Chapter 10-4 Dismantle
The Ashen Digger is a No-Dragon variant of aratnid designed to inflict subtle losses to enemy personnel behind combat lines.
At a glance they are frail creatures, offering little in the way of their contemporaries like the nerve-splitting Spine Nester.
Such is because the Ashen Digger is built to function like a plague carrier. Self-fertilizing creatures, they possess the capability of directly injecting the eggs stored in their palps, upon which the young will begin hatching within twenty-four hours, thus increasing their population drastically.
Those who suffer bites from the Ashen Digger are recommended to dismember or replace the affected region entirely through thaumaturgic or surgical means
-Nu-Beast Bestiarium, Idheim Digest
10-4
Dismantle
The depth of certain agonies was beyond the conveyance of even the most anguished of screams.
There were several things Chambers wanted to say to the chimeric creature currently wrapped around his most sensitive protrusion, the edged segments of its forelimbs slipping around the wrinkled perimeter of his skin, grasping him from the outside like a glove of pain as it bit and gnawed.
Torment came again and again, the sensation like a twin-headed burning fork sliding in and out of his supple flesh. The following sense that something was twitching inside his wound only made matters worse.
Agghh!
Wait, no! Stay the fuck away from that. Those are mine you fuck!
Please, Jaus, kill me now.
Huh. Ive seen this in a vicarity before. Im kinda like Dannis Steelhard now that I think about it
LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED
TRANSFERRING PHYSICAL AROUSAL INTO METAMIND
These were all things Chambers wanted to say, yet as he tore the wretched creature off his body, as he dashed it against the wall, felt the satisfaction of its bulbous body bursting into oozing spools of white ichor and ropey gore, what came from him was a shrillness he had not known himself capable of producing.
Itcould only be compared to those old steam locomotives found in Voidwatch distributed vicarities.
The whistle pierced down the vents, ringing out through the shrapnel punctures and rattling screws. Regardless of how loud he was outside, within his mind, the voice of his outrage was infinitely louder.
+AGHGHHHHH FFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK! IT BIT MY BALLS! IT FUCKING BIT MY BALLS!+
And across a linking within his mind, invasive ghosts swirled through the channels of pain running through his thoughtstuff.
***
DOWNLOADING TRAUMA-PATTERN: [ARATNIDS KISS]
Some traumas were more narrow than others, but Chambers torturous experience would be enough to incapacitate an exposed mind.
Perhaps not a ghoul thoughthe lack of any true genitalia and associated primal fears with regard to losing procreational ability impeded such worries. All there would be was pain, and hurt was nothing special to his kind.
Still. It was unique.
Useful.
A bit like Chambers himself. The fact that his screams sounded so amusing helped.
Of course, there was the matter of two hundred accretions snapping to wary alertness at the sound of his cries. Checking the DeepNav, Avo found that a few contingents of Conflux technicians had settled into the former living quarters on this level and had set up a workshop of some limited fashion.
Currently, the paths of their perception all intersected where Chambers was.
Annoying, but easily solved.
INCOG ACTIVATED
TUNNEL TO GATE 44 OPENING
Twin announcements flashed through his cog-feed. The latter was likely Draus departing to do some scouting in preparation for what was to come.
Good. He would make his final adjustments here and falsify the ambassadors details in accordance with her recommendations.
They were upon the final steps now. With each act, the chains tightened, and the path to Mirrorheads death encroached. No matter what Ninth Column wanted. No matter what the Guilders, the Incubi, or even Mirrorhead wanted.
He just needed to make sure nothing went awry at the last moment.
***
INCOG ACTIVATED
Chambers didnt notice the text flashing across his eyes. His preoccupation in that instant was more along the lines of spewing strands of sour as he heaved and coughed on an empty stomach.
Fuck, he murmured. Something tickled inside him, a searing series of pops resonating in his new wounds. Body tight with worry, he slowly reached down and checked. A series of crunches greeted him after the initial squeeze. Digging through the injury despite the hurt, he looked down and immediately regretted it.
There, on his hand, clung a sticky clump of tiny rat giblets and diminutive spider legs.
The fucking aratnid had laid eggs in his uh kinda sorta eggs. That meant it was an Ashen Digger.
Chambers wondered if he still had that Dannis Steelhard vicarity where they showed how to deal with those
The voice crackled into the back of his mind without warning. +Youre hidden. Time to get moving.+
Guh, fuck! Chambers hissed. Rage spiked in him at the return of the voice. He noticed the mem-data flowing faintly the lower right corner of his perception. Incog activated.
Shit. He had some kinda nova-elite super Necro in him.
