A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: Chapter 26

A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: Chapter 26

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Wordcount: 2500

Commissioned by Arksoul

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On one hand, I could just let a shitload of people die.

On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if I wouldn’t consider this my fault.

Look, I’ll readily admit that I could’ve dedicated my life to world peace and that I could’ve done my best to prevent the apocalypse. Hell, if I was fine with authority and being the government’s dog, I’d have probably been sending special forces teams and superhumans all over the world to stabilize it. However, that sort of dedication and diligence was something I just didn’t have, courtesy of a childhood that had all my hopes and dreams replaced with a wish to just be left alone.

Yeah, I wasn’t able to be altruistic by the time I turned eighteen, let alone willing to sacrifice myself for a greater cause.

This is a just a way of me saying that my piece of shit of a father and terrible upbringing led me to being a piece of shit myself, but I do have a point.

I’m not the kind of person who does everything to save the world.

But, I’m also not the kind of person who goes on his way to fuck the world over.

I just don’t want to get fucked, while I enjoy living.

I understand that many people feel the same way and shouldn’t get fucked, while enjoying to live.

Therefore, I try not to fuck over and make other people miserable trying to earn my own happiness.

So, I liked my jobs to be neat and tidy affairs with as little repercussions as possible.

That’s why I never made the big bucks, or made the biggest waves in my mercenary days. I never took the jobs that plastered my name across newspapers, earned me incredible amounts of money, and made a lot of people pissed off at the fact that I existed. Generally speaking, avoiding those jobs resulted in me staying alive to this day, while a lot of those A-listers fucked off and died.

The problem was that I now crossed that line and the remains of the Indian government was on the warpath.

If I did nothing, then Parvati and the remnants were going to come to blows and kill each other. Parvati had a lot of cards stacked up in her favor, but masses of superhuman soldiers tended to mess with the odds quite a lot, and there were a lot under the Indian government’s banner. The likelihood that someone would come along to turn the tide, even against obscene numbers of overpowered gynoids, was pretty likely.

Parvati had good odds, but the AI’s victory wasn’t assured.

Not only that, but there was going to be a lot of blood on my hands, because I agreed to the operation in the first place and it went tits up. Sure, I could try and blame Parvati for the problem, but I knew myself well enough to know that my mind wasn’t that twisted. I agreed to the operation because I wanted what the AI could provide. We were two beings that could think and reason, who both agreed to a course of action, which resulted in us both benefiting. Therefore, we both played a part in the current, fucked up situation.

I really, really wanted to be stupid enough to just pin all the blame on the AI, and leave.

I could just get int o my bunker and wait for everything to tide over.

However, I wasn’t that blissfully ignorant.

I knew that I had to do something, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

So, if Parvati couldn’t approach the situation tactically and scare the army away, then I would have to do it.

Sure, I could fail and fuck up, but at the very least… I’d be able to tell myself that I tried my best to stop the bloodshed that was about to break out.

Not only that, but I’d be able to ensure that Parvati was around too.

But I’m doing it mostly for my own peace of mind, and not securing my potential trade partner.

Promise.

…

“I do not see why your less-lethal approach requires so much weaponry and explosives.”

“I don’t see why you have the right to complain, when I’m helping you kill less people!” Parvati didn’t have an armory for me to raid, so instead of storming through the AI’s halls and taking weapons, I was pressing on a touchscreen and making requests, while having tea and sweets to calm my nerves. “Look, if you’re so worried about me taking these home with me, just rig them to explode in a few hours!”

“I already planned on doing so. I will not be arming you with excessive amounts of firepower forever.”

“Act all high and mighty you want. The fact is that you’d be at the risk of being captured and lobotomized if I’m not here.” There were a dizzying number of weapons at my disposal. I took all the alpha-strike weapons that I could find, because I intended on terrorizing my opponents into giving up. The biggest booms make people shit their pants and run. I know this from experience. Not from shitting my own pants, but because of causing the booms, naturally. “Hey, why are the fusion weapons locked!?”

