Brent Stinebaker
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32-17 Masters and Disciples (I)
🕑 Added 2024-12-25 10:23:33 +0000 UTCFeel this, Naeko. eel the cold steel of my blade against your neck. You fought so well, survived so long, even forced me to strain my limbs. Yet, a well-fought battle is not a victorious one, and the fate of a worthy challenger is one shared by lesser chaff.
There is little glory in defeat. But much to be learned from it. You feel the metal, yet you failed to notice the ghosts leaking from my memite, burrowing into your mind slowly, softly whispering false-choices to you, pushing you just enough to choose the wrong thing, to end up on the wrong path.
You ask me why I force you to learn everything. To wield the blade, to fire the guns, to use the bombs, to make your traps, to pilot vehicles, to learn about venoms, to solve equations while I strike at you.
Because this is required when you assume the mantle of a god. Because to embody everything, you must be capable of fighting as if a force unto yourself. You cannot just be a master at swinging a blade, for that is not a master, but a corpse-to-be with an expertise. You must be better. At everything in terms of combat. You must understand war beyond your enemy, in more dimensions than your enemy.
For to be lacking is to present an opening. And openings are invitations for death.
Mind your mind next time.
-Zein Thousandhand to Samir Naeko
32-17
Masters and Disciples (I)
Zein clasped both hands around her dragon-glaive, her stance widening ever so slightly. Still, she refused to manifest her Heaven—or perhaps that was unnecessary, and she wanted this to be a duel from days of old. Even so, she was god enough unto herself. Her body was no longer biology-made, but mythology-built, and the legend left by her deeds forged this instance of her resurrection.
She stood on air as if daring gravity to pull her down. Her gaze was locked to the Sage, unblinking, unyielding, absolute focus becoming her. And from behind came a wall of ordinance born of mankind’s golden age. Beams, missiles, slugs, quantum-delivered mechanisms, nanotech bombs, and even more coldtech Avo could barely comprehend drew close at alarming speeds.
The Deep Ones, meanwhile, loomed, their shared pressure fraying the very edges of the tapestry, leaving even the Substance behind them sunken and collapsed within eldritch fissures.
The Sage of the Sundered Mind simply twitched its fingers, taunting both sides like a Magslinger preparing to cast a flechette.
“Waiting on you, boy,” Zein breathed. Her breath glided up the side of her glaive, and where it misted the flat metal, the dragon, Akusande flickered and dimmed.
“Nah,” Naeko said, biding his time, watching Zein as intently as she watched him, barely noting the Infacer, leaving the Deep Ones to Avo. “You’re old. The years settled on you hard. I’m gonna be nice. Just this once.”
“What sour lies from your lips. You know better than I that time is but a whetstone for our like. We are merely refined further by its passage. And I am far older than you, boy.”
“Sure. Which makes me wonder, why’d you start losing to me in your later years? Were you using your ‘whetstone’ wrong?”
“Oh, I so missed this.”
{I did not,} the Infacer muttered bitterly. {Zein, stop enough of this sundown qucikdraw nonsense. We have bigger problems.}
“Oh, do be calm, Broken One. I am having a conversation with my dear disciple. Everything else can wait. I will draw only when the moment is perfect.” The tip of Zein’s glaive pulsed. Chronology itself vibrated, and space followed thereafter. Avo observed her, watch the patterns looped and coalesce around her very being. Zein, the Goddess of Duels, was a simple adversary at her apex.
Simple and extremely dangerous.
There was no distance that could prevent her from reaching Naeko—so they had to engage her.
Time itself was another blade for her to wield—so to be cut meant suffering an unmaking at the hands of the nothingness that followed.
With the countless Domains she possessed, there was little in the ways of asymmetry that could be used, either. Her most fundamental miracle was efficient and simple. It allowed her to cut through all things; it allowed her strikes to reign absolute over all things. This meant that space would bleed, that time could be dismembered, that information could be beheaded. How these canons might express themselves, Avo wasn’t fully sure, but he also didn’t wish to discover first hand.
Ultimately, the greatest advantage she had was her Ninth Sphere Heaven and Hell. A full sphereage more than Naeko, with all the benefits that entailed. She could directly force a backlash or paradox and emerge the victor thanks to the Infacer. The Infacer who was currently launching even more cosmic-spanning Rendsinks using clustering missiles that traveled at near-light speeds.
That didn’t mean Avo and his forces were out of options. They just needed to play a careful game. And a dangerous one.
More fissures spread out around his Sage of the Sundered Mind. Fissures that resembled a web for a den of spiders. The tapestry around them frayed and dissolved. Foundational laws governing how things should be, how the world should function, collapsed into incomprehensible expressions for their component Domains. What sprouted from these gulfs was entropy, was calamity.
It was also something Avo could use to his advantage. So far, Zein was capable of traversing the Sunderwilds like him — or at least cutting through it, but not the Infacer. For whatever reason, the Dyad had not bestowed such gnosis on the Neo-Creationist mind.
So, Avo could force this fight to be near even. To make this even more reminiscent of the old duels between Naeko and his master.
