Chapter 13-6 Hunters in the Dark (I)
I ran up against the Incubi a couple of times. Nasty biz, but I made it without getting nulled.
Trick with them is to make chasing you a bother. Most times, if the Incubi are after you directly, youre fucked with a capital F. They dont come after someone without all the details. Second most common way you end up coming across them is when youre on a dive of your own.
Usually, that means youre fucked too, but with a smaller case f.
For me, I was in the middle of sequencing their Special Interest Entity when they came spoofing their way in. Got real lucky that day: They werent ready for me and I wasnt ready for them.
Considering the guy I was jacking technically didnt exist, that meant we were all fighting in the dark and off the books.
Of course, there were four of them and only one of me, and they dismantled all my protections without making a peep. Bad odds. Real bad. Really shouldnt have made it out.
But then the guy I was jacking just noticed us. All of us. Host awareness went from zero to max in an instant. It was like he had a second mind patrolling his insides or something.
Anyway, my wards were cracked and the Incubi were clawing through my outer thoughts when the others came.
To this day I dont know who they were or where they came from, all I know is that their ambush saved me from mine.
The Incubi turned, fought, and all started unraveling in a second.
I jacked out.
I lived.
Didnt get paid that time, but sometimes, managing to survive means more than anything in the world.
Let that be a lesson to you, consangs. The Nether is a deep, dark ocean, and if you dive deep enough youre going to run into some sharks.
Or the ones that prey on them.
-White Rab
13-6
Hunters in the Dark (I)
Abrel Greatling had not resurrected since their last encounter. This truth became known to Avo as he crept out from the hidden mechanism left in her mind. The grooves of her mental wounds greeted him like clefts and handholds, and in the crevices of her fractured cognition swam unidentified ghosts.
Exorcist Necros, he assumed.
They were professional enough, though being slightly above middling did nothing to earn his praise. Working in teams of twelve, they approached the structure of her mind like a ladder but neglected to venture into the depths of her palace. Doubtless for fear of encountering traps, or transgressing against a Fated Guilder a Godclad no less.
Such was fine with him. It offered room to operate. A place for him to observe his opposition before he decided on the next steps.
Back in the demiplane, he projected the dive from his perspective, using his phantoms to feed the details of his processes over to everyone else. Most of those present had gathered around him once they heard what was going on.
Essus, however, sounded like he was finally sleeping now that Chambers attention had been drawn away.
HOST AWARENESS: [NULL]
There wasnt so much danger of Abrel noticing him. Not after what he inflicted on her. His trauma-patterns had smote her clean through, gouging her ego from surface thought to subconscious memory. Most sequences connected to her brother were frayed from the intensity of her anguish, the sheer torment of being exposed to her beloved brothers ignominious end enlightening her mind with newer, more sublime flavors of despair.
Everything she recalled of Jhred caused her hurt, from his descent from the Tiers, to all the times she tried to bring him home, to his ultimate and horrific death at the hands of Fallwalkers unknown.
It was the last that gnawed at her the most. A day ago she had friends to count on. A family away from family. A cadre of her own, the hard-earned spot of leader proof of merited deeds that served as a burning candle against her mothers shameful shadow.
They were all dead now. Dead for good. Cessation.
Lurking in the depths of her subconsciousness, he plucked at the strings of her hurt, subtly cycling memories and enhancing details to enliven her misery. He considered planting scenes from Jhreds mind over in hers but restrained himself from such pleasure.
Even a novice Necro would be able to notice such an obvious sequencing.
Instead, he magnified her wounds and listened as she thrashed and shuddered, the keening screeches tearing out from her throat less than human, far below the merit of a Godclad.
It was a joy to break things.
It was
A moment of symmetry passed between her mind and his. He caught a flash of himself writhing as she did, Little Vicious unlatching his flesh from his shattering bones. In the pause that followed, he fought himself, fought and pulled against the worst of nature with every ounce of his might.
The beast was strongergrowing stronger with him, and it wanted its due. More than flesh, it wanted that which flowed when the concept of self was undone and the nectar of a breaking spirit.
He was more than what he was, and in some fashion, that included the monsters as well.
