AN: My friends, I return bearing a gift for the holiday season. I'm sorry it's been so heavily delayed, but I needed this hiatus for a number of reasons, but mostly to figure out how the events of this chapter would play out, the general direction of the rest of our story, and where the line is between Finn Grows Up and the normal AT universe. With that, I offer you our latest installment, and the promise of much more to come. Enjoy!

Chapter 11:

As The Sky Fell

Thoros saw Princess Bubblegum to the door after their discussion, the monarch leaving behind a small cylinder of plain grey metal.

"If anything develops, hit the black button to contact my retainer, Peppermint Butler," she instructed as she mounted her skimmerbike. "He's trustworthy with any sort of information, so speak to him as you'd speak to me. Also, step up your local security patrols. There's been something rotten in the air the last few days. I'll bring Finn and a few others when he's ready, and we'll bring him up to speed."

"With certainty," came the reply. "Anything else?"

"We're almost done selecting our first-generation designs, so get working on your tooling as soon as we send over the schematics," PB said, tossing her long braid off her shoulder. "Oh, and careful where you put that thing." She pointed to the communicator. "Try not to melt it."

With that, Bonnibel tore away from the cave entrance of Thoros' complex, furious cones of exhaust screaming out of her boosters. "Well, that went painlessly," she considered. "Now I just need to get the procurement sorted, have Peppermint send it along, and then gather Finn and the rest of the gang." The princess winked rapidly, deftly manipulating her eyepiece's HUD. "Peppermint?"

"Present."

"Sitrep," PB ordered curtly.

There was a moment of unintelligible mumbling as the manservant arranged the pertinent information. "The rifles have been assembled and issued, with briefings progressing smoothly. However, our contacts are reporting that Finn and Jake are progressing slowly with Flame Princess's retinue. Details are spotty, but they may have been attacked by a third party; descriptions match pre-war combat drones, but we're still waiting on confirmation."

"Glob gommit," the gum girl swore. "How'd they get past our instruments? We'd have seen them coming if they came in from space. Hmm..."

Peppermint Butler was uncharacteristically strained. "This is too soon, Princess. We are not ready."

"I know," Bonnie shot back. "We need to brief Finn, ASAP. Pick him up on our spy satellites."

"My lady, communicating with the satellites now could expose them to attack. The enemy's passive detection capabilities are too sensitive, if they are in orbit they will certainly intercept our transmissions."

Bonnibel growled low under her breath. "If they've landed forces, they've already been snooping around long enough to map every satellite we have. Flob their passive sensors; I need Finn, now."

There was no answer, but her HUD lit up with the requested info, a plotted course that lead her to a full strategic picture of a range of several small hills with steep gullies winding between them, surrounded by thick forests on one side and open meadow on the other. Among the hills, four blue markers scurried around in the ditches; when the princess scanned them with her eyes, the computer saw her look and fed her their info, displaying them as recognized targets; Finn and Jake, Flame Princess, and FP's new bodyguard. They were surrounded, forty red markers in the trees behind them, with twenty more spread out along a treeline on the other side of the long clearing.

"Three platoons, my lady," her manservant said. "The groups in pursuit are all-purpose tactical formations, while the platoon in the treeline is a support weapons section. The support units appear to be acting as access relays to their integrated air defense systems. So long as the support drones are live, they can feed the tactical drones sensor data for air-defense operations. All in all, they've got a 100 kilometer detection range. Their pulse cannons can reach out to three km, and their missiles can reach to 50 km. You're facing 60 cannons and 10 surface-to-air launchers with 80 missiles total."

With a sigh, the gum girl shrank the map down to a little widget in the bottom left of her HUD, allowing Peppermint Butler to load to her augmented reality system. The AR system crafted the intercepted radar signals into a coherent threat in the form of a huge red sphere sitting on the horizon like a bloody second sun, reaching 13 km into the sky. At PB's low skimming altitude, the air around her glowed faintly green. This low, the princess would stay below the radar horizon, the imaginary line below which Ooo's curvature blocked ground-based air search radars. By the time they saw her, it'd be too late for them.

"Probably," added an internal voice that Princess Bubblegum brutally squashed.

"Looks nasty, but the skimmer has the munitions I need," she assured her retainer, before scowling. "The boys are about to get totally mugged though, I need to hurry."

With that PB muted her radio, before leaning low on her bike as it tore across the landscape.

