Clapping

"It's not going to be enough," Marcus Ford, the astronomer the government referred me to said. "You've actually moved the biggest chunk, but it's still going to hit us at an angle."

"Where is it going to hit?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "If a piece of metal that size and that dense even hits the ocean, it will cause catastrophic tidal waves that will kill more people than have already died. The cities on the East Coast in America and the west coast of Europe will be hit by tsunamis."

We were in Cuba at an observatory that was fully staffed unlike most businesses around the world. These people felt it was their duty to humanity to keep track of what was going on in the sky, especially now.

"More importantly, the water vapor that would be thrown up would create the equivalent of a nuclear winter."

I'd seen what one of those looked like, and I didn't intend to subject these people to that. For one think, I didn't have a world to put the survivors in. The cannibal world was infected, and even if it weren't, there was even less food there than here.

There wasn't time to build a bomb the size that would be needed to destroy the large piece. Bakuda could have done it, but I didn't have her skill yet, and she was likely working at least four or five tech levels beyond me.

If I tried to go back to Earth Bet, I'd have to try to find that number of Tinkers. While I could have possibly attacked Armsmaster and Kid Win, finding Leet would be difficult and would likely take longer than I had. Every moment that I was dealing with searching for tinkers was a moment I wasn't building bombs or coming up with strategies.

"How far do I need to move it?" I asked. "I'm limited to missiles of four tons or less."

"I don't know how you did it," he said. "Even the amount that you moved it is incredible."

"It was like playing billiards," I said. "You just had to use the right forces in the right place, and…"

"The president said you were having trouble seeing," he said. "Take these."

He reached behind him and pulled out something that looked like a weird combination of a telescope and binoculars. You looked down into them, and they were white on the outside.

"Vixen binocular telescopes," he said. He looked at them wistfully. "It cost me $4500. It's got three hundred times magnification."

"I'm sure the President will be happy to pay you back, assuming everyone survives."

I thought for a moment, and then an idea occurred to me. I took the telescope from him, and then inventoried it.

"I'll be back," I said.

I'd been hitting the rock with objects going three thousand miles an hour. Their mass was miniscule compared to that of the largest piece, but in space the speed had been able to overcome the lack of mass to a tiny degree.

The closer the rock got to the Earth, the faster it would be going, and the harder it would be for tiny changes in direction to make any difference.

If I was going to make a decision, I had to do it now.

It was becoming daylight outside, and the remnants of the ship were becoming more visible, including the vast majority of the fragments that were not on their way to Earth.

The vast majority of the ship was going to miss the Earth by a good degree, the majority of the pieces travelling away from the Earth.

I flashed outside of the moon's orbit, and I looked through the eyepieces. Even with three hundred times magnification I could barely see the closest piece.

As soon as I was standing on that piece, I saw that what the Earth was facing was a nightmare compared to what was behind the moon.

Blink.

I acquired a piece.

Blink.

I acquired another.

In space I couldn't speak, but I could push a button with one hand and touch a ship fragment with the other.

Over and over again, and unlike what I'd faced before, there didn't seem to be an end to the number of pieces for me to collect.

I had to release everything else in my inventory except for my dad. I saw the Nazi bodies floating in space, and if it wasn't likely that the people of this world would eventually come out here, I would have happily left them.

I had to release the missiles from the helicopters; I released them to strike some of the larger pieces, but they didn't seem to do much.

I'd grown beyond dropping cars on people. Four-ton pieces of metal were flat on the bottom and would work much better.

I was full to the brim, and blinked back to the moon.

I was able to use the telescopes to find the spot where the remaining pieces were.

Turning the telescope, I then looked ahead.

I imagined myself not moving with the solar system. Removing that velocity, I released the first piece of metal.

The Earth, and the cloud of debris were coming toward me at 67,000 miles an hour as the Earth orbited the sun. That wouldn't provide me with nearly enough power, though. I was crippled by my four-ton limit.

However, the solar system was traveling around the galactic arm at a rate of over 514,000 mph.

I'd have to make the calculations in my head, but it would take a little more than two hours for me to get out of range of a single teleport.

I launched the piece of metal at the same speed, but in the opposite direction.

The pieces collided at twice the speed- 1,028,000 miles an hour.

That made an impact.

It was only the equivalent of 91 kilotons of TNT, but I hit the largest piece over and over again. The 20-megaton bomb had done two hundred times the force.

Each four-ton piece of debris was hitting it at a million miles an hour, and I had fifty-nine slots, each filled with fifty copies of the same item.

