31 When Site Breaks

I flew through this sea of metallic hydrogen. As I neared the first piece, I found it to be no larger than a walnut.

This substance was heavy, and not just because I was standing on Jupiter whose gravity is over two times that of Earth's. This piece was denser than any substance on the planet, no matter the alloy or pure element. I mean, this walnut-size piece of SCP-2399 weighs about the same as a semi-truck if placed back on Earth.

I then clasped my two hands around it and tried to break it. Curiosity overtook me.

It didn't break. So I tried to use more force, and it still didn't budge. What the hell—

A shockwave echoed through the sea of metallic hydrogen when it finally broke in two.

I was genuinely shocked at how much effort it took to actually break it. If I clapped my hands using the same amount of force as I used to break apart this walnut piece of SCP-2399 I could shatter every window inside the San Francisco bay area.

No wonder this is a piece of Mekhane.

I then took out the Company's Smart Device. This thing had no problem standing up to the temperature and pressure inside the core of Jupiter.

Because of how opaque metallic hydrogen is to all light, I had to bring the phone right up to my face while turning the brightness up to maximum just to see the Pocket Space app.

I deposited the two pieces of SCP-2399 into my inventory.

Looking around me, I sensed thousands of more disturbances in the local magnetic fields within just a kilometer of radius around me.

This… is going to be a tedious effort, like counting grains of sand in a desert. I'll feel like Sisyphus as I carry pieces of SCP-2399 up to the Great Red Spot.

But for humanity, I will do exactly that.

______________

Goodwell took out a grenade before chunking it at a large group of these things.

The grenade hovered there in the air thanks to some kind of anomalous anti-gravity tech, before suddenly shooting out four lasers around it that sliced the nearby sun-corrupted humanoids into ribbons.

More were coming. They were like a tidal wave of endless humanoids.

"New orders from higher-ups!" Lieutenant Charles yelled through the barrage of gunfire, "We're—"

Silence.

The world fell into silence as though sound could no longer exist. Goodwell quickly recognizes that those humanoids that are slowly crawling out of the molten meat worms had just collectively conjured up a large glyph the size of a car.

It silences all sound. Even the sound of gunfire has been silenced. It was disorientating, that sudden void of sound.

Lieutenant then opted to gesture at the elevator on the tarmac rapidly—one of the elevators used to bring planes and other vehicles up from the hangar downstairs.

James followed without a second thought. Instead of firing at the meat worms, every security guard chose to aim more at those humanoids with half a dozen hands conjuring up the kinetohazards.

They were overwhelmed. More of those humanoids crawled out of the meat worms than they could be put down. Lieutenant Charles moved to tell all the other security guards while James headed toward the elevators.

Reaching the elevator, Goodwell opened a flap on the edge of this elevator to reveal the control panel.

As the Sergeant waited for others to join him, he continued to fire at the horde of humanoids conjuring up more and more glyphs.

In the midst of this silence, Goodwell found himself remembering a school project about Mayan mythology and recalled how Kukulkan was one of the creator deities.

Goodwell then chose to pray to Kukulkan and found the humanoids bursting into plasma.

It was very destructive, vaporizing three nearby humanoids who were caught in the blast. Good.

Goodwell continued to pray to Kukulkan and rained down destructive pulses of plasma upon the flesh puppets of the sun while more and more security guards gathered here at the elevator.

Though the rifle kicked back against his shoulder, Goodwell found himself missing that satisfying sound of bullets firing. Steadily, more and more of those fleshy humanoids were cornering the guards.

Just then, strange glyphs began to fall like snow. When one of these glyphs touched the arms of one of the guards near Goodwell, the protective armor and interior sealing suit suddenly melted away, revealing skin to the sun.

Goodwell froze at the sight of the arm melting like chocolate over a hot pan.

Just then, the exposed guard was suddenly kicked away by Lieutenant Charles, who promptly smashed the drop button on the opened ground flap even when there were still security guards not present on the elevator, all of whom were out there fighting.

Wait— not everyone's on the elevator yet!

As the ground rose above Goodwell's height, he found the blast door closing. As the elevator descended, more and more blast doors closed, sealing off the surface.

"What the fuck, Lieutenant?!" Goodwell instantly called out as sound returned, "There were still people who weren't on the elevator yet!"

"That was cold." Another guard agreed.

Charles took off his helmet to reveal the black hair and blue eyes underneath, "Look, I either close the blast door too late and we all get stuck up on the surface or I sacrifice a few. I don't like it either."

Everyone reluctantly agreed. They had no choice. What's done was done.

Once the elevator fully fell to the floor of the tall hangar, Goodwell could see how it was all empty. All the advanced aircraft and other vehicles were either taken away and placed in specific kill corridors or they were disassembled and salvaged for parts.

They were going to bleed the sun dry of any flesh power.

Charles then stared at the ceiling. The closed blast doors.

