Godclads

Chapter 8-16 Thousandhand

“Don’t engage.”

“But–”

“You spoil the only fun the old woman has for months, and she'll kick the shit out of you. Thousandhand’s been talking about cutting these Hungers for a fuck-long time. Let her play. We’ll move in if she needs it.”

“Her Frame… It’s just a Sixth Sphere…”

“Yeah. Like she’s going to need it.”

8-16

Thousandhand

It was hard to describe a cut so pure it inflicted a groove of hurt deeper than the pain of flesh.

The slash cut him out of reality, the edge of the blade painting a stroke of thought-cleaving agony down to the root of his being. His cog-feed flickered, an indelible line marring the forms of his ghosts, his thoughts splitting into disjointed streams.

A horse-head came loose from his Galeslither, the manifestation of his Heaven partially decapitated, form unspooling from thaumaturgy as his Hell screamed.

REND CAPACITY: 100%

WARNING: BACKLASH

CLASHING CANON

[SPACE]: YONDERGALES

VENT! VENT! VENT!

The flood of Rend came sudden and stark, with his Galeslither’s Third Circle struggling to compensate for the backlash. Something had contradicted one of his canons, and gutted his Yondergales open.

Rolling tides of stratocumulus spilled out through the wound, washing into the world outside as Avo shed the form of the Galeslither. The cessation of the billowing tempest was instant, the Galeslither itself a storm that never was.

Avo plunged, his path taking him through a fissure open upon the tapestr of existence. The streets of Xin Yunsha flashed by his eyes and through fogs he fell. Echoheads spearing down to stabilize his descent. The world slowed, and him along with it. His tails hung in the air, falling slowly like they were digging through quicksand, his body drawn taut by an unseen force, time itself feeling like a viscous fluid.

A reflexive urge to struggle wrestled a precious moment away before Avo mastered himself. He cast out his Whisper and–to his relief–found that his thoughts flowed unimpeded.

Splashing his surroundings with a narrow beam of perception, he reoriented himself as the pain receded from his senses, his mortal flesh uncleaved, but his Galeslither winced as it bled the venom of entropy down into the funnel of its Hell.

The ground he struck was not plascrete but metal. Metal rusted and piled. Metal protruded from the soil, like new teeth pushing through gums, or soil, ripe to bear strange fruit.

The world around him was shaped in a loop? Avo did a double take as he felt his own perception echo back upon his form.

Suddenly, the resistance melted away. Avo breathed. Avo moved.

His Echoheads split steel and sank deeper into the unnatural soil. Beneath vines enmeshed with plant matter and wiring both, he studied the world around him, head swiveling, tails chittering.

The total area of this plane felt no greater than fifty square feet, but it folded in on itself, a geometrical construct of limited perpetuity.

Above, strange mists caused more vines to sway. Budding bullets rain down in soft falls of gauss flechettes and flathead slugs, spilling free like ripe seeds.

Columns rose around him, part oak, park weapon stand, their sides slotted with jutting blades, maces, spears, guns, and axes, acting as spines to this garden of weapons. They grew high like beanstalk-armories reaching into the sky, spinning like a spiral as the permutation of armaments churned and changed.

“This is a nice garden, yes? I cultivated it myself.”

The woman before him simply appeared. There was no emergence, no movement preceding her arrival. She wasn’t. And then she was.

Taken aback by the woman’s sudden manifestation, Avo fired his Celerostylus and made to move back. The lurch of time followed, but impossibly, the world around him readjusted itself. The mist spilled faster, going from a drizzle to a hailstorm of flechettes. His Soul rang with warning klaxons inside him, the Woundshaper bubbling in anticipation of bloodshed.

TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED

With the world around him racing to keep pace with his heightened reflexes, the effects of his surging synapses grew nullified. Discontent roiled in Avo’s heart as he snarled; the deprivation of his new gift gnawed at him, feeling as if the edge of a new blade made dull.

The crossing of time relaxed as he quelled his reflexes, and with the flattening of his perception, so too did the flow of time in this garden equalize.

