Thankfully for Revenant, Onslaught didn’t ask any more questions, especially ones about Chronoshift. Instead, she finally gets the message and goes to sleep. Naturally, she goes to sleep in his bed, hugging him closely.
She is clearly planning for recurrent physical closeness to conquer his emotional and mental doubts. He has no idea if it will work.
His individuality made him much smarter, and improved his reflexes and strength, but… it didn’t do much to his own emotional development. He didn’t really get to level up his PTSD, nor his ability to thoroughly understand and control his own emotions. What happened to New Liberty just… suppressed them, mostly.
He was way better at reading and exploiting the emotions of others (it was about observation skills - and those improved a lot - and a combination of intelligence and charisma) than in figuring out his own.
He was, frankly, a mess. But a mess that ended up discovering that sleeping while cuddling his recently resurrected love interest was very comfortable and allowed him to wake up feeling extremely well-rested.
His individuality was still there. It wasn’t some sort of ‘only until you wake up’ deal, whatever the Visitor did to Reality was still there. Reassuring. Mastery is probably going to kill him sooner or later, but for now, he needs it.
“Good dreams?” Humility asks, as emotionlessly as ever.
“Kind of.” Revenant replies. He doesn’t remember what he dreamt of, really. Onslaught is hanging off his shoulder again before he helps her lean on a wall for a moment to be allowed to talk freely. “How about you? Did you dream of electric sheep?”
Humility stares at him quietly. Expecting the genocidal AI from the far future to know the classics of human literature was probably too much.
“Decay’s ready for release.” Humility decides to settle on the safe, business-minded option. “You sure he won’t do anything stupid? Besides, he didn’t seem particularly… dangerous in the comic book, Titan basically one-hit-killed him.”
“It wasn’t a matter of Decay being weak…” Revenant replies. “... it was a matter of Titan being strong. The superheroes, for all their love for spandex suits and other weird articles of clothing, were no pushovers, Humility. We were the side fighting at a disadvantage the whole time.”
As one would expect from a ragtag alliance of urban guerillas, terrorists and some crime lords with political ambitions fighting against the US Government at the peak of its power.
If he could find a way to make the heroes cooperate in their joint goal of getting off this world, the amount of firepower he would gain access to would be… substantial.
He was ready to do a lot of things to be able to order people like Aegis, Crusader, Quickdraw, Valiant, Fireteam or Hellmouth around. He knows how hard it was to kill people like them, even with all the assets and manpower of the Villain Alliance of America.
And then, they were Invincible and Captain Patriotic. True endgame bosses. The sort of people that Humility would never permit him to resurrect, for the AI would understand that if anything went even slightly wrong with that, the Informatic Scourge would be no more.
He doesn’t let himself smile visibly. But he has a faint framework of a plan. Well, that’s for the future. For now, Vermillion Gamma is the priority.
“That covers half of my issues with this idea.” Humility replies, Onslaught is still listening intently from the background. “You sure he won’t be… destabilized by the whole shocking revelation?”
Revenant chuckles loudly. Someone didn’t know Decay even nearly well enough. Even Onslaught barely got to meet him while alive, and yet was still smiling wryly in the background.
“Right.” Humility noticed their sudden bout of humour. “Let’s see how correct you are.”
They pick Decay’s clothes from the Magical Barracks on their way to the resurrection chamber.
***
Decay is a gaunt, thin-limbed man in his late twenties, with messy grey hair and black eyes. He looks significantly better than when Revenant saw him last time, to be honest. And no, it’s not the ‘it’s because the last time I saw him he was missing X body part’ situation or something.
It’s just that his hair wasn’t as greasy, his face lacked the eyebags due to him staying around for gaming purposes until 4am each day, and the texture of his skin improved significantly due to a better diet.
Turns out that sustaining your body mostly with fast foods, chips and either soda or energy drinks isn’t particularly healthy.
The life in retirement from villainy was clearly serving him well.
The tube opens. Decay stands there, naked but completely unbothered by it. He glances at Humility, at Onslaught leaning by the wall in the background and then at Revenant.
“... things got complicated?” He then asks his… well, cousin by blood, something close to a stepbrother before their ‘stepfather’ died a violent and well-deserving death, and heterosexual life partners for the rest of their life.
