Carnival - A LitRPG Apocalypse

Water is naturally an insulator. It doesn’t conduct electricity very well at all. The thing you need to do to make water more conductive is to introduce electrolytes. Like salt.

Salt is one of those annoying compounds whose solubility in water doesn’t vary much by pressure. Saturating water with salt still makes it much more conductive than pure water though. If you apply a large enough charge it doesn’t really matter anyway and John was planning on applying a very large charge. He pulled up Evie’s channel on the comms.

“Kiddo, can I borrow you for a minute? Need you to zap some stuff,” he said.

“Sure Dad. The swarms have fallen back to reform. Should be another hour before they mass again. Where are you?” Evie’s voice came back to him, deeper and more mature than when she was a girl. He still wasn’t used to his first daughter being so grown up. Ryn was going the same way far too quickly for his peace of mind.

“South of the Line in SA. An ant nest needs sorting out but we need to hold them for half an hour. Are you sure you’re free to help? The Wall can’t be left weak.”

“South of the Line? Yeah we’re good here, there’s a bunch of level thirties running about and a few of them are decent. You remember Maximus? The Italian bloke? He’s really come into his own since he hit thirty. Dude’s a wasp killing machine!” she chuckled.

John blipped his daughter in from the other side of the world. Evie appeared wearing her Carnival armour and summoned a disc of force to stand on. She was now almost John’s height, a point she was only too happy to repeatedly remind him about, and her flame red hair was hidden by her silver mask and helmet.

“What’s with the fire hoses?” she asked, moving over to where John was hovering.

“New trick. Pulling ocean water from the Trench. The pressure drives it through like a power washer.” An aquatic monster the size of a bus fell through one of his portals and began thrashing its hundreds of stubby paddle-like limbs as it started to suffocate in the air. “And we get some random stuff as well. It’s salt water so a good barrage should zap everything and its mum. Hopefully.”

Evie offered him a high five which he reluctantly slapped before she spun down lower. John took a moment to blip back to Puerto Salazar and grab Starfall who was less than pleased at having his smoke break interrupted.

“What the- Oh. Hi Stormwitch! Nice to see you again, you look wonderful as ever!” John smirked behind his mask at Starfall's futile efforts to charm his daughter. Evie had made it plain she had little interest in serious relationships and was entirely dedicated to preparing for the Void invasion. Many suitors came calling and he’d only had to blip a couple of them briefly into low orbit to save them from Evie declining their overtures with a blast of lightning. He hadn’t really had to put them in low orbit for a second but he found it prevented repeat offenders.

Starfall flew up to hover near Evie and began talking to her over the wind. John was too far away to hear what he said but it seemed to be about coordinating their attacks and not about merging their houses and founding a dynasty, thank goodness.

“I’m set, Dad. Are we good to go?” Evie asked over the local sweeper channel.

“Stormwitch is here?” demanded Unterbrecher.

“I sure am, Breaker. How’s it going?”

“I’m good thanks Evie. I’m back at Roto, John can you get me?”

The moniker Stormwitch was perhaps a misnomer. She didn’t control the weather, despite fishing for that kind of power when she reached her class two enhancement. What she did that earned her the name on the Bob-net was turn a blue sky into a torrent of electrical death across a vast area. Bolts of lightning began to fall, walking away from the area the torrents of salt water had already inundated. The lightning threw up blasts of debris where it landed and arced across the running water, stunning and parboiling the ants struggling to fight the current.

Beams of light began to fall from the sky, following the lines of Evie’s lightning bolts and flashing the water and dirt into steam. John switched to a spectrum that was unimpeded by the dust and emissions that were rapidly turning the ground below into a quagmire of skin-melting gases and bullet-fast debris.

“Now that’s how we do it!” yelled Starfall with a fist pump.

“Anything else Dad?” asked Evie in a bored voice. The devastation stretched several kilometres in front of the pair and had turned a stretch of untouched jungle into a mangled landscape.

“No, that should hold them until the reinforcements arrive. You want to go back to the Wall?” he asked.

“Please and thank you,” Evie replied.

“Are you coming home at the weekend? Ryn essed-up so we were going to have a little celebration.”

“I’ll be there Dad. Took the squirt long enough!”

“Yep. She did a good job overall but now she’s in Jintak’s hands for early training!” he chuckled.

“Oof. That’s rough. See you then!” Evie had experienced her fair share of combat training at the hands of the aliens herself.

