But if it was a time loop, and the conditions to break it were unknown, then there wasn’t any harm in trying the insane and impossible just to see what would happen. Not because there wouldn’t be consequences, but because the forces necessary to establish such total control over reality were such that anything but the most impossible of moonshots would not be able to surmount their odds. As such, Anya commanded they head to heavy weapons.

  “We’re going to power on Colossus.”

  There were no words adequate for how insane the idea sounded. They were going to power on the giant death ball that required global cooperation to stop and garnered the fear and distrust necessary to kick-start the First Tribulation? With five people? It was a bad joke, kick-starting infinity with five bodies.

  “Don’t we need to unlock it?” Alissa asked from Alex’s arm.

  “No.” Anya answered. A few eyebrows were raised, but her proposition was easily understood. If the Most High had granted her authority to unlock the heavy weapons before, then it was likely she could wield them again now. She had gone to ask them before not because it had been obviously necessary, but because she had thought Raethor still possessed the mandate of command and that the others needed to be gathered anyway. It would have been a good opportunity to ask the Most High to unlock the weapons again, and perhaps try to probe them for more information in the process.

  That didn’t seem necessary now so they quickly made their way deeper into the base. Despite the fact some hour or two had passed since the original T0 in which Anya had watched David die, the necrites were nowhere to be seen.

  Anya’s stomach growled and she hunched over for a moment in pain. Will proposed they stop by the cafeteria, but she declined. The timing was precarious enough, if they stopped for food it would become untenable. Will, luckily, had grabbed a few sticks of jerky. Anya ravenously devoured them and their salty flavor settled into her tongue. By the time she had finished the five of them only a second or two had passed, but the hunger remained. Will, unfortunately, had no more food to furnish her. It would have to be enough. She could always try eating the necrites as Will had suggested, but first she imagined she’d need to take on the greater form of her own.

  For that matter, what would happen if she consumed the new flesh stores on the base in that form? The greater necrites had devoured the forges in the old flesh mill, so surely she’d be able to do the same. It was a somewhat sickening thought to consider, but if the forges were already dead then there wasn’t really any moral issue at play. The organs inside them were already ripe, there would be no sense in allowing them to go to waste. On the other hand, they had arrived at heavy weapons. It was almost too easy for Will to open the door and for Anya herself to command Synarchy to rise once more to her service.

  Its open ribcage was once again covered in the reforming of flesh, save for the metal plates that dotted a kind of breastplate. The humanoid legs bundled themselves in thick stripes of muscle, and the bone dish rotten with disuse found itself again covered in skinless bloodless flesh. Writhing vessels formed from the torso and one brought Anya to Synarchy’s top, connecting to the same blood port in her arm she had ripped out the base’s cables from not even thirty minutes prior.

  They had left the doors open, but necrites did not appear. It would seem their timing had been early enough to manage after all. Anya’s hunger demanded a solution but there was nothing to be done. Her stomach growled and her temple began to pound as the body made its displeasure clear.

  She brought the others up to distract herself from the pain and hunger, but it did not help. So she began to speak in the vain effort to distract from it.

  “So…” Anya began, but in her distracted hunger lost the initiative to Alex, who spoke first.

  “What’s your plan Anya?”

  “That’s Commander to you, swine!” Jesús corrected. Anya imagined bacon would taste amazing right now.

  “No? She hasn’t asked for that and besides, Raethor’s not permanently dead which would make her Commander in Situ.”

  “Even still, you have no right to! —”

  “Shut up Jesús.” Anya demanded. The attempt to kiss her ass was transparent and pathetic.

  “How did you even pass basic? In the last loop you died because you couldn’t shoot the enemies right in front of your face?” Alex continued, bolstered by Anya’s demand for him.

  Jesús looked away, embarrassed, but then Will spoke for him.

  “How indeed.” The implication was clear enough.

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  “How are we supposed to survive if Jesús can’t do anything but kill minorities?” Alissa added.