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Revenant sighs. Yeah, Onslaught being there clearly screamed of ‘things got complicated’. “Apparently, we were characters in a superhero comic book all along. But now the planet we’re on got visited by another Wishgranter, and it resulted in people that never existed starting to exist for real.”
Decay stares at him for a few seconds, before blinking at him in visible surprise. Looks like he already mostly digested the news.
“What about…” He then tries to ask, but Revenant is faster.
“We can bring your waifu here, though probably not right now.” Revenant replies. Yes, getting married and then retiring to a countryside cottage with your wife and the newly-born kids just to focus on earning money through videogame streaming was an odd way of ending your career as a villain lieutenant and a dragon to the US’s Most Wanted Supervillain, but… “Your kids too.”
The twins are two years old. They are very low on the list of priorities. Then again, Decay can realize that much immediately. For all of his status as what Revenant suspects to be the Villain Academy’s comic relief slash unexpected fluff provider (he and his wife were almost blindingly in love with each other), he’s a consummate professional with a lot of experience.
“The setting?” Decay then asks.
“Apparently, the far future.” Revenant replies. “Mankind spreading among the stars, and so on.”
“What’s the status of videogames?” Decay then asks while tilting his head a little.
Revenant glances at Humility, as he has absolutely no clue about the answer to that question.
“Still kicking.” The AI replies. “Any genre you want to ask about in particular?”
“MMORPGs.” Decay replies. Just one of his many interests.
“The newest iterations of those tend to be frameworks providing tools to people to create their own adventures and entire campaigns within the established game mechanics.” Humility replies. “You make a character and then you can travel around, most inhabited worlds having thousands of dungeons set up by other players, some of them the length and complexity of an entire RPG game of your times. That you can then explore as your character in a blend of full-immersion VR game and expansive AR.”
Oh. So like some of the modern descendants of Pokemon GO, except each pokemon is a whole campaign to succeed in, a whole dungeon to crawl through, on your own or with other people.
Revenant glances back at Decay who, in his asocial and emotionally stunted way, seems to be going through a realization that God exists and loves him.
“Alright then.” Decay, eventually, nods. “Who do you want me to kill, Player One?”
Revenant grins. That’s the spirit.
“Some wayward alien self-replicating murdermachines that are stealing the brains of people, Player Two.” Revenant replies. Decay whistles in a combination of surprise and awe. “I have just the idea of how to employ your individuality to achieve that. But first…”
He hands Decay a pile of clothes. His dragon gives him a thumbs-up gesture, before starting to put them on.
“I’m starting to realize the reasons for your earlier reaction.” Humility comments, prompting Revenant to give it a slightly shit-eating grin. “It was… smooth.”
“Decay’s just like that.” Revenant shrugs. “Part of his charm. Doesn’t ask many questions, has simple interests, I don’t have to be afraid that he’d backstab me out of the ambition to take my position and he has a lot of combat experience. Surprisingly good tactician.”
“I heard that!” Decay shouts from the background. “That ‘surprising’ made it sound like I don’t look like someone good at thinking, boss!”
“You needed to find yourself a love interest to start taking a shower more often than once a month, and even that only because that’s when the smell was getting unbearable and I told you to bathe or I won’t be playing videogames with you.” Revenant shoots back. “You’re not allowed to criticize me for putting it that way.”
Decay stops the act of putting on his trousers to flip him the bird. Ahh, that little shit. Revenant missed him more than he is willing to admit.
“So, I assume that this is all we have?” Decay asks, being done with his pants and now putting on the T-Shirt with an inscription on the front saying ‘it’s 2161 and I’m still playing League of Legends, what’s your mental illness?’. “One supervillain, and three villain lieutenants including me as a dragon, Onslaught and the robot I don’t recognize?”
“AI/HUMILITY, written in capital letters and with a slash between the two words, to borrow the official designation.” Humility comments. “First generation Transcendent Cybernetic Intelligence, Slaughterer of Billions, Informatic Scourge, Sun of Icarus etc. etc. And since my deal with Revenant is that of two equals, I consider myself to be a supervillain, not a villain lieutenant.”
