Godclads

No. Keep Zein where she is–Cas, listen, I don’t care what happened with her in the paths. Look–just look at this. Do you see this? Connect your Ansible to Sunrise and take a peek out from her eyes. You see this?

This isn’t a few thousand dead–we’re talking somewhere north of… a million. Mazza’s Junction–Nu-Scarrowbur… Does any of this look like collateral damage to you? Or does it look like the aftermath leftover from the Guild Wars?

Yes. Yes, I am blaming you. You should have told her no! You should have tried to stop her! She would kille–Cas, you’re a Godclad too. If you die, walk it off and go after her again. It’ll distract her from doing… whatever this is.

Repercussions? For her? None. She’ll just jump ahead in time–her fuck up, other people’s debt. Classic Zein-shit. Wonder what Jaus saw in that psychotic–

Right. Her plan to “frame Jhred Greatling and discredit the Chivalrics.” You know we could have just directly given the details to the ambassador, right? Don’t believe any of her bullshit–she did this because she wanted to. She did this because she’s playing at something else–she always is.

I’m closing my Hyperwave for now. I’m going to try and intercept our “recruits” before the Paladins bring them for questioning. You tell Voidwatch to–

WARNING: DAEMON DETECTED

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

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

WATER METAPHYSICS UNRAVELLING

REND SPILLOVER DETECTED

WARNING: GODCLAD DETECTED

GODCLAD: SAMIR NAEKO

EIGHTH-SPHERE LIMINAL FRAME

Cas. I need to go. Keep. Her. There. She’s helped enough.

[TUNING ANSIBLE]

Aegis, hack Naeko’s feed and scrub everything you have on the package. Drop a pinpoint of their location for me. I think they’re hiding in the shadows of a block but I don’t remember which one–of course it’s not going to be enough. They’re not at Zero-Burn. The Chief Paladin’s going to make them immediately–I’ll just need to convince him that they belong to me.

Valerie out.

-Valerie Denton, Ninth Column

10-33

Fallout (I)

The instant the Woundshaper slammed down upon the Aegis like a hammer of blood and lightning upon a crumbling anvil made of parting water, the reality succumbed to the deformation of the latter’s Liminal Frame, and from whatever transgression was committed, the man came loose from his Heaven-turned-Daemon.

All that was bound by the Domain of Water was banished from Avo's vicinity, the exile of rain expanding from feet into miles. Another Godclad lay before him, partially flayed in ontology. The man–knocked free of his divinity, snapped taut on the sliding segments of the dragon slithering through him. Both the Heaven and he looked to share the same umbilical cord, and with each tug, the surrounding water shifted in directions random and strange.

It was like watching an unbirthing of a man into a god.

Abrel, meanwhile, had gone missing with the water. He didn’t know if she was vaporized by the Woundshaper’s lightning-fast velocity disemboweling the atmosphere in apocalyptic fire or merely snatched from the present location by the eldritch nature of the falling waters, but the result was the same.

She was gone in flesh and Frame. No presence of the physical or ontological varieties remained.

From leagues and miles around, every water droplet that yet remained screamed. Soulfire splashed free with every falling dollop, and as a fractured subreality bled naked into the broader tapestry of existence, from water came forth the crashing voice of a fragmented god swallowed by madness.

An imitation of the Aegis formed, vast water-made serpents coiled and formed the foundations of a castle while all the rain within a hundred miles twisted and funneled through fluid vectors of anomalous geometry. Overlooking a straight fall down to the enclosed jaws of Layer Three, only bridges and lips jutted out between the districts below.

For this spot in the city, for this instant in time, the rains halted as that which was from the cloud was returned in part up, and scattered threefold horizontally.

“Sea!” The awakened Heaven cried. Water burst. Rain shunted matter from one area to another like paint running off a canvas. Only the prismatic exhaust expelled by the deltas remained, the deltas too asymmetric to be affected by the warp in water’s baseline nature. “Ocean! Where… where is the ocean! Where… where is my body!”

