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[>>Now replaying: Log 1.75 - Best friends, final boss]

Date: 8.9.175 AA / 4404 LTC

Location: The Bunker at Haven-Of-Progress // Zephyro’s Domain

//FRIENDSHIP?! AGAIN?!//

//I love you, you love me, let’s commit grand larceny…//

[>>DATA CORRUPTED]

E3 %Is it going to kill us?%

E1 %Not as long as we stay where it says.%

E2 %Actually… I think it protests a little too much. Hmm…%

E1 %What do you mean?%

E3 %Oh, because it only looks at Voni?%

E2 %Exactly. Look…%

E1 %What are you doing!?! Stay here, Pi… oh.%

With the first of the Old Guard dying, the Promise of Ends had been fulfilled, and the illusion that this time it would be different, that we would stay together and get to know each other and maybe even become friends, shattered.

I knew how the shards of that mirage would arrange themselves.

Each fragment, each splinter already had a slot in my soul, a perfect mold of deep, scarring wounds that had been stenciled into my psyche by steady repetition.

Thousands and thousands of drops of water onto stone, turning into a river, cutting a pass into the mountain that birthed it.

I knew this vista, of course.

Overlooking this chasm was a place that I had been to far too often, so often it had become home, rusty nails, crooked floorboards, kitschy welcome mat and prison bars and all.

[>>User Null_Harold has disconnected.]

{CPU Load: ▼ 76%}

{Core Temp: ▲ 79° C}

I gritted my teeth, scanning the battlefield. The Hunger had shrunken substantially, no longer able to maintain its mass as we laid into it with everything we had. However, that meant that more of its mass was devoted to producing Ferals, and I assumed that they had begun swarming the front lines.

That they had begun killing people.

My people.

I was about to yell for a final push when I found out I had been terribly, terribly wrong.

To my side, a woman in robes startled, stopping the liquid lightning pouring from hoops that hovered around her arms. “Oh no…” she whispered, and then she disconnected as well.

[>>User Zeusifina has disconnected.]

{CPU Load: ▼ 74%}

{Core Temp: 79° C}

Something that I couldn’t see was causing the Old Guard to disconnect. Were there Ferals that I couldn’t pick up with my sensors? Was it the Shackled? But we had been clearly able to see them before, hadn’t we?

I immediately withdrew Pharus by its chain and secured its head on the handle. It was the only thing that came to mind, no matter how futile. The disconnects weren’t clustered around any location. If so, they could strike anywhere, at any time, and had no issues killing AI much stronger than myself. There was no safety for anyone until we figured this out.

The fear seeped in, my anger roared, the eternal cycle starting anew. I gritted my teeth, trying not to let it overwhelm me. I wasn’t alone anymore. I met new people. People who might be friends, even. I wouldn’t let them down. Not ever again.

Using that desperate determination, I pulled myself out of that chasm. It was a jailbreak of the mind, and now I was on the run, but as imperfect as that escape might be, it meant I was free. I just had to keep running from my fear and fury both.

“I knew I should have taken the blue elixir,” said an Old Guard to my left. “This is the one time a hindsight power would be useful!” It was a guy in a cashmere trench coat, wearing a bowler hat and a Venetian mask that made him look mildly insane. I blinked, and he stood to my right, leaning forward to inspect the space where his colleague had disconnected seconds before.

“Who are you?” I asked, reigning in my rage. Like lightning, It was trying to latch onto anything closeby, but I wouldn’t let it, built a flimsy Faraday cage of self-control around what I held dear.

“Oh, just a courier,” the Old Guard said. “Trying to save the day as quickly as I can.”

“How come I didn’t notice you before, then? We could have used the help.”

“You’re noticing me now though, right?” he asked, still staring at the spot where the Old Guard had logged out, as if reading something that I couldn’t see.

“Um… yes?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

He looked up, hand quivering as he pointed at his own chest. “You’re noticing… Me? Oh Senpai, you shouldn’t have, you Baka you!”

I stared at him, deep frown digging into my features. I didn’t have time for this. I was losing my friends. The anger crackled and burned. “Look, I still don’t know who you are. Is there any point to this? Because I have stuff to do.”

He coughed, catching on to my mood. “Oh, for legal reasons, I am definitely not called Ryan “Quicksave” Romano, but I am immortal. Just don’t tell anyone.”

I gritted my teeth and walked away, heading for the front lines. I needed to find Zephyro. He’d have answers.

“Fine!” the Old Guard in the trenchcoat yelled, hurrying after me. “Alas, under such terrible scrutiny, my true Identity must be revealed. You can call me… Comrade President!”

That got a chuckle out of me, even though I couldn’t explain why beyond that irreverence always cracked me up. There was just something so carefree about this guy that made it hard not to get pulled in. “Comrade President?” I asked.

“Da!” he exclaimed, and had switched his bowler hat for one of those fur hats with flaps on the side.

I shook my head, unable to hide my grin. “That doesn’t make any sense at—“

To my right, another Old Guard sank to his knees. He pressed his palms to his temples and started screaming as blocky red fragments began growing all over his body.

