“You are not being held responsible for this disaster.”
Marus relaxed at his father’s words. To say that the loss of so many worlds at once – especially to an outside force – was unprecedented would be to undersell the scale of the catastrophe. Obviously it had spread far outside of Marus’ own assigned world, but to many he was the originator of the problem. He’d heard the whispers that blamed him for allowing Cato to enter the System at all, and it would have been all too easy for Clan Eln to use Marus to take the fall for such a thing.
Not that it would have actually solved the problem. Nobody actually knew the extent of Cato’s forces, or where he was getting them. There was no way that he should have been able to put so many forces on so many worlds without even a hint beforehand, but Cato clearly had never cared about what was possible.
“However, this is something serious enough to take to the elders.” Marus’ father swiveled his head a few fractions to regard the map of territories. Clan Eln had hundreds of worlds, but fully half of the ones lost to Cato’s activities were theirs, putting a large bite into their steady expansion. Two millennia of work gone in days. “Come with me.”
Marus fell into place behind his father, feeling dwarfed and almost childlike in the shadow of the patriarch’s enormous frame, even if he was hundreds of years old. It was rare for Marus to go any deeper into the family complex than his father’s office; that was, effectively, the limit for anyone who was not a direct heir of the core worlds. They passed through halls lined with trophies and keepsakes, items that were rare even among the gods, and down a long passage to a great dark disc embedded in the wall. A portal connection.
It blossomed into life at the touch of his father’s deity icon, and Marus stepped through with some degree of trepidation. The core was a different place altogether; the deities there were not merely the family members who had been raised in the realm of the gods, but those who had fully committed to the divine path. That rarefied company had an understanding of the System that Marus could never hope to match, and in fact had no desire to try.
The System Space was a place of great crystal pylons, each of them stretching across the interior from one end to the other, the world wrapping around itself like the inside of an enormous ball. The estates dotting the space, arranged around where the pylons touched the ground, were reminiscent of the Temple buildings in mortal cities, with carefully curated lawns and terraced balconies. Yet what most struck Marus was how thick the essence was, saturating the entire space and almost intoxicating with each breath.
His father invoked his movement Skill, crossing to one particular estate with a flicker of will, and Marus followed, the two of them entering an ascetic vestibule that was neverthless as large as Marus’ entire deity domain. It wouldn’t have been surprising if they would have been made to wait weeks or months, considering the status of the elders that had to inhabit this particular System Space, but instead a mortal servant showed them through immediately.
The Eln Clan Elder waiting for them, meditating at the base of the palace-width crystal, actually looked old. Marus hadn’t seen anyone that appeared aged in longer than he could remember. It just didn’t happen. Yet when the gray-furred, slightly hunched man opened his eyes, there was nothing frail at all in the power glowing there.
“Tell me,” the Elder said, voice oddly resonant, as if it was coming from something more than his body. Marus’ father produced a memory crystal, holding it out in his palm, and it floated over to the Elder with some Skill wielded with incredible finesse. The clean, smooth lines of the essence involved were absolutely astounding, but Marus could only catch a glimpse before they faded.
“You,” the Elder said, looking at Marus, who hastily bowed under the weight of that gaze. “You have seen this yourself.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, Elder,” Marus said respectfully, finding it difficult to choose his words properly in the presence of the august personage in front of him. “I can confirm Cato is a real threat. We were able to contest his attempts on half of the worlds, but the other half were taken with overwhelming force.” He didn’t even have to mention Lakor’s death, or that of the Soach Clan scion either. That news had run out far ahead of anything else.
“Yes, this is an unusual threat. We have not seen such a rapid change since…” The Elder trailed off, seeming lost in thought, then blinked. “The balance between the Clans has been disrupted. This is something that we will have to address.” Without a flash or a flicker, suddenly several potent divine users appeared alongside the Elder — some clan Eln, but some of other clans entirely. Many had the appearance of being aged, but others appeared fresh-faced youths save for the glow in their eyes.
“There is already a [Crusade],” one said, responding to a conversation Marus couldn’t hear. “We can simply submit it to—” The word that the deity used was not something Marus recognized; it didn’t even sound like anything. It was like the special emphasis of System terms, distilled down to only the understanding the System granted, and it sent a flash of pain through Marus’ skull rather than informing him of just what the elders were discussing.
“The creatures Cato uses are all merely Copper,” another said. “Simply putting a minimum threshold on portals would cripple him.”