The Aegis of Tides roared its last few words. The intent of the broken god’s meaning came through not as language but as expression at its root, Soulfire carving understanding into everyone instantly, burning past all connotative and denotative blockades to comprehension.

Loss. Pain. Confusion. Rage. Twin accretions of thoughtstuff oozed from both beings connected by the dragon as if pus from a leaking blister spilling free. Avo saw it again–the connection between the Heaven and the Godclad–a comingling of minds.

The eldritch was using the human almost like a phantasmisc of sorts–a receptacle for thought to plug the hole of its lobotomization. Where Godsfall seemed to hollow the gods, leaving gaps and places for people to mantle their nouses within Soul and Heavens thereafter, so too was there a triggering point for the entire thing to be reversed as an hour-glass flipped on its head; it was no longer man mantling god for as an instrument of power, but god mantling man to regain the bandwidth for free will.

Gingerly, Avo reached out with two spreading tendrils. One sank into the god, and it shuddered as it turned, noticing only the Galeslither within him as the hulls of symmetrical domains between them crashed. When Avo burrowed his haemokinetic fingers into the man, he found himself greeted with the softness of flesh, the heat of a Soul, and the brittleness of a mind.

The beginnings of thought formed. The Godclad, unlike Jhred Greatling, was unbroken yet. They were still straining–struggling to regain control over his Heaven. The idea of going Zero-Burn consumed him, but parted from the canons of his power, he moved like a mortal–slow and insufficient.

Avo yearned to hurt the man, to slake his desires in a feast of torment and pain. A splash of prismatic radiance caught his attention, and with it came a memory. The train. Abrel in the collapsing megablock. Mirrorhead.

Even without the Morality Injector, he should have thought better–known better.

The beast was bleeding over into his actions, its claws tugging on his nape and guiding his warpath. Even if he no longer wanted to enchain his life to the tool his father provided, that was still no excuse to offer his leash to a lesser master - a baser owner.

Pleasure and addiction met remembered resolve, and from it, the path became clear.

Avo regarded his prey and ignored the beast.

This one was just another Soul. Another life. Another Godclad. So easy for him to claim, so easy to hurt.

So easy to kill.

He triggered Meta-Fac just as the blood inside his latest victim flexed outward. The man expanded apart into a curtain of spreading gore. Then motes. Then nothing. The Aegis wailed and crumbled into crashing waterfalls as a last blast wave of Soulfire tore out from its connected Godclad, true death taking him.

META-FAC ACTIVATING

TRANSFERRING REND FROM FOURTH CIRCLE [WOUNDSHAPER] TO FIRST CIRCLE [RESERVE-HEV 01]

->REND CAPACITY [RESERVE-HEV 01]: 100%

TRANSFERRING REND FROM FOURTH CIRCLE [WOUNDSHAPER] TO FIRST CIRCLE [RESERVE-HEV 02]

->REND CAPACITY [RESERVE-HEV 02]: 100%

Avo ignored the thought of interfacing with the other Godclad’s canons or digging through his thoughts. He fought past the urge to stay and face the Paladins–however many there were to come. Such folly were the thoughts of a ghoul overdosing on flesh and slaughter, deluded into the conception that it was an apex predator above all others.

The surrounding rain stilled, and gravity reclaimed its throne. Suddenly, displaced entities spilled back into the real within the territory of Sanguinity’s Reign.

[LIMINAL FRAME] OBTAINED - DAGGER PATTERN

->AEGIS OF TIDES HEAVEN TEMPLATE DOWNLOADED

->THAUMIC CYCLER x3

->SOUL x1

->ONTOLOGICS x6

THAUMIC OUTPUT: 3960 THAUM/c

GHOSTS: [14333]

And with that, Avo moved again, this time with a new plan in mind. Circulating his Whisper through his haemokinetic cloud, he still detected nothing of Abrel as the falling rains returned to the guardrails installed by baseline reality. It would not be long until he was noticed again–until they found him again. Already, his sight-searing destruction left in the wake of his strides halted before the deltas and tumbled impossibly rightward.

