Chapter One Hundred Seventeen - Wings, Sort Of

Road Rash is standing with his back to the camera, looking across the battlefield and scratching his stubbly chin.

Gobbets of green flesh are flying everywhere and Antithesis blood paints the whole scene green and black. A specific style of anime music fades in and out as a white truck careens from left to right across the scene, and back again, "isekai-ing" alien monstrosities everywhere.

White feathers keep spilling out of the truck's open back, and loud, pissed-off honking can be heard, also fading in and out with the truck and its music.

Chat's scrolling like mad, yelling about a truck and geese getting loose.

"He's having fun, huh?"

– Road Rash, streaming on Twitch and distinctly not being required to fight, first day of the Global Incursion 2057

 

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"Ow, ow," I whined and giggled, hanging from the shield's handle.

I looked down to study my injuries and lazy shivers fizzled from nerve to nerve, distracting me from the pain, calling my attention to other, more…interesting places. The longer I stayed still, the stronger it got. The more I hurt, the more insistent.

I clenched my thighs and laughed.

Blood flowed freely down my front and all over the mess of tubes and thrusters and packs in my other arm. The Antithesis beneath me kept licking at the drops of blood that hit them. I couldn't stop giggling, and got a bit light-headed.

Better fix this.

I had three deep furrows in my chest, leaking fluids. Lots of blood, but some milky stuff too. The blood was flowing down, the milk was flowing up and everywhere, covering my wounds.

This woulda been so much worse, back then, I thought, chortling again. Drunk on a weird, semi-orgasmic high.

Tinea, came Tynea's voice. You desperately need more energy. Nutrients. And nanites, if you don't want to wait for your bionite levels to recover.

I opened my mouth and went aaah~ giggling all the way. Little stars were flashing in my vision, my chest bled, breathing hurt, and I knew exactly what I was doing. Deja vu, I've just been in this place before~

First will be some nanites to help you heal, Tinea.

Something big and sizzly hit my tongue and I almost coughed as it rolled down my open throat, dissolving into an electric mist that spread through me.

And eat the next ones, please. These will top you off.

Thick and fluffy in my mouth. I giggled again. Marshmallows, full of juicy, dribbly sweetness. I chewed and swallowed. They went into my stomach and ballooned until I felt so satisfied I kinda just wanted to fall asleep and digest.

Warmth and pleasure radiated from my tummy and the pain went away. I smiled softly, happy. Yawned. Then I blinked when a wave of energy washed through me like the ocean. And more warmth. A sensation like the biggest gulp of water after the worst dehydration ever. It filled me up everywhere and charged me like the world's biggest sugar rush and caffeine hit.

"Whoo!" My eyes went big like saucers. "That's the stuff!"

My brain tripped all over itself as I saw all and thought about everything.

My boobs were knitting themselves back together and the blood had stopped running. I still looked like the victim of a slasher in a horror movie, though. I cackled at how literally true that was.

Then my brain tripped onwards.

There were two spots of nothingness fifty meters from Leah. Trailing after her. Not quite catching up, but she wasn't losing them either. I'd have to intervene.

Micro-missiles? Too weak, probably. Javelins through the brain might work, though. Can't aim accurately while they're invisible. Sense shape with antennae? Gotta get closer for that. Dangerous. Reveal first. Paint? Spray gun. Cement? Maybe. Do they have only one brain? Maybe not, they're twenties, after all. Set up for Leah's one-oh-five?

I smirked. Better.

One more Twenty-One beneath me. It had given up waiting for me to fall, but it was sniffing after my blood. It had also stopped bleeding. I scrunched my nose.

Gotta kill that one, too. So…more bombs? Ah, no. Its invisibility is badly damaged. I can test weapons against this one. Javelin micro-missiles, especially.

I smiled. Good.

One of my drones got shredded by fangs and crushed beneath stomping claws. I grimaced as another got caught, too. My last two drones were safe, jumping from tree to tree at the edges of the battle.

Scout's Quartet's good for spying. Gotta figure something out for scouting on the battlefields.

