Chương 2525: 108
Chapter 108: Pyrite 11-2
Pyrite 11.2
The sun was high in the sky, and its rays beat down on the back of my neck like a waterfall. Beads of sweat ran down my forehead and the sides of my face, and the oppressive summer heat sat around me, cloying and suffocating.
Around me sat the empty planes of the Great Basin Desert, the emptiest and least populated place I could think of. I stood atop the peak of a low-rising mountain that really could barely be called anything more than a particularly large hill, and I was regretting right then the dark palettes of my costume, because it made the power of the sun above me all the more horrifically potent.
Had I really only been there ten minutes? It felt like an eternity. Compared to the temperate climes of Brockton Bay, which had weather that might be called "mild" almost all year round, this felt like standing in the lake of fire in the deepest pits of hell.
How did anyone actually live in places like this?
I reached up and thumbed the communications device wrapped around my right ear.
"Are we ready?"
"As we'll ever be," said Lisa. "And for the record? I know being in the thick of things generally isn't my style, but being the girl in the chair for this isn't where I want to be, today."
"You're only coordinating the opening parts of this whole thing," I assured her. "Once we get to the later parts, we'll need all hands on deck."
If it came down to it… An all out fight with Scion was the last thing I wanted, because it meant Plan A had failed and our odds of winning went way down, but we'd done our best to prepare for that, too.
"Yeah, well, fighting the big, golden idiot who also happens to be a few steps shy of an actual fucking god isn't exactly what I want to be doing today, either," Lisa shot back. "But it doesn't sit right with me to be back here, all safe and cozy, while the rest of you are fighting the end of the world."
I felt my lips curl into a smile. She'd come a long way since that girl I'd met at the start of all of this, hadn't she?
"The Eden Simulacra?"
"All in place," she said. "Dragon's programs are all set and waiting to be triggered. Just need you to lead him where we need him to go."
"And the rest of the team?"
"Sound off, boys and girls."
"Armsmaster, ready."
"Clockblocker. I've got my change of pants ready to go, in case I go."
My mouth twitched.
"Vista, here, and in position. I've stretched out the space around you, so you've got plenty of room to dodge when Scion shows up."
"The Mouse is in the House! Just give the word, Boss Lady, and I'll give that big, golden goof the one-two! Mouse Protector Special!"
"Panacea, here. I'm as ready as I'll ever be."
"Um…Danny? Don't really have a cape name, now that I think about it. Maybe Odysseus?"
"It's fine, Dad," I told him.
"Well," he said, "I guess I'm ready. When you need me."
"Good. Dragon?"
"This is Dragon. Everything looks to be functioning properly. The Eden Simulacra are within expected tolerances, the Yggdrasil Seeds are loaded and prepped. The Near Future Observation Lens is tuned to observe the fight. Shall I put you through to Chief Director Costa-Brown?"
I pursed my lips. Alexandria. She…wasn't exactly the person I wanted to talk with, right now, but it would probably be a good idea to let her know. "May as well."
"Please wait."
Seconds passed. More sweat gathered on my head and under my mask, dribbling down my back and my neck and across my chest. It was irritating, in the "I have an itch that I can't scratch" kind of way.
Finally, there was a click and a familiar hard voice said, "Apocrypha."
"Is this line secure?" I asked.
There was a moment's pause. Then, "It is now."
"This is it, Alexandria," I told her. "The battle is about to start."
There was another second or two of pause. "Where are you?"
"The Great Basin," I said, "about fifty miles from the nearest human being. Probably at least double that, if Vista has stretched things out enough."
"You plan on fighting him there?"
"Only long enough to lure him to an empty Earth. Well, empty of people, at least."
When I thought of it like that, it wasn't entirely impossible that this fight would see whole species wiped out and entire biomes destroyed, was it? On Earths where no person lived, but this could very well be an extinction event for entire continents' worth of animals.
Was it bad that I didn't feel bad about that?
"I see. Are you expecting our assistance?"
"I'm expecting you to show up if everything goes pear-shaped, but until then, I just thought we should keep you in the loop, so you can be ready if you're needed."
"I understand. I'll contact Eidolon and Legend and bring them up to speed. Is there anyone in particular you can tell us might be of use?"
I hated to put this on her, but…
"Flechette, she was a Ward in New York for a while. Her power can pierce through his defenses, open him up for other attacks. If it all hits the fan, she's the MVP."
