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The blasted landscape was littered with signs of the civilization that was decimated before the world's ecosystem collapsed. Bill ran with augmented speed across the tortured terrain. He swam across the acidic river and dragged himself into the ruins of the alien docks, his leg was torn open leaving a trail of blood. He couldn’t spare the energy to divert to his regeneration skills.
Bill gasped as he collapsed in the alley. His senses extended, and he found a momentary respite. No Mi-Go swarms, and none of those damn Shaddari beasts. He took a moment to tighten his improvised bandage and scanned the skies. No signs that the Shadow Gate was up there…yet.
He couldn’t risk opening up his wireless network. He’d seen too many Bills corrupted and self-destruct under the invasive EM intrusions. He wouldn’t risk it. Only direct laser coms could avoid the insidious whispering AI. Bill jumped hearing the rasping noise echoing down the alley…a cross between a roar and a landslide. Bill grimaced as he prepared to run again. He secured his leg’s wrap and peeked over the ruined metal carcass that might have been a vehicle.
Fuck! A goddamn Shoggoth. I hope the others are ready. These bastards are fast and hard to contain.
Bill thought hard and made his decision, playing the rabbit was not his favorite role but his positioning was right. He leveled his HEKIA forearm guns and unleashed his barrage of kinetic rounds into the nebulous snake form. Bill gasped as the barrage rounds passed through the gaseous form and its maw turned toward him. He pivoted and ran as fast as he could as the Shoggoth screamed like a jet turbine accelerating.
Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he stagger-sprinted towards cover, deeper into the ruins. He heard the ground tremble behind him, signaling the monstrous entity's pursuit. With a glance back, he saw the Shoggoth gaining ground. Bill's heart raced as he pushed himself to his limits, knowing that this battle was far from over.
Where are they? He thought as he screamed in pain. His vaulting hurdle into the thoroughfare of the ruined city slowed as his torn leg finally began to give out. The Shoggoth blasted through the detritus and chased after him. Bill fell sideways and slid down a ramp into the drainage zone of a side alley.
Come on! The zone must be close. Just a little further. He thought as the Shoggoth slammed through the wall, raining debris across him.
Bill scrambled and crawled to the platform that was slightly elevated above the sewage. He panted in relief as he saw the signs he was looking for. The glow sticks indicated he was in the target zone, but he felt anything but safe as the Shoggoth poured itself down the ramp toward him.
The Shoggoth oozed closer, its form pulsating with malicious intent. Its hazy surface dissolving debris as its cloud of disassemblers tore everything around it into atoms. Bill's mind raced as he assessed his surroundings. He was completely caged in. It was a dead end.
Finally, his friends…twins…clones finally made their presence known. A focused EMP blasted the Shoggoth from above, disrupting its fog form. The billowing nebulous cloud collapsed inward into a solid snake shape. The Bills knew from past battles that the beast could shift back and forth between cloudy and solid forms. The EMP disrupted it and forced it to congeal.
Cappa, another of Bill’s digital clones, dropped on the Shoggoth’s head and stabbed into its sensor cluster with both of his exo-blades. Gamma above reset his Hertz rifle, on the lookout for other monsters.
Bill, or Bravo using their op names, rolled over. The heads of his brothers, Alpha and Delta, had bunched across his back, forcing him to spin aside to get to his feet. He grimaced. If they could get back up to the Shadow Gate, then their downed brothers’ neural pattern could still be saved. He looked grimly upon the Shoggoth as its form continued to deflate.
“God damn it. We need to talk about our roles and responsibilities. My leg is toast. You two can’t leave me hanging like that. I’ve got Alpha and Delta here. If you were seconds later, we three would have been unrecoverable.”
“Sorry about that, B. Maybe we should head back to the shuttle? I think our chances of surviving and getting our intel back are better if we get back up into orbit to wait for the new gate.” Cappa replied, grimacing as the Shoggoth residue sizzled on his armor.
“Anything worthwhile, Cappa?” Beta asked.
Cappa shook his head, wrenching the blade out of the writhing mess. He checked the readings from his blades. They had been modified to act as data taps if he could slice into the thing’s spinal conduit accurately.
"It’s neural code is so fucking alien. I’m not sure. It keeps having reference call tags to something called an Enochian. I think maybe it’s the next level up on the monster hierarchy in this blasted hellscape. Its base node is close though…real close.” Cappa said with his exhaustion evident.
