(Rewritten) Ch. 73 – Xenocide Act V; Antithesis-Ambushing Arson

Pyromaniacs: Fiery enthusiasts who believe that everything in life can be solved with a touch of heat and a bit of flame, whether it's roasting marshmallows, lighting birthday candles, or the idiot neighbor's house. They sometimes wear nun outfits.

They sometimes wear extremely hot nun outfits.

– Definitely Not Gomorrah

***

I threw another eight Ripfeather rounds and let them tear up the Ones, always inverting the rifling and coils' currents. Each shell ran through the flock and compressed it further, setting up the next one, forcing the aliens higher into the sky, until the ninth and last one chewed up the entire line with a whirling funnel of razors ten meters wide.

Satisfied, I slicked my rain-wet hair back, and smiled as bloody green and black bits showered the distant forest.

Leah sent me a meme of New Montreal's weather-AI fairy, done up in her usual butterfly wings, bikini top, and flowy skirt wrap with that slit that revealed a lot of leg, pointing her magic wand at a drone's clip of the alien flock being minced.

The drone had been positioned on the floor pointed skyward, right at the feet of a group of Threes running along and looking up as the fake pigeons fell. It was captioned "Inclement weather warning, with a chance of razor-steel tornadoes and raw chicken drums!"

Macabre and fucked up. I laughed and sent Leah a thumbs-up.

I was about to hit the switch to turn on the lure again, but Tynea's voice interrupted me.

Tinea, you may want to refresh your spray first, or buy muffling equipment for your antennae.

"Oh, right."

I unstuck the spray bottle from underneath my left boob and checked its contents. A little more than a quarter left… Hmm. About two hours of constant use. I'd either need to buy another one, or get that muffler soon. If I bought one now, I'd be wasting the spray, wouldn't I?

Ah, actually no, of course not. The stuff was a local anaesthetic in general. It would come in useful either way.

Still, we were saving up for that stompy vehicle. And I'd have to get a new primary soon, which would probably also be a few hundred points.

"What would a useful muffler cost?"

The Mark I Pulse Inverter Leah used to silence her guns costs fifteen points.

"Uh, those things hurt like hell. Why would I use one of those right next to my antennae?"

Not next to your antennae, but immediately covering them. The painful crash-dissonance you experienced occurs beyond the limits of the device's effect, not within.

"Ah, I see. Couldn't I just use that one? She doesn't need it anymore."

Certainly, though it isn't customized to be worn by you. You'll need to fixate it between your antennae, but I would be able to reconfigure it enough to serve you.

That was doable, and it didn't cost us any points. Alright.

"Leah!"

"Yeah?"

"Would you mind if I grabbed the muffler from you? For my antennae, against the lure."

"Take it. It's on the ATV."

"Thanks!"

I propelled myself from the tree, and even though the wood cracked beneath me, I still managed to cover a good eight or ten meters in one jump.

A few more hops put me next to Leah's quad and AI-I already triggered the muffler's release, so I hurried to catch it.

– Attention: Antithesis ETA eighty seconds. –

I'd lost more time sniping the cloud of flying aliens than I'd realized and hurried with attaching the muffler. Between the spatial sense of my antennae and the sensorium of the modified Sentinel on my tail, I found it fairly easy to 'see' what I was doing as I wove a web of sticky silk from stem to stem a few centimeters above my hair, and let the thing adhere to it.

Tynea repositioned the little emitter dishes until it looked like I had a mini radio tower sticking out of my head.

I looked fucking ridiculous. There were two enormous flycatchers waving around above and next to my head, a weirdly shaped spider web between them gathering dew, and a pointy thing with what looked like toy satellite dishes constantly tracking every move and twitch of the antennae haphazardly stuck in the middle getting jostled around.

Obviously it was perfect samurai content for the children, so I shot a quick clip of myself grinning and waving, and saved it for later.

It's ready, Tinea. You can activate the lure now.

"Alright." I toggled the lure on, and its powerful sound waves washed over my antennae, numbing me with a single prickling spike past the remainder of the painkilling spray-coat. The muffler immediately got to work and clamped down on the amplitudes with…authority made physical.

Vertigo jumped on my diaphragm like a trampoline, until AI-I spun herself another clone to shape my antennae and muffler's sound picture so that I'd hear 'normally' beneath the lure, restoring my spatial sense and ending my stomach's quest for emancipation. I could see none of the glassy fracturing distortion that must be occurring just beyond the inverter's field, though everything felt a little…stuffy and cottony. I could easily work with it and appreciated the analog computing the Quanta employed for the task. There was a qualitative difference between digitized audio, and this.

A glance towards Leah's egg showed her scuttling slowly back and forth a few meters from the treeline, sideways like a crab. The four legs of the pod worked in concert, two keeping her aloft, and two repositioning for the next step.

"Are you learning how to move properly?"