I'd gathered twenty-five hundred copies of the same item, blasting it over and over, and repositioning myself by teleporting to both stay ahead of the curve and to deal with the curvature along the galactic plane.

Tinkers were bullshit.

INVENTORY IS LEVELED UP!

YOU NOW HAVE 120 SLOTS OF FIFTY ITEMS EACH. YOU HAVE A WEIGHT LIMIT OF EIGHT TONS.

LEVEL 4!

I'd used almost four times the energy of the twenty-megaton bomb, and it had only taken me two hours to gather the goods and hit the largest piece.

Now I just needed to re-match my speed to that of the solar system and of the Earth, and then…

Uh Oh.

I'd taken a little damage from 3000 mph. What would 514,000 mph do to me?

Would my ability to spider climb even take that kind of damage, and would my reaction speed even allow me to touch an item?

If I positioned myself right in front of the largest piece, I could definitely hit it, but I'd likely die.

I doubted I could land beside it and reacquire my speed by touching, it though. I could dodge an item going 7000 mph, but this was more than seventy times as fast as that.

Even if I somehow managed to grab on, would I lose an arm if I tried to reconnect, or would I simply lose all my hit points and die? After all, that 514,000 miles per hour represented more than a tenth of a percent of the speed of light.

Landing on Earth would likely cause a fireball large enough that I'd kill as many people as I'd saved.

Could I regain my speed in stages?

I could only fly 1024 mph. How long would I have to fly to increase that to a point where I could catch up with the rest of the world?

Calculating the distance, I needed, I teleported far enough ahead, and then I began flying.

After an hour I gained a level of flight. I could now fly 2048 mph. If the time it took to gain additional flight kept doubling, it would take something like three weeks for my speed to increase enough to match back up.

This wasn't going to work. Although I was sure that I'd barely moved the largest piece out of the way, there were still smaller pieces that I hadn't destroyed that would be quite dangerous.

There was another option; one of my least used powers.

Mage hand was essentially telekinesis, and I had used it to lift myself before.

I was already flying 2000 miles per hour, and so I began applying that three hundred pounds of thrust to push myself even faster.

I only weighed one hundred and twenty when not in my metal form, and I was able to push myself forward with three hundred pounds of thrust.

Pushing myself forward at 2.5 gravities of constant acceleration, I couldn't really tell that I was moving much faster.

However, after five minutes I got a message.

"MAGE HAND HAS INCREASED TO LEVEL 4! YOU CAN NOW LIFT 400 POUNDS."

Now I was increasing my speed constantly by 3.3 gravities.

Ten minutes after that I received another message.

MAGE HAND HAS INCREASED TO LEVEL 5! YOU CAN NOW LIFT 500 POUNDS!

Now I was accelerating at 4.16 gravities constantly.

Twenty minutes later I could push 600 pounds, and I was accelerating at 5 gravities.

After the first 5 minutes, my speed would have increased from 2000 miles per hour to 18000 miles per hour. After the next ten minutes, it would have increased to 63,000 miles per hour. After twenty minutes, it would increase to 173,000 miles per hour.

Forty minutes later I was moving 441,000 miles per hour.

I could choose to keep or lose my velocity using Here and Everywhere, and I had to keep adjusting as the galaxy moved in a slow spiral.

MAGE HAND HAS INCREASED TO LEVEL 7!

YOU CAN NOW LIFT 700 POUNDS!

It might take ten more minutes acceleration to reach the speed I needed. I tried counting in my head, but I couldn't be sure down to the second.

I could have tried my cell phone, but even if the extremes of temperature didn't get to it, the insulating nature of vacuum would leave to rapid overheating.

I'd have probably overheated myself long ago if I had normal metabolic processes, or if I wasn't largely resistant to even internal heat.

Eventually, I decided to try it.

The only object big enough to see reliably was the largest piece, and so I aimed for it.

I appeared next to it, and it slid by me a little too quickly, beyond even my ability to catch.

I must have underestimated my time by a minute or two, because I was still ten thousand miles an hour short.

Continuing to add speed, I reached the thing by blinking, and I managed to grab onto it.

-20 HP

+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE.

I'd wasted two and a half hours just regaining my speed, even if I'd gained a little to my mage hand and flight, I couldn't be sure it was worth it until I made sure the biggest piece was going to miss the planet.

Blinking back to the observatory in Cuba, I found Marcus Ford staring at screens.

He must have heard me moving behind him, because he turned and beamed at me.

"You did it," he said. "It's going to be a near miss, skimming the upper atmosphere, but we'll be all right. We may lose some satellites, but in the long run that's preferable to everyone dying."

I nodded.

