[TnL] Chapter 165 – Let There Be Light

AN: Please enjoy. :)

Inserted AN from chapter 166.5:
Hey, lovely readers. Thanks for being here!

Thought it's time I give y'all a quick update on how I'm doing - which is...not so great. At the end of July I'd finally put myself back together well enough to write a chapter every 3 to 5 days, depending on how complicated it was and how much brainstorming or back-reading it needed.

Then an unwanted member of my family, one half of the causes of my rather debilitating traumata, decided to be an asshole all over again. Unfortunately they triggered precisely those maladaptions that ruin my ability to self-motivate. Since then I've been stuck at the painfully low level of productivity of less than 200 words a day.

I'm aware of those particular dynamics and have been on waiting lists for an insurance-paid therapy for the entire year already. It's unusual that I should have to wait ten fucking months to get a spot, but whatever. I decided, three days ago, that waiting for the paid-for variants of therapy is taking to long and is causing my story, my ability to write, and my mental health too much fucking damage.

As such, I've started looking for private trauma therapists and will be using any and all proceeds I receive from you lovely readers to pay for that therapy. I want to turn this into a positive feedback loop - the better the therapy, the more I can write, the more therapy I can afford. EDIT: I should add - I'm already receiving enough from y'all to pay for one session per month, which is a good place to start. This is not a call to make you donate. XD

Tell me what you think, especially if it feels like I'm missing something in my blindspot. <3

Chapter 165 – Let There Be Light

Radiology warning: "If you see an object that glows for unknown reasons in the electromagnetic spectrum, please stay away from it."

Tinea: I cräve the forbidden lämp, brøther!

– Excerpt from Live by Radiation, Die by Radiation: By 2025, improperly decommissioned sources had already caused hundreds of civilian deaths. The proliferation of cheaply made—and cheaply disposed—nuclear batteries from the early 2030s has only multiplied those numbers in the three decades since. Expert estimates range from fifty thousand to well beyond two million total deaths.

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"SITUATION CHANGE!" blared the Sim Cell given voice mere moments after she'd redeployed its remaining sensor array. No matter how many times she'd been in combat over the last few days, and no matter how intense the fighting had already been, Leah's hands still clenched knuckle-white around the shock straps keeping her secured. She just…wasn't getting used to it, on some level. It was galling, deep down. Maybe she simply wasn't a fighter. Not like her girlfriend was.

Inside a second, the yellowish—and apparently disgustingly toxic—fog she'd been spreading around went up in a huge fire; Tinea launched herself up and backwards; a little sun exploded against the side of the alien to burn the creature's electric chameleon skin off its armor; and Daddy-Long-Legs scrambled-climbed across her Implacables again, back into position guarding her Sim Cell. Then, a sister explosion wracked the insides of the many-legged terror. The old piloting pod Tinea had ridden declared itself spent and retreated from the battle, further up along the slope and past the storm-broken woods there.

Leah's brain hadn't even caught up before the thing stopped wobbling to surge towards her info-warring walker, flinging green gobbets of flesh and blood everywhere.

So, Leah just…skipped forwards, mentally, past all the confusion. 

Maybe she was getting better at fighting, after all.

Firstly, she set guns free. The revealed alien—some kind of Thirty-Three variant designed for sabotage with its wires—ran into a storm of cannonfire as every mech at her disposal opened up with extreme prejudice. Black lightning flared up along Daddy-Long-Legs's 105 mm armament and grounded itself in the Implacable's black-and-gold shell it was half parked on. The 20 mm hail from the Dakka's dual gatling turrets shattered ineffectually against the monster's exposed armor, but the big 203 mm high-explosive shells rocked it.

Still it came on, bleeding only from the deepest craters in its armor. It aimed unerringly for the Sim Cell.

Recognizing that the alien was after it specifically—and willing to break itself to reach it—the Sim Cell's tactical computers automatically evaded backwards and across the Implacables; the way that Daddy-Long-Legs had just come from, and the way Tinea had flung herself.

Leah made an executive decision to send the Daddy-Long-Legs with it as a bodyguard. Its one-oh-five wasn't gonna accomplish much against a Thirty-Three, but it would keep the nerve center of her little fleet safe against any smaller models, and to boot, serve as fast reinforcement for the flying brunette.

The Sapper, meanwhile, grappled the huge alien with its tree-destroying iron tentacles in an effort to slow it down and give the Implacables a killable target. The much larger creature rammed into the combat engineer's frontal plows even as the walker's legs buckled beneath the transferred momentum.

