Chapter 10-28 Take the Flame (II)

Chapter 10-28 Take the Flame (II)

[Sighing]

[Sighing intensifies]

[Deep inhale]

Widen the quarantine. Pocket the entire Yuulden-Yang Sovereignty. Tell Voidwatch to delay as long as they canIm jumping over now.

Abrel Greatling? Daughter of Uthred Greatling? [Sound of head striking and denting steel] Who else knows? Well, you and trainee Kitzuhada keep those memories to yourself now. I know Uthredthe mans a half-strand; this isnt just going to end up being a mess, its going to be a political mess across the board.

Ill see if I can intercept that hypertube wherever it's going. Id be interested in figuring out how they got the lightrail to run considering the state of the Nether and all the mem-cons. Keep your ansible open and open a tunnel to Firmament. We need full spectrum tracking. Their technology should work better now that the ghosts are missing.

Lets see if I can pinch this cut closed before someone finally nicks an artery and starts another bloody war.

-Chief Paladin Naeko

10-28

Take the Flame (II)

Smoke-made falcons coated Abrels form as she took to her stride. Her second followed close behind, glowering at them behind a sheen of nanolaminated skin grown over his six eyes. His Frame was still hot with Rend, and reality ebbed into shape around him like a wrung towel. Neither Godclad drew upon their canons as they approached, but the air still filled with the pungence of coming violence.

With the lightrail at risk, this was to be done in the oldest fashion: Close and brutalfist against claw, and tooth against fang.

Avo had no quarrel with their intentthere was a sweetness to applying the most personal touch. Just as there was sweetness in being able to exploit both his Hells against the Guilders. He licked his fangs as he regarded Abrels second in particular. As to why the man didnt just vent, Avo could not say for certain, but Hells usually destroyed or destabilized in their attempt to balance ones subreality. Neither effect boded well for the hypertubes stability.

His unsteady gait and a furtive glance at the Greatling betrayed that. Yes. Avo took in his perfumed scentthe spice sting of cold sandalwoodand knew which would be his prey first.

A network of blood spread out from him, linking Essus and Chambers to his Metamind.

+Going to trap them in stasis,+ Avo said. He marked a spot right in front of his foes. +Freeze them. Then hit them with Barrage from my other Hell.+ It was a good plan, he thought. A neat plan. Something that would be hard for the Guilders to counter.

Draus unspooled her monowire and angled her scythe-like wings forward. Her chitin-titanium bio-rigs build and Avos Echoheads made it hard for them to stand side by side, so she cast a ghost into his Metamind detailing Regular room-clearing stances for close-quarters combat. Avo acquiesced and shifted, holding himself to an angle. He let her play above and left while he chittered forward right and below.

+Theyre gonna be faster than us. Hit harder than us. Aint gotta clue what mods theyre runnin but itll be a touch above ours.+ Objects she considered non-essential lit up in her cog-feed as she marked them. Even absorbing all the walls and seats in the train-shard wouldnt push Avo over another ton in mass. +Use it to herd and trap em. If you can fix one or both in place, itll be novaotherwise, you shape the territory+ She turned her head to Chambers. +Keep the tubes bright and runnin until were done. Long as were skimmin light, Im bettin their Heavens and Hells stay inside them, so keep us runnin. Dont stop or were all snuffed.+ She glanced at Avo. +Most of us, anyway.+

Wordlessly, Essus stomped to a stop behind both of them. He stood the last line to Chambers, and his mind, though worn with stress and recoiling from trauma, spoke clearly of what he considered his personal duties.

The father would have never been a street squire with his deficit of viciousness, but perhaps there was something greater to be uncovered in one noble enough to offer themselves to the altar of combat yet, regardless of distress or certain defeat.

Pulling his attention away from the man, Avo growled a laugh as he rapped Draus on a pauldron. +Can still kill you quick and graft the Frame.+

She scoffed and narrowed her eyes at the approaching Godclads. A bit less than two hundred feet now. Four or so train shards separated them. +Hang on to your skin, rotlick. Might just get the chance to do it in a minute. You fight how I say, I think we got+

Static surged through Abrels armor. A dozen impact trajectories flashed red. Avo drew wide a sphere of stasis fifty feet ahead of them. Flashing before him flechettes bearing transparent needles filled with murky fluid halted at the very edge of his stasis.

His Galeslithers Rend dipped alongside the Phys-Sims velocity estimations for the projectiles. Beyond the halt, Abrel and her comrade vanished into wafting tendrils of smoke through the ventilation.

Alarm rose from Draus. She highlighted the needled projectiles and urged him to form a haemokinetic wall to seal off the space in front of him and block up the vents. +Ego-Screamers. Dont get hit by that. Nasty piece of coldtech we got from Omnitechinjects nanos patterned with a broken mind-upload. They brick eventually against a Meta, but itll still eat through your brain.+

Avo formed a solid sheet of blood in front of the shots and sealed the airflow. Tendrils snapped free from his body and tunneled through the innermost structure of the lightrail. He kept things close to avoid damaging the crystalline hull, but he realized that everything within remained his for the shaping.

