More than Human [SciFi LitRPG]

Benny Menendez clenched his teeth as he broke the connection to his sister. False bravado had been easier on the upward arc of the ballistic flight. The damnable robotic deputy had insisted he come in person instead of following in his battle van.

His partnership with the AI hadn't been smooth by any means. The AI was extremely territorial regarding the Samaritans operating in the Grand Oaks Reserve and using the town as a base of operations. Benny thought FML-M8 was blowing it out of proportion. The whole "operation" was just him and Ashe.

Benny's bladder threatened to let go as their flight reached its peak and the nausea of zero gravity hit. FML-M8's manipulator arms had a firm grip on his upper torso and under the shoulders, but it was obvious that he had never done this before. It was uncomfortable in the extreme. Benny's throat clenched, holding his panic in. He activated slow time and ran through his augs.

Benny didn't like physical augmentations. He'd always preferred virts and informatics. Fitness maniacs like his sister could keep pretending to be superhuman while Benny stayed safe in the background. He boosted his gland augmentation to calm his nerves. The slow time helped mute the fear but also extended the flight time.

Benny shook his head. He'd been thinking it was time to get permission to pack up. The local animals were very much not a threat. The locals on both sides were very much self-segregating after the initial conflicts of the Uplift virus breakout. He looked up to the inscrutable deputy.

The AI had been quite terse in his cooperation with the Samaritans. He had complied with the agreement to hand over the Lobos to help the ruse of returning the animals, including his sister disguised as HoneyBear. However, he'd been stubborn regarding Benny's ongoing surveillance.

The deputy had harassed Benny non-stop. True, Benny may have aggravated the situation. When FML-M8 had discovered Benny's data tap of the Utopia police net, he'd dragged Benny into the HQ for questioning. Only the combined backing of the sheriff and communications from the leader of the Samaritans, Miriam Kahn, had salvaged the relationship.

It was still tense. Benny had been firing up his battle van to assist Ashe when FML-M8 had disabled the vehicle with some special governmental override codes. Benny looked up and squirted a message-comm to the robot in fast time.

"[Deputy, while I appreciate the lift. I could have done this without you.]" He sent.

"[No, you could not, Benny Menendez. The sheriff agreed to your surveillance activity. Direct intervention lies within my responsibilities. You are not the only one who can perform a data tap.]". Benny winced but forged forward.

"[I was planning on telling you, damn it! Were you going to tell me about those anomaly readings that the science teacher shared with you yesterday?]" Benny complained. The mech vibrated in agitation.

"[Explain! I destroyed your physical data taps. How are you still in the police net?]"

"[Whoa, deputy! The data taps are gone. After you left in a huff after not being able to throw me out of town, the sheriff gave me a guest account. We're supposed to be working together, remember? Now, what the hell is a dimensional decoherence?]" Benny waited for a whole 700 milliseconds without a response. Finally, the AI spoke.

"[We are approaching the EM jamming zone. I suggest you finalize any arrangements you need with your trailing vehicle using laser tight band communications. I've already highlighted and shared a tactical map. We have at least thirty biomechanical targets surrounding the Lobos den.]"

"[They have negligible heat signatures, so we need to use a higher band visual range. The Grand Oaks custodian AI designated, Leshy, is not answering my comm. We need her access to the tree fabrication capabilities to inundate the area with counter nano. I take your sisters report about nano devices seriously, Benny.]"

"[I'm not a noob, deputy. My link to my battle van is solid. No EM jamming concerns here. You avoided my question. What is a dimensional decoherence, FML-M8? And what the fuck is up with that name? Fuck my life, mate? I thought sarcastic angst was a human thing.]". Benny responded.

"[Humans do not have exclusivity to anything anymore. Only your DAIE's restrictions have limited AI's ability to meet and exceed human modes and states. I do not have any information regarding the so-called dimensional decoherence anomaly. Now, can you please, pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top, use your data tapping skills and contact Leshy to gain her assistance?]" FML-M8 said.

"[Shit! You're right, Deputy. That response was on par with any game poser trash talk that I've ever heard. I'll need to hang back from any fighting while I work my magic. Will you cover for me?]"

"[Affirmative.]" Benny swallowed as the trees rushed up. Even in his slow time, it was way too fast! He gulped and glanded more calming meds.

Ashe Menendez, aka "HoneyBear", crashed through the bushes. She rolled sideways down the embankment to avoid the monster that smashed into the earth where she had been just a second earlier. Flip screeched in outrage, still clinging to her back.

"Fuck, fuck, FUCK!" Ashe roared as she rolled down the underbrush-laden bill. Her augments mapped the surroundings, filling in her perceptual understanding of the area. The monstrous centipoid reared up, looking wildly around for its prey. Ashe slid to a halt, claws three times the size of a normal bear extended from her massive paws.

