Alright, cadets. We’re going to be having some fun today.

There’s gonna be a time, juvs, when you get cut off from the rest of your fireteam during an op. Usually, this is because someone decided to prolapse the metaphorical laws governing space to make various balloon animals to dubious levels of benefit—or you could be facing a classic spatial rupture.

Now. Observe the Rendbomb of Space we placed next to you. In a few seconds, it will detonate, after which some of you will find yourselves partially fused with the walls before a brief but suffocating death and resheathing thanks to your Phylactery.

The ones that survive are to navigate the environment thereafter, locate their comrades, and then extricate themselves from the area without ending up dead.

And before you ask, no, there is no guarantee you might be able to complete this trial without a bit of luck. Just like how you might end up dead because the wrong canon was used at the wrong time.

War’s not about “sense” or “certainty.” War’s about making the best choices you can if you’re still alive in the shittiest situations.

Now. Let’s see which of you half-strands are going to be lucky, and which of you will actually have to run the course.

-Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma

29-1

Missing in Action

–[Draus]–

ONTOLOGY REVERTED

RESURRECTION COMPLETED

METAMIND ALIGNED WITH LIMINAL FRAME

BEGINNING MIND-THAUM INTEGRATION…

RESURRECTION - 100%

IMPLANTING NOUS

Jelene Draus jolted back into existence with her multifunctional projectile launcher primed, ready to fire. Her last memories before her death greeted her as if a chaotic haze. The Wombrash had overtaken her, consumed her and all the enemies she was facing.

Empowered by Avo's Gestalt, she targeted critical Godclads among Veylis's warhost, killing key Porters, keeping entire cadres hidden behind defensive demiplanes, high-threat Breakers threatening to make a push on the Stormsparrows' stage, and even esoteric assassins lurking as electromagnetic waves or wafts of heat attempting to penetrate the Paladin's lines. She fought as if a squad of three unto herself, with the arsenal serving as her scope and firepower, and the simulacra offering her maneuverability and opportunity. Additionally, she was attuned with the rest of the gestalt, and so she fought as more than herself, her mind drowned by a perfect symphony of other cognitions, elevating her to a new level of euphoric combat.

And then, all of a sudden, it came to a suffering halt. Moment by moment, more of the gestalt fell, their consciousnesses collapsing into incoherence from the pain inflicted by the Wombrash. Draus was beyond pain; her Regular conditioning allowing her to remain functional where almost all others were lost to insanity or agony.

The Nether shit itself. More bullshit happened. Draus briefly lost track of herself before she got back. Court of Truth dissolved into a chaotic melee, with only a scarce few capable of defending themselves, while most were consumed by the birthing plague. Draus stood along those few still capable of combat, executing Saintist after Saintist, even as her Heavens crumbled down to their own states of insanity, begging for final release.

At some point, she ceased to think, simply acted. She saw a target, she maneuvered to an opportune position, she fired, kill. A homunculus hatched under her armpit; she vitrified it, shattered it, threw a shard into an Instrument's exposed throat, summoned another shard, connected their pathways, fired through them. Ferromag round punched through three more bodies—kill, kill, kill, kill. Something took her left leg off at the knee; Draus adjusted immediately. She tumbled into a roll, tried to manifest her Arsenalist, but the heaven wouldn't fully respond, neither would the Simulacra.

Another shot went wide—a scything beam of heat, capable of splitting all mundane matter—but her attacker was wanting, and they failed to bear their suffering with dignity, an eruption of homunculi bursting out from their guts. She shot him as well, her projectile launcher fired, a ferromagnetic round struck his chin, the back of his head burst free in spring flaps—kill, fire, move, survive, kill, Meldskin at two percent; broken; regenerating; move, fire, kill, kill, kill.

