Chapter 206: The Old Switcheroo

System Analyzing…

Ravager Identified, Beginning Culling Procedure.

Ceasing cellular activity….complete.

Withdrawing soul for reintegration…

>>>Error<<<

System error with soul withdrawal, attempting patch.

>>>Error<<<

Attempting Bypass…

>>>Error<<<

Notifying Admin..

This is System Admin 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-5-6-2, what seems to be the problem?

Soul’s registry is identifying as seven thousand different discrete entities. System defers judgement.

Yeah, lemme take a look at that…Oh, wow, that’s crazy. Here’s what we’ll do, dump all files related to the soul from System memory, then re-boot. That should clean up the problem.

>>>Warning<<<

Deleting the Soul from System Memory will cause it to lose Ravager Status and be removed from the rotation. Additionally, rebooting the System will result in temporary downtimes for all entities.

Do you wish to proceed?

Yes/No

“Heeheehee!” Elliot giggled to himself, then tapped ‘yes’.

>>Warning, Permissions level Exceeded!<<

“Ah, crap.”

Reboot command restricted to Owner.

Checking permissions…

Access granted.

Scrubbing files.

Rebooting.

“Huh,” Elliot said, tapping the dark screen. “If I knew I had owner permissions, I would’ve made chainmail bikinis a thing.”

Except now that he’d dumped the memory of himself, He wouldn’t have admin privelages anymore. On the flip side, none of these aliens could make a positive I.D. on him ever again, nor could they hit him with the System Insta-kill.

Worth the trade, all things considered.

“Are you Elliot?” A young voice came from behind him.

***Calvin***

Everything went black, combined with the sensation of falling, Calvin fell for what seemed like minutes before his body reached some kind of equilibrium.

A black floor appeared underneath him, only differentiated from the abyss around them by it’s shine. Where’s the light coming from? Calvin looked up and spotted a black ceiling with little white orbs embedded in it, emitting light, illuminating the black room.

Calvin blinked and details began fading in, as though he were wiping sand out of his eyes.

A bag of some kind of orange snack on a table in the middle of the room, bits of orange bright on the black table.

There was some kind of chair with wheels on the bottom, a strange rib going down the center of the ceiling, ending at a flat wall divided by the protrusion.

There was a man with messy brown hair sitting in front of the protrusion, giggling to himself. He was wearing some kind of fuzzy blue robe. Calvin couldn’t see any more than that, given that he was facing away from him, but his voice sounded familiar.

“Are you Elliot?” Calvin asked, moving around the messy table, kicking aside the strange lightweight bottles strewn across the floor.

“Eh?” the man grunted, glancing over his shoulder. He was wearing wide glasses that Calvin had only seen on nobles, his jaw going slack.

He was the same man Calvin had seen in the mirror in the Guya dream.

“What are you doing in here?” He asked, coming to his feet and peering at Calvin. He was older, about the same height, a bit paunchier, with a bigger nose, but there were uncanny similarities in their appearance.

He saw Calvin’s gaze and folded the blue robe around his midsection defensively. “I had a six-pack too when I was your age, you know. You just try keeping it when your power build is based on sitting on your ass and letting your minions do the work. You’ll see. I give it five years.”

“You weren’t supposed to be in here,” Elliot muttered, staring at him.

“Why’s that?” Calvin asked. “Where is this?”

“Well, you kinda died, and this is-” Elliot held up a hand in an eerily familiar gesture, before the strange glass screen behind him began blinking with big red letters.

Mutation Und-

Define Primar-

The rest of the words were cut off by Elliot’s elbow.

“Shit, shit.” Elliot said, turning and hitting a key.

The wall in front of them brightened, showing the sky, blurred and out of focus, but definitely the sky…

And…

Is that Karen? Is that my view? It looked like the viewpoint of someone on their back, their eyes slowly opening and coming into focus.

But how can that be? I’m right here.

Calvin wasn’t watching Elliot, who was sidling toward the back of the room, until he heard a clunk.

Calvin whirled, and saw Elliot standing on a slowly raising platform, the blue of the sky shining down from above him.

Elliot waved with a cocky smile.

He’s trying to take my body!

