12 Miles Below

Book 5. Chapter 42: Last chance

A little nostalgic to hear that enigmatic voice of his. To think this was the very first machine that turned against Relinquished. I was talking to a living fossil.

“You dragged yourself up here fast, old geezer.” I said, watching the ceiling from my bed. “How?”

“Lower strata.” The crackling voice came back. “All teleportation network. Many nodes. Easy to hide. Easy to travel. Mite made.”

“I think I heard of it, on the seventh strata?” There’d been floating mentions from Atius about it. Something Deathless used, mostly because they’re the only ones that could go that deep.

“You will see. We will take. Division stone many land away. Too far land.”

“I imagined a mythical stone wouldn’t be conveniently right under our feet. Might be safer to just ride an airspeeder on the surface and then dive down?”

Static filled the air. “Dumb human. Surface. Will not step on surface. And. Too many land travel. Too much time. Stop being dumb.”

“Look, just because I exhorted you a few times already doesn't mean you should take it out on me like this. Rude and my feelings are hurt.”

Static. Then, very slowly, and with great care, Abraxas spoke again making sure every word was well chosen: “I will drop you off a cliff someday.”

“That… actually was a complete and grammatically correct sentence. Color me impressed.” I said, and I did mean it. “Feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside knowing you paid attention to my love of cliffs. And for whatever record you’re keeping - I did honor your secret up until Tsuya blabbed, that’s on her, not me. Honest to gods about that.”

“Reason I speak to you. And not Feathers directly. You, trust. Them, no trust. Tainted by pale lady. You not.”

Wrath was. Father wasn't. He'd cut off the unity fractal along with all the other fractals interconnected with it. Lost all of Avalis's true powers with that, but as he'd demonstrated, he had plenty of other occult spells to use up.

That said, telling Abraxas that it was safe to speak to Father wasn't a good move. Mostly because I hadn’t yet managed to beat Father and if he got wind of Abraxas he was probably going to vanish off without bothering to say goodbye.

“Talking about the main mission, how long can you hang around here for?”

“Not ready? How?” Abraxas sent back.

“Because I thought I had an entire month or more before you showed up! You travel on a floating boat, through the underground. That can’t be efficient.”

“Can be fast. Very efficient. Good boat. Bad human. Go trip off cliff. Will appreciate flying boat after.”

“Har, har, funny. But I seriously need more time.”

The line went dead for a moment, then crackled with static. “...What hiding?” He asked, going straight for my jugular.

“Building weapons. Big weapons. Nasty weapons that make Feathers fear me.” Hopefully.

“Weapons." He hissed, as if the word was disgusting to him. "Bad plan. Best plan, not seen. Weapons useless. Feathers powerful. Neverending. Unkillable. I live long, because best plan is best. Cannot kill what not exists.”

“All right. You’ve got some way to be invisible. Going to share that with us?”

If I could get that out of Abraxas, I’d have one more thing to toss onto my bucket list of ratshit to throw at my enemy.

“.... No. Not big enough.”

"Can we make more of it? Wrath learned how to build all kinds of things lately."

More static. "No. Not trust enough."

Eh, if I had a way to go invisible, I'd also want to keep it to myself. “Can you hide Wrath the entire way? What are the odds she’s going to be spotted at some point?”

Static. Then growling.

“It's all going to get iced up eventually." I said. "You’ll end up in a fight. Maybe not you personally, but Wrath sure as the gods. And to fight, she’ll need us. Stealth is great up until it doesn’t work. Being able to fight at any time on your own power is more reliable.”

Using Father’s own logic against Abraxas.

He stayed quiet, or possibly hopping around the channels again to avoid any backtracing. “Ok. Five days, human.” He growled.

“How in the white wastes do you expect quality weapons to be researched, built, and tested in five days? Give me another month. You can’t rush science.”

“One week.” He said, clearly wanting to rush science.

“Why are you being this obstinate?”

“Pale lady. Not distracted forever. Mites. Not wait forever. Time to travel. Long. I pay debt to guide, not wait. Mites do not do wait.”

