The Xcore experiment had kidnapped Sammy’s friend, replaced it with something otherworldly, and abandoned her Cal somewhere along the way. This person, this being, was no longer him. She knew it, but she had to ask.
“Fate of mankind? What will happen if you win?”
Allking regarded her with that depthless look she’d only seen in a few ancient veterans who’d sacrificed their lives, bodies, and minds to defend the cities. The same look Sergeant sometimes had.
“If I win…” he trailed off.
His glowing azure eyes gazed beyond the storm, war, horizon, and time itself. When he turned back to her, Sammy suddenly felt incredibly small. Like a grain of sand before a star.
Allking continued slowly, with deliberate pauses, “I will show mankind what they can become, hand you the keys to follow me here, and lead you into the stars and Beyond.”
He made a gesture of grasping the sky.
“That is the greatest fear of my siblings, a world where they are not gods among men, but simply men again. Where they, where we, can no longer call ourselves Fates. Where we are no more than tiny wishes among a sea of stars.”
A bolt of psionic energy from one combatant or the other seared a hole in the storm-choked heaven, revealing a tiniest crack of the glittering void. Through that tiniest window, for that briefest moment of silence between mountain-cratering impacts of powers and weaponry, Sammy thought she glimpsed a future.
One where she had psionics. One where a small squad of UC soldiers could wipe out a Hive jungle. One where Earth was bit-by-bit reclaimed.
Sammy looked again at the man standing before them. Pure conviction and purpose radiated in his gaze. He would lead them to that future, of that she had no doubts. Reality itself seemed to agree. Why else would it have crowned him?
Allking, she remembered the chant. The one true ruler of reality.
Her breath shuddered. Rain got in her eyes despite her being in cover.
Then the face of her oldest friend offered her the smile of a man knowingly walking towards all but certain doom. “Hurry,” he said, “Take off and join your comrades. The battle ahead is one I must face alone.”
***
Cal’s eyes followed the stolen Xcore aircraft circle around the fight, disappear into the clouds, and emerge near Battlecruiser Gamma. The saved he had escorted were safe. He had hoped to feel relief over this. Perhaps even contentment. Saving and helping others were deeds that should swell the heart with accomplishment.
Instead, Cal found himself failing to justify the lost time and opportunities. Once upon a stray thought, he even found himself thinking he’d skip this encounter in the next reset. Though he had accepted this reality was real on a logical level, his emotions struggled differentiating the present from any other reset.
Perhaps a longer chat with Bard wouldn’t have been so disadvantageous. For all their faults, Bard was an expert at living in the moment.
They might have also known how to deal with humans throwing their life away for no logical reasons whatsoever.
“We can’t leave so long as an evacuee remains behind,” said Sergeant Hallowan.
Cal studied the middle aged man’s resolute features, baffled.
“Exactly, and while we’re here we might as well deal with this battle of Fates you keep talking about,” insisted Private Orlsen, her eyes fierce.
They refused to listen to reason. Cal had told them, explicitly, what awaited them here.
“Hell, I died once. Might get lucky twice in a row,” said Irel nonchalantly.
The Fountain would be their grave. This was a battleground of forces beyond their comprehension. He had stressed this fact, yet these humans refused to heed all logic.
“If the conflict down here is as pivotal to UC as you say, we must ascertain a beneficial outcome to the cities,” Jaud reasoned.
True, humans have potential. Every soul can rise to seize their own fate. Cal’s own path to ascension relied on that very notion. But this was not an act of seizing it as much as carelessly discarding everything.
Sergeant grunted in agreement. “World’s fate isn’t one man’s burden.”
Was this a form of inherent human madness Cal outgrew and forgot? Some combination of foolishness induced by incomplete knowledge and overestimation of one’s abilities. What was the word again…
“Blessed be the heroism of the saved who pledge their souls to the Fates…” preached Paimon.
Cal tried to remember the proper way of ridding oneself of a freelance prophet. Last time he had blown their head off, but that would not be appropriate without the guaranteed resurrection of a reset.
“Mr. Toven, you said there are others here with potential to outclass strategic class psions, other Fates. Can you clarify our exact objective?” asked Sergeant.
They were crouched on a walkway between two docking hangars, shielded from the storm by an overhanging building, but close enough to the piers to spectate the battle outside.