“World Deity Eis is patron for other Ahrusk beings,” brought up a third. “Have him provide us what can be learned from them.” The tone made it clear that interrogating mortals was far below the dignity of any of the elders.
None of them brought up Initik’s role, and Marus was perfectly fine with that. The insect had been helpful enough, but couldn’t be trusted when it came to the real powers within the System. In fact, his world was probably thoroughly within Cato’s influence, and it was best to write off Uriva and, in fact, that entire area until they had a proper counter-strategy.
Watching the Elders, those who could interact with the very heart of the System, take the issue seriously, Marus felt that Cato’s days were numbered.
***
Cato had always known that one of the greatest threats within the System was other humans. Not because of their physical abilities, even if they were superior to other System-boosted people at their rank. Not even because of their knowledge, for without an archive they could only guess at the broadest strokes of what Cato could do.
It was because they could get inside his head.
They knew what he cared about, what his limits were. His cousins, especially, knew that he wasn’t about to just orbital-strike them, even if maybe he should. That both by nature and by goal he wasn’t going to burn worlds, or take any easy option if it meant the deaths of innocents.
What his cousins knew, and the System-gods didn’t, was that Cato wasn’t some cold war-machine, operating purely from optimized algorithmic logic. It wasn’t enough for him to just to kill the System, he had to stop what the System did. He couldn’t win merely with destruction; he had to preserve, improve, and free people from the shackles the System put on them. Even and especially any humans he could persuade away from the perverse, addictive behavioral sink of the System’s processes.
He had no idea what Morvan and Kiersten, or their neopredator friend, had in mind, but he had a foreboding hunch that it’d be more effective than what the System and its people had thrown at him so far. They weren’t trapped inside the paradigm of System Skills and abilities, where the strict hierarchy of personal power was all that mattered. Not that he had any idea what they might throw at him, since they didn’t and couldn’t control the orbitals, but he didn’t want to underestimate them.
“They don’t seem much like you,” Raine-Sunac observed.
“They were the ones who took to the System immediately,” Cato sighed. “I thought I knew them. I played games with them when we were younger, games that were much like what the System does, but they weren’t real. I thought — I don’t know. I didn’t expect them to hate the universe. But I guess they do.”
“What would be the point of that?” Leese asked, genuinely baffled.
“I’ve seen it before, even if I don’t completely understand the emotions,” Cato sighed. “Some people want to punish reality for not meeting their expectations. They just hate what is, and make it everyone else’s problem.”
“Nothing like your campaign against the System, of course,” Raine pointed out dryly. After so long, they didn’t quite treat him with the deference due a god anymore, which he mostly appreciated.
“The System is a single entity and a distinct threat,” Cato replied, then flipped a virtual hand, acknowledging the point regardless. “Even if fighting the System is a bit like tilting at windmills,” he said, then paused and pinged them with the appropriate database reference for the idiom. “At least I’m trying to make sure as many people and things are preserved as I can.”
“And what happens when the other humans stand in your way?” Raine pressed.
“I always knew it was a possibility.” Cato heaved a sigh. “I can’t let them stop me. Maybe they can be convinced to stop fighting if I cut off enough of the System, if I present enough of a threat. But if they’re standing with weapons drawn between me and removing an entity that destroys entire planets on a regular basis — I’ll have to go through them.”
Apparently that satisfied Raine. Even if he didn’t answer to the sisters, if he was expecting their help over the years and decades and maybe centuries that it would take, they at least needed faith that he wasn’t going to waver at a critical point. It was one thing to charge into the System, affronted what it had done and determined to get his cousins back. It was another to carry that campaign out to completion.
Yet the more he saw of the System, the shocking excesses, abuses, and most importantly the boring sameness of everything operating under the restrictions it imposed, the more he wanted to be rid of it. It wasn’t even a magic system that was particularly interesting, to his mind. It was all rote, programmatic, a simple invocation for a simple output. There was no mythos, no mystery, no sacred ritual.
He hated it.
Some people considered base reality to have the same problems, but Cato had never found it to be so. Reality didn’t lack any of those flavors. Perhaps it was simply the neural architecture, but even as digital life flitting between bodies at a whim, he was still struck by the beauty of the natural world, of the stars and the vibrant orbs of living planets.
Cato looked out at the view, the planet below in all its living glory, and once again found the strength to push forward. He didn’t want to try anything while his fellow humans were still on Sunac, but of course he needed to package up the exchange and send it to all his other versions. There was no telling where else they might appear, and that was not the sort of surprise he needed to spring on himself.
