Chapter 266: My Favorite Monster (Patreon)

“So those ant grenades you saw, they use those as both a weapon and a food source. The ants turn all the biomass in a certain area into dead ants, which the humpbacks can easily transport and digest. If a year’s not going well for them, they can drop one of those on the forest floor and convert a large swath of otherwise indigestible trees and plants into juicy ant meat.”

“Fascinating.”

“Odd they used the ants against us…suggests they were more interested in killing us than food. Because they could’ve used the ants on any biomass. Why risk it against us?” Backdraft muttered, rubbing his chin.

“Speaking of ants, you ever hear of thermites?” Bob asked.

Perry raised a brow. “Do tell.”

“So at some point a colony of termites Triggered and gained the ability to poop thermite as a biproduct of their digging through wood. If an anteater or something tries to mess with them, they’ll light themselves and their colony on fire and kill everything.

“That sounds like it would kill them. Even if they were immune to heat, they’d be buried in iron slag. You know they use thermite to weld railroad tracks, right?” Perry asked.

“I’m not a biologist,” Bob said with a shrug. “I don’t know how they survive. But they do. They’re a fairly common pest nowadays. Way more dangerous than regular termites, too. You got those, you best just abandon your -

“What is that?” Perry asked, pointing out at a swath of the Australian Desert that rippled in the sunlight a little too much.

“What is what?” Natura asked.

Sometimes Perry had trouble differentiating his eyesight from others.

“There’s a patch of land over there that’s wobbling a little more than the rest.”

“Well, it could be any number-“

A beam of light caught Backdraft in the liver, hollowing out a substantial portion of his upper body.

Perry whipped out his hand and modified the refractive index of the air itself, turning the follow up volley aimed at the rest of them into an explosion of light, scattering it harmlessly.

“Optic spider.” Natura said, her face turning pale as she, Dirt and Bob hit the deck, scrambling toward cover.

“Damnit,” Backdraft muttered, looking down at the softball-sized hole in his chest. “Right through the hyperweave.”

“You guys call it hyperweave too?” Perry said, kneeling beside Backdraft and applying his healing spell.

Normally he would defer to Bob and let the group healer heal the group, but Bob was ten feet away, and it looked like Backdraft’s heart was going to stop any second.

Paradox’s Seraphine Ouchie Corrector.exe

The hole closed up in a fraction of a second.

“There you go-“

When Perry glanced up, Backdraft’s hand was missing, a cauterized stump in its place, and part of his face was gone too. A second shot had been fired in a fraction of a second and Perry hadn’t seen it.

At least Backdraft had the experience to cover his head.

Backdraft grunted with effort and a laser returned fire the way it’d come.

Perry didn’t give him time to engage in a shooting match he was clearly losing, and picked the super up, using himself as cover, intending to carry him to safety.

A bolt of fear stabbed through Perry as he glanced at where Heather had been standing a fraction of a second ago, finding her ruddy gold hair disappearing into the earth. Taking cover.

Good. I don’t wanna test how the defences for her face hold up against these bastards. Perry thought as he placed the wounded Catalyst behind a rock and stood back up.

“What are you doing, get down!” Natura hissed.

That would make him less of a target. If he were less of a target, that would make others more of a target. Aussie man’s got the same idea.

Perry walked through a hail of laser-fire to stand next to Australia Man, who was scowling into the distance, lasers bouncing off his jaw.

“Are these optic spiders a necessary part of the food chain?”

“Eh.” Australia Man grunted, a furious expression plastered across his deep red face. Half sunburn, half fury. “They’re not supposed to be out here, no.”

He glanced up at Perry. “You remember those spiders I mentioned who could take out a city if we pissed them off?”

“These ones?” Perry asked, glancing at the hillside that seemed to ripple with the wind.

“Yep.” He glanced at Perry’s armor shrugging off laser fire.

“Your armor seems like it’s holding up.”

