Meteor tried again to stagger to its feet, but its leg refused to cooperate. Aside from the structural damage, its musculature was damaged, and wasn’t responding to commands to move. One hit was all it took to leave it in this miserable state.
Then again, even if it could move, what would it do? All of its techniques had failed. It lacked the power to crack Baron’s armor. Ultimately, this was a fight between Betas, and it had no way to influence the outcome.
From the ground, it looked from Trebuchet to Baron. The techniques they were preparing had last been used in concert to kill the giant human. Meteor had seen them up close, and was doing the math in its head to simulate their impending clash against each other. Trebuchet would launch a piercing beam from its trident, definitely capable of cutting through Baron’s armor. Baron’s Code would all be converted into inertia, delivering a blindingly fast vertical swing that would crush Trebuchet’s upper body in an instant. Whichever one connected first, the battle would be over.
Unfortunately, Baron was channeling Code faster. With increasing certainty, Meteor came to an inescapable conclusion: When they exchanged techniques, Trebuchet would be killed.
Cursing its own impotence, Meteor grasped frantically at anything it could do. It drew the sword its parent gave it, looking at the Code circuits carved into the blade. If it could use this blade, it would be strong enough to do something… but Alphas couldn’t reinforce objects with Code. Trying to do anything meaningful with the sword would just destroy it. Was there anything left it could do?
Meter’s hand tightened around the sword given to it by its parent. It was a precious gift, and a weapon that would open up new techniques and opportunities once it was strong enough to wield it properly.
In the moments before Baron and Trebuchet’s techniques resolved, Meteor could think of exactly one path forwards.
Aria watched itself fighting Halcyon, as if from a distance. It didn’t feel like it was present for the battle. Its body was there, but it was just an observer. Something else had taken control of it, and was fighting in its place.
No, that wasn’t right, either. Nothing external was controlling it. The decisions were all happening in its own intelligence core, and it could feel those thought processes as if they were its own. The only thing that really felt different was the perspective. It was watching itself think and act, like a spectator not just in its own body, but in its own mind.
From the back seat, Aria was able to regard the ongoing fight for survival with a bit more distance. Halcyon was incredibly strong, with a wider variety of techniques and years more combat experience. Rather than viewing those as a source of impending doom, Aria tried looking at Halcyon’s moves as inspiration.
By watching a grandmaster play, the novice gains insight into the nature of chess. By watching Halcyon, Aria felt the flow of Code within it. Tightly controlled, efficient, but also in constant flux. Something had damaged its reactor, and those imperfections only revealed more insight into how the process worked. The ways Code cycled through the body, the way different processes were automatically syncing with each other to compensate for the uneven input…
While its body fought, Aria began to iterate. Then, as Halcyon lined up its killing blow, it executed a new program.
The blow sent Aria hurtling across the cave, crashing into the wall just a meter away from the mouth of the cave and the three-kilometer fall beyond it. Something was wrong. Striking an unprotected Alpha, that attack shouldn’t have sent it flying. It should have pierced through it.
“Seriously? Of all times, you had to upgrade now?”
Aria stood back up. Its reactor gate was cracked open, letting in a stream of Code flowing in a cycle though its body. The Code threatened to overwhelm it, but it stabilized, flooding its body with coursing energy.
With the temporary power surge from a successful upgrade, a Beta could almost compete with a 1.0 on an even playing field. The jagged red lines crossing Aria’s faceplate were joined by sparks of green.
“Thanks, Halcyon. Even if it wasn’t your intent, I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from someone as powerful as you.”
Trembling with frustration and anger, Halcyon charged forward, and Aria charged forward to meet it. Aria summoned three simultaneous Cascade Rings, amplifying its punch’s range and force enough that it collided with Halcyon’s chest and knocked it off its feet. For the first time since their fight began, Aria came out of an exchange of techniques as the clear winner.
Trebuchet knew that Baron’s technique was going to be ready first. Despite facing Baron as an adversary, it couldn’t help but admire the machine’s strength. A younger Trebuchet may have even come to think of Baron as a prospective counterweight, although someone not from Crimson Sand would probably struggle to understand the meaning of the word. Besides, Trebuchet didn’t consider itself worthy of such a relationship. For now, it set such thoughts aside and weighed its options as the time until judgment dwindled.
It could deliver the attack early. That way, it could strike before Baron did, but its chances of doing enough damage to stop Baron’s counterattack were slim. It would damage Baron, then be crushed.
It could abandon the attack and dodge. If it did, Baron would probably unleash the attack half-charged, and Trebuchet doubted it would be able to change from preparing the Javelin Comet to evasion fast enough to avoid taking heavy damage.
It could try to withstand the attack, then hit back. Unfortunately, with the arc of the swing, the first thing hit would be Trebuchet’s head, so surviving that would be next to impossible.
Seconds turning into milliseconds, Trebuchet decided on a fourth option: Stay the course, and trust.
As predicted, Baron finished channeling Code about a quarter-second before Trebuchet did. However, right before it unleashed the killing blow, Baron was struck by a thrown sword, infused with Code.
Meteor was an Alpha, meaning that it couldn’t properly use weapon-based techniques… but that’s different from not being able to use weapon techniques at all. The sword was brimming with unmanaged Code, infused into it with no pattern and without regulation. It held together only for the time it took for it to reach Baron’s neck, and shattered on impact.
It was an unrefined technique, but it was just barely enough to break through Baron’s barrier, and chip its armor. In turn, that was enough to distract Baron, slowing it down for a fraction of a second.
With a roar that bled across the entire comm frequency spectrum, Trebuchet motioned to throw its trident, but didn’t let go of it. Instead, a three-pronged ray of light erupted from it, striking Baron in the throat. It pierced through, severing the connection between its AI core and reactor, and the giant fell, its killing technique unfinished.
Aria stayed close to Halcyon, hammering it with blows and repelling the heat transfer from its staff by reinforcing its body with Code. It didn’t know how long it could keep up, so it had to finish the fight before the upgrade surge died down. It probably had less than a minute to seize victory.
Halcyon summoned a cloud of cold bolts from overhead, thundering down in a ring around it from above. Aria was forced to fall back, and Halcyon raised its hand to use a new technique.
The star over Halcyon’s head thrummed with power, the blue flames overtaking the red. It erupted into frigid waves of Code, pouring outwards in all directions. Aria braced itself, diagnostics reporting an increasing number of internal systems failing. It ignored the warnings, pushing forward through the blizzard.
“Consider this a victory, Aria! I wasn’t sure if my reactor could handle this technique, but you forced me to use it regardless! If we were the same Version, I would have surely lost!”
Aria struggled to think amidst the plummeting temperature within the cave. Beyond the mouth, the waterfall fell in waves of shifting ice as it passed through the aura. Halcyon was heading towards the mouth, apparently planning to escape into the river below. Even damaged, a 1.0 iterator would be able to survive that kind of fall. Halcyon would escape with the Shroud, having killed Blue Canopy, and it would present its prize to whatever unknown masters it served, leading untold chaos to be unleashed across the galaxy. It would be a total defeat.
Aria could think of one last move, but it would doom the planet.
The planet is already doomed.
Even so, could it bear the burden of being the one to pull the trigger?
I’ll bear it for you.
Against its own will, Aria’s arm moved, and its weary reactor channeled one last Dynamic Bolt. It cut through the frost aura, and struck the Cosmic Shroud, breaking it into pieces.