John blipped her back to Aksu Prefecture just east of Kyrgyzstan to resume her role of monitoring that part of the Wall.

As the dust slowly began to settle Starfall flew over to where John was perched a kilometre above the ground. His mask was, as usual, transparent and John fought down his annoyance at the man's inability or unwillingness to accept Evie’s rejections. John liked the guy overall, he was one of the good ones but he was a little too stubborn for John.

A lot of Signatories didn’t really give up their involvement in their factions' politics. To be fair most of them retained a connection in some form or another despite the "official" separation. John himself still maintained his home within the territory of Wayfaire. However he had never been part of the ruling clique and had often butted heads with them over the years, making his separation from the faction much more straightforward than it was for most powerful people.

Having grown to power seeing to the interests of “their” people many heroes felt a perfectly natural attachment to their former group. Some factions had it worse than others in that regard. Almost none of the Imperium fighters were trusted enough to be considered members in good standing, likewise the Inheritors in the south of England. Mindscar was a perfect example; having previously been in control of the Inheritors she was never able to be entirely impartial and never qualified for Bob and Pete’s enhancements.

“I think she’s warming up to me!” he chuckled, earning a noncommittal grunt from John. “You can’t deny we’d be a great match!”

“She’d eat you up and shit you out, Fred. Evie is a very dedicated woman. You should have a chat with her ex-boyfriends. I think they have a support group or something.”

“They formed a supp- never mind. I see what you’re doing! Protective dad trying to test how committed I am! Well I’m all in sir. I’m sure a word from you-” Starfall began.

“No, Fred. One thing a father learns early on is not to get involved in that kind of shit. Occasionally terrifying a new boyfriend is acceptable, as is dealing with the aftermath of a breakup, but beyond that it’s her life. If you want to make something work with her, having her dad put in a good word for you is… well it’s retarded mate.”

Starfall scowled slightly, highlighting his chiselled chin and superb cheekbones. “But-”

“Fred. Look. You got your Essence a long time after she did. She’d been fighting and levelling for six years before you got your power. You’re a good bloke and a decent fighter, I’d have no problem with you and her getting together, but asking me to act on your behalf is fucking crazy dude.”

“Fair enough!” he grinned. “It was worth a shot anyway. Are you still tapping me for Ryn’s preliminary caster training?”

“Yeah. When you’re free it would be appreciated. How about we focus on the swarm below us? I can keep these portals open forever but at this point I'm salting the earth across a huge swath of jungle and I am starting to feel a bit like one of the big bad corporations of old due to all the ecological damage,” John muttered, eager to change the topic of conversation.

Starfall stretched out his hands and began calling down beams of light that obliterated any knots of ants that were working together to push against the torrent.

“They’re trying to move around the hoses,” John said, pointing to the sides of the man-made tsunami where the ants were reforming and trying to creep around the obstacle. More columns of light fell, smashing the bugs into the air and disrupting their efforts.

They kept up their deluge and barrage for another fifteen minutes, destroying thousands of bugs in the process. If they had found one of the main nests the horde of insectile death below them was just the tip of the iceberg. The main nests kept hundreds of thousands, even millions, of workers and fighters secure beneath the surface. And the little buggers always had escape tunnels to ferret queens away through.

The ants were an ambulatory plague of chitin and mandibles, consuming all the animals and monsters in their immediate area and then expanding by necessity. Whilst most tribulations stayed in one place and gradually expanded as new spawn pushed older spawn outwards the ants were a different issue. They were primed, as far as the Accordance could tell, to subsume the whole of South America over the next five years and no one had seen the main queen that had spawned them.

“John, want to play catch and bring the K.E.W.s onto target?” asked Bob.

“Where do you want the exit portal?”

“Portals. I want four of them. Four projectiles a piece. I’m flagging the receiving points on your HUD and where I want you to put the exits.”

Green spheres appeared before him, forming a square around the entrance to the nest, and in the top of his vision he could see four red markers. He glanced up and the markers became spheres themselves, only these were a third of the way to the moon.

“Gravity is our friend,” John muttered as he blipped up into the sky to catch the ballistic missiles falling into Earth's gravity well. In a single port he left Earth behind, appearing a couple of hundred thousand kilometres above the surface. He opened the portals as requested and then blipped back down to Starfall. As the blue light appeared above the entrance to the nest, foreshadowing some really big explosions, John moved himself and his colleague a couple of kilometres up and away.

