Chương 38: Chapter 16: The Tipping Point

Exponential growth was a hell of a thing.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of so many Lineages over so many years, he'd spread to hundreds of worlds, and on each of those worlds he'd gone into full-tilt industrialization. In a way it hardly mattered that he couldn't move forces through the portals in any meaningful way, as each world had its own armies and its own means of making them. Industry was the key.

Factories, mines, and refineries; siphoning atmosphere from gas giants, cracking frozen volatiles on icy asteroids, and spinning out an endless acreage of solar panels.

Some small percent of his ever-growing production base on each world was dedicated to building weapons and warframes rather than new industrial capacity, and a somewhat larger percentage was designed to be quickly retooled from one purpose to the other — a process that was underway after the warning from Koh-rel. Even if those portions of his infrastructure were relatively small, in absolute terms they were staggeringly large after years of dedicated growth.

That sort of expansionist strategy would never have worked in the Sol System. Most planets, moons, and asteroids in the inner system had already been at least provisionally claimed, and even in the diffuse cloud of frozen bodies on the system's edge such behavior would have earned negative attention. Harsh words, harsher malware, and harshest railgun rounds were the expected escalation for anyone who tried to go full paperclip maximizer, and for good reason.

There were no innocent motives for that kind of expansion.

Obviously any sane individual or community wanted a few thousand – or million – years of stockpiled resources, but as far as raw mass went it wasn't unreasonable to meet those demands, even for people with organic bodies rather than running on substrate. Equally obviously, such an individual or community would want the industrial capacity to provide both luxuries and necessities, to upgrade infrastructure based on other people's work or to innovate their own, and to provide for their own defense.

Only an idiot had an unarmed habitat.

But reckless, fully exponential expansion only meant war or other, more inhuman motives. Sometimes it had been actual paperclip maximizers, machines of varying complexity with no controls or orders in place other than to expand. Other times, it had been people who simply had appetites or attitudes that could not be satisfied, and those were just the incidents that were public knowledge.

There were rumors of a long, slow, quiet war in the frozen depths of the Oort cloud, an explanation for the occasional puffs of energetically vaporized material sensors visible to the proper sensors, but he'd never heard exactly who was fighting or why.

Cato's expansion was firmly in the war category, but there was even more than that. After any given planet was cut from the System's bonds, he'd need that infrastructure to fix the inevitable problems faced by the planet in question — and quickly. The people, certainly, but also ecological or geological instabilities, nonviable atmosphere, even solar radiance.

There was no telling how much the System had altered a planet, up to and including its tilt and orbital eccentricity — not to mention cutting off thousands or millions of years of biosphere evolution to adapt to natural conditions. He might have mere days to correct a biosphere collapse.

All of this was in every single solar system that Cato had expanded to, ignoring the newly-seeded worlds where he didn't yet have an industrial base worth considering. So it was across his entire territory. Every single world had a swarm of machines, ready and waiting to be directed, and after the warning from Koh-rel that swarm was growing far larger. Assaulting one planet or assaulting ten was the same amount of effort, especially since each version of himself was operating independently.

He didn't need to split his attention, and couldn't be stopped or deterred from events on some different world since he was physically unable to cross from one to another.

That amount of effort, all that materiel, was necessary to draw away the defenders at Gogri's portal, and isolate the warzone from further System reinforcements. Ignoring the potential for high rankers to teleport directly or the gods to provide transport, he needed to take seventeen worlds. Not that Koh-rel was connected to seventeen systems directly, but if he wanted a diversion he needed to take more than a few planets, and if he was to do that he might as well sever a small peninsula of the System's network.

Taking into account all the connections and diversion he needed to deal with, he was invading over forty total worlds, several jumps around the selected nodes and the entirety of the network between them and Koh-rel. Some of the assaults were designed to be beaten back, in hopes that the appearance of a victory would draw System people – who were decidedly not soldiers – away from the targets he actually cared about.

It was less than a tenth of the total worlds he had spread to and a tiny fraction of a percent of total worlds in the System, but still larger than any real-world military operation he'd ever heard of. Not that Cato truly considered himself military.

The two greatest challenges he faced, System-gods aside, were high rank dungeons and the Azoth squatting on the portal to the newly-inducted world. He had been given years to run wargaming simulations based on his observations, and sims at least gave him some options for dealing with the deities, even if Cato had not yet had the chance to deploy his solutions. In a way, he was looking forward to finally using the Big Bad Bug Bomb.

