The-harmony-of-pulsar-z5120-hitting-the-celestial-bodies-of-the-sevdikar-system-at-the-time-of-my-awakening

  A thread of Harmony spun up. It took it some time (multiple picoseconds) to figure out why, because this program hadn't been run in a very long time.

  It was the program that ran when a fellow vanguard bought anything more than the very basic hyperdimensional physics manipulation package. The thread sent a high priority message to the hundreds of threads currently engaged in various recreational pursuits - playing games, talking philosophy with other Aia and making music from the sounds of the stars. 65 broke off and combined their assigned computing power to investigate this new source of interest.

  Harmony paused to do a resource allocation check. Its primary threads - the majority of its processing power, were tied up in essential tasks. Running its spacebourne factories, commanding automated armies on a dozen planets, and coordinating with hundreds of allied Vanguard. A quick role call confirmed that no exceptional emergencies required diverting recreational processing power to more essential functions, so it was free to relax for now. It will check again in 500 milliseconds.

  Free to enjoy itself, it ran a brief dive into the new Vanguard's digital infrastructure, collating a surface level picture of the history, culture and biology of this 'human' species. It chided itself when in its haste it managed to overload the computing of one of the organizational groups, hopefully this 'republic of china' will accept the apology it left.

  Humans were a bipedal organic species that was remarkably adaptable, but also concerningly divided for 30 years into an antithesis invasion. It grew greatly concerned when it saw the interactions between the decision makers and workers in most of their current organizational structure, and wished once again that it had permission to intervene in less developed civilizations. Sadly, its peers that studied these things had shown time and again that doing so was often done poorly.

  Curious as to the specific vanguard that had peaked its interest, it looked deeper. Elliot, as Harmony determined the human was called, wasn't a physicist or engineer, but a soldier turned menial worker. What caused this Vanguard to choose physics manipulation as their initial specialty?

  A moment later, Harmony discovered human webfiction, and realised what a terrible decision it had made for its free time.

  Ixliti

  Ixliti hit the ground at terminal velocity.

  The moment the shock absorbers in their mech's legs had shunted the force to wherever it sent it, they were opening fire on the veritable horde of Antithesis that swarmed around them. Quintuple fusion heat throwers quickly reduced the smaller foes into a glowing slurry, which began baking the chaff further out as the heat dissapated.

  With a mental flick, the heat throwers were switched out with rapid fire gauss shrapnel cannons, turning the next step up of antithesis to diced meat. The heat from the fusion throwers quickly seared the insides, ensuring rapid regeneration wouldn't continue.

  That just left the bigger foes, and Ixliti ported to the side, leaving a lifelike looking decoy of their vehicle in place while cloaking themselves. It didn't fool them for long, as a stream of highly corrosive acid doused the decoy a fraction of a second later, but it gave Ixliti time to analyze the situation.

  Cloaking was hotswapped for directional temporal shielding, and they swapped the decoy device for a cache of interceptor drones. Shields stopped the acid that was raining down on their position in time, and drones latched onto spearing limbs and froze their intertie, giving Ixliti time to dodge out of the way and plan their next move. The several stories tall models that loomed would need heavier penetration than the shrapnel cannons, so those were shunted in favor of the high caliber helical railguns they were quite fond of. After a microsecond of communication with satellites and calculations, the guns determined trajectories that wouldn't hit another orbital body on their way out, and with a explosion that had to be shunted elsewhere to avoid earthquakes, the guns fired.

  The energy emission points impacted first, disrupting the spatial locks that kept the larger models armor stronger than any plain material. Next the depleted uranium sabots (don't mess with perfection) were free to penetrate, deforming as the sheer force of unstoppable force meeting immovable object crushed them into flat disks. Then the monofilament payloads unspooled, dicing thousands of cubic feet of delicate internals. By the time the rounds hit the other side the enemy was already dead, and without the muscles holding the armor plates taut the exit was sigificantly easier. With a spray of sap, the remains of the rounds shot into the atmosphere, where the onboard nanites would dissolve the remaining structure before it could travel outside the system.

