Godclads

Chapter 4-7 The First Circle

The impossible cannot be balanced by the natural.

For every Heaven, there needs to be a counterbalancing Hell. A certain counterweight of impossibility from the miracles created by a Heaven.

But don’t get it twisted: the Hell is still an ontologic–a weapon.

From the First to the Ninth Circles, each Hell is bound to a domain, and from that Domain they will vent their designated Rend. As such, if you ever want to qualify as a proper Godclad, you will learn the canons of your Heaven, and will understand what daemons it might accrue…

-Santanado “Starsinger” Mondelles, “Gods of Self”

4-7

The First Circle

The fall did not stop. Even after Avo plunged past the first floor, and then a second. Hardened plascrete and rebar shattered into particulate upon greeting his skin. From his black, plates and pieces from the Nightmantis spilled free, its dissolving matter spreading out from the entropic shroud that clung to Avo.

Down through rooms and halls, Avo sank, his body like a cursed stake driven into virgin soil. Solid matter around him withered away into flakes of crumbling sand, the spilling shell of his former rig unspooling like water-painted wings of chrome from his back.

Yet, more than the devouring gales that rippled forth from his body, Avo felt his awareness blossom again. It was like a limb was returning to him–a part of his being that had been forgotten, asleep, now reawakened and roaring back into existence. Through the darkness, a chasm of inverted flame began to burn.

Within, he felt it. Controlled it. His blood flowed and fused to his whims, shaping itself to his will. The Sangeist within him exhaled the strain that suffused its insides, and finally, it opened itself to the world. The entirety of the block came alight in glowing veins. All solid matter around him greeted his gaze as flashing patterns; the source code of their ontological architecture.

It was as if another pair of eyes had opened beneath his own, and opened fully.

He felt the weight of his Heaven now, burning deep within him as his Soul spun bright. Below, an ebbing reflection danced in opposition to the Sangeist, supping from it the building Rend, balancing its mass with a counter presence of its own.

A Hell for a Heaven.

Rattling shots sounded from above. Reaching out, Avo tried to halt his fall but found that though he could guide the gusting shroud spilling free from his inner flame, he could not stop it from unmaking all solid matter around him.

Not until he halted his venting.

VENTING PAUSED

REND CAPACITY: 55%

Like a gas choked away with a twist of a valve, the shroud broke from reality as existence shuddered and reset. As the blackness vanished, however, it suddenly became evident to Avo how much damage his Hell had done. Across multiple levels, decay reigned, and a certain rot had eaten away even more of the Gouge’s skeleton.

For a thirty feet radius, it looked like his Rend had vaporized countless tons of matter, peeling through walls and exposing horrified families. The entropic gusts that enwreathed him had eaten through metal and glass with equal ease, sparing only liquids and gases.

More interestingly, however, was the fact that the lingering edges left in his wake dribbled with falling rivulets of blood.

Avo’s Phys-Sim screamed, snapping his attention back to the present. An orange lane lined the encroaching impact between him and the ground coming up three floors below, threatening to meet him head-first in a collision, with his exposed flesh certain to be caked between the remains of his armor and floor of tattered carpeting exposing hardened plascrete.

Reacting more on instinct than thought, Avo shaped six limbs from the blood within him and drew them out from his pores. Bearing the properties of tungsten and blood both, Avo felt the new limbs greet his senses as he plunged their jagged tips into the walls.

Like hooks digging across chalkboards, the surfaces around him screamed, sprays of jagged shrapnel spilling free. Out of his shoulders, Avo felt a lattice of blood blossom into shape, caging his face between the closed hound-like jaws of the Sangeist as the symbol representing the pattern of tungsten exploded over his skull like a flaming crown.

This was the smallest the Sangeist had ever been. Far less than even a ton, but still, Avo could feel the blood that used to flow inside him coat over his body, pushing the neural drills of his destroyed rig out from his spine like rising adult teeth.

A growing hunger burned with him. Using himself as the channel for this miracle held its own expense. Still, he could not deny its coursing power. As the final drill clicked free from his spine, Avo landed. The impact would have broken his legs if this was a natural fall, but as he fired his Celerostylus, he hammered into the ground with expanding pistons of blood shaped from his haemokinesis. The ground groaned, fissuring, the plasteel beams inside groaning as they bent.

He released his reflexes. Nothing inside him hurt this time. Without the limiting feedback of his rig and or the fragilities of his body, his blood heeded the whims of his accelerated mind like a perfect instrument, never breaking and easily shaped.

A feral smile spread across Avo’s face.

REND CAPACITY: 58%

Without hesitation, he pushed his Whisper out the block to check which floor he was on now.

Twenty third. Between the missile and his Hell, he experienced quite the fall.