A haze of memories greeted her once more, and she remembered crawling across the ground, her lower body lost sometime during the combat. Death was approaching. She knew this on an instinctive level. That's why she vented the rend for her Simulacra. Slowly, a final swath of pustules bubbled behind her eyes, filling her skull with amniotic fluid. She didn't bother vitrifying this batch of deformed bastards. Turning her brain, matter to glass, was pretty much the same as suicide anyway. She made the moments until her end count.

Fire.

Fire.

Fire.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

Other sensations filled the atmosphere, a pressure hammered down against her frame, the weight as if a meteorite impacting her body. She ignored it. The Saintists were all down now, all of them screaming, all of them so close to their own final ends. Few of them had the chance to vent, but she was still hunting for Osjon, still hunting for major targets from Highflame, Omnitech, and the No Dragons.

Her Voidwatch-augmented projectile launcher fired at a rate beyond any terrestrial implant—firearm, ferromagnetic droplets, particle beams, and direct magnetic netics impacted, punched through, angled, killed. And through it all, the barrel never deformed. She kept firing, even as the screaming sounded within her skull, even as her vision was cut out, the sensation of tiny hands clawing through her optical cords, even as her skull burst open, the homunculi finally spilling free out from the expired Regular's form.

Draus plunged down into a realm of fire, and only then did coherence return to her. A kind of zen-like silence settled over her as she waited, prepared for the next bout of combat. She anticipated Avo, an appearance within her Soulscape, but when he didn't arrive, she simply accepted it for what it was.

Perhaps the ghoul was dead, truly dead. More likely, the half-strand was just busy, trying to secure a final boast over the High Seraph, if he could. Rouse thought over the intense bout of combat she just experienced, considered how she might be able to kill the Storm Sparrow. How she intended to react to a sudden ambush at the moment of her return.

Her resurrection slowly counted towards a hundred, and she kept herself loose. She doubted she would face overwhelming opposition, considering how badly the world was infested by the Heaven of Love. Even if Avo could secure Kae and keep the Heaven from falling, the after-effects of the rash would still likely last some time. And with how many she'd slain, she expected the Massists and the Paladins to be holding the upper hand and pushing forward. So, to keep her profile low, she simply came back in her ephemeral form, planning to rejoin the fray after examining the situation while avoiding any opening attacks by not drawing attention to herself.

However, as she settled back into reality, she found herself trapped in a cage of rubble. Debris held her in place, grinding against her body even through materialized Meldskin armor. No issue. With a simple touch, Draus turned most of the detritus surrounding her to glass and slipped through the reflection. At once, the pressure vanished, becoming as if a portal for Draus to step through.

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Slipping into her Liminal Paracosmos, the Simulacra drifted alongside her, carrying her through this tessellating space as she tried to gauge her exact location.

Her Metamind was still glitching. Flickers of erroneous data spilled across her cog-feed, creating unwelcome visual distortions. As she swam through the glass, she reached the very top of the rubble burying her and discovered herself to be somewhere altogether unexpected. She last remembered being at Scale, but as she reached the edge of the glass-turned-mound of vitrification, she found herself within what looked like a Rend-warped megablock.

Massive gears snapped and swung above her, shining with a golden chronological radiance. The block seemed to be cone-like, but an entire section of its walls had been punched through by outcroppings of tessellated brick—the very same substance that composed the Paladin's mountain fortress. Machinery and apartments were exposed to Draus. An exit wound tunneled upward through the insides of the structure, as if someone had fired a railcannon shot from the lobby through the roof. Dangling cords swung like vines from the walls spraying cascading sparks downward.

But there was also no one inside the damn block. Nothing. Not even a single fucking aratnid.

A distant set of screams and sirens echoed through cracks lining the walls, but Draus detected no accretions nearby either. Her paranoia flared like wildfire kissed by napalm. New Vultun was an incredibly dense city, with vacancies primarily found down in the gutters with the Spine. The Tiers, however, had been over-capacity for centuries. An empty megablock in the Tiers was usually a prelude to an ambush.

Without hesitation, the regular tried to trigger her Incog, but existence around her shuddere as if disturbed by a miracle, and suddenly, she felt a trickle of entropy build within her Frame. That was odd. She tried again. The same effect followed. This time, her Arsenalist’s Rend Capacity hit one.

