6.14 Build
Build 6.14
Bryce Kiley
2011, January 22: Brockton Bay, NH, USA
Lava sucked. I wasn’t sure why that came as a surprise to me, but it did. Texturally, it was like being bathed in thick syrup or ketchup. It was uncomfortable, but a person could move reasonably well through it.
And as I’d told Sabah, my suit was a blend of Essentia’s Expansion Suit and the raid suits pioneered by Germa 66. The former was rated for the average fire type pokemon’s Flamethrower. The latter was even better, built with the expectation that Germa might one day go to war against Totto Land.
The suits could never withstand Prometheus, Big Mom’s personal homie, but that was always an unreasonable expectation. Even Vinsmoke Judge knew that an emperor couldn’t be beaten by fancy gadgets alone. But someone like Charlotte Oven? That was a much more achievable benchmark.
No, the heat wasn’t a problem. At least, not immediately. What bothered me was the humiliation of being got by Leet’s chain chomp knockoff. For once in his career, his tech malfunctioning worked in his favor. Announcer-Moon declared their lead and ruled the shortcut valid, just like Mario Kart. Meanwhile, I stewed at the bottom of a lava stream in embarrassment.
I took a deep breath and banged my head against the wall. Well, I meant to, but the syrupy consistency of the lava meant I gently knocked my helmet into the stone. It wasn’t as satisfying.
I could already hear Amy laughing her ass off at my expense. She was asleep now, but this shit was being streamed live. She’d wake up and see.
“Ugh, I’m going to get so much shit for that,” I grunted in annoyance.
Such was life. This was what I got for asking for a race modeled off Mario Kart. A bit of luck was just part of the game. Figured that the guy who’d been surviving his own Shard’s assassination attempts would be the main beneficiary.
Still, I had a race to win. Or at least, pretend to actually try in. I figured that literally stewing in lava for a few minutes was a big enough handicap. The heat was starting to seep in, even the raid suit had limits.
As I got ready to climb out, a thought struck me: This was a fluid. Not all lava was runny enough to form a literal stream, but this one was. What would happen if I tried “running” in lava?
The Lather Road created bubbles by manipulating fluid dynamics and surface tension. While Om was called the “Water Queen,” there wasn’t a specific reason that it had to be water. The heat and friction were obvious issues, but Crown Chimera was not just the Lather Regalia. It was the Mirage Regalia, a fusion of Lather, Rumble, and Flame.
I used the first two daily. The Lather Road was the road that synergized best with the pyrobloin-based water vapor condensers from the raid suit. The Rumble Road gave me the explosive thrust I needed using Ramjet’s bullshit engines. They were core aspects of my Mirage Road, providing utility and mobility.
But Key Mother? I’d used it to access the Inorganic Net briefly to learn different martial arts. Other than that and the occasional After Burner, I just didn’t get to use it as often because, despite the tremendous friction of my usual run, the high humidity of the pyrobloin made it hard to strike a light.
I hit a bit of an epiphany, then. I’d been thinking about it all wrong. The Flame Road did not manipulate fire, not literally. Spitfire and Kazu weren’t fire mages from a JRPG game. No, Key Mother manipulated heat, and I was surrounded by nothing but.
That gave me an idea. It was insane, but it also sounded hilarious. It’d eat away at my aura like nothing else, but what was the point of this race if I didn’t cut loose a bit?
Besides, I’d been meaning to develop new tricks for the Mirage Road, tricks that integrated all the things I’d learned in my many specializations. It was about time I stopped treating them as disparate knowledge bases and started folding them all into a greater whole.
I began by forming a psychic shell around me, forcing the lava away. This gave me a pocket of mostly dry land at the bottom of the river. Slowly, I began to rotate the psychic shell while drawing it in until it was as much a drill as it was a shield.
Crouching down in my little pocket of dry land, I took a sprinter’s stance as Crown Chimera spun in place. It drew in ambient heat from the lava around me, compounding the thermal energy generated by its engines. I remained there until my feet began to scorch.
