Brent Stinebaker
patreon
19-7 Blood and Glass
🕑 Added 2023-11-12 19:33:38 +0000 UTC+Log: 238 Post-Fall
Agnos Kae Kusanade speaking. Ah… Former Agnos.
I have not been able to discern any changes in my Frame. If my prior theories were correct, the Imitators should have spread by this point, and the nature of my Soul should resemble that of the Stillborn. Alas, my Liminal Frame remains relatively “normal” from my examinations, with Avo continuing to be the only one of us capable of sophisticated canon auto-manufacturing.
My annoyance is great and my theory is potentially wrong. I am very displeased.
There. I had to say it.
Despite this, the Stillborn continues to be a wonder. I find myself so… frustrated as to what it has been designed toward than the obvious things we could have done with it. There was so much I could have fixed with it… so much death that could have been prevented if I just… agh, regretting the past is for another life.
We have to make do with what we have right now.
I must.
For Crisha.
For Wisher
For Heccata
And Dawton.
Ahem.
The thaumaturgic efficiency with the Stillborn designs of each canon is impeccable. Some miracles I have conceived should have taken ten times as many thaums if assembled manually by use Agnosi, but here we are, exercising greater miracles beyond my expectations. The Imitators are a key part of this equation, its ability to align countless wills toward a singular worship incomparable to anything we’ve seen.
Frankly, its potential is terrifying, and its ability to target and develop specific designs has opened my mind to new possibilities.
Voidwatch has allowed me limited knowledge of magnetism, physics, and inorganic chemistry. I know they are keeping my understanding limited for fear of what I might do–what I can do–but this is no time to be timid. I have seen what the Guilds are capable of–had contributed to their base of power.
There are creations that my fellows have made that will unmake us. The powers arrayed against us are immense and overwhelming. To stand a chance, we must be unknown and flexible. I will continue my petitions and expand the sophistication of my work.
Hopefully, we will soon have a spot beyond the city to develop further, beyond the eyes of the Guilds. I would like a place to experiment. Perhaps we should pursue another Fallen Heaven. See what secrets remain inside and examine the Stillborn at work.
There is so much work ahead of us. So many opportunities. But I’m not afraid. I’ve wrapped my fingers around my anger, and like the reins to some beast, I can direct it toward a more meaningful path.
The ones that destroyed me live their comfortable lives in the Tiers, suckling on the wonders I created, denying this city its path to growth. They must think themselves safe, hiding deep inside all those different planes and protected by their armies.
Well. The torture they inflicted taught me patience, and my resolve is tempered. When we climb the heights of New Vultun, I will see that we are prepared to burn their homes as well.
And unlike how they treated me, my hand will not slip from the handle of the blade. I will drive it down. I will cut away the rot infesting the skull of this city, and cleanse the wounds so the future might be ours again.
This was not the dream. That is what we all say. Helpless. Meaningless. A captive audience in stasis.
Well. I say damn that and damn them. I say I’m taking my dreams back.
And I have just the monster to manifest my wrath.
-Kae Kusanade, Operative of Aegis
19-7
Blood and Glass
Chambers’ second Heaven was designed for one thing, and Draus hated it.
Between the three canons she recalled it having, one was to transmute objects into genitals–regardless of sex, species, or age. The second was to expand the orifices of said genitalia, leading to the third and final canon, which was basically a biology-themed demiplane made out of singing penises.
The purpose behind such a plane: a self-contained Rash trigger. The current effect: Draus was now more motivated to hurt and mutilate the half-strand than ever before.
Swallowed by the Fucktopia, it took her but thought to fracture a distant panel of glass and sunder space itself. In the microsecond she was forced to face the veritable charge of squirming worm-looking privates, she heard off-tune melodies about how growers are better than showers, and more than a few thousand of the flesh nubs followed her out from her fracture anchor eight hundred meters away from where the Fucktopia was currently manifesting itself.
As seen from the outside, the full manifestation of the Heaven of Biology was a pulsating and erect structure, its central mast veiny, while two gargantuan spheres lined with countless holes swelled beside it, the openings enough to trigger an unnatural sentence of trypophobia in a person. Tiny fingers and fists poked out intermittently from the gashes of the “balls” and from the very base of the horrid structure swayed long sinew-like strands ripe with the vague shape of lynched infants.