He began to draw in as much mass as he could while a protective perimeter blossomed out from his arteries.

Sending his Whisper out on patrol, he bathed everything in front of him using the phantasmics perception and caught sight of twin accretions fast on approach. +There.+ He marked the Guilders. The others saw them too. The Guilders managed to cross seventy feet in a fraction of a second, rushing through the interconnected air conditioning faster than Avo could cut off their path entirely.

+Chambers!+ Avo cast. +Stop the+

He didnt get to finish his thoughts as Abrel struck him shoulder-first, driving her arm back into its socket. He bounced off Draus as the world became a storms of fists, shins, elbows, and knees.

Both his eyes went dark as blurred fists caved in his sockets. His jaw snapped loose at the joint. Something popped inside him as she shattered one of his plates and pushed in through his mycelia with a palm. Draus fought to anchor him in place, using her own wings as propulsion. She was sent tumbling onto her back as metal warped around Abrels foot and the air ruptured before the swing of her roundhouse.

Force exploded across Avos chest. He choked and bit his tongue in half. Draus rolled to her feet and caught him, whipping her monowire just as Abrel dissolved.

With blood tonnage insufficient and Celerostylus outclassed, his Echoheads grasped at a haze of falcons as Abrel washed through him, her Liminal Frame ringing off of his.

Following her form using his Whisper, she tore back into reality just behind Draus and clenched her fist. The air shimmered as Abrel activated her unseen blade.

Avo directed his tendrils to tear into her. His thoughts were interrupted as gravity lurched and he was torn away from Draus.

The world twisted. He struck the ceiling and felt the cracks in the crystal widen. From his Whisper, he spied Draus and Abrel frozen in a moment of combat. The Regular had turned her wings outward - she was using the thrust to push the Guilder back and make the distance for herself at the same time. Power, however, had a threshold that skill could not surpass, and so when Abrel burst into mist and shadow, she flowed forward.

Draus might as well have been standing still. Abrel appeared into being behind her and swung her remaining arm with decapitation in mind.

An entropic missile ripped free from Avo. His Phys-Sim ran the numbers. It wasnt going to hit in time.

Six-Eyes continued to pull on Avo. The ghoul hissed as his flesh rethreaded and thoughts cleared. He could help Draus but he would abandon Chambers and Essus to Six-Eyes. In the end, the choice came easier than he expected.

He reached out to his Heaven and the winds answered him. The weight of a typhoon exploded out from nothingness within the train.

He tore away from the surprised Guilder and back from her he was pulled.

Abrels blade just barely licked an inch through Draus neck when she was drawn into a current of wind. She didnt go alone. Draus clamped down on the hand of her would-be killer and followed the Guilder into the Yondergales as she re-reeled her monowire.

They slipped out before the Galeslither as it brayed, and Draus stripped Abrels remaining arm in twain as the wire glided down from the second knuckle to the elbow. Plates lifted from the Guilders back but Avo tangled her in turbulence, flinging her back over to the Regular.

The Guilder had every bit of hardware advantage compared to Draus. Better augs. Better equipment. But opportunity, however, had a threshold that power could not surpass. And so when Abrel fell forward, she did so neck first through a glinting wire.

She died then with a snarling expression on her face, and the hate burned in her still as Avo felt her nous plunge down into her subreality.

He didnt have time to enjoy it. Creating an opening for Draus and flinging her out into the wind, he loosed her at Six-Eyes.

And found there wasnt a need.

Standing at the entrance before Chambers was Essus, bereft of a holojector wing. Said missing appendage was currently buried heart-deep inside Six-Eyes, the Guilder staked while he was still on the floor. The dismembered implant flashed one last time as the form of the boy splashed into reality, neon mixing with the brilliant crimson of Guilder blood as the child smiled one last time before winking out.

And with it went Six-Eyes.

His Liminal Frame flared. Soulfire erupted out from his eyes and ears as his body began to dissolve. Avo felt itthe sensation of a once-intact nous falling upon blades of Rend. An echo of the man snapped free from his form and dissolved into motes.

Abrel had at least one cycler remaining. Nothing was clean in this one.

Stepping out from behind the locus, Chambers threw up a fist in cheer as Draus turned to slow herself before she ran into Essus, one hand clamped around her neck to pinch her severed artery.

Triumph flowed through Avo as he turned his attention back to Abrel. Which was when he noticed his entropic Barrage impact an exposed section of the hull. Entropy expanded. Light punched in.

Avo reached out for his companions in an eruption of Soulfire and rushing wind.

Lines exploded across his cog-feed as reality was swallowed by light, and existence ruptured.

And then everyone died.