16 15th Move | Beauty of Space
"Today marks the beginning of the Grand Army of the Jura Tempest Republic!" Rimuru announced on the steps of the half-completed Capitol building. His hands were spread out wide in a grand gesture with the members of the Senate from both political parties as well as me sitting right behind him in rolls upon rolls of chairs.
300 Anti-Army Armaments stood in front of the President in a neat and organized fashion. Some of them are piloted by AIs since, even with 5,000 residents within Metropolis, we're still unable to fill all of the A.A.A. in time for the ceremony.
Each A.A.A. stood like a statue. Given how the people are staring at the A.A.A., it must be a rather striking and unfamiliar sight, with the weapon on each powered suit being larger than the suit itself.
In truth, the A.A.A. that stood in front of Rimuru is a lesser variant of my original A.A.A. This version requires fewer personnel for logistics and maintenance since mine requires that for every hour of operation, the A.A.A. must be entered into a three-hour retuning and checking-up process.
However, I guess the most obvious difference between my A.A.A. and the ones used by the Army is that each Army A.A.A. only carries 11 weapons attachments to their back while mine can carry more.
Although the Army's A.A.A. carried fewer weapons, this doesn't make it any less effective at annihilating key positions. A gun is still a gun even if it's only a handgun: it's still going to kill people.
The most powerful weapons of the A.A.A. aren't its guns, but rather, a special missile that each powered suit only possesses one of. This singular special missile's payload is that of 'Hotdust', molecules of iron and anti-iron suspended in place within a vacuum emptier than intergalactic space using magnetic fields. Hotdust came about as a side effect of my creating the first antimatter reactor.
"The 300 power suit you see before you shall be our 1st Armor Division within the Army, and shall, in accordance with the Constitution, be used solely for self-defense and peacekeeping missions!" He had continued to announce. I tuned out the rest of his speech and started mentally designing the first superweapon of the Jura Tempest Republic.
[Weapons of Mass Destruction] gave me many ideas, and combined with [Dimensional Physics] gave me a bomb that would destroy all of existence itself:
A False Vacuum Bomb.
In its simplest description, the Higgs boson, produced by excitations within the Higgs field, is what gives particles their mass through what's known as the Higgs mechanism. A false vacuum describes the Higgs field in a relatively stable state but not in the most stable state possible, a condition known as 'metastability' and therefore, isn't at maximum entropy.
The False Vacuum Bomb works by destroying metastable Higgs boson field that currently permeates everything through the triggering a nucleation point— a few particles falling into the true vacuum state would cause enormous releases of pent-up energy, which would then cause other particles nearby to also fall into the true vacuum state. This 'fall' of particles would then spread out like a bubble, ballooning in size at the speed of light.
All the physical laws within this bubble of expanding true vacuum are significantly altered, possibly resulting in a physical configuration that is hostile to the existence of baryonic matter as we know it.
Of course, to ensure the weapon actually works I would need to know if the Higgs field IS metastable in the first place, but in order to test the metastability, I would need to trigger a False Vacuum decay.
See the problem? It's a catch-22 scenario where if I do build the extremely expensive weapon, it'll either be a waste of resources or it'll cause the end of the world.
'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' was said by J. Robert Oppenheimer after he made the atomic bomb, as he feared he'll be the one who would end humanity. But in truth, even during the height of the Cold War, there aren't enough nuclear weapons to completely exterminate every last human. Sure, their lives would be short, hard, and miserable, but humanity as a whole would still survive even after the bombs have stopped falling.
Humans are really resilient creatures. In my old world, around 75,000 years ago, the Supervolcano of Mt. Toba erupted, causing what would come to be known as the genetic bottleneck of humanity. There were as few as 3,000 humans left in the world, and yet humans, with their stone-age tools, still recovered. There was evidence of such genetic bottlenecking even in other animal species dating back to the same time as humans.
"I am become death, the destroyer of the universe." I quietly and softly said, as if the words were the highest cultural taboo. If I built this bomb, I would supplant Oppenheimer and become the destroyer of the universe as within the true vacuum, gravity might not be strong enough to bind atoms together to form planets.
