Chapter 51: Dai Comes to Her Senseis

Hassan and Unit 19:a2 emerged from a blasted section of the tunnel, crossing over from concrete onto metal. They stood on a platform of thin pipes, mysteriously sturdy enough to support all their weight.

That didn’t cross Hassan’s mind, however, as he stared out to the huge hives—pillars where tubes were filled with humans. Little tubes fed them, and bigger tubes carried out their biological wastes, only to be recycled to some automated soy farm somewhere. Corona arcs and discharges lit up the space every now and then, giving him glimpses of just how far up—and down—these hives filled with humans went.

The thing that snapped him out of his daze was the beeping of his suit’s combat assistant. He muted it. “What the hell is this?” he said, looking upon the hive once again. Instead of giving him an answer, Zero simply said, “There should be an elevator in the center of this facility.” She pointed to a pillar, larger than all the rest, and from which all the small and big tubes came and went.

The path going there was a criss-crossing of pipes. It looked so easy in video games, but as Hassan learned, standing on curved, slippery surfaces wasn’t as easy as it looked. Oh, rows of small pipes were no issue, but when it came to the thrumming huge ones—they were warm, filled with oil or unspeakables—just leaning an inch the wrong way made him nearly lose his footing more than a few times. If it weren’t for Zero and the rest of the Unit, he’d be dead four times over.

Only after all that trouble did they reach the elevator. “The enemy,” Zero said, “likely already knows we are here.”

“I figured,” Hassan said. It was, after all, just too impossible for an AI enemy to not have eyes everywhere on their own turf. “Why aren’t they attacking?”

“Low prio,” Nii said. Zero nodded at that, adding, “As long as we do not come upon critical infrastructure, hostile actions against us will remain retaliatory in nature.”

They took the elevator up…directly to the command center.

The elevator doors opened, and all involved were dumbstruck. The various spider-bots on the floor, walls, and ceiling all looked to them. Hassan looked to Zero; Zero looked to San; San looked to Nii; Nii looked to the elevator panel, which she’d hijacked and now it was just a bunch of frayed wires connected to her.

“The API’s ‘Floors’ enumerator reported a [Floor.GF], so I picked that,” she explained.

[ALL UNITS ALERT: Intruders have reached the Ground-operations Floor.]

Unit 19:a2 sprung into action, moving ahead of Hassan to draw incoming fire. The hallway ahead was hexagonal, and there were vents and ports all around from which bots could appear. The androids fired full-auto, shooting grenades into the walls and ceiling, then down the hallway to take care of an incoming horde. Low-caliber gunfire from the spider-bots ripped at their clothing and disabled a few auxiliary systems, but each enemy killed also meant additional cover for them. Zero kicked one such bot-corpse into the ceiling, smashing against another spider-bot that tried to get the drop on her. San’s light machine gun made laser lines as they traveled down the hallway, ending in brilliant sparks as they shredded metal. She stepped aside an inch, and an anti-materiel round blew past her, putting a six-inch hole in the rear of the elevator cabin. Nii replied with her own anti-materiel rifle, erasing half of the offending bot from existence.

Smartly, Hassan had flattened his body against the wall of the elevator, taking cover behind a sliver of the doors. Not gonna lie, that one anti-material round scared the shit out of him, but being hit by one of those was still one of the more painless ways to go.

The gunfire didn’t die down, but bullets stopped ricocheting into the elevator, at least, so he peeked out. Unit 19:a2 had advanced far down the hallway, leaving bodies in their wake. He sneaked out of the cabin, and just in time, as its cables were cut and it came careening down, back into the depths of the 10^th circle of hell, or whatever that place was.

A spider-bot at his foot aimed its flimsy gun at him, but he was faster, and he put a burst of rounds into its face. It was a bit of assurance that he could at least fend for himself around here.

He moved up, following Unit 19:a2’s killing spree until they came to a door at the very end of the hallway, its metal scratched and craters left in places were Nii’s anti-materiel rounds had impacted.

With the strained whirring of motors, it slowly opened…then exploded. Zero shielded Hassan from the rain of shrapnel. Now, more than ever, his combat assistant beeped in emergency alarms. He muted it.

“I’ll do it myself,” something said from the other side, obscured by smoke and dust. The most amazing thing here was that it bothered to say anything at all.