Big shapes were breaking past the trees in the distance, across the huge opening we were fighting in.

Six-limbed grasshoppers, I thought, weird alien heads with swollen, vertical slits for mouths. Long bodies. Long wings for gliding on thermals. Model Fifteen. Artillery. Throw wheels full of deadly spikes over several hundred meters. A Five, but worse.

I grinned nastily. Easy to kill, though.

Thousands upon thousands of single-digits everywhere. Ones up in the sky, Threes covering the ground, Fours mixed in. Lots of the large tiger-like B variants of the Three. I shuddered a little from all the uncanny silence. It just wouldn't ever be right, the way they made not a meep, not even in the middle of battle.

Easy kills for the Myriad, at least.

Explosions as Leah's auxiliary cannons continued raining fragmenting shells around her. The crack of lightning strikes from Daddy-Long-Legs' crown. I frowned, looking up at the seemingly endless flock of Ones.

Gotta get back under cover of the electrolasers, though.

And finally, there was still the heavily damaged Twenty-Eight, staggering along on two out of four limbs.

How's it not bled out, yet? Tough fuckers.

It was quickly getting overtaken by the alien reinforcements. I could see firing lines for Leah's one-oh-five gravitic grenades open up.

Could probably also kill it easily with my Class II Small Arms Ammunition… Nah. That's Leah's kill. She needs to experience taking out terrible threats in a clean, detached way.

Okay, plan of action…

I nudged Logistics.

"How many of what rockets do I have?"

– High-explosive: 100 –
– High-explosive, fragmentation: 500 –
– Javelin, hypersonic penetrator: 50 –
– Carrier, short-range carrier: 100 –
– The Long Hand, long-range carrier: 20 –
– The Third Degree, acid payload: 50 –
– Whereami Whoami, chaff payload: 100 –
– Standoff, self-deploying landmine: 50 –
– Raptor's Gaze, jet-powered UAV: 5 –

"Hmm. Good start." I looked around the battlefield again and considered just how many of the single-digits there were. "Keep building those fragmentation missiles, though. We'll need a lot more of them.

"And Tynea?" I asked, "What about my new sort-of-wings?"

Please have a look.

A weird snip flashed through my spine, giving me goosebumps. And suddenly I felt new things on my back. Behind my back. I was constrained there somehow, held down by something that was thin and had little give to it. Like I had limbs that were strapped down.

Oh. The covering tarp thingy.

I craned my head back, and there they were. Covered by blue, bulging fabric, I saw the outline of two pairs of long, meter-long limbs, all folded up. Twitching.

"Uh…"

Freaky.

I could feel myself wanting to stretch for freedom.

The long, thin arms of the suitcase-spider detached from my skin with a sucking sound, and the tarp between them split, rolling itself up before disappearing into the Skitterway.

I kept staring, mouth open, sighing into the release as my new limbs unfurled and stretched. And bumped into the inside of the bubble, where little flashes and ripples answered.

Some part of my brain went, Ah. Can't shoot through the thing. Good to know. The rest of me was both full of wonder at the new sensations, and kind of weirded out at the sight. I was a human spider.

Leah giggled through my Quanta.

"You should see your face, Tinea. You'd think you just discovered new tasty food or something."

I snorted. I could figure. I had seen babies and their hilarious expressions.

Leah continued, "What's it like? They do look a bit weird from the outside. Kinda…incomplete, I guess? Half-formed is the word."

"That sounds about right. Uh," I replied.

I could sense the new brain-thingy spread through the roots of these new arms. Moving them was utterly effortless. Like I didn't even have to try.

Huh.

I realized that I didn't. The thing was made to handle a gazillion of individual, microscopic scales that all could move independently. Calculations out the wazoo. Supercomputers couldn't do it. I could. Four piddly arms were nothing. The new brain was just…chilling. Bored, almost, except it didn't do boredom.

What the fuck? That's amazing.