Scrapping that idea, I began to look elsewhere for an answer, only to realize that the ceremony to establish the 1st Armor Division of the Grand Republic Army was ending as everyone began to leave.
Getting up from my seat, I stretched my arms a bit. There were mumblings all around me as various Senators and Ministers started chatting with each other talking about all kinds of topics. Because of my more accurate hearing thanks to this new body, I was able to discern them all before tuning them out.
No one tried to talk with me, so I stood alone like an unapproachable figure to be admired from afar.
After I finished stretching, I was about to say the phrase before I heard my name being called.
"Scientia!"
It was Rimuru, in a humanoid form that wasn't elven.
"Ah, Rimuru." I turned to face the approaching slime.
"So how did I do?" Rimuru asked, his eyes bright with anticipation of a compliment, "I saw a recording of your speech at the opening of the Academy, so you clearly know more than me!"
I placed a finger onto my chin and developed a thinking look. I can't exactly tell him I zoned out, and being brutally honest seemed like something undesirable.
"Well..." so I decided I'd give him some pointers, "I guess you were too loud the whole time. Loudness is an excellent tool to use during speeches, but keep in mind to use them only as emphasizing tools used to bring the listener's attention to certain topics."
Speeches are one of the most powerful tools of influence within a leader's toolbox.
Despite what most modern media would have you believe, Adolf Hitler was not a raving madman. If he was, he could've never risen to power. He was a charismatic man who had charmed all of Germany through his inspiring and hate-inciting speeches.
Such was the power of a seemingly simple speech.
Rimuru nodded at my words, "I see. I'll take that into consideration next time then."
Then, he clapped his hands together then dropped his head in a begging motion.
Heh?
"Please Scientia, could you help me edit my speeches then?"
I sighed and placed a hand on my forehead, "Rimuru, you're the leader of the free world. Please act like it..."
The slime's face drooped in disappointment.
"... but I will look over your speeches for really important events."
It seemed to be an acceptable compromise, evident when Rimuru had a bright smile on his face that was bursting with child-like delights.
"Thank you!"
I raised a hand to my side, "Door me, to my temporary lab," before turning to face Rimuru again, giving him a wave as I entered through the portal, "Well, I'm off."
Once I was alone in my labs, I couldn't help but keep thinking of that innocent smile. It reminds me a lot of a much simpler time before adulthood, before even teenagehood.
It was a smile that belonged to a much more innocent time.
When was the last time I smiled like that? Was it before I entered the corporate world? Was it before I entered university? Was it before that 'incident' with Kathy? When was it that I lost my innocence? When was it that I lost my ability to smile just like Rimuru?
[Silenced Emotion: 50%]
Immediately, the nostalgia faded away and was instead replaced with calmness. Now, if I remember correctly, apparently, orcs are an up-and-coming threat.
Walking over to my bookshelf, I took out a thick book filled with information about the various monster races. Flipping through the book as I walked back to my desk, I stopped once I found the section about ogres.
They are B-rank monsters, meaning that it'll take 10 B-rank humans to kill 1 without suffering any casualties 90% of the time. Orcs, led by a single unknown personnel, annihilated their entire village save for them. The fact that they also said how the orcs seemed to have no self-preservation.
That makes me think mind control is in the works.
[Silenced Emotion: 50%]
That means I'll need a type of weapon that's built for mass murder. Normal militaries during the Medieval time would consider 10% of an army loss to be a catastrophic disaster. The mind-controlled army would literally send every soldier to their own deaths without a second of hesitation.
[Chemistry] spoke up and offered me some easy-to-produce poisonous gas that attacks the respiratory system, causing death with only five minutes of exposure.
Not effective enough.
I'm thinking more along the lines of nerve agents, like C01-A042. Developed by the good ol' USSR, the C01-A042 belongs to a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok', meaning 'newbie'. Despite its rather disarming classification, C01-A042 is an absolute monster in the act of killing, with Russian scientists claiming they were some of the deadliest ever made and are five to eight times more deadly than VX, an already extremely toxic synthetic chemical compound.
