Chapter 7-10 Feed the Beast (III)
Hes killing my soldiers. Taking my Heavens. Hes hitting me in my home.
Why? Why now?
What do you have to gain, Guildling?
Whats this play youre making, Jhred?
It cant be insanity. Madness. I would understand you otherwise. The chaos, the compulsion Its not you.
Ive seen behind your walls. Seen how you order your outfit and have them dancing to your ever order. A little slave driver hiding from daddy; a real sloppy control freak.
But maybe thats it. Maybe youre that one flavor of broken that only comes from the Tiers. A juv with too much of everything, and not enough sense to get your head straight.
Look at you. Look at the state of your home. Your soldiers. Its pathetic. Its FUCKING PATHETIC.
Im sorry. Was I yelling? It comes over me somethings. Its like a leak
Ah. Right. Im not actually talking to you yet. Its just me. Just me.
Heh. This fucking kids about to learn. Yeah. We gotta teach him. Hes gotta learn the way of things.
And I think Highflame might want that Frame you took from them back.
-Mem-Log of Vincentine Ripperjack Javvers, Head of the Scalpers Syndicate
7-10
Feed the Beast (III)
Avo tumbled into the embrace of death with a newfound momentum, mem-data curving around his consciousness as he wasted no time, diving inward to access the root of his Soul. Sinking in, he cast a command and then parted, lingering for but a passing moment before remerging.
An internal separation followed. He ejected his Soul free of his Woundshaper, clinging stands of blood reaching for his departing light as if a joyfiend groping for another.
Tired of me already are you, master? The Woundshaper asked.
Can you fly?
Perhaps if fed the proper patterns and given means of propulsion
So. Not now.
The old god was silent, sullen at the lack in its abilities. From its structure wafted a note of disdain, with the fullness of its ire cast at the Galeslither. Can the pony match my current might? My capabilities to build? No, master. You will see it is little more than a messenger. A rank courier amongst true divinity. What worth is it to merely serve as beast of burden. The Woundshaper snorted. Imagine yourself worshipped as a mule might. That makes you no god, but cattle. An ass with a memorable name. Absurd.
Can imagine being made by humanity, Avo said, too focused on his transition to argue with his Heaven of Blood. Cant imagine having all that power and getting broken though. Bad look. Embarrassing.
The Woundshaper fused folded arms around itselfthe petulance behind its verbosity making it seem more childish than primordial. Perhaps, that too was something human-influenced. The need for its ego to be sated, to be wanted at all times.
You will see in time what I have to offer, it said. You will learn of the might we possess, and of the knowings I can share. The experience which you lack, I might yet bridge.
Avo speared the flames of his Soul into the silent Galeslither. The lightning-plated ribs of the horses expanded into an open rift, allowing him easy entry. Clapsed by the Heaven, he found himself in a place of calm while the walls around him rippled with discord, consumed by twisting winds. Solidity was strangely missing here, with gusts and vortexes enwreathing his fire with a protective shell of stratocumulus veined with forking bolts of lightning.
Lashing needles of electricity injected themselves into him, prickling a dull sensation of static in his being, the feeling like he was neurally lacing with an exo-rig again.
The sigils representing the domains appeared then, one in the shape of a nine-lined deltawith three stripes on each side of the triangleand the other in the curved shape of a cup with a spherical component crowning it.
HEAVEN GRAFTED - [GALESLITHER]
DOMAIN: (AIR/SPACE)
THAUMIC REQUIREMENTS - 55 THAUM/c
How does it feel to be mantled to nothing, master? The Woundshaper taunted more than it asked. Speak and let your learnings be shared. Let us both be joined by education so that we both might build on potential deficiencies in our structure.
There was a lightness to his being, but an impossible strength as well. Air, in reality, was chained by gravity, chained by molecules and mass. But the powers of a Heaven were closer to active analogies from lore than distortions of science.
Feels like I can probably fly. Such was his eventual response.
RESURRECTION - 95%...100%
ONTOLOGY REVERTED
RESURRECTION COMPLETED
DOMAIN RESPAWN ENGAGED
ENGAGING THAUMIC CYCLER: 299 THAUM/c
Ghosts: [242]
LOADING PHANTASMICS
The time of his rebirth arrived mere moments after his fall. Through a growing pellucidity, existence quivered as the fact of his death was unbirthed from history. Yet, this time, he did not spawn back in, or within, his own body.
