+Holy shit… what the hells happened here…+
-Exorcist coming upon the remains of the Three-Fingers Syndicate
15-7
Bonding (II): This Time With Murder
Chambers hated being a Necrojack.
Don’t get it wrong, being able to pierce into minds using his newly imbued skills was nova at first and certain to be useful in a pinch, but drinking all those secondhand emotions in? Taking in all those memories and seeing someone else’s innermost moments?
That fucked him up something bad.
Peel away from all the sexy little edits the Syndicates make for a vicarity and mantle yourself to another consciousness in their day-to-day, and the humanity settles on you like sediment on bedrock. You feel the weight. You feel all the parts where they’re like you and some of the ways they’re not.
But they become real. So real. An unwanted intimacy infests and suddenly he was catching second thoughts about what he was about to inflict on them.
He reminded himself that they were members of a rival Syndicate, then chided himself for thinking himself as part of a criminal organization still. This current massacre was gonna be done legit noble! They would free the survivors all proper. He, and the Agnos, and the Reg, and the ghoul together doing the right thing.
Or something like it.
Swallowing back another spasm of bile rising up from his throat, Chambers fought the swirling disgust in the back his mind back down to stillness as he drew on the memories and experiences Avo stitched into him. He was too deep to turn back now. And more, he didn’t want to humiliate himself before his patron and new consangs – he needed to keep showing his worth so they wouldn’t just kill him and take his Frame. He needed to stay usefu l– stay interesting.
Fastened to a blood-molded jack-station in the back of a stolen trash barge, the ex-enforcer found himself delving into the tides of the Deep Nether looking for an easy target to hit before the day went full swing. With Naeko clenching off the borders, the flow of immigration choked and funneled. Such would be the case until the Moot was formally concluded and the Guilds managed to reach an accord, but during this time, the Syndicates would play to their backlogs. The big ones would proceed as normal, while the lesser orgs responded with novelty or bankruptcy under the cold glare of the snuff market.
Thanks to his experience in the industry, though, it took him little effort to find the target he was searching for.
The Three-Fingers was a criminal enterprise that came to be under Sanctus. They operated a Sovereignty away from Mazza’s Junction, but so great was their influence in entertainment that even Mirrorhead knew to avoid broadcasting during certain days of the week. Of Ursday, Thulsday, Thennsday, Unday, Velhalt, Stalrest, Nulrise, only Nulrise, Ursday, and Thulsday were “imp-days” for Conflux because to go loud on any other in the local areas was to court the wrath of the Three-Fingers.
Something Mirrorhead already couldn’t afford considering his ongoing tensions with the Scalpers in Nu-Scarrowbur and Hundred-Eighters in Xin Yunsha.
Now though, things were different. Now, they had a perfect opportunity to slit the throats of a major snuff producer and stretch their ‘Clad legs out while they did it.
So long as Chambers could finish crawling through the most inward of his current victim’s memories.
The Necro he had sank his ghosts in was called Kennadin Svuavu. She had a cluster of scorpion stingers in place of hair growing from her scalp and she wore the tails in the fashion of a ponytail. This Crucible Necro thing was a gig to her at best because her true desire lay in direct participation, and she was mostly doing this to get herself familiar while making enough imps for the proper augs. Fame and power were cravings to her much in the same way water was a need, but between the overwhelming pangs of want, he glimpsed deeper and beheld the ugliness of her humanity.
Her past flowed through him like an unceasing string of events. He was swimming against the rivers of her past, and he saw all the moments her grandmother flung her against the wall during her rages, of how she called Kennadin a mongrel of stained blood, or the way she would take turns beating Kennadin and her father in front of each other while making them choose which parts were to be maimed on the other when the candle of cruelty was truly lit within her.
Fans of the Crucibles knew her grandmother by another name Stanza the Garrota for the bloodstained club she used to pulp skulls. The old woman was freelance now, but she worked with the Three-Fingers quite often to see her needs sated.
Kennadin told no one, but her grandmother was ninety percent of the reason she joined up in the first place. She didn’t really care much about hurting people or making imps unto themselves. She just wanted to collapse her grandmother’s world before killing the woman personally and intimately like the old woman did her father during that final drunken rage.
Existence flashed in a burst of expanding trauma and Chambers yelped.
COG-CAP: 33%
HOST AWARENESS: 8%
Instinct took hold thereafter – barely in time for him to hide as an artifact in her memories. Thankfully for him, Kennadin wasn’t one for reliving old wounds and her look inward came only as a brief glance.
