Godclads

Chapter 4-12 Loud

You ever see two ‘Clads past the First Sphere fight? Heh. Fight. The word don’t light the wick for the clash. The ordeal is like… something from an ancient myth bled out before you: a small apocalypse that goes unnoticed across the city.

The first thing that you feel is your mind straining, trying to keep its parts together. We’re creatures of pattern. Order. Our eyes are picky eaters in a sense. We like some standardization to the…uh…viewing process.

So let me tell you when the concepts of light and time are forcibly mangled down into a block-sized ingot, parting you from the outside until the ‘Clads finish their little scuffle, you don’t come out quite right. Even with your wards up.

And then you realize why they fight these wars quietly. Because Godclads ain’t heroes of wonder and miracles, but weapons built for existential defilement. Weapons choked by the wants and flaws and little idiosyncrasies like… like us. Too much like us…

Said we were creatures of pattern earlier. Well. Ain’t no pattern more consistent than reality. It’s almost like a parent to us. Cradling us in a… cradle of reason. And with that, there ain’t a better way to flay comfort out of a child’s eyes than by hurting their parent, is there?

-Mem-Log of Vincentine “Ripperjack” Javvers, Head of the Scalpers Syndicate

4-12

Loud

Flowing smoke clinging to streams of sweeping wind lashed Avo’s skin with a tongue-like warmth as he drew closer to the Galeslither’s crash site. A bend of rising fire crowned on columns of smoke rose in the distance over Burner’s Way. The streets were empty and ringing crashes signaled the sound of closing doors.

Avo didn’t stay out in the open for long. Local Nether might’ve been all distorted by the thoughtwave but that didn’t affect drone surveillance much.

Skittering through the alleys of the district, Avo listened as thumping heartbeats sounded through the walls to the ambiance of urban decay lined with a chorus of fire. The scents of unwashed bodies whispered to Avo that there were people here just recently, frying an aratnid over a barrel, bleeding themselves with joy.

Through fissures spreading along the walls, he noticed small spins of thoughtstuff shining naked over the eyes of a glaring voyeur, who fell back, screeching with madness as they beheld his presence. No wards--their mind boiled, witnessing something that they couldn't bear seeing.

Didn’t matter to Avo. He planned to snatch his Heaven, and he planned to make a leap down into the gutters, beneath Layer One. He left a body behind and shrouded himself in the armored form of the Sangeist–now charging at a reliable ten tons, Rend building steadily.

REND CAPACITY - 42%

Too steadily. He needed a new Hell. Something to soak up all his waste energy better. His Heaven had grown far beyond the already lacking equilibrium in his system.

Still, thinking back to what just happened, he wondered if his traces were covered by the body he left behind, or if anyone back at the Gouge got a good enough look at him manifesting his Heaven of Blood again. His guess was no, seeing how much strain it put on his wards to even gaze at a Heaven.

A naked mind staring at the corpse of a god wouldn’t have much of itself left afterward.

Following the sound of the crackling fire, he emerged from the winding paths of the alley into what looked to be a narrow sidestreet between two factory silos, the G-Tube running between them missing. Along the edges of both blocks.

The cut was clean as if a mountain-sized blade had surgically removed a sphere of space some eight hundred feet in area. Past the sputtering flashes of the only working street light in the area, Avo watched as glitching holograms danced overhead, flashing from the holojectors festooned to the corners of an industrial overpass.

Welcome to Burner’s Way, the Forge of Tomorrow.

Out of all the words, tomorrow seemed to flicker the most.

The skies over the promontory of rubble where once stood five pentagonally stacked temp-blocks were incandescent with a swaying flame. Stinging chemicals from melted plastics and popping electronics made Avo gag. Still, he carried on, the promised ecstasy of new power spurring him on, the gluttony of his Soul wed to the avarice of his mind.

Though a fire burned in reality, the shine of the Galeslither’s Heaven was absolute, its radiance choking away, but not dead, still tangible enough to be subsumed into his being. He could feel it.

Screaming aerovec engines sounded on the horizon, prying his attention loose to look past a reaching bridge that ran perpendicular to the factories. Across a grand expanse of open air, a translucent threshold was marked in his cog-feed.

Nu-Scarrowbur.

The district where the Scalpers were based. That fool Chambers should have known better than to sell to a junkie living right next to a rival Syndicate. Of course, the fool thing was selling to a joyfiend, to begin with.