“Naeko,” Avo began, pouring his plan over into the template’s mind. “When this starts, go for the Deep Ones. I will send a battlegroup toward the Weaver—or any Deep One that presents an opportunity. Try to burn it. Subsume and pilot it. Use the ruptures as cover against A Deepness Beyond. Force Zein to run the edge with you. Can avoid the worst of the Infacer’s barrage that way.”
His recommendation filled Naeko with a veritable thrill. [Shit, Avo, looks like Zein rubbed off on you some way after all. This is exactly the kind of stuff she would prefer during training. Won’t be able to resist following us in, either.]
“Question then is if the Dyad will allow it. They changed her mind earlier. Took whatever she felt about Jaus out of her.” A feeling of coldness welled inside Avo as he suddenly realized something. His original self might have the influence to lure Veylis into making poor decisions, as with Chambers’ alternate, but the same went the other way as well. The deliberate taking of another’s choice wasn’t something he wished.
As much as he was changing the Seraph, she was changing him.
This stalemate needed to be broken.
A shadow lurched across existence, caught Avo’s attention. The Great Silence—one of the Deep Ones—came forth. Language and information tattered upon the surface of existence. Relative meaning collapsed. A darkness closer, seeping in like a growing stain. A tendril of its foul touch brushed against the ethereal mists that composed the altered Sage, but within its threshold, the Conflagration burned unabated, and Avo’s thoughts flowed clear and true like a spring coursing down a mountain.
The Thought-Police Canon allowed for a great many new possibilities. A prison under one’s control could become a fortress, a castle—and now no one could tear his consciousness from him again. And a castle could be made a dungeon when brought down upon its enemies.
“Naeko,” Avo began—
But that was as much as he needed to say.
The Sage exploded into motion, seized the Great Silence by its thoughts—yanked the entire Deep One closer via a grip on its ego. It was as if a flood of pitch-blank ink gliding over the surface of water. Ink that covered a good three kilometers of real-space. The Sage vanished into the dark, its shape sinking into the ever-changing Scar Charts between the Deep One’s ruptures.
Only then did Zein cut. And cut well.
Her slash was the perfect stroke, spilling between the space which the Sage occupied, gliding between the pathways allowed by the ruptures. It sailed forth–faster than Naeko or Avo could react. Suddenly, a thunderous wail sounded, reverberating to the electronic cadence of a dying machine. Avo felt the governing EGI piloting the Deep One bleed. A critical section of its cognitive architecture had been hewed clean through.
But it wasn’t enough to end them yet. And the Deep One sustained itself on madness for eons regardless.
The rest of Killteam Innsmouth reacted. They met a wall of Rendsinks in a clash of entropy against technological order. The Weaver, prolapsed though its mind was, set its gaze forth on the entity with the single greatest thaumic mass — the Dyad themselves. It reached out. A burning world emerged from one of its wounds, and festering tumors spread like boils out from every rift in reality it caused.
{None of that,} the Infacer chided. A Deep Beyond rippled, and across the turbulent oceans of the void blinked dyson carriers. Dyson carriers that dwarfed Idheim many times over. Dyson carriers that launched Rendsink after Rendsink, countering the spread of the ruptures, only barely holding the desecration of reality at bay.
The chasm leading to the Dyad closed.
Zein cut again—this time to open a gate across causality.
Avo felt a pulse across existence a second too late. But somehow, Naeko responded perfectly. As the Sage nested itself in pace with the Deep One, he turned just in time to catch a falling slash from Zein.
Akusande let out a monstrous bellow as time, conceptualization, and continuum fell in a killing stroke. A killing stroke that met five closing fingers with a spark of Soulfire.
There they struggled. Master and disciple. A moment flashed between them. A shared memory that couldn’t be stolen by the fraying edges of reality. Avo glimpsed a young Naeko, body covered in welts, standing atop jagged rocks and slick stones. Ghosts trailed up from his glaive, undulating as if a string drawn to the sky. Lightning flashed, and upon a taller edifice lurched Zein. In that instant of light, Avo saw the grin on her face, saw the stone she was about to flick at Naeko.
But he also saw something more.
He saw how the ghosts leaking out of her glaive’s vivianite tunneled through the mountain, slithered toward Naeko without his awareness. He saw how she set up the conditions of his defeat but luring his focus to the overt assault at hand.
Then, lightning struck again. And with a flick of her middle finger, the stone shot out like a bullet, snapping through the air, skipping perfectly across the tips of raindrops without ever losing speed.
“Dodge.”
The lightning settled. The Soulfire of the present faded. The moment faded, but the moment echoed.
Zein blinked back but a meter away from the Sage. With a flourish, a thousand limbs branched out from her body, each holding a glaive bound to a different Domain, each capable of cutting and slaying anything that existed. Symmetry rang between the Sage and Zein. She exploded forth, striding off nothingness as if it was a solid platform. Gouges of unreality formed the boundaries of their duel. As the channels of internal stability shifted within the Great Silence, Naeko reached out to grasp Zein’s mind—only to quickly dispel his mists as chrono-clone of Zein burst into existence.
