Chapter 177 – The Battlepoet’s Private Recital
Some events are viscerally unsubtle. They do not explain themselves; they simply happen, and you are changed.
– The first time you stood before the vastness of an ocean. The first time you stood upon a mountain's peak and witnessed dawn. The first time somebody hurt you intentionally. The first accident you somehow got away from.
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Reddish pheromone dust swirled in the air as I dove through it, humming to myself a celebration of my journey. A coming-of-Age poem, in some ways.
I flirt with pain, I dance with death;
Child betrayed, free adult's breath.
The nest was fully panicking and producing clouds of biological chaff and other particulates. My antennae caught the odd vibration through hive trunks that whispered of hastily digging roots, trying to preserve enough material to regrow from later. The first set of Antithesis quick-growth buds would be flowering in minutes, the alien petals already twisting themselves into the muscle groups of those weaker model Ones and Threes designed to flood an area.
It wasn't going to be enough, not against the high volume of fire my cannonettes would answer with.
I was born beneath black cavern rock;
Devil's Child, breathed true evil's smog.
But reached above, found freedom gray;
Palms cut on shards o'fear, made my way.
Not when five Thirteens couldn't so much as corral me.
I slid a powered arc on one shin around the Thirteens and flicked out with my spear's blade to sever one of the heartvines connecting their three-part bodies. It shuddered hard from a sudden loss of coordination. Green blood sprayed thickly and obscured much, but I still sensed the whip of a tentacle ramming its way through the soundbarrier towards me.
I kept moving and nestled even closer to the floor, feet first, yet even so I needed to nudge the heavy mass of supersonic metal shards upwards. They ripped across the back of my arm painfully, but I gladly paid flesh to protect the more important bits inside my shoulder; and fed the flash of mortal fear to the fires of my conditioning.
First lived new life, evertrailing chains;
Then crimson skies, fanged alien-claim.
Sonde warned me of a boulder in my path. Her sharp eyes had no trouble picking it out from above while the paired Quantas transmitted the image easily.
I hit it with both feet and let my momentum leverage me up and over. Another pulse of my jets, carefully modulated by my flight brain, lifted me two more meters—precisely high enough to evade the storm of tentacles that had tried to predict my travel.
Met a miracle, was lifted from old fetters;
Machine god lent new purpose to old mettles.
Struck a covenant, violence for betterment;
But the miracle soon clothed herself in guilt.
I responded with a tentacle of my own; a beautifully glowing ephemeral streamer from my battleskirt, tipped with an incendiary grenade, swung elegantly through a blindspot in the midst of their attack.
She tore old scars, touched still open wounds;
But path persist' and strong will carry through.
The glow of sticky fire blooming greeted my eyes. I chuckled happily at the sudden panic that sent all the Thirteens into contortions as they tried to get distance from the fire that stubbornly clung to them.
Still humming, I carried on.
One of the Thirteens had caught only a tiny splash, and its excretions dampened its skin enough that the bit of burning jelly sloughed off it harmlessly.
Peace is never permanent, so knows my soul;
A thousand knives wielded unknowingly by all.
Blind hands cut and dig, eyes widen in shame;
But for love to live, I must forgive the pain.
Well, it was only a grenade after all, I told myself.
That was the Thirteen I chose to go after, once it separated itself from its burning siblings.
I whirled in circles around and above it, cutting down tentacles chasing me like a tangle of snakes, dodging and deflecting cracking strikes aimed at me from the front, always just a step ahead of the hive guardian's attacks.
It consolidated, drew its three bodies tight together so that no matter how fast I went, one of its mouthless faces would always have sight of me.
And so I choose; bloodied roads I travel,
And so I fly; not spared from hurt.
Giggling, I danced closer, close enough to flick a crystalline edge through another of its umbilicals, and too close to fully dodge the whipcrack of its tentacles.
The painful ripping of skin on between my wing arms only stoked my bloodlust and the smell of my own blood sharpened my edge, but I'd sensed the hit coming and angled correctly. Once again, my bones remained unharmed and the momentum of the strike only fed my own. I turned it, guided it along an arc on thrusters and into a spiral that curved my body around my javelin. My jets accelerated it, and suddenly; shredded alien flesh flew everywhere as I pirouetted horizontally against one of the Thirteen's bodies and let my twin-blade bite into it like a saw.
I laughed as I blended the beast, remembering the last time I'd done something similar during the execution of the Twenty-Two, rejoicing that I could go faster today with many more motors.
More vines came, both the grasping ones and the slamming ones, trying to upset my careful balance. But there was a magical oscillation to motions like mine, a physical property that caused a spinning top to flip on its head in proper weightlessness.
I wasn't in space, but I did have enough thrusters to simulate it. I tucked in my legs and blasted straight down from three meters above the ground, exactly fast enough to counter Earth's gravity. As if I'd flipped the polarities of a magnet, my pirouette mirrored itself and my body wasn't where the whipping vines sought it.
They found, instead, the blender of my double-headed javelin.
