Of course she’d come after everyone I cared for.
I could see that coming from miles off given it would be right in her directive. The Icon had been the first to predict this path, and she’d come up with a few dozen possible directions. We’d picked one direction she had only reluctantly outlined, and already expected to be the optimal pick: Fooling Relinquished herself, and removing Kidra and all others from the danger once they’d played their role in dragging Relinquished out here.
Her objections on this came from an odd direction: The idea that only Kidra and a select few humans would get preferential treatment on being saved while all others would
basically be thrown into the pyre. She knew it was optimal, I needed the clarity of thought in my fight, but that didn’t mean the Icon would have to like it.
The compromise on this one had been surrounding the Winterscars with pure Deathless hiding their abilities. Acting as mortal soldiers. And volunteering to die as a distraction against Relinquished. That mollified the Icon at least a bit.
War was still war, and she was trying her hardest to avoid the toll it would demand, long after she was gone from the commander’s seat.
I flew straight for the chasm Relinquished ripped apart, looking through the dead bodies there, to play my part as the distraught hero.
Deathless of all kinds lay there, bodies soon to fade into ash but not until long after all of this was done. And among the dead were a few with replicas of Winterscar decorations. I flew straight down for the one that looked identical to Kidra.
My dramatic wailing could use a bit of a brush up, so we planned on having Cathida handle that part to keep any kind of digital voice pattern matching. Turns out, I didn't need to worry on that front.
Relinquished didn’t pause to gloat or laugh at my loss. She stabbed forward ahead of herself, and a sword of the same make flew right at me, still half-forming out of nowhere from the occult.
I flew up to avoid the destruction as the massive blade cut through Kidra’s decoy, and ripped everything else in the local area.
Power, rock shards, and vaporized ice expanded upwards, splattering against my own barriers like hail on an airspeeder cockpit. The world went white for a moment, my soul sight letting me keep track of everything.
So I saw what she’d planned as the real danger.
Occult seeped out of the ground below, rising up like water. The bodies below began to float upwards, caught in the undertow of power rising. Rocks and everything that wasn’t fully part of the land pulled up. The shape grew recognizable as it flowed up.
A massive occult hand. Nearly the full size of the chasm itself. The fingers spread outwards, then curled inwards as it aimed to entomb me. I was the size of an ant in comparison.
Talen’s blade stabbed down by a flare of my will, blowing apart the manifestation. Scattering the floating dead in a ring outwards. Snow and ice that had been kicked up equally parted around me in an expanding sphere, leaving me with full visibility again.
Relinquished narrowed her eyes, then raised her hand again and pointed at the chasm. A shockwave of occult ripped free from her position, hurling everything out of the path as it raced straight for me faster than a sound wave.
Once more Talen’s blade slashed down,dividing the wave in half. The goddess immediately backhanded the air ahead of her in response, and all this distance away I felt the hit strike me from nowhere.
Belatedly, I realized she’d hid the anchor points within the shockwave itself.
The kinetic force slammed me up and through part of the newly made cliff. I broke through the ice and bent metal within it, trails of snow and broken land following behind me, arcing in a path and getting carried off by the freezing wind while I continued to fall straight back down into the surface below.
My skull felt like it had gotten squashed against my armor from that impact. The speed I ripped through the chasm walls was far faster than any possible human would have survived, let alone the actual collision against the terrain. But the fractal of Resilience hummed within me, tied to Resolve. Allowing me to survive far harsher treatment compared to any man alive. Things that should have broken an airspeeder, shield and hull, seemed to break off against Talen’s borrowed skills.
A01 had to craft his spears to do even a hint of damage against Talen, and those spears were built with the very concept of destruction deep within. Something like a kinetic hit was almost insignificant in comparison.
I'd really stepped into a completely different league of combat. One where she was casually throwing around enough strength to warp the world around us.
Having failed to kill me with blunt force, she flew through the air, her blade slashing down, a wave of division arcing after. I slashed upwards with Talen’s blade launching my own wave back, and sliced through her attempt once more. Her wave broke off into two parts that slammed into the ground below, causing two more separate chasms.
This time nothing had been hidden within, just pure power.
She was sloppy with it. A wave of division like that should have slid through the world like a razor sharp wire, disturbing nearly nothing at all. Instead, the land looked like it had gained a new scar.
Cut after cut came from her finger as she rapidly swiped again and again, ripping apart the land below as I countered each with far more precise and efficient cuts, flying backwards on the land as I defended myself and repositioned.
Occult whirled around as I dug into Urs’s dimensional fractal empowered with Resolve. From the lantern at my belt, Superior was dragged along for the ride, in the same way I had done with Urs himself, a soul tendril connected to my own.
The result mixed with the mirror fractal were thousands of copies flowing around the land, launching spears directly into Relinquished from all angles as I skimmed the land below. She remained unphased, her spherical barrier holding off each hit, floating far above, following behind me.
