Little Celah, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Sixthmonth, 1634 PTS

Janottka appeared radiant, her silvery eyes gleaming in the ochre glow, and from her brilliantly shining pink hair a pale orange mist fell. There was a transcendent quality to her, as if she couldn’t possibly be real. That made sense to me, because I knew fully well that she wasn’t. Rachel’s appearance was supposedly what she had looked like when she was alive, and I idly wondered whether Janottka’s appearance was as she had been designed to be, or whether she had chosen it for herself.

Janottka, however, was not the mind clone of a once-living being. She was a program, designed for a purpose. According to the Magister, she had been some sort of entertainment machine, designed to create games and stories. I did not fully understand what role a machine could play in such matters. I had heard something about games that children could play using their terminals, but the concept was alien to me, and I bore no interest in it. I felt I had more important things to do with my time.

Perhaps the Epon Celans had played them because their lack of a progression system had left them depressed and hopeless, and had nothing better to do.

Or perhaps, I admitted, I was the strange one.

Over the past few months, I had grown used to both Rachel’s presence and her capabilities. She was an excellent administrator and secretary, and her ability to acquire information from the network was unparalleled. If we did not need to disguise her nature, I almost wondered whether she would have rendered most of the sect’s palaces unnecessary. I had not put much thought into it at first, but her existence gave me an understanding of why Shades were so feared by the ruling civilizations.

Perhaps they worried that a Shade could outcompete for any technical position the same way that the Exid outcompeted all other races for labor jobs. Perhaps they feared that Shades would not, could not be religious in the same way that mortals could.

Or perhaps they feared a Shade’s potential. Rachel had spoken little of her people’s power, but from what I could tell, their technology was far beyond that of the Staiven and the Celans. But regardless of their technology, I wondered whether a mortal race could truly threaten the hegemony of the Ascended and the Osine. Perhaps beings such as the Terrans and the Khalak’Ora truly were threats to galactic stability.

Not that I particularly cared. It wasn’t as if I enjoyed the current state of the galaxy. As the saying went, Chaos is the mother of opportunity.

But regardless of her potential, I wanted this woman dead. Like the Sheneth-Ari, I saw her as a threat too dangerous to leave alive. If she survived this day, I was certain that I would live to regret it.

I found myself losing focus, my mind going on endless tangents as I mindlessly dodged Janottka’s assault. Rather than feeling as if I were playing with her, however, I felt as if she were playing with me.

Janottka could change her form to a much greater extent than even I could. It was as if she was composed of an amorphous goo, as whenever she wished, blades, chains, and spikes of metal could launch out from her body, fueled by the flickering mist that continued to drip from her hair like sweat. My body was already tired, my skin red and highly irritated from the burning of the flickering miasma on the titan, but I held firm, my fists clenched tightly. I was the weapon, I told myself. Just like Keitel the pugilist, my body would be enough. And if it wasn’t, I would be able to run if necessary.

“I’ve looked through the records, you know,” said Janottka, as a shard of metal burst from her chest, grazing my arm as I leapt away. There had already been multiple small injuries like that, and I expected many more by the time she finally fell. “Jin Luo is the name of the last remaining disciple of the Downpour Sect, the traitor who betrayed them to the Vermillion Cliffs Sect. One would think him to be you, a farsei man of the same realm who bears the sect’s martial arts and their heirloom. And yet…”

“I never claimed to be Jin Luo,” I replied, snarling as a silvery spike slammed out from her chest, forcing me to take another step backwards.

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“And yet,” she continued as if I had not said anything, “back on Canvas, another man claiming the same identity has been running rampant across the Crucible, using the same martial arts. ‘Stormdevil’ Jin Luo, a powerful practitioner of the spirit refinement realm. Of course, this information might be out of date. But as of half a decade ago, this man was on Canvas, one realm higher than you should have been at the time. What does this mean? Did your realm become reduced? That shouldn’t be something that is possible. Alternatively…” Janottka smiled widely, as if she knew all of my secrets. “It’s as if there was more than one survivor. Isn’t that curious?”

