AP5: Ch. 45, 46 (Patreon)

Chapter 45

Time until next Challenge: 4 days, 14 hours 21 minutes

We made excellent progress for the first ten minutes of our drive. The around roads around the fort had been destroyed, as they had in so many places, but the area had been scouted heavily, and General Cleary had enough clairvoyants to keep his maps updated and plan a path around the biggest pieces of debris. Any small obstacles could be ignored: the tanks wouldn’t even need to slow for anything smaller than a large tree trunk. 

We made it almost two miles in the first ten minutes, and could have gone even faster if we weren’t trying to let the rest of the group stay with us on foot. The ride was bumpy, to put it mildly. The tanks apparently had a complex system that helped them compensate for obstacles, but the floor still tilted crazily as we moved. Even if I was tough enough not to be hurt by repeatedly lurching against the walls, it was still an unpleasant ride. I didn’t complain: almost all the adults were in a similar boat.

At least things were a little easier on the kids. Gavin’s tail could be stretched to incredible lengths these days, and he’d looped it around his siblings and Anju and woven it through the handholds that had been added around their crawlspace. The result was something like a flexible, shock-absorbing seat belt. 

At least the lack of an engine made the drive less deafening than it could have been. It was still incredibly noisy - we were in the center of a vast mobile battlefield, and the target of many attacks - but it could have been worse.

The situation was stressful, but I was feeling cautiously optimistic until General Cleary turned toward the kids with a look of confusion. “I’m getting reports of extreme temperatures inside the other tanks. Micah Moretti, are you using your abilities to prevent that here?”

“Yeah,” Micah shouted.

A complex series of emotions flitted across the general’s face. I saw irritation and concern for sure, but his voice stayed calm. “How long can you keep that up?”

“I don’t know. It keeps getting worse. A while?”

I saw General Cleary visibly twitch at the imprecise response, but he took a deep breath before responding. “I’m getting other Specialists over here to assist. Please give me regular updates.”

“Okay.”

“Any other issues?” I asked.

General Cleary nodded tightly. “A few, but they’re things we prepared for. We’ve got monsters transmuting the tanks’ metal to other substances, but we brought a stockpile of replacement metal with us. We’re keeping up thus far.”

“I’m surprised-” I said, then cut myself off. “Never mind.” After our issues in Fort Defiance, it seemed strange that Hamlet hadn’t produced any monsters that could move through metal the way so many had moved through stone, but I didn’t want to point that out. If he was unable to for some reason, no harm done, but if he simply hadn’t thought of it, I’d be a fool to give him the idea.

We kept going. Micah let General Cleary know that his work had gotten easier after more people had arrived to assist, traveling alongside our tank. 

Five more minutes passed, and we made it another mile.

Three miles down, about 45 left to go, I thought.

Then Micah raised his voice, his comment loud but uncertain. “Um… There was something weird?”

“Explain,” General Cleary said.

“Underneath us it got like… really hot. Like, over 3,000 degrees hot. But only in a sheet? And then it dropped do-”

Micah was interrupted as the tank we were riding in came to a halt with a screeching noise of mangled metal. I nearly fell over, but Vince caught me.

“What the hell-” General Cleary growled.

“Can’t get her to move, sir!” our driver called. “Feels like the treads are fused to the wheels.”

“Get our metalshapers on it!” General Cleary snapped.

“New monster, sir!” Marie interrupted. “Seems to be specialized for melting things.”

He waved a hand. “We’ve been taking damage since we left. We had our shapers make surface changes to parts of the tanks so they could Connect to them. Our shapers are still alive, right? Let’s get it fixed.”

Marie shook her head. “The Continuing Connection Specialty cares about missing material, not about extra material. Our metalshapers aren’t tank engineers or designers, and isolating and removing the extra material will take time.”

“Can we take them down faster?”

Marie hesitated for a second, then shook her head. “Squad leaders say no. Hamlet’s spawning a lot of monsters underneath and atop us as we move. Even the ones that live less than a second are still melting sections of the tank.”

“Are they getting people’s armor?” I asked.

That made Marie pause. “...I don’t think so, other than part of one helmet. It had a sort of Roman crest thing on top that melted. The man wearing it was still badly burned, but it was nothing compared to what would have happened if his whole helmet had melted. And they haven’t taken out any of the portions of the tank that people were sitting directly on top of, either. That seems way too lucky.”

“It may be an artificial restriction,” Pointy said. “Many abilities are more taxing to use directly upon monsters or other contestants, and we’ve found a few edge cases where abilities have even stranger behavior. A review of the Informational Assistant’s footage pool suggests that while such abilities are rarely given to monsters, the monsters that do receive them face some sort of… fairness restrictions? Ariel has confirmed to me in the past that several such restrictions are hard-coded, so my guess is they were the result of previous legal battles.”

