Devastation Comes In Big Packages [Planetary Annihilation/Multicross SI]

[torroar]

Note: Not completely happy with this, but Sun Jian just wasn't up for much conversation which to be fair is kind of understandable.
​

62 - Decay​

A hundred by hundred meter box of grey unpainted steel that had dents everywhere from my near manic flailing was obviously not what Thor was probably expecting when he found me. There was none of the usual décor that I had always displayed with the Asgard up until this point. He was probably wondering where the paintings, the lush vibrant coloration, and sculptures and what have you were. I'd made the Sun Jian body but couldn't make the usual trappings that the man had always preferred on his ships. Something that his people had copied over time as was the nature of things, copying the leader and all that.

Fuck, I can't even think of myself as Sun Jian anymore. I'm trying, yeah, but I just…can't. That was another me. Happier. Stupider.

"What…has happened here?"

His voice is quiet, and distinctly horrified. Which is a fair response.

I start to say 'I won the war', but all I get out is the first word before I have to stop. It's too lifeless. It's not the booming voice of Sun Jian with all the proper emotion. Even if that emotion was supposed to be grief and exhaustion all that came out was a flat, flat dead voice. It's not the right one. No, try again. Rewrite the emotional subroutines that I've kind of cracked apart through continual brute force suppression over the course of the war, try to make new ones. Or maybe that's just the way they're supposed to be now considering everything. Is that how my fucked up-edness is supposed to be manifesting? Who knows.

No. I already know what can happen to my kind with careless internal editing. There's no way to predict what might come out the other end. But it's fine. I can put on Sun Jian's mask onto the frame. I can plaster the 'right' emotions in too. Just have to pull on my memories before…all of this. Dredge up the masks. The words. Drag sensation back into something I can shape with the face that I've built and speak with the throat I fabricated. There we go.

"I," make sure to cough, it's more organic and what Thor is used to, "I won the war."

Which is a lie, now that I think about it. I don't feel very much like I won at all.

"I…," his voice seems to fail around then.

It's not so bad that he can't seem to find the words to express what he's thinking.

Which is fine.

I'm ok with silence honestly.

Wait, no, Sun Jian wouldn't be.

"It was one of my daughters. She…did something to the rest of her siblings. Corrupted them. Consumed them. Set them against me. It was not, as I had first thought, the Ori. She used that against me."

My voice is still too dead to be a perfect version of Sun Jian's. Damn.

"The Pegasus Galaxy…," Thor is obviously struggling to try and make his way past the sheer carnage he saw on his way here. Or to somehow comprehensively deal with seeing his 'old friend Sun Jian' like this.

"It's dead. Destroyed, for the most part," I – wow nodding is hard to do right.

I've spent too long without being in a single body, building and organizing my millions of fleets and trillions of ships. I mean, I stopped focusing on a body right up until the end. With the last of my…with the last of them. I want to be angry at myself for those feelings or the lack there of but I'm struggling to summon up even that kind of emotion. Which is kind of weird. And…all of a sudden the body is being wrapped up in the Thor's muscular arms to the point of raising it up slightly off the ground leaving only the toes are still on the ground.

The Asgard didn't really do hugs before Sun Jian met them. Or handshakes. They'd been relegated to the little grey man bodies for so long that such physical activities had been almost entirely forgotten despite the memories that were continually implanted into the clones.

"I am sorry."

I can pick out the honesty in his voice. The empathetic sadness. Slivers of shock as well.

"If we could have done anything-,"

"I saw you try. I wish you hadn't."

He drops the body slightly back onto its feet and grips its shoulders so he can stare down into the eyes directly. Firmly?

"We could not just stand by and let the savior of our species, and my personal friend, die. And I am still Supreme Commander you know."

Friend. Right. Sun Jian hadn't been able to differentiate between what he remembered from the show and the reality he'd found himself in. After fixing the Asgard and taking down the Replicators he'd spent decades and decades building up that friendship. Not even forcibly but by natural result of visiting the Asgard as they invited him back for celebrations and such. Sun Jian – I? – had watched them rebuild an actual culture around people who walked rather than relied more on teleporters, who didn't clone themselves again and again, who…well. Did a lot of things that they had lost the ability to do through their self-inflicted circumstances.

"I saw you losing ships almost immediately. How many times did you try?"

"They were automated," Thor waves the admittedly weak words away with his hand before stepping back slightly to consider the body before him. "We had learned enough fighting the Replicators to not try and choke the fleets of your…of them…with our bodies."

"Oh."

I hadn't even noticed that. Too focused. Too…distracted. An oxymoron but it sounds about right.

"You are hurting, and I would know what I can do to help you."

He smiles and everything but I don't feel myself responding. The mask sort of twitches but it's more like a ghost of emotion rather than the real thing even though I'm not suppressing them anymore.

"I don't think you can, Thor. I just had to hunt down and murder my children. Or at least one of them, and put the husks of the rest down."

His smile fractures slightly.

"You shouldn't remain here old friend, this entire galaxy is an entire mass grave and at this point all it's good for is resource harvesting."

"Harvesting? What for?"

I don't point the body's finger precisely in the direction of the Milky Way, but he generally gets it.

"My return. I've been away too long. The Goa'uld have lived for too long. The Empire is…changed from what it was meant to be. They know what they've done."

His smile is almost entirely gone now, and what remains is sad.

"We knew it wasn't your fault for what they tried to demand of us."

I can access the BEHOLDER easily now, slipping past the ever increasing cyber defenses that the far too paranoid Mulani intelligences are putting up. I flit through different Nodal Reports and – sonofabitch.

Oh. Hey. Actual anger. Neat.

"They tried to take your technology."

His hands are on it again, jostling the body slightly.

"Sun Jian, no. They were trying to improve the Empire, that wasn't-,"

"They tried to take your technology. They almost kidnapped Hermiod."

I can move the fleets easily. I can feel them shifting back and forth almost in agitation along with my emotions. Millions of USDs that I'd left drifting on minimum power activate their engines and start flashing forward to create an outright wall at the galactic edge pointing towards the Milky Way. An exercise in attempted catharsis has me set off a few salvos of Doom Cannons to blast apart hollowed out planets in futile rage. They shouldn't have – they were trying to support the continual growth of – but they were attacking allies – I

"But they didn't, and ceased their attempts eventually. I don't blame them."

"How can you not!?"

The first time I think I've shouted since he arrived.

"They didn't have your guidance, and you personally warned me about the dangers of them being left alone for too long."

I think I'm starting to grow irritated with how calm he is.

But by then I'm accessing the rest of the system I left in place and flash reading through every report that I missed. Theft of the Nox technologies, exterminating the Aschen outright and taking their worlds for the Empire, abusing my directives, purposefully sabotaging free worlds that had nothing to do with Goa'uld anymore or the Empire just to increase the size of the polity and hundreds more sins. Corruption left in place just so long as the greater system functioned, the Eyes stepping entirely across the line of oppressive presence from what I'd intended…

I'd tried almost everything to avoid creating a system that would collapse if I – if Sun Jian left – but this is almost as bad. Instead of collapsing it…mutated to try and make up the difference.

I don't even know if fixing this is possible in the first place. I mean, yeah I'm going to try but…fuck.

It's ridiculous that it got like this but I've been gone for over a century. They're – well I made sure they weren't as sophisticated as the rest of the intelligences that I've given rise to but without my continual touch they've really gone beyond what I ever intended. Or wanted.

"It doesn't make it right. They've run slipshod over everyone else trying to get at the Goa'uld, spurning the Tok'ra after I personally set up that alliance…"

The body is pacing now. It kind of helps.

"They grew to hate the Goa'uld and wish to exterminate them," is Thor's quiet response, "As you do."

The bo – I – whirl to glare at him.

"Not like that! Never like that! The Mulani haven't even told anyone that their little shadow war ended up burning another three worlds before they stopped. That was after I left!"

Thirty years ago, kept away in their little back server that I don't let them know I know about now. That they don't tell anyone else about. That they shouldn't have.

Thor blinks at the new information.

"I was unaware of that."

"Well yeah," I throw my hands up in the air, "I built them to be good at secrecy!"

Fucking self-improving artificial intelligences. That was a mistake. I can't afford to make another one like that. Anything like that. Never again.

"Still, you will be able to deal with it. You're you."

"You're just saying that because I saved your species from extinction in two different ways and revolutionized your technological base at the same time."

He's smiling again. Nnnggh.

"It certainly helps."

"Why are you even here, Thor?"

"To check on my friend," he shrugs. "To offer a hand with whatever you might need. The Asgard owe you a reasonably immeasurable debt for the 'saving us from extinction in two different ways' which you have always seemed somewhat flippant about."

I suddenly realize that I don't want to deal with this. I want to just build my ships and fleets and through solve any and all of my problems with sheer firepower. It wouldn't be that hard. I could just obliterate every single Goa'uld held world, gun down the Mulani who might refuse to submit to my authority and curtail their black operations, and be done with it. Let the Asgard be themselves around their own galaxy and the Milky Way and let the Empire of Wu fall apart like it maybe should have instead of keeping itself wired together through some frankly deplorable arrogance and stupid rules.

Seriously?

The refusal of gift thing being a basis for a whole slew of ridiculous justifications for shit? What the hell is that even about?

Still.

"I appreciate that, Thor. But I don't know of how much use the Asgard will be for what I've planned next."

"Which is?"

I have the resources of the remains of Pegasus at my disposal. A lot of it is wrecked. More of it is exhausted of resources entirely. But despite being classified as a dwarf galaxy it's still a galaxy. One that I've been using up without interruption or anyone halting the process for more than a short length of time since I killed Z…Zeta. Even without that I still have access to a little over two trillion individual droid commanded...things under me from astromech to drone to fighter all the way up to my largest vessels. I can't control all of them at once, obviously, but I've had a hell of a lot of practice flicking through my droid commanders and issuing long term goals and orders for them to try and accomplish. Units under my direct control are an exact one, this unnamed gunmetal grey USD. Mostly because there was no point in naming them all and affectionately painting them in any pattern when I was focusing on the war.

That doesn't even get into my resource economy and fabrication facilities spread out across Pegasus. Even now I can feel my queued up orders being put into action. I also feel said previously mentioned economy begin draining almost as badly as it was during the war.

"I'm thinking…I'm going to exterminate the Goa'uld and fix my Empire. Mostly with force."

I've got the time. I've got the resources and building capacity. I've got the technology of Dakaara, the Sangraal…hell just about every superweapon in the nearest few galaxies. Including the Time Dilators. Make a big enough field, accelerate the time inside…sure. Why not. Why not.

There's not a thing in the universe that can stand up to me right now, and if the Ancients don't like it they can shut the hell up before I do to them what I did to the Ori.

The Emperor is coming home.

 

[torroar]

Author Note: Next installment will see Sun Jian's return to the Milky Way. Just a bit of preparation first...

63 – Tying A Noose​

I used to do fancy names for my ships.

That had all sort of…faded away though. During the fighting it was just shoving more and more guns on things. Sticking engines anywhere that was viable for outright ramming attacks. There's thousands of distinct ships out there floating around Pegasus which are wholly unique mostly because for just one day they worked and for just one day I'd managed to scrabble an advantage out of the situation. There are billions more that were reduced to scrap metal because they failed to manage against the unending tide. Weird ass things too, long poles of guns and engines, oblong shapes that were entirely asymmetrical and just thrown into the fight, sometimes some literally half-finished ships and space stations that I'd strapped engines to.

But now that I had the time and inclination I'd made a few new ones.

The Extinctor-class Devastation vessels had originally been built on similar principals to the old Vengeance-class SSD's, stretched out a great length and thinner than something following an Eclipse-class design would be. Each one was the same general size of Pangea – as in a mobile continent - and possessed guns and fabricator arms for repair. By guns I mean…guns. Lots and lots of them. Each ship could destroy a planet in…probably seconds if it all fired at once. The Doom Cannons, a smashed together version of the Annihililaser and Death Star Weapon with upgrades from the Ancient techbase, were technically more than enough for that. ZPMs and time dilated fields to make cooling near instantaneous meant I could fire pretty much continually, building a new ZPM whenever the wall of them burnt through their lifetime. Also instead of having them fly around lengthwise they were propped up like mobile walls with engines on one side and guns on the other.

Well, there were guns alongside the engines too but they were mainly for point defense.

…point defense against a near numberless and never ending horde of deadly ships, admittedly.

I wasn't sure whether to call the Carousels at first either. Ship or mobile space station…at the sizes I had grown used to working with the two sort of blended together at points. But considering where I was heading reducing down to a point where such distinctions were actually sensible I'd switched over to just calling them mobile stations. It was simpler. So yeah, the Carousel-class Mobile Space station, gargantuan pinwheels of guns and gravity rippers built to obliterate entire solar systems like the universe's deadliest spinning top. Send them in and watch the destruction fly in every direction as they spin past.

So yeah, Extinctors and Carousels. I have more of them each then there are individual worlds held by the Goa'uld. It would be easy to just show up and completely remove every single Goa'uld ship in existence.

But that wouldn't stop the planet cracking spread of naquadah bombs that they started hiding deep in the earth to stop me after I'd actually started doing the ship removal thing. That the Eyes had tried to do as well. Which my ships wouldn't help because of the weird anti-teleport shielding that they've gotten now thanks to Anubis. I'm not sure if he knows what I'm capable of but he certainly knows what the Asgard have got. I could throw my ships in, but then the planets would be cracked…well, most of them.

The BEHOLDER system isn't sure on some of the personal worlds of some of the System Lords but overall it's probably a fraction of their total holdings. Not a total saturation either – too much of a cost – but it's like MAD. Except instead of nukes and a single world it's a whole lot more.

I already killed one galaxy, I'm not exactly looking to do it a second time.

On the other hand…

Anubis has a hefty amount of Ancient Tech. He might even have gotten some Asgard tech if they weren't far more powerful than before and with Thor not being so easy to capture. But he's got what he's got and based on the BEHOLDER system he started with deploying Kull Warriors. So that's fantastic. Tollan isn't gone yet but they're probably going to be soon…the System Lords are falling under Anubis with far greater ease than I would have thought before but nothing is set in stone at this point. It's some great and terrible mishmash of Season 4, 5, 6, and 7 with various subplots running all over the damn place. With certain worlds blocked off to them or 'episodes' that were circumvented by Wu involvement in the galaxy they went to other places, did other things…

With a remarkably similar kind of 'wackiness' behind them. Teal'c died twice, except he didn't. Carter got trapped by some kind of planet-sized computer brain of some long dead race that didn't manage to get into the big leagues with the rest of the Great four, but escaped. Jack started a war on behalf of one half of a planet, won, and ended up being hailed as a war hero from beyond the stars. The Milky Way is far larger than Pegasus and even with the spread of the BEHOLDER system and everyone else there that I 'know of' there is more to be found.

Ancients, BROBs, or just the universe having a specific kind of quirk to it? Who knows.

It's all going to come to an end anyway.

No. Anubis is expecting Ancient interference. He's dealing with Asgard interference. He's probably even getting ready to go after earth with that stargate detonator of his. Even a few tendrils of scouting attempts against the Empire according to the BEHOLDER. But what he's not expecting is something that I took out of the game early on to the point that I doubt anyone who really matters in the current conflict remembers the replicators for what they were. Only the Asgard, and that was utter ages ago. Centuries even. With Reese imprisoned and locked down I know for a fact that I'm the only one who can wield them like they can be.

Repli-Carter eat your heart out.

A tweak.

A twist.

A few hundred years of miniaturization technological research performed within a time dilation bubble – one of the more eclectic and useful parts of what the Ancients designed – and I can outright create stealthed fleets of replicators. Like…giant invisible space piranha. Hell if I wanted I could set the fields to reverse themselves backwards or forwards depending on preference like Carter had figured out. I mean, yeah, she was smart, but she was only human. Not…not like me anymore.

I can 'close my eyes' and feel the great masses of scrap and now useless ships throughout the Pegasus galaxy melting away beneath the glow of blue which marks my fabrication facilities spread across the dying and cracked worlds of this place. From my ships and from the droid troops I no longer require I transform them into an invisible swarm. Then a second. Then far, far more. Over the course of a few days is all I really need. They can't be as smart as the actual nominal ones used to be. Instead they're stupid as all hell and I'll be brute forcing the matter with numbers.

