Anti-antithesis

A prevalent theory of convergent evolution studies was the thought that certain forms were simply more evolutionarily advantageous, so much so that multiple different species evolved to utilize them. Of course, the biggest meme being “Crabs are Inevitable” held true for at least five different species of crab, with hundreds of other non-crab species utilizing either their shells, claws, or legs in various capacities.

Such theories went out the window in the early twenty thirties, mostly due to the lack of crab-like forms or parts in the various antithesis. Some crab-like forms have been observed in ocean-dwelling antithesis, but only in certain parts of the ocean, and never in large quantities. Some online communities hold out hope, however, that the Protectors' true forms are crustacean in nature.

-A quote from AI Jelly during the Late Late Late Night Show. The following conversation has been lost due to the interference of multiple Vanguard AI, 2051.

Maniac

Man, do I love rampaging through corporate owned property, doubly so if everyone I see is guilty of some heinous shit! I mean, not that I would feel guilty killing corpo goons, but it's nice to have the high ground every now and then. Literally, as I just jumped off a roof to cleave an APC in half.

The raid started an hour from sundown after getting an okay signal from the kids in space. They still hadn't disabled the spatial lock preventing me from going up, but that's fine. I had plenty to do down here.

Yun Min led the troops to the walls with minimal resistance and burst through easily. Well, okay not easy easy, as the stationed soldiers resorted to using manual defenses, like vats of boiling acid and heavy machine gun encampments. The ones that survived my kids explosives, or the ones that discovered the explosives ahead of time, that is. Kinda crazy that they had vats of boiling acid, thinking about it, but whatever. They were minimally effective, anyways.

I was almost impressed with the troops this place had, standing their ground, making my people fight hard for every meter. A real stand up moment of humans fighting to protect their homes. I might have felt a bit bad, acting as the evil invader if not for two things. One, this was Bestlé, so fuck ‘em. Two, Bubbles sent me a message. I was very happy to hear from her, but also annoyed about the contents of said message, indicating that these guys are basically brainwashed cultists. Not asking about how I was doing, or where I was. Not even an innuendo! Just a status report...

This did make things easier for me, though. In fact, it just made me see these guys as extensions of the plants. Mindless killing machines that needed to be put down, and we were the weed whackers. Okay, not my best line, but it worked.

As I flashed through the defensive lines the Bestlé meat sacks had set up, doing what I could to make things easier for Yun Min's people to move forward, I saw my kids’ little girlfriend fly by, pelting barricades and recovered vehicles with razor sharp feathers, causing minor explosions moments later. Hmm, I wonder if Princess would like a new down coat. Bet it would look great on her.

I flashed up to a high point once more, taking stock on where I might be needed most, as these guys offered no real challenge to me. More vehicles were streaming out of garages, with thick, stocky mechs starting to make their way to the front as well. No heavy bitches yet, much to my disappointment. I really wanted to stab a giant tank and have it explode as I walked away.

I received an alert from the virus I planted in the systems earlier, indicating that someone tried to release the Monster party underground. I smirked as I saw the purge protocol activate instead, seeing the crab things boil in some special chemical. Dammit, now I want crab after this. I shot Princess a message, asking her if we could have some later.

A flash of an explosion drew my attention towards the fight, seeing one of our hover tanks blew up. I teleported over, seeing a few of my people heavily injured, but alive as they were pulled quickly from the wreckage. I traced the shot to a nearby roof, so I teleported over to it, slicing horizontally as I appeared, causing three trees to fall over instead of whatever people were supposed to be there. I saw the small squad of idiots attempt to flee, but I didn't let them. As their blood nourished the remaining trees on this roof, I got a ping from the space kids, saying something huge was just launched from the station and would impact near us in one-ish minutes.

“Lyssa, calculate the impact point and let the others know to move the hell out of the way.” I said.

