A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: 77

A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: 77

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Wordcount: 2500

Commissioned by Arksoul

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Combining Parvati’s abilities, Advika’s, and my own pretty much sealed the deal on the strip mine. Parvati had multiple shelters on standby to get people to safety and wean them off their new addictions. Advika had ludicrous firepower and sheer durability. Finally, I could get either of the two anywhere they needed to be in an instant.

Anyone who’s not a target can be exfiltrated instantly.

Anyone who is a target can be destroyed.

If there was a response to us, then we could escape instantly, especially because Advika’s power countered the counter to mine. Her control over energy basically invalidated most defenses against my own. You could saturate an area with energy and block me, sure, but if Advika was present by my side with her sensors and abilities?

Well, like I said, the strip mine’s fate was guaranteed, but we also gained the advantage of being able to leave whenever we wanted.

In short, it was obvious that Parvati was trying to foist Advika on me and showcase how working with her and it was the superior choice.

Honestly?

If there wasn’t a weird overtone of Advika trying to get with me personally and Parvati egging her ‘daughter’ on, I’d have taken the deal.

With that in mind, though?

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of having a being of godlike power barely a few months old cozy up to me.

…

I popped in, gave Advika line of sight, the guards and defenses melted or popped, and then I sent away the prisoners.

Sure, the giant weapons platforms would’ve been a threat against just me and Parvati alone, but with Advika the situation was heavily in our favor. She just swatted them down, even before they could get a lock or fire their weapons at us.

The simple fact is that any normal army would need to use bleeding-edge technology to counter a single superhuman like Advika. Advika could probably be put down with some nuclear mines hidden months ahead of time, blasted apart with an immense saturation strike of hypersonic missiles, or trapped in some other way. With money, time, and preparation, humanity can handle a single superhuman as powerful as Advika.

The problem is that there were just too many superhumans, a lot of them banded and worked together, and many of them also had money and time.

The only reasonable, timely counter to superhumans before they cause immense amounts of damage are superhumans.

This is a known fact, so as we ravaged the base, I waited for the shoe to drop.

And, I found it cruising our way from the upper atmosphere.

“There. It’s at thirty thousand feet and descending fast.” Of course, if someone established this much infrastructure and put this much effort into a facility, they’d have something ready to protect it. “Can you get rid of it?”

Advika turned towards the direction I pointed and blinked.

There was a plume of light from where she was and the target, clearing the atmosphere for a second, and then an intense beam of light.

So, that’s how she manages to fire such powerful lasers of in the atmosphere.

“I’ve damaged it, but it’s cast away most of its armor and is approaching fast.” Advika stated simply and all around her formed more of her attacks. Atmosphere clearing rays followed by bursts of power unfettered by the atmosphere. She harnessed the rising temperature around us and fed them into her attacks. It was a continuous stream of laser fire. Oscillating laser fire in multiple spectrums. I wasn’t much of a physics guy, but I could easily tell that she was putting out a seriously high amount of firepower. There was no sound, no pressure wave, and nothing besides waste heat that she gathered up, but it was still firepower. “It’s launching projectiles. Intercepting.”

“I’ll handle that part.” I grunted and assisted her. The projectiles were each about three meters long and covered in dense materials. They were flying fast enough to sheathe themselves in plasma from their interaction with the atmosphere. They were actively dodging as well. However, there’s a difference between dodging Advika’s attacks and mine. She had to set up the attack, creating a vacuum path between her and her target as to not do horrible things to the atmosphere. Me? Well, I created fields instantly around my target all with different output locations. The missiles were effectively shredded and intercepted by having all their parts and pieces sent high into the atmosphere.

There were no explosions as a result of my defense. Just scraps and parts falling to Earth aflame as they burned up on reentry.