I moved my new extremities around. The upper pair was quite thick at the roots and longer than my actual arms. The bottom pair looked similar, but a bit downsized and shorter. The tips were knobby, and my Quanta could see them continue growing underneath their skin, but too slow for the normal bits of my brain to perceive.

A few weeks for the actual wings to be finished, huh? Yeah, that tracks.

It looked like the next segments would grow out at an angle, to form the leading edges of each wing. The arms themselves were covered in a dense, quietly shimmering fuzz of extremely thin hairs.

There wasn't any swoosh at all even if I whipped all four of the arms through the air. My sensilla told me that the little hairs deadened any turbulence and smoothed the airflow.

"Natural is what it's like, Leah. Like they've always been there and I learned how to move them long ago. Like my own legs."

Tynea's voice joined us in the call, "You'll need to eat a lot, going forward. First from the pill kit, but also after your wings have completed their growth. Flight is very expensive."

I nodded.

"Makes sense. Gonna get some upgrades again for my guts and metabolism, I guess."

"I don't wanna be a party-pooper," Leah said with a bit of tension in her voice, "but I do need you to clear the way, Tinea. I want to get to that highway, at least. I hate having no way out."

I smacked myself into gear, mentally, and curled my legs up. Ignoring the remaining twinges as my wounds slowly finished healing themselves, I spread the Second Wind across my lap and tried to figure out how to best put the strappy mess on with one hand.

Actually, one hand and four finger-less limbs, huh?

I brought the new arms around and found that it was indeed much easier to sort the mess out and locate the seams of each, uh, strap, sock, and ring. Putting it on was still a challenge, though.

Tinea…

Uh-oh. That sounded very exasperated.

"Yes?"

Have you…thought about…sitting in the bubble?

"Uh…"

Ah. I was being a dummy. Got it.

I blushed. Tynea had said she'd designed this bubble to block bodies. And my limbs had knocked into it.

Um.

I let go of the shield and dropped onto my bum with a meaty thwack as the Myriad bunched up uncomfortably around my waist. Leah snorted and wolf-whistled me. I added a tally to the Tickle Revenge List. Admission would be extracted for the show, yes it would.

After opening up the battle skirt for more range of motion, I looked at the Second Wind in detail. It consisted of a four-limbed sheath of fabric that would cling to my wing arms, to which the harness was attached.

The harness consisted of thousands of individual hard pieces that formed a flexible shell around the fabric sock. It guided a variety of strings and lines away from the central packs, which was presumably where the canopy was attached to and where I would guide it with tugs and shifting of my weight. Thrusters were placed in groupings around and between the joints, such that I could orient them all into various directions just by moving my arms.

The slim pack with the canopy itself was made of rigid, thin shells and would sit in three solidly connected pieces. A tiny one above, and two larger ones side-by-side snuggled in between my tail and my new arms—which themselves were anchored to my lower spine via a small, but tough and very complex biomechanical system that had grown inside of me, a handwidth or so above my tail's root, close to my center of mass.

Hard plastic, probably? Same black aesthetic with glittering diamond dust. Wonder how the parachute is shaped, what with the break in the middle?

A few LEDs lit up and a big one blinked orange, and then slowly pulsed green.

That's the diagnostics indicator, Tinea. It seems your parachute is ready to be equipped.

I finally followed Tynea's highlights and advice to equip the jump jets and parachute, which was actually a lot easier than I expected, since the harness itself could move and wrapped me up with its socks and straps as soon as I shifted it to my lower back.

A ping against my Quanta announced that the Second Wind was ready for use.

Good timing, Tinea. The Aspis is about to run out of juice.

"Uh?" I asked dumbly.

Lean forward a bit, please.

The bubble flickered. It was still getting hit by a variety of quills, and Ones were still smacking into it.

"Oh, shit."

Two seconds.

"Oh fuck."

I leaned forward. I probably didn't wanna be falling parachute-pack first.

"Uh. Ah. Tynea? Concussion grenade, short-fuze."

The bubble disappeared and a round object materialized in front of my eyes. It matched my momentum as I started falling.

There was a big red button on its top.

I giggled.

 

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