Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 280: There are Laws even in Outer Space

“What am I looking at?” Isaac asked, staring at a mess of rocks, a shattered civilian starship, and several the Golems floating in space.

“Earth-Moon Lagrange Point Three. It’s under a cloaking spell, but we managed to pierce it when we focussed our observation satellite on it.”

“Why did it take this long?” Isaac asked, “Shouldn’t we have been able to backtrace the monster’s trajectory pretty easily, considering that it can’t maneuver in a vacuum?”

“L-3 is nowhere near the trajectory,” the tech reported and Isaac could feel a cold shudder running down his spine.

“Are you sure it came from there?” Isaac asked. Orbital mechanics might be wonky and often counterintuitive, but he trusted the NASA engineers to know how to backtrace something like that.

“Yes, it ejected several globs of its mass to redirect itself during its flight.”

Well, that wasn’t good, and it might be even worse.

On one hand, the monster with a literal rock for a brain figuring out orbital mechanics was scary.

On the other hand, if that thing had not figured out that it should hide its origins but also devised a method of doing so from scratch, it said some uncomfortable things about that monster’s intelligence.

Or maybe …

“Can you scan the space around L-3, and check if any other monsters have been thrown towards the Earth? And see if you can find any other ‘redirection globs’?”

Clearly, Isaac hadn’t been the only one with that thought.

“Do you have any idea how hard something that small is to …”

The tech’s protests were shut down by a withering glare from the Space Force General.

“Why do you think that monster went flying through space?”

“I think the bigger question is why the others stayed put.”

“Can the spaceship be identified?”

The constant barrage of questions didn’t get them very far for a long while, until some of the gaps got filled in.

***

“How many golems are floating out there?” Bailey asked, utterly aghast.

“A good thirty, all over the place,” General Sciuto, the Space Force officer whose name Isaac had finally learned, summarized, “How long have they been throwing each other at the planet, until this last one was finally on target?”

So the monsters weren’t smart, they’d just been at this for a while.

And sure, the re-directing by tearing off and throwing body parts wasn’t exactly a normal thing for creatures to do, but it all boiled down to a very simple principle, that of “any action will have an equal and opposite reaction”. Or to put it even more simply, recoil. A single creature, that had already been mostly on target, had figured out how to use this trick. As the saying went, even a blind squirrel would find the occasional nut.

“Around two days, if the pattern holds at Tier 10,” Isaac said, “Would I be correct to assume that you have some kind of space-based redeployment [Skill], General Scuito?”

“I was hoping you might be able to take care of things?” Scuito sounded almost sheepish.

“L-3 is currently over a light second away, and considering that I’d have to come to a dead stop to fight them, it would take me the best part of two days to do that. I’d be willing to do it in an emergency, though,” Isaac said, leaving the “you cheap, lazy, bastard” an unspoken implication.

It was bad enough that the Space Force had missed the vanishing of a civilian spaceship even though they were the biggest monitoring agency up there. Once the hunk of metal, which had been crushed like a tin can, had been identified, it hadn’t taken long to figure out what had happened.

Locate the starting point, check various security tapes around the time of departure, see who you can reach of the people who could have taken the ship out, etc.

It would have been easier if spaceships had been required to file manifests the same way ships or airplanes did, but the regulations there were fairly lacking. The fact that they needed to be launched from the moon was well reinforced, as were the dire threats leveled against anyone who got close enough to the planet that there was a risk of a crash, but that was all.

Still, they’d figured out who’d gone missing and worked onwards from there.

A large collection of various heirs of industry leaders, old-world aristocrats, and more of the “barely an adult, yet possessing more money than sense” crowd had decided they’d figured out a way to easily farm Tier 10 monsters despite the strongest of them barely having reached the fourth Evolution.

The hell of it was that that kind of Level gap would have been surmountable if they hadn’t been dumb enough to go after a Tier 10 foe.

“And where is the original monster?” another Space Force officer asked.

Isaac almost rolled his eyes. A new monster had appeared since they’d started observing, the answer should be obvious.

“Is there a reason a nuclear strike isn’t viable?” Scuito asked, addressing the scientific part of the conference.

“We’d send them flying all over the place and tracking down individual monsters would take a long time,” Isaac pointed out, “Explosions are weaker in less-dense mediums, and these monsters are strong enough that they could survive a hundred-kiloton, point-blank, explosion even in the atmosphere.”

A hundred kilotons was the standard yield of the nuclear warhead used by the Space Force.

“And something stronger?” one of the [System]-scientists asked.

This time, it was one of the NASA engineers who answered, though his reply took the form of a facepalm.

