Went to Cut the Lump and Grew Another
"What is that?"
Pele tilted her head. She had just stomped flat a B-series replica that charged her like a frenzied fan.
"Scientist has drawn his blade."
A dozen-odd dolls appeared at the very last, as if to prove they were special, and the battlefield went quiet at their arrival.
"This has become troublesome."
They were replicas of an entirely different caliber from Captain Earth's. I knew what they were, and the worry pushed to the front whether I wanted it or not.
"You know who they are?"
"Yes. I do."
All too well.
"They are Another One's subordinates, of the same standing as Scientist."
"Which is another way of saying..."
"That they are Another One's hands and feet."
Seven executives, moving at Another One's command. Replicas of four of them.
He can't use the Devil's Tree, so he switched tracks to cloning. Is that what this is...?
In the original, the enemy had been an army that made full use of the Devil's Tree. From D-series addicts to specially rebuilt humans, to the trees born of seeds the Devil's Tree had sown, numbers so vast they made the forces here look like nothing had poured out without end—and every last one of them wrapped in the Devil's Tree's buff.
The replicas surrounding us? Third-stringers he couldn't even put to proper use. Only the Earth family had been halfway serviceable, and even that Captain Earth was a defective product, riddled with flaws beside the real thing. A slightly unusual extra, nothing more.
Another One's executives were different. They were talents he had scouted himself. Scientist alone made the standard plain: only the smartest mind on Earth could meet him face to face and become an executive. Between what that human scientist had done to the world and the way he had pinned the feet of a party with a god in it, their danger hardly needed saying.
I didn't see this coming.
Scientist was a lunatic so complete that even the blank margin of a page would have been wasted on him, but to clone colleagues who served the same master? If this came out later, I had no idea how he meant to handle the fallout. Was he telling them that if they didn't like it, they could come find him at the Arctic?
"They really are his subordinates. Strong. Far stronger than the Heavenly Punishment."
Something about them seemed to grate. Pele frowned.
"And it looks like the drugs have kicked in, too."
Two familiar energies thrashed inside the executives' replicas.
"He has dosed them with the D-series, and with Death as well."
"How do they look to you? Set against the real ones."
"I'd say he's drawn them up to about half."
"That's half...? I can't even guess how strong the real ones are."
"They do not reach the level of a god."
Well. They could still drive a hidden blade into Pele's true body.
"In my day, that much made a Half-God hero."
"Heroes, perhaps. The presence rolling off them is an evil god itself."
Pele opened her palm. The Divine Spear appeared, as much her emblem as anything she wore.
"I want to take all of them myself... I shouldn't, should I?"
"Then you would have to overreach. Please keep your strength in reserve for later."
With those four on the field, I turned over the worst possibility. Scientist was not a man who wanted to die, but he was the sort who would sell even his soul to a demon if curiosity asked it of him.
"I will range the battlefield and support our allies. Pele, please don't push yourself."
"I'm a god."
Pele took the Divine Spear in a reverse grip. A throwing stance formed, beautiful as something painted.
"I'll finish this in a moment. Go help the others."
"Understood."
Thwip!
Pele's throw was the start. Scientist's secret weapons moved.
Four replicas closed in on Pele, weapons granted the series names M, MA, W, and A in that order. Among them, Asura's replica, A-09, caught her thrown spear in all six arms.
Kreeeeik!
Momentum drove him back, bare feet carving skid marks, while divine flame meant to annihilate evil burned his bronze skin. Death and Gluttony roared. Death killed divinity. Gluttony hungered, ravenous and foul.
The fire dwindled. Only when his six hands were half-shattered did A-09 manage to survive. Like the original, he showed no change of expression even as the pain hit, and he shook out those grotesque six arms the way one shakes out laundry. Hot steam rose from the wrists. He was regenerating, slowly, from the bone upward.
"Durability passes."
Pele clicked her tongue. She had meant to open by taking one of them out, and it rankled that she hadn't.
Then something appeared at the edge of her vision: a man with M-13 written across the chest of his clothes. Magician's replica dove low, a snake sliding in on prey. A deck of cards drawn from his wrist wrapped him as if to protect him, and every card was steeped in a scythe that reaped life and in a Gluttony that could devour the universe.
An energy that tapped at the nerves drew Pele's gaze for an instant. M-13's eyes tore upward into wrong-way slits, and then, with a pop, he turned to smoke. The pall choked her sight. She formed the Divine Spear again and swung it behind her.