Sweeping his perception up in a wide splash, a building full of naked thoughtstuff greeted him, the emotion of fear pouring free from the minds of gangers and tenants into phantasmal stratocumulus.

Five warded minds were diving down the exterior of the building, maneuvering to fire at him from the outside in, their perceptions yet to notice his Whisper. Four more were positioning themselves some ten floors beneath him, seemingly hoping to establish a horizontal-vertical L-shaped firing position to cut him down.

A final unit of two was already skittering down through the dust-choked openings his Hell made while venting his Rend, the contours of their rigs gleaming like missiles in a sandstorm. Reflex boosted. They were probably of a team as the Scalper he killed earlier–come too late to support their comrade.

Come too late to realize that they were merely throwing themselves to the beast.

Clicking his teeth in anticipation of his meal, Avo flexed the blood around him. With a scream of shredding alloy, the Nightmantis came apart around him. He emerged then from two cocoons. Physically, he shed his exo-rig as slats forming the shell of the Sangeist hardened around him. Metaphysically, he felt the Rend building within him again, inching back to fullness.

But this time, it wouldn’t stay full.

The two vanguards skittered down along the walls using embedded frequency blades, clad in the same black armor as the one that died earlier. It struck Avo as odd with how out of position they were with the rest of their forces but he supposed there could have been a bonus if they claimed his head and the bioware–

Avo winced and shot his mottled armor a look, bloodthirsty reverie breaking momentarily. He couldn’t tell if the mods were still on him. Probably not considering he took a missile to the chest. He sighed. Check later. Kill now.

Lining their descending thoughtstuff with his Phys-Sim, Avo lined his attack vectors and coiled two spear-tipped whips into being. When he was done with them, he needed to move further into the block. He had all the advantage up close right now, but still lacked the mass as well as the means to engage from afar.

As they came into visual sight, all but running down the walls through the floors, Avo fired his reflexes again and cast his whips free. The world stumbled to a near halt. The dust in the air flowed by the micro-inches. With his tactile senses broadened by his absolute control over blood, he felt the narrow lanceheads of his newly shaped weapons punching through the thinness of both Scalpers’ plating.

Immediately, though, he felt their writhing weight pulled down at him, their combined mass more than his natural strength could bear. Right. The force and speed of his blood would mirror his natural limits unless modified.

So, instead of struggling with the weight of the Scalpers, he tore their vessels empty of blood as well, exsanguinating them and feeding himself. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so hungry anymore while the mass of his tower grew.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 32 thaum/c

GHOSTS - [43]

Avo scanned through their ghosts with thought and found no sequences worth pilfering. He considered taking their rigs, but before he could claim any of their weapons or armor, two concentrated barrages of fire shredded the hallway. One from outside, one from below.

They established the pincer sooner than he expected.

He tensed his Celerostylus again and bit back the growing discomfort building in his skull, grateful that his body was being spared at the very least. As the symbiote imposed languor upon the motion of the world, the flechettes still greeted him frightfully fast, the impacts blunting against the thickening cells of his blood.

Still, Avo felt each shot strike him like a thunderclap, the kinetic energy spearing deep into his mind as layers of armored blood broke, folded, and mended. In an instant, he adopted more angles to his form, trying to encourage the shots to skid.

Manifesting a reaching limb from his back pulled himself toward the windows, the outside of the building. Two more shots rang through his rapidly circling bloodstream–the joined efforts between his Celeostylus and Heaven throwing flechettes aside as he spun his plate of armor like a whirlpool. Still, he could feel each shot chipping deeper, getting closer to the meat that wore the god.

And unlike the god, the meat was soft. Real soft.

REND CAPACITY: 61%...

Avo cast his Whisper out and peeked out at his foes. One team of shooters was below, at ground level while the other was scant feet away, vaporizing the exterior walls down to nothing as their gun barrels glowed and hissed baleful hisses of waste heat into the air.

In a second, Avo selected his targets and counterattacked. Lining an angle along the sides of the shredded walls, he yanked himself into position, his skull burning with pain, as he slammed against what remained of the walls and vented his Hell again.

REND CAPACITY: 58%...

Immediately, the Sangeist fizzled out of existence as a black cloud of gnawing entropy spilled free from Avo’s lungs as the flame inside him exhaled. A gust of all-devouring wind scythed through the wall in a winnow cleave. The walls dividing the interior of the Gouge from the world outside suddenly weren’t.

Four of the five Scalpers didn’t even get to scream, their bodies coming apart as if stripped clean by locusts. The last fell, the Scalper’s voice crackling through her compromised armor in a rising shriek, the shroud eating away her right arm but missing the mass of her body. Still, she maintained enough discipline to cut her cord, giving herself over to gravity as her shoulder-mounted gun flashed.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 36 thaum/c

GHOSTS - [47]

REND CAPACITY: 39%...

