Godclads

“Authority Greatling. There been a problem.”

“Jhred. He dead?”

“I–I’m not sure, Higher–that’s another problem altogether, I’m afraid. I’m talking about–”

[Sound of metal warping inward] “That godsdamned Vator. Who did he hurt this time–”

“Not… not Instrument Vator either, Higher. It’s… your daughter.”

“Abrel?”

“Yes.”

“Abrel.”

“Yes, Higher.”

“Are you sure?

“I’m positive, Higher. Instrument Abrel Greatling has been spotted at Mazza’s Junction, Nu-Scarrowbur, and then Akimaki in the Yuulden-Yang Sovereignty. She has engaged a rival cadre from Stormtree and there have been… casualties. Ruptures. A member of her cadre has met their final end.”

[Building shaking; rattling and breaking glass]

“... Authority?”

“Apologize–” [Deep exhale] “To the Ambassador on my behalf. Tell him that this is not meant as a slight on my part. Tell him that… personal matters have disrupted my plans.”

“Yes, Authority Greatling.”

-Authority Uthred Greatling, The Fire’s Height.

10-32

Cadre (IV)

Blooming out from his veins, the haemokinetic broadcast rippled in sync with the waves of his Metamind as ghosts flowed on pulses of blood.

Essus heeded the cast with a note of surprise while Draus simply responded. Slow as time was, her connection to her domains worked just like his. Godhood was not like a muscle to exercise, but a divine machine of feats and lore. The sprawl of glass she made from the shattered bodies of a drone squadron split in two.

One section speared high into the air while the other encased her in a reflective sheen, rendering her a taller, more insectoid-looking cousin to Mirrorhead. The shards of glass she flung into the air climbed at speeds nearing a hundred miles per hour.

For Avo, it might as well have not moved at all.

That was fine. He would go to it in just a moment.

First, he had to see to Chambers’ continued survival.

Mind blind in the throes of panic, Chambers was so preoccupied with howling his lungs out that Avo’s thoughtcast went unnoticed. Sinking into the man’s perception, the divided plates of Layer Three and the edges of a spatially quarantined district came into view as the ex-enforcer flailed against gravity. Terror stripping him of composure, the thought of manifesting his Heaven was a far one.

At least it was till Avo overwrote the man’s fear with an injection of artificial focus.

+Chambers. Listen. Activate Heaven. Get to Draus and Essus. Stick together–will convene with you all shortly.+

At his current speed, he could perform countless actions before the ghosts finished delivering the information over. With Sanguinity’s Reign, the Nether lag was vastly diminished for reasons Avo wasn’t fully sure about, but he wasn’t going to complain.

Instead, he was going to continue using it to his advantage.

He strode twice, his being lengthened into stretching bolts of arterial lightning. He kept both movements random, deliberately confusing the pursuing delta while using his vectors to approach Draus’ rising screen of glass at an angle.

Thousands of aerial platforms disintegrated in the wake of his departure alone. The sheer energy generated from his acceleration turned the surrounding air into plasma. Winds cooked. Light exploded out of him. He refrained from pressing his speed to the fullest, but when an eighty-ton object ripped across existence at the baseline velocity of lightning, things broke.

The path he trailed unzipped a tide of destruction as entire stretches of drones simply vanished. Things within his path dissolved without a trace, while others sustained damage miles beyond the mist. Past the rings of immediate destruction, drones flattened into crumpled husks of alloy while bioforms smeared.

As shockwaves of force and fire rode through the sky, shapes disappeared from within the palm of his Sanguinity by the thousands in milliseconds. Euphoria twisted through every fibre of Avo’s being—the closest analogy would be the satisfying sensation of pressing one’s hand down on a nest of insects and feeling each bug’s individual thorax burst against your skin.

No ghosts nor thaums greeted him in this mock slaughter, but he thought back to his battle in Nu-Scarrowbur minutes ago.

