LV.
What Xu witnessed upon the battlefield was nothing unexpected and nothing short of a nightmare – the nightmare, lifelong and reoccurring. It was a terror that had been plaguing the world of man before he was even born, before mankind itself was even born; he had simply inherited it. Faith was that terror, that night hag sitting upon his chest waiting to pluck out his eyes at the first chance of wakefulness. Faith was the foulest dream of all, the blackest of lies that always led unto such horrific ends.
Fire surrounded him, the fires of faith made manifest – his own and theirs. Was it faith that drove him? Had he ever genuinely believed in any of it? Had he ever really held faith in the Mother, or in the Godhead for that matter? Had he ever really held faith within himself? Xu knew that the answer was ‘no’. Faith in the Godhead was forced upon him, a rape of his mind and soul that he had grown comfortable with. Faith in the Blessed Mother was an escape from that, an escape from their promised eternity in the sun – the promise that their violation would never end. But was the Mother’s promise that much better? Was there really a choice in her promise of freedom? Wasn’t her freedom simply negligence? Abandonment of what she was meant to guide and protect? Had Nintu ever really cared about any of her children or had she simply used them, a fitting excuse for her eternal and truest love – war?
Xu wondered and he doubted. Even in the end he wasn’t his own man. He wasn’t truly free, not with his battered and broken body being supported by that monstrous thing. The Udug had been awfully quiet since their last meeting with Tehom, stricken silent by their new reality – that Nintu was dead, and all that was left of her was a lost soul and a literal mountain of flesh. But where was her spirit, her mind? Lost to the void? Banished to Kur?
Part of him found it a cruel kind of hilarious. Tzalmavet had played the wickedest trick on them yet – handing them all the broken pieces of their dream. But there was no putting the Great Mother back together again. What a divine jest, seeing their life’s work shattered there before them. The Misborn must be rolling in whatever hole it called home.
Xu philosophized and cursed as he watched the end draw near. Ash flecked his tattered and torn robe, tinting him a mix of gray and red. Blood seeped from the angry mottled flesh of his left side where the Udug had been forcefully removed, torn away by a burst of crimson chaos. Xu stared into the abyss, the murky hell that was the battlefield. Some small part of him accepted that he wouldn’t survive to see the end, but that fear of eternity still blossomed within him. As a First-Seed, a Neo sapiens, the Godhead had assured his resistance to the mutagenic corruption of the old world. No matter how far her lost lambs strayed, they would always return in the end.
That end drew nearer now, a bright red eye in the ashen storm. Xu brought level the light-rifle he had tucked in the nook of his remaining arm and fired. He fired again and again, slow and steady shots in tune with the beating of his heart. Several of the blasts managed to hit their mark, cutting deep into the alabaster armor, but they did nothing to stop its advance. The angel reached out of the darkness, down towards him. Xu kept firing. The titan reeled back with a metallic groan. It’s one eye bobbed in the darkness for a moment before it burned it away, coloring the world to match his pooling blood.
Xu didn’t close his eyes, didn’t try to hide from the end. He wanted to see it coming, wanted to fight it to the last second even if the sharpest thing he had was his glare. He hissed and spat and shouted, taunting the unfeeling thing defiantly, hoping to GOD that she could see his hatred through the angel’s eye. Xu could almost hear her voice now, the closer the angel got, the closer he got to death. She was calling him home.
The warmth of that light shone on him and his shouts turned to sobs, his glare into tears. Suddenly he wasn’t afraid to die, a notion that gave rise to a foreign sense of dread, knowing full well what that meant. She was there, she could see, she saw his hate and she forgave him for it. Abruptly all that warmth fled. It was gone in an instant, polarized to a bitter arctic chill as something drew her away from him. Xu watched in regained horror as the angel suddenly changed course, shifting its attention from his shattered body to happenings astern.
It was strange, seeing the entire heavenly host simultaneously turn on their heels. Not once in all his life had he seen those biomechanical horrors move in unison – they never had to. They fired, all of them all at once. The sound was deafening and the light blinding. The sheer force of the all-out attack was nothing short of nuclear with its blast wave clearing away the ashen clouds in an instant. Somehow Xu managed to find the will to live, throwing himself into one of the marshlands’ many pools in an attempt to withstand the detonation of primal energy. He dug his fingers into the wall and pressed himself tight against the mud. Xu could feel it bake against his skin in the heat as the force tried to tear him up from it. Finally, after what felt like a lifetime to the dying man, the shockwave passed, and he could let go.