"No, just testing things, actually. Moving feels natural, but also different. New."

"Fun?"

"Yes!" The joy in her voice made me giggle. It was good to see her take pleasure from being a samurai.

The me watching for danger drew an arrow in my vision, along with Antithesis outlines close enough to be distinct, and communication-me linked the information to Leah. I wanted to hang back a little, give Leah a chance to fight with four legs and two turrets.

I decided to go after the groups a little further away, and those at the edges. Ah, yeah, I could try to drive a wedge into their formation, couldn't I? With the new fire missiles.

Weapons-officer-me told the Myriad to craft one hundred fifty Napalm-B payloads and their Carriers, a few of the UAV missiles, along with a whole bunch of high-explosive ones.

"Tynea, I need more twenty mils and forty mils, and grenades, too."

Understood.

I started running while Tynea provided the ammunition, looking for a good place of my own to start fighting from. I stayed out of the way of both Leah's guns and the aliens' sight.

A fifteen second dash to cover a hundred or so meters of the underbrush, and I arrived at a small ridge. Not very tall, but enough that it had lifted the trees that grew on it a few meters above the rest of the canopy. The roots had eventually given way to the storm, the trees toppling like dominoes. They'd formed a nice, long, wooden berm above the muddy water running down in rills and streamlets. Wet, but not too wet. Lots of dying wood I could set on fire, even in the rain.

The place was perfect. The ridge was a hundred and fifty meters long, the gap in the forest thirty meters wide, and it was nicely perpendicular to the Antithesis, who were already beginning to traverse it in groups of threes and fours of…Threes and Fours.

I took a closer view at the collage of cameras from nearby drones, mapped onto the local terrain. AI-I added colorful highlights and Antithesis pathways, and I had a mostly accurate overview of the their movements.

Some forty or fifty aliens had already crossed the ridge, among them the Fives and Sixes.

I called Leah again, and the video showed her in her pod. She opened her eyes and lifted her eyebrows at me with a smile and a greeting.

"Hey." I waved at her. "How do you feel about taking on the Fives and Sixes alone? Eight of each."

"Oh yeah, as long as I don't let them trample me, I can kill them, no problem. I'll have to switch the guns to the 13mm stuff I was using on my bike, though."

I pursed my virtual lips with a concerned moue. "The quills won't be able to penetrate your pod's armor?"

"No." She shook her head and tilted it a little. "Ypsi says they'll be able to scratch it up and I'm gonna have to guard the leg joints, but they won't get through the shell itself."

"Okay. I can, um, offer you fire support from here. You're in range of 40mm indirect fire and missiles. Lots and lots of missiles. Have Ypsi talk to Tynea for marking targets, okay?"

"Sure!" Leah-style thumbs-up. I returned it.

"And I'd definitely notice, but tell me if you're getting out of the pod for anything, okay? I can't use shrapnel if you're unprotected."

"You can! I've got the goop-suit, remember? That thing's designed to absorb stuff like that. Easily."

"Oh, okay. Yeah." My lips quirked, and Leah's eyes narrowed. "But have you got your Foxteeth?" I asked, "And did you remember to buy your grenades?"

"Yes, and I've got the lunchbox, too. Now, quit being a mommy hen and get fighting, alright? Only seconds to go," she said with a snort.

"Aw." I pouted. Leah mimed pinching my lips. "Fiiine. Bye-bye."

"Bye, Tinea." Leah ended the call with a giggle crinkling her eyes.

I refocused on the Antithesis and studied how the entire super-group was moving. Most of it was still catching up, just about to cross the ridge. I'd be able to cut them off…

– Advice: Napalm-B payloads completed. Carrier missiles completed. –

"Now."

A whole bunch of thick red Xs were drawn across the overlay, and several versions of me worked together to shift them a little this way, nudge them a little that way. Even Tynea weighed in to open up a few gaps in the planned firewall.

Those would allow the ground-bound units to filter through slowly. Enough resistance to throttle the push towards Leah's glade to a trickle, but not so much that they'd just look for a way around the whole thing, either.

One hundred and fifty missiles jumped through the air and planted thick circles of fire all the way from one end of the ridge to the other, creating a massive roaring wall with meter-wide gaps here and there. A powerful gust of billowing heat pushed up in an instant, turning moisture into steamy clouds rising above the forest.

The winds stank horribly of acrid-sweet napalm and other burning materials, and deadening my sense of smell to anything else. Even the grassy, moldy Antithesis stench couldn't cut through.

Although that might've been because the idiots kept running into the sticky fire and dragged it slowly down the other side of the ridge, where their burning bodies crumpled against the submerged logs, and set them on fire too, despite all the water.

Uh, I thought, looking at my points counter tick up. Sure. I don't think I'll need anything else here, really. Hmm. Back up Leah, or hunt for stragglers?

***