Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 151: Suicide mission All stars

Perry took a deep breath. Chicago was preparation for this. He’d shored up his weaknesses and grown stronger. He should, in theory, be able to puncture a hole right through to wherever they were storing the other Digitizer and nab it.

Perry glanced down at his palm, covered in vantablack power-armor, looking like a man-shaped hole in reality. I’m not even trying to be edgy, it’s just how it turned out. I’m a happy-go-lucky boy with good grades, friends, a girlfriend and family. Why is everything I make BLACK!?

Sincethe number of versions is getting pretty high, we’ll start giving them names. I dub the Mark Seven: The Black Death.

Okay, maybe I’m a little edgy.

…I wonder if I could arrange for the suit to be powered by the souls of the damned. I think there’s a Nocul spell for that…NO, I must resist the edgelord inside me!

“You ready?” Solaris asked, unaware of Perry’s attempt at distracting himself from mortal terror.

Perry swallowed and nodded, scanning the horizon, covered in writhing steel. He could feel the nearest of Professor Replica’s Digitizer’s radiating sensation from behind him like warm sunlight. He could feel it, knew it was there.

In the distance, he could sense another point, radiating the same sensation. He knew if he followed it, he would find his goal.

He also knew it was a trap.

The replicators, more than anything, wanted to checkmate Solaris, so the trap around the digitizer would be Solaris-rated. Why simply guard a precious object when they could trap their strongest enemy, too? Perry was starting to understand Mass Driver’s word about their predictability.

It was a trap. And he needed to smash it.

They wouldn’t try a fast trap, because Solaris’s speed is relativistic. It would be something more in my wheelhouse. Something…funky. Hopefully that’s where I can find my opportunity to escape.

“Hey Perry,” Solaris said, using his civilian name, placing a hand on his shoulder and leaning down, lowering his voice.

“No matter what happens…Try not to die, okay? Your family has never tried to kill me all at the same time, and I’m a little scared of that.”

Perry gave a strangled chuckle.

“Best of luck, Sweeper.” Solaris said, giving him a final pat on the shoulder and a field promotion.

“How’s the pay?” Perry asked.

Solaris gave him a wan smile. “It’s not about the money.”

It’s about the respect.

Perry jumped off The Wall and turned his jets up to max.

He felt like he’d been crushed by a falling anvil across his entire body as he went from zero to mach speeds in fractions of a second. The System must’ve agreed with him.

HP: 11

“OH MY GOD!” Perry shouted, momentarily regretting the lack of time to test the suit’s systems. He’d just accelerated fast enough to turn a civilian to meat-paste inside the armor. Perry’s Tinker side felt the need to burst into uproarious laughter.

His wizard side agreed.

“BAAHAHAHAHAHAH!”

The only reason he didn’t steeple his fingers ominously as he blasted through the sky was because the sudden change in wind resistance might cause him to crash or explode.

Perry didn’t head straight toward the hidden digitizer. The replicators were very smart. They would certainly plot his trajectory and beef up the security on the Magnum Opus if Perry headed straight for it.

Not to say they weren’t guarding it zealously already, but a teeny bit fewer wildcard sandbaggers to pin him down could make all the difference.

So what Perry did was headed straight towards Chicago. This was another important Replicator site, and they would be forced to distribute ground troops to intercept in case he was planning on terrorizing the humanoids.

ETA fifteen minutes!

The sheer speed made Perry giddy.

The world slid by underneath him at an unreal, almost dreamlike rate, faster than individual Replicator could catch up to him. Perry watched with surreal awe as a Replicator bullet about the size of his fist kept pace with him for a mile or two before falling to the ground and splitting a tree in half.

The robot’s handheld lasers hit him like a flurry of hail before being absorbed into the black of his armor and converted to more power, unable to outpace the armor’s ability to eat light.

They tried to set up a blockade, and Perry simply weaved around it miles in advance, erring in the direction of his target.

Once there was a ninety-degree angle between the digitizer and Chicago, Perry juked left hard enough to paste a human inside the armor, turning on a dime and putting the sensation of the digitizer straight in front of him. Not that the Replicators cared one way or another, but he relished the thought of them wasting resources guarding Chicago.

HP: 10

Was it worth it turning on a dime rather than making a slower turn to conserve HP? The difference could probably be measured in a handful seconds.

A replicator could do a lot to the human body in a handful of seconds, so Perry felt the trade-off was justified.

The sensation from mom’s tracking spell in front of him rapidly became a sensation beneath him, despite there being no visible entrance or break in the forest. There was nothing in every direction for miles.

Of course they wouldn’t advertise it.

MELT.EXE

A house-sized tube of forest above the Digitizer turned to liquid, and Perry dove right in. he made the tube so big in order to cause chaos when it flooded the room he landed in.

The instant before he hit the liquid, Perry spotted the light shifting unnaturally above him.

Perry reflexively whipped around, ready to blast whatever was sneaking up on him.

Turns out it was the sun, moving overhead at a jog.