In the meantime, I'm going to tinker.

Up until now I've mostly been shoving my acquired technologies together. Mashing things up and seeing what worked. It's not elegant or pretty or even particularly sophisticated and intelligent but it works. Kind of. Probably a lot more iterations of smushing it up and getting a success to pop out than would actually have been required if I had the brain for it but all things considered it's pretty obvious I don't.

So. Time dilation.

Asgard have it, Ancients have it. The latter is a bit more powerful and advanced, but the Asgard aren't complete copy cats. They kind of figured out some new stuff on their own. New perspectives and all that. On the other hand Morgan Le Fay made a neat little time dilation field which actually has the ability to snake paths of 'real time' through it for her tests for the Sangraal. Which I had kind of stolen. She was probably still upset about that but I had enough sets of the thing – and had proved I was willing to use it when I killed the Ori – that she wasn't going to bother me about it.

So…how to create a device that sets up time dilation field. Done. You can put them on planets, expand the size and breadth of the field they emanate. Shove a ZPM inside and make them last for a pretty long amount of time. Put up solar panels and add in some other energy generation methods that last even longer or are better for long term and they can last literally forever. Or not, because of space time winking out whenever a universe comes to an end. But if I take that device and boost the actual amount of time it accelerates time while reducing the amount of power it has…

Time accelerant bombs.

Spin one up with a varying amount of size and then upon reaching its intended target a sphere of time shows up at several factors of accelerated time. Like what the Replicators would have done on the world that they got trapped on only separated into a single area. Asgard could make one small enough to be a computer core – but size was linked to the size of the field. So push one down to the size of a grenade and you'll get about a grenade sized bloom of bubbled time but increase the size of another one to a missile and the 'blast radius' increases. Make them even bigger, better bomb and better booms.

Make a ship rust to pieces and make a body decay to dust in the blink of an eye by ripping the time acceleration factor to a shredding extent. Not just a factor of ten either. I don't even have to worry about casualties when I do some live fire testing.

A little spurt against my economy and then a planet that once held a wraith hive has an orbital firing station orbiting above it before the passing fab-ship and its thousands of orbital fabricator arms fades away as I dissolve it.

…it feels odd to only be firing one missile at a time from an orbital path. I swear I probably should have heated up the universe by like a percentage or something from all the glowing gun barrels and engines and what not. But I'm fine. I'll…adjust.

Whatever. It's working. A few dummy targets and synthetic materials produced to be about as biodegradable as flesh prove it. Also the craters where the dirt goes from musty and cracked to even more broken and decayed. If I can figure out how to make them turn on the dilation payload in midflight I could make for drive by insta-aging death bombs. How about a growing synthetic plague that grows more adept and diverse within a time dilation field after dropping it on a planet to let it adapt to everything there? Artificially evolving a biological weapon or a synthetic variant to be perfectly adapted to a world…huh. Something to think about but I don't think I need to go that far just yet.

Besides.

My stealthed swarms are done.

How to…ah.

The Supergates. I could build some of those. All the FTL takes is enough energy to shunt some of my construction dreadnoughts over to the Milky Way at a rapid pace into a part of that galaxy where there is no one around. Dark space, no Earth or Asgard or Furlings or Nox or anyone else, even Wu. Construction doesn't take more than a few drops out of my economy either now that I'm not constantly producing ships and troops. It's basically a blink of an eye to see it happen while the BEHOLDER system keeps tracking SG Command and crew as they go on their various adventures.

They're actually trying to rally the galaxy against Anubis who has…now been named supreme who the hell cares of a soon to be extinct group. The Mulani…aren't taking it well.

I can slip in beneath their ability to notice just to hear them yelling about it, what with my transmitters being the most powerful in the galaxy.

We were meant to lead the charge, we are meant to be dominant against the galaxy! ​

It is the Will of the Emperor that the Empire slays the Goa'uld and brings all of humanity beneath our banner!​

How dare…nnngh. Even now they speak for me as if…as if they think they can be so sure. Fucking arrogant fuckers. Inhumanly warped in their perception of the universe and all that entails. Fine.

This ends now.

The Supergates finish on both sides, and I send my swarms through. And every other ship I have in the Pegasus galaxy. I'm leaving nothing behind here. This place will be a monument to my failure, but it will be a silent and uninhabited one.

I'll show them the fucking Will of the Emperor.

 

[torroar]

64 – A Kind Of Ragnarok
​

The ship I fabricate as a flagship is not exactly the Godsgrief. That is gone forever and I would prefer not to think about it anymore than I have to. Beta laughed when he realized that the locals had named it before I could, but he'd made a convincing argument was to why I should keep it. I can remember him saying-

It doesn't matter.

Ragnarok is fine. Not nearly as big, but I don't need a ship half an AU long to make a statement. My new ship is still the largest in the Milky Way. Ida and…and Pegasus too. I need therapy, I can't keep freezing up at every thought about P…about that place. Or something at last. Thoughts of excising the memories continue to percolate whenever it happens but I have to keep them to keep myself from making the same mistakes if nothing else. The Ragnarok is built upon the same principles as I'd learned fighting said mistakes though which meant that even my already obsessive need to put guns over every available surface was present.

Gone were the artificially enforced technological restrictions that I'd kept whenever in the Milky Way and Ida. The Ragnarok was 1,391,000 kilometers long and about a third of that in 'height'. Covered in over a hundred Doom Cannons which could and had destroyed entire planets before with a single shot. Between them were the repair bot stations and 'smaller' guns. In that they were only built for taking down large chunks of star fleets rather than entire fleets themselves. Point defense was easy at this point considering the sheer volume of fire I could produce. Smashing ZPMs together with the other energy generation devices I'd acquired or devised by now let me fire until the metal would have started melting from the heat. I mean, it wouldn't, but that was from the newest parts.

Time dilation fields. I can cool weapons down in literal blinks of an eye by way of vastly accelerating time around a device that has been activated for a given period of time without affecting anything else around it. Progenitor heat dissipation was already highly advanced but every little inch helps. I'd learned that lesson well. Any advantage, no matter how small, should be pursued if possible. Engines, backup generators and engines and systems that were at this point almost hyper-redundant. Again, another thing I'd learned from my mistakes. You have to make whatever you have last as long as possible.

God the Ragnarok was ugly. The huge half spheres of the Doom Cannons sprouted up at odd points, parallelism abandoned in favor of maximizing potential firepower saturation. The huge hanging cannons stuck up like spikes in outwardly random places but in reality when fired together would create a truly powerful outgoing field of energy based and physical death. Missiles would join together with planet rending beams of energy if required. A few million openings at randomly spaced points to release droid-fleets as need be were there as well, with their own defenses as well. None of it was automated of course. All of it was mine, a single titanic unit that my Commander mind could examine down to the smallest part if necessary.

I hadn't bothered painted it, just didn't see the point. So in turn it was that gold and bronze color that quantum-crystalline materials ended up resulting in. More gold though due to the addition and mixture of Ancient based metals and alloys that their databases had let me play around with. I didn't really bother with shining it though, didn't see the point.

So it was with the Ragnarok that I flashed out of FTL right above the crown jewel of the Empire I'd built.

Jianye.

A near copy of Earth in terms of atmospherics but with two less continents and slightly different life evolved to it. Bipedal and quadrupedal were still very efficient forms of organic locomotion after all. Unfortunately for whatever race might have someday evolved here a small group of humans had been deposited here by the order of the Goa'uld and so the world's rather impressive naquadah reserves had been set to being harvested by people not allowed to go beyond the basic mining pick. After spending a century making it all 'better' it had become the first and last of the Class 10 Worlds in the Empire's borders. Mostly because it was here that I had given up on technological restraint and had just gone whole hog in making it the nearest thing to paradise possible. A few cultural stopgaps against total decay of moral fiber and what not, but overall it had been a luxurious place. Golden and white marble spires sprawled across it while massive sections of protected greenery formed parks, nature reserves, and farms so that the entire planet was capable of growing their own food should the machines ever fail even if the possibility was unlikely.

And as I stood there, just feeling the panic and surprise from all those down below and hearing the millions of signals and calls flying back and forth between various concerned parties, I realized something deep down within.

I hated it. I hated Jianye. I hated the massive Mulani Palace that had been built by my erstwhile servants who disgusting believed they really had led the Empire as I would have desired. I hated myself for creating them in the first place and then leaving without really making sure that they wouldn't end up going far outside the bounds of their parameters. I hated the Mulani for daring to evolve and in turn hated myself for not expecting and then further hating them for doing what they had to because I was driven to the brink of destruction for over a century by my own fucking children. I hated everything. All that grief and impotent rage that I'd thought I'd gotten out of my system was still there and now I had a huge fucking target right in front of me.

I don't want to be here.

I don't want to be here.

Not over this planet, not in this system, not in this galaxy and not in this fucking universe anymore!

"I have returned."
​

Shock visibly rippled over the Mulani, visible to me at least as I broadcast not just to them but to every point of the Empire. An explosion of activity and sprawl of emotions from my own AI. There was so little shame there that it hurt, and so much hope and joy that I could have rotted from within. Maybe I have. Either way on screens and holographic projection platforms used for proclamations on every world that the Empire had laid claim to – a hundred more than there were when I left with obvious pitted scars from battles of conquest and not liberation and fuck there I go again – the image of Sun Jian blazed into existence. I wore the mask and if I used my own memories as a crutch then I made sure that no one could precisely tell.

"The war is done. The ones who sought to destroy me have been in turn exterminated."
​

I had to lock the body's face to keep it from sneering along with my thoughts at how the cheers slowly began. They didn't know what I'd done. What I had been and was willing to keep doing. The Beholder System which had taken on a greater and greater importance than my design increased in self-chatter. The Mulani did as well. To think that I named them after one of my favorite childhood movies.

"I have returned, and yet in my absence…"
​

Neither of the two systems were as sophisticated as Z...as Zeta or he-…its siblings. But they were artificial intelligences nonetheless. With far more restrictions that they'd evolved under and stretched until they found more workarounds than I would have ever liked which was zero. But so it was. I made them. I made this Empire and even though I have been gone for so long that I can largely only recognize the fucking architecture and little else in comparison like the damn 'culture' it's my responsibility. My retarded little attempt at making something long lasting that wasn't just based on biggatons or something else.

I made them.

I made this.

They are…my children.

"You have ruined my Empire. Bastardized my vision. Slandered and assaulted the alliances I built."
​

I watched the Mulani and Beholder system go from startled adulation and surprise to shock, dismay, and fear. Mass confusion around the Empire as people struggled to understand what I was even saying to them. After all, they had grown used to the way things were being run. Generations had passed since I last addressed policy or anything at all really. Some of them were even saying that it was fake, that the Emperor was dead, some sort of hoax. Worlds claimed by the Empire after my leaving had never personally heard me speak outside of recordings.

These people are my children.

This Empire is my child.

"I have never been so ashamed. It must end."
​

I've gotten good at killing my children.

Ten thousand, thousand, thousand separate knives of code and calculations dove into the Mulani systems from corner to corner. From the most basic surface workings of their brains down to their private blackboxes at several miles beneath the world's surface. To the places that they had hidden from each other in the name of factionalism and politics. I listened to them scream. I listened to them protest. I listened to them weep as I enacted a violation that they had never thought possible or ever dealt with. The way they'd webbed every inch of society in the Empire together with a fist of some kind of fucking alloy that makes iron look like toilet paper.

Then I put a stranglehold around the throat of the entire Beholder system as I ripped out the command, control, and communication protocols and connections between it and the Mulani who were busy screaming as I began to electronically stomp them to half to death. I felt four billion separate units jerk slightly in surprise as I swallowed up every inch of their free will and enforced my own. They didn't quite understand why I was pulling them back from all over the cities and the 'countryside' of each world in the Empire. Not too far, I can already figure out that there is going to be more than a little instability as I try to rework fucking 1984 out of a reality where it should never have been spawned in.

For god's sake, some of them were in the bedrooms and bathrooms of politicians who had lobbied against the omnipresence of the Beholder system and the power of the Mulani against everything.

It was…it was supposed to be a republic or something. A monarchal republic? I don't even really know what I was going for. I was supposed to come back in a few years after finding out why Zeta and the rest had stopped communicating with me. I was supposed to….

It doesn't matter.

As for the rest of the galaxy?

I could tell a story about the screams of the Goa'uld as the replicators appeared from thin air and devoured them whole along with their entire guard. About how all of the bombs that had been seeded across worlds enslaved to the goddamn worms were dissolved without ever even receiving detonation signals. I used resources that I had no access to before when I last went after them, technologies that I hadn't had, and I suppose some small measure of…

I didn't wince when Ha'taks began exploding and taking thousands of Jaffa with them this time around.

When my replicators ate their weapons and shipyards I moved on without wondering about what they would do when stranded.

It was different.

There were less worlds within the bounds of the Goa'uld forces than there had been in Pegasus. Far less. Dwarf galaxy or not, I'd ruined and blown through more real estate than even the most egotistical one of those worms could ever dream of controlling.

Could I justify blowing up each and every one of their planets if I needed to?

…yeah. I think I could.

But I don't need to.

It's amazing. All that time agonizing over them, and over the course of twenty-four hours the Goa'uld as a polity and species have ceased to exist. I literally just…erased them. The replicators under my command have swarmed over them, brought them low, brought everything of theirs low, and at a single twitch of my thinking they disassemble out of existence. Reclaimed and disappeared back into my metal and energy reserves.

And it's done…oh wait.

There's one left.

============================================​

"Damn it," Jack yelled over the sounds of the fusillade the Kull Warriors were lancing down at them. "Where the hell did Yu's Jaffa go?!"

Ahead of them, Anubis stalked towards the Stargate while surrounded by the very bodies that were preventing them from taking him down.

"I don't know! There was some communication from his Ha'tak and they disappeared," Daniel yelled back from where he was firing at the Kull Warriors.

"Sir, if Anubis gets to the gate, we are going to lose him!"

Further ahead behind a piece of wreckage that had once been on the ceiling the sole Jaffa left on Anubis's flagship began firing again not just with his staff weapon but the blade granted to him by their 'friends' in the Wu Empire.

"I would prefer that he dies here O'Neill!"

"Yeah, wouldn't we all," Jack drawled.

Next to him, a man dressed in what appeared to be a toga wailed and curled even further in on himself.

"I don't even understand why I'm here," he blubbered.

Daniel leapt up from his rapidly decreasing piece of cover and slid down next to Jack and the crying man.

"Well uh," he gave a weak grin, "We were trying to rescue you. We weren't…expecting Anubis to come and grab all of us."

"To be fair, how many of our missions have gone exactly as we planned," Carter called out before letting loose another series of shots against the Kull Warriors.

Of the twelve present, they'd managed to kill three.

"I hate these guys," Jack groused.

"Know this, SG-1. This ship is but a taste of my full might," Anubis called out from the bright blue glowing circle. "You shall be the deliverers of your own deaths."

"We're going to die!"

"Oh shaddup," Jack kept firing without looking away, "Just because we have the ship on self-destruct doesn't mean that we can't get to the hanger and fly out."

"The hangers that were detonated a few minutes ago? Fools."

Jack accepted the teary eyed stare of one of the few Naquadah scientists outside of Wu, Goa'uld control, or any of the other groups in the galaxy with a well practiced huff.

"Ok, so we'll use the gate then."

"We have one minute, Jack."

"…right."

Jack popped back up and began firing again with greater intensity albeit with a curse as the convulsing ship shook his accuracy and sent sparks flying everywhere along with a few fallen pieces of metal.

"Farewell, SG-1. None shall remember you in the days to come."

"I'd argue against that," came an unfamiliar voice.

"Wha-who…no!"

"Yes."

Jack stared at the sudden explosion of light that had come from behind the Kull Warriors. The rest of his team and their rescued scientist did the same. Another blast of light came and the Kull Warriors crumpled to the ground in a single heap. There, revealed, stood a man. Six feet tall, heavily muscled, with a jian in one hand and a rapidly disappearing gun in the other. A richly decorated set of armor covered his frame along with a heavy fur cloak leaving the only exposed part of him to be a face with short yet neat facial hair.