“Three weeks.” I said. “Better that we have the weapons to fight off than not.”

“Bad human.” He hissed. “Bad, bad human. One week. Make weapons. Prepare well. No more time. Then, I talk to Feather directly. Then leave. No choice.”

The comms went offline, as usual from my enigmatic friend. He didn't want to be tracked down, and staying connected on comms would run that risk.

“I think that rustheap coffin dodger likes you.” Cathida said. “How sweet. You’re his only friend.”

“What happened to all that talk about respecting your elders? He’s a few thousand years older than you. And going to be our guide down underground.”

“Odd way to treat prehistoric junk, deary.” She said. “Latest map update from his era might have the world marked flat. And I know shifty guides like these. He'll get you lost trying to find the sun on the surface but mysteriously find your wallet three times out of two.”

“We're not even the ones payin-- Wait, why am I arguing back with you?” I sighed, plated hand rubbing my visor. "I'll take it as a sign I need sleep. That's a rookie mistake."

She's an engram of the single most stubborn person that ever existed.

“Just as surprised as you are, deary." She said, with a verbal shrug. "Thought you’d know better by now. Shows you truly must be exhausted. Poor thing, you should put all this aside - nothing to solve that can’t be solved at dawn.”

She had a point about that. I took off the helmet, and let future Keith deal with all the ratshit from today.

And a few hours later, it was now my problem again.

“So that’s it. We have one week to defeat Father, or I’m stuck here.” I said, flopping on the bed, considering if I should just kick out the guests and sleep for another hour.

“There is no need to despair.” Wrath said, sitting at my desk as usual, wings awkwardly folded up to avoid ripping the fabric up. Again. Those things were sharp. Very, very sharp after the modifications we’d done on them. Some inspiration taken from To’Aacar there. “Significant progress could be made within a week. I am growing more efficient at fabricating the new designs you test. Production speed on occult bullets from initial template to current iteration has increased by three hundred and twenty percent.”

“All the bullets in the world aren't going to help silver melt if he can’t take out those shields.” Cathida said. “That’s the bottleneck. Tenisent is too quick to fight on fair terms. The shotgun attempts failed. It’s a weapon for handling targets that have no shields, no future in more.”

“No, there could be a future there." I said, thinking it through. "It doesn’t do enough damage on its own and there’s only so many pellets we can shove into one shotgun shell. But we could make multiple barrels, have them all fired in a sequence. Only reason we don't do that right now is that the kick of that many barrels would rip people up. Armor doesn't have that problem. Is that possible?”

Wrath hummed. “That has potential. Armor has tolerances that are several fold human bones. And physics shows no bottlenecks to making each attack sequential within milliseconds. Too fast to react to, even with current mechanical speed.”

“....Agreed with the hard drive honeypot.” Cathida said with a sigh. “More firepower is always an answer. And without having to think about recoil, you can focus all on the damage. Get something on paper, and I can tell you where it’ll go wrong in combat.”

I booted up my slate and prepared to write down complete schematic gibberish for Cathida to criticize the common sense into and Wrath to actually build the damn thing into something that worked.

Teamwork!

Only thing missing was a quick testing dummy.

Father made a good test target, but it came with a beatdown. I needed a faster way to get straight to the heart of things.

Arcbound was my ticket to testing out weaponry. He didn’t know it at first, until I sweet talked him into it.

Him and Sagrius were often together, given they were both possessed armors walking around, except Arcbound didn't have a body like Sagrius had. Father had trained the two of them into weapons sharper than an occult edge, and they’d taken the lessons to heart.

Arcbound had inscribed soul fractals just about everywhere in his armor, and learned how to spread his soul out, tendril by tendril, until he inhabited every one of those spare fractals. Any damage that took off parts of his body couldn’t kill him. And if they did manage to cut off the power supply to all those fractals, he had backups that were disconnected from everything. Lot of empty space inside the armor to fit in things.

