Capítulo 14: 13th Move | Newcomers
Using some of the nanites of the nanosuit and shaping them into tools, I took apart the half-broken Pulse Rifle in less than a minute. Taking out the battery from the depth of the sci-fi-looking gun, I placed it beside the E-Rifle before returning my focus to dredging up whatever useful parts like a scavenger picking apart an animal's carcass for bits of meat leftovers.
That took thirty seconds.
After the Pulse Rifle looked more like a skeleton, I moved on to the E-Rifle.
I first strapped the battery onto the side of the rifle before plugging it in. Next, I removed all safeties present within the E-Rifle that prevent the user from harm. Finally, I rewired parts of the insides of the rifle so that there's a three-second timer before the energy from the battery reaches the Kinetic Siphoner.
What I'm building is essentially a freeze bomb. By removing all safeties and overclocking the Kinetic Siphoner, I'm effectively having the freeze ray go out of control and start sucking in the heat from everywhere around it instead of just in the form of a beam. The overclocking would ensure the Kinetic Siphoner sucks out almost all energy inside a certain radius, meaning that the temperature within the bomb's effective 'blast' radius will get lowered until the only heat present would be vacuum energy that comes from the annihilation of virtual particles down at the lowest scale.
Maximum entropy.
If a single hit from the E-Rifle could cause such drastic pain on Ifrit, just imagine an Entropy Bomb.
Peaking out of the hole again, I saw Rimuru was able to bind Ifrit with spider silk while the latter constantly breathed out fire and caused an inferno of fire to erupt out of the ground.
I grabbed the E-Bomb, now without its sci-fi appearance, and instead looked more like an upscaled version of those stick sausages you'd find in the breakfast section of an IKEA store.
With the aid of the nanosuit giving me more accurate measurements that I could eyeball, I quickly calculated the exact motions, force, vectors, air resistance, and turbulence— general steps I'd need to take to throw the E-Bomb next to the floating Ifrit.
As it turns out, in an open system with an unknown amount of variables, it's next to impossible to calculate exactly where an E-Bomb would land to an absolute degree. However, my calculations were able to narrow this down to a two-meter cross-section.
Good enough.
Straining my own and the nanosuit's artificial muscles to their limit, I blasted off from my position towards the tallest building within the area— a half-completed three-story mall. The mall wasn't anything impressive considering it's designed to cater to a population of close to a thousand hobgoblins and direwolves, but it'll serve its purpose.
My free hand sunk into the wall like a chopstick sinking into mashed potatoes in an attempt to slow down. Pulling my hands out before looking up, I leaped to the top of the mall in a single jump.
Still, as I reached the top, I was treated to a front roll seat of a [Flare Circle] consuming Rimuru's elven form in a biblical firestorm that melted the earth around it.
[Silenced Emotion: 95%]
Without thinking and relying on pure instincts, I flung the E-Bomb at Ifrit like an Olympic javelin thrower.
Despite being rather exasperating, headache-inducing, and acting naive at times, Rimuru was still the first person— the first 'human'— I'd met after I reincarnated. [Psychology] noted how I latched onto the slime as a thirsty man to an oasis since despite my control over myself, I was apparently very close to a nervous breakdown.
In retrospect, reincarnation is a traumatic experience. Imagine you lying there on the ground, the pain from a knife wound on your back assaulting your brain, the coldness creeping in to replace all of your senses, spots forming inside your vision... and then you suddenly found yourself alone in a dark unfamiliar place.
I felt a phantom sensation of pain in my back.
PTSD has been diagnosed for less.
Seeing Rimuru being consumed by the inferno made me feel a blunted sense of sadness, as though he were a distant relative and his death was something that happened decades ago instead of just now.
The E-Bomb spun around on its center of mass like a boomerang, coming closer and closer to Ifrit before the internal three-second timer ticked down to zero.
The sound it made was indescribable. I have no reference to describe it, but if I were, I'd say it sounds vaguely like the banging of two metallic objects as the E-Bomb exploded.
Ifrit was encased in a ball of flash-frozen solid air.
E=mc^2 is a more important formula than most people realize. Einstein was the person who developed the idea that mass is energy, it was an original idea that came from his works on Relativity and thought experiments. It was he who proved mass is energy, just in a different, more condensed form.
The kinetic siphoner within the E-Bomb sucked in all available energy within a radius of 3.5 meters, and since energy cannot be destroyed, the E-Bomb converted that excess energy into matter near the core.
With the sudden exodus of all available kinetic energy, all atoms and molecules that are normally constantly vibrating and moving, all brimming with long-gone energy, returned to their lowest energy state: solid. However, if one compresses the atmosphere at sea level into solids, it'll only fill about 0.1% of the room's volume. As such, instead of being a single, opaque solid, the air that was flash frozen appeared more like a pretty, three-dimensional sea urchin-like 'snowflake ball' with a seemingly innumerable number of branches that are almost invisible with how thin they are.
