The Naked Weapon Pt. 11

I grinned, slowly, as Paragon flew to hover before my head. She looked tiny - but still managed to radiate a kind of pure dangerous menace that could only come from someone on par with Superman.

"You okay in there, Abby?" she asked.

"We are fine," I said, my voice booming. "Rinny says hi, Abby says hi."

"Whose...in charge?" she asked.

There was a long pause. I and Rinny shared a kind of weird mingled quasi-discussion. It was all so fast that I have a hard time parsing out individual sentences. Eventually, I finally said: "That's...a meaningless question. Ali's the one whose in charge." I grinned. "She is my girlfriend, after all."

Amelia/Ali clapped her hands. A sonic boom echoed out.

"Suiting up montage!" she said - showing that Ali had a bit of an influence there. "Paragon, can you handle this?"

Paragon sighed.

Montage was the right word for it. Paragon moved with brutal speed and careless efficiency. She didn't care about keeping the armor in one matched set, or in the idea of bringing them back together in one piece once it was all over. She just focused on spreading it out based off her grasp of our abilities. Those with natural defenses - like Barry/Pinkie - got only a bit of armoring around their chest, spot-welded together by flashes of her laser eyes. Those who looked more frail got shoulder pauldrons, bracers, and more. Weapons were tossed out and soon, I was holding a GAU in one hand and had manifested a pair of crackling psi-swords in my other hands. My free hand slapped a boxy ammo container into the GAU and I grinned.

"Put on a Cruel Angel's Thesis..." I said. "And lets blow this popsicle stand."

***

The Doyen military parade was a thing of grotesque beauty. Hundreds of warforms marched down the broad main street of the city towards a palace that hadn't been there the last time I had looked around. Ali's father had clearly gotten it built in a hurry, and he stood on a balcony, looking down at the parade in honor of his defeat. Next to him stood Doctor Oblivion, looking quite mysterious in his black robes. The Doyen Paladins marching by had psi-weapons at the ready and strode past the civilians who were watching with wide eyes and opened gapes.

The first sign that they were under attack was a cascading ripple of pops. Tiny spheres of black light consumed every single civilian, swirling around them, then vanishing. They left behind glowing craters in the pavement that Doyen crafted for their streets. Those civilians were now two continents away, and would miss one of the biggest shows the galaxy had ever seen.

The Paladins had enough time to look confused.

Then the warps opened.

Diamond and several other skilled warpers opened holes in reality - swirling and flaring. And through it came us.

Missiles and gunfire seared through the sky. To their credit, the Doyen reacted immediately. Psi-shields snapped up and interlocked with one another. Bullets hammered into them. Many reflected, smashing into the buildings. Dust and bits of crackling psionic debris flew into the air. Then I landed on the ground before three Doyen, unable to focus on anything but their attack. They slashed at me and I parried with two crossed blades - using my lower arms. My upper arms swung the GAU around and blew them in half. AS their warforms collapsed to the ground, I swung my head around.

Diamond was floating in the air, her hands pressed together as tiny black dots opened around her, loosing streams of sun-fire through her warps. These created bisecting fields of laser-like beams, which sliced and cut into Doyen. One managed to bring up a shield, which the beams struck and started to bore into. Tasmin and Barry both charged into a massed formation of shields, their shoulders smashing him. Lightning and flames exploded.

Then a Doyen charged into me and, again, my focus narrowed. I parried a flurry of strikes so fast and so skillful that I actually had to let my mind go blank and let Rinny take full control. Psi-sword and psi-sword danced, filling the air with car-sized sparks. I parried, swung, ducked, rolled. My warform was bigger, but it was also faster. However, the Doyen fought with a wild, almost insane level of bravery, flinging himself at my weapons again and again. More, several of his friends started to hound me, the Doyen trying to take advantage of their numbers.

To call the noise that slammed into my eardrums 'loud' was an insult to the noise. It implied that there were other things that might, one day, match it for sheer eardrum smashing oblivion inducing soul crushing sound. It was like sledgehammers wielded by giants hopped up on PCP and with a grudge against Mozart. It was like the end of the world.

It was Paragon punching someone.

Really really hard.

