135 135. Titan of Element
'Impressive design.' Liam thought as he studied the Harvester Mothership. Every detail was bare to his gaze, and it was interesting how the Queens had modified the original plan of the vessel.
The mining drill and the subsequent collecting equipment that took close to a fifth of the structure was gone, instead replaced by a shield generator and massive energy plants with astronomical output rivaling that of planetary cores. That was just one among many more inner changes made; the large unused void to simulate a biosphere was not spared from this fate.
The Harvester did not make their technology with wars in mind at a base level. Everything existed to further the harvesting process, as that was how the spaceships' production worked.
They built them from planets themselves, for the most part, after all. Everything in their plans had this function in mind: pest control included if a little of a rowdy resident native or implanted beforehand.
It wasn't the case here, and Liam knew because, amidst many other points, there weren't 'timberlines'; growth marks signaled the vessels had seen phases of great expansion by consuming matter like a tree. This meant it was produced differently than the norm, and it showed. All were wired to promote speed, resistance, and firepower to unprecedented heights.
It demonstrated the Harvester's proficiency in engineering and rapid adaptation to perceived danger. This increased their threat level by several magnitudes, which wasn't surprising.
They wouldn't use the same tactic that had them lose repeatedly. War and progress were intricately tied, no matter the species or the nature of the progress, and it was natural they would improve and change.
And Liam's feelings about the design were genuine, and it was a high praise from him. Though he had predicted such development, the Harvester's mind was comparable to his and Eywa's in raw computing power if its members synched.
And he was not ashamed to say he would take inspiration from it, of course, to improve upon it, but it needed testing, and he would be the hammer.
But first, it needed to be destroyed to every extent of the word. The Harvester's capabilities to adapt made it clear the war shouldn't go on.
The question of losing was not here for Liam as it had no place to be; he and Eywa were inevitable, and their spread was eternal, but victory would become more and more costly as the battles flew by and the war went on.
It was a price he was willing to pay if push came to shove, but he did not want to. The tune of the war needed acceleration, and one side was in dire necessity of annihilation.
"Let's see how this shield fair," Liam said out loud, attracting the gaze of his little audience of the elite of the elite of humans, the Lower Pillar within this room at this instant, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Temüjin or more widely known as Genghis Khan.
Each was reborn by their own volition; Liam had not forced it upon them. Neither was it to become Lower Pillar, but it was part of the contract. It was this or death. The only noticeable outside feature of their status was a faint purple shine in their eyes, and the one above was his son as the Pillar of the Element.
They were unique in this way compared to other Alpha Homo Superior, such as Max Patel, and those four in the room represented a sliver of their total numbers—each an extension of himself via the Element, each a beacon to increase his influence over reality.
But the same was doable on anything; his tames had been graced with even more extraordinary blessings as he turned them into Titans, massive creatures of immense power capable of laying waste to planets, but it wasn't the same.
Making these historical figures part of him was not a random choice. It was a way for Liam to heal a not-insignificant part of their Engramic Matrices due to the decay over time and to make himself grow.
It was to cultivate a larger web of thoughts, opinions, reasoning, imagination, and morals, creating a complex hive mind where he could choose what was the most optimized for the situation in a broad portfolio.
But it mattered little for what Liam was currently doing. Controlling gravity itself with his puppet body, he gained in velocity, reaching speed far above what the energy cannons could keep up.
Without this, he wouldn't have had a problem weaving it through the hail of green projectiles, and it was predictable where he would be hit. There was only so much variable he had to account for. It was akin to outsmarting a toddler in a board game.
And like he was on a board game, he played nicely, letting many plasma bolts reach their marks in massive explosions that would tear mountains and ravage cities. But it wasn't arrogance.
The puppet received damage, but it was not a random automaton he was controlling. It was a creature carved by the delicate hands of his mate for him to possess with the Element and expand upon it.
It wasn't a machine of mass destruction in the regular sense of the term. It was a creation to grow and assimilate, taking the most dangerous aspects of the Element and promoting them to extreme levels.
In many ways, it was just an all-in-one mobile farm, a seed with the sole purpose of growing. It was just that the ground and nutrients were the local reality.
And there was no possibility of fighting back efficiently without Tek. It was where the terror of the Element lay. An ever-growing alien force that spreads and multiplies without any limit, turning all that is different from itself into itself.
Destroy as much as you might; one atom will always remain, and it will come back. A scourge upon not only life but the universe itself, and that was the true strength of the All-Father. It was not living. It could not die. It could not be killed or destroyed by any means, only delayed.
After all, how could a chemical substance be killed? It would be akin to destroying every hydrogen atom, an impossibility nothing but beings short of the edge of omnipotence could do.
Then came the impact of the puppet slammed against the shield. From the epicenter, rolling waves of green spread like tidal waves of size and power beyond reason that spread across hundreds of kilometers before losing strength.
And yet it did nothing to the shield, the impact little more than a fly on a windshield, and even then, that would be an overstatement. The next instant, hundreds of cannon ceaselessly fired on the point of impact, all without missing their intended target.