But at the same time, I want the nerve agents to be quickly rendered harmless after use. This way, I won't be responsible for causing a local ecological collapse of the environment after the mind-controlled enemies have been KIA.
[Chemistry] offered up another solution.
Carrion. A necrotizing agent that causes rapid cellular degeneration within all life in the animal kingdom that touches the gas. It'll be as if the target had an extremely large dose of radiation as the skin practically slides off the flesh, 'melting' in a sense. It's actually rather merciful since nerve cells are the first to die when in exposure to this gas.
The good thing about Carrion besides its lethality is that once it's exposed to oxygen and binds with that element, it'll lose its necrotizing property and become harmless about after half an hour.
I imagine the A.A.A. carrying these agents and dropping them on top of the enemy.
There's just one problem: the image issue. Chemical weapons have always had a negative light shone upon them throughout history, so I think we won't get too many friends if we release such toxic gas.
Biological agents are just no, so nuclear is the only option left.
Even if they don't know the science behind it, a big flashy weapon would warn any nation if they saw its effect.
"I am become death, the guardian of democracy." I couldn't help but say, and mentally added 'and myself'.
Tapping and holding a finger on the desk, I waited for several seconds before everything lit up and the truth of the desk was revealed: it was my personal computer.
With several clicks, I had an AI search for the movements of large groups within the Jura Forest before clicking off and returning my attention to designing a new battlefield dominance weapon. I want a wondershot nuclear weapon that'll achieve victory on our side without too much fallout
Many things popped into my mind, some of the specialties had their own thoughts and ideas for what that wondershot should be.
I settled on the design that [Nuclear Fusion] gave me.
Opening a new file and titling it 'Project Thrones' I had begun to plan out how I'm going to build this. Checking my calendar, I looked down the week aisle and saw the only major event was that the Citadel is expected to be complete in approximately six Days.
So I'm pretty much free huh?
Time to get my hands dirty.
First thing first, I'm going to need Orichalcum.
Using the computer, I had one of the fabricator buildings manufacture me a ready-to-use asteroid mining unit that's much more efficient than the ones currently up in space.
The effect of ever-advancing technology.
As I finish designing Project Thrones, the fabricators should have completed the mining unit. Afterward, I'll use the portal network's satellite, tentatively called 'Doormaker' and teleport both me and the mining unit to an untouched asteroid filled with unrefined orichalcum.
Magical metals like orichalcum and magisteel are... interesting things. They looked like normal matter that had somehow been mutated by the effect of magicule exposure in a process similar to how animals would get mutated. Mutated atoms lose their old properties and gain new ones. I haven't yet delved too deep into this topic, but I plan to once the Citadel is complete.
I pulled up a log of the Doormaker Satellite while I worked on Project Thrones, seeing that it has scanned over 1,000,000 objects smaller than 50 meters across over the past week. Smiling at the amount, [Mathematics] said that it's a near certainty to have what I want due to casting such a wide net of data.
Using superior smart search filters that most internet-savvy people would envy greatly, I quickly isolated the desired asteroids and got 3 results. All 3 are around the range of 30 meters across and are made of approximately 3% unrefined orichalcum. Most importantly, all of them are within Doormaker's teleportation range.
Orichalcum is considered to be extremely valuable in this world, so much so that a single sword made by one of these is at least Unique-grade equipment. Except I'm not using orichalcum to make swords or armor, instead, I want orichalcum for its ability to stand up against temperatures that even dragons would hesitate.
The mining unit took several hours to complete, which was longer than it took to fully complete the design on Project Thrones. Thus, while I waited, I built a small donut-shaped pocket dimension generator.
The mining unit was shaped like a Gatling gun, with six long parallel-running barrels. Its size is taller than even I was, so it would've been rather cumbersome to wield.
Quickly wielding the pocket dimension generator to the mining unit's output, such an act allowed me a closer look at the features of this thing. Beyond looking like an oversized Gatling gun, there's a thing wire that was wrapped up and down the body of the mining unit and an adjustment nob around where the trigger was.
With that done, I took a deep breath to calm down.