Engagements between Xcore and UC were cooling. Their respective battleships had begun retreating from the still regenerating Hive Queen of Europe. Both sides had heeded his message.
Worst case scenario with Dragon had been averted.
Now, time to catch up and figure out how many others intended to contest the Fountain.
Cal beckoned Paimon and the four ‘heroes’ of questionable sanity to follow him to a nearby hangar where Xcore stragglers continued to repel the Hive creatures.
“The Empyrean fragment acting as the core of the VR server is the largest remaining fragment of the Empyrean’s heart,” Cal said as they walked past Bard’s glowing meme hazards splattered across the floors and walls. “A graft fashioned from it would guarantee a head start of several years, while burning it to borrow its original power of soul connection could allow one to reach all of Earth at once. You can likely imagine the consequences, should such an item fall in the hands of the likes of Bard.”
Sergeant stared ahead with a hard expression, imagining.
A few of the others shuddered.
“All at once?” Private Orlsen asked in disbelief.
“Such is the true potential of the Heart Fragment.”
Sergeant glanced at Irel.
She nodded, “Yeah, will link up when I can. That’s gonna rile up a few more volunteers.”
More volunteers to die? These mortals truly were insane.
Up ahead, an explosion collapsed an already rubbled office tower off the cliff. It crushed hundreds of creatures crawling their way up and a thousand more as it rolled down the valley. Xcore forces who’d managed to reach the surface took the moment to evacuate. Cal estimated that the area would be overrun by Hive within minutes.
He hastened his pace towards it.
“Mr. Toven, the area ahead will soon be compromised,” warned Sergeant.
“Indeed.”
Paimon cleared his voice. “I presume my fellow devotee means to ask your intentions, O’ Allking.”
Ah. Is the opportunity not obvious to them?
“Pardon my insolence, but your face seems to be surprised that others cannot predict the unpredictable chaos by a glance or read your mind,” said Paimon. Very cheeky of him.
Cal glanced back at the others. “A typical restart begins with a rush for grafts within the Fountain, followed by scouting to determine the others’ position in power and inter-Fate diplomacy. I’ve lost the initial advantage, but the ready access to Hive resources provides a rare opportunity to catch up.”
“Your definition of ready access is…” Jaud trailed off.
“A generous one,” Paimon supplied.
“Delusional would have been my word of choice yesterday,” Jaud said, “but yesterday was a different world. Let us hear it. How can we make a difference and help you in this?”
Cal cast his eye to the back of the Center-A hangar that connected to the main traffic hub of the Fountain. The former open air palace of glass, steel, and marble was now three floors worth of cafes, meeting lounges, and corporate workspaces crammed into one rubble jungle. A single spherical path had been carved through it, leading to the Fountains main elevator block.
Of the thirty-two elevator shafts one penetrated the mountain and into the bedrock, past layers upon layers of automated defensive measures and self destruction switches, all the way to the depths of the innocuously named ‘floor 34’ – the containment chamber of the Empyrean Heart.
Merchant and his allies were no doubt busy defending the area against the early skirmishing of other Fates, setting up contingencies for Dream’s inevitable nap time, and speed-running their power progression to prepare for Cal’s eventual arrival.
Paimon cleared his throat. “The Hive is fast approaching, O’ Allking. Now could be an opportune moment to share your plan.”
Cal’s gaze skipped over the distant wall of Hive monsters racing up the cliff and focused on the geography-defining silhouette of the Hive Queen of Europe. While her humic mass was enough to passively warp reality, causing the rain to intensify towards a flood-inducing water-fall, she would struggle to project that power past the twentieth floor’s null field and the assorted defensive measures. Whatever attack it could launch on Merchant in the time window before rival Queens’ arrival would be insignificant.
Unless someone gave her a hand.
“Most Honored Allking, as your prophet, I feel obliged to remind you that neither I nor your brave new saved can read your thoughts.”
The smallest smile crept on Cal’s lips as he stared at the distant Queen. Access to allies this early into a run opened certain options.
“Head inside, take one of the elevators to the floor beneath us, and jam the door open. Once below, prepare an ambush and wait to shoot on my command. Paimon will instruct you in the methods of disguising your presence from the Hive senses.”
“As you command,” said the prophet.
“Roger that,” said Sergeant. “A rare pleasure to Hive hunt during a swarm. Should we prepare to face a larvae, adapters, or a tankform?”
