***Day 21 of The Steel Tide***

Perry’s Body gave him superhuman endurance, but that just meant he got assigned longer hours. He was just as dead-tired and prone to wandering thoughts as the beleaguered soldiers on the wall wearing their camouflage.

Why do soldiers on the wall wear camouflage anyway? It wasn’t like it blended in with the wall, make them easier to see with the human eye or distinguished them in any way. Non-powered soldiers didn’t spend much time out in nature.

And yet…camouflage.

Must be tradition.

The thought of soldiers wearing branches on their head that glowed, warding off the replicator’s attention long enough for the grizzled veterans to go full-on Rambo on their asses, was an amusing one. He pictured himself sneaking up on a dumbfounded Replicator and stabbing it with homemade weaponry in the forest.

No matter how many times Perry stabbed them, they kept getting back up, though…

In the middle of his dream, his suit flashed a bright light into his eyeballs and blasted a klaxon in his ear, jerking him out of his dreamlike state to take manual control.

I was sleeping while the autopilot fought again!

The suit jerked Perry’s chin up, and he saw the reason he’d been blasted out of autopilot. Above him was a rapidly descending bomb the size of an SUV, and the suit wasn’t trained for that kind of situation.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

0/3 Slots remaining.

Perry stopped the bomb inches away from the concrete surface of the wall, flinging it away before the non-powered soldiers around him even had a chance to shout in surprise.

BOOM!

It didn’t stop the bomb from going off. The bomb didn’t damage the wall because it’d been too far away to spend all of it’s energy damaging the wall, but any of the surrounding soldiers who weren’t already behind cover were ragdolled, collapsing to the ground.

Inside the safety of the Mk. 6, it felt like he’d been subjected to a stiff breeze, causing him to stagger a single step backwards. He didn’t have time to check on the fallen. There were speedsters assigned to medivac and order relays for that.

Where’s the follow-up? Perry thought, scanning the skies.

The Replicators were predictable in that they always had a follow-up.

There it is, Perry thought, eyes narrowing as he spotted a rapidly growing dot in the sky. A troop transport.

They must have anti-air tied up right now, Perry thought as they blasted down towards him, trying to capitalize on his surprise.

By this point, Perry would’ve been surprised if they didn’t make a hard push.

Come on, then, Perry thought, waiting for them to arrive within smashing distance. They couldn’t go over him because the city’s shields were on Meatgrinder mode, flickering on and off rapidfire at random intervals to make trying to fly over the walls a losing proposition.

It saved on battery life, too.

Sure enough, the troop transport blasted down towards him at speeds a human body wouldn’t survive, treating their ground troops more like ammunition than soldiers.

Dragor’s Kinesis was still active, so he snagged the transport and dragged it down, pancaking the transport and everything on it into the monolithic concrete wall.

Dragor’s Kinesis was almost easier to use when you were exhausted, and had no spare mental energy to think of-

With an increasingly experienced hand, Perry cut off that line of thought and refocused on the transport.

A cloud of billowing smoke erupted out of it, occluding human vision with it’s lethal gas. Anybody who breathed a Replicator Smoke Screen would be shuffling off this mortal coil in a matter of minutes. Perry switched to infrared, and found that the smoke was filled to the brim with heat-reflective powder, making visibility shit in any spectrum.

Perry focused on Dragor’s kinesis and shoved a wall of air forward, revealing charging foot soldiers, peppering his suit with plasma and lasers.

Thankfully they were too low power to cause the Mk. 6 any damage. Not like their satellites. Thank God Solaris took those out.

Guess I didn’t pancake them all, Perry thought as the force of their guns rattled him around in his suit a little. It was no trouble though, Perry had literally been sleeping through worse than that until a couple seconds ago.

Auto Static Shock.EXE

His suit’s hand whipped up and razzle-dazzled them with bolts of lightning as thick as Perry’s arm.

And to think, even one of these guys used to be a big problem…

Things were going well enough until they deployed a squad of Powered bots after him.