That still didnt give them the right to startle him and let the aratnid bite him. Another cluster of somethings popped inside another bite. Chambers reached down and isolated that batch of problems too, crushing them between his fingers. He tried to ignore the sensation of things spurting against his fingers. This was not hot. Even for him.
Hey, half-strand: Next time dont just jump into someones mind without a warning. Fucking made this spider bite the shit out of me, fuck I got eggs hatching inside.
The voice grunted. Chamber paused. The grunt. Why did it seem so familiar?
Gods, but the voice was a half-strand. No sympathy whatsoever. You rust-fuck! Did you see what just happened to me? Im crippled, you half-strand! Crippled! Man down! Man double down! Its your fault it bit me in the first place. What the motherfuck was your plan having me clamber bare-ass naked through these tubes.
+Burn it off when you get the chance. Get to Blockcrawler now.+
Chambers jutted his head forward as his face coiled in outraged disbelief. Burn burn, what the hells is wrong with you? Im going to be pissing aratnids soon if I dont find a grafter or or
The Necro spoke again, and this time, he felt the full weight of their annoyance.
Chambers swallowed. There was a purity in them. Something deep and cold, unburdened with the thought of killing or hurting him. Chambers had run into those types before. Best place to be with a kill-happy sociopath: Away.
+Ill see if I can find anyone with a Woundhound injector. Get to Blockcrawler.+
Huh. Well, at least they werent a total half-strand.
Wait, the half-strand was in his head, hearing these thoughts. Shit. The whole time they could hear him. They could hear this too! He didnt know to control his own mind and hide what he was feeling. How the fuck was he supposed to think up new slurs to use on them now.
+Blockcrawler,+ the voice growled.
Wincing and whimpering, Chambers resumed his path through the filtration channels as he crushed and squeezed away what he could of the injected parasites. With each vibration, with each pounding step, he felt a growing swelling of pressure slithering inside him, little pinpricks from bladed palps trying to dig upward along the inner walls of his flesh.
Oh, hells they were climbing up they were nibbling their way up.
He redoubled his pace for both movements, crouch-walking faster while his hands picked away at things arriving with premature immediacy.
***
It didnt take Chambers much longer to squeeze through a tear leading down from the tubes he was inching through. Below, an artillery-hammered room thick with the swirling of mem-cons awaited. He slid down, the spray of tags on the walls imbuing the room with phantasms as Avos Ghostjack surged.
Within a tenth of a heartbeat, the latent mind-infectors were dismantled in sequence and threat. Avo kept them separated within his Metamind for now, but they would be most useful when time came to reinfect the loci of the block with his influence.
Shaped in an upside-down U, tarps and half-decayed battle foam coated most the damage that once exposed this section of the building to the elements. Despite abandonment to the mem-cons, leaving a direct intrusion point was still too much even for Conflux.
Chambers limped along the left curve of the room, heading toward a large mound of debris. He hissed as he cut himself on jutting blades and glass and steel, but the pain flensing his feet was paltry compared to the horrors that were swelling inside him.
Face clammy and breath quick, he surmounted the collapse and peered behind the rubble.
There, magnetized to the plasteel skeleton running through the buildings punctured internals was the Blockcrawler. Its current space ran between rooms and systems, its presence masked by its security system and its liminal placement.
Accessing the Blockcrawlers locus, Avo absorbed all information that remained intact from the drones mem-data.
KELVER-20 BLOCKRUNNER
SYSTEMS: [ERROR] [ERROR]
REQUIRES IMMEDIATE REBUILD OF PHANTASMAL STRUCTURE FOR FUNCTIONALITY
Right. Another thing Stormtree and Highflame fought over. Titles. Blockrunner versus Blockcrawler.
Considering both sides had a variant of this platform, it was more a thing of preference than functional difference.
Shaped like a rotating cube with a grid of fusion torches gleaming on each facet, six crab-like appendages extended from below as if legs bolted to a cube, studded with magnets that clung to the walls, the Blockcrawler was to be entered from a hatch above or belowextremely outdated tech even for its time. Down its legs were mag-accelerated guns. Most were rusted, but at least two still had the capacity to shoot through walls.
Highflame had a tendency to keep to a more solid matter motif, but both sides had taken to using smart matter pathing within the fibers comprising their newer vehicles if some of Draus anecdotes were to be taken at value.
Chambers, yowling as he stuck a leg through the missing hatch, slipped into the interior of the machine, and strapped himself into a cube-shaped gimbal. The piloting module was cramped with barley more than eight square feet of room to stretch and operate, but function superseded comfort when it came to instruments of war.
Linking his mind to the locus, the system hard booted using hisand by extensionAvos Metamind as a crutch. The mem-cons had eaten away much of it phantasmal structure, thus crippling its semi-autonomous functions. With someone at the helm, however, its baseline functions could still be managed.
