Godclads

Chapter 4-10 Reap the Winds

The Laeygyr Galeslither was not a golem designed for combat. But as was the case with the engines of void ships, if someone had a Soul, it had the capacity to be a weapon.

A Heaven of Air with the Domains of Wind and Space, the Galeslither was designed as a transport-logistic golem capable of moving over 300 hundred tons per mile shift between reality and the plane known as the “Yondergales.”

During the Four Guild Wars, however, it found additional success as a makeshift bomber and a fast extraction unit alongside its more traditional functions, though it suffered unacceptable losses once Ori-Thaum learned to counter them by jocking micro-frag missiles into the Yondergales just as the Galeslithers’ made their shifts...

-Caes eld’Calder, “Annals of the Fourth Guild War”

4-10

Reap the Winds

An instant. A moment. A millisecond of surprise.

That’s how much time Avo claimed upon his return, emerging from the veil of blood left behind by the golem he broke as if it were a gate. Into the screaming embrace of reality, he burst free, with the light curving before his surging synapses. With a thought, he drew layers of armor over himself from the very element he used to ingress into reality, the Domain that served as his doorway now becoming slatted plating, the new and improved form of his upgraded Sangeist fusing around him.

With a flick of will, a lashing construct tore free from his blood, lancing out toward the unprepared Scalpers scanning the perimeter. He knew not how long his death had been in existence, only that they were still there, that the beast still wanted its kills.

His licking blade flicked through the helmet and skull of the first enforcer. The armor ruptured, and from the rent, flesh burst free as roping sinews. Avo continued guiding the blade, building a rippling curve to its trajectory, its upper edge folding to spear into the knee of another enforcer.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 53 thaum/c

In the brightness of the block’s hydroponics center, a slitted wound opened across their leg, revealing the glinting grey of an augmented meniscus. They toppled with a low cry. One that went unfinished as Avo’s haemokinetic-grip surged into their wound and fused a dozen tungsten clots within the vessels in their brain.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 54 thaum/c

And then the momentum balanced out.

Suddenly, the Scalpers shuddered, their own reflex implants firing as they spun, festooned guns roaring in a wild deluge of suppressive fire. Immediately, Avo drew more mass to his control. His form swelled, he cocooned himself at the epicenter of his metaphysical shell made manifest, rising ten feet, then twenty. Shots skipped off against the torque of his spinning armor as he fused the thirty tons of blood that he drew upon, the rest parted from his tactile senses by cracks and fissures in the ground.

The enforcers doubled back, their augmented legs working against his galloping limbs as a lattice of ghosts flitted packets of thought near-instantaneously between the Scalper kill team, now three instead of five. From what looked to be the team commander, two more phantasmal chains spilled out. One to the other Sangeist, thirty feet away and out of position to be any aid. The other Ghost-Link went to the Galeslither sliding across the currents overhead, only just beginning to spin up its storm.

For now, it was just him and the–

The Ghost-Links between the Scalpers suddenly disappeared from Avo’s cog-feed. What were they–

A tide of spreading distortion burst free from the leader of the Scalper’s enforcer team. The impact splashed Avo’s surface thought from his mind, striking a gap in his focus–in everyone’s focus. Mind drifting, Avo stopped clenching his Celerostylus. Time resumed. For a breath, all combatants went still.

And when the thoughts filled the accretion of all their Metaminds, violence resumed.

“Necro!” a Scalper cried, their shoulder-mounted autogun snapping back to life, firing gyrojet rockets.

“Godclad!” another screamed simultaneously, fusion burner still thrumming up to readiness–not nearly fast enough to come online and save them.

A series of crackling blasts bloomed puffs off Avo’s armor, the rippling property of his blood canceling the concussive force. As the last sputters of thought reattached themselves to his mind, he immediately fired his Celerostylus again, as nails of pain slid through his nerve endings. Biting back his hurt, time slowed again and he lined his arcs. His Rend flooded down his Hell at a rate nearly triple the speed it used to.

The additional mass of his Heaven bore a cost.

REND CAPACITY - 42%

His Whisper was out of play now with how destabilized the Nether was, but there were only ten feet between him and the Scalpers, the gulf closing by the micro-instants. Lining three kill paths with his Phys-Sim, he shaped a dozen wisp-thin threads made from pressure slicing. Their armor was thick. Titanium. But titanium was mundane metal, and in this new age, mundane just didn’t light the wick anymore.

