Chapter 154 – The Deus Ex Machina Protocol; Act VII

"Little Red Riding Hood takes out a shotgun and shoots the fucker in the face!"

– Bro Grimm's Antique Fairy Tales, an audiobook from the year 2029, exhibited in and preserved by the New British Museum of the High Arts, 2057

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Breathing hard with exhilaration, I danced in three dimensions and bounced up and down through a psychedelic sea of luminous goo splatter.

Tentacles colored in neon rainbows boiled beneath me, above me, around me. My cannonettes raved, stitching and banshee-screeching a billion holes through tentacle nerve clusters, as my Second Wind hurled me right to left and back again past damaged and twitching tendrils.

I left behind me a trail of grenades like breadcrumbs, short-tempered spicy grenades with proximity fuses that didn't bother distinguishing between friend or foe.

If it moved, it died.

The irregular meter of their explosions only added to the maniacal rhapsody to cataclysm I was conducting, and the chaos gave me wings.

I tore order from the madness, my very presence a taunt to the riled up Nines. They followed me and my Chrysaora's colorful streamers of electric fields, 'round and 'round in a giant clockwise maelstrom, tighter and tighter.

Soon, soon, I sang to myself between giggles, soon I'll have 'em.

I swished past a particularly big tree, and twenty meters to my left I spied the ragged swath of silk I'd left as a marker four rounds ago, shortly before a Nine had gotten lucky and lopped off the tip of my tail, Sentinel and all.

No more spinneret for me, I giggled. Then I felt another 'Gutpharmacy' Medical Capsules burst in my stomach. Delicious warmth spread through my belly and radiated down my limbs as nanites soothed the myriad cuts I'd picked up. Again. My pendant's shield had popped long ago, and I rather preferred taking the knives to my arms than risk my antennae.

I bled freely, and my bionites weren't numerous enough to keep up. The emergency pellets stepped in and stoppered my wounds with clumps of chemically bonded hemolymph. If I had any left after the fight, they'd even help me regrow the pieces of tail I'd lost, and if I was particularly quick and took no more injuries, they might even speed up the growth of my wings a little.

The stretch of silk was three meters further away than the last go around. Through my Auxiliant, still floating fifty meters above and waiting for my signal to drop a magnetically attached bomb, I watched the vortex of Nines compress ever more. They were too…malleable to be bothered by lacking space. But they'd make a great target for a bomb.

Just didn't wanna tip them off too early. If I didn't get them all with the first bomb, the remaining ones would wise up instantly and scatter and they'd be absolute hell to track down. The octopus fuckers were smart like that. I wouldn't even risk firing the Auxiliant's cannon, that might be enough to make them think long and hard about why I was maneuvering them ever tighter.

The grenades were already a risk, but…the fact that I was using only proximity fuses seemed to satisfy their natural paranoia.

And I just loved the absolutely unpredictable nature of landmines. They were the embodiment of a hailstorm of thrown monkey wrenches in carefully laid plans.

Considering that I had surprised these fuckers from behind while they were trying to set up for something on the other end, maybe I was too? The thought had me choking on laughter, hard enough that I didn't so much bounce off the next couple trees as crash through them.

I recovered easily and kept moving, smiling as the cracked trunks slowly collapsed on top of the neon tentacle carpet creeping after me. The rain-slick wood was fun to slide along. It didn't give me much traction to work with, but since I could just keep bouncing between the trees, moving at speed wasn't much of a challenge. The Nines also didn't have much issue, seeing as they could just wrap their tentacles around the slippery branches entirely.

All in all, I was having a blast, and the ever tightening spirals I ran were driving my anticipation ever higher. They were a countdown that only ticked faster the lower it got.

A smaller mass of Nines moved further ahead, questing beyond the circles I was drawing. If I let them, they'd waylay my lofty plans of exploding the maelstrom all at once. That wouldn't do.

I engaged my Second Wind's maneuvering thrusters and jumped a dozen meters forward. The aliens reacted, threw tentacles up like a web thinking to catch me. I stopped dead instead, thirty meters away, and tossed a pair of grenades at them.

The fuckers were well familiar with those by now, but even so, they weren't fast enough to escape. I barely made it behind a thick tree—probably the healthiest specimen around—before shockwaves and extreme temperatures annihilated a good section of the aggravated and hyperactive rug of rainbow octopus weeds. Shrapnel pattered through the forest, barely audible above the heavy rain.

Dervish has to be done with that, doesn't she? I don't even wanna think about how much energy she must've already pumped into the river to generate that much steam. How many points has she spent on it? Is she even cooking enough Antithesis to make up for the expense?