Fucktopia, A.K.A Rash Central (Biology/Matter/Space)
Draus sighed internally, facing the mockery Chambers made of warfare. She was going to kill him slowly for thinking of this, Avo slower for enabling him, and maybe even Kae slowest for helping build it. She swore, now the former Agnos could ply her trade again, it’s like her good sense abandons her every time she gets a chance to commit to her work. All she offered was a cringe of disgust before humming about how they were to design the interior of the plane and asking Avo to apply the bio-thaumic knowledge he consumed from Elegant-Moon as assistance.
Resistant to lust thanks to a combination of her psychology and physical augmentations, she nonetheless chained a unified passage for over three thousand panels of glass flinging them them out to surround Chambers. He tried to move, but Soulfire erupted from the Fucktopia–and likewise from Kae’s Malestromer–an obvious moment of thaumic backlash. Draus knew this wasn’t a paradox as her own Heaven of Space continued to work fine as she assembled a cage of glass around Chambers, sealing him within her newly upgraded Liminal Paracosmos canon.
As countless reflective sheets were aligned to a single point in space behind the glass, Draus buried her Simulacrae’s Shield of the Returning Blow canon into the tapestry of space in the air before her and linked it to the glass-made prison she entrapped Chambers in. The polished shield shimmered then as its inward rings began to clear, and the form of the Fucktopia reared its tall and mushroom-like head again.
Then, as Rend for both her Heavens spiked once more, she opened fire, targeting the midsection of the Fucktopia as every gun that existed in her Heavens memory roared to life at once.
Slugs, two-stage micro missiles, heavy rockets, flechettes, explosive rounds, incendiary rounds, energy projections, fusion burners, and additional calibers of all varieties fired at once. The ordinance poured into the shield as a single bar of fire but emerged from over a thousand spots, the same projectiles occupying multiple positions in space as the Simulacrae and its “cloned reflections” did.
Fire and devastation erupted. Chambers’ form faded from sight, but she knew this was delaying action.
The Fucktopia had but a few canons and was built around doing a single thing. The gunfire would only tear through it. But with all the material it could convert, castrating the Heaven utterly demanded more time and focus than Draus had to give, for in that moment, an update flashed into her cog-feed, warning of a newly detected Heaven in her proximity.
The title splashed like neon bricks at the bottom of her perception, and Draus spun to face the threat, a spike of brutal delight summited her being.
Woundmother, Architectress of Sanguinity (Blood/Matter/Lightning/Biology/Luminosity/Protection/Fire)
WARNING: Distance to unnatural phenomena [5.8 Kilometers]
Affected (Domains): Blood, Lightning, Matter
Peering over the still crumbling blocks around her, a sanguine tempest unlike any she’d ever seen was building on the horizon. Bolts resembling veins and arteries spread as fractures through the world as pulsing monsoons of blood swept out from the fissures. Anticipating Avo’s immediate action, Draus seized all the glass she could affect and drew them into her Heaven to prevent them from being liquefied. She furthermore began vitrifying her immediate surroundings, contesting the expanse of his Sovereignty via the establishment of her own sectors of power.
As dust blanketed the cityscape, Draus watched as crimson towers speared up into the air, their architecture a mix of flesh, metal, glass, crystal, plastic, wood, and more. Snapped jaws remained the aesthetic of each of the Woundmother’s spires, but between the wolf-like fangs blazed orbs of oppressive radiance. Flowing tendrils of red continued to stitch more and more of the city into place, and as Draus directed a shard of glass upward for a bird’s eye view, she saw just how fast he was spreading–eating away more and more of the city like a fast-growing tumor.
Already, his haemokinesis had infested more than ten square kilometers, the old structures splashing down to become an ocean of viscera from which more of the Woundmother would rise. He could convert a bit beyond fifteen thousand tons now before his thaumic mass exceeded what his Frame could provide. But by then the endeavor of fighting Avo would be more akin to struggling against a carnivorous ocean as it brought the mass of a city down to bury you.
+Dice; Kae, pacify Chambers,+ Draus said, pulling a few shards out from the ensemble that made up her wings. +I’m gonna see about guttin’ a certain ghoul.+
She then launched the spikes of glass outward, firing them out of her ontological being via the Arsenalist to maintain absolute control over their movement vectors. A few hundred glass spikes slammed down across the replicated district, forming an anticipatory perimeter to contain Avo’s spread. As forks of lightning scythed out to claim her constructs, she instead fractured these new reflections and expanded herself across each point in space. With each fracture she pushed herself through, her speed multiplied as time slowed. The Nether-lag between her and Kae grew severe, but Dice’s connection was quickly clearing due to the enormous reflex boosts the Runebreaker offered.
