12 Miles Below

In the real world, we'd remained floating across the air, both of us spinning around weightless, while our full focus was elsewhere.

At the edge of his territory, in the great white expanse of nothingness, we grouped together.

Behind us was the comforting warmth of our current soul fractals, a home base that gave us ground to steady ourselves and push off against. Without that, as just floating souls, trying to claw our way into an occupied fractal would have been like trying to break in through a door, while floating weightlessly on the other side.

"Eight souls is no army." Father boomed across the distance. "The idea still has merit. Draw blades."

"That's Tenisent all right." A knight from House Bladeseeker muttered, thoughts tinged with a few memories of getting utterly beat down.

"Aye. And he's cranky." Another chuckled.

“When is he not?” I added, which the rest of the knights nodded sagely to.

"Shut it all.” A Stormsweeper knight said, “Lads, we only live once." An inside joke among the whole crew here.

They all knew the plan. Both their part, my part, and Journey’s part in all this.

"Training objective remains as briefed - if we can take on Tenisent's fortress and force him out, then we can rip any Feather's soul and send them packing from their body.”

"And take the shell for ourselves." Another finished.

They all agreed to follow Sagrius and our team down into the underground, but it didn’t feel right to simply ask something like this without returning anything but more danger. Maybe Hexis’s talk about how the warlocks saw their living hell as exactly this made me more self-conscious about what these knights were all going through.

Up until I spent more time with them. There was an open comradery with each other, sharing emotions and concepts freely, hope and a thirst for challenge riling through all of them. They did so almost without a second thought, the sort of comfort that family had with one another. I could feel it boosting my own mindset even now, like a virtuous cycle upwards. Almost like they were giving an unworded invitation to join them.

Hexis had let me know Tomb-bound souls were dangerous due to despair and hatred that could brew within them. But the knights here had no despair. No hatred. Only sheer unwavering faith in the clan and their abilities. They knew Lord Atius would never abandon them to this fate forever. They knew they'd find some way to heal Sagrius, eventually.

That faith was rewarded. The current plan, set out by Atius, had been to seek out mite forges on the migration down, and find a way to print out more armors with no soul fractals originally placed. Something they could forged in themselves and then command. He’d made it a top priority, spoke with them and Arcbound often on preparing themselves for an possible immortal lifespan.

They’d walk the world like Arcbound would eventually.

But why settle for a second rate shell, when they could loot a Feather? That’s what I offered them a chance to do. Is there anyone better to draw a Feather directly than us?

It was perfect. And for the entire week up till now, they'd been relentlessly practicing soul to soul combat, turning Sagrius's armor into a mini battlefield happening under the plate. All while I honed the weapons and spent nights not sleeping, up until Kidra forced her goon squad to bolt me down in bed, then take away my slates and engineering papers, right out of my hands if needed.

Inside the soul realm, the world was shaped around willpower. A mirror to the digital sea. And since I was the most familiar with coding, engineering, and working with a Feather’s tutorage directly, I was here to handle one specific thing only:

The digital code Avalis had tried using on Father.

Future Feathers would have this code running. And I'd been practicing fighting it with Wrath as the lead.

Not a whole lot of practice, figured we'd continue that as we descended into the underground. It was a long trip. But from the few attempts I’d gotten at it, I was pretty decent. Having all the keys fed to me was like a cheatsheet allowed on a test.

"You ready?" A clan knight asked, hand holding my shoulder. All concepts, so I felt more than just the hand on my shoulder but rather the reassurance and message meant by that gesture.

"I'll keep it off you for as long as I can." I said, taking a step forward.

“We know you will lad.” And I could tell they really did.

One last glance behind us, at our home turf. A tendril of my soul reached out to Journey, sending one last message.

Affirmative. It replied.

No goodbye and good luck? Journey you wound me here.

The armor ignored that completely. User not leaving. Luck not required. No wounds detected on user.

Technically true, my body was still inside the armor.