The only heat that remained after the grand heist committed by the energy siphoner was the Quantum Mechanical energy. If I somehow remove even more energy from the system, that matter would then turn from solid into what's known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate, a state of matter where the bosons themselves collapse into a single quantum state and behave as if they were a single particle.
Fascinating things and technologies can be made from Bose-Einstein Condensates.
The snowflake ball fell as gravity took hold of it.
The snowflake ball crashed into the ground and shattered into filaments of quickly disappearing steaming frozen air. Like air going from a place of high pressure to low pressure, the heat from around where the kinetic siphoner didn't hit traveled to fill the spots missing analogous to how humans would travel to places where they can get jobs.
And within the steaming, frozen remains rest Shizue.
I jumped down from my position, and the bones of my new physiology had no problem taking the impact of a three-story fall.
"Woah. Scientia?"
I heard a voice that I'd never thought I would hear ever again.
"Rimuru? But— you were caught in that massive firestorm." I spoke in a dispassionate tone. I would definitely be more excited had [Silenced Emotion] wasn't so high.
Rimuru was in his slime form, and looked rather sheepish, "well, as it turns out, because of my [Thermal Fluctuation Resistance], Ifrit's heat was nullified altogether."
[Silenced Emotion: 50%]
Seeing how he was okay, I felt a sense of relief. The ability to control how I could feel okay about a person's death but feel incredibly relieved the next was, strange. It was like holding your breath but as your limits are reached, it suddenly expanded. The Skill touched upon an area previously untouchable.
[Thermodynamics] wondered about Rimuru's limits by giving me a heat ray that can scorch a whole planet into an uninhabitable molten hellscape. I don't pay attention to it, instead, the helmet of the nanosuit pulled back to reveal my eerily perfect features as I turned to face Shizue.
Jogging over to where she lay, I found the superhuman barely alive with a faint smile on her face.
"Thank... you..." Her voice was incredibly weak as I looked up and down her wounded body.
Kneeling beside her, even an idiot could see she was on her deathbed. She continued with the last of her strength, "My re... quest... is on... my... bed..."
I recoiled a bit as though I smelled something horrible, my face twisted into disgust. She used me. Like a person with incurable late-stage cancer, Shizue knew that she didn't have long before Ifrit took over, and thus, she negotiated a 'lifelong' contract to get concessions out of me.
It was almost ingenious. Respectable even. After being so long in the business world, manipulations are an everyday occurrence. I'm fine with being manipulated (as I manipulate others), the only requirement is that the manipulation has to be impressive or never seen before.
The weight of a hand appeared on my shoulder. "I'm sorry," Rimuru said, trying to comfort me, "I've only met her a couple of times, but since she was your bodyguard, you guys had to have been close right?"
What Shizue has done is basically a suicidal person taking out life insurance before committing suicide, that way their parents would receive some money from their children's death. Except, the superhuman spun this around and innovated on the idea, where she used her own life as collateral to get some great benefits out of me in an employment contract.
I can't help but respect it.
Still... this would've worked for most people, but I'm not most people am I?
I am Scientia Tempest, the second Perfect Homunculus to come into existence. I shall be the one who brings modernity and the one who restarts the march of progress in this medieval Tolkien-esque fantasy world.
"You're not dying."
Too bad, Shizue signed on with perhaps one of the only people in the world who could save her, even in such a state, even when she's at death's door.
I'll chase away the reaper.
Despite my prejudice against magic, I did indeed place a charge in it out of sheer curiosity. Through that charge, I learned I possessed an extremely rare form of alchemy known as [Unlimited Alchemy].
[Unlimited Alchemy] is just that, 'unlimited', without restriction, limitless, ultimate, the endpoint of Alchemic evolution.
I can touch and manipulate souls. I can freely transmute one element into the next with the only limit being my Magicule limit and the Law of Equivalent Exchange. It was, after all, the reason why I was able to acquire rare metals like Titanium.
That is the ultimate form of Alchemy. To control matter itself, to control the very essence of life, to control the universe.
Workbench likely died from that explosion by Ifrit, so I'll have to make do.
I touched Shizue's broken body with both of my hands.
The weight on my shoulder disappeared as a crimson glow began to emanate from deep within me, lighting up the area around me despite the opaque skin-tight nanosuit. Red lines akin to blood vessels grew throughout my body, sprouting from my chest like how a tree would sprout its branches. There were so many glowing crimson lines that you'd see more of them than anything else.
Activating [Unlimited Alchemy] is like flipping on a light switch you never knew was there, lighting up a dark room you never explored.
It's... evil-looking, to be honest. Evident when Rimuru backs away.