“The area on the monitor is mostly vacuum, and a lot bigger than it appears due to how [Skills] affect the feed to fit more on the monitor,” Isaac explained before things could get tenser, “Creating an explosion big enough to take one of those monsters would require the strongest nukes we have. Taking out all of them would require a sizeable chunk of the US nuclear arsenal. There are simple solutions here, we’ve got people who can kill those things, especially with how vulnerable those things are up there. We just need to get those people up there as well.”

“Uh, I can go,” Patrick volunteered from his position at the door, “I should have a week without any important events. ”

He might have come in just a second ago, but he’d figured out how to pick up sound through his [Aura] a while ago and been eavesdropping for hours.

“Mr …” it was almost painful to see Scuito trying to recall Patrick’s name, but Isaac’s colleague wasn’t on the world stage particularly often, so it was somewhat understandable.

“Mr. Lerch, thank you for offering.”

… Isaac was pretty sure an aide had told him that.

“How certain are you that you’ll be able to defeat a Tier 10 monster?” Scuito asked.

“As certain as I can be without trying it out. I work best if I have time to prepare and know my opponent.” Patrick explained, with Isaac nodding along sagely.

Patrick was extremely capable but rarely had the time to shine as new monsters tended to fall to people with more immediate, “in your face”, kinds of [Skill]sets.

But give him prep time … well, there was a reason “Batman with prep time beats everyone” was a common argument that cropped up when it came to power scaling. A person with versatile capabilities and the mind to adjust their methods to deal with the problem at hand could be terrifyingly dangerous.

After another five minutes, the team to deal with their foes “up there” had been assembled, and Isaac switched his focus over to analyzing the overall situation.

He needed to start figuring out how to prevent a repeat of this situation, who to bug about setting up a proper monitoring system for people leaving monsters behind in random spots, be it deliberate or accidental.

He also needed to take an in-depth look at how his daily XP was influenced by off-planet problems. The Golems had clearly been spawning for a while, but he hadn’t gotten a reduction until one of them had over three-quarters of the way here. That little trick was clearly not one he could rely on, not until he’d fully figured out its intricacies.

But he had the time, given that Patrick would be taking care of the problem.

***

Outer space was huge in a way that was impossible to grasp without having witnessed it.

So big, in fact, that sensory [Auras] in the standard configuration that Isaac had taught him was useless once you got out of low orbit.

But between the pair of them, Isaac and Patrick had figured out how to adapt a while ago.

Instead of creating a widely dispersed field of thing auric threads, you compressed your [Aura] into a single sheet, infinitely narrow, and rotated it around you like an old-school radar. And once you found something, it wouldn’t be identifiable through your [Aura], the resolution would be too bad, but there was a simple solution for that as well. Turn your head around and look at it. With, you know, your good ol’ Mark 1 eyeball … not that the eyes of anyone with the [System] could really be considered basic.

On Earth, that trick wouldn’t work, you needed to see behind walls, through buildings, and underground, not to mention that information overload was functionally guaranteed if you extended your [Aura] out that far.

The point was that, out here, stealth was damn hard, and there were only really two kinds. Not being noticed in the vast endlessness of outer space, or hiding behind something, but barriers were few and far between.

Active stealth did work as well, as proven by the “hidden” mess at the Lagrange point, but generally, speed was the antithesis of stealth. Anything magically hidden would not be moving particularly quickly, and at that point, your [Aura] would sweep over it before it could get within striking range.

All in all, it worked just fine, except for one small issue … one did not have line of sight from the inside of a starship.

“Would you stop doing that?” one of the independent mages snapped for the dozenth when he saw Patrick stick his head through the wall for the nth time.

“What is your problem?” Patrick responded, also for the dozenth time.

“Because you can’t just … why can’t you just fucking sit still? Yes, it’s space, yes it’s cool, but can you stop acting like a toddler who some moron decided to give an energy drink to?”

Patrick pulled a blob of the Golem dirt from his inventory, “I’ve been gathering these, the monsters eject them to try and redirect. What have you been doing?”

“Wait, how did you … those shouldn’t have been in ra- … what on Earth?” the mercenary’s eyes bugged out.

Tier 10 monster parts were at a premium, only a small handful had been summoned so far, and when that happened, they were ganged up on by high Level people who razed the entire area down to bedrock. These things were known to be powerful, but overkill still worked, so overkill was the go-to method.

“Mr. Lerch, please come to the port casting room, Mr. Lerch …”

Patrick was already halfway to the room in question by the time the message began repeating. At fifty meters in length, the Oregon was on the small side for a space-based “warship”, but its design was meant for rapid upgrading.