Taking out my graphene phone, I couldn't help but record this historical moment, "Space, the (second-to-last) final frontier. This will be the recording of me, Scientia Tempest, right before I first step into the vacuum of space. My current mission: to exploit the orichalcum found within an asteroid, to defend the Jura Tempest Republic by building a weapon of mass destruction, and to eventually spread out across the universe."
I ended the recording. I felt like Yuri Gargarin right before he was launched into space.
I stretched my hand out, and said those fateful words, "Door me, to GXQ-100013A"
I don't need a spacesuit. I seem to have this... aura. Field? I have something that ensures I don't freeze nor do I go into shock due to the lack of external pressure.
I can somehow survive in space.
A black rectangular abyss appeared in front of me. The only reason that everything around me isn't being sucked into the portal was due to the barrier I had put in place in the event that I must travel from two points of very different pressures.
Walking through, the portal behind me quickly disappeared as I took off like a rocket, moving along thanks to the movement of the planet.
Because I was in the void of space, I couldn't fully comprehend how I was moving that fast since there wasn't any point I could use to compare to.
As I looked around for the asteroid, I found myself stopping.
Like a person being suddenly struck by an awe-inspiring sight, I froze completely as if the coldness of space was affecting me.
My jaw slacked, opening wide as I took in the sight of the galaxy.
A pitch-black ocean with islands of lights, all congregated in a single river that is the galaxy. Each star was like a pinprick droplet of paint on an endless black canvas that is the universe.
The first thing I noticed was just how intense and how many more stars there were compared to when I saw them on the planet. In hindsight, I should've expected such a thing since the atmosphere absorbs a lot of the light, so the light coming from the dimmer stars could not reach the surface of the planet, and those who can have much of their intensity decreased.
The river of stars that makes up the galaxy was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Each star was shining like a diamond and felt closer, more real.
Inside my heart was a sense of wonder I hadn't felt in decades, ever since when I was young. Ever since I saw the moon without the city light polluting.
Beautiful.
Truly, as I floated in the darkness, speeding at beyond supersonic speeds, I am surrounded at every angle by more stars, their beauty, the way they dance, the way they shine and sparkle, the way simply exist...
I felt tears form around my eyes.
I can get lost in looking at space, it's just so beautiful. My hands reach out to touch it, to touch the stars themselves. I felt possessed. I felt my tears flowing out of my eyes before floating away and freezing immediately, reminiscing about my past life's dream was to see humanity touch the stars themselves, to colonize another planet.
I'm smiling, a truly happy smile that I can't remember I ever made in this new life of mine.
Ha, I wanted to say, but nothing came out.
It's... so beautiful. There are just no other words. In my past life, I would rarely ever describe something as beautiful. I considered that word to be sacred and only used when something evokes a primal sense of wonder and amazement. So oftentimes I would instead describe it as 'pretty" or 'easy on the eye', never beautiful.
But this, this is absolutely beautiful.
I want...
I want it. I clasped my hand on a particularly bright star. I want it all. Every star in the night sky.
I want it all!
I want every star in the galaxy and beyond. I want the possibilities those stars offer. I want to touch the very stars themselves. I want to colonize a new world. I want to gaze upon a natural-born stellar black hole. I want to stand on the surface of a neutron star. I want to build colossal star-sized megastructures the likes of which you only find in fiction. I want to— I want to—— I WANT TO——————!
A new goal formulated inside my mind. A new plan of action.
I placed all my remaining three charges of the day into [Space Travel], super boosting it to the level that I could finally do something impossible according to Relativity:
Faster-than-light travel.
I then pointed at the stars themselves as though they could hear me, as though they were a real person.
Just wait. I'll come for you all!
Regretfully turning my eyes away from the beautiful sight of space, I focused on why I was actually here: to mine asteroids.
Looking around me, I saw that Doormaker deposited me some thirty meters away from the targeted asteroid.
The asteroid was grey in color, and it looked as if many different shapes were conjointed together like some kind of conjoined twin.
Aiming at the mining unit at the surface, I pulled the trigger.
