"A study of survivors of Antithesis attacks determined that nine out of ten never even see one up close. They either hide where they are, happened to be closed to military or paramilitary forces, or make it to shelter before Antithesis can reach them. That remaining ten percent can be divided up into people that were were saved by a Samurai, became a Samurai, or successfully managed to flee unassisted by foot or vehicle.
"Of those categories, the last are by far the smallest number. Running away just gives them something to chase."
-Survivor's Guide to Antithesis Attacks, 2051
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My back slammed into the seat behind me as Juny accelerated faster than I thought the hovercar was capable of. For a moment I couldn’t move, and then we were slowing down, dropping right next to a gaping hole in the pavement behind the wall, an enormous, dead centipede’s ass end mere meters from the opening. A smaller worm-shaped Antithesis lay dead beneath it, trampled by the larger model, and I couldn’t tell which died first.
This side of the wall was starting to resemble the outer side. Many of the Antithesis carried by the dead Fourteen had been gunned down within meters of their transport, likely before the troops on the wall had been forced to renew their focus on onrushing tide approaching from the other side. With the Antithesis on this side moving further into the city, they were forced to choose between protecting the civilians from a smaller number of Antithesis that had bypassed their line entirely or keeping an even larger number from overrunning their position, dooming the city entirely.
I didn’t envy them that choice. Even I could see, though, that they couldn’t protect anyone if the Antithesis took the wall, and they were likely aware there was still a samurai in town. That meant they were counting on me to do what they currently could not. I had to live up to their trust.
As Juny landed the hovercar, I leapt out of the seat and flung a mine like a Frisbee into the darkness, preset to activate by motion. It was an Insta-Crete Expanding Foam land mine, just like the grenade I’d used in the undercity yesterday, and would prevent at least the first attempt at using the tunnel again. Behind it, I dropped a grenade in as well, just for good measure.
Foam erupted upwards from the hole like an exploding geyser, then settled down and hardened into a material with the durability of concrete. If the mine went off, the concrete obstruction would expand even further into the tunnel, both preventing it from collapsing and making it that much harder to reopen the passage.
It took me less than a minute to deal with each tunnel, but there were six of them, and every second I spent on this was one more second the Antithesis ran unhindered among the population. Reports were already coming in of engagements between off-duty troops and the alien invaders. Some had been unlucky enough to stray near their gathering points- others had been slain by volunteers that had decided to sacrifice their time to keep the invaders out and deal with the lack of rest later.
There were a lot of them though, and the area of the city was much larger than the circumference of the wall. The same number of troops that were needed to hold the wall would be much less effective at searching the town block-by-block.
My fears proved justified, though, when Juny brought us in towards the final hole and I saw more Antithesis already crawling through it. I exited the hovercar with one SMG already in hand, but when I pulled the trigger, I got a lot more than I bargained for.
The rail-enhanced bullets shot out with cracks of thunder, sounding more like one continuous lightning strike than a series of gunshots. The entry wounds were the same size as ever, but when those rounds exited a Model Three, it was at the head of a geyser of pulverized Antithesis viscera, throwing a green mist in the direction the bullet traveled. Every rounds tore through several Model Threes without losing effectiveness, and a pack of two dozen canid-like creatures simply dropped to the ground in a matter of seconds.
It was one thing to be told these guns could over penetrate- it was another to see the sheer destruction unfold first hand. A group that would have taken me a few magazines to kill before dropped with the expenditure of just one- and I probably could have gotten away with less, had I understood exactly what I was about to unleash.
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But I didn’t have time to bask in the satisfaction of my victory. I ran towards the final hole and, although I couldn’t see through the darkness, I could feel movement in the tunnel already as a second wave approached. This time, when I flung a mine in, it exploded almost immediately, netting me a few kills in the process.
“Damn, that was close. Glad I did this first.” I tossed a grenade in to finish sealing the hole. I hopped right back into my ride and Juny took us towards the next target. “Juny, get me Nguyen, please.”
“Done!”
