Vivy did backflips, side flips, and all sorts of acrobatics to dodge the hail of steel beams and other materials. While the objects hadn’t been shaped into improvised weapons, they were heavy and made of metal—more than enough to cause some damage. This was even truer now that AIs had turned on humanity and had no more limitations. Each raindrop in that storm of attacks had enough brute force to kill.
Vivy would need a little help.
“God Mode.”
Fully utilizing Matsumoto’s unrestrained calculative abilities, Vivy spurred her positronic brain into overdrive to carry her programming down to the very tips of the arms and legs of her frame. This way, she could implement the ideal next move.
The world lost its color. Her consciousness became simplified, her honed calculative abilities perfectly tracking the trajectories of each object in the flurry of flung weapons. She slipped through every attack, her frame moving into the space that would allow her to avoid a lethal blow.
An onlooker might’ve even thought the projectiles were going right through her. She perfectly avoided the objects of that dense whirlwind using incredibly graceful motions. If her footing became unstable, she moved, using the entirety of the huge battlefield and becoming the sole focus of the entire attacking force.
Drawing attention, performing up to expectations… That was where Vivy truly shone.
“You’re making this exciting! I’m feeling great, like the adrenaline’s really pumping!” Matsumoto said.
“I could say the same about you.”
They both used their specs to the fullest as they faced the AI horde. Matsumoto’s extreme firepower mowed down countless AIs, filling the battlefields of both the air and the ground with torrents of bright red sparks.
“Eliminate,” Altair said as he raised his two massive crane arms and brought them down on Vivy.
The destruction from Altair’s arms was incomparable to the thrown steel beams and construction materials. Vivy’s vision was filled with red as she searched for a gap where she could continue operating.
“Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.”
Altair’s attacks pounded down on Vivy without letting up for a second, like a tsunami of blows. Even the sturdy scaffolding crumpled as easily as paper beneath a single strike from those huge cranes, and the AIs atop them got tangled with the debris and went flying. There was no camaraderie between AIs here, only the steely determination to eradicate the enemy. Altair continued his chain of attacks with so much force that he could potentially reform the land and dismantle a portion of Kingdom in the process.
“Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.”
“That’s enough!”
Something exploded in the middle of the manufacturing plant in the middle of his attacks. It was a group of bomber drones that had been in high-speed pursuit of Matsumoto in the air. During the battle, Matsumoto took control of them and directed them to target Altair. They slipped through Altair’s openings, since he was only engaging in basic defense, and fully utilized their high maneuverability to move in on Altair’s weak spots and detonate.
The immense explosion and resulting heat wave rocked Altair’s large frame. Matsumoto added in machine-gun fire for good measure. He then changed form and slammed Altair with a powerful shell from a cannon.
“Ghk…”
Matsumoto’s armaments and firepower were so out of the ordinary that it was like he’d been built to wage a war entirely on his own. Now that Vivy knew he hadn’t been designed by the genius AI researcher Professor Matsumoto, she wondered exactly what formulas could have given birth to Matsumoto’s abilities.
There was only one thing she knew for sure…
“Matsumoto, I’m glad I didn’t erase you as a bug a hundred years ago.”
“You’re saying this now? Like, right here? I am not the kind of thing you put in a desktop recycle bin!”
Vivy broke through the clouds of smoke as she listened to Matsumoto. She rushed up Altair’s crane arms, which he’d stretched out to support his tilted frame. The only way she’d managed to survive that storm of destruction was by clinging to those crane arms as he smashed them down over and over. Now she dashed up one of the cranes toward Altair’s main body for a counterattack that would turn the tables.
“Elimi…nate…”
Altair’s hulking frame groaned as he fixed his attention on Vivy running atop the crane, flames bursting from him here and there. He got ready to fling Vivy off with one flaming arm. Vivy didn’t let herself focus on Altair’s attempt at defense. She just kept running forward, leaving everything else to her partner in the sky.
“Everyone, attack!”
Matsumoto stole control of the gun-wielding drones and showered Altair with bullets from multiple directions. Obviously, this wasn’t enough to destroy Altair—the AI was as sturdy as his frame would suggest—but it did cause more damage to Altair’s broken parts, including his weaponized arms, and the AIs supporting him.
The bullets avoided Vivy as she bolted along the massive, flaming crane, allowing her to put all her functionality into running—she just had to keep going in a straight line. As the shuddering crane’s angle changed, she sped up. She easily moved across while the incline increased, then leapt from the joint where the crane attached to Altair’s main body. From there, she sprang onto a maintenance ladder on the outer wall of the factory and climbed up, up, and up while being swung back and forth by tremors. As she did that, Matsumoto and his drone squad continued their battle against Altair as he tried to hurl Vivy off. They didn’t get a chance to finish the battle, though.
“We were faster,” Vivy said as she made it to the end of the maintenance ladder.
In front of her was the base of Altair’s core: his positronic brain. Its housing was on a totally different scale, but it had the same purpose as a humanoid AI’s skull component, which housed and protected their positronic brain. Despite all the attacks, the housing for Altair’s brain hadn’t suffered a bit of damage.
But that was only because they were attacks from the outside. Once Vivy was inside and able to connect directly to the positronic brain, physical strength would mean nothing.
“I don’t hate you, but your decision and our mission are incompatible.” Vivy pulled out her earring-shaped connector and went to plug it into the computer loaded with Altair’s positronic brain. Several different options flitted across Vivy’s consciousness in an instant, but none of them were enough to stop her. She carried out her task.
“…”
Altair’s massive frame made him seem sluggish, but that assumption was off the mark, particularly when it came to AIs and their ability to process information. The idea that larger things were stronger could also be applied to AIs equipped with massive computers. There was once an era where the most powerful supercomputers used entire buildings as server rooms. Quite simply, larger sizes guaranteed greater abilities.
But did that then mean that no AI could compete with Altair, who boasted a size greater than any other?