His cog-feed thrummed with a warning as a ray of perception poured down toward the memories he dwelled in. Sinking into her hurt, he used the pain as cover and accessed her senses in the real. A feed opened in the back of his mind as mem-data formulated what Abrel could see and hear in the real.
Playtime had draw the attention of Exorcists. Just as wellhe intended to seek our their minds using hers. This worked better, all things considered.
The act wasnt very useful. Through her eyes, he found himself staring at the intersecting clamps of the sealed metallic cage. A grav-emitter thrummed dully within the confines while the Greatling girl intermittently ruined the peace by moaning the incoherent notes formed by a ruined mind.
Delusion oozed from her psionic injuries like an infected wound, fragments of broken thought tumbling through her, simulated in the form of a shattered megablock sailing free across the asteroid belt born of her sundered palace.
She fought to believe that her comrades were going to resurrect, that she was going to see them again, and soon.
She fought, but disconnected threads of awareness knew better. It was a strange state of being she occupiedto be convinced of two opposite facts at the same time without any dissonance.
Avo harvested the pattern as a means to shatter focus than harm.
DOWNLOADING TRAUMA-PATTERN: [ABRELS SEPARATION]
Little detail remained of her phantasmal refuge. Dangling threads of bleeding memory clung onto drifting structures as Exorcist Specters hovered by, scanning the mem-data for anything anomalous. Predictable. Exploitable. They didnt know he was there, and he still had a direct line to Abrel.
Taking a moment to filter through the Greatlings memories while using his ghosts as circumspect instruments, he deleted and modified what few instances of recollection she had of talking to him or Draus. Chambers and Essus he left as they weretheir faces were already exposed.
There was no hiding their involvement from resequencing her memories alone.
This, however, was just spontaneous housekeeping.
It occurred to him that what he could truly gain out of this endeavor was access to the Exorcists central systems and the Paladins official lobbies.
If he could predict or manipulate the premier Non-Guild security apparatus of New Vultunor even direct them to serve the fruition of his endsthen this was a dive worth embarking upon.
Those are good builds, Denton said, her voice sounding dreamlike mumbled back in the real. She was studying the Exorcists, he guessed. Judging their ghosts from the mem-data passed over by his cog-feed. Itll be hard for him to get past them without being noticed. Theyre working two-by-two, each keeping the other covered as they sweep through.
Off the side, he heard Draus snort and sensed the wry amusement leaking from her thoughtstuff. Yeah. Sure. This is difficult for em. Harder than your consangs back at Mirrorheads place.
The Glaive took no offense but held to her opinion. That was a surprise for all sides. What hes facing now is an active scrying force
He reached out with his Sanguinity and constructed a link between him and the blood two levels down. Her voice droned off into incoherence and he regarded the opposition.
Twelve Specters in his vicinity. Twelve working as a well-oiled team, though not equal in ability.
Already, he noticed that some of the Exorcists were missing details from how they interfaced with the mem-data, their searches only running barely past the surface. They simulated the memories and dipped themselves in, but their dives were half-hearted at best, these Necros were unwilling to directly entangle themselves in Abrels emotions and thoughts. Some were even sloppy in how they approached scanning objects and artifacts.
As always, those would be the ones to exploit.
Without his canon-wrought speed, he still could have smuggled himself over into their Metas with a bit of preparation. With the power bestowed upon him by his Heaven, he needed to waste no such time on such trifling obstacles.
He jumped from artifact to artifact, using his Ghostjack to spoof copied recollections masking his ghosts as he shifted between all the bodies, objects, and phenomena that Abrel could still remember.
Each among the Exorcists wielded their Specters more like soldiers or drones, watching flanks and clearing sequences with each basking another with their perception while someone watched the memories past from them.
It was a way of doing things, but there remained a critical weakness in the chain of their process: The Necro doing the scrying itself.
When your foe could submerge in memories using pilfered assets, all it took was one wrong download to offer entry to an intruder or trauma most unwanted.
And when comparing their thoroughness and sequence-pace to the Incubi, the artistry in them remained wanting.
They showered him with their passing gaze as he pretended to be one of the aerial bioforms he fought after Rupturing the hypertube. As each integer of mem-data ticked and shifted, he attuned his ghosts to make the jump.
