Chapter 10-15 A Cage of Thoughts (II)
A Godclad rooted in the domain of the material may find themselves at a disadvantage against a rival imbued with a Heaven of Space or Geometries. However, the spectrum of this struggle is vast, and with hubrises known and vulnerabilities uncovered, a demiplane can be made with but the weakest of sparks.
Domains must be measured against domain. Knowledge of enemy canons and hubrises too must be accounted for. To this end, the ultimate factor in a clash between the ascended falls to a single word.
Totality.
Despite all your miracles both absolute and relative, that which will be your undoing are the factors beyond you, the parts of the tapestry you cannot warp, that you are not anchored to.
Burn this into your mind, aspirants: Build your Frames wisely. When you seek your Agnosi, understand your role, your purpose in your cadre. Do not wander from your place of dominance in foolish pursuits or you shall be cut down like the swaths of ephemerals fated to die in the wake of your struggles.
Tower or sea; be you Breaker, Fortress, Seer, Porter, or Marker, you will live and die by your ability to shape the battlefield, to control and force your adversaries down narrower and narrower paths until you funnel them into the place of their unmaking.
Claim mastery over the breadth of domainsensure that someone can affect space, shatter and shape matter, guard your minds, and above all foresee portents to all coming dangers. Should you understand the tenets of this new age of warfare, you will see yourselves survive long enough to indulge in the finer aspects of immortality.
You may think yourselves Godclads upon graduation. Such would be a delusion.
Never forget that divinity is seized, that we are clasped in the corpses of our tyrants. You are Godclads only after you survive.
If you survive, perhaps in time, you will come to understand what it truly means to engage in Total Domain Warfare.
-Authority Osjon Thousand, Total Domain Warfare
10-15
A Cage of Thoughts (II)
So, Chambers said, masking his nervousness with a cough. I guess ah guess were gonna have to go back, huh? Gonna use those quarantine zones as cover. Get in real sneaky-like?
Avo fixed the former enforcer with a silent stare. Chambers heart rate was spiking. His fear was as obvious as his attempt to endear himself. The man was walled in by death and had no way out. No way out but forward.
In this, his life wasnt so unlike the survivors he used to fetch for Mirrorhead. It was only by good fortune and the oddities of his mind Avo deigned keep him alive.
Chambers edged back to Essus, studying the view. The latter held his head low and his heartbeat hammered loudthe organ enhanced but fundamentally the same. Essus was not a warrior. He had no taste for the bloodshed, but for the memory of his son, there was spark enough in him to muster at least one last fight.
They stood at the precipice of the district, gathered atop the outermost warehouse in the docks to better survey their situation. At the head of the group, Draus studied their target: The Conflux megablock. Set between them a blood simulacrum channeled the quivering shape of the structures interior, lattices of crystalline blood following the mem-data most helpfully provided from the sequences Avo extracted during his prior dive.
Overhead, rivers of error code marred empty aerolanes hollowed of traffic while distant impacts and screaming engines hinted at the devastation still afflicting the Warrens A thick fog blanketed the Spine, choking the world about them as a chill beset the scene. There was an unnaturalness to the colda touch of the eldritch about its presence.
And through the haze of translucence, in the direction of Nu-Scarrowbur, lights flashed as noises droned, with a sense that all around the area had been muted under the presence of an unseen weight.
I say we start low and work our way up, Draus said, pointing to where a deep rent ran along the lower southeast side of the structure. Following the schematics simulated by the phantoms dwelling in Avos blood lattice, she lined a path through mem-con-infested areas into the elevator and central power grid running as four interconnected pillars within the edifice. We got the Blockcrawler and we got you. She pointed to Avo. Got a good idea on how we might be able to clear this place floor by floor if need be, but the big game is still Mirrorhead. The Nethers down, that means Conflux has gotta start feedin fightin meat into what few golems and pilotable drones they got.
Threat low, Avo said. Will be able to jack into them at will. He wove a crimson helix from his wrist and bade it to spin. The Nether was still down with no signs of recovery yet.