Compact mana-to-electricity converters powered the ship’s standard tech, while demon blood reactors were currently the power source for the four guns, but they could easily be swapped out in the course of a couple of days, should something more suitable come along.

The internal layout and magical gravity were likewise not fixed, the metal plates that made up the walls and floor could be rearranged, and gravity would then be provided by rune-covered plastic carpets that took mere seconds to lay.

And the guns were interchangeable as well. Two particle beam turrets, one laser, one missile battery holding four bomb-pumped lasers, and two casting capsules, which were basically force-field domes that would let spells go out, but held in the atmosphere and provided protection that was actually slightly greater than that of the hull.

Yet a week ago, the Oregon had had six of these, and two weeks ago, it had been armed with four lasers and two missile batteries.

People might be able to go out into space now, and many did for the sheer novelty of it, but that wasn’t the same as knowing how to properly act out there, and the official guidelines changed every other day.

In the end, despite having the whole universe open, a lot of people were still staying down on Earth.

Patrick entered the casting bubble and manifested his grimoire. His newly designed [The Golem’s Bane] was an effective spell, but it was incredibly complicated, and this situation was a little too dangerous to use as training.

The monster had been picked up by his [Aura] a while ago, so finding it with his eyes had been easy. It looked like the very embodiment of power and menace despite the fact that it was floating freely in empty space, where it should be unable to hurt them.

Brief bursts of energy flew through his [Aura], being imperceptible to the human eye. The Oregon’s guns. Each shot tore through space at the speed of light, hammering into the monster and sending it spinning, flash-frying its surface, and removing small chunks while turning the flesh below into glass.

If they kept firing at that rate … Patrick stroked his non-existent beard as he made a mental calculation … just seventeen hours of this until they won, if the “main molecule” was somewhere close to the center, not hidden on some random body part that wasn’t being targetted. He really hoped things wouldn’t take that long.

And unless he was severely mistaken, they might not even have enough fuel to keep that up for that long. The mana converters could power all standard systems as long as a single person was still alive onboard. Meanwhile, the propulsion was provided by a VASIMIR drive, which converted neutral gas to plasma, then ejected said plasma via electromagnetism. As long as they still had gas, the convertors could power the engines.

But their supply of “munitions” was vanishingly small by comparison.

They were going to ask him if he could summon and kill a Demon Lord for more fuel, weren’t they?

One of the Oregon’s four missiles was fired, causing the entire ship to tremble slightly. Unlike the light- and particle-based weapons, Patrick could track it until it detonated and the Golem went spinning, missing a chunk the size of a medicine ball. They didn’t have enough missiles to guarantee a kill either.

Patrick tapped the intercom, “I’d like to try something, can you keep the ship steady for the next five seconds?”

“Stable for five seconds, starting now,” the reply confirmed.

[The Golem’s Bane] flashed from his hands, but before it could connect, the next salvo of lasers and particle beams impacted, sending his intended target flying away once more. Magic, while it could be pretty fast, was not a light-speed weapon.

After a minute of terse conversation, Patrick managed to convince the bridge to stand down long enough for one of his spells to land.

“Alright, from the top, [The Golem’s Bane],” he whispered and a light-grey bolt flashed from his hands, striking the monster that was now almost twenty kilometers away. It didn’t appear to do much, visually speaking, but according to the [System] message, it had still done quite a bit.

The Golem (Lv. 160) has been slain. 9,998 XP gained (10,000 XP base distributed across 3 people as per their contributions)

His spell was one he was inordinately proud of, perhaps to an unhealthy degree.

In essence, it was a modified barrier spell. Charged with 5,000 points of mana, it would hit the monster and, from the point of impact, project forcefields between the dirt particles, then scan how the body compensated for the intrusion, and then collapse whatever energy was left around the master molecule, cutting it off from the rest of the body.

And if the initial mana wasn’t enough, it would mark the master molecule so that subsequent attacks would be able to avoid spending so much mana on locating their target.

Unfortunately, two casts of this spell were the maximum his mana pool allowed, but apparently, that was enough.

The intercom crackled to life.

“Can you do that again?”

“Give me a bit to recover,” Patrick responded, “And next time, please don’t shoot the target while my spell is in transit. Or move the ship while I’m casting.”

“Barring the need to dodge or preempt enemy attack, once we’ve been informed of your intention to attack, we will not fire or maneuver.”

And that was how they spent the next week. They got into a position where he could hit the Golems but they couldn’t strike back, kill the monster, and move to the next one. And again, and again, each maneuver taking seemingly forever.

… The novelty of outer space wore off after two days.