Cal pointed to the ever approaching titan of biomechanical mass destruction bearing the title of Queen.
“We will swindle Europe herself.”
To truly catch up, nothing less than fragments of high existential mass would do.
Several moments later, Cal stood alone at the entrance to the Center-A lobby. Rain dribbled down his nose, chin, and starsteel knives. Cold water flooded past his bare feet, rushing off the shattered concrete piers on the cliffside.
His Crown pulsed softly against an uptick in native hume levels. Beside Cal, a frayed cluster of cables stuck between a receptionist’s cubicle and a collapsed cafe twitched. Slowly, in the corner of his vision, the wires began to extend and crawl across rubble like roots. A cracked datapad beneath the flood disassembled. The fragments of its screen spread into a glitching field of ‘algae’. Somewhere in the ruins, a broken speaker crackled with static.
Sparks crackled on his Crown as hume levels continued to rise. Former electronics began their second lives as part of the ever spreading jungle. Dead lamps bloomed into biomechanical flowers, casting the storm-drenched hangar in a garden of neon hues. If one squinted hard enough, they might’ve seen one of the long-extinct coral fields.
A cat-sized figure skittered up over the cliff on a collection of long needle-like legs. On its back, facing up, a gray humanoid face stared out, rapidly blinking. Its white eyes flashed like ancient cameras, darting across the mutating environment. They locked on Cal.
Blades grew out of the creature’s body, turning it into a blender on legs. Its body tensed, limbs coiling to leap at him.
“Not you,” said Cal.
The Hive creature shifted in place skittishly, eyes switching between Cal’s eyes and Crown.
Cal shook his head.
“Shoo.”
The little one’s blades retracted. It sprinted back where it came from.
Patient, Cal continued his wait.
The jungle around him grew from a coral field to a kelp jungle. The ground trembled.
Then, within the span of a thunderstrike, an endless stampede of Hive flooded up over the lip of the cliff. Clawing atop each other raced waves of biomechanical abominations stitched together from deep seas’ forgotten evolutions and human nightmares. Light gleamed off of their carapaces of metal and half-real composite materials.
Growth was their task, violence their method, and steel and psionics their tools. A human soldier could not hope to match a single adapter. A human cyborg could not best a tankform. Only the greatest of human psions could hope to match the Hive royalty. Only battlecruisers could delay a Queen’s wrath.
But when an entire jungle the size of a continent mobilized into one endless tide, nothing, absolutely nothing, could so much as give them pause.
The standard protocol was evacuation. This was centuries old practice. Common sense by now.
Allking too was outmatched in terms of psionics and physical power. In truth, he had little to no chance and knew it well as the tsunami of metal and death galloped towards him.
And so, he assumed the favored battle stance of the sole creature who’d ever instilled existential fear in the Hive, that of his eldest brother.
Claws dug into concrete as the entire Hive screeched to a halt. Mechanical eyes blinked across steel surfaces. Speakers and Hive chittered in discordant voices.
“Nogoodnogoodnogoodit’sthedevouringone.”
“The Hungerer… Here?”
“Dragon?”
Dragon, they whispered, voices reverent and afraid. Predictably, they did the only thing Hive can do when faced with a being like Dragon.
They called their mother.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
World felt thicker as hume levels climbed higher, causing evermore biomechanical life to sprout from the ashes of war. Mis-matched colors of the thousands of Hive eyes around Cal intensified in their glow, slowly harmonizing into the darkest blues of storm and rain. As the Oracle HQ had projected her will through Irel, so now descended into these creatures a fraction of the Queen’s mind.
“Cowards.” Her voice was a mountain purring with the accent of an ancient French scientist. “An imposter. Unworthy of my attention.”
Humidity became suffocating. Sound of raindrops melted into the undulations of undersea waves. On Cal’s right side, concrete sprouted fractal barnacles.
Cal spun and deflected the lunge of a blade tipped appendage from his right. The sound-barrier cracked as it whipped back into a blurring black shape. He stepped back.
Blink-fast stabs chased him. Their pace intensified, hastening Cal’s backpedaling towards the elevators. Each blow carved deep gouges through the rubble. Unfortunately, wild Hive growths kept the structure from collapsing, thereby preventing Cal from isolating his attacker.
Cal weighed his options while weaving away from the flurry of stabbing limbs and settled on playing his bait card early.
His assailant pulled back abruptly.