Revenant sighs internally. Is the designation a form of practical joke? Humility is, clearly enough, extraordinarily prideful. This is something to potentially be exploited in the future, then again he still doesn’t have enough intel on ‘Transcendent Cybernetic Intelligences’ to risk any of that.
What if the AI can switch between personalities at will, and it’s purposefully upholding a personality that is so in contrast to its name to bait them into thinking that it’s actually like that all the time? It could as well be capable of running two personalities in parallel, easily seeing through all attempts to manipulate it through its pride.
For some reason, Revenant expects that finding intel about TCIs - or AIs in general - without Humility making sure that they only learn what it wants them to know won’t be easy.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“So, two supervillains and two villain lieutenants.” Decay nods thoughtfully. “No mooks or elite mooks?”
Yeah, having someone to do the menial work and garrison the base and resurrection room surroundings while they are away would be nice, but…
“Kind of pointless to waste time spawning the henchmen while we’re on the population limit and I can get lieutenants instead.” Revenant replies. Decay nods in agreement.
“Does anyone care to enlighten me about the newly dished-out terminology?” Humility decides to interrupt. “I’m from a different genre altogether, in case you forgot.”
Revenant didn’t. He was just interested in hearing what sort of intel Humility was most interested in. And also wanted to make sure that the info drip that the AI was getting about his false world would be as sparse as possible.
“Supervillains are independent villains in charge of organizations.” Revenant replies. “Under them, you have the villain lieutenants. Also villains, with potent individualities, typically have their own unique aesthetic, officially recognized villain names and so on. If one of them is pretty much a second-in-command for their supervillain, they are dubbed a ‘dragon’.”
He pauses for a moment. Humility nods. Alright, time to continue.
“A lot of villain lieutenants are fairly independent, and it’s not uncommon for them to become supervillains simply by deciding to become independent.” Revenant continues. “Similarly, when a supervillain’s organization crumbles and is subsumed by someone or he is forced to escape and work for someone else, he can become a villain lieutenant too.” Decay was good enough to become a supervillain, in Revenant’s opinion, he just preferred to follow plans rather than create them. “Heroes mimic that structure with superheroes and sidekicks.”
“You’re going a bit around the main subject since I’m yet to hear about the mooks.” Humility replies. “I assume that you’re hoping to get a reaction out of me to figure out if my wanting to be supervillain instead of a lieutenant was due to me figuring out that the former name is more imposing or because I actually got more comic chapters to read to know what it means.”
Aww, busted. It was most certainly the former, but once again, what if it obfuscated the excessive pride?
“Mooks, sometimes called henchmen, are all lower-ranked people working for a villainous organization.” Revenant continues, ignoring the interjection. “Gang members, for example. Some of them have weak or otherwise useless individualities. A lot of them simply don’t have them at all. Elite mooks, in the meantime, are a common term for whatever group of more proficient and trained combatants the organization has formed among them. Which might range from a group of more physically imposing gang members to a squad of former special force operatives on the supervillain’s payroll.” He sighs. “In short, the sort of people that are supposed to keep the regular police, their anti-terrorist unit members or even the army occupied while the supervillain and his lieutenants are facing off with the superheroes and their sidekicks.”
“Some of them even get promoted to villain lieutenants, eventually.” Decay comments. “Like Black Knight. He was an elite mook for the Sanguine Pact, before pulling a From Nobody to Nightmare trope and becoming one of the most dangerous villain lieutenants in the country.”
Resurrecting the Sanguine Pact members is very low on the list of Revenant’s priorities. Those guys are all insane mass murderers. Useful, in certain situations and for the intimidation factor. Otherwise… yeah, no.
He doesn’t even want to imagine how homicidal they can go if the discovery that they were characters in a story will exacerbate their pre-existing mental issues.
On the other hand, if he will need someone to cause massive damage to everything in the vicinity, those guys will be absolutely perfect. He just needs to make sure they are on the leash or that they’ll die while executing his orders
“I see.” Humility replies. “There is a possibility that this ‘system’ we discovered here is vaguely based on a certain old videogame adaptation of your comic. An RTS game, to be exact. There is a possibility that it treats lieutenants and supervillains as ‘boss characters’ while spawning elite mooks and mooks in squads.”
