When Light Breaks

I hovered on the night side of Earth at the height of the Karman line. Being so much above the planet, I could see many more stars than on the surface since there wasn't an atmosphere for light to filter through.

The stars call to me. The Oort cloud calls for me.

My strands of almost crystal-like hair swayed from my body's most minute movements. Though I was clothed in Kukulkan's second ascension outfit, I didn't feel any coldness at all.

I wasn't affected by coldness.

I thought about my last conversation with Zvezdnyy. She was tearful. Despite never being told, the girl somehow knew how dangerous this mission was. Zvezdnyy didn't want me to go, but she knew this was a mission only I could do.

We hugged and cuddled. Angela (SCP-191) later joined and Zvezdnyy put up some half-hearted protest before allowing her into my embrace.

All three of us stayed like that. On my bed, I held the two in my embrace until it was time for me to go.

I smiled as I finished reminiscing about that happy memory.

Placing my right hand over my heart, I closed my eyes and began to feel for the Star deep within me. I held on to the 'rope' that Star had already given me and I started tugging on it. I needed more power.

More than likely, the moment I start moving across the solar system Ion would likely know. That means I can't hide. Maybe I can hide for a bit while in the shadow of a planet but I can't really hide for long, not when Ion has the ability to break into the holy site of the Church of the Broken God.

I can only run then. So I shall run. I shall move as fast as I possibly can. I shall speed across the solar system and reach Jupiter.

To aid me in this endeavor, I shall fully embrace the Heart of ORT. I will use that Star as a power source to allow me to move as fast as possible.

I tugged on that 'rope' coming from that distant star even harder, until finally—

My eyes burst open and were filled with raw power. The floodgate was opened.

I felt the same alien energy filling every cell of my body. I felt the Heart of ORT glowing fully. Instead of a mere candlelight like it was before, now it was a forest fire burning brightly and bringing the day into the night.

A smile tugged on my lips. I felt amazing. I felt like I could take on Ion without any problem. I felt like a druggie who's just taken his first shot of heroin ever.

This rush. So much power! Unlimited power!

As I looked down on my body, only now did I realize how there was a white fluffy scarf wrapping around my shoulder, and from that scarf fell a golden metallic cloak. More than that, there was an odd weight above my head.

My hands reached up and touched it. It was smooth. As my hands explored more of it, I realized how many feathers were on the back of the helmet.

No, this was a headdress. I now wore Kukulkan's third ascension outfit.

With that recognition, I looked down and saw how my legs were clad in a pair of metallic boots with green lines cutting through that monotone gold. The boots themselves came up to my thighs.

Yes, this is my peak. This is when I fully embrace the Heart of ORT when I am shining as that Star.

Without a second thought, I began traveling.

In half a second my speed reached up to half that of light. In only 1.5 seconds, I passed by the orbit of the glowing Moon.

As I traveled into trans-lunar space, I began to notice how all the stars of the Milky Way appeared to gather in front of me. They were moving, gathering into this one bright blob directly in front of me like some kind of headlight of a car.

Spacetime was being warped by how fast I was moving. Newton's Laws of Motion is no longer accurate. You'd need Einstein's Special Relativity to describe what's happening to me.

Such as length contraction. Einstein's Theory of Relativity states that there is no absolute frame of reference, only perspectives. With this revelation in mind, length contraction becomes easy to understand as from the perspective of a stationary observer, I, who was moving at near light speed would appear shorter than I actually was since the light from my feet would arrive only a bit slower than the light reflecting off my head.

I grimaced as my green personal shield flared up.

A speck of dust smashed right into me with the force of an atomic bomb.

Something normally harmless was turned extremely deadly.

Moving at this speed, a collision with a single grain of sand imparts as much energy as Little Boy.

This was one of the hazards of moving at near-light speed: any collision with micro-meteorites or the like would be incredibly dangerous with the amount of energy involved. I mean seriously, if I smash into a U.S. quarter moving at this speed I would be hit with 50 megatons of TNT, or the same energy as the Tsar Bomba.

