NOVEL FROG Chapter One Hundred Twelve – Disorder
Chapter One Hundred Twelve - Disorder
The view rattles, slips, and falls. The camera hits the ground hard, bounces, and shows slight artifacts and new cracks across the lens from the damage it has taken.
It rolls to a stop with an audible tock as it collides with something. The device's digital stabilizers work to clear up the picture, rotate the view by ninety degrees, and remove much of the artifacts.
The curious observer observes part of a nondescript road. There is littered trash, all kinds of dirt, and alien bodies. A lot of dead alien bodies. Smashed, squished, shredded, shattered corpses of Antithesis.
Suddenly a new wave of green-and-black bodies covers the view, eerily silent in their presence. Only the clicking and scraping of their claws can be heard.
From the left, faint sounds become audible. Music? Yes, music. It's distorted, played by overtaxed speakers.
Gas, Gas, Gas!~
It's coming a little closer, getting a bit louder.
I'm gonna step on the gas!
A whole lot louder. It's so loud that the microphone of the camera sounds tinny.
Tonight I'll fly~
It's properly blaring now. The ground seems to vibrate a little.
And be your lover~
The ground is shaking and the camera has a difficult time keeping the picture stable.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!
A horn blares, tires squeal.
Then, in a split second that somehow seems to last an eternity, a white Japanese truck—horn still blaring—crashes into the view from the left and plows through the horde of aliens.
The music mix drops and switches tracks. The moment continues to draw out, very obviously unnaturally so. Aliens go flying, plant matter is crushed, and the truck hasn't lost an iota of momentum as it violently parts the onslaught.
Deja vu, I've just been in this place before!~
Something intangible seems to snap and the truck races off to the right in a flash.
The music recedes a little.
Higher on the street!~
Bodies hit the floor and it's very apparent that their state matches the previous carnage. That truck has, indeed, been here before.
More squealing of tires, the music rapidly gains in volume again, and the truck returns. This time its grill is pointed right at the camera.
And I know~
A moment before the camera is crushed, the observer gets a clear view of the customized number plate.
It reads: THE ISEKAI TRUCK
It's my time to go!~
– Recovered recording of Isekai Truck in battle, fellow samurai and best friend of Road Rash, July 2056
***
"Hold on tight, Tinea!"
I sure fucking did. There was a new energy in Leah's voice. Something explosive, something angry.
Something that promised retribution.
Daddy-Long-Legs hopped forwards a meter or two, then started running again, with that regular lurch from the leg that had been ripped away. My hands clenched on the edge of the cot as we swerved, went a little sideways. My stomach rebelled, my tail tightened around Leah and her crash couch.
In my mind's eye, I saw the alien turret rotate to our rear, aiming around the spider's abdomen that had ducked out of the line of fire with the swaying movement.
The lights inside the living space went from soft gold to an alien black that had the little hairs on my nape stand on edge. I shouldn't have been able to see anything. Instead every last detail of the living space stood out in stark detail. My shoulders hunched. There was a sense of primal viciousness to it. Like a predator had caught me in its sight.
A sudden, all-encompassing static charge in the air added to the feeling. Black lightning flashed from the one-oh-five's turret across the outer skin of the spider. We went weirdly weightless.
My sensilla fuzzed and frizzed, then, almost gentle in its finality, the tolling gong of the cannon firing stroked across my antennae, down the back of my neck, along my spine, all the way to the tip of my tail.
Daddy-Long-Legs lurched, and didn't lurch. It was like there were two of him, two of us, and the other…copy? Potential? The other us-but-not went flying with all the force and more, only to shatter and cease existing moments later. Like a mirage.
I wanted to rub my eyes, but I found myself locked in place. I couldn't move. I couldn't even breathe. And I couldn't tell if that was all me, or if I was being held there. Something was hinky.
It, the thing that maybe held me, disappeared when the black light reverted to normal.
Part of me tracked the flying shell, and part of me tried to replay the last few moments.
What had happened, exactly? There was a black light. And then…
Uh.
There'd been a black…
What was I trying to replay?
Huh?
Oh, the shell. Right.
It had flown across the kilometers, towards the Twenty-Eight, like a normal shell.
Uh…
…
Why wouldn't it have been normal?
N… Nevermind.
And then it exploded a tenth of a second away from the Twenty-Eight. It turned into a black, rotating whirlpool of strange smears of light that…bounced off the alien and dissipated as it clanged off into the sky.
…
Fuck?
I zoomed the drone's view in and looked closely at the dense bone-plate we'd hit.
Ah, we did do damage. Good.
The bone's surface was off-white and kind of glossy. Like polished diamond, but bone. It looked stupidly dense. It looked like it would be uncomfortable to touch with how dense it was, like it might bruise me just from how immovable the material would be.
But in the center, there was a pure white scar, a whirled starburst shaped like a galaxy.
Not very deep though. A centimeter? Two?
"Load another, please, Ypsi," said Leah. She sounded like she was half annoyed, half disappointed. Pissed that the Twenty-Eight wasn't gone, but trying to keep it out of her voice.
Oki! Um. You used it wrong, though!
"Oh?"