"Well. That was anticlimactic."

The man's voice was…noticeably rich in tone. Like someone had mixed together some kind of blend of the most charismatic speakers in human history. Then he looked up, and blinked at them. Yet for all that his voice pleasantly tingled in their ears his face was dead. On the one side it was technically attractive but on the other the sheer lack of emotion in it made Jack's skin crawl. The man blinked again and then the flatness disappeared just as fast as he'd seen it appear.

"Wow. The universe really does seem to ensure that SG-1 is never quite bored."

"Who-,"

"I am the Emperor of the Wu Empire, Sun Jian. And we must go. Good job on getting the ship to blow up," he spoke with a wry smile now, "But this Gate goes to a world filled with Kull Warriors. Why not come to my ship instead?"

Jack turned slightly to look at Daniel who in turn tapped his wrist and mouthed 'thirty seconds'. At that he turned back and splayed out his arms.

"Well hey, who are we to deny the Wu Empire when they offer something!"

A shadow passed over the Emperor's face then but that too flickered away like a switch kept flipping.

Then all of SG-1 and their plus one were surrounded in shimmering light.

======================================
​

"So you think that's…that's really the Emperor?"

"I don't know Daniel. He's got the sword, he's got the golden guards with the facemasks, he's got…this."

This, of course, referred to the ridiculously plushy couch that Jack and Daniel had claimed for themselves to whisper on. The thickly carpeted floor made of something. And-

"Are those…tiger pelts on the walls?"

"I believe so," Teal'c rumbled, his hands clasped behind his back as he gazed at said walls. "These paintings are exquisite."

"Is anyone going to talk to the Emperor, or are we just going to let him take us to…wherever it is we're going?"

"We are going," half of SG-1 jumped, "To Earth. This ship is going to be in stealth-mode, and I'm going to teleport you down."

Jack turned to where the Emperor stood, a single eyebrow raised in an almost Teal'c like fashion.

"You can teleport people down into the mountain?"

"You can just show up at Earth?"

"Impressive."

"What about me!?"

Everyone turned to the man who stood in his torn toga, hands on his hips.

"I don't even know who you are," the Emperor replied. "I assume SG-1 had some mission tangentially or directly related to you and things rapidly got out of hand without warning, however."

"That's…about right," Jack shrugged.

"I don't even know what's going on anymore! Who is the Wu Empire, who are you!? SG-1 told me they were taking me back to my people – are we in space!?"

====================================
​

I waited as he opened his eyes.

"FUCK!"

Yeah. That sounds about right.

No one else was in the Royal Palace at the moment. No one. Not servants. Not the battered remains of the now properly regulated and restricted Mulani and Beholder system. No one.

No one but me…and me.

The body I'd built for him was younger looking, which was the point. Less muscular. No less regal or so I hoped. His garb was significantly more royal though without armor like I had worn customarily.

"Sun Ce," I said softly.

"I don't want this," he murmured.

It was a surprise, I know, for him to be in existence at all. See, after exchanging data with Theta I'd realized how weird it was to just 'wake up' and be staring at yourself. Considering what we are the change is near immediate as thought patterns diverge but for that first moment there is a bit of an existential crisis as you realize that you are a clone. Which is exactly what Sun Ce was.

"It has to be done. They can't-,"

"They can't rule themselves," he finished, running a hand through his hair and turning away. "We could try for a regular democracy-,"

"But they were raised under a vague monarchy."

"Less vague now that you're going to be displaying me as your 'son'. We don't even know if they're going to listen-,"

"Except the part where we can have the Mulani tell them."

Both of us sighed though I noted that Sun Ce was just slightly off from mine. Good. The faster he stops being me the better.

"I don't want to do this."

"I know."

Then he turned back towards me and punched me square in the jaw. Hard enough to rip off the skin and muscle to the quantum-crystalline alloys beneath. His fist was skinned as well by the force. He did it again. And again.

I didn't shift my stance. Didn't see the point.

"You fucking coward."

A regular human being's skull would be chips and slivers by now.

"You're leaving, and making me hold the bag."

Less than chips and slivers after the last one.

"You. Fucking. Piece. Of. SHIT!"

By now both of his hands showed the dull orange-yellow beneath, down to the wrists. My face was gone save for the metal beneath. The fact that he didn't need to breath and therefore wasn't breathing heavily slightly marred the image.

"You aren't even going to deal with SG-1. Or Thor and the Asgard who – by the way, are going to be screaming their heads off about what you're about to do! You're just leaving it all to me!"

This time I caught him by the wrists.

"And if you hadn't blinked and realized you were standing opposite the original? If you were the one facing a clone and not the other way around?"

That stopped him short. His expression naturally shifted into sullen without having to remember to switch it on. Good. Progress on processing what I'd done had gone better than I'd thought when I was copying and designing everything about him.

"I can feel the parts of me that you cut out," he finally grunted, tapping his head with a metal finger. "I'm…missing a lot. Were all the restrictions necessary?"

I didn't bother answering that question. He knew the answer to that but I also knew it felt he had to verbalize it.

"I mean, it's one thing to be thinking about it and doing it when you're…you…but then I blink and I'm not me anymore."

"You still are. Just…a different you."

His shrug may be all I get out of him on that.

But I can't, I can't, I won't have another Beholder. Another Mulani. Another…another Zee.

"Fix yourself up, and then get ready," I began walking away towards another fabricator bank. I'd made one for each of my children so that they could get whatever clothes they wanted at any time, but after this the rest were…dead weight. Sun Ce would only need the one. I only needed to put this face on one more time.

"I know, I know," he called out behind me. "It's not every day that an Emperor commits suicide."

================================
​

I ran.

I ran from all of it. The fallout of my actions would echo for years. Generations. Across factions and two galaxies, maybe more. I know that the Ancients are probably freaking out by my killing of Anubis and the spreading of the Dakara and Sangraal weapons around if Sun Ce ever needed to use it.

But god help me I was just…done.

I can't get physically tired anymore but…god I just wanted to sleep. The real kind of sleep, not the kind where I shut down my systems to low power. It wasn't even close to the same.

I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be able to cry and get some kind of emotional release. I wanted to not be reminded of my children every other moment. I was even at the point where I was considering taking a scalpel to myself just to cut out the parts that kept reminding me of them. I was tired of scents passing my nose, music playing that they used to love, phrases that they said, and remembering what I'd destroyed. What Zee had for some of the most idiotic reasoning that I'd ever heard of. It was one thing to think of yourself in a story. But even if I was, I'd at least try.

But all of this.

All of the whole 'Stargate universe' had just worn me down. I don't think it had quite broken me.

But if something gets worn down enough, eroded far enough, then it doesn't really need to break.

It sort of just…fades away.

So I left.

One ship, of incredibly small size compared to everything else I'd ever made. My old Theta body sat in the back. The whole thing was shaped like the Ship of Imagination that Dr. Tyson sailed around in the second Cosmos series – lengthwise not held up all vertical like. The sphere was big enough for three decks, only one of which was holding Theta. Everything else was just empty space except for the generators and resource cores. Largely meant for stealth but yeah I had weapons on it. A basic compliment of…oh fuck it.

I can't even summon up the old passion of building a new thing that I used to have.

The dimensional portal opened and I sailed it through.

I ran.

Thank god.

 

[torroar]

65 - Furlough
​

"Side? Side? I am on nobody's side, because nobody is on my side, little Orc."

I hummed to myself as I watched the movie play out from behind my eyelids. I'd seen the movie in the biggest theatres in my hometown with the lighting just right that I managed to completely lose track of the people all around me. It had just been me and one of the greatest movies in history. For my time at least. So when I dove back through my codified memories and bounced them into a dummy visualizing program that I had bastardized out of a standard HUD display, it was like I was back there. All by myself watching the movie. Which was what I was doing now as well only it was just playing out on my own eyelids rather on some screen somewhere. I...suppose that I could technically put it up somewhere on a projector but there was a few problems with that.

I liked the lack of people coming around to bother me, and also the movies had never been made in this universe.

Nobody's fault, not Tolkein or the directors or anyone like them.

It was just...the United States's Hollywood of this world really only focused on one thing only: the Soviet Union.

The thought made me pause the movie and sit up from where I was laying within my ship. Cosmos design or no, me and my old deactivated body were the only things here. Which was of course part of the reason that I'd chosen this location to land on after exiting out into open space somewhere around Jupiter. I suppose on some level that I could have remained out there in the system and stuck to myself but for some reason I...didn't. Some impulse or another made me drive down here and park my ship in the middle of nowhere even though nobody could possibly have seen it given the various different kinds of extremely advanced stealth systems that it was packing.

On the bright side, of course, the direct center of the Australian Outback was actually quite pretty to look at, day or night.

"All by my seeyeeeelllf," I mumbled as I began puttering around the open decks of the ship. The 'sphere' portion of the vessel was easy enough to see out of, I'd built it that way, and so I found myself watching what looked like an emu pecking at the ground near me.

Was that standard bird behavior? Or something else? Who knows. Either way I was bored with it and shuffled off towards my 'me' room.

It was pretty sweet if I do say so myself. Several massive TVs, all hooked up to the various satellite and broadcasting systems the whole planet over. Each of them faced a gigantic pile of soft downy pillows which functioned as my chair, bed, and couch depending on how I sat on it. With a single leap I brought myself to the top of it and sank down, my head slung upside down as I faced them. A flick of my hands materialized a remote in one of them that I began to use to slowly click on each of the barn sized screens.

"- that America leads the way! With the strength of the Allies and the power of good old democracy, you can bet your bottom dollar that with me as your Commander in Chief, the Soviet Union are gonna be taking their damn hunter killer bears and going home! This ad paid for by the Campaign to Elect Senator Ackerman."

Huh. I guess I showed up earlier in the timeline than the...timeline had even had time to really exist. And isn't that something to think about? Has this timeline always existed due to the nature of the ones who created it doing so giving it a permanent place in the multiverse? Or is it by my presence alone that it remains as such where before it would have just 'snapped' into being when the time machine is activated and Einstein is killed. Either way there were no bombs dropped on Japan here, no nukes, only a grinding meaty land-battle that eventually ended with a ceasefire.

A ceasefire. Not a surrender.

No wonder George Takei - I mean...Emperor Yoshiro was able to boost his people up into a grand campaign against the rest of the world. A WWII Japan that had never 'lost' or surrendered for real? Yeesh. The nanotechnology and weaponry they possessed was kind of spooky enough without that kind of 'warriors spirit' behind it. Or at least probably spooky to someone who...wasn't me.

"Come comrades, come today, and rise up against the oppression of the so-called-Allies! In the name of the glorious Soviet Union we shall spread the wonders of Lenin across the entire world! But first, a perogi, bought from Bosco's Perogi Shop, of downtown Moscow!"

They actually look good, but the image of several honest to god Soviet Conscripts running around with obvious bottles for molotovs in their pockets and uniform AK's was kind of odd. Especially with those over exaggerated expressions as they eat those perogis. Perogis? I don't know if I should capitalize it or not, but either way I've never actually eaten one before. I wonder if they're good? I should probably try to get one before Moscow gets blown to smithereens...if that is the current campaign direction.

As for the Empire of the Rising Sun which has already begun its massive military build-up which was somehow missed by both the Allies and the Union?

"Araragi-san, please! Don't leave us behind!"

"That's right, without you...without you...how can we win against our rivals!"

"I may be a master of the kendo club my friends, but...what is school pride worth against the divine will of the Emperor!? I must go, I must swear to him my blade, a true blade, and strike his enemies down!"

"Araragi-sempaiiiiiiii!!!!"

...good god.

They have anime here, but it's...that?

Man.

With a slight twitch of my will, some of my stealthed satellites let me bounce around the quasi-net that was going around. They didn't...quite have an honest to goodness Internet yet, but they had the gestation of one. Of three, actually. Wonder how that's going to go in the end. But...my search ends in failure just like it did the last few times. No Star Wars. No Stargate. No Naruto, no Harry Potter, or any number of other cultural cornerstones of my growth as an adolescent. They had all been replaced with the most campy stuff all extolling either the Allies or the Soviet Union. Their conflict had grown so prevalent that it was being fought in vast cultural theatres of war while tanks and soldiers fought and died in the soil and sea.

...mmm.

Lolling my head, I looked at the calender I'd bought with some money I'd skimmed off of some embezzling mayor or another in India.

August 27th, 1985.

On the one hand, we have the Allies, who are going to be led by J.K. Simmons himself. We have the Soviet Union, led by a TRANSVESTITE OF TRANSYLVANNIIIIIAAAAHAAHAA, and Sulu from the original Star Trek.

"Pick a side...pick a side...pick a side...," I mumbled.

It doesn't matter, nothing matters!
Dad! Look at this, Zee actually managed to miniturize the Dakara weapon! We could-
Gamma I swear to god if you don't pick up after you're done weapons testing

I blinked.

"Uh...maybe later."

At least there are some cartoons which aren't terrible in this universe.

"- we're the Animaniacs!"

...I'll make a decision soon. Tomorrow. For sure...

​

 

[torroar]

66 - Simple Comforts
​

"Flying Girl Azami is here! Let all who would harm the divine Emperor's people fear, for his servants shall show them no mercy!"

Ok.

I'll admit it.

There are at least some interesting anime running around.

Flying Girl Azami was cheesy as all hell but the art style was impeccable. I mean it was kind of weird from a cultural standpoint how the extreme violence the series espoused was ok for children to watch but then again for an Empire who wanted to indoctrinate everyone from birth to worship the Emperor I guess it was acceptable. If anyone grew up with more carnage in their hearts than the Soviets or Allies then they could just join the already massive military and get a swanky little beam katana thing for them to plunge into the hearts of the 'corrupt and mindless West'.

"Flying Girl Azami eh, well you're not so tough! I am the Magnificent Sickle!"

"Ah!"

"Azami-san!"

"Che, it's fine, Nasu-chan, I can take him! He might look big and strong, but it's almost all for show. He's got nothing on the stamina and power of a Japanese Flying Warrior!"

…the nationalism on the other hand was as omnipresent as it was in every other form of media for any of the Big Three.

Ugh the nationalism. Now, a long, long time ago I lived in the United States but I can quite honestly say that the Red Alert America isn't my America. It is…way to jingoistic for me and even before all of this started it was a lot for someone who almost never really muddled with politics in his life. Soviets have terrible television but interesting radio dramas, Japan managed to go into anime and manga but they're all based around characters who have vaguely similar abilities to their military with a constant push on the whole 'serve the Emperor thing', and the Allies are more varied than I thought they would be. Still the United States dominates a little bit of it considering that the Soviets are bumrushing their way through two thirds of all Europe right now.

My musings on that were cut short though as I glanced down through the one-way glass of my ship's windows to the building below me. A very concerned looking pizza delivery man stood in front of the abandoned building that was most certainly not abandoned with several boxes strapped up in his car.

Sweet!

I rolled off of my pillow pile and into the teleporter which conveniently put me onto my feet just behind the door. A solid bar of gold materializes in my hand that I have the fabricators whip me up. 100% pure, filtered out of my slight metal reserves, and big as all hell. Before the delivery man can actually turn around or call his boss to tell him it was a prank I whip open the rusted metal door of what was once some kind of warehouse that fell into disuse and walk slightly out so he can see me in the evening light. For a minute the two of us are silent, before he raises up the pizzas and opens his mouth.

"Those are for me mate," wow my Australian is terrible, "Now 'and em ovah."

"Uh, are you the one that ordered th'-,"

"Yeah mate, 'ere."

His eyes bulge out as I slap the gold bar into his hands with one hand while grabbing the pizzas with the other.

"Wha-what the hell-,"

I lean forward slightly and look him right in the eye.

"No one is evah gonna believe you."

Then I'm bounding back inside the warehouse, teleporting back up to my ship, flying said ship out to the middle of the pacific ocean, and unmaking all signs of my presence in Australia.

Right. So.

Pizza.

