Godclads

Chapter 7-11 Feed the Beast (IV)

+Auspine? Auspine?

Yeah–yeah! I’m trying to get to her too, half-strand, calm the fuck down!

What do you mean you think her ghost is missing?

If she got nulled or snuffed, we’d be getting alarm bells now. Thoughtcasts calling for backup or something. But there’s nothing on the drone perimeter, so doubt they’re in the shit. Might be just bad N-lag…

Send a knot down to patrol anyway. It’s probably nothing but—

Wait, something’s wrong with the lobby. The traffic’s disappearing…

Hells with it. I’m casting in. Give me a secon–

[SESSION LOST]+

-Intercepted thoughtcast of Kendrin Carlwin, Scalper Operational Dispatch

Feed the Beast (IV)

+Avo! Avo! What the hells are you doing?+

Concomitant to his intrusion of the locus, a spike of alarm followed, the harshness of Draus’ thoughts. Her outrage was unexpected, but ultimately impotent on her end.

+Making new problems.+

He possessed both the ability to create and choice to inflict such a reprisal upon the spectators. Mayhaps there was a bit of envy in her as well: she could but slaughter the symptoms in her time, butchering hunters and extracting survivors.

Her actions, though commendable by standards of virtue, meant little to stymie the cultural contagion of atrocity fueling these depths.

The topsiders were drunk on entertainment. Drunk on slaughter. Drunk on death.

She wasn’t hitting the right people. She was hitting their parasites–the Syndicates easily replaceable material, profit-seeking fresh meat that desired, for once, to be the ones delivering abuse.

Across the session, he heard Draus muttering curses under her breath. Her frustration came mixed with a flustered tone repeating statements in the back of her mind. She was trying to put together something Kae was asking. +Avo, listen to me–+

+Opportunity, Draus,+ Avo said. Delight bloomed from flower to garden within him as the act called to him. With his Heavens, he now possessed the capacity to inflict mortal harm to all Crucibles.

How total could one’s retribution be?

+They watched us. Slithered under my skin. Enjoyed me killing. Enjoyed me dying.+ He paused as a shadow of Essus nagged. A pang of disappointment accompanied the reminder of the man. +They killed the boy. Others. Essus. He was weak. But… survived. Deserved better.+

Avo paused. Even departing from the being that he once was, some beliefs remained unshed.

The father was easy to hurt. Easy to prey upon. The same reality lingered on the boy as well.

But they did all they could. They struggled. They almost survived–would’ve, if not for Little Vicious succumbing to spite, fulfilling her sadism.

A new epiphany came ablaze within Avo. The hunger he once felt for the father was a fading candle now. The beast noted him as a nu-tiger would a rodent: barely worth chewing. The father was only guilty of being a fool.

+He earned better,+ Avo finished.

A beat came from the other side. A faint symmetry of understanding manifested in Draus’ mind. +It ain’t about that. It ain’t about justified or not. I don’t give a godsdamned shit about the voyeurs.+ She paused. +Jaus knows I hoped for the Tiers to burn more than once. But if you do this… You attack the FATED, we’re not gonna be playin’ with easy prey no more, sync? The Guilds are gonna bring the hammer down on this Sovereignty so hard that the Syndicates’ll get two choices. Disappear; be disappeared. And then they’ll start digging around for us.+

And she thought such a thing was going to dissuade him? Avo hissed out a low laugh. +Good. Smash the board. Ruin the game.+

+That what this is? Tryin’ to throw off Ninth Column… whoever the fuck else tuggin’ strings too?+

Avo smiled. +Easy opening. I’m going to leave a ghost. Conflux ghost. Have it bleed over into the root. More pressure on Mirrorhead. More chaos to reinsert Chambers and have him deliver false intelligence during infiltration. Force Mirrorhead to make bad choices.+

Draus considered his thoughts as a dull, but undeniable thrill grew within her.

The Woundshaper chimed within him, its tone a melody of glee. “She is of a want with us. She fights with paltry denial, but truth made nude, she wishes to see the fire spread, just as we. For what else can be worthy fruit to a lifetime of embattled labor in these ravaged narrows?+

A note of pure discomfort slid out from Draus mind, sounding akin to a jagged blade catching along a chalk scabbard. His actions made her wary. They made her anxious. They made her excited. Strange sounds came from a strange cocktail of emotions.+You’re just gonna do this. Don’t matter what I say, does it?+

+Choice is mine.+ Avo said. +Maybe you could have convinced me if they taught argumentation to you. Rhetoric.+ He mockingly clicked his fangs together.