In the first second, after I pulled the trigger, the mining unit in my hands started to light up like a flashlight— synchrotron radiation. Bursts of steam and dust appeared all over the asteroid's body as though it were a steamer designed to make buns.
Very soon, cracks began to form in a circular pattern and the image of the asteroid within my eyes started to distort.
This mining unit was a gravity drill that utilized sophisticated manipulation of gravitational waves generated from particles accelerated through the tiny wire-like particle accelerator that was wrapped around the whole drill. By controlling these particles and their effects upon the curvature of spacetime, the drill creates two sets of coherent gravity vortex 'winds' with one inside the other and breaks the object down with tidal forces.
By having one spin clockwise and the other counterclockwise, it creates this torsion effect between those two winds that are strong enough to rip a planet apart if the drill is scaled up enough.
Since gravity is invisible to my eyes, I could only see its effect on light and the asteroid.
Cracks germinated all over the space rock like fungus to a piece of rotten wood, with a large majority of those cracks concentrated in the area between the inner and outer gravity vortex.
Silently, as there's no sound in the void of space, the asteroid buckled under the strength of the gravity vortexes as cracks spread out more like wildfire on a dry summer day. Before I knew it, the asteroid crumbled as if someone had punched a sandcastle and was sucked into the vortex of gravity.
A side effect of the gravity drill was its ability to grind materials between the two sets of gravity vortex into a cloud of dust finer than even volcanic ash. While this makes processing the metal easier, it also comes with the side effect of needing to make sure no one is breathing in the toxic stuff, hence the pocket dimension.
In total, the asteroid took an hour to fully mine.
After consuming the whole asteroid, I looked to my left and reached out with my free hand. Moments later, a hole in space opened up thousands of kilometers ahead in front of me, right in my path.
See, the planet moves. Everything in space is moving. This new world moves at speeds of 107,000 km/h around the sun, and let's now even get into the complicated maths behind the movement of the sun within the galaxy and this world's superposition in the ever-expanding universe.
There were no absolutes, only frames of references and relativity.
So for the portal created to not fly off into space, the Doormaker Satellite uses anchor points to base their calculations on, that way the portal stays still instead of flying off into space when I open one on a planet. The positional calculation is one of the main reasons why the Doormaker Satellite needs so much computational power.
But the problem with it comes to objects in space is that they are also fast. The asteroid I was on was moving at speeds of 18 kilometers a second, and to stay still relative to the asteroid, I also had to move at 18 kilometers a second. Meaning that my landing would likely be extremely messy unless I somehow slowed down.
Now, normally this wouldn't be a problem, as Doormaker uses another nearby celestial body to base their calculation on. However, the closest planetoid is the moon and I can barely see the thing, thus, Doormaker used the sun instead.
Doing some quick maths with [Mathematic], the impact ballistics of me moving at Mach 52 would almost certainly both cook me alive and cause me to partially disintegrate thanks to the air friction.
Leveling the gravity drill to where I was going, I switched the mode over from 'mining' to 'propulsion' and pulled the trigger.
Instantly, [Mathematics] told me I'm slowing down—
My head smashed into the drill as the machine pushed against my stomach.
ARGH!
[Silenced Emotion: 70%]
The drill slowed down quicker than I did, smashing into me and causing my body and legs to fold in like the shells of a clam.
I would be grunting in pain right now had I been on the planet, I observed as I raised my head, my forehead, and my nose bruised due to the slow down causing me to smash my head into the drill. [Material Science] telling me that had I been any faster and tried to slow down, I probably would've caused major structural damage instead of the small cave-in on the mining unit my face had made just then.
I idly wondered if this was what Rimuru felt like doing due to being bogged down by so much paperwork every day that he had to work 80 to 100-hour weeks.
Being a President of a nation is not easy.
Just as the faint purple outline had appeared into view, I should be slow enough that it wouldn't be TOO painful.
I was blinded by the brightness of day as I zoomed through the portal at speeds well and truly beyond what is considered 'normal'. For a fraction of a second, I felt my body heat up due to air friction.
*Smash*
*Crash*
*Crack*
"ARRRGH!"
