Ch. 90 - Xenocide Act VII; Denouement

  Click. The tinny recording of a male voice is heard:

  "Spontaneous orgasms; that is, orgasms without sexual stimulation, are a medically known phenomenon. These can range from mildly pleasurable to invasive and torturous, and the experience of such varies from individual to individual.

  "Some studies have documented more than six hundred different causes for these reflexive reactions, from medications such as antidepressants, to normal physical stimuli such as sneezing."

  Click. The recording cuts out. One of the listeners clears their throat.

  "Say, what's the chance we can use this?"

  "Maybe as a new drug? If it can be made to vary in intensity, it can be made to be more and more addicting. And more and more expensive."

  "Get on it."

  – Recorded snippet from the boardroom of Naughtainment LLC, March 2042

  ***

  I stared at the energy bubble. Some distant part of me noticed how it modulated its opacity against the glare, and probably did a lot of other stuff I didn't understand. Everything was overly bright and a little blurry. My pupils must've been blown wide open.

  But most of me was utterly overwhelmed by the violence around me. Every dip in the spherical field sent a nervous flutter through me, every divot a maddening pulse through my spine.

  My tail curled around my legs restlessly.

  I knew Tynea had calculated things for safety. She'd said as much earlier.

  But I saw death. And it was visceral. It touched me with ghostly fingers.

  The plasmatic storm outside strangled the sphere around me, and answering thrills quivered through my body. My nerves were on fire. Everywhere. My spine bowed and I whined under my breath.

  I felt it coming.

  It wasn't exactly sexual. But it was driving me insane. More than it had ever before.

  Death touched me, and from my diaphragm out, I orgasmed. Flashes of lightning went through me, and I shook as I came. My eyes squeezed shut, and my head leaned against the inside of the Aspis and my knees bumped against my chest as I curled up and wetness drenched my thighs.

  I panted hard as the world around me suddenly went utterly dark, and then returned to more normal levels of light. My body was curled around my arm, which was being held in place by the shield.

  Holy crap, that was intense. I shivered again. Huh. That… Uh. That was my first orgasm as Tinea, wasn't it? Yeah.

  Well. Wonder if it'll still be different from actual sex?

  Pictures of a certain tall and occasionally leggy someone ran through my mind, and I hurriedly focused on everything else as the flush on my face deepened. My agitated antennae weaved through the air and painted a picture of my surroundings. I seemed to be hanging in a void of nothing but air.

  I opened my eyes as the last frissons quivered through my belly, and worked to calm my breathing as I looked around.

  My shield and I were hanging in the air. There was a crater. A fuck-huge hole of a crater below me. Maybe thirty meters across, made of glass.

  "Holy fucking shit," I whispered, trying to make sense of the violence I'd just enacted.

  The nearly invisible sheen of the energy barrier flickered, then disappeared with an ugly pop from the shield. I yelped as the Aspis suddenly dropped out of the sky, and me along with it.

  My dream-training kicked in, and I contracted my body and extended it like a falling cat would, to twist around and land on my feet. My toes burned even through the thick sole the moment I made contact, and I hissed as I hopped onto the shield's cushions.

  I sat down, tail twitching to balance the convex disk on its bulge, and massaged my feet after putting the broken rifle, cracked and probably shattered underneath the wrapping, aside. It frosted over quickly, as it lay there. I smiled at it. Well, that was a worthy send-off, wasn’t it, old friend?

  I touched the weapon one last time and decided I’d leave it here. The very crater it had made was as worthy a grave as any.

  Feeling the intense cold radiate from the glassy crater, I focused on my heat detection. Everything around was utterly black. There wasn't a speck of heat aside from myself.

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  When I looked down, I noticed lines of warmth traveling from the shield and from where I'd touched the glass, forming a crystalline grid and dissipating slowly into the cold material around.

  "How's this stuff so cold?"

  The warhead inverted the teleportation after the plasmatic explosion and transported most thermal energy within a fifty meter sphere away. It's usually done to ensure nearby ordnance won't be set off in a chain reaction. The stripping of energy instantly froze the molten ground to temperatures far below zero.

  My eyebrows jumped into the sky. "Holy crap, how did I survive that?"

  I created an exclusion zone around you. The warhead did not interact with anything within a three meter sphere of you.

  "Huh…" My eyes wandered to the Aspis on which I was squatting. "And this thing? What was the energy barrier? I could sense a great deal of electrical charge from it."

  The Death's Knell was modified with additional shielding through your Class I Esoteric Defense Systems. It served to repel the plasma and radiation. Most of the threat was handled by the warhead itself, of course. Still, I had to burn out the Aspis's circuits and emitters to prevent any radiation poisoning. It is no more than a well-crafted passive shield, now.