Millions must have perished from the collateral damage alone there. Using some of them as the substance of his apotheosis, he had reached a place where a few strides might inflict the same or greater harm than two Godclad cadres facing each other in open combat.

Little wonder why Godclads regarded the FATELESS as nothing. What could they do but die? What could they do against a power that could not be exhausted, that could not be denied?

His tungsten shell glowed red as the storm stuff faded from him like peeling paint.

Heat obfuscated the world, and the blow he cast against the atmosphere itself was still unfurling outward in a rising tide, swaying the surrounding fliers into fissuring streams of light.

His Phys-Sim fed him two warnings: The delta remained behind him, closing to two hundred and fifty feet, while another snapped into shape behind him. On top of his two pursuers, he felt the sudden manifestation of more patterns of matter.

Something large was pushing its way through the rain. Channeling his Whisper into the mists that coursed from him, he directed his perception nearly eighty miles eastward from where they came and saw the Highflame Aegis swimming through the falling rain. In accompaniment with Abrel’s last surviving ally, his cog-feed registered three hundred more spatial distortions forming within the thousand-mile stretch of awareness provided by Sanguinity’s Reign while he was at full mass.

More problems by the second. They needed to get gone, and get gone soon.

Twin flashes of light tore open the flesh of reality. Above where Draus once stood, a constellation of gleaming shards assembled, slowly fusing into the shape of the Twice-Walker. A little more than three hundred feet away, in a yet congested section of the airways, the screen Avo requested she turn into a gateway came alight as well.

It was ready.

Time to see if the deltas could still track him even after he cut them off geometrically from his tail.

Lightning coursed through his vessel. At the top of his spire, the warg-head snarled with thunderous delight. He traveled like a spear flung from beyond the veil of the sky to smite the earth down to bedrock and core. Space around him blurred. He emerged from his stride just before he slipped through the threshold of the reflection. A glimpse brushed his notice as he beheld what awaited him on the other side. Hails of gauss-flung ordinance and biological missiles dove out to strike Draus. Touching the fight briefly with his Sanguinity, he felt her make glass of all that was solid and let all that wasn’t pass through her.

Out through the tunnel came a river of firepower. A river that choked and parted before the Woundshaper’s post-hypersonic approach.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 54%

He emerged from the Twice-Walker as a concussive tunnel blasted out from her gateway. Immediately, he set about casting a new message at her, but the gateway closed the moment he left the threshold and re-entered reality.

He didn’t even get to see the demiplanar nature of the interior this time. Not that he was complaining. The deltas had lost track of him–and were breaking off as Abrel’s shadowy falcons coiled along the tubes.

Avo turned all attacking entities within a mile of him and Draus into blood. Again, it was like feeling every single bug die personally before his touch all at once. The sky was a moving cage filled with shrapnel and dancing bodies, naught but the golems, the drones, and the tube brushing against the outline of Avo’s mind.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 57%

The beast choked on pleasure, not even aware that they weren’t killing any actual people. Just the sheer scope of the violence titillated it to the very precipice of its ability to feel.

Blood mingled with the falling rain. Red splashed down the dancing pieces of the Twice-Walker, hovering with an ease that the Woundshaper didn’t have the canons for. He wondered why its Hyalokinesis allowed it to exert influence over range while he was limited to the tactile at baseline.

A tide of concentrated fire split an opening through a few distant drones. Six hundred feet away, a blazing phoenix studded with bursting seeds spilling into sprawling canopies of lushness approached. It looked as if the pyrokinetic avian was pierced by a trident of charred almonds, and from below the wood expanding into existence behind it, fire plumed free from where the roots were meant to be, allowing it to soar.

Bioforms and vines and leaves were burned into the fabric of existence from its quavering flames, and with the winding path it left in the air, Avo could practically taste the joy bleeding out of Chambers.

This was the freest the man had ever felt. Avo drew Chambers’ memories into his Metamind.