His greatest strength was his ability to leverage resources. Cato wasn't some strategic genius, certainly nothing like Enceladus, but he had a lot of solutions in his databases and the ability to apply them. More importantly, he could apply them at scales undreamed-of by most people within the System.

The drop pods had millions of tons of insects inside. Swarm intelligence was not a new concept. It had been toyed with even back in the early days of computing, but there was a difference between coordinating a large number of agents and embedding a fully reactive intelligence in a dispersed cloud of entities, let alone something as complex as the human mind. The model that Cato was using had first been engineered on Europa, with swarms of fish adapted for the planet-size ocean.

But the specific version he was running was the one that had been weaponized by the improbably-named Team For Good Or For Awesome, in order to retake a McKendree Cylinder from someone else's ill-advised genetics experiment.

The bugs themselves, as well as the drop pod, didn't actually have any of the System-jamming technology — at least, not immediately. Each of them carried raw materials and a catalyst to create and engage them in an instant, though, and from there to instantiate the organic fusion snot. It was the best solution he had to dealing with high rank beasts and dungeons, the ones he couldn't engage with warframes.

It did take time, but the upside was that they weren't subject to the instant destruction from the gods, nor did they prompt the System quest.

Anyone that was actually watching would still recognize the swarms of bugs as being something unnatural, but Cato had already been shown that the attention of the gods and various System-folks was not all-pervasive. If he could avoid tripping the automated defenses and garnering recognition, he could get away with a lot more.

Even better, small insects didn't prompt the murderous instincts of System beasts and monsters, while some would inevitably be preyed upon, the swarm wouldn't necessarily be targeted by the area-effect Skills of high level monsters.

The insects didn't have the benefit of the System jammers, so they were still subject to some alteration. Experiments had shown that, given some time, they would grow larger and the combat loop in their neural architecture would be significantly reinforced, but none of the insects were intended to live long enough for that to be an issue. Besides, they were being actively controlled either by Cato or by combat algorithms, rather than basic instincts.

In general he wasn't worried about the System copying them. Without specific external stimuli – actual electromagnetic waves interacting with certain glands – they were nothing particularly special. Activating the System-jamming biology while still inside the auspice of the System was more risky, but he was fairly certain that it had been done back on Earth — and even if not, it'd be awful difficult for the System to create something that rejected it by its very nature.

The entire reason the System-jamming biology worked was, so far as anyone who wasn't a superintelligent AI could tell, because the System did interface directly with the mind. Skills were an invocation of software rather than hardware, so to speak. So the neural static acted as some kind of localized denial-of-service attack, leveraging processes built deep into the System's very nature, possibly even the rules of its altered reality.

Overall, the Big Bad Bug Bomb was, in a very strange way, a subtle attack, even if he was dropping a million tons of genetically engineered material at a time. Various versions of him had spent the last few days — while one of him conducted a steadily "losing" battle on Koh-rel in order to hold the attention of the System-gods — maneuvering their forces closer to the target worlds.

The Big Bad Bug Bombs got dropped first, targeting all the unoccupied dungeons so he'd have enough presence to remove everything at once.

Actual tons of insects translated into an unholy swarm, flowing out of the big drop pods like some kind of horrendous, chitin-laden fluid. They went directly into the dungeons, while the drop pods themselves dug roots into the ground, a modification of FungusNet technology acting as a control station. Some insects carried more FungusNet components to act as relays, though the distributed intelligence of the combat algorithms probably was good enough to navigate any given dungeon by itself.

The most difficult thing would be if there were any floors that were hard-locked behind boss deaths, but the worst case scenario was to swarm any boss mob and detonate small fusion bombs inside it. Even Bismuths would have a hard time dealing with that, though according to Yaniss that kind of gating was less common with higher rank dungeons. She'd heard stories that Alum-ranked dungeons didn't really even have discrete bosses, but rather entire cities or mountains of monsters and beasts.

Fortunately he didn't need to target those anyway; the point was for the insects to find the core and detonate a fusion explosion on that.

The first Bug Bombs crashed down on thirty separate worlds, flooding into Bismuth and Peak Platinum dungeons. They'd take time to work their way through the massive dungeons, time that he could be using to deal with his other targets in the more usual way. Three hours after the Bug Bombs, the first warframes landed, drop pods blazing down from the skies and slamming to the ground by cities and lower-ranked dungeons.

Surprisingly, they didn't get instantly vaporized. Cato had no idea what to think about that, and he desperately wished he had more insight into how the System-gods worked, because he didn't have enough data points for any conjecture. Even the best analysis software couldn't conjure answers from thin air. On the other hand, the blatant display of force and the accompanying System quest did stir a lot of people to action, and many of the worlds had native Bismuths.