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Near unkillable. Filled with fractals on the inside keeping his soul tethered, and fractals on the outside ready to power occult shields. Capable of tapping deeper into an overclock than any, along with equipment made by Wrath to suck out heat, all across the inside section where a body should be.

He was about as close to Father as I could get. And he was currently standing very very still, as I pointed my new toys in his direction.

“I want to lodge a complaint.” He said. “This doesn’t feel ethical.”

“I regularly commit war crimes as a hobby, and you knew this.” I said. “Besides, you need to test just how much damage you can sustain. And also get practice fixing up your body once it’s damaged. And I need more data on how my latest weapons work against a shielded unkillable target. Everyone wins.”

Sagrius nodded to the side. He hadn’t been able to split his soul up like Arcbound had, too much of it was tied to the central soul fractal, where the armor’s soul had once been. It meant that if a hit actually cut through his soul fractal, we didn’t know what would happen to his life. But that wasn’t the reason he didn’t make for a good target. The reason I can’t run tests on him, is that his shields were endless. I ran out of shells before he got even slightly winded.

Sagrius was a gods damned occult tank. And that was just with his own willpower. That would come in handy underground, especially if he could do what Atius did. The knights within could also draw out occult shields, and they’d gotten very good with it, just to add insult to injury.

The Winterscar captain stood by my side, while on the inside the knight spirits all trained hard on the next plan. I had come up with a special plot, and it relied on all of them. One of many.

Everything was coming together. All the weapons, training and tactics. And it had to. Days were passing by. My weapons had to work. One by one, they did. Differently then imagined. Some retinkered. Others, used for a completely different purpose.

Nights became time for designs and wild ideas.

Days were spent on field testing those ideas, iterating on the failures and successes.

Dinner was eaten cold, and only because Wrath literally forced me to eat.

I worked like a man possessed. Because all of this had to work.

It had to.

"Father.” I said, watching him walk into the light as I waited in my seat. “I've come to kill you."

This was it. A week of frantic practice, building, testing, insult throwing, and worse, but I’d gotten my final loadout. I had one more attempt left. One last chance.

On his part, he looked around the empty unheated section, eyes narrowing as he scanned for potential traps. Finding none, he turned back to look over my current equipment, taking stock of what I might or might not send his way as I stood up and kicked the chair out of the way.

Hiding the multiple barrels on my arm was impossible, so I left them out and proud. He saw what they did last time, he probably had a good idea of what they would do this time.

Wrath had really scratched her mind trying to make my insane plan come together. Firing multiple shells, all so close to my hand, meant there were a few security bits to deal with. Else I'll end up shooting occult pellets right into my gauntlet and Journey was not going to be happy about that.

That wasn't the only weapon I had exposed. He could probably see through my armor and all I was carrying with me. "You've brought others." He said, drawing his blades slowly. "What have you planned this time, boy?"

"Guess you'll find out soon enough." I said, shrugging. Then I lifted my armgard up defensively, blade lock step in the other hand.

A beat passed and we both moved at the same time. He opened up with a standard gap-closing move, made even more ridiculous in range due to his Feather's strength and speed.

I started with ghosts and fire, as usual. Everywhere. Then ghosts with occult armguards trying to bat him out of the air. Equally everywhere.

Like past encounters, he was forced to abort his direct line, and weaved through every attack instead, slowly getting closer and closer to my position. Eyes locked on target, frowning with focus. I could tell this wasn't pressing him to his limits yet, just forced him to take it slow and steady to reach me.

I flipped my blade right back on my hip and took out the knightbreaker launcher. Safety was taken off, shell loaded up, trigger lever pulled and the whole thing was ready to fire.

That put a pause in Father's rampage, he'd clearly noticed the change in armaments. Still, without knowing the rest of my plan, he was forced to stick to his own, albeit with more caution.

He knew I had only one round, so taking it out this early meant business.

Father approached, keeping slightly out of range. Then leaped right past my ghosts in one lighting fast move.

His aim was to overwhelm me past my ability to block with my shield. And then slice straight through the unshielded launcher, rendering the knightbreaker functionally useless. If I focused on keeping the launcher out of his reach, he'd out-trade me by slicing through my actual shields with a few well placed sword hits on what I couldn't protect. Lose the launcher or lose my life.