Her smile was infuriating, claiming to know more than she did. What she already knew was far too much for my tastes. I did not respond to her comments, did not want to even think about the matter. The storm of my heart raged fiercer than ever, fueled both by my anger and the newly increased power of my soul.

I dashed towards Janottka, surprising her with my sudden burst of speed, and punching with all my force into the side of her head, and sending her spinning into the ground. Her body crumpled haphazardly, and fragments of metal crumpled to the ground around her like dust at a sawmill.

Janottka’s body had a thickly silver sheen to it, and was perforated with tiny cracks and crevices in her flesh, which quickly filled with silver, and then shaded back to her standard grayish brown skin tone.

“There was a Cyrus in the Downpour Sect,” continued Janottka as she rose once more to her feet, one of her legs kicking out and thinning as it transformed into a whip. I leapt over it, rolling on the ground and back to my feet as I launched myself towards her once more. Still, I said nothing, refusing to respond to what I clearly recognized as taunts. “Cyrus Iwen was his name. Of course, the records say he died soon after the sect fell. Do you know who is said to have killed him?”

It was getting harder to ignore her, as her words dug into my insecurities and worst memories.

“Shut up!” I hissed, foolishly diving towards the Shade, who had seen the movement coming. Who had, apparently, been anticipating it. Her hand stretched out, interrupting my path, which had been far too simple. Janottka’s slender fingers wrapped around my throat, tearing me off the ground as she lifted me into the air, a mocking look in her eyes.

“You’re not good at controlling your emotions, are you?” she asked.

Again, I chose not to respond, but my emotions had yet to return to a state of order. In general, I believed I was quite good at controlling myself. I could be reckless at times, but that was simply due to confidence in my own abilities. But the events of my past weighed on me, and perhaps they always would. Nothing could tear apart my self control greater than those memories.

I floated above the ground, feeling the large hole in my gut that had been torn open by Janottka’s fingers, feeling the tight clench of those same fingers on my throat, slowly beginning to clench. Janottka had lost some mass during our battle, some of the metal structure that repaired her every time she took damage, but it had not been enough. She was the hardiest being I had ever fought, and unlike a person, she had no particular weak points to aim for. She was strong, stronger even than myself, and she knew it. That made her arrogant, made her think that she had won. I had one more card to play, and while I was not certain it would work, I felt inclined to believe my chances were good. After all, this was something even Rachel feared.

I reached into my ropes, awkwardly pulling open the clip on a sheath I had hidden by my waist, and slashed outwards. I was wielding an intricately carved blade, still untarnished as the day it was forged, and dug it deep into the Shade’s arm. A flash of multicolored light filled the air between us in the blade’s path, causing an intense pain to rush through my body. Janottka screamed as well, backing away in horror as her arm was lopped off from her body by a growing abscess in the air between us, allowing me to topple to the ground gasping for breath.

The air had been sliced far too cleanly, my hand moving much faster than I had anticipated. A lesion had formed between us, the first I had ever witnessed, and its energies tore into me, frazzling my agonized nerves as my meridians were filled with a mixture of different miasmas. I had dealt with the intrusion of sanguine many a time before, but flickering, genesis, manifest, and even extant were now dousing my blood with their chaotic energies.

I staggered to my feet as I crawled away from the tear in reality, my hand so clenched around the knife that I perhaps could not have dropped it even if I wanted to.

“You shouldn’t have that,” Janottka growled, as I chuckled despite the pain.

I smiled in response, my body aching and weary. I wanted nothing better than to sleep for a week straight, or perhaps for an eternity.

Miasmic Mixtures: [Multiple miasmas are able to exist in the same place, but they are unable to combine. Only in the Brink is this possible, and in Telles, all one acquires is a chaotic mixture. Combinations of miasmas all have different results, according to their individual processes, and the advanced sciences of certain races have begun to touch on controlled usage of multiple miasmas in a single machine. Uncontrolled mixtures, however, such as what is produced by a lesion, always has one single result. Utter chaos and unpredictable results for everything it makes contact with. Such chaos is inimical to ordered structures such as machinery, living beings, and in many cases, molecular structures themselves.]