12 Miles Below

Doors sealed around us, boxed in and with only seven to our name against thirteen. This would have been the time where they’d taunt and demand we surrender. They got to the first part, just having trouble with the second part.

There’s still seven of us. And that meant taking us out would have one or two of their ranks get cut down in the process - if we’d been any other surface clan knight team. So they wanted to throw out small probing attacks, just to send the message.

Terrible idea, sending a group of three against Father.

He tossed the dead slaver off to the side, and absentmindedly shook his hand clear of the blood. The other two slavers had stopped in their tracks, staring at him. The rest of the room had grown exceedingly quiet.

On our side, we’d fought against Feathers. We knew what they were capable of. Wrath casually chewed forged metals just to see if it had any potential in cooking. So watching three opponents advance on Father of all people, we’d all silently agreed to wait and watch the utter shitshow that was going to happen next.

Not like anyone in this room was walking out of here alive. The doors were shut, but they’d find out soon enough they’re the ones shut in here with us.

“What are you?” The slaver leader hissed out in the silence, staring at the dead body flung off to the side.

Father simply let a short pulse of occult warp around him as answer. A small light show, a byproduct of just triggering fractals. Harmless, cosmetics really. As far as the occult goes, a cantina trick to me and the other knights.

Four slavers instantly turned and raced for the doors. They didn’t open, even with them banging on the doors in panic.

The slaver leader took a step back, hand reaching down for his occult dagger, not yet drawing it out. “Knew this day would come sooner or later.” He muttered. “Fukin’ Deathless. Couldn’t have just stayed underground and left the surface alone. Fine, fine! What do you want? Money? Resources? Name your price, we’ll fuckin' pay.”

“Winterscars.” Father said, crossing his arms. “Erase this filth.”

The Slaver leader froze, as if he couldn’t believe that had been the answer. The rest of us didn’t need another word. We drew arms and went straight for it, marching past Father who remained watching.

The enemy charged back, more out of reflex than anything else. I took a deep breath and made sure my link to the soul fractal was secure. Our lines crashed into one another.

I took the Rakurai stance, which was utterly unfamiliar to any of them since it had been outright invented by my clan. The effect of that was near instant - Slavers thought I was some rookie knight that hadn't been trained right, so two peeled off the main group and ran straight for me.

One launched himself at me with a move I recognized from Tetsu, they must be fans of that school since they all seemed to default to it. I executed the third form of our Lightning style, a counterattack variant made specifically for this.

It worked exactly as I'd hoped it would, giving my target only a half second's moment to do anything before the sequence of moves became utterly inescapable. The unblockable part came from the Winterscar blades I'd made, abusing the occult crossguards to pin down the enemy's own weapons. Those equally worked exactly as I'd forged them for. Technically, the third form technique needed two of my blades working in tandem, I only had one and my other arm had my armguard.

That didn't make the move any less effective, quite the opposite. The armguard lit up and slammed into the pinned slaver's chest, acting like ten entire occult blades had landed hits on the slaver at the same time, the waffle pattern easily overloading the enemy's shield. That let me move onto the last part of the technique faster than I should have. A swift diagonal strike, entering the slaver's left shoulders, through the neck and partially nicking the jawbone on the way out. Without shields, the occult edge cut perfectly through it all, ending his life with far more mercy than the man could possibly have deserved.

His fellow reached me a moment too late, trying to chop at my head, only to have two other Winterscar knights step in and slam down blades directly into his leg and blade arm. Perfectly pinning down his weapons with their crossguards, while keeping out of range - all in addition to draining out his shields. Those flashed hard for a moment as the slaver tried to take a step back to get his weapon free again. But the knights had positioned themselves too well for him to escape contact fast enough, and the combined occult edges of both blades and cross guards were eating away at his shields nearly as fast as my armguard would have.

He managed to move his leg out, and only because that knight opted to switch roles and parry a few opening strikes from two other slavers trying to help their dying comrade.

I slipped right into the offered window and executed a straightforward lunge directly into the pinned enemy’s helmet. The weakened shields broke down a moment before my own blade reached, leaving him with nothing but a gurgle as the occult edge glided into his helmet.

The Winterscar knight holding his blade arm pinned let go and slammed an open palm on the dead slaver’s chestplate, pushing the body off my blade to help speed things up, already turning away to handle the next enemy without bothering to watch the dead body drop. The other knight was lockstep with us and advancing on the next slaver too.

