Chapter 258: We Tried (Patreon)

The dragon’s palace was shielded against teleportation, along with most of his  research facility. I.E, Berkeley.

But, there was a gap right around the miniature park in the middle of the university, specifically kept there for teleporters to land and be scanned by the security systems.

The instant his portal closed behind him, Perry was immediately besieged by heavy munitions and lasers from every conceivable angle.

The lasers hit his eyes first.

HP: 13->5

In a fraction of a second, Perry’s HP dropped precipitously, and the bullets were still heading towards him.

Bit of an oversight putting so much downtime between the lasers and the bullets.

Portal.exe

Naturally an anti-portal field had sprung up, so Perry changed tactics.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

That was blocked as well. It seemed as though dimensional tampering in general was being shut down.

PPP.exe

Old Faithful, the spell he’d created as a combination/upgrade of Kolath’s Floating Armory and the life-draining Threads Of Gintax, the Pernicious Prison popped into existence at the tip of his finger.

Razor sharp threads of sticky tar blasted out in a web, mangling and gumming up the gun turrets surrounding him.

That was when the killbots managed to overcome their own inertia and join the fight, just as the soul-ripping blast of light scattered off Perry’s inner defenses, turning the surrounding grass dead and crumbling in a fraction of a second.

Static Shock.exe

A blast of lightning caught one of the robots in the chest and flung it high above the university, dropping it on the roof.

Perry caught a monomolecular blade on his shoulder and absorbed its sharpness in a battery, then returned it to its owner.

The offending robot collapsed into sparking chunks while the living lightning from Static shock turned around and caught another robot in its serpentine jaws.

PPP.exe

With another application of the Pernicious Prison, Perry swiftly crushed the remaining opposition.

When the robots tried to magically reassemble themselves, Perry absorbed and then deconstructed the spell that was doing it.

Eventually his attention turned to the curse underneath him buried deep in the soil that bent Fate and made it impossible for him to win, nudging his choices and circumstances in a way that made the situation always turn against him.

Perry disabled it.

“…Alright, Fine. Whatever. We tried.” Tyrannus’s voice echoed through the ruined park as he came out of the nearby building, nudging aside a splintered tree stump as he approached.

The massive dragon had grown a few inches in the time since Perry had last seen him. It was interesting to note that Tyrannus was essentially a teenager in dragon terms, being only in his fifties.

“Hello, William,” Perry said as Tyrannus approached, giving a respectful nod one ruler might give to another.

“Good Afternoon, Paradox.” Tyrannus said, nodding his head. “What can I do for you? I enjoyed the wedding, by the way.”

“I’m looking to make a medical-grade curse,” Perry said, brushing dirt and scorch-marks off his clothes. “Something to lower the natural defenses of someone extremely powerful so we can fix some damage. Bone of Hrax and the corrupted miasma of Mount Encoria.”

The dragon scratched his chin.

“Those are rare Essences.”

“I could make you more once I have them,” Perry offered.

“That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?” Tyrannus asked. “Handing you a monopoly over a material I already have. It’s just not good business.”

“Alright,” Perry said, blowing air out of his lungs in barely controlled frustration. “What do you want?”

“I want to remove the cancer spreading through my empire,” Tyrannus said. “In a matter of months, there will be more mimics in The Eternal empire than there are people.”

“Quarantine didn’t work?”

“No, it did not,” Tyrannus said, shaking his head before motioning for Perry to follow him. “We created a piece of infrastructure capable of detecting mimics and installed copies at every major thoroughfare, and it worked very well for quite a while, keeping the spread slow while dedicated teams tracked down individual cases and destroyed them.”

“What went wrong?” Perry asked.

“The mimic assimilated the infrastructure and sent false information for two weeks before we caught on. By that point offshoots had spread throughout the entire empire. Like the spores of a tenacious, deadly mold.”

“I was worried that might happen,” Perry muttered. It was one of the problems he’d foreseen with implementing a mass solution to the problem. If the mimic could infiltrate any infrastructure dedicated to ‘the solution’, then it ceased being a solution, and quickly became a liability on the same scale.

It needed to be entirely unaware of the infrastructure dedicated to removing it, and unable to reach it, even if it knew.

PPP.exe

Tyrannus stopped in his tracks as Perry enclosed the two of them in a bubble of shiny black tar with ivory script dedicated to Gintax and Astra scrolling down it.

Portal.exe

With a quick cast, the two of them were teleported high above the world, at an altitude life struggled to survive.

Tyrannus caught himself with a quick spell, and Perry did the same.

“I assume you’ve had a thought?”

“Can I interest you in some high-altitude surveillance drones?” Perry asked, speaking a little harder to force his voice through the thin air. “Something the mimic is unaware of, and couldn’t reach if it were?

Tyrannus glanced down at the western coast of the American Continent far below the two of them.

“Useful, to be sure, but I also need a firebreak. Do this for me and I’ll give you the materials you need.”

Perry was pretty sure he knew what he was getting at, but he wished he didn’t.

“Explain,” Perry said.

“In our experiments, it has been revealed that the mimic can copy supers abilities. This is problematic, because one super caught off guard could be used to turn thousands of civilians and accelerate the spread beyond our capacity to manage. I wish to remove the possibility of this happening.”

“You’re talking about killing the vast majority of your acolytes so that the mimics can only spread at the speed of a civilian. Total Scorched Earth.”

“Yes.”

“…I’ve got a better idea.” Perry said.

“Do tell.” Tyrannus replied, craning his neck to look down at Perry.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

Hundreds of Paradox-brand surveillance drones popped into existence around the two of them, stretching as far as the eye could see. enough to surveil the entirety of the west coast.

An oversized tablet appeared in Perry’s hand.

“Right this way,” Perry said, creating another portal.