Then, when I could hold it no longer, I shot out of the lava with the single most powerful After Burner I’d ever made. My regalia roared like the beast of myth it was named for, forming a cone of twisting pressure waves that launched molten slag in every direction. It wasn’t quite like a true volcanic eruption, but damn if it wasn’t close.
That was Step One. I stole energy from the lava and made it my own, carrying it into the air to fuel my run.
From the moment I breached the lava, I began to transition back to using pyrobloin. My regalia swallowed air like a black hole. Lather and Rumble Roads joined as one, rapidly forming a road paved in water vapor.
But the pressure and heat of a pseudo-eruption had not vanished. The vapor turned to superheated steam, expanding and forming a pressure wave that propelled me faster than I’d ever gone before. I gritted my teeth and did my best to wrangle Crown Chimera.
I was barely touching the pyrobloin road anymore; the damn thing vanished pretty much as soon as it formed, heated even beyond what pyrobloin could maintain. At this point, I wasn’t skating as much as riding a barely controlled rocket launch. My Road wasn’t just a philosophy; it was a physical path that was as impermanent as the desert mirage.
Still, I wasn’t the boy I’d been when I first made this hybrid regalia. I’d grown, both in understanding and mastery. What was impossible then was within my grasp now. It was enough, just the slightest brush of the vapor road was all I needed to give myself direction, to leash the eruption.
Step Two: Integrate All Three Regalias, was complete. It’d be the work of months to master doing this without a lava stream to help me kickstart the process, but this was a start.
Announcer-Moon shouted something, but I wasn’t listening. Sound had long since blurred at the speed I was moving.
Down below, I saw it, the giant lava golem that acted as the final obstacle of this floating island. I felt a feral grin split my face. I had all this energy, all this power. I couldn’t think of a better target.
I reinforced the psychic shell in front of me with everything I had. My own momentum compressed the air against the shield into friction and heat, not unlike a shuttle reentering the atmosphere. It pressed heavily on my mind like a physical weight, but I needed a rounded profile. The heat and gas had to travel in a predictable path, not irregularly as would happen if it pressed against my body alone.
At the same time, my right hand glowed with a prepared formula. I’d worn two alchemical circles tonight: My left hand held the circle for organic alchemy while my right looked a lot like the good colonel’s favored gloves.
It was the formula best suited for inorganic alchemy involving gaseous particles. It allowed him to ignore pesky things like the strength of atomic bonds or the positions of electrons to simply rearrange gaseous matter. Most of the time, Mustang used it to generate more oxygen for his flames.
Step Three: Become a Living Meteor took that principle to the extreme. After all, so long as the principle of equivalent exchange was followed, the sky was the limit.
I made dicyanoacetylene, better written in shorthand as C4N2. I had plenty of gases in the atmosphere. It was, after all, just carbon and nitrogen arrayed in a specific pattern. All I had to do was separate four carbon dioxide molecules and a single, diatomic nitrogen molecule into its constituent atoms before slapping them together. The balanced chemical equation made one dicyanoacetylene and four paired oxygen molecules.
I laughed like a lunatic as I made a few, final adjustments to my trajectory. Step Three stripped away what control I had over my run, but that was fine. I could hardly miss the giant lava golem now that I’d stabilized from the initial liftoff.
I shoved the gas behind me. A tail of blue-white fire formed. It was just about the hottest burning gaseous compound that could be easily manufactured, burning at nine thousand ten degrees. And with four dioxygen molecules generated as a byproduct of its creation, it had plenty of fuel.
As I approached, my body twisted into a kick I’d practiced thousands of times already. How many times had I twisted my own spine apart to master this? How many times had I clawed up from the waves and forced myself to try again?
For the first time since Crown Chimera’s creation, the three regalia cores worked in tandem. Shields from Pokemon and One Piece. Explosive alchemy from Fullmetal Alchemist. A Road to call my own from Air Gear. Everything came together to form the spiritual successor of my debut capstone.
Bringing my heel around in a perfect roundhouse, I shouted for all the world to hear. “Mirage Road: Meteor Impact!”