“It looks like some sort of gunboat” Parvati showcased the target we were firing at. The target in question was like a large, gray brick with thrusters on both ends and a main body covered in large missile tubes. The front of the missile boat was an armored prow that was steadily melting off against Advika’s attacks, but it must’ve been at least a meter of armor designed to withstand firepower up in space while disgorging missiles. “It’s on an intercept trajectory and with that much mass and power, I suspect it’s powered by some sort of fusion engine that can be jury-rigged to explode very violently.”

“How violently?”

“At least three megatons. Up to five.”

It made sense in context. Their operation was destroyed and their people gone. Of course, they’d send a blistering amount of firepower at the target and drop a strategic weapon on the site to attempt to kill the enemy. If a regular superhuman force came in to do the same, it would’ve been the end for them. However, Parvati, myself, and Advika were way beyond the superhuman average and so we were able to deal with it with our combined strength.

Still, though, I relocated us at least a hundred kilometers away just in case.

That much wasn’t enough.

Advika glared at me when I did.

“I would’ve intercepted it before it landed.” She stated with a frown, before refocusing on firing on the gunboat from our new location. I moved us again, and she scowled at me outright, while Parvati was silent. “Why—

“That wouldn’t be enough. No way they’d send just that, since they knew they’d be stepping on a lot of toes down here.” I extended my senses while Advika went silent and frowned. I searched for places in the immediate area that I couldn’t reach… and found the issue, while dragging my new allies even further away from the facility. “Damn, they’re nasty.”

The ground beneath the facility broke apart and erupted upward like a great gout of earth. Inside the pillar were faint signs of the explosion that caused the eruption. The gunboat surged into the upturned earth and exploded within it, scattering suphereated scrap, stone, and everything else stored under the facility in every direction. An explosion, an artificial landslide, and finally another explosion from another source. A series of attacks that would’ve discombobulated the attackers, buried them in sheer mass, and then slammed them with another, massive attack all at once.

Without a semblance of a doubt, that would’ve killed the vast majority of superhumans.

Advika and Parvati would’ve been a bit banged up.

Still, though, I had to ask myself… if I were a bunch of rich bastards who are trying to turn earth into a colony for their personal use, would I really just do that?

The answer was, of course, no.

“Parvati, make sure to scan the prisoners for any trackers.”

“I have already set up a jamming field and I am scanning them as we speak.”

“Great. I think there’s going to be a reprisal to that.” I kept my senses stretched out over the horizon, while periodically moving us around. What was the possibility that some of the people up there brought along someone with precognitive abilities? What are the chances that a someone with that sort of ability decided to join up with the people who got the hell off the planet? Not zero. I made sure to increase my speed of transfers. Advika looked my way. “Just being cautious. When you’re dealing with people who have as much at their disposal as these guys, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

The people on Earth have been up to crazy, wacky shenanigans after the global economy melted. Parvati was made post-collapse. The machine-god Advika was modelled after was made in a secret government fallout bunker in India. The ruler of Japan, in the middle of a famine, was building literal giant bio-mechanical titans and had mobile breeding camps and child supersoldiers. A whole superhuman city in Canada is literally uplifting animals and braving a whole a new world by making the physical body whatever they want. All super crazy stuff… and it was being done by people not in outer space with the resources to spare to wage interstellar war.

I think a little bit of paranoia is warranted.

It was time to wait and see, rather than perform any stunts that’ll get attention.

…

Thankfully, the response was a conventional one, even though it was led by a bunch of race supremacists.

“Parvati?”

“Tapping in, Designation: Egress.”

The three of us were observing from a shelter we set up just beyond the horizon. Parvati provided a few invisible drones, Advika made us invisible to thermals, and I teleported in anything remotely useful. Parvati, being a crazy capable AI, brought in a large pillar hooked up to several generators that covered us in a reverse-engineered version of the optical camouflage that hid the facility. If they meant to deny tech with the self-destruct mechanism and the suicidal gunboat, it didn’t work.

Mostly because Parvati was just that ludicrous.

Anyway, we were observing the response of the flunkies that the space imperialists were employing.

A bunch of larpers hopped up on roids, in power armor, who were pretending to be Neo-Vikings.