Clang!
A shard of steel burst apart before her eyes. Warrior's replica, W-32, discarded the sword that had served its purpose and drew the bow slung across his back. The arrowhead on the string flickered a dark crimson. Pele split W-32 in two, bow and all.
No feel to the cut.
A faint error ran through her divine sense. She had cut the enemy her senses locked onto, and still she had not cut him. She turned her head. The arrow aimed at her brow grazed past.
"You're really trying."
A few blinks, and her senses returned to what they had been. She rolled her eyes and found, near the archer, a woman with purple hair. Minder's replica, M-77, blew her a kiss from her fingertips.
"Mind control... You've got a rare ability there."
Just now, that thing's power had interfered, however faintly, with a god's cognition. Even in the state of a divine avatar, it was plainly something to be shocked by.
"So what. The price is enormous."
Blood poured from M-77's nose. She startled at the nosebleed she had spilled without meaning to. A god was a mind that had held firm across thousands of years. No weapon had any business touching that ground.
Even so, I have to be careful.
There was not only one replica of that thing. If several of them came at once, even Pele could be tied down for a few dozen seconds.
As if he knew his colleague was in danger, M-13—who had not so much as shown his tail—popped out of the shadow with a greasy little smile. A grotesquely fat snake, a monkey spinning a knife, and a pigeon with a bomb clamped in its beak came with him, ridiculous as a troupe. Animals sprouted in a rush, as though they meant to throw a festival. Pele let out a short, dry laugh.
"I've been hit with this so often it isn't even surprising."
Set beside true madness, it was a child's game. The shadow he had used as an exit became lava. The animals were swallowed and turned into playing cards. M-13's face hardened, and he swung his staff; a blade jutted, blunt, from its tip. Before the staff could reach its mark, the lava swallowed him first. Skin melted until the bones of his face showed. The energy of Death let him resist a death that should have lasted only a moment.
Pele sighed.
"Their teamwork is good. How irritating."
She ignored him. Lava closed around her. M-13 pushed his lip out in a sulk, and the burning figure scattered like a mirage.
Through a gap in the lava, Pele looked at A-09. She had no idea when he had arrived. His arms were driven into the lava, and killing intent poured off him toward her, while above the lava arrows slammed home by the dozens. If she had spared M-13 any attention, she would have eaten the attack.
She stroked her chin. Brace her gut and show them one face of a volcano, or take them as she was? From what she had measured so far, these were not opponents she could swat aside at her ease.
"Nothing for it."
She looked over the battlefield with her divine sense. A few of the kids were struggling, but it had not yet turned serious.
"He said to save it, so I'll only draw a little."
She raised the state of her body, the one fixed since the Heavenly Punishment. A domain that had been shut began to widen. A wall like heaven, the kind that would stop anyone else cold and drop them where they stood, she broke through in a matter of seconds.
"This much, for now."
Beside her true body, it was a drop in the bucket. For a divine avatar as fragile as glass, this was the best she could do.
"The kids ought to know how hard it is, living in this body."
It felt like being bound tight in empty air and getting by on a single eye. Just now, that one had become two.
Fwoosh!
In the moment she let her attention wander, the lava was breached. A-09 unfolded a dazzling martial art with his six arms, a lofty school whose very name she did not know. Pele admired it in spite of herself, even as she tore all six arms apart with her bare hands.
"They all piled onto me in that little gap."
As if they had sensed her brace her core, four became ten. The rabble posted around them rushed the other children, and this stretch of ground alone lay empty, wide and bare as a wasteland. Pele smiled, fierce.
A flinch.
Emotions numbed by a god's pressure, the replicas trembled anyway. They knew it by instinct.
The rank of an existence.
"Kids. Hold out, even a little."
If they fell too fast—
"The Child of Man who told me to hold back is going to scold me."
"Got that?"
Pele crushed the head of A-09, already missing his arms. A corpse with neither arms nor a head collapsed.
And then Death and Gluttony seized the flesh.
She annihilated it at once with the Divine Spear.
Nine pairs of eyes took on a strange light, and the light in them began to go out. Caught flat-footed, Pele hurriedly turned four of them to ash with thrown spears, but five lived long enough to kill themselves. Death and Gluttony ran wild.
"Damn it."
She had gone to cut one lump away, and grown another.
Pele drew a boundary in lava. Those things must not be allowed to cross over to the children.