I had gone through multiple trees as though they were chopsticks instead of the decades-old trees they truly were. I felt my bones rattle and break as I finally stopped after hitting a particularly thick tree.
My body was in pain. From feeling alone I could tell there were at least hundreds of fractures within my bone structure. Using my muscles and raising a hand, I found the arm acting more like the limb of a boneless animal like an octopus, giving me a bit of a fright.
I felt a bit sleepy. It seems this body also has greater pain tolerance since I think a human having this many broken bones would be unconscious at the very least.
Yet even being in this much pain...
"Ha, ha ha ha ha ha..." I laughed. I couldn't help it. I laughed as if I had just been told the funniest joke I'd ever heard.
If I had a heart, I think it'd be pumping so loud it'd be deafening.
I didn't think everything through in my eagerness to view space. Still, that was the most fun I've ever had, definitely more than anything even in my old life.
"Ughhhhh..." A sharp pain caused me to groan and cover part of the left rib. Wrapping my other steadily healing arm around my head and lifting it so I could check the rest of my body, I found my legs bent in zig-zags.
This... is going to take some time to heal, I'll probably take the day off and just relax.
Thank god no one was around here to see me like this.
So I lay there, under the shade of a tree with a small chunk of it torn out. I started to entertain myself mentally with ideas of spaceship designs and some introspection.
According to Relativity, the speed of light is the speed at which causality can occur, and the speed of a photon must be equal in all frames of reference. This is why time dilation occurs at near-light speeds: for the speed of the photon to be the same, your time will get slowed down for such a thing to occur. This is also why once you reach light speed, you can no longer perceive any time.
This was described in Einstein's Special Relativity.
In fact, modern physicists are extremely doubtful of FTL because if it is true, according to Relativity it would suggest the possibility of moving backward in time and raises the specter of the Grandfather Paradox. Not only that, but it would also call into question the most fundamental aspect of modern physics: causality.
Clearly, Einstein was wrong. The Universe allows FTL.
The Doormaker is already evidence of that. Instant travel between two points in space.
A major rework of all known physics is needed, at least on the level of when Quantum scale things were discovered.
But before that, before I could rework and come up with theories about how to integrate FTL with modern physics, I'd need to know more about those two areas first.
"Yeah, I should probably do that during my break," I said to no one as I felt my legs drag themselves across the ground before straightening like shapeless water freezing into a solid. [Limitless Regeneration], a most useful power that allows me to be much more reckless than I ever could.
That took a little while.
Once I made sure the bones had all healed, I used the gravity drill as a makeshift crutch to heave myself up. Man, I never thought I would ever need a walking stick. Such an act pulled up memories of how I used to play around with my grandpa's walking stick by taking it away when we were out in the park.
Yeah, I was a bit of a brat, but after Kathy suddenly collapsed I think that's when I straightened myself up to be a real big brother.
My clothes were all ripped, with them appearing more like strips of cloth than anything coherent.
No matter, I can always have the fabricators print me more.
Leaning on the half-broken gravity drill, I raised my free hand and spoke the phrase, "Door me—"
"Oh? A HUMAN? What could a human possibly be doing here in such a scene of devastation?" A haughty voice belonging to a male had prattled.
Instinctively, I felt my eyes twitch at the sound of that utterly annoying smug voice.
Whatever the entity said next was ignored when I closed my finger on the bridge of my nose in rapidly ballooning frustration. After doing business long enough you can tell the personality of a person from the tone of their voice alone, and someone that haughty has got to be one of those with a massive ego and is usually the son of a really rich person who has servants pandering to their every need and wants.
Those are some of the worst people to work with because they expect you to do pretty much everything and even more somehow! Those who are born with a silver spoon won't ever know what it's like to be the other guy, so they have next to no consideration or empathy when issuing demands and requests.
Please let my instinct be wrong, oh god, please don't let it be one of those!
My hope was left unanswered when I turned around and saw a humanoid lizard person with an entourage of more lizard men in more submissive body language.
[Silenced Emotion: 20%]
Yep, it is indeed one of those. My thoughts had a tone of finality in them as if they would be my final thought before my execution.
No.
