Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 269: I’m Not Mad

Perry hit Lam at the same time as he finished casting Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

Rather than get fancy with it, Perry created a massive pit directly underneath them where once had been solid rock. Together they plummeted down, gravity doing the work of pulling them out of the optic spider’s line of sight.

Seraphine’s ouchie corrector.exe

Perry hadn’t tried it on mutant spiders before, but it seemed to work as the 3rd degree burns evaporated in a faction of a second, and the tiny spider-child gave a wheezing cough.

Above them, the first twenty feet or so of solid rock were vaporized by a laser the width of the entire hill.

Perry caught Bob’s gaze. The duct-tape speedster was armed with his signature roll of tape and a serious expression, seemingly deciding how he was going to leverage a roll of duct tap while falling down a vertical shaft.

Or even whether they were far enough down to be safe.

Heather grabbed Natura and sprouted fleshy wings from her back, catching the air and slowing their fall.

The bottom of the pit rushed up to them, appearing out of the darkness in a split second. Bob grabbed a rope out of Aussie Man’s hand and slapped a massive pad of duct tape to the wall, securing the rope.

Aussie Man held onto his teammate and the rope, wincing as it sizzled past his flesh.

From Backdraft’s hands and feet emerged jets of flame, energy seemingly harvested from the chill air above them. The catalyst hit the ground with a grunt, rolling to a halt a moment before Aussie Man hit the ground, letting go of Bob and shaking the burns out of his hand.

Natura and Heather alighted on the ground with a decent amount of force, rolling to transfer momentum.

Dirt…

Nobody remembered to grab him.

SMACK!

The sound of flesh hitting stone hard echoed through the pit as Dirt hit the floor spread-eagled, as it he’d been trying to maximize his surface area.

The stone underneath him…flexed, drawing him in and bleeding off his momentum before bouncing him back up like rubber.

“Gah!” Dirt grunted, collapsing upside down against the wall of the pit, his body resting awkwardly on his neck, feet dangling in the air above him. “Ow.”

“Should take them a moment to figure out we weren’t vaporized,” Perry mused, glancing up at the tiny window of sky above them. “I’ll-“

“Time out,” Aussie Man said, motioning for Perry to wait. He glanced over at Natura, who was pale and shaking, fumbling through her utility belt with trembling fingers.

“Natura, this is hardly your arena. We aren’t bushwalking, this is just a fight. I shouldn’t have brought you to the city in the first place. Paradox, can you send her home?”

Perry nodded, opening a portal back to Bendigo.

“Alright kids, last stop before we fight laser spiders that can rearrange the topography.” Perry said, the portal wobbling invitingly beside him.

The rest of Australia Man’s team caught his gaze, before he nodded to them.

“Alright, let’s pack it in.” Backdraft said, tapping Dirt on the shoulder. “A little one took out a lung, I’m not gonna get killed for spider politics.”

Dirt nodded before following along. “They don’t seem to have much issue with stone, either.”

Bob looked conflicted, glancing back and forth between Aussie Man and the portal.

“Get outta here Bob.” Aussie Man commanded. “You’re the only one you’d have to patch up if you stayed.”

Bob squared his shoulders, heaved a breath, and nodded, exiting the portal.

DING~!

Perry got a notification on his HUD and read Gna’kis’s message.

The wasps were ready to experiment with. And she already had some promising results. Very promising.

Perry briefly struggled with the impulse to ditch this mission and return to the pressing issue that was the Mimic infestation.

But there were two things stopping him from doing that:

#1: The Butthole needed to be probed. If it was consuming land at an exponential rate and nobody had been measuring it, then time was absolutely not on Perry’s side. He should address the potential Earth-destroyer before he washed his hands of it.

#2: The optic spiders shot at him. Lucy used him as a tool. And that wouldn’t stand.

How to respond to #2 was still on the backburner. Perry didn’t want to indiscriminately kill people on either side until he knew who needed a good killing. But…he could do something that would piss off all sides of the Spider civil war.

“Hey, Gna’kis,” Perry said, opening a new portal. “Would you mind keeping this spider safe? She’s a minor and I think her guardians don’t have her best interests at heart.”

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“Oh my god, she’s so cute!” Gna’kis said, reaching through the portal to receive Lam. She looked up at Perry and frowned.

“What?”

“You look mad.”

“You literally can’t see my face.”

“I literally can. Divine being, remember? Don’t do anything stupid. But especially…don’t die. If you die, I’d have a hard time drawing your soul out of Elysium, although I might be able to win on appeal, since I have a prior claim.”

“I’m not mad,” Perry lied. “I’m just in a rush. I’ll just check the prostate real quick and be right out.” He held up two fingers. “Also…are you starting your own afterlife?”

“Whaaaaaat? Gotta get back to the sciencing, byeeeee!”

Wraith heaved a sigh, shaking her head as the portal closed.

Leaving just the three of them.

“You can go if you wanna,” Aussie Man said with a shrug. “Nobody says you gotta die on my little side-mission.”

Perry glanced at Wraith, who gave him the ‘I’m coming along with whatever you do’ nod.

“I’m staying. This seems like one of those things that bites you in the ass if you ignore it.”

“You look mad.” Aussie man said. “Is it ‘cuz of Lucy?”

“I’m not mad…” Perry said. “But If I were, I would ask you what we should do, what with being mad making people stupid.”

Aussie Man leaned against the wall. “Well, I’m not mad either, but if I were, I would say that there’s a strong case for ‘eliminating’ the threat outside the butthole.

We don’t have any obligation to fight Lucy’s war for her, but…Because of the way space is distorted around the butthole, if you rush into it, you’ll get torn apart by your body trying to go in multiple directions at once. The only way to get in is by safely and carefully picking your path in. It’ll take several restarts and backtracking.”