"That's not gonna hold." He said as his eyes returned to ground level, "Everyone, replenish your munitions, then, go to your assigned posts in the second phase."

Charles then walked away, leaving the group after giving out their orders. Goodwell's training took over as he followed the order to the letter. Recalling the exact rotation given to him, the man took off for a particular corridor.

The metal clanked against his heavy boots as he approached a small ammo depot armed with explosives ready to blow apart the moment those things came through here.

They carried just enough to supply one full person. There, Goodwell took several magazines of faith bullets before strapping more grenades to his armor. The man also took apart his gun and began the process of cleaning a lubricating the barrels and other components with the provided bottles and wipes.

It would not do for a gun to jam in the middle of a firefight. Especially not one of this proportion.

Ten minutes later with the gun squeaky clean, James Goodwell let out a long tired sigh that should only come out of the lips of a man who's lived for too long instead of someone as young as him.

He wanted to mourn for those who were abandoned. That was his worst fear, to be honest. To die alone, served up as the sacrificial lamb by Site Command during a mission.

Quickly assembling the gun once more, Goodwell checked his equipment. The assault rifle was fully operational. The armor was almost unscathed, and his optics that prevented sunlight from reaching his eyes while allowing him to view the outside world were about halfway depleted in terms of battery.

Troublesome. So the Sergeant turned off the optics and pulled it up, revealing a pair of dark sunglass panes that acted as the last line of defense. With a single tap of a button on a display screen attached to his forearm, those blackened sunglasses turned transparent like they were panes on a normal pair of glasses.

He's not going to need it anytime soon underground.

Goodwell traveled deeper into the facility until they reached the second line of defense: kill corridors.

They're named kill corridors because they're lengths of tight hallways leading to the hangar with a machine gun nest set up on one end. It'll be like shooting a fish in a barrel as it corners all these instances of SCP-9401A into tight spaces where they can be gunned down in a reasonable manner.

If these bastards want to move deeper into the facility, they'll have to move through the kill corridors.

The man crossed a corner and found the kill corridor he was assigned to.

"Sergeant James Goodwell! Reporting for the second phase!"

"Goodwell! You're the only one assigned to us who survived?" The woman manning the machine gun asked—the commander of this machine gun nest.

There were about four people here not counting him: one to man the machine gun, one to feed bullets to the machine gun, and two others served as assistant shooters.

"Unfortunately, yes."

"... Alright. Good to have you here. Settle down and get ready to send those abominations to hell."

Goodwell jumped over several sandbags set up around the machine gun. Glancing at it, the Sergeant found the machine gun to be unlike anything he'd ever seen.

For one it had two barrels parallel to each other, and was much larger than even a minigun: more like an autocannon. On top of each barrel at the base was a large curving magazine with the symbol of a skull on the side.

The man took up positions over a series of sandbags. He lifted his helmet and drank some water before the person next to him asked a question.

"How bad was it?"

One of the people who served as an assistant shooter asked. Carol, her name tag said.

James thought about how to answer that question. Should he be truthful or…? Ah fuck it, I might as well as be truthful, no point in hiding shit at the end.

"Bad. There were a dozen of us up there, and we lost six."

"Damn." The woman must've thought that having a 10% casualty rate was bad enough.

He turned to look at the fully-clad security guard next to him. Since he's going to be truthful, might as well do it all the way, "Listen, we'll most likely die today, but at least we'll die in the most glorious way possible: defending humanity."

"Heh. Fair enough. Might as well as go out with a bang."

Even near the end, camaraderie still existed. Honor still persisted.

It made James wonder about all the divisions inside the mundane world. All seemingly insignificant and meaningless in the face of extinction.

Everything other than survival seems meaningless in the face of extinction. Gods? Well, a Goddess did descend to give humanity a hand.

The woman manning the machine gun suddenly yelled, "Get ready ladies and gentlemen, Site Command just told me through a telepathic message that the enemy has breached all but the last layer of the blast doors!"

Goodwell placed his helmet back and took up a prone position on a collection of sandbags. There, he replaced the holographic sight and replaced it with a night-vision one.

Every muscle inside his body was tense as he waited for the appearance of those things.

There was a distant cloud crash of metal. The last blast door gave away.

The sound of slobbering meat shambling grew louder, and so did their groans and moans and cries.

James stared down the night-vision scope of his rifle. His modified sandy yellow FN SCAR. A favorite of his.

Right now, the night-vision was at low power, so he could see perfectly fine even in this medium-light environment of a corridor.

*Boom*

That ammo cache exploded, telling James exactly where those fused corpses are now.

The man began to pray. He prayed to Kukulkan for victory, for deliverance, for the right to live just one more day.

Then, just as the first thing came into view, James opened fire.

*Blam*

A bright flash of plasma vaporized the first thing that walked out of the corner.

It wasn't enough. Like a flood, those things came erupting forth, a literal avalanche of bodies that appeared most like a liquid, so numerous that no individual humanoid thing could be made out.