Adrenalin surging, Calvin jumped forward, leaping off the table and tackling Elliot to the ground.

“Holy shi-“ Elliot shouted, an instant before Calvin hit him.

Calvin got him into a mount position and started beating the traitorous fuckwad’s face in.

Elliot reached out and grabbed Calvin’s fists, his grip as unyielding as Abyssal Steel. His face showed no sign of being beaten on, like a toddler had been punching him instead of a full grown man.

It was like wrestling with Baroke.

“You’ve got good instincts, kid, from a lifetime of fighting, but you’re in my world. I built this place. Did you think you could hurt me in it?”

Calvin used Elliot’s palms as leverage, leaned forward and headbutted him, crushing Elliot’s nose with a spray of blood.

“Ow, fuck! Okay, off you go.”

Calvin’s arms were twisted down and around with an irresistible force, pinning them to his chest. With a grunt of effort, Elliot sent him sailing across the room, slamming into the wall on the far side of the room.

Calvin gasped in a pained breath and spotted the last bits of the platform raising into the ceiling.

“I’ll treat your girlfriends real nice on your behalf! I’m not inconsiderate.” Elliot said, waving an instant before the platform became flush with the ceiling.

“FUCK!”

Calvin turned around and looked at the wall displaying the view point. He saw his own hands being held in front of the screen, opening and closing.

“Calvin, you gonna live?” Karen asked, leaning over him.

“That’s not me!” Calvin shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Yeah, just stunned.” Calvin heard his own voice respond through the wall.

“Godsdamnit,” Calvin muttered as he began looking around the messy prison for a way to take his body back. He checked for some kind of leve where the moving panel had appeared, but there was nothing. There was a small box in the center of the table with several buttons on it. None of them did anything, although one made buzzing noises.

He checked the small glass panel in the center of the room.

Password?

“Sonofabitch.”

“Calvin?” the box on the table said in Nadia’s voice. “Is that you?”

****Pasha Llortan****

As soon as the boy died, things started going sideways.

The kid fell out of the sky, coalescing out of a cloud of wasps. The enormous blonde woman smacked him upside the chest with the sword again, deliberately turning the blade sideways to blunt the impact.

Is she taking it easy on me? He thought as he was flung into the next available building, shattering its wood exterior.

Something had felt a little off about this whole fight from the beginning, and Pasha was starting to be able to put a word to it: a setup. Someone wanted me to hit the boy with the targeter? Why? Is one of Greshna’s loyalists trying to protect the bastard’s soul as a last-ditch method?

Damnit. Llortan felt played.

When the floating girl with the big mammaries tried to kick him again, he sealed her in a bubble of Bent and sent the bubble flying into the stratosphere.

He targeted the muscle-bound archer with a paralytic spell, and the behemoth toppled over like an ill-balanced plastic doll, his Mind too weak to fend off the spell. Strangely it wasn’t countered by the most annoying one…The dark skinned, slender girl with the smoke creations that seemed to strike at the exact wrong time, to her, he… Llortan couldn’t find her.

The girl was nowhere to be seen.

That just left the big one with the sword.

“Calvin, you gonna live?” he heard her say as he flew upward, cresting the rooftop to look down at the scene beneath him.

The feel of Warp in the air was thick, as if it had erupted out of his body upon his death, like ten thousand men and women expired all in the same place. That was impossible, even for the people with the strongest Bent reserves.

What is going on here? Llortan thought, eyeing the boy’s body inspecting his own hands.

“Yeah, just stunned.”

Llortan used Life Sense, making the world dim to dull shades of black and white except for everything living, which glowed with radiant light and color.

… the kid was bleached of color and drained of light.

“That kid’s dead as shit,” Llortan muttered. Did the Warp density create an undead Mutation? Was his soul still in there?

Llortan had to check.

He siphoned off half his Bent and used it to create a Maze, closing it around the warrior standing beside his quarry.

Llortan landed on top of Greshna, kicking his slender human body back down into the rooftop.

He held his palm over the boy’s chest.

System, soul extraction.

…

There was no answer. Even if there had been no soul at all, the system would have answered him. This was unheard of.

Am I disconnected from the System? Am I trapped in some kind of illusion?

“What’s the matter, buddy? System not working for you?” the corpse under him said with a sneer.

