The Divine Smith of The Xtraterrestrial Combat Unit

[Gerald Apollyon]

Discovering that I had been reborn into the world of XCOM had been a bit of a shock to get used to. Having my birthdate pushed forward a little more than two decades on top of that to put me in line with the XCOM 2 timeline as a slightly younger and fitter man was a bit harder to swallow but I'd had some time to get used to my new circumstances. On the one hand I was a full two decades younger than I would be with my old birthdate and thanks to ADVENT I had never gained the weight I had when I had died, on the other hand my beard and hair were back to their non-existence and short status respectively and while I didn't mind the loss of hair, it had returned to its full fluffy appearance after all after starting to thin, but I did lament the loss of the beard. Razors were expensive after all and constantly buying new ones along with shaving cream was a tedious experience. Luckily this time around I wasn't going into the US Navy, because it didn't exist anymore in any real capacity thanks to ADVENT taking over the world, and as such I had shaved a handful of times when my peach fuzz was starting to come in to even everything out and then started letting it simply grow out.

Beyond the fact I was living on what amounted to a Vichy Earth my childhood was fairly normal for this new alien run world. I knew intellectually that the aliens were bad for the planet and humanity being subjugated was something that was going to need to be addressed but overall, it wasn't the worst way to spend your childhood. Then dad got called into one of the Gene Clinics and we never saw him again. That's when I was rather rudely reminded that this was still essentially an occupation by a foreign, hostile power that didn't care one bit about their subjects beyond whatever value they could pull from both our bodies and our planet before fucking off back into space. I had become complacent with the lack of violence and general misery on the news, no new or continuing wars by old men who'd never have to face the consequences of their choices, racial tensions were completely absent, even resource shortages and environmental damage was, supposedly, a thing of the past. But dad disappearing into one of ADVENT's gene clinics really nailed home that we were living in an actual police state. After all, the surrounding plant life may have started reclaiming the areas that humanity had been forced to abandon when we were all relocated to the Mega Cities, but the scars of the invasion still remained. Plenty of old cities were ongoing reclamation projects thanks to the Lost that were the byproduct of the abduction devices used in the invasion and the wilderness outside the city was incredibly dangerous thanks to the roving groups of Chrysalids that were the remnants of the groups deployed during the various terror attacks during the invasion.

Mom had never been the same after dad vanished; she became a shell of her former self and became paranoid and despondent in equal measure, forcing me to step up and take over the running of the household. I took whatever part-time job I could find to put food on the table and the roof over our heads on top of going to school to at least keep up appearances of us being a happy family. A few times, during her few moments of lucidity, would sometimes mention a sister she had that was in the military and had been scouted for a secret project but she had never shown up so I had no idea if she was killed during the invasion or if she even existed in the first place. It didn't last unfortunately, I came home after a shift late to find my mom laying in the bathtub, a bottle of wine within arms reach and her forearms opened from wrist to elbow. That had been the night of my 17th​ birthday and from then on, I came to despise both the Xenos for taking my parents from me and the date specifically because it was just another reminder of what I had lost.

The death of my mother was not something I was going to hide, nor was it something I wanted to hide anyway. Let her become a black mark on the Speaker's image of the perfect ADVENT he was selling to humanity. Fortunately, I was just old enough to avoid being put in the Foster System and thus avoided that hellhole but that still left me living alone in the same house, it was no longer a home, where I had lost both my parents. I spent the next year just kinda stewing in my own anger and helplessness in the face of my inability to take revenge for the loss of my parents which is when my 18th​ birthday rolled around and everything changed. Over the years of my new life, I had felt something growing inside me, some kind of well of power growing in the area around my stomach and on my 18th​ birthday that well of power burst forth and I discovered that I did indeed have a way to take my revenge for my parents.

It was called the Celestial Forge and it claimed that it was the greatest compendium of Crafting Perks, Powers and abilities from across the Multiverse and it was now mine to do with as I pleased. On its activation it provided me with three free rolls to help get me started on my journey to avenge my parents and to drive the filthy xenos from Earth for good. The first perk to be rolled was from the Domain of Safety called Cry Havoc from the World of Darkness series. I wasn't all that familiar with the setting but from what I remember it was Urban Dark Fantasy meets Cthulhu meets Vampire the Masquerade. The part that was most interesting to me however was that apparently there was a force in the setting called 'Mania' that allowed certain aspects of the setting to work at all, mainly the hyper advanced tech and magical artifacts. If a plain mortal were to interact with these 'Wonders' then the 'Mania' allowing them to function and stay together would start to break down and the 'Wonders' would lose their potency and eventually stop working altogether. This force was called 'Havoc' and I now had the ability to selectively apply 'Havoc' to any tech I created, making it unusable and, more importantly to me, unreproducible to anyone who wouldn't be able to understand how my tech worked.