When the lines had crawled to my eyes I was able to see souls unaided. I could see Rimuru's soul, I could see the soul that belonged to the tempest wolf known as 'Ranga', I could see the souls of the hobgoblins who all stood at the perimeter and look at the fight.
I 'see' all. It was like a blind person finally able to see again. It was amazing. It was awe-inspiring.
Looking down at Shizue's body and seeing the fading soul, I used my hand that's intersected with red lines of varying width to catch her fading Astral Body— the container for her soul— like how someone would try and cup the disappearing water in a pit of sand on the beach to try and preserve it.
"Uh, Scientia, what are you doing?"
A holographic display appeared next to me. Using my tongue, I 'pressed' (holograms are composed of photons, and are thus, intangible, so I merely passed my tongue through certain buttons on the holographic panel) and typed out a command.
>Form: Orb of Nanite
Very quickly, an orb large enough to grab with one hand formed emerged from a section of my nanosuit and quickly fell onto the earth with a thump.
Slowly, like a person tipping their cupped hand over to let the water inside flow into a better container, I let Shizue's fading soul drip into the orb, having her possess it.
The number of individual pieces should help in containing Shizue's soul until proper transfer is possible. [Automation], [Robotics], [Martial Artist], [Cybernetics], [Nanotechnology], [Material Science], and [Metamaterial] gave me plenty of blueprints of super-powerful metal bodies that Shizue can inhabit while [Biology] gave me another genetically perfected biological body.
A small part of me wondered if I created the first Lich or perhaps more accurately, the first Horcrux in this world.
[Silenced Emotion: 30%]
"hehe~ hahahahahaha— HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—!" I laugh to the high heavens knowing I've succeeded, before dropping my head down to look at the orb, "Gotcha."
_____________________________________________
I told Rimuru to eat the remains of Shizue, saying that the body is dead and it cannot accept any more souls while also assuring him I'll build her a better one.
After that, I had to sign an apology letter to the hobgoblins and aid in the reconstruction. Thankfully, through poaching— I mean, redirecting some nanites into my own pockets, I was able to ensure the setback made by the destruction of my personal laboratory is reduced drastically.
By reprogramming some more nanites, the building repairs were quickly underway.
Over the next three days, I decided to turn the Egg into what's known as an 'Arcology'. Arcology is a combination of the words 'architecture' and 'ecology'. It is an effective architecture that is designed for high-density populations while being ecologically sound.
The Egg now has long vertical farms running down its sides. The arcology utilizes the feces generated by its inhabitants to fertilize the farms.
When told of this, however, some of the farmers were up in arms, saying how much vertical farms would deprive them of their livelihoods.
Rimuru negotiated with the farmers and now they're in control of the vertical farms instead of the much more efficient AI algorithms and machines.
Bah, the will of the people. It's times like these that I wonder if I should've implemented democracy later instead of right away. Ignorant people do not make for the best citizens, they make for good peasants.
Eventually, as I was supervising the repair of the buildings, a nervous-looking hobgoblin approached me to notify me about how Rimuru had cut a deal with Congress.
Supposedly, the hobgoblin residents are scared by me in particular. This fear only increased after the Ifrit rampage since I was the one closest to Shizue. Just like the time after 911, those hobgoblin residents attempted to get Congress to do something about me that'll make their lives much safer.
Congress knew that they couldn't just get rid of me, so they cut a deal with Rimuru where I would be granted a place far away from civilization where I could test my stuff without worry. The House Speaker had said this: '...what Scientia made is undoubtedly making our lives better, but sometimes it is too dangerous to be so close to Metropolis...'
Effectively, I've been granted my very own Area 51. And Congress also made Research and Development official with me as its director.
Since the Jura Tempest Republic claims the entirety of the Great Jura Forest as its territory, I have a lot of space I could claim. So I chose Veldora's sealed cave.
The reasoning behind my choice was that, as a Perfect Homunculus, I only started eating food once I left the cave since my body can apparently consume magicule for basic sustenance. In fact, after some tests, I realized I could eat anything— even dirt if I can stomach the taste— since matter itself seemingly is turned into magicule once they enter my stomach. Hence the reason why I don't release any waste.
Being right on top of Veldora's sealed cave, I can simply passively consume the magicules in the air.
The physics behind this is beyond me for the moment, even as I started creating hyper-efficient textbooks with [Teaching] and other specialties to teach myself knowledge about topics like physics and engineering in my free time.
Being given this plot of land, I realized that I had hit the practical limit to how much raw materials I can get from manual labor. This means I need to look towards other, much more abundant and easier sources.
So became my endeavor to harvest asteroids.
A single asteroid several kilometers across contains more iron than humans in my old world have harvested throughout their entire history. It was also predicted that asteroid mining would create the world's first trillionaire in my old world since there was just so much valuable material hidden within those massive metal pebbles floating out there in space.
