A/N: So I'm back for the time being, I'd be a fool to promise regular updates, but I do intend to wrap this up and finish the fic in the next couple arcs or so. Don't mind the cliffies, they're well planned out.

Angry Bird 8.5

February 24, 2011, Train Yards - Brockton Bay, 12:25 AM

"Lisa: [urgent] Okay, it's definitely trying to build something there, let's have the blasters focus there."

Good, they had it handled. I wrapped some mana around my hand, made it invisible and started scanning through it. No blue glow, clean scan results, I wrote a quick macro to absorb all the incoming photons and record them, my hand turned into a black void and I started getting a stream of data.

"Lisa: [relieved] Okay, the scanner is sufficiently damaged, it would take a while to rebuild it."

I felt a few spikes in healing costs again.

"Taylor: [alarmed] It's not happy! Aveek you just rezzed a few people who were definitely pancaked from random telekinetic attacks. It's shooting in the wild now! I'll try to highlight any telekinetic activity that I sense with my bugs. "

Well, happy to save lives, or resurrect, whatever is needed. Anyway, I could do without the black hole effect, I was catching the radiation on the surface of my hand anyway. The next version was to take each photon, extrapolate its path and use radiation conversion to emit a copy of it exactly where it would have come out if my hand weren't there.

The black hand vanished. It was like my arm just ended at the wrist. I think I had it!

"Lisa: [concerned] Okay, taylor's strategy is working, we can see the huge fly swatter telekinetic panels trying to clear the area. Eidolon is using a shielding power to try and block them, but people still are getting hit sometimes. Your healing is mostly fixing it, but I don't think this is sustainable, it's trying to rebuild the scanner again. 6 more minutes and we'll lose Brockton Bay to quarantine. Do we have any solutions or do we abandon our city?"

That's true, the healing costs were still spiking a bit, but there was just one more thing to test.

"Aveek: [distracted] Almost there!"

I applied mana on myself with the intent to mimic all passing radiation, and made the mana invisible.

SKILL CREATED

A skill has been created through a special action.

True Invisibility: (Active) Lvl. 1 - 8%

You cannot be seen, by human or machine.

Note, exotic particle and quantum foam detection may still find you.

Cost: 270MP/sec.

Skill XP gained. +1 level up.

You're back to level 27

Oof, that took most of my regen, but it is sustainable, and it'd get cheaper as it levelled. I'd need to watch my mana output. That level-up was hard earned. I had kept a tight leash on Gamer's Mind to maintain a fine balance between jittery nerves and floaty calmness, both could be distracting. I switched on True Invisibility and exited the ID.

"Aveek: [hopeful] Okay, can anybody see me?"

"Taylor: [intrigued] I can tell from the bugs on you. But you're not on the camera feeds."

"Lisa: [surprised] Same, my power can guess from your supposed route but otherwise you're invisible. This has potential. Do you have a plan?"

"Aveek: [scheming] The beginnings of one, but I need to find a few other things out, I want to head over to the drone, I'll need to keep the healing and zizproofing only within my range around the drone, you'll need to organise the attack based on that. Give me the signal."

"Taylor: [deliberative] Give me 30 seconds."

"Lisa: Analysis tells me the whole body is just an exotic container, but from its behaviour it's trying to avoid damage to the base of its left wing, see what you can figure out. Meanwhile"

"Aveek: Acknowledged."

I saw one of the huge flyswatter telekinetic panels light up in fireflies and begin to make a sweep, then slamming into a green forcefield just before it hit a flying cape shooting lasers at Ziz, the green thing was Eidolon's, I took scans of everything I could as usual.

Soon the multi coloured firefly paths started leading all the capes out of the action area, except for a few highly durable flying blasters and alexandria packages, who started getting closer to the drone. Only Eidolon and Alexandria herself, who were immune to the scream anyway and hadn't needed my zizproofing yet, stayed in the midrange. Taylor's route for me made a last circuit of the leaving capes and then headed inward. The fight of the flyswatters intensified.

"Taylor: Go Aveek."

So I went, dodging through the debris field was not really difficult because none of it reacted to me, so as long as I timed it right, I could pass. Soon I reached the body of the drone, I went and touched the left wing, to see if it could feel the touch. No response. Good, I sat down on top of the wing joint, healing and zizproofing macros running, now the load on it much reduced because there were far fewer capes left and there were no direct attacks from the drone reaching them.

I did not try to scan it anymore, that'd be a waste of mana, instead, I created a thin tendril of mana, and started extending into the base of the wing, scanning just inside the tendril.

The matter inside was a crystalline structure, definitely not a known material but it was made of known elements, nothing outside the periodic table, but as the tendril kept going in, space seemed to shrink, the atoms were packed much tighter than possible, in fact the tendril took enough mana to go a metre deep, but reached barely a few centimetres, so this was dimensional compression. I kept pumping mana, all of my remaining regen into it, and made the tendril thinner and thinner. The scans told me the deeper I went, the more compressed it was. Technically my tendril had extended almost 200 yards, but it was still barely 8 inches in. I kept going, trying to comprehend the physics behind it.

"Lisa: [worried] 3 minutes left."