“What are you?” asked the Queen’s voice, now emanating directly from the being before him.
In the dim gloom of the lamp-flowers stood a dark tall humanoid of alloys and Hive composites. It had the bladed legs of a common adapter variant, the sturdy long tail shared by many tankforms, and a limbless upper body of an Xcore third-gen cyborg of all things. Framing its abyssal blue eyes and body was a small forest of flexible tentacles, each tipped with a starsteel hook, blade, or fangs.
Pieces of other creatures scurried across its body like insects, assembling themselves into arms. A swarm of Hive fabricators buzzed around it, adjusting its proportions. Empyrean fragments blazed through her metallic carapace, burning as fuel to allow the Queen to project her power through this avatar.
The creature stook an uncannily dainty step towards Cal.
He sheathed a knife and flipped a pistol out of its holster. He removed the clip and chambered in one anti-armor round with a high melting point.
“You have fought me before. Strange. We’ve never met?”
“Clairvoyance–”
“Is not blue.” Glow of a white fragment inside her intensified. Her eyes blinked with that same power. “Limited physics amplification?” Her head tilted. Light the white fragment intensified, shrinking as it smoldered inside her. “You amplify projectiles. Useful, but narrow.”
Unperturbed, Cal took aim at her.
“So calm. Like Dragon.”
Cal’s shot rang out like a rail cannon.
The Law he’d left active decreed that ‘chemical propulsion is amplified a thirty-fold’. The shock-wave of that single shot ruptured the pistol into shrapnel, broke all the bones in his left hand, and melted the bullet casing.
Queen’s body jerked backwards. Black and glowing fluids oozed from the hole in her chest.
A tremble shook the tunnel. Large chunks of ceiling began collapsing in an avalanche behind the Queen, blocking off the rest of the Hive.
Cal threw himself low to roll beneath a falling pillar, leapt through the gap between office floors crashing against each other, and sprinted for the open elevator. Air continued to thicken around him. Hive vegetation flourished as if seasons passed in seconds. Ahead of his steps spread the fractal barnacles.
He landed sideways on the narrow elevator shaft’s wall and leapt straight down. Several meters behind him, Europe’s avatar burst through the collapse in an explosion of dust and rubble. She dug clawed limbs into the walls of the shaft, ran after him, and threw her tendrils at Cal.
Gravity trapped him into a narrow range of possible movements, further limited by the thirty-five starsteel equipped tendrils flying his way. Not that he was a stranger to such conditions.
Each swing of his knife glided through biomechanical flesh and deflected several fatal blows. Each twirl of his body stored momentum from blocked attacks and channeled them into kicks and blows that pushed away oncoming cage of tentacles. Each move he took was perfection beyond computation or comprehension.
But even his skill could not overcome the sheer difference in hardware. A claw gouged open his thigh. A spear-tip punctured his left lung. A bodyslam launched him at the grid-roof of the halted elevator below. Too fast for him to survive.
Cal struck his knife through the cable. It slowed him some. He still crashed through the metal grid.
Collision with the elevator floor fractured a dozen bones and ruptured a few organs. Only Nervefiber allowed him to override the body’s shock and scramble out of the way, before Europe slammed into where he’d been, denting metal with her mass.
Vision blurring and senses screaming, Cal limped ahead. His steps left bloody footprints and his palm slid slickly off the glass wall. On the other side, ceiling lights flickered, mutating into polypal growths. Tools and workbenches began transforming to mimic the alien lifeforms of the sea floor.
“Fascinating. Such output with such low psionic presence,” marveled the Queen, chasing Cal with leisurely steps. “Like Dragon, you hear her voice without losing your identity. Curious. Let yourself be integrated, share this knowledge, and I will preserve parts of your identity in your echo.”
In the bloodstained reflection, Cal saw Queen’s avatar open her chest. Fabricator swarm rode on her tentacle. They began sculpting the three Empyrean fragments that she plucked out of herself. Tendrils approached him.
“Counter offer.” Cal coughed. “You want the Heart, but can’t reach it before Africa arrives. I can guide you through the security measures and share with you the weaknesses of psions currently attempting to dismantle it.”
She paused. Her eyes flashed white with some manner of sensory power as Europe attempted to see through his deception.
“And in exchange?” she asked.
“You kill them for me and give me the fragments of that avatar.”
“Agreed.” The reply was instant. “Speak, you are expiring.”