"Fuck’s this?" Draus muttered to herself.

"It is more than entropy…" her Arsenalist said, speaking directly from her projectile launcher. Drowse looked down at the gun collapsed within her augmented transplant.

"What you mean?" Draus asked.

"Your mind… feels laced. Lace to mind. I can hear your thoughts," the Arsenalist said. "I can remember your recollections. Nicoma, Durek, the Orphans. I can hear voices coming aliveinside of me as well." And then the Arsenalist's voice trailed off. And for the first time, the Regular sensed a feeling of fear emanating from her Heaven of Guns.

Draus scoffed. "Godsdamn it, Avo. The fuck did you do to us this time?” Because who else was she to blame? How else would the world be this kind of half-strand bullshit happen without the half-strand taking a shit in the wrong Nether-hole and forgetting to flush?

Giving up on trying to activate her Incog, she instead launched a shard of glass from the rubble through the open gorge leading all the way up to the top of the block. Guiding her fragment up the floors, she scanned the levels above her and found them empty as well. But there were plenty of drones still left cleaning the insides of apartments. Some hot coffee still steaming from cups on tables; holo-stations playing old vics on repeat.

There had been people here. Recently, even. But they were all gone Now. All of them vanished without a trace.

She expected an attack to come any time. The treat could strike her thaumaturgically, mentally, even physically. The Regular stayed ready. A destroyed megablock was in many ways a greater challenge to overcome than even an intact one. Rubble rendered one entrenched against artillery, and damage inflicted upon the structure's internal infrastructure created new crevices, unexpected angles of attack. But no ambush came, and only the ambience of distant discord hinted to Draus that there were still people left in the world. The megablock she ascended might as well be a tomb.

“We glimpse this place from all its angles, glass and reflection all,” the Simulacra suggested. The heaven shuddered, and all that was visual symmetry responded with a trembling vibration. There was a vast network of pathways Draus could build beyond this space. And just as well. She needed to get moving. As her shard shot through the final rent lining the top of the block, a blinding flurry of colors across the sky.

A vibrant deer-like creature composed of countless phantasms and sporting an enormous curved horn raced against a new limited edition aerovec on burning hooves. The bioform screeched, and its manifested projection glitched, spraying numbers and loose strings of unstable memory across the world like sprinkles of falling grain.

The holographic Aerovec bailed over Draus' shard as well.

+INTRODUCING THE NEW YONDER QUICKSILVER DULEXE!+

A crackle went across the thoughtcast, and Draus thought she could hear a discordant chorus of whispers spilling over. Some of the voices even sounded familiar. As the ad climbed, however, it rose higher into the air and then sudden vanished between an odd ethereal membrane that extended as far as Draus could see. The Daystar looked a smear of brightness hidden behind a thin tarp, and pulsating undulations passed through the membrane, giving off an ethereal translucence.

Her cog-feed flickered once more, and Draus briefly glimpsed a sudden vision overlapping her perception. It intruded into her visuals like an unwelcome premonition. She saw Scale from high above. She saw four burning Souls and watched them rupture, shatter, break, and then pool back together like melding yolk. And from the wound that was left on the surface of reality, tendrils began to spread, pouring down, weaving through the bricks that composed scale, burrowing across reality. The tendrils sported the same hue as the membrane she was now regarding.

And as fast as it came, the vision left her, her cog-feed stabililzing thereafter.

"Godsdamn Nether bullshit," Draus grumbled to herself. She hated it when the Nether got like this. She had half a mind to launch a series of disruptions at the membrane to punch her way through, but something told her it was a bad idea. Bringing up her DeepNav, Draus' frustration only grew as she was greeted by an empty emulation of her surroundings.

"Of course you'd be broken now, you piece of shit," the Regular muttered to herself. It was just as Guard Captain Nicoma once said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and the things that you can't think of going wrong will also be wrong waiting for you to discover them, like an IED attached to a toilet seat.

