“So, I think that I have to address that particular situation,” Revenant says, a few hours after the fight between Onslaught and Humility. “You do remember me having emotional issues and a lot of complicated and entangled feelings concerning your resurrection and the whole ‘we were characters in a comic book’ thing?”
“Yes.” Onslaught replies steadfastly. “Yes, I do. I’m still processing all that existential dread, to be honest, and a part of me feels as if it is all a bad dream. And I still think that you’re being a dummy with said emotional issues.”
“Right.” Revenant nods, completely ignoring the accusation. Onslaught is one of the very few people out there that can call him a dummy without any sort of retaliation (even verbal) whatsoever. “Care to elaborate on why you’re processing said existential dread in my bed?”
The regretful weakness of the flesh is that, unlike the machine, it needed to rest from time to time. It took them a while of general scavenging (Onslaught helping greatly in opening doors and locked containers) to get tired, but eventually, they decided to rest.
They ended up returning to the room with bunk beds and mysteriously spawning villain uniforms. No clothes to spare, so they ended up having to lie in the bed pretty much just in their underwear.
Finding proper night clothes is very low on Revenant’s list of priorities.
She told him that she was going to do it on her own, so he let her. But then, he found himself just staring at her awkwardly while she made her way towards his bed before slipping under the quilt.
“Revy, do you remember what was the end result of me deciding to act like a girl in one of those stupid rom-com animes and dancing around the subject for who knows how long?” Onslaught retorts, her thin arms wrapping themselves around his neck. She is… warm .”I ended up kicking the bucket before getting to second base. Can you believe this?”
“I unfortunately can.” He replies dryly, trying to ignore his emotional state worsening rapidly. “Look, I’m not really in the emotional state to…”
“I know and I get it, you’re being yourself. So, the exact type of a lovable dummy that I fell in love with.” Onslaught cuts in, trying to look at him sternly but missing his eyes a little. “We’re not doing anything steamy until you stop being a dummy. But, it’s cold outside, you’re warm and I’m going to get some skinship under this pretext or I swear to God I’m going to punt you through the wall. Got it?”
Revenant sighs. Yeah, he… is kind of emotionally weak to the girl that ended up being the central point of his villain origin story AND was his tragically deceased love interest. Meeting her again threw all his established character development out of the window.
Add still having issues believing in the whole ‘character in a story’ thing and he really wasn’t himself right now.
So, instead of arguing against it, he just hugs her back while sighing tiredly. Onslaught puts her head on his own pillow, right in front of his neck, his own chin resting on the top of her head. She is… slightly smaller than he is. The size kind of fits.
It’s way more comfortable than Revenant is willing to admit loudly.
“So… any girls you want to tell me about?” She suddenly asks a few seconds later, prompting him to groan loudly.
“Go to sleep.” He says, closing his eyes. Well, trying to. Because then she clears her throat loudly, and when he opens his eyes again… yeah, it’s this look on her face. “I’ve destroyed the United States out of sheer despair after your death. You really expected me to intersperse that with dating?”
“That’s not a no.” Onslaught replies, before pouting a little. “Yes, or no.”
She probably won’t let him go to sleep before making sure that no potential love rivals are waiting to be resurrected. Her father was a supervillain that used to play in the same league as Revenant did, she leaves nothing to chance.
“Yes and no.” Revenant replies. Her pouting grows more intense. She looks a bit like a chipmunk now. This chipmunk could destroy a US Army tank by tearing off its turret with her bare hands and then slamming it into the tank itself over and over again.
It was this combination of incredible adorableness and capacity for the extreme violence that initially made him attracted to her.
“I was a supposedly handsome young man, who was burning the country in memory of the woman he loved, all while wearing a very well-tailored business suit.” He replies. “This also implies having some degree of magnetic charisma, as you can’t lead an organization the size of the Villain Alliance of America without it. Yes, I was quite popular. No, I didn’t reciprocate.”
He really wasn’t in the right mind to even consider doing any of that. He still isn’t, probably.
“Anyone who was really dedicated to that cause?” Onslaught asks. Ugh. This is, in a way, a nice relief from the whole existential dread moment.