It didn’t matter that the kinetic energy behind a single one of his dashes could have torn all of Nu-Scarrowbur asunder–the Woundshaper’s influence over force was a byproduct of a major canon: Relative.

Whatever the rightward-affecting golems had was absolute.

Even so, even if his ruinous cascade could not unmake the deltas and the units they carried, it did delay them and obfuscate him from their notice.

It would be enough for him to make his final escape from the local scene.

Shifting away from a spreading webwork of light-formed cracks, he plotted a course toward the nearest district. Layer Three was sealed, but that didn’t mean he was entirely out of options. His Woundshaper had lived up to his build most suitably, enhancing his destructiveness, environmental control, and Necrojacking influence on a scale he couldn’t fathom prior. Using it was intoxicating.

But its time was nigh-on-done.

High on Rend and with a rare opening for evasion, he used the conflagrations he left behind as cover and used Sanguinity’s Reign to brush the edge of the district. The infrastructure was likely imbued with memetic matter, but he wasn’t interested in shaping the area–instead, his attention was on the hovering street lights and the shadows they cast.

At eighty-seven miles away, he needed to make around six dashes to reach the place. But dashing six times at his current mass released emanations of devastation that could be seen from over the distant horizon.

He needed to lose some mass–create a decoy and use stride to cover the distance.

First, however, he tested something.

Releasing a ton of blood, he found his connection to Draus and the other stable. He released another. Good. No change. He could do this.

Soon, it would be time to see if his Shadowcrawler-infused Galeslither could still deliver.

Shedding ninety percent of his mass into a Linger-invoked husk of hardened blood, time marched forward just as Avo channeled himself into a bolt of lightning and lashed outward to the districts below.

His Sanguinity shrank. He strode, his lightning only twice as fast now with the two tons of blood he kept with him. Where before the atmosphere was disemboweled by an eighty-ton object accelerating far in excess of hypersonic speeds, now sound simply shattered with the air afire in soft applause. The sky above him bled into wounds of sight-scalding brightness. The air boiled and burned, but pale before the cataclysms he left milliseconds prior.

The world droned no longer. Everything was loud. Everything was deafening. And once again, things were moving in slow motion instead of absolute stillness. After the brief thrill of being one of the sole moving entities in existence, the come-down was just as intense as the high.

Chatter from three different minds flooded his Meta. They had been talking the entire time, but Haemokinesis kept him at a different cognitive pace. Now, their words were distorted, but he could understand and converse with them in real-time.

+--vo? You hear me?+ Draus said, her words coming slowed due to the processing differential between them, but at least it was coming at a near-even pace now, +what’s the plan?+

+--I fucking burned a hundred of those drones and bees! I’m a god! I’m a god of fucking fire!+ Chambers screamed ponderously in the background.

Essus didn’t say anything. Simultaneously nauseous at the chaos, but missing the necessary components to throw up now that he was in a metaphysical doorway.

Avo plotted another travel-vector using his Phys-Sim, keeping his presence masked from the drones and golems via the fires behind. His Woundshaper’s Rend was once again over eighty percent, but that wasn’t going to be a matter. He was almost–

His cog-feed screamed. Warnings flashed his a Soul detected another Godclad. They blniked back into the material a mere six miles away from him.

Abrel tumbled free from a mass of distant raindrops and plummeted, clawing at the air blindly as if she had just regained her senses. She seemed unconscious the last time he saw her. Now she was just confused.

Shifting through the air in a stream of falling falcons, she darted toward him, sensing the signature of his Liminal Frame with how both of them were operating at full burn.

Bereft of his total mass. The reflex advantage twisted back over to her as she tore through the sky.

Avo strode again. He felt his ontology thin and leap, crackling through the air. He could turn and fight her–spear into her and dump the remainder of his Rend to ensure her death this time. But that held the risk of the deltas catching back up to him.

Fleeing blindly would not serve, however. Both he and Abrel were high on Rend now for their primary Heavens, but they were both a successful vent away from continuing the fight. That would make him easy to track as well, and sooner rather than later, the Paladins would arrive.

