OOM: Mongolia

Noriko is young; very young, considering how thoroughly she clings to a particular set of philosophies--to think of it as a game, with a winner and a loser and you must be that winner. She’s seen more than most teenagers her age have, still; being a superhero without really getting trained for that will do that to a person. But there’s no point in focusing on that depressing tidbit of information--she’s here in Mongolia (albeit a really fucked-up version of Mongolia that ought not exist in the present state) for a reason, she has a job.

And that job is essentially to be a distraction and support force. One that doesn’t get herself killed, hopefully doesn’t let anybody else get killed, and takes out anything not on the Resistance side of this conflict. She’s okay with that; Noriko is not a resistance force leader, nor is she a Marine, or a scientist-turned-paramilitary-figurehead, or a uniformed soldier recognized by any country on the face of her earth or any other. But she knows how to fight and how to do it well, so she’s going to. At first it’s easy; the ambient electricity in the air charges her up for a good blast of shocking blue-white flashes. The loud and bright krrrkk-fzzzzzt her very real lightning makes is satisfying, especially when it results in two or three or seven of the creatures she isn’t thinking enough about to get names for dropping to the ground without even twitching. A quick jolt like that can do some interestingly major damage to both circuitry and residual organs, she knows. Luckily, it does precisely jack to her. The frog- and crab-monstrosities, however, do a lot more.

The metal of her gauntlets starts to heat up as she keeps applying current to it, and one of the conducting plates burns her arm a little, but other than that and being hellaciously messy, Noriko escaped more or less unharmed. There were some scratches, none very deep and one on her shoulder didn’t want to stop bleeding, but she did what she agreed she’d do. The manhacks were the nastiest parts for her, because even in borrowed clothing from the bar that covered a lot more of her skin than her uniform top, and was also sewn of spidersilk, there was a lot of her that wasn’t really armored. It’s only when the little drones start falling out of the goddamned sky that things go kind of to shit, but Nori keeps herself covered by hiding under a conveniently now-dead...something that used to be human. Once. Maybe. The more she looks at it to wait out the falling things for a minute, the more she isn’t sure she knows anymore, and isn’t sure she really wants to.

God this was a fucked up world.

---

Nori had heard Alyx’s speech in person before the fight, and she liked the words, listened to them with all the seriousness any other girl might take dating advice from a best friend. She couldn’t ignore the resonance with some of her own past, the idea of endurance and being the most stubborn thing on the damn field, at the risk of losing everything if you weren’t. But knowing the people around her were in the same spot, if not one more desperate because they don’t have a Milliways to escape to or another world to live in, helped.

On reflection, it’d been like Alyx said: that kind of special nature, that ability to dig one’s heels in and give your overlords a nice big fuck you, that’s why they’d win. If you could consider it winning, and if it happened at all.