He pulled down his instruments like the strings of a marionette. Through trees and glass did his new-grown limbs sink and pass. And along a cage of intersecting cleaves, he would lay claim to the newest of his thaums when he finally slew the enforcers.

At least he would have, until the wind wretched his strikes off course.

The Galeslither’s arrival came not as a hurricane this time, its bodies still spinning, trying to build up the winds before attempting to mangle his flesh. Nor did it slip free from the spaces between currents to greet him alloy against pseudo-alloy, though that was doubtlessly soon to come. Instead, it was a plucking irritation; an interfering hand parrying aside mortal blows. Even with time slowed, its whistle sounded mocking, its form hidden amidst the warring tides of cloud above.

Through no longer being able to overwhelm him with ease thanks to his newfound mass, the wind-twisting golem would still shift his strikes.

All the while the other Sangeist came thundering over, its looming mass coming like an avalanche.

Fusing his strings into a hammer instead, Avo spun his mass around, acquiescing to the wind just as the Scalpers brought their burners to bear. Like a twirling wrecking ball, his newly shaped weapon spun out, its head growing to be three tons as it smashed and tumbled across the ground–far more than Avo could naturally hold upright.

But with the new canon he claimed that wouldn’t be a necessity. With the canon of Linger, the ball retained both properties of blood and metal even as it left his grip, letting it bounce toward the Scalpers. Even with his skull afire with nerve pain, he couldn’t stop watching, waiting for his blow to strike. Crashing through the splintering trunk of a tree, two Scalpers dove out of the way.

One, their thoughtstuff still recovering, went under the sphere, their armor cracking as they died, a roar of agony preluding a final crunch as their insides came free like paste in a crumpled can.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 55 thaum/c

REND CAPACITY - 79%

His capacity was screaming at him again, calling for him to vent his Hell as soon as he could. The new permanence in his constructs was filling his Hell fast. He needed a safe place to vent.

And then, an idea flashed in Avo’s mind.

Expanding the armor around him into a round fortress, he solidified what he could as his Rend spiked to the edge of overload.

REND CAPACITY - 95%... 98%...

OVERLOAD WARNING!

He released control and, shielded at the center of his new fortifications, he unleashed his entropic shroud into the ground beneath him, punching deep and through as he sank low.

REND CAPACITY - 90%... 82%...

Descending, he heard the ringing impacts of projectile fire cracking the thickened exterior of the blood skin he shed. Grinning, he moved quickly. If they were focused on shooting, they might not realize his thoughtstuff was in motion. Shaping his shroud, he cut until he punched through to the level below and then moved it forward, leveling it out into a circling arc.

He was going to cut the floor out from under the enforcers. Take them by surprise and flank the Sangeist. He ran after the eight-foot wide gaps he was eating through the matter of the floor. Above, a thunderous crash sounded as the other Sangeist brought its weight down against his barricade, shattering through with its superior mass.

REND CAPACITY - 71%... 64%... 55%...

Behind him, he heard the pitched voice of the pilot boom out. “He’s gone under! He’s gone under! Burn ‘em out! Burn ‘em the fuck now!”

A low warbling thrum rang from the half-tunnels he'd left behind. Avo realized what was happening. Their fusion burners were ready, and everything in its path was going to slag.

REND CAPACITY - 41%

No time. Avo stopped venting and reactivated his Heaven. Tearing into the plascrete foundations between the levels, he swallowed chunks of mass and grew, the matter between the shovel-like jaws he shaped using his own blood, each bite getting bigger, working upward. Behind him, the air grew hot, and every inhale singed his lungs.

REND CAPACITY - 54%

His mass was well past a ton when he cut free out of the ground. Not ten feet away, the enforcers were pouring fire into the tunnels he made, the diminutive suns funneled through their arm mounts spraying a yolk of bright light, coating the lip of the tunnel with a new sheen of hyper-heated glass.

The Sangeist, then, was so focused on the burning that it too missed him; the Galeslither, sweeping low, missed him as well. The thoughtwave bomb had proven to be more asset to him than they.

An opportunity presented itself. Avo took it, driving a spearing whip through the backplate of one of the Scalpers.

With a flex of his mind, Avo felt his control spread through the blood flowing within the enforcer’s body. With a fist, he pulped their organs. With a twitch of a finger, he swung the dead Scalper’s still-firing fusion burner up in an arc. Slashing past the blood of the enemy Sangeist, slagging its command module.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 56 thaum/c

Mimicked titanium melted and blood steamed in a rising hiss. Before Avo’s eyes, a pulsing flash detonated across his sight as the Heaven within the blood fissured, like it was short-circuiting.

