5.1: Invasion Earth

Location: My Apartment.

Time: Some time after dawn. Don't care, jetlagged.

Just seeing Paris again is enough to help me feel relaxed. I'm not even sure where May and Louise are, they aren't home. Oh, it's after nine. Louise would be teaching.

I collapse on my bed and that's all I remember until my stomach begins to complain.

I fix myself some fresh fruit and pass the time waiting for the girls to return. Mmm. The grapes are good.

At least the world isn't doomed because I got high. Thankfully what I thought I did and what I said I did were two different things, no wonder Batman panicked. I merely gave the moon a nudge that would in time resolve the slowly decaying orbit. I didn't pull it thousands of miles closer, which Batman had thought from my words and the shift in gravity.

It was an immense amount of power I was outputting, I think I had city wide awareness. But pushing the moon itself like a lawn mower was out of my league. I half expected various gods and goddesses of the moon to come complain, or worse smite me. Even if I do worship the father of the wolves that ate the Sun and Moon during Ragnarok… I suppose at least Loki enjoyed it, assuming he wasn't responsible. Hard to tell with trickster gods.

At roughly four o'clock I notice an odd darkness spread. It wasn't cloudy, when I looked from orbit earlier. I can't see the clouds, but my windows are facing in the wrong direction. I grab a bottle of soft drink and head up to the roof to look on the off chance I'm not being paranoid enough.

When I saw the source I looked away before taking a swig of my drink.

A damn eclipse? I'm jumping at shadows.

The problem becomes more evident when the eclipse continues on and on.

What? Don't tell me, this is Wotan?!

Then it gets worse… as I see the moon rise. What the heck is eclipsing the sun?

A quick jaunt into orbit, with a slight evasion to avoid a passing satellite gives me a clear view.

It's a goddamn mothership.

A massive vessel, maybe a quarter the size of the moon. Sitting right between the Earth and the sun. At just enough range to cast a shadow over us. If I were the aliens this would be either a shock and awe tactic, or a finishing move. In only a few days plants will start to suffer. In weeks humanity will be starving. A year? We'll be a fraction of the billions that exist now.

Which race are they? I don't know, the vessel is suitably alien.

Dammit, warp drives make war between planets easy. Why can't I be in a world where the aliens are limited by basic physics and the logistics of supply? Interplanetary war is impractical without that one crazy little device.

So the big questions: are they here to subjugate us, experiment on us or exterminate us?

I'm leaning to subjugation, this isn't a casual 'hello we want to trade'. This is them shoving a boot on our throat and making us choke just enough so we know they can kill us by stepping on us harder.

Oh, I'm picking up a rather wide radio band signal. As in, alien. It's on every civilian channel and most military ones. Heck I can almost taste what it says.

Surrender. Disarm your armies, submit. Or be destroyed.

The space around the ship is flooded with a cloud of glittering things. I can only guess that those are fighter/escorts, bombers and troop transports. Perhaps robotic or clone troops. The vanguard of the assault.

Well… I can't do much like this.

Time to nut up or shut up.

Gear. I need it. I don't even care about where it comes from.

Down towards the largest collection of metal I can sense.

I have maybe an hour or two.

My old gear wasn't enough to deal with Brain and these are super advanced aliens. The tech base is different. Gotta stay as hard hitting and mobile as possible, because one hit likely means death for me.

I descend on a warehouse filled with construction materials. Tons of screws and nails. Beams and sheets of steel.

With a thought I bring all of it to me and begin to smelt it down into what I need.

Solid structures. Even as I cover myself in wires and chains.

Topped by the customary helmet.

As I fuse the metal and alter it's composition to mirror armour materials I have sensed previously. Building on this I further alter them, changing the metal so that the compounds form in fractal patterns. I take the idea from the pattern of carbon rings and make it out of metal atoms.

The result? Well… it's shiny. Harder than anything else I have available, at the expense of being difficult to mould into new shapes. However I cast it into the shapes I require, so this is a non-issue.

I rise to leave and the entirety of the contents of the warehouse move to leave with me. Tons and tons… maybe between ten and fifteen tons. I hadn't realised just how much iron I was pumping after my training. Almost half again what I used against Chemo.

And this time, I'm not going to be taken by surprise.

I look at the cloud of gnats now visible with the naked eye, they're almost here.

Reaching the military base I enter and find May and Louise… and a good dozen or more people I've never seen before… and that Major from the magic demonstration.

They startle at my current look, my war armour wasn't seen in public last time.

"VICTOR!" May shouted, running to hug me. I pull back the metal and embrace her. "Glad you're okay."

"What's happening?" I asked her.

"Aliens! They're claiming to be here to save us from ourselves, but the soldiers say this is a lie." She explained. I agree with that assessment. This is just their feeble excuse for the conquest.

"I want you to take Louise and hide in our secret base in the mountain, I want you to protect her okay? She can't fight and while I know you can, I need you to be my secret weapon." I lied. "These aliens are here to fight and one of the first places they'll go will be right here."

I switched to French. "Louise, go with May. Hide at our base. If I need your help I'll go there. I'm going to blunt this invasion as best I can." I added aloud, for the students. "If this is an invasion the first military target they hit will be here after any nuclear weapons installations they detect, an obvious military base lightly garrisoned just outside Paris. Grab any gear you can and get ready for the possibility we may be the new French Resistance at any moment."

Grabbing a phone I tried to reach Fleur, but the lines were busy. All of them. Everyone who can is making a call right now.

I watch Louise leave beside May in the crown of a massive tree as it strode away like an ent.

And five minutes later the invasion began in earnest.

As the first vessel to breach the atmosphere descended to hover over a capital city. And the other seventy did the same. Across the world, every major nation was faced by the unknown and their response to the threats?

We refuse to surrender.

Then thousands of smaller ships followed the same paths down, attacking indiscriminately.