X
James Pryce
I steered Koopa King towards the base of the mountain. We were in the lead. For once, Kevin’s tech malfunctioning had worked in our favor, blowing us off the mountain’s summit and about halfway down. It also disabled Creed for a bit, knocking him into a stream of lava.
I was a little worried that we’d killed him, but this whole space was his doing. I figured that if his protections weren’t sufficient, that was his own damn fault. At the very least, Maven didn’t seem panicked so she probably had a private line to him.
“Leet, you got an answer for that golem?” I asked Kevin. We were in a tunnel but the far exit was rapidly approaching.
“Maybe, gimme a sec,” he said as he began digging in the trunk.
“You have maybe thirty. Pretty sure the golem’s right outside.”
“Got it. I’ve got an idea, bud.”
I tried to remember the full arsenal he brought. People called us jokes, but we were still veteran capes. We had more in our storage than we let on.
When Kevin made something based on a video game, he sometimes overstepped. Life wasn’t a game. Some things that were iconic to a game’s playstyle were highly lethal in real life.
We were video game ambassadors. Our goal was to introduce people to new games as an art form. Leaving behind actual bodies kinda ruined the message. So, I could admit we weren’t the most responsible people, but we did police ourselves to some degree.
The more dangerous the tech, the more careful we were about using it. This became increasingly true in recent years as Kevin’s tech started malfunctioning more often. Some things, we held back to use on heroes only, and only to escape. Others were tossed into a safe indefinitely until Kevin could figure out how to make them more broadcast-friendly.
So, as imposing as the lava golem was, I didn’t feel too intimidated. Kevin, when he had something to prove, could be pretty fucking scary. I chose to believe in my friend and kept driving straight.
Behind us came Maven and Armsmaster, pretty much neck and neck. They were still a ways off, but they seemed to have come to an unspoken truce. At least, they weren't firing on each other. Figured, they’d do anything to keep us from winning.
Then, we heard it. The mountain rumbled. Somewhere up above, there was a titanic explosion that made our teeth rattle.
“What the fuck was that?” Kevin stammered. “You heard that? This thing can erupt?”
“This does seem unnecessarily realistic,” Armsmaster muttered.
“I swear to god, if it starts raining flaming rocks–”
“No worries, the mountain did not erupt,” Announcer-Moon clarified. He loomed overhead, leaning a bit closer as if to get a closer look. His smile, already gigantic, widened by several molars. “Creed, on the other hand…”
“Ugh, really? Showoff. Why can’t you be a normal kid,” Maven huffed under her breath. We probably weren’t supposed to hear that.
“What do you mean ‘erupt?’” Miss Militia asked the moon.
“Exactly what I said. He was in lava. Now, he is not. And here he comes!”
Before we could comment, a blue comet rose up into the sky. It seemed to hang there for a lazy second, but only from our perspective. It then turned and fell in a perfect arc, straight towards us. Initial eruption aside, there was no noise, because it outpaced the sound of its passing.
No, not “it,” Creed. I could hear him laughing like a psychopath through whatever magic bullshit that let us all talk to each other. If I squinted, I could see the silhouette of the caped tinker, diving like the world’s most suicidal falcon.
He rammed straight into the lava golem, center mass, with a berserk shout. “Mirage Road: Meteor Impact!”
“Of course,” Maven sighed sounding utterly done with the world, “of fucking course you named your special move.”
The golem did not break as much as it evaporated in the impact. The blast wave sent us all scrambling, and this time, there was no way I could use it to my advantage. It was only thanks to Kevin’s localized gravitic generators that we landed on our wheels to keep driving.
“Fucking son of a bitch stole our thunder!” Kevin cursed. “I was gonna destroy that! That was my kill!”
“Cope and seethe, Leet,” Creed shot back, still laughing.
“Well, that was certainly a hell of a finisher. Creed is once again in the lead and the rest have just finished picking their jaws off the floor as they approach the final mountain, the Big Cheese!” the moon shouted.
It was an objectively stupid name. No one except Mouse Protector would ever approve of a dumb name like that. And yet, I couldn’t say it wasn’t appropriate.
