The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

When Immortal Slaughter fails... time travel is not an option. At least not here. Deal with it.

All the seeds in the hundred-forty-something-thousand people were hatching-sprouting at the same time. I was panicking-freaking-out-breaking-down as I stared at the mind-boggling sphere of nothingness-devastation-death poking into outer space and down way past the earth's crust and the five thousand square miles of demon grass uprooting-awakening-revolting-destroying right next to me.

All those people would die and it was my fault. Why did I think I could save them? Why did I think I could kill one of those massive jellyfish-gods? My hubris doomed them all.

"Contractor!"

I fancied myself a God. Got some nice System powers, got way over my head.

"My lord snap out of it!"

I was just rotten fruit, after all the makeup was removed. I was made to destroy and inflict suffering, not rescue and renew. A Dungeon.

"Contractor!"

Who cared if I could make toy robots? It was all pointless. The game was rigged. I couldn't hold a flag for two hundred years. Not with that kind of thing roaming the world. It was doomed. Miraculous reversals happened only in fiction.

"My Lord! Hear my prayer!"

"Contractor, look at me!"

Even burying myself in the deepest Dungeon would do shit to save me from something that could dig three hundred miles down in seconds. No. I had to escape.

"My Lord, the children is dying!"

What could I do?

"You can save them!"

"Contractor, I believe in you!"

Fuck. I snapped my focus back on my Core. Larry had opened up Blackjack Six and Rta was holding me in her hands, with the platypus on her shoulder. How did she get out of my personal domain? What is going on?

"Save the children, at least!" Rta begged.

"I can't." I spoke in 14.4 modem language.

"You can. You are a God." She retorted.

"How?"

"Your magic can heal believers! You healed the Rangers. Save the children!"

My magic... the Skill ranks.

I typed on the keyboards inside Blackjack Six. The land train PA System shouted. "Profess your faith and bind your fate to the Apple God! I can save you!"

I started to cast Consecrated Ground everywhere in the wagons with prisoners. The magic started burning the seeds but the people were still getting harmed by the heat. They needed to convert so the magic would heal them too.

But what about the children? Some of them were young enough they couldn't even comprehend language.

I remembered what Rta told to those people all the way back.

"My Lord is the slayer of Jabberwock, Protector of Pitsmouth, Warden of the World Tree, Defender of Speranza, savior of hundreds of thousands of people, the bringer of green, the lord of all trees, pilot of the God-Machines, conqueror of the skies," she pointed at the dirigibles, "wielder of a thousand spears of light, the new Lord of Valhalla and Flkvangr, Maker of Computers, Master of the Internet, and patron saint of the children."

Patron saint of children. At the deity level, belief was everything. I didn't need to make the children believe in me. I could claim them as mine.

"All children are under my divine protection until the day they Awaken to the System. Only then can they make the choice to follow me on their own free will or go in peace to seek another path."

A ripple went out on the conceptual dimension, a reality above our baryonic universe. A Law had been proclaimed and any challengers to that must throw their hats down in the ring. Alas, Earth had been abandoned by all Gods save one. Me.

The result was immediate. As the roots breaking through the children's bodies burned, their flesh was made anew. My Holy Light soothed their pain. I wasn't done.

"Mothers and fathers are thusly claimed as well, through the bonds of love they have for their children. Let my warmth embrace them and cement those links."

I could see the golden threads connecting the child to parent. They too started to heal. I used Bless on them. Forced it upon them. They were mine. It should be engraved upon their souls!

Rta had her Grilled Tex-Mex helmet on. Things were blurry when I was literally wrestling the fabric of reality and spinning a new Law out of whole cloth and guts.

"Profess your faith and believe in the light you see! Or become food for the demon grass you ate. [Kvasir's Mead]!"

She conjured droplets of some golden liquid over the mouths of the former New York residents, and let it drip upon their lips. I could see a new light in the people's eyes. Some accepted the thrown rope, some rejected it. Most disbelieved, too far down the path of cynicism and skepticism to believe such things possible. They lost hope.

The seeds and sprouts, millions of them, burned. Of their hosts, I had saved perhaps twelve, thirteen thousand. Some were in critical condition. Most were dead.

In the end, the choice was never mine. I was too weak and lacked the determination to really compromise. Or that was how I felt. Hindsight being 20/20, I bemoaned myself on what I could've done differently, on how I could save more people if only I had...

What was done was done.

Minutes had passed since the Armagellykull vanished five states and doomed the continent to a lava death. The grass was fighting against my flamethrowers but I had been too modest in that front. The damn Demon had more biomass than I could ever hope to burn with ten times the number of flamers I installed, thinking I was containing it.

No. The thing extended for five thousand square miles. Containing it was never an option.

I had to flee.

*

*

Grass had a peculiar ability most plants displayed in one way or another but grass was king among the entire Plantae Kingdom. A stretch of grass was an individual, a stretch of grass cut in two was two individuals. There was no central cluster, no trunk to be felled. Unless you cut the grass in slices so thin, they didn't have any hope of becoming cuttings and sprouting leaves and roots, grass was infinitely capable of regenerating from vivisection.

