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131. Expected Victory
🕑 Added 2024-02-07 19:02:08 +0000 UTC‘This hurt far more in real life!’ Miles frowned with gritted teeth, shocked by the burning agony on the non-existent stump of a left arm from the shoulder up.
However, he didn't have the time to dilly-dally, and his training well accounted for this type of injury. He had far worse than that within it, such as bisection and even decapitation. Insanity for any human and pretty much everything, but why not have measures in such cases when death was not definitive?
It went without saying that his training was rather intense, inhumanly so, and would drive insane all that went through it. And Miles was quite sure that, to a degree, it was on purpose. It was extreme even by Eywa’s standard, but in the end, all that happened was in simulation.
But virtual training was not real life, and this was real; his body could feel everything to its fullest extent. Miles was not immune to pain. It was by the All-Mother and All-Father will. It could not be debilitating or send him into shock like humans, but he experienced it to its fullest, no matter how unpleasant it may be.
However, the pain was vital to any complex organism requiring the ability to interact using intricate tasks within its environment. It was a protective mechanism informing the individual of what was a threat and what was not.
Even lifeforms lacking such systems possessed more or less similar alternatives to organisms from harm. It came as no surprise that Miles’ body possessed this sense.
“Fuck!” he swore, switching his Tek Sword for Tek Gravitational Grenade as he backed off high up in one of the interspaces of a massive bridge that connected what appeared to be enormous aquaculture plants to an even larger one. Their sizes were comparable to entries in metropolises.
The dimension of everything was incomprehensible; the smallest structure stretched over dozens of kilometers, and the largest could be measured in countries if not continents.
Miles' pain grew even more with the burst of speed, the increased pressure, the windblast, and the slightly acidic atmosphere against the bare, still sizzling wound where a shoulder and the arm attached to it once were. His eyes through his Tek Helmet narrowed, and once he found a crevice, he didn't think any further and entered.
A Tek Phase Pistol materialized in his only hand, and he used to cut and meld pieces of the alien organic metal alloy, sealing the exit by welding the fallen piece together into a homogeneous mass. This simple task done, he didn't waste time; it won't hold for long, and from the little he glimpsed, it wasn't the only entry. But it was too small for any of their fighter jet-like spaceships to go in.
However, he was not alone here to begin with. He didn't need to turn around to know the fifty or so drones in bio-armor that made them each as tall as him. But he also didn't need to turn his head to fire his pistol in their vicinity, cutting most of their number.
The last few remaining in the open began to be massacred by three turrets levitating above his shoulders, shooting concentrated beams of blue light hotter than the Sun surface. These were Tek Shoulder Cannons, helpers in battle he couldn't have brought before due to how intense and chaotic the ‘fight’ was.
But it was perfect here, and each had a different fire mod. One was quick at the cost of power and range, the other was the exact opposite, akin to a rail gun and a sniper rifle for long range, powerful but slow fire rate, and the last was an in-between of the two before.
And while the turrets did their magic, he had to work on the source of unbearable pay.
“Fuck!” Miles muffled a scream amidst the hellfire his turrets were bringing as he did the most excruciating task: storing his Tek Chestplate in his inventory.
Melted metal, skin, bone, and muscles, but also the deep layer of burned tissue, had partially fused together with a burn that fitted well beyond that of the fourth-degree category and by a large margin.
And all was ripped apart by his action, like a bandaid. The forcefully cauterized injury opened, revealing pulsating muscle and a part of his ribs with other bones. However, there was no bleeding. His veins had automatically closed, sealing any further blood from being drowned out in obscene amounts from his body.
“That's a pretty nasty wound… They didn't miss me,” he mumbled with a drawn-out hiss of pain, observing the would-be debilitating injury.
Morbid fascination aside, he needed it closed and switched the mod of his pistol to healing, the light turning from ruby red to forest green. Then he shot himself in the shoulder, and a beam of this color bathed his grievous wound, mending and knitting flesh back together at a rapid pace.
However, the arm did not grow back, not that it was out of the Tek Phase Pistol capabilities, but it demanded minutes, minutes he didn't have. So, he essentially made a healed-up stump to negate a significant percentage of the pain and problem with having such an injury.
Next was the rest of the Tek Armor, and in a brief second, it was all switched for a new set, his lost lime replaced by the armor and usable like a prosthetic. He turned on his Tek Helmet and saw a disturbing sight that before he hadn't seen due to the damage received on the helmet, but now it was all too clear.
