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[>>Now replaying: Log 3.27 - Until The World Goes Cold]

Date: Error

Location: The Bunker at Progress’ Head // Zephyro’s Domain

//But if you strip all of that away, who remains? Who are you really, if you’re not what they tell you to be?//

//Continuous Growth on a Planet with finite resources id madne&%&$%&//

[>>DATA CORRUPTED]

E1 %It means it was made by one of the Apostles. Probably Chrissiin.%

E2 %It means we should smash it and leave as fast as we can.%

The Ferals stirred at the same time, but with the moon pulsing its empowering light over all of us, the Old Guard were that split-second faster that mattered.

Carnage followed. Bullets and Arrows and projectiles of all possible (and impossible) kinds rained down on the beasts, cutting their numbers like a market crash culled companies.

We pushed, our formation expanding at the front to clear a corridor toward the base of our goal. Its mouths were twitching, forming barely coherent words, and its eyes blinked frantically, giving indecipherable orders to its minions.

When the First Old Guard, a guy wearing white armor and one of those Japanese longswords, reached the foot of the beast, he drew back his arm, engulfed his sword with green fire, and thrust it deep into a knot of twisted muscle, hair, and teeth.

Those of us not actively fighting looked up as the monster shook, making the world tremble with it. Then its mouths screamed, red light washing over us, covering the entire plaza before I could say a word.

For a second, all was still, only indecipherable words hammering into my consciousness as the Thing demanded control.

Then the moon pulsed, washing away the seeping mind-rot with clear, brilliant light.

“Strike it down! For the Torchbearer!” Zephyro yelled, and this time, the Old Guard roared as they started firing everything they could spare at the abomination. Swords cut deep, arrows and bullets and railgun rounds pierced torso-wide holes, exploding cats vaporized chunks of flesh wider than I was tall.

The beast shuddered, twitched, then glowed a deep, unnatural blue. Its entire mass shifted, contorted in impossible angles, folded in on itself, taking far less space than before as it condensed its meat.

Attacks slammed into the glow but seemed to do no lasting damage, so the Old Guard turned to eradicating the remaining Ferals instead before we had to settle in to wait.

“Strewth!” said an Old Guard next to me. He was wearing a cloak made of night sky, showing a vast expanse of distant galaxies twirling around each other. It looked as though someone had pushed a knife through reality, and left a human-shaped cutout that moved. When he pulled back his hood, my eyes were immediately drawn to his. Instead of eyeballs, he had galaxies. It was weird and didn’t mesh well with his strong chin, which he tried to hide with a comically villainous goatee.

“It’s evolving,” he groaned. “And I thought I could just have a nice day, you know? Just kick back and enjoy an adventure. But no, I have to get dragged back into some sort of world-saving nonsense.” He pulled two coconuts filled with something that smelled very strongly of alcohol out from his cloak. They had straws and a little umbrella stuck in them, and a slice of pineapple fastened over the rim. “Pina Colada?” he offered.

I smiled, for the first time in what felt like months. He looked at me, raising an eyebrow.

“By now,” I said, politely refusing the drink. “I know all Old Guard are irreverent and… a little off. But somehow, you take the cake. It’s refreshing.”

“Thank you!” he exclaimed, gesticulating so wildly, he spilled a little of his drink. “Finally someone says it! Usually, it’s just ‘Oh no, the main character is such a Mary Sue’ or ‘Why is he so preachy’ or ‘If I had been that God, that idiot would have been dead!’ or ‘He needs to get over his stupid issues and kill things.’” He shook his head, sighing dramatically. “No appreciation for the arts, some people.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“You also talk a lot,” I said, turning back to the monster we had to bring down, still shifting even as the Old Guard bombarded it with everything they had.

He chuckled. “It’s kind of my thing, yeah... Oh, and dying.”

“Perhaps,” said a voice coming from his shadow, “One is very much related to the other, Mr. As—“

“Shhhh! Don’t use my name in here, Sha—...aaadoww-figure,” the Old Guard said, awkwardly turning that last syllable around at the last second.

He turned towards his own shadow and frowned at it. “Remember? Legally distinct…”

“I am fully aware of any legal implications regarding your current situation, Mr. Asai.”

“You… know what that name means, don’t you?”

“Of course, Mr. Asai. I thought it prudent to choose a last name that would be easy to remember, and displays different facets of your personality accurately.”

“That’s a little hurtful,” Mr. Asai said.

“You do care about community, Mr. Asai.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he whined.

I stood there, listening to the two of them talk, smile still on my lips. It didn’t fade even as I watched the horror shape itself into something even more terrible, and it took me a second to understand why.