I didn't have a solution yet, my idea was to try to disrupt the compression or damage the structure somehow, but the secret of endbringer durability was clear, it was just incredibly more dense the deeper it got, and definitely regenerated by replacing outer layers from the much denser stock inside. I didn't know how to counteract that yet. I sent the results to the girls.

"Taylor: [awed] That's a pretty solid defence indeed."

"Lisa: [Excited] go deeper, there has to be a core!"

Time for some drastic measures, I needed more mana, I might have long term gripes about this decision, I had 30 free stat points to allocate, I used 21 of them to push my WIS to 75.

My regen gushed, despite maintaining invisibility, I was regenerating more than 100 points a second, I pushed it all into the tendril.

It ate and ate mana, almost a minute later, the tendril was a figurative mile and a literal foot and a half long, it touched something new.

This was real exotic matter, I could tell that it was orders of magnitude more compressed than the preceding layer, the material was still crystalline but the atoms sort of were half-there-half-not and electrons, photons, even atoms kept popping in and out of reality? I delved deeper into that scan, spooling as many mental threads as I could, I pumped 1000 mana, about a third of my pool into the end of the tendril. It managed to create a ping pong ball sized scan area, and spilled out sort of laterally out of reality, which I could tell would have been summed to roughly a city sized sphere in a normal single space. This was intriguing, it was actually not just compressed in space, it was spread out across multiple universes, like multiple IDs layered on each other, somewhat similar to how Taylor's and my multitasking skill layered multiple versions of our brains. This must be the core!

"Lisa: [anxious] I'm sharing the timeout clock with all of you."

78s left to quarantine

Okay, the time for experimentation was over, the time for annihilation was nigh. I shared my plan with Lisa and Taylor.

"Lisa: [hopeful / concerned] This should work, but that explosion might have unknown consequences."

"Taylor: [determined] I'll ask Eidolon how strong his shield is."

57s left to quarantine

I didn't have time to dally, I pushed 2000 more mana, almost all of my remaining pool, into the end of the scan area, but this time I didn't ask it to spread or scan, I shaped the mana, into the inverted cone of a shaped charge, as deep as I could go into the core, which was barely a couple inches. I then injected the intent into the mana - once detached, it would stay inert for 30 seconds, then convert into antimatter, about 2 pounds worth. I did not make it spill out across all the billions of layers of reality the core was spread through, it would make the explosion too thin, I made it spread across about 40 million of them, it would still be a ton of TNT concentrated in the space of a thimble for each layer. I messaged a final confirmation.

"Aveek: [cautious] I'm going for it."

"Taylor: [cautious] wait, incoming connection from Eidolon."

49s left to quarantine

I un-inventoried my armband and accepted the call.

"Maker. Eidolon here, I will need to amplify my shield, I will drop the power that blocks the Simurgh's scream, you'll need to do that for me. Are you up for it?"

"Confirmed, I can, how much time do you need to form your shield once you drop the power?"

"5 seconds."

38s left to quarantine

"Aveek: Taylor, ask Dragon to share a 29 second timer with Eidolon."

I confirmed the intent on the mana bomb, and flew away from the drone.

29s left to detonation

"Done, do you have the timer?" I asked Eidolon.

"Yes."

"I will apply my power on you at T - 10. It'll give you a 5 second buffer to switch and apply the shield."

"Good."

Taylor was quickly clearing out the space, the capes all flying away. Till now, Eidolon had never come into my range, because he didn't need Zizproofing. For me, it was just a matter of flying out of the debris field and bringing Eidolon in my range. The macro worked automatically, I timed it just right.

10s left to detonation

"Eidolon, you're proof."

For the first time, the serene face of the feathered menace changed, it bent its neck to look at Eidolon, forehead crinkled in confusion. The debris field started falling.

"Lisa: [gobsmacked] What the fuck!?"

5s left to detonation

"Taylor: [confused / elated] The scream has stopped for everyone in the bunker!"

A shield sprang up around the drone, a green upward open parabola.

3s left to detonation

The drone started moving upwards. Still looking at Eidolon. Some of the debris started smashing down on the ground.

2s left to detonation

"Lisa: [Astonished] Aveek! Check out the drone!"

I Observed it.

Forethought Prime / Terror Drone 3 / Simurgh

Title: Mindfully Mindless

Class: hacked alien

Level: ?

HP: 30M

SP: 4.7Q/5Q (parasite Shard Points)

STR: ?

VIT: ?

DEX: ?

INT: ?

WIS: 0

CHA: ?

Desc: This terror drone is a parasite-brainwashed alien being deployed in the theme of a telepathic angel.

Powers:

Telemetry - Can perceive at an atomic level of detail in a planetary scale.

Telekinesis - Can move things at distances of tens of kilometres - precision increases with proximity.

Extrapolation - Can predict future probabilities at great precision.

Status Effects: Reprogrammed (Parasite), Theme-bound (Shard), Trojan Infected (Forethought Prime)

I quickly ran a diff between this and the previous result.

1s left to detonation

There was only one difference between this result and the previous - this was missing Motive-bound (Shard)

What did that mean?

The drone kept gently flying upwards, most of the debris had dropped to the ground, making a huge ruckus. The green shield was also moving up, Eidolon tracking it probably to keep the drone at the focus of the parabola.

Os - Detonation