Chapter 2-12 Counterattack

Chapter 2-12 Counterattack

Heavens can best be understood as metaphysical vessels for the gods. Something like a body, but also an entire plane unto itself, bridged to base-existence through Domainsforces like fire, materials like glass, or even feelings and concepts like sadness.

Something for the Heaven to emanate into reality.

Ultimately, the only true limitation is how vulgarly the Heaven bends reality, and if the Hell or Hells connected to the Heaven can drain enough Rend to ensure reality remains unruptured

-Thaumaturgy: The Scaffolding of Reality

Ch 2. Heavens, Hells, and other Ontologics

2-12

Counterattack

It didnt take Avo long to track Draus down via scent. The golem was still rampaging blindly, smashing through crates and crumpling stacks. Avo scoffed. A little bit of karma there. It could have tracked him via his thoughtstuff easily if it didnt detonate the thoughtwave bomb earlier. Still, he knew the effects wouldnt protect him for long.

Better to seize the initiative again just like they did earlier against the hunters in the silo.

Draus was scouting from the inside of a high-stacked storage unit. Clambering up from the two other units beneath it, he moved with quiet and caution, listening for the drones as they did another sweep. As he made it past the lip into the stack proper, open jaws greeted him, snapping out to claim his head.

Avo flinched back. Unnaturally pearlescent teeth froze an inch away from his face.

No, Draus hissed. Her woundhound whimpered and shuffled back into the darkness of the unit, letting him up. It was smaller than the one Avo had produced earlier. The wounds Draus had suffered were less severe. A floating arm, a punctured lung, and a good amount of blood swirled across its fur. It growled silently at him as if daring him to approach Draus.

Looking at the Regular, he noticed her dismembered limb had been returned to her. It was still wreathed in enhanced muscle, but he smelled the carbon fibers no longer.

Woundhounds replace wounds, Draus said. Their myth dont say nothing about metal. She spat, as if annoyed. He would be too if one his arms was suddenly much weaker.

The thing about thaumaturgy is that it rooted itself in its own laws. Despite usurping reality, Avo knew that all gods needed some element or channel within reality to take shape; mythology to give itself a proper vessel. Thats why the Guilds imposed thought-bans on knowing the names and scriptures of gods for unlicensed personnel.

Through the other side of the storage unit, Avo realized she cut out a small vertical embrasure for her to peek out. It wasnt particularly wide, but he guessed that was the point. She needed as small a window to functionally shoot from as she could while avoiding detection.

Out in the distance, Avo watched as the ichor-fueled golem stomped down on another container in a fit of rage. The container folded. Little Vicious roared something about cowards and her show being ruined. Nothing new there. She lashed at the mangled container beneath her with scything limbs of blood. Unactivated Wights spilled out in pulped pieces. Avo guessed those were undelivered units from the factory far below, meant to be taken up and distributed across the Warrens.

Back before this entire part of the city went under, anyway.

Shifting next to her, he spotted the drones as well. Four remaining as he had thought. Light drones that they were, they still had more than enough firepower to kill him should they sweep his head with one of their beams. Ghouls and concentrated light or fire didnt do well. Hells, the suns could cook him if he stood out beneath the naked rays long enough.

They were circling the sky over the golem, casting their scans out across different containers in scrying sweeps. Problem was they were scanning the same area. As a group. He was lucky their pilots were idiots. They could have covered so much ground if only they scattered to different corners of the room.

Thought you had a life to get back to? Draus said.

Better odds with you, Avo said.

She fixed him with a brief glance. A quiet laugh escaped from her chest. The Low Masters make you with a conscience or does this here merit belong to that father of yours?

Father, Avo said. Morality was hard. Didnt work the same without phantasmic. Emotional simulator. Gave me ethics instead. A bitterness burned inside him after saying that. Havent been doing well there.

The ethics? Draus asked

Avo grunted.

Yeah. That dont make you special. Draus spat. Just makes you a New Vultunite.

A jingling sound drew his attention. Avo noticed Draus clenching her holotags in her fist, a mantra of silent names slipping from her lips. Outside, Little Vicious' outbursts grew more and more severe. Yet, with each savage exertion, the golem seemed to shrink. Avo blinked.

Was its eldritch brightness losing its luster? Seemed like it was getting smaller, its tower-like shape shrinking.

With a final mutter that ended halfway, Draus sighed and let the tag go. She had more to say. She just didnt sound like she had the strength to say it.

Prayer? Avo asked. The Guilds banned worship, but how people viewed what was worship could be very interpretive. Hard to punish someone when they just claimed the act was psychological or pure traditional. It's one of the few bans that the Guilds unofficially gave up on enforcing. Too much bureaucratic capacity was required to achieve it manually and too hard to sequence if they wanted ghosts to do it auto.