"What a terrific creation," Albert said with no worry as he observed what was happening with fascination like his fellow Lower Pillars and what was not to be fascinated about.
This had sent him close to madness: the Element, a substance breaking all rules of regular and quantum physics—a conscious example of an anomaly that was their liege.
And here was one of the most representative examples of its potential bare for their eyes to feast upon and trillions more.
The puppet body plunged into the shield as more firepower was concentrated on it, entire swaths of its body turning to plasma before regrowing larger with the added energy in a never-ending cycle.
From the ring of metal on its back, the Argent Sea freely poured without end, and from the torso, hands, and feet, thousands of black roots pulsing a bright purple grew. The black root pulsed a bright purple, and the silvery liquid of hexagonal particles shifted around its form, shipping itself into a bubble that commented to the shield's outer layer, like an embryo attaching itself to the womb of its would-be mother.
But that was where the comparison ended. From the bubble, more roots and silvery thread sprouted, the two promoting the others as they feasted upon the plentiful energy so graciously given, be it from the shield or the green hails.
And like this, it grew and spread farther, faster, and deeper at an ever-increasing rate until it reached abnormal speed for even the Element all watching were accustomed to. And like a snowball that started an avalanche, the momentum gained promoted the constant shattering of the First Law of Thermodynamics.
"The insects have lost. Their fate is to be crushed under boots." Temüjin thought out loud, and his words were not only for the one nearby but for every Lower Pillar via Psionic.
More precisely, toward individuals he considered peers, if not close to this status, such as Chandragupta Maury, Napoléon Bonaparte, Khalid ibn al-Walid, Hernán Cortés, Julius Caesar, and many more. There never was a moment when there was no debate, an internal battle, and a battle scenario.
And there was a lot to discuss during the current war, one that was of nature entirely alien to them. What all these warlords, conquerors, and tacticians could agree on is that it was a spectacular sight.
In under three hours, a third of the shield had been ingrained by steel thread and onyx root, their depth beginning to breach the inside of the rapidly weakening green barrier as the Harvester Mothership allocated more energy to it and the cannon below unknowingly worsening its fate.
The root began to travel to the hull of the gargantuan vessel. Without a lapse, they tore through the hyper-dense alloy with the same ease as wet paper to dig within with gusto.
As this happened, the cocoon that the puppet body had been staying motionless until now had stopped enlarging; what was within began to be visible to the naked eye, such was how bright it was.
Then it bloomed. In its center, five lines came into existence and traveled to the base, the light below escaping in potent rays of concentrated Element so hot it rivaled the internal heat of stars.
A hand of thorny black roots came out, cutting through the light, after another, then a head followed. A lozenge of burning violet shined, the horns having turned into a crown burned in everlasting flames of the same color the rest of the body followed.
The magnificent disk reshaped on the back, and the flow of Argent Sea morphed itself into a war scythe of illusory light fitted for the size of the creature that arose. A creature that led trillions of sigh from all across the Milky Way to enter various states of awe, shock, terror, and beyond.
It was a humanoid of burning Element comparable in size to the Harvester Mothership's; it had been growing like a tumor. Then, on its face, an inhumane wide smile grew just as the ethereal face of the All-Face did the same, and both their gaze locked onto one creature.
The Harvester Queen.
And the alien royalty's current state of mind was in disarray. She could not comprehend or begin to process the visceral neurosis never experienced in her kind that she was suffering from the spectacle unfolding. It was not the pain of the All-Mother as she ripped mind and soul into flakes but the realization that any and all hope of a victory was gone from the beginning.
Without a word, the giant humanoid moved at a speed it should not have, mere movement spanning the size of continents.
The left hand faced the ship and came to shoot dark vines that cut through the thoroughly wearied-out shield and tore through the hull and everything below before exploding into barbed spikes.
Its target was immobilized, trapped by the precise strike that caused critical failure all across the Harvester Mothership. It grasped the war scythe and, in a graceful, swift, and decisive strike, the weapon, like the blade of a Guillotine, swiped down.
Light flashed across space as the slightly curved blade and shaft of the bladed polearm cleaved through the massive spaceship, killing all as a blazing inferno of pure Element plasma bathed them in its far too warm embrace.
An explosion of green and purple followed as the automatic self-destruct sequence was triggered, pushing the two warp drives to overclock with the energy system, turning everything within into a supernova.
Then it all went away, and what remained was a mini black hole. The massive creature of Element stood unfazed by the gravitational singularity; its weapon turned back to a silvery river, and everything began to break apart as it shifted into a fetal position.
"Father, is it turning into a planetoid body?" Miles, the first to snap out of the awe-inspiring and jaw-breaking sight, asked with genuine curiosity.
"Indeed, I cannot keep its shape for more than minutes without it consuming itself to fight the natural consequence of such a massive and heavy body. Eywa and I designed the Titan of Element to be short-lived." Liam answered, robbing the attention of his creation within the rooms, for he knew questions were to follow, and he was all too happy to answer them all.