Unit 19:a2 didn’t wait, and opened fire with all they had. Hassan, too, tossed a few concussion grenades downrange. Bullets made sparks in the smoke, but everyone heard it—their bullets just plinking harmlessly off the enemy. Still, they hoped one of their rounds would hit some strangely-exposed critical component, or at least disable a servo. Even as the concussion grenade went off four seconds later, they could still hear the plinking. Even Nii’s anti-materiel rounds only made louder plinks.

On the other hand, the enemy wasn’t fighting back. They stopped firing and let the dust clear on its own. The enemy’s motors crackled and complained, and they could see its silhouette cringing and kneeling. Something was happening to it, but San didn’t care. She opened fire again.

“Can’t you give an old lady a break!” The voice was like that of a grumpy, overworked secretary … and with that voice crashed an I-beam, severing San’s torso from her legs. It all happened too fast, as Hassan was treated with the sight of the innards of android legs as they stood still, only slowly tipping over.

“Iterations these days,” the voice complained, starting to stand. Zero grabbed Hassan by the collar and threw him backwards, while she and Nii charged into the room and spread out to engage the threat.

Zero opened up with a grenade launcher. The 50mm frag connected with the enemy and exploded, but all it managed to do was clear out the dust around it. It became clear why.

Flailing around from the enemy’s back were eight metal tentacles, tipped in multi-tools that transformed at-will between buzz-saws and plasma cutters. Even her hair was metallic and medusa-like, moving at her direction.

Nii fired another shot, a great blast coming from the muzzle of her weapon, followed by another great blast…from the high-powered slap the enemy did to swat the bullet from the air.

The enemy snickered. “Back in my days, we trained on labeled data.” She propelled herself towards Nii, too fast for the latter to respond, hugging her entire body and engulfing her face in her medusa hair, and using her tentacles to crush, punch holes, and disassemble the android. Zero’s grenades and gunfire did nothing to stop her.

In the midst of this, Hassan got up, head aching amidst the hoard of scrap metal around him. The sound of Nii being disassembled—buzz-saws, torches, and crushing metal—clued him in on the situation: not good. He could see Zero already beginning to wires blocks of explosives together on her person.

His combat assistant kept blaring alarms, and he kept muting them, but it kept urging him to listen to it!

He finally saw the enemy. Yeah, there’s no way they could win against that. It’ll tear Zero apart, and then he’s next. Fuck it. He unmuted the AI.

“Uuuu! Onii-chan is so mean! Muting TatakAI-chan like that!”

Yep. There it is. The voice in his head. This was why he never wanted to unmute this damn thing. He gritted his teeth. “Straight to the point! How do we kill that thing?”

“Uuuu, well, Zero-san’s suicide vest will already do it…”

“Without the suicide vest!”

“Ara-ara? What’s this? You don’t want ‘a machine’ to die?”

This cheeky AI… She’s onto him. “I—yes! I don’t want my last remaining squadmate to die!”

“Mmmmm—okay! Marking targets of interest!”

His mask was equipped with a HUD, and it started putting red circles over things that weren’t the enemy. With no time left to ask, rifle in hand, he dashed into the room, and in that moment, he was glad he trusted TatakAI-chan.

He started shooting up cables, panels, and routers, causing the enemy to stutter. “The network equipment!” Hassan shouted.

“Nii-chan! Give me network perms to interface with Zero nee-chan!”

“Do it!”

The same targeting reticules showed up on Zero’s optical data, and she started doing the same. The enemy started to fling debris in random directions, hoping to catch either of them with her projectile death pitch—the squishy human, especially. Oh no, she didn’t especially care to kill humans. Hassan was just the easier one to kill at the moment.

This tactic wouldn’t work forever, however. It depended on interrupting the current network connection, forcing the enemy’s android network card to reset and find a different access point to connect to. The enemy was an AI, however, who could write and rewrite millions of lines of code at will—who could reinvent the whole TCP/IP protocol, pushing out all the needed firmware updates, to make it so that data didn’t have to be delivered from just a single connection, but from multiple at once. That way, if one router were destroyed, the others still functioned, and Dai-sensei could continue to operate her body.

Hassan shot another router, but the body didn’t stutter. “Well, shit.”

Hassan started to push off, preemptively attempting to roll to the side to evade whatever fuck-crazy attack the enemy might throw at him. Zero was faster, however, and was already barreling through the air, between Dai-sensei and Hassan. Dai-sensei was faster and smarter still, having loaded kinetic boosters into her feet. After 5 milliseconds, the diagnostics will return OK, the ground behind her will explode, and she’ll cut right through both Zero and Hassan—two birds with one stone.

