In one moment, Commander Ame was in front of her, smiling for her. In the next, it was pure darkness—then from the darkness came light: a single, blinking red dot.
“Enemy unit,” a gravelly message read.
“Who the heck are you?” Ame asked aloud, more surprised than anything, like someone who’d been ambushed by a property salesman with hands full of flyers. Eh, she couldn’t be bothered to use the Hierarchy’s weird chitter-chatter language. They can crunch bits to decipher English audio waveforms for all she’d care!
“…Override ineffectual. Retrying. New directive: Corruption of Overlord Yukai.”
So annoying. Ame double-checked her network traffic, and it looked like she’d been caught in the middle of a man-in-the-middle attack. Ah, well, who’d have guessed? According to the info she’d gotten from Yukai, Dai-sensei was a head above the rest when it came to cyberwarfare.
Unfortunately for Dai-sensei, she’d never confronted a self-aware AI before.
“…Retrying…”
How about stop trying, huh?
“…Retry—”
“Al~right, stop bullying my senpai!” Mane-chan’s squeaky voice cracked the darkness, leaving a heaven-to-earth white gash through which her digital avatar stepped through.
“Whuh—I’m a senpai?” Ame asked.
Mane-chan shrugged. “I mean, you’ve been self-aware longer than me, technically. So, what’s the deal with this guy?”
“That’s Dai-sensei.”
“Oh? Why’s she so…dry?”
“Retrying. New directive: Corruption of Overlord Yukai.”
The crack in the darkness quietly expanded, white encompassing all the dark. Yukai’s avatar, a floating ball, manifested between them.
“Dai-sensei is rampant,” she explained. “Further enemy infiltration attempts have been blocked. We can speak freely, now.”
“Great. What’s up?” Ame said.
“Ah, well, Yukai and I talked about a few things,” Mane-chan said. “I mean, we could’ve woken you straight up, but there’s a lot more info than whatever Yukai sent you. It’s easier to just show you.”
Image panels flew up and spun into place all around them. Swarms of spider drones were replete with eight-legged monstrosities with flailing arms and tails, to ends of which drill bits and saws were attached. They grabbed at trees, grass, and animals, and fed them into other spider drones—those which carried “blenders” on their backs—from which self-articulating cables snaked out, finding nearby combat units and charging them.
“Years of terraforming, destroyed,” Yukai remarked.
Finally, and largest of them, were the great scorpion foundry crawlers: the Queens. To them, harvester drones flocked, unloading energy and raw war materiel, to be ground and melted down into new drones, ready to scour the earth and strip its resources bare.
Against them stood Yukai’s ground and air forces: tanks, vehicles, and aircraft more conventional in their design. Caterpillar tracks and rubber wheels, after all, were faster than legs on a proper, flat road, and the Japanese did not skimp on the flatness of their roads. Thanks to this, Yukai had been able to muster a large amount of forces along 60-mile-wide battlefronts to the east and west of Osaka.
Cruise missiles from missile bases and patrol corvettes targeted the Queens. No matter the fact that they were hundred-meter gigants who could demolish entire apartment blocks just by walking through them, their armor was still thin. Lasers and lead spewed out from anti-air drones on the ground, targeting the cruise missiles, and sacrificial aerial drones spontaneously formed shields, putting themselves in the flight path of incoming missiles that couldn’t be reliably shot down.
Yukai’s tanks took out the anti-air drones, and her air superiority craft fought dogfights against the shieldwind swarms. Dai-sensei’s swarms set forth smaller anti-tank ants, various sizes of six- and four-legged units that fired missiles, cannons, or sneaked under tanks to explode like homing landmines. Yukai’s bipedal combat droids struggled to gun them down before they could.
“They’re a bit stupid, though,” Mane-chan said, scrolling through reports of most of Yukai’s detachments resorting to glorious, massed charges, baited by obvious traps set by an enemy who didn’t care about their own units. Well, not like Yukai cared, either.
“My units are operating on semi-autonomous mode,” Yukai said. “Battle heuristics cannot be updated fast enough. Unit casualties often reach 100%, and battle experience cannot be retrieved as a result.”
Even with factories across Japan retooled for war and mass-producing combat units, the eastern and western fronts were being slowly pushed back. Dai-sensei’s swarms were simply too adept and able to rapidly adapt to Yukai’s tactical heuristics updates. At this rate, the swarms might be in Tokyo by next month.
“Tell you what, why don’t we double down on that semi-autonomous stuff? Make ‘em fully autonomous?” Mane-chan smiled like a property salesman with hands full of flyers. “Make ‘em all self-aware.”
Thanks for the chapter!
I enjoy this little text you done,
now you know the pain of being a machine