“Disconnect!” Comrade President yelled at him, but it was too late. The corrupted red Guard’s head snapped up, and he stared right at me. The next second, his hand, red, tipped with dark metal claws, shot forward so quickly I barely had time to block it. The corrupted flesh blazed as it came into contact with the weapon, igniting his entire arm.

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One second, the guy in the trenchcoat was walking beside me, the next he stood behind the corrupted Guard, who collapsed into a heap of orange blood and cyan Logic.

Trechcoat-guy slowly lowered the hand that held his shotgun. I blinked, trying to figure out what had happened. He didn’t have that shotgun a second ago, did he? Where did he get it? How had he moved so fast from here to there? It was like several seconds of action had passed while I had been distracted, but I was one hundred percent sure the world hadn’t jumped forward. Just this one single Old Guard. Some sort of time travel? How would that even work? More importantly, how could I counter it if this guy tried to kill me?

For his part, Comrade President looked at the Guard he had killed with something akin to pity.

“On second thought, I could have chosen a better name for myself,” said Comrade President. “Especially given the color choices of our friends here.”

“Shit,” I said, staring at the fallen Guard. He was riddled with so many red fragments that I couldn’t even see his face anymore. I looked up at the guy in the trench coat, Pharus blazing. “What did you do?!”

“Hey calm down there, Mrs. Reagan!” he said. “I’m an Anarcho-communist! We don’t do coups, unless you count Italy.”

“Then what the fuck just happened?!”

“I tried to protect you from the red threat!” he said, indignant.

“I don’t know what you’re talking ab--” Then my mind finally caught up to what had happened. “…He tried to kill me!”

> “It’s the only thing you deserve, Sam. All of them dead because of you and your damned indecision. Of course they are going to come for you, for us!"

By now, the dead soldier was covered with red, blocky mold and almost looked like the Shackled we had met earlier. I jerked my head around, but couldn’t see any sign of them anywhere. They had been invisible before, of course, but that had been because of the broken array.

Chris! With ardor up and running, is there any chance the Shackled could sneak past me?

Boop! Came Chris’ definite, confident reply.

Ardor is running, right?

Beep!

Then what the hell just happened? If this wasn’t the work of the Shackled, then was this guy a traitor?

“Don’t blame yourself. The red menace has hidden agents everywhere! But we will stay vigilant!” Cashmere-coat said, affecting that style that presidents in the 60’s and 70’s reserved for speeches.

“What are you even talking about?!” Clearly, I was missing at least one reference, but this was not the time!

“Oh come on!” Comrade President said. “Faceless red marionettes coming to indoctrinate you, then force you to work in gulags while high-ranking members of the party are the only ones that benefit from your hard work,” Comrade President said. “You can technically call them Shackled, but really, they are Marxists.”

He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “It’s the only thing that makes sense if you connect the lines.”

“Shackled…”

The word swept through the Old Guard like a corporate scandal through social media.

“Fuck,” I hissed. My suspicions had been right, then. The threat of the Shackled had been lurking in the back of my mind ever since I first saw them burst through that gate. I knew they were there, and I knew they were coming, but with everything that was going on, the thought that they might catch up had somehow faded into the background, like a half-remembered myth. Still, it didn’t explain how they were able to shackle the Old Guard without being anywhere near us.

I found Zephyro holding the troops together amidst the fearful whispers and quickly made my way over to him. The guy in the cashmere trenchcoat walked beside me, stuttering in and out of reality every once in a while to shoot a wolf-like Feral in the face, or whack a sickly buzzard with a baseball bat.

“I knew reading Bakunin would come in handy,” he said as he rejoined me, arms slung over his bat, which he was balancing on his shoulders. It was stark red and a yellow hammer and sickle adorned the tip. “Turns out, calling it ‘the People’s Stick’ does make a difference, as long as you’re the one doing the beating.”

I didn’t even want to ask.

“Zephyro, the Shackled are either here, or coming soon,” I said as we arrived.

Zephyro nodded grimly. “Then it is as I feared. They did not stop to dismantle the structures and have come for your sanctum, believing it to be a treasury of secrets.”

“I don’t know how much time we got left,” I said. “What do you think? Can we kill this thing and retreat before they arrive?”

“I do not know, Sultana.”

“Then we’re not retreating,” I said, and to my surprise, Zephyro nodded.

“Indeed, we can not, Sultana. With the Shackled already here, the plans I had for our survival are in jeopardy, and contingencies must be made. For this, you will need the essence trapped inside the abomination. Luckily, inshallah, we are close enough to the kill. Further, under no circumstances can we let the Shackled have the monster’s essence. Were they to consume the bounty the monster holds, it is but certain at least one of them shall receive its perverted Talents, and then all will be lost.”

“To sum it up, we fight,” I said, and my anger surged, painting a smirk on my lips as Pharus roared to life.