Shockwaves from pointblank cannonfire bruised exposed alien flesh and the rivulets of green blood from cracked armor turned into fountains. Leah was forced to watch her poor Hatchet get crushed beneath the house-sized monstrosity.

At least she'd stopped the thing dead, and the other warstrider was already unleashing its swarm of mechanical scavenger ants upon the Sapper.

One of the Thirty-Three's legs suddenly got blown off at the knee—a weakness her tactical computers exploited immediately to immobilize the huge cthulhu-spider. From there, she reached into the limbs of her own war machine and stomped over to dismember the creature entirely.

Its head still lived, even with it torn off. "Tough bugger," she said, studying the ruin of its face. The trunk had torn open, bits of pseudo-intestines prolapsed from the force of the internal explosion. Its organometallic wire-garottes were a tangled mess and had caused plenty of inner lacerations, too. "Stupidly tough, even. Say, Tinea. Weren't those Sol rounds the same you used to kill the Twenty-Two?"

"Yes. Those aren't exactly tanky, though. Just very…bulky. These are Thirties," the woman replied. She'd already landed and posted up some seventy meters away, well off the ground. Leah saw she was busy replacing some component of her parachute's pack, even as she kept glancing around. "Tynea says it'll bleed out and die momentarily. I'm still suspicious, though."

"What do you mean?" Leah asked. For the first time since her girlfriend had rejoined her, she felt the obsession to check her tremor sensors. The data from the battle was a complete mess and the rain continued drumming on the ground. A stressful noise all but designed to rub her raw, made worse by the knowledge that she did have someone specific to blame for it.

"You know how quickly they regenerate, don't you? It could've retreated to heal, and we probably would've lost it in this weather. It could've come back later, maybe when the rain wouldn't have interfered with its stealth anymore. Instead it chose to waste itself on a death run trying to dislodge you."

Leah went still. "There really are others."

"Yup. And they're probably close enough that they could've taken advantage of the chaos the thing would have caused, if you weren't willing to sacrifice your Sapper to finish it so quickly. Frozen and waiting for us to start moving again. To let our guard down." Tinea whacked the bit she'd been fiddling with shut and let it reattach to her back. Then she looked towards where she knew Leah lay inside her warstrider.

There it was again, that grin full of manic, wide-eyed watchfulness. Leah pretended not to see the ticking eyelid indicative of a heavy migraine—Tinea was a samurai and had the resources to deal with anything.

"Refueled and ready for anything," the little murderess finished.

The Sim Cell automatically updated the battlefield prediction patterns on Leah's HUD, in the form of a map filled with color-coded smears tracking suspected enemy presence, with symbols coded for their probable course of action.

It should've been square miles of well-established terrain and known features and obvious options. Instead it was a tiny circle of indistinct maybes, of washed-away probabilities formed from the Sim Cell's best guesses of how the artificial monster monsoon might have reshaped the terrain, and where Antithesis might have washed up from the floods.

Leah despised not knowing everything about more biters inside engagement distance, and if anyone had asked her, she wasn't sure she could claim she didn't hate Dervish right then for taking that away with her stupid storm. However unlikely it was, admittedly, that a pair of Class II samurai would actually suffer for it.

Still, it was frustrating, so much so that Leah snapped and fired a volley of wind-corrected 203 mm shells towards the Class III's last known location, far out in that river. Enough was enough.

Two seconds later, she dragged a deep breath into her lungs, held it, and let out a deep sigh. Then she ordered a set of four additional rounds, these more fireworks and warnings in the sky than explosions, and fired them along a much shallower, much faster trajectory. They'd arrive before her first, rather more kinetic volley would.

If a surprise storm wasn't gonna fuck up Class II samurai, then a pair of artillery shells was gonna do even less to a Class III samurai. But her own complaints wouldn't have a leg to stand on if she'd done a Dervish herself.

Two and a half minutes later, right when her Implacable's tactical computer calculated that the first volley would impact, Leah's eyebrows rose in surprise.

She'd apparently robbed Dervish of a good thirty thousand points.

"Hah!"

⁂

Dolores stared open-mouthed into the sky where words, written in flame, proclaimed Heads Up, Stupid Bitch!

It was an interesting type of fire, too. Kept writing itself into the sky over and over again as the rain tried to wash it away. Four artillery shells hung in the air, suspended on counter-rotating, fold-out propellers and spraying some kind of self-regenerating, highly pyrophoric material.