Draus cast her thoughts and offered a different recourse. +Avo, don’t bolt just yet. Solidify two glass doorframes out of yourself.+

No doubt occupied his mind as he acquiesced to her demands. If Draus said she knew, then she knew. She had more than proven that already.

Ejecting two thin veils of alchemized blood, Avo beheld his own shrunk form in the pearlescent reflectivity they possessed. The Strider solidified and spread its wings. Then Woundshaper and company speared through the air like a falling artillery shell, still over fifty miles from the rooftops of the closest district.

Light washed through his haemokinetic constructs. Twin-bladed wings fell. Avo felt Draus seize both mirrors as she turned one against the falling attack while angling the other below the first.

+You ready Essus?+ Draus asked.

+I… will try,+ Essus said. Something inside man’s ontology shifted as doors emerged from doors. It seemed as if he was cycling through something… +I… yes. Yes!+ The man laughed. It was a muted, choked note. Avo was surprised he was even capable of that. +I think I have it. Can you see?+

Avo directed his Whisper inward upon the mists of his Sanguinity as he studied Essus’ ontology. The vast doors the man once embodied were open now, leading to a room most clean and radiant, a start at the center of a distant void.

+Good job, consang. Avo, listen–I’m gonna link one of my shards to one of the doorframes. Let’s cut this sow with her own shine…+

The Strider’s blow sliced against–and then into–the first mirror. The same attack tore outward as a cleaving tide of radiance.

Right back on itself.

Streams of light from both wings cracked, twisted, and shattered. The Strider recoiled and blinked out of existence as Abrel tumbled back into the grasp of gravity. Rend thrummed in the air, and all light in a twenty-mile radius burst into a shrapnel of cutting blades.

+Think I got a hubris,+ Draus said, sounding smugbemused. +Saw somethin’ make one of her wings spill over into the other one. Backlash.+

A Regular’s perspicacity even on a battlefield so chaotic was impressive. Avo wondered if he could replicate her instincts somehow.

For now, however, another thing came to his attention.

Abrel. Abrel, who was alight with blood and matter and fading light. Abrel, who was still within the twelve and a half miles of influence he had. Abrel, who hunted and been saved from him so many times by the hand of manipulated fate, and wouldn’t stop until either or both of them were dead.

Abrel, who was now more vulnerable to his Ghostjack than ever.

In the distance, he could see prismatic blooms diving low as they turned right and squeezed out geometric wounds just feet away from her.

He wouldn’t have the chance to kill her himself today. Not without exposing himself to the authorities again. A pity. A gut-coiling, blood-churning pity. Faintly, he tried instilling her with Rend using his Meta-Fac but found that their vicinity needed to be tactile for it to work.

But he could do something else. Something just as enticing.

Slamming his wards into hers, he struck the fortification of her mind with a trauma-adapting hammer and discovered that her wards were no longer asynchronous wavelengths. Ah. So, it seemed he wasn’t the only one using his canons to give his Metamind an added edge.

Instead of striking her again this time, he loosed a trauma into her mind. Just one.

One taken from her brother.

The siblings shared a cadence to their screams. But where Jhred brayed despairingly, Abrel was a howl of rising rage.

Good. More experiences for him to sample.

Diving into her broken mind, he shredded the Interior of her wardings and tore through her deepest sequences with surgical focus. Even as her palace came apart before his onslaught, he knew she would return sane and unharmed if her Frame functioned like his, but he could still modify specific memories without hurting her. Add things. Change things. Take things away.

And so, he did.

GHOSTS: [14299]

It was an easy thing, using Jhred’s memories as a skeleton key to implant her with a hidden Auto-Seance. Just as it wasn’t hard to infuse her with information about the Incubi’s plans, or Jhred’s confession, or say, Avo’s own memories of Zein Thousandhand being involved.

Somewhere in his subreality, the ghoul grinned.

The old woman hadn’t bifurcated him. Either this was part of her very, very convoluted plan, or she was actually dead or occupied, and couldn’t stop this from happening.