Time dilation!

POW! Perry hit the liquid and sank dozens of feet under the surface of the forest before he had an opportunity to stop himself.

Perry’s mind worked fast. He was already inside the effect, which would presumably get stronger the closer he came. It was a seconds-to-hours kind of thing, which made sense for a trap designed to hold Solaris long enough to destroy the city.

Now, I’ve gotta choose. Retreat now and look for a way to disable it, wasting roughly an entire day in the process, or bet that I can find and disable whatever’s making it fast enough to avoid wasting all my time.

If he took weeks of real time to find and destroy the generator, then it was the same as failing his mission.

Making you Fail without even an opportunity to fight back. That’s their style alright.

If he went back outside the effect, there was no guarantee that he’d be left alone long enough to figure anything out before being swarmed. Less than that, even. After all, hours were passing per second on the outside world. They would be waiting for him en masse.

Based on the progress of the sun, Perry estimated about a week for every ninety seconds.

Well, let’s do this.

Perry took a deep breath and hopped himself up on Attunement.

Stability 40 -> 34

Attunement 50 -> 56

THERE!

Just like in Neuron’s Blue Hall, there was a localized effect causing time dilation. It seemed to balloon outward and encompass hundreds of feet in every direction.

It was also caused by a giant egg-shaped void overlaid on the background of stars. Replicators didn’t build this thing, they’re just using it as a trap.

MELT.EXE

Perry melted everything between himself and bored through the ground as fast as possible, bursting out right in front of the egg.

He flicked his Attunement and Stability the opposite direction.

Stability 34 -> 46

Attunement 56 -> 44

The void of space faded away, reality reasserting itself. Perry was in a solid steel cube with bright lighting surrounding…nothing.

Where there was a massive sphere in his senses beforehand, now there was…nothing at all.

As the seconds ticked by, Perry hesitated, heart slamming in his chest.

Could I just go get the Digitizer and bail? In less than ninety seconds?

Signs pointed to ‘no’, but was it a better choice than breaking…whatever this thing was? There could be a leak, or some kind of explosion, or he could be torn to shreds by vibrations in spacetime.

Screw it. Flipping the table when you’re checkmated is a legitimate strategy. Retreating now is losing. Fifteen seconds spent second-guessing himself was 28 hours. He simply couldn’t afford to think.

Perry reeled back and smashed an armored hand down on the empty space…and whiffed. His hand sailed through empty air, touching nothing at all.

What the…? This was tangible evidence as any he’d ever seen that it wasn’t just Perry’s senses that bridged the gap when he was Unstable. Senses can’t detect things they aren’t on the same dimension with. He’d been blurring the lines every time.

The solution, then…

Stability 46 -> 34

Attunement 44 -> 56

The void popped into existence again, right in front of his face. Is it weird that this thing looks almost the same as my armor? Perry thought idly as he raised both hands up and brought them down at the egg.

Crack.

The pure black void cracked, revealing…Otherness.

An icepick headache slammed into Perry’s temples, causing him to stagger backwards as the cracks grew and spread, a living miasma emerging from the egg, questing forward blindly, amorphous pseudopods forming to T???a???s???t???e??? reality, like a child might eat a crayon. The distance between himself and the monster shortened. Not because it moved closer, but because the creature ate it.

Well…this might be a problem, Perry thought as red lines began to erupt from the ground in his periphery.

Some kind of sealing spell? Perry wanted to look, but couldn’t bring himself to tear his gaze away from…whatever he was looking at, as if the act of taking his eyes off of it would give it some kind of license to change him.

That’s what’s going on, Perry thought, wincing against the headache, but forcing himself to keep his eyes open. If he turned his stability up, this thing would be free to affect him however it wanted, because it was infinite compared to him, existing in more dimensions at once. It could rewrite him like a paper doll…probably by accident. He was stabilizing it into a form that could be perceived simply by paying attention to it.

If he stopped…

It was an interdimensional explosion happening in slow motion, Perry was grounding it in his flow of time by virtue of his Attunement’s gravity pulling it along with him along the axis of the fourth dimension. If he stopped, it would spread through time itself and arrive at all times, in all places. Perry himself might cease to exist as he was if he dropped his Attunement or left. That’s what his Dimensional Tinker subclass was telling him.

But wait, if I failed, wouldn’t I not exist to attempt this at all? Does that guarantee a success…Or what if I already have failed and the Paradox I am now is different than I’m supposed to be? Would I even know? Is this…a Paradox?

A shudder ran down Perry’s spine, a manic grin began tugging on his lips as he took a step forward, raising a hand and speaking in a low, firm voice. Like when you’re trying to project confidence to a wild animal.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave this dimension in the condition you found it and go about your business, where-when-whatever you came from.”

Naturally the abomination didn’t understand a single word he said, but it did reach one of it’s lumbering pseudopods forward, tentatively touching Perry’s armor.

The intangible thing slipped through Perry’s armor like it was made of jello, landing a cold touch on Perry’s wrist.

