Chapter 10-33 Fallout (I)

Chapter 10-33 Fallout (I)

No. Keep Zein where she isCas, listen, I dont care what happened with her in the paths. Lookjust look at this. Do you see this? Connect your Ansible to Sunrise and take a peek out from her eyes. You see this?

This isnt a few thousand deadwere talking somewhere north of a million. Mazzas JunctionNu-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 killeCas, youre a Godclad too. If you die, walk it off and go after her again. Itll distract her from doing whatever this is.

Repercussions? For her? None. Shell just jump ahead in timeher fuck up, other peoples 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? Dont believe any of her bullshitshe did this because she wanted to. She did this because shes playing at something elseshe always is.

Im closing my Hyperwave for now. Im 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. Shes helped enough.

[TUNING ANSIBLE]

Aegis, hack Naekos feed and scrub everything you have on the package. Drop a pinpoint of their location for me. I think theyre hiding in the shadows of a block but I dont remember which oneof course its not going to be enough. Theyre not at Zero-Burn. The Chief Paladins going to make them immediatelyIll 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 latters 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 manknocked 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 man into a god.

Abrel, meanwhile, had gone missing with the water. He didnt know if she was vaporized by the Woundshapers lightning-fast velocity unseaming 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 waters 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 gods 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 againthe connection between the Heaven and the Godclada comingling of minds.

The eldritch was using the human almost like a phantasmisc of sortsa 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 strainingstruggling 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 mortalslow and insufficient.

Avo yearned to hurt the man, to slake his desires on 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 betterknown 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.The initial posting of this chapter occurred via N0v3l.B11n.

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 blastwave 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]

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

A Regulars 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 wouldnt 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 wouldnt 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 wasnt 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 Jhreds memories as a skeleton key to implant her with a hidden Auto-Seance. Just as it wasnt hard to infuse her with information about the Incubis plans, or Jhreds confession, or say, Avos own memories of Zein Thousandhand being involved.

Somewhere in his subreality, the ghoul grinned.

The old woman hadnt bifurcated him. Either this was part of her very, very convoluted plan, or she was actually dead or occupied, and couldnt 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 didnt affect his Necrothurgy. He still wanted to render himself a haze in her memoriesand 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. Ill 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 dont.+

And with that, he tore the sprouts of this newest memory from her mind and fragmented them with his Ghostjack. She wouldnt remember this. And even if she did, they would need to burn Jhreds memories out from her mind to get all that he had fused within her mind. In a sense, he hadnt broken anything. Just corrupted.

Not even death would undo a phantasmic.

As the deltas 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 didnt hear anything. Or that he wasnt 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 one of the deltas, 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 Paladinor whoever this newcomer wasdescended on the scene, a demiplane widened from midnight firmament abovethe 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 districts entire. As Avo strode a final time, he touched the edge of the districtwith 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 were 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 couldnt. 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