Missed spears launched by Superiors floating above her slammed into the terrain and detonated craters. Parts of her citadel collapsed as my own strikes broke apart against her flicked hand.
Her own blasts cut jagged slices into the terrain under the snow, and her shockwaves would crush entire airspeeder sized holes into the ground. The world shook as we hurled power against each other.
At this distance, all everyone else could see was a single glowing sphere of occult where Relinquished floated. And hundred traces of light constantly slicing through the air into her shields at nearly all moments of the fight.
A final blow sent me flying backwards until I slammed into the snow, skidding a few hundred meters, splitting the snow in half.
My shattered bones instantly mended, as did most of my wounds. I stood back up from the hit, and pulsed Resilience magnified by Resolve, mending the rest of myself near instantly. So long as my soul remained alive, I could outheal just about anything.
Journey, however, was taking a more permanent beating. I was surviving damage my armor was never rated to handle.
There was a reason Urs no longer wore armor after he’d forged Resolve. The fights he would fight within were far beyond what a relic armor was made for. How can simple metal and shields survive the very concept of annihilation?
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My hand and arm just vanished from a torrent of occult in one of our clashes. It was like a river of obliteration passing right by where I had stood, a vacuum collapsing behind it as even the air was simply deleted from reality, and it would have eradicated me completely if I hadn’t dodged.
That was the kind of fight I found myself deep in. That arm reformed a moment later as I willed it back, but no plate returned. The gauntlet and arm plating was gone for good, leaving only my own skin and hand exposed in the world.
Soon enough, I was the one moving Journey around as the armor’s systems failed one after another, backup power keeping half the helmet still functional. I still needed the armor just to keep communications open. Part of my defenses grew focused solely on protecting the armor’s soul fractal and nano swarms at my chestplate.
Both armplates were obliterated within the first ten minutes of our duel, and one lucky glancing hit had taken my shoulder and part of my face with it, missing Journey’s soul fractal by inches.
Fourteen minutes into the fight, I had one foot completely barefoot, while the other had a few holes punched through, leaving it a completely unpowered segment. The chestplate remained connected to the half-broken helmet, still powering the communication system. I’d been forced to jettison the visorplate itself as a part of it remained covering one eye, and the screen within the plate was long dead.
Machines were still crawling the land even this far off the battlefield, and those made an attempt to swarm me on the few times I slammed into the ground. They must have been stragglers who had either ran off to escape the main fight, or were trying to circle around the human army.
The smarter ones took one look at where I’d landed, turned, and raced off the other way. If Relinquished noticed them, they’d simply fall over into the ground the moment her eyes glanced over them, the chassis skidding to a stop on the ground as their lights winked out in instant death. She would suffer no traitor to live now.
A few lucky ones managed to survive her wrath, sprinting away into nooks and crannies made as a result of the ripped apart land, hiding from her sight.
The ones that ran directly for me, either deluded in thinking they could kill me, or too simple minded to consider the human fighting off their own goddess was maybe a bad target - well, they all found themselves sliced into pieces the moment they walked into range of Talen’s division aura. I didn’t need to stand fully back up to keep that around me as a second silent shield.
The piece of Talen’s soul absorbed inside my own made the technique feel as if I had been the one in that grove practicing under Urs’s calm instructions, for hours at a time. Studying how to manifest division without cutting myself. Again and again, ceaselessly, until I could call up hundreds of them at a time and lay waste to army after army.
But never in Talen’s memories did he ever face an opponent like the one that floated with the wind far above my head, staring me down with contempt.
She knew I was planning something. I wasn’t simply trying to wear her down, she had seven thousand years to manifest herself, and an entire world to draw power from. There’s no possible way I could erode her power before my own was tapped dry. I’d need to keep bombarding her with Superior’s spears for a solid full day at this rate.
And Relinquished was correct in her fear. I was up to something.
Superior was the one who’d come up with the idea as we collected data fighting against Relinquished.
The first discovery was that she was keeping away from us. Each time we tried to fly or race across the ground to get closer to her, she’d swat us away or move herself to keep a specific distance. We had never managed to get even near her physical shell, not a single time.
We’d debated among ourselves what that meant, and the leading theory was a simple one: She kept her shield up at all times. Which meant if we got close enough to her, we’d be able to see what that shield really was made of. And possibly see through it into other lines of defense she was holding close to her chest.
The second discovery was on considering how Relinquished could throw an entire world’s amount of occult powers at us. She seemed to have a limitless reserve of it, while all other machines could only connect with four powers. A goddess she might be, but there were still rules she was bound to.
