[Sighing]
[Sighing intensifies]
[Deep inhale]
Widen the quarantine. Pocket the entire Yuulden-Yang Sovereignty. Tell Voidwatch to delay as long as they can–I’m jumping over now.
Abrel Greatling? Daughter of Uthred Greatling? [Sound of head striking and denting steel] Who else knows? Well, you and trainee Kitzuhada keep those memories to yourself now. I know Uthred–the man’s a half-strand; this isn’t just going to end up being a mess, it’s going to be a political mess across the board.
I’ll see if I can intercept that hypertube… wherever it's going. I’d be interested in figuring out how they got the lightrail to run considering the state of the Nether and all the mem-cons. Keep your ansible open and open a tunnel to Firmament. We need full spectrum tracking. Their technology should work better now that the ghosts are missing.
Let’s see if I can pinch this cut closed before someone finally nicks an artery and starts another bloody war.
-Chief Paladin Naeko
10-28
Take the Flame (II)
Smoke-made falcons coated Abrel’s form as she took to her stride. Her second followed close behind, glowering at them behind a sheen of nanolaminated skin grown over his six eyes. His Frame was still hot with Rend, and reality ebbed into shape around him like a wrung towel. Neither Godclad drew upon their canons as they approached, but the air still filled with the flavor of coming violence.
With the lightrail at risk, this was to be done in the oldest fashion: Close and brutal—fist against claw, and tooth against fang.
Avo had no quarrel with their intent—there was a sweetness to applying the most personal touch. Just as there was sweetness in being able to exploit both his Hells against the Guilders. He licked his fangs as he regarded Abrel’s second in particular. As to why the man didn’t just vent, Avo could not say for certain, but Hells usually destroyed or destabilized in their attempt to balance one’s subreality. Neither effect boded well for the hypertube’s stability.
His unsteady gait and a furtive glance at the Greatling betrayed that. Yes. Avo took in his perfumed scent–the spice sting of cold sandalwood–and knew which would be his prey first.
A network of blood spread out from him, linking Essus and Chambers to his Metamind.
+Going to trap them in stasis,+ Avo said. He marked a spot right in front of his foes. +Freeze them. Then hit them with Barrage from my other Hell.+ It was a good plan, he thought. A neat plan. Something that would be hard for the Guilders to counter.
Draus extended her monowire and angled her scythe-like wings forward. Her chitin-titanium bio-rig’s build and Avo’s Echoheads made it hard for them to stand side by side, so she cast a ghost into his Metamind detailing Regular room-clearing stances for close-quarters combat. Avo acquiesced and shifted, holding himself to an angle. He let her play above and left while he chittered forward right and below.
+They’re gonna be faster than us. Hit harder than us. Ain’t gotta clue what mods they’re runnin’ but it’ll be a touch above ours.+ Objects she considered non-essential lit up in her cog-feed as she marked them. Even absorbing all the walls and seats in the train-shard wouldn’t push Avo over another ton in mass. +Use it to herd and trap ‘em. If you can fix one or both in place, it’ll be nova–otherwise, you shape the territory+ She turned her head to Chambers. +Keep the tubes bright and runnin’ until we’re done. Long as we’re skimmin’ light, I’m bettin’ their Heavens and Hells stay inside them, so keep us runnin’. Don’t stop or we’re all snuffed.+ She glanced at Avo. +Most of us, anyway.+
Wordlessly, Essus stomped to a stop behind both of them. He stood the last line to Chambers, and his mind, though worn with stress and recoiling from trauma, spoke clearly of what he considered his personal duties.
The father would have never been a street squire with his deficit of viciousness, but perhaps there was something greater to be uncovered in one noble enough to offer themselves to the altar of combat yet, regardless of distress or certain defeat.
