Chapter 1: Unexpected discovery underground
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A Portal and Nier Automata crossover.
(Includes side elements from Azur Lane, Girls Frontline, and Zoids, plus a few more.)
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Anoth woke up in a very uncomfortable position. He was hanging half over the edge of a hole in the concrete floor and on various debris and upside down only to lose his balance a second later and fall down the hole to face plant on the floor below.
"Crap!" Anoth cursed as he slowly stood up again. "I've slept better before." And when his gaze fell through the hole in the ceiling above him. "And I've done better landings before."
Anoth dusted himself off as he looked around.
"Where am I?" he wondered. All he saw was a reinforced concrete building. A reinforced concrete building without any utility lines. No electric wires, no water, nothing like that. In addition, he could see dense roots growing into the building. This meant that this building had long been abandoned. No windows, no ground cover, no wallpaper. Just bare reinforced concrete.
The first thing Anoth did was jump back up through the hole to the spot where he had landed. As he saw the hole and retraced his track from where he had come, Anoth realized that he had flown through several other buildings on his way to this point.
"I made a wonderful crash landing there." murmured Anoth. Suddenly he heard the noise of battle from below. "What's going on there?"
Anoth approached the hole in the facade where there may have been a window at some point (or not) and looked down.
There was a single female struggling against what appeared to be an oversized child's toy. A number of children's toys that chorused "Kill! Kill! Kill!"
Looking closer, Anoth saw another figure lying on the floor behind her, in a widening puddle of what appeared to be blood. Anoth could also see that the powers of the still standing figure were as good as exhausted.
It was clear to Anoth that the two needed help.
However, Anoth wasn't quite sure what was actually going on and which of the two was the real aggressor.
But when the one standing figure collapsed after being hit by one of the oversized children's toys and didn't get up again, Anoth made his decision and jumped down.
He landed right where the now unconscious young woman had been standing before, who had fought against the machines. He was right between the "children's toys" and the two "androids". At least they were labeled as such by the children's toys.
With the sword Raijinga in hand, which he had drawn while jumping, he now looked at the machines. "Sod off!" was all he said. The unspoken threat was more than clear with the drawn sword.
The machines, however, didn't seem to care.
"Kill! Kill! Kill androids!"
When Anoth charged Raijinga by channeling his powers into the sword, causing lightning to begin to erupt from the sword, the machines paused for a few seconds. But then they kept coming towards him.
"Last warning."
They didn't listen.
In response, Anoth swung his sword back and swung the sword in front of him. The result was a massive surge of electrical energy that destroyed any machinery it touched. Anoth had destroyed all 58 machines present with a single blow.
"Well. No one can say that I didn't warn them." Said Anoth as he let his sword disappear again. With that he turned to the two rather badly battered androids and first of all ran a scan of the two.
"You are not simple androids." noted Anoth. "More like my T-Dolls."
Then he heard more machines approaching with their typical "Kill! Kill! Kill!". And they came from all around him.
"Very well. Time to go." With that, Anoth grabbed the two badly mauled android girls and their weapons only to disappear a second later in a flash of light exactly at the time when the first of the machines came around the corner.
He reappeared in a flash of light on the roof of one of the nearby multi-story buildings he had been able to see from where he crashed. The fact that all of them had flat roofs made it easier.
Anoth immediately activated an ECM interference field to make it difficult to track them down. Then he examined the injuries of the two androids.
It took several hours before he had stabilized the two. This confirmed what Anoth's scan had already suggested.
These weren't just androids.
The two had mechanical arms and legs. Also, their skeletal area was mostly high-strength metal surrounded by artificial muscles. However, they also had internal organs. And if he could believe the scan, the two of them were quite capable of conceiving.
The bottom line is that their whole structure was very similar to that of the T-Dolls.
It didn't matter right now either. First of all he had to make sure that the two didn't just die out from under his fingers.
He had just finished tending to their wounds when he was contacted.
It was Lisa.
"Where are you?" she asked immediately.
"In the midst of the ruins of a city. Or what's supposed to look like one." Was Anoth's answer. "Firing up localization beacons."
The whole system was operating on low subspace frequencies. A technology that neither the androids nor the machines here possessed and which they could therefore neither track nor locate.