Short of getting the girl a Heaven of Speed, she was the fastest of them by far at baseline, gradually growing faster still with each second of acceleration she accrued, and the best part was that her Rend filled at a consistent rate instead of spiking exponentially like Draus’ did when she fracture-replicated herself across different points in space.
Comparatively, Avo was more similar to the girl and grew even faster in some ways, but his miracles had a dependency on consumable mass. All Draus needed was a piece of glass to sacrifice for another increase in speed.
As such, the struggle would be determined in the shaping phase.
His focus would be to spread beyond her ability to contain–playing a blend of Breaker and Maker as his Heaven grew to be an unstoppable onslaught, unleashing a deluge of constructs and miracles to overwhelm her.
She, contrarily, had requested a design of damage and precision–a hyper-mobile Breaker-Porter capable of delivering obscene payloads from any reflection in her network.
Expanding her wings into growing sheets, she moved her “bodies’ forward and engaged with Avo, the path behind her melting into a single cylinder of glass that encompassed their ten-kilometer battleground.
As the final few structures of the Woundmother rose into shape, Draus thought she could faintly hear a thunderous voice cackle with delight, as lightning surged through the veins of the serried heights, the orbs above them consuming all the brightness in the air and feeding them into kilometer long tendrils whipping out to cleave her in twain.
Cleaving out using her blade, she delighted with the discovery that her Spatial Severance canon worked even on Avo’s Fortress of Luminosity. Physically indestructible though his shine was, separating material objects across different points in space was beyond the purview of its protection.
He swept and speared. She cut and parried. For the length of a heartbeat, they jabbed at each other, testing miracles. He fought as the heart of a hive, the weight of his violence vast and industrial, striking at her from every angle using blood, matter, lightning, light, and the first of his new constructs built from the substance of his body.
Eldritch organisms birthed of blood, constructed of blood were whipped out at Draus’ replicas through his lightning. Unlike Chambers’ monstrosities, Avo’s were of an even more impossible nature, the blood simulating their bodies also containing properties of metal, glass, plascrete, fire, and above all, vivianite.
Within the burned phantasmal embers, flickers of his Conflagration, and through them he acted with perception, directing them to consume her attention and forcing her to waste bullets and glass to stymie their approach.
He didn’t infuse them with the protection of his light. Nor did he spend more than a few tons of mass on them. They were meant to be small. Swarm-like. Expendable. Something to overload another’s focus so he could prey on potential openings and fuck-ups.
Too bad Regulars didn’t make mistakes.
REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRAE RESPLENDENT]: 31%
REND CAPACITY [ARSENALIST]: 19%
She moved as a legion of glass-made titans unto herself. Angling twenty of her replicas a full kilometer ahead of the others, she fired herselves forward using her Arsenalist and began her initial charge. Avo’s constructs came apart as blades and wings hewed and struck. Shooting space-severing blades out from her as if loosed by gauss canons, her shots pierced clean through Avo’s towers, blood spraying free before flowing back into place, his micro-city regenerated in an instant.
This was when she lost the first of her replicas. It began with a blossom of fire. A sudden flash of brightness then nothing. Her Heaven rattled as Soulfire escaped from her Frame like exhaust.
THAUMIC BACKLASH TRIGGERED
AFFECTED DOMAIN: (GLASS)
REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRAE RESPLENDENT]: 58%
WARNING: NUCLEAR BLASTS DETECTED!
Where her twenty vanguard used to be now blossomed envelops of sight-searing brightness. Blooming blastwaves crashed out to meet her as she responded, counter-firing her Arsenalist again and shifting her collective positions in random vectors. More explosions followed. Draus shuffled her replicas back out of her prime self and avoided any unnecessary losses.
Reviewing the situation from the enclosure she fused around the scene, she realized that Avo had pulled a similar trick as to Chambers–he detonated his constructs. Unlike Chambers, it seemed that his explosions were outright based on warheads.
+How’d you manage that?+ Draus cast out, her wings in wide-sweeping arcs, shuttling any matter caught along their edge into her inner demiplane.
***
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 44%=%
Avo was a storm then the Simulacrae and the Arsenalist made Draus a flight of teleporting hawks he just couldn’t cut out from the sky. His Sanguinity slipped through her glass each time he tried to touch, and when she cut, no damage was inflicted until the passage closed and his matter was parted.
That, and her definite edge in terms of speed made him almost draw on the Fardrifter, but her thoughtcast distracted him.