The first step to creating a proper space industrial base is to create a telescope to find the asteroids in the first place. Since I don't have any satellites in low-planetary orbit, I decided to combine this step with step two of somehow getting the mining equipment up to space.
Unlike 21st Century Earth, I don't have to play around with chemical rockets when I've unlocked nuclear fusion, a process that releases thousands to millions of times more energy than chemical reactions. Thus, my own rockets can be the size of a small house rather than a skyscraper.
The power of the atom; a supposed glimpse into the power of god.
Strapping an AI, multiple long and short-range sensors, self-replicating nanites, and asteroid mining equipment onto the fusion rocket, you got yourself an autonomous mining drone that'll find an asteroid and start self-replicating on it like crops growing on fertile soil to create a fully operational asteroid mining base.
The vast resources of space finally opened up to me, and any limits on resources were raised so high they might as well not exist.
Resources! Unlimited resources!!!
I laughed like I never had before as I watched the fusion rocket light up the night sky like a second sun when it launched into space. My insides felt giddy when I imagined how many resources I can now play with, the only other time in my immediate memory I've felt this way was during a particularly profitable month on the stock market.
Thus, deep within the Jura Forest, far away from any civilization, the first rocket ever to be launched artificially into space occurred.
More than efficiency, the fusion torch also has a huge leg-up on chemical rockets in terms of speed. By shooting high-temperature plasma out the other end, the fusion rocket is able to achieve near-relativistic speeds of one percent of the speed of light.
That's almost 3,000 kilometers a second. With that speed, the fusion spacecraft can circle Earth in a bit over ten seconds, or reach the moon in less than two minutes.
Safe to say, it took mere hours for the spacecraft to locate an appropriate asteroid before moving said asteroid into lunar orbit. I didn't choose the planetary orbit because I don't want to become a dinosaur.
In the span of a week, the spacecraft turned into a fully-operational asteroid mine that gives me, if translated into Tempest Dollar, billions of dollars worth of raw resources like iron and other metals. And this is just the beginning. After becoming fully online, the spacecraft would then use some excess material mined from the asteroid to create more of itself and send those to search for other asteroids.
A Von Neumann Probe describes a spacecraft capable of replicating itself. When discussing the Fermi Paradox of why there aren't any aliens despite the universe being so old, a Von Neumann Probe is a topic that will get inevitably brought up because it was estimated by scientists that any civilization that has sent out Von Neumann Probes could colonize the entirety of the Milky Way in as little as a million years: a paltry length of time on galactic time scales of billions of years.
The spacecraft I sent up was a Von Neumann Probe designed to harvest every asteroid in this solar system. The only limit to this growth was the periodic hydrogen refueling the spacecraft would need that I would provide.
With the issue of resources no longer being a problem for the foreseeable future, I can now focus on constructing the Citadel, my own private base of operation that serves as my home and a place where I can create technologies and experiments without anyone checking up on me.
Since raw resources weren't an issue anymore, I could now fully immerse myself in the Unique Skill [Inspired Inventor] and find technologies that would make the Citadel nigh impenetrable.
Laying on my bed one night, I started going through all the blueprints that the various specialties have given me. Some were useful like the 'AK-47' version of a plasma grenade from [Mass Production] and [Plasma Physics]. Some weren't within my capacity yet, like the Block-Form Singularity Mathematics that utilizes gravastar shielding from [Dimensional Physics] and [Armor]. Some were actively harmful, like a sentient AI from [Codes] and [Artificial Intelligence].
A good rule of thumb when it comes to building anything is 'is this more intelligent than it needs to be?' Does my Roomba have to be intelligent enough to do my taxes? If not, then don't give such high intelligence.
Intelligence is the greatest gift a Creator can give to a Creation.
It is the most dangerous trait anything can have. Humans, with their intelligence, were able to dominate Earth to such a point where entire species are left at their mercy without the majority even realizing it.
As I skimmed through the many blueprints, one from [Material Science], [Wavelength], and [Quantum Physics] caught my eye.
It describes a type of matter manipulation device that, through alternations within a material's quantum strings, creates an oscillation effect that cancels out any form of vectors and forces. This in turn creates the illusion of an 'immovable' object. It's not truly immovable because once the effect of the device fades, normal physics takes over.
Matter under this effect was collectively called 'Siberium' because any atomic distinctions no longer exist and they all exhibit the same properties.
In the end, I decided to coat the outermost layer of the Citadel in this Siberium, making the Citadel an immovable and unstoppable object that rejects all forces and vectors outside of a select few.
I originally planned for the rest of the layers of the Citadel to be composed of Computronium and Nuclear Pasta, but the latter was a case where I had hit the extended resource ceiling. Nuclear Pasta is a special form of degenerate matter that exists within the crust of neutron stars. It is the strongest conventional material in the universe, and I wanted to layer the Citadel with it.