Something flung open beside them like an open door. Reality stuttered, and five feet away, twin flaps of obsidian flung wide as a ninety-foot-tall doorway made from the blackest ebony opened and opened again, projecting itself forward as Essus struggled to comprehend his new form. Each “step” he took reloaded his location in reality, and he left threaded fractals behind him.

Avo could feel more drones turning into them, but his cadre had assembled. Now, it was time for his other ideas. He didn’t know how long he had until the Paladins started arriving. He–

Something inside him shivered with delight, and the Woundshaper responded in kind. What if he waited for the Paladins to come? From the Galeslither, however, came only disbelief. “We are at the center of madness… the winds run unnaturally… we must be away from this place…”

Avo ignored his second Heaven. What if he found their taste to be most palatable as well? Something distant inside him twitched and struggled against his aroused hunger. They couldn’t linger here.

A shard of glass inched slowly into his awareness, pulling him back from the reverie of imagined bloodshed. Nether-lag cracked in the back of his mind as the first bits of mem-data trickled over from Draus.

And there was another problem he had to solve—communications. Right now, at his tonnage limit, his speed was leagues beyond the others. He could release some of his mass and speak to them, but that would just leave them all vulnerable.

Presently, however, he understood what Draus asked of him.

Reaching out with a tendril, he took the glass shard from her grasp and added the patterns of its matter to his Canon of Remembrance.

HEAVEN - WOUNDSHAPER

DOMAIN: (BLOOD/MATTER/BIOLOGY/LUMINOSITY/LIGHTNING)

THAUMIC REQUIREMENTS - 1044 THAUM/c

Two additional thaums. Not bad.

Parts of his slatted design developed a more reflective sheen. His new armor caught the glint of an encroaching tide of rushing explosions bearing down on them as an avalanche from two miles away. Judging from its trail, these blasts were likely caused by his strides.

Ah. If it wasn’t his old consang, unforeseen consequences.

He spread himself wide and round like a bunker, around his allies. Yet, halfway through his haemokinetic shapeshifting, he felt a most dissonant sensation as Draus sank into him. Right. The Twice-Walker had a canon that let it do that. Didn’t it also have the ability to make a demiplanar pathway?

The answer came as some of his blood spilled into a loop; the Twice-Walker created a spatial passageway using itself and his Woundshaper as junctions.

“Ah,” the Woundshaper laughed. “The huntress has thought ahead. Most wise. Go, master. Go and pull the two burdens into our crossway. The Regular has solved several matters of concern concurrently.”

He didn’t need any further prompting. Reaching out to scoop both Essus and Chambers into the tunnel that shimmered past the surface of his gleaming blood, he found the former most elusive as they blinked from place to place while the latter made a mad dive for him even without prompting.

Ultimately, it was the Lushburner that descended beneath the ichor first while the Gate of the Passing Dark followed. As Avo performed a quick dash to arrive next to Essus, he found that flinging himself outward as lightning did nothing to impede the functionality of the Twice-Walker’s Liminal Paracosmos.

Essus’ Gate stepped one more time and, despite the vastness of its size, it ballooned into shape within Avo as well. Oddly, it seemed to materialize inside his internal passage with a stutter, slipping from one point in reality to another. With motes of blood running through the passageway via Sanguinity’s Reign, Avo confirmed the presence of his companions as Essus released himself from the form of his godhood and Chambers soared and dipped around Draus.

Finally, her message loaded.

+Channel this here glass and hang on. I got myself an idea ‘bout our problems. Right now, we ain’t a real cadre since we don’t got all that fancy learnin’ from Guilder school, but I think I have a way for us to get around the whole ‘separate and apart’ problem. Gonna create a pathway usin’ both of us as conduits. After, you can put Essus and the half-strand inside. Make it easier for us to pull a runner.+

She had some ideas of her own indeed.

