Revenant’s hopes of the situation calming down to some degree, allowing them to establish a proper powerbase before abandoning Ball Python were promptly destroyed. Because, hey, things couldn’t get easy for a change, right?
The supervillain realized that things just went sideways again when his breakfast (with his girlfriends, of course, although they were acting sufficiently reserved while in public for Revenant to uphold his image) got brutally interrupted.
With a message signed as urgent.
WolfgirlBestGirl: Black Mamba just sent an urgent SOS message
WolfgirlBestGirl: Under attack by an unknown force
Fuck.
Revenant practically jumps off the chair, shouting at the girls to get ready for combat. They are surprised for about three seconds (while following the order because hey, when he does that, he most certainly has a point in doing that), before the official announcement comes.
Revenant has no idea why Decay decided to give him a three seconds heads-up, but hey, whatever floats his boat.
***
Around Black Mamba, the defensive preparations established by both Ferris Palmer and the metahumans clashed with a strength of determined, numerically superior and technologically superior opposing force.
There was merely a single entrance into the Black Mamba. Naturally, establishing a defense there would be a bad idea. Sure, all the enemy forces would have to advance towards it, but… if they were too strong, how would the defenders retreat from encirclement?
The main defense line was a bit away from the entrance corridor, facing the direction from which Revenant & Co expected the Truthseekers and/or transhumans to arrive from. The cables were set up, connecting it with the Black Mamba’s power network.
The result was a heavy laser cannon placed in the outlying chokepoint, together with two quick-firing deployable railguns. In short, absolutely everything that was needed to shred whatever was coming down the main corridor. Everything.
The laser itself was actually a part of the frigate’s armaments, originally used as a point defense laser. This sounds relatively weak - it wasn’t even supposed to be a weapon. It was primarily used to defend ships against missiles.
Except, the missiles were small objects going at you at blindingly fast speed. Range of missile engagements was counted in thousands of kilometers at the very least. The precision to hit the enemies at that range and firepower to instantly melt the whole missile to avoid it exploding instead (for example if the interception happened at pretty much the missile’ effective range) was insane.
It was like having a WW2 battleship main artillery tower being used to fight off enemy tanks and infantry units at close range. They needed it to be set on a minimal firepower to not be legally classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
And then, as if to slap Revenant and the others in the face, it managed to fire exactly once. Destroying a handful of drones that the Truthseekers used for an opening strike, while basically melting a big part of the corridor.
Truthseekers had a lot of drones. Before the laser had the time for its internal capacitors to recharge for another salvo, second wave of drones was already there, suicidally charging the fortifications, ignoring the automatic fire from the railguns and the few surprised soldiers garrisoning the line, before performing successful suicide strike against the cable lines in the corridors behind the defense line.
And thus, they lost the laser.
It wouldn’t have worked a day or two later. Decay was scheduled to do his wall alterations in order to hide the cables in the walls or floors. For now he was practically finished with his job altering the side corridors. It was a necessity, there was no point in establishing a fool-proof defense line if the enemy would simply walk around it, but…
Yeah, bad timing. Then again, it was fairly common for the enemy force to strive for bad timing. That was kind of the point in war.
The railguns could still fire, they had some energy left. But the defense line was certainly broken now, and with the few people maintaining overwatch over it, it was indefensible without the laser.
One of Palmer’s sidekicks (okay, officers, the locals didn’t know the superhero terminology) in charge of the Black Mamba ordered a full retreat from the external defensive line, while sending a message to the Ball Python about the attack.
Thanks to the cables set up between the two ships, the command center in the transport ship received the message immediately.
The four soldiers that were at the defense line promptly rushed back, just as the railguns were set to an automatic fire. It was only going to buy them a few seconds, but that was all that they needed to rush towards the end of the corridor and leave the enemy range.
Theoretically.
Practically, Revenant was down by two mooks by the end of said corridor.
The Seekers immediately deployed heavy powered armor that sprayed the whole fortification area with bullets before the soldier remotely controlling the railguns concentrated their fire on a single point of its body, and made it retreat for a moment.