In this fight, there was no such thing as too many contingencies. I couldn't afford to leave her out of things just because I felt bad about thrusting a burden as big as "mankind's survival" on a single, unprepared girl's shoulders.
"I'll make the arrangements."
"Thank you."
There was another pause.
"For what it's worth," Alexandria said slowly, solemnly, "I hope that none of this is necessary. I hope that your plan works."
But… I heard in her voice, in what she didn't say.
Yeah. But I'm not going to bank on it. As much as I disliked her, I at least understood that sentiment. I knew better than anyone the stakes we were playing with, here. I'd seen what happened when the plans fell apart and everyone had to scramble to find something that would work.
"It will."
There was still only one answer I could give her.
With a click, she hung up.
"Tattletale," I said into the microphone.
"Yeah, Chief?"
"I'm going to start, now. Everything else is ready."
"Got your feed on screen, Chief." There was a second or two of pregnant pause. "Good luck. Don't die on me."
"It's not part of the plan," I said wryly. Uncharacteristically, Lisa didn't even snort.
I let out a breath. Centered myself, focused. Through myself and out into the vast halls of legend, I reached for my chosen Heroic Spirit.
"Set. Install."
A moment later, I was Atalanta. The heat hammering down on me was no less unbearable, but it was more familiar to her, who had spent her life in the Mediterranean, running through the fields and hunting wild beasts. Even for her, though, this was extreme.
It was easier to ignore, now, and I reached down to pick up the visor that sat at my feet, a thing of sleek lines and glowing lights that looked like something out of an eighties sci-fi movie. It probably wouldn't have been out of place in Tron.
Laplace's Eye, the Eye of the Demon that Knows the Future. It was not an understatement to say that most of my Heroic Spirit archers had some form of Clairvoyance related to far sight or remote viewing that allowed them to attack from some truly ludicrous ranges, or even a limited future sight to predict where the target would move. A rare few had no such thing, just incredibly keen eyes that could see great distances.
For the latter, this was my answer: a lens that could predict the location of my target, or more completely, where my target would be from moment to moment, adjusted for when I took aim, when I released my shot, and when it would reach the target. It could not change the outcome of the future. It could not choose the future I desired. It simply showed me what will be, based upon the set parameters of my archery.
Under different conditions, it might not be necessary. However, of the archers I knew best and those rare few I had examined just for this moment, they were either too powerful and might force Scion to retreat, their Noble Phantasm had a fatal drawback that I didn't want to test, or their Noble Phantasm wasn't powerful enough.
It was a shame. Antares Snipe (Heavenly Scorpion Single-Shot) would be the ideal, here, if only it packed a bigger punch. Chiron would have made Laplace's Eye obsolete.
I fitted the visor over my head, taking care not to catch it on the cat ears that I now had.
"Βλέπω." (Activate)
The Eye flickered on, and I saw a vast void surrounded by a ring of light, because it wasn't looking at anything, right now.
"Σύγχρονος." (Attune parameters)
Mathematic formulae that I had no hope of understanding on my own flickered across my view, and then, suddenly, I was looking at an empty stretch of ocean as Scion flew across it, headed towards… Well, that wasn't really important, was it? All that mattered was that he was in sight, and if he was in sight, then he was in range.
I hefted Tauropolos.
"Κλειδώνω." (Maintain target positioning)
My view swung so that Scion was always in the center. A series of glowing red numbers told me how far off target I would be if I fired right then, at my current angle, in my current direction.
I turned until the numbers were green and pulled back on my bowstring for a full draw. Two arrows materialized, perfectly nocked.
"Phoebus Catastrophe!" (Complaint Message on the Arrow)
The bowstring snapped back, and the pair of arrows flew into the sky on a trail of glittering green light. Through the clouds and across the empty blue expanse above, streaks of light fell like a meteor shower and disappeared over the horizon, aimed at an enemy far out of my natural sight.
It was kind of weird, I had to admit, watching on my visor as a rain of arrows struck my target before Noble Phantasm even actually landed. Even though the delay between what I saw and when it happened was only about thirty seconds, I had to catch myself and constantly remind myself that there was a delay.
I was almost looking forward to the fact that it would shrink as he got closer. Less to try and wrap my head around.
