Antumbra - A Lost Cause

Grey - Chapter Seventy Two

Arva felt her mind get sucked back into the real world, her and Marcus releasing each other as both of them recoiled from the intensity of the memory. The feeling was unlike anything she experienced, deeper than the connection between her and her machine had ever been. It was almost as though she had her mind turned inside out and back, and the trip left her trembling with exhilaration, as if all her senses flared up at once.

"Now..." Marcus panted, no doubt experiencing the same rush she did, "you understand them as I do."

"It was..." Arva's voice wavered as her jaw trembled uncontrollably. The vision was so vivid, so real, she felt as if she had actually been there.

"Hell." Marcus finished her thought. "No other word describes it."

"These machines," Arva looked at Antumbra's hands, "were designed to be unstoppable in combat, ending wars through overwhelming force, and if they couldn't-"

"They would simply lay waste to everything," Marcus mused, and Penumbra held a hand to its head. "End war by ending it all."

"Why?" Arva asked, "that's not a solution. You don't fix a problem by just... deleting it."

"Not only that," Marcus said, "but it didn't work. Those on the Habitats survived, safe in the clouds as the world burned."

"Or maybe they had some sliver of a conscience." Arva mused, "and knew the Habitats would shelter some of humanity." She recalled the man with the silver hair, Antumbra's original pilot, and his guilt and hesitation at the moment the three machines combined their power. She felt the man's emotions, not his thoughts, and felt incredible pain and despair. Arva could only speculate what he must have lost to agree to such an act of genocide, but it was the same pain she felt over Katalin, magnified beyond her capacity to empathize. It left Arva feeling bleak, but gradually her own emotions returned as she remembered what Marcus had done, and was still planning to do.

"Whether it was their intention or not," he said, "they did not succeed. Humanity persisted, war returned, hatred and subjugation festered and produced more conflict. And the world suffered from the event, scarred and barren. Even 'deleting' the problem didn't work. It was inevitable."

"Then why?" Arva asked, "you know it solved nothing, and you're trying to repeat that same mistake anyway?"

"But I'm not." Penumbra held up a finger, pointing towards the sky. "I won't destroy the whole world, just those who deserve it. The Habitat, and humanity, will be strategically cleansed using the energy of these two suits. All that will be left are Hybrids, and without the humans to bleed the last of the land and hold us down, we can finally begin to grow." Penumbra began to walk forward, but Arva was still too out of it to move her machine. It felt heavier, like Antumbra was only partially active, but Marcus stopped just short of her, beneath the hole in the ceiling her suit had made.

"You saw how the energy worked." Arva said, hoping to gain a few more seconds as she felt her suit returning to normal. "It spreads and burns everything! There's no strategy involved."

"Untrue," Marcus replied. "I know how the machines work, and the effects of the reaction can be controlled. That same reaction is constantly being produced on a small scale within these machines, with every machine, even the Habitat itself. However the Umbra lineage has a unique feature: it can turn this reaction from a slow burn into a condensed, fusion bomb. Contained within a powerful electromagnetic field the energy is built up and, eventually, released in a catastrophic wave."

"And how do you control that?" Arva could feel Antumbra was nearly back to full function, she just needed another second or two.

"It's quite fascinating," Penumbra's posture relaxed as if eager to explain, only to turn its head to her slowly. "But I know you don't really care."