That was proven impossible primarily because of just how expensive Nuclear Pasta was. A single sugar-cube-sized pellet of neutron star matter contains the same mass as Mount Everest. Not only that, to produce and maintain Nuclear Pastas would require an insane level of consistent pressure similar to those found within the depth of a neutron star, as normal matter really doesn't like to be packed so close together due to what's known as the Coulomb's Law and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
Contenting with merely the Siberium and Computronium, I later coded an AI that would write the codes for a more advanced AI that would be responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the Citadel.
Looking at the large clearing that surrounds the skeleton frame of the Citadel embedded within the cave that used to seal Veldora, I couldn't help but let out a content sigh.
I lay on the edge of the clearing, simply relaxing under a tree's shade on one of those chairs you'd find on the beach. I exploited [Automation] and [Artificial Intelligence] to their absolute limit. Instead of humans moving around, there were a variety of autonomous drones each of different sizes and built for different purposes.
Seeing every drone working together seamlessly was like seeing how cleanly everything on a conveyor belt was put together: there was just something soothing about it. Something oddly satisfying.
I think to a person with OCD, seeing how there was next to no wasted time as the drones got to work assembling the Citadel has to be like heaven for them.
A bright light darkened the whole clearing as a space shuttle landed next to the massive fabricator building, bringing in fresh supplies from up there in space. The shuttle was enormous, easily the size of a skyscraper, and the many drones that scurried around looked like mice next to an elephant, all of them aiding in the offloading and refueling process.
With a simple downward swiping hand gesture as though I'm scrolling up the page on a TV, a flat hologram panel materialized into reality.
The clothing I wore had electronics integrated into them. While from the outside, they looked simple, like something a parent would wear for a day out in the park, they are in fact what I consider to be the next generation of clothing if these were to appear in my old world.
The clothing was made from conductive fibers which allows them to become touch-sensitive and instantly harden if a high enough current runs through them. More than that, this clothing is connected to my own private internet that I created to facilitate communication with my drones up in space and those that are currently working around me.
I wanted to integrate a piece of a brain-computer interface into my flesh, artificially since [Inspired Inventor] is still giving me no ideas for how to improve my body, almost as if my current body can no longer be improved. It's a ridiculous notion, so using what I knew of neuroscience I learned from [Teaching] and [Biology], I tried to insert such a piece of electronic into my brain.
It failed when my [Limitless Regeneration] pushed the thing out and healed everything I had cut.
Seeing how my new physiology seemingly doesn't allow any modification, I gave up on the brain-computer interface for now and instead integrated it into the clothes I'm wearing.
The holographic display in front of me showed how the Citadel was going exactly as planned and is expected to complete on schedule. The Citadel itself is going to be an imposing upright standing cylinder 100 meters across and 300 meters tall, with most of it being built into the ground, the whole structure would've given me a lot of space to work with.
But not enough.
So I consulted with a rather interesting specialty: [Spatial Compression] and came up with ideas that'll make the inside of the Citadel much larger than the outside.
Opening a log of the events happening in Metropolis— because I refuse to be out of the loop even while hundreds of kilometers away— I saw how there was a report that was filed about a minute ago of how Ranger Team 4 was asking for fire support since they're stuck in a fight against a group of six (6) Ogres.
Ogres... I racked my mind trying to remember the ogres in Tolkien's works. They were giant humanoid creatures that wielded clubs. Hrmm.
A weird feeling grazed past my gut, almost as if telling me they are important somehow.
With a few clicks of the button, another screen opened up, displaying the number of a particular hobgoblin. I couldn't see them, but I could hear them.
"C—Commander Scientia—"
"Director. Commander is for when I'm in my military officer clothing. Right now, I'm acting as the Director of Research and Development."
"Ah," The hobgoblin stammered a bit before composing himself, "yes, Director Scientia. How can I help you?"
Rigurt. He was a direct subordinate of Ririna and is the head of the Rangers, a group responsible for patrolling the edge of the outskirts of the Capital in teams of three. They were some of the most heavily armed as they had to frequently deal with hostile wildlife.
To give them trouble, these ogres must be quite formidable, possibly even a match for Shizue.
"Tell Ranger Team 4 to slowly pull out, and prepare for full retreat when I appear. I shall be taking the field myself."
A stunned silence followed my statement. One could almost picture the face that Rigurt was making. "Are— are you sure, Director Scientia? The support that we sent to Ranger Team 4 should be more than enough!"
"Yes. Pull back the support. Send me the coordinates, I've been itching to test this new weapon of mine."
"... Right away, Director Scientia."
Rigurt's voice sounded particularly grim.
Getting up from my lying down position, I stood up and stretched my arms a bit before turning to face my left and uttering a specific phrase:
"Door me, to my workshop."