It had to be the unity fractal. She was reaching tendrils through it, connecting her soul to other soul fractals connected to various powers. But she wasn't throwing everything at us all at once, which we couldn't figure out why. If she could connect to everything, everywhere, all at once - then she should be able to hurl a hundred different powers at us. Instead, we only counted very few at a time. As if there was a limit to how many spells she could actually cast per second.
As for why, we got the answer from how she responded to her army running away from us.
Anything she saw, she instantly killed off. But it was the way they would die that gave us the clue: All toppling one after another in under a second. Like a wave of death had brushed over them all.
She was targeting them one at a time, only in rapid succession.
Machines that managed to both run from us and stay out of her sight, ran off freely to live another day.
And that meant each time she killed one, it was because she’d paid direct attention. There was a limit to the Unity fractal she was using. She wasn’t all knowing.
And while manifestations of Superior were swarming at Relinquished, constantly bombarding her with spear after spear, a smaller subset were working together in secret with the information we were building.
A dozen Superiors were here with me now, silently gathered together in the digital sea, just on the other side of the mite lantern still hooked on my belt.
Weaving and holding together their magnus opus. Drawing from my own newly improved soul sight with Urs and Talen’s addition, in order to weave something beyond the spears A01 and Talen had developed.
It was a rush hack job sure, but we were going through thousands of iterations in rapid pace.
We had the speed part mostly solved. She wouldn’t be able to react in time, the spear would slice through the air several dozen times faster than a bullet. What we needed now was to have that spear puncture through every barrier in one hit.
This was the real work I was doing under the surface. Testing her defenses, trying to study what was keeping her protected. And exactly what she was trying to prevent by keeping me at a long distance.
Relinquished was powerful. But she wasn’t creative. Her shields were probably the same fractals that had been recovered from the golden age, and she’d never improved or changed it since. But she knew humans and protofeathers had been able to create and craft new fractals with enough time and knowledge. And for a few like Urs, outright create them from next to nothing.
I thought it would take me half an hour before I managed to get close enough to see what kind of shield she had. But then the battle changed.
Because Relinquished went from toying with me, to completely desperate about taking me down.
The change was instant. I could feel it in the occult around her, emotions bleeding through.
There was fear mixed in now.
There’s only one reason I could think would prompt Relinquished to go from trying to whittle me down at a distance to unloading everything she had all at once: Wrath had succeeded in her first task. She’d both made it on board, and had begun to change course so that it would come here.
There was now a time limit to how long Relinquished could safely fight me.
A wave of fire came from her hands, massive in scale. More like a small mountain, ripping through the world. I parted it across in the center with a punch of my hand, channeling Urs’s command of the heat fractal.
Talen’s soul sight showed me the true danger in that attack. Obliteration itself, flying through the fire, silent and invisible. Hiding among the flames. The only attack that had thus far managed to eat an arm and shoulder off my body.
I dodged off to the side, seeing ahead in the future slightly, just to make sure she didn’t have some backup last-ditch plan that would have nullified my dodge. She didn't. She'd hoped I wouldn't have seen it through the flames.
It passed by right by me, while I cut with Talen’s blade in a counter-attack. The slice cut through the storm, ripping a horizontal line across the super-heated fire.
She slapped my wave aside as she had before, then she rocketed straight for me, her blade physically swinging for my head, hair completely disheveled, the face of pure rage across her features. A giant coming to clobber me with a blade a few dozen times my own size.
Likely her blade was enchanted with all the means to break the world if she was going to use it physically against me.
I’d seen the kind of weapons that had speared Urs in his containment, and the one used to drive Talen mad. The occult could be a home to some terrifying things if one was prepared.
But those weapons had been made by protofeathers, and at that level they had to be tailored for the individual. The blow that took Talen down wouldn't work on Urs, nor myself. We weren't the target.
She’d never made her own weapons like this. Her blade could only hold her strongest generic attacks, but nothing specific to eliminating me.
I held a hand out and summoned the multi-layered defense of Urs, catching the blow against it. Her swing crushed through three layers, and came to a halt on the fourth. Nowhere near my final defense.
As I had gambled, everything within that massive blade was generic. And that was well within what Urs’s defense had been built for.
At the same time, I manifested the concept of division across the air all around her, and pulled it down upon her like a blanket.
Superior joined me, and so did several hundred derivations from different universes, pooling together to slice her down from every direction.
She screamed in outrage and a ball of pure occult power pulsed out, destabilizing us all, knocking me backwards again back down into the ground. She'd overpowered us with brute force again, no fineness or efficiency anywhere.
I got back up, laughing. Standing there in the freezing air, both armplates gone, one shoulder plate missing, barefoot on my right, and holding my hands far apart as if asking her to come for a hug.
All she really had to her name was the largest stick in the world, and nothing else. She couldn’t create weapons of war specialized against me, she lacked the intelligence and creativity for it.
But I could, against her.
And now that she was close enough, I made her realize why she’d been smart about staying the fuck away from me.