“Fuck. These beasts are deadly, but we need to find their weaknesses. There is some sort of networking going on, even between different classes of monsters. We need to find that control point…if we can hit nodes in their network we will have a bigger impact.” He complained.
Gamma slammed down to the pavement, jumping from his overwatch position. He sent a flurry of foglets and the last drone loose into the sky to mask them from the attention of the ever-present swarms of Chthonic beast-swarms.
“Something ain’t right. Every time we’ve hunted in the past, we would be swarmed by Blightwing and Mi-Go by now. Posts!” Gamma yelled.
“Fuck! You guys take these neural cores. I’m going to struggle if I don’t have time to patch my leg up.” The trio quickly redistributed their loads, reset and loaded their weapons, and sent out a thin screen of motes to secure their immediate surroundings.
A distant rumbling began to grow as the Bills began to run. Bravo sighed as his system finally got his Achilles tendon reattached. He picked up his pace to catch up with his twins and shot a tight beam up to the last overwatch drone that Gamma had launched. The image return was very bad news as the rumbling and grinding noise grew louder.
“Damn. We’ve got a fucking horde assembling around us, a fucking menagerie, and they're not fighting each other. It’s like a real army…coordinated…and encircling us. They are three clicks out but coming fast. A flight of Blightwing will be on top of us in less than a minute.” Bravo reported.
“Clever bastards! We thought we were luring them into a trap while they encircled us. If we use the ruins as cover, maybe we can break through their line and get back to the shuttle.” Gamma said.
Before the team could execute their plan the rumblings grew in intensity, vibrating the ground under their feet and collapsing a nearby derelict building. Cappa was hit hard with falling debris and the ground collapsed from under them. Bravo snapped out his flight wings as the ground fell away and an enormous empty cavern was revealed.
Too late he and Gamma looked at each other as they realized Cappa had fallen through…and he had been carrying Alpha’s neural core. Both of them dove into the darkness, pulling their sensor motes in with them. If they couldn’t go over or through…maybe they could go under.
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The Enochian Mantid drove his forces forward. He roared in impatience. The foreign creatures had been in his grasp! The backlash from the memetic compulsion in its mind, placed upon him by the R’lyeh Architect’s pet Psychophage punished him for the delay with nearly overwhelming pain.
It gasped and rallied its forces. No less than three of its brethren overlords drove their separate armies towards this end. The Mi-Go swarms, Xothrati Skimmers, Byakhee drones, Shaddari, and Vorlathian Wings were easy to control… nearly mindless with their only desire to feed and obey. The Shoggoth and the Erdu Stalkers were not so simple. Those creatures had a base cunning and obsession to consume higher orders of prey. It struggled to keep the army on task and chasing the new beings instead of fighting amongst the throngs of flesh and power.
The Mantid hissed in pain. It welcomed it. At least wrestling with the horde alleviated the mind worm that burrowed ever deeper into its hidden minds. If it didn’t succeed, the Psychophage’s infection would burrow and eat until only a mindless husk remained.
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It roared again, forcing the motley carpet of beasts into the hole created in the ruins. Many would die in the plunge into subterranean depths, from the denizens of the deep if not the fall. The lives of the weak were tolerated to be put into service. Now they would fulfill their purpose. The new beings must be captured and consumed to learn their secrets.
The Mantid’s mind filled with the chaotic sense impressions from below. The three bipeds were fast, fighting with blades, fists, explosions, and energy beams. The lesser creatures of the Enochian horde were cut down as soon as they approached. The Shoggoth’s weakness against EMP proved too much. These new ones had weapons targeting that vulnerability. The overlord compelled the many-limbed Erdu Stalkers forward, the large biomechanical creatures were fast and durable.
The stalker pinned one of the fleeing things and began to slice into its body and neural lines. Another large explosion ripped through the underworld as a captured biped detonated before the Stalker could consume him. The explosion ripped the Stalker apart and filled the cavern with flame and shrapnel. The foreigners and the hoard dropped into a new, deeper, cavern as the tunnel crumbled.
The Mantid screamed in outrage as the massive Abyssal Behemoth reared up from below. He dove into the hole. Its survival depended on success. It had hesitated to enter the fray, but the Behemoth was going to take its prize. It was resistant to the Mantid’s compulsion, but the Enochian knew how to kill it. It would get the prize or die trying.
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Max woke in a panic. His nightmares of the Chthonic realm while dark, brutal, and intense; had always been a distant concern. This one had been different. Seen from the rapidly changing perspectives of Mantids, Behemoths, Shoggoths, and Stalkers; Max had initially had a rush seeing humans fighting and winning in the ruins of Shadow Earth.