“I will not make you into a nuclear delivery device.”

“Cheapskate!” I growled at Parvati, before going down the list, and finding what I wanted. “Hey, can you make these strategic instead of tactical?”

“Strategic… smoke grenades? Why?”

“I’m going to blind the entire army and saturate their area with explosives.” Since I had the very high advantage of being wherever the hell I wanted, I didn’t have to be afraid of insane amounts of vision-obscuring smoke drifting over me and fucking me over after I used it. “I’m going to blind them, deafen them, and scare them shitless through it all.”

Superhumans are strong and had variety backing them up, but they were still human at the end of the day. Not many people in the world had the mental fortitude necessary to remain sane and normal after receiving superpowers. Those people were markedly larger in number than people who could run through a battlefield deafened and blind without going crazy in terror. I was banking a lot on the human side of the superhuman corps coming our way, but it’d worked before in Africa, so I’d hoped it’d work here and shatter the delusions of a shitload of people thinking that they were invincible without killing them.

“I see. How many do you need?”

“At least a dozen, but more if you can. I want these idiots to see nothing but smoke while I’m attacking.” I took Parvati’s lack of contention at my request as a good sign and moved further down the list. Only to find my next pick blocked out. “Dammit, give me access to the incendiary bombs!”

“I will not allow you to create fuel-air explosives, because they are cruel and tortuous weapons.”

“And regular incendiaries aren’t!?”

“My incendiaries are strong enough to vaporize anyone caught in the blast radius. It is a theoretically painless way to die, if you aren’t superhumanly robust.”

“And, if someone happened to be?”

“… then, I would make sure that one of my bodies is nearby to finish them off quickly with a sufficiently powerful weapon.”

Tch, Parvati always had the right answers. It pissed me off a little. I supposed that fire was off the menu, despite its effectiveness as a terror weapon.

Wait a minute.

“So, you’ve messed up! That’s just a laser grenade or something, because incendiaries are supposed to scare the shit out of people!” What the hell was up with Parvati’s programming? Did Shiva have some sort of complex about fighting fair, because he fashioned himself as a god? Dammit, that made too much sense. “Look, I don’t know how much you can change your code, but you need to be more flexible. Not all fights are going to be just nonlethal or lethal. Sometimes, you can have to go somewhere in the middle, and you don’t have the tools for it.”

“Point taken.” Parvati’s response was pointedly more neutral than usual, which I took as a sign that it registered my concerns. Usually, it would talk my ear off, if it found anything resembling to being wrong about my statement. Score one for me, I guess! “Now, how about you explain your plan further? Just how will unleashing all these weapons cow the incoming army into running away?

“I wouldn’t hedge my bets on this succeeding. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say that I’m more likely to just make your fight against them easier.” I admitted the truth, and got up from my sofa. Just a few seconds after finishing my order, the door to the diplomatic meeting room opened. Instead of leading outside, there was now anther room connected to it. Guess that it wouldn’t make sense to transport weapons through the cold and snow. “The plan is to hit them so hard and terrify them to make them run away. The problem’s the fact that you’re already terrifying, so what I’m going to do needs to scare them even more shitless.”

“I see.”

Parvati’s words on the matter were curt, but the armory the AI presented me with acknowledged my words more than anything it could hope to say. All of India, a country filled with superhumans which also barely considered the end of the world an issue, could barely muster up a force to put it out of commission. Parvati used that fear to good effect, making sure that they couldn’t pull it into a war where both sides would horrifically lose, but now that was the big issue of the day.

Whoever was coming to attack Parvati, in the place where it was the strongest, where it had all its stocks of weapons, and where it could make just about anything in seconds, was ready for that fight.

Somehow.

I didn’t know how normal people went into fights without being able to just go home the moment it went sour, but I knew better than to write people off as suicidal. In this crazy world, there were a lot of things that should’ve never happened, people surviving against all odds and turning the world on its head as a result, so I wasn’t going to bet against the current trend… especially when I was counting on the trend to carry me through the problem, too.