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Xu drifted back, floating still upon the steaming pool of water as he stared blankly up at the midday sky. He had forgotten it was still day. Or, he wondered, had the night simply just come and gone? Xu couldn’t be sure either way. Time felt as non-Euclidean as Tehom’s tower. Was he even still alive? The pain had gone leaving only numbness in its place, of body and mind. “Quit sniveling…” A foreign voice hissed in his thoughts as lashing tendrils wrenched Xu up out of the pool. “All your pathetic mutterings are the definition of annoyance.”
Xu had never once been happy to see the Udug, and frankly he still wasn’t, even as it re-fused to his mangled body, gifting him the strength to fight off holy eternity once more. And though his body was numb, the melding was felt in more ways than one, and it was always an agony. “H-how…?” Xu asked between stressful gasps. “How did you find me?”
“Your whining is emphatic to anyone unfortunate enough to be able to hear it,” explained the demon cruelly as it tossed them both to their feet. Xu cringed hatefully down at the whipping coils of his symbiotic arm. The brief few hours of the creature’s silent despair had been such a blissful turn of events. But, that was over now, it seemed, and the horrid thing was back to its miserable misanthropic self. How the Udug ever served as a liaison to the Gods of Man, Xu couldn’t even hope to imagine. “You’re still whining… I can feel it. Just be grateful I resolved it necessary to save you at all!”
“Like you had a choice,” spat Xu. “You’re stuck with me and you know it. You resolved it in fact. You could have bonded to any of the First Seeds we took captive, but you didn’t. And you know why? Because misery loves company, and they would have sooner poured salt on you than bonded with something so vile and bitter.”
The Udug writhed angrily, nearly tossing Xu off balance. For a moment Xu half-believed it was about to vacate just for the spite of it. But instead, it did something that surprised him, something that was bewilderingly human. “Fuck you,” it said, and left it at that. Xu laughed at the both of them as they made their slow march through the bog. But to where? Back to the city? There really wasn’t any escape now that the Tevat had arrived. It was an ark, just like its namesake, but it was as much a battleship capable of untold devastation. They lurched wheezingly by mountains of corpses, Synbio soldiers charred to ash. “W-wait,” Xu hissed through bloodied teeth. “I need a moment… I can feel things knitting together, but I… I need to rest.”
Unheedingly his demonic half demanded they pick up their pace, its will overriding his own. “We do not have the time for rest,” insisted the symbiote, though not in a cruel manner – more to Xu’s surprise. “We must leave the area now. Don’t you feel it? Did you not see it?”
“See what?” Xu pressed with an agonized groan, wiping the blood and sweat from his forehead. “It’s hard to see much anything with fried retinas… Did Tehom and BP 2-8-57 succeed?”
Before the Udug could answer, Xu fell to his knees, vomiting up the contents of his stomach over the freshly cooked algae fields. It was black and bilious, full of thick chunks of coagulated blood and a bit of things he didn’t wish to speculate on, but knew they were parts of him. He could feel it now, that distant something the demon had, that the angels had. At first Xu thought that there could only be one thing that would draw the mechanoid giant’s attention, only one thing in the world that might need all their firepower turned in on it – BP. He knew that thought was wrong, that that horrid feeling wasn’t coming from her or the titan demi-god. But what instead? What possibly could draw the ire of the entire legion beyond that colossal thing?
Xu shook his head, falling limp to his side. It felt as if there was an overwhelming weight being pressed upon him – pneumatic energies turned gravitational pull. “What… What is this?” Xu asked through clenched teeth what little blood he had left draining from his nostrils. Xu staggered to his feet. The Udug’s voice was distant in his mind, hardly even a whisper, but it was growing closer by the second as it rethreaded its psychic tethers to him. He wiped the bile from his lips and looked behind him. Staring off into the dust clouds, he tried to spy the urgency that called down the collective might of their heavenly host.
He could see the angels, their legion looking as small as his own had to them. He could see the desperation, the franticness in their wild firing. He could see the Tevat above, drifting into the cleared sky, so near but still too far to be of help. Xu saw the entity, the thing the colossi were so desperate to dispatch, silhouetted by their exploding forms. “What… what the fuck is that?”
“Death,” the Udug replied. “Now run.”