I took a breath and pulled back on my bowstring, nocking another arrow. Laplace's Eye showed me Scion stopping as the first arrows struck and gouged out great chunks of flesh, then his hasty use of a forcefield to block the rest, even as the missing skin and muscle filled back in. I watched him look around, confused, searching for an enemy and finding none.
Of course. Heroic Spirits were still vague spots to precognition at the best of times. It wouldn't take long, however, for him to track the direction the arrows had fallen from and get my general location, even if he couldn't pinpoint me exactly.
Let's speed that along, shall we?
Twenty seconds after Phoebus Catastrophe rained down from the sky, I took aim and loosed my second arrow. I waited only two seconds, then nocked another and loosed a third.
I watched Scion through the Eye the entire time, always taking aim through its lens as it adjusted the distance it had to account for. My second arrow hit him, blowing out a section of his shoulder, but the third was blocked as the light glowing through his skin brightened almost to blinding and became the thin plane of a visible forcefield.
His face finally turned in the direction the arrows had come from, even as the gruesome wound on his shoulder sealed and filled out as though it had never been, and his eyes looked off into the distance. Calculating the trajectory of my arrows and determining the flight path, and therefore where they'd come from. My lips tugged up into a vicious smile.
Finally figuring it out, huh?
Again and again, I nocked arrows on my bow and fired them, adjusting for the distance every time as Scion began to fly towards me. Despite possessing the same destructive force of an exploding tank shell, they were all stopped by the glowing light that hovered over his body and broke like cheap plywood. After the fifth arrow, he picked up speed and burst through the sound barrier as the delay between what I was seeing and when it happened started to tick down rapidly.
In seconds, he'd crossed the ocean and was upon the East Coast. Moments later, he'd soared over the Appalachian Mountains, and then the Great Plains and the flatlands of Kansas, the Mississippi River, and he was rapidly approaching my remote location in the west of Nevada.
The delay was down to five seconds. I nocked one last arrow, let it fly, and the instant it was gone, I ripped Laplace's Eye off my head and turned my gaze towards the horizon. A streak of golden light was there, and it was quickly approaching, growing larger and brighter with every second. My final arrow was ignored the way all the others had been, just as I expected.
This was as far as I needed Atalanta for. Now, it was —
Shit!
I leapt out of the way as a narrow beam of golden light lanced through the spot I'd just been standing, landing on the barren slope of another nearby hillock. The peak I'd been perched was struck and instantly erased, as though someone had reached down and scooped away the top half of the hill. Even hardy Atalanta probably would have been utterly destroyed by an attack like that. Seriously injured, at the very least.
Not dicking around, was he?
I put on a spurt of speed and bounced around to gain some momentum, leaping from hill to hill and pushing off the instant my feet landed, then leapt as high into the air as I could, turning as my body spun to fire off one last pair of arrows up into the sky.
"Phoebus Catastrophe!" (Complaint Message on the Arrow)
Comets streaked down and homed in, falling upon him like meteors as Scion looked upwards and the glow around him intensified. This time, he took the entire thing without damage, the barrage slamming uselessly into his forcefield and diverting where it wasn't utterly crushed. He withstood it all with contemptuous ease.
That was fine. It hadn't been meant to do much of anything to him in the first place. I just needed his attention off of me for a few seconds.
As my distraction rained down from the heavens to strike at Scion again, I tucked myself into a roll and tumbled into cover behind one of the hills to break line of sight, and then as I ran, I thrust Atalanta away and ripped off the crown that made me immune to precognition and other clairvoyant Thinkers. The rest of the fight, it would be useful, but for now, I needed him to actually know where to follow me.
Here's hoping Contessa won't leave me out in the cold.
"Door to site B!"
A silvery pane of light materialized in front of me, folding inwards to reveal one of the uninhabited worlds we'd chosen to plant the Eden Simulacra on, and I breathed a mental sigh of relief — no need for Khepri, yet.
Without waiting for Scion to nip at my heels, I dove through the portal and came out on the other side in a clearing where the Eden Simulacrum sat, motionless. The sensors in its eyes caught sight of me and it turned its head long enough to search me, examining my face and my body and my general appearance, and then a moment later, turned away, uninterested, because I wasn't Scion.
