea."

Potentially, though that could be fixed or tailored to your specifications.

Alternatively, you could configure the Quanta to kick your primary awareness out moments before you suffer a grievous-enough injury; this would cost neither points nor time.

"That sounds reasonable."

It is. It's perhaps the option I would recommend for the immediate term, though it would bar you from accessing the Quanta's seat of consciousness, and thereby its time dilation, until your conditioning relaxes again, or at least has settled on a stable level. You could, of course, also choose not to engage the time dilation at all.

"Limiting."

Yes, though the Quanta's and the buds' processes would continue to assist you all the same.

"Yeah, but I don't like that idea. The acceleration of my conscious awareness is invaluable."

Understood. In that case, you may want to pick your moment to occupy the Quanta, and then avoid exiting its seat of consciousness until you have fully healed whatever injuries are setting off your conditioning. This would require the use of those drugs to avoid any unwanted flinching out of the Quanta due to such injuries, but using it once or twice would not cause permanent alterations to your neurology.

"Gotcha."

Thirdly, You could, slowly, recondition yourself through mental techniques to remain seated within the Quanta when injured. That would be a slow process, but it would not require that you damage your conditioning.

Fourth and lastly, you could learn to employ both your conditioning and the Quanta simultaneously, using more mental techniques along with further cerebral augmentation designed to manage these schisms in a controlled manner.

"Mental techniques?"

Meditations that cause wanted, targeted decoherence, tuned to align with your installed augmentations. Intentional insanity in small doses to halt uncontrolled insanity, like using fire to create firebreaks against a forest fire.

"Huh. That…actually sounds metal. And dangerous. And time-consuming. Is that really advisable or feasible?"

⁂