Godclads

+Yeah. I heard of Three-Eye. Hells, most people in this line of work have. But you hear about him in the same way you hear about the supposed hidden Guilder uniparty puppeted by Old Noloth within the Deep Nether. This consang’s a fucking myth in the sense of we tell stories about him, but no one really knows anything concrete.+

+So, you claim to have no real information. None at all. I find that… depressing considering a woman of your connections and stature—+

+How old are you?+ Twenty? Eighteen?+

+I don’t see how that—+

+You’re giving speeches I heard before—right out of the Ori-Thaum manual. You gotta be young. Gotta be. It feels like you guys keep making the same mistakes, but I think someone among your Mirrors just likes training the recruits this way. No, I don’t know much about this supposed Three-Eye. But guess what? I don’t know lots about a lot of people. That’s the entire point in this line of work. What I do know usually gets nulled by a jack after a run is over because I’m not risking shit pop on a thoughtscan.+

+I see. What do you remember—+

+Juv, I am going to do you a favor: the answer to any question connected to Three-Eye is no. You can tell because of three things. The first is the fact that I’m still alive, so if he’s secret Guild VIP, he’s not important. The second is the fact that I don’t remember him, so if he’s also a Squire, then he’s a better pro than I was anD decided to vanish back into the shadows—something I should have done to escape this conversation. The third thing is that he might be one of yours. I mean, who else can hide information from the Silvers? And who else ends up shooting at their own Colors a bunch? Let’s not bullshit ourselves here, you might be in the middle of another Clan spat.+

+...Very well. I will—+

+Listen, I know who you are, and I’ve been in this game long enough. If you try jacking any further into my mind you’re probably going to trip an essential memory and both of us will end up nulled.+

+So if it’s alright with you, I’m going to accept your imps, and you’re going to accept that this is a dead lead. I warned you about pulling this shit, but you didn’t listen. Now you learn. Or we die. Up to you, consang.+

-Exchange between Quail Tavers and Ori-Thaum Glaive [NotHere] (Recorded by White-Rab)

34-14

Master of Hounds (IV)

—[Avo, The Hidden Flame]—

They are among the Deep Ones. They are hiding within the Rupture.

Two statements from Ignorance drove Avo into overdrive. He wasn’t just facing the Infacer right now—the Dyad was involved too. They had to be. For all the gifts and knowledge the ensouled EGI possessed, they couldn’t traverse the Sunderwilds like Avo. No one could. Which meant that he was likely facing a more stabilized version of himself, or the Dyad was feeding information directly over to the Infacer now.

Both represented critical threats he couldn’t ignore.

He expected to have more time, hoped that Highflame would take a while for the Infacer to digest and fully occupy. But hopes were vain things to have in this world, and even the Deep Ones proved a momentary impediment.

A thousand bolts of crimson lightning lashed out from all the Beloved he seized. The Woundmother’s power spread as pulses of all-consuming blood crawled across the land, drinking in matter and alchemizing them into ammunition. Guilder forces, structures, platforms, and more were dissolved into a faint red mist, only to be reconsolidated a moment thereafter. Thereafter, all that mass was infused into a raging storm as a new eldritch city emerged from the red mist like a mirage.

The Woundmother’s highest peak loomed first. Structures molded from veins flecked with gold flared with sky-splitting power. More lightning was unleashed from its slashing limbs, striking across the span of kilometers in a thousand—then ten thousand whips. This was only the beginning. As the leaping bolts speared through the gored opening Avo left in the Substance, he transmuted them back to solid matter. The weight of a few thousand small mountains crashed into the vines of entropy at impossible speeds. The air combusted. Firestorms enveloped the landscape. With a thought, Avo turned the mountains fissile—and nuclear blasts joined the firestorms.

Then the second barrage of hidden attacks followed. He stole Rendsinks from captured golems—redesigned their chassis with Amni-tech. The new structure caging the Rendsinks were now imperceptible to the mind; one would forget them as fast as they saw them. These Rendbombs were delivered with the help of the Sage. A misted palm formed over them: A palm that sported a baleful eye at its center.

Now even if his adversary had a warmind or something that could affect thought, they would see nothing, for their will came second to Naeko’s.

This all came together in a brutal opening bombardment. In the span of a second, the gap between the district and the place where Scale used to be turned white. The tapestry spasmed. The air burned as every last breath of oxygen within five hundred kilometers was spent to feed a growing heat. The blast grew. Large and fast enough to swallow three whole Sovereignties. Rendbombs detonated within the firestorm, the true attack masked by the first. New Ruptures flayed entire sections of reality, allowing entropy to reign. They sprawled over existence like a growing infection, and their limbs intersected with parts from the Deep Ones were Domain symmetry was possible.

