All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 229: Heavier Than A Mountain

I surveyed the shambling towers of rocks that followed me. Now, I just needed to figure out what to do with them. I supposed I could consume them all or chop them to bits with my sanitation lamp. Or maybe I could destroy them permanently? I supposed I could consume them and transmit them to energy like anything else. That would probably be the simplest approach.

After considering it a bit longer, I decided there was no reason not to. Arcing through the sky, I curved to attack the first one in the pack. My Sanitation Lamp shot forward in a beam of blinding blue-violet light. It blasted the stone to surprisingly little effect. The rock in its front slowly heated up, but only the single rock the laser touched was affected, not the whole pile. Based on my modeling, it would take me a significant amount of energy and time to heat even that to the point where it was slowly melting a hole.

All right. That wasn't going to work. I needed to change tactics. I came in closer using my Air Manipulation and tried to lift them up, but came up with only dirt and snow. The piles were somehow much heavier than my sensors indicated they should be. It was as if I was trying to pick up the entire mountain instead of a few individual rocks. Confused, I tried to use my vacuum to pull them into my dustbin. Again, they didn't budge. As though they were connected to the earth themselves rather than floating collections of disparate rock.

Pulling out my Divine Sword, I charged the monsters head on. The golden blade passed through the arm of the lead golem, and I felt the rocks easily shatter in its path. The arm fell loose, with several cracked stones hitting the ground beneath them. Activating my vacuum once more showed that I had no trouble consuming those. But the rocks were now strangely inert. They had no energy beyond that of a normal stone, unlike what I'd expected.

Slowly, other nearby rocks worked the pile. The arm regrew as rocks shifted and morphed into a new limb, replacing it.

I hacked into it again, spinning between its legs as I took off. The pile collapsed as the stones were split in two. But it kept reforming slowly as the others closed in around me. How odd. I decided to try something else, this time slashing straight up its body with the sword. The whole thing collapsed into just a pile of unmoving rocks. But as I flew up, one of the others swung at me. A fist made of rocks smashed into the soft plastic covering of my sensors and sent me hurtling back toward the mountainside. I felt the plastic shell crack in a few places, and my energy levels slowly drained as my repair functions went about mending the damage.

These things were strong. They moved slowly, but I was having real trouble hurting them. And without being able to simply pull them into myself and dissolve them, I realized I didn't have as many offensive weapons as I had thought. Perhaps I had grown arrogant in my last few fights.

Fighting a weakened demon lieutenant after it had just woken up had felt quite impressive, even if Beatrice deserved a lot of the credit. So had destroying the Wraith and the undead with it. But I had to accept that I was remarkably well suited for fighting those enemies, and maybe I needed to be a little more creative in some situations.

My damage healed, and I floated up from the crater I had left in the mountainside. I started running some models to see what other options I had.

As they worked on my options and tried to dissect my opponents, I played a little bit of keep-away with the rock monsters. Luckily, they were slow, so it wasn't too hard to stay ahead of them. As I watched the progress bar in my mind's eye, I started playing a game where I tried to get them to hit each other. And to my surprise, as I did this, the bar started filling a little bit faster. I must've been getting some information from them that was helping the models fill in some blanks quicker than I expected in a foreground process.

I tried to figure out why, and it only took me a few seconds to realize the pattern. They did not hit each other at all. They worked in complete harmony, each strike layered one after another, covering openings as though they shared the same sensor inputs, making me work to find a way out if I became cornered. Their movements left no way for them to accidentally damage each other. It was like they were the limbs of the same person. When my model finally spat out some answers, I wasn't as surprised as I probably should have been.

These were probably not their own creatures. They were almost certainly puppets of something else. It explained a lot of things, like why I had been relatively unsuccessful in damaging them. Apparently, even if I managed to destroy them utterly, that wouldn't have any more effect than trimming off someone's toenails. They were expendable and interchangeable. The towers of rock would just reform, or new ones would come out after me.

The only answer I didn't have was why they were chasing me. What had I done to anger something so powerful and seemingly mindless? It was a complete mystery to me. I don't think I missed any attempts to communicate or anything along those lines. So clearly, this was an instinctual response.

