As half the surviving enemies coldly executed their comrades to absorb their enhancements, Mandy, Jerry and I understood that the Red Dragon had not made soldiers; he had made sacrificial pawns and suicide bombers. Force Awareness meant I could make a pretty good guess on how much tougher any material was. From how the enhanced men's bones, muscles, soft tissues and skin had more than doubled in resilience and the power generated through their every move had similarly increased, they seemed to have grown at the same ratio of dead to survivors. If their other abilities had grown at the same rate then the overall abilities of the opposition hadn't changed, they had been concentrated.
As even a basic understanding of concentration of force would indicate, a twice as powerful enemy can produce far more than double the results. A combatant with twice the toughness for example could largely shrug off multiple attacks from weaker enemies and keep going, while even glancing blows from their twice as powerful offensive powers could devastate said weaker targets. That's not even getting into how twice the speed would make them harder to target and let them perform attacks faster, while double the accuracy would make hitting others far easier.
The second potential problem was something that needed confirmation, so I let loose with my eyebeams on a trio of targets. One lost a leg at the hip, the limb sliced off by a brief sweep of a beam. The second I blasted through the stomach with a narrower shot. The last was struck in the face, the burning energy and piercing force leaving him blind. All three were injured to the point of either shock and pain rendering them temporarily incapable of fighting or loss of sight unable to fight effectively. Almost immediately, their fellow enhanced turned on them and executed them with either point-blank shots or repeated stabbing with a blade construct. Even if I'd expected them to do so seeing them actually carry out such tactics left a sour taste in my mouth not from the gore and death - the Invasion had desensitized most of us to such things - but for the callous disregard for their fellows.
They launched themselves at us en masse with the same lack of strategy or care for their defense as before, not because they couldn't but because such things were irrelevant. Us killing them was acceptable because it wouldn't change their group's combat ability; if anything, it would make the survivors stronger overall. A force-field dome stopped them for a few seconds. I didn't bother with the effort to make it last more than twenty seconds since at best they'd bring it down in three, instead using the brief respite to create a dozen layered forcefields behind the first.
"That should give us some breathing space," I told the others as our enemies started bombarding the outer force-field with corrosive constructs. "I'm still miffed they can damage my force-fields. There's nothing about them that should be damageable; it would be like trying to cut down the Earth's gravity well by swinging at it."
"They are not dealing damage through physics, they're destroying the fields much like you can create them," Mandy explained. "You want your fields to bar their attacks, they want their attacks to blast through and hit us, your respective powers are both active and thematically opposed." She shrugged. "Frankly I'm not surprised the Red Dragon employs counterspelling if he was allied to The Wizard."
"Great." It really wasn't. "Any ideas?"
"How long can you keep creating the domes?" Jerry asked. "I think I got something that might work but I need to do some rebuilding."
"I could keep layering fields from within," I told him, thinking. "As long as they're not meant to last they're not hard to make." The thinnest I could make them while still stopping attacks was an inch thick and each lasted two or three seconds under fire, thus... "It would hold them back maybe ten minutes. Eight to be safe."
"Do it," Jerry's golden armor nodded before its internals started shifting. "What I have in mind will be tricky but it might be a solution."
I nodded and both of us got to work. Layering more force-fields to keep the storm of destructive attacks was nice, pressure or no. Honestly, I felt better building defenses than smashing things, even if I was better with the latter than the former. Given the nature of the opposition we might have to do more of the latter in the end but there was a difference between only ever using violence as a solution and only using it as a last resort.