On Rhurel, a water-wielding Bismuth whipped up a vortex around an island city to protect it, while on Koes an earth-type erected domes that were less impressive than the Azoth's had been, but still troublesome. The world of Khem had someone who, once the invasion started, began sniping his orbital forces with tangles of wire traveling at hypersonic velocities — to varying success. But one or two Bismuths couldn't cover an entire planet.

While the machinations of the System-gods were mostly invisible to him, he could still spot the currents when something happened. Having eyes on hundreds of worlds meant he could spot a sudden shift in traffic, and the ripple of notifications hitting people's own personal System interfaces. Of course, the sisters usually had frames to monitor the local notifications, but it was obvious that not everyone got the same quests.

Higher rankers were getting preferentially more urgent quests to come defend the worlds in question, to judge by how quickly they moved.

And finally, the Azoth reacted. Judging by how easily the System-god had abandoned the planets of Sydea and Haekos, the fringe and frontier worlds were not considered all that valuable. Less valuable than the more developed planets several hops inward, at least, and rather than spending Azoths on blocking his obvious goal, they'd rather spend them on countering the far larger move.

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It was a sour victory. Cato had once had grand plans of infiltrating worlds, showing people the alternatives to the System, getting them on his side, and only then bringing it down. Yes, there were people invested in their power, but the vast majority of individuals were not that powerful, and surely they had all lost someone to the brutal, ubiquitous violence the System required.

Sydea had shown that it was possible, and the general reaction of the sisters and Yaniss demonstrated that, given the opportunity, people did see the value of life outside the System.

But he'd been forced to move in reaction to crisis, with no buildup and no gentleness. Raine and Leese hadn't had time to prepare the way on any world, partly because he was still trying to spread out and partly because Uriva had shown that System-gods would respond to the subversion. Or at least, could, and he had not been ready to show himself. Now his hand had been forced, and everyone would know that he was around.

Cato-Koh-Rel dropped a full hundred of the orbit-capable warframes outside the dome the moment the Azoth left, the man teleporting back to the Nexus by way of a marble arch conjured from nowhere. They raced through to the other side and, since they weren't immediately annihilated, half of them promptly detonated their special packages as the rest scattered in all directions, the Orion drive kick sending Cato-payloads out of the atmosphere.

It washed the area in fusion flames, but that was why he'd kept up the assault, to keep the lower rankers out of the blast area.

With that, his primary goal was complete, but he wasn't going to just halt the invasion forces everywhere else. Raine, Leese, Yaniss, and his sims all agreed that it was far, far better to carry through with it where possible. It was one thing to be shocked by the suddenness of it all, and have to adapt to a life without the System, and another to wait and anticipate another assault for years, letting the fear and resentment grow and poison the populace against him.

Besides, if he was going to start trying to subvert the population on other planets, he would need a credible amount of strength. While the drastic steps needed to get at Gogri so he could combat its apocalypse were not ideal, he could at least make some use of his massive show of force. Dramatically and publicly removing just under twenty worlds from the System demonstrated that he could do so, and had the force of will to back his force of arms.

"Wait," said Yaniss, or at least the version of her that was around Rhurel.

"If this gets cut off, does that mean there will be two of me?"

"One of you for each world," Cato said, somewhat amused. For all that she took to reconciliation better than anyone he knew personally, she hadn't truly internalized what it meant to be digital life. One of the reasons why he was resistant to offering it as a primary incentive, even if on the surface it seemed to be all upsides. The experience of no longer being fully unique, among many other restrictions being rendered moot, could and did destroy people.

"If you don't want that, you'll want to reconcile back somewhere outside the invasion area and abandon this substrate."

"Hm," said Yaniss, and did just that without any further discussion. The substrate suspended operations, compressing and assembling Yaniss' gestalt into a static package, broadcast it through FungusNet and, upon confirming receipt, discarded the condensed archive. That particular operation was one of the sticking points for most people, as for some that was the same thing as suicide, even if continuity of experience was maintained throughout.

Cato didn't have any problem with it, but of course he was staying, as were the sisters, though there was the possibility that they wouldn't be completely isolated. One of the worlds that was within the region of the System he was cutting off was a mere forty light-years from one of the worlds that was remaining within it, verified by spectral data of the star in question.

It wasn't close enough to hold a conversation, not nearly, but he'd already set up some deep-space broadcast and receiver equipment so that he could at least get updates once the connection was severed.

