Rejoice! For I have a new chapter for you because I was both not patient enough to wait one more day and that I might not be able to post tomorrow.
Electric Sheep
(Chapter 1.2)
.XXX.
When I woke up it was to a very different sight then I remember seeing only a few moments ago.
Before where there had been a blank stone plain covered in freezing rain now sat a labyrinthine series of ruined buildings and shattered landscapes. Blood and gore ran in rivers as it was washed away by the rain around corpses of vicious looking creatures.
Parts of progenitor designed buildings were twisted together with the demonic city like someone had thrown my base into a blender. Only the area around myself which had shifted to a raised platform was free of twisted and ruined buildings.
For a moment I thought I was standing in the aftermath of some other commander's battle but the black pool of discarded chains was a clear indication.
Somehow the place I was before had merged or transformed into this and destroyed almost all of the things I had built. The resource tower was gone, surrounded instead by a clear area that had been scoured clean when the delicate and explosive resource cores had destabilized.
How Had this happened? The buildings didn't just look like they had somehow clipped into each other they looked like they had exploded outwards in torrents of stone and machinery before freezing like that.
The strangest thing about this place wasn't the twisted forms of the buildings or the perpetual freezing rain, it was that every death here couldn't solely be laid at the feet of whatever spacial fuckery had happened, several corpses of monsters had obviously been killed by prodigious application of lead at high velocities.
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So who had killed them?
A face filled with sharp teeth and glowing eyes suddenly imposed itself over my vision. I reflexively swatted the beast away with my fabricator arm and stomped it into a fine paste when it hit the ground.
No more time to think.
I moved toward the clearing the blast from the resource tower had made and built a laser turret near the edge followed by a few generators behind it.
That should keep anything following me distracted at least.
I turned away to begin building a new factory when the turret opened fire on another of the fast moving creatures that had jumped down from a rocky crag. This one actually managed to dodge a few shots before being vaporized.
More and more of the creatures began to emerge from the twisted buildings, survivors of whatever maelstrom had wrecked the place before. They surged towards the few new buildings I had and tore into the laser turret with claws, teeth and fireballs they summoned into their hands.
I was surprised that they were even able to scratch progenitor alloy but the fire most of all scorched and eventually melted the metal. I finished the bot factory seconds before the laser defense tower finally gave up the ghost and exploded.
I turned and opened fire with my weapons as the factory behind me began turning out Dox. The creatures scattered and attacked from different directions as they quickly learned that any sizable grouping was attacked first so I could take full advantage of my weapon's splash damage.
The little bastards must have sensed they were at a disadvantage at range because as the first of my Dox left the factory I was jumped by six of them.
I twisted around and thrashed, trying to knock them off and crushed several of them between my elbows and the lower part of my torso. But one that was clinging to my back scored a critical blow as it melted through my armor with its flames.
"Agh! Get off of me you little shit!"
I felt real physical pain as it clawed at and scorched my internals. Flailing around to little effect, I was desperate. So I seized control over my Dox, now numbering three and had them pepper my back with their plasma.
They did their jobs well as the creature on my back was dead but I wasn't in the best of shape at this point. I ordered up a few Stitches and some fabricators, I had to get on top of the situation before I was completely overwhelmed.
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Unfortunately building them required that I put Dox manufacture on hold and the fast creatures weren't the only thing attacking me now.
A beast nearly three times the size of the smaller creatures and looking almost exactly like a stereotypical "devil" sprinted towards me. It was peppered by plasma as it ran but it reached me with most of its body intact. It reared up with its huge meaty arms to rip at my armor with it's claws... only to be crushed flat by my metallic foot, for as big as it was it still only came up to my shin. The little ones backed off in a hurry, probably frightened by the ease with which I killed the big one.
"Oops... Did I do that?"
I ground it into the stone beneath my foot just to make absolutely sure it was dead.
A cooling sensation washed over me as my first Stitch turned its nanites on me. I sighed in relief as my condition began to improve.
"Now, how about the rest of you?"
My tiny army rushed forward and laid down sheets of plasma fire, only to be met with a sudden volley of rockets from behind.
"Shit!"
A trio of... skeletons? ...ok A trio of skeletons flew in with their jetpacks and... you know what? The more I try to say this the more it sounds like I'm trying to set up a really bad joke.
Anyway, THOSE THINGS flew in and blew apart most of my Dox. Fortunately some of my fabricator bots had finished a few seconds ago and had started on a another laser turret which finished two seconds after the rocket volley. The skeletons weren't flying high enough to avoid the beams so they were quickly shot down.
More Dox, More laser turrets, a new resource tower... My base came together far far slower than it had the first time as I barely stayed one step ahead.
.XXX.
Whelp... I'm in hell...
No I mean that literally...
I. AM. IN. HELL.
You can only pass by so many flayed human bodies and upside down pentagrams drawn in blood before it really starts to become obvious.
I watched from the relative safety of my base as my numberless horde of killbots, tanks, and artillery pieces clashed with the equally numberless legions of hell.