Instead, he rose into existence from the funnel of air left in the skull of his former corpse. Crawling free from the mangled strings of gore that swayed with leaking trails spewing from his hollowed head, Avo climbed onward, pulling himself free as if the air was a fabric he could tug on.
His egress came paired with song. With a flex of effort, the air shrieked. Thunder tumbled forth from around him as a chorus of neighs screamed out, the cry of the Galeslither resounding in a binary of realities.
His senses and form billowed wide like a rising torrent of wind, he rose high, the cocoon of his former corpse erupting as fluid sprayed and muscles tore. The sound of flesh coming apart rattled against his expanded being with satisfaction. It was like popping the lid on a soft drink, like folding the vertebrae of struggling prey.
Chunks of meat rained down just mere feet below, his descent to street level halted at the last moment by his manifestation.
He knew not long it took him to fall from before, only that his return had been accelerated to the utmost. The fact he managed to emerge from a falling corpse instead of the air mopping at a splattered puddle was testament enough to his Frames pace.
His cog-feed came online to a spill of errors. He realized that he wasnt so much seeing the world around him as he was feeling. Bound to the heart, three eldritch steeds stitched to a synchronous stride. He cast out his Whisper to scout ahead and add a layer of sight to his already expansive awareness.
A crackle of thoughtstuff leaked over into his mind. A session activated.
+How are the wings?+ Draus asked.
Turning his mind to his DeepNav, he found her two hundred feet ahead. His hastened return saw her lead blunted but not undone entirely.
That came with a single gallop of his winds. With but a single stretch, he zoomed, the Galesilther braying plumes of cascading wind as he trailed behind Draus rust-coated Zephyr.
+Handles like a dream,+ he replied.
REND CAPACITY: 1%
To ride the winds was like falling away from gravity. The nature of said travel, likewise, rubbed his mind raw with its strangeness. The steeds were steered by reins of vectored currents. Vectored currents that also bled into the whisks of their cloud-hewn manes, each strand a torquing whip capable of flensing paint from matter.
His trail marred the already battered surfaces of the gutters with new scars. Each gallop, each flowing stride, the air chiseled deep gashes through plascrete and squealed as it clashed against metal.
Sailing the winds infused him with lightness, but also a smallness. More than ever before, he sensed the size of things around him. Pebbles brushed against his touch. Abandoned aeros toppled and groaned as they slid, dragged away abandoned joyfiend camps.
Testing his canon, wrapped his winds around a rolling bottle and pulled it inward, leaving it spiraling and adrift in the Yondergales. A new weight settled in his non-existent gut. It was like he was storing things in his stomach, though he received no nourishment from the process.
Beneath him, the spreading webwork of layered streets was a divide between ruin and fortitude. The megablocks themselves rose as pillars holding up the sky while all they loomed over seemed toppled to some inflicted damage, some subtle decay.
Cracks and crevices became known to him as he washed over matter. Though the local area stood an abandoned plaza left darkened by missing holos and sparsity of traffic, there were enough flashes of thoughtstuff to remind him he wasnt alone, that there were still those that squatted where they could.
More importantly, however, he felt it. That familiar place of his youth. Down an alley, he felt part of his new ontology slip out into another existence. The lurch he felt within himself nearly tore him out of his steed-infused state.
He had drifted over the length of a broken holo-ad pole. A holo-ad pole with an infected shadowa rift point for ghouls and other horrors to intrude topside, straight from the seemingly infinite armory of the Low Masters.
Something Walton had a hand in.
Avo pushed those thoughts from his mind. He came here to hunt. That was forward.
Behind lay the fragments of his ego, of his code.
Moving matter brushed the contours of Avos perception, the wind like his skin and fingers both. His presence roamed four hundred feet wide, allowing him to caress the disfigurements that comprised much of the gutters.
The environment assailed him with its wrongness. The closest he could describe was urban undeath. The megablocks, guarded by Syndicate drones and enforcers, and bunker-like in design had themselves not escaped the touch of harm.
Ahead, the Ultimart shivered with growling music. Through his Whisper, he scried five distant shadows, their descent like spears sinking down through fissures of light from the heights past Layer One.