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A Thirteen was ultimately just an extension of its nest's excretory organs. It absorbed the various poisonous metals the larger structure dragged from the soil and isolated them at the tips of its forest of tentacles to form clubs and crude blades. But it also grew powerful musculature and a metabolism designed to supercharge itself should their hive be attacked—yet it had no digestive systems of its own. Once severed from the net of nutrition, it would burn through its metabolic reserves and starve to death in minutes, ideally taking both the attacker and its accumulated toxins with it.
Since I'd come to them, they hadn't needed to tear themselves free entirely to defend the nest.
Slowly, one graceful strike after the other poking past its guard, I forced the issue. Bit by bit, I strangled the Thirteen's access to the energy it needed, and increment by increment, the car-sized monster slowed.
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The one-third body I'd shredded minutes ago finally sagged in death. The entire creature twitched from misfiring neurons and a gap opened up between its bodies, revealing the full knot of heartvines keeping the whole thing functioning and fed.
A tempting weakness to exploit.
I knew better. It disguised a trap. With my wing arms, I'd get instantly tangled up in there, become easy prey. I chucked an incendiary grenade inside instead, deciding that I'd had enough fun anyway.
I backed away and watched the Thirteen go up in flames. When it tried to run me down in a last ditch effort, I took to the air instead.
Everything in and around the nest was already burning, mostly from the panicking Thirteens on fire. If it was summer, or even autumn, I'd probably have started a forest fire, but between the huge river nearby and the cooling weather, the fires were conveniently contained.
The charred bodies of halfgrown Antithesis were everywhere. The flood of models meant to siege me into the ground had never even had a chance—and all it had taken was a little bit of napalm at the right moment, in the right place.
Battle often went like that, I knew.
I focused on my breath and calmed down as I circled the low thermals. Dodging the rising smoke and ash was a meditation of its own, but easy enough that it let me process the day.
Find an ending I liked to it all, too.
I flirt with pain, I dance with death;
I married both, and kept my chosen breath.
What once was curse, I carry as a choice—
A grown soul speaking in its own soft voice.
Much had happened, and much had changed with new realizations. I found I was still hurt by Tynea's actions, yet my ire had disappeared entirely. It was difficult to tell where our relationship would end up, but at least I didn't fear being betrayed again, even deep down.
Some doors that I'd instinctively slammed shut, I'd opened up again.
That, I found, was good enough.
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My loud engagement with the nest had indeed triggered its emergency rooting instincts. Every lateral root and burned pod I lifted came with very fresh-looking rootlets. I knew that if I missed even one, a new nest might grow from it.
It usually wouldn't really make a difference so far from civilization—no humans lived close by, and the wildernesses were all infested anyway.
Except there was that global incursion thing going on, and I'd stimulated this particular nest with my attack. Whatever would grow from these rootlets would itself be more aggressive by default, and if it came in contact with whatever dormant nests might be neighboring it, that might spark and snowball another incursion.
No, I did have to clean up after myself, and properly.
"Tynea?" I asked.
Yes? she answered. There was a certain nervousness in her voice, genuine in a way I'd not heard from her before. Like walls of pretension had been torn down.
I couldn't tell yet if she'd chosen to expose a bit of herself to meet me halfway, or if my…stark reaction earlier had forced it.
"I think I'll need another jar of those apocalypse wasps. Can they go after the roots and vines, too?
Their larvae can, if we allow the adults to be a little more viable than usual. Feeding on the wooden material will let the larvae mature into adults, at which point they'll be going after the bodies and consume those, too. Then they'll lay more eggs inside the roots to repeat the cycle.
Tynea's voice seemed to have regained some of its strength, now that we were back on familiar ground.
"Will they properly dispose of the entire nest?" I asked, looking around at all the charred and still burning corpses. "I'm not sure there are enough bodies left for the adults to breed in large enough numbers."
It'll be fine—they don't need the corpses to lay eggs, they just prefer them for food because we want them to. If the adults can't find any corpses anymore, the eggs they'll lay will instinctively stay as root-munching larvae for longer. We'll also set them to undergo phenoptosis only if they consume material that isn't Antithesis for more than ten generations in a row, that way they'll catch any hidden rootlets triggering a late regrowth.
"Yeah, that sounds fine. Gimme as many as I need."
Tynea inserted a grid into my Quanta's HUD at the same time that she spawned a large glass jar for me to catch. There were fat worms inside, floating quiescently in some kind of liquid. They had what looked like massively powerful mandibles. I wasn't sure if they were for cracking the hard fibers of wood and root, or for digging through tough soil specifically, but I needed them to do both.
Five larvae per square, please. Inside the lid are a few packaged wafers of food they'll like. Soak them in the blood of the Antithesis first, which will program their feeding instincts for the adult state.
"Gotcha," I said and got to work.
A few minutes later, I nudged her. "Hey, Tynea?"
Yes? she answered, and like clockwork that nervosity in her voice was back.
"...Can I trust that you won't hurt me like that again?"
Yes. I haven't since.
"I know."
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