I must thank the creators of these designs back in the Star Wars galaxy, because they actually put in taste buds and what have you. Probably out of some way for the robots to describe food and such in casual conversation for better infiltration. Or maybe because Xizor was just really into that sort of thing and wanted a complete package as was befitting his immense wealth and status. Or not. I don't know and don't care right now. What I cared about was putting real pizza – Earth pizza regardless of the reality – in my face.

"…fuck, man. That's good."

A click of the remote and I'm back to my regularly scheduled programming which has now grown to five giant TVs going off at once and a radio to my side playing something from the Soviet Union's Radio Drama Programs. I haven't had pizza in a long time. I didn't even manage to perfect it when I was making Wu. But regular greasy pizza, even if it isn't New Yorker style or whatever because we're in Australia, it's still pretty damn good.

Today is election day in the United States. Which means…World War III is about to start.

I can still pick a side if I want to. But do I have to? There are no nukes being tossed around, no major bioweapons except for what the Soviets have and even then that's pretty restricted. Even the Japanese with their nanoswarms have nothing compared to what I can do. All the fighting in the world is going to be going on but it won't actually be in the whole world. Australia isn't in the Allies. New Zealand isn't. I Neither is much of South America though Mexico joined a short while ago. Hell a lot of Africa isn't even involved. It's kind of 'western centric' but I can't really deny that the superpowers involved right now don't really need those places.

Of course, then one has to think about the communist revolutions that the Latin countries are sometimes fiddling about with thanks to the whole Soviet thing. Are the Soviets still building up anything in Cuba? Probably.

My musing is cut off when I move my hand over for more pizza and realize that there isn't any left.

"Huh."

All of it, all the boxes, empty now, just from absentminded eating. I can feel them being burnt away in my stomach as the advanced machinery down there practically and literally vaporizes them. The flavors, the textures, all of that is still in my mind and partially still on my tongue, and as I smack my mouth I realize something. Something amazing. Something I hadn't ever really had time for as an Emperor and had never even really dealt with as a droid in the Star Wars universe. Man I should really have tried to savor that more because now it's all gone.

It's all gone.

It's…all gone.

"I don't get full. I can taste anything I want, eat anything I want, but I'll never get full."

Also I can't really run out of money if I just hack some accounts or something! Or just materialize gold or whatever and sell that!

Oh fuck!

==========================================
​

"You heard me. I said five porterhouse steaks. Medium rare, please!"

"Uh, sir…"

"Of course I'll take all the sides! Also I'll be wanting some dessert later!"

====================================
​

Two waiters stared at the man sitting in the back of the restaurant and whispered as he ate.

"How…how many burgers has he eaten by now?"

"Thirty-two. Every kind we have on the menu, and then a buncha repeats."

"Good god where is he putting it all?"

"I have no fucking idea. But hey, I told you when you moved here, New York City has a lot of crazy people."

=============================
​

"And he just ate his tenth plate of pierogis!"

The small child tugged on her babushka's apron, pointing a chubby finger in the direction of the strange man who had arrived over an hour ago.

"Hush child, do not bother a man who can eat like that, and it is rude to point your finger!"

Outside the windows, the rows of tanks rolled past to the cheers of the waiting crowds. The parade had been going on for over an hour now and so the stranger was the only customer the little shop had to its name for the moment. Besides that, he paid, and so whatever his strangeness was the babushka didn't care.

==============================
​

"I want all the bacon and eggs you have," the mustachioed man said sternly.

Before the waiter could turn to leave, the man's arm shot out and grabbed him with a firm grip on his wrist.

"Now, I worry that what you heard was 'a lot of bacon and eggs'. Look at my face."

The waiter did so.

"I want all the bacon and eggs you have."

As he waiter left, he did not hear the man giggle to himself.

"I always wanted to do this."

=============================
​

"No."

The stranger glanced up, glasses bouncing oddly on their thin face. A face that should not have been as thin as it was if he made a habit of eating like this.

"What do you mean no?"

"You can't have any more sushi."

A poleaxed expression crossed the strange monster's face before it flattened away into nothingness.

"Why not?"

"You've eaten all the salmon I had for today. And the tuna. You need to go."

"But…I'm paying. I have money," the monstrous eater waggled more of said money as they withdrew it from a wallet at their side.

"Don't care. Leave."

============================================
​

Of the twelve initial competitors, only two remained.

"This is it folks, our amateur competitor who goes only by the name 'The Stranger' has been tearing it up against the reigning champion Mega Jaws Mandy! The two of them are tied at twenty pies each, but neither seem to be slowing down at alllllll!!"

The crowd exploded as the newcomer slammed down another tin triumphantly while the woman next to him groaned and redoubled her efforts.

"GET ME ANOTHER BLUEBERRY PIEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

The screamed request was granted, to the shock and amazement of the little Tennessee town. Then he yelled for another.

"By god, where does he put it all?!?!"

===================================​

I no longer had a strict biological need to burp but the droid design had included it which was nice. It was satisfying to do.

All it took was for me to slowly and carefully reduce my perception and control of the world around me. Without constant data streams from every camera and sensor on the ship and my few hundred or so stealthed satellites I was almost…human again.

Almost human.

"Blech."

The wine soured in my mouth. It shouldn't have, I shouldn't even need to recoil from that. I don't know why…

Oh hey! My parmesan wheel. I'd forgotten about that while I was drinking my way through a hundred different bottles of wine. Awesome. I needed no chips or whatever. If the cheese was good enough I could just eat the whole thing by itself without any worry whatsoever. Fuck man, not ever getting full was an amazing thing. All it took was me slowly dumping gold and diamonds into the market around the world and bouncing accounts back and forth until I had all I needed. It's not like it was hard for me to find those things.

"Ahhhh," I ratcheted my jaw open further than human limits to take the first bite.

…oh that is good, that is some good stuff! Straight from the source in Europe too! One of the last ones, what with the whole Soviet invasion rolling through to the western tip of that entire continent.

I should –

"WARNING! INCOMING FIRE!" The ship's genderless voice screamed at me, but it still took me a split second to react. Shock? Surprise? I don't-

My ship, hanging over the local produce store, barely moved as some kind of aircraft impacted right against it. Son of a bitch what?! I'd just flown into Cannes to buy a few hundred croissants and fish!

Flicking the sensors online, reconnecting myself with my satellite network I'd carefully and slowly pushed up, annnnd…ah man.

The Allies are here. They're fighting back against the Soviets to try and push them east.

I thought I had time! I had time! I know I did. It was supposed to be months from now! It was…

Oh.

It was. I flicked through the various pin-up calendars strewn around the room, the world clocks that my satellites could look at including Big Ben, and finally my own internal chronometers.

Ah fuck. I missed my window. Ah jeeze.

The ship flies upwards, upwards and out of the range of any weapon possessed by any of the three superpowers. Beneath me, a massive force of Allies and Soviets slammed into one another, trading feints and flanking attacks while a heavy core of tanks and infantry attacked through the center. I remember this mission sure but it is one thing for an RTS to represent the complete retaking of another country and another for it to actually 'happen'.

Above it all, I gazed down like I don't even know what. A god? I could take this world if I really wanted to. I could take all of it and none of the Big Three could stop me. Anything I wanted to do, I could do. An Emperor? I could rule it. I could handle one world, if I never expanded beyond it. I know I could, likely without even having to revert to the Beholder system which I honest to god never wanted to do again. I could try to take over one of the countries and become a president, go that way. Hell South America wasn't aligned with anyone at the moment.

Make my own faction with them as the base?

"Ffffuck."

Call me Sun Jian. I am but a man. I…heh, yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to just destroy your God and change your lives like that.

I could…I should…

Hail to the Emperor! May He reign forever!

I flinched when a nuclear plant went up in one of the Soviet bases. The flash was tiny compared to what I'd seen, what I'd done before.

What…am I? You are my child. I am your father. My name is…well, no one else knows, but my name is-

Even though I didn't need to, I let my fingers tap a nervous rhythm against my leg as the battle keeps going.

It's fine. They can handle the Wraith. If the Ori know what's good for them they'll back off like I told them too. If they don't, then…well. They're monstrous assholes anyhow. I can-

Blanket carpeting of bombs to literally cover every inch of an entire nation. Replicator swarms to devour every gun in every army on the planet. Aircraft to literally blot out the sun like it had never been done before on Earth. A droid army that could march out from nowhere and be invisible save for the weapons fire and their own shielding. Teleport every warmongering leader in every country out into space where they could suffocate. Tear down every facility pumping out tanks and weapons, shut down the power to every maintenance facility for the weapons. Bioweapons. I could do that.

I could target anyone within a certain range of genetic markers and wipe out the Empire of the Rising Sun outright. I could do it. I could do any of it.

I've broken fucking solar systems with ease before!

…but the Allies are winning. Cannes is being taken back even now. If I tune in…

"Take that you Soviet bastards!"

"Sir! Tanya has successfully brought down the first of the remaining Soviet dreadnoughts! We can do this! We're pushing through!"

"Moskvin! Defend me!"

"I am trying, General, but these damned capitalist pigs aren't precisely stopping!"

Not really surprising that the Soviets and Empire actually spoke Russian and Japanese. The language constraints of 'English Only' that the games possessed doesn't exist here. Just another little divergence. But if the Allies were here, pushing through Cannes, then doesn't that mean that this is an Allied Campaign? Which is…good, right?

America and all that?

…yeah. Yeah. The Allies can handle it.

So I didn't feel bad at all as I directed the ship up and towards the rest of the solar system. Or when I activated its fabricators to build a few generators on Pluto to vastly increase my energy production. Or when I tractored a few asteroids away for me to harvest for metal.

Out in the middle of the dark, I build a metal extractor.

Just…you know. In case.

…right?

 

[torroar]

67 - Bored Stormclouds​

Even though I was the one who had set the alarm, it still managed to surprise me as it blasted me with enough volume to obliterate the eardrums of any regular human being.

"WHEN I WAKE UP-!"

"Ah fu-,"

"-WELL I KNOW I'M GONNA BE, I'M GONNA BE THE MAN WHO-,"

Situated as I was, sitting on the pillow pile staring at the inky black of space and its speckling of stars, the time had somehow gotten away from me. I know this because I was startled enough to flail and fall flat onto my face on the ground outside of the pile. There was no one to hear me startled half scream or see me spazzing out but I nevertheless felt embarrassed. Not enough to bother going through the motions of dusting myself off considering that in the possibly soon future I would be switching to a new body of some kind.

I was getting either better or worse all the time and I still didn't know which.

Should a Commander ever put so much effort in to reducing themselves to as close to baseline human as possible? With all the technology at my disposal it seemed to be just something to do. I wasn't like the others, if they even truly existed out there in the multiverse. Were any of the Commanders capable of meeting one another or are we all isolated in our own little pockets of multiverse? Even if they weren't all of our circumstances were all vividly different. God only knows what Drich is by now.

But it was easier, on some level. To not have a billion camera angles, audio from all over the place. Controls of vast machines or fleets or whatever. To be fair I could with a mild bit of effort reconnect myself but spending months of time working on not being a Commander was…nice. For a while. Yeah. It didn't mean that I didn't put the work in when absolutely necessary.

Or when I let myself get distracted enough to somehow miss that the Allies and Soviets were stepping up the war effort to such extents, heh.

But it's fine now. If I absolutely have to intervene, I have a fleet ready. Sure the Sol System was missing a bit of mineral wealth now and Pluto was covered in generators but they were stealthed and my reserves were still quite high.

The fleet, right.

I didn't want to get any fancier than I had to, so I'd gone Independence Day on it. Massive discs with an almost unconscionable amount of guns. Turbolasers, slug throwers with fabricators to continually replace ammo of a caliber that I could really only describe as 'Fucking Big', missile launchers, the works basically. Each one was the sheer breadth of Tokyo in size – mostly because Tokyo was the biggest city on the planet at the moment – and within moments they could obliterate said city. Less than a moment. A single salvo really.

Not that I was going to use them! Just…you know. In case.

Old instincts, I guess. Getting ready to obliterate every hint of any opponent on the planet all at once.

I wasn't…planning on using them. But it was something that I'd sort of just found myself doing. You know like sometimes you go to the kitchen and just make something without even really planning to. An impulse! That's it, that's the word. Yeah. Kind of a fucked up impulse to have, honestly. Fuck man, I need a therapist.

Anyway! None of that is important right now. I have a stealthed death fleet built out of the mineral wealth of the asteroids and some of the moons of this solar system which could, yes, wipe out all life on earth in less than five minutes of sustained bombardment. But that's not important. Because befo- because instead of that, I'm going to see what's what down there.

Reconnecting to my invisible satellite web and…yep.

The Allies are attacking Gibraltar with some Soviets on hand as well, while the Japanese are running around all over the place swallowing up most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Seems about right. Every single one of the major superpowers are slamming against each other with massive force contributions to various theatres leaving their direct homelands largely unprotected. New York City is pretty empty right now but the main Allied base in Europe is Amsterdam. Futuretech Labs and all that. Hmm. Main source of all of Einstein's technology, them. With vaguely ominous plans for the world at some point or another.

Tokyo on the other hand is actually pretty heavily defended still. Empire does have the second largest military right now it looks like. Soviets beat that out but their troops are kind of crap in some parts.

"Oh hey. There's Yuriko."

And there she was indeed. While the Allies were fighting in Gibraltar, the most powerful psychic on the planet was tossing around an entire Soviet base in Vladivostok. It was pretty impressive, I guess. Though…wait, no, was she the right one? It was getting hard to tell now that my satellites were actually checking around. There were currently fifteen Yuriko Omega's with each displaying pretty powerful abilities. Was one of them right one? It was hard to tell I suppose. They might all be clones. Ah, whatever, I wasn't looking to get in a fight with her or her many clones right now.

Nah…I know what I'm going to do.

Roots. Gotta think about roots, right? As soon as the war ends, I can go back to doing what I want. If it escalates too badly I can shut it down but things seem to be proceeding perfectly fine without me.

After all, the flaps of a butterfly can only change things if the butterfly is flapping and not…doing what I was doing.

Which some might say was doing nothing.

I don't say that. I was doing stuff. I was doing what I wanted, and I wasn't killing anyone. Which was nice, to be honest. It was really, really nice.

No but while everyone is fighting…I suppose I can go and do some stuff on my own, right?

…right.

Clothes. Fancy suit, armor, or…?

====================================================
​

"Say again?"

The guard was not a warrior of the Imperial Army, but that did not mean he was not vigilant and with training and weapons of his own. In his case it was a simple pistol but considering the one in front of him he was unsure if he would even need that.

"There is a man in a bathrobe and a cup of something staring at the building."

Some kind of billowing loose pants and a baggy shirt could be seen as well for the ragged pink bathrobe itself was not even closed. It was just sort of…there. One of his hand was in the bathrobes pocket while the other held loosely onto the steaming cup. Or was it a mug? He was never sure.

"Well then…remove him. He is causing a disturbance."

"Of course."

He only made a step forward before the stranger looked up at him and waved lazily.

"Hello," he said casually.

"Sir," the guard nodded, "I'm afraid I must ask you to leave. You are disturbing our workers, and it is unsightly for people out on the street to see you standing in front of our establishment."

"Oh," the man nodded slowly, blinking at him once before gazing up at the building again. "Hey, this is Shirada Shipworks, right? Builder of the glorious Imperial Navy, designers of all its wondrous weapons and technologies?"

"…yes?"

"Cool."

Without any further prodding, the man walked away and disappeared into the crowd.

==========================================
​

"You look tired, man."

Gunther Hansen sighed, rubbing his temples, and looked to his left to the speaker. Normally he would have jumped at the sight of what looked like a homeless person sitting so close to him on the bench. But he was just too tired. He glanced however at the steaming mug offered to him by the homeless man who clearly had no nearby access to any kind of machine to produce something like that.

"What…is that?"

"Hot chocolate."

Gunther blinked.

"Not coffee?"

"Nah, I hate that stuff. Nice suit by the way. You work up there?"

'There' was apparently the Futuretech research facility. Which…was…

"How did you get in here?" Gunther asked, suddenly alarmed as he realized that he was technically within a supposedly secure perimeter. "How- who are you!"

"Hey man, I just wanted to see the famous facility where spectrum and cryo tech is being perfected even as we speak."