The sheer force of the earlier detonation would leave the phantasmal sea blunted for at least a day, but this inconvenience was to his advantage. Enemy golems could be penetrated and bent to his will with but a thread of blood now. He just needed to locate their locus while keeping a low profile.
There are also other ways in, Essus suggested. He acted as a shadow to the others, lingering behind while Chambers exaggerated his helpfulness. The gutters should still have places for access. And the tunnels too. He paused, taking in a breath. We could even start in the lobby beneath. Where where I was set to perform.
Essus too wanted to be of some use, but the man mistook his position. Avo simply wanted to feed off him. To vicariously feel the culmination of vengeance when the father performed an act of righteous bloodshed in the name of his boy. Avo would ensure it, so both pleasure and virtue could be sated in tandem.
Sent Avo a look. Yeah. I dont think thats necessary. Gesturing to the interior of the block, she continued. Im thinkin, Avo, that if your Heaven works the way I think it does, you might-oughta be able to eat through the walls and spread your awareness like roots. This way, we establish alpha-strike advantage: Light up their accretions without ever riskin exposin ourselves; engage when we want. Most importantly, we use em to help us pinpoint Jhred and move to engage him first.
He understood what she was trying to convey and found it a most appealing prospect. Drawing enough mass from the matter within the block, he could thread himself across multiple floors and snake his way through entire groups of unsuspecting Confluxers, tearing from them Essence, ghosts, and memories all. Yes. We can do that. Want to do that.
Draus chuckled. Figured you might. Pulling her eyes from the simulation, she glared out at the towering presence of the megablock enshadowed by passing wind. Their breaths were beginning to fog the air now. The cold was growing fast. He wondered if it was Zeins doing as well, somehow, or yet another player entering the fray.
We should go, Avo said, stretching his awareness using his Galeslither, trying to read hidden dangers from the undulation of wind currents. Think we're ready. Think we can take them. Do this. Compromised their minds. Theyre blind. Wont see us coming.
Yeah. The Regular cracked her neck. With a bow of her head, she lowered the helmet-carapace of her bio-rig over her face. I second that. She shot Essus a look. Dont gotta come if you dont wanna. Might not end the way any of us want. Thats the way of the run, but you aint no squire. You can still walk away. Find somethin else.
The father said nothing, offering only a reserved expression of anger and an upward-facing palm placed below the holographic emulation of his boy.
She cocked her head in an apology. Alright, then. Avo: You got entry?
Yeah, Avo said, infusing himself into the rushing breeze. I got it.
***
Riding low through the mist, Avo galloped through countless columns of rising smoke ascending from the districts below. The Spine of the Warrens was never a stable place. Here was just one step up the proverbial ladder, a step beyond where joy fiends and FATELESS waited to die in the dark.
Decay and rust cloaked by veils of flashy virus-ridden neon was the usual aesthetic. But now, with the Nether silenced and the districts laid bare, all the blemishes leftover from the Uprising and the Fourth Guild War revealed themselves. Functional structures and bomb-shattered husks stood side-by-side in district grids, the former betraying themselves only by artificial lighting still shining through the windows.
Amongst the districts, Mazzas Junction stood the most ruined, its former role as an intersection with other districts and trade hub now characterized by a tide of new crashed aeros and partially collapsed quick-fabbed buildings carpeting the stretch leading up to the wounded leviathan that was Mirrorheads personal megablock.
Distant from the sign of any mem-tags or ramshackle repair work, the organs of the building were separated in places only by the thinness of tarps or cheaply welded steel. What revealed Confluxs disarray further was the absence of a physical patrol holding a perimeterto-be-fatal negligence with the suppression of the Nether.
Wrapping his winds along the base of the premises, he funneled himself in through an openinga furl of torn alloy and punctured plascrete petaled inward by a gauss-flung slug.
REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 8%
Letting the Blockcrawler slip free through the folds of his Yondergales, Avo resettled himself into the shape of his flesh next to Essus, the vehicle beneath them trudging forward after a brief lull.
Casting wires of blood out from his body, he formed a closed link between Essus, Draus, and Chamberswho he promptly re-sequenced using his Ghostjack, peeling the memories of Avo and Draus earlier conversation out from his mind.