"I'm not dealing with this, not when I have multiple broken ribs," I announced tiredly and turned around. Outstretching my hands and ignoring his cries of indignation, at the moment I could not care less for the future ramifications of my action.
I just want to lay on my bed! A nap sounds just like what a doctor would have ordered.
The mellow thoughts were like a warm hug.
"Door me, to my temporary lab," I should probably add an option for mind reading for the Doormaker. Eh, I did a mental shrug before moving through the black portal. I'll do it sometime after the completion of the Citadel.
The portal opened mere inches away from my bed, allowing me to let go of all my muscles and collapse onto the soft sheets and marshmallow-like mattress.
"Zzzzz"
_____________________________________________
"S... Cute..."
Huh?
I felt my eyes reactively blink open and bemoaned my action immediately afterward. Have you ever slept so deep that when you wake up you want to sleep more and go back to that happy place but can't?
That's what I'm feeling right now as I get up from the bed to rub the sleep out of my eyes. A mental fog clouded my mind, making my reaction time and judgment less clear.
Ugh," rubbing my head with one hand and using the other to rub my almost healed ribs, I found that I no longer wore strips of cloth for clothes. "What...?"
I don't recall ever changing, did I...?
It was only after the realization that my clothing had changed did I recognized how I now was laying properly in bed, with the sheets over my lower half.
A chill went down my back as I realized someone must've broken in. I whipped my head around to search for any intruder before settling down on Rimuru in his humanoid form.
Oh yeah, I did give him access to my temporary lab, didn't I?
"Drink," Rimuru said as he handed me a glass bottle filled with a bluish liquid that [Medicine] combined with [Magicule] recognized as a 99% healing potion.
Head still half awake, I complied with his request and drank the thing in one gulp. A bright aura covered me and I felt my head immediately clearer.
"Why... are you here...?"
"Well, the Ranger team investigated a disturbance in the forest east of Metropolis and they found several scraps of advanced tech and droplets of blood. When this got reported to me by Ririna (who apparently didn't have access to your room), I immediately thought that something must've happened to you and quickly came over as fast as I could."
Rimuru paused and sat down on a stool, his arms were using his knees as support when his torso leaned forward.
"I saw your bed was soaked in blood!"
Anyone could tell worry choked his voice. Although, he's really just overreacting.
"I changed the sheets and took the rest of the day off to watch over you. [Great Sage] said how you were fine since you had [Limitless Regeneration] but I really didn't want to leave anything to chance. [Great Sage] also said how apparently, your skills were, quote, 'censored, and the Unique Skill can't explain its exact effects', unquote."
Huh. Still, overreaction or not, it's really sweet of him to do that.
My posture straightened itself. Vulnerability seeped out of my body like steam as one boils sea water for salt.
Wetting my dry lips, "I..." couldn't decide on what to say. What should I say? [Psychology] tells me I should hug Rimuru and bond over this experience but...
I never want anyone to see me vulnerable, ever, especially not someone close to me.
So instead, I chose a compromise. I turned to look at him, and uttered a simple, "Thank you."
"You're welcome!" Rimuru said cheerfully, his worry practically evaporating away to reveal that side of his that could just almost never be down for too long.
I felt uncomfortable laying in bed and looking completely defenseless, so I got up and stretched my arms a bit as Rimuru backed away to the wall to give me room.
Seeing how I was fine, Rimuru asked whether or not I wanted to have lunch together and hang out the day after tomorrow. Hmm, I guess I haven't seen him in some time with how busy everything had been, huh?
"Sure."
After that, the humanoid slime left the room, leaving me alone.
Is this what people who narrowly avoided death felt like afterward? This relief? Looking over to the nightstand, I saw the beaten-up gravity drill alongside the pocket dimension generator still attached.
Why the hell did I weld them together again? I asked myself as I racked my brain. Jaunting over to the broken machine, I put my ear next to the pocket dimension generator and heard the hum that indicated it still worked. Good, I can work with this.