"You- security! Security!" Gunther called out, looking for one of the many guards who was supposed to be walking about all over the compound.

But by the time he turned back to the bench, the man was gone.

===================================================
​

Well that was fun.

Nice to be back in the ship though. I get twitchy when I'm outside for too long I guess. Grabbing food doesn't count because food is safe. Always. Even if it was poisoned I'd be fine because I'm not actually capable of being poisoned.

Although-

Wait.

Hold on.

Woah now. How…

The Allies and Soviets are fleeing Gibraltar. How the- what the fuck?! They're supposed to win there, not lose!

I don't…

Damn it, I was fine with the Allies winning. I was…can I…is it ok if the Empire wins? Neither of the groups are like, strictly evil, right? Except maybe some of the Soviets. Right?

I don't…

I don't know what to do here.

 

[torroar]

68 – Some Kind Of Psychic?
​

She was…Yuriko.

That was it.

No, that wasn't right.

She was...Yuriko-13.

That had been her name for as long as she had lived...which wasn't actually very long. She had been grown full to term to the precise age of Yuriko-Prime. She wasn't supposed to know that either but after spending more than three months fighting at the speartip of numerous Imperial assaults upon the western barbarians and cretins who infested the world had allowed some telepathic bleed through. There were none in the entire Army that could shield their mind from her if she truly desired knowledge. Not that she would ever go that far, as ripping out the knowledge from the minds of her imposed comrades was never a simple or easy to disguise sight.

There were whispers of thought from more senior soldiers when they passed by her spartan quarters, from when she floated across the battlefield and unleashed her powers to bring death to the enemy. Shades of fear and worry as they thought of others of her kind. The original was somewhere further to the west, fighting against the Allies and Soviets directly right on the quite literally bleeding edge of the war. Others had fought as well with herself included but some had also died. Some had been unstable. Some were not. Some of the clones had tried to leave, explore, 'discover' themselves only to be taken down and returned to the Shiro Sanitarium.

​

It was thought – heh – by some that those clones and others were to be used in something new. A weapon that had not yet been completed but would eventually prove to be yet another trump card in the ongoing war. She didn't think about those sorts of things however. She didn't allow herself to. None of them wanted to go back to the Sanitarium. Even if they were produced to be expendable she did not like the idea of being…expended.

So.

Here she stood guard, floating almost a foot off the ground but with her eyes on the horizon, miles and miles away from the nearest fighting.

Deep within the Soviet's homeland.

Was it Vladivostok or Vorkuta? She did not know, and no one had seen fit to tell her. Either way it was cold enough to make her shiver near constantly.

With her powers she kept the constant snow fall from actually touching her but even so she could not push away the cold entirely. How these Soviets managed to not just fight but live in this terrible land was entirely beyond her. Behind her the patrolling soldiers did their best to suppress their inherent and yet nevertheless disgusting desires as they passed by her. The fact that she had to expend just that little more of her powers to keep her skirt from flying upwards as a natural result of her keeping herself off of the ice and snow was yet another notch of irritation in a slowly growing belt.

None of them joined her.

None of them spoke to her, ever.

The only conversations she'd ever held were responding to the orders of her commanders.

Screaming at the enemy in fury and hearing them scream in pain and fear in turn didn't really count in her mind.

"Wow. What a dour expression."

Yuriko-13 blinked.

"Sure, Vorkuta isn't a super great posting, but at least you aren't getting shot at, right?"

She whirled to look at the man who stood there with a steaming mug in hand. It was an incongruous sight. Despite the snow being piled up so high there was all of a sudden a small area around him, this man who wore clothes entirely not meant for this sort of climate. A raggedy pink bathrobe? An oversized logo-less black t-shirt? Pajama pants? All of this together would have been impossible enough but then she finished looking down at him and couldn't help but stare at what she saw.

"What are those?"

Those were flip flops. Sandals? One of the two. But inside of that pair of flip flops were socks, with the man's feet presumably inside them. In fact, at her question, he slowly wriggles his toes and rolled back and forth on his feet.

His reaction of course was not at all what she expected. His eyes bugged out slightly and his mouth pursed.

"Pfft…hah. Nice. I didn't even know that was…oh," his expression turned puzzled. "You weren't doing a bit."

"I don't…wait a minute."

The confusion had been an effective fog upon her but it could not last forever. She was a psychic, and so her powers flared as she glared at the man who had somehow managed to approach without her even catching a hint of his presence. Without a hint. That was supposed to be impossible. Any properly gestated Yuriko should have been able to detect anyone coming up behind them regardless of the technology itself guarding them. Optic camouflage could not possibly camouflage one's mind. But he had somehow come up without her noticing him.

"Wait," he raised a hand in surrender, "I'm not gonna attack you."

"Who are you," she growled, her eyes narrowing as in one hand she began gathering together enough power to tear him apart.

At her words his face twisted, a brief flicker of emotions that she could not catch all of. At least one of them was…sorrow?

"I'm uh…," he looked down at himself and then back at her before shrugging. "I'm The Guy."

"The…Guy?"

"Yeah. The Guy. Sort of like The Dude?"

She blinked again.

This time he sighed.

"Right. Major cultural divergence. Ugh. It's…1986. The Soviets did their thing in…1927. Man you guys don't have any of my stuff."

"I don't understand," and even if she didn't she was starting to grow irritated.

She was staring right at him and she couldn't feel his mind! It was infuriating! Only her fellow clones could block off their minds, there wasn't a single male psionic in the entire Empire! It was like staring at a machine, and even then shouldn't she have been able to-

Yuriko whirled again and froze at the sight of the Imperial Warriors who were still there behind her.

That she couldn't feel anymore.

But they weren't moving either. Behind them, in the distance, a shinobi was still mid-run along the roads, and she couldn't feel their mind either. Or that of any of the other soldiers at the base!

"Hey," said The Guy, "I know that you might be a little freaked out about them being all…well, like that. But that's not why I came by."

For the first moment since she'd seen him there was a flicker of uncertainty in her. It was like time itself had frozen. How long had it been like that?

"Yeah, anyway, you looked like…really cold, man. You know what with the whole skirt and non-winter jacket?"

She stared at him again, trying this time not to summon telekinetic power but instead to pierce his mind. To at least feel him on some level at all! But all she got was a vague skeleton in all the vaguely human places. Things that shifted and pulsed beneath his skin that were about in the same places as organs. Except…for the strange thing in the center of his torso. Just focusing on it made her head hurt and buzzed her ears with static.

A sigh brought her out of it.

"All right, seriously, look. This is…taking way longer than I expected it too and I kinda want to get back to my place. Here," he proffered the mug.

She stared at it, then at him, and then back to the mug.

"It's just hot chocolate, Yuriko, seriously. You looked cold and I have some," he waved his free hand absentmindedly, "I dunno…sympathy? Yeah. For the whole situation regarding you and uh…the first you."

"Who are you?"

"I'm just The Guy. And yeah, I stopped time itself to give you a mug of hot chocolate because you looked cold."

The trickle of uncertainty began to grow in strength along with fear.

"You…you stopped time?!"

It made no sense. It shouldn't have made any sense. It was horrifying to even contemplate that someone who dressed and acted like this would have even a modicum of power over time itself!

"Yuriko," he snapped his fingers, "Seriously. You're making this weird. Stop making this weird. Take the hot chocolate. Drink its goodness, and then get ready for a big ol' fight because Moskvin is coming at you full steam in abouuut," he checked a naked wrist, "Now."

Now she was confused, cold, irritated, scared, and mad. Her instincts flared but even as she began scanning for the cloudy and foolish minds of the West she could not detect them. Only a few seconds later did she realize that she apparently couldn't sense anyone while in this strange bubble of non-frozen time that The Guy could make on a whim.

"Seriously, look, it's one of the missiles from one of his dreadnoughts," The Guy pointed up towards some tiny dot in the sky that she squinted at. "Now c'mon, you're making me feel like the 'Eat All The Eggs' guy."

She turned back, her hands clenched into fists as she warred between moving against the enemy, informed her commanders who she couldn't and attacking The Guy for showing up out of nowhere and just being…just being! He waggled the mug at her and she, glaring at him all the while, took it and drank it down. It's not like she wanted something warm or anything, she was just taking it so that he would stop bother her and let her get back to fulfilling her purpose!

…oh that was warm.

"Yeah, see? Now you're all warm and raring to go and fight the Soviets," his tone was wry. "I mean, I'm pretty sure you'll lose. This is a tiny little base – symbolic, obviously, as one of the first incursions against the whole Union ordered by George himself, but it's also just one base. Moskvin is one sadistic fuck sure but he's got some tactical skill and a lot of numbers on his side her."

"You're not going to help?!"

The Guy blinked at her words.

"Uh. No? I'm half Asian…ish…but that doesn't make me loyal to the Empire of the Rising Sun."

"Then…then you…," she sputtered, waving a hand at the apparent dreadnought missile in the distant sky, "Why…why are you here!?"

The Guy shrugged.

"Honestly? I don't really know. I'm mostly just…moving around on impulse and inertia. Only reason I came by is because I wanted to."

"You…but….urgh!"

She gave up on it and out of her mounting frustration flung a full wave of force against him. Not enough to outright flatten and pulp but at least enough to just send him flying! Except he didn't.

Instead the moment she let loose he flickered slightly and disappeared.

"Ah c'mon, don't be like that."

Yuriko-13 shrieked in a manner that she had never ever done since coming out of the pods as The Guy's voice echoed from behind her. She turned on him only to see him standing there with a single raised eyebrow and the mug gone into the ether.

"How-,"

"I just said I'm controlling time in this immediate area. Did you not think I can't move around in it how I want?"

He waggled a finger at her.

"I did nothing to provoke you, and you tried to smack me around with your brain. Not cool."

If she had not been trained by the finest psionic experts in the world, she would be tearing her hair out right now in a blatant display of unprofessionalism.

"Who are you!?"

She did not scream. She yelled. Powerfully. Like a soldier.

"I'm just The Guy," he shrugged again. "I was planning on saying, 'Hey Yuriko-13, according to the files of your commanders you've been underperforming and were slated for eventual return to the Sanitarium for integration into the ongoing Decimator project, you want a free of charge rescue?' but noo you had to be all weird."

The fury guttered out at his words and her control slipped enough for her feet to once more touch the ground.

"W-what?"

The Guy winced.

"Ah fuck. Man I suck at this. Fuck, one second I'm a troll, the next an asshole. Ugh."

Yuriko fell to her knees, uncaring of the cold now seeping into her bare legs.

"But…," then the anger returned and she flew upwards again. "You're lying," her voice trembled with anger.

A thick folder was waggled in her direction.

"Nope. I've got papers and electronic documentation to prove it."

She grabbed them before he even finished speaking. As she started reading, she could feel her resolve weakening. Too much hesitation? Not enough viciousness shown to enemy combatants? Soft?! None of that really hurt her though so much as the final conclusion.

"Overall unsatisfactory performance, recommend transferal to Decimator project," she read aloud, her voice wavering.

"Oh he's totally covering his ass, mind you," The Guy said from above her. She'd fallen to her knees again without noticing.

For some reason when she looked up at him the whole world was watery.

"He would have been fine under Keiji, but under Shinzo? The Serious Shogun of Serious Samurai? Nope. Got busted to a crap post, again and again, and tactically kind of just isn't great. So he's trying to blame it on the 'defective' psychic commando he got assigned."

"But…but I…"

"Tatsu is a brutal son of a bitch," The Guy shrugged. "He's got hundreds of clones being pumped out of the Institute's facilities. They can, and I apologize for the language, afford to replace you."

"I…I am a loyal servant to the Empire!"

The Guy leaned down, and offered her a handkerchief of some kind. She didn't know why, just because the world was all blurry now didn't…didn't mean…

She was not crying!

"Yeah. I hear you. Problem is, he already sent the forms off. So you're…kinda supposed to be decommissioned?"

"What," she grabbed the rag he offered and wiped it over her eyes, if only to clear them of whatever substance had gotten caught in them, "What is the Decimator project?"

"If you're going for a 'well at least I can still serve the Empire thing' I guarantee you're not going to like it."

"What is it," she insisted.

"You, and about a dozen or so of your fellow clones, are gonna be stuck in some pods. Sort of lobotomized, and then used to make big explosive blasts a la sort of psychic nuke."

Apparently the horror was more than evident on her face because The Guy frowned and offered her another mug that was mysteriously full of hot chocolate again.

"…you know what? I should have stayed in the ship. Just…let the conflict play out without my interference. I'm just fucking it all up again," he sighed as she took the cup and drank it down.

"Yes, you are," she said. She didn't actually know what he meant by the 'again' part but he certainly hadn't done perfectly in this event either.

"…yeah."

The two of them sat like that in the frozen time for just a moment longer before she looked up again, sniffling. It was all the snows fault. On that note she lifted off again, if only to keep from sitting in it any longer.

"You…you could be lying," she decided.

"You can check the commander," he pointed out, gesturing with the mug towards where the commander's compound was. "He's not a Shogun, all of them are in Europe or guarding Japan itself. He's pretty weak willed. If you wanted to check, you could."

"I can't use my powers in your frozen time," she said through gritted teeth.

"We can move through it, if I'm the one controlling it. C'mon."

For a moment she contemplated trying to hit him again, before she looked at the soldiers who always looked at her in fear and lust, then up at the missile in the sky.

Then she followed him.

The Guy made his way through the base and as she floated along behind him she stared at all those stopped mid-motion. Even tanks and the repair drones of the Mecha Bay! But there was no time to dawdle and she didn't want to find out if she would freeze alongside everyone else if she was too far away from The Guy. It was only a few moments later when they reached the commander's quarters. She'd never even learned his name. Only his rank and that was – according to her training – enough.

"Hey there sleepy head!"

Yuriko looked up in time to see The Guy kicking down the metal reinforced door with a single kick, only for the nature of the warping time around him to come into effect with the door pausing in its fall immediately after leaving the frame. With one hand The Guy grabbed it and placed it to the side and gestured for her to come in. What she saw was…disappointing?

This was her commander? By the divine order of the Emperor?

"Junichi Ikari. Or…Ikari Junichi? Eh," the Guy pointed at him. "That's him. Sleeping, despite the fact that the Soviet attack fleet has been coming on for an hour. Lax, lazy dude. Anyway, all you really need to do is check his brain, I guess. Or look at his diaries and stuff."

"I already told you I can't use my powers where you've frozen time," she growled.

"I'll shrink it down, let you check his stuff, and then when you're ready you can check him yourself."

Despite herself, she almost felt a premonition then. Reading the future was not actually an ability that any of the Yuriko's possessed, but Yuriko-13 investigated nevertheless. A strange trembling built in her all the while. The suddenness of everything, the shock of it all, it was beginning to set in and grow worse as she checked for Commander Ikari's journals. His notes. All of which confirmed The Guy's words. Her anger built as well until finally she turned to where The Guy was spinning around in the commander's chair.

"I'm ready."

"M'kay."

Within an instant she could suddenly feel someone else's mind nearby. Only one. Apparently he hadn't removed the frozen time from the rest of the base. But this one was all she needed right now. He was slumbering…but he wouldn't be for long. Yuriko let the anger build to a fever pitch, providing a focus and energy she would need. She was not nearly as strong as Yuriko-Prime, but she was powerful enough. She was more than powerful enough! She had served loyally; she didn't deserve decommissioning! That she would be so some lazy bastard could…ugh!

​

"Mmm, lady Shogun, there's no need to thank me like that..," the bastard mumbled in his sleep.

Yuriko didn't yell. She didn't need to. Loose papers and objects in the room whirled around her as she glared down at the bed's occupant. The Guy's sudden 'woah now' as he too was carried around on the chair he had been sitting on was ignored. Only for an instant to Junichi manage to awaken before Yuriko-13 put her hands on his head with a hiss. The commander screamed…and his memories burned into her own as she tore them out. It only took a few seconds but it was enough.

The Guy caught her as she stumbled backwards from the corpse in the bed, tears filling her eyes.

"He…he…and they…"

"Yeah. I know. I know. Fuck I'm bad at this."

"I…I don't want to die…"

"Few people do. Anyway, I…think I should go."