The third and final floating island really did look like a huge slice of swiss cheese. It was mostly made of sandstone and there were many holes of varying sizes dug throughout the triangular wedge. More importantly, there were huge sandworms burrowing in and out.
The racetrack split into many smaller routes as we approached. Each of them went into one or more of these holes. If you didn’t drive fast enough, or fucked up your timing, you were likely to get eaten alive.
“Oi, what happened to this being a nonlethal race?” I asked the moon. “Getting eaten by one of those giant sandworms sure as shit sounds lethal to me.”
“Oh, those cute, little guys? Don’t mind them,” Announcer-Moon said with a smile that I just knew I’d be seeing in my nightmares. “You won’t die. You’ll just get to experience what it’s like to be crapped out the ass-end of a worm, no big deal.”
“Yeah, no big deal, maybe for the fucking moon,” I grumbled.
“Wow, I didn’t know Bowser was such a whiny bitch. Is that canon?”
“Fuck you!”
“Forget it, man,” Kevin said. “Just drive straight ‘cause I’m pulling out the good shit.”
I glanced back. He had his trusty bazooka propped over his shoulder again. “Red?”
“You know it. This is the last stretch anyway, no point in holding anything back.”
“Alright, but let me know when you use the other stuff. I need some warning or we’ll go flying again.”
“Got it.”
Kevin took aim and pulled the trigger.
The red shells, unlike their green counterparts, were tinkertech. There was an infrared tracker on Kevin’s Mario hat that communicated with the missiles mid-flight. I wasn’t sure what exactly made them tinkertech, but Kevin assured me that not even the military had anything this good.
The three shells spiraled through the air along a central axis. They looked really cool like this, letting loose blazing sparks in elegant patterns as they shot towards their target.
He was aiming at the ArmsCycle. Truthfully, that was better than the alternatives. Creed was probably nimble enough to dodge everything and I had no intention of being on the business end of a “Meteor Impact.” Maven was nowhere near as scary, but her racecar was durable as hell. I doubted the red shells would do more than piss her off.
Miss Militia’s rifle transformed in her hands. It shrank to the length of her arm, gaining in width what it lost in height. The thick barrel let out a thumping noise as a projectile was launched into the air. It burned an eye-searing yellow-white and arced beautifully to intercept the red shells.
“Thermite? What the fuck?” Kevin complained. “What kind of hero carries fucking thermite in her pocket?”
“The kind who can conjure her own ammunition,” Miss Militia said, voice just north of freezing. There was a distinctly smug undertone that was honestly doing it for me.
My best buddy wasn’t having any of it. He leapt onto his feet, trusting the localized gravitic generator to keep him steady. His hands caught on fire as he unleashed Mario’s special move. A huge fireball rocketed towards the ArmsCycle as though it had a mind of its own.
Unlike the red shells, this couldn’t be redirected with a flare. To be honest, I wondered if whatever tech was used to shape, contain, and move the fireball couldn’t be put to better use elsewhere. It did fit our theme though, and looked very cool. I supposed that was as much as either of us could ask for, being streamers and all.
Unfortunately, Armsmaster got to steal our cool moment. Miss Militia took over the steering through a wheel in her sidecar as he leapt into the air. He did something that made his halberd glow a purplish blue before cutting the fireball in half.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked Kevin for an explanation. “You can’t cut fire!”
“Fuck if I know,” Kevin snarled. His gloves began to spark so we had to toss them aside. Shit timing, those fireballs were some of his better tech.
“Repulsive partitions created by magnetic fields that divide the air currents, forcibly redirecting thermal and electrical energy,” Armsmaster said proudly. “Kid Win has been most helpful since his revelation.”
“Yeah? Fuck you, too, Halbeard.”
“We know who the better tinker is.”
“Yes, me,” Creed cut in like the arrogant asswipe he was. “You lot can bicker over who’s second best.”
We reached the surface of the cheese wedge. Up close, it was even dustier, with enough loose sand to create dust clouds behind each car. Visibility suffered, as did our speed. Even with our big, monster truck tires, the loose sand slowed us down, though not as much as everyone else.