"I have your position." Lisina answered seconds later. "I came to on a bunch of grinning balls and you?"
"I made multiple 'house calls' and then found myself hanging over a hole."
"Ouch." Lisina answered. "I'll be with you in about an hour." With that she ended the communication.
Anoth, meanwhile, was busy setting up a Mobile Shield. In the distance he could already see how a huge storm was brewing and it was on a direct course to the place where he was right now.
A little later the generator, a disc about 40cm in size with a thickness of about 15cm, was Online and a shield with a diameter of almost 20 meters was in position.
Immediately thereafter, he began evaluating the data he had downloaded from the two androids in his care. Especially to find out what was actually going on here.
In doing so, he came across a subprogram which his own AIs classified as highly dangerous.
When Anoth started analyzing this program it didn't seem to be really dangerous at first sight. Until he found out that it was performing a forced download and was shutting down the entire firewall in the process.
And here was the real danger.
Anoth decided to download the file to a specially secured test server.
It was a logic virus.
It made the infected units go berserk and fight anyone that wasn't infected. And in part probably against everyone else as well, even while the virus continues to eat its way deeper and deeper into the system.
There were other lines of code in the virus that apparently triggered a self-destruct sequence from a facility known only as a "Bunker".
Anoth's sensors had long since found a space station in orbit with a noticeably high level of data traffic. It would not surprise him if this station was the so-called "Bunker".
He couldn't really rewrite this virus because the file seemed to be updated regularly. But he could definitely write a counter virus.
It will take a while to finish this one.
At least a few hours.
This was mainly due to the complexity of the logic virus that was in the file.
Overengineered.
Definitive.
A much simpler code would probably have done the trick here.
But whoever wrote this probably wanted to be absolutely sure that the virus was doing what it was created for.
Anoth could hear the thunderstorm clearly now.
It was now almost directly overhead and the rain had begun to fall on the shield where it was pouring down in great torrents of water.
A wet bludger right next to Anoth told him that Lisina had just arrived.
"And?" asked Anoth jokingly. "Did you like the view?"
Lisina just snorted while wringing the water out of her red and yellow hair.
"Oh yes. A wonderful view." she growled. "Those damn tin buckets slowed me down."
Anoth just raised his hand in her direction and you could see the water flying off her and collecting in a floating sphere. As soon as all the water was gone from Lisina, which she acknowledged with a "thank you", Anoth threw the ball to the outside.
"So what do we do now?" Lisina asked when she sat down next to Anoth on one of the chunks of concrete lying on the roof.
"Well." Anoth sighed. "I do not know yet." His eyes fell on the two androids. "Both of them are out of danger. We'll probably wait until the two are conscious again and then we'll see."
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The next day
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The storm had passed and the sun peeked through the clouds from time to time as Lisina looked at the two android girls.
Anoth had long since got up and was on the hunt. Lisina knew that he should come back soon.
Lisina noticed that the two androids had still not woken up again. But a check of their vitals and systems showed they were in no danger.
Right after that she took care of a spot where they could make a fire to cook whatever Anoth was going to put there. There was enough undergrowth and loose branches nearby so that Lisina was back within a few minutes. She found most of the wood inside the ruins, lying dry. Most of it had probably been blown in there by various storms. Or was washed into it during floods.
Lighting the fire was easy for Lisina. That was part of the basics for surviving in the wilderness.
A small spell placed directly over the fire removed the smoke. So they were not discovered so quickly.
Thirty minutes later, Anoth was back.
With a 2.5 meter (8.2ft) long and almost 200kg (440lbs) heavy arapaima.
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Several hours later
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The Arapaima had been completely destroyed between the two.
Anoth was currently taking care of the two androids while Lisina jumped to a nearby building and looked around.
In the distance she could see an old amusement park. This was also the place that drew her attention the most. Because from there, fireworks rose almost continuously.
What happened there?
When she told Anoth about it, she could literally see the huge question mark hovering over his head.
"That's more than strange." Finally said Anoth.
"Shall we take a closer look at the place?"
"It definitely piqued my curiosity." Meant Anoth. "Both of them are in artificial deep sleep at the moment and the camp here is secured so far and I have sent out my sirens to gather information."