Business required some semblance of reliability to work, lest it became stretches of tense trade punctuated by instances of opportune theft that would eventually prelude several very deliberate assassins.

The impact zone looked something like an egg to Avo, with its outer edges bright with fire hissing out from the detritus while a shattered leg kicked desperately, its form flickering in and out of existence as the pilot continued gunning the golem’s engines, trying to wake the winds again, to escape.

REND CAPACITY - 49%

With a thought, he blanketed the flames with his gusting shroud, slicing away the matter which fueled the flames. Deep instead, where his Soul echoed in blasts of resonance, he felt his Hell grind hard, straining itself to simulate miracles opposite to his Heaven.

A problem created by the mass imbalance inflicted by his newly seeded canons was his best guess.

Slashing a path of quenched fire between the rubble, Avo expanded the space between him and his armor to prevent convection. The heat in the air was unnaturally potent as if the drifting air was only just remembering to cough up some of the burn cast by the now-dead enforcer’s fusion burner.

The trail cleared, and he ascended the rubble as if it was a dais, and he, a figure from old history, come to assume the mantle of privilege and position.

Fitting, seeing as he was going to seize a new Heaven.

The downed Galeslither lay in two mangled cans of titanium folded into one another. The third, slagged, segment of the golem was missing. Maybe it went tumbling loose. Maybe it just finally finished melting. Ultimately, it mattered little. He didn’t come here for matter but mythology.

He pulled himself toward the crippled steed on stalking tendrils of red, smoke baptizing him as he sank low, the rising resonance burst from his cycling Soul crashing against the ontological vessel of the Galeslither.

“Killed me,” Avo said, hissing at the struggling horse. This time, it was he that was approaching, and there was nothing it could do. It flickered back into being a machine as jets of hyper-heated air screamed loose from the command modules’ rent engines. He chuffed a laugh. “Twice. Most expensive meal I’ve eaten.”

Blood spilled free from the confines of his flesh, shaped into a hound’s jaws. He tore into it. But it was not his blood that clamped down around the horse. No. It was the weight of his ontology, given shape by the thaums in his being–the fire unleashed by his Soul.

The steed wailed a final time as Avo began to draw it into himself. Around and above, vast tunnels of twisting gales coalesced like rapids rushing toward the delta that was Avo. Around him, his Soul’s flame burned bright, the colors of the conflagration around him nearly colorless and muted before his divine incandescence.

The flavor of suffusing a Heaven into oneself was an ineffable ecstasy; sustenance that filled him in a place deeper than bone.

Yet, as he drank, he wanted more. More.

As the final bits of the Galeslither went down, he felt his Liminal Frame flare out before collapsing back inside him.

A new aspect of the beast awakened inside him, a primal understanding that he was no longer just a failed monster left to die in an ever-climbing food chain. Now, he was a Godclad, and with enough preparation and audacity, there would be nothing and no one he couldn’t eventually claim as prey.

And suddenly, a small scar of dread formed in a pocket of Avo’s mind. Maybe it hadn’t been right to consume the Heaven, to awaken his desires.

But he couldn’t deny that this was the single closest sensation he knew to true happiness. The parameter of his existence was a savage thing, and so, he found himself gripping the chains of control tighter.

A hissing pop sounded, a hatch on the side of the golem bursting free. Avo's attention snapped back in place. The thoughtstuff of the pilot, once shrouded by the brightness of the Heaven, came staggering out. He was surprised they were still alive, even more, that they were almost unharmed.

Garbed in badly scratched utility plating that carapaced in ridges of chrome, the pilot came forth, twitching, their heart screaming in spasms. Neurachem withdrawal.

“Wait,” the pilot said, holding up their hands, “I surrend–”

Their head came apart in a welter of gore. Avo blinked. A trajectory lanced a lane of red through the parting pieces of their skull and out on the horizon. Gauss flechette. With reflexes surging, Avo spun, a wire-sharp whip of blood slicing out from his veins. A flash of thoughtstuff came into his periphery. He cleaved.

And Draus shifted.

Her first movement was a stuttered twitch, his Phys-Sim lining her position–but too late. She spun again, her head tilting less than an inch. Avo’s whip claimed not by a flake of skin from her ear before he collapsed his construct and halted his reflexes.

Time flowed free. The flames around him burned on, the crackling sounding like clapping. Before him, Draus stood, face blank of any expression beyond disdain, glaring at him.

