The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

Physics-Chan favors this one!

On the matter of accelerated plant growth, I had a beef to carve with the System. My Perk clearly stated, "neutral or friendly plants" and this damned demon grass was anything but.

Then the downside of having north of 400% the thought speed of an ordinary crystallized apple with a human soul struck me. The demon grass seeds hadn't attacked me. Even though I was right there, next to it in my birth... ripeningday suit (not really, I was wearing a really cute ribbon on my stem), the roots hadn't attacked me. As far as this dumbass System was concerned, the grass roots didn't check the "hostile to me" box. Ergo, friendly or neutral.

I set a new Law in my Domain. Infernali and any magical plant not only are to be considered hostile but the growth Perk's effects are to be reversed unless I specifically vetted that individual or species as neutral or friendly. I had to do that straight away, granting my blessing to some magical herbs people cultivated to make potions.

The new rule, especially the reversal, ate into my DM budget to keep the new rule but I shrugged and told the aristocrats living imprisoned... I mean, in my luxurious land train mansions, that potted trees were all the rage. Boom, DM upkeep of the new rule paid for.

I had three choices ahead of me. I wasn't counting the null choice, the one that was obviously below all others was to turn around and go see if I could get people in Florida. Abandon this madness behind. I put it here just to make sure I understood running away and rebuilding was always a choice. Heck, I could give up everything and fly away with Larry and Rta (I would have the Valkyrie carry the platypus), tow Speranza with me and start anew elsewhere.

So, with that at the bottom, I saw the three choices. One, purge everything, kill the demon and the infected people with great prejudice and literal Imperial Tons of napalm. Burn New York and everything around it, including a small chunk of the Atlantic Ocean, get rid of the thing. I knew I could save people, so that choice was put aside, still above flipping the bird and running away.

Two, send the flamer bots. Burn the grass, hope it didn't send some sort of distress signal that triggered all the seeds. Nope. I was pretty sure the grass monster was with its proverbial thumbs on the kill switch for 150,000 people. Even me, as callous as my Dungeon mindset made me, balked at the idea. Not to mention I couldn't let a single seed escape. Acting harshly would only spell disaster.

Three, negotiate with the people and convince them to accept treatment. A treatment that so far has a 60% fatality rate. That wouldn't work.

Four, continue to kidnap people and improve the treatment. Playing nice obviously carried a huge risk. Who knew what would they do if I told them I intended to kill their source of food and Experience? The grass was not a symbiote, not in the long run. It just worked on a time scale different than people.

What? Did you notice I said three choices but then discussed five? It is good to know someone is paying attention. Thank you.

I presented my results to my co-conspirators. They agreed and I built thousands of Iron Maiden units.

*

*

But first, some diplomacy. I sent drones with LCD screens into the city, playing a video of a helpful girl attempting to get their permission to chat. When someone accepted, the drone played a clip of the girl patching them through to an operator and then a live person at my call center would take up and attempt to convince the person to accept to move. All call center operators had Charisma above 500.

Yeah, I resurrected call centers. It was my most evil deed so far. Forget dissolving a man's arms, forget kidnapping p people to conduct experimental surgery on them without consent, forget the mass kidnapping I would have to do if they weren't convinced by the call center operator.

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They weren't. Not a single one of them took the chance and most even attacked the drones outright. Now that I had failed as predicted, I had no other recourse. "They gave me no choice but to trample them", said every conqueror ever. But nobody knew what "Geneva" and "Nuremberg" meant anymore. Therefore, we were doomed to repeat history.

I drove the land train to block the grass on the New Jersey side and started deploying flamer walls. It was an upgrade to my SHREDDER walls but with plasma flamers instead of barbed spears. Then we drove all the way at the edge of the giant alien grass patch, setting up a fiery barricade to curb the advance of the World Boss.

Once everything was in place and the people of New York were trapped with their Gramineae overlord, it was time to shoot an episode of The X-Files. I no longer cared about subtlety. The people of New York were being abducted left and right. Uncaring machines flew above the city and snatched people whenever they were found. They said nice things like "we want to help" and "this is for your own good" but for some reason they didn't trust the abducting robots. I wonder why.

Perhaps because I was treating people like livestock.

With the reversal of my growth Perk, I had four times the time to operate. I also started with the seeds closer to the head and went down from there. Yet, no matter how much MP my Green Energy Perk gave, I still had only so many hours in the day to cleanse people. The robots were kidnapping them faster than I could cut and heal people.

So, I created a gulag. Yes, I was pulling no punches and also not honeying my words. I had no idea how I could sleep at night with all those heinous crimes. Not sleeping helped a lot, by the way. Dungeons were awake 24-7 and plants knew not what sleep meant. One usually needed a brain to sleep.