“Kitsune and Hypothermia were really persistent about their feelings, even if the latter in a rather quiet way.” Revenant replies. “Despite me giving them the cold shoulder the whole time. With how much of… polar opposites they were, I… I now strongly suspect that it was the author ship-teasing me with popular female villain figures to facilitate the growth of fanfics exploring those particular avenues. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”
There is an unspoken ‘... so that we can finally go to sleep since we really need to rest’ in his voice. She can read him like an open book, even after all those years. She just decides to ignore it.
“You… didn’t respond to Hypothermia’s feelings?” She asks. Yeah, she never met Kitsune, but Hypothermia… They were close. Very close. So close that even the term ‘best friends’ barely described what they had going on. She knew that Hypothermia had a crush on her fiancee the whole time?
“Is there something I don’t know?” Revenant asks, looking at her questioningly. Onslaught looks down, thinking about something for a moment.
“Before I… left the stage, I told her that if something goes wrong and I die… I mean, it was a war back then… I wanted her to protect you in my stead.” She eventually says. “I knew that she had a crush on you, and I said that if I’m out of the picture I hope that she’d be happy with you.”
Oh.
“That explains the…” Revenant freezes, not saying a word for a moment. That’s when her grasp grows stronger for a moment. “When the news of the New Liberty being destroyed broke, she… she used her ice to knock the gun out of my hands when I…”
His words fail him again. He didn’t want to mention that. It didn’t really happen, just the Author’s way of weaving his Traumatic Backstory™, but…
She says nothing. Instead, she just hugs him closer. He reciprocated, not knowing what to say. Was it due to him going off the script? Due to the Author no longer writing his life for him?
“I’ll have to thank her once we bring her back.” Onslaught says quietly.
“For what?” Revenant asks back. “It was a story, Oni. It was all written that way and…”
“I don’t care.” She replies instantly, cutting in before he could say anything more. “It might have been a fake life, but it was a fake life that shaped us. For me, it all happened. For me, she did save you just as I asked her to and… she didn’t live until the end, didn’t she?”
Silence once again. They are both holding each other under the quilt, their presence mutually… comfortable.
“No, she… she died during the second battle for Pittsburgh.” Revenant eventually breaks the news. “We messed up the timetable a bit, heroes overwhelmed my command post, she… held them back until I got away. Out of her own volition.”
Onslaught squeezes him closer. Yeah, there will be a lot of words said after this, once he brings Hypothermia back. It’s going to be… problematic.
“How bad was your last update?” Onslaught then surprises him with a subject change. From an emotionally painful one to… honestly, it was an emotionally painful one as well.
“I…” He decides that saying that he doesn’t want to talk about it will just make her continue asking, so he swallows those words. “Bad.”
“How bad?” She asks, confirming his suspicions.
“The ‘I went mostly braindead out of sheer pain’ bad.” He replies. He can feel her entire body tensing in his arms. “Chronoshift found me before my heart stopped beating so she shifted me back to my pre-update state and then I managed to get myself prepped for immediate full anaesthesia the second the brain update happened again, and it wasn’t that long ago, but if it happens again I…”
“We’ll figure something out by then. You’ll figure something out.” Onslaught replies after a short moment of silence. “If it happens again I’ll find a way to keep you alive until this… Chronoshift is spawned. Who is it by the way? I never heard that villain name.”
Now. That’s a complicated question to answer. How exactly is he supposed to inform his formerly dead love interest - who was now back to her prime and clearly interested in restarting their relationship - that not a long time after her death he ended up pretty much adopting a girl that has become his…
Morality chain? Replacement goldfish for Onslaught just without the romantic part? He is about to start confessing to his villain origin story that he might have accidentally made a twelve years old girl with a traumatic backstory think that supervillainy is the coolest thing ever when things go sideways violently.
Before the two of them secreted themselves into the temporary bedroom, Humility announced its desire to act as a watchman. They didn’t encounter anything living (or, at least, moving) thus far, but it didn’t mean that they were safe.
They discovered it the hard way when they heard a sound of an explosion followed by a screeching cacophony of torn metal and - still emotionless - shout about an enemy attack from Humility.
And while they were busy having an emotional moment of a reunion long overdue, they were both villains.
Onslaught practically sprung out of the bed, engaging her individuality and clicking her tongue loudly enough to get a grasp of the surroundings with echolocation, before leaping towards the door. Revenant rolled off the bed right after her, grabbing the piece of sharpened metal wrapped with some torn cloth for improvised handles and running after her.
