Brent Stinebaker
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10-27 Take the Flame (I)
🕑 Added 2023-05-05 19:13:59 +0000 UTC“You know what, soldier? You’re wasted as Regular.”
“I do somethin’ wrong, Higher?”
“No. You’re doing too many things right. Killing too many targets. Not dying. Hells, your Merits are through the roof. You’re making an awful lot of Instruments very happy people.”
“I aim to please.”
“Nah. You aim to kill. You love to kill. I see it. You don’t need to play coy with me. But… ah. Never mind. You’d make a good ‘Clad, you know that Draus?”
“Don’t quite know what you’re spittin’, sir.”
“Don’t glower. You know I’m right. There are pieces missing inside you, consang. Pieces that were never there to begin with. But hey, that just makes you perfect for this city. Listen, when this war shit is done, I’m gonna recommend you for Axtraxis.”
“Permission to speak freely, Higher.”
[Sigh] “Shoot. Break my heart and tell me all you ever wanted was to fight and serve the cause–”
“Sir, I’ve seen what the Frame does to people. I see how Greatling is. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be them. I don’t wanna burn my days killin’ the small. There’s no gleam in that. That ain’t the dream.”
“‘No gleam.’ Draus: You’re more than worthy and wasted as a Reg.”
-Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma to First-Dragoon Jelene Draus, Fourth Guild War
10-27
Take the Flame (I)
Avo cut through the skies and the Strider followed. Draus vanished the stretch of a bridge and drones cut out after her.
Spearing through the air at one hundred and eighty miles an hour was slow for a Guild-grade aerial vehicle, but that was by necessity; the district was a hive of architecture and memetic architecture at that. Short of the Tadpole turning into a golem with control over forces, inertia still held a tax.
Something Abrel quickly discovered as she tore out from around the corner and struck the curved side of the twin-pronged tower that looked carved out of nothing but vivianite.
The drone fell like a whistling arrow at Avo’s command. Countless shining bridges spilled out between blocks and streets as he plummeted. Beyond the dilapidation and decay that gripped the lower Warrens, Light’s End resembled a orderly nest, and its occupants were all part of the hive.
Encased in rectangular glass passageways, he caught sight of countless curious bystanders as he speared past. There were thousands of them gathered behind windows and depolarizing walls. Unlike the fear and chaos that gripped the streets of Nu-Scarrowbur, he could glean no such tension brimming in their relaxed postures.
This was just a curiosity for them–a break from whatever their professions demanded. They watched with the eyes of bored office workers taking in a peculiar sight rather than the leering bloodlust of a Crucible spectator.
Life and death for him and his allieswas but a passing amusement. When he crossed from sight, they would return to their stations and proceed along the railways of routine.
Essus’ voice bellowed out in low-pitched alarm with each pivot and turn. Avo fastened them tighter to the Tadpole. Blades of light flashed out at him just as he dipped down to sail alongside a Hypertube tunnel, glass-casings coating the gaps between the latticed tubes shrouded him from a slashing wing.
Light splashed and broke into chipped particles. It was like watching a glowing stream of blades shatter against something unbreakable. The two absolutes clashed and two canons shuddered under the weight of paradox. Reality jolted as Abrel’s wings sliced against mimetically guarded metal and glass. Her strokes bled blurring mirages as multiple geometries in the environment shivered.
Avo did not turn from the opportunity presented to him. The Second Circle of his Galeslither came alive in the chaos. A pocket seized the opening in the air behind him just as he turned a corner. Light flashed out off the reflections cast by the mercury gleam of an Exorcist Tadpole twisting between the latticed pathways interlacing the blocks.
He knew he succeeded when he felt his Frame rattle and all light behind him vanished. Too much paradox for Abrel–she needed to vent her Rend or switch to another–
The world shook. Avo’s cog-feed sounded with the detection of vented Rend. From shadows and darkness flew forth swarms of darting falcons. They were not smoke-like as the ones enwreathing the Strider's arms and legs. Instead, they bore a fluid quality to them as they rushed out. Uncountable in number, they washed out from every spot of smoke or darkness around him, diving out to smear themselves against passing drones or clefts left between buildings.