“Thanks John, I hate being close to ground zer-” the impacts blasted the words away and made them both reel as the pressure waves from the bombardment washed over them. Four mushroom clouds rose up, merging into one nightmarish marker of destruction as they coiled around each other and the winds teased the dust into hellish shapes.

“Cap troopers incoming!” said Bob as lines of fire began to burn across the sky, focussed on the centre of the cloud’s base. “Need portals back to Salazar and Roto. We’ve got troopers and mechs ready to come through and begin clearing the way underground.”

Fighting the ants underground was a losing proposition. John had seen videos on the old internet of people pouring liquid metal into hives and the weirdly organic sculptures they ended up with when they cleared the dirt, and flash fried insects, off the cooled material. They really needed something like that. Maybe a portal into an active volcano that dumped lava down into the nest? He made a note to run the idea past Bob.

It had to be better than the brutal up close fighting that was going to happen as the humans and their machines pushed deeper into the nest. These weren’t defenceless bugs and their intricate nest designs provided plenty of opportunities for ambushes, deadfalls and traps as the humans fought their way deeper into the earth. John didn’t envy the poor bastards filing through his portals at the edge of the ruins the sweepers had made.

All surviving nationalities were represented in the fighters gathering below him. Some places had been lost to the monsters, much of sub Saharan Africa was monster land now, despite the efforts of heavily supported coastal communities hanging on. Most of China and northern India were the province of the Wasps and it was too dangerous to go there even for the strongest of the Accordance teams.

Despite these setbacks the remnants of humanity had largely come together, even Chingis Reborn who now dominated the Asian steppes, and they offered up soldiers to hold where humanity felt it stood a chance of winning- or at least a chance of stemming the hordes of monsters that flowed out from those lands. It wasn’t entirely altruistic. Once you passed a certain level, usually in the early twenties, one of the best ways to level up was to be on a Line or the Wall, playing King Canute and trying to hold back the tide. Almost everyone who signed the Accords these days had survived a few years holding the Line.

The comets of flame fell and smashed down in the centre of the amalgamating mushroom clouds, disgorging their B-1945 cap troopers who began hunting for an access point in the choking fog of dust and particles. Actinic flashes flared, temporarily blinding the less experienced Line troops whereas their more experienced colleagues had their visor set for maximum reactive shading.

John watched as lines formed and columns of troops began marching into the maelstrom he and Bob had made, following their instrumentation to connect up with the advanced elements.

“They look like ants from up here,” muttered Starfall.

“I guess,” John replied quietly. “From high enough up all species look pretty much the same.”

“Going to bring in the big guns?” demanded Unterbrecher.

“Where are you?” asked John.

“Back at Roto supervising the jungen und mädchen coming through. They don’t need me here though!” John blipped back to El Roto and got a bead on his German counterpart before blipping back to his overwatch position.

“Are you thinking großes aufsehen, like usual?” John asked, suppressing a smile.

“Ja, mein kamerad!” Breaker sounded far too happy about what he was asking John to do.

John blipped Breaker in, half a kilometre up, directly above where Bob’s drones had ascertained the entrance to the nest was. With a Germanic bellow of delight that carried all the way up to John and Starfall, and would have put the fear of god in him if he was an ant, the metallic man briefly formed an aerofoil to right himself then morphed into something along the lines of a finned torpedo. As his new form cut through the air he did something with his momentum. Both Breaker and Bob had tried to explain how Breaker's power worked to John. Metallic flesh was pretty straightforward and John could wrap his head around that. Brendan had alien copper for skin so it hadn’t been anything new to him. Shapeshifting was also a known quantity, his dog could do it after all. The manipulation of momentum was nothing he had encountered before.

John could change an object, or persons, momentum when he teleported them. It had been the basis of his first, clumsy, form of flight. Breaker could boost his own momentum, or make it disappear completely and John had no idea that could work in a universe with conservation of energy. In the end Bob had just told him it got shunted into a parallel reality and John gave up looking for a deeper understanding. Magic was about the best way to sum up most of what they could do anyway.

Within a moment Breaker went from a falling bullet to a silver streak as he flashed down to the ground, throwing up yet another cloud of dust and disappearing into the nest with a happy yell. The sound of brutal violence and gleeful German battle cries echoed over the comms for a few seconds before Breaker remembered to turn his mic off.

“Crazy Kraut bastard,” said Starfall fondly.