Besides, I had two ideas of my own. One of them was iffy. The other... I'd wait and see how our unwanted guests reacted to everything else first...
xxxx
Name: Jerry Norris, HP: 2088/2088, SP: 3000/3240, MP: 3952/1440+2880 Class: lvl 72 High Artificer
Skills [0/15 super-skill pts]
Academics lvl 52, Assessment lvl 54, Ceramics Creation lvl 43, Damage Reduction lvl 48, Deception 2, Emergency Recharge lvl 13, Energize lvl 53, Energy Reserve lvl 40, Energy Weapons lvl 71, Enhanced Armorer lvl 71, Enhanced Biological Engineer lvl 11, Enhanced Electrical Engineer lvl 72, Enhanced Nuclear Engineer lvl 38, Enhanced Roboticist lvl 63, Fast Healing lvl 30, Fabricate lvl 72, Fuel Creation lvl 51, HEMA lvl 34, Instant Repair lvl 39, Language: English lvl 5, Language: French lvl 2, Metal Creation lvl 58, Persuasion lvl 13, Rapid Recharge lvl 54, Piloting: Battlesuit lvl 38, Programming lvl 37, Magical Miniaturization lvl 28, Transdimensional Engineering lvl 14
Stats [0/360 pts]
Strength 24, Dexterity 100, Constitution 69
Intelligence 160, Wisdom 50, Charisma 20
With an Intelligence of a hundred and sixty and a superhuman level of Academic skill, Jerry had all the time in the world to look at the upgrade to his sheet and consider his options. He'd put another five points from the last level into Intelligence, which was the same as he'd done for a good half a dozen levels now. The old grumbling of the game-like stat being more like mental speed and data analysis/synthesis than real-life genius was barely an afterthought nowadays as said mental speed as well as the effects of his various crafting skills picked up noticeably. Being "merely" a comic-book scientist was more than an equitable exchange in his not so humble opinion, because he could actually push the limits of technology beyond what reality allowed.
The superpowered 'skill' he'd taken at level seventy was the key to both his current armor and his weapon idea for trying to bring down the Red Dragon's human experiments on forced empowerment. Transdimensional Engineering was a game-changer. He'd only had it since his last big fight against the Pacific Kaiju and he'd spent the majority of his waking hours pushing it to level fourteen because of how useful it was. One effect was that it enabled him to "fold" or "compress" his designs, fitting more than was physically possible in the same space. A second effect gained after it had hit level ten was the ability to overlap different designs on the same volume without unwanted interference, essentially giving that volume an extra 'depth' dimension that could contain different layers of material. Alternatively, he could overlap materials but have them fuse together, creating impossible new composites through dimensional overlap.
His armor's internals were already being rearranged through his Fabricate skill, leaving cavernous new spaces where Metal Creation, Ceramics Creation and Fuel Creation deposited conjured matter to be shaped in the second stage of the construction. The five-point intelligence increase might not seem like much, but compounded through all his various skills it allowed him to add two one-ton compartments for the new weapons, weapons that would be a good twenty percent better than he could have previously made.
As he proceeded to the actual design, how Jerry's intelligence stat and its associated skills worked different than reality showed their real worth. Real research and development was the work of years, decades even, from dozens of people at minimum but more often hundreds or thousands. For Jerry, it was the work of a minute to analyze the implications of how further he could push physics now, four or five minutes to come up with a new design with seven and a half million components and troubleshoot it in his mind, then as soon as he was sure it would function properly, spend another five minutes on actually building it with Fabricate, component by component.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
His mana fell sharply as two bundles of finger-wide tubes formed on his suit's shoulders, superconductive wiring extended to the enhanced, miniaturized Thorium reactor and electricity-multiplying Potentia Coils on his back, then led to the slowly forming body of eight hundred missiles. The basic idea behind them was the optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles of the US Army, with major improvements in their speed, handling, accuracy and ruggedness to be able to actually hit supers that were faster than jet fighters and more agile than cats. The second problem was actually making the missiles' components tough enough to survive impact without shattering, because these missiles wouldn't carry the micro-scale protonium warheads the rest of his armament did.
He was pretty sure he could kill the opposition in one alpha strike now, but he was also certain their enhancements would just feed on the violence of said attempt then rubber-band back to their creator only to be applied to more brainwashed victims for the next battle. Efficient, expedient, simple; it was what an engineer and Jerry himself would have done in the bad guy's place... if he ever became a megalomaniac mass-murderer with delusions of godhood. So the real engineering challenge was to produce a non-lethal, largely non-violent weapon that worked on people tougher than tanks.