“That’s a problem,” Raine suddenly remarked, unprompted, a few hours later. “I’ve never seen this type of System prompt before — it looks like a universal broadcast, and it says you now have to be Peak Silver or above to use portals.”
“Oh, damn.” It was very obviously a move aimed at him. He couldn’t advance within the System, and all his warframes were forever stuck at the lowest ranks. He would still be able to drop his materiel from above, but only sufficiently ranked-up Lineages would be able to provide support across worlds. Depending on what exactly that broadcast meant, the portals and portal-like transitions within dungeons might be off-limits too. If that was the case, he had no idea how he’d address that, but it would require testing. Surreptitious testing, to avoid tipping his hand.
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A few moments after Raine reported that issue, the various communications from other versions of himself confirmed it. Then other reports announced the other shoe dropping — the crusade had been expanded. To everywhere.
The entire System, all the hundreds of thousands of worlds, had been told that Cato was the enemy and given incentive to combat him. Or more importantly, given incentive to not cooperate with him, which was one of the worst weapons they could wield against him. Of course there would be resistance, of course the powers that be would take offense to him removing people from their grasp, but he had much to offer the vast majority who were scraping and scrabbling to get by.
No longer.
It had always been a vague possibility, somewhere out in the wargaming algorithms, but the sad fact was that he had no good answer for the System directly telling the inhabitants not to work with him. To contend against the knowledge that reality itself would reward them hurting, opposing, and destroying him and his at every opportunity. Even with the defense quest, there was some degree of uncertainty, a degree of that unknown where he could maneuver. Now that was gone, and it was a war of his sentiment against the System’s direct reward. Propaganda was going to be harder than ever.
“We might have to wait for a few years before making another move,” Leese suggested. Cato would have loved to capitalize on what he’d just done to try and make the case that the people of the System could align with him, but she was probably right. The Crusade quest only had potency if it had a target; if he went quiet for the next few years, it would be useless and limp and people would forget about it. Probably.
The problem was, there was no telling what might force him to move again. Another expansion perhaps, as he was forced to assume that his other selves on the other side of the cut-off section of the System were successful. But surely inhabited planets were not so common throughout the universe that they could be located easily. Or at least, there had to be some limits if the System had taken thousands or millions of years to spread as far as Earth.
“We might have to,” Cato agreed, looking at the world below.
***
Morvan stalked back and forth around the Nexus building, seething. It was bad enough that their know-it-all cousin thought he was better, just because he was older, but to also send a copy into their new home to nanny them? When they were younger and played games, the man who now styled himself as Cato had seemed reasonable enough. But once Morvan and Kiersten had started spreading their metaphorical wings and finding people on Earth of a more similar mind, he’d become an annoying pest. A busybody, a meddler, refusing to just let them enjoy themselves.
By himself, Cato wasn’t really more than a nuisance. He was too soft-headed and soft-hearted to be a real threat to anyone, but he’d clearly been corrupted by the artificial intelligences back in Sol. Luna, perhaps, or Enceladus. There was no way he would have been able to get orbital bombardment technology otherwise, let alone have the spine to employ it. That much was clear by how careful he was about how he wanted to treat virtualized people, and not simply real ones.
“Morvan!” Justin’s bark broke him out of his stewing, and he turned to look at the wolf. “The gods wish to commune with us,” Justin continued, eyes glowing gold and fur whipping in an intangible wind. Purely theatrical, Morvan was sure. Justin had always been a little bit of a diva.
“Sure,” Morvan said with a shrug. He had yet to find the gods of the System to be all that impressive. They barely interacted with the real world, apparently too preoccupied with being a fake deity to actually live. When he reached that rank, he had so many things he wanted to do.
He followed Justin, teleporting into the nearby temple and joining Kiersten where she was already waiting at the pylon. Nobody else was there, wisely giving the Azoths a wide berth — which was just as well, since most of them would be shocked by the lack of deference the trio showed the gods. Upjumped administrators just weren’t impressive.
Justin settled in front of the pylon, essence flickering and flowing as he invoked his Skills, and their surroundings changed. This actually was worth respecting, since it was real and not some virtual creation. The three of them, along with a circle of the Temple floor, had been drawn into some other dimension, one of the pocket universes the System used for dungeons and the like.
[World Deity] Eis looked like some combination of ferret and otter and Morvan found it almost impossible to take him seriously. Even when Eis was being as dignified as possible, he had droopy whiskers. It was ridiculous.