I placed people in a stone prison, stacking the floors as I needed. We entered December with heavy snowstorms and the bots kept their relentless kidnapping job. I kept doing unlicensed surgery to purge the seeds.

Graminaesshole, the name I decided to give the humongous monster, remained still during the winter. Not sleeping, just still. The places it spawned monsters for the people to kill still spawned monsters but they weren't farmed as often. And since controlling Infernali was as easy as getting chicken to calm down using an air horn, the monsters started to prowl around.

*

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Then December ended. I wasn't having grand adventures, daring escapades, skin-of-my-neck (sigh. neck?) escapes. No. I was parked across twelve miles of New York / New Jersey countryside, powering another two-dozen mile of flame throwing walls, kidnapping people, and doing illegal unsanctioned surgery. What an adventure.

At least the Guardians were happy with their free level. People celebrated the new year, year five of the World Tree. I got a silent notification telling me my five levels were deferred.

Ugh. How long until I am free to soar and smash some demon gods?

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit.

> Current tally: 935,214 / 4,000,000

What the fuck? Where did I get an extra 440,000 people? I did a head count in Speranza, 430,000 as expected. Then the other shelters and stuff. 45,000 people living in my bunkers all across the east coast (except Florida. I wasn't ready to face Florida Man and his... unbound powers).

Wait. 440,000 was conspicuously close to the number of permanent residents... plus the 10,000 in Atlanta...

The System was notorious for being English challenged. What if instead of 4,000,000 people for 1 year, it meant 4,000,000 people-years? 1,000,000 people for one year, or 400,000 for ten? Why would it tally the people of Speranza twice?

The only way to know for sure was to wait for a year. Or eight. I felt giddy. Then I remembered that eight years was supposed to be a fucking lot of time.

Meh. I spent about six decades in that landfill. Which was a lot and I only didn't rot because of my own magic? Anyway, I felt much more relaxed now.

*

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And relaxed was exactly how I shouldn't feel. Winter ended, I had captured every single person in the grass area I could find and my gulag was a prison tower for 150,432 people. By March, I had treated... 2,700 of them. With only less than 100 casualties and 200 people with permanent crippling injuries. It was not my fault a seed decided that the tube inside a woman's spine was a good place to grow. Anyway, at this pace, I would take me two years of dedicated spellcasting to heal all of them. And I didn't dare touch the grass monster until all seeds were dealt with and gone. I burned anything that tried to grow near the walls but that was it.

March was also the day the shit hit the fan. Without anyone inside the walls to kill them, Manhattan was crawling with nasties. The plant-spawn monsters had free rein of the place and I didn't dare to let people hunt them. Apparently afraid of the water, they werent crossing any bridge out of Manhattan because there was none. I had finished breaking every bridge and demolishing every tunnel they could use.

Some of my forward defense bunkers were destroyed. One moment I sense some liquid or gel flying at high speeds toward it, the next I lost connection. Switching to the dirigibles visual, it took me a fraction of a second to find what was wrong.

Two Armagellykulls were coming our way. As I watched, one of the tentacles pointed at the blimp and squirted some black goop. Seconds later, the blimp was gone. I watched from another dirigible as the former vanished, devoured by the black goop.

That was it. No Dungeon walls armor, no warning, no pass Go and collect $200. One instant the squirt struck the blimp, the next it was gone. Even I would need to put some effort to absorb a blimp that fast with my Materialization speed. And they were coming straight at us. Tracing their path and calculating their speed, I had about a week before the land train was in range of one of those squirts. I said squirt, yes. Fight me.

*

*

I connected to the PA system at the rangers' base. "Rangers, prepare to fight. Don your Grilled Tex-Mex armors and go to training room 4-B." 4-B was our flight simulator room.

While the teens prepared to fight, donning their spandex pilot suits, and clamping some strange triangular bits of tech to their heads that somehow improved their fighting abilities (they were holy relics gifted by me, don't bother asking), I asked Rta to go there. She was training Einherjar and making the USMC hell week sound like a debutante spa retreat.

While they prepared, I had a blimp shine a beacon down to the ground several miles ahead of the Armagellyskulls. There, I burned a dozen million DM Replicating Raindrops robots over a few minutes. When the rangers reached the training center in their power armor, I already had the vehicles for them to pilot remotely. A realm away, more precisely.

They connected their power armor systems to the simulator, and I connected the simulator to the robots hundreds of miles away. They would experience some decrease in fighting performance because of the ping lag but at least we didn't have a hundred million people trying to transmit data at the same time. The frequencies were ours. I also connected Blackjack Six to one of the robots.

Our Mecha came alive and we moved a bit to adapt to the ping lag delay. Then the sixteen of us charged the Armagellykulls.