The cutting lance of fusion flame left a gleaming wound through the ovoid command module, and the bricked machine core of the golem came loose amidst a falling shower of blood.

REND CAPACITY - 66%

From its depths, Avo heard the deafening wail of the pilot. Her screams were of a mellifluous melody, his opportunism rewarded, his appetite awakened. The scent of her cooking flesh wafted through his nose as he pushed for the last Scalper enforcer, the wide shoveling construct beneath him swallowing swaths of plascrete as his tonnage began to swell past ten feet.

REND CAPACITY - 77%

“Mihada!” the Scalper cried, their voice keening with anguish, directed toward the cooking pilot crawling free from the melting ball that used to be the titanium heart of their golem. Shaking the strain from his skull, Avo was just about to fire his Celerostylus when a gust of wind wafted over.

And through him.

A rapid splash of roaring clouds pried Avo free from where he stood, drawing him into a constant free fall. Firing his Celerostylus, he caught sight of the wisping mane of a roiling three-headed steed.

The creature was shaped from blackened clouds and its eyes were pinpricks, like centers of swirling storms. Wisping torrents of spraying rain formed the misting main of the horse, and a frozen bolt of lightning fissured like a cage of clasping ribs holding the midsection of the horse intact. Its body flowed, the snapping bones of the machine enwreathed at the center of the metaphysical Heaven zooming toward Avo like a speeding lance, the winds coalescing around it.

Its hooves, then, ran on rings of pulsing air as it dove toward Avo, flicking between machine and steed. His Phys-Sim screamed numbers flashing through his cog feed as a million moving variables overloaded his ghosts and drove up his cog-cap. With a snarl, Avo deactivated the phantasmic before the overload could cascade through his Metamind.

As petals of speed peeled from behind the Galeslither, Avo realized what it was about to do, and how it had him in its sway. His Rend was still full, and it was charging at him at Mach speeds. Desperate, he fired his Celerostylus to buy him a bit more time.

An eruption of pain bloomed behind Avo’s eyes. It took him every ounce of will to keep his organ tensed even as spots formed in his vision. Immediately, he began venting his Rend out.

Except it wasn’t going down. Because no matter was dissolving.

No matter other than the shell of the Galeslither.

The pilot didn’t think this through.

Between him and the pilot, their spiking terror split into two halves, mutually shared. Avo, desperate not to be real-deathed as he fell, guts clenching, the pilot of the Galeslither likewise unwilling to bifurcate themselves upon the shroud of entropy blooming out among the storm clouds, its presence a spot darker than blackness.

The Galeslither tore to the side, the flashing steeds neighing loud like passing thunder. Avo felt every layer of his eardrums burst apart as his sense of sound left him. Thrown free into a spiraling descent, he suddenly felt cast back into reality, falling from on high.

Outside the block now, plunging down toward the broadcasting dish that crowned its top. To his left, the Galeslither screamed as it tried to right itself. No. It was pulsing in and out of the winds as it tried to right itself.

Did his…Hell infect its structure somehow?

The thought didn’t linger. Instead, Avo found himself in free fall, the blackened gout of his shroud gusting as he greeted the dish. He cast his entropy ahead in a wave, burning a hole through the dish's thinness as he fell, and kept falling. Equilibrium lost, Avo cleaved at everything he caught sight of with his shroud, chipping his path clean with wide-arcing scythes.

REND CAPACITY - 68%... 58%... 46%

Down, down, down he went, like a dollop of blackened plasma eating through all in his path. Plascrete, glass, metal, and biomass came apart before him as chasms opened up down the levels. Howling in desperation, he vented as much as he could, spreading his gusts wider, longer, hoping that he could finish out his debt before he splattered.

REND CAPACITY - 33%... 21%... 15%

For a beat, as he plunged into the hydroponics center, a snapshot of two figures and a hound snapping to stare at his falling form burned itself into his mind.

REND CAPACITY - 8%... 0%

And, as Avo’s Rend finally emptied, his shroud disappeared. And so did his protection.

For the second time within a minute, Avo's smeared apart in the hydroponics chamber, casting him beyond the coil of mortality and back into the embrace of his Soul…

INITIALIZING RESURRECTION - 1%

SIMULATING LIMINAL FRAME