A black upright rectangle in the form of an opened 'door' to somewhere unknowable materialized into existence. Around the pitch-black rectangle was a purple outline.
It was a portal, a legit, existing portal where two points in space were connected via a bridge.
It was made as a joint project between [Dimensional Physics], [Spacetime Engineering], [Quantum Mechanics], and [Portal]: a portal network centered around a massive satellite up in geosynchronous orbit, hovering right above Metropolis. It was physically built by those asteroid-mining spacecraft after I transmitted the blueprint and the order.
Creating a portal required so much energy that Fusion alone wasn't enough, so to power this portal network I built the world's first antimatter reactor that inverses the polarity of baryonic or 'normal' matter and turns them into antimatter, which can then be used to react with other baryonic matter in what's known as an Annihilation reaction that releases 100% of all energy.
Basically, the energy released equals mass (in kilograms) multiply the speed of light squared, and then it is all multiplied again by two for the energy released by the antimatter side.
The power generated by this reactor was equivalent to multiple Hiroshimas every second, and paired with the colossal computational power of the strongest quantum supercomputer I've designed and the machines have built up till this point, I could instantaneously travel to anywhere within the Jura Forest by just saying the activation phrase of 'Door me' and then say where I wanted to go.
Normally, I would like to open this up for public use with the sheer convenience it offers, but the energy requirement was just so much that it's only available for my own personal use.
I've hit a limit I once thought was practically impossible.
Walking through the portal, I appeared back in the middle of my temporary workshop, not lab since I don't do any research here. It was a rather cramped room, with my work desk taking up a sizeable chunk of the floor space.
However, what would really catch anyone's attention if they were to enter was the large power suit situated next to the wall on one side of the room.
While looking somewhat unassuming at first, what with it only being notable for its size, the true power of the suit lies in what isn't there.
The Anti-Army Armament, or A.A.A. for short, is a power armor that is designed for pure destructive power. It is designed to carry enough weapons to lay siege to an entire city or completely obliterate a bunker complex the likes of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex that formerly houses the headquarter of NORAD.
Powered by a miniature fusion reactor, the armor is more of an exoskeleton platform in the shape of a human meant to carry the accumulated weight of over a dozen weapon attachments ranging from guns, swords, lasers, missile pods, plasma cannons, exotic weapons, bunker-busting pile drivers, autocannons, high-caliber railgun designed for the sole purpose of penetration, and more.
It is a one-man army.
I placed a hand on the shoulder of the A.A.A., my hands delicately tracing the surface of the inactive armor as though a single hard touch could break it.
I think I can level New York City in less than an hour with this with the correct armament configuration. I don't think Ifrit could've rampaged for as long as he did if I wore this instead of the nanosuit.
I eventually hope I could perhaps arm the soldiers of the Republic with this. An entire army of one-man armies.
Is that enough to protect Tempest once information about me being a Perfect Homunculus gets out? My mind couldn't help but wonder. It was going to happen sooner or later.
[Silenced Emotion: 45%]
I reached forward, and with a single touch, activated the A.A.A.
The humanoid powered-exoskeleton suit responded by opening up, some parts moved, and others shifted around to allow a person to walk inside.
Coming inside I slotted in perfectly. The suit quickly rearranged itself and a helmet was lowered onto my head. An itching sensation emerged from the back of my neck as neural connectors sunk into and hooked up with my nerves.
>Welcome, Superuser_01, please select the desired loadout.
The clothing I wore connected itself with the A.A.A., granting the latter its hologram-projecting capacity. The A.A.A. used this capacity to project a holographic panel displaying all the weapons available to me.
It reminded me of a bit like the prelude to the level of a shooting game, where you select your loadout.
With wide swipes of my wrist, I scrolled through many weapons.
If I'm going up against ogres, I should carry heavy firepower, so a selection of lasers, missile pods, autocannons, and a sword for close-range combat should be enough.
With that done, I spoke up the phrase once again: "Door me, to Anti-Army Armament's hanger."
Perhaps the only downside to the A.A.A. was that it required a whole hanger large enough to hold a helicopter in just to slot in the proper attachments.
Walking through the portal, I was greeted with the sight of many thick machine arms coming from the ceiling, with the walls of the hanger filled with many large weapons all connected to machine arms themselves.
Standing in the middle of the hanger, those thick machine arms moved to pick up the requested armaments and slotted them in behind my body, attaching them to specific slots on the back of the power suit.
Every time a new armament is attached, I felt like I'm given a new arm. Instinctively I tried to flex it, and thanks to my experience with M.A.N.A., the feeling of getting new arms wasn't foreign.
In a way, the A.A.A. can be seen as a direct next step of the M.A.N.A., where the operator can slot in mechanical arms for tinkering or for war.