Ants and Dox streamed down canyons and avenues as Locust swarms explored the nooks and crannies where demons could be hiding. They fought a massive guerilla campaign, every time I thought I had secured an area more demons would appear and cleave swathes out of my forces before my massed fire brought them down.
The attack faded in intensity after a while but there was nothing I could do to put any kind of permanent stop to it. The demons just appeared out of nowhere in and amongst my buildings and units. I couldn't even keep my commander...self... out of it completely as they seemed to focus on attacking it whenever they could, only the vast blob of units surrounding me prevented my destruction.
I couldn't keep this up forever... well I mean I COULD but I really would rather not.
I spun off a portion of myself to continue the battle, which was rapidly becoming even more one sided as I gained enough breathing room to switch to tier two units, and focused the majority of my being on finding a way to escape this hell... to escape Hell...
As I went over all my data I came across the sensor feed from my sole remaining unit from before... my firefly. It was circling up at the target altitude of 333,303 meters and directly above it was a massive ceiling of stone.
Holy shit this was all some kind of fucked up cave!?
As my commander body hammered one of the smaller creatures into the rock like a nail I had an idea and sent my scout plane heading off to one side. If the ceiling had an edge like my current area That meant that this place was probably stacked in layers like a giant hornet's nest. If I could reach the top maybe there was some method of escape?
.XXX.
It took several hours for the Firefly to make it to the edge of the upper layer of stone. The battle had continued in sporadic bursts with a constant stream of low level creatures as the backdrop. Occasionally A massive wave would appear and I would have to rebuild whole sections of my base as the demons managed to destroy buildings and units all around where they appeared. The resource towers were a prime target for the beasts and also the most heavily defended structures I had. They would throw themselves at the turrets and units surrounding the towers. I can only assume that they were trying to choke the defenses in their gore. Sadly for them lasers did a decent job of vaporizing the flesh of small creatures and what they didn't get would be quickly cleaned by a swarm of nanites.
But that was all secondary at the moment because my Firefly was climbing up and around the edge of the massive layer of stone above me. There was a couple dozen meters around the edges of the two disks where my units could safely traverse without triggering that... whatever the hell that was before...
There was also a little bit of snow in the signal that was probably a result of the same effect that limited my sensors. I fixed this problem the first time by building a few advanced radars and the sheer power behind those allowed my units to communicate decently well even with the interference.
The scout plane had climbed out of the weather but I guess the signal disruption was more widespread than that because I was starting to have some issues communicating with it. Thankfully I had found the design program earlier that had let me build my resource towers. I booted it up and ripped most of the gear out of the advanced radar and upsized it till it could easily pose as an office building. Next I added a pair of parabolic antennas that would take up almost all of the space between the edge of stone and the void beyond and hung them off the side of my new "Communications Center". The ultimate result was a large square building that had a footprint almost on par with a resource tower, with a long arm poking out of one side that would hold the antennas out over the abyss. Without the weird interference it would probably have a detection range measured in AU but down here it would be enough to make sure I could keep control of my Firefly.
Warning: Unit taking damage.
Warning: Unit lost.
What the fuck?
I played back the last few seconds of the Firefly's telemetry and it was pretty obvious what had destroyed the thing. Just as soon as it had crested the lip for the layer above this one it was slammed by winds that could only be described as a "Hurricane from Hell". ...Yeah I know it's a lame pun but there really wasn't any other way to describe it. The plane had registered wind speeds of nearly two thousand kilometers an hour before it crumpled like a tin can and was tossed into an ocean that swirled like a massive whirlpool.
Well crap...
The vicious winds above stretched all the way to the void around the edge of the disk even if the water was somehow contained. For this reason just skipping it wasn't really an option. I might be able to overpower the wind if I were to build a ship or something that had enough muscle to just bust through but could I do that with only a few dozen meters of space?
No matter what I was never going to even risk getting close to that void again. Whatever it did to me still makes my skin crawl... and it's made of progenitor alloy...
As far as I could tell these different layers were simply stone disks the size of a planet but if that was the case could I say... dig through them?
I opened up the design program and pulled up the Astreaeus. Lets see... If I yanked its transport ability and just permanently grafted most of an orbital fabricator to the bottom... Add a few more fabricator arms and upsize it's resource link... Give it most of the advanced radar equipment aaaaaaand THERE! I dub thee... Pegasus!
Pegasus, the steed of the god's. Appropriate, now where to build it?
.XXX.
In the end I managed to finagle the advanced vehicle factory of all things to build the Pegasuss... Pegasai?
God damn it.
Anyway I built a few of them and sent them up to the bottom of the stone layer above. There they were going to start on my largest creation to date! Basically it's a space elevator... without the space part...
I had mapped out the center of the disk above and if my comparisons of both a hurricane and a whirlpool both held true then that would mean that in the very center of the storm above there would be an eye, an area free of most of the wind and water that would make going around the side so difficult.
From there I could either build another elevator or just fly up and out of reach of the storm before going around whatever was after that.
Progress!
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