AP5: 25 & 26 (Patreon)

Chapter 25

Time until next Challenge: 10 days, 12 hours, 18 minutes

The trees weren’t close, but our speedsters still could have made it across the fields to safety in a matter of seconds. Instead, they had moved to engage the second speedy Titan. We’d been lucky that it had gotten so confused by the road-destroying snake, but that streak of luck had ended, the barbed tail slapping one defender after another as it dodged attacks from my husband and a handful of others.

Seeing the line of fallen bodies made my heart sink, even as I flagged them with holograms and directed someone with Cure Poison over to help. We handled dozens of those Titans on the road yesterday, with far fewer casualties!

I knew the comparison was unfair. We’d gotten good at dealing with two or three Titans at a time. People had familiarized themselves with others traveling in the same vehicle or working the same duties, and some level of trust had developed. The composition of our group had shifted as we traveled, true, but it had been slow enough that we’d maintained cohesion. 

That cohesion had been lost. Attacks were still ongoing from all angles, and groups had been scattered and separated. Only Analyze let me make any sense at all of the confusing mess our forces had become. 

I spotted a twotwo begin to stoop, aiming for someone near me.

Down! I Announced, and everyone near me flattened themselves against the ground. Six Force Shields popped into place around its chosen target, a man wearing modified hockey goalie gear. The shields shattered instantly, but the impact made the big monster’s flight wobble. Its talons still smashed into the man, sending him rolling across the ground, but the twotwo lifted away carrying nothing. 

I climbed to my feet and began jogging forward again, gritting my teeth as I sent another warning to a group ahead of me and to my left. I’d hoped to use my abilities judiciously, but I knew I’d been putting in more effort than intended, as I spotted opportunity after opportunity to change the course of the fight.

I wondered how long I could keep this up before collapsing, and Analyze was quick with an answer: four minutes, 13 seconds.

Shit. We need to get under cover. We’re not far…

We were already moving as fast as we could, unfortunately. Yeah, individuals could have streaked ahead, but isolating ourselves was a poor plan, especially as we should be seeing a third speedster Titan bursting out of the trees ahead any second… ah, there we were. And, hell, Vince and the Quick Crew were way out of position, still trading blows with the previous speedster. I could try Paralyzing this one, but I’d only be able to hold it for a moment, and the effort would probably knock me out.

I flagged it with a hologram and blasted out one more Announcement:

Full attack! Kill or immobilize ASAP!

Most people had used their Specialties already, but hopefully most people weren’t as tired as I was and could burn their energy to take this thing down before it hurt the rest of us. The words “full attack” was a phrase we’d discussed. Everyone knew it meant to do just that.

The air around the speedy Titan suddenly glittered like an Independence Day finale, as over a hundred people unleashed everything they had. The monster ought to have been fast enough to dodge the attacks, but the density of the sudden onslaught had left it nowhere safe to shelter. The skin and fur on the side closest to us was blasted, burned, or torn away almost instantly, exposing its softer tissue. Priya was near the front of the group and she practically tackled the monster, driving her sword hilt-deep into its side, then falling to the ground as it vanished beneath her.

I spotted another Titan begin an attack run behind me, but didn’t lean on Announcement, pulling my gas mask down from my face and relying on lungpower: “Twotwo!”

The first among our group had reached the trees, and I was only a dozen feet away. 

Stupid as it might have been, however, I didn’t run forward. The yellow Titan was sinuous, but some of the trees had been densely packed, and I could see a trail of broken limbs, branches, and fallen trees where it had forced its way through. One tree in particular had caught my eye, the gray corpse of a long-dead 60-foot pine. It had snapped off just above the roots and fallen forward onto the hillside.

Dropping everything else I mentally held, I grabbed the tree. Analyze had given me good odds of being able to lift it, but if it was too rotten and waterlogged…

It wasn’t, and my mouth stretched in a savage smile as I swept it forward, bracing it against the ground like a massive pike, tilting the end upward just as the twotwo got near. It tried to wheel aside, but it didn’t succeed fully, and my improvised spear slammed into its left wing. The dead wood wasn’t a great weapon against the tough skin of a Titan, of course, and the first fifteen feet of its length exploded into splintered to powder, even against the relatively fragile wing… but the Titan had been moving fast, and eventually the tree tore through the wing, leaving it impaled like the world’s worst shish kebab.