If there was but one consolation, however, it was that his adversary did not attack, finding contentment in looking upon him instead, her right hand resting on a hilt bereft of a blade.

Even before he had a chance to take in her features, something about her made the beast within cringe with alarm. If Draus made the beast quaver, the woman before it made it wilt. She stood no titan of stature nor did her form bear any disfiguring cybernetics. Her height reached a scarce six feet at most and her musculature was exemplified by threads of nanocarbide, with pellucid edges of crystal forming an additional superstructure around joints and spine.

Her face was windowed by a transparent visor, her skin aged but not brittle, wrinkles blending with battle scars. Her hazel eyes then were like embedded gems, the only thing of pure beauty upon a war-painted visage. If he were to weave her presence into an analogy, he would liken her to a gnarled tree that just wouldn’t die, and held her pride high upon her flaring brows of aged gray.

It was that which dwelt beyond her flesh that made him stay his hand the most. Her Metamind was a fortress of pure hubris, her wards a dance of blades in an endless pirouette with no walls behind. Her mind was built like a taunt, and her Soul burned bright. Brighter than any he’d been basked in.

WARNING: FOREIGN SOUL DETECTED

UNIDENTIFIED GODCLAD DETECTED

CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE VI [EST. 100004 THAUM/C]

A Sphere Six Godclad. A Sphere Six standing across from him, this place her plane, his cage.

Avo’s mind raced. Where did she even come from? He hadn’t felt her presence at all. She just… suddenly was.

She swept him with her gaze and sighed, grading him with a rueful note. “Well, my new friend. You seem to be no dragon. Or ghost for that matter. I struck thinking I was to rid myself of an old annoyance but here I am, no dragons split, no priests silenced. Instead, I find myself faced with… Who are you, Fallwalker? I’m not sure I’ve seen someone turn themselves into a bioform before but… who I am to judge the whims of the youth these days. Change is expression.” She laughed. “Change is preferable.”

Avo said nothing, his intent less on talk and more on understanding his opposition. The beast instead screamed for him to attack, but his better senses enchained his rageful hubris with control. Whoever she was, he assumed she was the one that split his Heaven. Cleaved him out from his divine avatar.

To throw himself at her with reckless disregard would be folly most fatal.

He needed an angle of attack she wouldn’t see coming. He needed an edge.

“Master… I… I feel… I think I have encountered her before.” It was strange, tasting the fear of a god. The architecture of such its bleeding emotion matched the human conception of dread; dread in the sense of losing one’s agency, in being twisted from form. “I do not… cannot remember…”

Gods don’t understand death, and will never truly know it. But everyone could fear being changed without their own choosing, for if one cannot be the master of their own actions, then how much of an ego was left to mantle the vessel?

Her fingers clicked a steady drumbeat on the hilt of her unseen sword, its design strange, with a nub-like pommel hosting a microlocus, self-adjusting smart-matter grip, and a crossguard of solid ebony. “Is your silence a matter of reluctance, impudence, or incomprehension?”

His mind raced. Casting his Whisper out, he examined her mind again and zeroed in on her weaknesses. He had never seen anyone using wards like hers, but their design left too many gaps. Even as they talked, they were building new memories with each other. Memories that could be obfuscated. Confused.

Subtly, Avo reeled his Whisper back inside before casting out from behind him again, shuttling it along the loop and focusing his perception in a beam from over her shoulder. He stared upon himself, trying to best mimic her perspective; such would allow him to infiltrate her minds using symmetrical memories, and avoid the risk of facing the blades of her mind, however she was to wield them.

Right then, he just needed to bide his time.

“Host should tell their name first,” Avo said. “Impolite otherwise.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “Impudence, then. Hubris. Hubris is a good quality for a young Godclad to have. It will teach you much. If you survive.” The wryness of her expression took on a near-girlish quality. “Ah. You remind me much of my sister in a strange way.”

“How is she?”

“Hm?”

“Your sister,” Avo asked. He worked to keep his Whisper a bit further away from her, using his perception more as a scope than a broad lens. The spoofed memory would be ruined if she was part of the picture.