"But there are still some of the larger pieces that I'm worried about," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "There's still three the size of a twenty-story building, and a dozen half that size. I plan to take care of those shortly."

"I wouldn't have believed it possible," he said.

"Your binoculars saved the world," I said. "I'll get them back to you when I'm finished with them."

A moment later, I was back in space.

I had a day and a half left; it was ultimately all the time in the world as long as I could work quickly.

Far Strike didn't create a very big hole, but my bomb tinker specialty came with an intuitive understanding of how to place explosives to cause the most damage.

I was able to seek out the weakness in the metal by studying the stress patterns on the outside, and then by creating tunnels in the metal that took advantage of that using far strike, I was able to make the metal sheer off.

It took an hour of using far strike to drill, followed by using inventoried metal at three thousand miles an hour in the right spot to crack the first larger piece in half.

I gained two levels of Far Strike.

Over the next eight hours, I cut the larger pieces in half, and then in half again. Each piece was now a quarter the size of a twenty-story building- now 65 feet on a side.

A hundred-foot asteroid would be a town killer. The Tunguska asteroid had been two hundred feet wide or so. Thirty foot would be scary but safe

Of course, having the pieces hit all together wouldn't help much. I could only inventory pieces a little larger than three feet on a side with my eight-ton limit.

Grimly, I continued to work, intentionally smashing pieces with other pieces while working to cut them down to size and to eyeball them into going into the ocean instead of on land.

Eventually, time ran out, and I returned to the observatory to check with the astronomer.

"It's a miracle," he said. "You've managed to get almost all of them. There will be a couple of them that will hit in China, but mostly everything will be all right."

I wondered if China was going to blame me. It wasn't like I'd intentionally aimed it toward their cities.

"Where is it going to hit?" I asked.

"Um…Hefei and Nanjing," He said.

"Do you have any pictures, or at least directions from Shanghai?"

The computers of this time worked incredibly slowly, especially to someone living on the time scale that I did.

Eventually the images appeared, and I concentrated on memorizing them.

"Oh," I said. "Here's your binoculars. I wouldn't touch them for a while until they warm back up."

Then I was gone.

Hefei was on fire. Windows had been shattered everywhere by one of the largest remaining pieces, and I could feel terrified and hurting people everywhere in range.

There were collapsed buildings, and I could feel people trapped inside.

I couldn't understand their thoughts; no one was thinking in English, and they weren't able to translate like the Harvester Queen had.

I blinked to the closest people, and I began using mage hand to lift rubble while I used my own strength to lift other rubble.

There was a woman inside, huddled under a desk. She had thrown her body over that of her child, and I could feel her terror.

She blinked as I lifted the rubble off her, and I reached out and healed her.

I healed her child as well.

Over the next six hours, I rescued three thousand people in two different Chinese cities. I healed half as many.

I gained four levels of healing, to level 24. I could now heal 192 hp at a time.

I saw people trying to help each other, people who were risking their lives for their neighbors.

They weren't any different than anyone else I'd known, and they seemed to be good people for the most part.

This was a different world, and this wasn't the CUI.

It wasn't until the military showed up that I saw people who weren't as nice as the others.

"Miss," one of them said in English. "You will come with us."

"No, I won't," I said absently as I healed a small child.

"We must insist," he said.

"You can't make me do anything," I said. "And I'm busy."

"You are wanted for questioning in the destruction of Shanghai," he said.

"I didn't do it," I said. I looked up at him. "I don't think you'd like what would happen if you went to war with me, but I haven't deliberately hurt any Chinese cities."

He tried to grab me, but it was like grabbing a ten-ton statue. I didn't have a lot of mass, but I could use my strength and flying ability to keep myself in place.

A dozen others dogpiled me, but I simply walked, dragging them along.

When they started shooting at me, I inventoried all of their weapons, moving quickly enough that they couldn't react.

"I just healed these people!" I said. "And you want to start shooting at them again?"

Scowling, I said, "If you don't want me here, I've got other places to be."

A moment later, I blinked, and I was back at Area 51.

The President was in a meeting with his staff, and they all looked up, staring at me.

Before I could say anything, they all stood up and started clapping.

The clapping seemed to go on and on, and I felt something weird in my throat. It was like I had a lump there.

My eyes felt a little moist too; that was concerning, since I hadn't had any physical reactions since I had gained Gamer's Body.

I suddenly felt exhausted.

I'd been running for three days solid, and I hadn't slept.

"Is there a bed around here?" I asked. "I could sleep on the moon, but with my luck I'd get smashed by one of the last pieces of the ship."

"We'll get you a bed," he said. "And then we can talk about the future."