System Supervillain, Chapter 194 (Patreon)

This one was seriously fun to write.

Chapter 194 – Dead World

(Earth-617)

The dead were relentless. When the System returned, the Seal of the Immortal King had ruptured. Enskerka the Undying had emerged from his ancient tomb, along with his army, swollen by every soul who had ever died in the land of Egypt. It was an army of incalculable size. And it had been beyond even Enskerka’s ability to control.

The army of the dead spread like a plague. Every person they killed rose to become one of the undead. If a person had powers in life, they retained a twisted version of those powers in death.

Egypt fell within days. As the undead began to spread through North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, the Squadron Supreme, Earth’s premier superhero team, went on a desperate mission to the heart of the chaos, hoping to take down Enskerka himself. Hoping that cutting the head off the snake would end the threat.

They knew it was a suicide mission, but it was the only hope the world had. Piercing deep behind the front lines, they struck at the undead warlord directly. And, against all odds, they succeeded in bringing him down. But not without cost. Trapped at the top of the Great Pyramid, which had lost the top third or its structure in the fighting, Foxtrot, the last remaining member of the Squadron, called down a nuclear barrage upon her own position. Four overlapping blasts annihilated her, and the newly risen forms of the other Squadron members, preventing them from being a new threat, now that the necromancer was gone.

However, slaying Enskerka did not end the threat. The undead horde was now completely uncontrolled, a mindless tide of hunger that surged across the land. Though the undead could not swim, they could walk through water just fine, and they had no need to breathe. And then, there were the dead who had powers, as well.

Everyone realized that there was no true safety left on Earth. The dead roamed freely across Africa, pushing back the last holdouts until even Madagascar fell in the fifth month of fighting. Asia fared better. Defensive lines stretched from Iran to Georgia, using the terrain to funnel the dead into choke points. Istanbul became a fortress city, with the Bosporus Strait becoming the key defense keeping the dead out of Europe. The Greek islands, Crete, Sicily, Gibraltar, and more became further defensive outposts and watchtowers, standing guard against the undead walking under the sea.

In the seventh month, a ray of hope was found. Researchers learned that whatever magic animated the dead and spread through them like a plague did not affect animals. The dead still hungered, and moved towards any signs of life with mindless persistence, consuming animals just as readily as people, but the animals did not rise as undead in turn. Even carnivores and scavengers, if they fed upon the dead, did not turn, or show any signs of being carriers of an infection.

That hope was short-lived, unfortunately. Quakeman, a minor villain in Georgia, with the power to create localized earthquakes, fell to the horde in month eight, slain by the undead Hawk Lord. With his powers changed and amplified by the undead curse, defensive walls shattered with every step he took, and the undead began pushing into Eastern Europe. By the first anniversary of the Seal breaking, the UK and Ireland were the last holdouts in the west, while southeast Asia was reduced to defensive lines running from Bangladesh, through China, to just north of Beijing, keeping as much fertile land as they could, using mountains and deserts to help keep out the dead. However, the Korean peninsula was lost, and Japan found itself under siege, constantly guarding its shores against the dead.

Not all was bleak, however. While the undead did not suffer from anything like hypothermia, their bodies slowed drastically in the cold, and they were susceptible to cold damage. Fortresses remained in the northern areas of Europe and Asia, but the populations were limited by how much food those frozen lands could produce, especially as wildlife disappeared into the hungry maws of the dead. But those fortress cities survived, and that was no small thing.

That, and the fact that ocean predators could still feast upon the dead, meant that, while Europe, Asia, and Africa were lost, the rest of the world had a chance. The deep oceans became barriers that the undead would not be able to cross, meaning that Australia and the Americas were safe. Or they should have been.

And yet, the horror was not yet done. In the fourteenth month of the undead apocalypse, the supervillain known as Maestro was revealed to have been turned to the undead. Worse, he retained his powers of mind control, allowing the undead villain to control the undead as well as the living, and he still had enough of his old cunning to use the undead Korean heroine Huinnalge to ferry him to a container ship heading to the United States. When the container ship, filled with a crew long since turned undead, crashed into the Baja California peninsula, the undead were now loose in the Americas.

The Oracle of Rio di Janeiro, Sibila, traveled to San Diego, and took control of the defenders holding the hastily constructed defensive line from Ensenada to San Felipe. But she was too late to prevent Maximus and the Gladiators, San Diego’s super team, from falling to the undead, buying the time for that wall to be built. If it was not for the mutant supervillain Frostknight, then the defensive would have failed then and there, as the undead heroine Blinker tried teleporting behind the lines, only to be met with his enchanted greatsword, Frostmourne, which was said to cleave souls as well as flesh.

When the Gel-Nak fleet arrived, in the third year of the apocalypse, they took one look at the planet, and requested permission to turn their fleet around, and declare Earth to be under quarantine. Unfortunately, while Supreme Commander Dhava Vrir’ak saw the undead plague for the threat it was, his orders did not allow for retreat before at least seeing whether the undead could be contained or controlled. And so, a destroyer and two transports descended towards Rome, to scout things out.

