Seraphina Martel 2: This Time It's Personal
How very meta of Rakshasa.
Alea iacta est.
"So be it."
I count down like I said I would. It's for my parents, now. To get all of the possible "civilians" out of the way. My preparations will keep the explosion from destroying everything nearby, but there will still be a lot of debris and a significant shockwave. The warehouse will be utterly destroyed. I let time count down, then I step Sideways.
It's a metaphor. I don't have to move. I just am there, between life and death, between the ticks of the clock. It will be an interesting experiment. Perhaps her ghost will emerge. I can watch, at the very moment of her end. I don't think I want to. But perhaps I should. I finish my calculations. The walls and floor and even ceiling are covered with chalk and calculations, my mistakes and repeated equations, the part where I had to start completely over.
I mark a spot 10 meters "back" from the vault door, thus above where the first room of the bunker should be. It won't matter, really. But it helps me keep track. Using ladders, I construct a sort of tower, building a superstructure to suspend the tarps with. Not from. With. As soon as I let go of something and will it so, it returns to normal time. Mother made me practice endlessly, for thousands upon thousands of hours, to have extremely precise control. Maybe this is why she did. This...thing I'm doing.
Before the tarps go up, I somersault off the top of the highest ladder and flicker in and out of real time, hundreds of times a second, slashing my hands through the air to shape a wind tunnel that will push down and out, making a partial vacuum inside the tower of ladders to the floor where X marks the spot. I've unleashed something. I feel freer than I ever have before. The ladders won't stay up for more than a couple seconds, but they don't have to. I am between time itself. I am the mistress of my own destiny.
For the first time ever, I am making a decision. For myself. For no other end or purpose. I am going to kill this woman because I want to. Because I don't want her to exist.
Then I hang up the tarps, suspended frozen in time but not attached to anything. They will maintain the vacuum for the hundredth of a second I need. I've built a container. It might resemble a ramshackle railgun, but it's actually a contrivance to contain the brunt of what I am going to do. To contain the energy, focus it, push it down and out into the ground, instead of into the air.
The last piece. Sheet metal at the top of the tower, over the partial vacuum below. A piece of rebar half an inch across. Five kilograms. I use my fingernail to shape the end into a sharp point. It doesn't even scratch my nail. Aiming the iron spear straight down, at the middle of the X, I let it go, to suspend in the air. Then I start hitting it with my palm. Over and over and over and over. Imparting superhuman strength in each blow and greater and greater speed on that piece of metal.
13,587,710 miles per hour. Two percent the speed of like. 0.02c. The Lortenz factor was there. As much energy as a 20 kiloton bomb, concentrated in a single point.
I jump off the scaffold and land, then I walk outside the warehouse, 100 feet away, and I enter normal time.
Faster than the world's quickest supercomputer can add 1 and 1 to get 2, the iron projectile sublimates to plasma. If there was air near it, that alone would have caused a titanic explosion. But there isn't. There's nowhere for the energy to go but the ground. Four microseconds later, the rod hits. Two microseconds after that, the plasma penetrates fifty feet into the ground. Another five microseconds and shockwaves buckle the ground around the impact site, sending out ripples like the ground is made of water. The concrete, steel reinforcement, thin layer of air just above the ground, everything within 500 meters of the impact site and underground superheats to well north of 100,000 degrees, more than twice as hot as lightning. So hot that the affected area doesn't melt or vaporize; it becomes plasma, too, a fluid soup of subatomic particles that try to expand but have nowhere to go as fast as need to.
They ram into each other and impart their energy. Temperature rises farther and farther. Conditions become hellish, hotter than the center of the sun for a single, brief instant. Muons, pions, and exotic particles found only in the hearts of stars and the beginning of time flicker into being, ram into the earth, and disappear in antimatter collisions. Instead of an apocalyptic fireball, there is a small mushroom cloud that claws at the air above, taller and thinner than a nuclear bomb's mushroom cloud, finally blowing off the top of the warehouse. The roof will peak at 10 miles into the sky, a few minutes from now.
A microsecond after that, an electric storm erupts, lasting about a tenth of a second, tendrils of lightning flying out in every direction. Heat finally has time to catch up and spread from the impact, grounding into the earth and making dirt and concrete steam, then erupt, throwing earth and stone into the air. The sound is louder than thunder, a tortured scream of air rushing back into a void and nature creaking under the pressure of an angry goddess.
Anyone else standing this close to the impact would die very, very quickly. I can ground and undo all of the heat, energy, and shrapnel as it flies towards me, by stuttering in and out of Sideways and subtly adjusting position and mass. I could probably just tank it, but I'm not going to try. That smacks of the kind of arrogance that gets people killed.
Nothing remains standing for 300 feet in every direction around where the warehouse used to be, where there is now a glowing crater 80 feet deep at the center, electricity sparking between pulverized rubble. It will take a minute or so for the charge to dissipate into the air. I stand at the edge of the crater, a slim cone behind me the only area free of devastation.
It has been less than a second. Hardened military bunkers wouldn't stand up to that kind of power.
And I wasn't even trying that hard.
I look at the sky and understand that I can't undo what I have just done.
Then I wait for the other shoe to drop.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:42, Fri 17 May.