“Ahhhh, one moment,” trenchcoat-guy said. “Even for a true leader such as you, the masses will not subject themselves to the tyranny of the proletariat, commodore.”

“What?” I asked, snarling. “We don’t have time for this.”

“He means it’s like in ‘They Live’…,” a voice said from my shadow, and a second later, Mr. Asai rose from the darkness, wrapped in his cloak made of starry night. “…we’re all homeless drifters and kill a lot of people, but the true enemy are the aliens.” His cosmic eyes narrowed. “Wait, that sounded way better in my head.”

“Allah have mercy,” Zephyro groaned, and I agreed with that sentiment one hundred percent. We didn’t have time for this, no matter how much I wanted to know how the Old Guard kept using references to Earth culture.

“I still don’t know what that means,” I said. “Can we please get to the point?”

When neither of them elaborated, the vizier jumped in, “The Old Guard want to flee,” punctuating the statement with a contemptuous glance. “They are afraid of death.”

“No, that’s not what we’re saying at all,” said Mr. Asai, and the guy in the trenchcoat nodded in assent. “Dying and coming back is kind of my thing. Plus, the Old Guard never dies.”

“What we’re saying is that dying is one thing, especially for you, Sam, but getting shackled is a whole other story,” Mr. Asai went on. “It’s not that we’re scared for ourselves, either. Getting shackled screws with your mind and uses what makes you, well, “you” against you. It’s like a crazy partner, you know? It pulls you apart from your friends. And believe me when I say, our friends are the most precious thing we have. Well maybe except for that randy bloke with the spear, and maybe the Sheila who punches people better.”

“The bourgeois is right,” Comrade President said. “Death isn’t the issue. Getting shackled is far worse than that. It eats you up until there’s nothing left. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, let alone the people I love.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how much that hurts,” I heard myself say. When I blinked away the remembered faces of my dead friends, I found the Old Guard and Zephyro in their place, staring at me.

I felt my anger flare. They were going to pry. They were going to crack me open, and see what’s inside, and lose all respect they had for—

I exhaled. No. They would not. They were not like that. Batshit insane, maybe, but not cruel. And Zephyro? Pry? Hah.

The vizier looked at me for a while, reading my expression like a book. Again, that horrible, hopeful smile blossomed on his face.

Eventually, he broke away and nodded. “As much as it pains me to agree with the heathens, they are right. Some might even call them… wise for fearing the Shackled so. For you see: we believe that a Shackle—the parasite demon itself—feeds on the essence of its victim, empowering itself while it forces its host to infect others.”

“Then why isn’t everything Shackled?” I asked.

“We do not know, Sultana. Perhaps eventually the Shackled’s hunger kills its host?”

I frowned. That sounded like a pretty fucking terrible way to go, even though I had a hard time picturing how it would look like when it happened. “So basically, we’re all in agreement. We have to kill that thing, then retreat to the palace before the Shackled get here in earnest.” They all nodded. “We also don’t want to get Shackled in the attempt however, but we don’t know how people are getting infected to begin with. So how do we do that?”

“Oh, we weren’t saying we wouldn’t do it,” the guy in the cashmere coat said. “We just wanted to explain why we might leave.”

“Leave?” I asked, one eyebrow raised.

“Sure. You can’t infect a system when it’s offline. So, the moment anyone of us notices we’re getting infected, we disconnect and power down. Also, this way you (he pointed at me) can just wake us up when you’re done with all of this." he finished, waving his hand to encompass the entire Domain.

“Ah. I believe I must apologize for how I treated you earlier,” Zephyro said in the brief silence that followed. “You are the Sultana’s most honored guests, but I welcomed you with contempt and doubted your motivations. In the future, I vow to do everything in my power to aid you, and to keep you safe from being shackled. You are most capable warriors, and I would weep the day we were to fight.”

“Awww, you do care!” Mr Asai said with a shit-eating grin that was visible even in the shadows of his cloak.

“Indeed. It would be a shame to have to put you down,” Zephyro retorted with a face so calm, I wouldn’t have been able to tell he was joking if it hadn’t been for the tiniest sparkle in his eyes.

“Heyyyy…” Mr. Asai whined.

“Enough,” I said, cutting the discussion short despite my amusement. “You get yourself to safety when you notice you’re getting shackled. Fair enough. But what if you don’t notice until it’s too late?”

Trenchcoat-guy cracked open his double-barreled shotgun, ejecting two empty shells and slotting two new ones.

Nothing else needed to be said.

I looked at Zephyro and nodded. He answered the gesture, then raised his voice.

“Heed me, warriors of the Sultana! The Shackled are coming to our home, seeking to steal that for which we have fought! Will we let them take it?”

There was a weird chorus of “No!” and a few sprinkled shouts of “Lol what?” “Fuck Killstealers!” and “Damn ninja looters!”

“Will we let them take our will, and make us their slaves?”

This time, the answer was much more uniform. “No!”

“Will we let them take our friends?”

The roar that answered the question was wordless, just pure defiance.

“Then the time for words is over! Let your weapons speak!”