Two Tadpoles encroached from behind, gaining on him due to their unburdened mass. A falcon painted the drone beside him, the inkiness of the eldritch bird’s form feeding into the gaps and gulfs between the armor.
It seemed the Strider’s Hell dealt with reinforcing or mending objects.
Three shots thrummed out from a rifle. Three Tadpoles sparked and spewed flaming projectile trajectories tunneled through their engines. Following the orange path to its origin, Avo located Draus again. She was flying with her chest facing the sky and Chambers secured to her chest like an infant using what looked like makeshift cords. More Exorcists were moving to intercept them, but they had some distance now.
She shot twice more downward and he realized what she was firing at. Her projectiles painted lanes of white down to the entrance of a hypertube station. Yes. That was probably their best chance to evade both Abrel and the Exorcists. Seeing how things were, the Paladins would soon be on the scene as well.
With a command, he directed his Tadpole down directly toward the entrance of the station. It was large and wide enough for him to fly it through, and when it was done, he would drain its mass and take what benefits he could from it.
The world around him was a clash of colors. Ebony rivers comprised of swirling falcons licked after him like rotting tongues. Neon sirens oscillated and pulsed from newly arriving drones. Some twisted into shape not six feet away from him as golem knots jaunted through the expanse of space trying to hunt him down.
Even with the Nether down, the last neutral authorities of New Vultun were coordinated in their approach, surging after escaping fugitives without chaos or confusion. No drones collided. As more pursuing vehicles entered the chase, they began to subtly shift their positions, inching into formations as they tried to head him off.
WARNING: SPATIAL DISTORTION DETECTED
A golem made out of three spinning rings slipped into existence just before him. With it spilled out ten drones and three other burning golems–they looked exactly the same as the one he subsumed earlier. He expanded his blood into a hair-thin lattice as they fired. Slugs, missiles, and flechettes snapped through the air and tore through his defenses. They struck his cordyceramite plating as speckles of blood.
He spurred his drone into a dive.
He was eighty feet away from the entrance, and he saw Draus angle her scything wings to drag them along the ceiling and walls to slow her pace. It was time for him to disembark as well. He connected to Essus’ mind briefly as he absorbed the Tadpole’s mass. +Prepare to fall.+
A note of alarm rose through the whirlwind of terror gripping the man’s mind. +What?+
The drone unzipped into streams of blood beneath him. He let the Exorcist it contained tumble free and left their fate to distract the hands of their comrades. The beast growled inside him. It was a shame not to eat the Exorcist, but he didn’t have the time. Part of him was also wise to the probability that more assets would be devoted to chasing him rather than stopping Abrel if he was the first one to snuff one of the city’s prefects.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNSHAPER]: 2%
REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 65%
Expanding the additional two tons of mass he gained from the haemification, he wove an externalized skeleton around his person and found himself annoyed at how much the act taxed his attention. He twinned the design to his body and found himself envious of the drone he was just flying as he fused a crude gimbal into place to hold Essus.
He already had the capacity to generate facsimiles of matter using his blood–what would it take to construct proper pieces of machinery?
The ground was fast approaching. He shifted over to using his Galeslither as he used the air to smooth his landing. He dared not draw upon the fullness of its manifestation with the presence of space-affecting golems. With how easy it was to paradox demiplanar canons, he decided upon keeping his Rend as low as possible.
Something brushed the winds he wielded. He guided his Whisper along the circuitry of his blood and directed his perception backward. Glinting speckles were chasing after him. He chittered his Echoheads. No. Not specks–fleas. Particulates the size of insects. Voidwatch had long been reticent to part with their nanomechanical machines, but the same reluctance didn’t crossover into the use of drone-adjacent creatures.
As his speed fell to the low sixties, he released his pull on the wind and opened another pocket, this time for the drones and other pieces of coldtech chasing him. The sphere burst large, expanding a good hundred feet in circumference before he felt its structure start slackening. Multiple movement vectors fed his Hell. His Galeslither’s Rend plummeted. His hunters froze–caged in stasis.