If this was an intentional attack, I could imagine this would have been a lot more effective, too. As things were, the creatures posed no danger to me. Rather, it just forced me out of the area. I supposed the point could've been to hide something around here, but that just seemed fairly unlikely. So, I went with my gut instinct and said it was a responsive protocol with no actual consciousness behind it. But the big question remained: how was I going to deal with it?

I pulled up out of the reach of the rock puppets and reached out with my Advanced Sensors, seeing if I could detect where the energy that powered them came from. As I focused on it, I felt something impact the undercarriage next to my wheelhouse, sending me spinning through the air. Looking down, I saw a small rock falling away. Suddenly, dozens of others were flying after me in a hail of stones. Adjusting my thrusters, I began taking evasive maneuvers, never able to stand still for more than a quarter of a second.

Before the rocks found me again, I spun, twirled, and looped through the air as I did my best to trace where the energy was coming from. For each of them, the pattern was very similar. Energy seeped through their shapes in a simple 1 to 1 overlay. The energy then spread down into the ground and trailed off towards the mountain peak. I followed the path back toward the source of the energy, hoping to see if there was something I could disrupt along the way. But about halfway up the trail, I lost the path.

The thing didn't lead directly to the peak. In fact, once it got most of the way up the mountain, it sort of dispersed into the center of the mountain. I lost any ability to follow it without burrowing or digging deeper.

I needed to collect my thoughts. So I soared up above the mountain, well out of rock-throwing range, and watched for a response. Unexpectedly, the rock monsters did not go back to the village. Rather, they simply stopped and collapsed into rock piles. As they did, I felt the energy recede back into the mountain and diffuse throughout the entire peak.

Huh? This was a really weird phenomenon. I wonder if it was what Daedalus was feeling. I needed to go find him and ask.

***

Bee knocked on the door frame of Arthur's office and held her breath. She watched as Arthur finished scratching something on a paper before looking up and noticing her.

She had to admit she was a little bit nervous. It had been several hours since they had their argument, and Bee took most of that time to calm down before talking to Susan. But now she had to come at least mend fences. It wasn't that she was entirely convinced the man was right, but she could see his point of view now and understand his frustrations. She hoped that he also felt the same way. At the very least, maybe he'd see how her decision at the time made sense. But it wasn't something they should be fighting over when they both agreed on the main points. And when they had a war to address.

"Hey," Bee gave a slightly awkward wave. He looked at her for a second with hard eyes before gesturing for her to come in. She shut the door behind her before taking a seat in one of the chairs across his desk.

She opened her mouth to apologize, but Arthur beat her to it. "I'm sorry I lost my temper with you earlier. That was out of line. I understand you were put in a tough situation and made the best of what you could, but as a father, it's hard for me to see the safety of children put aside so recklessly."

Bee was waving her hands in front of her. "No, no, no, no. That was my bad. I probably could have made some better decisions." She hesitated, then sighed. "I talked with Susan a little bit, and she helped me see it from your perspective. Well, I can't say I 100% agree with some of the statements you made. I do think that you are probably right in that I should have been more insistent on coming home with them. However, I do not think that Night Knights are going to see it that way. Say that they're children as much as you like, but they have real power. They don't all have to listen to us if they really don't want to."

Arthur nodded thoughtfully, "Yes, they're all young and easily impressionable. They've looked up to you and Tony and Void, obviously with all your going out saving the day, and they want to do the same. I tried to help teach Bradley to avoid something like this, but…" The man sighed. "I should have realized this was a more general issue. But I think we actually can figure something out for them."

Arthur paused. "It's been a long military tradition to use young boys as messengers and pages during battles. They run arrows between fletchers and run messages between officers. It's a useful role but one that we'd prefer not to spare men for if we don't have to. Most importantly, it's safe.

"I think perhaps we can get the Knights involved with the effort like they want, but in a non combat way. That will help them learn discipline and structure. Then, one day far in the future, they can choose to take part in a more direct manner if they want to. Once they're mature enough to make that decision. Though hopefully, they won't even have to at that point."