Constellations of unprotected minds glittered along the length of the spearships.
The Scalpers were bringing in their entertainment for the evening, preparing to drop them down along the narrow in-path flanked by both arms of the Ultimart.
Judging from how many wards ran along the curves, the general sequence planned for this Crucible took shape in Avos mind.
The spearships would land and release their prisoners into a kill box, feeding an additional spike of casualties to excite the watchers. The survivors would then be herded into the mall itself and made to traverse the winding pathways and storefronts on both arms while the Scalpers deployed specialized bioforms and hunters after them to end the night.
Gazing over into Draus mind, he flicked his gaze through the immensity of the mall and knew for a fact that little hope awaited the refugees.
Should he wait for them to start the festivities, it would make it easier for him to blitz them while they were distracted gunning down the helpless. But Avo really wasnt feeling subtle.
Instead, he wanted to see what it felt like to be inside a crashing spearship.
Thoughtstuff came alight like speckles of light. A large concentration of specters and ghosts bubbled near the tip of the rightmost arm of the mall. A bulbous dome of cracked glass greeted his Whisper as he found himself wondering just what he was looking at. A packet of mem-data darted over from Draus.
The Scalpers had set up their operations center in an abandoned theatre.
Upon further study, he noticed that it was of the eldest variant: a stage of polished wood in the memories, looked down upon by an amphitheater of chairs and clapping watchers.
Not a vicarity theater then. Not even a movie theatre. This was a place of naked emotions, humans greeting others in sold-instances of make-believe. Walton had shown him memories of such a place. They were made on song and dance, and they relied little on the touch of the thaumaturgic, the technological.
Intimacy.
That was the term he was looking for.
Performers facing people. Themselves, but not.
And the Scalpers had set up their ghosts to infest such a place, ferrying in spectators to witness another bloodletting.
A kinder heart would have called it perverse. In his present mood, Avo merely found the contrast fascinating.
But in the depths of his Frame, another mind gurgled with displeasure. Feckless curs. These partlings commit sacrilege. Though you use me not in the present, I beg of you, master, to make victims of them. They confuse the means of such a structure, and I fear they may use the wrong end of a blade for pleasure if such stands testament of your enemys stupidity.
A beat followed. Avos mind spun as he tried to comprehend the last sentence. +Pleasure?+
Draus coughed. +Avo, it dont matter
It does matter!The Woundshaper interrupted. I speak of them defiling the very purpose of the architecture. This was not a place built to house their spirits. This is a place of song. Or once was. It should either remain so or have its patterns sipped and repurposed for another means.
With the Woundshapers words came a new suspicion within Avo. Gods had their Heavens: forms representing how they were seen and how their powers are channeled. The one known as Saathwu was sovereign to both blood and matter, yet the architectural intent of things weighed on it as true as deception or an insult would weigh on a person.
Mayhaps it bore two domains, more than just its powers it seemed almost vectored to specific functions, yearning for both slaughter and creation. The desire for reconstruction was undeniable, as if the feelings were his own.
+Think you mightve been a builder-god too?+ Avo asked.
Impossible, master. Not as I am now. But perhaps a time upon a time, long before my second breaking, I was offered lifeblood to raise fluid cities.
The faint wistfulness within the Heaven polluted Avos Metamind with a klaxon of unfamiliar confusion. He had known what the feeling was from his countless dives but never felt it arise from within before.
+Hundred feet to approach,+ Draus said, resetting his focus. She pulled to the side and peeled off, moving to circle the supermall, serving as overwatch instead of direct fire assistance. Avo could feel her mind working potential angles of infiltration. She would follow after stashing the aero along with Kae. +Alright, Avo. If you wanna hit em you best hit em hard and fast. Snuff the Necros and start the killin from the inside is what I suggest.+
+Necro first,+ Avo agreed. +Always kill the Necro first.+
Draus chuckled. +Alright. Go on. Make Old Lady Tavers proud. Youruhnu-horses are mighty loud, though. You might wanna fence that sound in before your galloping pulls their attention.+
And like diving under the water, Avo guided his Galeslither beneath the waves of reality, vanishing into another realm within the currents themselves. His senses narrowed into a snake-like path. Ahead, his Whisper bobbed past the surface of the wind, peering half-submerged in the tapestry of reality as if a phantasmal periscope.
