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TH - Book 2 - Chapter 5 - The Root of the problem
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 16:52:56 +0000 UTCEven with the anesthetic getting the spine out of my shoulder felt unsettling. It wasn’t painful, but I could still feel the thing slowly dissolve, and then have my own flesh push out the residue as it knitted itself back together.
I could tell from the look on Skyler’s face, that watching the process wasn’t pleasant either.
Once the process, which only took about about a minute, finished Skyler helped me back to my feet. “Everything good?” she asked me, concern in her eyes.
I rolled my shoulder a couple times, making sure everything felt okay before drawing Rending Wave and performing some basic moves. It honestly couldn’t tell I’d even been injured. “Good as new,” I confirmed with a smile.
“I’m glad,” Skyler huffed. “Even though I appreciate the save, you really need to worry about yourself more! What if you’d died?!?” she hissed.
“I reacted as quickly as I could!” I insisted, “It's not like I wanted to get hit there.”
{Athy: Ladies, I hate to interrupt, but the longer you leave the hive the more likely it will have time to respawn its defenders. Once you take care of it, you can use the token you earn to invest in improving your gear, and maybe prevent this from happening in the future.}
“Right… I guess we should deal with that first,” Skyler muttered. She slowly climbed out of our little foxhole, and I scrambled to follow. When I reached the top I was shocked by the devastation. The damage the antithesis had caused with their reckless harvesting over the last day and a half, had been matched by Skyler in seconds. Massive craters that dwarfed the harvesting holes dotted the landscape, most of which were littered with antithesis parts, and slowly filling with the enzyme gas she’d launched to clean up.
“You did a real number on those antithesis,” I said in awe.
“Well, you were writhing in pain at the bottom of that pit, and they were threatening to overwhelm us, I didn’t really have time for subtlety. I just hit them with the biggest blasts I could,” Skyler replied. “I just hope I didn’t go overboard and collapse the entrance,” she added under her breath.
The two of us quickly jogged towards the approximate location of the hive entrance. Thankfully, the antithesis appeared to have created their hive deep within a section of solid rock, so the tunnels seemed to be intact.
I was about to step directly into the burrow when Skyler grabbed my arm. “We don’t know what’s in there,” she whispered. “Remember what happened in that transit shelter? We shouldn’t just head in there blind.”
“So? What do you suggest?” I whispered back. “It’s not like your drones can detect a Nineteen down there.”
“We don’t need to detect them, just flush them out,” Skyler replied. “Step back.”
I stepped to the side, as her drones floated up to the entrance and tilted forward. A second later they unloaded deep into the hole and the entire thing was flooded by a familiar green mist. I turned towards Skyler and raised an eyebrow.
“The gas might not be as effective at killing the antithesis, but it’ll still be deliberating to them,” Skyler explained. “At least, I hope so,” she added under her breath.
“Definitely a sound strategy,” I added as the gas ran out of the hive and over my boots. “How about you send in your scout drones while I buy a gas mask. I know this shit is meant for destroying antithesis flesh, but I’d prefer to avoid breathing it. Just in case.”
{Arty: It’s definitely not good for you, but it would take months for the carcinogenic effects to become lethal and we could easily fix you before then.}
I raised an eyebrow. {Rei: I think I’d rather avoid having to deal with that if I can. Could you please just get me a gas mask like Skyler?}
{Athy: No problem.}
I held my breath when I reached down and grabbed the gas mask out of the box, and pulled it on as fast as I possibly could. Artymis was probably correct, and taking care of cancer was well within their ability, it didn’t mean that was something I wanted to deal with if I could help it.
As soon as I had my mask on, Skyler turned towards me. “Looks like the plan worked better than I expected. I think we can head in, just take it slow, and follow my drone,” she said.
I nodded, drew Rending Wave, and slowly descended into the darkness. After a few steps Skyler’s scout drone floated back, and used its built-in flashlight to lead us deeper into the complex.