“I have time,” said Cal to reassure her, drawing a raspy blood-choked breath.
“A minute twenty one seconds, until cardiac arrest.”
“Hours,” insisted Cal, coughing some more.
“Speak,” urged the Queen. The sway of her tendrils betrayed her anxiety.
Cal drew a rattling breath and pressed on his most profusely bleeding wound. “Floor twenty is a null field. A spatial anomaly from the early days. An avatar will disconnect, if you attempt to remote control one across.”
Queen of Europe considered this and nodded. “Continue.”
“The two guarding the Heart are known as Merchant and Priest. The former can purchase and copy anything owned within limits. The latter channels an imaginary God from the Empyrean’s home dimension. They are three to five times more powerful than this avatar of yours, and more versatile, but lack combat skill and raw might.”
A coughing fit seized Cal, nearly plumbing him into unconsciousness. His arms trembled. His graft worked double time to keep his heart pumping and brain cells alive.
“Now… your–”
The Queen plunged several tentacles into his stomach. They opened his chest cavity with surgical precision and implanted the writhing Empyrean fragment she’d been sculpting all this time. Hive replicators began fusing shut his flesh and replacing his organs with biomechanical Hive parts.
[Empyrean fragment detected. Synchronize y/n?]
Yes.
[Synchronizing the Empyrean fragment.]
Fragments within Europe’s avatar blazed furnace-hot as she channeled her psionic presence. Crown trembled with cracks of lightning as an impossible deep-blue pressure of the seas themselves fell upon Cal. The world darkened and air felt heavier than water. Darkness, cold, and crushing depths fell upon the world. A smattering of pale dots appeared in the depths of the Queen’s dark eyes as she leaned closer.
[Alert! Synchronization disrupted by hostile will.]
Initiate infiltration protocol.
“Curious foundation. Hive, but not. What else did you hide, strange human?”
Cal formed a finger-gun with his healthy hand and pressed it to her metal skull. “My other guns.”
Four Law amplified bullets lanced through matter, turning Hive biology into physics.
The world returned to base reality. Hive growths remained, but stopped growing. Air was again light to breathe and burned like fire in Cal’s lungs.
He released the first law.
Sounds of the others’ pained grunts reached his ears.
“Are you able to set your bones right before I declare healing instant?” Cal shouted.
Private Orlsen laughed through sobs of pain. “Set my bones? They’re poking every which way! AAaaahh! They’re poking out? They’re poking out!” She let out a delirious giggle. “Wow, this painkiller is amazing.”
“Yea, they dope,” echoed Irel.
“No one is critical,” reported Jaud. “Three broken hands that need proper setting.”
“Just gimme a cyborg hand, whatever,” slurred Private Orlsen.
“Yeee gurl, lez go. Cyborg sisters,” shouted Irel.
“Ayyyy!”
Cal heard a crunchy high-five of two mangled hands smacking against each other, followed by Jaud’s angry reprimands. Perhaps she had been too generous in administering her drugs.
“Begin the work,” said Cal. “Sergeant, I could use a steady hand.”
Hurried steps reached Cal. Sergeant kicked aside a still squirming spear tendril and shoved aside the Queen’s corpse with his new cyborg limbs. His eyes shot to Cal’s abdomen.
“She’s infected you. Hold on.” Sergeant’s reached out.
Cal caught his wrist before Sergeant could remove the dimly pulsing fusion fragment that’d displaced much of his guts.
“This is what I was after.”
Sergeant’s brow furrowed. “A painful death?”
“A graft handcrafted for my body by a Hive Queen.”
Hive replicators squirmed through his flesh, shepherding the spreading roots and shapes of the implanted fragment to entwine with his Nervefiber foundation. The graft’s existential mass exceeded his own by a few magnitudes. Once tamed, its output would more than match anything of Fates’ design.
However, vestiges of the Queen’s presence scorched his soul like a dying star engulfs a planet. She attempted to erase him and turn his body into a vessel for her to inhabit. While his Crown deployed psionic probes at the graft’s weaknesses to try and force synchronization, Cal focused on enduring the Queen’s will.
“The Hive replicators will attempt to create new mutations until the last of the Queen’s echo burns itself out. Some of them will be beneficial. Others will try to lobotomize my brain. Kill and extract the ones I tell you to as fast as you can.”