The two Winterscar knights and I went right into the middle of the fight, hacking and slashing as a team. Tactics here were standard, basic and easy to chain together. One would lock down an enemy and break their shields by striking at arms or legs, another would go for the killing blow on the chestplate or helmet, and the third would ward off the enemy so the other two could focus on their task. Anything my armguard could slam into would usually have their shields overloaded within a tenth of a second, an outright eyeblink, making me the deadliest weapon in the room.

We swapped roles depending on who was closest and in better positions. No need for communication or callouts, and the soul trance gave me full sight so I wouldn’t miss any openings even if I had my back turned to them. Like having eyes in the back of my head.

The three of us were using basic tactics that anyone could reasonably fight off against. It was the speed we moved at and the gear we had that made all the difference. The slavers could tell what we were doing - and they couldn’t do a thing to stop us. The blades we used could all execute moves and techniques that were utterly alien to the enemy, and coming up with an effective counter to something brand new on the spot was something on the league of Kidra and Father. Scrapshit trash knights like these mooks had no chance.

As for our side, there’s a level of skill where being better doesn't mean faster results. Kidra was in a different league than I was, and yet I was keeping pace with her group just as easily. Faster even, if the enemy ever made the mistake to get within shield bashing range.

I felt... almost at home. The number of enemies around me didn’t weigh down. Memories of dead timelines before flowed through my head, and along with those came the experience gained. In each of those timelines, I was there. I’d lived through it subjectively. One Keith for one mind, so an infinite amount of Keiths never overwhelmed the greater whole in the same way my own lifetime never overwhelmed me. Maybe if it had been five Keiths for one mind, I would have lost track of what each me had been doing.

But that hadn’t been how that quantum immortality worked out. Each additional Keith both added another body and another mind, which balanced out the whole. I was lucid and aware in every single timeline, right down to the very last moments.

My head started to roll into autopilot. I waded further into their battle lines, drawing on everything I’d learned. How to keep track of a few dozen enemies all around me using the soul trance’s vision. How to best move in a way that would make the enemy stumble into one another, turning them from a mass of enemies to glorified walls holding the rest back for me. I used my blade to prod the wall into shapes that worked best for me, while trimming away any free hits. The occult armguard could blindly block anything with hardly any effort or aiming, and it never ran out of juice like a relic armor could.

It was harder to work with my House knights oddly enough. I was used to being alone against an army of machines dogpiling down on me. Having a friendly unit nearby was something new to get used to. I couldn’t quite make it fit with the pattern I’d gotten good with.

So I dove down deeper into the enemy lines, where I was fully surrounded by the enemy. Their attacks were slow, sloppy, filled with a superiority complex at the start. And then quickly turned to panic. I could use the occult if it ever got too difficult. But the sheer speed I had along with the newfound intuition that I’d picked up was all I ended up needing. And in each doomed timeline, that Keith didn’t use the occult either. So I’d grown pretty comfortable using just a blade, kicks, and whatever weapons I could find in the field.

The more enemy knights tried to push down on me, the easier it got for me to slip through, redirecting hits to force their own blades to hit each other. Battle switched from a life and death struggle to more of a moving puzzle, where I needed to maximize the amount of occult edges around me by kicking, punching, shoving and slashing around until everything locked into place. It was even easier, since I could just kick anything backwards. Right into the meatgrinder that was the advancing Winterscar line, where they’d mercilessly cut down the near unshielded target.

And then I had to deal with another break in the pattern: The enemy began to rout not even a minute into all of this.

More of them would outright shove each other into the meatgrinder just to buy themselves a few more seconds to try and pry the doors open. The machines hadn’t done that when I fought them. I could kill off hundreds of Screamers, and they never stopped trying to leap at me. It made them predictable, reliable even.

The slavers were caving around me, fighting back in ways I wasn’t used to anymore. My focus snapped back to older training with Father, returning to the movements and techniques built to counter individual targets rather than countering a moving wall.

If I’d been slower, I’d still have been a better fighter than they were. With the Winterblossom technique making Journey move to my mind, they had no chance. And even if they did have one, I still had the occult ready to tap into a long with Cathida as a backup. I could summon dozens of half-formed arms and blades to turn into a straight blender. Or leave the crusader to break spines while I focused on summoning a small army.

Of course they’d try to run. Moot point too. There was nowhere they could run to. Those doors weren't under their control anymore. And they didn't have the time to cut a way out.

Father remained in the backline, watching with arms folded across his chest as House Winterscar’s current roster of knights all went to work. I could tell he was keeping most of his focus on me, evaluating. Waiting to step in any moment he thought I wouldn’t manage against the enemy.

