Chapter 71: Chapter 68

The deployment of Strigoi combat robots was a milestone for the Nexus. These bots were completely designed and created from scratch, instead of how we used to upgrade existing ones like the Eversors or Centurions.

They looked like the Cylons from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, though leaner with barely any armor on them, and sported jetpacks and a smaller pair of arms below the original ones. The arms and feet ended in claws, though the main arms had wrist-hidden lasers in the same style as their show counterparts.

These guys were built to be faster and stronger than the Eversors, fuelled by so many fusion cores that they could theoretically debone a super mutant behemoth in under a minute. Or explode with a strong enough force to level a small town.

Against the Children of Atom around the crater, I had to lock down my emotional stats as the ten Strigoi made a bloody mess of everyone in their way. There was no theatrical killing like the Eversors, just violently quick overkill all the way.

I watched a pair of rad worshippers grabbed and smashed into one another so hard that they seemed fused together as they collapsed. The guy with the flamer got backhanded with both right arms from a Strigoi, tearing off the entire side of his body as a result. Heads were ripped off shoulders, bodies were quickly torn in pieces.

Morale of the Children of Atom quickly plummeted and they tried to run, but practically all of them were pounced on or had objects thrown at their backs at such strength and speed that they broke apart like twigs dolls.

I watched the massacre with enforced apathy, noting with some interest the decreasing resistance offered to my robots. Someone in a lot of wire decorations emptied his rifle at full auto right to the face of a Strigoi, a few Children tried ganging up with spears and machetes on another, someone even ran up with what I assumed were a bunch of grenades in a suicide run.

They all died quickly and brutally, and not even the pulse and anti-armor grenades that the suicide bomber set off did so much as scratch the paintjob.

The Zippy Lid remained hovering in stealth mode above the crater, blasting the Pillar Men’s theme from the open bay doors. It was probably the most fun upgrade I ever implemented on the craft.

Something changed in the air, and I felt a heavy pressure settle in the back of my head. It was like a migraine, except…weaker? Or was it because of my stats? I tensed as my surroundings became a hazy blur, and turned when my instincts picked up a sense of wrongness at the stage at the center of the crater.

A familiar figure formed on the salvaged wooden structure, the humanoid shadow thing that I’m assuming is the avatar of the Atom or something similar.

The formless head turned towards me and I could taste its hostility. “Interloper,” it rasped as it raised a splayed hand in my direction. “Die.”

*****

It was angry for the first time in forever. The vaguely familiar stirrings of emotion was a disquieting break from the tranquil life it had led up until recently. The memory of its past was as unclear and vague as the shadowed form it took, but as it stared down at the interloper, the one to ruin its peaceful life, the strong emotions dragged up the faint hints of its past.

There was a time before everything was so desolate, when it was constrained in a mortal shell. Something happened then, a brilliant and painful flash of light. The searing embrace of flames and radiation was too much for its frame, but the spirit still clung on. Its essence was diluted into the very radiation that incinerated its previous body and spread thin across vast distances.

It lay dormant for so long in a state of near-death before it was finally awakened by the taste of intoxicating faith of its first followers. He heard his new name, Atom.

Like a man lost in the desert discovering an oasis, Atom fed off the prayers, regaining some consciousness and finding its presence was greatly expanded. It was weak, so very weak, and while the small trickle of belief offered by its followers was far from enough, it was at least a start.

Eventually, more people fed it their faith, and as Atom fed off their prayers, their beliefs remade it, overwriting its origins and giving it new purpose. It truly believed itself to be the embodiment of Division at some point, and was content to just recuperate under the steady stream of offerings from its faithful. It was radiation incarnate, but most of its body throughout the world was numb and unresponsive, only the small areas where the Children gathered allowed it to maintain a hazy presence.

It couldn’t do much in its weakened state, but Atom managed to reach out through dreams and visions to send warnings of the dangers it sensed through the omnipresent radiation.

Though it would take centuries before it could regain control over a decent chunk of its essence, Atom was content with this existence. After all, it was a god that was beloved by its small but fervent followers.

Sure, it numbly felt parts of its essence shift and give throughout the world from efforts to cleanse radiation, but those attempts only displaced the radiation, or at worst buried it deep underground. Atom’s presence remained, as a whole, unchanged in volume, free to inspire live-giving fission even deep in the earth.