“Nguyen, I’m finished blocking their entry points. How are things on your side?”
“Thank you for your work blocking the holes, madam saint. Antithesis have stopped attacking over land- they’re just pouring out of those holes near the base of the walls now. We’re taking casualties, but holding them off. The bigger problem is the reports of civilian casualties. The militia has managed to stop a lot of the ones that slipped in, but the survivors are congregating on a single location, and there are too many of them for the militia to handle.”
“A single place? Where is it?”
“Sending the coordinates now. It’s a shopping mall we were using as a distribution node. The Antithesis broke through the militia’s first line of defense outside and are now inside.”
I called up Juny’s map and saw that at least half of the markers denoting hostiles inside Boone’s inner town had vanished; mostly around the regions defended by off-duty militia. They had sealed off the residential areas for the most part, but some of the outlying high rises and shopping areas were left vulnerable in return. The militia seemed to be hunting down the stragglers in several buildings, but the Antithesis outside were now grouping up, as Nguyen had said.
“Got it. We’re on our way. Erica, out.”
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The shopping mall wasn’t the type you would see on the upper level of a megacity or a pre-Antithesis town. It was taller rather than wide; over a dozen floors of nothing but stores with all kinds of products on offer. A town this size wouldn’t be able to support nearly that much commerce, so a lot of those store fronts were probably left empty after two thirds of Boone’s population scattered.
Still, when the town is under siege and rations are under military control, you’re still going to get a significant number of people showing up; likely more than the mall saw on a regular day. And now the Antithesis had many of them cornered, or were chasing the ones that were fleeing towards the skybridges above. The militia seemed to have opted for a fighting retreat, judging by the gunfire from the upper floors.
We landed near the front entrance on the ground level, where barricades had been set up and the militia had fought its first stand. A good dozen Antithesis had died here, alongside half a dozen militiamen whose bodies had been left behind during the retreat. I was glad for my filtered air right about now; it was hard enough to bite back the bile climbing my throat at the site of dead humans, the first I had ever seen.
It was also hard not to think about the lives lost- the people they left behind, and the futures cut short.
I stepped past the small battlefield and trod over broken glass to enter the building, the only sound besides gunfire being the crunching beneath my feet. The inside of the building was hollow- a central, open area ran up the core of the tower, crisscrossed by numerous escalators that ran back and forth between each floor. The courtyard on the ground level was full of tables packed with supplies; the rations that were to have been handed out when the attack occurred. Some of them seemed to have been broken into, either by panicked civilians or by Antithesis intent on gathering food for their hives.
The up escalator on the ground floor was jammed. Looking up, I saw a dead Model Three jammed into the mechanism at the top, jerking back and forth as the motor tried to continue its movement.
“I am detecting a number of civilians in the back of the clothing store to your left on thermal sensors!”
I turned to find a shitty fast-fashion chain, easily identifiable by the memes printed on the shirts I could see from here. A lot of them featured samurai in embarrassing moments, and my sympathy went out to them as I considered my future place on those same shirts.
Inside, the lights had been turned off or broken, but under low light vision I could see a maze of clothing racks, a combination of the type with clothes hung by hangars and the type with clothes simply stacked on a horizontal surface. The rows were staggered, making it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction, and the heat signatures were on the far side, near the changing rooms in the back.
I approached cautiously. I saw no Antithesis on thermals, but I suspected that was due to their nature as flora rather than fauna, because every few moments I felt a ping on my motion tracker, there and then gone, indicating a brief moment where something was visible amidst the sea of cloth. I briefly considered just shooting and hoping for the best, and I would have done so just yesterday, but I couldn’t risk hitting the people in the back.
Explosives were out for the same reason, as well as the risk of structural damage to the building.
That left just two approaches. I could use the walkways between sections, or I could go straight through the clothes. Honestly, I didn’t see much of a difference between them. The walkways were a good couple of meters wide, but would provide me little to no warning of an ambush all the same.
“Worst safari ever,” was all I could think to say as I marched into an inevitable ambuscade.