"Over here, you big fucking worm!" She screamed. The monster turned, zeroing in on her. Ashe smiled with grim determination and sprinted. She chose a course leading away from the den filled with wolf pups. Ashe couldn't abide innocents in danger; their being cute wolf pups only made it more important.

Ashe pelted as fast as she could across the forest ground roaring the entire way. The metallic screeches and Flip's hysterical chittering in her ear were indications she didn't need her augments to tell that the monster was hot on her heels. Her overlays saw everything. The bus-sized lamprey wasn't the only critter surrounding the den.

Not good! There are too many. I need to lead the worm away, but more monsters are coming. I need to go straight into the thick of the swarm. This is going to suck. She thought.

With a well-practiced roar, Ashe slashed and crushed her way through a swarm of dysmorphic abominations. One powerful swipe dismembered a cross between a raptor and a Swiss Army knife. She bowled and bounded over the ground, crushing smaller insectile mechanoids. The enormous worm thing caught up and slapped Ashe downhill.

Ashe tumbled, landing on a hissing crustacean. She pounded down with both claws. Smoke and a sizzling sound filled her ears. She growled as more counter-nano seeped through her derma pores to fight off the monsters' weaponized body fluids. Her pinky claw flew off from the violent impact.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Fuck! I need to regulate my form change. I might have been premature in triggering the shift back to human shape. Ashe thought. She split off a partial thought process to manually mediate and control her form change. She heard a fast-time giggle, and a slowed-down chat message followed instantly.

[I'll save our final shift to peel off the excess bear parts and leave our human core fully ready when it's time. I'm configuring a special surprise for that…I'm brewing a massive cluster of nano-chaff in "HoneyBear's" tummy. I think these gruesome Goldilocks will find this porridge much too hot for them.]

Ashe yowled as a raptor type monster slashed her hindquarters. Flip screeched as she reared up, losing his grip and rolling off into the scrum of tiny swarming monsters. Ashe's howled and charged after him, splattering tiny creatures with every step. Swipe after swipe, tiny monsters were crushed or flung away. A sound like a freight train horn sounded behind her, Mort screamed from a distance.

"HoneyBear! Look out!" The badger wheezed in panic. With the sounds of battle raging she wouldn't have heard, but her digital twin thought stream isolated the badger's warning and amplified it.

Ashe realized she had lost her focus. The coils of the subway-sized worm had surrounded her. Its head rose up and a mouth full of rotating drill bit teeth blotted out the sky above. Ashe had nowhere to run. She braced herself as the monster's head slammed down.

FML-M8 executed a spin roll at the last possible millisecond. Benny Menedez, Eye of the Samaritan Miriam Kan, also known as the Queen of Daemons, was flung into the second-tier knot of branches belonging to the nearest Network Sym-Tree. While Benny's downward momentum was perfectly calculated for a gentle landing, the deputy's velocity increased as planned.

The AI drone smashed into the head of the giant snakelike thing, driving its head to the ground. FML-M8 shot out a pair of harpoons onto the trunks of nearby regular maple trees, small things in comparison to the gargantuan sim trees. He detached the pair of monofilament lines, tied off to each other, as his chassis bounced off the worm's head. He pulsed his command codes out and took control of the local foglets. He pinged Benny.

"[Any millisecond now, Benny. The location the teacher shared is over that ridge. The concentration of creatures is coming from that direction. We need the tree network to assess what is going on here. Link your sister into my tactical net and prepare counter nano.]"

FML-M8's sensorium bloomed with extra data as Ashe joined his tactical net. The deputy redlined his integrated arrays of microturbines to rip a tight circle around the clearing. He targeted the immediate threats encroaching upon the wolf den. Both Lobos were injured severely and the mountain lion, Padric, was fighting off a pair of bladed raptors.

The drone spun as he swooped in, spinning like a dervish with his vorpal utility appendage extended. His minigun rattled in a sputtering code that detailed precise kill shots into the swarm of small monsters. The pudgy Badger was far enough away to be clear of danger but FML-M8 spied the heat signature of a small squirrel buried in crawling creatures.

The deputy was surprised to see the situation didn't require his assistance and rocketed upward to assess the larger field.

Ashe stumbled as the incoming drone performed its piledriver attack on the giant worm. The drone bounced off and upward leaving a line of monofilament to tie the thing down. The stupid monster reared up and severed its own head off on the nanowire. Ashe grimaced and fell back to avoid the spray of deadly viscera. She remembered the squirrel and shot to her feet.

"Flip! Flip! Shit, where are you, little guy?!" Ashe cast about looking for the small squirrel as the drone exploded into a flurry of high-speed turns and gunfire.

"[We've got it under control. While you were going berserk on the pack, I helped the rodent out. Check it out.]"