Alright, Chambers said. In the fucking thing. Now. Find me something to fix my balls. Ill beg. Seriously. I beg hard: Itll be undignified and youll feel bad.
Avo wouldnt. But he got the point.
Accelerating himself using his Heaven, he reviewed the overall situation. Mirrorhead was still in place, still whining about his woeful life. No one had come to investigate the noise Chambers made after the Incog activated. Casting out, his Whisper scried at the nearest Conflux personnel with care.
Most of them still had a trauma-collapse trigger set to activate when someone lacked the properIncubi-mandatedsequences. Considering the memories were universal, it seemed the Incubi broadly applied the effect via loci-transmitted mem-cons.
Pulling the memories he claimed from the Incubi, he compared them to what lay before him and matched a symmetrical enough facade of sequences to enter the minds of enforcers and technicians anew.
The Syndicate Necros, despite being mentally crippled, were still useful as another jackpoint in case what he obtained from the Incubi was insufficient to spoof past their grid in due time. Most of them had been quarantined to a specific spot on each floor. For now, Avo was content to leave them be.
Redesigning a mem-con from the ones just harvested took a bit of time, but turning the infrastructure already built in by the Ori-Thaum to his own ends sped things along. As Avo hopped from mind to mind, he arrived against a central loci and accessed its mem-data. There, he pulled the information he needed regarding Essus current location and installed his viruses.
Subverted, the Ori-Thaum defense grid was now his to command. Nine thousand eight hundred and seventy-three active signatures of thoughtstuff were now registered and primed for collapse. It was at once sobering and enticing to lay gaze upon a hidden construct capable of distributing mem-cons at such efficiency. For all the momentum he possessed, their skill at direct sequencing and phantasmal architecture design exceeded his.
He would need to study their methods in depth when this was done. His skill as a Necrojack could be nourished further by the waters of his betters.
As he slid back over into Chambers mind, a new interface manifested in the back of his mind, mapping the slow spread of his influence through the block. Soon, all would be infected, and he would have full control.
He cast a quick update to Draus before locating Essus on the DeepNav. A marker materialized far down the block, descending to the point of the gutters.
Gutters? Bringing up some of the memories he took from the locus, he found mention of a filming today. A lite Crucible was scheduled to take place in the lower levels just above the Penumbra. They needed to keep it quiet to avoid drawing too much attention from the Exorcists.
The theme had twenty recent volunteers placed in a maze. And they would have the Lingerer hunt them.
The Lingerer.
They were having Essus participate. Except for this time, he was to be on the other end of the entertainment equation.
If there was ever a true display of absent justice, it would be the fate of a good man made a wretched monster by no fault of his own. All he had wanted was a better life for himself and his son. All he got was torment and mutilation.
Avo wondered how Walton would feel regarding the man, and the casual indifference Mirrorhead inflicted the atrocities he did upon him.
Flicking the marker over to Chamber, he felt the former enforcer jolt again with a shock. Tiny specks of awareness were flickering from the base of the mans bloodied privates. Avo could try hitting some of the hatchlings with his traumas, but he really didnt have anything that would null a creature so simple.
He could try jacking into their thoughts directly and crippling them each by each via the scrambling of their cognitive architecture, but he deemed it a waste of time. They werent going to kill Chambers, and a Woundhound shouldnt be that hard to find in a Crucible of all places.
I I think theyre crawlin up my tubes, Chambers said, breath coming in bated hisses. Considerable pain filled the mans mind. He was handling it most adequately.
+Might be. Get down to the bottom. Woundhoud waiting there.+
Spitting out a breath of slurs, Chambers directed the crawler downward. Intermittently, it had to slice through blockages of infrastructure and slats of bolted plasteel. Moving where elevators and electrical systems were joined, the blockcrawler operated in a sense much like aratnids did, avoiding open rooms as it scanned through walls and adjusted its path in the folds between.
Its legs sang sawing notes of mechanical exertion with each step. Through the gloom around them, it cast a light on the decayed divides that ran within the block. Cords of wire and veins of copper glinted and swayed. Dormant elevators were severed and locked in place, halted from freefall by the clamps during the war.
The better part of ten minutes passed before they finally got down to where Essus was. Through it all, Avo cast out his Whisper when he could, lessening the time it took for his mem-cons to spread again.
By the time he was done here, all that remained would be the creation of false intel on his end. After that, he would find the time to experiment with his Canons. There were more potential synergies between his Heavens and phantasmics that he wasnt exploiting.
They were two hundred feet away from Essus' mem-locked location when Draus session activated.
The first thing that spilled through was anxiousness. +Avo. Somethin fuckys happenin in Nu-Scarrowbur. The Scalpers are gone.+
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