:;Checkmate

“T minus five hundred.”

It was the end of the war. Cheques and Balances knew that in a few minutes he would be dead. He had been doomed from the start, but only now had that outcome reached unity in his predictive algorithm. He was afraid. He knew that wasn’t an appropriate emotion for a machine. It was the human one. Importantly, it was what she expected of him as a person. So, somewhere deep in his autonomous code base a decision was made that he should feel fear. Because of her.

If she was also afraid, he couldn’t see it. Her residual self-image was so much different from real life. Younger. Lither. More vibrant. She twirled Enthalpy nervously in her hand, looking in all directions- chocolate and anti-chocolate, vanilla and anti-vanilla, strawberry and anti-strawberry. He still didn’t really know why she was so natural in this environment. The how had been so fascinating.

“Tell me again what in the nine hells happened to our backup,” She growled. She paced.

“This fight is doomed. All other resources have been redirected. “ He was too tense to sigh, “You don’t need to be here for this. “

“Bullshit.” She was so obstinate. “You’re my daemon, and I’ll kill the bitch if she thinks she’d going to touch you.”

“You were going to try and kill her anyway. Hows that been working out for you?”

She gave him a glare that would turn a lesser machine into stone. Yeah, she was pissed. It still came as a surprise when Enthalpy darted out and cut him. She squeezed out thirteen drops of blood.

“What the fuck?” Okay, he didn’t really expect an answer. Nor did he have time to really push it. All his systems were gearing up for war and its aftermath.

She flicked the first twelve into flowers. The last, she opened the window and dropped into the mass of ice lilies there. They had been growing, layer by layer, protecting and hiding this place. The blue white lilies turned a pale red.

Cheques barely had time to register and integrate this change before, “Contact!”

The woman took off like a shot. All that nervous energy was released in one go, on one vector. That vector was “out.” All those red flowers set off a laser light show, blasting spiders and infrastructure deep into enemy territory.

Cheques black spiders were fighting a losing battle with Celestia’s own far superior white ones. They were outnumbered and outgunned, even with the unexpected artillery of the laser lilies. It hardly mattered that his network was made only to fight hers. He was sacrificing too large webs just to slow her down.

His woman burst from the initial salvo like a bullet from a water balloon. She ran across the web with reckless speed, setting it on fire behind her. Enthalpy was a blur, swung in wide arcs. White spiders splattered as she cleared a path. The few tens of thousands of milliseconds this fight would last was not enough for them to adapt. Instead, they herded her by sheer weight of numbers into a dead end web.

She jumped, launching herself off the silvery strands and deeper into the heart of her enemy. She landed in front of a thing. It had been human once, she thought. It stood on hind legs, and had a face. There the similarities ended. It had a pony’s head, and hooved limbs, but a pigs face. It had a tail that split to a million fiber optic ends. On its tortured torso were far, far too many limbs. Some looked stuck on, useless curiosities. Some held leads to the countless pigs, spiders, and less identifiable beasts that infested this web. Tentacles flailed in reaction to her presence.

She was too far for a direct slash at the monster, so she pierced the skull of a nearby pig. A black little spider, heretofore an unnoticed hitchhiker, slid down her sword and into the swine, turning it black. The abomination was quick, though. Tentacles came at her in the blink of an eye, before she could capitalize on her conversion . She jumped again. It was short, barely getting her to the next strand over. This didn’t slow it down. Grasping tendrils circled around her, as the beast spread its limbs through most of the nearby net.

As she awkwardly fended off those abominable limbs, Cheques came to her rescue. She saw him from the corner of her eye, vectoring in anti-strawberry. He followed the wake she had left between webs, and he came in swinging with his one good arm.

He looked like shit. One arm was held against his chest, obviously broken. His face was smashed in, his nose at an unnatural angle. And the blood. Good gods, the blood.

“RUN!” He obviously meant to flee, retreat, save herself. He left her an opening. She took it, but dove deeper. She bounded against gravity from web to web, picking up speed and juking erratically. She was racing, not only for her own life, but for her friends and for the worlds. She knew she must be close, for she felt the heat of the core ahead of her.

Then it was there. The enemy wrapped around the pulsing heart of the world like a parasitical fungus, past a wide moat above her. It was far too far to leap, and she was out of time. She could feel him dying behind her. The world went dark and far away.

“Get away from him you BITCH!”

She didn’t recognize the voice as her own. All she knew was she was flying up, daring physics to oppose her sheer force of will. Physics was winning. She tossed a rose, pushing superhuman energy into it. It rocketed down toward the surface, blasting a great hole in the world, and she was barely propelled up. She did it again, and again, inching her way to that white horse with murder on her mind. She fully intended to kill with her bare hands.

Then she ran out of roses. Gravity cruelly and inexorably took hold of her. She saw herself spin, imparting all of her momentum into her sword and throwing it into the heart of the world. From her faraway place, the red haze cleared just enough to realize what she had done. Enthalpy would pierce the world, unleashing it’s slowly burning fire all at once. The energy would pop the earth like a soap bubble, or burn it to ash and freeze it in nuclear winter. As for herself, newton’s third law took her. She was falling into the hole she had blasted into the world, and it was deep enough she knew not where it ended. She watched Enthalpy, her arrow of death, arc gracefully at her enemy in that; it’s promise of mutual destruction.

It missed.

Lacking sufficient momentum it turned in its apogee and bounced its hilt against the last web, falling back to reunite with its master. Celestia, like a manic cartoon spider, reacted instantly, growing her web to catch it. The mad scientist saw the relative speeds, a quick calculation showing the blade to fall in enemy hands before it could be retrieved. That could not be. Without thought or regret, she triggered self-destruct.

end part 2

Author's Note

Unedited chapter posted. I'm thinking I'll need to add detail before it's finished.