The railguns held ground for maybe twenty seconds afterward, before being finally destroyed by another wave of suicide drones. In Revenant’s opinion (that he voiced up much later, once he reviewed the recordings), deploying the powered armor was a minor tactical mistake on the Seekers part, most likely caused due to the commander behind the Corporation unit didn’t expect the defense line to have a concealed high-capacity battery right next to it.
Unlike the cables, it was hidden in the wall. And while it wasn’t enough to fire the laser, it was enough for the railguns to fire.
Especially as Palmer was paranoid enough (honestly, even Revenant was impressed) to put wireless relays here and there, just to allow remote control of the guns from Black Mamba. As a result, Truthseekers ended the initial engagement with a single damaged powered armor and thirty-two destroyed attack drones.
With the defense line that was supposed to successfully repel any attack, it was honestly a big victory for them, once again proving that idiots were disappointingly scarce among the command structures of various organizations of the 26th Century.
The Black Mamba garrison had enough time to send the feed of the powered armor, carrying the Seekers’ iconography. Giving Revenant the identity of the enemy forces. Then, the enemy drone vanguard reached the cable connecting Ball Python and the Black Mamba. And promptly severed it.
This time, it’s not the schedule that Revenant could blame the disaster for. They just didn’t expect the enemy to get so deep without a response force arriving from the Ball Python. They didn’t even plan to cover it up, there was no point and doing that for an almost two kilometers long cable was an insane amount of work for no real benefit.
Or so they thought. Instead, the Black Mamba promptly lost contact with the HQ, leading the officer in charge of it to decide to bunk down and hold the fort until the arrival of the enemy forces - instead of dashing the fuck away from the ship and moving to rendezvous with the relief force.
It was a mistake. Then again, an understandable one, due to said person being a drafted civilian. Intelligent, after a few years long military service and chosen to become a lieutenant in the reserve force. He had skills. But…
His enemy was of incomparable level of skills.
The entrance corridor was fortified, but to a lesser degree than the main defense line. Several automatic turrets, the remaining soldiers behind barricades. Gunfire erupted, and for a brief moment, it felt like a combat of equals.
It was nothing like that.
For the first time during this battle, some of the Endless showed up. Firing down the corridor, advancing forward under the cover of a heavy powered armor carrying two massive shields, powerful enough to (when put in front of it) withstand the heavy weaponry that was available to the defenders.
The powered armor was slow. Bulky. Cumbersome. But it was gaining ground. Out of the seven human defenders, two were shot by the advancing Endless. Reasonably good achievement, considering how overwhelming the enemy force was. They actually managed to kill or injure three Endless.
Then again, refer to their name. They were designed to be expendable.
Once the powered armor got close enough, the officer in charge of Black Mamba’s defense ordered a full retreat and sealing of the ship. It was too late. Then again, in his defense, he couldn’t see the trio of Perfects hiding behind the powered armor, nor could he know just how impossibly quick the Perfects could be.
Black Mamba was captured within the first ten minutes of the battle, Revenant’s faction losing ten mooks in total while eliminating forty-two light attack drones, three Endless and one damaged powered armor. All thanks to the Truthseekers exploiting every single weak spot in the defense line that Revenant and Lieutenant Colonel Palmer managed to establish with their limited time.
Once again, the passage of centuries made people smarter in general. When you were against what was considered to be an elite force in this sort of circumstances, you were in for a bad time.
Enlightened Weber immediately reorganized his units, fully expecting the counterattack from the enemy force. It didn't require an IQ of 200 to realize that cables needed to go in some direction, and with the Black Mamba defenders trying to change the battle into a siege, it was obvious that they were awaiting reinforcements.
From the direction of the cables, most likely. Once again, it was no rocket science. And even if it was, Enlightened Weber had Truthseekers Corporation’s equivalent of a doctorate in, you guessed it, propulsions systems. Including those of modern missiles.
The Seekers began to advance, slowly and carefully. Aware of the fact that the chances of further traps being there were actually fairly big. Especially as their recon drones already found some of them, scattered on the other side of the main defense life.