Yeah, yeah. Well, good luck to you on your side of the fight here. I sent it the impression of a thumbs up and left it alone to do it's thing.

I had a job to do here.

The enemy code was woven into the landscape, not quite present but not quite removed. Halfway between the soul realm and the digital sea. It had no thought, no feeling. It was simply meant to repel and it did that with expert ability. Like the machine archive we’d visited with Father.

For machine code, it looked more like a massive creature of some kind. Organic. Tendrils of data moored to the flat land between us and Father's walls, reaching far up into somewhere else. Like one of the god's fortresses, barely visible through the clouds. Ever watching down.

The knights behind would have to breach the soul fractal the traditional way, by sheer willpower. I would use the code as a backdoor.

I sent out a matching machine signal code provided by Wrath, and hitched a ride through the pipeline, flying side by side to the data stream, hiding in its shadow. Below me, I could see the knights begin the advance forward across no man’s land.

My concept of self reached into the halfway point between digital realm and the soul realm, and that's when the full code revealed itself through the fading clouds. Like a massive fat oyster at the center of an agri-farmer hydroponics grid.

A tendril of willpower snaked through, digging past the illusions and decoy walls. The hard outer shell that protected the code. Wrath had exposed the whole thing to me, I knew what to look for. Inside a small crack I went, burrowing under the soft tissue like a parasite.

Hallways and chambers materialized around me, slick with smaller programs flowing through like blood cells. Keeping the whole thing alive and ready. I passed through like a ghost, unrecognized.

Every now and then, archives and data points would be in range. I skipped past those, looking instead for my target. A command and control node. Massive thing too, floating in the middle of an arterial chamber, like the beating heart. Looked like a silver square, only sections lifted off, revealing red tendrils connected down to the ground, walls and ceilings. While parts of the code looked almost fungal, this one looked far more animal-like. Built like a predator’s mind would have been. That’s because this was the eyes of the code.

I got close, then severed one of the connective tissue string in one strike, weaving a brand new matching string and cauterizing the wound before the whole system noticed the damage.

The code took the replacement with little trouble, quickly healing the graft and absorbing it back into the system. It’s long range general scan saw human souls in the distance, and that didn't change as the knights approached. It couldn’t yet do anything to humans outside the soul fractal, but it could ready itself from a sleeping mode to a more alert mode if it noticed they were getting closer.

I repeated the process, taking out eye after eye from the inside, until all the system saw was an unchanging picture across all spectrums.

I'd blinded the beast.

The knights got in position, two flanking both sides of a column, while the rest drew on their willpower like a drill, spearing out right into Father's first walls. The blow looked more like a bright beam, flying straight for the defenses and landing into them with a power that shook the ground.

Despite the concentrated hit, the wall remained firm and unyielding. That was expected, Father had the home field advantage. These walls had been strengthened over and over, meticulously cared for.

Unfortunately for him, the knights weren't done with one hit. They began a steady, rhythmic attack on his fortress, each hit, they took a unified step forward, letting the impact mask their movement.

Father reacted. The ground before the knights roiled, spikes growing out to impale our group.

The two flanking knights took a step forward and fulfilled their role as the group's shields, summoning pillars of thought that intercepted and held off the mass of spikes. Father increased his attack, spikes now striking at the group from all directions, faster and faster.

Two more knights peeled off the back, and joined the defense, leaving only three to man the central column forward.

I could sense him searching within the territory at the same time, realizing already that the digital side of the defenses hadn't activated like they should have. Which meant me, since he could see I wasn’t among the knights.

Mind floating through the tendrils of logic, I hid in the shadows, keeping the system down. Making small cuts in specific places, bleeding the beast right where it needed to work.

Father's own tendrils of thought soon flooded through the channel and veins. He was using Avalis’s processing speed, letting it handle repairs while keeping a direct eye, a supervisor searching for something he knew was there even if the rest of the system was convinced it wasn't.

Immune systems were brought out, flowing past me as I mimicked the signal, merging slightly into the walls, letting the data wrap loosely around my concept self. Like fungus growing over my skin, lightly connecting me to the chamber walls.