I looked up and saw the after-effects in the air. Clouds were split. The palace was shattering like blown glass, Ali's father flying away in his warform. And Doctor Oblivion floated in the air, his arms crossed, his force field shuddering with the ripples of her impact. His blue skin glittered with sweat, and his grin was fierce and demonic as he looked at his nemesis. Paragon's cape flapped and her eyes flared with a killing red light. So, I've mentioned that she has eye-lasers. But I meant they were lasers. As in, they were invisible. And even with the amount of dust that this battle was kicking up, none of us could see them. We could see the points where they touched Oblivions' shield, which started to glow brighter and brighter and brighter. Then flames roared to life, crackling and burning in the air.

She was setting the atmosphere on fire.

FOCUS.

Rinny slash the more sensible part of my brain jerked my attention back just in time to see the massive psi-lance, being manifested and weilded by three paladins at once, rushing towards my gut. I twisted to the side, trying to bring my GAU up, but the lance caught my dependable fuck-you gun and impaled it like I preferred to do to my girlfriend. As the chunks of molten gun rained on the debris strewn pavement, I grabbed onto the lance with all four of my arms, lifting it up and shaking it. The paladins who had held to it were scattered and the lance lost cohesion a moment later, buzzing out of existence.

That gave me enough time to manifest a psi-sword in each hand before the Doyen returned to the fray.

I parried, struck, kicked, spun, twisted. Two Doyen fell dead. And above me, I could hear Paragon's roar of pure and utter fury. I looked up and saw that Doctor Oblivion was fleeing, running after Ali's father.

Paragon started to rush after them.

"Fuck shit fuck!" I swore, leaping into the air. The telekinetic counter-pressure of my body caused the ground under me to bell downwards, like concrete had become a sailcloth. The resulting fracture pattern kicked up dust in a huge choking cloud, but I left that far behind, shooting after Paragon, Ali's father, and Doctor Oblivion. We moved at a remarkable pace. I wasn't even close to keeping up to Paragon - she gained on me bit by bit. Way to rub it into my nose, Para!

And just as last time, Doctor Oblivion twisted around.

"You really are so predictable, Pargon," he said.

Or at least, I presumed he said that. He was that kind of pure dillhead. I reached out with my telekinetic force, grabbed onto Paragon's cape, and yanked as hard as I could. Fortunately, her super-suit wasn't latex. The cape jerked her throat hard and she was caught up short and fell fifty feet, flailing, squawking. I would have been worried about snapping her neck like Gwen Stacy, but she was also Superman, so...you know, she could deal with a bruised throat better than she could deal with-

Doctor Oblivion's beam split the sky. I twisted to the side and the Rinny part of me tossed a telekinetic blast at him. The blast struck his shield and jarred his arm upwards. The shockwave of pure heat sent me rolling and spinning in the air. By the time I righted myself, I could see that there was not a cloud in the sky, and that a slash of pure white light could still be seen in the heavens. It bisected the orbiting moon of Doyen Prime - visible in the light of the day, the same way Earth's moon could be. Exactly one and a half seconds later...

The moon split. The movement was slow and graceful and terrible for all that. Molten red light fanned outwards from the whip-line that Oblivion had put through it, and soundless chunks of moon-rock the size of continents flew outwards and away from the orbiting satellite. Oblivion and I watched, my mouth open in shock as the moon pulverized itself, ripping and splitting apart. The destruction would take hours, I was sure, but even the initial stages were gut-punch terrifying. Slowly, I turned to face Doctor Oblivion.

"Huh," he said.

"You fucking asshole!" I shouted. "What the fuck were you doing!?"

"Trying to kill the most powerful Spark in the galaxy, what does it look like I was doing?" he asked, scowling at me.

"Have you even READ Seveneves!?" I shouted, gesturing to the slowly exploding moon. "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!? What if you had HIT THE GROUND?"

"You'd have died," he said, casually. "And I'd need to recruit Doyen from different planets."

I gaped at him. It was really beginning to click just what breadth of pure and utter callousness it took to be a supervillain. I slowly floated to the left, ready to dodge at any moment if he lifted that gauntlet. Behind him, Ali's father started to float back, his massive warform glittering with a shimmering light.

"W-What have you done, Oblivio-' He started, before Oblivion casually lifted his palm and vaporized him.

"...I'd be offended, but...we all kinda knew that was going to happen..." I said, slowly. "But...I...seriously...what the fuck?"

