Godclads

Chapter 9-12 The Beast Unseen

So… so, the Twice-Walker is a very specialized Heaven. A very–uh–very specialized design. I think it was made… made by Highflame j-just recently. Just before the beginning of the Fourth Guild War.

It’s designation is between Porter and Breaker. It’s actually not… not a Heaven of Glass, but–but glass is one of its domains. It’s actually a Hea

So… so, the Twice-Walker is a very specialized Heaven. A very–uh–very specialized design. I think it was made… made by Highflame j-just recently. Just before the beginning of the Fourth Guild War.

It's designation is between Porter and Breaker. It's actually not… not a Heaven of Glass, but–but glass is one of its domains. It's actually a Heaven of Reflection, with Domains of Radiance, Space, Glass, and Reflection all working in tan-tandem.

It's… it's been rated for Sphere Four Frames and above. Very vulgar but… but quite effective… and elusive too.

But… but there are countermeasures. The Domain of Space is… is always vulnerable to Backlash.

I'll see… see if I can–uh–come up with something to… to affect it.

-Kae Kusande to Jelene Draus

9-12

+He’s in.+ Avo ran his tongue across his fangs. +He’s mine.+

+Don’t get all high on yourself,+ Draus cautioned. +You ain’t got him yet.+

But Avo did. And he knew from the very moment Mirrorhead wandered in, barging through the memories without preparation or caution. Even in the realm of the mind, the scion of the Greatlings thought himself above reproach, that the power of his Heaven could somehow protect him here.

Not so, poor Guilder. Not so.

These wilds belonged to beasts of a different make, and here, even titans could be made prey.

Mirrorhead sailed across memories, his review of the mem-data peripheral at best, perception setting a course across memory, but the waters he charted were but the shallows. Sloppily, he left matters of protection entirely to his wards.

Ah. The Phalanx pattern. Avo was familiar with the phantasmic. Twenty layers of checkpoints lined with oscillating traumas, each portioning Mirrorhead’s consciousness from surface to deepest, segregating his thoughts into manageable districts. Not only content to serve as multiple blockades, the phantasmal protections moved, each shuffling over the other like a cycle of ever-escalating tides.

It spoke volumes of the Syndicate boss’ ego that he was using wards usually meant for Highflame’s forward-operating demiplanes or administrative command fortresses.

To be caught within the stacked defenses would shatter an Osarai Memguard within seconds.

Avo’s wards were ample, but he had tuned them for versatility and mind-diving, not raw combat. Should he find himself discovered, there was little doubt regarding the threat the Phalanx posed.

But Necrojacking was so rarely about force on force. No. More often, there were two duels in play: the first a tale of awareness, to detect your foe from the forest of memories; the second, a clash of two bodies of water, each seeking to dilute and subvert the other.

With how Mirrorhead operated–flooding Chambers’ mind with over ten thousand ghosts–he saw himself as impregnable. Overwhelming. How very Highflame.

Shrouded behind a beltway of twenty orbiting mass graves filled with writhing bodies set ablaze, Mirrorhead approached as the nucleus of a star system, the rings around it sliding across each other like a deck of cards. To amateurs, it would be a staggering sight, the show of force overwhelming like a tsunami, an avalanche. Even Chambers’ memory shivered against the immensity of foreign ghosts marching through him.

Avo, however, found himself delighted. More and more he had the measure of his foe. He had experimented with his implants and Heavens in preparation for this. Tested how his new enhancements might play with his Necrojacking.

Today, he would honor Mirrorhead as his first official mark.

Channels of mem-data spilled down from Mirrorhead’s invading Mind-Palace, dipping down and rifling through Chambers’ sequences. The Guilder operated with breadth but no depth. He would sweep the mind clean in moments, but the details would evade his notice, left only to the automatic functions of his ghosts.

And so, Avo accessed the functions of the hive and sent out a command. He felt Draus’ notice drift over.

+Acknowledged,+ the hive said. +Beginning transfer. Expending biomass to keep hosts alive.+ A new interface popped up in his mind. Circuits formed in the structure of the void ship, each channel connected to the countless Helios embedded in the cloning pool. Needles pierced their skins. Blood was drawn. The biomass of the pool dipped, but in its place, coursed countless mingling streams of crimson, blood flowing into a newly shaped compartment formed just below the nexus.