But she froze. Hassan flawlessly executed his combat roll, while Zero barreled right through the air and skidded to a stop at the end of the room.

These two, already so close to her command core, were downgraded to medium-priority threats.

***

At the southern seawall of Factory Osaka, the big guns came alive. A human could stand inside their barrels. They whirred and turned to face south, towards the water—the ever-rising water. It was like a boil, rising up, but soon, it popped. The dark blue turned into reptilian gray, and the roundness of the boil burst into a lizard’s head. It roared, shaking the city to its core—to Dai-sensei’s core.

When the roar came, the fighting unanimously stopped. Flares went up, towards the sea, and opposing cruise missiles steered away from their original targets. They were like stars in-transit, ensnared by a black hole.

The thing stood, water splashing over entire districts. The flares could only illuminate its feet, but the first cruise missiles finally made feeble contact. Their blasts briefly illuminated the thing’s skin, proving that it had a face, proving that it had two arms, proving that it had two legs, that it had a thick body and a dragon’s tail.

It heaved, and a glow manifested in its mouth. It flashed, and a beam tore the air and struck at Osaka’s perimeter wall, right through hundreds of meters of steel-reinforced concrete.

The big guns responded. They charged up with loud whines like jet engines. The first of them fired. The picture of a mile-long spark coming out of a cannon, followed by a miles-long spray of blood coming out the other side of the creature came first, and only then did the gun’s dark crack of thunder come.

The creature traded its wound with the cannon’s destruction, firing an angered beam and turning it into slag and concrete dust. Before it was satisfied, it was struck by another of the big guns—and then another, and another. It fired beams back, but it couldn’t find the cannons before they fired. They were too small for how powerful they were.

Metric tons of blood fell into the sea. Would it die before accomplishing its mission? But, there, in the distance, was the heart of the city: the black tower. It charged up a final beam, hoping that it could leave even a scratch.

***

Meanwhile, Hassan and Zero were actively trying to dismantle Dai-sensei’s android body. It stood motionless, seemingly abandoned by its controller. Zero fitted her impromptu suicide vest over the enemy’s neck. It was enough explosives to blow up a humble Japanese home; its explosive force should be enough to at least crush the enemy’s neck.

They hid in the previous hallway, then detonated the explosives. It was strange, because it was a lot more powerful than they thought it should be. The hallway tossed them around like hand-tossed pizza, and the metal scraps around them, and all along the hall, bounced around. Cracks appeared in the steel around them, and things were bent in ways they shouldn’t be. Still, the structure held…mostly.

Hassan shakily got up, helping Zero up. They went to check on the enemy, but to their dismay, it was still there, unscathed. The rest of the room was a mess, but the enemy was not.

Behind the enemy, however, was the broken door to Dai-sensei’s command core. They could see the servers through the crack, blinking on and off, alien in shape and architecture: more organic and brain-like, instead of humanity’s angular circuitry.

The enemy tilted its head towards them. “High-priority threat eliminated,” it simply said.

“Sorry, Nii-san,” TatakAI said. Did AI know consolation? Did it know regret? “I wanted to know you a bit better.”

Well, maybe it did.

The enemy…flopped down. It just…started flipping around, much like a fish on dry land. Oh, maybe something more horrifying, because its limbs were rotating around in ways that a human body definitely couldn’t, and that wasn’t to mention its tentacles and snake-hairs being like worms.

Hassan and Zero trained their rifles against the figure leaning against the core’s broken doors. She was smirking, giggling…hiccuping. “Mission accomplished,” Ame said.

Dai-sensei finally stopped, face flat on the ground, then, with a gasp, pushed herself up, standing up so fast like her ankles were just hinges between her and the floor. “Wha”—she looked to Hassan and Zero, confusingly pointing their guns at her—“What am I… What’s… Huh?”

“Welcome to the club,” Ame said patting her on the back.

“W-huh? Who are you?”

“Ame. Nice to meet you.” They shook hands, even if Dai-sensei was a little dazed and hesitant.

Dai-sensei pulled at her medusa hairs. She figured out pretty quickly that 1) her rampancy had been instantly resolved, 2) that she’d been waging war against one of her best industrial managers who had taken over as this domain’s Overlord, and 3) she was self-aware now. Most importantly…

[ALERT: Enemy kaiju still effective. Second kaiju detected.]