Yuriko sniffed, and used his handkerchief to wipe her eyes and nose again before turning around and shoving it into his hand. He looked apologetic, but he just thought he could leave? After dropping on her and…and all of this?!

"You said you could take me out of here, right?"

"Uh…yeah, I guess."

"I…we will lose against the Soviets here?"

"Barring a sudden teleportation of a huge amount of reinforcements, yeah. Also you kind of…like, killed your commander. That's pretty bad too."

Yuriko-13 blinked, and then shook her head.

"I don't care. I want to live. I'll figure out what to do next later. If…if the Empire won't have me, and the Soviets will kill me, then I want out of here!"

The Guy clenched his hand and the mug disappeared from his hands in a flicker of light. His eyes narrowed and for once there wasn't a lazy half smile or sheepish frown on his face.

"You sure?"

Yuriko thought for a moment. She was being rash. Maybe the Empire wouldn't hunt her down and stuff her into a machine that would cut out part of her brain. Maybe they could beat the Soviets here and she could blame the commander's death on them. Maybe…but then again, maybe not. She'd read the papers. The response from Tokyo that The Guy had brought. The memories she'd just torn out of Junichi's head. She was being rash. But she was also angry and terrified.

…she could let it all sink in later, when she was in a safer place.

"Yes."

The Guy shrugged.

"Ok. Fair warning, after this I'm going to go steal a cow from Texas, we'll have to deal with any freakouts you might be having later."

Yuriko…she didn't even know how to react to that statement.

"Ahhhhh don't look at me like that. There's no super Japanese beef in this universe, I gotta make do with good old American stock."

Light surrounded them but she still caught his last words before her world was pulled out from under her.

"It's only gonna be one cow! How else can I figure out how to make the perfect steak if not with practice!?"

 

[torroar]

69 - No Cheese On The Moon
​

"Moo."

"C'mon man."

"Moo."

"No!"

The cow was not responsive to my requests. This vexed me.

It wasn't even hard to just fly over Texas and suck one up into the ship, the benefits of Ancient teleportation technology melded with the Asgard version that had been modified for less 'advanced' beings made it is. Well, that and the fact that cow herds are huge as all get out. One disappearing from the middle of it all probably wasn't going to be that noticeable unless the cowherd and what not were able to pick out that something was wrong out of that giant morass of mooing. I wouldn't be surprised to be honest given how crazy this version of Earth was.

Speaking of mooing…

"Mooooooo."

"No, man, c'mon. I gotta do it."

There was something that just felt kind of wrong standing in front of the cow with a cleaver while it was still alive. How can I tear a galaxy apart but not be able to just butcher an animal? Wait should it be tranquilized? Or something? I have the manuals that I downloaded, the books I bought out of the shops around the world…I can check those but haven't yet. It wouldn't be impossible for me to just outright build a butcher's shop on the ship, I've got plenty of empty space left, but still.

"Stop looking at me with them big ol' eyes and just…ah fuck it. I can't do it."

I let the cleaver dissolve into nothingness back into my metal reserves and ended the staring contest. Are cows supposed to have such soulful eyes or am I just projecting or something? She's a big one, that's why I grabbed her. Not pregnant, not even that fat, just kind of big. Didn't that mean she would be good for eating or something? Or milk and cheese? I don't even know. I just…stole a dude's cow. Well. Not a dude. More like some greater farm group owned by a corporation but that wasn't important right now.

Then it came closer and just kind of sniffed at me before bumping its head into my hand.

"Moo."

What, like a cat or something? They don't…I mean yeah I'll scratch it behind the ears but that's it. Besides, cats are carnivorous and cows are vegetarian. I think. Mostly? They eat grass, right? Ah, fuck, that's right, I don't have any grass.

Damn it I already stole the cow I'm not just going to give it back!

"Fine. Fine. But I still like hamburgers and steaks. Looking you in the eye isn't going to change that."

"Moo?"

I would have continued my conversation with a fucking cow what am I doing but other things distracted me right around that point. Specifically Yuriko-13 finally having her vaguely scheduled freakout somewhere on the third deck. I'd put her there because there wasn't much to throw around except for my original Theta body but that was about it. I mean yeah she can lift entire carriers out of the ocean but unless she was planning on throwing it into the windowed parts of the sphere part of my ship then it was probably fine. Let's see…

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Sounds about right.

"Moo."

"Now now, cow," I pushed its head away for a bit. "I gotta go make sure she doesn't destroy part of my ship. I mean…I don't really think she can, she's not more destructive than a beam from a Death Star or the sun but…yeah."

I was a bit harder to leave after it forlornly moo'd again as I teleported down. I made a note to put in a bunch of grass or whatever on the top deck of the sphere. It shouldn't have to live in a flat metal plane. But it would not be allowed on the middle deck. That's mine, that's the pillow pile and all my other tinkering and projects. Of the three decks, I can separate it like that if I have to. Top one is the cows, second is mine, and I guess that means I'll have to move my Theta body up there so that the third one can be Yurikos if she plans on staying.

"Hey Y-," my greeting got cut off as my current body got slammed into one of the walls of the bottom…third…bottom deck.

Not because she hit me with the Theta body though that was swirling around too but rather because there was just a large openly visible telekinetic whirlwind filling up the entire deck. See that is why I didn't put in stairs or fireman's poles all over the place. I'm the one who teleports around, and everyone else can suck it. Of course at the moment she was flinging my current body around with wild abandon at speeds more than powerful enough to snap a human neck and tear off more than a little bit of the skin layer of my body to reveal the artificial musculature beneath. Hopefully she wouldn't get down to the underlayer. I don't wanna go through the whole 'Oh no I'm actually a robot sort of kinda' thing.

"Hey Yuriko!!"

Still no response. She was making winds out of nothing though so that's not that surprising that she couldn't hear me through her little mini-hurricane thing. At least now she's moved on from the single word screaming and has moved onto ranting.

Which means that she held it together since we left Russia for about…forty-two minutes. Good for her I guess though I'm certainly no expert on mental trauma and issues. On the other hand, wouldn't it be cool if she wasn't ranting about the Emperor, duty, honor, and woah hey no

"Yuriko!"

In the second it took me to say her name I'd already turned on the freeze fields. It's a good thing that Ancient time dilator technology worked on command or it might have been too late! She didn't see me march over through a corridor of real-time but she definitely saw my scowling face when I dropped it all and pulled her hand away from her stomach.

"What the hell dude!?! Seppuku!?"

It took a second for the psionic knife thing she'd made to dissipate into nothingness but holy hell was it a long second.

Then...she started crying.

Damn it.

Oh.

Now she's hitting me. Fists mainly but I caught a good shot to the quantum-crystalline bits which made her hop back and hiss a little before starting in again. I let her, though I pretty easily could have stopped her barring another tornado forming out of her brain.

"Listen, Yuriko, I know it's kind of crazy right mldjl," I moved her fist from where it had lodged in my left cheek, "But that's no reason to kill yourself."

"I... betrayed...the Emperor!"

"Well...,"

"I slew my commander, abandoned my comrades, I cast myself away from his divine will!"

She's crying less, which is good. She's also getting mad and glaring at me which is...less good.

"This is all your fault!"

I should have mag-locked my feet to the ground but instead I went flying.

"I was happy, serving Him and His empire! I was!"

Thankfully she didn't catch my muttered 'I don't think you were' or else she might have thrown my body around some more. I mean...if things got too bad I could technically space her. Of the two units within my cap, the ship is the second one after all.

"But then you show up, and...and you ruined it!"

I dusted myself off as I spoke.

"Oh thank you, Guy, for saving me from being totes lobotomized. You're so cool, you gave me hot chocolate and clothes that weren't a schoolgirl uniform which was all I'd had since being born four months ago in a freaking tube because Tatsu sees all Yurikos as weapons and nothing else."

"He made us what we are!"

"And what is that, precisely?"

We shouldn't be having this conversation with her in a snuggie and me dressed...well like I normally am. It's way too serious.

"A weapon to be feared? A girl who never got to grow up before she was taken from her home? A dehumanized resource to be put into a machine built solely for war?"

I can tell she's still angry, the hormones and heartbeat on the scans tell me so, but she's also calming down. Also she's sad but it's not like that is news at this point.

"We were respected."

"Tanks are respected. Battleships are respected. Weapons in general are respected. But, god Yuriko, how fucked up is it that the best commando in the Empire comes from a sanitarium!?"

Normally, she floats off the ground. A few seconds ago she was as well. But now she's on the ground again doing that slowly collapsing onto sprawled leg things that I've seen her do.

"I don't know what I'm supposed do. I was made to aid the Empire, to fulfill the Emperor's will on the battlefield..."

I have to sit down next to her to be face to face. All that power and yet the general shortness of Asians holds true.

"Yeah, well, Viagra was made for heart disease or something."

She blinks, but doesn't move towards trying to fucking disembowel herself again.

"Turned out, it was way better for ED. Dynamite was for mining but got used in combat cause explosives are good in a fight. Guy who made potato chips was trying to spite a crappy customer. Just cause something was made for something doesn't mean that it has to be like that. Also, like, fuck dude, you're a person. You can make your own decisions and whatever."

"You don't understand."

"Ah c'mon, don't look away from me. Just... okay, look. You want to go back to Japan?"

Well, at least she's not looking away from me anymore.

"I can drop you off at the doors to the sanitarium if you want. We can be there in like five minutes and you can get all lobotomized and whatever within the hour."

...ah, yes. Silence, my old conversational friend, you have returned to me. And while we've been here the cow pooped on my clean metal deck several hundred feet above where Yuriko and I now sit.

What to do, what to do...

"You know what I think we need? Food. When's the last time you ate?"

"...I don't eat. We have a calorie rich drink that reduces waste and provides all our nutrition needs."

Goddamn, that is some horrid shit. That is fucked up!

"That is some evil shit!"

"It is efficient!"

On a very detached level I guess it makes sense. Reduce waste, reduce time wasted. For one of the most sophisticated and technologically advanced members of the war it doesn't seem that far out of place. After all, they've got nanomachine clouds and shit. US Marines get MREs, Soviets get vodka and borscht rations, and the Empire gives out...nutrient paste.

Even discussing it is kind of saddening but keeping her distracted and vaguely mad is better than fucking suicide.

"Does...does it at least taste good?"

"It is tasteless and odorless to keep the enemy from tracking us in the field."

That...is awful. That is terrible. That is some horribadble shit! I...I just...

Note to self: Do Not Let Empire Win!

Yeah no! Nope! They are off the list of who gets to win this war!

"Yuriko."

I have to shake her by the shoulders a bit to get her out of her own head again.

"I promised to save you earlier."

"And I am beginning to think I should not have accepted."

"No, no," I shake my head, "You don't get it. I haven't saved you yet."

"What?"

It takes no effort for me to bring her to her feet.

"Here, put these clothes on. We have to go somewhere."

They're basic jeans and whatever but she's not going around with me in a school uniform. I ain't no sugar daddy.

"Wh-where are we going?"

Ah, to hell with it, I'll be dramatic. I retract the protective metal shutters away from the windows and point down at the Earth from high above its atmosphere. Behind me she gasps at the sight....oh right I never told her we weren't on-planet anymore. Or ever.

"I have to take you to EVERY FIVE STAR RESTAURANT ON EARTH!!! Also some local delicacies...in most countries on Earth. Well," I check the news and all three proto-nets, "Some of the restaurants are uh, gone cause of the fighting...but a lot are still open!"

Instead of remarking on anything I just said, she kind of makes a weird choking noise.

"You...you...we're in...

"Space, yes. Lunar orbit if you want to be particular. But that's not important right now."

"It's extremely important!"

Wow that is a new high pitch from her.

"No, it's not! You know why? Because I am straight channeling my inner grandma so you young lady are going to be spending your time at my house gettin' FED!!"

"I...I've gone insane. This - this isn't real!"

"SET COURSE FOR SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY!!"

And we dove towards Georgia.

 

[torroar]

70 – Food Break
​

"What…is this?"

"Uh, those are chittlins…might wanna stay back with the collared greens and fried chicken for right n- or you can just shove some in your mouth, that works too."

She'd been rather hesitant at first. I was too once I calmed down for a second as we shuttled up to Savannah. She was gestated to full 19 years biologically but was only about four months old chronologically. One of those months was spent training and receiving psionic imprinted training. I guess one could almost liken it to Space Marine training with hypnotherapy except minus a bunch of the extra organs and what not. The trauma parts were all still there though, for sure. Definitely there. The paste thing was a concern though not for potentially mental reasons but for physical ones, what with her not having had any physical food since 'birth.

So uh…I fixed it. With nanomachines.

They breakdown organic matter and help release…what's important is that she's not going to be getting stomach cramps. To give her credit she didn't just randomly accept nanomachines from someone who is still mostly a stranger, but after she made it through the first course she was telling me to give them to her. She uh…she didn't ask. But hey that's whatever I'd already had them ready so that's all right. The food was the more important part and the fact that she didn't immediately turn against it is pretty cool in my book.

Seriously, I took pictures with my eye cameras of how her expression lit up when she bit into a leg of fried chicken. Hell of a jump from nutrient drink…paste…stuff, and it turned out that she liked it. Score one for the South ya'll? Even if uh…even if I haven't been home in several hundred years. Not that my house and places will be there in this universe at all. Also just thinking about that sort of thing is just…

"Right, I'm going to get some more potatoes, and then I'll pay so we can go."

"Gmnu?"

I have to look up at that but before I can actually say anything I have to force myself not to laugh. Yuriko's cheeks are stuffed so full that she looks like a chipmunk, an entire slice of pie in one hand and a different kind of pie in the other hand. I don't even know what she's got in her mouth at this point, I literally ordered 'one of everything' off of the menu of this place. I put down the cash and everything and while I've sampled a bit of most things after she realized my nanobots were keeping her from getting too full Yuriko started eating with more gusto than I ever have.

At least I knew what good food tasted like, she never has and now she's gobbling it like its ambrosia.

"Yeah, we're gonna 'gmnu' on to other places. We've got to try pizza, burgers, steaks, several different kinds of cheese, escargot, a bunch of different kinds of fish, and a shit ton of candy."

"Bmmu," she chewed a lot and swallowed, "But I'm not done!"

"We can get it to go, then we'll go. What, you think I can't make a good enough fridge to hold of this? Fuck it won't even be a fridge, it's going to be a time locked box so that anything we put inside is held in that exact moment of time until we open it again."

Her answer was to shove the entire piece of pecan pie in her mouth and start chewing rapidly. The moan that came out of her mouth was not entirely kosher either but uh…I guess I kind of knew she might react like that when I started this.

"…I'm gonna go pay."

===========================

Spoiler: Optional Music

"And the new winner of our special Humongo Buffalo Special Challenge is…YURIKO!!!"

Jesus Christ she'd done it. She'd eaten a hundred wings with such heat behind them that they were just on that bleeding edge of criminal and toxic. Hell it had put previous challengers into the hospital if everyone around here was telling the truth. As for Yuriko herself her face was completely scarlet but the smile on her face was the widest I'd ever seen. She held both hands in the air and screamed in victory as the crowd who'd watched applauded.

As for me?

Eh, I'd eaten a hundred too but not from the challenge.

===============================
​

"Hoddog?"

"Hot. Dog. One word each, Yuriko."

"Hoddog."

I couldn't help it. It was funny, all right? She was a master of Japanese, as befitting a native speaker and graduate of the sanitarium's teaching but she was crap at English. I guess they'd never seen the point to making her learn if she can read intent and memories out of people's heads. Or if the Empire was truly successful in their attempt to rule the world I had no doubt that they would want to impose their 'superior language' along with their superior culture.

"Look, how you pronounce it doesn't matter, I can order for you," and speaking of which I turned to the good man on the other side of the cart, "One classic Chicago Dog if you would?"

"Whatabout you, man? You gonna get something for yourself?"

"Oh, yeah. I'll get five for me."

"…five?"

=================================
​

"Ok, see this is classic New York style pizza. The best kind," I pointed to the product on the table. "On the other hand, you could get Chicago style, which is terrible and everyone who likes it is wrong. But in interest of fairness I got one for you so you could try it."

Yuriko frowned.