Eis was joined by two other deities, of different species but both looking like they were aged. He could tell right away that it was put on, given how common performative age was back on Earth. They may have looked wizened and wrinkled, but they didn’t hold themselves like someone who was genuinely old and had to adapt to a weakening body. Of course, gods were entirely immortal anyway.
“Natives of Ahrusk,” Eis began, speaking while the other gods watched closely. “You have been called to this place due to the heretic and blasphemer known as Cato. This coward claims to come from Ahrusk, to share your origin, and it is that connection that has granted you an audience. The faithful of the System require your insight into the nature of this outsider.”
Morvan nearly sneered at that, and beside him Kierstan’s shoulders twitched as she suppressed laughter. The translation was easy enough: the gods been caught with their pants down and now they needed someone who wasn’t useless to bail them out. Not that they could admit that.
“You aren’t going to be able to beat Cato in a confrontation on a planet’s surface,” he said aloud, feeling like he was lecturing infants. Everyone knew what it meant to control the orbitals. “What you really need is something that lets people carry the System with them, so you can go out and engage him in deep space. Just getting near any of his stuff will slag it, since it’s not real enough to exist within the System.”
“Only Azoths or above,” Justin rumbled. “The distances involved mean that nobody else would be able to get anything done. Even at Azoth it’s going to take time.”
“How can the distances be that great?” One of the gods with Eis wondered.
“You could fit three war-worlds between this planet and its moon,” Morvan said confidently, even if he had no idea how far away the moon actually was. The point was that the vast expanses of vacuum outside of planets were large beyond the scale even the System’s gods were familiar with. “And Cato is likely based further away than that.”
“Doable,” Eis said doubtfully. “But for every world in the System…”
“You’re still not likely to completely purge him that way, if he wants to be difficult,” Morvan told the god. He didn’t want to get into all the digital mind technologies that Sol had on offer, but if Cato was fine with copying himself, he could stow copied imitations way out in the middle of nowhere, where it would be impossible to find. “What you really need to do to beat Cato is make it so he doesn’t want to take more planets.”
“He has said directly that he is opposed to the System itself, mortal,” Eis said, stressing the word as if it truly mattered.
“What Morvan means is that Cato won’t just destroy things,” Kiersten explained.
“That’s the weakness,” Morvan agreed. “He wants to save people, or tell himself he’s doing so anyway. If you just cut your losses, squeeze everything you can out of any world he’s sighted on, and burn it rather than let Cato take it, he’ll be too scared to move.”
“That seems excessive, and fearful,” one of the guest gods said scornfully, and Morvan shrugged.
“It hurts Cato more than it hurts you. Defeating him with sheer force of arms isn’t reasonable. This isn’t that kind of contest. You have to break his morale, his willingness to fight.” Morvan grinned widely, pleased with the solution. “If he’s going to get a bunch of random nobodies killed when he shows up, he’s not going to show up.”
“We have already fended him off on over a dozen worlds,” one of the faux-elders muttered, but another one, a large, furred being with a flat tail, nodded thoughtfully, even eagerly.
“And I went to one of those worlds, and he showed up within minutes,” Morvan returned. “I’m not sure why he retreated from some battles and not others, but he’s sure not gone.”
“How tenacious can one Systemless heretic be?” Eis muttered, and while it was unclear whether or not he was addressing them, Justin replied anyway.
“He uses entirely different tools, my lord,” the oversized wolf said with considerably more respect than Morvan thought appropriate. “I suspect you might do well to think of him as a summoner or puppet user on an extraordinarily large scale. None of us know precisely what techniques he’s using, or else we might be of more help, but I very much doubt fighting his forces will accomplish much.”
“Very well,” Eis said. “Do you have any other insights to offer the gods of the System?”
“Cato doesn’t like fun,” Morvan muttered. “He can’t be allowed to win, or he’ll replace all this with his fake bullshit.”
***
For the first time, Initik thought about expanding to another world.
It was more of a passing whim than something seriously considered. He could very easily best any of his neighbors in combat, but that might bestir entire clans, and even with his prowess he couldn’t hold out against them all. Especially since he had a vulnerability they didn’t: he cared about his world.
For most of the clans, frontier worlds were just useful fiefs, not something worth a personal investment. They had hundreds of worlds, and their people were spread everywhere. Initik had one home world, and that was it. Even those Urivans who had settled elsewhere in the System weren’t his people. They had been changed by their time beyond the bounds of Uriva, their loyalties altered and their priorities shuffled.
