Throw the Artifact shard, distract Them. Use the Echo to whittle down, weaken, keep any one from overpowering the others. Glide in with Spark, use THE FINGER. If they’re weak enough, use the area release. Make sure every kill counts. Filter Chaos through the Echo as much as possible to avoid becoming Overwhelmed. Repeat.

He’d shored up the Echo with more Shadow when it had fallen to stray strike that shouldn’t have been too much for it. Certainly not when it was joining him in the fray. The tether had also been bolstered, to increase the amount of Mana he could flow. Mana Bolt was running as hot as it could be run continuously. The bursts of Bolts ripped into one, two, three, four RBBs, bleeding them, keeping them too weak to rise above. Each time one got enough of an upper hand it would suck in the shard and start forming into a Scorpion. Thankfully, the Scorpion’s hardened Shadow didn’t do much in terms of slowing down the Spark, but it became totally impervious to Bolts. Even the most powerful ones were shrugged off by its hardened armor plates.

Twenty. Thirty. A hundred RBBs fell. His core was practically full to bursting. He barely even hesitated before throwing some minor enlightenment its way. Raw power alone was no path to victory. The compression, but this time, no skills were offered. No spells. Nothing. Just a freshly emptied core and the sense that the denser star at the very middle of it all had gained another thin layer. This time, several hundred RBBs fell before he recalled, Sheer numbers can overwhelm, but a field of weak foes is easily mown. Then so many it must have been nearly a thousand. The amount of Mana his core could hold each time seemed to go up significantly with every compression. Was it not that his core was compressing, but growing instead? Maybe something of both.

When facing an endless number, controlling the flow of them is more critical than the speed at which any one is killed.

Then another.

Shadow provides a natural structure, but without the volatility of Chaos or Mana, form would hold no meaning, never moving, never changing.

When the last one was upon him, he’d long, long since stopped tracking kill counts. He’d refined his tactic of gathering and weakening a mass of RBBs, using the shard as bait, to an art. Each burst of Spark found so many targets struggling to reform their Shadow, ripped open partially by a hail of Bolts, that a dozen or more would collapse under the single burst of lightning. His dual center system chugged on the Chaos without becoming Overwhelmed. His core filled to a ripe completion. He had already prepared mentally for it, having had days of nonstop fighting just since the last compression. Still, no offerings from whatever source had offered before.

Skills are a shortcut in time, false experience, but also the seeds for- his mind sputtered to a stop, unable to complete the thought. What… what was… he doing? Something to do with his core? Oh, it was full. When did it get full? He needed to think of something, say something to himself. Compress it. There was something important he’d thought of. Thoughts grasped fruitlessly, the concept fading, gone. A sense of pressure built up within him instead. His core? His core was pushing back?

For the first time, truly, that he could recall, all of Them around him froze, but not because of an RBB or some Artifact enhanced version. There was the distinct sense that they were looking at him.

And they were afraid.

Still fighting for the shard, the writhing masses stumbled and moved away. Those who had yet to engage in the wrestling match were swifter, moving outward from him in the shortest path possible. A few drifted back towards the group wrestling for dominance, those close enough to still deem it more important, yet they took a wide path to do so.

His Shadow pulsed. The tether to the Echo frayed under the hard wave, the Shadow and Mana in it lost to the environment, escaping down into the cracks. Likely, to return later as Them.

WHO ARE YOU?

Who was he? Who… who are you? Why was there a booming voice in his head? What did this have to do with Them being afraid? With his Shadow bucking and rippling violently no matter that he willed it otherwise?

Mentally clamping down on his Shadow harder than he’d ever done before, the violent rippling reduced. It did not cease, however, and his mind was quickly feeling the strain of the effort. He’d been feeling his control growing during the endless harvest of this last battle. His ability to harden his own Shadow, compress his Mana, reinforce the spell structures, they had all improved. His energy emissions had grown less and less, making him a ghost of death among Them. Combined with the distraction of the shard of Artifact, it had been shockingly easy to maintain the fight without taking more than the incidental glancing blow.