Oh?
“That sounds useful,” Revenant admits. “But unless the process makes them into puppets lacking their backstories and unfailingly obedient to me, I’m not sure if mass-spawning them right now is wise. We can more or less control the reaction to the existential dread issue when we’re dealing with a single villain lieutenant. Doing the same for, say, ten former special ops operatives at once might be… problematic. And we only need one person to go insane and damage the resurrection chamber for things to go violently downhill.”
His own elite mook unit was composed of former CIA operatives, US Marine Corps/US Army defectors and some lesser villains and other recruits that went through proper Training from Hell at the hands of the aforementioned groups.
They were all very dangerous people. Professional Cape Busters, the well-equipped and trained individuals without superpowers (or with weak ones), capable of throwing hands with metahumans, some of which were practically One Man Armies if not downright Physical Gods. And they had results.
He feels naked and vulnerable without a squad of those as his bodyguards. Without all the highly competent mooks that formed the skeleton keeping the Villain Alliance of America up. With his enemy being a bunch of robots, he’d love to have some of his henchmen from the VAA’s Cybernetic Warfare Division with him, for example.
But… too dangerous.
For now.
They’ll revisit that idea in a while, once they manage to deal with the Vermillion Gamma issue and establish something akin to a base of operations. Besides, how is he supposed to feed all of those guys?
Not now.
“So, let me guess.” Decay decides to say. “You expect the enemy to come to swarm us… probably through a single passage or something like this. And that’s why you brought me here.”
Revenant grins.
Hey, Decay is generally rather asocial and probably somewhere on the autism spectrum (not like Archvile ever bothered to let him visit proper medical professionals for an actual diagnosis of anything whatsoever), but he is well-trained and much more intelligent than people expect.
He has issues with personal hygiene, not thinking. Consciously letting people underestimate him as someone who got the job because he is Revenant’s friend (as if that would be enough to become his dragon) only to have Decay successfully outthink and backstab them never ceased to be amusing.
“I think…” Humility decides to cut in. “... that I’m missing something out of it. Like, say, your plan.”
Of course it does. Time to amend it - and make sure that there isn’t any element to Vermillion Gamma’s operating patterns that Revenant missed. All while relocating to the ambush site, just in case the enemy appeared earlier than expected.
***
The thing is, with the complete and utter chaos of the maze that was surrounding them, it really wasn’t easy to make a flanking manoeuvre. Revenant understood it rather quickly after waking up in this strange new world.
You needed an exact topographic map of the whole area to even hope to find a way to the same endpoint but through another route. And if the Vermillion Gamma was still at the ‘spreading the recon squads’ stage around, it most certainly didn’t have such a map ready.
The fact that said scouting party blew up the wall (most likely due to detecting movement, sound etc. through the wall, which wasn’t very thick in that particular area) also said some interesting things about the enemy.
In the end, just as Revenant suspected, the Vermillion Gamma’s response unit arrived in force… and tried to swarm the area through the exact same passage that the scout unit made.
If Humility was to be believed, there was an intellect behind the enemy force, one at least comparable to an average human. A lot of those intellects, actually. But they were most likely residing in whatever central hub Vermillion Gamma operated from, to not risk dying because their hardware was destroyed elsewhere.
After all, they couldn’t hope to upload themselves back home if that happened, because all the walls around interrupt the transmissions completely.
The end result was a large swarm of drones told to follow the known route of the disappeared scout unit - apparently, it was leaving some markings on the wall - before reaching the last marker, and begin patrolling the area around it, steadily expanding the search radius until encountering the lost unit or enemy force.
Or, well, that’s what Humility predicted - correctly - to be the Vermillion Gamma’s reaction.
It was a large swarm. At least fifty small melee drones, five small projectile drones and five large melee drones (like the one that grabbed Humility during the earlier ambush).
The words ‘at least’ were there because even Humility had problems counting the destroyed bots due to how utterly massacred they were.
Decay’s individuality was called End. It worked by allowing him to accelerate the entropy of everything he touched. At its full strength, he could make an object - or a human being - age by about one hundred years per second.
He could also coat himself in an entropic field that made everything that got close to him (about 6,7 inches/17 centimetres) age at a smaller but still significant rate.