  “With Colossus.” Alex surmised. He hadn’t objected to their coming here and for good reason. It didn’t matter how strong they were as soldiers or how powerful their weapons were in any given normal situation. Their firepower was enough to take over a small country— Synarchy itself could probably blow through a mid-sized kingdom on its own— but in the context of a grand and glorious empire? Their empire was stronger than anything that had ever come before it, but on a global scale it was one of several of a comparable size. They all strove to create stronger weapons, and their weapons had become so strong from behind closed doors that none of them could afford to display them in plain sight without risk the others would come knocking with countermeasures. Alex was confident their empire would win any war of any scale as it already had in the First and Second Tribulations, but in the Third they had nearly lost. Everything their empire stood for was on the brink of destruction. Their soldiers were pushed many miles from the edges of conquered territory almost to the borders of the empire itself. Only the necrosis bomb had halted the advancing armies, and only the necrosis bomb allowed them to get by with losing recently-conquered territory alone.

  Their empire had been on the precipice of defeat, but only because it had been unwilling to use the weapons stored for the rainy day that was to come. Because no matter how many miles of tributaries you lost, if the heartland was untouched there was always another day to conquer. There was always another land to take and its people’s continued shifting borders and slaughters and tributes would always be there tomorrow.

  But then they had discovered the new flesh, and with it the situation changed. Suddenly it became very advantageous to have such far-flung colonies, and very detrimental to have lost territory in the last war. It was lucky, then, that the empire’s population had swelled from many decades in the proverbial sun. It was so easy for the laws to change, and so easy to produce the kind of radical change that their forefathers could only dream of.

  And yet all things have a cost and it had come time to pay the reaper’s due. Here in this moment Alex knew that the new flesh was not a boon to all mankind: it was a curse. It was a tax on the future to pay yourself in the present, whose cost became more and more steep the longer the burden wore on. But as the empire found itself fording deeper and deeper through the waters of the Rubicon on the inevitable path toward global war, it did not stop to consider the implications of such a technology.

  Here and now, Alex knew that all their technology had failed. There was only the ancient relic designed for the explicit purpose of killing everyone in the world if its master so demanded. All these toys and weapons designed to discriminate between bodies were meaningless when all bodies around were hostile. In such a situation target differentiation was a weakness that could not be afforded.

  They would kill everyone in a hundred miles and perhaps then it would be enough.

  Or perhaps not.

  “Do you think it will work?” He finally asked Anya.

  “I think we have to try.” She answered weakly.

  “Synarchy wasn’t enough and neither was Judgement. Is there anything else we can do?”

  Silence hung heavily over the air for the seconds it took Alissa to grant it courage.

  “We can try again tomorrow! As long as we’re together we can defeat even the sun in the sky!”

  Alex pinched his sister’s cheek.

  “Do you really think we can do it?”

  “Of course!” She pouted. How dare he doubt her?

  “We have the power of the master ra—” Jesús began, but Anya stopped him.

  “Jesús, I’m going to strip you of your rank if you don’t shut up.”

  “Can you even do that?” Will asked. Anya glared at him and he backed down. Jesús said nothing.

  “If you’ll just be an effective soldier I’ll give you a promotion. How about that?”

  Again, could she even do that? Will had no idea, but dared not question his commander pro tempore.

  “Anya, he’s insane!” Alex questioned hotly.

  “But we need him.” She answered bluntly.

  Did they? Alex was pretty sure they didn’t. Colossus was the only weapon they needed, and some racist fuck wasn’t doing anything for their unit. He added precisely zero value and in fact was actively detrimental for being a waste of resources on the line.

  “He’s worse than useless!” He objected. Why would she stake their victory on Colossus and then act like Jesús mattered at all to the final outcome?

  “But we need all the soldiers we can get.”

  “He shouldn’t have passed basic! Is he even a soldier?”

  “Jesús has been here in our unit for years and you’re questioning him now?!” Will objected strongly. “He’s every bit as effective as you are, you just have to look past the myopically-close targets you always fire at!”

  “You can’t shoot blindly at rocks in the distance and call it sniper-fire.”

  “Jesús doesn’t shoot at rocks. He’s probably killed twice as many enemies as you!”

  “But they may as well have been rocks for all the strategic value there was in shooting them!”

  “They were targets. He eliminated them.”

  “They were black, not strategically important.”

  “Hitting an enemy’s reserves is strategically valuable!”

  Alissa interrupted them. “This conversation is ridiculous. Why are you having it?!”

  “Enough already.” Anya demanded. Perhaps her hunger had gotten the better of her, but what’s said is said and what’s done is done. She didn’t have to follow through on her words if Jesús didn’t help them, she just needed all the help they could get right now.

  Jesús’ thoughts, of course, were elated. “I’m going to kill so many minorities when this is over.”

  But how could Anya ever have possibly known that? She was so hungry after all.