But then the Interloper appeared. He actually had the means of excising and cauterizing Atom’s ‘body’, permanently removing the radiation made up its vast existence. There was a noticeable speck of a void in Atom’s being, and the notion of that speck growing was what fuelled it to take preemptive measures.

To Atom’s surprise, the attempt of directly removing the Interloper failed, proving it was a far more serious threat than imagined. It had expended a considerable amount of energy just to manifest and send out what should be a lethal wave of radiation, but all that did was alert the Interloper to its existence.

The little time it had to muster its energy and followers after that had not been enough as the Interloper counterattacked. Atom felt the void grow from a pinprick to a puncture wound and sensed the enemy armies invading deep within its presence. And then the Interloper himself descended to exterminate its followers, and Atom was forced to act.

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With as much energy as it could spare, it sent a blast of radiation from his open palm at the Interloper below him. A cascade of fissile explosions washed over the Interloper and the intense radiation charred the ground around him, but the Interloper remained standing and unharmed.

“Well, fuck you too,” he replied defiantly.

Anger and surprise gave way to fear, and Atom was struck with the realisation of its powerlessness. It spread its senses, watching its followers around it being taken down like dead plants under a radstorm.

The source of its sustenance was being horrifically drained away. So much of its fostered wellsprings of faith, snuffed out. Even if it fled now, the strength expended here would set its regrowth back by at least a century.

Fear gave way to outrage, and Atom mustered what reserves it had and condensed itself into a form only slightly larger than the Interloper. The shadows melted away and Atom glowed as it fully manifested into the physical world as the living radiation envisioned by his church.

It lifted both hands out at the Interloper and unleashed a focused beam of light that caused him to actually dodge aside. That sight brought feral joy to Atom, knowing that it had unleashed something that the Interloper couldn’t ignore, something that could finally harm him.

Atom fired off more shots at the agile Interloper who danced away from each beam, before finally, finally one beam connected. The Interloper was flung into the ground and Atom didn’t relent, diving forwards to pummel the man with its bare fists of solidified radiation.

A metal husk rushed at it, and Atom sent a dismissive blast that sent it dropping into a burning slag. The other soulless soldiers tried to intervene, but it easily brought them low with the true power of a wrathful god.

It returned its attention to the Interloper, finding the bruised man coughing blood, with smoke trailing off the many burn wounds on his body. Savage vindication filled Atom at the sight of the fallen foe, but as it readied to end its enemy’s life, it noticed something troubling.

Why was the Interloper, even in this utter defeat, laughing?

“If you can touch me…” he sputtered weakly in a triumphant voice, and then brought up a bloody and skinless hand to weakly slap Atom’s side. It would’ve laughed off the effort, but the contact caused Atom to jump back in pain.

Pain!

How?

What?

“...I can touch you.”

Atom stumbled backwards as the foreign feeling fired off a primal fear in it. Its featureless face turned to the still cough-laughing Interloper, and then back at its wound. The glow of radiation was dimmed to a cold blackness around that area where he made contact.

No. This was just a wound, a last act of defiance. The Interloper was still on the ground, defeated and waiting for the final strike. Atom regained its composure, and then strode angrily at its dying foe. Triumph filled its entire manifestation as it channeled more energy into its fists, ready for the killing blow.

It would be slow, it decided. The last moments of the Interloper would be painfully drawn out for Atom’s followers, Atom’s Children to witness. It would make him scream and regret th-

If it had a mouth, Atom would be screaming as something washed over it, cold as the void of oblivion. Pain flared all throughout its body as it collapsed to the ground. What conscious thought unoccupied by the pain saw and felt its form evaporating into nothingness, the condensed radiation removed by a bright beam from the heavens.

Worse, Atom felt the void break beyond its physical manifestation and spread into its entire essence. Paralyzed by pain, it was helpless as the radiation that was its lifeblood and very nature was snuffed out cold. As Atom’s physical body fell apart, its essence tried fleeing its frame, just as it did the first time as a mortal.

It barely made it, a fragment of a fragment left of its essence wriggling free from its doom, but the liberated scrap was forced to shed off its sentience and consciousness. It was too desperate to escape the pain to care, too eager for that small chance of fleeing to realise.

As it finally wriggled free, what was once the Atom became a speck of an essence, drifting aimlessly in the aether, not enough of anything to realise and bemoan its fall from grace.

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