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Before this disturbance to his Shadow, he felt as if his control was infantile at best. Whatever it was which rattled his thoughts also rattled the very fiber of his being. The Shadow was his foundation, his form. Without it, while true having never experienced it, he knew with absolute certainty that he would cease to exist.

WHO ARE YOU?

The question, nay, the demand ripped at his soul. Pain blossomed along with frantic desperation. It felt like he was being shaken apart, that only the mind splitting effort to stabilize himself was keeping his Shadow from revolting completely and stripping him of life. What if… what if he answered the voice? Would it stop then? It felt slightly familiar. Had he heard something like it before?

What was his answer, though? Who was he? Was he human, though he seemed to be some sort of ghoul or wraith? Was he even a living thing in the biological sense? Was he a machine instead? Perhaps a creation purely of Mana and Shadow, a sentient spell? All of that answered the question not asked, what was he. It didn’t answer the who.

How could there be a who, when all that he was had been stripped from him?

Rather, had it? The smell of the warm air and too many people, the nauseating mixture of cologne, perfume, deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, sunscreen, lotion, makeup, dryer sheets and detergent, odiferous cheese, pickles, freshly baked bread, the worn canvas seats, the metallic tang of the heavily scrubbed interior, the exhaust tainted freeway air from an open window, all of this hit him.

Now him now, but the memory of it. The memory of a commute done countless times. The memory of humanity in its full glory, chaos stuffed inside order, all the while craving more chaos. Boring. Disgusting. Damaged. Isolated. Destructive. Sad, overwhelmingly sad, the people. A long daily commute over months and years to a constant, dull job, limited social success, these things were shared by so many and had their way of dragging you down into the cool damp of the well within every person. A well that no collie would seek your rescue from. That was for prescriptions and talking heads, pats on the back, wasted money and vacation time.

It was also community amidst the endless empty loneliness of a city. Dozens of familiar faces. Did they know him? Really know him? No, he hadn’t spent any real time or effort to know them intimately, but yes as well. They’d spent literally months of their live together. Not talking, perhaps, not interacting in a very direct way, but that one time he’d been sick for a few days? A bunch of them had inquired about his absence when he’d gotten back on the bus. A small gesture. You noticed when one of the other cogs in the wheel went missing. A weak community, barely there, but a real one. And there were true friends among them, for each other. Lovers. Parents. Children. Siblings and cousins. Happiness. Those striving for justice and those who received it. The hungry and those who fed them.

Humanity was good, it was bad, it was everything and nothing all at once. But who was he in it all?

He was Cog. One of the many, keeping the machine going. Without him, there might be another, a replacement part, but he had value. With him, the replacement would still be used as well. His part, however dull, however meaningless and small it felt, had value. He kept the machine working no less than any other part. The machine which supported everyone.

He was One. Alone and not worse off for it. Part of the community but not truly living in it. Himself, not reliant upon others to define him. His success and his failure were his own to enjoy or to bear. Though he may desire the companionship of another he did not need it. His mind and his life were free to be his own. As One, he could choose to play Cog, but not truly be Cog. Cog did not have to be all he was.

Likewise, Cog could stand alone, Cog could play One.

He was Link. A connection between others and connected to them in turn. No matter how tenuous, how fragile these connections seemed, they were real. Those connections, more than anything, made playing the role of Cog and living the loneliness of One possible. The connection was the truth of life. Hadn’t he realized that before? Hadn’t some of his earlier enlightenments been related to the understanding that being alone was not survival?

Yet even though One could not live in absolute isolation, One did not need others to establish that they existed. That they lived. Though Cog was part of a greater whole, Cog did not need a great many other parts to form a machine. Cog required others, but only the whole was defined by the sum, Cog himself was still Cog regardless of what form the sum took. Link though, Link needing others and was defined by them. He remembered the Sniper. Others were out there. Link did not need to make a machine with them, to form anything structured, but Link needed to connect with them as individuals, tie their existences together in a manner separate from the machine they made together.

He was all three, but he knew, he felt with total surety, he could only define himself as one of them.

WHO ARE YOU?