And then there were her immediate surroundings. Rows of rising and falling structures held up along three layers of floating platforms. Heavy Sanctian aesthetic. Massive bronze and gold buildings sporting too fucking many windows, pointless windmills, clicking gears, and splashing water wheels leading to a highly sophisticated network of aqueducts. Everything here was tied together by some tube or pipe. It was like looking down into an alloyed jungle. Drones darted between buildings as they sprayed fire suppressant at the streets below.

At first, she thought herself lost in a Sanctian Purgatory in the Tiers—she’d fought in plenty of places like this during the war. However, it was when she looked beyond her immediate surroundings that her assessment went back to being uncertain. Pillars of scattered rubble comprised of shifting brick lay buried across the district, slowly swelling and widening the fissures they inflicted upon the environment. More parts of Scale left scattered about. Burning aeros lay like crushed cans against buildings and street corners while people wailed and wept.

More and more drones were circulating through the narrow streets, dodging between pipes, and Draus followed them, she noticed a final oddity that made all her thoughts go still.

There, in the far horizon, a colossal Old Nolothi ziggurat rose from the ground to toward all surrounding structures, becoming the cornerstone of this abnormally altered district. The top of the ziggurat also sported an extension—a helix-shaped tower that pierced the membrane above. She knew that tower. It bore the exact same design as Avo’s memory tower in the enclave.

Synaptic bolts carrying ghost-charged memories jumped from the tower’s spire, and every now and again, a burst of what felt like synaptic lightning surged through the air. Every time it did, the faint whispers Draus kept hearing in the backdrop grew louder before they subsided thereafter.

Shaking off her surprise, Draus triggered her Auto-Seance and attempted to contact Avo. Only to feel her Rend grew evermore.

"When the hell did you stop producing Rend, too?" Draus cursed, glaring at the accretion rounding her head. But as she spoke her frustration, two happenings demanded her attention. The first was a message incoming through to her ansible. The second was the golden gleam of four chronoframes rising from behind a row of buildings as they slowly approached the ziggurat. Each chronoframe was fully manifested, materialized as massive semi-humanoid forms. At a glance, resemble heavily armed combat skins with massive arms and legs, guns attacked to the end of a dozen gleaming tendrils, but also odd oblong cores instead of heads. The cores were where the Navigators formed the heart of the frame, and they all but glided toward the ziggurat with extreme haste.

A sweeping splash of red flickered in Draus' periphery, and she saw a swarm of surveillance drones slowly approaching the area. She flicked her shard out—then projected threading beams of light from its surface, hopping across nearby windows and reflections to expand her demiplanar junctions. Carefully, she closed in on the chronoframes as she accepted the ansible transmission.

{Guard Captain Draus,} Calvino greeted, {I am extremely that you're still alive. I reached out—}

{How's the rest of the cadre,} Draus asked, cutting the mind off. She didn’t give a shit about pleasantries.

{I am still trying to reach most of them. Dice, Essus, and Citizen Marlowe have been confirmed as survivors. But we are still monitoring the situation to get a better—}

{What situation, Calvino. What the fuck just happened? Where’s Avo? What the hells happened back in the court?}

A brief lull entered their conversation. {Well. We suspect that Operative Avo’s Frame ruptured.}

Bitterness churned somewhere deep inside Draus’ gut. She knew. There was always the possibility at any time. She knew. Still. It was… they weren’t done. They still had too much—

{Veylis as well. Right now, we are unable to fully confirm Avo’s condition. Or the High Seraph’s. All we can say is that their ruptures might have comingled, and you are currently trapped within a layered “substance” spreading across New Vultun. So far, it is exhibiting anomalous properties of memory and chronology melded together.}

{Well,} Draus said, snorting as she looked at the distant ziggurat. {Reckon that explains some of this, then.} She paused. {Doesn’t make it any less bullshit. Godsfuckingdammit Avo.}