Firewalls began to trigger around as containment protocols roused awake at Father's angry command.

The knights had reached the first wall, and only a single one was hammering away at it. The rest were all huddling around the wallbreaker, calling up shields on demand to hold off the spikes. A mix of smaller spikes attacking at alternating speeds, with one large spike every few seconds, aimed at different sections of the shield. That one took two or three knights all reacting at the same time to hold off.

The digital code remained unable to locate the knights. If it could, tendrils would have wrapped around each, holding them down while the rest of the system launched a swarm of anti-life patterns and other defenses. The beast had quite a few different means of fighting off an enemy soul. And I was actively running rampant across all the nodes needed to run those.

Father stepped into the field directly, smashing his willpower in one giant fist straight down at the huddled crew. They shook, multiple knights falling on a knee in effort to hold off the tide above.

The wallbreaker remained focused on his task and left the defense to the rest of the knights.

On my end it was getting hot here. Flames were licking around, searching for anything that didn't belong. And soon they were burning away any new code that had been recently generated, attacking its own flesh in search of where the itch was. Things that I had cut and had been mended since I’d moved on were burned away again, blindly.

Father gave it orders, and the beast obeyed. Walls of digital gates wove into the fortress walls he'd designed. And each gate was instantly breached as I input the correct key, or used the inner systems to resolve their own defense.

I was running out of room to hide in though. Father searched for where the keys were being input. Sniffing me out.

I was a tick sucking the blood out of the system, leaving only bite marks behind me as I shuffled around.

Far under me on the battleground, the first wall broke. The knights swarmed inside, finding an utter maze, filled with Father's cold fury. His willpower once more smashed into them, this time from under their feet, scattering them into the walls. Then he appeared himself as a full concept, stepping out from a wall and descending down on the first isolated knight, swords in hand.

That was a proxy of his mind, he owned the ground here, he could appear anywhere he wanted. And he could do that more than once. Three versions of him were on the field, fighting off the intruders.

But we'd made it past his walls. Already the knights were claiming ground, ripping it free from Father's control. Turning it into new breach points to launch attacks from or retreat behind. And more importantly - taking partial command of Feather's shell.

Not enough to make him stab himself, but enough to inhibit some of his armament. Similar to how he’d begun to mess with Avalis’s command as the bastard was trying to stab the life out of me. Small things, finger twitches, eye blinks, spasms. But it was enough to mess up any fighter who relied on perfect command.

A bloody hand filled with broken data ripped out the living walls around me. It blindly groped out, fingers trailing through empty space, before curling back into a fist and withdrawing into the wall.

He couldn't tell where I was in the digital code, this place was still more of a black box to him. But he could tell I was somewhere in here, and he could take a few gambles to yank me out.

More hands came out the wall, educated guesses at my location. I moved with each sabotage, keeping the system locked down and offline.

One knight had already been stabbed through the chest, damaged too much to retain a concept together, and forced back into captured ground, where he’d been isolated against more of Father’s split mind. Soon the breakpoint was retaken, and the knight had been eliminated, forced out of the soul fractal and back outside the wall. He had little chance to make it across the distance back into the fight. Not with Father's spikes picking him off if he tried.

The rest of the group was still advancing at a good rate. The maze was only slowing them down, not completely stopping them.

I began to reuse the system's offensive capabilities against itself. Making it believe it found me in different sections of data, and watching firewalls quarantine those sections for a full flush. It wasn't enough damage to really break the system, too much of it was self-repairing and built to handle all kinds of damage. But it certainly wasn't as equipped to deal with an intruder that snuck under its hard shell before the fight even began.

It never had the chance to trigger an identification tag on me, and so it was ill-prepared to hunt me out. I didn't give it any mercy, using Wrath's tendrils of spun code like a scalpel.

Concepts of swarm tactics. Cut.

Concepts of ash and containment. Cut.

Concepts of simulated prediction. Cut.