Ah crap.

Like it had finally tasted something worth it’s time, half a dozen more pseudopods lashed out of the egg and surrounded Perry, the cold touch of the creature wasn’t cold as he could define it…more like cold in the sense that it was an absence of something he’d been submerged in for so long he’d taken it for granted.

Typically this would be heat, but in this case it was…existence, perhaps?

Perry unleashed every weapon his suit had to no effect, his arms and legs retrained by the creature’s transparent limbs, dripping liquid insanity onto the floor. The strength afforded him by his suit was meaningless, because strength had no meaning in the creature’s grasp. Space and time itself seemed to stretch and warp as he was drawn closer to the egg, cracking further every second to reveal a baleful, hungry eye that seemed to draw him in.

“Hey,” Perry said, trying another tactic. “You know Mars, Jocelyn and Clank? They’re pretty stand up guys, and they vacation here occasionally, would be rude to mess up their hang-out spot, don’t you think?”

Sure, it was kind of a pathetic name-drop, but Perry was in a bit of a pickle here.

One of the pseudopods wrapped around the side of his face, sinking gently through his helmet to silence him. Perry wasn’t sure if it was because he was annoying the creature with his monkey-noises, or if it simply was an accident. Didn’t matter either way.

Fuck it.

Perry opened up his mouth and took a bite outta the apocalypse.

A keening wail echoed across realities as the creature yanked backward reflexively, drawing him violently toward the shell towards it’s thrashing visage. A fire seemed to well up inside Perry as the world devolved into thrashing mayhem.

You know what? I haven’t had breakfast yet.

Perry’s body seemed to move on its own. Biting, chewing, swallowing, c???????o??????n??????s????????u?????????m????i?????????n?????????g?????????. He’d never been so hungry in his life. It was more than mere starvation. It was a fire consuming his stomach and the only way to put it out was to desperately shovel more of this delicious feast into his mouth, hoping it would douse the flame.

HUNGRY.

The bright red lines in his peripheries glowed brighter, and Perry’s eyes rolled back in his head.

When he opened his eyes again, he was sitting in a leather chair in a well-appointed library, wearing fine Manitian eveningwear.

Sitting across from him was…him.

Fake Perry raised a brow but didn’t move as Perry took in his surroundings. Sunlight was beaming through a massive window behind him, filtering through manitian trees he’d only seen described in books and in a few refugee’s front yards.

In front of him was a fine wooden coffee table between himself and his doppleganger.

Perry ran a finger across the underside of the expensive table and came back with rusty brown dried blood.

Huh. Less clean under the surface. I’m nearer the window...

“Would it be terribly cliché if I asked where we are?” Perry asked.

“Not at all. We’re inside your soul.” Fake Perry responded, flipping a page.

“Which would make you…Abun’zaul, I take it?” Perry asked.

“That’s just a label. I prefer to be called Perry,” Abun’zaul said, his voice and cadence exactly the same as Perry’s. “I’m currently assimilating you. This will go easier if you relax. I want you to know the copy will be perfect, so you don’t have to worry about your friends and family. I will love them exactly as you did.”

“Right…” Perry muttered, glancing around, his heartbeat spiking despite himself. “You’re not real.”

“Oh?” Abun’zaul asked, using Perry’s own face to display genuine curiosity.

“This is a mental prison, Adregarde’s Mental prison, specifically. I didn’t know exactly what the red lines were a moment ago, but a glowing red formation and trapping you in your worst nightmare are both hallmarks of the spell.”

“Funny that Replicators can cast spells.” Abunzaul said. “They kept that one close to the vest.”

“But it makes sense,” They both said as one, pausing to glare at each other reproachfully.

“If the Replicators have even the barest hint of souls, then they are ‘living’ things as far as magic is concerned.” They echoed each other.

Not to mention a mental prison was one of the only that stood a chance of Containing Solaris. When combined with the time dilation from the egg, it was brutally effective.

“So…This is your worst nightmare?” Abun’zaul asked, motioning to the illusory library.

“Having my soul consumed from the inside out and being replaced by you? Yep.” Perry said, folding his hands over each other. “Therefore this is Adregarde’s Mental Prison. And you are not real.”

“Okay, okay, fair point.” Abun’zaul said, nodding and setting his book aside. “Let me ask you something. How does Adregarde’s Mental Prison fetch your worst nightmares?”

Perry’s skin went cold. “A conduit…to the soul.”

“And where am I held?” Abun’zaul asked.

In my soul.

“So, can you definitively say that I did not hijack the spell to breach containment and arrange this little meeting? Are you sure the creature you fed to me just now didn’t knock anything loose in your System? Did you think that poking and prodding at your own soul wouldn’t have consequences?” Abun’zaul asked, the light seeming to dim as he stood to Perry’s full height.

“You’ve woken me up,” He said, clenching a fist.

“And I. Am. Hunger.”

“Fuck,” Perry muttered, lunging to his feet as the Perry mask began to peel away, revealing way too many teeth.

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