It’s rated to withstand fifty continuous Petawatts.” Perry said.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a lot.” Perry said.

“Well alright then. You interested in lending a hand with some spider diplomacy?” Australia Man asked.

“I’m down.”

“Bewdy.” He turned his attention back to the distant hill that was raining laser fire on them. “Alright, listen up! I don’t know if you were just spawned and nobody told you, or if you’re just a bastard, but you’re not allowed to be here. You’ve got about fifteen seconds before I kick your ass straight back to your mother’s eggsack!”

Australia Man grabbed his hat and began sprinting forward at meteoric speeds, his body ripping through the air.

Perry followed suit, the thrusters on the back of his suit sending him forward fast enough to create a sonic boom that caught up with him as he arrived.

Arriving at the spiderweb, Pery knew why they were called optic spiders.

The webs distorted light in such a way that they turned nearly invisible, harnessing a mirage-like effect that hid the webs from the casual observer.

There were thicker strands, about the width of a pinkie laced through the web like arteries that seemed to converge on a central point in the web, with a thickness approaching that of Perry’s arm.

What kind of…oh. That’s a big spider.

Perry only got the faintest impression of movement under the concealing web, a leg longer than a man was tall shifting the slightest bit, a shadow of movement, before a beam of light caught him in the chest and struck him back with physical force.

Perry stabilized his mid-air tumble and ran a finger across his chest, where a small portion of the outer dermis had pitted from the searing heat.

That’s a…strong laser…no.

The math didn’t work out.

The spider was using its webbing as a fiber optic array to collect sunlight across roughly an acre of land. An acre of solar, even if it was stored for years, does not amount to an entire country’s energy production several thousand times over, as would be required to cause damage to Perry’s armor.

That much sunlight could cook most natural materials. Not Perry’s armor.

There was some Tide-based fuckery going on here.

Perry’s biggest problem was that he couldn’t perceive the lasers approaching.

He might be seven hundred times faster than a human, but by its very nature, he couldn’t see light before it arrived, because it was the medium he would use to see it. If he could see it, it was already hitting him.

Unless…

When Perry had been about to let himself die from over-Attunement, he’d seen the tremors of causality preceding Solaris’s arrival.

Not seen.

Perceived.

A little reverse-echo of what was about to happen. That twitch that happens when your brain has already figured out the answer before it bothers to tell you the thought.

Perry closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Let’s see what the Potent Thaumaturge class can do.

Sliding stats.

Stability 136 -> 135

Attunement 135 -> 136

Perry gasped like he’d been dunked into a bath of ice-water as the world around him jumped into sharp relief.

The difference between 135 and 136 was 36 entire units of Perry. Overall, it was only 5%, but the shift was far greater than a mere 5% would suggest.

Like the battle with Gorm, he could see perceive possibilities as reverse echoes vibrating through the fourth dimension, growing stronger until the moment they happened.

This is wild.

Paradox dove down towards the web and jetted to the side as an echo of a laser strengthened in front of him.

Then he got hit with a laser.

“GAH!” Perry grunted as the armor took most of the impact and sent him skittering off to the side, bouncing off the arid desert like a skipping stone, finally hitting the stone.

“How’s it going?” Wraith asked, her face popping out of the earth on the other side of Perry’s limp body, using him as cover.

“Try not to get hit in the face. The defenses there are weaker, and this guy packs a punch,” Perry mused, running a finger along the pitted armor in his upper leg.

“Can you keep its attention?” She asked. ‘Safely’ was implied.

“Of course,” Perry said, glancing up at Aussie Man, who pulled out a…

Perry blinked.

Boomerang? I should’ve known. Where was he even keeping that?

The boomerang looked like an Escher painting to Perry’s dimensional senses, gaining that sense of Meaning that echoed through the fifth dimension.

It was going to hit. The Fate of the boomerang had been decided, and everything else in the world was aligning behind that pre-ordained fate. Everything, from Australia Man throwing it, to the air parting seamlessly around it, was dragged along in service of that one pre-decided event.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Perry muttered, standing up and lunging forward, turning his jets back on to cover the distance at just below the speed of sound.