+Half-strand. You keep whatever you doing clean. And we pull the fuck out right after.+ He could feel her shaking her head. +This shithole is going to be louder than a nest of artnids diggin’ through a corpse. I’m gonna need to make a cast at River.+

+I’m going to Burner’s Way after,+ Avo said. +Scalpers will come down. Distracted. More reprisals against Conflux. Fewer eyes on their perimeter. I’ll get Rendsinks. Get new Heaven. Keep session going. Will need to talk with Kae later.+

She said something right after but he listened to little of it. The bulk of his focus was recommitted to seeing the lobby perverted to a new purpose.

With three Necros on location, the complexity of wards protecting the locus could charitably be described as minimal. A single layer of rippling waves greeted his cog-feed as he studied it. Looked like an Omnitech pattern he was familiar with: the Signet Flowshield. Effective at withstanding a mass of brute force trauma, but less apt in responding to slow blades, tailor-made to pierce the veil.

The concepts of memories parallel and opposition applied. Obvious traumas would crack against the protections with minimal effect, making Secondhand Fatality and his other standard Ghostjack functions less useful.

Given some hours of scrying and shifting through sequences, he could have made the perfect toxin to bypass hardened flesh.

Ultimately, however, such things were unnecessary. He had the ghosts of the three Necros, and filtered through the recollections he captured and retrieve the mem-codes.

It took less than a minute for him to pull the necessary sequence to interface with the locus. As he cast the phantasmal keystone into the waters of the lobby, the twisting waves laced with screaming faces parted to expose the depths of mem-data that flowed beneath.

GHOST-LINK ESTABLISHED

LOBBY - NS-14

Active Visitors - [296,034]

Gazing up at the Specters swirling around the locus like a flock of birds, he tasted their growing impatience and ignorance. They remained bound in the inner depths of the lobby, playing new mem-sims with one another to pass the time.

More were flowing in, the number of attendees spiking upward by an average of ten thousand per minute.

“Blind fools, they,” the Woundshaper said. “It is an ill thing to tread upon foundations one has not ascertained. To entrust one’s faith in apathy and ignorance is to court my contempt. They disgust me, master. Know that you dispense great justice.”

Its words made Avo chuckle. “You don’t care about justice. Just want to see them break.”

“You fling contrary words at misunderstood semantics, master. Justice is valued within me, but you conflate its meaning with virtue. Do you think me a gluttonous savage? A beast of avarice like that feeble thing that quivers beneath your veins?”

The beast snarled, confused at where the offense was coming from. To its feeble mind, it was as if the blood coursing within had taunted it.

“Indeed, we wish to grow. But you wish to ascend. I hear it in you. The desire for the change. The metamorphosis from failed monsters to predator proper. So true do my desires ring. The fire grows to feed what we wish to see. Dominance and freedom for you. And the power to give rise to living cities and birth crimson arsenals for me. Why else ascend? Why else dream?”

He fed the inner structure with Secondhand Fatality, subverting the internal sequences of mem-data with chains of pure trauma. Chains that all the visitors would have to pass along should they wish to enter the premises and lay gaze upon the show.

Given more time, he could have made a mem-con to spread the devastation even further. Such a thing would infest even the Tiers with substantial damage. But it would also draw deeper attention to his methods.

And he didn’t need a team of Incubi hunting for him. Such a fight was beyond his current readiness.

Besides, this slaughter was his gift to the voyeurs. Those that lay beyond concerned him little for now.

With a simple thought, he shed a ghost loose into the root functions of the lobby. One that bore the memories of a Conflux enforcer, once it was discovered.

Ghosts: [297]

For a second, Avo waited, savoring the stroke of brutality he was about to inflict.

The sound of encroaching boots thundered from the outside as a marker moved across his cog-feed. One of the tags Draus had left on a Scalper fireteam was approaching, no doubt to check why the local Necros had gone silent after the sudden storm that engulfed the insides of the theatre.

They approached ten in number, with the sounds of an additional drone as support.

It wouldn’t help them.

Looking up, Avo cast his Whisper through the ceiling to stare at the thin cracks of light pouring through the fissures between the plates of Layer One.

The precipice of morality was behind this city; above it. It loomed as a cliff New Vultun had long fallen from before even the ghouls and Syndicates, let alone his new and coming transgression.

He felt no weight for the impeding deed for there was no weight to be felt. The watchers on the Tiers lived such indolent lives of succor, fattening themselves in a purgatory they regarded as paradise. A prize for second place, living in the neat slave kennels at the bases of each Guild’s respective Elysiums.

But there was a cost to living like dogs, and that was the fact that sometimes, you end up dying for a war you never even knew existed.

Something that Avo had only recently learned himself.

He injected a new thought. He changed a binary function within the lobby. Access for visitors went from restricted, to open.

And in the passage of seconds, as a torrent of users made to travel down the pathways of corrupted memory, thousands shredded away into echoing screams of mental shrapnel, their vestiges slashing through the inside of the lobby like cascading bombs.

Before his eyes, a vast tear opened up as the crystalline facets of the spinning locus overheated and cracked, and beyond the gaze of natural eyes, he watched as mangled Specters oozed through the wounds.