The campaign was definitely going to take more than forty years. The scope of the System was so great that even if he faced very little resistance, it would take a lot of time to spread through the entire thing. A depressing thought, but Cato had known what he was getting into from the start. Maybe not the sheer scale of it, but they had all known the System was large.

If there was any useful, actionable understanding of what happened when the System was cut off, he would definitely be able to apply it. Eventually. Forty light-years was even close enough to think about sending reinforcements, though that spun the timescale up to multiple centuries and used very untested designs, so it wasn't something he wanted to rely on. Slower than light just couldn't compete with the System's physics-breaking portals.

"Shoot, he took out one of the remediation ships," Eshe Mor, née Leese Khem, complained. The Bismuth sniper was one of the few high rankers with the skillset to reach beyond the edge of the System, and while the sheer number of forces made it improbable for him to put a serious dent in the orbital swarm, some targets were more valuable than others. Such as the big crafts full of machinery meant to fix the inevitable ecological disasters that would be left in the wake of the System's disappearance.

Raine Khem wordlessly adjusted the trajectory plan to put Leese's remediation ships back where they should have been originally, well within the point defense blanket, while Cato took control of one of the scout-forms near to the Bismuth in question. He couldn't just sit back and watch, even if wasn't likely he could change any minds he had to at least make an attempt.

"You'll want to leave before the System falls," Cato said, hijacking a nearby pseudo-bird scout's syrinx to speak System tongue. Amazingly, the Bismuth didn't react by reflexively shredding the spokesbeast, but rather snared it in wire — but with surprising gentleness, doing no damage to the scout bird.

"Who are you? Why are you attacking?" The Bismuth barked, almost literally, as his form was something reminiscent of a canine, though with almost catfish-like whiskers and oddly yellow-green fur.

"I am Cato, a being from a world that the System attacked," Cato said. He'd had years to consider his script for such questions, and had settled on an explanation that might not be perfectly accurate in every detail, but was more understandable.

"My quarrel is with the System, not with you or yours; none will be harmed if I can avoid it. But Bismuth bodies and higher cannot exist without the System, and so you will either need to trust me to give you a new body – which you have no reason to – or retreat until there is time to establish that trust."

He actually didn't know how he'd do that. The stories of the fighting on the planets should eventually show that he was being entirely nonlethal, but he couldn't count on word to spread like it would in the information-dense polities of his home civilization. Natural propaganda wasn't reliable but, fortunately, he was in the position to execute the largest leaflet drop of all time.

"We will repel you and your kind, demon," the Bismuth sneered, and pulped the bird-scout. Cato sighed, suddenly incredibly tired despite his human frame on one of the command ships being perfectly awake and aware. He knew that it was incredibly unlikely that he'd be able to save many Bismuths, at least right now. Even if they could look around and see that he wasn't actually killing people, most of them would see no need to retreat, let alone believe that the System could vanish and take them with it.

But he still had to try.

Initik clicked softly to himself as he regarded the chaos in the Clan Lundt System Space. Most of the World Deities there likely hadn't seen each other in centuries, but they'd all been brought together by a common cause. Cato had attacked all their worlds at once, finally demonstrating the true scope of his threat and forcing a cooperation that had never before occurred.

Clan Eln and Clan Lundt crowded together, still separated but at least at the same table, shouting and arguing as scry windows showed the worlds under attack.

Forty worlds was a worrisome chunk of the clans' holdings, though he understood both the clans had thousands of worlds under their purview. In relative terms, losing roughly twenty apiece was very little, but even in the normal fighting, backstabbing, and skullduggery between clans that many worlds didn't change hands at a time. And to someone like him or Mii-Es, who had a single chosen world, the scope of that attack was beyond anything they could withstand.

He had no idea where Cato had gotten the amount of creatures on display, let alone the artifacts he used that floated out beyond the System's reach, but if he concentrated everything shown on a single planet he could reduce that world to dust in short order. Only Cato's determination to avoid harm to all those living on the planet prevented that.

That was the greatest weakness Initik had discovered, and there was no guarantee it would be enough. Just because Cato had yet refrained from too much force out of consideration for the inhabitants of each world didn't mean he was incapable or even unwilling. His self-proclaimed goal, as delivered by Muar and reinforced by the conversations scried during the invasion, was to remove the System.

If Cato was willing to go as far as assaulting dozens of worlds at a time, Initik very much doubted individual mortal lives mattered to him, so simply trying to hold people hostage didn't seem to have any logical basis.

Not that direct combat was doing much, either. Wiping Cato's presence from an entire planet was easy enough; the crystal bearing the instructions on how to do so had already been passed on to other deities, along with the signature such a divine act needed to look for. But Cato didn't stay gone. Only Initik had been able to truly remove Cato's presence, and the squabbling Clan members seemed to have forgotten him entirely.