Yeah! The Disorder has a charge! You can trade that for mass and energy. Shoot it through softer material first, then it'll be stronger by the time it reaches the Twenty-Eight! It's why I gave you this one. Top peak of Class I! Annoying to use, but it's good against multiple strongish enemies in a line.
"Oh! I see. Thank you, Ypsi."
The giddiness was back in Leah's voice, any disappointment blown away.
Mm! The Class II version is nicer.
"I bet."
Ypsi teleported the second shell into the loader for another twenty-five points, and Leah reversed our course. She lined us up so that we'd hit several Fourteens first.
I stayed silent, just absorbing everything that was happening. Something had unsettled me, and I couldn't put a finger on it. It was disquieting, and I didn't know why.
So, I just kept my eyes open. Watching. Learning.
Leah either hadn't noticed whatever was off, or she already knew and it wasn't dangerous. That helped me settle a little, gave me the patience to miss nothing, just in case. It let me think properly.
We'd made a major tactical error earlier. We were occupying a mobile vessel, something designed to be fast and deadly. But we'd stood still, and worse, hadn't even mitigated the risks of doing so with proper precautions. Just a few sensors scattered around would've been plenty.
We hadn't even thought of that. And Leah had paid the price.
I was too experienced to make that kind of mistake. But…I also hadn't really seen any action for longer than I'd been alive by the time that I crossed the Atlantic.
Couldn't realistically blame myself. It's not even like we had had the time to prepare properly. Racing home wasn't just a question of wants and wishes, it did actually affect the mental stability of Leah. She needed to be home. If we wanted to prepare for a mission like this, for all the things that could go wrong, that would take…weeks, probably.
Should I have asked Tynea for advice?
Probably. Something to dig into once we're traveling again. See what she's capable of. Or even allowed to do?
The light suddenly switched from the comfy, soft gold to an alien, threatening black, and the hairs across my nape crawled. My whole body tensed, as if something truly deadly was staring me down.
Huh?
I felt like I'd been here before.
I rapidly switched to the camera of a nearby drone. There was nothing I hadn't already seen, at least not in visible range. Our tremor sensors didn't pick up anything either.
No. This…trepidation came from us.
My mental eyes looked at our mech. Black lightning slithered across the outside of Daddy-Long-Legs. We were still moving, but slowly and deliberately. Lining up the best shot. Leah had a plan, I felt the tension in her body ratched up with every motion.
The thousands of tiny stars across the spider had also all tinted an eerie black. I thought I'd go blind without the illumination, but instead, everything was excruciatingly clear. Like I had no choice but to see it all.
Shivers scraped across my spine, and then there was a low, rolling chime-slash-gong as the cannon went off.
What a peculiar thing.
It was as if a big, furry paw gently dragged itself across my back and along my tail, to the very tip.
Then the recoil hit. No, it didn't.
Or did it?
Huh? Oh!
A ghostly copy of us and of Daddy-Long-Legs split away, and it seemed to absorb all the recoil and more. It was thrown several dozen meters clear of us. But before it could hit anything, it just shattered and dissipated, like a mirage.
…
Mirage?
Huh?
I'd…thought this before, hadn't I?
I'd thought…what?
Uh.
My brain scrambled for something. I'd just… Something was off. Not for the first time.
Right?
I could feel the loose ends in my head. In my Quanta. What was I thinking about?
Oh!
The shell! Leah had fired it only a few dozen meters away from the closest Fourteen, and the Quanta helped me remember the details.
The esoteric grenade had cleared the barrel and jumped the short distance like a perfectly…normal…shell…
Weird.
And then the fuze ticked down microseconds before it would've hit. Its internal machinery engaged, and the chaotic-mass generator spun up. It created an unstable ball of ultra-dense artificial mass, but in a disorderly way, designed to shred space with an uneven distribution of stress.
The projectile's spin quickly turned this ball of writhing gravity into a slightly more controlled whirl. It only grew more frantic as it flattened into a disk, and then it hit the front of the first Fourteen.
Instead of bouncing away, it ate into the monster. It ripped its flesh and bones into itself, and the more it consumed, the faster it spun. I could see something light up at the very center of the twisting mass.
Half-way through the huge alien, the energetic cone of a pulse grabbed at the atmosphere behind the projectile. And then it shoved with a violence that tickled my brainstem.
I recognized it. That was quite similar to the supra-pulse of my own micro-missiles' Javelins, just altered a bit. And just like those Javelins, this projectile suddenly tore a line across the entire clearing, far too fast for even the Quanta to track.
It intersected with the right hindquarter of the Twenty-Eight.
I jerked when Leah howled with glee as one of its legs was ripped right off. I looked at her and I found a strange sort of satisfaction, a mean gleam in her eyes that I really didn't like. It stuck sideways in my heart.
Panic twisted my insides. It wasn't right.
It wasn't like her, either. I saw the twisted vengeance of a victim seeking satisfaction in torture. Only mean-spirited, corrupted blackness waited down that road. I'd seen it as a child. It created a bitterness that lashed out against the wrong targets.
I'd been one of those targets very often. Tears sprang into my eyes.
No.
I couldn't let her fall like that.
***