Though she had vowed revenge, the 2nd Generation Idol lacked the means to enact it. Having lost her guardian, Maori Niizono, she was little more than a plastic bag floating in the air. When the wind blew she drifted this way and that, completely at its mercy. Even finding food was a challenge. To continue her idol activities, she would need to acquire new skills. She would have to change herself from the 2nd Generation Idol to the 3rd Generation Idol or be left behind by the times.
For an idol to grow, she needed biomaterials. For this, the 2nd Generation Idol set her sights on one type of Novum Organum — the spiders. The same spiders that wove threads reinforced with sturdy carbon nanotubes. They ate human corpses, spreading far and wide; if you threw a rock anywhere they’d go scattering. They came in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a millimeter to a meter.
The 2nd Generation Idol pretended to be dead, luring the spiders in close. The stupid spiders fell for her trick, biting into her intestines. Then her nerve jack cables attacked, pulling them into her body, converting their strength to hers. She was after the spinnerets, the organs that produced their threads. She digested the rest of them leaving only the spinnerets, placing them in all corners of her body. Thus, the 3rd Generation Idol was complete. This was a minor upgrade; the only difference from the 2nd Generation Idol being the dozens of spinnerets poking out of her stomach and intestines and lungs, but the presence of these organs made a huge difference to her mobility. Threads expelled with great force from the spinnerets wound themselves around footholds. Reeling these in allowed her to rapidly move around. She was copying the way the Vigilantes moved with their arrows, but since the carbon nanotube reinforced threads were so sturdy, she could move even faster than them.
Additionally, the threads could serve as weapons. Far stronger and thinner than piano wire, they could easily slice through human necks, arms, and legs. She still had virtually no defensive ability, so she couldn’t attack aggressively, but she could lay traps. She quickly laid traps by leaving tasty corpses where Vigilantes often passed and placing threads all around. These were shockingly effective. She could use the natural human inclination to save those on the brink of death and kill their companions one after another as they came to help.
The 3rd Generation Idol was merely a transitional state. Being an idol meant moving constantly forward. Never forgetting where you came from, never basking in your current glory. An idol satisfied with taking the lives of a few dozen was hardly a life worth living. She had to kill a lot more people. She had to rise up the idol rankings or she’d be crushed by the changing times.
Humans provided the materials for the 4th Generation Idol. To defend her delicate brain, she followed the principle of hiding a tree in a forest, realizing that she could hide it amongst a lot of other brains. The Idol rewired the brains of the humans she killed, turning them into passive slaves, connecting them to her own brain with nerves protected by carbon nanotube membranes. She hid her brain among the slave brains, turning them into a defensive wall. These nerves were powered by signals sent from her own mind, overpowering the individual consciousnesses. As the 4th Generation Idol became a giant brain ball she needed more powerful movement organs. Once again, she used humans. Arranging human legs and arms so they grew in all directions, she could roll around at high speeds. In the hands, she placed Kalashnikovs and machetes stolen from the Vigilantes, allowing her to attack as she rolled. Naturally, she also added digestive organs and sensory organs like eyes and noses and tongues, dozens of each arranged like jewelry. She always took the utmost care with her fashion statements.
Armed with carbon nanotube threads, Kalashnikovs, and machetes, the 4th Generation Idol at last launched an all-out war on the Vigilantes. The Vigilante base was in an airborne giant jellyfish floating midway between the troposphere and the stratosphere—the tropopause. Before the super flare, the jet stream had maintained a constant speed above 30 meters a second, but now the windspeed was several times stronger. The cause was the destruction of the ozone layer. The ozone layer had absorbed UV rays, raising the temperature of the atmosphere. Because the ozone in the upper stratum maintained a high temperature, a stable atmospheric state was maintained — the upper layers were warm, and the lower layers were cooler — and it was rare for winds to form in the stratosphere. But after the giant flare destroyed the ozone layer, the stability of the stratosphere was lost, and the speed of the jet streams increased. The airborne giant jellyfish rode the strong jet streams like kites, remaining aloft. Anchored to the surface by countless spider threads, the winds never swept them away.
Filling her stomach with putrid gas, the 4th Generation Idol floated upwards, sending out thread after thread, swiftly pulling herself higher. There were dozens of polyps growing like mushrooms under the airborne giant jellyfish. Humans made dens between the polyps and lived there. As the polyps grew and fell off below, they moved their dens higher, to the immature polyps. The jellyfish cut off all harmful ultraviolet waves, and they could store air and heat between the polyps. The spiders lived in the same places and were the Vigilante’s rivals for the same resources. Babies were often bitten by spiders and died; combined with the skin cancer the average life span was extremely short. But somehow, they were surviving. Until the 4th Generation Idol arrived.
The 4th Generation Idol’s attack caught the Vigilantes completely off-guard. They were prepared for attacks on the surface but had never dreamed she would come to them up here. This would cost them dearly. Clutching to old-fashioned ideas of what an idol could be, they were left behind by the changing times. Idols these days don’t just make themselves available — they actively chase the public down. Failure to keep up with the latest trends is punishable by death.
“Gahhhhhh!”
Shrieks echoed between the polyps. The out-of-touch Vigilantes were helpless before the overpowering idol aura radiated by the 4th Generation Idol. She’d spent the week before her assault sunbathing, stocking up on energy gathered by the Novum Organum. Down time was of vital importance to any idol, and she was a major proponent of taking it easy. Relaxation was an important idol activity, too. It allowed her to unleash all that energy in that moment. It was so important to make that transition between on and off stage. When she was on stage she had to keep her body moving, killing all the humans. She had to hit the steps just as she’d practiced, spit those threads, fire her Kalashnikovs, decapitate with those machetes... Seeing her like this, it was tempting to describe her as an organism bred for slaughter. The humans all screamed aloud in the face of the 4th Generation Idol’s sprightly dance and cuteness. As their cries rained down on her, the 4th Generation Idol knew that she was really shining. This was what she could do when she threw herself into her idol activities.
At last the screams died down, and her slaughter ended with no requests for an encore. The 4th Generation Idol finished by harvesting spare organs from the dying humans, consuming their flesh, and slurping up their blood. She felt amazing. Years of preparation had made these idol activities a tremendous success. As a reward to herself, maybe she’d acquire a little house. There was a gap between the polyps where the Vigilantes had lived. She should remodel it and make it a place of her own!
It was some time before the 4th Generation Idol felt like doing much of anything. A classic case of burnout. She wasn’t sure which direction to take her idol activities next. Her first great success had been so dazzling she was fixated on it, unable to take the next step forward.
The Idol was self-produced. Creating her characters, expanding upon her strengths — all of that depended on her alone. But the 4th Generation Idol was unsure what path she should follow. So she returned to her roots. What was it she’d really wanted to accomplish as an idol? She’d wanted to sing and dance and bring smiles to her audience. She’d definitely never wanted to strike fear in their hearts. Or fire Kalashnikovs wildly. Or carve organs out of the dying. Idols weren’t supposed to slaughter humans, they were supposed to entertain them. This might seem obvious, but the 4th Generation Idol had forgotten it. And by the time she remembered, it was already too late. She had killed everyone who could have been a fan. Fans were everything to an idol. An idol with no fans was no idol at all. Idols could not exist in isolation; their fans completed them. How ironic that her idol activities had destroyed the thing that made her an idol.