[...] 4,569,210 kill messages were suppressed. You gained 14,984,321 Dungeon Mana.

> For killing level 200 Graminaesshole, you gained 29,112 Experience points.

[...] 15 similar messages were suppressed.

I was dropping large cluster of white phosphorus rockets on the grass, carpet-bombing Manhattan, and surrounding areas to keep the grass from coming this way. As it was cut down and killed, I was getting some Exp for killing clones of the grass boss.

In an ideal world, I would farm it for Exp indefinitely. In reality, I was just buying time to get the fuck away from here.

While I dropped ton upon ton of white phosphorus on the grass and Replicated oxygen as close as I could to keep the thing burning. Clouds of black smoke choked the world and only upon touching my Domain did they vanish.

meanwhile, I was expanding the land train balloons, layering another bubble of 0.1mm Dungeon-Wall-reinforced steel and removing the air from the inside. The grass kept advancing, smothering the white phosphorus with its sheer biomass, burying the combustible material underneath churned earth and wrecked city.

I had to act fast. No time to make big balloons and I was pretty sure a slap from those massive roots would puncture through the Dungeon Wall armor. The thin layer of steel wouldn't resist the pressure if not for that magic. I cut off the dead weight that would matter nothing in the air. The treads, wheels, power trains, motors, engines, and the battery packs that made the land train move on land were shorn away. I even cut off the lower decks full of water, splashing a Great Lake's worth of liquid upon New Jersey.

The land train jerked upward, ascending ever so slowly. Not good enough.

"Inside my Domain, steel's density is reduced to a quarter of the real value with no loss of other physical properties."

I proclaimed a new Divine Law inside my Domain, using the last dregs of Divinity I had and a copious amount of Dungeon Mana. But over the months, I stored so much Mana on the trees from the energy my Dungeon was generating I had a lot of Mana for a rainy day. Or a doomsday, like today.

The dirigibles shot upward. So did the land train, pressing everyone against the floor as the 115 wagons floated up, pushed by a buoyancy they shouldn't have. I wasn't in my best state of mind so it took me a few seconds before I started Replicating nitrogen inside the balloons, reducing the buoyancy, and arresting the upward fall of my machines.

I also had to pressurize the entire land wagon and insulate the walls. We were going up so fast the ambient moisture was starting to freeze on the metal.

With Physics-Chan's blessed law of gravity shielding us from attacks from the main Graminaesshole body because it still took a lot of effort to lift a root fifty feet thick two thousand feet up in the air, I finally breathed in relief. Physics-Chan was faithful even though we were not. For that, I was thankful.

Why haven't I thought of going airborne from the start? My merry blimp wagon and the Hugging Mommas escort were adrift in the wind while I adjusted balloon size, and slowly restored steel's density to what it should be.

I wish I could rest but Physics-Chan beamed a wicked smile upon us. We weren't out of the woods yet. Or the patch of demon grass. Because the Coriolis effect was pushing us westward, toward the massive bubble of blackness that refused to vanish and quietly go away.

I Replicated massive propellers on the sides of the land train. These propellers had some degree of motion and I used them to steer the steel snake toward the east. We moved over the smoke cloud rising from a burning Manhattan and then we were cruising two miles above the Atlantic Ocean. The water churned and roiled like a bucket being stirred by a person. The sea foamed and splashed as massive roots thrashed all around. They splashed Olympic-swimming-pools worth of water into the land, trying to smother the burning phosphorus. The grass was cutting its losses and trying to save its biomass.

But we survived the cataclysm. I kept a wary eye on the black bubble and the angry grass as I changed course and flew my composition south along the east coast.

*

*

Massive cracks split the USA and Canada in half. The earth trembled. This went on for days, until the black bubble vanished. Canada and the USA split in half. Water from the arctic ocean flowed down the new crevice on the crust and poured upon a massive lake of magma. Just like the cork on a Champagne bottle, the magma from the mantle burst upward with extreme violence, making the eruption of Yellowstone, Mt. Vesuvius, and others seem like a science fair experiment in comparison.

Even the remaining Armagellykulls were moving away from that. Physics-Chan was going to town with her vengeance against the magical insanity.

The magma solidified, creating a massive mountain. The clouds of smoke spread. We fled south. Months passed. We flew over the Amazon rainforest, which was surprisingly rejuvenating now that humans weren't around to fuck up with it. And without people to torment, the Infernali left that green belt alone.

To the south we went. More months passed. The lush Amazon would soon wilt under the dark clouds created by the eruption.

After Rta vetted the children and parents, we moved them to Speranza. Some of the New York residents were too ingrained in their mentality and remained in the land wagon.

I feared nobody alive remained on North America or even Central America. Perhaps I would have better luck in Argentina? I set course there. If I found any large group of people in Brazil, I would take them too. They had a lot of plains down there. I could even learn something useful.