It would have worked too. If I hadn't shored up my defense.

Deep inside my armor, multiple soul fractals watched on, tendrils connected to surface fractals, ready in wait. Sagrius had been an utter monster when it came to practicing. And the knights that followed within him had little else to do but practice on their own.

Shield fractals lit up across my armor, flashing out and intercepting his attacks on my legs and arms, the ones I couldn't commit to protecting.

In exchange, I triggered my first surprise attack. With a swipe of my shield, I exposed a weak point on myself and Father instantly dove in like a wolf, aiming to take a chunk of my shields with one savage strike.

Here’s where I began to ruin his day. And it all started with a bandolier on my chest, holding four little packaged shape charges.

There was a weak point Father was unaware of and Hexis had pointed out. A threshold existed to trigger shields. Handled by an autonomous function that could detect threats. A primitive system used by my armor as well, lightweight and made to run as fast as possible. Things like bullets would be ignored. Things like giant bullets would be blocked. And approaching occult edges were the basic test case, so those would trigger the shields regardless.

Wrath could flare out her shield manually of course, as could Journey. But that was typically left to the sub-systems to handle. And Father would be no different.

The first shaped charge detonated on my armor plate. Directly into his approach. Inside the shape charge were four small plates made of highly resistant metal that would survive the detonation, and keep the interior systems safe. Metal that wasn't just resistant as their only gimmick. Inside each was a drop of power cell fluid, powering a ridiculously strong magnetic field compared to the mass of the metal.

They almost turned back and stuck on my own armor, that's how powerful the magnet had been tuned to be. Almost. But the shape charge's kinetic force was strong enough to blast the metal bits past the threshold of my armor, and into Father's range, exactly as meticulously tested for.

His sensors detected the explosion. Non-threat. No shields.

His sensors detected the scraps of metal flying right at him. Non-threat. No shields.

The metal scraps flew right onto his plating, snapping into it like glue instead of bouncing off.

And inside each was Hexis's gravity fractal. The one that turned gravity off. In the most basic form, it needed direct contact. And now it had exactly that.

Father noticed a split second after, an eyebrow raised just slightly in concern. And then felt exactly what it did.

Small circuits inside registered the contact and directed energy into the fractal. He began to float, his earlier inertia making him fly past me, footing lost.

In one fluid motion, I turned my knightbreaker and aimed it straight at him as he passed by. My finger hovered over the trigger button, but my gut told me to wait a single moment.

Father was ratshit incarnate. I had to see if he was going to find a way out of this, or float helplessly in the air for me to line up a shot.

Not even a heartbeat later, he proved I’d made the right call in waiting to verify first. He was still close enough to the ground to kick straight down, rocketing him straight up and into the ceiling. I’d have shot and seen the round fly right where he’d once been a moment ago.

The issue with the location picked is that it had walls on all ends. And while Father's movements would be dramatically different without gravity, that didn't mean he wasn't capable of becoming a blender with blades just with a gravity handicap. His body landed hard against the ceiling, legs absorbing the energy, eyes glaring down at me with a calculated calm that made it clear he wasn't at all phased by any of this.

"Fuck." I hissed, seeing exactly what was going to happen next.

"Yep." Cathida confirmed. “Fucked.”

A moment later he rocketed down, landing before me, and jumping right off that, blade trailing behind him on their cords. They slapped straight into my armor, one blocked by a frantic shield up, and the other by one of the knights. The blades retracted back to his hand, too fast to react to.

Once more he was on the ceiling. Once more he was already plotting destruction under that utterly cold gaze.

My ghosts all instantly turned and tried to chase him. He was gone from there before an eyeblink, hopping from wall to wall like the world's deadliest insect, slashing at me from every angle using those lines to keep the swords on target.

"This is ridiculous." Cathida said. "How did you make him more dangerous than before?!"

I pinged the knights within my armor, sending a message soul to soul. They were well used to that, since I caught them chattering away with each other like amused spectators at everything going on.

