Chapter 17-10 The Rash Abides (I)

Chapter 17-10 The Rash Abides (I)

+Paladin Baers, were getting reports of a nuclear blast going off over the district of Vengs Stand. Do you have eyes on the situation?+



[Messy eating noises; slurping]

+Paladin Baers?+

+Yeah. A whole bunch of drones. Golems tearing shit up. Next to a megablock. Fucking Syndis, dispatch. You know how it is.+ [Food wrap wrinkling] +Looks to me like some kind of foggy missile or something isthe hell is that+

[WARNING: OBJECT RAPIDLY APP]

[SESSION LOST]

+Paladin Baers?+

-Paladin Dispatch

17-10

The Rash Abides (I)

Shotin Kazahara didnt enjoy being nuked. Didnt enjoy eventually evolved into full-blown hate during the Fourth Guild War when Highflame decided to keep the nights bright, the air radioactive, and the bombs constant. It was under such constant devastation that he got quite used to being deaf. And blind. And the feeling of his flesh cooking off his bones before he managed to switch to another stack or manifest one of his Heavens fully.

It was thanks to such practice that he only responded with muted astonishment at the sudden blast erupting in the air two meters next to him. His Raiment of the Unbreaking mightve rendered him conventionally indestructible, but in less than a microsecond, the air was going to get very, very hot, and his flesh was going to get very, very fried.

It was times like these that he wished he opted to upgrade his Heaven of War some more.

Thankfully, after a lot of practiceand a few thousand deathshe developed another technique that could potentially save his life: accelerating away from the danger as fast as he could.

His Heaven of Speed manifested fully as a screaming thousand-winged eagle exploded out from his Frames subreality, switching places with his ephemeral self in existence. A row of eyes ran along the sides of the Heavens body, and its feathers all bore directional arrows. A tail of tassels danced out from its open ribs as an orb of watery force shivered, narrowing into a teardrop, pointing to his new vector of hyper-accelerated movement.

Withering wind and phantasmal fire lashed out at him from the corner of his awareness, but caught in the wake of his miracle, they snapped past him, their weight nothing compared to the ponderousness of his Soarer of Endless Pursuits.

The air split against the wings of his Heaven as he dove blindly, trying to avoid the blast, the sound barrier cracking around him as the nearby megablock closed with him in a blink.

Still wasnt enough though. The blast still licked the back of his feathers.

Soulfire erupted out from his eagle as he tumbled out of its form, hubris triggered, his skin and hair igniting even as the Raiment formed around him again.

REND CAPACITY [SOARER OF THE ENDLESS PURSUITS: 66%

The plascrete wall of the block crumbled before him as he tumbled through wall after wall. Something slick and soft splattered across his torso. Jaus, he hoped that wasnt a person. Through the tumbling havoc, he found his armor screeching against the tilted floors of a blurred hallway, each turn his body made taking a chunk out from the ground.

Then, the blastwave caught up to him. He knew it from the vibration running through the building, from the way the building shook.

He was lucky that was a low-yield warhead. Something greater and some of the damage would have gone through.

Burying a fist into the floor, he dug a furrow into the ground even as his burn-molted skin screamed for him to stop. His pain editor kicked in a second later, silencing all agony past a certain threshold. Activating his TraumaSight phantasmic, he winced as he reviewed the damage. No broken bones, but both his lungs were burned, eight percent of his skin was missing, and worst of all, his hair was on fire.

Slamming hard into a reinforced door, Shotin came to a final stop and released his armor. Staggering two steps forward, he vomited as he kept walking, already familiar with the after-effects from the last hundred or so times he experienced it. Patting out the flames of his biosilk suit burning on his body, he ran a hand through his hair and sighed. Clumps. Coarse. Falling out.

Rude. He wanted to say, but the only noise his lungs could make was a wheeze. He considered killing himself just for the resurrection but resisted the urge when he knew he would lose his lead.

The blood earlier could that have been Dice? What else didnt he know about her? How the hells did some FATELESS refugee girl go from being owned by a Syndicate in a death game to having a Heaven and an Incog in the span of a week? It didnt make any sense. There was something else here. A greater force at play.

Just how capable was this Aedon Chambers?

Shotins session rang and he answered when he saw the name in his cog-feed.

+Oh, gods. Seeker! You need toyou should resurrect. Ill direct the knots+



+Dont worry, Nara,+ he said, grinning. Part of his cheek detached from his bones. Spatial reality was settling again. They made a good attempt, but this game was going to be over soon. +Ill be fine. Send our boys and girls out to have some fun. Tell them to use their Phys-Sims. Follow the big red container. Ill bring the cage down real soon.+

His nanosurgeons screamed as they fought to restore his body, their efficiency strained to the max as he directed them to his lungs first so he could breathe again. Turning to his right, he saw a juvmaybe no older than tenstaring at him with a big, cold bottle of SurgeMax.

Hmm. Cherry flavor. His favorite.

Flick you fifty imps for a sip.

The kid blinked. F-uhSeventy!