Draus smiled then, and it struck him how the age in her eyes clashed with the youth of her features. Age had been blunted by those with the merit or imps to afford the treatments. Avo had little doubt that Draus had a few of these rejuvenating measures overriding her natural biology. Still, the mind filled. Memories grew. Psychological scars could not hide. They just got thicker.

Names of dead friends, Draus said, Less holy. More meaningful. You got shit to get off your chest, nows the time. Got less than five before the fights back on. Good odds that one or both of us greet the Big Nothing. Cant piss you a gold thread to hide that.

Avo tried to think of something. Something poignant. Walton would know what to say. Unfortunately, Walton was as dead as her friends, and sentimental wasnt how Avo would describe himself.

He stuck to dry honesty. If you die, going to eat your eyes. Never had Reg-meat.

Draus smile broke into an incredulous guffaw. Her voice sounded battle-worn, but her laugh was true. Genuine. Humor was so very hard to achieve. Walton would have been proud. Avo kept going.

Regs swear to serve citizens, Avo said, breaking the tension before whatever came. Technically, am owned by Waltons Wardcrafting LLC. Im citizen-adjacent. Demand service.

Youre a weird godsdamned ghoulie, Avo, you know that? Draus said, wiping tears of mirth from her cheeks.

Avo didnt laugh. The snort didnt count. Heard a few times. For a moment, Avo forgot to remind himself to hate her. Got a plan?

Got a vague notion of one, yeah, Draus said. She pointed to the golem. Golems a hard target. Tried punching through it with the railgun. Shot bounced right off. Didnt even make penetration. Its got at least seventy-five tons of blood alchemized around the command module. Started with ninety.

Losing mass? Avo asked.

Yep, Draus drawled. Stormtree never built a Soul into these here golems. Not worth it when they could just replicate the same Messenger-grade Heaven over and over. Theyre built to be cheap. Expendable. Hells, Im figurin some locals mustve pulled it out from a gutter somewhere after it got abandoned. Surprised they managed to get it working. Probably siphoned some thaums off from techno-thaumic fusion reactor thats still working somewhere. Keepin it charged between fights.

Good to know. How long tills its dry?

Couple more hours is my reckoning. From my reckoning, this thing aint nearly vulgar enough against the real to be a power-hogger.

So died Avos dreams of outlasting the thing.

Right now, Draus continued, battlefield is shaped to their advantage. They got eyes in the air with those drones. Couple of them tagged me. Minimal penetration, but still opened up my skin something bad. Means theyll rip you right up, and we dont want that.

You dont?

Little Vicious sounded a far cry now from the sweet and coquettish host of the show that she started the night as. Good. The Crucible she was hosting had already killed him once and slaughtered two hundred more already. If he got the chance, he was eating her. She made a choice. She was fair prey.

The golem she was piloting tore into the stacks that were Draus last known location. The Regular was probably long gone and making for the crane at full surge. Meant he needed to work faster. Get his part done.

Peeking up quietly, Avo studied the position of the snipers again. Both their guns appeared to be pointing out from the same point. No spotter between them. Two gunners. Uncommon, but these werent soldiers, just over-chromed muscle. The woundhound growled, hungry to leave existence and see its duty done. It had its eye on the prey as well.

Get the bigger one, Avo told the hound, his mind already telling it what to do. It clambered up a stack and he followed. Together, they climbed, the two snipers still firing blindly, their shots threading through countless other storage units in rhythmic crackles, unaware of the encroaching threat.

The hound got atop the snipers container first. Avo was just a second behind. Their combined mass made the entire stack wobble. Below, he noticed the thoughtstuff of the hunter suddenly spike in fright.

You feel that? One of them asked the other out loud. Even muted somewhat by the metal, Avo could hear their heartbeats, and smell their sweat. He placed his shotgun right against the top of the container. He aimed, treating the yolk-like accretion of their thoughtstuff as targets, picking the one on the right for his first kill.

His gun roared. The thin sheet of metal between him and his prey burst apart beneath a wave of hyper-accelerated alloys. His arm snapped back along with the gun. Through the gap, the woundhound squeezed in, its mass funneling into the open rent as if it was a liquid.

Again, he blinked. Draus said these dogs were standard? Never knew they could do that.

A moment after, he felt himself draw in his new harvest, sown with a spray of his gun.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 19 thaum/c



GHOSTS - [33]

Plunging a claw into the rent, Avo peeled the metal back with all his might and entered. The sniper he shot had been bifurcated down the metal, their metallic spine cord the only thing distinguishable from the mush of their remains. The other snipersans an arm and coughing up bloodgreeted Avo before he could even land.

He made a miscalculation. He should have stayed on top and fired again.