Perry thought it was a person at first, since they looked human and wore camo, but that counted for very little these days. Still it bought the robot an extra fraction of a second to deploy her Power.

“Child crossing!” She said, blowing a whistle and pointing a stop sign at Perry. “No vehicles!

Freakin’ Wildcards!

Perry’s suit stopped in place as three more energy-type Replicators crawled out of the pile of dead robots, having played possum the entire time. The powered bots slung beams of high-powered energy at him, intending to chunk him. Perry didn’t know if his suit was strong enough to take it, and he didn’t intend to stick around and find out.

Autopilot.EXE

Kolath’sFloatingArmory.EXE

Perry flipped the release switch with his kinesis and yanked himself out of the suit. An instant later, His suit was trisected by the energy-type attacks, while the third robot tracked his running away, following after him with a glowing whip.

Shimmering ghostly metal armor and weapons formed around him as the whip came down, parrying the attack.

If the sudden manifestation of floating steel armor and blades caused it concern, it didn’t show it, simply winding back for another lightning-fast attack.

Perry shoved the whip aside and tried to smush the powered bots into the ground with Dragor’s Kinesis, but they reinforced their frames with glowing energy, stalking towards him, eerily silent.

Damn, Perry thought, glancing over at his armor, which was mostly done sticking itself back together.

Perry played rope-a-dope and retreated, making sure the robots had their backs to his armor. He was forced to play a game of dodge-the-energy-blast for a grueling fifteen seconds, before his armor re-entered the fight. It snuck up and sucker punched one of the energy-types from behind and took it out of the fight.

Things went fast after that. Perry dove back into his armor and only almost died three times during the whole fight.

A new record.

A couple minutes later, the Sweeper on duty swept in to relieve him and stabilize the situation.

“Nice to see you again, Warcry.” Paradox said between zapping robots. The Static Shock spell, not using up its ingredients, or any power from the suit, made for an excellent mainstay. Perry could literally do it all day. That fact that it sought out targets on its own like a living thing was a side-benefit. Perry braced against a hail of gunfire, then punched the core out of a bot sneaking up behind him. The robot was snatched up by its fellows to be recycled.

“Paradox? You’re still alive?” Warcry asked, a cloak of scintillating purple energy fluttering around her entire body. She’d upped her game in the time since he’d seen the Energy-type last, and she’d taken the idea of covering herself in her own power for protection to the next level. It was anyone’s guess how she got it to behave like natural cloth, though.

“What do you mean, ‘You’re still alive?’ It’s only been like, six months.” Perry demanded.

“Plenty of time for you to get yourself killed. I figured you’d still be wearing carboard armor,” Warcry said, slicing through the oncoming robots out to hundred yards with dismissive ease, giving them both a bit of breathing room.

“I thought about it, but figured I didn’t want to be a laughingstock professionally.” Perry said. He could have taken cardboard Mat-Spec and a couple points in Underestimated…but…nah. “Hey, how’s the pay for being a Sweeper? I’ve been thinking about dabbling.”

“It’s not about the pay, it’s about respect.” Warcry said.

Paradox shrugged. “How’s the respect, then?” Honestly, Perry could use that more than money.

Warcry shot him a wide grin. “It pays well,” she said.

Her eyes sure are bloodshot, Perry thought.

Warcry gave a tiny frown. “Wha-“ She coughed, a bit of bright pink blood bubbling out from her lips, a moment before her eyes, ears and nose began to ooze blood.

Warcry’s shield winked out as superpowered Replicators kept in reserve converged on their position, sensing weakness.

***15 hours later***

“Warcry died today,” Perry said, staring at the ceiling of the Spirit Forge from the floor, his entire body made of lead. He should be standing at his computer, working on designing a printer for carbon microprocessors for the Mk.7 and its spell-frames, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. Too tired.

Nat’s head reared up, but the Tinker was too exhausted to do much more than heave a heavy sigh.

“Replicators hacked into her nine-year-old brother’s phone and tricked him into giving her ‘magic pills’ that would help keep her safe.” Perry muttered.