If he got anything wrong, his presence would be revealed. Considering the conditions of his failure, he doubted they would be able to dismantle the Auto-Seance he hid inside Abrel considering how deficient their diving was. Worst case more security was placed on her or some other form of prevention resulted. Maybe isolation, but they couldnt keep her hidden forever.
The risks were more than acceptable.
Once again, he dove, pouring himself from the confines of a broken mind to another unsuspecting of his encroach.
As he made the crossover, he felt the process smooth. Simple. Almost reflexive.
His ability had grown not just thaumaturgically, but also skill-wise. He found himself more capable of interacting with emotions and concepts alien to him in the past, his study of the human animal a growing domain of knowledge.
The Exorcist he wriggled his way into was a bit better on the defensive end than she was at scrying. A dozen trap sequences lined her exterior thoughts like winding trenches filled with internal patrol Specters and protective mem-cons.
It amounted to nothing. Avo resequenced his Whisper using memories he copied over from one of her security phantasmics and tunneled through another layer of defenses by priming his adaptive wards using a similar trauma.
From there, it was a simple matter of carefully fording his way across.
On the other side, he feasted on her memories and grew bored of her almost instantly.
Immediately, he felt himself sheathed in an atmosphere rife with boredom. The mind assumed itself to conduct a routine operation rather than expecting a high-degree of threat.
Abrels mind had been broken, after all.
Who could have accessed such a nulled mind? Who could even infuse the drifting fragments with the memorize need to create a private tunnel?
The Exorcists name was Gennue Yullades, and she was forty-forty cycles of age. Other details flowed through him, revealing she lived in an Undercroft district tied to the No-Dragons Ark, and that her twin daughters were in charge of a novelty bio-splicing restaurant that was doing quite well.
Swimming up the stream of her cognition, he gazed out from her eyes and found her strapped into a gimbal next to a hundred other Exorcists hovering within similar mechanisms. Whatever they were in, it was military and it was loud. Wherever they were bound demanded a heavy cost in speed. Using his cog-feed, he detected two hundred more accretions within five miles and his Phys-Sim estimated they were all moving at a velocity just beyond 25 thousand miles per hour.
From Avos ghosts came a filtered memory, and through this easy enlightenment, he found himself aware that the Exorcists were in motion, heading for a destination masked even from them. Static lined a locus festooned to the far end of the vehicle. Another machine-based cognition directed things here. From Gennues mind, he absorbed the code name of their supposed destination and found it already known to him.
The Unwhere.
Flashes of the void passed and expanded in a small window to the side of his cognition. A strange flow-shaped machine pulsed intermittently with light before lancing out a beam of thin-white radiance into the distance.
And then the memory was gonehidden behind walls of heavily resequenced encryptionsones that even the Exorcist had to unlock manually.
Receding back into her inner memories, he divested her clean of useful mem-codes, and prepared her as another checkpoint in his campaign to install himself within the phantasmal infrastructure used by the Paladins and Exorcists.
He cracked her protected memories as well, but all he found were more personal details and a repeat of the scene from the void.
The full scope of the Unwhere remained denied to him.
As insurance, he also hid an Auto-Seance within her, but he doubted he would ever return to her mind. Still, it was best practice to have a secondary access point when shaping longer-term operations.
Finally, as he began to make his way toward the pulsing Auto-Seance at the heart of her palace made from transparent outlines, a strange phantasmic caught his attention, its sequence and make rare.
Most of what she had was useless or already surpassed on his end. From wards to trauma-patterns, she was his lesser. However, there came moments when one had something of a specific utility, its effects too useful to be regarded as a bauble, but not direct enough to serve as a first-response tool.
Regardless, Avo still thought it worthy of copying.
Placed next to her inactive Ghostjack, he found himself drawing mem-data out from an instrument that looked akin to a telescope the size of a megablock held in place by crude rocket pods.