Pulling his attention away from the man, Avo growled a laugh as he rapped Draus on a pauldron. +Can still kill you quick and graft the Frame.+
She scoffed and narrowed her eyes at the approaching Godclads. A bit less than two hundred feet now. Four or so train shards separated them. +Hang on to your skin, rotlick. Might just get the chance to do it in a minute. You fight how I say; I think we got–+
Static surged through Abrel’s armor. A dozen impact trajectories flashed red. Avo drew wide a sphere of stasis fifty feet ahead of them. Flashing before him flechettes bearing transparent needles filled with murky fluid halted at the very edge of his stasis.
His Galeslither’s Rend dipped alongside the Phys-Sim’s velocity estimations for the projectiles. Beyond the halt, Abrel and her comrade vanished into wafting tendrils of smoke through the ventilation.
Alarm rose from Draus. She highlighted the needled projectiles and urged him to form a haemokinetic wall to seal off the space in front of him and block up the vents. +Ego-Screamers. Don’t get hit by that. Nasty piece of coldtech we got from Omnitech–injects nanos patterned with a broken mind-upload. They brick eventually against a Meta, but it’ll still eat through your brain.+
Avo formed a solid sheet of blood in front of the shots and sealed the airflow. Tendrils snapped free from his body and tunneled through the innermost structure of the lightrail. He kept things close to avoid damaging the crystalline hull, but he realized that everything within remained his for the shaping.
He began to draw in as much mass as he could while a protective perimeter blossomed out from his arteries.
Sending his Whisper out on patrol, he bathed everything in front of him using the phantasmic’s perception and caught sight of twin accretions fast on approach. +There.+ He marked the Guilders. The others saw them too. The Guilders managed to cross seventy feet in a fraction of a second, rushing through the interconnected air conditioning faster than Avo could cut off their path entirely.
But Abrel surprised him. Instead of pushing through the available junctions in the ventilation system, she plumed free in a fog of screaming falcons. Her partner was missing and as she stepped this time, the floor warped beneath her as she went from fast to near-imperceptible.
Wiring and seats burst free as two figures congealed from smoke. The air crackled with the sound of hissing static. Abrel went from sixty feet to five before Avo could even notice. Several gaps formed in his haemokinetic perimeter. Something cleaved clean through his outer defenses.
He triggered his Mime-Fog more out of reflex than a conscious decision. Only the Whisper riding the circuits of his blood revealed to him how he was just attacked.
A humming sheen of transparent energy had sliced out three inches off from his head. Something inside Avo knotted at how closely death brushed him, how he needed a boost from his Canon of Haemokinesis now, damned be the risk it presented to the train’s structure.
A lash of cold pain filled him as three of his Echoheads came apart. He didn’t even realize she struck again at first–nor did the fact that it was Draus who parried the blow. The Regular folded over Abrel as she riposted from three places. No thoughts occupied Draus’ mind, but a constellation of sequences was afire with muscle memory and instinct. Her monowire flicked horizontally while her wings punched down and leftward.
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Avo followed in her onslaught. Constructs of blood exploded out from the wall and the floor while he remolded his protections and invoked his Canon of Haemification.
Abrel blurred. Minor shockwaves pulsed from her as her arms vanished. Her unseen blade sparked with each impact, and more, it drank kinetic energy away from all that it struck. She deflected all three of Draus’ attacks with the same movement, despite the spore-ridden fog washing over her. Through the Whisper, Avo gazed upon her and beheld the bloodlust in her screaming face.
There was a purity in her hatred. An absoluteness in her loathing. She gave everything to cutting into him, slicing through folds of air as he lurched back on instinct. A thin line of pain traced his plates. She still managed to take an inch.
Then came his assault. The tendrils melted into armor and burrowed into flesh. A crimson cleaver erupted from her right and hewed deep. An arm snapped free from her. A gasp of disbelief followed as he pushed further, unzipping armor and gene-perfected flesh from shoulder to neck.
Her finger twitched. She exploded into a flock of wailing falcons as a tide of black washed through the train car.