“Chambers, stop fuckin’ around and cut the damn connection. We don’t get all mornin’.” Draus' voice came as a murmur through the real and he tasted her dry annoyance staining the air.
They had been circling the stretch of the Crucible and tailing Three-Finger drones as easy jackpoints. Airspace was crowded with spectators trickling in like diamonds flaring into existence, but being fused within Avo’s Incog-channeling shroud of haemokinetic architecture, stray glances were parried from notice.
Again, Avo might’ve given him years of skill, but there was an attitude–an unspoken mindset that all the best Necros could channel he just lacked.
He knew how to be cold. Just look away and pretend it's not there. Or think of something else.
Being a Necro didn’t leave you that option. Everything was in your face all the time always. You couldn’t turn away because you needed to sequence the bullshit memories all that crap and all the emotions would leak and blend and his wards would rattle and shake…
Mustering himself, he directed his efforts into overcoming the final threshold in Kennadin’s mind separating him from cutting the Crucible’s stream. Much as Avo would delight in burning all those spectators, he yearned to keep his Conflagration a hidden edge.The ghoul was filled with regret at what could have been a delicious genocide being downgraded to a tasteful massacre.
As if Chambers didn’t need more reasons to be scared pissless of the fucking rotlick.
Digging his way through another wall filled with long stretches of boredom punctuated by child abuse that made him think of his father, he finally accessed the ghosts she had connected to the lobby itself and prepared to change her mind from within.
With just one thought, one command, she would end the stream and eject all the viewers, leaving the Crucible halfway finished.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Afterward, Chambers would proceed to the next part of their operation: activating Avo’s session and unleashing the flame.
And killing Kennadin.
He hesitated.
“Shit,” Chambers muttered to himself. Distantly, he could feel himself sweating, his muscles tightening as anxiety took him. Why was this getting so hard? He snuffed people before, right? Shot them in their stupid faces with his guns and watched skulls pop like squeezed graps. Rode in bodies that were tortured and flayed alive by Slaughterman and the others.
He knew New Vultun. He knew how nasty this city could be and how this went.
So why was pulling the trigger so hard…
He swallowed. He thought. He acted.
Projecting his thoughts through the same ghosts he used to conclude the Nether stream, Chambers offered the only consolation he could to the one he was about to see murdered and a sour discomfort left him with the spoken sentiment. +Listen, it’s not fair–we don’t always get a shake, but I’ll get the sow for you! I’ll snuff your grandma! She’ll get hers!+
And before Kennadin’s surprise could settle, he ejected the ghosts holding Avo’s session and jacked out.
Dim, pulsing phantoms projecting a three-dimensional grid simulated air traffic directly upward from his sight. To his right, however, stood the benefactor behind his new capabilities, and Avo’s widening glee made itself known in rows made up of dagger-like teeth.
“How was it,” the ghoul asked, breath bated with anticipation. The living flames that crowned its vessel cast the interior of the vehicle in a haunted shimmer, and between the flickers, Chambers thought he could see flashes and instants of Avo’s countable victims staring out from within the blaze.
A version of Chambers himself stood amongst their number, but soon, they would be joined by countless more Syndicate types. Countless more thrown to the flames. The Necros he skipped across.
Kennadin.
Chambers gagged as he tore himself away from thinking about what he just did. “I… I did it.” He croaked, trying to hide the encroach of his panic behind a facade of triumph. “The stream should be cut and the–” He threw the bile back down his throat and breathed in through his nose. “--This is our Crucible now. Should have locked all the Necros out earlier too.”
“Good,” Avo’s Echoheads snapped down to stabilize him as the aero banked leftward. “Many flaws. Too much hesitation. Too much empathy. Too much internal struggle. You’re wonderful.”
“I, uh, yeah, your ol’ consang Chambers is pretty nova now, huh.” He shot a disturbed glance at the only other “normal” person in the aero and found his expression shared by the Agnos. “But I could’ve never done this without you. Literally.”
“I would have never done such a poor job with your skills,” Avo answered.
The words felt like a jab in the gut, and Chambers felt a spike of anger thrust through him. He basically just sighed the death warrant of…
Wait, what was Kennadin to him? Why did he even give a shit about her, she was overseeing the butchery of random flats.
“I left your humanity unchanged for a reason,” Avo continued. “Wanted to see how skill but not aptitude would mix.” The ghoul lifted his head and gave a rasping chuckle to the ceiling. “Poorly. You’re wonderful.” He patted Chambers lightly on the shoulders. “Continue being yourself if you wish.”
The ex-enforcer felt his right eye twitch as whiplash took him in every direction. The rotlick was getting harder to comprehend by the day.