Beneath Avo’s feet, he felt two pinches. It wouldn’t be long now. He had been yearning for a chance to use this.

+What’s this?+ Draus asked. +You gonna use your Heaven?+

+Yes,+ Avo said. Grinning. +Wait. Watch.+

As blood was drawn, he deposited himself in the form of a Scalper, injecting his mind deeper into a sequence, within a false series of memories he placed within Chambers.

A false recollection was structured: five Scalper enforcers abreaking through the G-Tube capsule with the help of two drones. Through physical violence alone, they brought Chambers and the techs down. Believable harm was painted onto each member of Conflux via memory artifacts taken after Draus’ “conversation'' with Chambers. As such, they all looked distinctively wounded enough to fool the unfocused eye.

All except for one deliberate detail: Chambers was wearing the wrong rig: the Nightmantis. This, among countless other small mistakes, was sprinkled through Chambers’ sequences. Obvious errors incremented into the sequences designed to pull–and halt–the attention of Mirrorhead’s sweeping ghosts.

Stashed with mem-cons, viruses, and other observational phantasmics, Avo had turned the former enforcer’s mind into a pseudo-labyrinth of his own design.

He didn’t expect his traps to overwhelm his prey’s defenses. He just needed Mirrorhead to linger in place long enough for his Ghostjack to twin enough symmetry for him to spoof his way into Mirrorhead’s defenses.

Before, this would have been an operation that took months. Pluck pieces of intelligence and piece them together. Planting Specters and other phantasmics within subverted loci.

The hive chimed with a note of completion.

BIOMASS: 42%

80 TONS OF [O-NEGATIVE] HAEMO-TEMPLATE PRODUCED

Avo reached out through the ports threaded into his leg, constructing an expansion of haemokinetic roots. Like a spill of brambles, his influence reached out as a swelling briar, subsuming the pond of blood contained below him with his control.

“Ah,” the Woundshaper, “We are to indulge in celerity again, are we master?”

“Yeah.”

His mind came alive with an eruption of lightning–his already Heaven-boosted reflexes evolving into an all-consuming thunderstorm as he fired his Celerostylus right after. Draus, fast as she was with her Accelero, was not amped by a Heaven. A dilation grew between them, the ghost connecting their wavelength crackling from the stain of building lag.

It didn’t matter. She would bear witness to this, to his new capabilities in retrospect. Let the Metamind regale her after. The intimacy of active triumph belonged to him.

Right now, he heeded the slavering urge of the beast and the Woundshaper, the building surge of his reflexes coursing through him as skill, pace, and planning interwove to imbue him with the absoluteness of flow.

A beast unseen, Avo slithered out through the memory, a serpent seeking to taint the veins of a giant with its bite.

Across seven sequences, Mirrorhead found himself halted. Seven sequences with obvious incongruencies. Seven sequences Avo was going to use to his advantage.

Crashing tides of perception rushed through the memories like a greater stream grinding counter over another. Chambers’ mind was wailing, holes forming in the fabric of his thoughts. But he wasn’t yet nulled. How begrudgingly commendable.

The real dive began when Avo triggered one of his phantasmics. An entire sequence blanked as questionable mem-cons and pornographic vicarities flashed into activity. Mirrorhead’s perception was suddenly diverted, leaving only a ghost to scan the false memory Chambers had of wearing the Nightmantis exo-rig.

Avo had not been a Godclad very long, but he had been a Necro for his entire life. To use the power of one to enhance the other was an obvious choice.

In the Nether, he was a bolt of electricity to Mirrorhead’s tortoise. The latter seemed impregnable, but the creature was as soft as any when it reached its head out to eat. Ghostjack cleaving prepared memories into shape at a rate once impossible, Avo descended on the lingering ghosts in his targetted sequence, the flow of Mirrorhead’s mem-data plunging deep into the fabric of Chambers’ mind like pillar, two rivers of memory running perpendicular to one another.

To Avo, the measure of Mirrorhead's ward was pillar, watchtower, and ladder all. He just needed to slip past the outer shielding and interface with the deeper memories within.

A Phalanx ward was constant motion, traumas shifting and overlapping. Avo remembered the first time he ran one with Walton. His father had him hitting “softer” vulnerabilities. Guilder Necros maintaining the structure. Personnel passing who used the block’s loci to clock into work. Golems they injected with sequence eroding mem-cons.