He never made a move. Never needed to.

If any slavers managed to escape through doors, I had no doubts Father would be yanking the escapee by the throat, and throwing him right back into our lines. Even if they somehow cut through the doors and actually tried to run, none of them could outrun a Feather's shell.

Kidra wasn’t as calm, I could see her hacking her way through the slavers in the soul trance, chewing directly to me as quickly as she could. Maybe in thirty seconds she’d break her way to my side of the battlefield.

Thing is, all of this didn’t take thirty seconds.

By the time she’d gotten halfway to me, it was all over. The last Slaver fell on his knees, head flying off somewhere, while the rest of his body slumped over.

The leader had been impaled against a doorway at some point, likely trying to escape along with the rest of them. The only sounds left in the room were splashes of bootsteps over growing pools of blood on the ground, with an occasional snap of an occult blade cutting through a dying survivor on the ground.

“My my deary, you learned a few tricks,” Cathida said, sounding actually impressed for once. “Got the most kills out of the group on this one, color me like gold. And I know I wasn’t the one to teach you any of these moves, so fess up. Who's been teaching you behind my back?”

“I don’t think I got the most kills?” I said, feeling a little perplexed. "Did I?"

“I’m counting the ones you shoved backwards as a kill. You did all the work, only reason you didn’t cut their heads off is that you were too busy going after the next one. That ain’t what the goddess wants to know though - When exactly did you learn to fight like that, deary? You seeing some other engrams while I’m not around?”

She hadn’t technically seen the thousands of times I’d fought against the machines with no occult at my hands. The only timeline this Journey had lived through, had been the one where I’d won. So to her, it really must seem like I’d just had a snap change in how I fought, whereas to me it felt like a few hundred lifetimes all lived simultaneously.

“Keith.” Kidra said, voice sounding like she’d caught me trying to loot parts of the House walls to sell off. “What in the three gods was this?”

“I… uhh. Look, I get how it must have looked, but trust me when I say I wasn’t in any danger.”

“You were in the center of their lines.” Kidra hissed, voice doing that thing where she was keeping calm but was absolutely not calm. “That, quite literally, is the the most dangerous location to fight from.”

“I… could move fast enough to keep all my directions covered without issue. And the soul trance let me see in every direction. The centerpoint is the best location to fight from when you’ve got all those advantages.”

She kept her helmet fixed on me. Then turned directly to Father. “Why did you let him get that far into the enemy?” She demanded. “You of all people should have yanked him back into the lines when you saw I couldn’t get to him fast enough.”

“You know the answer already, girl.” He said, kicking one of the dead bodies on the ground away from him, and then nodding his head to another knight. That one knelt down and began to strip away the best section to hold onto. “A bloated existence has made them lethargic. The taste of power has cost them too much. They are nothing more than a lesson to learn from.”

“You let Keith go off into the most dangerous part of the fight - because you thought it was good training for him?” Kidra said, sounding more like she was fighting herself to keep calm. “Good or not, it only takes a few seconds for an armor to lose its shields. He could have died in an eyeblink if anything had gone wrong.”

“I am faster than an eyeblink.” Father said, staring Kidra down. “And you know that. I saw the way you battled. There was no fear in you either. Had you needed to, you could have broken through far faster as well. You knew, just as I did, that your brother was too far above these miserable fools to be in any threat.”

Her helmet turned back. I could almost hear her growling in there.

As for me, I was feeling a little off. I wouldn’t say I forgot about the lifetimes I’d spent dying, but at the same time I hadn’t thought about them up until I had my blade out and had to fight. It’s only then that everything snapped back into mind. A little troubling. I wasn’t sure if this really was just something I didn’t care about, or if my head was doing something to keep me sane. The propranolol had been running in my system, so it had been running in every timeline version of me as well. Otherwise, probably not mentally healthy to have a few infinite visions of dying floating around in my head. Probably.

The Winterscar knights around us said nothing. To them, they were sworn to follow behind. This was a squabble between the house heirs, out of their jurisdiction. But they were still part of this team. I spent days with them, teaching them about the occult. Training with them against Cathida down in my sanctum.

I gave a sheepish look across the team. I’d seen them move in the soul trance, like a solid wedge that broke through the enemy. Utterly inevitable, following behind my lead. More likely trying to catch back up to me when I’d slipped further into the fight now that I’m thinking back on it all. I’d made use of them like a cliff ledge. Anything I kicked backwards into them, was effectively removed from the fight.