Being permanently aged by about 2-3 years each time you punched him was a damn good deterrent for melee-fighting heroes. Even if it, regretfully, didn’t do a thing to bullets and damaged all clothes he was wearing.
That’s, of course, unless you were Titan, the Top Hero of the State of Mississippi. The definition of a genius bruiser, a guy with a doctorate in astrophysics that looked like a walking mountain of perfectly-sculpted muscles. A guy that was smart enough to identify the threat at a glance and gut-punch Decay through a pile of crushed metal that used to be a street signpost, letting it shield him from the entropic field effects while instantly KO-ing Decay.
Humility saw the scene in the comic. It knew Decay’s individuality, or at least its rough outline. There was no mandatory meta-ability introduction scene for Decay, as a result. But… There were three things that Humility missed, due to Decay being taken down too quickly in that particular scene to showcase them properly.
One: He could make End’s effects selectively target only particular forms of matter. Allowing him to, for example, rapidly age someone without damaging their clothes or belongings (useful when you wanted said belongings for yourself). Or ‘ageing-out’ a fragment of a greater whole.
Two: He could make End’s effects capable of self-propagation, although only in a limited range outside of the point where it started. Otherwise, he could theoretically destroy the planet itself if the effect was used on the ground and you were ready to wait a few centuries for the rocks to age into dust.
Three: He could combine those two effects into a self-propagating, selective attack.
Revenant had him selectively carve a large chunk of the wall out of it, before further shaping it to form handles on one of its sides. Then, when the swarm appeared, he slapped the shield, applying a Selective/Inorganic variant of End onto it.
Then Onslaught, who was holding the handles, rushed forward at maximum speed, slamming the shield into the frontline of Vermillion Gamma’s bots, propagating the effect onto them… all while moving fast enough to slam said frontline into the second line.
And then, when the first line began to crumble into nothingness, slam the second line into the third line.
Projectile bots could fire through the wall - it wasn’t that tough and it was in the process of crumbling to dust as well even if it was way more resistant than machines in front of it - but they weren’t anywhere near the front of the group. After all, you wanted them behind the melee fighters. Unless the situation changed and you regrouped them.
But they didn’t give Vermillion Gamma the time needed to regroup.
As a result, Onslaught - together with Decay’s individuality effects - basically runs through the entire initial enemy response unit, leaving behind a long corridor full of crumbling machines, the cacophony of crushing metal slowly dying out.
When she reached the backline she immediately used her echolocation to locate the fleeing command bot - a rhombic hexahedron carrying one of the higher machine intelligences behind Vermillion Gamma - and slam it into the floor before tearing its tentacle appendages off, stopping its escape.
“You people…” Humility commented a moment when stepping into the corridor right next to Revenant, both of them walking by madly grinning Decay. “... are slightly terrifying, you know that?”
“Just slightly?” Revenant asks, glancing back at the AI. “I’m almost insulted.”
There was some damage to the walls and the floor, the End’s effects gnawing through all inorganic matter without differentiating its sources. But it was rigged to not penetrate too deeply, so the corridor was ‘only’ disfigured rather than entirely destroyed.
“Right.” Humility decides to not comment on that. “Good news is that we’ve destroyed the initial response unit, but it was a big initial response unit. This means that the enemy forces we’re facing are bigger than I anticipated.” The robot stays silent for a while, both of them walking down the corridor with Decay following suit. “I’ll try to pry some intel from the command bot, but there is a high chance that we’re talking about another starship merged into the fabric of the planet.”
Uh-oh.
“How big of a starship?” Revenant asks. “And how many enemies can we expect?” He doesn’t like the direction this talk is taking.
“No idea.” Humility replies. “Vermillion Gamma rarely deploys capital ships, so I’d say that a cruiser is the most likely option. But the machines don’t waste space on amenities. There could be thousands of drones inside. And we didn’t buy ourselves that much time with this stunt.”
Uh-huh. Well, it looks like he’s going to have to improvise. Thankfully, the next villain - and this time a supervillain - is almost ready for release. And they’ll be very, very useful quite soon.
***
We're running with the theme.
Thanks to AIs and a friend of mine going by Tormound.
Decay
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