The boomerang gained speed and pierced through the side of the hill the spider’s den had been buried in, piercing the earth and slamming through the bunker the spider had built for itself

A limp spider body about the size of a double-decker bus was jettisoned into the sky, where Perry was waiting for it.

Not only was it huge, it was odd-colored. It had white hairs with a pitch-black body underneath, and it was dragging a leg-thick chord along with it’s spinnerets, which lead back down to the mirage-like web underneath it.

“Good afternoon sir,” Perry said. “Do you have a moment to talk about the L-“

The spider broke out of its boomerang-induced stupor and dragged a leg across it’s abdomen, firing a dozen of those pearly white hairs in his direction.

Suddenly Perry’s HUD was flooded with white light as the hairs burst into brilliant white flame the moment their base touched oxygen.

BASTARD!

Perry instinctively dove through the hair flashbang and hit the spider in the abdomen like a pile-driver, he leaned out of the way of an echo of pain in his right ear, and a thin section of his armor on the right side was burned away.

The spider’s spinnerets convulsed as it tried to drag the frankly absurdly powerful laser across his face, but Paradox slipped out of the way, kicking off the monstrous spider and sending it back down to Earth.

“He’s got white phosphorous hairs,” Perry said through comms as he gained distance. “Careful with grappling.”

“That’s literally all I can do,” Wraith responded. “Will my armor hold up?”

“Yeah, just…squint.”

“Got it.”

Wraith widened out underneath the spider like a net and wound around the creatures many legs.

SSSSSS!!

The entire battleground was bathed in blinding white light as a huge swath of the oversized tarantula’s hairs detached from it’s body, peppering Wraith and everything else in the surrounding vicinity.

“Hey, HEY! Calm down!” Aussie man said, tromping into the thick of the white smoke caused by the bright white flares.

“You good?” Perry asked over comms.

“I’m good,” Wraith responded, “I’ve got my eyes in the back of my head.”

“Gross.” Perry said.

“What are you doing here!?” Aussie Man demanded, picking up his Boomerang and disappearing it into a leather pouch that definitely wasn’t big enough to hold it. “tryn’a eat people?”

“Wraith, let go of his front legs, he needs to be able to talk.”

Wraith unwound from the giant spider’s front legs.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” The optic spider signed.

“How. About. Now?” Aussie Man said, making a split between his fingers and treating each of them as a spiders oversized front claws, making exaggerated gestures in Spidersign.

“Yes, yes, I understand you. Would you mind letting me up?”

“You gonna try and laser us again?” Aussie man asked, his gestures disturbingly spiderlike.

“If we’ve established an armistice, I see no reason to break it, as it would likely turn out poorly for me.”

“Alright, let him up,” Aussie Man said aloud, gesturing to Wraith.

“Much appreciated,” the spider signed, climbing right-side up with disturbing fluidity.

“Now, why are you lurking in neutral territory blasting unsuspecting humans?”

The spider gave the equivalent of a shrug “Our land is shrinking, I’m not as strong as my brothers and sisters, so I came out here to the outskirts avoid being eaten.”

“You mean population density and not land shrinkage right?” Aussie man asked.

“Nope.”

Australia Man took a deep breath and blew it out, puffing out his cheeks.

“Damn.” He glanced up at Perry.

“Do you have time for a detour? I gotta take care of something.”

Perry glanced at his HUD, which was connected to the lab testing venoms on mimics. Nothing substantial yet, dickbag wasp still being grown, as samples seemed to destabilize the machinery the moment they began pupating, leading to his samples dying prematurely. They were using non-enhanced incubators on them now, and that seemed to work, although it would take time to finish. A few days, at least.

“Yeah, I got time. What are we doing?”

“The Butthole is puckering.” Australia Man said, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m gonna go wrestle it into submission.”