Current sentiment was with Cathida. I'd somehow managed to make him even more dangerous. Or at least a completely different type of terror.

And it got worse. Now he was re-directing his movements mid-air, using occult arcs from his blades to rocket him in different directions. Looked like the center of a whirlpool of occult blue, pulses striking ghosts, walls and myself alike.

Thankfully the knights could continue to guard me for quite some time, his attacks had changed from constant and unending to more sporadic, though far faster. And the arcs themselves did a more dissipated hit. They sent me flying with each impact, but could be managed by the armor’s shields.

That was all true up until he outright barreled right into me as my armguard was occupied fending off his arcing sword. An armored hand grabbed my throat guard, then constricted. Connected through the hand, the gravity fractals affected me, making Journey exactly as weightless. We yanked off the ground together, dragged away with his innerita, straight for a wall.

During which he didn't miss the chance to stab and slice the shit out of me with his other blade. The knights held, though the utter ferocity made them all shut up and focus on their job.

We hit the wall hard, Journey having to trigger shields just to soften the blow. Father had one objective now, slice through the knightbreaker I had out. He didn’t know what my ultimate plan with it was, but he knew he had to take it out. Any Feather fighting me would do the same.

I kept it behind my body, constantly using his own shell and anything I had in reach to keep the knightbreaker rotated out of his attack range. This close, I was like an insect inside a praying mantis's grip, barely keeping the fangs off me.

I survived only because he didn’t get a real break to finish me off.

By yanking me into a grapple like this, he'd also limited the amount of mobility he had. And that was all that had kept him safe from my occult ghosts before. So he had to keep moving just to stay ahead of the pack.

We bounced from wall to wall, with each leap he tried to rip past my defenses. The knights had made it clear a single sword wasn’t going to overwhelm them, so he’d abandoned that tactic and went straight for a full grapple. Using everything he had to try and grab the launcher out of my own hand.

That also meant opportunity. The knights didn’t need to focus on occult shields if he wasn’t using his swords currently. All this was the exact requisite for another tactic. "Delta!" I called out frantically as he smashed me into wall after wall. "Plan Delta, delta, delta!"

The knights within all acknowledged. Then pooled together for an attack only they could pull off. Occult began to leak across my armor, making us look like a blue comet bouncing across the empty space, bouncing off the walls.

When the knights were ready, I cut my occult ghosts, brought my focus to a laser point on one and only one stream of thought and joined them. As one, we reached a combined soul tendril straight out of Journey, sinking right into Father's own shell, weaving into his soul fractal network.

If we couldn't beat him in the real world, we might as well try a different field of battle.

Beyond us, inside his network of tendrils and connections, was an utter fortress. Walls of will, layered out over time and spikes of killing intent in between each. That, I could tell was his own additions. Weaved through all of it was digital code, things that echoed of history. The weapons machines used to fight off human souls attempting to attack them. Claimed by Father, repurposed and turned against any intruder.

He had taken To'Avalis's shell. And he clearly had no intention of ever returning it peacefully.

"This is going to be a problem." I thought out to my companions, mind opening up to the other side. "This is a lot worse than expected."

The knights all gave a shake of their metaphorical heads. "Aye. But we all knew Tenisent was always going to be a tough bastard to take down." One said. "This is expected. We're ready."

At the very center of it all, spread across every crack and stone, was Father. Surprise flickered briefly through his mind before it was shut completely off from our senses.

"All right, time to knock on the door." I thought out to my team. Then turned my attention to the distant fortress. "Father." I called out, now tradition. "I've come to beat the shit out of you."

"Mistake." He rumbled out, intent echoing out through the landscape. "This will not work, boy. Feathers won't be caught by surprise. And they won't be beaten by humans."

"Of course it wouldn't work." I waved my mind backwards, to the other souls that had joined behind me. Each sharpening their teeth, necks cracking, shoulders rolling, knuckles digging into palms in anticipation.

"One soul isn't going to break a Feather, you're right about that. So I brought an army with me."