A ping from Mission Control tore me from my musings. The whirlpool of Nines was starting to fit inside the lethal radius of the bomb waiting to be dropped. That meant about half of the aliens would die immediately. The other half would survive, injured, heavily so.

I could do a few more laps to wind them even tighter, get them deeper inside the radius. It wasn't a bad idea, but…it wasn't necessary. The tighter the mass of tentacles, the more blades I'd face, and the more difficult it would be for me to maneuver through them without getting ripped to shreds. I was already bleeding too hard for my bionites alone. Worse injuries might risk lamed muscles. I'd get stuck and killed.

No, whispered my survival instincts in the back of my brain and nudged me with excitement for the big boom. Time to end things.

On my final round around, I tossed twice the number of proximity mines towards the outside, and staked a ring of stronger, remotely triggered grenades into trunks, under roots, past the water between rocks, wherever I could reach without getting caught by tentacle blades.

The paranoid fuckers noticed. Their massed movement began losing coherence; individuals broke from the swarm to strike out on their own. I could smell the panic pheromones thickening the air. It just egged me on around the last quarter arc, even as the wider net of mines I'd laid blew up those first questing ones and boxed the rest of them in with the threat of explosive death.

They'll realize the first ones cleared out the mines in just a few more moments. I sped up, kicked off of trees hard enough their trunks cracked.

When I arrived a hundred and eighty degrees from where I'd first approached, I whooped, deactivated the flying bomb's electromagnets, and bounced a hard left, in the direction I expected Leah to be waiting.

Three and a half seconds. That's how long it took the bomb to fall fifty meters.

Three and a half seconds in which I used the Second Wind to blast myself clear of the neon puke of Nines and past the canopy. I covered a good seventy meters' distance, too.

Three and a half seconds in which the Auxiliant reconfigured itself to ride the coming blast's shockwave to follow me. It shunted all sensitive bits into storage until it was nothing but a sleek mass of armor panels and hidden radio transmitters. Even my bird's-eye view went blind when it packed its cameras away.

A single, disposable laser altimeter remained, misused as a rangefinder to track the bomb's descent.

The imaginary click of a detonator echoed through my skull and sent shivers down my spine, just as Mission Control counted zero. I rolled up in a multilayered ball of the Chrysaora's streamers that hummed with energy.

A small sun dispelled the gloom behind me, and its white light illuminated my knees' bones through my skin even with my eyes closed. But the fireball was only a half-second precursor to the actual boom; it cloaked the bomb in plasma. Shockwaves in a plasma became touchable to electromagnetism.

And my lovely Chrysaora was all electricity, pumping lightning down its streamers like blood through arteries. The zapping energies drummed the air with a low drone, and then the half second passed and the little sun exploded like a supernova.

Between one moment and the next I was a negative knot, a hole streaming lightning strike auroras through a wall of plasma. My antennae, even squished between my body and my legs, jolted with uneven discharges spiked pain through my brain. I tumbled through the air, screaming and laughing into my knees, half blind from the impossible brightness around me, tasting an explosion from the inside.

The experience scored itself unforgettably into my synapses, to know what it was like to shape the fundamental forces of the universe so much that I could see a detonation come and tear a hole into it to remain hale.

It broke the notion of common sense.

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Somewhere between five seconds and a dozen eternities later, I rolled to a stop on the ground, grinning and giggling and breathing hard…and perhaps just a little singed. And cut up. And missing sections of my tail, which smarted the most of all.

But really, the pain was hardly going to put a damper on my mood.

Smaller chains of explosions were still going off all around me—my reactive explosive hexweaves blasting stone and other shrapnel before any could hit me. The teleporting disks were expensive, but I didn't really mind. I'd just made us some three thousand points. At least. It was a bit difficult to tell, what with our values yo-yoing up and down so much.

Another crash announced the arrival of my Auxiliant nearby as it bored its armored nose half a meter into the ground. Still giggling and unsteady, I climbed to my feet to wobble my way over to it, relieved when it answered a ping and reported only minor damage—the wanna-be rangefinder was toast.

Everything else was fine and it only took the flying weapons platform another moment to do its purpose justice and deploy hover engines powerful enough to yank itself clear again.

Happy with my cannon's condition, I finally staggered around in a circle to take in my surroundings—and there she was.

Leah's entire armada—plus two new spider behemoths—was parked in an absolute abattoir of an Antithesis killing field. Every time something twitched, a few auxiliary guns would flick over and put another bullet in it.

A hatch popped open in Daddy-Long-Legs's bottom, and warm light spilled from within. A homecoming beacon. Aww.

As much fun as I may have had in the last half hour, nothing did quite as much to lift my spirits as that, not even the mind-bogglingly beautiful and slowly fading energy-rainbows I'd put in the sky with my final stunt.

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