She slammed into him like a flashing blur, pinning him against the wall. The storage unit shifted. Avo felt gravity lurch as they tilted at an angle.

Half her face was denuded; caused by the spread of his shotgun. Her missing arm told him that the woundhound had got to her. The fact that her exposed skull was layered in a full inch of plasteel told Avo that her chrome mustve cost her a fortune. Before he could react, something expanded beneath his chest, punching clean through his right pec. Avo screamed. She twisted and dragged her arm up. An implanted arm-spur had sliced him open, peeling his flesh like it was hot butter. Seizing her bouncing face-flap, he pulled. The butchered remains of her cheek snapped free between his claws. She screamed and pulled back, her spur coming free of his tissue.

He seized the momentum, unwilling to waste any more time. He rammed his shotgun into her neck, rooting her against the wall. Her eyes widened. He pulled the trigger. The roar of the gunshot within the confines of the container blew out three more layers of his eardrums. One layer left.

If he lost that one, he was going to need to wait a while before he could hear anything.

The sniper, meanwhile, looked less like a person and more like loose threads of sinew smeared along crenulated notches of metal. With a gasp of pain, he examined his wounds. She had opened him pretty badly. He could see part of his pec cut loose and lodged in the pale bone of his exposed sternum. He winced.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 20 thaum/c



GHOSTS - [34]

Suddenly, a sudden burst of force tore out of him. The bodies around him turned to motes of nothingness, while the metal of the container scattered into kaleidoscopic patterns. The weight in him had grown immense. Wide. Whispers snaked and chanted ineffable mantras from a place deeper than his bones. A flame spread out around him, sundering existence from matter, force, and space into naught but malleable concepts.

THAUMIC THRESHOLD REACHED

LIMINAL FRAME ONLINE

AVAILABLE ONTOLOGIC SLOTS - [1/2]

HEAVENS - [0]

HELLS - [1] - FIRST CIRCLE - DOMAIN (MATTER/ENTROPY)

SOVEREIGNTIES - [0]

NO GRAFTS DETECTED - DEFAULTING TO ZERO-BURN

The flames around him suddenly flashed out of existence. Gravity took hold of him as he tumbled down, landing in a deep depression. He found himself face-down in a smooth crater eight feet deep into the plastcrete floor. It was as if the space around him had been shorn from existence altogether.

A loud weight pounded against the ground, tearing him from his thoughts. Another. How long was he in that crater? Golem. The golem mustve seen the fire spilling out from him. If it had been chasing Draus, it was now after him.

Crawling out from the rent, Avo winced as the hyper-sharpened ledge he reached for cut deep into his hand. Mantling over and stumbling into a wincing run, Avo looked up and made for the crane. From the corner of his eye, he saw a looming tide of red spearing its way through the stacks. It looked smaller, why did it

Avo felt his foot splash into something sticky, the smell coppery. Like blood. He looked down, a pool of blood extending like a crimson carpet beneath his feet, spilling out from around the corner.

Twisting, he leaped for a stack, jumping to get off the ground. A sting weight punched clean through his calf and dragged him back down. In his periphery, he could see more blood flowing in from the intersection paths ahead and behind him.

The shadow of the golem rose over him, its reflection looming like a sword head high.

+Yeah,+ Little Vicious laughed. +I learn too. Fancy that. I think your Reg friend might call this an encirclement. Told you Id get you, ghoulie.+

From the spread of blood around him, two more tendrils shot through him, pulling him down. Avo activated his Specter and cut every phantasmic aside from it and his wards. Using all his newly obtained phantasmal mass, he cracked his armored consciousness like a lashing whip into Little Vicious surface thoughts.

Spots exploded through his vision. His mind screamed as exploding spikes of pain were plunged deeper into his skull. Through ringing ears, he heard Little Vicious scream, her voice hoarse as some of her thoughtstuff spewed out an already mending crack in her wards.

+FUCKING GHOUL!+ She howled, her madness amplified by the sheer trauma he struck her with.

The blood across her golem quivered, the focus of its pilot scattered.

Avos cog-feed drifted in broken splashes of data and screaming ghosts, blinding and deafening him as he found himself splashing down into the blood. With a whimpering groan, he pulled himself to his feet, blind instinct guiding him while his fractured mind was slowly being fused back by his Metamind.

It was deleting pieces of damaged cognition and cloning backups in their place. It will work. Mend him soon.

He just remembered that he needed to get to the crane. Crane. Draus is at crane.

Behind, Little Vicious wailed, her broken voice sobbing with laughter. +R-run, ghoulie! Run!+

Avo did as she demanded. She didn't need to tell him twice.

Whatever plan Draus had for the golem, he hoped it was a good one.