If I’d been physically holding my “pike,” the twotwo would have slammed into me, but I was twenty feet to the side and the twotwo was grounded, in easy reach of all our melee specialists. 

It was toast.

I backed into the trees, trusting my allies to handle the present I’d giftwrapped for them as I checked over the battlefield. I could see my kids already behind me, in the relative safety of the woods. Vince was… Oh, thank God, safe, successful and on his way back. It looked like the Quick Crew was splitting up to scoop up injured stragglers who’d been left behind, but they were strong and fast enough that they’d be here in mere moments. Another twotwo was starting its dive toward us, but three of my allies had already chopped down or uprooted trees to make their own oversized spears. 

I could see ten more holograms in the distance, but we’d made it to the forest ahead of the main wave of attackers and I couldn’t honestly conceive of the twotwos threatening us while we were under such thick cover. Even if all forty remaining got here at once, what were they gonna do? Land and try to chase us through the trees like big angry geese? Destroy the woods giving us cover? They were welcome to try. There was a lot of forest.

We’d lost… I winced… at least eleven people, assuming everyone who was injured recovered. But…

I raised my middle finger to the sky as I swayed woozily. “Screw you, Hamlet. This round’s ours.”

Chapter 26

Time until next Challenge: 10 days, 11 hours, 43 minutes

“All our injured are stabilized. What now?” Priya asked.

The last of the twotwos had been dealt with several minutes before, freeing up physical fighters with Healing Touch - like Vince and Priya - to move from “active defense” to “triage.”

I’d been sitting with my eyes closed, quietly discussing our situation with Ariel and our options with Marie. At my friend’s question, I opened them.

“We walk, I think.”

“Walk?” Priya sounded incredulous.

I nodded. “Marie assigned some people with Improvised Equipment to making stretchers a few minutes ago. I’m thinking we carry the guy with Ultraviolet Vision so he can keep watching the sky for more twotwos, as well as the other people who are in bad shape. Once they recover, we can let our healers use the stretchers to take a nap as we walk.”

Marie cleared her throat. “You know you’re taking a stretcher too, right, Meghan?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I can, I guess. I did use my abilities pretty heavily.” 

Priya looked back toward the edge of the woods. “Will we really be able to keep ahead of the Threats by walking? I know they’re not fast, but they’re not that slow.”

“No,” I said. “But it will give us more time. There was a group assembling at Fort Knox to help us out and replace our vehicles with something tougher. The old plan was for them to keep building up strength until we got to them, but that’s changed, obviously. They started heading our way as soon as we realized what Hamlet was up to. Unfortunately, they won’t make it here before the Threats behind us, so we can’t just sit tight. Still, if we can keep moving toward them…” I hesitated.

“If we can keep moving toward them, we can stay ahead of the Threats for long enough?” Priya asked.

I gave her a strained grin. “Uh, hopefully? It depends on how fast we can move and how fast they can move. It should be enough. I think.”

“How long until Hamlet can throw another group like that at us?”

I closed my eyes, having a lightning-fast dialogue with Ariel. “Honestly, it depends on how fast we move. Aside from us, there are only a handful of people within fifty miles with Intensifiers, and the Pylons are widely spaced. If we didn’t have to flee the Titans and could just sit tight here, it’d probably take three days to throw a full wave like that at us. Since we’re moving, it really just depends on how quickly we get into a new area. Maybe ten hours?”

Priya sighed. “That should be enough time for the reinforcements from Fort Knox to reach us. I guess my only problem for now is figuring out how to keep Anju close while we move.”

I smiled impishly. “How about I ask her to keep an eye on Micah, since Micah doesn’t have any movement abilities?”

My friend tilted her head thoughtfully. “And then I ask Micah to keep an eye on Anju, since Anju doesn’t have any energy defenses?”

I held a hand up for a high five. “No teasing them about how cute they are together, though.”

Priya tapped her palm against mine, shaking her head seriously. “God, no. They can never know we think that. Nothing more disgusting than parental approval.”

…

Five minutes later, we were on the move. I was laying back in a stretcher deep in the middle of the pack. It was just a bedsheet stretched over a pair of poles and sealed to itself with Improvised Equipment, so it wasn’t the most comfortable place to rest. Despite my exhaustion, I found my mind churning.

The twotwos were a mistake, I thought to Ariel. 

