Chapter 141 - Wukong, minus Sun (Patreon)

Notes : Chapters 142, 143, 144 and 145 have been written and added to the queue !

Yeah, I had something of a surge. Everything was written since wednesday, fyi. Basically a chapter a day. Reminds me of old times.

Anyway ! We'll stick to the two chapters a week schedule until I have six chapters in the backlog, and next week has gone by. Mostly to make sure I'm on my feet.

This chapter and especially the next are also chonkier than usual, so I hope you'll enjoy.

Chapter 141

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Projected Decoy Site

Sapphiria knelt as she shouldered her plasma gun.

She was on passive sensors only. She didn't want to just court a monster attack, not while scouting the decoy site.

Unfortunately that also meant she was remarkably blind in some fashions. There wasn't exactly a whole lot of stuff emitting energy signatures or signals in the valley.

Which made the bursts she was receiving all the more surprising.

Exotic radiation, sure. But that didn't tell her much beyond 'anomalous effects happening in this direction'. She still hadn't worked out how and at what rate magic's exotic side effects decayed. The testing she'd done with her own magical experiments down below, at least the ones Cia had let her do, as the simulacrum was still following Kalia's admonishments to not let her girlfriend take too many risks, had proven remarkably inconclusive. She was going to need a physics lab and a lot of experimentation time, neither of which she had.

The other readings she was receiving however...

Bursts of energy, like active sensor pings. And whispers of something she wasn't certain on how to interpret. Her database returned...a particle containment field?

There was another roar. And a noise she recognized. The whistle of spines moving through the air.

They were closer than the previous roar.

Retreat was an option. She had encountered spine firing monsters before, and they weren't capable of these kinds of roars. This screamed monsters fighting monsters to her.

But the entire point of this was to slay these abominations lest they attack the town or its logging parties. And what better time to take some out than while they had just finished murdering each other and still suffered the exhaustion and damage from that fight?

Sapphiria fiddled with the plasma gun, and looked at Paul, who gave her a minute nod. His expression said it all, he'd gone through the same reasoning she had.

She relaxed a bit. It wasn't necessarily the best decision, but it was vaguely reassuring to have the squishie backing her up on it.

There was another roar. Closer than the previous one. More exotic radiation. And...

Her sensors noted atmospheric anomalies. A split second later, she saw a plume of snow rising up from the trees, not coming down from them.

The warbook, her massive collection of weapon data in her system used for threat identification, happily informed her of what she was looking at.

Atmospheric concussion blasts. A shockwave weapon, like a sonic bomb.

A weapon particularly effective against squishies, since it ruptured their organs and did all sorts of things to their anatomy that usually precluded the continuation of vital functions.

Shit.

Shit shit shit shit!

"Paul, you need to retr-"

The next roar drowned out the rest of her sentence, and caused Paul to stumble back like he'd been shot, his eyes glazing over as a trickle of blood came out of his nose. And ears.

She started towards him to provide assistance...before throwing herself to the ground, as something that looked disturbingly like one of those sea urchine monsters flew overhead, except someone had decided to maul it and squeeze out all of its organs.

Okay. That was...probably not just a concussion blast.

The running battle they'd been hearing suddenly erupted into the clearing. Two of the spiky monsters ran, while another retreated, firing as it did.

Something leapt out of the woods, and Sapphiria's sensors struggled for a second to make sense of it. As far as she could tell, it wasn't stealthed, just covered with so much anomalous gore the sensors were having trouble.

It looked like someone had taken a macaque, then tried to build a tank sized xenohorror from it. It grabbed the spiked monsters, heedless of the way its natural defenses dug into its hands, then tore it apart, first with its teeth, then bare hands, once the creature was sufficiently weakened.

The other two stopped running, and opened up again. The macaque staggered, and for the first time Sapphiria started getting an appreciation of just how damaged the thing was. It clearly had some kind of protective field, as the projectiles lost a lot of energy before impacting, dispersed into the air like thunderclaps, but it hadn't been enough then and wasn't enough now to prevent damage. What she'd first taken for similar defensive spikes to the urchin creatures were actually projectiles stuck into its hide, and a great deal of the macaque's body mass appeared to be missing.

...She should really name these things. Monster monkey, too angry and impulsive to die?

I dub thee Wukong, O horror from beyond the limits of science.