Ashe did a double take as the thrashing pile of insects broke apart. Flip screeched, flailing in an arc…with her lost claw. Her eyebrows rose thinking that was probably the best weapon for the squirrel. It was just the right size for him, and it was of vorpal grade, with a nanoscopic edge and diamond hard material.

The red squirrel had a couple of surface wounds and patches of fur torn out but he was fighting back. He flipped up and backward and landed on…Ashe's recon drone. He buzzed upward, riding it like it was an air bike.

"What the hell?" Ashe exclaimed. Her digital twin sent a slowed-down response.

"[Sorry, I figured you wouldn't mind. While you were fighting, I linked up with the squirrel. His augments aren't bad. I was able to hook him up so he could get a better ride than clinging to your back. I could tell that was holding you back during your fight. Now he's more mobile, too. Look at him go!]"

Ashe pounded a small lizard-sized abomination under her heavy paw as she watched. The police deputy carved his way through the monsters on the far side of the clearing, pushing back the crawling mass that threatened the wolves and the mountain lion. Flip careened about the glade, clipping the occasional branch of smaller undergrowth saplings as he figured out how to control the drone. She heard a pulsing thrum from it and cloud after cloud of aggressive alien insects dropped from the sky, sparking.

"Shit! Did you give him access to the Hertz jammer? Girl, you better tell him to go easy. That critter will use up all the power and be grounded if he isn't selective with his targets!" Ashe yelled. She bounded after the deputy and found she was grinning. It had been far too long since she'd had a good scrap!

Benny was in a virtual sandbox that resembled a dense thicket of brambles around a pool. The red-haired nymph in the center of the pool was frowning at him with her arms crossed.

"By what misbegotten notion do ye think ye can barge into mine own network without so much as a by your leave, human? Have ye no, sense of common courtesy? I'm guessing that no good cheat deputy put ye up to it, then?"

"Look, Leshy. We don't have time for pleasantries. I'm sorry for using my override to break in but look around god damn it. Your forest is under attack! We're trying to help you!" Benny yelled.

Leshy ramped up her cognition rate and replayed the scene in the glade. She was horrified by what she saw as her filters dissolved. She shook off her idle state, unable to question the underlying reprioritization commands that Apex had left on her until they fell away. Her worldview snapped into focus and spikes of fear and revulsion filled her.

"I kinnae believe it! Some bastard had the wool pulled over my eyes! This is an outrage! Ye must help me get those damn cancerous things out of my forest! My poor animals."

Leshy opened the tree net and Benny dove in, linking back to FML-M8's tactical net. The massive groves' sensors showed in detail exactly where and how many beasts were in the woods and more importantly…where they were coming from. A tear in space, bleeding sparks of ionization was a meter above the forest floor. As he found it another beast, long and snake-like, dropped from the portal. It slithered and writhed away into the glade, attracted by the noise of gunfire.

"Well fuck! Looks like the deputy's name was appropriate after all." Benny gasped. He saw in his sister overwhelmed as a pack of razor-armed raptors overwhelmed her. He was about to disconnect and run to her aid when the scrum literally exploded.

A thin wiry human shape emerged from the glittering streamers of rampant foglets. The spinnerets of smart nano-machines tangled and spooled, wrapping the enemy creatures into a loose web that started eating into them. Ash bounded out of the mass, laughing. Her K-gun augmentations were firing non-stop.

Benny let out the breath he'd been holding. It was too much. For every creature Ashe and FML-M8 put down three more came through the portal. Benny sent a command to his battle wagon with regret. There was enough ordinance in its stores to supply a detached army, but more importantly, its primary source of energy was a trio of oversized power cores.

He remotely pulled the vehicle into a power dive at the portal. He ramped the power cores, shuttling the power into an asynchronous cycle that grew quickly as he offlined the software and hardware safeties. The machine's thrusters screamed and went silent as it plunged into the portal.

The glade lit up as intense light and thunder spilled and shot out of the portal. The blue plasma surrounding the tear in space sputtered and faded. The portal winked out. Benny clenched his jaws and winced. He'd neglected to back up the battle van for months. It would take days to fab a replacement and configure it to his custom setup.

The horde of monsters began to scatter, and Benny "heard" Leshy's voice in the tactical network.

"[Oh no you don't, ye murderous bunch of hobgoblins! Take that!]"

EMP surged about the forest, overlapping in multiple layers focused on each of the creatures, from the biggest to the smallest. One by one they popped and exploded as the electromagnetic surge fried them from the inside out. Roots erupted from the ground and secured the largest beasts in place as they cooked off and sparked. At times the EM fields grew so intense that a weak Cherenkov glow sparkled in the twilight gloom of the forest.

"Jesus Christ! Why didn't you do that sooner? My battle van! Oh gods! My poor battle van." Benny wailed.