Keeping the protective shell around him active even as their bodies returned to normal, Avo turned to check on Dice even as the first waves of perception washed over them.

+You alright?+

She didnt respond, instead looking down to check on the nu-kitten in her coat.

A weak meow sounded a moment after, and Avo felt the blood rushing through its veins while its heart screamed. The creature was confused. Terrified. And probably the only other living thing that made it out of that building.

He was going to mock Draus about dying here later. Hopefully, the Necros would be too busy chasing him to notice her resurrection.

Just as he extended his Sanguinity to locate and liquefy Shotin, the first trauma pattern chipped a dozen ghosts from his mind. Followed by three hundred. That assault lashed out at him through the drones closing in on him, firing conventional munitions at his haemokinetic protections.

Avo scoffed.

His Conflagration and Sanguinity swept out together. He absorbed their flechettes and devoured their traumas. A hundred tons of matter vanished from his surroundings as his Woundshapers thaumic mass climbed with its tonnage. Across the Nether, the strike cells barely had a moment to react before they belonged to him.

Knowledge entered his awareness. Sessions and information he was formerly denied surfaced in his mind. Twenty-two new minds entered his template as each of the Incubi found themselves unbalanced by their sudden deaths. The jocks wept and shrieked inside him, unable to face their own ends.

One moment they were flinging mind-breaking horrors at what looked to be strange fire.

Then they were burning. They were the fire and the fire was them.

Corrupting the loci of their drones, he accessed the machines he turned via their session. He had them under his control just before a knot of golems approached, their protections pushing the touch of his haemokinesis away.

The golemsdespite all the armor built into their bodieswere not ready for the drones to fire into the open exhausts of their engines. Flames gushed out the more materially rooted golems while the shield-emittersomething that looked like a hovering watchtower more than a weapon of warturned to shield only itself from harm as Avo drank the Heavens out from the other two and melted away their structures.

HEAVENS OBTAINED: RUNEBREAKER (WAR/STRENGTH) x2

As he triggered the sessions for the Incubi cells Mirror-Convex and subsumed his mind as well, he contemplated this final defensive Heaven with lecherous hunger and yearned to possess its power. The impenetrable protections it offered would go well with his Woundshaper, seeing as he could feel its presence pressing against his Domain of Luminosity.

The only question was how to get through to it. The jock piloting it reacted fastcutting themselves off from both lobby and comrades. It seemed as if they deactivated their Auto-Seance as well.

[Avo. Get the fuck out of here. You can snatch this Heaven some other time. We need to go before]

Then, two things happen at once.

The first arrived as spatial reality stabilized, and the sky above changed. Metaphysical stacks of translucent shot through the ground as the environment distorted around him, the surrounding district still present, but overlapping with another space entirely. The presence of people and drones vanished from his awareness in an instant. It was like he was alone.

The second was the sudden deactivation of the golem, its protective shielding winking out for no obvious reason.

Avo wasted no time, seizing both matter and mind as he claimed it for himself.

HEAVEN OBTAINED: SHINEGUARD (LUMINOSITY/PROTECTION) x1

Yet, as he flooded the locus of the machine, he found the jock already nulled. In fragments. Only a single string of mem-data provided any clues.

+Avo. Going to make you an opening. Get away from the block. Brace for Rend dump.+

Uncertain who the memory was from or how they knew his name, he reacted, Boltstriding just as a tide of perception splashed through the district while a jungle sprouted into existence around him, Avo found himself dashing forth into a place that resembled the Vengs Stand but was empty of people. Ignoring the change, he spread his Sanguinity wide, but found only greenry and woods for leagues and leagues beyond.

He wasnt in real space anymore. A weight was treading on his Domain of Space. The immense weight he felt earlier.

A thoughtcast flooded the air. +Hello. Good morning. This is to the bastard that ruined my hair. I see you. Little lightning bolt. You have five minutes to come to the megablock so that we can talk like civilized people. I wont lieIm probably going to punch you at least once, but thats better than getting shifted into an undersea plane where youll be promptly crushed by all the pressure. Dice. If youre the one who managed all this, Im impressed; but still, fuck you, Im bald now. Come out. Dont make me snuff you. Shotin.+

[Fuck,] Corner said. [Were in his pocket. Were in his stacks.]

[He seems nice,] Chambers said. [Maybe we should talk to him? Yknow. See if we can get close and burn his ass.]

That gave Avo an idea. He stopped striding and activated his Incog again. Waves of perception were radiating out from the tower, but they wouldnt reach him yet. Turning to study Dice, he let out a breath as he began to plot.

So, he asked. Do you have a preference of powers?

The girl blinked, her holocoat glitching from being Stormwreathed. The gift? Now?

Might not be a better time, he said. Might also ask you a favor. Give you another gift after.

Whats that?

Might need you to talk to someone. Use your mind for an ambush. Itll burn a bit.

She just stared at him in silence. I want the cat to be safe.

Avo studied the small creature peeking out from the lip of her jacket, hissing at him. Okay. Ill make sure the cats safe.