Two figures crouched low below a hilltop ridge, slowly creeping up inch by inch. In a soft whisper, one spoke to the other. "So," FP muttered. "What's the plan again?"

Finn didn't mind repeating himself; saying it helped his thought process anyways. "Guy and Jake are acting as a rearguard, they're going to use Jake's stretchy mobility to spring a tricky ambush on the bots down in those hills back there. You and I are going to do reconnaissance on this side, so we can keep you moving towards the Candy Castle. They'll catch up with us."

Okay, got it," FP said sharply. She was no stranger to fighting, but this was more like a small war than the fights she was used to; the robots were both overwhelmingly numerous and utterly relentless, reacting almost instantly with full coordination. The four had been in a fighting retreat for at least an hour, using Jake's stretching to stay ahead while Finn's sharp blue eyes kept watch for their foes behind and plotted safe paths through each piece of terrain. How, FP wasn't sure, but Finn's piercing gaze seemed to be at least as effective as that of their attackers; despite all the twists and turns, Finn seemed to catch every new development before or as it developed. He had been using her as fire support to cover their movements with salvoes of searing magic. FP quickly learned to follow those eyes unerringly, their directions guiding her against targets she couldn't actually see on several occasions.

Carefully, Finn popped his head up, his eyes scanning rapidly as he surveyed the land ahead of him. As FP waited for the last human to start relaying information, she saw him suddenly drop, flattening himself against the side of the ditch, and Phoebe had learned that move well enough by now that Finn didn't need to tell her to mimic it. An all too familiar cacophony filled their ears as bursts of blue bolts streaked through the air and slammed into the ridge, spraying flecks of hot earth around. "How'd they get in front of us?" FP cried above the din.

"I don't know!" Finn responded. "But they're spread out along that treeline so they can all fire on this position together, so they must have been told which way we were going!" He scanned their rear sector, in the direction of their comrades, before barking directions in his general's voice. "Get back up on that last hill and cover Jake and Guy, when they've regrouped with me, turn around and cover our move so we can flank and assault their position!"

FP swallowed hard. It was one of the more complex tasks Finn had given her, and the first time he was leaving her without a bodyguard. "What if they shoot at me?" she asked. She was strong, but Flame Princess was no warrior, and the trust she was forced to place in Finn's tactical acumen scared her more than it did Jake or Guy, who better understood the decisions the boy hero was making with their lives.

Finn winced; Phoebe wouldn't like the answer, he knew. He clapped his old friend on the shoulder, trying to comfort her. "You stay as low as you can, and you shoot them back, harder," he said. "If you need to move to a different spot on the ridge, do it, but you need to force them to aim your way until we can get parallel to their cover and push them off that tree line. As soon as they stop shooting, move up behind our assault and you'll be safe until we can finish rolling them back and get moving again." He tried to force the hardness from his expression. All the plans he'd had for this meeting with the ex-girlfriend had gone straight out the window the moment Jake had launched him, and it'd only been downhill from there.

FP nodded. "And if there's too many dudes in that treeline?" Finn couldn't help but frown. He squeezed FP's shoulder again, as much to comfort himself as to comfort her.

"...Then it's just not our day," he said, and like that, the haze of stress was broken. Phoebe laughed, and then so did Finn, for just a moment. The way he said it made it sound like a rained out picnic, even though she knew it meant that they'd all probably die. And somehow, that made it ok. "Ahh, can it," he ordered when he could speak again, all grins. "And get back up there, we're counting on you."

FP giggled once more, before heading back down the path. "Don't you boys forget about me," she tossed over her shoulder, before clamoring up the hill.

"You can do this, Phoebe. The boys need just a minute to cross that field, and one more to clear a path so we can leave the rest of these things far, far behind. All you need to do is show these bumpkins the biggest fireworks you've got, for two minutes."

Further back, Jake popped out from behind a hill to launch his stretchy mitts, slamming two drones with them. One hand then stretched further to shoo three more away as they crested the hill, sending them tumbling back to the bottom. As Jake formed a lasso and reeled Guy in to pull him out of a tight spot, a torrent of howling, cackling flames rushed past in sheets over their heads, before arcing down to smash the pursuit in a conflagration that that left the struck hillsides covered in furious, roiling firestorms. The clanking mechanical figures failed about in the blaze like blinded animals in a hellpit as their scopes, sensors, and transmitters melted and failed, until a second torrent of magical flame hid them from sight again. "Pretty sure that's Finn and FP's cue for us to regroup," he said with a chuckle. "Are your buns toasted? Because mine are pretty toasted right now."