It might have been an improvised weapon, but a shiv is a shiv. And he knows how to use it.
Using it against what he encounters in the corridor might be a bit problematic, though.
He can see the smoking ruin of a wall that was torn to shreds by the explosion, someone tunnelling an entrance into the corridor. Quite close to it Humility is being pinned to the wall but a mass of… tentacles?
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Really?
Of course, they are purely mechanical and appear to be immobilizing Humility so that another tentacle ending with what looks like a plasma cutter can crudely vivisect the robot’s chest, probably to get to whatever energy source was there. Those are some very non-sexual tentacles.
They also clearly die as much as the robots can when Onslaught grabs the nearest bundle of tentacles for a better grip before slamming her fist into the side of the cube-shaped body that was floating in the air on the other side of said appendages, her arm diving into it until the elbow.
The tentacles spasmed uncontrollably, and the main body was bounced back under the impact. Onslaught’s hand is back out, covered in a mixture of fluids that Revenant has no time to try to identify. The grasp that the homicidal, menacingly floating companion cube after a paint-job had on Humility weakened, the AI freeing its right hand and grabbing the tangle of tentacles that was still holding its other arm before crushing it with its fingers.
Looks like the attacker is of a decidedly lower technological level. Was Humility just surprised? Revenant has issues explaining the machine being grabbed so easily otherwise, and…
Whatever power was keeping the monster’s body floating went out, the machine collapsing into the floor in an instant, the faint red lights on its otherwise pitch-black body flickering out of existence.
More cubes fly out of the hole in the wall. They are smaller than the one that they just defeated (that one was at least a meter in diameter, the others are half that at best), but there are several of them, they are fast and armed with tentacles ending with plasma cutters and blades.
Most of them lunge at the nearest target, but one of them settled on picking a fight with Revenant. The supervillain decided to make it clear that his individuality might be mostly about his intellect, but… it also works for his muscles, reflexes and so on.
He might have been training his body for only a few years and had only a few occasions to use that practically. But Mastery made his growth curve perfectly linear. Despite being relatively puny in build, most of his physical characteristics are at least comparable to pre-Wishgranter Olympic athletes.
He dodges the machine's lunge, rotating his body quickly enough to get to kick the robot’s side with enough strength to almost slam the machine into the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. He’s no Onslaught, he didn’t do anything more than stun it for a moment, but it’s enough to close the distance and drive the shiv into its side before the tentacles can respond.
Look. They are blinking lights on its body. Blinking lights imply something else is there than just pure armour. It’s really not rocket science.
The shiv cuts through, but not deep enough to do any damage. The machine tries to swing its tentacle appendages at Revenant, which actually gives him an idea. Three seconds later the robot gets pierced with its own plasma cutter, the cut this time deep enough to make it fall to the floor.
“DODGE!” He then hears Humility yelling. He has no time to check who is the target of the shout or what’s the threat, he just instantly jumps back to the other side of the corridor, all while also trying to gain as much distance from Humility as possible and…
Something flies right in front of him at high speed. Judging from the loud crashing sound he heard, it had enough kinetic strength to crush a part of the wall further down the corridor. That would be deadly.
He looks back at Humility just to see it axe-kick another machine into the floor, this one being more cuboid than a straight cube. Some sort of projectile drone?
He will have the time he needs to find out since the flow of the attackers clearly died out. He killed one small drone, Onslaught and Humility slew at least four small ones each plus the big one at the beginning.
Reasonably good for a backline strategist. He is used to being surrounded by people that could kill him quite easily yet are still following his orders to the letters. He got a few such individuals to throw themselves at his enemies as suicidal bombers.
“Your ugly cousins, Humility?” Revenant asks. The fight is clearly over and Humility isn’t trying to dash out of the corridor, so none of the bots are probably rigged to blow after death.
Onslaught seems undamaged, leaning on the wall more and more as her adrenaline rush is leaving her body together with her individuality power boost.
“Do not compare my superior programming framework and state-of-the-art hardware to those flying piles of trash.” Humility retorts. Revenant finds its name absolutely hilarious all of a sudden. The AI then stomps on the projectile drone, crushing its main body to a pulp.
Onslaught chuckles, the warlike smile still on her face. Looks like she found that hilarious as well.