That dive took the better part of eight months, but it had been a foundation experience in breaking wards and diving against the Guilds.

More importantly, it gave Avo all he needed to crack Mirrorhead in a single encounter. The Syndicate boss could have ten thousand more ghosts hiding behind the glass. It wouldn’t matter. Not with his skill.

The Phalanx was a mountain indeed, but now, Avo was an unceasing bolt of lightning stinging at its face, trying to find a crack he could widen, a fissure to sink into.

And there was always, always a parting in the stone.

HOSTILE AWARENESS: 2%

The first flashes of memory he peered from Mirrorhead were scrambled–the mem-data a exchange of integers and memories with each crossing of his wards. The changes happened in a cascade, and the sequences themselves were assuredly randomized more each time. Yet, despite all this, the same weakness that afflicted Mirrorhead was the same vulnerability that affected Zein–until she used her Heaven, at least.

Perspective. It was hard to spot the difference in a memory cast in perceptive symmetry. When staring at the distant shadows of a block punching up through the Layers, who’s to say from what eyes the image was plucked? With further sequencing, even visual details such as cog-feed visuals could be blurred past noticability.

Just as Mirrorhead’s focus inched back toward studying erroneous shape of Chambers’ armor, Avo hurled a strand of infiltrating memories into the intersection.

He felt his mind shudder.

He felt his wards rattle.

He felt his mind slip behind the first layer of Mirrorhead’s mind place.

HOSTILE AWARENESS: 2%

He hissed with sibilant pleasure. In the real, his Echoheads rattled. Like a blade slashing across the same nick over and over, sooner or later, steel would greet bone.

Mirrorhead’s awareness held stable. The twinned memory slipped through the gap and snapped in place. Unaugmented, this was a feat unachievable. Mirrorhead’s would have noticed him almost immediately without his hyper-accelerated jacking, the time gap to his exposure via a spike in mem-data a mere gap. But through his Canon of Haemokinesis and the Celerostylus, the gap was now a gulf.

The euphoria of power and this new horizon tugged at his hubris. He could do it. He could strike now and earn a howl of pain from the Godclad. He stood on the outskirts of the man’s mind. This was sacred ground to sully. It was almost too tantalizing an opportunity.

Avo denied this siren call to hurt. The beast was talking. The beast was growing… almost smarter appealing to his hunger in more ways than one.

“Ah, but gods grow with mythos,” the Woundshaper said. “Surely you would be no diffferent. You, in all your totality.”

Want tore at his ego. He wanted to overpower Mirrorhead. He wanted to break the other Godclad; leave him in a cage made from the detritus of his own mind. To squeeze a despairing capitulation from the Guilder before final subsumption.

As a Necro, Avo knew better. He wouldn’t be crossing twenty layers in one attempt. He was here to subvert each ward to his whim before proceeding. Only a true fool would trade near-certain victory through patience on an impulse of savagery.

Only a fool or a ghoul.

Or a Godclad.

It occurred to him that Zein might very well have done the unthinkable here. How had she made it to her old age acting as she did? Was it all her Heaven.

No matter. The task remained. And Avo knew exactly what he needed to subvert, to get deeper.

An atmosphere of anxiety and frustration stained the mem-data of these far waters that were Mirrorhead’s short-term memories. The actual phantasmics only rose in lonesome structures five rungs inward. Their shapes rose heavy and pointed, spire-like blades hailing phantasmal stratocumulus, the false sky kissed by faint brightness, the dawn spilling forth from the lip of the horizon. The blocks representing each phantasmic were battlements of gothic radiance, vast walls gold painted titanium painted with pastels of glass mosaics, painted iconography dedicated to weapons and instruments instead of people.

Never people.

Faint shivers of ethereal fire quavered as interlocking wings flew over the blocks like apparitions, making them seem as if candles.

Some who post in the Nether claim that Highflame lacked culture. That it was just blind ego-apotheism held up by cult-like militarism. Such was a lie. The Golds were people of symbology. They strove for embodiments. Often, they fell flat. But Avo knew of them to never question their resolve and might.

And to exploit their inflexibility.

You see, the problem with the Phalanx was also that which made it seem so formidable. The wards themselves. Necrotheurgy was a flexible art, but there was a rhyme and order to its foundation, namely, the purpose of symmetry.

