We stood on thin air, flying through Iulius’s atmosphere in a military airship that lacked a metal bottom to it. The only thing that separated us from falling was an almost imperceptible film of forcefield that warped under our weight. Looking through the translucent field I could see our target ahead. A patchwork fortress created by Servi labor and conscripted Artisan’s technopathy and metalworking skills, sheeting of metal armor and shielding placed over and welded to a number of skyscrapers. It was a crude thing made only grand by its size and how quickly it had been put up. It astounded me honestly. Where had they gotten all the materials for it? How had they hidden them from detection? How had they done it in a day and a half without the military wiping them out?
I shifted my weight and the forcefield beneath me creaked. It would break soon under all of our mass, but I supposed that was the point.
“Rise and shine, ladies and gentlemen.” Dio said. “We’re coming up on the drop point. Would anyone like to say anything?”
“There are no true gods besides the god of war.” Quartias Fulvion said solemnly. “Worship him today in bloodshed.”
“…right. Except for all the others that have been scientifically proven or historically encountered.” Dio said. “But good try, clone boy.”
Quartias did not say anything in return, but I sensed his disdain for Dio radiating from him. I was reminded that the Claudion family was the first Great Iulian House and the Fulvions were the second most powerful after them.
“Five seconds, remember, everyone below us in that fortress has been marked for death by my father. Do not be merciful, do not hesitate. As I said, kill everything that moves.” Dio said.
Then the forcefield turned off and ten of us fell through the air, dropping out of the cloaked ship. Artillery and defensive fire smashed against us, but the weight and durability of our armor meant that the great blasts only shook us in our descent.
We fell and fell. Landing was not exactly our plan of attack. Instead, we punched through the thick metal plating of the roof of the fortress like a bullet through cardboard and began puncturing through floor after floor. We came to a sudden halt thirty floors down from the top. About halfway through our crashing plunge through the skyscraper alarms had come on.
We were surrounded by Servi. Or rather, what had once been Servi. They had all taken whatever alchemical bioenhancers that were flooding the empire. Not the same vintage and strain as the black fluid the flight attendants had taken, those had transformed into blue skinned, bat-faced monsters with foot long claws and poisoned fangs. There was more variety with the altered laborers turned soldiers. Some had red skin, others had a greenish tint to them. Some had gills and others had scales. Some had two eyes, some three, some six like a spider. Some were normal sized; some had busted out of their clothes as their bones and muscles grew beyond normal proportions for their Path. Some had black veins, others had ones that glowed bright yellow.
All were going to die today.
“What in Olympus’s name?” Caesia whispered over the commlink.
They were a sick and twisted menagerie of monstrous half-humans, warped by dark science and arcane chemicals.
Secretly, silently, I was almost glad that they had done this to themselves if I was going to have to fight them. Easier to slay someone if they looked like a crazed beast or a demonic creature out of legend. Harder to see the person I once was in them. Now all that I had to look at was something that would have frightened me as a little boy in my father’s lap.
These alchemical lab rats were strong and fast and durable, enough to put them into the midrange of Copper Imperators.
Good for them. We were Bronzes in armor so heavy that the ultra-resilient structural frameworks meant to support this goliath of a skyscraper for thousands of years was bending under our feet and threatening to send us back to falling through this place like missiles. All this meant that when I hit the bodies of my foes with the spatially folded ludicrous mass of my gauntlet as the full speeds of a Bronze Imperator moving as if they weren’t wearing armor, the former Servi exploded.
Not just their heads, not just their chests, their entire bodies were unraveled and torn apart by the physics of my fist moving through them, their soft tissues popping like a water balloon and their bones fragmenting into shrapnel that plinked against my Adamantplate.
My Silicon Daimon AI was helpfully providing the firing lines of the weapons pointed at me, which would be incredibly useful if I was facing a Militaris with an Ember rifle, but the weapons the mutants were firing at me were either to slow to catch me or just fast enough that the rounds got the honor of crumbling like paper against my armored chest. I had not even bothered to draw my Keenblade yet and neither had anyone else on the strike force, we were content to treat this like a fistfight on the street. Well, except for Andarias who was ripping targets in half like some kind of savage ape. When we finished with this level, we jumped and let the force of landing send us down a floor or two or three in the case Andarias’s bulk.
Stolen story; please report.