Turns out, I didn’t need to ask what she meant by ‘Worked better than expected,’ because I found out in the first hundred feet. We found an infant, malformed Three, attempting to crawl its way back to the entrance. It was already badly melted by the time we arrived, and one of its back legs had literally melted off. The creature snapped at me once, from more than ten feet away, before its head collapsed in on itself, and it died.
{Athy: The hive is in self defense mode, trying to birth new models early in order to stop your advance, but since they’re not fully grown they don’t have enough strength, or mass, to resist the gas long enough to be a threat. They’re literally dying within minutes of being born.}
“I’d prefer that to facing a horde like we saw outside,” I said as I plunged Rending Wave into the back of the creature’s skull, just in case. “Skyler’s drones might have machine guns, but compared to the mortars...”
“Night and day, I know,” Skyler whispered. “I’ll have to think about how to improve their effectiveness in buildings.”
“Honestly? I think this might be a legitimate tactic to use,” I replied as we slowly followed the drone deeper. “Even if it doesn’t kill the fully grown models quickly, it’ll make them easier for us to deal with.” I paused for a moment. “That is assuming that there aren’t a lot of people stuck inside, and the anti-cancer treatments aren’t super expensive.”
“Maybe we should investigate something with less side effects before we try it in a residential area,” Skyler replied quietly.
We walked for several minutes, slowly encountering more and more malformed antithesis, until the two of us just stumbled into a massive chamber. There was a massive root network sprawled across the floor, walls and ceilings, which looked completely different to the system we found in the woods earlier. Most of the Model Tens had already fallen, while the last few poked ineffectively at the antithesis birthing structures ineffectively as the flesh literally melted off their bodies.
The hive didn’t look that great either, most of the structure was bubbling, and smoking. Large puddles of pus and melted antithesis flesh were everywhere.
“Is there anything left for us to do here?” I asked quietly. “It seems like the gas has done our job for us.”
{Athy: I think you underestimate how adaptable the antithesis are. Even now they’re trying to create models that resist the enzyme. Give them a couple hours, and the damage to the new growth will slow. A couple days, and they’ll bounce back, immune to this specific formula.}
{Sky: That fast?}
{Arty: They’re sacrificing hundreds of models trying everything possible to make a resistant birthing chamber, that’s why there’s a pile of corpses underneath each pod.}
{Athy: And while they’re trying to adapt here, they’ll just swap one of the other gathering sites to a birthing site. The only good thing about this situation is that any changes the antithesis undergo here will not be universal. The enzyme will be just as effective against other groups in the future.}
{Rei: So what do you recommend we do about the hive? If it’s going to adapt to the enzyme, we need a different solution to get rid of the entire system, don’t we?}
{Arty: Do not worry, your Class I Anthesis Biomass Denial Catalog has a number of other options for dealing with the antithesis. Desiccators, acids, and for exceptionally large jobs like this, nano disassemblers.}
{Sky: Isn’t that dangerous? You know, I’ve seen documentaries on the grey goo apocalypse before. You know, nanites converting everything else into nanites, until there’s nothing left but a massive nanite blob…}
{Rei: That’s a thing? We’ve inhaled nanites before! I did it not even half an hour ago!}
{Arty: Calm yourselves. Protector nanites cannot self replicate, and have very specialized programming based upon their purpose, and have limited battery life. They literally cannot go rogue. The flesh melter nanites are the most efficient way to deal with this hive, when combined with the enzyme, but if you’d prefer to use another option you could use the desiccation injectors. It should only take you a couple days to get rid of the entire system that way.}
{Sky: I get it, the nanites are safe. You didn’t need to resort to sarcasm at the end to get your point across.}
{Athy: Unfortunately, that wasn’t sarcasm. It would literally take several days to use the desiccation injectors. Effective for small areas, but difficult to use against larger systems. So, what do you want to do?}
Skyler and I exchanged a quick glance. “How do we set up these nanites?” I asked.