General Cleary grunted. “Good news, but it doesn’t help the tanks. If a few inches of distance were enough to leave part of a helmet vulnerable, there’s no way to use that to protect the internal mechanisms of the wheels and treads.”

“We’re going to have to walk?” I asked.

General Cleary didn’t respond to me immediately. “Marie, make an Announcement. I know disabling monsters has gotten more difficult, but I want everyone making an effort to do so anyway. Also, reach out to your counterparts. Have them ask if anyone has any brainstorms to get us out of this. We can afford a couple minutes. And contact Stevens, have her come talk to me about the possibility of an aerial evacuation. She opposed it before, but it’s worth having the discussion again.”

Marie nodded.

A few minutes later, Flip arrived, elbowing her way inside the crowded tank interior. It wasn’t the best place for a strategy session, but I supposed it was better than trying to talk while under constant attack. The younger woman just barely fit in with the rest of us, and she wasted no time, launching straight into the discussion. “Sir, I still think that flying out should remain our last resort. Having three dimensions of enemies to deal with while none of our fighters with Biological Augments can bring their full strength to bear is a recipe for taking heavy, heavy casualties.”

“There are plenty of burrowing enemies, and we’re still dealing with the flyers. Seems like we’re already getting hit from every direction,” General Cleary said. His tone was measured, the voice of someone raising a point out of due diligence, as opposed to someone with deep conviction in what he was saying.

Flip was shaking her head. “With all due respect, it’s not the same, sir. The burrowers don’t move particularly quickly. Even someone with no biological augments is faster. A lot of the aerial enemies are fast, and we’ve been relying on gunfire and elemental specialists to take them down. That’s going to be harder when they’re coming from every direction, especially since my flyers are predisposed to watch where they’re going. In tests we ran back at Fort Defiance, our passengers had difficulty effectively defending every approach while being carried, especially since they can’t turn and reorient quickly on their own.”

Marie raised a hand, “Forgive my interruption, but communication is also going to be difficult. The number of people who can directly contact a communication specialist will drop substantially. If someone is injured, poisoned, or diseased, they can’t seek treatment on their own. they’ll have to tell their ride, who’ll need to rendezvous with another flyer carrying someone with the appropriate ability.”

General Cleary folded his arms. “Acknowledged, both of you. That fits with all our pre-evacuation briefings this morning, so I can’t say I’m surprised, but I was hoping… Well. Any brainstorms from my subordinates, Marie?”

The communications specialist shook her head.

“Alright. Make an Announcement: two minutes to prepare, then we head out on foot.”

Chapter 46

Time until next Challenge: 4 days, 13 hours 58 minutes

I climbed up a ladder toward the tank hatch. I wasn’t slow, but I was still hurried along; people squatting atop the tank lifted me the last few feet and nearly tossed me out of the way. I did my best to help them, scrambling to the side and straining my senses to detect the monsters nearby.

There were a lot. 

Even before connecting to me, Ariel had always kept the little monsters at a reasonable density. The very first time I’d ventured out, I’d had to fight two leafenrats, but only two, and after I’d dealt with the monsters, I’d had plenty of breathing space to recover. Things had gotten a little more intense as time had gone on and the variety of monsters had increased. Even so, a careful group could usually limit themselves to fighting one to three monsters at a time, with space to recover before they started the next battle.

There had still been plenty of ways for people to be overwhelmed - especially if an area wasn’t being regularly cleared - but the gamelike, artificial nature of the contest was obvious. It had always been “fair,” at least from a certain sadistic perspective. 

After Ariel and I had connected, things had only gotten better. I hadn’t been able to make major changes, but I’d been able to subtly tweak spawn rules in ways that made dramatically unfair situations less likely.

Hamlet was clearly operating under a different paradigm. 

Monsters were popping up right in the center of our group. Some appeared mere inches away from the people they attacked, while others materialized underneath the tank or inside trees and bushes. We had hundreds of people with a wide array of sensory abilities, so even the monsters that appeared in more hidden locations could have their ambushes spoiled… but the quantity and diversity of enemies meant that mistakes were inevitably made, and each fumbled fight left us with injured bodies and damaged gear.

Most monsters were killed in seconds, but some held on, weathering an increasingly intense stream of attacks until someone found their weakness. The instant any monster died, another would appear, offering a fresh deadly puzzle for our group to solve. I kept Analyze running, trying to catalogue our attackers and their weaknesses, using holograms to communicate monsters’ vulnerabilities when I could, but it was challenging. In the seconds I’d seen the outside, I’d already counted over 200 different types of attacking monsters.

Worse, either Hamlet was directing the smaller monsters to our location, or they had a massive “aggro radius:” a dense and unending stream was coming toward us from every direction, like we were a ball of ice cream dropped in the space between a wasp hive and an ant nest. I could feel monsters slowly moving toward us underground, and the skies above were nearly black with floating, flapping, and fluttering shapes.