  "I see…"

  I leaned back and looked up at the slowly darkening sky. The setting sun threw some spectacular reds and oranges around, and I felt the wind pick up a little. A cooling column of air was gently pressing down on me, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation of dewy softness brushing through my sensilla and settling on my face and chest.

  My eyes popped open again when something wet touched my nose, followed by another wet spot on my eyelid, leaving me blinking before I properly looked around me again.

  Snow! It's snowing!

  Wisps of fog condensed around the walls of the glassed crater and wafted down to gather at the bottom, slowly covering the ground. The crater was cold enough to generate its own weather, but my enhanced skin isolated me well, and I enjoyed the beautiful, cozy sight.

  The glass was striated with inclusions and impurities, but very smooth and glossy. It had a raised lip that stopped the mud and rainwater from flowing inside. The radiating cold turned the gentle drizzle into snowflakes some thirty meters up.

  Looking beyond the crater, I could see iced trees creaking in the gentle wind, leaves crackling; there was a quiet tinkle as they broke from their branches and shattered when they hit the frosted forest floor.

  I smiled contentedly at the vision, and sighed a little when I realized it would only last until the frigid glass had warmed enough to kill the localized convections.

  Well… Time to move. A quick mental glance told me that Leah was already approaching and would come into view momentarily.

  Smiling a final farewell at the hunting rifle, I stretched my arms and let a yawn slip out, before I stood up and slowly stretched each limb, shifting my hips and tail to balance on the Apis's curvature.

  ***

  Leah was utterly spellbound by the drone recordings of Tinea's last battle.

  She'd replayed the last minutes five times already, but she just couldn't get over the enthralling…beauty and madness of that last bit, where Tinea recited a poem she'd never heard before, followed by the stupidly brilliant mother of all explosions right at the end there.

  It… It just didn't seem real. It couldn't be. That wasn't how life went. The whole thing wasn't possible. No way would a battle like that happen outside a movie. But…it did. It wasn't acted. It didn't feel artificial. It was gritty, and bloody, and graceful, and utterly, utterly enthralling.

  It was very Tinea.

  She started the video again. And again, the way that Tinea moved hypnotized her. The gleeful smile full of crazed ecstasy on that pretty face danced and twirled with the hawk-eyed calculation in Tinea's gaze as she raged across the field, only for the complex…whatever to gain yet more depth when she started that poem.

  It told Leah things about the girl she didn't know how to understand.

  Leah was still grappling with the unsettling and exciting flood of impressions and what emotions they made her feel, when her pod arrived at Tinea's clearing, cannon and maintenance drone in tow. The freezing air brushing past her metal skin made her shiver, and she realized that she wouldn't be getting out of her pod here, either.

  She chuckled at the juxtaposition of the two extremes. She'd escaped the ridiculous heat of her own battle, only to arrive to be blasted by a cold that would physically hurt if she opened her egg.

  Leah let the cannon uncouple and stepped closer to the glass crater. She edged past the lip…and just stopped to take in the sight.

  Tinea stood at the center, surrounded by softly swirling fog, eyes closed and stretching her limbs with languid grace. Her hips gently swayed, ice crystals glittering all over her tail, and in the girl's hair too.

  Snowflakes materialized meters above and sunk like feathers into the mist at the bottom. And like a nymph out of a fairy tale, the enchanting woman in the mist enjoyed herself with easy, almost dancing, motions.

  The enhanced sensors of Leah’s pod saw through the fog and detected the inverted dome thing that Tinea balanced on that prompted the slow dance, but to the naked eye, it all combined into something completely magical. Leah decided to keep the recordings.

  When Tinea smiled at her over her shoulders, Leah couldn’t help but stare hungrily and had to fight her desire to jump the woman’s bones.

  Yeah, she thought, I’m a goner. Hella gone.

  She carefully gathered each file showcasing Tinea in combat, included the captivating scene in front of her, and put them all into a folder she named ‘Battlepoem’.

  “Ypsilon, can you back this folder up, please? Together with Lily’s video.”

  Certainly, Leah. I’ll send it to your workstation as well, if you’d like?

  “Yes.”

  Done.

  “Thank you.”

  You’re welcome, Leah. Always.

  She grinned at Ypsilon’s reassurance. It was good to have friends, even if they weren’t all human.

  After a last good stretch, Tinea gathered herself and pushed hard off the disk. It went rocketing across the crater and ramped off the edge, up into the air, and sailed out of sight where it crashed into the forest. Tinea, meanwhile, sprinted out of the crater as fast as she could, cursing under her breath at the cold nipping her feet, right past Leah, until she was off the painfully frigid glass.

  Leah hid a delightful, secret little shiver as Tinea trailed fingers along her pod’s skin, and giggled as she turned to catch up.

  ***

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