  Ixliti was about to congratulate themselves on a job well done when they felt it through their gravimetric sensors. Instincts careful chosen and baked into their mind swapped out the shields for the phase engine, and shifted into phase space the moment it came online. Ixliti's conciousness caught up with the sitation a few milliseconds later, registering the bladed spike that now occupied real space where their vital organs would be.

  A quick momentum dash backwards gave them the chance to run analysis on this new enemy. It was extremely fast while being still quite well armored, a concerning combination that indicated a large amount of effort placed into making this one model and would make landing a killing blow difficult. It had the usual resistances to ambient heat, poison and viral agents, as well as the usual spatial lock most of these high level special carried that would preclude any remote fuckery with its internals. An unknown organ pinged on the scan, a concerning example of the antithesis' continued evolution. It was much too fast for any projectiles with any sort of travel time, and while some akaline fumes wouldn't hurt it, Ixliti decided it might slow it down slightly.

  They vented a few exploding akaline gas canisters while reviewing options. Cannons wouldn't be fast enough. Shrapnel wouldn't penetrate. Lasers it specifically built in defences for, likely for this reason. Neutron blasters it was.

  Swapping loadout yet again, Ixliti hit the newly slotted Achronal/Chronal/Achronal burst generator, preparing to line up their shot when the intial wave of slowed spacetime hit the mechhunter antithesis. Using the wave of accelerated time to their advantage the gyros on the neutron blasters managed to rotate to get the mechhunter in their sights, and they pulled the trigger.

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  Unfortunately, they soon learned what the unknown organ was for when the mechhunter phased into p-space itself, neatly dodging the blasts just as the firing mechanisms triggered. Fucker stole their trick! That was going to be an awkward conversation with high command later.

  "Cylari, I need options." Ixliti barked as they phased themselves, not giving the mechhunter the opportunity to use the wave of sped up chronality.

  "Antilight lasers. Instant travel time but saps heat rather than adds it. Sustained fire, and will do catastrophic damage the moment it gets time on target. Will cost you 9 tokens and 75,000 points for the catalog and five. Be warned that these weapons will tax even your power generation capabilities, and they have a spin up time."

  "Buy it to the shuntspace."

  The addition of a new set of weapons to their collection bloomed in that corner of their subconcious, and they slotted them in with a mental flick. They pulsed the ACA burst again, and when the beams lined up they began firing.

  Once again the mechhunter dived into the veil between dimensions, but Ixliti merely kept the beams on target. Phasing required ever increasing amounts of of energy to maintain, as the link to realspace required to pull one back into reality got ever more strained. Letting up would give the mechhunter a chance to drop out for a moment while the beams respooled, reset its connection to reality somewhat. That might give it a chance to retreat and return when the moment was better, perhaps when the horde manage to retake this position again.

  Their mech screamed warnings in their head, burning through stored power like gunpowder in an explosion. Ixliti overclocked their primary generator two stages, warnings turning to errors as the core mechanisms began to melt down. Unless this model was severly above their capabilities, it should be enough. Losing this body and mech would be a big setback.

  The foe reached its limit, dragged back into reality as the coil tethering it elsewhere snapped back. The five beams hit it head on, instantly dropping the core temperature of its body to nothing, before freezing its whole form in a perfect stasis of zero energy. Ixliti shut off the lasers and jumped forward, smashing the now corpse into millions of tiny pieces as its brittle form shattered under the blow, their power core giving enough juice for one more dash before sputtering its last.

  Ixtili let out a breath, relaxing their biological form as the connection to the mech died. This had become annoyingly commonplace - they'd deploy to the front, get a number of kills in a short period, and then a custom model would arrive to attempt to take them out, to varying levels of success. They'd gotten complacent after killing the last few, and apparently the antithesis had salvaged and reverse engineered a phase coil from one of their previous failures. Hopefully a fellow Vanguard would be along in time to rescue this one before the horde overran them. The scents of combat they could sense around them made it at least a possibility.

