[Short Story] Breakthrough Cleanup

“Hmm, looks like we’re dealing with a Martial-focused breakthrough. Just look at the remains of those mountains! Reduced to rubble and fist imprints.”

“No, you’re just seeing the forest and not paying attention to the trees. While this might look martial in nature, that is clearly only a part of it. I mean, those burn marks, that region of magma, and of course the scorching all over the place! This was clearly an incident based around a fire concept.”

The faceless man and woman both stand there in silence, watching.

The man sighs, “Damn, you were right. This is a fire event.”

The woman shakes her head, “No, I won’t claim credit. While fire adjacent, it seems this might actually be something with friction? Of all things.”

The man shrugs, “Eh, just another method of heat generation. Whoever broke through here didn’t manage anything deeper. Now that would have been interesting! Anyway, we’ve got a decent accounting of the damage. We should get to work.”

The woman nods, “Let’s.”

They both reach behind their backs and pull large arches of stone out of their small packs. The stone arches are set upon the ground next to them, their weight alone sinking over a hand-span into the hard-packed soil. Once settled, there is a hiss-pop-thwang sound and a purple swirl grows inward from the edges until both arches are filled.

Moments later, a rush of people almost stumbles through. All of them wear clothes appropriate for construction. Though the style varies from simple hides, to canvas clothes, which have visibly been hand-stitched together, and all the way to blue jeans and hard hats. The only through line is the fact that every piece is brimming with Qi and covered in formations.

The faceless man starts shouting orders while the faceless woman pulls aside a small part of the group in more official-looking clothes to start managing things.

“That lava isn’t cool! We need someone to get it to stop rubbing against itself and creating perpetual heat. Water won’t work, those with a peace concept should go and make them get along!

“Earth benders to the mountains. I want the range restored pronto! Also, the friction stuff should be barely a coating on the surface. Gather it up and dump it to the side for processing.

“Fire masters are to disperse and gather any eternal flames. This protag just made us bank! I want said fire stored and secured for Veil Cross. Not every day you find a fire like that will work in a grey sphere without an outside power source.”

With that, the majority of people get to work. The rest wait as the lady plans.

“Okay people! While they’re doing that, we need a temporal window. I want genetics pulled off of as many plants and animals as possible! We’ll never manage full matching biodiversity, but by the Boss themself, we will do our best!

“Managers, while they’re getting a rough understanding of that, I want the details recorded. I’ve told you this more times than grains of sand on this planet, but the Heavenly Dao does not want to pay us! Every expense recorded, every iota of Qi tracked, and all of it double-checked and justified.

“We aren’t maintaining places like this for the good Karma! That comes when we return home with our pay.”

From there, orders continue to flow, heard with perfect clarity by only those who need it. All while the sound of house size and bigger boulders are being tossed around to build up mountains. Not that the other people aren’t working just as hard. They’re simply quieter compared to that. Though the ones in charge of reconstructing the ruins that used to be here are making a racket of their own as they use various methods to wear away their newly placed structures so they look properly aged.

Slowly the mountains rise up once again and all the surface lava begins to lose heat, admittedly at a slower rate than it should. Still, better than nothing. Besides that, the flickers of flame burning eternally become harder to spot, even for the two faceless beings overseeing the area.

This all advances until some small animals have been placed. The quick clones make short work of whipping up other similar animals.

It is at this point that both of the faceless overseers’ heads snap to the side, both facing the same point, despite the fact it means the man’s head is now turned almost completely to his back. A small claw pops through and seems to hang there, in the middle of the air, for a moment. Then the claw is dragged downward, creating a sound similar to a fifth-dimensional being dragging their claw through a cube of blackboard material.

Space itself parts, the edges ragged and yet seemingly purposefully done as the edges of those jagged bits are actually smooth beyond material means. The edges pull apart into a perfectly round circle, the jagged bits providing enough stretch to allow this without actually stretching space. Through this circle pops out the front of a QCRT screen.

There is a moment of static as the quantum state of the ray guns within are calibrated to the current dimension. The two faceless overseers are then dragged into a state of being between moments, unable to move for time is not passing logically anymore. Only through the grace of their boss are they capable of even observing this moment between. Which is the entire point as the QCRT screen scrolls through page after page of texts, images, and videos as needed.

Time continues forward and there is no longer a circle in space. The two do that shrill finger whistle thing and all the workers stop.

The man coughs into his hand, despite not having a mouth. “Change of plans. This is good enough, we’re needed elsewhere! Get ready for a Magic and Tech situation. Magitech is a 3, but Science has reached 8 with a few sparks up to 12 and Magic is unknown to most, but rates a 9 for the average user, but only a 11 on the high end.”

The faceless woman nods, “We are heading into a full-blown protagonist cleanup. That ‘3’ for magitech? Well, we have a ‘talentless’ mage who studied technology extra hard to make up for it with a ring grandpa in a smart watch that just broke the floodgates wide open to 15!

“Reading indicates they are a polymath prime spark and the boss indicates that we’ve got an entire continent to clean up! We’re calling in the full crew for this and may need to grab some experts for the weird science. We’re moving out in five seconds!”

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And the two stone arches suck everyone through at the same moment. Then, with everyone gone, they peel off of space in the form of two flat sheets of paper with photos of their respective arches. The two pieces of paper hang there for a moment, before folding themselves in half again and again, shrinking with every fold until they vanish from reality.

