[Because the only time you need to worry about a soldier is when they don’t have anything to bitch about. As long as they’re griping about something, they’re doing just fine.]
“Well, then I guess I’m doing just fine, because this shit fucking sucks, Pontiac.”
[Suck it up, soldier boy. You’ve got a big one coming your way,] Pontiac countered, then highlighted a large heat source that was on the move in their direction.
Corporal Cuervo whistled, then sighed, “That thing’s the size of an apartment building, Pontiac. ETA?”
[Faster than you can run. I’d give you the numbers, but it’d just make you cry.]
“You know I can factory reset you, right?”
[Psh. As if you’d do something like that. I’m amazing,] Pontiac bragged.
“Right, right, right, you’re the best. Options?”
[Don’t get stepped on and do your best to leave a pretty corpse? It’s bigger than you, probably stronger than you, and my scans show that its skin is way thicker than yours.]
“Well fuck. Maybe I can find another ham and cheese omelette ration cube and use that to poison it to death,” Jose said, already leaping from tree to tree as he unassed the area and headed toward a convenient cliff he had climbed up earlier. “Need a distraction. Suggestions?”
[You could start a fire... maybe. The vegetation here is really thick and green and there’s no way of telling how effective it would be.]
“That means there’ll be more smoke, right?”
[You could say that, yes.]
“Is the biggest boy still on my six?”
[Yep. And I know what you’re thinking. I give it a 62% chance of success.]
As Corporal Cuervo fled from the oncoming apartment-building-sized monstrosity, his AI assistant, Pontiac, was running simulations as fast as she could. Finally, she landed on the solution that had the highest probability of success and put up a guideline in Jose’s visual range.
[Follow the guideline and we should make it out in one piece. Maybe two, but they should be repairable pieces... I think. Better than meat paste anyway, so that’s good, right?]
“Yep,” Jose panted; he was really stressing his lactose acid recyclers and heaving enormous lungfuls of air with every breath.
Just as he was about to reach the point where he would light a fire to obscure the upcoming cliff from his pursuer’s vision, Pontiac yelled, [TAKE COVER NOW! INCOMING!]
Having full confidence and trust in his partner, Jose dropped from the treetop to the ground and scrambled behind a shrub. To prevent curious plants from accidentally eating him or burying him alive, he triggered his NUTS and a nanite colony flooded through special pores in his skin, covering him from head to toe in an environmentally sealed, self-contained power armor.
The upgraded power armor used by reapers was the main limiting factor in producing them. A few of the elements used in the alloy that the nanites were made of was only present on Earth in incredibly minuscule amounts. Even after so many years of gathering trace elements from the sea, less than a hundred pounds of them had been gathered, in total. In comparison, Aron had warehouses full of “rare” elements like gold and platinum, and he even had actually rare elements like Californium and Protactinium in abundance.
But Francium, one of the core elements in the NUTS (Nanite Utility Tactical Suit) was even measured in grams. Not kilograms, not pounds, but grams. Despite all of the seawater filtration and seafloor mining Aron had done, he had only found 31 grams of Francium. Luckily, the alloy the nanites were made of, which he had whimsically named Unobtainium, only required a few hundred micrograms per nanite colony.
(Ed note: Scientists and researchers estimate that there’s only 20-30 grams of Francium in the entire Earth’s crust at any given time. It’s a transuranic element, so it decays, and has a half-life of 22 minutes in its most stable isotope, Fr-223. Francium decays into Radium-223 or Astatine-219, and a practical use for it has yet to be discovered to date.)
After Jose’s NUTS wrapped him in their protective embrace, he locked his muscles in place and gave his best impression of a harmless rock. Pontiac, meanwhile, was displaying the fight between bigger and biggest with an almost sadistic glee.
[Wow, that’s an even bigger biggest boy, don’t you think? The one that was chasing us was only about seven stories tall, but look at that beauty. It has to be at least two hundred meters from top to bottom! It’s a right proper kaiju isn’t it!] If she had a body, she would be jumping up and down and applauding. Jose knew that, because that’s what she was currently doing in her augmented reality projection form.
Pontiac sobered and turned to face her partner. [Uh oh,] she said with an adorable frown on her face. [We might have a problem.]
“Is it fatal?”
[Maybe. We’re sinking, I think the plants found us.]
Jose was the only person in his recruit batch that had delved deep into the instruction manual that came with his AI assistant and tweaked her personality and appearance settings himself, rather than letting her slowly adapt to his needs. He was regretting it now.
“Understood,” he snapped, all business now. “Options?”
[Three possibilities. Light a fire here and escape in the smoke obscuration, dig yourself out after the kaiju leaves, or run. The fire’s your best option, just running is the worst. There’s no telling whether you’ll be able to dig yourself out if you let yourself be buried.]
Jose pondered for a moment, then reached through his NUTS and grabbed the firestarter from his storage. “Plan A it is, then,” he said, scraping some magnesium off the block and dropping a spark into the pile of magnesium powder.
Oddly, the foliage around him seemed rather highly flammable and easily caught fire. It was almost as if the sap contained within the plants was made of gasoline, or perhaps naphtha, as the fire dripped down from above in giant heaping globs and splattered, spreading from plant to plant. The fireline was racing forward faster than even Jose could run with his implants augmented by the NUTS he was wearing.
The battling monsters in the distance had already noticed the incoming flames and hightailed it out of the path of the fireline, roaring and howling as they sprinted, barely able to keep pace with the oncoming fire front. It was a battle of nature versus nature, one that the wildlife was sure to eventually lose as they grew tired and slowed.
“Uhh... oops?” Jose blinked as innocently as he could, then a glob of fire landed directly atop his head, heavily enough to knock him face-first into the dirt, even digging his head into a small crater.
“Fuck!” he yelled, flipping the bird behind him at whichever tree had faceplanted him into the soil.
Pontiac, meanwhile, fell into a laughing fit. She fell on her back, kicking her feet in the air and pointing at Jose as she held her belly with her other hand and laughed until her face was a bright eggplant purple.