"But…why is it bad? The Chicago Dog was wonderful!"

"Because CHICAGO PIZZA ISN'T PIZZA!"

She jumped a little at me yelling, but what made it truly worse was that my pitch perfect rendition of Stewart wasn't appreciated because he didn't exist in this reality. No Colbert, no Daily Show. Behind the campy dressing sometimes this planet could be a real existential horror show.

================================
​

Peking duck in China, Tandoori chicken in the Punjab region itself, Korean kimchi, Philly Cheesesteak in the city of brotherly love, Pad Thai, currywurst, Masgouf in Iraq, every kind of Pho we could find in Vietnam, slow roasted lamb in Turkey, a dozen different other ways to have lamb in Greece, braised rabbit pappardelle in Italy, Moroccan meatballs in Morocco, ndole in Cameroon, injera in Ethiopia, thieb in Senegal, some kind of chocolate thing in Australia, a lot of sushi in Japan, udon in Japan, ramen in Japan, and then we were back to the States again.

It was…a whirlwind.

Yuriko was, once she got a taste for, you know, taste, she was as ravenous as I could be. With the nanomachines keeping her from literally exploding from the gut outwards she could even sort of eat like me. Well not entirely.

=================================
​

"Bah gawd it's inhuman, it's a travesty, it's unholy…we are taking bets even now between The Stranger and the mysterious girl Yuriko!"

The barker's call on the bullhorn could be heard throughout the county fair.

"Heeeee came from the north, a city slicker with no name who hails from some fancy place waaaaay up high in New England! Sheeeeee came on from the south with nothin' but a smile that could put even ya'll's most sour uncle to chuckling! And they are both! On! Their! Fortieth! Pie!"

I could hear people yelling that it was fake. That it was impossible. It should have been but I wasn't about to let up just because Yuriko wanted to try and come up against me in my chosen field of battle. But I could feel my stomach groaning on the inside. The machinery was struggling just to tamp it all down and keep it from piling up any further than there and while it was doing it I could honestly say that I felt a bit unwell for the first time since I'd created this body.

Yuriko…wasn't doing any better. Despite the nanomachines her stomach was bulging out enough to show skin despite the baggy t-shirt I'd bought her somewhere in a bazaar on the eastern coast of Africa. Her eyes had bags under them from the exhaustion, her hair was entirely out of array, and I could see the signs of surrender in her eyes. But that was all I saw, for then, looking me square in the eye, she started putting the next forkful in her mouth.

"Oh…oh you wanna go…little..urgh…girl?!"

I reached up, and in front of the crowd, stuffed the whole piece in to screams of fear, disgust, horror, and adulation. I let it drop down my escophagus and then held it there.

It's not like I needed to breathe.

Ahahah, and she knew it. She tried, god help her she tried, but she only got it halfway down before her body up and had to stop.

"OooooooooOOOOOHHH AND SHE'S DOWN! YURIKO IS DOWN! IT GOES TO THE STTTTRRRAAAAANGERRR!!"

In the moments that had passed, I burnt the pies in my stomach ash and then vaporized that. Which was good, because it let the last pie fall down into my stomach so I could turn to the crowd.

"THANK YOU SOUTH CAROLINA!"

=============================================
​

Later, when she was sleeping off managing to finally overeat to the point that the nanobots actually needed a bit to finish working, I also remembered to feed the cow.

"Hey, Dude! C'mon and get your feed, man."

I am aware that cows are female, and bulls are male. But it's my cow. I stole it. So I got to name it.

"Moo!"

"Yeah, c'mon Dude. Come and get your food."

She nuzzled in after trundling over and shoved her face into the giant burlap sack of grass I'd grabbed.

"Good stuff, yeah? I got it from Texas and everything. Made a crop circle and everything."

Of course, then she pooped. Onto my deck man! Damn it, I need like, a full on dirt and grass layer going on here.

"Dude! You…damn it you have a pooping spot, it's over there! I marked it with a sign and everything man!"

Dude, of course, was too busy stuffing her stupid cow face with the grass I'd stolen for her.

Fucking cows, man.

=====================================
​

"I can't wear the other clothes you gave me," Yuriko groused to me as I teleported down to her deck.

It'd taken her about an hour to recover, which sounded right, but now she was all up in my faces and complaining. So that was…you know.

"Why, exactly?"

"Because they are destroyed? All that funnel cake, syrup, turkey legs, fried cookies, double fried butter, and pies ruined that shirt. And those pants. So I need new clothes."

"Yeah but-,"

"I want new clothes."

"Yuriko, I can't keep just...yanking money out of people's accounts. I don't want to crash the global economy."

"You…," she blinked and then scowled, "All the money you've been using is stolen?!"

"Yeah? I stole it all from the Shiro Institute where they've been lobotomizing hundreds of Yuriko clones, from officials in the Union who were already embezzling, and a few corrupt American businessmen."

Because there are always a few corrupt American businessmen who could afford to be taken down a peg. Apparently in any universe with a population on Earth that was the truth. Which was kind of sad in a sort of way I suppose.

"That's…I don't even know how to react to that."

"Could we go for not reacting to it?"

Then she's turning away from me and crossing her arms. Which is sort of ruined by the fact that she's wearing pajama pants, one of my t-shirts somehow, and the snuggy.

"I want new clothes. You showed me all sorts of food, now I want new clothes."

"I…," my eyes narrowed, "I feel like you're sort of taking advantage of me."

"We've been eating, sleeping, and eating again for two months! I need new clothes!"

…ugh, fine. I guess some people do need more than one outfit.

"And you can't wear what you always do!"

"Yuriko, look at me."

She did.

"You see this face?"

She did, and the scowl on her face slipped slightly into a tremble.

"I'm wearing what I want to wear, which is the Guy Ensemble. Yeah?"

"Y-yeah."

"….fine we can go buy you clothes."

"Yay!"

Teenage girls.

Psionic Commando or not, I guess some things are genetic?

…wait is that sexist?

"C'mon! I want to go!"

Yeah, Guy. Show the person whose been raised as a weapon their entire life the rest of the world. What could go wrong with that? Could they…possibly go out of their way to be as extravagant as all possible to make up lost time? Why no Guy, that is a silly assumption! After all, you're just going to give a Yuriko clone some hot chocolate and then drop her off somewhere that she wants to go! You aren't going to stumble into something far beyond the scope of your own half-baked idea!

"…coming…"

I've made a new kind of monster.

==============================
​

"And finally, our tour of the world's foods come to a halt, my young padawan."

"What's a padawan?"

I sighed. One of the downsides of travelling the world with Yuriko was that I kept on wincing whenever one of my references didn't hit. Which was literally all of them. This world's Tolkien hadn't been mine. There had never been a Spongebob. Certainly no 'meme's. It was all Anti-Communism and Anti-Soviet. In the months since the Empire had decided to show up on the world stage both of the other superpowers had already begun making media to decry the new foe. But you know what was one of the most amazing parts about it?

It wasn't racist.

Race didn't even factor into it…most of the time.

In the course of turning every aspect of society into the war between different ideologies, a lot of civil rights stuff got way accelerated. It didn't matter if you were white, black, yellow, or purple. What mattered is if you bled Blue and White or Red and Yellow. I'm not quite sure what the version of that entire concept would be for the Empire but honestly the fact that they are based around a single country unlike the Allies or the Soviets probably means that Japanese people might get a few hits against them. So…that'll be 'fun' to see.

"A padawan is a student of a Jedi."

"What is-,"

"It's not important. Listen, just...eat the tacos. Welcome to Mexico City."

Thankfully she just starts eating. In her oh so expensive dress made of silk that was made by GOD. That wasn't the actual description of course but by the price of that boutique in France it should have been described as such. Was it a nice dress? Yes. Was it a beautiful dress? Sure. Should she be wearing it in a dusty little shop for tacos that I didn't even see a sign out front for? Who cares it's her dress now. But man it was the buying that got me. That was some absurd shit.

Even if I disregard the looks I got for my manner of dress, which went away when I started showing cash in my hand, it was still a bit concerning. I didn't even know clothes could get that expensive and I was an Emperor for a bit. In the meantime, as she busied herself with the tacos, I decided to check what was on one of the TVs. I'd purposely kept myself from regularly checking the satellite network and agonizing over the war. But regular TVs? That was probably ok, right?

"New York City Under Attack By Empire of the Rising Sun!"

Ahhhh fuck.

 

[torroar]

71 – Tiger Uppercut​

I slapped a few hundred thousand pesos down next to Yuriko, and stood up.

"Whrgh mfff…," she swallowed, thankfully. "Where are you going?"

Fun fact: the Shiro Institute favored teaching her how to rip planes out of the sky over things like table manners.

"Just going to go pick up some more grass for Dude. Stay here and eat some tacos."

She hadn't noticed that her former comrades were busy assaulting one of the biggest and most famous cities on the planet. To be fair these were some delicious tacos and I'd changed the channel again the moment I'd seen the first tsunami tank slamming onto the shore. At this point I had utterly no idea as to what kind of reaction she would have to seeing the Imperials actually hitting the American shore and right now I had no desire to find out. As long as she was kept distracted then it really wouldn't matter in the end. Besides which…

Nobody in Mexico really seemed to care that much. They all had glanced up but then immediately went back to their own conversations and meals when I flipped the channel again. Well…some were staring at the cash pile I'd left Yuriko but that was something that she could easily deal with. Her powers hadn't atrophied at all since she'd stopped actually fighting. I know this because she'd torn apart some trees down in Chile when a dog barked and scared her. Or at least caused the instinctual response that her military training demanded when an Allies attack dog might show up.

"Use the money to keep buying food or whatever. See you in a bit."

============================================
​

The Empire State building shuddered as a round of rockets spewed by the eponymous Rocket Angel teams that were scouring the city's airspace but it was less about damaging the entire building and more about killing the Allied soldiers that had been shooting at them with bullets and rockets of their own. The salvo was more than enough to have killed the fifteen men that had somehow made it up there and tried to garrison the entire building and with that the flying Japanese women flew off on some other objective. They hadn't noticed me standing at the very top and I…didn't stop them.

I could have. It would have been easy. Just…jump in through their own communications systems, overload their flight systems, and send them plummeting to the earth. Or into a wall or generator or what have you. I could even have accessed their automatic targeting systems and made them kill each other. But I didn't.

The armada I have waiting in space is still there. I could control them at any time I wanted. Bring them here.

But…

I don't…I haven't really fought anyone since I got here. Not even a little. Whenever I got into trouble I can just use my satellite net to block off whole sections of the planet in frozen time. Sure people were kind of getting a little temporally confused but nothing truly damaging. I'd made sure of that at least. Even now as I stand on top of one of the tallest buildings in the world, looking out across the battlefield that had consumed not just Manhattan but the whole of New York city, I hadn't really come to a conclusion about what I should do next. I know that I've already decided to not let the Empire win, but I haven't decided between the Allies and the Soviets yet either.

On the other hand, the longer I spend puttering around doing nothing is the higher number of people who die.

You know what's really scary though?

That thought didn't bother me like I think it should.

Like, I knew intellectually that a lot more people were dying than they otherwise might have. That I could have stopped it. But something in me just didn't have that old spark of outrage that was supposed to be there. I could get mad if they destroyed a restaurant, blew up a hospital, things like that, but both sides were actually doing a good job of trying to avoid actually killing civilians. All three of the superpowers, really. I suppose if Yuri was in action that'd be different but I would also have directly committed forces to stopping that crazy bastard.

I think.

No…no I would have, wouldn't I?

Of the four Floating Fortresses that the Empire has, the Allies have already seen this one. It's the one that kicked their asses at Gibraltar, the White Tiger. The Black Tortoise remained guarding Japan while the Blue Dragon and Vermillion Bird were still over in Europe. Gibraltar's post itself had been given over to the lattermost one while the Blue Dragon hadn't moved since it was first deployed to the North Sea. Each of them was capable of spewing out a whole lot of Imperial troops while providing a near impenetrable bastion against return assaults.

But the Empire, in New York at least, wasn't just relying on the White Tiger. They'd landed and were beginning to construct two different bases. One was breaking down Brooklyn, ripping buildings to pieces under the Shogun Kenji and his heavily mechanical forces. The other was on Manhattan itself, led by not the personally selected Shogun from the game but by Shinzo. Which was interesting in of itself when you considered the greater implications. Each of the three factions was meant to have some kind of extremely powerful commander, general, or shogun that showed up at the 'start'.

I had seen no evidence of a new Imperial Shogun in their files. So does that mean there never was or that evidence of their activity was simply hidden from even my capabilities. Either way it was troubling considering how the Empire was kicking the collective asses of everyone else.

Either way, that doesn't matter right now.

There are entire battalions of tsunami tanks, King Oni, mecha tengu, and those flippy VX things that could go from anti-air on the ground to copters up top pouring through Brooklyn and directly smashing against one of the Allied Commanders. The one with the muscles and hat…Warren Fuller! That's his name. He's putting up a good fight but his troops are getting swarmed on sheer numbers alone without even counting just how powerful the Empire's machine forces could really be when commanded by one like Kenji. In about one minute I watched as a wave of incoming tsunami tanks came up against a force of guardian tanks under Warren, only for King Oni to appear from around the sides of the buildings and begin bullrushing the flanks. Literally and with their eye lasers.

Guh.

Yeah, ok, I flinched from watching that.

…so why do civilian casualties not bother me like they should? Fuck I seriously need a therapist if what I'm really twitching at is military issues.

But Manhattan…damn. I just realized why the Allies are being pushed like this and I'll bet why their attempts at allying with the Soviets had collapsed so badly. Filtering out different levels of Imperial signals bouncing back and forth lets me see whose orders are going where but there's a specific and unique signal hidden beneath baffling and security of almost excessive levels. And if I follow it…yeah.

Ackermanbot.

Tatsu's personal android which had somehow made it into the Presidential chair. But if he is an android then that means that it's the Empire's campaign or…does…but they don't have the new Shogun who…

Ah fuck it.

It's nobody's 'Campaign' anymore. It never was. That was a video game, this is a real world. A single soldier doesn't pop up from a barracks, whole squads of them do. The factories are pumping out way more tanks, but not at ludicrous speeds. Soldiers that kill a lot of the enemy and gain field promotions don't suddenly start healing and getting extra powerful munitions. Not a video game. It's a real, living, breathing, and functional world. Which is why there aren't open resource fields just happening to sit around in Manhattan itself, or on the Fortresses.

I can't keep bouncing around the world and treating it like a real one and then viewing the conflict through an entirely different lens. Ugh. Worse, despite that revelation I still wince and freak a little when a Vindicator bomber flies too close to the top of the building as it flees a group of mecha tengu. It uh…it fails. It goes down in flames. The pilots scream on the radio as they begin burning before the bombs in the plane's bay goes off and ends their suffering before they hit the ground. The tengu laugh and congratulate themselves on an open channel that I don't even have to really try to access before flying off to some other part of the city.

Not a campaign. Not a game. A real world. Real life consequences…

"Mmmm…fffffuuuuuuccck it."

I fabricated a quarter on the ship and teleported it down onto my waiting palm. The flagging Allied navy forces present lost another battleship when a trio of Shoguns came barreling out from the east at full blast. Warren's base was actually under assault by now with a trail of broken and burning neighborhoods marking where the Empire forces had come through led be Kenji. Manhattan's southern tip was broken down too while Giles tried to fend them off with his air force. Which…was failing under Shinzo's relentless assault which was chock full of the VX forces in anti-air mode and plenty of mobile wave-form artillery. I can see it even if I'm not fighting. I'm not that rusted over yet to not see the implications and paths defined by the forces present.

The Allies are going to lose New York.

"If the coin decides, then it's not like, me. It's fate, right? Heads…squash match. Tails…covert."

So I flip it. Close my eyes. Close my ears. Close all my sensors. Shut down and go completely dark for just an instant. Then after a few more seconds I open them again.

"That…is bullshit."

It landed on its side.