“What the hells was that?”

The Hidden Flame didn’t bother lying to his cadre. “Suppression. Cadre. Hear me. Enemy contact detected. Thing the Dyad might be operational. Or another version of me. Draus. Shotin. Need you now. Chambers. Keep Bonds on standby but keep working with Vator. Focus on seeding the Beloved. Rely on Kae for support.”

“But—” Chambers began when suddenly, another version of him flickered into existence right beside him. The other Chambers wasn’t manifested in his guise as the Lovebringer, but as the man he was.

[Don’t worry, real me. I’ll look after our ghoul.] The template grinned at the original, and the Chambers hesitated.

“Right. I’m gonna hold your ass to that. Stay hard.” He offered a tendril to bump.

[Steelhard!] The template bumped him.

From the Woundmother spawned a swarm thereafter. Bioforms, automated constructs, and other blood-born abominations. They rushed toward the oncoming blasts—dove through tides of force and heat with ease as thin lattices of red formed between them. The Heaven of Blood was constructing a perimeter around the gap. They were trying to make sure no one was going to escape quarantine and retaliate.

The ethereal power from the Forgotten glided through each string and sinew that lined this new construct. It was as if a net was forming between the spreading Ruptures and dimming explosions.

“A surveillance grid has been created,” the Woundmother said. “Nothing will escape my notice now.”

Avo wasn’t so sure. Something escaped his notice, after all, and he was by far the more perceptive between the two of them. If the enemy was beyond his notice, he couldn’t fault any failure on the part of the Woundmother.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Avo? What’s happening?” Draus called as she pushed through a mound of debris. Her right arm was lodged clean through Shotin’s chest, and between her metallic fingers did his biomodded heart still beat, each of his veins clinging to his mangled body like cords of carbon fiber. He spat blood and curses at her face, still full of vigor, still not finished with the fight. Draus, for her part, was missing both her eyes and had a large spike rammed through one of her ears. Strange grayish fluided mixed with the steady pool of red running down her neck. “Hey, Kazahara, knock it the fuck off. We got ourselves a real fight.”

It took Shotin a few seconds longer to calm down. In that time, the Soulscape shifted around them, flames reverting the damage they inflicted upon each other, while ghosts slithered through their Metaminds, updating them with everything they had to know.

“Holy shit,” Shotin muttered, stumbling. His mind reeled as he struggled to process everything Avo just revealed to him. “You did all that shit while we were fighting? You’re… you’re literally creating temporal insertion points using maleborn Sang? What the fuck?” A bitter laugh left Shotin as a gasp. “And I thought I was going to kick your ass.”

“Don’t despair. You would have died. But you would have tried.”

“Yeah, like that matters.”

“Only to yourself. And that might be the only thing that holds true weight when it comes to a human mind.”

The Seeker feel quiet as he ruminated about that.

“So, what’s the sitrep?” Draus asked. The Regular was all-business unlike her counterpart. Already, she was surveying the scene through Avo’s perception. He constructed an entire battlespace for her. A full simulation of the conflict zone sprang up in a miniaturized representation. She watched as a nest of ever-expanding red emerged in the aftermath of the blast. Ruptures ran through gaps left by the nest while pulsing fields of Sangunitity created sectors of control for Avo. Vectors highlighting Guilder assets appeared and then winked out in the same instant. In the corner of her vision, a counter for matter gained and spent rose and fell while a thaumic counter remained at sub-zero percentages.

The Regular’s eyes narrowed. She was focused on the battle, but found herself wondering if the nigh impossible Rend efficiency was a glitch.

“No,”

“Right. Will it be that way if you get dropped somehow?”

A good question. Something Avo considered. A single point of failure was a major risk—something he had prepared against. “No. The Ameni-Tec implants in your exo-cortexes allow localized pieces of me to run. There are nodes of me already uploaded to your exos. Essential templates as well. My destabilization or true death might affect Rend efficiency. Won’t be a critical failure. You can connect to a Rendsink or each other. Going to apply some a Sang biomod to all of you so you can directly access Rendsinks in our temporal dimension as well.”

“Yeah. Like an Omnipresent Operating Base.”

“Hm. Good title for it. But it’s more than just a facility.”

Shotin loaded next to her in the Soulscape and took in the battlespace simulation as well. “Fuck. That’s a lot of moving parts.”

“Got any idea where the hits will be coming from?” Draus asked.

The Seeker huffed and shrugged. “Could be from any and all angles. If we’re running up against a rival copy of Avo—wait, what’s the condition of the Deep Ones?”