I saw a section of the city become highlighted as a large targeting circle rapidly shrunk, settling on a section of the wall near where the main fighting was happening. It would crush a factory of some sort, possibly also whatever civilians took shelter within. Some part of me wanted to evacuate them, but I knew I could not move nearly as fast as Mom to do so. I may be able to move faster than sound in short bursts, but she stops time when she gets serious. Totally cheating.

Another part wanted me to teleport to the pod thing and try to fuck it up before it hit the ground, but Crow told me the odds of me doing that successfully was basically null as it was moving way too fast to accurately land on it.

Instead, I sent my kids, Bubbles, Queen, and Interloper a message, telling them to get ready for some bullshit from space.

The wait was mercifully quick as the fireball slammed into the ground with a force reminding me of Mom’s Hammer at its lowest setting. Dirt, concrete, glass, and steel went flying in all directions, creating a massive dust cloud that prevented me from seeing fuck all.

I heard a large metal structure move, followed by multiple plates hitting the ground. Interloper flew as high as she could to get a visual for us, and what we saw had me cackling hard.

It was a giant blue crab. A massive, one hundred meter long crab, not including its legs, but a crab nonetheless. What the fuck was up with this company and crabs?

It unfolded itself as the dust around it settled, its massive legs spearing into the earth, raising it high above the ground and just a bit lower than the building I found myself on. I could see a metal structure on its back from here, so I assumed that there might be either people in there, or a big gun. I was betting on people piloting the thing like a mech, as that would make cracking this thing so much more satisfying.

A massive claw shot out towards me, which missed as I saw it coming from Interloper and was able to teleport a safe distance away. The second claw shot out towards Interloper, who was just out of range anyways, but dodge to the side as scale-like things flew out towards her from the claw.

I smiled as I moved to teleport onto the Crabzilla’s claw, but felt space thicken in the area. I scowled instead. Fucker had a spatial stabilization anchor on it.

“Lyssa, anything you can do to get my teleportation working?” I asked as I sprinted towards Crabfest.

Lyssa feels your frustration and offers a resolution! Stab the highlighted spot to disrupt the Crab!

I saw a spot on Crabpot’s forehead light up bright pink like a comically large weak spot. “Thanks, Lyssa.” I said sarcastically, causing her to send me a sparkly thumbs up emoji in my augs.

As I was moving around the battlefield, trying to figure out my next move, a bunch of holes opened up beneath Crusty's shell as lasers and bullets started raining down on basically everything beneath it. My troops, Bestlé's troops, didn't matter to it, they were all valid targets.

Thankfully, my people deployed shields shortly before Wannabe Sushi landed, so our casualties were minimized to nothing more than bad coughing and reminders on why eye protection was mandatory. The Bestlé goons, on the other hand? They fared far worse, being cut down in droves.

I saw Queen decide to rush one of the legs, brandishing a huge chunk of steel in the shape of a sword. He slashed super quickly and tore a chunk out of the six meter thick leg. A few more of those and he might shave the leg down to its first joint.

Beach Mine didn't like that and pulled its leg up and away, slamming a claw down on Queen. Somehow, he fucking parried a claw that was bigger than he was, then stepped back to target a different leg. Crazy fucker.

I adjusted my teleportation marker to any place around the battlefield to see how fucked I actually was, and discovered I could teleport away from Crabbucket, but not towards it.

This gave me an idea as I placed my marker way above Butterbait and teleported about one hundred meters above it.

By complete coincidence, Interloper was right there! I definitely scared her as I fell rapidly towards Crabapple.

Now, did I have a plan for slowing myself down? Yes, actually. Meters before I hit Mr.Snipples shell, I teleported to my left and about ten centimeters up, adjusting my position to fall upwards instead, taking advantage of the conditional spatial disrupter.

With the whole falling to my death thing out of the way, I landed safely on the metal plate, deciding to stab into it and see what happens. Turns out, nothing much as it, at least in this spot, was pure metal. Not even any wiring that I could hack into.

Before I could do anything more, two different, smaller drop pods slammed into CrabFace, causing it to tilt heavily to one side. The pods landed on the metal plate a few meters to my right and dug deep into it, denting it in such a way that I believed that there might be something below. Point towards people below!

