Chapter 4: Chapter 4

"Keep the damn thing away from the weapons at all cost!!!" A man wearing white instead of the standard black kevlar the others were sporting shouted while waving at my form with a very shiny-looking gun.

He didn't get a chance to fire the thing before one of my lasers drilled a hole through his skull.

I half expected them to stop shooting and stare at his body as it fell to the ground but to my surprise, they didn't stop firing and if anything increased the number of rounds hitting me.

'Huh, guess those uniforms aren't just for show.'

My respect for them rose just a tiny bit, but that didn't change the fact that they were in my way and my level of respect wasn't enough for me to even consider leaving any of them alive. 

That, and the fact that I don't have a reason or the ability to feel guilt. Which, made it a relatively simple endeavor to create several tendrils coated with steel barbs at the front of my body that went and speared through the first row of soldiers.

Blood spattered all over the remaining men and as they realized that their guns were not having any effect on me they started to panic. Some remained focused which was commendable, and attempted to maneuver around my flailing murder weapons, succeeding, some of them were dodging a few swipes whilst scoring some rather precise hits at where I was setting up my laser clusters, buying them a few seconds at most.

I had mentally separated them into three groups more on instinct than anything. The battle-hardened veterans that knew how to keep a cool head when under pressure were the 5 or so that actually knew what they were doing, the temp workers that were just barely paid enough to give a shit kept firing at my body while trying to back away even though this room only had the one entrance, and the new hires that were trying not to empty their bowels were quite literally spraying and praying with a few of them muttering honest to god prayers under their breaths. 

It was kinda pathetic.

In a kicked-puppy sort of way.

Another wave of my limbs and a few more of them were bisected at the waist with others being either too far away, or smart enough to lower their bodies close to the floor, though a quick burst from some freshly created laser platforms turned them into smoldering piles of flesh.

I figured it was about time to end things anyway.

It took a measly 9 seconds for the small battalion of 30 highly trained men to become a group of 3 quivering cowards. Though, I can scarcely blame them for being pants-shittingly terrified after I just wasted the rest of their squad without taking any damage. 

"Madre De Dios" A brown-skinned man said as he fell to his knees, my tendrils slowly approaching, waving around menacingly as they inched closer and closer. 

I have no idea what he said but I'm assuming it was something along the lines of 'Oh god we're about to die arent we' he probably shortened it considerably but that was the general vibe it got from that line.

The other two had passed out already they didn't get to witness as with a viper-like motion, my tendrils attacked and speared through their brains killing them instantly. There was no need to make this any more painful than it had to be, and I didn't personally have anything against them despite the laughable attempt on my life so a painless death was the least I could do for them. 

I once again thought it weird that I felt nothing after brutally murdering these people as even without an emotional response there should be something right? I was presumably human like them once, so a bit of hesitation wouldn't be out of place. 

But after a few seconds of nothing, I figured why bother whining about it? I can kill without retching up my lunch or feeling like a piece of shit, so why not see that as an absolute win?

~~~

It was a bit difficult to squeeze my entire body into the room as it tried and failed to accommodate my massive size.

The weapons they were trying to protect from me were taken into my body and analyzed by my bots as the walls cracked, straining to hold themselves together as I pushed more and more of my oversized body into the room.

'Oh! This is new.' I thought as the threshold for the room was reached and everything exploded outwards, shooting chunks of drywall and concrete into the wider area.

I was only half paying attention to the fact that my nanobots saw a 203% increase in photon collection, meaning that either I was in a place with numerous UV lights shining down on me or the sun was directly contributing to my energy generation. 

Instead, I was more focused on my new gains.

The first weapon I finished breaking down was something called an atomizer. The initial design had it looking like a crappy plastic ray gun you would find at any store during the Halloween season.

The base of the gun was sporting a blue finish, while the barrel was painted a silver color--no not painted, it was actually steel. Huh, seems like the steel was acting as a conductor for the energy it shot out. And the 5 yellow rings on the conductor were used to mold the energy into a ringlike shape when fire, meanwhile, the black grip and red trigger were nothing special. Just plastic painted their respective color.

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But what really grabbed my attention was the power source.

Mainly the fact that there was no clip nor a battery inside, which were obvious ways to power the thing. Thankfully the gun's schematics were coded on the inside allowing me to get a good read on the inner workings without wasting time with trial and error.

The gun itself fired rings of blue energy that exploded into blue bursts of physical force after coming into contact with sturdy objects. They had huge impact damage, managing to cave in a man's chest even while he was wearing body armor but other than that they don't actually do much.

A good anti-personal weapon but against anything else, there were much better options.

Though the after-effects didn't interest me nearly enough as the shape of the shots fired were, because as it turns out these idiots had found a solution to my problem.

I dug a bit deeper and found what I was looking for almost instantly.

Seems like the coils drew in ambient energy from the air and stored it inside the barrel. Things like heat, electricity, light, hell it could even use air to charge up. Though it would take longer to charge the less potent the energy was. Apparently, the coils are 85% Gold, 11% Copper, with 3.9% of it being titanium, while the remaining 0.1% is an extremely rare material called Nth Metal.

Seems like all of the absorbing properties comes from the Nth metal with the rest of the combination used to store the energy.

Though the term Nth metal struck a strangely familiar cord within me.

Something about the word made me both excited and terrified at the exact same time, though I couldn't recall why. I would go scanning my shredded memories for any information but something else caught my attention before I could. 

While going over the schematics I found that there was the mention of the weapon being capable of drawing power from something called the bleed.

Now, with my amazing computer brain I know that isn't referencing actual blood because that would just be stupid, but since they deleted all relevant data about where I was I don't know what the hell a bleed even is so I'm forced to leave that particular fact alone until I had access to a computer of some sorts.

Actually, even a pager would work at this point.

I'm pretty sure with the...scrapped...Sonic screwdriver... Combing the two of them to give me something that could access the wider web and should be relatively simple as far as reverse engineering unfinished and untested technology is.

Unfortunately, those were the only two things I got, the rest was destroyed when I fired mah laser through the door.

'Well I guess it wasn't all bad'

Plus, I could now create gold, copper, and titanium, so if I was ever in need of these materials or if I just needed some money for some unknown reason I had an easy in.

Though the Nth metal creation didn't work no matter how many times I rearranged the molecules into the correct pattern. Something about its structure just fell apart each time, as if there was some missing ingredient to hold the entire thing together.

After a few thousand attempts I decided that I would relay this task to a separate cluster dedicated to this atomic structure for the foreseeable future. I had a feeling I wouldn't be seeing any results in a long while but it won't hurt to keep trying even if it ends in failure.

And! I managed to augment my lasers into something more useful.

With the shaping and absorbing properties of the coils, I now had a way for my lasers to keep their shape even after firing, and I solved the issue with energy storage so I wasted no time incorporating those parts into my design.

Now, I won't have to rely on solar power to keep my guns charged, and my lasers will now keep their cylindrical form even after being fired so the issue of runoff was easily solved.

The only downside is that I only have 0.2 lbs of Nth metal so I can only keep either 10 small ones or 1 large laser active at full power at a time.

An improvement to be sure, but still not enough to perfect the design in any reasonable fashion.

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