The three ships were attacked before they even landed, as two undead (who the System identified only as Devil’s Daughter and Serafina) crashed into the destroyer, crippling its engines, before doing the same to the two transports. Understanding the threat, and unwilling to spend more troops on what was obviously a lost cause, the Supreme Commander initiated self-destruct systems on all three ships, wiping Rome from the map in nuclear fire. However, without the kind of weaponry needed to properly sterilize the planet from a safe distance, the Supreme Commander ordered his fleet back to Gel-Nak space, so that he could recommend Earth be placed in quarantine.

All of that, though, was in the past. The Undead now had a presence on four of the seven continents. Australia and Antarctica were still, blessedly, free of the creatures. South America was still free of the plague as the defense line in Honduras and El Salvadore held. Unfortunately, much of North America was lost.

It was not a failure of the Baja Line that spelled the doom for most of North America. Instead, it was an attempt to discover a way to cure the plague, or at least stop its spread. The Graham Peak facility in Utah was working on an inoculation that would prevent victims of the plague from rising as undead. Not a cure, but the first step towards halting the spread. Lab tests on cultures were promising. Then the human trials began.

Death Row inmates were brought in. They were not violent criminals, but insurrectionists against the military government that had taken over after martial law had been declared. All of them scanned as regular humans, with no powers. Low risk, and they had all been ‘disappeared’ over a year ago. It was just a proper utilization or resources.

The inoculation, unfortunately was a failure. Even worse, two of the test subjects, a reporter named Maria Sandiego and her camerawoman Zoe Barret, had latent powers that had not expressed, and did not show up in the scans. Contact with the plague, along with their violent deaths, forced the powers to emerge. Zoe could create a powerful acid, capable of dissolving all but the toughest materials in moments, while Maria was able to create copies of herself. Many, many copies. While none of them were particularly powerful, the numbers more than made up for it.

The facility, which had not been hardened against powers, fell almost immediately, the scientists and staff quickly joining the dead. The first sign anyone outside the facility had about the outbreak was when the undead descended upon Salt Lake City. By then, it was too late.

Everything south of Boise, east of the Sierra Nevadas, and west of the Rockies was lost before the military could be effectively deployed. Mexico had enough warning to evacuate civilians ahead of the horde, and the refugee column fled southward as the Mexican military bled to slow the tide, allowing the Honduras-El Salvador line to be established before the last defenders fell in Mexico City, four months after the Utah Incursion. The President of Mexico, fighting amongst the last defenders, set off a series of nuclear devices that had been hidden around the city, laying waste to an area over one hundred kilometers in diameter, and erasing an untold number of undead.

To the north, the military government in the US took a more direct route to ensuring that they had time to set up defenses. They did not bother evacuating civilians. Instead, they used the US strategic weapons arsenal to activate Operation Black Dawn. Overlapping nuclear strikes descended on a line two hundred kilometers wide, stretching from Santa Fe to Corpus Christi. Behind that line, the Texas-Kansas Defensive Line was built. The military government called it a necessary sacrifice to preserve those who could still be saved.

That is when Lady Abstract, working with the heroes Silver Knight and the Technician, along with the supervillains Frostknight and Lolth, came up with a plan. A desperate plan, but a plan all the same. They would attempt to evacuate the remaining population of Earth to someplace that wasn’t already dying.

Tapping into Lady Abstract’s powers, Silver Knight and the Technician devised and built a machine around her that would open a gateway to another world. Lady Abstract did not have the strength to rip open a portal, herself, but if, somewhen across the time and space of the infinite multiverse, another world was reaching out, the machine would latch on to that attempt, and lock the portal open on their side, making a solid connection. Then, Lolth would use her technomantic powers to activate the Upload Chips that had been distributed to the survivors in year five, and copy everything that they were into digital files, stored on a solid state drive the size of a small car.

The Upload Chips had, until now, been used to copy a person’s consciousness when they died, allowing humanity’s defenders to have a second shot at life when they fell against the zombies, by downloading them to robot bodies. This, however, would be on a much wider scale, burning out the bodies of every human being remaining and uploading their consciousness, all without asking for anyone’s consent. The team decided to ignore the ethical problems until after everyone was safely in another world, where the undead apocalypse wouldn’t touch them.

Lady Abstract knew that she would not be joining the rest of humanity in the digital world. The portal would only stay open so long as she lived. When it found a match, Silver Knight, the Technician, and Lolth would enter the digital world with Lolth’s powers, not through the Upload Chips, because they would be staying on Frostknight’s personal device, not the solid state drive the rest of the world would inhabit.

That was, after all, why Frostknight was part of the project, besides being Lolth’s brother. He would use his magic sword to store the drive carrying the rest of humanity, set up the device that would end Lady Abstract’s suffering once he was through, and then step through the portal. Then, humanity would have a fresh chance, in a new world.

“Frostknight!” Lolth’s voice called out from the hidden base’s speakers. “Lady Abstract just locked on to a portal! It’s time!”