From the ruinous chasm came a symphony–sweet, sweet percussion with a choir of mind-breaking howls. Again, music flowed through the theatre, strummed free from nulled ghosts that once cupped the minds of lecherous watchers.

With the cage broken, an eruption of phantasmal errors plumed outward, engulfing the unseen sky above base reality, the seas of the local Nether cast into tsunamis of turmoil.

Crackling gasps snapped in the back of his mind as Draus’ words were choked down to packets, carried over only by the pseudo-quantum delivery functions of their shared session. +Jaus. I see it… see it from here.+

A faint warmth of pleasure passed through Avo. Would Walton be offended of this feat of Necrotheugic terrorism? Would the Low Masters rejoice at the harm he inflicted on the topsiders? How absurd that the dreams of his owners could only come to fruition through his emancipation.

Perhaps, then, that was what the node had wanted. Another deviation. This time, to see what their beloved ghoulling could inflict if finally unchained.

The Scalper fireteam was approaching, their signatures eighty feet away, just outside the walls. They didn’t matter. They were just lambs charging a lion. Fuel and little more for the burn within him.

Pulling his eyes away from the growing constellation of nulled ghosts, Avo drew upon his Heaven once more.

With a stride, he peeled out of the material world, flesh turning to torrents of howling air. The winds he became twirled into small vortexes and fused into a triple-headed steed. Upward, he smashed through the broken dome above, the force of his ascent lifting mangled remains and unbolted objects.

His rise came dichotomous to the spewing cataclysm of thoughtstuff bleeding into the Nether: twin omens that the fireteam should have heeded.

Below, he saw the Scalpers take loose formations, unprepared for his falling. Through his Whisper, he saw their kit and angled his approach.

All were enforcers. All came clad in battle-worn rigs. The true danger were the breachers–of which there were two–and the fusion burners they had attached to their arms. Of what little threat this group possessed, they held a majority stake.

Quelling his Heaven momentarily, Avo sailed back into his mortal form, calling upon the eldritch workings of his Hell for the first time.

With a thought, the winds around the Scalpers beneath him twisted and blossomed into an inverted vortex. Spreading in broken fractals given shape by torquing currents of air, the two breachers of the group were immediately rooted to place. Submerged in a spatial stasis, they strained, voices barking expletives distorted by static.

REND CAPACITY: 28%

The Rend percentage dipped in Avo’s cog-feed. To see it undone, the other Scalpers would need to fire into the bubble to feed the Hell the momentum it hungered for lest they leave the breachers in for a long stay.

Unfortunate that none of them knew how his Hell worked. Or would even survive long enough to find out.

The fireteam was spread along the exterior of the theatre’s walls, in position to cut their way in by firing through the walls. Behind them, the floor extended for sixty feet before it met the railing, and beyond that, a forty-foot drop to the deck below.

Reflexes surging, Avo checked his DeepNav for the other fireteams. They were spread out across the complex, too far to be of immediate assistance unless they just started blind firing in his direction using the thoughtstuff of their fellows as a mem-lock.

Good. That gave him opportunities to experiment.

Rendered languid by his accelerated senses, Avo resheathed himself into the vessel of his wind-striding steed and crashed down upon the Scalpers in a tide of force.

The drone accompanying them was chained by Ghost-Link to one of their number–a necessity now that all the jocks were dead. It fired upon his last known position with twin barrels. A leak of knowledge flowed over from Draus as she recognized the weapon platform: a Hammerdog Chainsaw, with Hammerdog being an arms and armor subsidiary under Highflame.

This particular drone was a hundred and fifty years past obsolescence, but its twin twenty-five-millimeter autocannons fired all the same. Tickling his aero-natural skin, Avo tasted the rounds. Hard slugs with explosive payloads.

Each shot would have made pulp of a ghoul.

The winds around the drone opened. He tugged into the Yondergales, its guns still firing, barrels a hot weight against his mind. With his Whisper as an eye–the fin of a shark beneath waves of wind–Avo diverted all ghosts to his Ghostjack and wards.

The Scalpers didn’t seem to have a combat Necro, but Incogs always put “seem” into doubt.

A lash of traumas crackled forth through his Whisper. The enforcer connected to the Chainsaw cried out. Their wards fractured. Their Ghost-Link overloaded. The drone stopped firing, and tumbled away, resetting to auto.

Still, though, the Scalper’s mind had held. Impressive. Avo marked him for sequence review later, once he was dead.

Accessing the now vulnerable locus of the drone, Avo cackled and the storm-wreathed faces of his steed spread into cruel rictuses. A new system booted in the back of his mind as mem-data flowed.

Without hesistation, he let open a passage to the Youndergales again and shoved the drone out with a helping gust.

This time, its guns were pointed the right way.