DOWNLOADING PHANTASMIC SEQUENCE
->DOWNLOADED
PHANTASMIC OBTAINED: [MEDIUM]
[MEDIUM] COG-CAP: 99 SEQUENCES (VARIABLE)
->STRUCTURE: A ROCKET-POD BUILT AROUND AN ENORMOUS TELESCOPE SAILING UP INTO THE SKY, CHASING SOMETHING UNSEEN
->FUNCTION: ALLOWS FOR A SIMULATED RECREATION OF ALL MEM-DATA AND PHANTASMAL SIGNATURES IMPRINTED ON AN INANIMATE OBJECT; MORE RECENT MEMORIES REQUIRE FEWER SEQUENCES TO SIMULATE, WHILE NETHER-BASED OCCURRENCES PAST THE PERIOD OF 99 HOURS WILL ONLY LOAD FRAGMENTED DETAILS AT BEST.
HOST AWARENESS: 5%
It took a bit of finesse to dampen the Exorcists attention, but he managed by modifying a diluted version of Abrels Separation and using it to crack her attention. While she suddenly found herself wondering why she felt safe and suspicious at the same time, he accessed the Auto-Seance she was using and began to pilfer the memory it was currently running.
Unlike most freelance Necros, the Exorcists and Paladins had a unique advantage in being officially associated with the Guilds and Voidwatch in particular. Again, this afforded them access to unique memories no one else possessed.
This particular combination had Avo descending into the soft fur of a monochromatic creature he spontaneously knew as a panda before rising on a blackened sea to hunt some pale leviathan known as a Moby Dick under the behest of peg-legged man. From there, the peg of the man shattered into seeds of green as he found himself lost in some kind of green thicket. The mem-data called the place the Amazon and a few stray notes of music accompanied it.
From there, the bushes parted, revealing the panda once more as the memory began anew.
It was far simpler than what he made for Drausor any of his connections, really. But what they had were authentic memories of other places and things he had never encounteredthat most people on Idheim hadnt encountered.
Saving the configuration, he entered her Auto-Seance and saw himself ferried across the vastness of the Nether in a fraction of an instant. His ghost stuttered and his cog-feed glitched. Visual data was beginning to load a millisecond late and some of his commands werent traveling across.
Nether-lag was an inevitable consequence of running ghosts across multiple minds. His Meta had at most one more transition before his Necrojackign efficiency dipped below acceptable parameters.
Thankfully, that was a jump he didnt need to make.
As he found himself released through another Auto-Seance, he drifted out into a massive Nether-based landscape that sprawled wider than entire districts. Like rivers lining the bed of an ocean, the lobby was awash in simulated structures and phantasmal activity.
But he barely had a moment to take anything in before a searing scythe of perception swept through the entire area like a traveling spotlight.
He cast his ghosts toward the nearest stable sequence he could findbut they didnt respond. Again, he sent his command, and only with a staggered jolt did they start moving. They injected themselves back into the structure comprising the Auto-Seance they emerged from, and he hand them a link with the available sequences for additional stealth.
A full real-time second later, the wave of perception washed past like a thundering flood. Right then, if his mind hadnt been hyper-accelerated, he would have been caught without any question or doubt.
Digging into the mem-data flowing through the Auto-Seance, he tried to get his bearings as to where he was. The information that flowed through his mind proved to be more than a little satisfying.
LOBBY DESIGNATION: [OVERSEC-C1]
->DESCRIPTION: CENTRAL GOVERNING LOBBY FOR CROSSOVER OPERATIONS BETWEEN PALADIN AND EXORCISTS
Avo embedded his own Auto-Seance and jacked out while quelling his reflexes in the same instant.
Time snapped back into pace.
Denton was still talking when his cognitive state stabilized. ...itll take more than just quick-jacking to get past their noti
Jacked in, Avo interrupted. Got access to Oversec-C1. Mem-data tells me it should be important for Paladins. Exorcists.
Draus broke into a smug grin as she lifted her eyebrows knowingly at Avo. Takes some gettin used to, seein a rotlick like you do something subtle.
Beside, Denton stopped talking as her eyes widened and then narrowed at his projected phantoms still trying to portray all that he had accomplished in the briefness of time.
A low whistle filled the room. Hells, not far from the tree at all, huh? Cas said. It wasnt all respect in his tone; an undercurrent of wariness remained.
Going back in, Avo said. Nether-lag sorted. Going to find where theyre taking Abrel.
That, and he was curious just how much of their infrastructure he could subvert.
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