This first power was incredibly powerful in its own right though kinda useless without any tech of my own to produce which my second power fixed nicely. It was from the Domain of Knowledge, the Future Tech sub category called Foraker-Hemphill from the Honor Harrington universe, sometimes shortened to Honorverse for conveniences sake. The Honorverse were a series of books written by David Weber and was literally Horatio Hornblower in space, very Age of Sail and late 19th​ early 20th​ Century geopolitics but with space ships, FTL and lasers. Foraker-Hemphill basically elevated me to one of the foremost experts on Honorverse tech, I knew how to create the Phased Array Gravity Drive, or more commonly known as the Impeller drive which allowed for close to 600 gravities of acceleration, inertial compensators powerful enough to negate such acceleration, the Hyperspace Drive, the Warshawski Sail, and so many other technologies that would catapult Humanity to the stars and beyond. Was I smarter or more knowledgeable than a true savant in their field of course not, but as my dad was fond of saying 'I knew enough to make me dangerous'.

Unfortunately, about 90% of the tech was useless to me as it stood right now as they required orbital infrastructure and ground facilities that just didn't exist. Putting out of my mind all the stuff that I was in no position to take advantage of my mind alighted upon what was most pertinent to me, the infantry scale stuff, more specifically Pulsers and Battle Armor. Pulsers were essentially modern firearms modified to be mass drivers using gravity to propel their rounds instead of electromagnetism. They typically fired 3-4.7mm explosive darts at around 2000m/s although they also tended to use non-explosive solid penetrators as well while Battle Armor was essentially a fully enclosed vacuum rated suit of Powered Combat Armor that was capable of increasing a man's strength by 10 times and let him run up to 60kph as standard or sprint with the help of integrated jump gear at 100kph while being almost completely impervious to kinetic weapons and being somewhat resistant to plasma damage with the armored outer shell being electrified to help disperse plasma blasts turning a center mass chest hit from instantly dead to alert to a threat. Granted in the Honorverse setting Plasma Weapons were heavy support anti-vehicle weapons and not infantry rated like the ADVENT's own plasma weapons so I would assume that they'd have a far lesser effect on the Battle Armor but I wouldn't know without testing and testing in this context would be getting shot with a plasma weapon and I wasn't too keen on getting shot at just yet. And that was without getting into all the genetic engineering tech of the Honorverse, the Prolong treatment was something I was going to be looking into when I had an actual lab to work with.

As great as all that was it paled in comparison to the second part of the power that I had received, in addition to all the knowledge that was shoved into my brain, when I eventually got around to building any of it, I could choose how I built it. I could choose to build it decades more advanced than my peers, build it more quickly than was almost physically possible or, and most interesting to me, build it with an unbelievably tiny resource base. I could build my own suit of Battle Armor and Pulser for a fraction of the material costs it would take anyone else to build and for any part that wasn't resource intensive I could fall back on one of the other building methods. Anything that was just tedious to do I would be doing at the increased build speed, anything that was resource intensive would have the tiny resource base applied while I would be applying the decades ahead to the programming of the suit.

All of that was amazing at it was so I was giddy with eagerness for my last power and I was not disappointed. It was from the Domain Quality: Appearance called Decadence from the Dune universe. I now had the skills to sacrifice neither form nor function when I designed, created or arranged things while also being able to make my creations to perfectly appeal to anyone from the crassest people all the way to the upper crust of society. In addition to that I could also figure out the most optimal décor for any purpose or environment which included the best hiding places for discreet surveillance devices. For a few minutes I simply sat on my bed wondering how I would make the best use of Decadence to help me achieving my goal of building a suit of power armor and gravity rifle. I was playing with the copper bracelet dad had made for me for my 13th​ birthday, simply admiring the intricate engraving on the simple band of copper when it hit me. I could use Decadence to create jewelry and by combining it with the secondary power of Foraker-Hemphill I could do it in a fraction of the time it would normally take. And it didn't have to be restricted to jewelry, furniture, board games, knives, swords, even armor were all on the table as a secondary, and more substantial, income to supplement my current work. YouTube would be my friend during this time, learning the relevant skills would be relatively easy to start, it would just be a matter of practicing to build the said skills from a complete amateur to someone people would be willing to drop hundreds maybe even thousands of dollars for a piece from.