"They haven't been to the park yet, have they?"
"They didn't give the park a high priority, so no. So let's take a closer look at this weird amusement park ourselves."
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Some time later
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On the way to the park, they had jumped over a wall almost 10 meters high and were now standing on the other side with a direct view of the entrance to the park.
On the way they were forced to destroy some smaller machines.
Now they saw identical machines, dressed in brightly colored clothes, throwing confetti around and dancing.
What was going on here?
Both walked slowly through the park and past the machines that seemed to be celebrating.
Not one showed any aggressiveness.
"That's pretty strange." Meant Lisa.
"Yes. The ones we've met so far have all been highly aggressive. But these ones..."
By now they had reached the center of the park.
It looked like there was a stylized theater standing there.
The gate there, however, was locked.
That was not all.
Anoth also received a conspicuous number of signals coming from the theater.
Their coding was similar to that of distress signals.
"Are you receiving that too?" Anoth asked his daughter.
"Yes I do." She confirmed as she stared intently at the theater.
The two exchanged glances then Anoth kicked open the gate.
Then they ran over the bridge in the direction of the signals they received.
With a bang, Anoth burst through the front door and up the stairs. Already they could hear the sounds of battle.
A few moments later both stood in the entrance to the theater hall. There two androids, a boy and a woman, were fighting a machine that looked... rather... shall we say strange.
She probably wanted to portray an opera singer.
Also, she screamed all the time that she wants to be beautiful.
The reason for this didn't matter to Anoth at all.
However, the two androids had a huge problem. Both were badly damaged and as good as dead.
"ON THE GROUND!" called Anoth and activated his rigging from one of his docked battleships that he had available as a fortress ship. Both androids immediately dropped to the ground. Immediately afterwards, eight 20cm guns fired eight heavy plasma jets, leaving only the lowest part of the machine intact. The rest was simply vaporized.
Seconds later, the lower part also blew up in an explosion that threw debris in all directions. Some of them bounced off Anoth's rigging.
Then suddenly it was quiet.
Only now did the two androids, who had felt the tremendous heat of the shots more than clearly, dare to get back on their feet.
The moment both were back on their feet, they turned their swords on Anoth. He, on the other hand, just stared at them. Then shrugged, turned around and headed back down the stairs.
Lisina looked a little longer at the two androids with a raised eyebrow. Then she followed her father.
"Looks like they see us as enemies here." Meant Lisa.
"I wouldn't be surprised if they see us as machines too." Meant Anoth. "But that's beside the point for me right now. I've discovered a strange signal deep underground. That is coming right from under this theater. And there's an elevator back there.
"A rather peculiar source of energy at that. As well as energy signatures pointing to the possible existence of stasis pods."
"You mean that there might be survivors down there?" asked Lisina surprised.
"They're definitely not on the moon. There's only a simple data server."
"How do you know?"
"A simple long-range environmental scan that includes possible moons revealed this."
"And how do you know they're supposed to be on the moon?"
"Because I intercepted a transmission from there that was said to have come from the "Council of Humanity". I then examined the moon particularly closely to be absolutely sure. The scan only confirmed the results of the first scan. On Luna or Sol 3;1 there is not a single human."
"What do you think? You already had a guess."
"I think they only used Luna as a launch pad and temporary base and that their actual base is much deeper in the solar system. That would make sense if only for safety reasons alone."
"And where would they be in your opinion then?"
"There would be multiple candidates for this. Mars, the moon Europa, for example. But they could have left this system long ago and settled on a completely different planet. That couldn't be ruled out either. After all, a few thousand years have passed since then."
"Then why haven't they come back yet?"
"Religious reasons. Maybe they also classified the planet as taboo. Or they believe that the WCS is still raging here."
"WCS?"
"White Chlorination Syndrome. That's what they called it back then. Those who become infected have two options. Either they accept the offer of a Sadistic God and become what is called the Legion once their bodies turn to salt, or their bodies gradually become to the statue and then also crumble into salt."
"What god would do something like that?" Lisa asked in horror.
"A god that I destroyed... let's just say a long time ago." Was Anoth's answer to that.
"How do you know?" finally asked Lisa.