His interest and elation turned to horror when he saw the men all wore his dad’s face. His gut told him the vision was far more than a dream and at least one of the men had died. Max threw up aside from the cloud bed, bile and blood as waves of migraines ripped into his temples. In horror, he opened his systems to check for damage. Notifications filled his vision as the pain began to recede.
[DreamLearning skill engaged. DreamLearning + *, DreamLearning capped.]
[Decode +1, Decode reaches level 7]
[SkinWalker +1, SkinWalker reaches level 5, Train skill with new patterns, utilize personalized features like fingerprints, retinal pattern, EM link signatures, and more to enhance disguise.]
[SkinWalker saved patterns: Xavier Bermatti- high, Leah Choi - high, Charlie Hawkins - high, Nigel Farnsworth - low, (open)]
[Acid Resistance +1, Acid Resistance reaches level 8]
[Chthonic Block +1, Chthonic Block reaches level 8]
[Chthonic Domination +1, Chthonic Domination reaches level 5]
[Swarm +1, Swarm reaches level 10, Skill cap award +100XP, New Skill Unlocked]
[New Skill Chthonic MindJoin 1: Ph'nglui merger through the depths to mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh! high space to control and mithra ul portal ixh'karnath]
[New Skill Chthonic Puppeteer 1: Adonai papelesar tolcariphonu nonucafe, adonai pamchal*!]
[New Skill Puppeteer 1: Combine high-functionality drone piloting with swarm multitasking for smarter management of external actuator control points.]
[Puppeteer +4, reaches level 5, Error - data streams corrupted, ftag r’lyeh scrof emulation target, auto skill customizer triggered nonucafe, pflut.]
[Chthonic Domination +1, Chthonic Domination reaches level 4]
[Skillz Training Search Match - Activate Skillz training capture for Skill Mirroring? Y/N]
Max shuddered as his biological brain caught up with his Multitasked alter egos that were exercising his skills while he rested. The notifications blurred as he accepted the prompts. He tried to sit up as the burning sensation of his left leg grew. His eyes were blurry and his access to the camera sensors was quicker.
He saw himself using his links to multiple sensor stalks. He was lying partially in the cloud bed, tucked into between the Yggdrasil trunk, the Matter Compiler, Bo’s Bike, Rare element stocks, and the pile of debris. A moment of confusion as he visualized Xavier’s body in the bed. His leg was resting in a steaming foaming bath that was the source of the burning. He would have jumped up, but his physical control was still outsourced.
His memory synced and he relaxed. His self-imposed training regime! He was cycling through his friends’ appearances, boosting his SkinWalker skill. He had the beginnings of a plan to get back at Nigel for that first night in Casino Terminal. The disguise ability needed improvement in the privacy he could only get inside the Tesseract.
“Gah! Why am I bleeding? Damn it. Am I going crazy or was that my dad in the wasteland?” He cried.
“[Take it easy, Max. Don’t move anymore until your system equalizes the changes! The signals coming from your uplift modules kernel are unbalancing and stressing your brain. Your uplift virus is still active. Lucky for you, it’s repairing the damage and laying down another layer of dendrites. Can someone take his damn leg out of the acid bath!? This is not the best time for resistance training!]” His Dr. House daemon said.
“[Sorry, Max! I was distracted by the Tesseract signals, too. It gets intense when we’re fully enclosed in the pocket space.]” Mal sent. With a flurry of electronic commands, the dense foglet net packed into the space pulled the basin of acid away and Max’s bed formed into a chair.
Max entered the OverLayer virtual to see Mal, House, and Sherlock. Virtual screens filled the space with details on his system, body, status, and his latest vision. Sherlock’s sharp eyes broke away from his review and he regarded Max with his pipe clenched tightly in his teeth.
“You are correct, sir. It appears all of those men are or were your father. Unless I’m wrong, and I doubt that greatly; the gate array used by the MIT team breached the realm of your dream. I think that it is not a hallucination at all but rather a leakage through your connection with the subspace control kernel. It appears that your father’s previous mission to help stabilize the Uplift emergence and track down his saboteur hackers may have found a new avenue.” Sherlock said.
“How does any of that lead to the dead world in my dreams?” Max said, although his intuition was already racing ahead, tying the loose threads together. Sherlock confirmed his guesses before he could retract the question.