The sensation of swelling power came to a jolting stop when he felt the first bomb shred through his broadcast. Others followed. Pockets formed in his awareness as Sanguinity’s Reign turned porous. Faintly, as more and more blindspots formed in his awareness, he touched the platform responsible for countering him and found it similar to a Sangeist’s Rendsink.

An instant later, it came apart and ruptured, its contents twitching between mundane blood and alchemized fragments of matter.

The Rend within Avo’s system spiked. His cog-feed began to wail.

WARNING: REND DETONATIONS DETECTED

DOMAIN: [BLOOD]

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 71%... 74%... 76%

Immediately withdrawing Sanguinity's Reign to a limit of twenty miles, he strode as he began to make his escape through the opening of Layer Three.

Just as lightning began to jump through him, a translucent wall burst into existence over the opening he was aiming for. He altered his stride, dashing twice as he fled from the first signatures and entered the field of his reduced awareness.

Additional blasts followed. Blood plumed through the falling rain as the last of Avo’s crimson mist parted from existence. Suppose for influence that vast came a trade-off–if he could strike at distant domains using Sanguinity’s Reign, so too could it be done the opposite way around.

Another trickle of thoughts from Draus loaded. +They’re bringin’ out the Rend-bombs. They’ll eventually herd us out of the sky. Don’t bother jumpin’ around–Light’s End is on lockdown. Layer Three’ll be closed off. We need to find a secluded spot in a district somewhere. Go zero-burn or somethin’. Least that’s what the ‘Clads I fought with did when they wanted to go miss–.+

His attention drifted as rainwater congealed into the shape of the Aegis on the borders of his awareness. It was barely nineteen miles southeast of him, and it was currently swimming through the downpour, rivers of water running free.

And within the wetness, Avo felt another signature sing out to him–one he instantly recognized.

Abrel. Abrel who had escaped his grasp time and time again. Abrel, who drove him to break his determination of choice and elevate his allies to godhood. Abrel, who denied him a chance to savor her brother’s flesh.

Abrel, who was now floating unconscious, her body flickering in and out of existence as the falling rain formed junctions from the skies above, midnight rivers darting between forking cracks of light. As he focused, he noticed the fortress-like outline of the Aegis’ and noted the other Godclad funneling her out from the fray.

How auspicious this opportunity was: to kill and devour an entire cadre. And just along the way of his escape, no less.

Hundreds of prismatic trails searched the space behind them from afar. Considerably fewer aerial platforms remained as tides of destruction continued to sweep through the wind. The chaos had given both cadres enough room to flee from the golems and emergency response teams, though their escape remained in question.

Another thing Avo did know was this: He could feel Abrel, but he couldn’t touch her or kill her using his Sanguinity. Not with the veil of water protecting her. Not without all her cyclers compromised.

So far away, the metaphysical ripples of Soulfire from his Frame didn’t reach far enough to give his position away as he watched the Aegis flee.

He took the opportunity. This was a chance for another two Souls and all the ontologics that came with them. A chance to remove two individuals that possessed knowledge of his capabilities.

Abrel had seen him kill Jhred, after all. There would be questions about where his Frame went. And how.

So, with his mind made and Rend-bombs slowly cascading inward towards his position, Avo strode twice more, diving into forking bolts as he struck the Aegis from behind.

He expected to shear the water from his foe—to utterly vaporize their ontological structure.

What he didn’t expect was to catch a full blast of Soulfire across his Frame as the Aegis snapped apart into two pieces.

The water around him froze and began falling back upward into the sky. All that flowed strained against forces unseen.

There, still alight with crackling currents running through his bloodstream, Avo found himself at the epicenter of a prolapsed dragon. To his left, the form of a man strained, and to his right, the structure of a water-made castle began to collapse.

WARNING: DAEMON DETECTED

->ASSOCIATED HEAVEN: [AEGIS OF TIDES] - THIRD SPHERE

->REND CAPACITY [AEGIS OF TIDES]: 98%

WATER METAPHYSICS UNRAVELLING

REND SPILLOVER DETECTED