And that's how I spent the next two years, working my day job more as a cover than anything else while developing the skills necessary to make use of Decadence to its fullest potential. Of course, my first few pieces of jewelry, again mostly simple bracelets and pendants made of copper as it was the cheapest 'precious' metal on the market, to my co-workers to set the ground work. Get them talking about my pieces and how I was looking to expand into the handmade jewelry market in our city, then gift a few small wooden pieces to show that I wasn't just a one trick pony and it basically exploded from there. I was eventually fielding commissions from family members of my coworkers for their own pieces, then friends of the family and beyond raking in a pretty decent amount of cash. Some of said income was invested back into the business, better equipment, better materials and eventually I made enough plus what I made selling the house to move into a smaller house with a basement and garage so that I could begin on my real projects.

The garage was turned into my new workshop/forge for my commission work while my basement became the workshop where I would develop my Battle Armor and Pulser. Ironically it was the Pulser that proved to be the easier of the two to develop, getting my hands on the base rifle was easy enough. My dad had had a love of bullpup rifles ever since I could remember and had gotten his hands on a DesertTech WLVRN rifle chambered in 7.62NATO and it only felt right to use the weapon my dad had so loved as the base for the weapon that would put so many of the Xenos scum that had taken him from me into the dirt to be worm food. Converting the WLVRN was a task in of itself don't get me wrong, getting all the parts and pieces itself was a bit of a chore then developing the gravity manipulation tech to make it work was a process but eventually I had it. I'd soundproofed my basement to a frankly absurd degree but in order to muffle the sound of my work and to go undetected by the Xenos it was barely adequate in my own opinion but the Pulser was everything it was advertised as. The first testing firing put such a massive hole in the basement wall that I was worried that the entire house would collapse on top of me, especially for only firing a 4mm dart but I suppose that's what 2000m/s muzzle velocity will get you, but it ended up becoming a blessing in disguise. The new hole in the wall was eventually excavated and it made more room for the next project, the Battle Armor itself.

While I would continue to pump out commissions to keep my income stream stable and I would devote some of my time to creating the ammunition, magazines and powerpacks for the Pulser the vast majority of my time would be consumed by my attempt to build my own functional suit of Honorverse Battle Armor. Overall, it was slow going, taking far longer than the Pulser which was understandable considering it was a far greater undertaking than just converting a regular modern rifle to accept some level of future tech, even with the support powers granted by Foraker-Hemphill it took most of the two years to even get to the prototype stage. Of course, after that it went much quicker to go from prototype to what would be considered a first gen production model. It wasn't quite up to the standards of the Manticorian Royal Marines but then I was starting basically from scratch here so I figured they'd give me some slight slack in that regard. I was also supremely thankful that my power had decided to forsake giving me anything new during the last two years while I was working on my armor and weapon, trying to juggle that on top of figuring out my current abilities would have probably led to me either overextending myself to a dangerous degree or paralyzed me as I was locked in a constant spiral of new powers/abilities and trying to work them into my armor and rifle.

To celebrate my accomplishment, I splurged a bit and bought a family sized pizza meal from the local place and wouldn't you know it they were running a deal because today just so happened to coincide with the 20th​ anniversary of Unification Day. The day when humanity bent the knee to the Xenos to stave off immediate annihilation in return for a slow death at their hands. I was in the middle of taking a bit of a piece of pizza when there was an explosion on the TV at the site of one of the celebrations. The pizza slice halted in front of my face, completely forgotten, as I sat up on my couch now fully invested in what was happening on the screen. Apparently, someone had decided that Unification Day's 20th​ anniversary deserved a bit more than military parades and some fireworks, one of the new statues dedicated to the Elders had been bombed while a nearby Gene-Clinic had been raided.

I turned off the TV at that point, chewed the last of the pizza slice in my hand, wiped it and my mouth with a napkin and laid back on my bed with my arms splayed out to either side. If I remembered correctly then the second XCOM game started with an attack during the U-Day 20th​ and if that held true now… I grinned, then things were about to become far more interesting in the days ahead.