Oblivion rolled his eyes. "Quit your grandstanding, Doyen. Your kind have destroyed worlds for less reasons." He sneered slightly. "My goal is altruistic. Imagine, if you can imagine anything in that myopic brain of yours, a galaxy free from hunger. From want. From chaos." He licked his lips. "A galaxy where we have obliterated all that stand between the sapience and savagery. Freedom. Individuality. Not following my orders." He shrugged. "I need a more...pithy way to phrase that last bit."

"Independence?" I suggested.

"Yes! Independence," Oblivion said, chuckling. "I built this." He tapped his gauntlet. "The power to destroy worlds. Imagine what I could so with sixteen trillion bodies with which to work." His eyes glowed. "What glories I could build."

I crossed all four of my arms over my chest. "That's it? That's your megalomaniac scheme?"

"What?" he looked confused.

"You're just pulling a Lex Luthor," I said, shaking my head. "I kinda expected something a bit more original from a freaking blue neanderthal from space."

Doctor Oblivion's eyes narrowed slowly. Then, he smirked. "And I expected you to remain dead, Abadai Hatem..." He grinned, slightly. "How did you do it? Last second teleportation? Was the body you used a fake? A clone?"

I chuckled. "I think I prefer the idea of you dying without ever learning one way or t'other, you murderous psychopath."

He snorted. "If you were as smart as me-"

"Oh bullshit," I said, shaking my head. "I'm not even a billionth as intelligent as you - I can't build sun-blasting gauntlet doom fists, and I can't make warp portals with technology. But you know what I do know?" I asked, smirking.

Paragon flew up behind Doctor Oblivion. She was close enough to breathe in his hair.

I had gotten to the last breath of the single syllable word "I" in the sentence "I know when to not monologue like a dime store cartoon character" before Paragon punched Doctor Oblivion in the head. He whipped through the air, spinning head over heels. She blurred around to meet him in the air, then smacked him downwards with a double handed strike - her fists clenched together. The impact rippled outwards in a tree-shattering concussive wave as I started the "N" sound in "Know." She had landed, grabbed him by his fringe of hair, dragged him to his feet, and punched him five times in the face before I had gotten to the W. The last blow came as she opened her palm, and sent him flipping upwards into the air. He met her foot - and her foot met his spine as I started the 'weh' in 'when.'

Doctor Oblivion hit the dirt and I blinked, stopping at 'en.'

"Holy shit, you're scary," I said, slowly.

Paragon panted, then landed. She grabbed onto Doctor Oblivion's corpse.

"You're under arrest," she snarled.

"What!?" I exclaimed.

Doctor Oblivion groaned and spat out a single bloody tooth as Paragon slapped thick cuffs around his wrist, yanking and gauntlet off with her other hand.

"WHAT!?" I shouted.

She looked up at me as I slowly flew down, landing before her. I found that, with a quick twist of my mind, I could actually remain merged with Rinny and still shrink down, so that I was only twice as tall as Paragon, rather than fifty times taller. At this level, I could see that Oblivion looked like a mass of bruises, and he was missing one tooth, but he didn't even look like he had any bones broken. I looked at him, then at Paragon, then at him, then at Paragon again.

"What!?" I said for a third time.

Paragon smiled, wryly. "Unlike you," she said. "We're not savages."

Doctor Oblivion groaned. "Could...have fooled me."

Paragon shook him gently. "Shut up."

I breathed a slow sigh. "Well, at least I can gloat some more." I grinned at Oblivion. "I guess you should have checked to make sure I was more dead before getting all smug-boots about it."

Oblivion blinked at me around a rapidly swelling pair of black eyes. "What?" he asked.

"Okay, is what the catchphrase for today?" I asked. "At the Doyen ship, after we kicked your asses the first time, you bragged about how killing me meant that your plans were still going perfectly." I grinned. "And, I mean, you would have been right. Without me, you-"

"Oh that!" Oblivion laughed as Paragon started to float upwards. "I was bullshitting."

I bit back a what and instead thought through what he could have meant. It was suddenly stupidly obvious. What had the Doyen parade been about? My palm mashed to my face and I groaned. "You were saving face. By acting like your plan was going perfectly you kept your patsy..." I muttered.

Oblivion laughed as Paragon started to fly back towards the capital. Somehow, he still managed to sound maniacal.