We were close now, close enough that we could have shouted insults back and forth without the moon having to make us heard. Creed was in the lead, with me, Maven, and Armsmaster following behind in that order. Squealer and her dumpdozer were comfortably where they belonged, lost in our collective dust.
“Bullshit. Are you even a tinker?” Kevin shot back.
“Of course I am. I'm a free tinker whose focus is salt mining. I can build anything so long as I can make at least one person point and say, ‘Creed’s bullshit.’”
“You're a dickhead. Let's see how you like this! Uber, I'm going all in!”
I groaned as I hopped us over a sand dune. There were easier targets, like literally everyone else. “Fuck, dude. You sure?”
“Yes, I'm sure! We’re second! We’re so fucking close! We need to get his ass at least one more time!” he ranted.
That was Kevin, always easy to pump up. That was true in school and when we played online with chat enabled. I already knew there was no stopping him when he got like this.
I let out a quiet sigh and a rueful grin. He sometimes didn't know when to quit, but I knew I'd back him every step of the way. It was just what bros did. Besides, him flying off the handle a bit was part of what made life interesting.
My fingers tightened on the wheel. “Alright, man. I'm ready for the fallout. Go nuts.”
“Fuck yeah! Let's bring the thunder!”
I knew what was coming. In competitive Mario Kart–yes, that was a thing–the two most valued offensive items were the feared blue shell and lightning bolt. The blue shell targeted whoever was in first place, sending them tumbling and giving everyone else a chance to overtake them unless they had a shield ready.
That was nice, but the lightning bolt was more valuable in our expert opinions. It was indiscriminate, harder to defend against, and could singlehandedly win you the entire race if timed correctly. It was the king of Mario Kart items. Which, of course, was why Kevin chose to build it.
Two tactical drones rose into the air. They expanded like colorful weather balloons. One had the Mario M while the other had a stylized Bowser symbol. They generated twin currents through multi-dimensional refraction principles, whatever the fuck that meant.
A third drone, shaped like Lakitu and his cloud, began to direct the storm. Everyone, regardless of where they were or what they were doing, were about to be hit by lightning.
Well… sorta. We couldn’t shrink people like in the game, but we could use the electrical current to generate a targeted EMP ray that would chew through conventional hardening methods like a hot knife through butter.
Within seconds, four arcs of massive lightning shot from the Lakitu drone, one per each car. Kevin cackled deliriously as the lightning struck home. He shouted something obscene, but it couldn’t be heard over the lightning.
X
Sabah Azimi
I couldn’t help it. I screamed as the lightning hit me. Consciously knowing it wouldn’t do anything didn’t mean it wasn’t super-scary.
To my surprise, Armsmaster and I were the most heavily affected. He did manage to deflect the EMP bolt, probably with that electromagnetic repulsion field or whatever he had on his halberd, but he lost control of his vehicle. Miss Militia wasn’t nearly as great at steering the ArmsCycle as he was and they went over the edge, no doubt to be caught by a cloud.
In my case, the lightning washed over APEP’s chassis and sent me skidding to a halt. I almost went over the edge as well, but only just managed to catch myself by deploying my wings.
I hadn’t expected that. If anything, I thought my car would have the best defense against something like this, especially given Bryce’s own use of electrical attacks.
“Did… Did you just EMP APEP?” I asked in disbelief. “I could’ve sworn this thing was shielded.”
“Yeah, fuck you, bitch,” Kevin cackled. “Who’s the best tinker, now?”
“I didn’t realize I was even in that particular race,” I replied primly. I pushed a button and a secret compartment on the dashboard opened up. Out came a glass bottle of coke.
Taking a deep breath to center myself, I opened it and had a single, refreshing sip before swirling the bottle in my hand. Bryce said this was the “good shit,” to be used in emergencies. This surely counted.
I slammed the bottle upside down into a slot near the stickshift. The soda whirlpooled down through a special drainage pipe, one that led directly to the soda engine. After several seconds, APEP roared back to life, almost as if the car itself was angry.
“Oh, yes,” I purred. “Now, we were back in business.”