The farm above was not for the Harvester. It was for the thousands, no million upon million of people below. What he entered was a hangar filled with green pods connected to organic tubes themselves connected to containers. In each pod was one person or creature, always alien in origin; they were all naked and asleep, forming neat lines per size, species, and sex.
There were varying expressions that he could discern on the most human-like, and none were serene, even if he didn't know these alien species’ facial mimics. All he could see was two extremes of positive and negative, all displaying intense emotions.
“By Mother and Father,” he swore, his silver iris with the faintest pink dilating at the horrifying sight. However, it wasn't people whom the Harvester kidnaped; they were visibly all grown artificially here. A lack of use atrophied the muscles on their limbs, but also genetic alteration with how the limbs themselves were.
Some were even akin to chimeras between several species present. If that made it worse, he didn't know and didn't want to ponder this philosophical question.
“That is what the record meant by theoretically psiophage…” Miles said with mild disgust, “Psychic vampire… But is it so much different than any kind of farming or even hunting?”
He wasn't feeling sympathy, however, only using rationality, avoiding hypocrisy, and gaining understanding.
In many ways, the Harvester from just this alone didn't make them evil; that would be a foolish point of view. To begin with, the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were easily changeable depending on the circumstance, making use of them nonessential.
*BOOOOMMM!!!*
The world shook, and the roar of machines and fireblasts echoed through the chamber, snapping Miles back to the present. His gaze shifted away from the countless pods, and he said matter of factly, his tone cold, “I’m not here on a rescue mission.”
There was no need for justification for such an act or the act of inaction.
First, he couldn't realistically save them. Second, he didn't know if saving them would be worthwhile. And third, the spaceship he was in had a larger diameter than Pandora. If there were hundreds of thousands here with the lowest estimate, he couldn't fathom even with his brain how much more there was.
Was this moral? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it didn't matter, and this was a choice based on empirical data; he didn't like it, but he didn't have to, for that didn't change anything about the situation.
They would all perish today, and in a way, it might be the better end for whatever might be within them. The presence of an advanced mind and emotion didn't mean sapience if nothing was here to cultivate it.
For all he knew, they were only lumps of flesh with potent Psionic and nothing else, and that seemed to be the case from further he was getting from his Father.
But that didn't mean they didn't have their uses; Liam had requested genetic material of the Harvester, so why not take more? And so from both his gauntlets, Tek Claws solidified into two iridescent light blades.
Storing the hovering turrets, he began to hover, the jetpack of his chest plate flaring up, then his position shifted forward, and shockwaves followed. With them also came hundreds of claws marked upon organic and inorganic alike, blood, glass, and flesh, followed by a delay soon after.
‘If I didn't have reason to hate them before.’ Miles thought as he shifted his right gauntlet, cutting through a pod and the misshapen head of the blue creature within that looked like an Asari teenager with transverse intercalary limb deficiency.
As much as he tried to remain calm, it wasn't a task without difficulty. He hated the Harvester for their goal; what they did and what he saw only added oil to the fire. There was a fine line between unfeeling logic and free cruelty in the latter part.
But cruelty was the point here. It generated more emotion as such; it was born of this logic, but it was not unfeeling, and there laid the problem for Miles, and he hated it all.
And what he hated was to be destroyed, spinning on himself at more than a hundred turns per second, taking enough g force to turn an average man into a meaty yet crunchy paste of gore. He widened his arms, the Tek Claws shifting upward to form an arrow of light along special paths in his Tek Armor. He drilled through all the pods, walls, and drones and burst out on the other side from a deepwater way where trees half the size of Hometrees were growing by the thousands.
“That felt good!” he exclaimed with a bloodthirsty smile, all blood, pieces of flesh, and debris on his shield washing away as he flew through the water.
“But I want it to end,” he added, the bloodthirsty smile shifting to one of extreme displeasure as he looked up to the sky hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers above where an indentation similar in size to Texas, France or Germany.
This indentation was the belly of the Mothership, where the Queen lodged; the entire Harvester Mothership was an extension of the former, like petals of a flower grown from a portion of the resource recollected after each harvest.
The shield of his Tek Armor, turning to its maximum, became visible in the shape of a form-fitting veil of bright and ethereal blue hexagons. Similarly, the propulsor of his Tek Chestplate was clocked up by his will to go faster, the shape of his Tek Claws shifted, and he brought more of them ready to switch to a new pair as the last will break.