Her wryness turned to nostalgia, her expression lost in the reverie of memories. “Oh, she's dead now. Been dead for some four hundred years. I killed her. For my husband.” She shrugged with a smile. “I loved my dear sister, but she was too much like my father: zealots of yesteryear, so happy to be a slave. But brave. Reserved in a charming kind of way.”

She sighed, letting the memories go. She stroked the hilt of her blade with her fingers, the gleam in her eyes unknowable to Avo.

“Apologies. I forgot what you asked of me. I am Zein O’yaje. A disciple of many arts, but my heart–” She flicked her hilt up and suddenly, volume itself seemed to quaver into the form of a shivering blade. As the edges fused into shape, it filled with a crystalline fluidity, its shivering waters bearing a pellucid transparency that parted light itself into dappled fractals upon passage. “--has always belonged to that which cuts.”

She looked upon her weapon with the eyes one would reserve for a lover, the affection in her gaze poignant and unashamed.

So distracted Avo was by the woman’s eccentricities that her name resounded in him a beat later, his alarm gushing out from him like blood seeping after a withdrawn blade. “Thousandhand? Zein Thousandhand?”

Collapsing her blade back into a flowing shawl, she held up both her arms and studied them, putting on a play of deepest focus. “No… just two, really. The title is exaggerated.” Her eyes slide off him. “Mostly exaggerated.”

Avo blinked.

“It is your turn,” she said. “What should I refer to you as, consang? I must confess: I am not a patient woman. Age has made my fuse short, and my schedule is ever-so-filled. Speak with your mouth, or…’

She gave him a small bow as she gestured to her sword. “I am always willing to exchange martial knowledge with another if that is your preferred method of conversation.”

The Woundshaper shivered. “Master, avoid facing her directly… She… she has done something to me before… I feel it… I cannot remember…”

Another few seconds. Another few seconds and he would have enough length of memory to attempt circumspect interfacing with her mind. Or so he hoped.

“Just a Fallwalker,” Avo said, keeping his words vague. “Was just–”

“Lying,” Zein said. She tutted. “It’s not a very good lie, mind you. I trap you in the fissure upon detecting your Soul, my Frame noticing yours. A blastwave of phantasmal shrapnel fills the air behind you, and I said previously that I was hunting dragons. Priests. No surprise from you. I assume you to know the Hungers. A better lie, then, could be to say that you were having dealings with an unknown party. Vague enough to serve you, and it would also help you draw out this conversation some more.”

She smiled. “That is what you are trying to do, isn’t it? Keep me talki–”

Avo fired his Celerostylus again. Time slowed within and accelerated without, but in the instant of his initiative, he reached out into the near waters of her thoughtstuff, Ghostjack flashing as he cast out a chain of obfuscated memories, fishing for symmetry. The moment came fast, just as time tore his advantage away. Masked by her gaze, the memories connected as he sank deep into her mind, his focus diving between

INITIATING META-DIVE…

Slipping past the gargantuan blades that uncannily resembled the hulls of certain voidships, Avo gazed upon her palace and immediately froze. Her internal mem-data shifted and changed at a catastrophic rate, her ghosts moving as if they were streaks of lightning, the engine of her mind a phantasmal construct of pure speed.

Without his Celerostylus slowing things, he could–

+Remarkable,+ Zein’s voice came again, her mind ebbing with genuine amusement. +You managed to smuggle yourself into my mind. Quite the skilled Necro, aren’t we.+

Avo froze. His blood stilled. Her awareness remained at zero in her cog-feed, so how–

“It’s a good trick,” Zein said, this time in the real, her expression as if suddenly realizing something. “Both yours and mine. You play perception from angles, but I wield it by using the question: when? Still, I commend your skill. It takes quite the Necrojack to slip past my focus.” She nodded. “I think Walton would quite be proud of you, Avo.”

Suddenly, Avo felt something slip free from his mind. Incredulous, he turned to realize that not only had she used her influence over time to… notice his intrusion somehow, but her Specter was also hovering above, its perception beaming over his shoulder.