A single command came then from Draus. He responded without considering. Using his Whisper as his eyes, he opened another pocket of stasis right at the entrance leading to the nexus where Chambers and the locus were.
A force slammed into him before he learned what was caught in the net of his Rend. Out from the flowing darkness came the six-eyed Guilder. The man’s right arm was unfurled in six segments as gravity distorted.
Avo was torn free from the ground and pressed into the ceiling alongside Draus and Essus. He hissed. Here he was thinking the Guilders were going to get nice and bloody with him; a ghoul could but dream.
The scene unfolded: A warped shoulder-mounted autogun rose extended out from the Guilder’s damaged armor, while Abrel pulled at her stasis-entrapped arm just eight feet away from reaching Chambers as the former enforcer used the locus for cover.
Three acts of violence played to the rhythm of three different moments. The Guilder’s autogun sparked and exploded; a long haemokinetic pole punched out from the ground and impaled him through his groin; Abrel dislocated her arm free at the shoulder but found herself unable to break free–so augmented was she in fortitude that her strength was insufficient to achieve the necessary self-mutilation.
Six-Eyes gunned his grav-thrusters in response, but Avo’s touch was already halfway to his spine when the armor malfunctioned. As such, though the Guilder snapped loose from the pole, he twisted at an angle and speared into the left side of the train-shard. Glass and plastic filled the air. Gleaming bone and sinuous nanotubes were exposed to the light as grav-thrusters cleared the Mime-Fog. Avo and Draus pushed off the ceiling while Essus just fell. The Guilder tore through the inner layer of the train and sight-searing light flashed through the room. A moment before he could strike the crystalline exterior, he tore a cord free from the base of his neck, severing himself from his combat skin.
Six-Eyes tumbled and rolled before Abrel. Her eyes widened in desperation as her sole remaining companion bounced to a stop beside her. His innards were oozing free from multiple wounds while his nanosurgeons battled to mend his flesh. Most of his intestines were missing entirel---woven into blood at Avo’s touch. A tri-clustered heart beat inside his hollowed chest, gnawed clean of bone and flesh.
It was only thanks to his augmentations that he was still alive at all.
Hacking bright-red blood from his clogged noses and swollen lips, the Guilder pushed himself onto an elbow as he tried to back away. Teased by the delicious taste of the man’s exposed insides and the horror writ upon his face, Avo stalked forward, keeping his eyes locked on Abrel’s.
It had become a joy to hurt her, to sup torment from behind her eyes. There was a taste of her brother about her–a depth of her pain that was all-consuming. He was going to make her watch as she–
Draus screamed into his mind. +Avo, just fuckin’ kill ‘em! You can fuck with their fuckin’ corpses, godsdamned lat–+
The Regular gave up on reasoning with him and just sidestepped. Her monowire coiled out. The beast roared for Avo to stop her–to cut her down before she stole pleasure from them again.
Six-Eyes held up an arm and winced back in preparation for the coming strike.
Abrel clenched her teeth.
And twisted her back to the stasis.
Wings of light blasted free from behind her as klaxons blared within Avo’s cog-feed. His Galeslither’s Rend went from half to nothing.
WARNING: DAEMON FORMATION IMMINEN–
Avo collapsed the stasis before the pocket could burst. But Abrel failed to quell her miracle. Twin beams of light sawed clean through the sides of the room as she wrenched herself free. The train shuddered and something began to crack. Red began to flash across every-shard as error-codes flashed over the seats.
The lightrail broke loose the surrounding stream of brightness as fractures spread along the crystalline hull.
+Chambers!+ Avo cast. +Stop the–+
He didn’t get to finish his thoughts as Abrel struck him shoulder-first, driving her arm back into its socket. He bounced off Draus as the world became a storm of fists, shins, elbows, and knees.