“Fuuuck,” Heather said, shaking her head from where she was puddling on the floor beside him.

“We almost lost our section of the wall, too,” Perry continued. It always felt like a surprise how insidious the Replicators could be, despite knowing full well they had above-human intelligence and zero compunctions about methodology.

“I liked the prawns better.” Perry said, matter-of fact. “They don’t hack into the internet and claim that they’re just another government conspiracy to keep people in line, or convince nine-year olds to poison their sister. They just eat you. Replicators are such dicks by comparison.”

“Hear hear.” Heather groaned. “I miss the internet.”

They’d been going non-stop for weeks without access to the outside world. The internet had been shut down entirely after thousands of people died when their prescriptions had been changed, water poisoned by the automated water filtration systems. Orders were delivered by speedsters, and all electronic communication was viewed as suspect.

How they turned the kid’s phone back on and delivered messages to it while the network was down was the subject of some speculation, but it couldn’t be anything good. After the news broke Perry had seen thousands of terrified parents in the streets smashing their bawling children’s electronic devices.

Heather’s statement lingered in the air for a long, looming moment, the only sound breaking it up was the repetitive tapping of Natalie working on her newest project.

“Are we gonna die?” Heather breathed into the silence.

“Everyone dies eventually.” Perry spoke. “Our death just might be more…robot-y than is typical...Although, there’s a chance my Gramma might ‘port us to another planet if things look really bad.”

“What are the odds she only takes her direct descendants and leaves everyone else to die?” Heather asked sourly.

“Pretty good…I could get you pregnant.” Perry offered innocently. Heather was not too tired to punch him in the shoulder, it seemed.

“Rain check on that, I guess,” Perry said.

“Nat, come ‘ere, I need cuddles. I’ve only got two hours of free time.” Heather said, making grabby-hands at Nat while Perry rubbed the forming bruise on his shoulder.

“If I stop moving for one minute, I’ll fall asleep,” Natalie said, shaking her head.

“I’ll totally wake you up,” Heather said.

“No you won’t, you’ll just fall asleep, too.” Nat said, glowering at Heather. “You did last time.”

“Perry will wake us up,” Heather said, glancing over at him.

“Mark six, set a timer for an hour and forty minutes.” Perry said, throwing his hand over his eyes. The concrete floor of the Spirit forge was starting to feel pretty comfortable after all.

The visor of the Mk. 6 blinked green in acknowledgement.

Natalie sighed and set aside the dagger she’d been working on and joined them on the floor.

“Wazzat?” Perry asked, glancing at the wicked-looking blade.

“I was talking to your grandma about possible solutions, and an artifact called a Genocide Blade was mentioned as a possible solution. Or…a temporary patch, anyway.” Nat said as she laid down between them. “I thought it was something I might be able to do.”

“Wazzat?” Heather asked.

“It’s a war-crime made by a phytolich a long-ass time ago,” Perry said, smothering a yawn. “It’s kind of like a magical version of the Replicators. You stab the dagger into whatever species you don’t like, and it will kill the target, then gestate a magical self-replicating terminator out of their corpse. The terminator then goes around single-mindedly killing the species it mimicks, consuming them before budding asexually ad inifinitum. That’s why there’s no true goblins left on Manita, actually. Far as I heard there’s only four left in existence, all in a secret vault on a secret moon that obeys its own laws of reality. Not exactly something you can pick up at Wal-Mart.”

Perry glanced down at Nat curled up between them. “Kind of a long shot, don’t you think?” Perry asked. The success of the Genocide blade largely hinged on the ‘terminator’ product being able to hide in plain sight amongst its original species long enough to overtake them. Replicators, being a hive-mind, would catch on way too quickly for the magical facsimiles to grow and spread.

“Everything’s a long-shot,” Natalie, muttered, her voice quiet, eyes closed, already drifting off.

I hear that, Perry thought, his eyes drifting closed.

Scrape…scrape…Scrape…

A soft scraping noise, like metal feet against the concrete floor of the Spirit forge, tore Perry out of his dream.