Rolling tidal waves of storms and wind carried him forward as he felt his Rend grow. In this place between places, his steeds opened their mouths to scream.
All the wind around him served as their voice.
And, orbiting his center, a bottle tumbled through the air.
REND CAPACITY: 6%
So far, the Hell of his Galeslither was proving far superior to that which lined his Woundshaper. His Metamind estimated that he would still be at two percent if he hadnt just shifted across dimensions. The operational time it provided him solidified his desire to ascend Burners Way when he was done here.
Darting ahead, he cut past a dozen patrolling light assault drones watching the perimeter. Draus judgment intruded. The Scalpers used these drones poorly, keeping them a scant fifty feet away from the mall proper instead of spread out through the air in an interception grid. Seeing as they were just below Nu-Scarrowbur, perhaps the syndicate didnt think there was a need.
Their folly was his advantage, however, and Avo continued along his path, the weight of his being sending debris tumbling, husks of cars screeching across vacant lots.
As he crossed the curve of steps leading up toward the entrance of the theatre, positions were being marked in his cog-feed. Draus was sharing her targeting information with him, mapping out where the Scalper assault teams were. In seconds, she isolated all ten of their pockets.
As expected, they were scattered across the top story of the mall. She sent him flashes of mem-data. Their guns were already readied and primed while their armor cast them with skeletal holos, skulls with severed caps burning neon over their helmets.
Ten by ten. Ten enforcers for ten teams. One hundred guns for five hundred flats, ripe for the slaughter.
The air of the Nether was tinged with perverse excitement and building thrill.
Fittingly, Avo felt the same way.
Twisting against the laws of momentum, Avo shifted movement vectors without the need for deceleration, his track formed from platonic lore of wind and air, lacking the limitations of actual physics.
The drones were scanning for missiles. Sudden attacks bearing mass and numbers.
Alone, he was little more than a distortion in the wind, and this deep in the Warrens, his coming bore little notice when there was all of the dark to watch for.
Using his Whisper as a guide, he slipped past the perimeter guard and found himself twice-incensed at the lack of Specters.
+Necros aint doin their jobs,+ Draus said. +Might be because they think theyre having this party in their basement. That theyll be able to scramble reinforcements real easy-like here.+
Hubris made victims of giants and cripples of gods. The Scalpers stood neither, and evidently, the attack they experienced in the Spine clearly didnt leave a deep enough mark.
Perhaps repetition was needed there. Few things stressed the importance of learning than repeatedly dying. Avo could attest to that. Just a shame none of the Scalpers could.
Arcing, he descended toward the bulbous dome of the theatre, a falling artillery shell of screaming wind.
REND CAPACITY: 13%
His Hell was filling gradually, but the pace was languorous compared to his Woundshaper.
And this is a fault of my making?
Slipping through cracked planes of painted glass, his Whisper saw faces and figures disfigured upon the artistry, cracks petition the wholeness of their likeness. Below, a truck-sized locus spun, its presence a gleam bright chasm splashed upon his cog-feed, with new Specters filtering in each and every second.
Four square-shaped drones with articulations meant for engineering filtered through the room. The audience seating had unbolted by way of a fusion burner, the ground still ashen with soot and heat. Their absence made space for the position of said locus, while supplemental machines spilled from its open-clawed base.
Three Necros worked the room, their minds more uniquely warded than the others. Beneath the stagepounded into a frozen tide of bent boards by an undetonated warhead still lodged through the woodtwenty drone-jocks lay slumbering. Neural needles ran plugged to the base of their skulls while minor locus above each of their stations hummed, doing their utmost to keep each operator in sync with a dozen or so machines.
Jocking was more management than it was piloting. Indeed, they represented the bulk of New Vultuns martial forces these days, with enforcers a necessary reserve to hold territory, bioforms for another angle of attack, and then golems in place of now obsoleted coldtech vehicle platforms.
--another ten-thousand casting in, one the Necros said. She stood a bit taller than her two compatriots. Gazing upon her legs, two very different implants greeted his mind. Her left was a fifty-year-old SSzwa Grasshopper-2, designed for running. Her right, meanwhile, was a Dynamitea non-Guild street-grafter special that mesh of heavily armored chitin implanted with eight thrusters usually found on micro-missiles.