After everything was done, I flexed all of my new arms at once. When I first made the A.A.A. and prepared it for mass production for the Grand Republic Army, I was hesitant to call it a power suit since it's more of a mobile artillery platform that can also fly.
If another person were here, they'll see a humanoid with weapon attachments of varying sizes coming out from their back and moving. It would be like seeing a weird emperor crab.
[Silenced Emotion: 60%]
"Door me, to the location given by Rigurt."
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Walking through the portal, I found myself beside some broken trees next to a flowing river. The place was quiet, with the only sound being the water flow of the river. Such a sight reminded me eerily of how I met the trio of adventurers and Shizue, so I was on alert the moment that realization hit me.
This is a world of superhumans. Even with so much firepower at my disposal, I shouldn't let my guard down.
I had to keep moving because of the ground pressure I'm exerting right now thanks to how heavy this suit was will pretty much cause me to sink into the dirt.
Unlike the previous two iterations, this A.A.A. constantly observes my surrounding through tiny cameras and sensors that are situated all over my body like the stripes on a zebra, so that way, I won't ever be surprised.
Through these multitudes of information-collecting tools, the A.A.A. alerted me to the fact that there was a sleeping agent in the air.
>Three designated: hobgoblins found. Status: asleep.
Reading that information off of the HUD, a startling realization hit me—
... I'm in a trap, aren't I?
>Alert
Suddenly, the sensors detected a rapidly approaching mass behind me. As I turned around to greet the threat, I found a massive hammer the size of half of my own body was now above my head and quickly descending, with the intent to kill me.
Reacting with pure instincts, I flexed one of the smaller armaments containing a laser emitter and it shot out a beam that sliced clean through the individual's hammer and hand. The heat of the laser was hot enough to cauterize their wounds as they screamed out in pain.
"NOOOOO!" An unknown individual screamed out.
>Alert four individuals rapidly approaching from all angles.
Ah, four of the other five must be rushing forth to help their compatriots.
Two of the autocannon attachments swirled around and started firing all around me in a random pattern designed to cause those individuals to scatter like leaves in the wind.
*KRA—KA—KA—KA—KA—KA—*
The autocannons mowed down several trees by pumping them full of ferromagnetic tungsten rounds.
Electromagnetic mass drivers are always superior compared to chemical-propellent-based munitions in events where power is not an issue.
[Psychology] observed how those individuals seemed to only have moved after I harmed the one that just attacked me. It made me think perhaps they are intelligent and capable of empathy. The process of elimination dictates they are the ogres and they aren't exactly like the ones depicted in books made by Tolkien.
Looking down at the person now without a hammer blocking my view, I saw how he looked almost exactly like a human but with dark gray skin with a pair of white horns on his forehead. The ogre wore clothing that seems to suggest they were from feudal Japan.
Is he like Rimuru? A reincarnator from Japan?
Such a possibility made me reluctant to field test the A.A.A. on them. [Psychology] then remarked on how I have a double standard between the people of this world and those of others but I ignore it.
I then placed the cutting edge of the only sword armament next to the neck of the one who got an emergency hand removal surgery.
"Come out, or your friend dies. I know there are six of you," My voice was broadcasted by speakers on the A.A.A., making them sound different; more normal, like their owner possessed flaws that make them feel less of an eldritch abomination's attempt at blending in.
Several assumptions were within that statement.
Assumption 1: they care about this one.
Assumption 2: they know about the symbolism of a sword on another person's neck.
Assumption 3: they are intelligent and can be parley with.
Assumption 4: there's a distinct possibility that there are more reincarnators from feudal Japan.
Slowly, the A.A.A. detected movements all around me. On the HUD, multiple windows opened up to display those who were walking out.
One female had a single horn and purple hair, another female had two horns and pink hair. The males that walked out were a ninja-lookalike with blue hair and a single horn, an old one that has two horns, and finally, the one who's looking especially angry and had red hair and two horns.
All of them wore clothing that reflected Japanese culture before the Meiji Restoration.
"So, I'm told you guys are the ones who attacked the Ranger teams... wanna tell me why?" I tilted my head to emphasize my confusion at their actions.
"You! Is taking away our homes not enough? Do you always want to hunt us, ogres, until not one of us remains?! Know this then: even if you kill us now, the ogre retribution will never cease until you're dead!" The red one threatened out, seemingly trying to make themselves stronger than they actually are.
A good negotiation tactic to use if the other person doesn't know you. There's a reason why when you are in the interview for a job you never tell the interviewer the level of salary you're expecting since if you go too low, you're effectively giving up on well-earned money.
However, what I gleaned from that little tidbit coming from the red ogre seemed to suggest that a new threat has emerged, one that is strong enough to slaughter a whole village of these ogres.
The curious side of me took over, [Biology] expressing interest over the ogre's evolutionary pathways that would make them so human as to possess opposable thumbs.