Llortan went to punch the creature in the face. A general rule of thumb with undead is to destroy or remove the head. Usually, not always, but usually.

It leaned to the side, and slapped a hand on his limp, wounded arm, pulling a bloody hand away with him as the creature scuttled backward.

“Do Harbingers still use those old bio-coded automatic defenses?” The creature asked as the blood on it’s palm seemed to expand and grow, forming keratin spikes around it that were eerily similar to Llortan’s claws.

“How do you know-“

The black spikes shot forward, catching Llortan in the chest. Three of them glanced off his ribcage, dealing superficial damage, but the final one managed to penetrate a lung.

He’s growing weapons from my cells! Normally the automatic defenses allowed a harbinger to scratch their ass or thumb their chin, but that was a security flaw that could be exploited. Case in point.

System, Switch to self-isolating force field. System…SYSTEM!

Damnit.

LLortan dodged out of the way of another volley of keratin spikes, running a hand over the wound on his arm, wincing as he sealed it off with Bent-created fire.

Can’t afford to give him any more material.

Strangely enough, this creature’s fighting style was at the same time, totally different, and yet similar to the Ravager whose body had spawned it.

He was holding a whirling sphere of replicated blood above his palm, slowly growing as bigger and bigger monsters leapt out of it, each of them a grotesque mockery of the Harbinger form, with huge singular talons instead of hands, and extra legs giving them incredible bounding potential.

Every single one bore Llortan’s face, bearing expressions of twisted agony and moaning in his own voice as they leapt up at him, trying to strike him down.

This little bitch is trying to scare me, Llortan realized, his ire growing at the arrogant prick’s expression. It obviously wasn’t the same Ravager as before, but that smug face pissed him off.

“You think you can intimidate me, who has existed for millennia!?” Llortan demanded, weaving Bent into cleansing fire. Sub-atomic fire, of course. With the System apparently down, he wouldn’t survive nuclear fission.

Just enough heat to clear all his genetic material from the scene, taking away the Biomancer’s material.

“Die!” He launched the white-hot fire downward, and it was met by a vinelike plant. The green fibers turned white-hot as they were incinerated…then exploded outward, driving more of itself into the dense fire, using it as fuel for it’s own growth.

The plant caught Llortan in an explosion of thorns, sending him flying backwards as he desperately cut the grasping tendrils with concentrated Bent.

“Longweed, bitch!” The boy’s voice grew distant as Llortan tumbled away, slamming into another building, this one partially scorched from lightning.

Llortan coughed blood, tugging the keratin spike out of his chest. Above him, the massive green bush that dominated the sky of the city, was being consumed by enormous Llortan-faced caterpillars the size of buses. They had nodules lining their backs, with sphincters that shot Llortan-faced insects out, orienting on him.

The faces were laughing now.

“Stop!” Llortan shouted, accessing his Bent and pointing at the bush, focusing his Bent on temperature control. A blue laser shot out of his finger and touched the tree. Instantly the temperature of the area dropped by hundreds of degrees, causing the bush and everything on or around it to collapse into a shattered mess of bloody ice. The nitrogen in the air turned liquid and pooled to the ground.

A boot landed on Llortan’s chest, pushing him through the ceiling of the building, dropping them both into the second floor.

Above him, the pale ravager’s corpse smiled at him, expression full of feral glee.

“Make me.”

Right then, a young woman’s voice raised above the din of creaking wood and shattering ice.

“Get him!”

Llortan looked up and spotted several unfamiliar humans charging toward him. He raised a shield reflexively, but the biggest one jumped over him and swung an oversized hammer into the undead creature’s chest.

“Kala, wha-“ The undead ravager managed to say before the hammer caught him in the chest and catapulted him through the wall.

***Calvin***

“What was this called again?” Calvin asked, eating the crunchy treat.

“Popcorn,” Nadia’s voice came through the box as they watched Matthias’s team assault Elliot in the real world, with Kala leading the charge. Calvin chuckled as they started whipping his ass.

I guess that’s my copy paid Matthias for, Calvin thought, I always was a little suspicious of Elliot. My clone must’ve been even more suspicious.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“I like it.”

Macronomicon