<Titan designation: “twotwo” did underperform relative to projected efficacy.>

“Projected efficacy?”

<Total contestant kills and injuries caused per Titan are recorded, and tracked per type and individual. Twotwos are among the most lethal types of Titan, as well as the fastest and best able to traverse variant terrain.>

I snorted. I was wondering why Hamlet picked them. I guess that checks out: he just looked at some numbers on paper. Twotwos are ambush predators. Stealth predators. That’s terrifying if there’s one of them, but when there’s forty or fifty, we can prepare. They’re less dangerous the more of them Hamlet makes.

<Observed data does not directly contradict your hypothesis.>

You sound almost reluctant!

<Twotwos’ lethality statistics are still among the highest, even after recent decrease.>

Recent… Ha! Oh, that’s rich. The 50 twotwos Hamlet sent at us brought down their average?

<Confirmed.>

I couldn’t help but be amused by that information, even if it was completely irrelevant. It was probably a relevant number in most Maffiyirs, because it was the kind of thing that would let Overminds adjust the contestant death rate to match what their bosses wanted. Statistics were good for population-level adjustments. 

Statistics weren’t good for making specific decisions, like planning an assault against a prepared force. 

I wonder if this failure made them realize that. They have to have military experts, don’t they?

<Indeterminate.>

They must, I thought to Ariel, and the more I considered it, the more I believed it. Even if the Commonwealth had been at peace internally for thousands of years, they’d kept adding new citizens every decade or so via the Maffiyir. We’d learned that most of those planets were below Earth’s tech level: that meant they almost certainly didn’t have unified world governments. Unless our direct predecessors had all been total pacifists, there were almost certainly Commonwealth citizens familiar with warfare.

Although… just being in wars doesn’t mean you’re good at military strategy. Humanity’s history had a few brilliant military leaders, plenty of solid-but-unimaginative commanders, and a solid share of complete idiots who routinely snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Even if the Maffiyir company had a solid military commander advising them, would that be enough in a situation like this? If the Titans don’t have programming for fighting cooperatively, they probably don’t do mass assaults like this frequently.There’s probably not a doctrine in place for “how to kill a specific contestant using Titans and Threats when that contestant is protected by the combined might of her people.” 

<Reminder: directly targeting a specific contestant is illegal and impossible.>

Thanks, I said, touched that Ariel had been continuing to listen in and had thought to volunteer the information. So they’re probably not going to act perfectly. They haven’t done this before, and you’d need a brilliant military strategist to plan a flawless strategy on a new battlefield like this.

<Indeterminate.>

Yeah, yeah, I told her. What kind of person was advising Hamlet? Maybe just a member of the Soundless? They were a predator species, I’d heard. Maybe they thought that was enough expertise. It was probably either a member of the Soundless or an ex-contestant, and with 95% casualties in almost every contest, an ex-contestant wasn’t likely to be the best their planet had to offer, since, statistically, the best was almost certainly among the dead.

Actually, I told Ariel. I hope they did ask an ex-contestant to advise them.

<Explain rationale.>

Well, at a minimum, that person would probably have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of getting to say “No” to the people who’d destroyed their world. But if they said yes… I doubt they’re going to be motivated to do a very good job. 

<Speculation.>

True. But… Ariel, you said Hamlet couldn’t typically listen to Mental Speech or Announcements, right?

<When you are in the Challenges and Trials, Hamlet controls the nanites responsible for all ability implementation, but I am typically in charge of ability implementation on Earth. Exceptions arise in the vicinity of Threats and Titans.>

Right. So, using Mental Speech isn’t perfect information security, but it’s better than anything else. 

I opened one eye to see Marie walking beside me. “Hey… Make sure that the brass don’t talk about this attack out loud. Especially don’t let them offer any criticisms of Hamlet’s strategy.”

“Go to sleep, Meghan.”

“I’m serious! I think the Maffiiyir might not have access to a competent military expert right now. I don’t want to give Hamlet tips.”

“They probably don’t, since the Voices for Non-Citizens radio broadcasts said the Maffiyir company only had a skeleton crew left in-system. I’ll pass it along, but I don’t think you need to worry. You have a perfect memory, don’t you? Some of the first questions the military asked to you after you linked up with Ariel were about how to communicate securely.”

“Still-”

“I’ll tell them. Just get some rest!”