James pulled the trigger and didn't let go. He felt himself praying like he'd never had before. His every mental faculty and thought all on praying to Kukulkan.

The machine gun then fired as well. It didn't sound like gunfire, but more like the screams of the damned as they were dragged to hell.

The machine gun the woman manned fired pale ghosts that seemed to dissolve the tide of meat and flesh. The bullets were numbered so high that the machine gun appeared more like a flamethrower, spewing out twin ropes of pale fire down the hall.

In an instant, the encroaching wall of flesh parted as though they were made of bubbles and someone had just taken a blowdryer to it.

The machine gun was extremely effective. Vast swathes of the molten, waxy meat were gone in less time than it took James to blink.

So this was what SCP-914 was really capable of.

Goodwell didn't even have to fire anymore as the machine gun took care of that flood of meat. He didn't even have to do clean-up duty as the bullets ate away at the flesh around it, dissolving more of it until not a single cell of corrupted meat was left.

The machine gun stopped firing. The screams of the damned stopped.

This wave was seemingly dealt with. The machine gunner took audible deep breaths as James could see how her hands were shaking even from over a meter away.

"Anti-life bullets. Extremely corrosive to all forms of life no matter if you're in the animal kingdom or plant or whatever." The woman took off her gloves and saw how her hands were much more emaciated like they belonged to a person who hadn't eaten in over a week, "The side effect is they emit this anomalous radiation that corrodes away the vitality of the gunner. I think I just aged by a year. John, switch with me. I'm going to eat to recover some energy."

The man whom James had originally assumed to be the reloader took the woman's position. There, he took out the large magazines on top of the gun and replaced them with new ones.

The gunner sat by the wall of the corridor and chowed away at a nutrient bar.

It seems they've won a brief respite.

"Everyone, check your gear." The commander-gunner said as she paused eating. "We want them to be in tip-top shape. If you need ammo, check the munition box. We got faith bullets, warping bullets, nova bullets, and…uh, disintegration bullets."

James's body relaxed as much as he could. He took off his helmet and finished that bottle of water before chewing on a nutrient bar. The flavorful thing tasted amazing as it felt like he was still alive. That he wasn't one of them.

No wonder why so many people cared about food. Good food really does add the spice to life.

When… if he gets out of here and rebuilds society, he is for sure going to learn how to cook instead of just eating take-out like he always does.

"Is the nutrient bar really that good?" Carol asked, "It's just a nutrient bar."

"Sergeant Carol, let me say this to you," James pointed the half-eaten nutrient bar at the woman, "When you just got out of danger, everything tastes good as it reminds you how you're alive."

He continued to eat almost ravenously, devouring that bar in a few more bites.

Then Carol handed him a chocolate bar.

"No shit," James slowly reached forward, "You guys get chocolate? Foundation chocolate?!?"

Foundation chocolate was a nickname given to the tiny chocolate bars wrapped in the SCP Foundation's logo. You can't buy these things, and they were only given out on special occasions from the Foundation. Usually on holidays or on a person's birthday. Or in this case, used as morale boosters.

They tasted amazing. The rich chocolaty flavors melt on the tongue and lift the spirit.

These chocolates became something akin to money among the Foundation staff. They were traded for favors or material goods, literal bribes. It was said that not even senior Foundation staff were immune to the allure of these chocolates.

James bit into that chocolate bar. The explosion of rich flavors danced across his tongue, making him almost forget all the troubles of the world.

"Oh… my… lord!" Goodwell groaned out in satisfaction. Sadly, the chocolate was gone in only three bites.

"Slow down." The gunner-commander said as she pulled out a metal carton full of these chocolates, the place where Carol had taken the chocolate from, "I saved these things up, hoping to be able to retire and eat a single one of these bars a day until all my teeth fall out. But given how things are, I figured why not share them."

It was only by the third bar that Goodwell slowed down, his stomach almost bloating with how much chocolate he had eaten.

"You know, it's ironic how I found heaven in the middle of hell."

Everyone laughed.

James got to know more about those around him. He learned about Carol's love for music. He learned about how the squad leader, the main gunner, has a tendency to collect yo-yos for fun. He learned about backup gunner John's nerdiness when talking about computers. He learned about Michael's habit of browsing Reddit secretly during his posting as a guard.

As everyone was laughing at the joke, the squad leader woman suddenly grew serious.

"... I see." She said to no one before turning to the rest of her squad, "Seismic readers show the things are trying to dig down into the deeper part of the facilities. We are to prepare to abandon our current position and set up elsewhere deeper."

They're avoiding the kill corridors entirely…

"Are they going to activate the Alpha Warhead?" James asked. That was an emergency in case things got really dire.

"No. Site Command is not that desperate yet."

To which everyone let out a sigh of relief. Thank god the Alpha Warhead isn't going to be activated so soon.

It was the second to last line of defense. To activate it would mean things cannot get any more dire and that being buried alive is preferable to being out in the sun.