A note of confusion rose from the former enforcer as they moved through a flechette-shredded gulf. If the mem-data was right, past three more quarantine rooms would be some elevator doors. Preparing for deeper insertion, Avo willed his blood to rush forward, piercing out from beneath his flesh like brambles as he drained the walls around him away.
More than once he felt his wards shudder as his Heaven caressed the presence of a mem-con embedded in some source of the cognition-intruding virus. For each he found, he lashed with traumas and his alchemy, breaking them sequence-first, and unbinding from physical reality as he drew in more mass.
This time, however, he did not inject the absorbed tonnage into his own body, instead keeping himself spread out like a growing expanse of roots. Or arteries. In a strange sense, he was like an infestation of biology gnawing through the guts of the block, slithering the fingers of his existence through channels and circuits melted into place.
Good thing he remembered to empty his Rend earlier. Saved him some time here.
COG-CAP: 33%
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 3%
Circulating his Whisper through the reach of his innumerable limbs, he tasted the structures around him as a vague blur shivered on the floor just above, revealing the vagaries of where the Confluxers might be stationed.
+Eating into the building,+ Avo cast. His thoughts ran more like circuitry through his blood, hopping through each of the other three minds in the network at speeds of near instantaneity. +Accretions showing. Bit blurry. Whisper perception limited without the Nether.+
+But its there,+ Draus said. He could sense her grin. +And thats all we need. Well keep the Crawler runnin. See if you can take a peek at the situation above, pull us some data relatin to Mirrorhead.+
Chambers interjected. +If I had to bet on it, the bossmans probably hiding in his little glass house.+
Both Avo and Draus fell silent at that. Yeah. That seemed more than a little like Mirrorhead. However, confirmation was better than speculation; Avo pierced through the ceiling, hairs of blood pushing free like blades of grass squeezing through concrete.
Yet, the first thing to capture his notice wasnt the sole enforcer stumbling about the width of the room above, but that which she was carrying, and that which she was casting down to the ground.
Bodies.
The enforcer was chucking mangled pieces of bodies into the room.
Corpses were being tossed in one after another, each of them dismembereddisfigured by means unnatural and obvious. Each landed with a rattle of breaking glass, naked bodies coming apart into halves and pieces as their insides spilled free from wounds, skin, and muscles disentangled from the base that was their bones. A few others were even more brutalized, their body less flesh than glass, so unmade from humanity they seemed like fractured statuettes of sparkling transparency left chipped and shattered. The severity of the harm made it seem like the dead were forced to walk into a hurricane filled with nothing but blades.
Knowing Mirrorheads canons, that might just about be the case.
+Jaus,+ Chambers breathed. +Fuck me, but am I glad I left.+
Draus grunted a laugh. +Is that how you member things now?+ The amusement left her. Linked to his Whisper, she studied the area around the room as the Blockcrawler kept pushing for the elevator. +Place looks like a storage room of some kind. Weird. They definitely got plenty of other places to stash the corpses. This dont seem+
+Efficient?+ Avo asked. The vector of his curiosity returned to their nakedness as he frowned. Slaughtering a group of people was one thing, but stripping them had to hold some deliberate intent behind it. Regarding the sole living enforcer he could see, Avo decided that there was little point in playing this game of deduction when he could just tear the information out from the source.
Guiding a single strand of blood between the bodies, Avo directed his flow in the fashion of a snake, surging forth as they turned to pick up another body. Titanium sabatons parted before Avos touch, matter melting away into blood as his hair-thin haemokinetic construct injected itself through the fabric of their undersuit beneath.
Needling his way into their bloodstream, he took her as a puppet, usurping her circulatory system and forcing stillness into her movements. A choke crackled from her vocal modulator, her muscles struggling against a force far greater that rooted her from within. She tried to scream but he squeezed. Her ribs imploded. One of her lungs popped.
A loud wheezing gurgle whistled loose from her shuddering body.