Of course, they weren’t helmets even while in full power armor and had tattoos on their faces and blonde hair and beards in braids.

And their armor was, naturally, covered in iron crosses, runes, and swastikas.

Couldn’t get more cliché if they tried, honestly.

“Damn, that’s not good.” The first one to speak up earned a grunt from the leader. The leader was the one wearing two fridges worth of power armor instead of one and was a full head taller than the rest. Genetically modified, surgically enhanced, and roided up. I’d say he gets a year to live at most if his masters decided to stop supporting him. All that stuff needs constant input and maintenance. “You think the freaks finally pulled something? Or the blue-bloods?”

“Neither. This one’s a new factor. Sensors registered thermal attacks in every direction. Nothing that either have.” The taller one with the bigger armor and bigger muscles also showed that he had a bigger brain. He was bare-faced without a hair on his head, but he had sharp eyes. He looked around and I was sure that if Parvati didn’t work hard on making her drones with anti-gravity tech and silent, we’d have been found. He nearly looked right at a few several times, probably imagining where onlookers would look from. “Some form of stealth transport, too. Nothing in airspace in any of our sensors. Ground or orbit.”

The mention of orbit made Parvati hiss.

Guess the AI will be looking for stealth surveillance systems in Earth’s orbits in the near future.

I could do it one better, though.

“We can send Advika up there and just clear the whole place out save for your satellites.” That seemed to get the AI’s attention. The gynoid body nodded after a second and returned to focusing on the conversation. It was probably mapping insertion points and finding places to unleashing ridiculous amounts of energy to cover the most of Earth’s orbit. With Advika’s output, and my ability, it should be a few hours a day and we’ll manage to clear things up. “Can you run a scan on their faces? Are they people we know?”

Parvati shook the head of the gynoid it currently occupied.

“None from the two leaders. The rest of the gathered group show as various criminals or extremists. It’s highly likely that they’ve been inserted as leaders into the invading force.” So, it was likely that whatever movement gathered these people together got usurped. Or, maybe, the rich and powerful already had friends leading the various organizations and consolidated them during the collapse. A lot of the agitators before the end were funded by one group or another to get what they wanted, after all. “I’ll need to acquire their bodies and perform autopsies, if I am to discern more.”

An AI performing autopsies should have sent alarm bells ringing in my head.

However, instead, I could only nod.

The stakes are so high that I just accepted that happening for more information on the people trying to use Earth as a resource point.

Fuck.

“We should acquire that information now.” Advika threw in her two cents. Thankfully, finding a real threat to her seemed to have gotten her out of her weird mood when we met again. I’ll take the machine god being incensed and angry over being weirdly looking for affirmation from me. “Those two leaders can provide us with information on our foes. You may do your studies on them after we acquire our information, creator.”

The two of them were ready to argue when someone else came into the scene via a sleek vehicle that used the same optical camouflage that hid the facility.

All the enhanced thugs in power armor knelt as the doors of the sleek, dartlike transport opened and a completely covered figure came into view.

And promptly swung their hand and sliced off the arm of the leader of the group… who took the blow without complaint.

Seriously, I left the safety of my bunker because I thought things cooled down.

It looks like the craziness just dialed up to eleven.

“That is the consequence of your first failure, Elric. The next failure will be on your head. A new facility will arrive in a month. Protect it and man it, or perish.” Those were the only words said by the figure clad in voluminous white robes. For a second, I was afraid it’d look our way. Thankfully, whoever or whatever it was didn’t expect stealth drones produced by an AI from their own technology. “Set your hounds loose and search for the perpetrators. If they are not found, you will be interred and be made useful.”

Interred.

That word resounded in my mind, while memories of the empty space in the giant biomechanical superhumans made by the Shogun came to the forefront of my memory.

We never found a superhuman scientist in the Shogun’s employ, and the slot where an ordinary person would be placed into the mutants was coffin-like.

Was there a link between these people and the Shogun?