I found that as time grew on and that I grew more melancholic, despite how I had taken reassurance before in that the Servi had taken on monstrous faces. I switched to my sword, my hands feeling dirty in a way that even killing for money in the arena had not done. It seemed more civilized to use a blade and like it was given these warped monstrosities a more dignified death. Who were these people I had come to take their lives? What were their stories? Why had they joined up with this rebellion and taken something that would disfigure them and assuredly kill them in the near future? Was it the poor wages? Abuse by authorities? The lack of social mobility and the absence of any prosperity if they were not born rich or from a better Path?
As I deftly beheaded and bisected my attackers with the Keenblade in my right hand, I debated the morality of my actions and theirs.
There was a saying I had heard as child when news traveled all the way to distant Livinius from Iulius telling of striking workers being silenced with the sound of a gun. That saying was: All children are born with white in their eyes. It meant that before Awakening, every child of all the Paths had white sclera where Metal would someday replace it, that despite all the differences that the subspecies would develop, there was something uniting all of humanity.
Simple enough. There was something more meant in those words than the base fact of human anatomy though, a whisper of equality and equity. The idea that the Paths did not have to define who you were and should not decide your rank and role in society. I suspected if I was to take the communicator off an ordinary Iulian laborer’s wrist and tried to type those words into a message that the communicator would forward the user’s identity and location to some logging server where an unlucky sender might find himself kidnapped in the night and interrogated by state forces.
The problem, as I saw it, was not that the sentiment did not have value for those with an empathetic heart but that the saying fell flat for those with a more cynical, realist view of the matter. Not all humans were created equal, it was as such by the will of the gods. Even if we divided up all the wealth and political power hoarded away, it did not change that one group of people Awakened to be able to move quick enough to break the sound barrier and heal from almost any wound and live for hundreds of years while another group of the greater human species got the ability to work slightly longer. Even the highest heights a Servus could reach only barely touched a Copper Imperator while far reaches of the Emperor’s Path made you a half step away from godhood.
The power differential between a man and a woman or an adult and a child or a rich man and beggar were all puddles compared to the oceans between my old Path and my new one. I could not change it without killing off one of the two and several others that would just take the Imperators’ place of dominion like the Militares or the Venators or the Campeadors. Leaving aside that the Dominium was too far flung and the Servi were too numerous for such a genocide to occur, the loss of even a fraction of ninety percent of the empire’s population, primarily the working populace, would collapse the Regent’s interstellar empire. Mirroring that difficulty, not even Augustas and the Nine Golds could kill off all the Imperators alive, let alone a Slave revolt. Many would escape to distant uncharted stars and the conflict and wholesale slaughter would generate new Gold Imperators that opposed the killers in record numbers.
I did not want for any of the Paths to be destroyed, but the point was that daydreaming of a world where there were no such divides between humans was futile. The twelve Paths were here to stay, no matter how anybody felt about it, and so were the imbalances. The uprising going on right now across the empire, however justified it might have been or felt to the abused and the dispossessed, was not going to oust the Imperators from power nor would it improve the living conditions and treatment of the Servi.
That did not mean that I was going to let all this injustice stand that created the unrest. I promised the person who I once was that when I reached Gold and could make great Silvers like Governor Theseas Claudion scrape at my boots and force armies and fleets to obey me that I would make changes. Changes to the way that people were treated, changes to fairly compensate them for their daily work, changes to the way they were shut out of the lawmaking process that governed their lives.
In the meantime, I killed anything that moved as I was commanded, with a heavy heart and a dream of the day that I was powerful enough to remake the universe into something saw even the least of men as something of value.
“Is it not arguably your grandfather’s fault that things are the way they are?” Alsig said,
As I stabbed my sword down the throat of a skinless bird-man that had once been an ordinary person who had sacrificed his body and sanity, I spoke aloud, though with my commlink dead.
“No, Alsig. Without Augustas the Dominium would just have a different name and a new face wearing its crown. All men would have been born equal if it was not for the intervention of the gods and the creation of the Paths.” I said. What if they had never been imposed on mankind? What if every human had been made an Imperator, with no Unpathed humans to be killed off to make room for the chosen and no lesser paths to be lorded over? If the Skyfather wanted, surely he could give anyone my Path as the ring that Augustas was unable to replicate had.
Caving in the chest of a woman with tentacles coming out of her face and who had bulging, grotesque biceps, I took a moment to stare upwards. Though metal blocked my view of the sky, Alsig helpfully pasted a view into my vision of what the sky would look like if I was on top of the building.
For the first time in my life, I looked at the heavens above and viewed it as I did Gold Rank.
Something everyone would tell me was beyond me. Something to measure myself against. Something to define myself by.
Something to be claimed.