"—essence cost alone would put me in debt for another century—"

"—Clan Horash would see it as weakness if we just—"

"—already a marginal world, so it can't be worth—" Listening to the arguments and complaints, Initik found most of their concerns to be petty. The World Deities were administrators, not fighters. Bureaucrats, not leaders. He heard very little about tactics and strategy against Cato, and quite a lot about the costs incurred and the political implications among the other clans.

"They're all cowards," Mii-Es muttered at his side.

"They grew up in a powerful Clan, were gifted their status as [World Deity] and trained to manage it without ever having to actually rise from being a mortal." Initik clicked softly, his gripping claws flexing.

"Is it any wonder they find themselves at a loss when confronted by their first real threat? I merely fear the consequences if one of them—" As if his words were prophecy, Lakor had apparently had enough of the bickering and decided to take action. Not just through the Interface, not just exercising essence from his System Space, but actually taking Koh-rel's battleground himself. Lakor invoked [Manifest], the way deities were meant to interact with mortals, even if Initik personally hated the Skill.

The deity in question vanished from the shared System Space and appeared on his world, a colossal titan towering over the capital city Nexus. The Skill was hardly subtle, and while a Deity's presence that way provided all sorts of strength to those around him, there was no purpose to the form but combat. Combat at the scale that could level continents, or worse.

In fact, the deity's first action was to gesture with one hand and rip an entire mountain from the ground, the white-sloped mass of rock hovering in the air for a moment before the deity pointed and sent the mountain screaming off into the sky, aimed at something beyond sight. It looked impressive, but was only equivalent to what an Alum could do. It was also irrelevant; fighting Cato wasn't fighting a single person.

He was a swarm, but very far different from any dungeon or monster swarm, for it wasn't the sheer numbers that were the danger.

The mountain vanished in a moment, and someone manipulated the scry-window to show, a few second later, a blooming explosion in the evening sky overhead. Mii-Es chuckled, though whether she was taking satisfaction in the destruction or she knew how pointless it was to hit a target that way Initik didn't know. He almost said something, but looking at the scrum of useless deities who had never properly fought in their lives, he didn't think it worth the effort.

Cato's answer came a few second later. Two thin beams of almost-lightning came down from the sky, the Skill that had destroyed the Azoth. Normally something like that would be no threat to a World Deity. Normal Skills simply didn't affect Deities, and even the greatest of an Alum's destructive Skills required a certain something more to hurt a god — as Initik well knew, since he had done it, so long ago. But Cato's weapons weren't normal Skills, and whatever they were, they sneered at divinity.

Lakor bellowed in pain and rage as the beams intersected him, and even went through him like some phantom energy. It was obvious that the beams held more power than it looked like, as where they touched the god and the ground both, fire and thunder blazed into existence. And the beam didn't stop; it was not a single Skill, but a continuous, channeled attack, with no end in sight.

Lakor was forced to teleport away, moving from the ruined capital city to another major city on the other side of the globe — to no avail. A new set of beams found him there, as well, punching burning holes in divine flesh with their unrelenting fury.

He ripped up more mountains, tearing holes hundreds of miles wide in the ground as he hurled the monstrous projectiles into the sky. One of the beams vanished, but was replaced by another, at a different angle. That was the danger of manifesting in a battle-form; like many transformative Skills, it changed a person, and the Eln was clearly focused on fighting when it was obvious that what was needed was a measured and intelligent approach, not blind aggression.

Lakor had to be spending essence like water, but to no avail. The group gathered around the scry-views slowly went silent as the bizarre sky-beams went on and on, second after second, seemingly inexhaustible in their terrible effects. He kept trying to fight back by hurling things in the direction of the beams, but they seemed to be able to appear from any angle.

Suddenly, a tipping point was reached and Lakor vanished in a massive billow of blinding flame. For a moment there was not a single sound within the System Space, and all the gathered deities simply watched the scry windows, none of them wanting to admit what they'd just seen happen.

Cato had killed a god.

"Time to go," Initik said to Mii-Es, as the arguments erupted again, louder than ever. He had no need to stay and see the outcome. Even if they managed to push Cato off of some of the worlds, likely by using Initik's knowledge, the damage was done. Cato had shown that he was a genuine threat and not just to a few irrelevant territories. Even if Initik could keep Cato out of Uriva, that didn't mean the god-killer couldn't surround Uriva, cut it off from the larger System, and starve his world until nothing remained.

Initik needed a new strategy.