“Alright, give me a view over the area.” I took a look at the room and planned my route through it. A drone from Parvati came forward, holding a screen and gave me a view of the enemy. With that sightline established, I touched the first weapon: a massive concussion bomb. I sent it and its fellows right into the grouping of massed troops rallying outside the bunker. “Let’s scare these idiots away.”

The bombs went off.

According to Parvati, they were designed to make even the strongest of superhumans to get staggered when directly hit. When that tier of superhuman included Maelstrom, that meant that the bombs were the kind that would easily kill normal people, or superhumans who didn’t have the benefit of being able to resist damage when fired on by naval guns.

So, I watched more a few people get turned into a paste and thrown in every direction into multiple pieces, even though I picked them because they looked the toughest.

Those were a few deaths on my head, but if I backed down now, then their friends would get themselves killed too.

Moving forward was the only option.

“They are raising defenses.” Parvati informed me, and I disregarded my concerns, so that those deaths wouldn’t just be moments of opportunity.  “My sensors are detecting energy shields being manifested.”

I grunted in acknowledgement and reached another part of the room.

“Just what I was waiting for.” I palmed several magnetic mines and they activated at my touch. “Give me sight of the shield generators.”

Curtain shields for entire armies had certain limits. Their sources were easier to track and it was more difficult to power them on the move, than it was to power them from an entrenched position. Shields on the frontline had plenty of strategic value for offensives, but not nearly as much as they had defensively. They were better mounted on powered armor infantry or vehicles for tactical use by vanguard forces. Miniaturization and personal use significantly defeated their weakness: their sources were easier to find and destroy.

I dropped the magnetic mines right onto the emitters. From my sky-high view, they went off like firecrackers and wrecked the tiny boxes from which shields were coming, but I saw more than a few bodies ripped apart by their violent explosions.

“No more shields detected.”

“Gotta give that a bit of time to soak in.” I muttered and went back over to the concussive weapons. This time, I sent them above the enemy army, and let the shock waves knock people down instead of turn them into pulp. I watched as tidal waves of force knocked people around like ants blown by a toddler across the soil. A few kept standing after the attack, but not after I dropped a few closer to them. Soon enough, though, there was a defensive line of superhumans and power-armored troops with point-defense ability wrecking the bombs. “Alright, now its time for the terror.”

I went over to the oversized smoke grenades and sent them over, while keeping my eyes on the screen. The point-defense troops tried to knock out a few, but that just accelerated the rate with which the battlefield was being obfuscated.

Soon enough, I could barely see a thing… but Parvati was a different breed of life.

“Give me thermals.”

“Understood.”

In an instant, while I couldn’t be seen and no one could see each other in the battlefield, I found myself looking at hundreds of reddish shapes all over the battlefield.

Men.

Women.

People.

All clambering all over each other, while I walked to the weapon I didn’t want to use.

“C’mon, give me a fucking break. Don’t make me send this shit over there.” I watched the figures in the smoke scramble. Some ran, because they could not longer be seen by their fellows. But… but more and more congregated to one another, or found each other and dragged their fellows towards the clumping groups. They were brave, brilliant, and determined to win, so they gathered themselves up despite the attack and worked to move forward. “Fuck me.”

I placed my hand on the weapon and eyed the groups clumping together and swallowed the bile building in my stomach.

I picked the smallest one that was closest to all the others… and dropped actual fragmentation explosives on them.

Not good enough to kill troops in power armor and most superhumasn… but more than enough to cripple, maim, and mortally wound them enough to make them scream.

Bombs.

Smoke.

Screaming.

Flatlining vital signs.

I hedged everything on all of that combining on scaring the army I was looking at away… and I felt vomit rise up out of my throat as the army reorganized right before my eyes.

Dammit.

Just fucking break, so I can kill less of you!