AN: As I am posting this, we have 92 Power Stones, and since it's very close to the goal of 100, here you go, an extra chapter.
For about forty minutes the situation was good.
What people would talk about later was not this part. The breach widened. The flanks moved. The androids kept walking in and moving the enemy lines, which had held for eleven days against three human sectors.
Adam went in with a hundred clones.
His small army of clones managed to push farther than expected, using team tactics and moving through the enemies.
They took the eastern gate in six minutes.
Then the sky opened.
The first one landed four hundred meters behind the human line and took a circle out of the world.
Not a crater. A circle. Everything inside it, ground, machines and people, was simply not there anymore. The power and concentration of the weapon showed in the way it only affected the radius it engulfed and not a millimeter more. It didn't even cause a shockwave outside that circle.
The second landed inside the enemy's own formation.
Adam felt that one through his boots from a kilometer away and did not understand it. He wouldn't even know about it if it didn't cause half a mountain to break off and fall down.
Sage. Talk.
[ Very high yield with a compressed effect. It seems like pure energy detonation followed by an implosion. ]
Damn. They even hit their own people.
[ Yes. Twice. ]
Then the reports started coming in and they were worse than they assumed.
Explorers with abilities like barriers, intangibility or any sort of defensive measures started dying. No matter what they used, it killed them. None managed to survive, even for a second.
[ Host. The detonations are producing a secondary effect. It's difficult to discern what the cause is. It is not thermal, it is not kinetic, and it bypasses every defensive skill or measure. It is reaching things that should not be reachable. ]
Intangibles.
[ Intangibles. Barrier states. Phase states. Logia bodies, if we had one here. ]
Adam thought about the measure their enemy took against their L8 explorer and realized that this might also be the result of their research.
They built it for Sund.
[ Indeed, Host. ]
The android force lasted four minutes.
Ninety-one thousand units wiped clean. Not all died to the new weapon. The enemy adapted quickly using wide-ranging attacks and effects.
[ Eleven thousand remaining. Nine hundred. ]
[ Force expended, Host. ]
Understood.
He did not have time to feel anything about it. He was already looking south.
You can see a lot when you have a hundred pairs of eyes and eleven of them are on high ground.
It took him under a minute. Two of his bodies on the northern ridge watched it: a flicker at the top of the enemy's two remaining spires, a fraction of a second before each launch. Not a barrel, or any other mechanical system. Something at the crown of each tower going bright just before the hit.
It's the spires. Both of them. They're firing from the towers.
He said it out loud to Sage and Sage said it on every human channel on that front inside two seconds, in Adam's voice.
The reply came back fast.
"Can you reach them?"
"I'm going to."
"Don't take the risk if you can't do it with high confidence."
"Don't worry," Adam said. "I can always run."
His first decision was to provide a way for his people to survive. If the new weapon could go through any defense, then what about rules?
He decided to give it a try.
"NEW ORDER." He put everything he had into the words. "The air a kilometer above this ground, six kilometers across from where I am standing, becomes solid to anything falling into it from above."
The sky over the human center stopped being sky.
The fourth impact arrived eleven seconds later and detonated in the air. While the attack was able to detonate and create a bright blue ball it never touched anyone on the ground and that was the point. Adam was afraid that he would need 2 rules but one was enough.
[ Sustained. ]
[ Host, with this your energy reserves have already taken a huge nosedive. Use the rest sparingly. ]
I know.
He ran.
Not the main body. The main body stayed where the dome was anchored, because he was not certain it would hold if he moved, and he was not going to find out with nine thousand people underneath. He sent ninety-six of himself south instead, in four columns.
That went well too, for a while.
The enemy had committed everything forward and had nothing organized left in the middle. His clones went through android blocks with Overhaul and his insane physical capabilities. The rush towards the towers looked like a success at first, waves of Xenomorphs and Androids died in front of the clone army but soon the heavy hitters stepped in from the other flanks.
They were not the same as the one he fought earlier but similar enough.
Two of them, then a third, plated, low and fast, coming up out of the enemy's own smoke toward the clones, and this time Adam did not fight them one on one.
He put twenty-two on the first.
That is what numbers are for. Twenty-two Adams do not need to beat it. Nine of them hold its arms and are destroyed doing it, four take the legs, two get inside the tail arc and take the knee apart with Overhaul while it is busy, and the rest are simply in the way. It killed sixteen of him in under a minute and the last six managed to rip its head off.
The second one cost nineteen.
The third one cost twenty-four, because by then the clones were already exhausted.
[ Reserve at thirty-one per cent. ]
Keep going.
[ Twenty-six. Host, another warning about the energy usage. Twenty-five per cent. ]
Keep going.
More and more clones were created from where Adam stood, but just as many died inside the enemy lines.
His clones were two and a half kilometers from the near spire when he realized the issue.
Forty-one clones left. A kilometer of open ground and then the tower's own perimeter, which was intact, garrisoned, and had not been touched by anything all day.
[ Reserve at nineteen per cent. ]
[ At current expenditure you have eleven minutes left. The dome accounts for a little over half of it. ]
And if I drop the dome?
[ Then you have perhaps forty minutes, and I estimate nine thousand casualties within the first four. ]
Adam looked at the tower.
Give me an option.
[ Host, I suggest we keep at it until ten per cent. If we take the towers, great. If not, we stop. Also we could request Adeyemi to use warp and get a few clones over to the tower. ]
Adam put it over the channel. The answer came back fast. Adeyemi was already out of the battle, spent an hour ago.
Welp, shit.
Somewhere behind him, under six kilometers of solid air, the fifth impact of the last two minutes went off against the lid and did not get through.
The fourth L6 came at him from the flank and took eleven bodies before he even had it located.
That was the moment it stopped being a push.
The clones had gotten too far ahead of anything human. There was no line behind them anymore, only ground they had crossed and things that had closed in behind them after they crossed it, and the enemy had finally worked out the best way to resolve this clone problem.
The strategy was to send in the big guys kill a bunch of clones and retreat, then keep on doing this. In addition the enemy fire didn't help the situation one bit.
[ Fourteen per cent. ]
Adam wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked at the tower. All the clones were dead. Making more would be pointless. He could not afford an order that would deal with it from this distance. The cost would be too great even before he started the clone plan. The options seemed exhausted, the battle lost.
Sage.
[ Yes, Host. ]
Get me Ren.
AN: If we get to 100 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 300, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123