Her legs kicked. Her fingers twitched. He cut his way up into her brain, jacking into her mind directly. He wasted no time with spoofing, choosing instead to crack her pitiful wards with a low-yield trauma and sink his ghosts into her memories.
Dread and violation spilled over from three directions. The enforcer in his clutches, Essus, and Chambers were all bound by a singular emotion, and it was absolute terror at his current actions, seeing first-hand his capabilities.
Draus, meanwhile, remained indifferent. The Reg had seen worse.
+Avo Avo, this this is not you cant+ The fathers mind stuttered to a grinding stop. +Have you been inside my mind? Have you?+
Avo ignored him and dug through his new victim's sequences. He grunted in annoyance as he refrained from drawing in more mass and firing his Celerostylus. He was already feeling some time-dilation prying his blood-locus network. He wondered if he could accelerate Draus or the others the same way his Canon of Haemokinesis multiplied his speed.
Suppose he could test that using the enforcer when he was done with her mind.
Filtering for the nearest sequence relating to the bodies she was removing, Avo pulled half an hour's worth of mem-data from her near-term memories. As things turned out, when the Nether went down and the Confluxers realized it, some of them tried to make a run for it, snatching the opportunity to leave their employer before he could realize.
Some of them had already been planning this operation for quite some time. Using manually operated engineering drones, a group of around two hundred technicians and enforcers began precision-burning the cortex bombs still embedded in their skulls. Spurred by one groups attempt at emancipation, a dozen other cliques formed and made to break.
Of course, an avalanche didnt form without noise, and with the growing quantities of people trying to flee, Mirrorhead noticed, even without the Nether.
The butchery that followed left a lull of nothing but static and terror in her mind. Entire portions of the megablock and whatever glass the Confluxers had on them exploded into a storm of vitrifying shrapnel as the Twice-Walker manifested, diving through reflections and yanking the defectors into its plane. Mirrorheads initial assault was near indiscriminate, seeking to break the wills of all who dared run, with the loyalists offered as acceptable collateral.
The enforcers last recollection was only running, fleeing, and obeying the bellowing shout of the Syndicate boss. Parts were outright seared out from her mind. Parts like the emergence of the Twice-walker itself, the naked presence of a Heaven entirely too much stress for her mind to bear.
Draus snarled in disgust as he filtered the information over. +Well, would you look at that: Hes about as good as his ma when it comes to killin his own.+
Avo grunted with amusement. +Seems like.+
Examining the enforcer a moment longer, he pulled out the last time she saw Mirrorhead. He spoke to heralong with the bulk of his forcesfrom a floating shard of glass in the Mall Brawl. It was like viewing him through a portal, or window of some kind. He sat there, seething and raging at captured deserters and loyalists alike, raging about their task in fits, barely coherent.
She recalled little of the Godclads words, only that she was scared. Only that she was part of a group tasked to strip the dead he left behind in the real, collecting their valuables and other possessions before dumping them into a single area floor by floor.
Pluh-pluhughhh, she moaned, trying to speak the word please. She wanted to beg for her life. Unfortunate. But it seemed she was bound to feed the whims of one Godclad or another.
Subsuming more matter, Avo felt his might and celerity build. A time-made lag formed between him and the rest of his cell as he drove the enforcer he held in clutches forth, pulling her into the room.
THAUMIC OUTPUT - 983 THAUM/c
GHOSTS: [1042]
Her death was a sudden, messy thing. Her body, not attuned like her blood was to his touch, and divorced from the Frame itself, denuded itself around the anchoring of his haemokineses. Her armor groaned as servos sparked and screeched, breaking free at her joints.
Avo released some of his mass and let time slow. Frowning, he withdrew the strand of blood he had nested inside her and let her fall atop the rest of the bodies, her falling bulk sending out a splash of gore and a burst of darting glass.
+So,+ Draus said. +Mirrorheads hidin in his little hole again, huh?+
+Seems so,+ Avo mulled. Going over her mem-data again, he felt a feral smile pull at his face. +Draus. What say you to a trap? Could indulge in some friendly fire to draw him out. Pull him into a cage of our making.+
+Id say youre thinkin what Im thinkin.+
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