Both his eyes went dark as blurred fists caved in his sockets. His jaw snapped loose at the joint. Something popped inside him as she shattered one of his plates and pushed in through his mycelia with a palm. Draus fought to anchor him in place, using her own wings as propulsion. She was sent tumbling onto her back as metal warped around Abrel’s foot and the air ruptured before the swing of her roundhouse.
Force exploded across Avo’s chest. He choked and bit his tongue in half. Draus rolled to her feet and caught him, whipping her monowire just as Abrel dissolved.
With blood tonnage insufficient and Celerostylus outclassed, his Echoheads grasped at a haze of falcons as Abrel washed through him, her Liminal Frame ringing off of Avo's.
Following her form using his Whisper, she tore back into reality just behind Draus and clenched her fist. The air shimmered as Abrel activated her unseen blade.
Avo directed his tendrils to tear into her. His thoughts were interrupted as gravity lurched and he was torn away from Draus.
The world twisted. He struck the ceiling and felt the cracks in the crystal widen. From his Whisper, he spied Draus and Abrel frozen in a moment of combat. The Regular had turned her wings outward - she was using the thrust to push the Guilder back and make the distance between herself at the same time. Power, however, had a threshold that skill could not surpass, and so when Abrel burst into mist and shadow, she flowed forward.
Draus might as well have been standing still. Abrel appeared behind her and swung her remaining arm with decapitation in mind.
An entropic missile ripped free from Avo. His Phys-Sim ran the numbers. It wasn’t going to hit in time.
Six-Eyes continued to pull on Avo. The ghoul hissed as his flesh mended and thoughts cleared. He could help Draus but he would abandon Chambers and Essus to Six-Eyes. In the end, the choice came easier than he expected.
He reached out to his Heaven and the winds answered him. The weight of a typhoon exploded out from nothingness within the train. He snatched the Regular in the last instant.
Abrel’s blade just barely licked an inch through Draus’ neck when she was drawn into a current of wind. She didn’t go alone. Draus clamped down on the hand of her would-be killer and followed the Guilder into the Yondergales as she re-reeled her monowire.
They slipped out before the Galeslither as it brayed, and Draus stripped Abrel’s remaining arm in twain as the wire glided down from the second knuckle to the elbow. Plates lifted from the Guilder’s back but Avo tangled her in turbulence, flinging her back over to the Regular.
The Guilder had every bit of hardware advantage compared to Draus. Better augs. Better equipment. But opportunity, however, had a threshold that power could not surpass. And so when Abrel fell forward, she did so neck first through a glinting wire.
She died then with a snarling expression on her face, and the hate burned in her still as Avo felt her nous plunge down into her subreality.
He didn’t have time to enjoy it. Creating an opening for Draus and flinging her out into the wind, he loosed her at Six-Eyes.
And found there wasn’t a need.
Standing at the entrance before Chambers was Essus, bereft of a holojector wing. Said missing appendage was currently buried heart-deep inside Six-Eyes, the Guilder staked while he was still on the floor. The dismembered implant flashed one last time as the form of the boy splashed into reality, neon mixing with the brilliant crimson of Guilder blood as the child smiled one last time before winking out.
And with it went Six-Eyes.
His Liminal Frame flared. Soulfire erupted out from his eyes and ears as his body began to dissolve. Avo felt it–the sensation of a once-intact nous falling upon blades of Rend. An echo of the man snapped free from his form and dissolved into motes.
Abrel had at least one cycler remaining. Nothing was clean in this one.
Stepping out from behind the locus, Chambers threw up a fist in a cheer as Draus turned to slow herself before she ran into Essus, one hand clamped around her neck to pinch her severed artery.
Triumph flowed through Avo as he turned his attention back to Abrel. Which was when he noticed his entropic Barrage impact an exposed section of the hull. Entropy expanded. Light punched in.
Avo reached out for his companions in an eruption of Soulfire and rushing wind.
Lines exploded across his cog-feed as reality was swallowed by light, and existence ruptured.
And then everyone died.