“Before you ask, that was MENACE/VERMILLION GAMMA, written with capital letters and with a slash between the first two words, scouting party.” Humility ignores the chuckles. “There are more where those came from. Much, much more.”
Revenant realized that much from the ‘scouting party’ bit, but… hey, if Humility wants to share intel with him, he’s willing to allow it. In the meantime, he approaches the projectile bot, before pulling a part of the bent armour off.
He recognizes that particular form of matter at a glance, even if it's this damaged and with some foreign metal objects lodged within. Brain matter, the shape too distorted to guess the origin of it.
“Wetware?” he asks, Humility letting him investigate peacefully. He picked up enough engineering skills from Demiurge and Clockmaker to be a fairly qualified engineer himself… although the technology seems completely foreign. And way more advanced than anything he ever saw aside from Clockmaker’s masterworked tech.
“Crude attempt of inferior and malfunctioning AIs to circumnavigate the natural limits of its hardware by incorporating brains of organic life forms into the design.” Humility replies. “I’ve long ago deemed that method to be a complete dead end.”
Makes you wonder how many millions of people ended up as brains in a jar before Humility decided that it was a dead end. Does he really want to know? Does it even keep a tally of those?
“Care to elaborate on the designation?” He then asks while standing up.
“Official coding system for threats, as per the Confederation of Mankind’s Unitary Communication Protocol.” Humility replies. “First word is the origin of the threat. HAZARD implies natural origin, BANDIT a human origin, MENACE an alien origin and NIGHTMARE the threats of more esoteric or extradimensional nature. Then you have colour codes for the exact threats in question, and occasionally a secondary designator when the threat is internally varied. The Visitor that ruined this system should probably be designated as NIGHTMARE/RAINBOW, due to being an otherwise unidentified extra-dimensional entity and Rainbow being a codename for unidentified threats.”
Revenant nods. A lot of data, but it will smooth out the future communication between them. There are probably a lot of threats in this mess of a planet.
“MENACE/VERMILLION means berserks, a race of alien machines that are best summarized as wayward berserk probes.” Humility continues while Revenant flinches. That was bad, especially in the middle of this gigastructure of a planet. It’s hard to find a worse place to face Von Neumann machines. “Gamma implies the split-off group that attempted to switch to a techno-organic computing hardware to supply their failing processing power with wetware, to a rather limited success. Looks like some of them were swallowed by the Visitor.”
Looks like Revenant had his first contact with an alien. That he promptly murdered it with a knife and its own plasma cutter before examining its corpse to learn how to more efficiently butcher its kin. Humanity at its finest, fellas.
“Does anyone care to explain to me the ‘berserk probe’ term?” Onslaught cuts in. “I’m the one providing this group with brawn, in case you didn’t notice.“ Humility glances at her but decides not to mock her lack of knowledge.
“The ultimate form of applied xenophobia in the space setting, Onslaught.” Revenant replies. “You don’t want to even meet aliens who can be potential competitors of yours in the future? You send out self-replicating machines that, when they encounter signs of intelligent life, reproduce en-masse and exterminate it. Before launching hundreds of new probes to continue searching for intelligent life. Or life in general. Over and over again.”
He decides not to mention the alternative, high-tech variant - have your probes fly far away, before mass-replicating and constructing a Nicoll-Dyson Laser. So, a Dyson Sphere, except it’s supplying a gargantuan energy weapon that’s then used to sterilize all planets with even remotely habitable conditions within the nearest few hundred light years. Before the probes replicate again and continue doing that elsewhere, over and over again.
Sure, the beam will take centuries to reach its destination. But once it’s fired, it cannot be stopped, and the targeted planet is doomed. And since the attack goes through the massive emptiness of the deep space void - and approaches you with the speed of light - you can’t even detect it before you’re dead.
Human’s attempts at explaining the lack of contact with intelligent life (the Fermi’s Paradox, as it was called) give birth to some top-quality nightmare fuel.
“Good news is that VERMILLION/GAMMA are pathetic compared to most of their kin.” Humility decides to comment while Onslaught is busy processing the new knowledge. “Their technology is trash-tier, and their wetware processors are cognitively inferior even to regular humans. Most of their combat drones are running on brains of non-sapient lifeforms, making them akin to reasonably trained small pack predators, just lacking their natural instincts..”
Explains the Zerg Rush tactic that the drones presented, Revenant decides. There was really no rhyme or reason to it.