“Moved one over into the void. Three left. Accessed their minds. Know the enemy is hiding in the Ruptures. Haven’t located them yet. But will soon.”

“You sure about that?” Shotin asked.

“Yes. Ignorance is not their ally.”

The Seeker muttered something under his breath, commenting on how his life was turning into a series of nonsense sounding statements that somehow become true when the world’s most special ghoul invoked them. “Alright. And they know that you have this… Ignorance miracle?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck. If they’re still there and not gone, I think we’re about to get hit in multiple places all that the same time. This isn’t an ambush anymore, it’s probably about to become an offensive. Prepared to get flooded—they’re going to try to drown you with threat vectors.”

“What do you—”

Shotin’s words proved true a second later as Avo felt something ripple across the tapestry. The pattern of destruction wove and cleaved through several others. Space, matter, force, and more shuddered as something trespassed between two points of damage. A new signature suddenly manifested in Avo’s battlespace, appearing someplace deep within Deep Ones’ containment area to a point along this section of the fallen city eternal.

A jagged, rusted shape burst out from the fabric of space itself. It spawned free over a mountain of rubble, and nearby, downed aeros, burning golems, and mangled corpses become the anchor for its arrival. It moved fast and struck hard, launching a salvo of hissing missiles inflused with rot and decay, bombarding all it could see.

In seconds, Avo Metamind formed a target profile.

PATHBORN DETECTED

MEM-DATA FROM PRIOR ENGAGEMENT DETECTED

LOADING ALL RELEVANT INFORMATION ON ENEMY TARGET [DELIVERER]

“Great,” Draus said, clenching her jaw. “Been waiting for this.” But her thrill plummeted just as fast as it climbed. “But why the fuck is she coming right at us? No sense in this.”

True to her words, the Deliverer was fighting more like a terrorist than a soldier. Its attacks were indiscriminate, striking at anything and everything that resembled a stable structure or a moving entity. Almost like—

“Ignore her,” Draus said with a snort. “She’s luring fire.”

“You’re certain?” Within the temporal dimension, Avo curved the progression from past to present as the scene before them slowed. Though the supposed “present” for baseline reality continued to progress second by second, the realm grown from the bodies of the Sang and held up by Avo’s divinity took a longer route to reconvene. He spent a good few minutes observing the Deliverer, running simulations for different possibilities.

In each scenario, the Deliverer faced true death in short order if she didn’t retreat. Draus was right. And that meant this was deliberate. They were trying to lure him out. Which pointed to another one of the Infacer’s plots.

“Better not play into their hands…” Avo muttered.

Just then, another warning sounded through his Soulscape.

WARNING: SOUL DETECTED

->A DEEPNESS BEYOND

The Infacer flickered into existence near one of Avo’s remaining Deep Ones—the Trinary Melody. The Hidden Flame responded without hesitation. He shifted the Ruptures, trying the cleave the EGI from existence. With every movement, more of exist tore and bleed, chaos and collapse consuming the world, yet despite all he tried, the Infacer continued to evade.

“He must have a version of me with him. He must.” Avo chuffed slightly. “Annoying.”

[Finally. You know what it is like, trying to kill you,] Zein said.

Through the Trinary Melody, Avo spotted a glint of gold. A trailing flame glided between places, moving faster than Avo could continuously perceive. Pulses of false vacuum let the rival Conflagration move from place to place nigh instantly.

[Give me unto the Guard Captain,] Zein said. [You have a favored hound. Time you release her leash, and let us go hunting. The Deep Ones are a calamity, but when hunting a plague, you need precision. A calculated antibiotic.]

She was right. But Avo still felt like he was missing something lingering just around the corner.

WARNING: CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMALY DETECTED

A new point in reality vibrated as the barrier from past to present thinned. A building mass was leaking through—Three-Eye was set to arrive soon as well. And not far from the Trinary Melody at all.

Avo cast a thought of frustration at Zein.

[What? I was planning to use him as a shield. You must still wish to preserve your father’s node, no?]

“Hate you.”

The old sow had the audacity to laugh.

Suddenly, a pulse of something burst out from the golden flame the Infacer was piloting. It shifted from place to place, and though Avo tried to angle his many Ruptures, it moved as if prescient, knowing where each limb was going to be. Seconds later, it splashed against the stable remnants of the Trinary Melody’s governance module. The bits of Avo’s consciousness lingering within the Deep One’s mind felt a trickle pass into him.

This wasn’t a distortion or a trauma. His wards were—

A new warning flashed into his mind, and to his disbelief, a patch of his Soulscape began to wither as memories began to collapse.

WARNING: UNIDENTIFIED MEM-CON DETECTED

WARNING: NECROJACKING ATTEMPT IN PROGRESS