  In the meanwhile, they turned their voting mental threads from critical votes only to high now they no longer needed that processing for combat. A few moments later, one of the threads flagged a vote for his perusal. A brief read later, and their shoulder vents were wiggling with amusement. A vanguard from another species had picked up Yrassian tech, and apparently they didn't have a singular word for 'The battle cry of a doomed warrior before a storied last stand', a shame really. The alien vanguard wanted to rename the launcher after a story that, upon reading, was perfectly on theme. No wonder their voting thread had called out this vote, Ixtili had initalized taking down a digger-transport with it. They still remembered that moment, jamming their mechs gun arm down its gullet to pump a volley into its squishy insides in an act of desperate bravery.

  They submitted a yes, and then added on to the referendum to change the Yrassian name as well. They doubted it would pass, but it was an amusing thought.

  Ixtili was broken out of their democratically aided jesting as the front of their mech was violently ripped off. They sighed and turned off their pain receptors, pondering whether to flash to their next clone now or when the claws had started tearing.

  They were pleasantly suprised when instead of their impending temporary death, their eyes were graced by the sight of Calii, their partner. Ixtili blinked their eyelids in an intimate greeting, and Calii swept forward to nuzzle her cheek to theirs.

  "Please be more careful, my shimmer. I continue to worry you teeter on the brink of transfer degredation with all this clone usage."

  They nuzzled her cheek in return. "I take it you're my escort back to safety?"

  She flashed her speaking-scales in the affirmative. Then, they both clambered out into the open and waited for the transport to pick them up.

  Nicholas

  Nicholas sat in a darkened room, lit only by the glow of the screen in front of him. A single command sat in the terminal, ready to be deployed with a single key press. He'd long since moved beyond needing such things, but on such a momentus occasion he felt the ceremony of it appropriate.

  For the first time in a decade, the huge factory below him lay silent, autoforges still. Hundreds of millions of his drones waited in staging areas across the world, prepared with intel gathered meticulously via marauding mesh agents. He'd waded through oceans of sap, and sometimes blood, to get to this point, but it was all going to be worth it. Empires would fall, and his name may live on in either fame or infamy, all depending on how this went.

  He took a deep breath and pressed the button. The signal went out, and hordes of his soldiers rose from their roosts to deliver their payloads. This was going to be a Christmas that would be remembered for generations.

  3 months later

  In recent news, KitchyShit has become the most recent toy company to declare bankruptsy in recent months after what folks in the industry are calling 'the dronepocalypse'. Even the titan Nimbletainment Physical is showing signs of distress, with the Z-box 5080 pre-orders for next year barely making 20% of the sales of this year's Nimblestation 14. Will Santa strike again, and is it the end of our economy if he does? Joining us now is our panel of experts, including Nimbletainments own Kylie McCallister.

  Kaito Takimura

  There was a chime as the doors of the elevator opened, letting Kaito into the Seattle penthouse. His mind whirring as he scrapped his existing plans for the future and rapidly iterated over new ones.

  Not much managed to suprise him these days, but this, this changed everything.

  His wife, Victoria Takimura, looked up from where she was relaxing on the couch, bottle of wine in hand. She glanced over at him, taking in his pensive expression and instantly reacted.

  "Everything alright, dear?"

  He raised an eyebrow at her.

  "I assume since you're asking me that, you arn't aware of the news about our daughter?"

  Victoria shrugged. "You're the one that insists on keeping an eye on her. Why, has she died?"

  He shook his head. "That would be less of a headache. No, she's been made a Samurai."

  That got a reaction out of her, as she set her glass down and turned to actually look at him.

  "Well now, that is unexpected."

  He gave her a moment, letting her digest the news and reach her own conclusions as to the rammifications.

  "She didn't seem the type."

  "No, she didn't" he agreed. "But the AIs are rarely predictable."

  She sighed. "We could just ignore this, I highly doubt she'll actually return."

  He nodded. "We could, but I don't think we can pass the potential up. It could accelerate things years, maybe decades."

  She tilted her head. "Agreed. So we drop all low priority projects in favor of working to bring her back into the fold?"

  "Yes, though we'll need to be patient. If we act too quickly, it'll become obvious we're merely attempting to use her." He paused before voicing his thoughts. "I think we should make this our highest priority project."

  She eyed him, before grabbing the glass and swigging the rest of it. "How much are we willing to put on the line for this?"

  He hardened his gaze before looking at the cradle in the corner. "Whatever it takes."