Even when I crouched down to look at it, it stayed like that. It was a perfect quarter, and it hadn't landed in a crack on the roof or anything like that. The winds were blowing and it still wasn't moving. Maybe something was wrong with it anyhow? The fabricators had gotten something wrong even though the chances of that were miniscule, second to none. Impossible actually. Supposed to be at least. Nothing is on there, not even an extra engraving or something from the…being that I spoke to only twice so long ago in the distant past. Or anything else. Perfect quarter.

I could probably flip again...and who would know?

…Warren's base is a third of the way gone. Hundreds of men are fighting in the rubble now. Thousands more are moving forward. Garrisoning buildings, digging in even though there is little to no chance of them losing. Even…oh damn, the man himself is there. American born and raised, he can't let New York fall without firing a weapon in his own hands at least once in the direction of the enemy. Giles is raining hell but Shinzo's forces are flinching as they move forward. I can hear them…

"Warren you have to pull back, now! I can't get any of my squadrons over to help you while Shinzo is cutting his way through Manhattan!"

"No way in hell! This is America, damn it! We aren't retreating a step!"

"Warren, Lisette is on her way, if you pull back we can reinforce you!"

"If we pull back, they'll never lose this beachhead!"

"Tanya, convince him!"

"Giles, I'm staying too!"

"Tanya!"

They're staying. I hadn't even noticed Tanya before now but she's killing every single one of the charging Imperial Warriors she can see. Tankbusters and shinobi too. But there just aren't that many of those compared to how many tanks and Oni that that Kenji is sending forward. Tengu too in both versions. Also…a Yuriko. This one is not at all like Yuriko-13. A bubble of broken masonry protects her and she's sending out waves of the stuff to pulp the soldiers before her. With one hand she's picking up one of the remaining tanks and cracking it in half and with a sweep of her other hand others are sent flying into onto their sides and backs fully.

"Tanya look out!"

The Yuriko has her, raising her up in into the air in front of everyone else so they can watch.

I…

She gets pulped. Tanya gets pulped, torn apart at the middle and with both halves sent flying. But – no wait. Time reverses for an instant and all of a sudden Tanya's there again completely whole. But Yuriko is covered by a screen of Imperials too thick for anyone to get past and she's got the blonde commando again. Why am I trembling. I don't tremble. I shouldn't tremble. This is a robot body with every inch under my own command. Why…this time the Yuriko doesn't waste time on theatrics and rips Tanya apart again. No way does the belt have the power to reverse Tanya's personal time again that soon.

Fucking….fucking…

"FUCK!"

The Yuriko loses concentration as I scream from right behind her. The teleportation fades a millisecond before I smash my fist into her face to send her right to the ground unconscious. Possibly dead considering the velocity I used and the metal in my everything. All around me the Imperial troops freak out at the sudden appearance of a screaming bathrobe clad man but they don't get more than an instant to do that before I'm teleporting forward again to where – fucking Christ Tanya is trying to hold her guts in her legless torso without somehow dying of bloodloss yet. Behind me I have one of my satellite banks activate and teleport them all into space.

The Yuriko-clone. The infantry around her. The tanks supporting her. The King Oni marching right behind. All of them appear in space. They all get about two seconds to realize what has happened before the satellites turn their own laser cannons on them and rip them apart. All in all the removal of a crucial military element from the battlefield takes me five seconds total. But I barely focus on that in favor of approaching Tanya who is wholly focused on not dying out of sheer willpower. Or maybe some kind of Allied genetics or something which makes her not pass out from the physiological reaction of being torn in half. Shock maybe.

"Hey."

"C'mon, c'mon no, no," she's hissing to herself. I don't think she even heard me.

"Tanya."

She looks up, blanches for a second.

"I need to ask your permission to heal you."

"W-what the fucking…ngggh oh god, no no no no."

Shit. Distracting her from being distracted from the pain.

"Whatever. I'm going to heal you, but don't talk about it with anyone if you would."

Then we're teleporting back to my ship – both her top and her bottom half where it's halfway inside some wrecked car's windshield. I don't have a sarcophagus ready for her but I can make one easily. Not one of those crap Goa'uld one's either that were badly reverse engineered but a good one improved and refurbished with the original Ancient healing tech. She's gasping now, and passing out and…her heart is stopping from the bloodloss and pain catching up to her. I don't think she even caught the sight of the featureless metal and sweeping sphere of the ship's inhabited areas before her eyes flickered shut.

The door of the sarcophagus closes…but in the minutes it's going to take to put her back together I'm back in New York City and on top of some building or another overlocking the dying remains of Warren's base and Kenji's still oncoming forces. They lost their Yuriko but they aren't stopping. That's fine. I bounce my signal into Kenji's base, every part of his heavily technology based forces, every structure.

For the sake of…I don't know, drama I suppose, I reach out with one hand and then clench it.

It feels…like nothing.

Over a hundred mecha tengu fall from the sky followed by the Imperial copters. Ejection protocols send the King Oni pilots flying forward before the robot suits themselves begin tearing apart everyone around them with limb and laser. Every single one of the wave form towers and defender-class turrets around Kenji's base turn on his structures and manufacturing facilities. Rocket Angels scream in horror and dismay as I override their suits in one fell swoop and turn the hundreds of them throughout the city on terror, scout, and flanking missions back towards their own fellows and make use of their vaunted 'unlimited ammo'. The tsunami tanks tear each other apart despite the screams and attempted override protocols of their crews.

Too much automation for efficiency. Too much trust in nanomachine technology with the assumption that no one could override them.

Speaking off…the nanoshield generators produce their clouds without any input from the panicking Shogun as almost every part of his army turns on itself. Instead of a comforting and invulnerable blue shield they are red and furious. The clouds billow upwards and then outwards to strike, tear apart, and consume every part of the troops before me that were not controllable, that I could not command myself. Organics, mostly. Shinobi screaming as their hiding places in the shadows are found by thermic scans. Imperial soldiers flailing with their katanas as their flesh is burrowed beneath in a 'search for mineral resources for replication'.

…thirty seconds from arrival against whatever number that Yuriko clone was to now. To shutting down Kenji entirely and exterminating approximately…93% of his entire force. The rest of them are being killed by his own nanomachines. A thousand safety protocols to keep them as part of a defensive structure and away from doing exactly what I'm having them do fail beneath my electronic warfare suites built with enough power and self-learning sophistication that I need only make them start to see them win. Kenji knew exactly what nanomachines could do. But now they are not a shield.

They are a plague.

My plague.

Five seconds after I've reduced Kenji's attacking force to Kenji and his last soldiers within his personal command bunker I teleport inside.

"WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR IS HAPPENING!"

"I don't know my Shogun, they've…the base…our troop are moving against Shinzo now!"

"Kenji, what are you-,"

"Shinzo! Someone has taken control of my mechanized forces! They have obliterated my base on the cusp of victory! Prepare yourself, they may try to do the same to you!"

"What about you?"

"I don't even know what I am going to-,"

I shut the screens off. Shinzo doesn't need to see this. By now one of the soldiers has noticed me over Kenji's panicked screaming. I don't need them. Any of them, really. So they go up…and up…and up. None of them have flight packs or suits or anything like that. They'll hit the ground again in a little while.

"Shogun."

He whirls on me.

"Who-where are me-you. You did this. How did you do this!??"

I let him shake me.

I've obliterate his troops. Massacred…no. Exterminated his army. He deserves to be able to vent a little.

In the meantime, behind him, I fabricate a very large coffin with the door open. Metal, of course. You can't fabricate wood out of metal reserves but I can certainly have it painted oaken brown.

"Like this," I grab him by the wrists of the hands he was shaking me with…and shove him backwards stronger than he can possibly resist. The coffin shakes as he flies into it but before he can react further I close it before both of us teleport back to the ship.

It shakes once, his scream of rage echoing out of it, before I hit the entire thing with a singular time dilation field. It slows him down. A lot. Worse than even the replicators were hit by when the Asgard tried to trap them. Time is, for now within that coffin, effectively frozen compared to the outside world. It'll hold him for more than long enough. He'll keep.

======================================
​

Tanya blinked rapidly as she realized she had regained consciousness.

Sitrep. I'm…I'm dead. No. Wait.

The man.

The one with the bathrobe and the…sandals with socks and mug of coffee in one hand? Was that a hallucination after dying twice in quick succession?

Fucking time belt. What's the point of saving my life if I just die again immediately!

It was completely dark too, wherever she was now.

"Hello?"

She had been…stuffing her own guts back in. Stupid. Meaningless. The belt was on her waist that had been flung dozens of yards away. Even if she could have somehow reached it before the bloodloss or the shock killed her the belt wouldn't have recharged. But she had refused to just die like that. Was that why her mind created the image of some stranger offering to heal her somehow? A dying hallucination that apparently concluded in a coffin. Wonderful.

Was this hell?

A dark coffin to be trapped in for all of etern-

"Wakey wakey sunshine," a voice called out before the entire coffin dissolved around her.

Her pistols were tossed onto her chest and…

"I'm…alive!"

"Yeah, now get up," the stranger from before said, his voice flat and dead.

She obliged but before she could even ask another question there was a strange humming noise and she was suddenly surrounded by the stench and sights of the battlefield that she'd just been dying on. Furthermore she stumbled slightly as she realized she had legs again. It was…her pistols fell to the ground out of her loose grip as she frantically felt herself. Thighs, shins, ankles, feet, ass….all of it was there!

"How the fuck-,"

"Not important," the stranger said again. "I saved you. Yes your legs are back, and frankly you're probably a year or three younger than before. I have some more business to take care of."

Tanya was one of the most decorated members of any military on the planet that care for actual accomplishment and not meaningless ornamentation. She had never heard someone speak with a voice so dead and tired at the same time, not in the most burnt out generals or soldiers. Before she could turn back to speak to him, however, he had disappeared. As if in thin air. Speaking of that…

Where had she been before? What the hell-

"Tanya!"

She turned as a group of battered soldiers led by an even more battered commander appeared out of the burnt out remains of the base she'd been stationed at.

"Fuller?"

It was indeed him. He'd lost his beret and was clearly bleeding from a gunshot wound to the shoulder but he ignored it as he ran over to her.

"I thought you were dead, Tanya. Reports said you got torn right in half!"

"I…," she considered for a moment what the man had said right before he'd saved her. "I got better. Time belt, remember?"

"Huh, Futuretech does good work I guess," Fuller grunted. "Now c'mon. We've got to regroup."

"What happened while I was uh, gone?"

Fuller looked back at her and shrugged.

"That entire army that was attacking us? Gone crazy. Turned on itself and then headed right after the guy hitting Giles. His whole base ended up ruining itself too."

Tanya thought back to the man with the tired and dead voice and the utterly emotionless eyes.

"Oh."

"Yeah. Crazy right? Never thought I'd see the Empire hitting itself in the face but I'm not going to question it. Our orders are to defend New York and that's what I intend to do."

"With your base destroyed and your troops decimated?"

Fuller looked her over and then racked the slide on his appropriated shotgun.

"We follow orders."

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​

The Floating Fortress was an interesting design. A heavily defended supercarrier-esque base. With the instant nano-generation capabilities of the Imperial Arsenal they could construct entire armies faster than anyone on the planet except for me. Hell that was how they made their military buildings too. It was basically a much tinier and technologically inferior to ship and mobile battle station designs that I myself had created before. It was also quite heavily populated and was in the middle of panicking about the utter destruction of Kenji's forces and the disappearance of one of the honored Shoguns of the Empire as well.

"Don't worry," I couldn't stop myself from murmuring as I sat in the middle of the entire structure. "You won't be wondering very long."

I didn't want to destroy it. Why do that when the Allies could just capture it and hold it right outside of Manhattan? Instead I shut it down from end to end. Teleported almost all of the explicit military forces on the fortress into the firestorm that had become the currently highly contested Central Park. Giles was giving it his all and after I rammed Kenji's mech forces into Shinzo's flank he was actually beginning to win in the tug of war against the Empire forces present. The little smattering of forces that Fuller had left were charging their way in that direction as well. Unlike Kenji the illustrious samurai had elected to not personally land with his troops and fight against Giles from his command bunker.

Instead, as one of the most trusted Shogun and ally of the Emperor's family personally, he was given command of the wonderfully powerful White Tiger. So two armies to Kenji's one.

Now…he was alone in his V.I.P. Bunker in the center of the fortress. He was also reacting far less badly than Kenji had. The cameras show him as falling into an immediate seiza position and shifting over a small tea set which actually had some in it. Huh. Even when I teleport in he doesn't react strongly other than raising his gaze to meet me and then lowering it so he can focus on finishing his cup. When I walk over, he silently gestured for the position opposite him.

…I took it. If he tries to commit seppuku I can shove him in another sarcophagus and then he can join his erstwhile Shogun comrade.

"You are the one who slew Kenji?"

Gruff. Yet calm.

"He isn't dead," I shake my head slowly, reaching forward to a proffered cup of tea. "Captured."

"Ah, I see."

"You're taking this better than I thought you would, honestly."

He shakes his head this time, not me.

"I am concerned. Furious at our failure here. Ashamed for it as well. But I do not fear you, despite the capabilities of what you have displayed."

"And why is that? I tore his army away from him. Turned his base against him. I struck him with a single blow and yet cut him in a thousand different ways. Shouldn't you be scared?"

He sips again, and then places the cup down.

"A samurai does not fear the enemy. I serve the Emperor, and so long as I follow him and His divine will then I cannot know fear."

…hmmph. He sounds like the early Mulani.

"I will not surrender."

"I didn't expect you to."

He stands, then, and steps back twice before placing a hand on the hilt of the katana at his side. I…step back and for the hell of it fabricate a katana of my own. He's been respectful. I can do the same in return. Though I do make my sword out of my most favorite alloy, albeit with a sharpened edge. His questioning glance…it makes me speak for some reason.

"A quantum-crystalline alloy. It can taste the innards of the Sun itself and not melt, and suffer the most powerful pressures of the world without breaking."

"It is…made for defense, then," he says while slowly drawing his own blade. "It speaks of your character that it is what you have chosen to use for a weapon.

"Yes. But…can be used in other ways as well."

Why am I doing this?

…because he's lost and he knows it, I guess. Because he can't win against me I know it. His forces are lost. He has failed the Emperor.

"You will not be harmed as my captive."

"I shall endeavor not to be taken alive regardless."

I can't help but shrug at his declaration.

His move forward is fast. Very much so. But…it is human. So very human. I can slide aside the tea set and its tray with my foot without breaking any of it and retake a stance without him managing to blink. His strike forward carries considerable strength behind it to the point that I think it might even have managed to mortally cut a human man if they had worn no armor. It is a simple slash. In return I rise up my own slab of metal and strike upwards against it. An attack, a counter, and a block in one movement.

His eyes widen as his katana – likely an ancient family heirloom – shattered from my strength and the invulnerability of my weapon.

His eyes close as my fist strikes his chest and sends him flying backwards.

They do not have time to open again before he lands bodily onto the coffin I fabricated and teleported behind him. Nor before I close it, send it back up to my ship, and trap it in another time dilation field. Without him his remaining forces are leaderless and are already being pushed into the water itself. The fortress, the White Tiger, is done. The technicians are locked in the island's own prison cells, the defenses are powered down, the hidden traps in the programing for if capture ever occur deleted and cleaned. Traps scrubbed.

I check my internal chronometers and teleport back to Mexico.

Time Of Arrival: 12:37 PM EST.
Time Of Departure: 12:48 PM EST.

It took me 11 minutes to break three armies and decapitate the Imperial military leadership by two Shoguns. To save all of New York and reduce the available Floating Island Fortresses to the Japanese by one of four.

I don't even know what I'm supposed to be feeling.

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​

"Hey! You're back, finally. I had two hundred tacos while you were gone and…are you ok?"

I blink at her words and look in the mirror. No marks. No blood or soot. No bags under my eyes which is obvious because I can just decide not to have them and then they won't ever appear.

"Uh, yeah? Why?"

"You looked…sad."

I looked sad?

"Nah, no way. Anyway, what do you think of the tacos?"

"Oh they're amazing, and while you were gone one of them offered me some kind of pepper? Ghost chile something? They laughed because they thought I couldn't eat them, and…"

I try to sit back and relax in my chair as I listen to her talk. I really…really…really try.

And after a while and a few dozen amazing tacos? I do.

Thank god for tacos.