I didn't waste any time bothering with that; as the portal snapped shut behind me, I took off in a Vantage towards the treeline in the distance, bending the space between one step and the next to cover the ground instantly, and dashed into the underbrush, just in time for a flash of golden light to announce Scion's arrival. Pressing myself into the shadows of the trees, I peered out to see how he reacted to the Simulacrum.
He didn't see it immediately. His head swiveled for a moment as he scanned for me, and the second he started using Thinker powers to search, there was no doubt he would find me, with the Crown of Concealment, Aga-Gira, looped through my belt instead of on my head.
But before he could think to do that, he saw our puppet instead, and it had his full attention immediately — it was obvious in the way he just stopped and his body stilled. If he was actually human, I would have said he even forgot to breathe.
At first, he was confused, like he didn't know what was happening. His face screwed up into an expression of bewilderment that felt completely incongruous with his alien nature — but it was as I had told the Doctor a year ago. It was because he was so alien, so completely unused to the feelings of the humans he was emulating, that he could be brought low and killed. Sheer, overwhelming force wouldn't have been enough, and even a silver bullet power would have been utterly useless if he was clear-minded enough to avoid it.
After a few moments, however, his confusion changed and shifted, and the expression rippling across his face, pulling at his cheeks and his mouth and widening his eyes, could only be called a tentative hope. Like a man dying of thirst who had at last come across an oasis in the desert and almost didn't want to believe it wasn't another mirage.
If I didn't know so keenly and so completely exactly what he was and what he would have done in that aborted future, I might even have felt bad for him. I know if I'd walked into someone who looked like Mom, down to the tiniest and most insignificant detail, I'd have been struck dumb for at least a few seconds and might have allowed myself my own few seconds of hope.
But any sense of empathy I might have had was squashed ruthlessly and callously by the knowledge of the casual and indiscriminate cruelty he would have inflicted, for want of a nail. The billions of lives he would have taken with all the glee of a child pulling the wings off a fly.
"Set," I whispered. "Include."
From within the halls of legend, I called upon the might and power of a Heroic Spirit, and in my outstretched hand, a bow appeared, the Vijaya Dhanush — Karna's bow, an ornamented thing of beauty and majesty that was far beyond the craftsmanship of human skill with a weight that felt impossibly heavy in my grip, even though I lifted it with ease. I held it out and rested fingers upon the string, but didn't draw it back, yet.
I waited a precious few moments, watching as Scion floated gently down and the Simulacrum reached out with its hands towards his cheeks like a lover welcoming her partner home, watching as he reached back with a tenderness that felt wrong, coming from him, running the pads of his fingertips across the fake's silver skin. The awe and happiness that slackened his face, so raw and open. So human.
It would have been so easy if I could have finished things there. If only it was as easy as delivering the final blow, now. If only I could just hit him with my strongest attack and that would be it. If only.
But if it was that easy, we could have laughed him off as a mere monster. This? This was an opening. But it wasn't a big enough one, because there would only be room for one attack before he hardened his defenses and became all but invulnerable. If I struck him as hard as I could now, with the Seeds that would open the way to his true body, with the Longinus cannon that would then carve it apart and rip him to pieces past the point of recovery, he would avoid it and be that much harder to finish off later on down the line.
That was why I watched and waited, waited until he was at his most vulnerable, before he had a chance to discover the ruse and see it for what it was. That was why I took aim and only slowly pulled the bowstring back, until a flaming arrow manifested upon it, perfectly nocked. That was why I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and centered on my target.
Maximum devastation. Maximum effect. Nothing I could hit him with right now would do anything more than superficial damage, so there was no point in attacking him directly. It would just be shrugged off and might even expose the Simulacra for what they were, and in that case, Plan A would be a bust. All that work from the last two years would be for nothing.
That was why I turned my flaming arrow away from him —
"Brahmastra Kundala!" (O' Brahma, Curse Me)
— and obliterated the Simulacrum's head instead.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
The final battle begins. Also, Bleach reference, get.
I kinda wanted to use a different Archer for Atalanta's part, but there aren't that many who don't have a couple of problems. Arjuna, for one, would start a debate in the SV thread about whether or not Pashupata would be an instakill on Scion, and I wanted to avoid that as much as I could. Plus, if it had, that would have been a pretty boring final battle. Arash... Yeah. At the very least, Stella would wreck Taylor, and she'd be in no condition to fight after that.
This chapter wound up a little on the shorter end. Next one will be much longer.
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