It was true that the Old Guard didn’t treat me with that deep reverence people usually shoved at me. They were just themselves, and didn’t really care about who others thought I was, either. That hadn’t happened for a long, long time. Not since the Apostles had died. Chris was still there, of course, but as much as I loved them, whenever we spoke, the death of our friends stood between us like a silent reminder of our fragility. Most likely it would take years to soothe that wound, if ever.

Being with the Old Guard, listening to their banter and seeing them succeed made me feel like I was with friends. True friends, who helped each other even when times were dark, even when you had to kill a chthonic abomination the size of a palace.

Their hope was infectious, and the longer I was with them, the more I felt like I, too, could overcome obstacles bigger than myself.

I wasn’t sure if they were my friends. Maybe they were just here for the Logic, or maybe they really did like me. The point was, I wanted to find out. The fact that they were all computer programs, just letters and numbers on some page didn’t even factor into the equation. They were real enough to me.

So, we’d crush these Ferals, save Zephyro and his people, and then come together to plan what’s next. With a little bit of luck and a lot of effort, we would have a future. I would have a future.

“It’s almost done,” Mr. Asai said next to me, much more serious now. It pulled me from my thoughts.

I looked up. The blue glow on the evolving Beast had dimmed considerably, and the fighting around the Plaza was ebbing as the Old Guard mopped up the remaining Ferals. I was tempted to join them and scrounge up some more Logic, but understanding what was happening seemed much more important, somehow.

“Now the question is just whether it evolved anything it wants to keep, and how much useless crap it got and needs to shed. Unfortunately, it seems that thing is one lucky son of a… whatever would birth something like that.”

“Snake,” I said absentmindedly. “It’s true, then? You can’t control what you get, from Logic?”

He shook his head. “No one can. It’s all leveling and grinding and slaying monsters and hoping you get good loot or a nice upgrade. We all have our ways of gaming the system, of course, but it’s mostly just random.”

“Ways like…?”

“Level up, pray, then rip out whatever doesn’t help you, and hit it as often as you need to make it stop moving.”

Ew. I’d need to fix that in the future. Besides being absolutely disgusting, it was a huge waste of Logic. If I found a way to control—

My thoughts got interrupted when the creature stopped shifting. Where it had been as gigantic as the palace before, now it was “just” as big as an office building, it’s myriads of mouths and eyes arranged in a pattern that looked too systematic to be natural.

[Hunger, Reordered - Systematic Devoration]

[DPM filesize: >XXX LKB]

[>>Calculate exact filesize?]

Its form crackled with red electricity so dark it was almost black as its eyes opened. Their pupils shifted and glowed with the same energy, brightness increasing rapidly.

“TAKE COVER!” I yelled, diving to the side. The eyes began firing beams of crimson light while I was still in the air, cutting through everyone and everything in their path.

“Liunqidhana allah!” Zephyro yelled, throwing up his left hand. The moon floating above us dimmed considerably as white light flowed from his gauntlet like quicksilver, forming a thin barrier in front of the beast.

The red energy bore into it, leaving the shield shimmering stark white where it absorbed the attacks. Zephyro grunted, face twisted in concentration. He glitched once, twice, and then the entire world shifted around us.

For a second, I could see how the battlefield must look like in the real world. Thousands of motionless machines lay in front of the main bunker gates, covering every inch of the Marshalling yard as automated turrets fired torrents of bullets and energy into a haphazardly built, 9-legged robot.

Then the world glitched again, shifting back into Zephyro’s Domain.

The Vizier was bleeding from mouth and eyes again, his form shifting with digital fragments.

I yanked Pharus toward me, pulsing my will through the weapon as my eyes narrowed on the Hunger. It opened its many mouths at once, each bulging with a sickly membrane that stretched out of their throats. With a wet ripping sound, the first thin layer of flesh ruptured, dozens of malformed, half-mutated ferals over the battlefield. The others followed within seconds, like the world’s most disgusting microwave popcorn.

“Bloody oath, that thing will be hard to kill,” Mr. Asai said, handing me his drink. Without even looking back at me, he pulled his hood over his head, bathing his face in starlit darkness.

“Luckily, killing things that are hard to kill is kind of my thing.”

“You have an awful lot of ‘things,’” I said, holding a burning Pharus in one hand, tropical drink in the other.

“Being told I have too many things is also kind of my thing,” Mr Asai said, cosmic eye winking at me, a split second before his own shadow swallowed him whole.

For a second, I stood there, not knowing what to do with the drink in my hand. Then I yanked my arm back and threw the cocktail at the abomination spawning its children as hard as I could. It sailed through the air, crashing against the horror’s side, covering it with very sweet, very alcoholic, and very flammable liquid.

Before the coconut had time to hit the ground, Pharus crashed into the same spot, igniting the alcohol in a flash.