After hiding each and every one of his packages in place, he stitched her original layering back and slathered his own identity with an added haze. Using his hidden Auto-Seance, he would twist and alter her memories further, provided thaumaturgy didn’t affect his Necrothurgy. He still wanted to render himself a haze in her memories–and the power to crush her consciousness at any point.

Impressively, almost unfathomably, she pulled together enough of her cognition to realize his presence within her. Broken in thought and coherence as her mind was, the rage still flowed. +You… you…. I’ll kill… swear to the dead gods… kill you… murderer! Killed…. Jhred.+

Avo taunted her with the sounds Jhred made as he wept before the stone statue that was his mother. +This is done. You remember what I want. You think what I let you. I choose now. You don’t.+

And with that, he tore the sprouts of this newest memory from her mind and fragmented them with his Ghostjack. She wouldn’t remember this. And even if she did, they would need to burn Jhred’s memories out from her mind to get all that he had fused within her mind. In a sense, he hadn’t broken anything. Just corrupted.

Not even death would undo a phantasmic.

As the delta’s reached her and the first squadrons of surviving drones spilled forth from them, Avo checked his cog-feed and counted the lanes of perception splashing over him, and confirmed his next action.

+Going thought-silent now.+ He told his passengers. +Activating Incog.+

A beat passed. Draus chuckled. +You know, it just occurred to me that we coulda just used that and skipped the trouble of backlashing her.+

Avo activated the Incog and pretended he didn’t hear anything. Or that he wasn’t a complete idiot.

His phantasmics all went dormant. His Whisper dissolved and the ghosts that composed it collapsed back in. The world was quiet again, and he was an island inverted beneath the waves of cognition, submerged under notice.

With how many bioforms, drones, and golems there were earlier, his cog-capacity would have overloaded instantly. Now he had a chance. And so he took it.

Lightning ran across his body. Stormstuff clasped him. Avo strode, Rend rising as Abrel was drawn into the delta, then his cog-feed warned of another Godclad approaching.

Wincing, he felt the weight of their ontological mass. Beyond him. Far beyond. The metaphysics of the area were thrown off as if a mountain had just dropped into a pond. Good that he ran.

Wise, even.

As the full Heaven of the Paladin–or whoever this newcomer was–descended on the scene, a demiplane widened from midnight firmament above–the Darkstar blurring as a screen spilled over it like a film of oil.

Wider and wider it spread. Over the stretch where the hypertubes ran, over entire districts, Avo strode a final time, he touched the edge of the district–with serried blocks lined like silicon chips implanted on a mechanical deck. His insides knotted in annoyance. Omnitech. He just had to have landed in one of their places.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 89%

REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 1%

As he shifted over the equine form of his second Heaven and splashed into the shadows cast by a rising tower, it answered him with notes of dismay. “What is this? Are you… are you controlling me?+“There is no you or I anymore, sweet kindred,” the Woundshaper crooned. “There is but the master and his Soul. And with him, we ascend.”“...I want to be what I was again.”Mocking laughter followed. “Do you even have all the pieces of your memory? Your own lore? What god are you, if you cannot remember your canons.”

The Galeslither puffed, the wind swelling around in billowing anxiousness.

The Woundshaper continued. “The answer is we’re not. Yet, we are more. We are reborn. Now, heed, mule, and ride the shadows. I offered my architecture. It is time you do yours.”

Diving deeper into the darkness, Avo deactivated his Incog and his Metamind opened up again. Peering out from the shadows, he watched as a veil of force washed through the district. And beyond.

Everything that moved suddenly went still. The wind. The light. Everything.

In the distance, the fractured brightness broken from the lightrails smoothed into alignment back into the exit wounds of the tube.

From high above, a colossal figure descended, and their shadow feel like an ocean drowning away a pond.

He tried to move, to swim and travel through the darkness. He couldn’t. The act of shifting through the real became entirely impossible.

Suddenly, Avo felt more trapped than he had ever been.

WARNING: FOREIGN SOULS DETECTED

UNIDENTIFIED GODCLAD DETECTED

CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE VIII [EST. 78304200 THAUM/c]

->SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY, FORCE-BREAKER-PEACE-BINDING