“And the bad news is that there might be an awful lot of them nearby, and since one of their patrols went dark, they’re going to send a bigger group to investigate.” Revenant comments, drawing a scarce nod out of Humility. “Great. Since that group emerging from behind a wall completely surprised you, I assume that asking you ‘how much time do we have’ is probably pointless.”
“Correct.” Humility replies. “The network connection here is fleeting at best, and trying to fully open to it in its current state is probably suicidal. And the walls' internal structure is utterly incoherent, severely limiting the range of my sensors. Unless we’re very unlucky, probably at least a few hours, maybe a day. Those scouts are probably spread wide.”
Probably. The last time he trusted that word, Pittsburgh happened. Unfortunately, he knows next to zero about the present situation, and his list of assets is extremely short. He has the option to get more, but…
“It's time to get another teammate, preferably so that they’re up and running by the time you wake up.” Humility then adds. The Slaughterer of Billions is, undoubtedly, correct. “Any ideas on whom to resurrect?”
“A ranged combatant will be useful.” Revenant replies, his mind already considering and rejecting a lot of candidates. “How alright are we with the large-scale devastation of the surrounding superstructure?”
“I have no idea about the structural integrity of literally anything around us.” Humility replies. “Try to keep it as low as possible before we can do some proper resistance tests away from anything we might potentially need.”
Fair.
“That eliminates a lot of potential names.” Revenant replies, before starting to think aloud. “Virtue, Faultline, Blastwave, Fireline and Incinerator are way too destructive. Amplitude and Songbird are too destructive and mentally unstable for me to risk them having a meltdown over the ‘we were characters in a story' revelation. Repulsor is perfect in terms of his skill set, but he is a vigilante and he might try to kill us instead. Arsenal’s firepower is a bit too low. The best ranged combatant choices right now are probably Just Cause or Singularity.”
“What about Hypothermia?” Onslaught asks. Of course, she asks that.
“She has incredible firepower and control to apply it with minimal damages to her surroundings, but her firepower depends on the amount of ice, liquids and air humidity in the vicinity.” Revenant replies. “I don’t think there is enough of either in those tunnels for her to be as powerful as we need her to be.”
He does want to meet her, too. But… there are more pressing concerns for them right now. Survival is paramount. If they lose control of the resurrection machine, they are all going to inevitably die.
“Just Cause sounds like an odd name for a supervillain.” Humility comments. Revenant would have preferred something more constructive, but…
“She was a Top Superhero of the state of Florida, before participating in a failed coup d’etat against the US Government that started the First Villain War.” Revenant replies. There is a deep irony with her hero name, her being a Latino with Panamanian ancestry and her attempt to coup the United States, further embellished but her coup being aided by some rogue CIA members associated with the Liberty Party and the People’s Liberation Front. Although you needed some historical knowledge to find it funny. “That limits your work opportunities. But she is a bit too independent and she might shoot you in the face after hearing your full title list.”
“Duly noted.” Humility replies expressionlessly. “Singularity then?”
Not until they figure out if modern tech can undo her brainwashing. Making her live once more without that would be tantamount to making someone innocent suffer a Fate Worse than Death - again, to boot - for your own gain.
He draws the line at doing that to his own friends.
He just isn’t sharing his motives with Humility. The AI would find ways to exploit it further down the line.
“Bring back Decay.” Revenant decides. Humility stares at him without a word for a long moment.
“He doesn’t have ranged combat capabilities.” The machine points out. “You aren’t bringing your dragon just to make sure that you outnumber me to the point where you can safely dispose of me, right?”
He isn’t suicidal. They need Humility alive.
The whole overlap between popular superhero genre tropes and the ‘real-life superhero/supervillain world was a subject for a whole lecture. Such as the fact that a head lieutenant working for a supervillain was typically referred to as their ‘dragon’.
Revenant was bringing back the person who in a way was Lord Vader to his Emperor Palpatine.
“No, I’m not.” Revenant smiles faintly. “I just think that I know how to use his individuality to cause even more damage to the Vermillion Menace than we could with a ranged combat meta-ability.”
***
Third chapter, third case of AI art.
Once again, the character mentioned in the chapter name.
Namely, the infamous Slaughterer of Billions.
Obraz [https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/956270231142170644/1058158511634268390/sdfwa.png?width=410&height=656]