"My sirens found ancient records. Believe it or not they were literally carved in stone. The only material they knew had any chance of surviving through the millennia."
"And how do you know about the gods?"
"Logical conclusion. The Legion is described in the text and the fact that the infected turn to salt. From there it wasn't difficult to put two and two together."
"Is anything else mentioned in the lyrics?"
"Yes. It mentions and describes Project Gestalt and the associated Project Replicant." Anoth just shook his head. "Both projects were doomed to fail from the start. People were dealing with forces that they didn't even begin to understand. The fact that the project ran for over 1,400 years before it finally failed completely is more than amazing. Actually more of a miracle. "
"Who left these notes anyway?"
"There were only two names on the board. Devola and Popola. I assume that the notes came from the two of them. A certain Emil is also named. But these notes are more recent. There is talk of an invasion."
"How did the WCS come into this world in the first place?" asked Lisa. It had not escaped either of them that the two androids they had rescued, but who were very suspicious of them, followed them and listened spellbound.
Anoth stopped and leaned against the wall. "Judging by the timeline of the records, there was an incident in Tokyo in 2003. A huge statue, which from then on was only called a giant, appeared in the Shinjuku district. But it was not alone. A red dragon appeared almost at the same time lined up with these giant, and the two engaged in a battle in which the dragon emerged victorious, only to be shot down by fighter jets.
"The now-dead giant began to disintegrate into a substance very similar to sodium chloride. Table salt. Except that it lacked any weight or mass. Later, this mass is referred to as Maso. Shortly thereafter, the first outbreaks of WCS began in Shinjuku. And from there From now on the catastrophe takes its course. It went so far that weapons of mass destruction were used in an attempt to stop the spread of the WCS. Unsuccessfully. On the contrary, in fact. The use of nuclear weapons only spread the Maso even faster. Then at some point work on the Gestalt project began .
"However, I highly doubt that Project Gestalt was the only project. There must have been dozens more. After all, the humans were facing their own extinction. And when the only alternative is the total annihilation of your species, anything else is preferable to that. Things like Money become irrelevant and meaningless at that point. Who knows what projects they came up with to avoid their own annihilation."
"You think that directly under our feet could be one of those projects?"
"It definitely cannot be ruled out."
Now they stood in front of the elevator. It was still intact. However, if Anoth was honest with himself, this elevator looked fairly new.
A little later they were a few floors below.
"Is that what you discovered?" Lisina asked as all they saw in front of them was a pile of ancient flickering TVs and lots of rubble around them after walking down a short corridor.
"No." Was Anoth's answer. "What I discovered is much deeper than that."
They heard the elevator stop again behind them. A little later they heard the footsteps of the two androids.
Anoth and Lisina decided to continue ignoring the two and pretending they didn't know they were there.
"How do we get there?" asked Lisa. "Although I'm surprised these old TVs still work at all." Added Lisina, who was now examining the strange stack of televisions in the middle of the room more closely.
"I discovered another shaft. But it's somewhere behind this wall. About 20 meters away." Was Anoth's answer. "There's a lot of rubble in between. I'll have to dig."
With that, Anoth walked to the center of the room, telekinetically tossing the pile of televisions and other junk aside and activating his main rigging, which he then aimed toward the wall where he intended to dig.
His rigging was so enormous that it almost filled the entire room.
2B and 9S, who were watching the whole thing, went white as chalk. What just appeared on the man was many times larger than what he had used to disassemble the crazy opera singer. Also, they could see hundreds of guns on the rigging. And that told them something, even though many of the weapons were little bigger than toys, they didn't want to find out what they could do.
Support legs extended from beneath the rigging and Anoth knelt so they were now resting on the ground.
"You're not planning on blasting your way through the rocks and rubble, are you?" Lisina asked with a worried look at the cracked ceiling held in place only by a few rusted and dented I-beams.
"I'm not that stupid. I want to use my point defense phasers as digging lasers. Just to do that, I first have to build a mount for it and completely reprogram them."
"And how long will that take?"
"About 15 minutes." replied Anoth. "After that, I set up a force field around where I'm drilling."
"Why-" Anoth cut her off before she could finish, because he had already seen the question coming.