Guy cracked a grin; the fight saw the two bond surprisingly well, as Guy's piercing spear and Jake's stretching led to the dog hurling the fire-person bodily in what they had dubbed the Long Range Ballistic Kebab Maneuver. "Golden brown," Guy said, and the two chortled gleefully. As they ran up and down the ravines, Finn met them half way, beckoning them to follow as he rushed to the far ridge. They passed by FP, who was still firing on all cylinders as she sent barrage after barrage.

"FP, switch targets on my mark!" Finn called to her between attacks, before turning to the other boys. "Ok, here's the plan. They're dug in all along the next ridge, so FP will suppress while Jake gets the three of us parallel to their position. We overrun them quick and FP will come in right behind us."

It was a tricky predicament; any error in FP's covering fire or the move across the open space and all three of them could be gunned down, but any delay in the subsequent assault on the ridge could leave FP alone with a hoard of drones breathing down her neck. They all recognized the many different ways this could fall through, but none of them complained. "We're commited," Guy said, jerking his head to indicate his royal charge. "You've brought us this far, Finn the Human. Say the word; we of the Fire Kingdom are already in your debt."

Finn grinned like a madman. "Then let's mosey," he said. He turned to Phoebe. "Go!"

29 kilometers away, Princess Bubblegum began her own attack.

Of all the forms of warfare known to Humankind before the Mushroom War, Bonnibel had concluded that the suppression of enemy air defenses was, by far, the most dynamic, the most desperate, and the most intricate. It played like a game of flashlight tag combined with supersonic chicken, with attacking aircraft flying straight into the teeth of the air defenses, sniffing with passive sensors for the targeting emissions being aimed against them. Those emissions were then traced back to the ground sources by specialized weapons, while the air defenses flicked their sensors on and off, relocated after firing to avoid being found, and intercepted incoming missiles with point defense weapons; this was just the basic theory. Since its first iteration, things had gotten even more complex, but PB's research was more than thorough.

The bike's twin forward prongs each opened a bay door, the rotary launchers within test cycling and coming back green in her eyepiece. First she launched twice, the munitions streaking out ahead of her. They were decoy missiles, equipped with transmitters that made them appear on radar as threatening aircraft loaded with lethal payloads. Then they popped up, gaining altitude until they entered the red AR curtain representing the enemy's threat zone. They marked in her HUD as transmitting, and just a moment later her display pulsed with several 'pings', as active sensors aimed their radars directly at the offending objects. As the decoys relayed the signals that the enemy aimed their way, PB rippled off a salvo of missiles. They shot out, lower to the ground than even the princess dared to fly. As enemy missiles rose into the sky to streak towards her decoys, her skimmerbike's sensors fed her own missiles updates, adding the ground launches to her target list, and she loosed another salvo. The micromissiles would impact just as the princess popped up and made a direct attack run. They were all tiny things, each as long as one of Bonnibel's bare feet, but the little missiles were potent and intelligent. They had a Mach 3 boost function used to pounce quickly before targets could relocate and long range to keep PB out of danger; at this short distance, that flight time would allow her missiles to make complex maneuvers to avoid interception, as well as loiter around the area to search for any lost targets. The weapons could be networked infinitely, in groups of any number up to the maximum weapons capacity. The gum girl had launched ten weapons in two salvoes, each swarm of five separately coordinating to strike from multiple angles. She exhaled as the spread of weapons pulled away, watched them pop up at the last second before activating their terminal boosters and diving back down, and took a deep breath as her interface told her 'seven kills, one intercepted, two retargeting' in a calm, neutral tone. Her HUD highlighted the target that was no longer covered. With a well aimed wink she cued the skimmer's pulse cannons, and, in a rare outburst of anger, roared what the humans who wrote her books had once said when they played this game.

"You've gotta be shitting me!"

In retrospect, Finn would never be able to remember exactly what happened that day, in that hour, in those few heated minutes. As the years wound on, the day and almost everything that had come before it would fade bit by bit. Yet there were some memories that would never fade, even in his twilight years; his feet pounding across the earth as the sky fell right over his head, and then how the world seemed to crack where the sky landed, till up and down dissolved into thin air and the ground rushed up to kiss him goodnight.

By the time they all made it back to the castle, they were all completely exhausted. Finn made it first, Princess Bubblegum laying him astride her skimmer bike, strapping him in, and ordering it to return home with him. She walked home with the others; Finn was received by Peppermint Butler and taken directly to PB's lab.