Like the goblins, the ogres were so human-like in appearance that any taxonomist can easily mistake them for an equally evolved cousin of the Homo Sapiens.
Realizing that the red one was still spewing out threats, I made a decision and mentally commanded one of the autocannons to fire a single shot toward a direction without any intelligent life.
*KRAK*
The thunderous noise of an object moving past the speed of sound and the subsequent sonic boom is finally enough to shut the red one up.
Before he can start up again, I interrupted him, "Are you done with your threats? Because I can just capture you all and dissect you for information. I'm trying to make some form of diplomacy here and you truly are not helping."
The white one stepped forward, "Such power," he spoke with faux reverence. "To strike so fast as a human is unbelievable, please spare us O' Mighty One, we were only trying to defend our new home from your 'rangers'. It is clear to me that you are not the one who destroyed our village nor were you in control of the Orcs." The old ogre then bowed deeply, shocking the rest of his compatriots.
Trying to appeal to my ego?
"Please, if you must take a life, take mine instead of the Young Master's."
"What?!" The Young Master, apparently the red ogre, yelled out in indignation, "I can fight my own fight! I don't need you to bail me out! I—"
"ENOUGH, Young Master. This being is obviously strong enough to slaughter us all by itself, they would have no need to use orcs. Take this as a lesson in knowing what battle to fight, and what to avoid. This will be my final lesson as your mentor; I will die today so you can live." The red Ogre looked conflicted, before backing down.
The hell?
Through this interaction, one can easily replace the ogres with humans and it wouldn't look out of place. What the hell is going on? Why are supposedly a different race behaving with such human-like behaviors?
Animals are brutal creatures. They are not human, even if we like to assign human traits to them. Chimpanzees are considered Homo Sapien's closest relative and they are some of the most violent creatures in the animal kingdom. In most zoos, if a chimp got out, it was instant kill-on-sight because they are that dangerous; not even lions are given this kill-on-sight order.
So to see this... this self-sacrificing behavior...
There has to be some entity that's managing everything to ensure humans never became the dominant species like in my old world.
The faceplate of the A.A.A.'s helmet opened up, revealing my features to the world. "Tell me, old ogre, are you named? And who was it that annihilated your village?"
I can investigate whether or not any of the ogres are reincarnators after I figure out this new threat.
"We have no names, and it was a masked individual that lead the orcs to slaughter our friends and family." The rest of them seemed to tense at the mention of that masked individual. "Even as we defended ourselves, the orcs always came back as if they were possessed with no fear of death."
"Hmm," the gears inside my mind started to turn. Opportunity presents itself. Having more superhumans to defend me is a desirable outcome, and since they have no home, the Republic would be an excellent place to settle down.
Even with Shizue, it's always better to have redundancy.
"Swear your absolute loyalty to me and I can assure you I will help you achieve your vengeance against this... masked individual,"
"You wish to ENSLAVE US?!" the red one accused.
To which I waved him off. What a ridiculous notion, "Beyond the ethical issues, I have no need of slaves. I would much rather have willing workers who reach their full potential, so think of this as more of a contract, where all I need is for you never to directly or indirectly harm me. You see this thing behind me?" I spoke and thumbed at the many armaments attached to the power suit.
"I built this with my two hands. It's for the military of a newly founded nation that I'm a part of. However, personally, I'm a tinker, and I'd be much more useful in the backlines handling research and development..." trailing off, the old one obviously knew what I was implying.
"You want us to protect you?"
"And not betray me in any fashion, that is all I ask. I can throw in plenty more benefits into this contract to incentivize things."
"We..." the red one seemed to ponder for a moment.
Then the old one spoke up, "We cannot decide right this instance. We would like to have some time thinking things over."
"That's alright. Why don't you come to our Capital?" I raised a hand, palm facing the sky as if offering them something, "you can decide after you see all we have to offer."
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AN: now the exponential curve really starts to hit as Scientia can recreate other powers. Also, Rimuru in this timeline is much weaker without the skill boost from consuming Shizue.
No [Degenerate] for you!
Magic according to the Wiki of Tensura is "...projecting an idea into reality via a medium, usually magicules..." I read that magicules are capable of warping physics or even reality itself to achieve the desired result, sort of like the Esper abilities of Toaru or a less rigid and less powerful form of a Reality Marble localized in front of the user.
Essentially, if you want to create a lance of ice you would concentrate the magicule in an area to lower the temperature enough that an ice lance would form.
Also, I was wrong about the fireball example from the last chapter, after further reading, I discovered that a magical fire cannot be extinguished by water. What I read from this is that reality is warped around a localized area to allow a fire to exist, any direct non-magical interference is rendered null.
However, indirect ways are like those in the last chapter, namely when the Entropy Rifle created a shield of cold air that the fire cannot go through, which is completely possible.
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