As I continued to speed up even more, any unintended collisions would become even deadlier.

I grimaced once again as I was hit with a cloud of dust.

That was enough energy to level Manhattan down to its bedrock.

Nonetheless, I continued to speed up even faster.

Mars came into view as this barely noticeably pinprick of green before rapidly becoming larger.

That's Mars. Moving at this speed has blueshifted Mar's color enough that it's no longer red for me.

Huh, that's strange. I thought during the debriefing that it was going to take light some 46 minutes to reach Mars, but somehow I reached here in less than five minutes—

Ah, that's right. Time dilation.

Moving at 99.49% of the speed of light, my Lorentz factor has reached 9.9—

Why do I know this stuff?

— At this level, every minute for me is going to be ten minutes for those on Earth, and since I wasn't always moving at 99.49, oh wait, now 99.6% the speed of light, my Lorentz factor was only going to increase, and the effect of relativistic time dilation was only going to become even more extreme.

As I passed by Mars, the color of the red planet shifted from its shades of bright green back to red. Weirdly enough, the planet looked like someone had stretched it, flattening its sides before bending it like someone curling their fingers inward. More than that, it was rotating.

In less than a millisecond Mars was already behind me, turning redder by the millisecond.

By now, almost all the stars in the night sky were shifting in front of me while the space behind where I was traveling was a dark abyss.

The redshifting of light has made Earth invisible to the naked eye. Oh sure, I could still see it on the Infrared spectrum, but any higher wavelengths and it's completely invisible.

All the lights from the stars in front of me got increasingly clumped together, more and more contracted.

Passing the orbit of Mars, now comes the long journey of traveling through the Asteroid belt and finally reaching Jupiter.

I reached 99.99999% of the speed of light. Length contraction has made everything around me almost completely dark save for very long wavelengths of infrared and the bright spot in front of me, a spot where all the starlights have gathered. Around that bright spot was a crown of rainbow, a corona of visible light still not yet blueshifted into X-rays and Gamma rays.

I grimaced once more as I smashed right into an asteroid, slowing me down to a mere 99.9991% of the speed of light and completely disintegrating that asteroid into a soup of fundamental particles.

I ignored it.

As I sped up to even higher regions of relativistic speeds, I found that corona of rainbow slowly retracting into that infinitely bright spot like the edge of a closing umbrella.

By now I was moving at such speed that it'll take a photon a whole month of travel to gain a single centimeter lead.

Spacetime warping has become extreme. My Lorentz factor was now in the millions. Every second for me is now many weeks for those on Earth.

It was primarily due to this time dilation that I was unable to react to the sudden appearance of Ganymede in my field of view.

OH SHI—

—I had only nanoseconds of relative time to react—

Crashing into Ganymede, I tried to slow down. I tried to floor the brakes but I just kept on going and going until I went right out the other side.

I passed right through the entirety of Jupiter's moon in a fraction of a second, but for me, that was less than a millionth of a second.

Thousands of kilometers of rock and dirt were gone in an instant as I pierced through the largest of Jupiter's moon with ease.

I slowed down to a crawl over the length of five thousand kilometers. Looking behind me at Ganymede, I found the moon to be an utter wreck.

I was showered in a cloud of moon gore as I made an utterly massive exit wound on the remnant of Ganymede. I mean close to half of the planetoid was gone with more disappearing every second as they were lifted off Ganymede, carried away by the force of my impact like wind carrying sand.

The whole moon became loose, appearing more akin to a comet. Gravity could no longer bind them together anymore.

Crap. That's probably going to give Jupiter a new ring. A small one, nothing like Saturn but a ring nonetheless.

I had no time to repair this. Ion could be here any second so I flew towards the humongous gas giant with strips of colored wind moving across its surface.

Jupiter appeared to get larger and larger, like a titanic maw that could consume whole planets.