Sergeant drew his knife warily. “This will involve a lot of stabbing, Mr. Toven. Can your body endure it?”
“No.” Cal drew a dying breath. Air trembled as he spoke, “Dying is forbidden.”
A chime-like droplet announced the new reality.
Though the only visible change was the notch on Cal’s Crown, everyone could feel an unsettling wrongness in the world.
His Hume levels plunged from 2.0 to 1.5, and continued to slowly decline as more of his body tried to quit living. Blackness continued to creep at the edges of his vision, but he couldn’t die.
No longer breathing, Cal embraced the blackness behind his eyelids and let the physical world peel away. Numbing coldness of his extremities, the itching pain of things crawling inside him, and everything else fell into the void as he immersed himself in the Crown.
Through its filters, his world became one of shifting pressures, concentrations, and waves. Through it he saw the reality represented as waves of light, psionic presences as oceans seeking to drown each other out, and souls as distant beacons in the horizons.
In that world, Europe’s graft was the Sun in the shape of a hundred-limbed horror from the depths of Hive fever dreams, a black star that blotted out the world. It wrestled against the unyielding ring of his Crown. Cal added his own will to its effort and plunged his palm into the creature’s brain.
Echoes of the Queen’s soul spurted out like blood. He glimpsed in them the blueprints of artificial flesh half-liquid half-solid, an amorphic body of tendrils capable of entwining to mimic any anatomy, and a flexible nervous system optimized for enslaving and burning Empyrean fragments. All three designs required parts of his brain replaced, but could be harnessed into less invasive variants.
Alas, such a process would require his hands-on guidance. A choice had to be made on which benefit to adopt.
Cal focused on the blueprints, fumbling through the world of light to find the strings that connected the Queen’s instructions to specific Hive replicators. Once he located them, he drew in air with lifeless lungs.
“Left ribs.”
Distantly aware of a starsteel knife opening his skin and fingers plucking off the tiny Hive fabricators.
When Sergeant finished with the ribs, he continued, “Right shoulder blade.”
Cal barely felt it and waited patiently before providing further instructions. Sergeant worked in silence, cutting away at him and the fabricator swarms, until only the ones responsible for constructing a liquid muscle system remained. Of the three grafts, it would have the greatest impact on his survivability, thus allowing him to abuse his Laws to a greater degree.
“Gnarly stuff,” commented Sergeant.
Cal narrowed his focus on pruning the remaining fabricator swarms. The web of intent puppeteering them split the graft into four separate projects.
Swarms near the Nervefibers around his bones were creating an interface that allowed nano-second scale switching of the liquid properties between impact absorption, regeneration, strengthening, and more. Those on his skin prepared the surface layers to allow optical and psionic camouflage. A colony of fabricators traveling between his body and the Queen’s corpse repurposed her weapons into starsteel dust. They imbued it into the liquid muscles, synthesizing a compound that surpassed many limitations of natural physics.
Again, the Queen’s designs deviated a little too far from his human anatomy for him to accept them all. None of the features were easily replicable through Laws of grafts of his own design, however. One of them was something only Magos was capable of creating. The choice between them took him a moment longer.
Cal eventually instructed Sergeant through the removal of all but the fabricator swarm imbuing starsteel into the graft. Extensive testing would be required to find out its limits, but the data provided by the blueprints was promising.
“What about the rest?” Sergeant asked moments later.
“I’m assuming command of them…”
[Infiltration protocols successful. Hostile echo disrupted.]
[Resuming synchronization…]
Crown had pounded tirelessly against Europe’s echo. Cracks spread rapidly across the nightmare’s form as it lost cohesion and power. Its pressure against Cal’s will waned from starlike intensity to a flicker.
Cal wrestled the puppet strings of remaining fabricators from it and sent them instructions to adapt the graft into his existing human anatomy. The tiny little fabricators expressed brief confusion as to how keeping this human alive would help the Hive, but obeyed nonetheless.
As it vanished, the Queen’s echo screeched in frustration and sent out a single order to all nearby Hive creatures.
Kill him.
Cal forced open his eyes.
Hive roots crawled towards him along the walls and ground. Lamp flowers flashed violently in his general direction.
“How petty.” Cal clicked his tongue. Someone of Europe’s power should know how to be a graceful loser.
Sergeant tried to lift Cal up and run, but cables wound around and through his battered form. He began hacking at them.