The tank I’d been traveling in had been at the center of a massive formation, and my allies were taking down every single oncoming monster before they reached me… but not all the monsters needed to get close. Some were content to hover high overhead and rain attacks downward. They were still in rifle range, but with hundreds of other, closer targets to focus on, some were living far too long.

As I climbed down from the tank, a man hit me with his shoulder, knocking me to the side, then swayed and dropped to the ground.

I stared at his crumpled body, activating Analyze. Still showing up on Life Sense. What went wrong? Oh! There’s something embedded in the gap between his neck and chest armor. Small needles or spines. 

I waved a hand, shouting. “Cure Poison here!”

Another man knelt by the first, who soon sucked in a massive breath and rolled back to his feet, shaking his head. 

In the few seconds it had taken, the rest of my family had followed me out of the tank. Gavin had already attacked a monster that had been burrowing up from below. He’d killed it successfully, but the last few inches of his tail had been coated with something that had melted his fur and started to melt the skin beneath. Fortunately, whatever substance had caused the harm had been part of the monster he’d killed, and vanished when it did. That was far from a guarantee; Hamlet seemed to be prioritizing monsters that could create dangerous substances from materials in their environment. Stuff monsters changed would linger after they were slain, even if the monsters themselves vanished.

Gavin healed his wounds, but didn’t bother regrowing the hair. He had barely finished before he needed to dance aside. Something like a massive antlion burst from the ground in the spot where he’d been standing, and Vince brought his sword down as it emerged, bisecting it.

Cassie was clinging to Micah, who had his arms wrapped protectively around his little sister and Pointy. His head whipped from side to side. He’d been working on using his abilities without hand gestures for weeks. His intense, focused posture made me certain that many of the elemental attacks around us were his, especially after I saw the flickers of small, precision Shockwalls slowing the movements of the weirder-looking ones. Micah was smart enough to focus on the enemies that would be harder to kill with swords or bullets… although it was hard to identify those with any certainty amidst all this insanity.

I sensed something wriggling inside the nearby tank and yanked Micah toward me. He didn’t resist, pressing himself against me just in time, as something like a giant millipede squirmed out from the crevice between the tank’s body and treads. One of our bodyguards stepped into the space Micah had vacated, bringing down a sledgehammer on its segmented back.

The robot-legged version of Cassie’s Summoned Transport began to take shape next to us. My oldest and youngest kids scrambled inside and it started moving forward, but had barely gotten moving before a stray gout of something glowing hit the transparent canopy. Micah cooled the glob of whatever-it-was near-instantly, but when the hardened missile popped off the canopy, a visible blemish remained behind. 

It took damage in the first forty feet! I thought. We need to make it almost 45 miles!

“Move out!” I heard General Cleary shout. His command was echoed moments later in an Announcement. 

At the front of our group, a vanguard worked to clear brush and flatten ground, limiting the places Hamlet could spawn monsters out of sight. Someone handed me a stack of titanium plates - I hadn’t been able to bring them inside the tank - and I immediately lofted most of them overhead, creating a mobile ceiling for my family to march under. I kept two telekinetic “hands” free to shove and tug the people around me, doing my best to get them out of the way of monsters that appeared belowground. My Telekinetic touch wasn’t that forceful, but most people took it as the warning it was meant to be, moving enough to dodge the subterranean strikes.

Most people.

I was in the most heavily-defended part of the formation, but even here, I couldn’t relax. The metal “roof” I’d made above our heads wasn’t seamless, nor was it strong. Some of the missiles were strong enough to punch through the titanium plates, and almost all were strong enough to push the plates downward. I could slow a monster’s dive and turn a strike from a piercing horn into a slam from a metal surface, but I couldn’t truly prevent even the physical strikes, and I was even less successful against other attacks. 

Projectiles streaked into any gap, and liquids seeped around the edges of the plates, causing burns and worse if they dripped onto unprotected skin. The metal-melting monsters caused their own set of problems, appearing atop of plates and turning whole sections to liquid, leaving Micah and others to frantically freeze the metal before it could hit the skin of those below.

I wasn’t the only one creating such a roof. Other telekinetics were doing the same, and many people were holding up other protection, like a group to our left where two people were lifting what appeared to be a bus roof above their heads, sheltering twenty others. Even with all the problems our roofs had, they were still superior to just taking the attacks from the aerial monsters above. Still, almost half our force was out in the open, giving up the protection a roof would offer in exchange for the clear lines of sight necessary to make their own attacks on the monsters above.

  A large missile tore a hole in a roof being held up to my right, and before the metal-shaper beneath it could repair the damage, something else streaked through the gap, hitting a man - who’d looked up to survey the damage - right in the eye. I felt his life fade, too fast for the healer five feet away to fix.

Unlucky, I thought. Horribly unlucky. But there were a half-dozen people getting wounded every second. The vast majority of those injuries could be healed, and were, but… you only had to get unlucky once.

And we had a long way to go.