I'll be honest, I felt a bit of fear. This extremely large Jovian planet… it's an irrational fear, so I push forward and descend into the depths of Jupiter's cloud layers.

It was loud, that was the first thing I noticed as I could hear the loud booms coming from hundreds of lightnings. The clouds weren't white like those on Earth, instead, they were mostly shades of brown with the occasional outcrop of white.

These clouds were all made of mostly helium and hydrogen. Jupiter would've been very flammable if not for the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.

I was now veiled in true darkness as I crossed 50 kilometers of Jupiter's cloud layers.

Continuing my descent, I opted to travel even faster since I was likely not even a single percent of the way down to Jupiter's core.

Lightning became more common. It was almost deafening with the unceasing roar of thunder and flashes of light as I descended deeper into Jupiter. The pressure was increasing as well.

Then, I suddenly hit a layer of liquid hydrogen. It felt just like that time I descended down into the ocean, only this liquid was only about 33 degrees Celsius above Absolute Zero, a solid 13 Kelvin above its boiling point.

The pressure here was intense enough to force hydrogen into a supercritical fluid state.

I swam through this ocean of liquid hydrogen. It really didn't feel any different from swimming through the ocean except for this one, it's way colder and the pressure is astronomical. However, that coldness was disappearing as the pressure forces the liquid to become hotter.

I didn't want to ignite this pool of hydrogen I was in. I didn't want any potential for nuclear fusion to occur and cause a runaway reaction that would set all of Jupiter on fire.

So I didn't conjure up any plasma. Nor did I move at speeds that would cause nuclear fusion, only at the higher ends of hypersonic.

I used the gravitational pull of Jupiter as a lighthouse inside this dark abyss of liquid hydrogen.

It took about ten minutes of travel before I felt droplets hitting me.

Rain-like droplets of helium and neon precipitate down through the sea of liquid hydrogen.

By now, the temperature around me was over 5,000 kelvin, and the pressure here was two times that of the Earth's core.

This was how hydrogen was able to stay in a liquid state despite the temperature almost being able to make plasma.

It took me half an hour to cross that 21,000-kilometer-thick layer of hydrogen before I finally hit the sea of liquid metallic hydrogen.

The liquid was extremely smooth. That makes sense. Metallic hydrogen has zero viscosity as a superfluid after all.

I had no problem swimming through it surprisingly. I had an even easier time moving through this than through air.

Well, the pressure just jumped, and so was the temperature rising as well as I continued my travel down to Jupiter's core.

Thus, I increased my speed. I moved so fast that cavitation bubbles began to form behind me, trailing my cape and my feet.

A dull sense of warmth surrounded me. The liquid was over 10,000 degrees Kelvin.

I should be nearing Jupiter's core now after close to an hour of constant travel…

"—!"

I smashed into a solid surface, digging about a meter into it before stopping.

I swam through that 40,000-kilometer-thick blanket of metallic hydrogen and finally reached Jupiter's core. A ball of rock and ice with a radius one and a half times larger than Earth. The place where the heaviest element is contained inside Jupiter.

The pressure down here was unlike anything I've ever encountered. It was over 40 times more intense than those found in the depth of Earth's core, and the temperature here was hot enough to rival lightning.

Yet nonetheless, the incredible pressure forces the metallic hydrogen to stay as a liquid. A superfluid.

Time to get to work then.

I reached out with my senses. My eyes were useless as the metallic hydrogen was opaque to all forms of light. I tried to detect any disturbances in the local magnetic field that would point toward pieces of SCP-2399.

"..."

There are so many, what the actual fuck?!?

__________

Back on Earth.

Sgt. James Goodwell checked his guns once more. He was once more assigned surface duty and so, he was clad in an opaque full-body suit underneath his usual armor that sealed him in.

Walking on top of these solid concrete walls with nothing to do was boring, so Goodwell explored the new gears that were given to him.

Glancing at the magazine underneath his assault rifle, Goodwell probed at the symbol of a cross upon his magazine.