Stretching a little bit before picking out a set of working clothes, I looked to the sides. Raising my hand and using it as a pointer for where the portal is going to be, "Door me, to the temporary lab,"
Walking out of the portal and into the small laboratory, I detached the generator from the drill using a molecular slicer and placed it directly over an input port of a new machine known as a 'Molecular Assembler'. This is a nanotechnological device used for atom-scale manipulation of matter, allowing a degree of precision completely unlike anything before it, such as creating gold with 100% purity. A feat that was previously only possible with my [Unlimited Alchemy].
Now, usually, such precision is often traded at the cost of speed, since nanites are fragile and must move slowly if they don't want to cook themselves through waste heat.
However, with the constant application of an energy-sucking Entropy Field, the molecular assembler can give its nanites as much power as it wants and any waste heat will get sucked out and recycled as additional power.
This means the machine achieves near-perfect efficiency.
Pushing the donut-shaped generator in and slotting it with a hiss, I turned on the assembler as it got to work, making the required nanites to construct Project Thrones.
It's going to be rather massive, like the Death Star. However, unlike the Death Star, there is no 'exhaust port' within this reusable nuclear weapon.
*Ping*
That was the alarm I set when the Doormaker Satellite detected oddities that didn't fit with old data gathered from when it first launched. A holographic display projected itself in front of me from my clothing. All the while, the assembler hummed softly in the background like rain outside of a house in a thunderstorm.
The display showed how there were massive movements of large animals within the largest drainage basin in this world that eventually congregate into the mighty Ameld river which flows out from Lake Shisu, or as the locals here call it 'Lake Siss'.
The display then highlighted how there were multiple places where there had once been a settlement but now was either deserted or had fires burning.
This was in the dozens.
Moving the timeline back by a few weeks via a slider on the side, I found over half of the destroyed villages were vibrant towns and villages composed of what the hyper-definition cameras on Doormaker define as 'goblins'. Moving the slider slightly to the present, I focused on a particular village 700 miles east of Lake Shisu and found exactly when it had been attacked.
The display showed giant hulking figures trampling through the small village compared to their size. There were fires everywhere in the village, and there were piles upon piles of bones.
When a single one of these humanoid figures raised their head to the skies, I could see exactly how they had... a pig snout for a nose? They looked like sumo wrestlers but had their heads replaced with that of pigs'.
Okay, now there's just no way these 'orcs' evolved naturally. Who the hell combined the genes of humans with that of pigs? And how are they not sterile? Humans and pigs are of different classes of animals for crying out loud! It'll be like someone making a hybrid between Crustaceans and Aves (birds).
That degrading thought died as the camera then zoomed in to see a group of orcs eating the villagers by ganging up on them like zombies. Some white fragments that are probably bones were flung out of the pile here and there before being picked up and eaten by another orc.
I silently looked at the gruesome broadcast, knowing that it was a recording, not anything live. I moved the camera into another village closer to Lake Shisu and brought the slider closer to the present, only to receive the video of a group of orcs swarming over a still-alive goblin who was being torn limb from limb. The goblin, still alive but with death quickly approaching, looked on in muted horror as his limbs were devoured in front of his eyes.
That was a week ago.
"..."
I... I guess it's a part of nature? I try and rationalize what I saw in front of me, a Tolkien knockoff world must have its own food web to maintain a correct and stable ecosystem. Biting my lips, the goblin continued to cry out as it bled, only attracting more and more orcs due to his screams.
Is this what a wild photographer feels like when they are filming a lion catching a gazel? Or when a Hippo kills an animal for the crime of jumping into their watering hole to escape from African Dogs?
The goblin finally expires from his wounds as the rest of the orcs descend upon its corpse, eating everything in less than a minute before moving on to search for their next meal.
This...this isn't natural, they're like zombies who thirst for the flesh to eat. Locusts who would are like invasive species that would destroy the ecosystem.
This what killed off the Ogre's village? Is someone leading a vast army of mind-controlled orcs?
I'll need to prepare the Army. Doormaker predicts they could reach Metropolis in 2 weeks at the fastest, more than enough time to tweak and improve upon Project Throne.
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[Silenced Emotion]- Perfection should not be tainted by the disease that plagues all flawed creatures, as such, it shall not.