She didn't even mind the two up-down rounds that hit some seconds later, to either side and mere meters away from her. Those smashed into the freshly exposed gas bladders of a hovering-hive Twenty-Two variant (Seriously the aliens were just throwing everything and the kitchen sink at her, weren't they? Dolores had never seen so many variants in one place.), and the ensuing conflagration cooked the hundreds of single-digit models it had had loaded. 

Thousands and thousands of points. She didn't particularly need them—not anymore. Not unless she left Earth, which she wasn't planning to.

"Amazing", she whispered to herself, looking down. She was, in fact, located exactly above the spot where she'd initiated the huge whirlpool that was still dragging in Antithesis from all over the St Lawrence River. "I don't think I was half that accurate at Class II. Not at that range, through a storm, and without eye-on-target. What kinda gear she gone for?"

Dear, I do believe that was a message, Adymra said dryly.

"Oh, right." Dolores looked around herself. "I suppose she wants the weather cleared up?"

That would be my guess, yes.

She wasn't entirely convinced, considering the accurate blind-fire, but her whirlpool would last long enough to collect all the remaining Antithesis either way.

And so, the artificial goddess bent her reality-shaping potential towards cleaning up after herself and spoke, "Let there be light," and there was light. 

Eventually. 

After a few more minutes of manipulating the local atmospheric conditions.

⁂

We'd found them, and the stealthy assholes didn't know it. Yet.

The fallen tree had tipped me off—it lay splintered in the wrong direction, against the wind, and roughly towards Leah's battle group. Like something had pushed it over in its haste to get to her, only to freeze.

They were still there, three of them, and the front-most one still had its invisible claws hooked into that log, waiting for an opening we weren't going to give them.

Now I hung off the side of the Sim Cell, shoving electronic replacement parts through a tiny hatch at a tinier maintenance drone inside the walker. I'd thought I'd located the Thirty-Threes, but the Sim Cell, with its larger and more sensitive wing, had seen only normal terrain and a little confused signal noise. It was only once Leah had fired her big guns and made the aliens twitch, that I'd become certain I was seeing something the machine had missed.

I'd asked the e-war Hatchet to self-diagnose, and indeed, it had found some damage to its sensor-input processors, presumably from my Sol rounds' EM pulses. Tiny current spikes in tinier Class 0 components that weren't shielded quite well enough.

"Weather's changing," said Leah.

I looked up and found that the clouds seemed…colder?

Leah pushed a weather update through the network, and indeed, the lowest layer of the storm was raining off faster than it picked up new water vapor from the no-longer boiling river. The cloudbase was dissolving to reveal the cold thermals of the layers above. 

Intuition wanted to claim that the storm must be getting worse, but instead it slowly dispersed its load across a much larger area. It would rain for a while longer, but less heavily. 

I smiled—I'd be able to fly again soon.

"Looks like Dervish is done?" I answered, paying careful attention to the hidden forms of the Thirty-Threes. They continued to hold still. Leah had dumped her new token from the single kill straight into unlocking the Class II General Cannon Ammunition catalog. A timely upgrade, one we really rather needed. We were hoping for another pair of tokens for taking out the entire group.

"I think so. I might've expressed my displeasure in kinetic terms."

My lips twitched with a wry grin. "I noticed." I was proud of her. Not for the ballistic messaging, but for how she'd handled the fight earlier. "Good job, Leah."

"Hmm?" she asked, confused.

"You didn't hesitate when the creeper attacked us, and more importantly, you instantly recognized the necessity of sacrificing the Sapper to regain control of the engagement."

She actually blushed. There was a covert happiness there, something that told me I'd said exactly what she needed to hear. I didn't know what, but it discombobulated her in a way that was really rare. Precious, too.

Leah didn't really do the blushy maiden.

"Uh…" she stammered, "you did say it probably had friends."

My grin widened. I wasn't quite done teasing her. "Yeah. But most people would still have hesitated to throw tens of thousands of points away just like that. It turned what could've been good cash into worse than a wash, but it was necessary. Tactically wise."

Leah went even redder, groaned, rubbed her face to reconstitute her composure. "Cut the flesh to save the bone."

"Exactly."

My lovely girlfriend waved her hand at me and commanded, "Enough flustering me. Get going already. I'm done loading and my crawlers are just waiting for fresh victims to fall upon."

Laughing, I rode my freshly refueled jets on a powered arc into the sky, to usher in the beginning of the final battles blocking our way home.

⁂