Jerry's rarely-used Biological Engineering skill was more of a hobby for when he was too wound up to build another orbital laser and worked on his pet chicken or made half-hearted attempts at a cure for old age despite all the issues that can of worms would bring. Its comparatively low level reflected this but it still was high enough to give him the specs to make his idea into reality. Electrical Engineering helped provide the power but even with Magical Miniaturization and Transdimensional Engineering, putting that power through a hair-thin guidance wire was proving impossible with common materials.
After a bit of thought, Jerry formed microscopic tubes of diamondoid filled with Lanthanum Decahydride dimensionally fused to a super-strong, super-elastic ceramic fiber. The ceramic fiber and the diamondoid tube kept the Lanthanum Decahydride pressurized and a sheathe of microscopic heat pumps of diamond and liquid helium would maintain a temperature of two hundred and fifty Kelvin even while the wire was under maximum current. Under such conditions, that particular Lanthanum composite was a superconductor, enabling the transfer of large amounts of power. Overall, the design was clunky and inefficient for its size and without reinforcement would have been too fragile to work, but with magical enhancement it became viable.
Finally came the more mundane bits; gyroscopic system, optics, guidance and over four hundred microprocessors per missile, each the size of the average human cell or the smallest natural insects. Other than their size these components were largely mundane, redesigns of military technology that existed since the nineties. Despite that they were the most physically complex part of the weapon and the reason modern anti-tank missiles cost as much as sixty smartphones a pop; military electronics were stupidly overengineered but necessary. Not even Jerry could finely control eight hundred missiles at the same time so basic navigation would have to be automated.
A very loud boom and the sounds of over a hundred supers blasting at a force-field made Jerry's bones shake even in his armor. Glancing up from his work, he found that Maya's protective dome had shrunk to a mere fifteen feet across, barely enough for Jerry's armor to stand within and from how it barely distorted visibility it must have been worn down to the last couple of layers. Heat from those red magical blasts came through as the dome began to flicker. He was cutting things way too close, but what was new?
The two clusters of missile tubes on his shoulders spread out like blossoming flowers as he manually acquired targets with the guiding lasers. Each tube should have had its own sensor system but there had been no time to program one and his Fabricate skill could shape matter but not information in electronic media. Something he'd been meaning to fix since before the invasion but there had always been another priority - too late, now. The missiles would be slow at these distances, too, possibly allowing the enemy to see the attacks coming and dodge. Each tube should have had its own magnetic acceleration system to counter just that, another system he didn't have time to build. He scrapped the staggered launch plan, assigned six missiles per target for a cluster launch and kept a mere two dozen in reserve for the second wave.
The force-field was flickering more and more as the final second of systems checks stretched out in his dilated perception before bursting in a shower of crimson blasts. He forced a hard override on the checks and launched immediately, pencil-sized missiles fanning out from his armor's shoulders like a hedgehog going supernova. Each flew forth at eight thousand gravities of acceleration on its hybrid chemical-ion drive. The super-high-speed camera he'd built into his helmet on a failed attempt to track Maya when she went all-out, captured the event in the diamond clarity of two hundred trillion frames per second for future perusal.
For those few moments, all of Jerry's mental resources were taken up by adjusting trajectories to account for enemy action, with nothing to spare for anything else. Here, a pair of supers had seen the missiles coming and were using their flight powers to accelerate away; change the approach vectors to intercept. There, others had started blasting at the projectiles instead; evasive maneuvers on manual to both dodge and avoid the wires from tangling up. Fully half the missiles were having problems adjusting due to latency of all things! Well, he had copied the two-mile-long wiring from the original design. The next iteration would have wireless guidance for short ranges; for now he'd use his powers to assume direct control.