“Jaud,” Sergeant shouted. “We’re under attack!”
“Relax,” said Cal as cords wrapped around his neck. His hume levels approached baseline as his damage accumulated. “Time the window for desperate acts of spite by a fair margin.”
A second Empyrean fragment connected to his soul. His Crown hummed.
[Synchronization complete, simulating the Crown.]
[Hume level: 31.2/1.0]
[Grafts:]
[Nervefiber Foundation Ver. Allking]
[Liquid Europe Musculature Ver. Allking]
Info about the latter graft being dysfunctional due to intense bodily damage scrolled past his view. Cal ignored it, searching for the pop up that his new existential mass had prompted.
[Existential mass sufficient for simulating the Kingdom.]
Begin. Reserve five humes.
His hume levels dropped as the Crown complied.
Allking’s Kingdom awakened.
And nothing changed.
Unlike some of his siblings’ Systems, his did not infect nearby souls with greed to gather material wealth and power. Neither did it warp reality and infect the material world with memetic hazards. His System was, even according to the hopeless perfectionist known as Magos, flawless. It didn’t spend a single nano-hume of existential mass on anything but achieving its primary purpose.
Cal’s blazing eyes found Sergeant.
The man stared at him with apprehension and worry.
“Sergeant Hallowan of United Cities, you have demonstrated yourself a man of integrity and courage,” said Allking, as if instead of dying on the floor he sat at the end of a vast throne room. “And more, you have demonstrated a will to prioritize mankind over your own soul.”
Sergeant took a step back.
Hive roots continued to kill him, but Cal neither cared nor paused. “Under more favorable circumstances, this would merit knighthood. Instead, you shall be the first true psion.”
He paused, and though his voice was a choking whisper, it rang louder across the reality battleship’s artillery.
“Awaken.”
***
John Hallowan’s eyes drew wide. A blue box filled his vision.
[The System will bridge your soul directly into the Beyond, allowing utilization of psionic abilities without Empyrean fragment intermediate. Your existential and physical power can grow with exercise and without limits. The System will not restrain your free will or soul in any way. All I, Allking, ask of you, is that you use this strength for the good of mankind.]
[Awaken? y/n]
Psionics.
John’s breath shuddered.
Power to prevent stupid deaths of stupid fresh recruits. Prestige to rise above Captain rank. A chance to make a difference.
Psionics. Yes or no?
How many nights had he cursed his poor compatibility with fragments? How many nights had he punched until his knuckles bled to numb the pain? He remembered every name he’d lost, yet dared not count them up. His knuckles turned white around his combat knife. Yes or no was not a question to him.
“Give me everything,” he hissed.
[Awakening the System...]
Something stabbed through him. Sergeant jerked and clutched his chest but saw nothing. Inside, he felt a gaping hole. From somewhere indescribably far away, something rushed in to fill it.
Ice cold power filled him like a double-shot of combat drugs. All of a sudden, John felt everything.
[Awakening complete!]
[Hume level: 1.6/1.0]
[Psionic aptitudes: Physics manipulation, Physical amplification, Pain manipulation.]
[Psionic abilities: Endure.]
John laughed heartily. For the first time in years, he felt something wet on his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if this was a dream or not.
Then he remembered Cal Toven’s dying body.
“Mr. Toven!”
“At ease,” said the deceptively youthful man’s forever calm voice.
The vines that had bound him whipped impotently at Cal’s feet. His body was still a walking forensic textbook, but somehow walked on grafts and willpower alone. Above his head, the crown-like halo crackled with a second notch.
A strange feeling tickled John’s new senses. Two pressures emanated from the man before him.
“A second law,” he guessed.
Cal nodded, but did not elaborate. Whatever it was, it kept the vines from binding him. Despite his wounds, the young man managed to make turning towards the others appear regal.
“Come, let us reconvene with the others. Once awakened, officer Jaud should be able to revive me to a condition I can heal from.”
“You sound certain she’ll accept.”
Cal glanced back at John. A rare smile visited the youths lips. “Considering the width of your grin wider, I am positive.”
John touched his own face and realized why his cheeks hurt. He hadn’t used these muscles in a while.
And while all this business about Fates and reality bending was still too incredulous for him to comprehend, half jokingly, he found himself mouthing a silly phrase as he watched the distancing back of the young man known as Allking.
It began with the words ‘All hail’.