***
Chambers’ turmoil from the dive was obvious to Avo. Obvious, and extremely interesting.
He committed a deliberate act in leaving the man with new knowledge but minimal changes to his foundational personality. It would leave him unoptimized as a Necro, certainly, but what it revealed about humanity was worth delve into further later.
For now, there was killing to be done.
Raiding the Three-Fingers Crucible was among the few rare purely good suggestions provided by Chambers. Today’s program took place along a single street in the Warrens. From five hundred flats were the “volunteers” drafted, and unlike the cat-and-mouse style game Avo experienced during his ascent, the survivors here were all deposited into an abandoned two-story Exorcist station and made to conduct a last stand while waves of other refugees mixed in with Syndicate specialists conducted brutal frontal assaults.
The title of the entire affair was “State of Seige” and watching the disorganized defenders stack furniture to serve as blockades where plascrete walls had fallen told him all he needed to know about their chances.
There were two thousand lives the Three-Fingers could waste on them, and though no one was granted anything heavier than a primitive slug-caster to ensure the atmosphere remained desperate and intimate, all it would take was for one auged-up butcher to slip through the walls and all would be done.
Or would have been done.
Casting his cognition through the session Chambers dropped for him, he devoured all his fire touched but expanded only to a limited scope. All at once, the minds of the Syndicate Necros and jocks flashed and vanished within the vastness of a searing leviathan. One hundred and twenty-two were, then weren’t. Beyond them stood just a bit over two thousand disposable assets now left without orders on the field.
Waiting for their deaths.
As Avo retracted his presence from hollowed minds, he took care to obliterate the bodies as well, and in the stretch of seconds he felt his Frame brighten with a drip of thaums. He recalled fighting Rantula and the Scalpers then, and noted the immense chasm in his growing powers in the nearness of a month.
If he had already changed so much now, what would he be like in another month? A year?
Who would he become by the time the Ladder was due for its return?
Another fragment of information passed through his awareness, and he found himself faintly bemused at the promise Chambers granted to the head Necro of the operation.
Ah. Humanity. How expansive it was. How faceted. Chambers barely cared about the flats, but here he was battling against a personal meltdown when faced with the fullness of another ego poured into him.
It seemed of all the choices the ex-enforcer was capable of, the ability to choose against caring wasn’t one of them.
Patting Chambers on the shoulder with an Echohead, Avo walked next to Draus and stared beyond the frontal windshields. “It’s done. Necros down.”
“Did you null any of the spectators this time?” the Regular asked.
“Was tempted too. Didn’t. Need to keep my mind a secret from the Tiers for as long as I can. Too many prying eyes. Keep things contained.”
She eyed him with suspicion before her features softened into flatness. “Looks like all that burin’ cooked some sense into you.”
“Other minds… remind me of what you say sometimes.”
She fixed him with a peculiar stare as she sent landing coordinates atop a build across from the defender’s station. “They do that a lot?”
“Only when I’m considering something foolish,” Avo said. He pointed an Echohead at Chambers. “He won’t be a good Necro. Cast an apology to the last Necro he was inside. Felt bad for her.”
“Him?” Draus said, glancing at Chambers who was now sitting up and rubbing at his head with a distant look behind his eyes.
“Easier when you don’t need to dive that deep,” Avo said. “Cursed to experience life as another.”
“And that don’t work on you and the other cruel shits, huh?” she said.
Avo leaned in. “We do the same thing. Dive through the same memories. But there is something missing.”
“Humanity?” Draus asked.
“Yes. But wrong part. Significance. Being a person means something to him. Pain means something. To live a certain way means something. I think I am… more elemental still. Purer in want. Think you might be the same way.”
“Reckon I might be a simple gal at times,” Draus agreed. A leakage of thoughts escaped her accretion, and he followed it to the stash of guns she took from what was left of the demiplane’s armory. The entire place had nearly been emptied out from the last residents, and Denton hadn’t had the chance to call for a restock yet.
Seeing that Draus was now a Godclad though, Avo didn’t fully see the need for mundane weapons. He could have molded practically any gun in existence for her and it wouldn’t make a real difference.
What they were about to indulge in was a practice run of their Heavens, Hells, and canons. An easy trial run for them as a cadre.
The Three-Fingers were effectively gelded for the Crucible. Their Necros were gone and their jocks as well, but the twelve disabled patrolling golems would probably soon be commandeered by in-field enforcers.
Thus was the reason why Avo spared the muscle immediate burning. They needed adequate targets to practice against, after all; cutting their teeth on ephemerals alone just wouldn’t do.