“Shit, Avo,” she said, her drawl somehow adding more weight to her disappointment, “how’d you manage to snuff anyone with that shit accuracy.” She shot the dead pilot a look. “Couldn’t leave that one alive either. They saw you. A loose piece of mem-data right there, drifting in the wind.”

He didn’t really know how to start this conversation. Not well, anyway. Part of him was strangely glad to see her again–a notion he found beyond dissonant considering she was a Reg. The beast, however, wanted him to cleave her in half and drink from her corpse for taking his deserved kill.

“Could’ve let me feed then,” Avo said, voice nearly a snarl. No thaums. No ghosts. She took that from him.

Draus ran her tongue behind her cheeks. “Nah. I ain’t that cruel.”

Her new limbs were chitinous, her arms bearing mantis’ edged blades along the elbows while still extending onward into workable digits. Her legs, however, bore resemblance to that of a grasshopper’s. Along her back, the clasping legs of a biomechanical rig expanded out around her, connecting her to her new limbs via an external centipede-like organism slotted into the back of her skull. In her hand was a standard gauss rifle.

Avo swallowed and gnashed his fangs. Draus stared. For a moment, neither acted, just watching. He had gained power, but the opportunities it granted him also unveiled new temptations. It was much easier resisting the urge to eat her in the Crucible when he knew he couldn’t kill her.

The beast snarled, but Avo smothered it with a burst of willpower. Draus wasn’t choiceless. There was probably a reason he could find to justify killing her. But she knew more about the functions of his Liminal Frame than he did.

That, and he still felt like he owed her. He couldn't stop thinking of her open wrist, of the sweetness in her blood, his bestial hunger clashing against ingrained honor.

“New limbs?” he asked.

She looked at her insectoid limbs and shrugged. “Got ‘em at a discount.” She studied him for a moment before her face cracked in a ghost of a smirk, and shook her head. “You were thinkin’ of making a go for me just now, yeah? Won’t lie. Odds are in your favor now. But I’d spit the same ‘bout all the other ‘Clads I helped put down.”

“No,” Avo said, the words coming out choked with effort. “Won’t try to snuff you. Not right.”

She squinted at him. “What? You tellin’ me I’m out of your diet now?"

No. “Yes. Found me. How?”

“Waited for you to make a mess,” she said. “And then I followed the noise. And godsdamned did you make a lot of noise. Reckon it might even be enough to pull the attention of the Paladins down here. And trust me, you don't wanna tangle with them just yet."

“Should leave,” Avo said.

“Reckon we should,” Draus said. “Just gotta pick our new friends up is all.”

Avo's eyes narrowed. “New friends?”

“Found in the G-Station. They were trying to pull a runner. Leave you hangin’ from how it looks to me.”

Avo growled. He was going to flense the flesh from Chambers’ body slowly before dipping him in salt water.

“Still there?” Avo asked.

“Nah,” she said. “Bricked the capsule takin’ them. Secured other means of extraction. Mine. Can’t rely on Syndicate equipment, see. Little problem with it being compromised. So, you comin’ with?”

Avo studied her, listen for her slow, methodical heartbeat, and used his Heaven to watch the flow swimming at a constant pace through her system. If Mirrorhead was a blank, then Draus was stability. She didn’t betray much about herself either but then again, she didn’t have much to betray in the first place.

“When you stole the golem. Thought you did a runner. Expected it.”

Draus’ face cracked into a sneering laugh. She took a step closer, standing a scant foot away from Avo. Even with her new limbs, he still towered over her by half a head, but her musculature made him look outright malnourished.

“Did you kill Mirrorhead yet?”

Avo frowned. “No.”

“Then this ain’t over. Then we ain’t done. Know his type–burned my life fighting for his kind. The boy’s Highflame, through and through. Or he was. Suppose that makes him and I birds of a burning feather, but I don’t cotton to sullying myself by association, so he can stay in that there classification alone.”

And immediately Avo remembered why he missed Draus during his very, very brief tenure with Conflux. Unprofessionalism and incompetence were like cancers. It got into you and around you, and before long, it would see you dead.

Yet, within seconds of meeting Draus, she came prepared, with his former “comrades” bagged, more information on his former employer, and potentially a means of attack that didn’t require using the father as a triggering mechanism for a mem-con phantasmic.

Avo leaned down. “Coming with. But Mirrorhead. When we take him. Going to eat him. Hurt him. Drink his Heaven. Strip his frame. Crack his mind.”

Draus’ nostrils flared. “Well, if you want to eat an ex-Guilder, I think I got the condiments.”