The urchin monsters she'd just call Urchins. Why? Because it was unlikely she'd need to regularly refer to the actual thing. Especially since she wasn't exactly troubled with waterborne life right now, and even squishies barely cared about the things, except to complain about them. Usually only because they tended to be invasive species on colony worlds.

Except for those in Tau Ceti. They made fine cuisine out of the damned thing. For some reason.

The Wukong closed the distance to the two Urchins, who seemed to split apart by reflex, forcing it to target one while the other tried to finish it off. Sapphiria finished her aborted movement and helped Paul back up. He looked a bit dazed, but her scans didn't detect any injuries beyond a mild concussion and some burst blood vessels. His ear drums weren't even ruptured, which was downright weird for a sonic weapon, and once again indicated that she really had no clue what the hell she was dealing wit here.

Given the fact that this much damage had already been done to him despite not being the target of the attack, it made her targeting decision that much easier.

She nudged him in the direction they'd come from, and he had enough wits to pull back, as she knelt and shouldered her plasma gun.

The first bolt was medium power. As she expected, it impacted onto the simian abomination, and detonated like a plasma grenade, dispersing its energy, flashing the snow into vapor and then broiling the corpse of the Urchin the Wukong had caught up with and been busy tearing apart. Interestingly enough, the Urchin was supposed to have another such shield, but it appeared to no longer be functional.

Neither, in fact, was the Wukong's. There was a...she was hesitant to call it a 'sound'. It was too primordial for that. More like a feeling of the universe breaking and tearing, then making itself right again, like a tiny, distant echo of a manastorm. So vastly different to how it had worked for the Bone Tyrant.

The Wukong whirled around to face her, and prepared to let out a roar-

Sapphiria dove to the side, while knowing that given the area of effect of the thing, this was going to hurt even if she avoided the worst of it.

But to her amazement and surprise, the Urchin came to her rescue. Seeing its chance, it unleashed a barrage of spines...directly into the Wukong's jaw.

This time there was no exotic radiation, no shield to disperse the blow. The spines hit the Wukong like rivets, and nailed its mouth closed, several piercing all the way to the other side of its skull.

The macaque like creature had a split second to look comically confused, before the universe screamed.

Whatever ability it had been using definitely worked like a spell, because an aberration formed...inside its body.

Her evasive maneuvers paid dividends as suddenly the Wukong began to inflate like some comical balloon, its anomalous flesh and skin somehow holding it together far past any normal physical limitations, before bursting, the spines becoming shrapnel.

The surviving Urchin took the brunt of it, sparing her the need for a cleanup, as winds howled for a few seconds, air rushing out from the aberration, before dying down again as its mana expended itself.

It was...oddly closely related to the attack the Wukong had been doing. Sapphiria wondered if that was a coincidence or not.

She filed it for later. She had samples to grab, and a squishie to escort back home for medical treatment.

*****

"One day, you're going to return with yourself and the people that come with you intact. On that day, the skies will fall and the earth shatter." Said Kalia, and Sapphiria winced.

It wasn't that the mage-magistrate sounded frustrated. She simply sounded...resigned.

"I did try to get him to pull back. I just...wasn't fast enough. I'm sorry."

Kalia shook her head. They were both inside the infirmary, next to Malry's office. Sapphiria had been able to sneak a peak inside with more than just sensor readings, and it was a bit shocking to see something this well organized for a squishie. Everything was properly labeled, categorized, and though the system to catalogue everything was unfamiliar to her, Malry didn't even glance at her shelves of alchemical components whenever she needed something, just reaching out and always, without fail, finding the right vial.

In a place of honor was the cases she'd given her, filled with pills. It felt hilarious to have just a couple of regular colonial medical supply boxes in the middle of a room that could have leapt out of a fantasy novel, but then she remembered why all this was needed, and she grew sober again.

"Don't beat yourself up." Said Kalia. "No one is perfect, and besides which, he's just lightly hurt."

That much was true. But concussions were tricky even at the best of times. The ways of the squishie brains were still not wholly understood, even by the Federation, and the amount of research devoted to it had been staggering.

Though, of course, said research had its limits. With guardrails placed early in the Federation's long and difficult history with exploring biological sciences. Some bemoaned them, and it was true that both pre-Federation Earth and the Hivemind had made great leaps in very little time...