Elsewhere, the two faceless overseers appear mid-air along with those who had been with them for the last site as well as a few thousand times more people in an even wider range of clothes. Costumes, mech suits, one guy in just a kilt, spandex in various forms, metal armor, and more.

Below them, the shreds of clouds dissipate, allowing the group to see a moderate-size continent. Except at the center of it is a crater only a couple weeks old. This crater covers two-thirds of the continent and even breaches the ocean at a few points, yet water has not begun to fill the space at all.

The faceless man points to the five ocean breaches all at once. “I want temp dams at each location! The bioselective magnetic field won’t hold back the oceans forever!”

The faceless woman snaps at a group of people with heads formed from holograms. “Those aren’t clouds! We have a full-on magitech nanoswarm and they’re spreading. I’m upgrading this to a 17 equiv. Someone note down there’s a nanotech talent at play!

“I want everyone using peak defenses or we’ll lose some of you. That’s only one away and I do not want to have to tell those important to you that you died from being cheap!”

Within the group of hologram-headed people, one man with an eagle’s head designed to appear as if made from lightning bolts, except only the outline, throws up a bigger hologram so everyone can see. “Confirmation on ignition event details!”

The hologram plays a scene of a scrawny boy holding what looks to be a sister. Except said sibling isn’t breathing. Around them stands a bunch of adults, sneering down at the boy, bodyguards off to the side restraining some chimera-looking bots, clearly put together with whatever parts were on hand.

The bots go still and the boy howls out in despair. This only makes the adults look down on him more. At least until a black shadow swirls out from under the child’s clothes and begins to seemingly dissolve everything around him, including the sibling’s dead body.

With each passing moment, the nanobot swarm grows larger, and now panicking adults order their bodyguards to finish things. Except it is too late. They try to shoot the boy with projectiles and energy weapons. All of which are absorbed or deflected by the nanobots. There is even a skilled mage that tries to use a tech disruption spell.

Which does nothing.

Soon, the entire district where this happened has been reduced to an empty crater. The boy is left sobbing, arms still out as if to hold his sister, except there’s nothing left.

The eagle hologram headed man grunts, “Damn, lost his family. Though that sister should still be in there. Thematically the story fits, if a little off-kilter.”

The faceless woman thrusts her hands out to the side and pulls in the nearest “cloud”. Forming the magitech nanobots swarm into a magic rune, which she sends a burst of power through. “Confirmation, the sister can be saved, though fading! We need a planetary quantum stabilizer. The less decayed the sister’s mind is, the greater the chance of a happy ending!

“We need to leave the crater and stabilize the bots. Concept team, circle the continent and make the barrier between land and sea inviolable to the nanobots. I want coast to coast coverage!”

The countless people all zip off to start wrangling the problem.

One group in particular includes the guy in just a kilt. He seems to run a tight ship, directing them to start filling in the holes left by the nanobots after extracting surface resources. One problem, “Heyo, overseers! The bots didn’t only take the ore, they extracted the concepts involved. We fill these holes in like normal and the ore won’t fill itself back in!”

The faceless man frowns, and an eye rune appears on his forehead that glimmers. His frown deepens. All around him, the land has become even flatter, a dull grey permeates the entire continent.

He turns to his fellow overseer, “Confirmation on upgrade to magitech level 17. The swarms have completely sucked the magic out of the land. Resources will not respawn anymore.”

The faceless woman turns to the hologram heads, “Can I get a confirmation on whether the nanobots automatically respawn lost members?”

A lady with a few abstract polygons for a head zaps away a tenth of a swarm and they watch carefully. “Respawn confirmed!”

The faceless woman makes a fist in frustration, “It is a complete extraction.”

The man turns his eye rune on the respawning swarm, “Worse, the Mana veins have been converted as well. The swarm isn’t using veins to spawn materials and then create new nanobots. Those veins are directly creating new nanobots that automatically sync with the swarm. Even if completely wiped, the swarm will revive itself.

“This might be beyond our capabilities to properly restore. We’ll have to confirm the details. The protagonist’s rage-induced outburst might have even spiked one or two elements of their tech to the peak. Though whatever it was has likely been taken with them. I’m guessing the original production tech they had on them was warped into an artifact through their rage.”

The woman nods, “We need more specialists. We need to report our findings up the chain.”

The man drops his eye rune, and both overseers bring up a coil of runes on their foreheads. Together, “We call upon the world System! May our message pierce the veil! Guide our words to the ear of our boss so that we may report the seriousness of the situation. We will do as much as we can to repair the damage, but it will require greater power!” And the two press their foreheads together and wait.

It does not take long. The swirl of runes, matched to one another, warmed up and a glow escaped from between them. Like a liquid, this light flows down their body and forms a pool at their feet.

Around this display, the shadows being thrown begin to wiggle and gather, leaving areas of twilight despite the sun overhead. This shadow forms a swirl of its own, and space ripples at the center. Though once the ripple forms, things don’t last long. From the center of the overseer’s swirls, a sharp light slashes outward and right into the center of the shadow swirls where it slices through the veil and vanishes, taking the shadows with it.

The two overseers separate and nod to one another before turning back to their crew. The man claps his hands, “Okay, shows over! Whatever comes of that doesn’t change what needs to be done! Gather the swarms, restore the land, rebuild the towns! There’s work to do and we don’t want whoever comes in to fix the overarching issue won’t like it if they have to do more than necessary!”