Amelia, Ch 218
"That can't possibly work," Zach muttered. "Can it?"
"Not a chance in hell," Lisa replied. "The Endbringers already can't exist by the natural laws of our reality. What they're doing's going to put one hell of a dent in the fucker. Probably. Even that's questionable. But only attacks that can hurt the core will actually kill an Endbringer."
"Can we break the field?" I asked. "Maybe save the people caught inside? Their lives are being thrown away for nothing."
"No," Emma answered. "Opening the containment now would let the exotic effects pour out into the rest of the world. The results could easily be worse than New Delhi. It might even make our whole world uninhabitable." HorrorDismay.
"And they're using this on their own people," Taylor growled. "When that weapon shuts down, we're taking at least some of those barricades. The whole fucking thing if at all possible. We need to know how that tech works. This is a whole new kind of WMD. It might even be a way to attack Scion directly. If nothing else, if we have it that means they don't."
"And the possibility of an international incident?" Lisa asked.
"Fuck to that," I said, adding my support to Taylor. "They just unleashed that... that! On their own people. No one's going to blame us for doing what we must to stop it from happening again."
"Right. Just making sure," Lisa replied. "Any objections to Operation: World War Three?"
"Umm... if I may?" Trevor spoke up. "If you're willing to cannibalize some of our equipment, we might be able to do this without them being able to prove we were ever here in the first place."
That would be nice. "I'm listening," Taylor spoke for us.
....
The shield was still up, or at least we were unable to scan into its location and Behemoth had not left the containment, almost an hour later. We finished our project within that time. Over two hundred of our zerglings were cut open to remove the shunting components, but we finished our new device. A nearly sixty mile long tube of modified Yggdrasil. Crystal and Vicky were busy pumping it with as much power as they could, and I was adding the amount of power I could by drawing off the normal Yggdrasil mass. We were ready.
"The power signatures are fading," Emma informed us. "Exotic physics effects are being detected. Either it's shutting down, or it's about to rupture. No way to know until we see it happen."
The shields didn't shatter so much as they evaporated, leaving behind a desert of twisted shapes existing without rhyme or reason. Several large slabs of matter had fallen into the blue sand that was all that existed of the soil. Crystals and metals were strewn about. Strange and colorful corals extended out of the sand, and birdlike creatures started falling from the sky and shattering into goo. A goo which struggled to move before breaking down into mist.
"Life?" I asked. "That field created living things?"
"It makes as much sense as anything else," Emma replied. "The laws of reality changed, but they didn't stop existing entirely. They're dying because whatever chemical properties allowed them to exist in the first place no longer apply. As lethal to them as the weapon itself was to the people caught within."
One of the crystal forms shifted and shattered. Beneath was Behemoth. He was reduced to a skeleton. Or, skeleton might be the wrong word. Perhaps more like an artist drawing the proportion lines before getting to the rest of the drawing. Litte more than stick figure with extra details. If anything, somehow, he looked even more terrifying this way than he did with his flesh intact.
"Now!" Victoria shouted, and the ring of plant material shunted over. Taylor had six and a half seconds for the matter to completely encase the ring of barricades and shunt back. Any longer, and its cloaking effect would fail. She did it in five and a quarter. The massive wall of rings took their geosynchronous place in our dimension. Could the theft be attributed to us? I asked myself. Maybe. Our teleportation equipment was already pretty well known, but only a few knew we were using an alternate earth as a planet sized staging platform and at-will base of operations. Either way, they certainly couldn't prove anything.
Behemoth charged the line not far from where he was trapped, smashing into the soldiers who had, not long ago, murdered innocent people who were simply trying to flee. The Yangban moved quickly, opening up with similar tactics as before. This time, the eldest of the Endbringers was done playing games. Now he fired at three divisions instead of one at a time. Now when he shot, he got the whole group. In three seconds, seventy five Yangban and hundreds of soldiers died.
"They broke its program," Lisa spoke in horror. "They follow a mantra of hitting harder than they are hit, and that was one hell of a hit. It's not going to retreat. It's not going to hold back. If we were to try to kill Behemoth now, it's just going to result in a slaughter. It's going to keep killing until it feels it's achieved enough of a body count to match was just happened."
"That could take hours," I replied.
"It will take days," Lisa corrected. "Well, Eric, you get your wish. I don't think China will survive this."
"Is there anything we can do?" I asked. Fuck, didn't we just basically say we wanted this?
"Unless Chariot has a way to evacuate entire cities?" she responded. "No, there's really not."
Behemoth's next attack was a new one. He smashed the stub that was once his fist into the ground and it rippled outward, a shockwave in the earth. Where people were standing, there was no warning. They didn't fall or scream or even see their deaths coming. They simply exploded into gore.
"He's still holding back," Lisa continued her analysis. "Less than before, but that was nothing but theatrics. Taking time to telegraph his attacks unnecessarily. He could easily do that without the stomp."
Behemoth moved into the part of the city which hadn't been functionally removed from the face of the planet. His kill aura no longer simply killed people, it caused the glass of the buildings to melt.
"Radiaton output is off the charts," Emma informed us. "Much higher and your insides would simply liquify. As it stands, lethal exposure would occur in minutes. If you survive everything else for that long, at least. I think he's trying to lure the defenders into following his trail and killing themselves."
"Would the Zerg do anything to help?" Taylor asked. "Slow him down at least?"
"No," Lisa responded. "He'd just burrow underground to avoid them and start killing from beneath the earth. Fighting us in person is... more like a polite formality than anything. He certainly doesn't need to do it."
"So what do we do?" Vicky asked. "Let him go on his killing spree across China until he gets bored and takes a nap? Then kill him after he's calmed down a little?"
"That's exactly what we have to do," Lisa responded. "There are no other possibilities."
The visual display flickered again, and then fuzzed into near nothing. "What happened? Another reality weapon?" Taylor asked.
"Close," Trevor answered. "According to Dragon's tech, her satellites have gone dark as well. It's Scion. He's finally showed up."
"I hate to say this," I spoke up. "But that's good, in a twisted sort of way. The fuckers run from Scion, right? He'll go back into hibernation before killing most of China. Hell, maybe he won't run. Maybe he'll fight back and at least do some damage to Scion."
"We'll have to find out later," Lisa replied. "Whatever else happens, there's nothing more we can do here. Pack it up, head home, and hope like hell he didn't see us watching the battle from this side. The idea of him knowing where to find our dimension worries me.
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A/N- And, sometimes, no matter how far off the rails you go, you intersect canon.