That was a calculated move on the Seekers side. The biggest success of the defense line that Revenant established was the fact that the Seekers had no understanding of the area behind it. As a result, the enemy was walking in blindly.
Staying there and defending the position while forcing the enemy to come to them was logical… on a first glance. Weber, instead, elected to advance while learning the details of the area… so that in case of attack, they could retreat into an area that they already had scouted.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Scouting was extremely fast when you had a friendly AI (one of the Prometheus’ children) work real-time on rewriting the feed from numerous drones and cameras on the armors of the Endless scattered around into a 3D map of the area, that was then immediately uploaded to Weber’s brain thanks to some active cerebral implants.
The Endless and the Perfects also had those. And yes, they were immediately informed of the exact outline of the corridors they passed too, just to ensure an immediate negation of the informational advantage that the enemy had.
Revenant’s enjoyment of the future was constantly soured by the fact that masterminds of passably high quality were about as common as… Well, nothing comes to mind right now, but in the end, the point was that they were depressingly common.
Less than twenty minutes later, furious gunfire erupted throughout the corridors as Revenant’s forces encountered the Truthseekers’s vanguard.
***
What Udo Weber had already internalized and used to its full potential, Revenant was only realizing right now. Namely, the fact that the commplants opened completely new avenues when tactical command was involved.
It was a bit slower thanks to the lack of a friendly local AI and no active cerebral implants, but even the passive ones he had gave him numerous options. He got himself a handful of people with some computer skills to act as his staff, and had them continuously update the network.
It was like being allowed to use a minimap in real life, with the simple disadvantage of the feed being slightly delayed and suffering from some personal bias. The staff officers were, after all, working on the basis of reports they received from people in the field.
They have a map of the area to work with, but in many cases, all that Revenant has is a, say, ‘3+ enemies, infantry’ marker at some place. And, once again, it is to be expected that the situation changes.
And guess what. The Truthseekers’ officer knew how the system worked, and that the chances of their enemy having active cerebral implants for real-time updates were slim. This was a flaw in Revenant’s command abilities that the enemy was going to take the full advantage of.
In the meantime, the battle… slowed down to a crawl?
***
After about an hour of skirmishes in the tunnels, Revenant has finally achieved certainty. He knew what the enemy was actually doing. And, frankly, it was pissing him off enough to start referring to the mysterious enemy commander as Smartass, even in his mind.
Now, let’s explain the situation correctly. The enemy forces only committed further attack drones and the Endless. The lives of the latter were actually being actively conserved, the enemy retreating after a brief firefight or holding ground and engaging in a long distance firefight that was played out too passively for any side to get seriously injured or, much less, killed.
No Perfects were spotted. That alone was heavily suspicious.
The most important part of predicting the enemy mastermind’s actions? Consider what he knows to figure out what he might be planning. And what did the Smartass know? He knew that the metahumans existed. He knew that they were a threat and a major wildcard that simply couldn’t be predicted.
He encountered a completely unfamiliar enemy force in the direction of the metahuman retreat. What was the logical assumption out of the present events?
Smartass was willingly increasing his own ammunition expenditure to an illogical level despite engaging enemy force at a doorstep of their base - because he was testing the enemy. Waiting for the metahumans to arrive so that he could swarm them with Perfects and, hopefully, capture them with as little damage as possible.
The defenders weren’t even an issue. Seekers were going to blitz through them with a combo of heavy powered armors and the Perfects and then spread Endless far and wide to sweep through the enemy leftovers.
With at least one hundred Endless and a dozen Perfects, it was going to be enough to completely destroy their entire opposing force.
It was a perfectly logical plan.
Revenant was going to use it.
***
There were many things that Revenant was skilled in thanks to his long years of being a villainous mastermind. One of them - and possibly the most important one - was exploiting synergy effects between individualities.
In the world of superheroes and supervillains, 1+1 rarely meant 2. Sometimes it could be 0.5. Sometimes it could be a thousand. It was a matter of analyzing both ones and figuring out how they interacted with each other.