Suddenly, her hand was on his shoulder. She moved. When did she move? He didn’t even notice—didn’t even feel it.

“Don’t be bothered,” she said, shaking him, “you’re quite good. I simply stole the technique from you. By gazing back into the past. The pace of our minds however… ah, a trifling thing. You show great promise.”

“Promise?” Avo said, setbacks sending him into a stupor.

“Quite so,” Zein said. Then she was back where she stood. She didn’t walk. She didn’t move. She just was.

“Master,” he heard his Woundshaper whisper. “I think… I think she is skipping across time. Jumping forward.”

Avo sighed. Of course, that was a Heaven someone had. Time. A Heaven of Time with a canon of… skimming?

“Come,” she said, rolling her shoulders, “I wish to see what else you are capable of. But before that…”

She snapped her finger and suddenly, a large cylindrical mechanism appeared next to him. It was an ugly industrial orange piston, looking far too rusted for use. Groaning, it began to topple.

“For the Rend,” Zein said.

Avo understood. Expanding a sphere of stasis, the winds caught the falling block and the weight hinged itself along the bubble’s surface, draining his Rend.

REND CAPACITY: 97%

“Now, what–” Avo’s words died in his throat. Geometry around Zein shivered. He felt the blows like a series of bombs going off against his fungal-ceramite plating, her palm blurring into countless thrusts, resounding thunderclaps shivering his very blood.

Yet, no pain followed the impact. No wounds. Only a faint ringing, and a tingling numbness.

Avo tried to move his arms, tried to claw at Zein. Only… his arms didn’t answer him. He stayed upright through the strength of his Echoheads alone.

His Echoheads.

He swept one down at her–a predictable attack meant to provoke action. She vanished. His Echohead halted and chittered, filling the world around him with static waves. She rematerialized by his side, already in motion to deliver another blow. She found herself greeted by the snapping extensions of another of his tails.

In his tactile sense, he felt her halt as the blow struck her dead out. The air crackled. She shuddered. Avo growled, wheezing with nerve-deaded laughter as Zein toppled.

And turned.

An impossible force seized him by the speartip of his Echohead and tore him high. It was only by merit of his other tails rooting deeper into the ground that he wasn’t sent tumbling into the air, but merely off balance.

Off balancing into another rising palm.

This time, the impact plumed in a shockwave out from his back. Air emptied itself from Avo as he felt both his kidneys melt into nothingness. Spots formed in his vision. Above, he heard the rainfall stop momentarily.

Then, the ground rushed up to hit him, his Echoheads now twitching uselessly as well.

“The In-Seers of Sanctus called this technique ‘Ringing the Spirit,” Zein explained. Avo made noise comparable to a constipated nu-dog. “Not quite so effective on a ghoul considering the biological redundancies you possess. The… tentacles are a nice touch. Two-structure biology. It is always good to be prepared.”

It was a special kind of miserable to be praised and lectured while one was pawing at handfuls of dirt and metal.

“Do you have Walton’s Helix?” Zein asked. “I wanted to ask earlier but I decided to hit you first instead.”

Avo coughed a vague affirmation.

“Splendid. He wanted you to have it. He was always very proud of you–spoke highly of you. I think I see why…” Her voice trailed off. With a nudge, she rolled him over on his side and had him look up at her.

As shards of tungsten fell forth from the sky, Zein nodded down at him, fingers tapping her blade contemplatively. “Yes.”

“Ye-yes?” Avo asked.

“I think I will take you as my apprentice. Should you accept, of course. You will be the first in many–eh–days. You should feel proud.”

“Feels like… my insides are shaking.”

Zein frowned faux seriously. “What an odd sensation of pride you feel, young one. Come. Up. Up. Your foresight deals you justice. Your striking however… can be improved! Stand quickly. I wish to show you something.”

Mind spinning from the constant left turns the old woman foisted on him, Avo worked to get his Echoheads under control first. “Is it another beating?”

“Of course not,” Zein said, lying badly, grinning broadly.