For the revolving layer of wards to interlace and pass through one another without smashing the traumas together, a moment of alignment was required. Alignment, and an opening.

To slip past the wards, he didn’t even need to wreathe himself in copied memories repeatedly. Rather, he just needed to maintain a functional facade long enough and use the wards behind him to his advantage. With each repetition, he would descend deeper and deeper inward. Until he was finally within the confines of Mirrorhead himself.

A grim bemusement swelled within him.

There was always something to do with an elevator when it came to Mirrorhead.

The crossover came languid, more placid surf splashing on a beach than crashing tide thanks to his enhanced reactivity. On the cusp of impact, the structure of the oncoming trauma and the trauma he passed through behind him.

A flash of memories spilled out as raw mem-data, announced raw and clear within the confines of the Metamind. Avo scoffed. And here was obvious proof he wasn’t dealing with an actual Necro: No regard for internal security either. The ruler of Conflux clearly thought he was untouchable.

To Avo's surprise, he found portions of the memory familiar. The screams. The flickering outline of a woman’s form was painted over the firmament via countless Ori-Thaum phantoms. The former matriarch of the Greatlings and Mirrorhead's mother. A woman that Highflame itself seemed desperate to forget, censoring her name and memory from the Nether itself.

Indeed, the memory only grasped the vagueness of her personhood. If that. She had long hair, possibly. A shrill voice–but that might’ve been more due to the screaming. The remaining sequences formed a peripheral snapshot of that day. Pain. Sorrow. Disbelief.

A child crying. The choked sobs of a younger Jhred Greatling escaped from his throat, despite his attempts to fight it. He forced himself to watch what the Incubi did to his mother. He knew he wouldn’t remember. He forced himself anyway.

It was really quite pathetic. The longer Avo lingered in the Guilder’s mind, the less he thought of the other Godclad. What kind of idiot uses a major city-wide event that countless people were witness to as a conjoining gateway for their traumas.

Mixing memories he already had with assets spliced from his ghosts and rarer artifacts he had to copy from Mirrorhead’s memories, Avo altered his outer phantasmal architecture and passed through the second layer using the conjunction. The process repeated itself up to the eleventh, with each crossing demanding only patience and analysis.

Things got a bit interesting again with the twelfth to eighteen layers as the inner rings began to shift and change positions faster, their switches becoming random–sometimes even three at a time. Finally. Some actual paranoia and rigor.

If only Mirrorhead decided to use something other than various memories collected from the day of his mother’s demise to pacify each of his protections. A lesson for the uninitiated: Use very, very specific memories when it came to creating wards. The more unique the circumstance, the harder for Necros to spoof. Speed gave Avo an edge, but it was Mirrorhead that failed in upholding a proper defense.

The first Phalanx Avo dived with Walton had different associated memories for each ring. And the switching started from the eighth. Here, there might as well have been a red carpet as Avo timed his crossing again and again until he was finally behind the innermost walls, finally in the section of the fifteenth.

The wards ahead were finally interchanging at a pace faster than near-unmoving, and so too was the access memory switched for something far more specific as well. Ah. So even Mirrorhead wasn’t that hubristic.

No matter. A steady search through the mem-data showed Avo the sequence he was looking for: the memory Mirrorhead had of speaking to him. Not when they first met in the aerovec, but rather Avo “induction” into Conflux, in the very same room Chambers’ was spasming in.

Perfect. It had all the components he needed to install–

A spike of phantasmal lightning crackled out as a phantasmic at the center of Mirrorhead’s mind thundered with the spill of another mind leaking over. Auto-Seaence. Someone was accessing the Metamind from within.

Almost immediately, he felt the waters of their perception splash against–and through–the insides of Mirrorhead’s wards.

Whoever this was, they had complete access to his mind. And with how quickly and deeply they worked, this wasn’t a sloppy amateur with too many ghosts like Mirrorhead.

No. This was the reflexive sweep every Necro that made it past their first hundred dives got used to making.

WARNING: NEW ACCRETION DETECTED

[UNIDENTIFIED] AWARENESS: 3%...8%

The attention of the newcomer bore down closer and closer to Avo just as Mirrorhead’s mind lurched with exhaustion, turning inward.

Instinct screamed for him to jack out, experience, on the other hand, revealed a path toward continued subterfuge right in front of him.

Firing his Ghostjack, Avo drew shape from the memories of his past once more.