It wouldn’t work during their first meeting with the Truthseekers. But now? Now things have changed significantly. His list of available ones has risen by far. And with the Commander Smartass giving Revenant time to consider his options instead of blitzing first and asking questions later, it was going to bite the Corporation in the ass.
Endless opened fire when they saw the enemy advance. And they quickly realized that the gunfire wasn’t working.
Destro marched first, his individuality at a maximum strength. He called it Hyperadrenaline, which was a name that honestly meant nothing at all. Just a way to refer to it, not actually describing the way it worked.
If Decay was the one to name it, he’d probably call it ‘Nanomachines, son’. Destro changed into a massive, black monstrosity of bulging red vines, built like the Incredible Hulk. His body hardened to the point of being able to walk through anti-tank rounds. And even if someone hit him with enough strength to damage his body, he had a healing factor that would let him regrow limbs.
Oh, and his strength was amplified too.
He was mimicking the enemy powered armor (unknowingly, they didn’t get the feed from the Seekers’ attack on Black Mamba), by carrying two large and extremely thick shields that resisted most of enemy firepower at ease.
The corridor was lengthy, wide and right in front of the center of the enemy line. Revenant ordered an assault right into the central piece of enemy defenses, right into the thickest concentration of the Endless. The firepower they met with was intense.
Then the enemy realized that conventional arms won’t work. So, they fired some high-concentration laser beams. It didn’t work either.
“I THINK THAT THIS IS HOW A RETIREMENT LOOKS LIKE!” Destro yells, with a slightly bloodthirsty grin on his face. Hey, he is fighting the bad guys, that’s enjoyable. “SOME PEACE AND QUIET!!!”
“I…” Virtue, walking right behind him and having just deflected the laser beam to the side. “... question your definition of peace and quiet.”
“IT’S AN AMERICAN PEACE AND QUIET!” Destro yells back, his voice only barely eclipsing the fierce gunfire all around them. Yeah, he is definitely enjoying this immensely.
The enemy - at this point slightly panicky - brought an exotech plasma cannon. A fast-flying ball of superheated plasma that should have completely obliterated the advancing metahuman pain train, if not for a simple fact.
That gravity suddenly went quirky in front of Destro, redirecting the ball back at the enemy.
Singularity was kinda scary when you let her be that.
A moment later, while the enemy (now down by six Endless that were so utterly scorched that there wasn’t anything left and three more that were only partially melted down) was trying to figure out what to do, they got close enough. So, Destro charged forward.
“WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR…” He yells while charging. He is really, really enjoying it. “...THEODORE ROOSEVELT?!”
He can only hope that he will survive Thorn inevitably hunting him for sport. In the meantime, he charges through some of the completely terrified Endless (someone’s morale was hitting rock bottom), crushing or sending them flying in the process.
Gunfire of the remaining Endless is dying out, just as more and more of them are torn to pieces with Virtue’s hardlight bullets and Singularity calmly ragdolling some of them before slamming them into walls.
Twenty Endless, equipped with some of the most modern equipment in the Galaxy, fanatically loyal thanks to hardwired indoctrination and with basically a dream defensive position. Yet, they are being wiped out, left and right.
It’s not the only place where it’s happening. Elsewhere, a smaller squad of the Endless is surprised when the corridor in front of them suddenly erupts with ice, Hypothermia taking a solid chunk of the Ball Python’s water supply with her.
The icecap in the corridor is thick enough to withstand everything that isn’t a plasma cannon. And that particular unit has no plasma cannon. Ice spikes skewer several soldiers even through their body armors, before Hypothermia walks through the ice, wearing her highest-density ice armor. Somehow, it’s as much of a work of art as most of her creations.
A few of the remaining Endless raise their guns. Hypothermia snaps her finger. They have maybe a second or two to realize what was happening before their bodies erupt, the water in it turning into ice.
On the other side, Decay is deployed in similar way, Revenant doing his best to prevent the Endless (seen by the Truthseekers as expendable either way) from rushing forward to crush as many of them as possible, breaking the metahumans support network in preparation for the future engagement.
In the center of the Truthseekers defense line, the enemy was basically stomped. As Revenant expected, Commander Smartass responded with an entire squad of Perfects rushing in, guns blazing.