***

I leaned on the sill of the window on the observation deck of PsiCom HQ and watched as Doyen Prime burned. Even with Paragon and a bunch of super-charged psychics, the math was brutally simple: You cannot break apart 1.51e+23 kilogram sized chunk of silicates and heavy ore in orbit around a planet without fucking that planet up hardcore. The propagation and collapse had been even faster than if Earth's moon had been blown up in the same way - the Doyen's moon was not only bigger, it orbited closer to their planet.

The end result?

A rain of stone equal to about two and a half Earths, all of it streaking through the atmosphere at the same time. The friction alone would have been bad enough. As it was, the surface was a glittering star-field of blue-white explosions. Nuclear-scale fireballs and waves of continent shattering concussive force exploded outwards, while the atmosphere itself was consumed in waves of oxygen-fires. The PsiCom HQ was sitting about fifteen million kilometers away, and even that felt too close for something like this.

"Sucks, doesn't it?" Ali asked, leaning to the rail next to me.

I nodded. "It...was your homeworld..." I said, slowly.

"It wasn't my homeworld," Ali whispered, softly. "I was born in space, while my father traveled from system to system, to find new people to enslave."

I nodded again, then slid my arm around her shoulders, drawing her close. She pressed her face to my chest. Squeezing me. Together, we watched the burning, blazing planet.

Doctor Oblivion was taken back to his homeworld. Every psychic on the ship had searched him and scanned his mind. Omniack had taken a crack as well. In the end, three of his bones had turned out to be fakes, filled with components for construction. Removing and replacing those with biokinetics had, according to Paragon, increased the chances of him staying in jail by a factor of two. I had asked about the chances of him getting the death penalty and Paragon had looked at me as if I was a barely literate barbarian.

The Doyen rebels fanned outwards, to bring news of the destruction of Doyen Prime and of the foundation of a new Doyen Republic. They carried with them tablet computers bearing the pre-recorded message from various human leaders, offering them a way to make peace with the race that had been a thorn in their sides for centuries.

Across the Doyen Empire, slave revolts started as rumors about what happened at Doyen Prime spread. Many were brutally crushed and PsiCom was kept busy for weeks and weeks, flying from planet to planet, to stop hideous genocides enacted by Doyen Nobility who believed they could still get away with that kind of bullshit. With our ability to fuse with Doyen warriors, we didn't really face a whole lot of trouble. Despite that, it was a grinding few months, with a great deal of heart ache. We didn't lose anyone...but it's hard to arrive at a world to find that you were too late for tens of thousands of slaves - put to death by old vampires who didn't know that their time had come.

After the last hot-spots died down and PsiCom started to shift from a full and total warfare stance, Bravo Squad...started to slide apart, like stars winking out one by one.

Vicky left first.

"I have my people to look too," she said, simply. Then, quietly, she had taken my shoulder and squeezed it. "Thank you Abadai Hatem. Without you, we would never be free." She smiled. "And...thanks for the name. Victory Smith. It is far better than what I first bore."

"What...is your real name?" I asked, grinning at her - trying to feel happy for her despite knowing I'd miss her fiercely.

Vicky chuckled. "I said that you could not pronounce it with your tongue. But..." She coughed, shifting her mouth parts. A hideous gargling screech escaped her lips, making my ears ache and my teeth buzz. After five minutes of screaming and screeching at me, she at last finished, inclining her at me. I blinked at her.

"...see you around, Vicky," I said, at last - and she laughed.

Tasmin and Beli both left a few days later.

"India needs psychics at home," Beli said, cheerfully. "We're going to be working on some movies."

"Really?" I asked.

"That's the cover story at least," Tasmin said, her voice flat. Then, blushing, she glanced aside. Without looking at me, she kissed my cheek, then turned and walked off, leaving me blinking there. Beli gasped, her eyes wide.

"That means she likes you!" Beli whispered. Her 'kiss' goodbye was a lot more involved. And involved me fucking her brains out against a bulkhead, my hand clapped over her mouth to make sure no one overheard us.

Diamond went a day layer and I fully expected it. She punched my shoulder, smiled, and said: "I'm retiring. I wanna see what warping gets me. Maybe I can work for Amazon." She rubbed her chin. "Or maybe I can teleport Jeff Bezos to Mars and see how he likes having to piss in a bottle between work shifts."