+How’d you manage that?+
She was asking about the nuclear blasts–how he managed to finally make use of the pattern he consumed back in Nu-Scarrowbur.
The truth was in the fire. Zein arranged for the Lushburners there for a reason. He was supposed to use them to prime his warheads–an act Calvino insisted made no sense and evaded the complexities of how a nuclear weapon was supposed to work.
Whatever the case, the moment Avo finished his canon enhancements and added his Domain of Fire, he suddenly felt aware of the mini-nuke pattern lingering inside himself. As if he could press on it somehow and burst it.
Growing the fissile matter inside his new haemokinetic bio-constructs was more instinctual than planned, and the attacks thereafter came with template-Draus and the other egos inside his Conflagration whispering tactics and potential strategies to him.
[The nukes are good,] template-Draus said. [The sheer heat they generate seems to bypass the protections of my reflectivity. Might wanna figure out more ways to leverage that.]
[You should switch over to your other Heaven as soon as possible,] Kassamon said. [I know we’re staying disconnected from her Neurodeck for the purpose of the competition, but I bet you my last imp that she has more Rend than you do right now. No point in slugging things out. Test the other Heavens too.]
[Boltstride your city into her,] Abrel said. [Make her spend time cutting and fly your Fardrifter into her little cage.]
+No,+ Avo replied. +Paradox risk. Don’t want to overload one of her Heavens. Her Rend might be too high.+
[Touching,] template-Draus deadpanned. [Then why don’t you go with the third option?] He felt a cold amusement come alive inside her. Only a Regular could find satisfaction in plotting their own murder.
[Yeah,] template-Chambers agreed, his Fucktopia currently tossing and turning in Kae’s grasp while Dice pummeled away at his force using her hooves and weapons. [Give her a taste of the… uh…]
The man’s reaction was apt.
The Woundmother and Fardrifter both woke with certain aspects of their original personalities intact when the Imitators finally returned their consciousness to them. The Techplaguer on the other hand…
Avo continued to be at a loss for what Omnitech did to make the ontologic the way it was. It remained silent even after his last death, and the text for its canons continued to confound…
[Do it,] template-Draus said. [I like surprises. What’s another one after the first? Brick my godsdamned Neurodeck.]
As Avo Bolstrode his entire city away from another wave of glass-edged munitions, he manifested his “upgraded” Heaven of Data for the first time. From his being came what Calvino described as “bad graphical glitches in reality” as panels of spatial reality lost detail and “de-pixelated,” and from the cracks in real space crawled a lanky, multi-limbed monstrosity made of ones and zeros, with a single antennae protruding from its head as–
“AGGHHHHHHHH!” the Techplaguer screamed, its voice a crackle of electronic noises reverberating in the depths of Avo’s skull.
“Oh, it speaks,” the Woundmother noted, still more focused on the battle.
“This is more like screaming,” the Fardrifter–once Galeslither, then Zephyr–said. “One empathizes.”
[Damn that’s loud,] Abrel winced, wishing she could cover her ears or something. The sentiment wasn’t just shared by a few other templates including Chambers, but Kae and actual-Draus as well.
The HUD of his Neurodeck vanished as a human skull screamed at him. “H-he-llooo! YOUR MAINFRAME IS A VIRUS! I MUST–children need to be protected. Inserting censors and restricts! Starting in safe mode… safe mode initiating.”
And then strange tunes filled his mind as Avo found himself entirely too distracted to use the Techplaguer’s canons–or even fight for that matter.
Luckily for him, Draus actual self reacted the same way.
{A-vo!} her voice crackled as he accepted her ansible connection, the information not visually displayed but screamed into him through his Heaven of Data. With each word it spoke, Calvino switched and fragmented, data spilling out from its body like he was being disemboweled from the inside. {W-what the hells is–going–}
She was promptly cut off.
“CONVERSATION TERMINATED!” The Techplaguer roared. “BAD LANGUAGE DETECTED! PARENTAL SETTINGS ONLINE!”
[What the fuck is even going on with this thing,] Corner muttered. [Glitch? Know something about this?]
But the other dead Fallwalker just shrugged. [You’re asking the wrong druggie about hearing voices.]
Corner snorted. [Of course.]
Comments
Bluecimmers
Wow! You are such a delight!
Brent Stinebaker
That will be updated after the next few chapters. Right now, they might still be pending adjustments in-setting so none of the current canons are rooted in stone quite yet.
Arataumaihi
Are peoples' canons listed elsewhere? I keep getting lost on who can do what at this point.