"He's in rough shape," she said mostly to Jake as she ordered the ride back to base. "But he'll be fine. Peppermint Butler will see to it." Jake growled; whether it was at her or otherwise, Bonnie wasn't sure, and she didn't ask. The magical stretching dog left them all behind in long strides, and Princess Bubblegum arrived at her laboratory later to find Jake practically wrestling her butler in an attempt to enter.

"Hey, hey!" she barked, pushing herself between the two in spiteful defiance of her relative lack of muscle, till they had no choice but to stop or risk hurting her. "I just performed an air attack that I've only read about using completely virgin weapon systems to save every single being on this rock and my day isn't over, I have literally zero time or energy for this... This bullshit!"

Jake shot Peppermint a confused look at the odd language, to which the hard candy could only shrug in turn.

"Sorry," Jake apologized, sobered by the display. "I just gotta see my little bro, Princess. Please."

PB gave Jake a long, hard look, but eventually relented. "Alright, but I'm warning you," the princess granted with a tired sigh as she fished in a pocket for reading glasses and removed her eyepiece. "None of this is gonna be pretty."

Jake nodded, and the princess led him in. It was a wide room, full of a legion of different devices that Jake couldn't begin to identify, but the princess lead him directly into the furthest corner. There, as they stepped through a break in the instrumentation, Jake found his baby brother. Finn was lying on a bed encased fully in a glass canister, various tubes running across the boy and into him. "Don't touch the glass," Bonnie said. "It displays his medical status and allows me to control his care remotely. He'll be in an induced coma in there for the next day or so; it'll keep him safe, alive, and out cold until his internal organs are up and running again." Jake took a moment to digest it, and when he looked to her again, PB continued.

"Jake, I need to ask you how much you know about Finn," she stated, slumping down into a rolling chair and stroking her throbbing temples. "As a human, I mean."

"Well, he's tough and strong. Smart too, in a dumb way. Always aware; the kid sees, hears, feels, smells, whatever, everything that goes on around him. Maybe not all of it, but he always gets you with one of them. He eats a ton and burns it fast. He's always thinking, always observing. But other than that, I'm not sure. There's nothing to compare him to; we never found any parents, any other humans at all." Jake seemed heartbroken, as serious and somber as PB had ever seen him. "Some people, who might have been once upon a time, but… Nothing like him."

"This… This is going to be hard to stomach." Jake nodded, and the princess continued. "As you said, Finn is the last human left; nobody has ever found any others, not since the bombs fell. But there are other places you can look. Books, digital documents, other info sources. I've read a lot, Jake. Really. I've read mountains of textbooks on human biology alone. And Finn barely resembles it, when you get under the skin."

"What... What're you on about?" Jake demanded incredulously. Bonnie steeled herself, and gave the loyal pooch the most honest answer she could.

"His bones have been generating an outer coating of tungsten carbide since he turned 14. I've got no idea how his body is doing it; normal humans don't metabolize tungsten in any form, but it makes his skeleton... Well, you saw for yourself how much ordnance fell on those hills, and not a single bone in him has so much as a microfracture. All his injuries are to his soft tissues and abdominal organs. His accelerated healing is also on display, as you can see that most of his superficial injuries are already gone. His nerves are superconductive at his normal body temperature; it's hard to measure without a real human to compare to, but..."

Jake raised one finger. "Finn is not fake," he said, almost snarling. PB sighed, nodding her head in silent agreement, holding both hands up in a plea for patience.

"No, he's not, but his nervous system as a whole operates around seven times as fast as a baseline human should. His immune system engineers enhanced superbugs and then inoculates itself with them, every muscle and connective tissue he's got has five to ten times the normal fiber density, his eyes have enough rods and cones for three people plus retinal nerve implants that I'm pretty sure are digitally-imaging infrared sensors, his deep lung tissues have an enhanced capillary interface, his cardiac musculature is insane... I could go on for hours, but suffice it to say that nearly every aspect of Finn's physiology has been dramatically enhanced. Literally, the only parts of him that have been left unaltered are his overall human layout and, oddly enough, his reproductive system."

"So Finn... Finn wasn't…" Jake choked up in disbelief before he could finish. PB completed the sentence for him, feeling her heart break a little as she pulled the hound into a tight hug.

"No, he wasn't born. At least not like this." The gum girl said softly. "He was built."