(Rewritten) Ch. 30 – World Gone To Shit

"FUCK MY LIFE!"

– They, who have contracted a terminal case of reality

***

All was quiet. Not even a rustling beyond our own. I circled around the bubble just in case, but nothing jumped at me.

"All good, Leah. Come out," I whispered, and moved to the door to watch the corridor.

Once Leah scrambled her way out of the tunnel and joined me, I carefully stepped into the still air of the hallway, and focused both ways.

Exit first? Or the pantry, stuffed with biomass any Antithesis would go for? I fell back on old training—Work from the inside out, make sure your back's free. So I turned to the right and cleared the cells as I came by them. No models in need of killing.

I checked on Leah to see how she was doing with her balance, and she appeared none the worse for wear as she wobbled along behind me. In fact, she seemed downright chipper, out of the bubble. Having eyes again must make exploring this prison an entirely different experience, huh?

Reassured, I continued all the way to the nutrient storage, but again, found no alien plants there.

Working my way back past our cell towards Leah's, I stopped just before and warned Leah gently. "There'll be two bodies in there. I already searched them once, but there was nothing to find. Unless maybe you think you might recognize who they were?"

Leah hesitated for a moment. I could see the knowledge of whose bodies they were playing through her eyes, and the recognition that this was her cell.

She moved up and stopped in front of the room with a heavy exhalation. After a quick shaky glance at the bed I'd found her on, she steeled herself, and moved through the doorway to look at the dead people's faces.

She shook her head at me, and said, "Nope. Don't know 'em."

Well, there goes that chance at a trail. I took pictures of both from various angles, made sure they didn't have some sort of actor's facial mask on, and led Leah out of the room with a gentle hand to give her a good squeeze in the corridor. She returned the hug and buried her nose between my antennae with a wry smile, when she saw me glance up at her worriedly. But before long, we got going again.

We cleared the facility room by room, worked our way past the guard's room, carefully snuck up the stairwell, all the way to the exit, where the door stood open above my strings, which didn't vibrate except from our own motions.

I slowly crept forward and found only an empty landing pad.

Whispering quietly, I said, "Leah, I think we need to check around the building. I still see absolutely no indicators as to where that model One came from."

"Alright, I'll be behind you," answered Leah equally quietly.

Nodding, I went around the corner, quartering the pie as naturally as if I hadn't left that part of my life two decades in the past. Part of me would always be most relaxed on the knife's edge, I supposed.

Model Three, twice. Model One, one. Model Four, one.

They saw me, and at the same moment that the first one scrambled in my direction, I commanded, "Sentinel, dumb 7.62!"

The crosshair of the Sentinel shifted slightly, aligning with its own barrel for non-guided projectiles, and the moment the icon for the Sentinel flashed ready, I opened fire on the Threes, and let the guided Foxteeth plug the One.

It was an intense experience, sensing the bullets as they jumped across the gap and smacked into my targets. I could literally see how the pressure waves rolled away from the barrel, thanks to my antennae, but the sonic cracks hurt my ears.

Fuck, I'd forgotten to protect my hearing. Of all the…

It took a few rounds each for the Threes at full-auto, but I did get them both.

Then I aimed the rifle at the Four, and shot my first HSRP. The trigger pull felt normal, and so did the firing of the bullet. But in a complete departure from normal, an extremely loud whistle assaulted my ear canals, tore at my ear drums, left me with a high-pitched whine ringing away.

A sonic crack beyond anything smacked me in the face, and slammed across my sensilla so bruisingly hard that I instinctively snapped my antennae closed with a painful wince, and hid them behind my back. They'd gone numb with an electric buzz all over.

The model Four's front half just…disintegrated violently.

There wasn't even a clear tunnel in all the flying matter that told me where the bullet went. It looked more like an explosion had gone off right where trajectory met skin.

My ears tingled, too, and stopped ringing moments later. The bionites? Must've healed me.

"..." I kneeled down with a splitting, nausea-inducing headache and tried massaging the stems of my still-healing antennae. At least I could feel the torn roots be knit back together, each one another spike of pain dissipating.

"Everything okay?" Leah yelled from the doorway. I just gave her a thumbs-up as she slowly wobbled over and sat down next to me, grinning at me as she pointed at the wrecked model Four.

"But, holy fuck, Tinea! What was that last shot?" Leah asked with a glint in her eyes.

"Uh…hypersonic rocket, basically?"

"AWESOME!"

I lost it. I laughed my ass off at Leah's impish glee, until she had no choice but to join me.

I caught myself once the tracker top right in my vision updated itself and read forty points in red color.

"Oh, got some points. Still in my emergency funds, but it's something. Should we try to split the kills? You need the points more than I do, right? As long as I have enough to buy ammo and medicine, I'm fine."

If you work together, Tynea suddenly injected, you each receive only a split of the point reward, but the total gain is increased by ten percent.

"Oh!" I said, meeting Leah's eyes, "we should plan around that, then."

Leah is currently using your gun, though, Tinea, which would mean her kills are credited to you unless you specify otherwise. Do you wish to share evenly, instead?