X
James Pryce
I couldn’t see what she did exactly, but Kevin’s lightning hadn’t knocked out that supercar for long. Behind us, APEP rumbled like a beast of legend awakening from its slumber. I remember that other thing Creed was known for besides silly roller blade tricks: soda engines.
I’d heard about those, of course. But like most other people, I thought they were gimmicks, a creative spin on “renewable” energy. It was one thing to send them to Damascus to power a few light bulbs or water filters, and a whole different thing to fuel a high-performance racecar.
“Was… Was that Coca-Cola?” I asked in disbelief.
“The authentic stuff, straight from Peru,” Maven said with an audible smirk.
“Authenti–D-Did you pour Peruvian cocaine into your engine?"
“You can’t prove that. As for who the best tinker here is,” she said smugly, “I’m pretty sure that’s still Creed.”
“Your boyfriend is such bullshit,” I grumbled.
“Not my boyfriend, but yes, yes he is.”
Bullshit.
Pure bullshit.
I stopped thinking about it. It was more important to build the lead we had. Armsmaster was temporarily out of the game, but I’d eat my own thumbs if the guy known for his fuck-massive arsenal didn’t have a backup plan.
Besides, Squealer hadn’t been affected at all. Her dumpdozer had no defense against energy weapons, we’d all figured that out by now, but there was something to be said for rugged construction. As far as I could tell, only the crane arm that moved Mush around relied on electricity. The rest of the ride worked just fine, even if she was cussing Kevin for ruining her dash display.
The bigger issue was Creed. He hadn’t had much time to prepare before Kevin’s EMP bolt struck him. He held up his hand and shot his own lightning to try to deflect it, but at least a part of our attack must have gotten through because he fell like a stone and tumbled along the dirt pathway.
I wondered how much of his tech we knocked out. Hopefully, it’d be enough for us to catch up to the crazy bastard. Either way, there was little left of the race so I thumbed my own secret weapon. It was now or never and Creed was the last one we had to pass.
Author’s Note
The viscosity of lava varies heavily. What Bryce is describing is fluid basaltic lava, definitely on the runnier side.
4(CO2) + N2 = C4N2 + 4(O2). This is, technically speaking, a valid use of equivalent exchange. Like Bryce mentions in-chapter, it ignores basically every other rule of chemistry, but all the atoms are there.
In pure oxygen, it burns at 9,010 F. For comparison, the temperature of basaltic lava is anywhere between 1,830 F and 2,280 F.
One more chapter of this. I didn’t think it’d be this long when I wrote the outline for it. Believe it or not, I cut out a bit of the outline. Well, hope you’re enjoying the dumbest race in Brockton Bay’s history.
Animal Fact: Part three on polyergus ants: If slaver ant workers are so worthless at anything but raiding, how do slaver ant colonies form in the first place?
One way is for a young queen to follow behind a raid and sneak in during the chaos. She has a narrow window of time to find and kill the host queen while the workers are distracted.
This can be risky because polyergus ants will not tolerate competing colonies in their territory. A known colony will be raided again for more slaves, so if the new queen cannot build up her daughters fast enough, she will be discovered and wiped out by her old colony.
The second way is for a young queen to venture further afield and hit a colony on her own. She rushes in with a fog of appeasement pheromone and finds the queen while the defenders are temporarily pacified. She then engages in a deathmatch with the queen and mutilates the body, bathing herself in the queen's pheromones. After this, worker ants will bring her food and clean her.
However, this might not be the end. Some ant colonies have multiple queens so she must challenge and kill them all. Odds are good that she will die in the attempt. Either the workers figure things out and literally rip her limb from limb, or she loses a deathmatch. Polyergus ants are better equipped for direct combat, with sickle-like mandibles meant for cutting ant exoskeleton, but a direct loss isn't unheard of.
I still think it's crazy that a single ant can have any kind of realistic chance against a colony, but that's nature for ya.
Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. If you’re also like me, you can find my works on
Space Battles: https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/fabled-webs.514019/
Questionable Questing: https://questionablequesting.com/members/fabled-webs.29875/