Well, one just had to look at the Hivemind to see where unrestricted neural experimentation might lead.

Sapphiria felt Kalia grab her shoulders, then simply let herself be hugged, melting into her girlfriend's embrace, before finally returning it.

"I know he'll be fine." Said the AI at last. "It's just that...I realized how little I know about these creatures. I thought it was fine, that I could just take the heat. But had this thing fallen onto us without already being embroiled in a fight, it could have killed him just as collateral damage of blasting me. It's like..." She lowered her voice into a whisper. "It's like fighting a war blind. Like I'm facing a fleet whose weapons I do not know and ships I barely understand."

Kalia nodded.

"I understand that feeling." She smiled. "At least, you're also bringing unknown weapons and ships to this fight."

"Not as unknown as I wished, but..." Sapphiria sighed. "You're right."

Whatever technological memories were left on this world, they were both incomplete and skewed, based on both what had survived and a different tech base to the Federation's. Which was why everyone was always surprised by her use of robots everywhere, but not the power armor. Or the plasma gun.

And plasma weapons were light years ahead of utility bots in terms of technical complexity and technological sophistication. Not to mention cost. Oh stars the cost. There was a reason Federation warships used railguns and lasers, not plasma cannons.

"So...did you get what you wanted?"

Sapphiria nodded.

"I got readings of the area. It'll do. And we already had a fight in it, so we know the monsters will definitely go there if provoked."

"Good. I trust your defenses, but..."

The mage-magistrate grimaced, and Sapphiria smiled.

"You'd rather the monsters were a bit further away than you doorstep?"

"Yeah. Plus it'll help with the logging expedition. They're a lot faster now, but I can't help but worry still."

Sapphiria nodded. Those expeditions were growing ever shorter and more efficient as they got used to their new tools. In fact, their ability to bring back wood was becoming the problem. She really needed to make a few cargo haulers for the surface. Rugged ones. Not a snowpiercer, but something that could make it through on a rough trail. They had their autocarts of course, but they cost mana to operate.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

She sighed, before shaking her head at Kalia's interrogative gaze.

"It's nothing. I fully understand, and support that. I'm focused on scaling up, but I'll make room for the outpost. If nothing else, the bulk of it should be simple to make, and a small concentrated defense net should be relatively cheap. At least compared to Astralis'."

"Well, certainly less ground to cover and people getting in the way."

"Indeed." Squishies got underfoot everywhere, but this was their homes, and they needed to be up and about. She couldn't just set the guns to 'shoot everything that moves'. Not that she would anyway, that was a recipe for disaster, but in a more isolated setting, she could scale down some of the failsafes, and more importantly give absolutely no shits about the collateral damage.

Which meant, of course, that it was time to pull the gatling shotgun turrets out of the depths of her databanks. And start working on those damned flechettes, whose absence she's come to regret when fighting the Bane.

"So...back home?"

"Yep. Back into the dank underdepths of the mountains."

"It's actually dryer than here."

Sapphiria smiled.

"Why yes, but no one needs to know that, do they? If they think it's dark and unpleasant, they won't try to get into my home as much." Her eyes twinkled. "But don't worry, I'll bring you in again...once I have made some accommodations."

"They were indeed somewhat spartan."

Sapphiria marveled again at how much had been kept into the language of this world, despite having none of the cultural context for what 'Sparta', let alone spartans, even were.

"Indeed."

"In the meantime, you're welcome to stay whenever you want."

"I'll take you up on that soon. But right now I need to work." And if she spent the night here, she would do anything but working. Even outside of...more physical activities, Kalia was a fascinating conversationalist, who was both deeply curious of the Federation and more than happy to share about her world. And that wasn't even touching on their discussions on magic.

"Fine." Kalia leaned down, and they shared a long and tender kiss, before separating. "Have a safe trip, love."

"I will. I'll keep you updated on the outpost."

"Keep Ramina in the loop as well. She's getting a bit restless."

The AI nodded. She had an idea about that. Why not drop some homework and help solve one of her problems at the same time?

"I'll throw her a bone before I go."

"Just not too big a bone. I don't need to peel her off of you again." Cautioned the mage-magistrate.

"It should be fine." Said the AI.

Less than half an hour later, she made a note to avoid thinking, let alone saying, things like this out loud.