A chrono-clone with a blade infused with the power of violence. Absolute violence.
Its strike went wide. The path its glaive traced left a golden wound along the insides of the Silence, causing the Deep One to shudder. Naeko shifted around it, allowed it to dissipate as he awaited an opening to make his approach.
“Yeah. That hasn’t worked for years, Zein.”
She swayed in the air with casual nonchalance. A rupture hundreds of kilometers long crashed down to consume her, only to be parried by one of her many hands. Parried toward Naeko. Who promptly sent the rupture whipping back at her with a slight shove. The Sage’s ontology was as if a singularity of mind and matter, and the EGI—already wounded from Zein’s cut—cried out again as Naeko bent its will. But when Naeko tried the same thing against Zein, he was forced to react his mists again.
A distortion burst out from her glaives. No. More than distortion. Along the edge of her thousand-blades, one shivered with broken ghosts, and echoed with the song of long-infused traumas. A Domain of Trauma.
“Trauma,” Avo said, casting his thoughts through the Sage. “Suits you.”
“One must always have the right tool when hunting specific prey.” Zein flicked her blade. “And you are a very specific kind of beast to slay, Plague. Be flattered.”
Another rupture twisted and encoiled around another. It came swinging toward them. Zein sent it reeling off with a backhand. Soulfire splashed from the impact, the effect akin to sparks flying from two clashing blades amidst a downpour. Outside, Avo could hear the Infacer loudly blaring for Zein’s aid. They were sprinkling in slurs and curses as well.
“Might want to help your consang,” Avo taunted, knowing Zein was about to do no such thing.
“Hm? Oh, the Broken One. They will be fine. They were fine for billions of years, were they not? No. I am here to test the mettle of my boy. And what a fine arena you have decided upon. These withered and mutilated creatures make a fine mountain for us to do our old dance.”
“Don’t remember you redirecting the mountain at me,” Naeko muttered, mind still locked to the fight.
“I would if I could, boy.”
“You would if you could and you wanted to,” Naeko replied. His palm shifted closer—then suddenly back. An echo of Zein burst into being, transcending the limits of causality. Only to be flicked by Naeko as if a pebble, sent flying into a rupture.
Avo still wasn’t sure how the Chief Paladin was reacting so fast. Even with Avo’s understanding of the tapestry, it took time to process and predict what Zein was going to—
[That’s your problem, Avo,] Naeko said. The overall template spoke to the Hidden Flame, shaking his head. [I can give you all of my understanding, everything I learned. But that doesn’t make you the finest glaive. Because you ruminate too much. You drown in your own thoughts while you try to shape them. That’s what made you a good Necro. But you can’t be wrestling with yourself and another person at the same time. When it comes time to swing steel and shed blood, it’s about knowing, about acting, about feeling your enemy’s every action.]
Intuition. That kind that defied even Avo’s understanding. Such a thing baffled the Hidden Flame. He had all of Naeko’e experiences, his every skill. So why did this epiphany elude him.
[Watch,] Naeko said. The Sage shifted closer again. Zein didn’t cut this time. Instead, she stayed in place. The Sage shifted once more. Zein feinted her approach from an angle, then an arm shout out from her—its tip charged with a Peace-piercing counter-pattern. Naeko rolled and bundled a rupture around his divine hand.
The blow struck. Soulfire flashed. But Zein pulled her limb back, a twitch of amusement on her lips. Across from her, the size of a small mountain, the Sage was wrapped in wire-thin wraps of entropy, and more, the hand was now a fist, and the power of violence shimmered from its boiling mists.
REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED MIND] — 8%
“Come, then,” Zein said, holding her arms open. “You attack. Show me.”
And Naeko snorted. “Fine. But you best keep your eyes open.”
“I—”
Before Zein could respond, Naeko punched upward. Up and away from her. Up and deeper into the Great Silence’s ontology with the twine of entropy still held between his digits. The Great Silence cried out. Its structure disentangled, ruptures pulled as if strings from a ball of twine. And through it all, Naeko pressed his force on the environment, on what Zein hadn’t anticipated.
“Battlegroups. Prepare to disembark.” Naeko’s command echoed through the fire and his lesser variants timed their exit. When this would be done, the Substance and tapestry would look very different. And the conditions of the battlefield woudl change once again.
Through a weave of ontological wounds, the Sage surged and Thousandhand followed, her blade flashing as she cut a way across time and space, slashing at Naeko, roaring with glorious laughter all the while.
And as they jabbed at each other. As Zein sent more clones to probe Naeko’s reactions, as he launched mind-crushing impulses of force, tendrils of living flame began to seep out from the Sage’s mists, leaking into the bleeding static accretion that poured out from the innermost section of the Deep One like leaking yolk, crawling toward an exalted delicacy, and to turn the tides of war: to sample the taste of a superintelligent mind; to mantle a weapon that tore the reality open through mere existence alone.
Comments
luxrus
Merry christmas!
Brent Stinebaker
Merrychapmas