“Which means that making a break for it and trying to sprint past the guards isn’t a viable option,” Perry supplied.

“We can’t allow any pressure at our backs, because that’ll get us killed. We gotta kill ‘em.”

“Oh good,” Perry said with a sigh. “I was thinking the whole ‘kill them all’ response was an overreaction because I was mad.”

“You said you weren’t mad.” Aussie Man said with a hint of a smile.

“You said you weren’t either,” Perry said.

“I’m mad.” Wraith said with a shrug.

“I’ll take the ones on the north side.” Aussie Man said, reaching into his leather pouch of holding and pulling out a boomerang, limbering up his arm. Can you take the ones on the south?”

Perry nodded, glancing at Wraith.

“They won’t know what hit ‘em.” Wraith said, her arms growing bladelike protrusions.

Perry closed his eyes.

Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

One Perry blasted his jets and flew into the sky, while the other focused on the Idyllic Manifestation, stretching his limits of the spell’s range.

He pictured the surrounding spiders lying in ambush, their webs laid for miles in every direction, catching the light and powering their outlandishly strong attacks. The optic spider’s greatest strength.

Their Achiles tendon.

The Perry that flew into the sky noted the position of the sixteen spiders lying in ambush before he was vaporized.

Perry collapsed the scrying orb, overlaying his preferred reality on the current situation.

“Alright, go.”

Wraith signed the direction she was going first and Perry nodded, taking the other southern spiders.

She turned ethereal and dove through the Earth while Paradox flew up into the sky.

He could’ve swum through the rock, but the loss of speed just wasn’t worth it.

Paradox felt Aussie Man refocus his position at the north side of the bowl around the butthole, just as the sixteen spiders gave the lead optic cable clutched between their spinnerets betrayed glances.

Perry had ‘manifested’ massive swaths of air in the web chains, effectively shredding their ability to collect solar energy.

Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe (5)

Perry split into five, focusing his attention on the sensations he was receiving from his high Attunement, picking up intention and meaning across the fifth dimension and using it to…

DODGE!

The spiders were fast thinkers. Realizing that their webs had been compromised, they immediately spun a much smaller collector behind their backs and scraped off their phosphorous hairs, generating a massive burst of artificial light, focused into a beam that should’ve knocked him out of the air.

And it did knock three of his five copies out of the air.

Three of them dodged the intent of the attack.

The trick was waiting until the vanishingly small sweet spot between the inverse echo of intent that radiated through the fifth dimension and the effectively instantaneous attack.

Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe (10)

Perry collapsed the spell on the version of him that had dodged with the widest margin, then re-cast it, giving himself more opportunities to work on his timing as he bum-rushed the spider furthest away from Wraith’s target.

Start at opposite ends and work their way towards the center.

For Spider Number 1, Perry got some practice dodging its attacks before he simply flew through it, collapsing the probability dodge an instant after he passed through it’s body.

his supersonic wake imparted a large fraction of its energy on the spiders body and scattered the creature all throughout it’s department-store sized dugout.

Perry hit stone at supersonic speeds and took a page from Dirt’s book, modifying the flex and strength of the stone, effectively rubberizing it.

CRACK!

The stone flexed with a sound like a gunshot, sending him bouncing off at 120% of the speed he’d hit it with. Perry cleaved through the air and angled for #2 with the speed of a ballistic missile.

With another application of the Probability Dodge, Perry avoided the laser strikes.

He was flying through the air, making big and flashy moves to give Aussie Man and Wraith more breathing room.

In the distance, he saw spider blood spray out of the first dugout that Wraith had been heading towards, but he also spotted the spider closest to that one awkwardly crawling out of it’s dugout and attempting to laser the third in the chain.

A massive hole was blown out of the spider’s body when its buddy fired back.

Anya slipped out of the possessed spider and back into the ground, presumably to rejoin Wraith.

Aw, crap, they’re already ahead of me, Perry groused as Wraith’s #2 and 3 began fighting to the death, not understanding exactly what had prompted them to turn on each other.

Perry split into a dozen possibilities and swooped past his #2, dragging a Pernicious Prison net through the spider’s dugout, chunking the building-sized behemoth in a fraction of a second.

Perry made a tight turn, enjoying the G-forces trying and failing to peel his body like an orange.

Alright, #3. I can’t split like Wraith, but I can move faster than her.

Perry reached #3 in a fraction of a second, lowering the number of Probability Dodges he employed as he rapidly gained experience with dodging intent rather than trying to dodge light itself.

Operating on this plane of reality, exchanging blows riddled with Meaning and Intent, that could take on lives of their own and propagate through the fifth dimension, was the natural extension of how mages fought. At least according to Andre, the old duelist Mage and Grandma’s personal General.

Perry was thrilled to finally be taking a step on that path. Even if it was a bit...Paradoxed.

Static Shock.exe

#3 exposed its position as bolts of living lightning sniffed it out and caused its limbs to twitch madly.

Paradox used Dragor’s Kinesis to drag the spider out of its hole and crush it to paste.

“We surrender!” one of the spiders spoke through it’s web, the massive creature waving a shimmering white flag above its torso in the universal sign of surrender.

Perry stopped.

He took a deep breath and flushed the anger out of his system.

As logical as it was to wipe them all out…as good as it would feel, Perry was a Superhero.

Or, he tried to be.

“Your surrender is accepted,” Perry said, his voice amplified by the Mark Nine’s speakers.

Portal.exe

The spider flailed for a moment as it fell through the portal, disappearing to a megafauna holding cell in Perry’s lab.