Revenant prepared for that. The first one barely had the time to register enemies in front of him before he died. Black Knight expanded the effective length of the slashing surface of his sword, a single wave of it decapitating the man that was still about twenty meters away from the villain.
The fact that the Perfect had reflexes good enough to actually dash backward by two meters, despite noticing the attack the moment that the blade entered his neck, was a testament to the incredible work that the Truthseekers have done when designing Perfects was involved.
The reflex alone was… incredible. It wasn’t enough to save that supersoldier, Black Knight expanding his sword’s effective length to compensate, but it was dangerously close to Overclock’s reflex-amp individuality. And it was one of the most powerful of its kind.
The other Perfects after the first one show up, and for a lengthier moment, the room is a mess of multiple simultaneous battles, superhumans clashing left and right, a battle of the intensity that wouldn’t be out of place among many metahuman battles of the Second Villain War.
Now, it's one more case of Truthseekers having an advantage over their enemies and making sure to exploit that fact. For all their individual combat skills, not all metahumans participating in combat on this particular part of the frontline had a lot of experience in fighting as a group. Destro never fought side by side with Black Knight or Singularity, for example.
This couldn’t be said about the Perfects. They were also receiving orders directly from Udo Weber. As a result, the metahumans were at least partially split up, at the cost of two more Perfects.
There were ten of them in total. The situation was pretty bad, although not critical. The metahumans were holding ground, actually winning to some degree. Especially Destro and Virtue were a problem to the Endless, Destro acting as a tank for Virtue to do ranged attacks in peace.
Plasma blades or whatever the hell their stock melee weapon was, it was just too small. Destro slamming a shield in their faces was going to be lethal, even if the Perfect managed to carve a hole in the shield with their blade.
Singularity was mostly busy with attempts on crowd control, using her gravity fields to slam people into the walls. It wasn’t enough to kill them, not with how sturdy they were, but it sure as hell prevented the Perfects from fully employing their numerical superiority.
Black Knight was in trouble, cornered by two Perfects. Of course, the fact that he was cornered made the moment into one of the most enjoyable experiences in his life.
The enemy was fierce, fast as fuck and was capable of one-shotting him if a blow connected (at least if it was the one of his enemies that had a plasma blade in their hands). The dance of dodges, parries and blows?
Oh, he absolutely lives for this shit.
Worst of all, he only managed to slice one of them one more time with a long-range Bladelength x15 slash, and even then, it wasn’t a lethal hit. The enemy realized what Black Knight swinging his sword midair meant, the warning spreading between the Perfects, everyone dodging when it happened.
Absolutely fucking awesome.
He jumps backward, and then fires his pistol at the enemies. It’s a special one, a chamber modified to let the tip of his finger touch every bullet before firing it. And then… Velocity x15.
The Perfect carrying a plasma blade, the one that was more dangerous to him, fails to dodge in time. Their reflex is enough to give him a capacity of dodging bullets of normal firearms at just that range. That one Perfect didn’t expect the bullets to go this fast, and got shot multiple times, the armor-piercing bullets with their extreme velocity piercing their armour easily. .
His friend closes in for an attack, taking advantage of the enemy temporarily focused on his gun instead of blades.
And then, Black Knight notices another person that he didn’t earlier, a man in a corridor behind the Perfect. It’s at this moment that the villain suddenly feels his body freeze in place, unable to move a single centimeter before the attacking Perfect pierces through his Durability x15 armored business suit.
Fuck. At least the sheer adrenaline rush of the blade getting close to his chest gave him enough of sheer strength to power through the restraints and snap the Perfect’s neck. Before, regretfully, dying to the blade in his chest.
Fuck that too, Overhaul is around, and it was fucking fun. Say what you want about Revenant, he gives Black Knight the best fights.
***
Spend quite a while refining the image, but... here you have it.
And no, the length of the rifle isn't due to compensating for something, it's because it's the heavy anti-armor rifle used to deal with powered armors.
It's for increased armor penetration.
Obraz [https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1106241074403483798/1132028506293940344/image.png]