"Uh, Lieutenant Charles?" Goodwell called out to his commanding officer, who was standing 10 meters away, "Why's our guns have crosses on them?"

His Lieutenant walked up to him. Staring at the magazine for a while, he said, "Oh you're one of the religious ones. Didn't they debrief you on how to use these 'faith bullets' I think they're called?"

"Faith bullets? No, they didn't have time. Only said if you find any instances of SCP-9401A to just pray and shoot."

Lieutenant Charles swept his gaze at the landscape outside of the walls of Site-19, before giving Goodwell what's presumably a sideways glance.

Hard to tell under all that thick layer of armor and full-body covering.

"The higher-ups finally let SCP-890 have a crack at SCP-914. Did something to it and turned that thing into a factory that's spewing out these anomalous technologies. You got God's miracle in the shape of a bullet, I got phaser bullets. Testing shows it shunts any solid matter hit into another dimension."

"Are the higher-ups really using SCPs? Did the Ethics Committee allow it?"

Charles laughed at 'The Ethics Committee' part before shrugging, "Seems like it. Not like the Ethics Committee would put up much of a protest. They're just stamping whatever paper's in front of them."

Then, Charles raised his gun and aimed it down at somewhere in the barren landscape.

He pulled the trigger.

The light around the gun warped and left a trail of distortions as the phaser bullets shot out and traveled over a kilometer away, whereupon hitting an almost hidden flesh blob created a spherical portal that shunts whatever's been hit into an alien dimension.

As the portal collapsed, it sent forth gravitational waves undetectable to human senses.

"Probing units. Foundation Type-Blue clairvoyants and diviners are foreseeing the flesh bastards launching a massive attack in the next hour or so. There have been some seismic activities as well all around Site-19. The lab coats think they're going to tunnel underground and pop up. Enjoy this quiet time of boredom and tranquility, Sgt Goodwell. It's not gonna last."

With that, Lieutenant Charles walked away, leaving a tense Goodwell.

And the Lieutenant was right. For no more than a minute, after Charles had said that, the alarm blared as the announcer said how there were multiple large instances of SCP-9401A all rapidly approaching the facility from underground.

Simultaneously, the ground outside of the walls depressed before dozens of massive molten meat worms each with a mouth wide enough to eat multiple school buses came up and surrounded Site-19.

Each meat worm came up, tall, majestic almost like a whale, before falling down with the intention to crack the walls using their mass alone.

"Holy shit. Fire fire fire!" He heard Lieutenant Charles scream out.

Multiple portals opened up all over the thick, waxy, meat worm, but compared to its sheer size it only seemed to annoy the beast as if fell.

*Booom*

Like a falling skyscraper, the meat worm crashed down. Surprisingly, the walls stood up against the weight of many tons of fused flesh and instead cut into the worm akin to knives.

"Do not let up! Fire fire fire!"

Goodwell found himself praying to every god of every religion he knew of as he pulled the trigger. He prayed to the Lord. He prayed to Allah. He prayed to Shiva. He prayed to the Buddha. He prayed to Odin. He prayed to Ares.

As a result of this, his bullets all had random effects. Some burned the flesh. Some transmuted it into gold. Some even exploded in showers of acid.

The meat worms didn't do anything after they'd fallen. Instead, they lay there, motionless as they took on the assault.

All kinds of bullets were used to try and shred this meat worm down to size. Beyond random effects and opening portals to alternate dimensions, some of the security guards shot out cryo bullets that flash froze a large chunk of flesh while there were others of a more transmutive property.

Amidst this barrage, hundreds of arms emerged out of the surface of the meat worm. They looked like maggots trying to crawl out of an empty carcass they finished eating.

Those hands then started making weird gestures and in turn, all kinds of glyphs started manifesting all over the worms like a suit of armor.

Goodwell realized these fleshworms were just carriers for humanoids able to perform kinetohazards.

They're trying to swarm them.

The sun is trying to bury Site-19 under an avalanche of corrupted flesh.