He struck the tessellated tiles leading to the hypertube station with haemokinetic-reinforced Echoheads first to blunt the landing. The ground greeted him in a series of eight spine-rattling impacts and refused to dent or fracture. Keeping what momentum he could, his tails lashed out and pulled him along. Still linked to Essus, he cast a wellness check at his companion.
+Landed.+
+Yes… I felt that.+
Avo’s cog-feed sounded a series of alarms and he ended his stasis before the Hell could over-exceed its quota and spawn forth a Daemon. The fibers across his body tickled. He still remembered how the Twice-Walker’s quavering visage reeled its former master toward it, like a leviathan sucking in a snack.
Pathways leading down into the depths of the tube were ribbed in crystalline layering. A mural splashed out overhead, its design depicting people from across various clades walking hand in hand upon a cloud-made city. Their bodies sported all manner of chrome and other modifications, but each adorned their bodies with diadems or other articles of silver while a patch scintillated on their chests. Its design showed burning eyes sprouting between the links of a crown, and beneath its vibrant aesthetic flowed a single line of text: All will be revealed.
If he wasn’t certain this was an Ori-Thaum district before, he knew it now.
For a moment, he found the emptiness of the station odd before he remembered that the Nether was down and people were likely sheltering in safe zones or Guild-owned buildings away from public spaces. Suppose this served as a confirmation that the thoughtwave detonation was Sovereignty wide.
At the foot of the sloping walkway, Draus waited for him while Chambers dry-heaved beneath her sub-arms whle her scythe-wings twitched. She gestured for him to hurry–her gauss rifle now missing–and pointed toward a wide-open terminal separated into glitching columns and departure gates.
Then, without any hint or warning at all, she extended her projectile launcher and fired. The micro-missile whistled through the air and missed Avo by a foot. Twisting his Whisper around, he noticed nothing at the lip of the entrance. Nothing but–
The entrance shivered as a curtain of water spilled over it. The missile exploded. The rushing rain tore in, and behind ground the inexorable mass of a castle squeezing its way down a pedestrian entrance as Abrel and another of her cadre swam through the rushing waves.
Beside the Aegis, the other two Godclads looked bloodied and beaten. Abrel was missing a leg, and her combat skin was flensed and bent in several places. It looked as if she took heavy ordinance directly to her chest. Avo could feel the Rend spewing out from the other member of cadre. Blood was leaking out from beneath their armpit, and it stained the water red.
Avo growled and shifted into his Galeslither. Better to evade right now than to engage. He wondered how all three made it out from Nu-Scarrowbur even with the Bloodthanes present. He wondered if the Bloodthanes were following after him as well.
Scooping Draus and Chambers into his currents as he dove toward the gate, he rushed through the dormant phase gate and swept into the room as an unnatural flood roared behind, sweeping abandoned luggage and concession drones aside.
Multiple mechanisms and gateways stood closed, but not vacuum sealed. He slipped through cracks and wafted past three different checkpoints before he finally arrived at a waiting station. Another thing that separated Light’s End from the lower Warrens: No elevators.
There wasn’t the need.
The lightrail of the hypertube was a chainlink of crystalline shards that ran twelve cars long for a total of five hundred feet. Geometries of light played across a canopy of crisscrossing beams focused through various lenses that plated the exterior of the tubing. From vicarities and taken memories, Avo recalled the locus to be at the front, and so thusly he rushed into the train.
Releasing Essus and Chambers as he arrived at the empty control nexus of the lightrail, a still locus rested around metallic rings and arm-like apparatuses that projected a grav-field to hold the mind-crystal in place.
Avo was about to connect to the locus when he suddenly froze, tendril an inch away from touching its structure. He had no idea how deep the Low Masters’ subversion of the local Nether ran. But if he lingered, he faced fatal odds.
Growling, he took the plunge and connected to the locus and dived. A simulated lobby began to boot and glitch behind his eyes. The world dissolved and immediately he felt his wards rattle. The first structures that manifested next to him were twisted in sequence and memory. From memory, most public system loci ran on simply palaces and lobbies. Bland, grey rooms with simple shapes and doorways for easy accessibility.