Captain Sagrius was the armsmaster that I’d normally talk to. He represented the whole force. With him gone... I turned to Kior. One of the two knights that had remained on the sniper nest overlooking the skyscraper bridge. He’d seen me fight, he’d held off an army of his own.

“What are your thoughts on all this?” I asked, watching as he cut off a section of relic armor to carry with as the primary source.

He stopped in his tracks, then turned to face me. His helmet turned back to the other knights who were also in the middle of working through the looting. They looked back at him, some unworded message going through all of them.

“Master Keith. When they attacked the dance hall, we had to fight them off with just the blades you forged for us. We had no armor. We were all only knight contenders. Even then, we were able to win.”

“I remember, you were part of the crew that were looting armor outside the hall." I said, waving a blade tip at what he was working on. "More things change, more they stay the same.”

“Indeed they do, sire.” He said, cutting free the piece of armor. Black smoke fled from all parts of the armor to sink into the open slots inside the plate he’d removed. “What I know is that without the advantage of armor, they were nothing. Without some kind of advantage, they are nothing. I felt no fear watching you advance forward into their lines.” His helmet turned to the other knights, then turned back to me. “Ordinary men cannot possibly kill you.”

The other knights nodded at that, turning their attention back to their looting, as if it were a done deal.

Father gave a grunt of approval, turning back to Kidra. “Do you see now, girl? Even your own handpicked knights know better than to worry for your brother. You cannot keep protecting him from the world. He no longer needs it.”

“Father, the knights see him as a prophet for the gods.” Kidra said, turning her gaze over to the sheepish collection. They all studiously avoided her gaze, each far more interested in their current work, even if that work was just cleaning blood off their plates. “Do you all think I have no knowledge of what goes through my own house? None of you are as subtle as you think you are.”

They said nothing back to that, one by one standing back up from their work and lining up before Father, standing at the ready to continue the operation.

“Whatever you all believe my brother to be, he is still human. And what he can die from hasn't changed. Prophet or not, a sword to the head will kill anyone.” Kidra said. “If you forget this fact, then you are unfit to protect him.”

Father saw the Slavers as beneath his attention, and his instincts on combat probably made him feel confident in watching me fight. He knew already I was fighting far under my limits.

The knights all saw me in a different light. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it exactly, but to them the thought of me dying to some random slaver seemed ludicrous. After all, no hero ever died from a random mook in the songs the clans taught. Kidra would say they weren’t combat veterans just yet, just highly trained newly drafted knights.

Kidra was the voice of reason here, trying to remind her knights reality didn't play favorites. Three gods above, we have been the random human mooks that took out targets far above our weight class in all this.

Now that we were on the other side of the equation as the giants stomping around, who’s to say someone else doesn’t do to us what we did to Feathers? “Sorry, I’ll stay by the combat lines next time.” I said, and meant it. “That’s on me. Snow kills just as easily as a fall would, if it’s not paid attention to. Shouldn't forget that saying exists for a reason.”

I’d gone into an autopilot earlier without realizing it due to how familiar it felt. Can’t let myself do that again. Better to learn the lesson now while it was still small.

Kidra glared at me for a moment longer, before giving a slight huff and nodding. “So long as you understand, that is all that matters to me. Snow isn’t the only thing that kills. Arrogance kills just as easily as we do.”

“If you are done with this squabble, the remaining slavers are attempting to flee.” Father said, eyes glowing slightly. “Wrath’s group has been just as efficient hunting.”

Effectively, I could see twenty two red dots on the minimap left. Wrath had already eliminated a good chunk at the same time we had. Some gathering and making a break for one of the airspeeder hangers. Wrath’s complete control over the system meant that they wouldn’t be able to open those bay doors up which would delay them by at least an hour to hack through the whole thing. An hour was a very, very long time to be trapped in this particular compound.

Wrath’s group of green dots were flying straight through like a large fish in the pond, chasing down a smaller group of five dots. Those blinking dots hit door after door, stopping by each for a few seconds to break through, while Wrath’s group sprinted across them as if there weren’t any walls, hounding after like dogs chasing down a pipe weasel.

Even from the map, I could tell the panic in the way the red dots moved at the door fronts, outright shoving one another out of the way. Wrath’s group soon caught up to the group and surrounded them. The very next moment, they quickly blinked from red to gray one after another.

The green dots paused, almost as if digesting their meal, before they turned and began to move straight for the hangar. Where the rest of the fifteen red dots were converging on.

Guess that’s where the slavers were making their final stand. Shouldn't keep them waiting.

Next Chapter - Wrapping up loose ends