Concepts of radial damage. Cut.

Concepts of direct damage. Cut.

The knights broke through another wall, and then went straight for the throne room. They found all three copies of Father there, looming before the stone throne at the center.

"Satisfactory." One of them said,

"However, too reliant on the boy to succeed." Another said.

"Against the digital monster, it will not give you a chance like this." The third said.

That part was true. This beast was nasty when it was fully awake. It had a few dozen ways to trap, fight, confuse and blind a human enemy and having more than one knight fighting in the realm wouldn't have changed its ability to multitask. After all, this was the code built by a protofeather to beat the human empire at it’s peak, and it hadn't been altered since.

Only reason it had been helpless this far, was because I had every single key and cheat possible that no humans would have had in the past.

"Aye, but we'll be in his armor on the way down." One of the knights said. "He'll be with us in the first fight. After that, we'll have our hands on a Feather and their systems to ourselves, turn that monster right back at another Feather."

Father’s eyebrows furrowed in thought, then he nodded. "Acceptable enough."

The other two mirrors of himself stalked straight forward, one hand outstretched, pillars of willpower slamming right into the knights.

They in turn leapt right into the fight, combining their own willpower to force his walls and terrain against him. Father was equally doing the same, sometimes having the walls outright snap shut like jaws on the knights, or the ground swallow them up. Was the most fluid and changing battle I'd ever seen, almost like a madhouse.

That’s the last I got to see before the fourth side of Father continued his relentless search around the machine beast. At this point, I knew my speeder had reached its last stop. He was getting better at taking guesses where I was hiding, and one of those grabs would get my leg or arm.

So my objective turned into making an absolute mess of this system, going after all the nodes and stabbing deep into each. Making the whole thing as crippled as it could be, and then doubling back to re-stab and cut sections that were rapidly repairing.

It was a good run. And it was over fast. Father caught on to where I was shortly after.

Hundreds of hands ripped free of the walls around me, right as I was about to stab another node. Most missed. A few caught me. That was largely enough.

I was promptly dragged straight out by a massive wall of willpower, thrown right into quarantine. The fourth iteration of Father glowered down on me.

I gave him a shy wave and smiled. “Father. Nice to see you again.”

"Your attempt has a flaw." He said.

"And what would that be? Always open to constructive criticism."

"Your true body is unmoving. You are too cut off from it. I am not. A Feather can and will remain moving even during a siege."

He's right about that. I'd dug down a little too deep. My actual body was a legless cricket in sight of a mantis.

"You're going easy on us then, by not attacking? Doesn't seem like you."

He growled, some parts of his walls fading just slightly. Curiosity. He was curious about what I could do fighting off against the strongest arsenal machines had. That’s why he hadn’t started the fight again in the real world.

"I have seen enough." Father said, the concept of a blade pointed right at my throat. "You are defeated." I could see what he was sending. He’d have a blade to my real body’s throat, and the shields would vanish faster than I could react to.

"Not until my armor's shields are gone. And they're not."

"So be it, boy."

A beat passed and the world shook around me. I could sense the soul fractal linking me back to my body was moving around now.

Without me.

One of Father's duplicates vanished mid-fight with the knights. His mind needing to think and move elsewhere.

"You left the engram in control." The one staring me down said. "If that was your plan, it has no future, boy. Avalis's control virus remains in my possession. Did you think I wouldn't know how to use it?"

"Oh, I fully expected you to say you could use it." I said. "Question is, can you?"

He did. I could see it in the soul fractal, the commands being sent out. And then the confusion when it did nothing. He tracked down where the block came from, and found it within the battlefield.

Just like Father's own fight with Avalis, throwing the Feather off with small minor overrides, the knights were doing the same here. Only they had been ordered to do more than mess with the physical world.

"The main plan was to kick you out of your central fractal." I said. "But I never said that was the only item on my to-do list. That cranky old bat's one of the few I can trust to go toe to toe with you and at least survive. She's my best asset.

And now she’s back."