What he saw were mutations. Faces and traumas and fire and other places fissured around the empty expanse he was in. Mem-cons lined every sequence he could behold. If this place was a body, every sinew would be infected, and the bones would be rotten to the core. He was at the base of a tree and even the roots were trying to bite into him.
His Quicksand cracked slightly before it adjusted. The next few impacts broke against him as he surveyed extent of the affliction, trying to find the root phantasmics governing this place. The more he studied, the wider his insides chasmed.
Perhaps he could clean the locus out if he had eighty tons of mass accelerating his thoughts, but right now he had but a short window. Jacking out, he could hear a torrent of water crashing just outside.
He didn’t have the time. He needed some means of accessing the system fast and ignoring the mem-cons and traumas outright. Something to punch right through without destroying all the sequences. Maybe if there was someone expendable–he should have kept that Exorcist with–
Avo paused. He snapped around, eyes fixed on Chambers.
“Mem-cons,” he said, inspiration striking him. “Expendable. Durable.” He grinned.
Chambers took a step back, lip quivering. “Consang, please–”
Avo stung the man’s mind with a thread of blood and fused it to the locus. Chambers cried out in surprise as he toppled back onto a flower-petaled seat blooming with foam cushions. Error codes burst in front of him as a holoprojector failed to receive any resources from the locus.
“Start the train.” Avo said, hoping that his gambit would work.
“Just… just start the train?”
Water slouched close. Something unbolted outside. “Now,” Avo growled.
Chambers whimpered and his face scrunched with concentration. A current of ghosts flowed through the link. In the nexus, the locus rose and began to gleam. Suddenly, the doors all snapped shut as an upbeat tune began to play. The exterior walls along the train depolarized and the outside world turned transparent.
A flood of water smashed into the lightrail. Just as the train thrummed. Light speared down from the various lenses placed across the room. Light peeled away the outer skin of the train as the exterior world suddenly turned into a pale stream. Only a whine gave away the fact that they were traveling. The train didn’t shake, didn’t bounce, didn’t even groan upon metal plates.
Being injected across a concentrated beam of light did not have anything to do with sound, after all.
+Welcome aboard Line Thirteen of the Easterly light expanse. Please ensure all thaumic devices are switched off. Affecting the domains of Light and Space are strictly prohibited–+
A chuckle came from Chambers. He pointed to his link. “I… I did it! I fuckin’ did it!” He threw his hands up and his coat opened. He exposed himself to the group as he let out an incoherent shout of triumph. “Fuck yeah! Whose the best half-strand in–”
A loud crack rattled from the back of the train car. Past countless light-dappled doorways separating each shard, a figure crawled out from a puddle of water, and behind them followed another.
WARNING: HIGH REND SIGNATURE DETECTED
WARNING: HIGH REND SIGNATURE DETECTED
Rising from pools of water, Abrel Greatling emerged from the shallow film of water like it was a deep pool. She planted bare leg roped with wired muscle–just regrown from the regenerative properties of the midnight rains. A single member of her cadre followed her, coughing as he tore his cracked helmet free from his head.
His skin was copper while his eyes shone pale blue. He lacked an inch of height next to Abrel, but his bulk more than enshadowed hers. Basked in the light of the traveling train, the Greatling collapsed her own helmet. For a heartbeat, she stood there, eyes bloodshot, face contorted in palpable fury. Her lips peeled back as she bared her perfect teeth. An inhuman noise of primal hatred escaped from her.
She let out a breath.
She took a step forward.
Behind, her only accompanying ally followed.
Avo let his Echoheads rattle and growled. Fine. Two. He could deal with two. He still had his Heaven. He still had his ghosts. He still had Draus. He cast out a tendril of blood and connected to her. +Going to draw their attention. Shoot them when I–+
She strode next to him and flexed her wings. +We rupture the inside of the train and we all die. I know how it works.+
Avo paused. +So. We do this the ugly way.+
He felt her narrowed gaze glance up at him through her helmet. +You tryin’ to sound disappointed?+
He grunted a laugh. +No.+ Abrel Greatlings footsteps rose to an uneven sprint. He walked out to meet her. +Looks like I’m going to get to taste more Guilder flesh after all.+
