Chapter Thirty-Nine - Getting a Clue

“The Vtuber boom of the early 2020s turned into a strange phenomena. At some point it became relatively cheap for brands to have their own Vtuber mascot, either with a real person behind the digitised face, or a carefully curated auto-responding AI.

That led to an entire generation that grew up more comfortable interacting parasocially with vtubers than with real life humans.”

--Rise of the Anime Girl, a study in three parts, 2035

***

I took point, mostly because I was the more subtle of the two of us. Going invisible--after pinging Manic to get her augs to display my location--meant that I was... not visible to the aliens.

Whatever. Point was, I was better at the front than the rather loud Manic, who was even now blasting some music from some speakers built into her clothes. I wasn't a music buff, but I recognized Fortunate Son when I heard it. I wasn’t sure if it was entirely appropriate to the context but I wasn’t going to start a debate I’d lose about music.

I checked my map as I walked down the side of a quiet street. The biggest confirmed group of antithesis was just a couple of blocks down, most of them gathering in a five-way intersection right on the edge of the fires that Gomorrah had started.

My plan had once been to take the aliens out while leaving as much of the city intact as possible, but that particular plan was several hours old by this point and with Gomorrah lighting everything up, it was kind of a moot point.

I’d hold back from the really destructive explosives, because the splash from those might hit Downtown and injure the folk I was meant to protect, but that still left me with more choices than before.

“Okay,” I said over the comms so that Manic could hear me. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m going to dip into the area with all the aliens, figure out which hole they’re crawling out of, then set bombs next to those. We’ll collapse the entire area down, then move in to mop up the survivors.”

“Sounds like there isn’t much for me to do in that plan of yours.”

“Would you rather hit up a group that outnumbers us a hundred to one head on?” I asked.

“Huh... alright, fair. Not quite at that level yet.”

“Me neither,” I said before shutting my comms off for a moment. “Myalis, can I have some resonators, maybe a few proximity mines, and... I guess some acid bombs. You know the ones that float up and rain acid down on an area?”

I’m familiar, yes. Are you getting these to prepare yourself?

“No, I’m giving them to Manic with instructions. If the aliens try to get at her they might cover her retreat.”

Manic didn’t seem impressed when I gave her the equivalent of a tupperware bin full of esoteric explosives, but she got the idea easily enough. “You just want me to cover my ass?”

“If you die while I’m a block away, it’ll look bad on my resume,” I said.

“I’m glad I matter so much to you,” Manic muttered. “These are some weird-ass bombs.”

“Hey, they’re creative. I thought you’d be all over that.”

“Blowing shit up isn’t art,” she said.

I stared. “Huh. And here I thought you knew something about art. Guess my impression was dead wrong.”

Manic rolled her eyes, then made a shooing gesture at me. “Go on, get to work, Stray Cat. But leave a few for me, would you?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said before patting her on the shoulder. I checked my gun for the third time, then started running off towards a nearby building. It had a bridge on its fifth floor that connected it to its neighbour and which should give me a nice view of the area where the antithesis were crowded.

I wanted a bird's eye view of things before I got down and had to navigate around the xenos.

I regretted that choice by the third floor. Sure, my suit had some neat setup that made walking up stairs a little easier, but it was still hell on my calves, and even if an exoskeleton kinda helped, it still used some muscle groups that weren’t used to being used at all.

“Just think of how thick your thighs will be,” I muttered to myself as I pushed past the burn and continued to jog up the stairs. “Crush Lucy’s head, just like in her dreams.”

On reaching the fifth floor, I navigated through a few corridors and across a rather boring bridge above an alley and into another apartment complex. It was the sort of shitty living space with minuscule homes and trashbags heaped out in the corridors where someone might, one day, be assed to clean up.

The far end of the building had a wall with several windows that overlooked the big intersection. I walked over and caught my breath while taking in the scene below.

The fires were spreading out to my left, though it looked like they weren’t spreading all that well. A few small apartment buildings were up in flames, but some buildings right next to them were still fine.

I was guessing, but I figured that maybe some places just didn’t have enough flammable stuff on the outside to catch fire so easily.

In any case, it didn’t look like the fire would spread too much, or so I hoped. No way of knowing, not for a while, at least.

I stopped paying so much attention to the scenery and focused more on the aliens below. There was no lack of those around. Model threes by the dozens, bigger ones, like fours and fives milling around the edges, and then a couple of big bastards.

A couple of model fourteens, the big centipede guys with the heavy plates over their segments, a few model fifteens, the artillery aliens that spat out those spiky wheels, and a single huge model eighteen in the centre.

The latter looked a bit fucked, with parts of its side looking partially melted, though not the way I’d expect them to if they were burned. The nanomachines at work? If so, the little robots had a lot of chewing left to do.

The only other time I’d seen a model eighteen was in the defence of New Montreal. It had dug its way under our defences and came popping out of the backline ready to rip our crap apart. It had taken on a tank and won.

There was absolutely no way our defences right now could handle one of those, even half-chewed up as it was.

“What is up with this hive?” I muttered.

It might be throwing everything it has at the wall to see what sticks, to borrow a quaint colloquialism.

“Right,” I said. Bigger aliens like that might take longer for the nanomachines to kill. So they’d actually be effective for a while before dying.

Maybe Gomorrah’s fire had been the right solution all along, because all of these hitting the piss-poor defences we had would have caused a huge breach. The militia didn’t have the firepower to take the bigger guys out, not unless they got lucky or drew the fight out.

And drawing out a fight was almost always something the antithesis wanted.

“Let’s go say hi,” I said.

The way back down was much easier than the path up, owing to gravity being a friend for once and because I practised with my jump jets by leaping down entire flights of stairs.

On arriving at the ground floor, I checked to see if my stealth stuff was still properly active, then I resisted the temptation to kick open the exit door. Instead I carefully pushed it open and slipped outside.

A model three’s head rose and it opened its three-hinged mouth as if it was sniffing the air.

I moved on past it, careful with my footfalls not to disturb any of the junk on the road.

There was a light rain coming down from above. Not water, but ash. Thick grey flakes that settled on everything and cast the world in shades of grey and black. The aliens were just slow enough that the stuff accumulated on their backs and sides, turning them into marble statues of grotesque monsters.

It also meant that I was leaving prints in the ground behind me, the same way boots used to leave prints in the snow, back when snow was a thing in this hemisphere.

I weaved my way around the bigger aliens. I didn’t know if they’d have sharper senses or not, but I wasn’t ready to bet my life on a not.

“Myalis, any clue where these guys are coming from?” I asked.

Then one of the doors to a building across the street slammed open and a wave of model threes followed by bigger, uglier aliens came pouring out.

“Nevermind, I think I figured it out.”

***