Leah nodded. "Yeah, that'd be nice, if you don't mind. I'd also like to build a buffer."

"Sure."

Understood.

"But, Tinea, Antithesis, here? Where do you figure they're coming from?" she asked.

I stood up and swished my antennae around until they quit being scaredy-cats, properly unfurled, and tried to listen for more aliens rustling through the sickly trees and undergrowth around us. "My HSRP was loud. Anything close by would be heading this way, yet I sense no movement… Let's go high. That usually worked out for me. Until I jumped off a roof, anyway," I said as I looked up at the roof of the facility.

"What?" Leah asked with a nonplussed expression.

I turned to her. "That was how I became a Vanguard. Shot a bunch of aliens, saved a bunch of people, and when I ran out of bullets, I hopped five stories to kill a Three that was about to eat a little girl."

"How the fuck did you survive that?"

Her big eyes made me take Leah's hand, to reassure her that I was quite okay.

"I became a samurai and used a bunch of the points I'd been awarded for medical stuff. Might not have survived otherwise, I figure. My legs were…ballooning sausages and I don't think I had a pelvis anymore." Seeing that she was more morbidly fascinated than anxious, I continued, "My spine was broken. I might've been less mobile than you were, even though I still had arms. Somehow, most of my torso, my arms and my head were totally fine from the fall. Nearly no pain. Just…smashed everything below. It's why I got that Sleeve you're wearing, so I could keep fighting."

"... I'm glad you're still here," whispered Leah. I smiled up at her and stroked her hair. It had a really beautiful, rich shade of red, the kind you really only see in commercials. But Leah apparently grew that color naturally. I wonder who her parents were? How'd she end up orphaned, considering the dollar price of such genetic editing?

"Yeah. I was fine pretty quickly. I'm still fine. And so are you. And will be."

"Yeah."

"I'm gonna jump us up on the roof, okay?" I warned her, pointing up. She nodded and I gently helped her climb on my back so I could carry her piggyback. I waited until she held on to me, then crouched low.

Then…I straightened up again, and said, blushing a bit, "I should probably try this on my own, first. I haven't actually really moved yet, in this new body. Even with all the alien dream mobility training while I was out."

Leah snickered as she set her feet back on the floor and tousled my hair. I didn't mind, at all.

When I bent my knees this time, I gave a good shove straight up, high enough to see the roof in its entirety to identify a place to land. On my second hop, I went for it and touched down precisely where I wanted to. There was no wobble and I felt right at home. The dream training had paid off. I was effortlessly mobile.

I looked around myself and saw nothing but a few solar cells with attached batteries, presumably for the computer, screens, lights, and cameras down below. It was a very generic setup that didn't hint at anything, though I did ask Tynea to record the make and models of all the equipment, as well as any identifying scratches or damage, just to be sure. It'd be hilariously easy to nail 'em if they slipped up and tried to sell this shit second-hand.

Then I walked to the edge of the roof, and felt not even a twinge of discomfort. The therapy, too, had been effective. I crouched low as I saw movement a few hundred meters away. Not wildlife, no birds, no animals. Those were Antithesis.

Model Ones, Threes, Fours, and occasionally, the much larger ursoid Sixes, hundreds of them spread out over the entire crater.

I stepped forward and off and landed lightly beside Leah, who gave me a big grin and another thumbs up.

Taking her piggyback again with my hands underneath her knees and her Sleeve's hands properly locked in front of me, I jumped us both atop the roof in the same place I landed before, and gently pushed her to stay low.

She too saw the aliens everywhere.

"Tynea, how many Antithesis units am I seeing?"

Several tens of thousands.

"What?!" Even Leah whipped around to look at me.

Look to the horizon in the east. At the edge of the crater.

And then we stared across the swampy ring. There was a river of single-digit Antithesis barely visible in the distance, more than twenty kilometers away, slowly moving southwards. My enhanced eyes let me make out the individual units. There were a whole bunch of double digits in there, too. Some of those grasshopper-looking artillery units, and a bunch of others.

"What… How… Why so many?"

May I suggest you buy a Class 0 satellite uplink for a few points? I believe you will want to gather information on the state of your planet. This is a rather unusual development.

You may also wish to descend and go into hiding again. There are Antithesis with very good eyes around.

"Fuck." I snapped up Leah, ran off the roof, and dashed back inside the facility.

Close the door, leave it open? We needed points. We weren't going anywhere, and we couldn't afford to be attacked by the big swarm outside. But a few poking in every now and then, that we could work with.

Where and how should we position ourselves? The inside of the building was clear. With almost all of it underground, they'd have to dig in. I'd be able to sense that. The only way to enter was through the front door we'd exited through, then down the stairwell and past the guard's room.

I looked around the sole above-ground and windowless room, and came up with a rough plan. I strung new silk strings and laid sticky silk traps across the floor. Any incoming units would bunch themselves up, get in the way of each other.

Leah and I set ourselves up at the top of the stairwell. We didn't have very long sight lines, not even through the open door. The landing pad was too small for my liking.

It is what it is.

I was a bit worried about being overrun, but at least they could only come from one direction.

For now.

***