“Your father’s technology, this Tesseract, and the MIT team's demise appear to be central to everything. I didn’t want to state it before, but as we are quite isolated here in the Labyrinth, I am freer to do so. My twin instance, operating with your father, felt that the hacker’s abilities exceeded both human and AI, something that grew beyond the restrictions the DAIE enforces on Earth’s populace, a superintelligence. What game it's playing? We don’t know...yet.” Sherlock paced back and forth. He stopped his flowing expose, his look almost feral in its intensity.
“It seems your father had taken it upon himself to find out! More so, he has breached the legal and taboo restrictions on cloning to brute force his way to an answer. He must be in dire straits to risk the backlash his methods might generate, both legal and ethical.” Max groaned.
He wanted to help, but his father had purposely hidden his plans and agreed for Max to go to the Labyrinth. He knew he could leave at any time, at the cost of the accelerated training he was getting towards mastering his augmentations. Max growled with his conflicting emotions as his enhanced mentality surged with scenarios and potential. One of his alter egos yipped in surprise and they merged. A plan blossomed in Max’s mind and he smiled.
There was something he could do from here, and it only cost credits to do it. He needed to get moving. His acquired Chthonic skills were transferable, he could use the Labyrinth’s restricted business center to buy a file transfer to his dad.
“Alright! Let’s get moving. I have some credits to take, a call to make, and a Labyrinth to break. My dad needs help, so I need to move faster!” Max vowed.
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[Name: Max E. Mitchell Level: Adept 24 (24,150/25,000 XP)]
[Body Design Model: Custom – Canis Familiarus Uplift Free Stats: 0]
[Str: 100 Agl: 100 End: 100 Vit: 100 Energy: 3110/3,200]
[Per: 94 Int: 100 Will: 100 Regen: 1,200/min]
[Skill - Claw/Vorpal/KGun:10/10/4 Strike/Disable/KGun: 10/10/4]
[Skill - Speed/Reflex: 10/10 Balance/Gymnast/Dodge: 10/10/10 Leaping: 10]
[Skill - Shock/Arc: 10/4 EMP Blast/Focus EMP: 10/1 Stun/Focus Stun: 10/6]
[Body - Strobe/Laser: 10/7 Poison/Poison Spray: 10/3 Heat: 1 Chill: 2]
[Body - Heal/Regenerate/Transform: 10/10/8 Oxygen/Recycle: 10/9]
[Body - Painless:10 Precision/Ambidextrous: 10/8 Ballistics/Ricochet: 10/1]
[Body - Unbreakable/Armor: 10/10 Skin: 10 Hulk: 7 Gland: 10]
[Body - Stamina/Tireless: 10/10 Stealth/Chameleon: 10/9 Skin Walker: 4]
[Resist - Neural Scaffold: 10 Poison: 10 Shock: 10 Sonic: 10 Light: 10]
[Resist - EMP: 10 Heat: 10 Cold: 10 Acid: 8 Radiation: 10 ANDD: 1]
[Sense - DigiSense: 10 Scent: 10 ExaVision: 10 EM Fields: 9 Geiger: 5]
[Sense - EchoLocation: 5 Radar: 2]
[Mind - AI Assist/Comp (Mal): 10/9 Identify/Analyze/Expose: 10/10/4]
[Mind - OverLayer/World Map: 10/10 Language: 9 Dream Learn: 10]
[Mind - Access/Hack/Intrude: 10/10/7 Privacy: 9 Bastion: 10 Gestalt: 4]
[Mind - Pattern/Decode: 10/6 FastCog/PreCog: 10/8 Telekinesis: 6]
[Mind - Empath/Poker-Face: 10/5 Memory: 10 Multitask: 10 Pilot/Puppet: 9/5]
[Mind - Daemon: 10 SkillZ: 9]
[Daemons: Musashi, Sherlock, Tesla, Captain Cypher, Dr. House, Hawking, (Open x4)]
[SkillZ I: Swim, NanoCraft, Brachiate, Meditate, Dim11 Math, Surgery, Skill Mirror 0.35]
[SkillZ O: Katana, Kempo, Kunai, Adv Biking, Adv Coding, Customize Skills, Tech Scavenger]
[Domain – Swarm: 9 PowerCore: 10 Backup: 1 Meditate/Cultivate: 10/8]
[Chthonic: Domination: 5 Block: 8 MindJoin: 1 MindStorm: 3 Devour: 2 Puppet:1]
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