The Isekai App

Molly ran all day and we arrived at dusk. It was a lovely purple evening. I'd never been here before; I suppose I'd expected the familiar silhouettes of the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, those sorts of things, all bunched up in a cartoonish Greco-Roman cluster. Nothing like that; it was the same jungle that dominated the Earth since Sliceday, with a few buildings visible among the trees.

The Wasp Queen contacted us. "Ready for the harvest. Begin at your leisure."

"Thank you, Your Majesty. Kids out of danger?"

"Yes, your concern is appreciated. Go forth and kill, but leave some for my children if you can."

"You guys heard the lady."

Lir's monster hands twiddled their monster fingers on his controls. "It's your job to give the word, Mateo."

"Don't be ridiculous." Because we were in full group-mind mode here. It wasn't like earlier, where there were cores of individual points of view floating in a soup of merging personalities. This was very different, and I confess that I miss it. Or dread it. Complicated.

Imagine you have a little puppet on each finger. This one looks like a fuzzy dinosaur who ships everyone he knows. Here's a sort of living balloon guy in war paint. That other dude on this other finger doesn't have eyes, they're too restrictive. One is a big lobster with water-filled armor. And don't forget the gangly Human with too-large hands, like Mickey Mouse; he needs some lines too.

You, the puppeteer, are putting on a show, so you do a funny voice for each character, and you wiggle each finger when they speak. In this case, the wiggling finger is messing with the controls of a colossal war beast charging five killer robots.

I made the Mabruk finger puppet scan aggressively, revealing our position to our foes, though we already assumed they knew where we were.

"Got it," I made Mabruk say, and had him feed enemy positions into our instruments and selves. Then I had Ruhk focus all of our Rune-based shielding defense forward to protect our charge. As Lir, I fired up the weapons systems, allocating whatever energy we had to them. And as Amalthea I took aim.

Ready for the harvest, the Queen had said.

There. Five, on the horizon. Too large to take cover behind the low hills of Washington D.C, hovering machines that bristled with weapons. And the machines burst like flowers with petals of fire, petals that stretched and darkened at their bases but kept glowing at the tips. Missiles.

"They have ballistics working, that's kind of interesting."

"But not twisty missiles, no style at all."

"Barriers up. Let's see how this goes."

I had no idea which of us was speaking, or if any of us actually were. It didn't matter. We all watched as the contrails stretched and neared, possibly thirty of them, all heading for Molly.

DUMBASSES

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

We laughed as the attacks struck the numerous, dense shields I'd built, runes powered by my own unpleasantness, whichever of us I was. All our anger, bitterness, dissatisfaction and general irritability flowed freely, a middle finger to Humanity and its grotesque cruelties.

The missiles struck. Detonated.

Later I saw the footage from the drones, edited together in a theatrical presentation with dramatic music and breathless commentary by both Todd Preston Covenant and Lux Interior. It was pretty cool, I have to say.

Molly, a colossal charging crimson bull shape the color of dried blood, but glowing, surrounded by orbiting streaks of cold light. The horns, impossibly wide, her head low.

Her shields. They resembled the diagrams you see of atoms, with the electrons whirring in multiple orbits around the nucleus, faster than fast.

And she was surrounded by a fiery bloom of white-hot magnesium destruction as the missiles hit. Pop poppity pop pop, they went, though the explosions were far more impressive-looking than the sounds they made.

Inside, atop Molly, we heard nothing. It was a feature of the Rune system I'd set up. Molly's hearing was protected too. If you're gonna do something, do it right.

It could be that the video was just dramatically edited; the ball of flame was huge enough to obscure Molly, for just an instant. Then she burst through it, never slowing, unstoppable and deadly. It looked pretty good.

All business.

"Heat levels rising," said Lir, or me, or someone. "Lasers."

Amalthea: "Lasers!" Then she sank back into the groupmind.

The heat on Molly increased, and she went into the Stalk.

I'm not sure whose idea that was; one of us may have suggested it, or she just knew that lasers were amplified, focused light. No idea how she'd learned it; I'd neglected to include that information in her bedtime stories.

It was pretty interesting. The lasers were visible as five flickering red lines in the now-ubiquitous smoke from all the missiles. Where they were trained on Molly's hide showed as bright dots.

As she vanished, though, the beams bent. In horseshoe shapes, or slight angles or even a spiral around one of her legs. The land around Molly ignited, scarred and torched by the deflected heat.

"Temperature's going back down. Smart girl, Molly!"

THANKS

"How are you feeling, sweetie?"

HURTS

"I'm sorry. Only a little while longer. Open fire, whoever wants to."

All of us wanted to.

I yelled in exhilaration as Amalthea finally got to fire her own lasers. They flickered from a massive armored turret on Molly's back, three long-barrelled cannons. They didn't go boom when they went off. They hummed. They kept humming. They burned.

Ruhk sent swarms of drones. They didn't go after the huge enemy war devices, but instead hunted and disabled the opposing combat drones by the dozens, the hundreds. Equipped with angry, vengeful AI people rescued from the President's hell simulation, the AI's leaped into the surviving enemy drones and simply took them over.

"One down," someone said. And it was true; Amalthea's battleship lasers had simply liquified the hull of an enemy weapons platform. Metal splashed to the trees below, hot and red, and the sudden lack of armor allowed the thing to gain a new tunnel, blazing gold and shimmering with lethal heat. It crashed spectacularly to the forest, sending up clouds of dust and flame.

Everyone's teeth were bared, if they had them, in a savage smile.

"Firing the Twisties," said one of us, probably Mabruk.

The Twisty Missiles. Everyone loves Twisty Missiles.