Even with all he could do, twenty percent of the missiles missed. Another seventeen percent were destroyed, intercepted via a barrage of crimson magic. Twenty-three percent had their wires severed, becoming no more than kinetic projectiles that could hardly take out a tank, let alone any but the weakest supers. One percent failed due to unexpected design flaws or freak accidents, such as impacting dust particles at exactly the wrong time and place and getting their guidance fins stuck. But the remainder thirty-nine percent worked exactly as they had been designed to, at least two hitting each surviving enemy within six milliseconds of Maya's force-field getting breached. The single enemy that managed to dodge or intercept all six of the initial salvo assigned to him was targeted by all twenty in the second salvo, going down with fourteen hits.
Upon impact, tiny tines of carbon composite and silver on the missiles' noses pierced the targets' dermis and embedded themselves like miniature harpoons. Then massive amounts of current flowed through the superconductive wires linking the targets straight to his suit's main reactor, delivered in extremely short, powerful pulses. Automated modulators read each super's electrical resistance, adjusted for the measured reinforcement from their enhancement, then shifted the intensity and duration of the pulses for maximum neural disruption.
One hundred and twenty-nine targets spasmed and shook involuntarily as they were electrified, suffering total voluntary muscle control all but instantly and experiencing enough of sensory overload to scramble any attempt at a coherent response. Their flight kept them in the air for one to three seconds before shorting out and dropping them to the ground. Super or otherwise, humans still had a vulnerable nervous system and without powers specifically tailored to protecting it they could be incapacitated with far less effort than it took to actually hurt them and no need for physical violence.
"Oh, nasty," Maya said, prodding one of the Red Dragon's brainwashed victims with her toe. "I've been on the receiving end of lightning attacks and they're never pretty. One out of ten, wouldn't recommend."
"All the times you got knocked out during the Invasion was what gave me the idea, yes," Jerry couldn't stop himself from retorting with a cackle now that they were no longer in immediate danger.
"Hey, that was just me being too tough to kill!" the blonde complained. "And it didn't happen that often either."
"Not that often?" he shot back in incredulity. "It happened near a dozen times, including during the final battle... twice. Everyone noticed it happening."
"Everyone's a critic," the Amazonian blonde huffed. "But that's ancient history-"
"It was six months ago," Amanda muttered, sotto voce.
"-what are we going to do with these guys now?" Maya finished, speaking over the two of them and kicking the nearest flailing foe. "How long will this super-taser of yours last?"
"Good question. Hold on a sec," Jerry told the girls before he fell fully into the dilated perception of what he called 'tinkering mode'. He measured the temperature of the superconductors and electrodes and its rate of increase in parts of the system that weren't affected by the heat pumps. He checked for deformation in the diamond coating from repulsion between electrons and accumulation of faults from high-speed electrons jumping out of the superconductor via the occasional quantum tunnelling phenomena. Damages from vibration and other mechanical stress that would normally not become relevant for months of normal use but were far more frequent during battlefield conditions.
One of his skills steadily drew on his mana reserves to make instant repairs, but repairs were never as perfect as the original and would cause further errors to appear faster and faster. A better-designed system that wasn't a total rush job would have accounted for many of those but as things stood... "Six and a half minutes before the first component failures. Given redundancies, maybe ten minutes before one or two of those guys go free."
"Not much time, then," Amanda said, stalking forth decisively and waving her hands over two incapacitated foes, palms-down. "If you two are done bantering, I'll see about removing this... destructively overclocked enhancement from these poor souls before it kills them."
Sometimes, he thought Amanda worried too much. He'd tried to get the redhead to relax a little, but deep down his... whatever she was to him nowadays still felt like the little girl who'd had a nervous breakdown on the first day of the Invasion. Maya in contrast never seemed to worry enough, always bantering even in the most horrible situations imaginable while beating her way out of them with her own two fists. The blonde had nearly turned into a zombie after being bitten in their first monster encounter ever, then shrugged it off overnight. Jerry and Amanda had seen her going down several times, thought she'd died, and she seemed hardly affected by it. Was it courage or madness? Was Amanda's worrying common sense or a weakness he had to help her overcome? Jerry didn't know and his over-inflated Wisdom score did not help at all.
After this was over, he'd take Amanda and the kids for a short vacation to deep space, come hell or nuclear war. Both were actually likely nowadays.