"The rock and debris that I remove while digging doesn't just go away. It becomes gaseous. And I don't think you want to breathe gaseous rocks and concrete, do you?"
"It doesn't have to be." Lisina admitted and kept a distance from the wall and looked for a position somewhere behind Anoth.
It took almost 10 minutes before Anoth had completed the reprogramming and had the prototype rig for drilling between the two main flight decks hanging in his rigging.
"All set. I'll start now." said Anoth.
The four evenly spaced emitters of the Point Defense phasers began to glow and shortly thereafter sent a beam against the wall to be drilled. Anoth adjusted the position of the dots a little because if he had started drilling like this they would have had to crawl through the tunnel .
He adjusted the diameter of the tunnel to about 2.5 meters and then the ring on which the emitters were mounted began to rotate. The faster the ring began to spin, the more obvious the future size of the tunnel became.
Then the beam changed to a yellow beam that was significantly stronger and drilling began.
Several cubic meters of concrete were vaporized on the spot. The vaporized material was stopped by the surrounding force fields and Anoth had already begun sucking up the toxic mist and sending it through Molecular Reconstructors that converted it to simple heavy hydrogen (Deuterium or ²H or D). A small part of it was then processed further directly into heavy water (deuterium oxide or also ²H2O or also D2O). The heavy water was mainly used in his laboratory for various processes.
The deuterium itself served as fuel for the fusion reactors of the smaller ships and airplanes etc.
It took almost two minutes before the mining laser did its job and the ring began to descend and spin more and more slowly. As soon as the ring had come to a standstill, hot water vapor rose from the four emitters when Anoth began to cool them down. These were actually designed for short bursts of fire. Not for two minutes of continuous fire. This made them a little very hot. A fact that was easy to see. Because the actual cooling elements on the back of the emitters glowed in a bright red. The water vapor that was created was also sucked up. Otherwise, the chamber would have turned into an extremely hot sauna in a matter of seconds.
The dug tunnel was still red hot from the heat. But Anoth cooled it down within a relatively short time using ice jets.
It took a good quarter of an hour before Anoth first deactivated the force field and then his rigging again.
Much to the relief of the two androids who were following the whole thing hidden behind a metal box.
"Then let's see where the shaft leads." Said Anoth who went through the now cooled but still warm tunnel and stopped at the end.
There was a deep, completely dark shaft. Anoth activated only the search lights from his rigging and let them shine down the shaft.
It was deep.
Very deep.
At least 2,500 meters.
Because his headlights didn't reach all the way down.
"That goes pretty far down." Meant Lisa. "What was that back then?"
"I assume this used to be at a mine for whatever." That's when Anoth noticed a bit of white powder still clinging to the shaft's wall. He rubbed a little and tasted it. "Salt." noted Anoth. "It was a salt mine."
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A jump and an infinite fall distance later.
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Anoth and Lisina landed almost silently at the bottom of the shaft after what felt like an eternity.
"How deep are we?" Lisina asked, looking up the shaft and seeing the two androids slowly following them. Using their pods to slow their fall.
"Almost 4,500 meters." Answered Anoth, who was busy opening a rusty door that did not want to open. With a metallic crack, what was holding the door closed gave way and Anoth pushed both halves of the door aside.
What greeted them was not what they expected.
"Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Science." Announced a tape in a male voice the same moment they exited the shaft. "Astronauts, war heroes, Olympic champions - we only want the best and that's why you're here. So: Who is available for research?"
"What the…?" Lisa asked loudly.
Then a female voice sounded. "But yes."
The male voice took over again. "You guys met on the drive here. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Cave Johnson. I own the company. The nice voice from before belongs to Caroline, my assistant. She already has sent your fee to a non-profit organization of your choice. That's right, Caroline?"
"Yes sir, Mister Johnson." Announced the Female Voice, Caroline.
Cave Johnson immediately took over again. "She's the backbone of this company. And pretty to boot. But alas... already taken. She belongs to science.
"Where did we end up here?" Anoth and Lisina wondered when they saw the Aperture Science Innovations logo hanging from the ceiling while the other two androids landed behind them.
"What is this place?" came the boy while the woman just looked around.
That was also when another person entered the room from the other end, holding a strange device.