But now that he’d seen what Cato was doing, what he was capable of, a single world didn’t seem nearly enough. Out on the fringe of the frontier, he was too vulnerable, too isolated. Even if he had managed to wind up on fairly good terms with Mii-Es, despite her oddities, she was hardly a political powerhouse and her world was several links away. Not, then, a strategic alliance of any consequence.
He lay on his back under a slice of Uriva’s sky that had been hung in his System Space, his claws working slowly in idle thought as he considered the matter. Whatever the response from the big clans and core worlds might be, it wasn’t likely to benefit him. More the reverse. He didn’t know to what degree they could truly control the System, but it was certain they would privilege the core worlds over anything on the frontier.
Initik new that he was caught between two titanic forces, and it was not a matter of withstanding both. That would grind him, and Uriva itself, to paste. Even as a god there were limitations, and if he wanted to keep his people and himself intact, he would have to maneuver very carefully indeed.
His Interface chirped at him, and Initik glanced through the messages scrolling past. Then he was on his feet, reorienting himself with a flicker of will as he cursed. It seemed his own foresight was coming back to bite him.
When he’d sent Muar out with a [Crusade], it had seemed a great idea, a way of forcing people to take the threat of Cato seriously. But he’d only instantiated a personal quest, one that could spread, and he hoped it would, but no more than that. The [Crusade] that had come back, projected out from the core worlds to the entire System, was something different.
The call to arms was not simply one option of many, offering rewards for action, it was an imperative. It subordinated every other quest, every other incentive. Simultaneous with it came a rippling alteration of the portals between worlds, blocking the movement of the lowest ranks. That at least made sense, if it existed to limit Cato, but combined with the new [Crusade] it would very quickly drain all the higher ranks from every world — and with them would go every mentor, trainer, protector, guard, and troubleshooter.
Worse, he had seen the sort of battlefield that the higher ranks were entering. The absolute devastation Cato could wreak. Even if at times Cato was oddly coy about employing his power, he could very easily destroy Golds and Platinums. He could even kill gods, and so Initik didn’t entirely know what the [Crusade] was intended to accomplish.
He did know that it would ruin Uriva.
The effects wouldn’t be immediate, but this was not going to be a short conflict. Cato had already shown he could command vast armies and move vast distances. Uriva’s entire population of Golds and Platinums would simply vanish into the froth of war without a sign.
Initik paced the perimeter of his System Space, claws clicking as they moved in reflexive uneasiness, as he tried to think of a counter-move. Even as a deity he didn’t have the authority to override something like the [Crusade], nor to alter the rank-based restrictions on the portals, coming as they did from the deepest processes of the System. Locking down the portals out would work for a certain amount of time, but only a certain amount. He couldn’t afford to isolate Uriva forever, even if he hadn’t already spent most of his reserves on removing Cato’s influence.
He found his thoughts more and more drawn to the two not-Urivans he had in a stasis circle in the depths of his estate. They were not useful as intelligence, especially as out of date as they must be, time-lost for years, but they were a resource nonetheless. Initik had not missed Cato’s interest in preserving the people of the worlds he assaulted, and on that single point they had a common interest.
Initik was not so foolish as to believe that he could sway Cato to his purpose, or the reverse, but it might well be worth opening a dialogue. If nothing else, perhaps he could delay the inevitable until a better option presented itself. It had been some time since he had needed to use that particular approach but, ages ago when he was still mortal, he had learned that a little bit of fast talking could easily put him in a more advantageous position.
He prowled into the room he’d created to hold the pair, double-checking that the stasis was still in place. Of course, he should have been alerted if something had happened, but nothing beat inspecting it with his own two eyes. The two not-Urivans were frozen in time, exactly as they had for some years, and while keeping them that way was easy enough, unfreezing them might be tricky.
The problem was that he wanted their cooperation, and he hadn’t exactly left them in the frame of mind that would endear them to listening. He studied the pair closely, and of the two he decided on unfreezing Leese first. Her body language was subtly less aggressive than Raine’s, less immediately protective of her companion.
Initik shifted her out of the stasis circle, keeping the frozen time in place by sheer force of will as he carefully snipped away all the other Skills he’d layered on her. Being freed of all that coercion didn’t mean that she would take the time to listen, but a compulsion almost certainly would cause the self-destruction he had seen with Cato’s agents before. Only then did he release the stasis spell. She immediately took a breath, eyes flicking around, and Initik spoke before she could make a decision.
“I am willing to release both you and your companion,” Initik said bluntly. “But I wish to talk to Cato.”