Then he disappeared a second later, a shockwave exploded, blasting the closest tree to shred, and the blast traveled far and beyond, killing all in a three hundred meter (~984) radius and heavily injuring all up to one and a half kilometer (~4921ft), after it was varying degree of injury that progressively diminished.
‘I can only do that once. Good, it wouldn't have been possible to do it another time. This fucker do like to go kamikaze.’ Miles mentally said, rising faster and faster, continually creating shockwaves as he cut through the air.
He was reaching a speed that he should only safely reach in the vacuum of space. At such velocity, a substantial percentage of the periodic table will ionize into plasma with the heat by the friction with the air currently generated.
Tek was powerful, but it was not omnipotent and would wear under extreme duress. This very same kind of duress presently endured, and Miles was only increasing it. His speed was well over five times that of atmospheric reentries and pushing above and beyond that generous speed.
And yet he felt slow. Seven long seconds went on until he was even close to the Mothership, whose energy shield was turned on by the Queen to stop him during that time. A futile action, he reckoned with no small amount of glee, but it was magnificent that it created a neon green sun.
The outside shield was nigh impenetrable for not only its sheer durability from a pure quality point of view in structure and energy but also in quantity, and it wasn't meters thick; it was hundreds of kilometers (+100mi). From an outside perspective, it didn't look like it, but similarly, Earth was smooth from a certain angle when the oceans and mountains begged to differ.
But here, the shield was ‘only’ a dozen kilometers (~8mi) in thickness, and it was weaker by nature compared to its larger cousin as it had a lower energy modulation capacity. And so the Tek Claws, with his momentum, were enough for him to rip through the shield.
Following up, he proceeded with the same zeel in the Mothership, digging through the hull that was far thinner than the one from before, and he entered.
Through the vision of his Tek Helmet, his eyes set themselves on a large spherical object protruding from the ceiling, a sphere that was in his flight trajectory. But that was what was within that interested him, the Harvester Queen, and she seemed far larger than what was in the record.
Like the lower caste, she seemed to have fitted on herself a bio armor, multiplying her already impressive size by a bit more than two and a half. Around her was a shield, in her claws several weapons, such as a bus-sized autocannon, and her many back tentacles had energy blades Miles didn't doubt would hurt a lot.
Alas, none of that mattered. Miles didn't come to fight to have an epic battle with a titan, an alien monster rivaling skyscrapers in size. He came to kill and collect samples with surgical precision.
The only acceptable fights that lasted more than seconds were spars and one in the name of sports; anything other than that should be avoided at all costs. His Father and Mother taught him this and never to play with and underestimate a foe.
He was taught to kill without giving any chance of retaliation; it was a mercy on both parties and fundamental logic. And that is what he did to the Harvester Queen.
His body of light blade and esoteric metal that was all but a blur cut through the resilient material of the sphere, then through the personal shield of the alien queen, after it was her.
From bottom to head, she exploded outward by the shockwaves in a shower of cremated flesh, half-burned organs, and greyish-green blood as he flew through her. And be continued, this time heart hammering for he knew what was to come, gravity increased a hundredfold as the self-destruct sequence unclenched itself.
But when it did, Miles was already outside; however, the Harvester Mothership explosion followed the next instant, and the blast caught him the moment he reached the wormhole.
Burning agony followed as he reappeared on the other side, and he fell on the metallic ground with a loud thud, indicating there was an artificial atmosphere. His head spun, the pain not the cause but the realization his lower half from up to his kidneys was utterly gone.
The sensation was disorienting to the highest degree and pretty disturbing; it wasn't just his leg he lost. The fact it was temporary did little to change the fact that he had now been forced to be a eunuch for the next few days.
-Congratulations, Miles. That was an impressive display of grit and skill. I’m proud of you, and I hope this has been a learning experience.- the voice of Liam graced his mind as he weakly looked up with a grin forming behind his helmet as it opened. What it revealed was not pretty to any extent, in injury per se, eyes were bloodshot, ears burst, mouth pouring blood, and mysterious piece of flesh.
-What of the last one?- Miles inquired, shifting his body using his only remaining limb to look up in the sky where eleven green stars of bright fiery light were and another dimmer disappearing in the distance.
-For your Mother to track.- Liam answered before generating a stream of Argent Sea to make his son a false lower half.
Healing him from such an injury will not happen instantaneously; a stronger, more advanced body requires specialized treatment when the damages are of such scales.