The tops of the pods exploded upwards, letting its occupants exit the sunken pods safely. I saw a bunch of gold and green heavy power armors wielding flame throwers rush out and start cooking Sidewalker’s shell as a fire giant stepped out laughing.

“My goodness, young lady! You really live up to your namesake, don't you!” He said with a deep, rumbling voice, a huge hammer resting on his shoulder while a huge grin was plastered on his charcoal-toned face. “And here I thought an orbital drop onto this monstrosity was impressive enough, but to do so with your bare body? You have my immense respect, Samurai Maniac.”

I smirked at him under my mask. “Yeah, well, it worked, didn't it? Now, come on, I need to smack this Googly Eyes in the face so I can teleport freely again.”

Baldy nodded as I saw his hammer glow with white plasma flames, a scowl forming on his face shortly after. “Indeed. Spatial stabilizers are such a pain. Lead on!”

I start running towards the front of the Tailless Lobster, but we didn't get far as numerous hatches open up along the metal plate, releasing…. More crabs! Point away from people below.

These crabs were fully metal, probably drones, some had guns for claws, others had glowing claws for claws. A large chunk of them started shooting at us with high caliber rounds while a bunch of others started rushing towards us with their glowing claws.

Baldy stepped in front of me as a green hard-light shell formed around us, the smaller green guys rushing forward and blasting a path through the crab-bots with pure white fire, melting everything they touched and heating up the metal plate below.

Baldy started walking through the fire and molten metal, swinging his hammer and causing waves of plasma to sweep through the crab swarms, dealing even more damage to Cocktail Sauce. I tried to follow and found that the heat of the molten metal was blocked by the green shell. I rushed forward, basically sprinting to keep up with the casual walking speed of the laughing bald fire giant and his casual crab broil.

Soon, turrets popped up further away from us and pelted us with more gunfire, but the fire giant ignored them. Softshell Taco started to shake itself, but neither of us so much as tripped as I jumped onto Blady's shoulders and he just kept walking, acting as if my presence was simply the most natural course of action in this situation.

As we made it near the edge of Shellshock’s shell, it tried to swipe its claws at us, but we were at a bad angle for it, having the claws brush no more than a meter above us. A large chunk of scales tried to pelt us from said claws, but were rebuffed by the heat Baldy and his goons were giving off, not to mention the active fi they were throwing up at the claw. I hopped off Baldy as he laughed once more. “The device is here, correct?”

“If Lyssa is correct, which she normally is.”

He smiled a large, face splitting smile as he hefted his hammer above his head, the, uh, head of the hammer shifted to grow a massive spike. He swung down hard, the hammer cracking the crab shell where the glowing pink light marked, causing Bloody Mary to both tilt forward and screech. Okay, so less confident there were people inside this thing. Baldy wound up again, slamming his hammer-pick thing even deeper into Hot Pot, this time spouting a jet of plasma deep inside.

I felt space loosen up, making me smile wide and cackle hard, feeling like a huge stone was taken off my chest. I shift into overdrive as time slows around me. Baldy winked at me as I received a message from him.

[Race to see who can take out the most legs?]

I replied with [You're on.], disappearing from that spot to land on the closest leg, swiping down. Euthanasia sliced nicely through the shell, but didn't have the reach to slice through in one go, which was crazy, considering how big she was.

Instead, I aimed my arm into the new wound and summoned my favorite ranged toy, (now in new flavors!), and yeet my upgraded explosive lance deep into the leg, and as I teleported to the next leg, the lance detonated marvelously, disconnecting the first leg from Mud Bug.

I saw a flash of white come from the other side of Low Rent Lobster and felt a heavy vibration reverberate through the shell. I might need to work faster to beat him if he could one tap each leg.

The smell of cooked crab filled the air in the meantime, causing my stomach to growl. “Lyssa, is this thing edible?” I asked quietly.

She didn't answer, so I took her silence as a no and continued to remove legs to at least win that race.

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