Enforcers tended to like that leg. Avo didnt. Hed seen plenty of streams detailing what tended to happen to someones unaugmented pelvic region should the thrusters misfire at any point in the wrong direction.
The other twoher juniors, he guessedstood next to her. One had a set of three extra arms rigged to their spine while the other seemed almost entirely clean of chrome beside the eyes.
An eclectic bunch.
Good thing they were all worth the same to him dead.
Avo dove. The senior Necro kept talking. A flash of curiosity possessed him as he tangled himself. In seconds, the weight of his presence shivered the room with swirling wind as he accelerated to his maximum velocity.
What remained of him outside the dome of the roof plunged inward. Metal warped and tore. Glass shattered entirely.
Eyes turned and minds spiked with alarm as he fell. The senior Necro noticed himher hand blurred, the motion by instinct as she drew a large pistol and fired. The slugs skidded for the merest instant against Avos winds before he swallowed them, pulling them into the Yondergales as well.
And then, before anyone else could react, he enveloped the offending Necro in his grasp, and coiled himself, through skin, pore, orifice, and bone.
In a place between realities, the Galesilther carried the voice of its master, its neighs thundering with savage delight.
Her veins burst. Her skinenhanced with polysynthetic fibersshredded and tore. Bones swiveled, drilling through calcium. And for a final flourish, Avo released his grasp on the bottle and her bullets.
A rip opened between the currents. He listened as the shells flicked through her parting jaw, made wider yet by a suddenly emerging bottle. Screams flowed in from the outside, the other logisticians and Necros breaking before the unfathomable horror of facing an immaterial threat.
REND CAPACITY: 21%
THAUMIC CYCLER: 300 THAUM/c
SIPHONING GHOSTS [21]
Ghosts: [263]
DOWNLOADING PHANTASMIC SEQUENCES
DOWNLOADED
PHANTASMICS ACTIVE - [THOUGHTWAVE DISRUPTOR]; [BINARIST]
Ignoring the new phantasmics he just reaped, he shoved his full destructiveness through the passage of currents. The corpse of the Necro dematerialized as his steed emerged, coming apart as little more than mist and stray flecks of tissue.
A typhoon in a bottle, the Galeslither swirled into existence in a sudden cataclysm. Latching onto those yet living, he urged his Heaven to do a little prance along the room.
Bodies and machines were torn from the ground and pressed against the ceiling. He could feel their lungs straining as he sank his being down their throats. He found that he enjoyed the strain building within their chest as he forced screams back into the lungs from where they were pushed.
The resulting pops greeted him as a chorus of applause, a fitting final play as past came unmade upon gales of destruction. He stroked the walls with new paint, though his new victims passed from rupturing organs before they dissolved into smears.
He would have to find someone more durable to prolong his experimentation.
Just a pity so many Scalpers had fusion burners.
THAUMIC CYCLER: 322 THAUM/c
SIPHONING GHOSTS [35]
Ghosts: [298]
A list of new phantasmics flashed through his cog-feed and vanished upon rejection. Nothing new, and nothing he couldnt replicate.
The grinding sound of the locus base twisted into folded petals of metal pulled him from one reverie to another. He noticed that the locus was still functional and that spectating Specters were still coming through.
A memory spiked through his mindthe unpleasant delight of having voyeuristic parasites suckle amusement by using him as a vessel.
From such unpleasantness came inspiration, however, and a special concoction of cruelty was roused.
REND CAPACITY: 29%
The winds lifted into stilling tides. The steeds faded. From behind a cloud of dust and falling debris, Avo reformed himself into flesh to better gaze upon the dangling locus.
He and Draus had done much to harm the Scalpers. To provoke them.
So far, however, all that they have taken were replaceable. New golems could be smuggled, and new meat came cheap in this city.
Trust, however, was a thing less easy to reforge.
And the lives of those in the Tiers were infinitely more valued than the ones below.
Avo loaded Secondhand Death into his Ghostjack as he approached the physical shell of the Scalpers local lobby.
How many did the Necro say just arrived? Ten thousand? He would take a peek, and then decide to wait a moment longer.
Or to sever whatever length of the snake had dared dangle down from the tree immediately.
He had never nulled a few hundred thousand people at once before. He wondered if a few hundred shattering minds would feel any different to him than one.
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