Portal.exe

A few minutes later, they were in Temple, the pseudo-religious organization where Tyrannus stamped out zealot Acolytes – AKA Supers – through military brainwashing.

In front of the two of them were a line of Acolytes-in-training, standing stock-still and nervous as hell as their god-emperor surveyed them.

“This is Paradox’s Sluggish Paralysis.” Perry said, pointing.

PSP.exe

The trainee froze up and fell out of line, their body moving as slow as sap as they attempted to stand back up.

“What’s the core of the spell?”

“Primarily Blade Tree knot. Their Essence manipulates water to create hydraulic motion inside their branches. This spell uses that to slow down the water inside people’s bodies as far as it will go without them dying. Don’t use it on the elderly though.”

“It’s a potent debuff, but it doesn’t seem to be the solution to my problem. I assume you’re going somewhere with this?” Tyrannus asked.

“Of course. I realized that I couldn’t slow water down beneath a certain speed before it simply kills the subject, but if you reinforce them…”

PTO.exe

The next trainee in line froze in place, toppling backwards.

CLINK!

The kid made a sound like solid ceramic as they hit the ground, cracking the tile underneath them.

“This… is Paradox’s Time-out.” Perry said, motioning to the subject. “It adds Bullet-hopper essence to the mix to reinforce the body, allowing me to turn the slowing effect down to the point where a human would die a thousand times over.”

“Are they aware?” Tyrannus asked, peering down at the rosy-cheeked young man staring straight up at the ceiling, still as a marble statue.

“Nope,” Perry said, knocking on his diamond-hard victim. “And you can wake them up whenever you have a need for them.”

“Can they be turned?” Tyrannus asked.

“I doubt it, but it hasn’t been tested.” Perry said with a shrug.

He leaned in close to Tyrannus’s ear.

“I figure you can put them in stasis and store them somewhere no one else can get to them, you know, rather than killing them all.”

“That is a better idea.” Tyrannus admitted quietly. “The recipe?”

Perry sent the spell’s recipe to Tyrannus’s new tablet.

“Don’t let that thing out of your sight, obviously.” Perry said, nodding to the tablet.

“Obviously.”Tyrannus said, nodding. “let’s get you those Essences.”

Fifteen minutes later, Perry walked away whistling with the bone of a particularly vile…whatever the opposite of a saint was, along with a sloshing tank full of compressed air that could melt someone’s face right off their skull.

Not from any chemical reaction, mind you. Just based on the sheer evil of the essence.

Perry dragged the two ingredients back to his lair and rubbed his hands together.

“Let’s make some magic happen.” Perry said, laying out gramma’s curse and getting started on replicating it.

Despite what people might think, he still needed a Terry-powered machine to complete a ritual, which bumped the complexity up a bit, but it was nothing Perry couldn’t handle.

Perry took the blood from the floating piece of bone marrow and filled a specialized cannister, mixing in bone powder and the other ingredients he’d gotten from Dave.

The final step was suffusing the entire mixture with miasma while chanting a prayer to a dark god.

The cannister began filling with microscopic bubbles, turning milky white as the air-permeable membrane at the bottom got miasma forced through it.

The top of the cannister had a vent that diverted the lethal air back into a cannister, where it would have to be set aside and re-purified later.

In the meantime, the liquid inside the cannister had gone from blood-red, to milky white as bubbles refracted all the light, to green as the bone reacted, then clear as it transformed from a slurry of raw ingredients, to a potentliquid curse.

Perry wrinkled his nose as he detached the cannister from its pedestal, screwing an airtight cap on the bottom.

It didn’t smell bad. Didn’t smell like anything really, but the clear liquid curse gave him an impression of awfulness that gave him phantom gag reflexes.

Bleh. Do not like.

Perry went to see what Hippocrates was working on.

“The cure will target and reverse the damage caused by Scrape’s virus, patch Mr. franklin’s genetic code, while providing Mr. Franklin’s immune system with a clearer picture of what to go after, flushing the last of the original virus out of his system.” Hippocrates said.

Perry hovered over the three doses, looking down at them.

“Make more.”

“Excuse me?” Hippocrates

“I know how this works,” Perry said, pointing down at the three bottles. “You’re gonna make only three of these, and we’re gonna be like ‘oh, no! we’ve only got three chances to cure him!”

“And then one of them is going to explode mysteriously, and another will get vaporized in a burst of uncontrolled power from Solaris, and then we’ll be down to one, and it’ll be this whole earth-shattering battle to administer it to an unwilling patient.”

Perry threw up his hands in frustration at the end of his rant.

“Make. MORE. Doses,” Perry said. “I’ll watch you do it. I wanna be drowning in these things until we confirm that he’s been cured, understood?”

“It’s fairly expensive…” The AI muttered.

“You have obviously not been around supers long enough, Hippocrates.” Perry said.

“I’m two weeks old.” Hippocrates said.

“There’s ALWAYS some life-or-death Mcguffin that raises the stakes, and it’s sure as hell not gonna be a three-vial limit, you get me?” Perry asked, poking the balding hologram. “More. NOW.”

Hippocrates rolled his eyes.

“I’ll do as you ask, but what could possibly-“

One of the vials exploded, scattering glass and Solaris-saving liquid across the brushed steel floor.

Hippocrates’s eyes widened.

“Hold on a sec.” Perry said, pulling out his cell phone and dialing gramma.

“This is Marigold Zauberer, to whom am I speaking?”

“You better not be dicking around with Fate to make accidents happen. Areyou?”

“Not…currently.” Gramma said.

Perry scowled at Hippocrates, who was still staring at the random vial explosion. He caught the AI’s attention and gave him the universal gesture for ‘hurry the F*#& up’.

“Explain.” Perry said, pacing back and forth as the synthesizers in the room began humming to life, incubating more batches.