A burst of three flechettes plunged through Avo’s nimbus and struck him. They broke like glass against his body. Bending the currents of his shroud with a thought, Avo basked her, unmaking her lower body with a gesture.

A shot punched through the ground beneath Avo’s feet, slicing a clean wound up between his eyes. Hissing, he pulled the shroud back around him and channeled its withering flow through the ground beneath him.

But a flash of naked thoughtstuff flashed across his mind. Choiceless. Caught in the crossfire. Just beneath him. Reacting, Avo pulled back, funneling his gale away from a bronze-skinned juvenile running terrified through the halls.

The kid turned to up stare through the hollow in the ceiling, eyes dull as they stumbled, the thick nectar of joy dripping from an exposed vein.

Avo growled. “Get away–”

A rising tide of mag-flung shots cut through both his words and the juv. The adolescent came apart in a soup of gore, blood staining Avo’s body while their bursting flesh dissolved.

Growl turning into a furious hiss, Avo brought the full weight of his Hell down through the floors beneath him, guiding his entropy like a coruscating tornado.

REND CAPACITY: 21%...15%

Beneath him, his blood pooled, the ground cracking and sinking as the floor destabilized. As the last hissing whispers of his Rend came spilling free, Avo lashed it through the last floor and sheared the winds through the building. He didn’t get far enough to kill the Scalpers, but the way was clear.

REND CAPACITY: 0%

With a thought, he drew all the blood he was in contact with back over himself, the Sangeist layering over him in seconds as he dove.

His humiliation this day was approaching completion. He had been fooled into partaking in a fool’s errand by a short-sighted idiot. He had shamed himself when he failed to do his due diligence to prepare for said fool’s errand, proceeded to intrude into the lives of three people that didn’t earn the pain he brought them to steal a package, likely lost said package surviving a missile strike during his escape, and now got a bystander killed in the crossfire.

Avo had enough.

The Scalpers were going to die. And when he got back to Chambers, the man will find the fates met by his Syndicate rivals to be far more merciful.

Diving down, Avo pulled himself down what walls remained like a spider. The collapsing structure poured confusion into the enemy’s firing pattern. Still, he could see the pulsing flashes of their guns even through the smoke, the dull shine of their ward-protected thoughts in the Nether.

For the third time within thirty seconds, Avo fired his Celerostylus and struggled not to scream. He expanded the veins inside his head using his own blood to prevent an embolism from the stress erupting through his body.

He slammed down in their midst like an unfurling flower, his petals lashing wisp-thin blades. Around him, the Scalpers screamed and gurgled. A stray shot cracked deep, halted inches from his shoulder. He felt his slip, chipping through the thickness of titanium before slipping through flesh without resistance.

With every stroke, he cleaved a life free from existence, claiming them for his Soul. Limbs and parted pieces jutted loose from bodies. Screams choked off into silence. A blind haze of ravenous hunger exploded at the center of Avo’s mind as the world turned red, his violence unchained from his thoughts, the beast slipping free of its leash.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 40 thaum/c

GHOSTS - [51]

He knew not how long he spent afterward mutilating their corpses and shredding through their armor. All he knew was that by the time his conscious mind managed to usurp the feral creature wearing his body, he found himself striding past the front door, the flayed skin of his recent victims clinging to him like a cloak.

Avo blinked. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He looked behind him, and the open doors to the megablock smashed outward in a welter of gore and mangled bodies caking the soft swallow soil beneath his feet.

His Rend was empty. He must’ve vented again at some point. He must’ve. But he couldn’t remember. He clutched at his head and strained to contain his rage. Bubbling with tension, he dug his claws across his body, tearing into himself.

He promised Walton he would be better–that he would wield choice of instinct. For the last few years, he did his best to serve the ideals of his late father; offering piety to the ideals of the man in place of their person.

Today, Avo failed his father. Today, he let the beast run free. Today, he was unethical.

A ghoul.

A wet cough caught his attention. Not far ahead, leaning against the rusted husk of an abandoned aerovec, one last surviving Scalper muttered into her comms, her auburn hair stained red with blood running down her scalp.

Oh, right. He saw her fall. He took her arm. Legs. But didn’t finish killing her. The jagged edges of her frayed armor were sawing into her spilling intestines while the right half of her face hung denuded, swaying from her jaw.

“L-Longship, ”she said into her hissing rig, “re-request e-extraction. Team’s f-fucked. Ne-need immediate…” Her voice trailed off.

Beneath the shadow of the Gouge, Scalper and ghoul greeted each other for the first time.

“Kivvers? Kivvers? Come in Kivvers? Galeslither has been dispatched. What is your condition? Ki–”

She killed her comms by driving her thumb into the exposed electronics of her rig. Something delicate broke. Spitting blood at Avo’s feet, she barred her teeth in resigned defiance. “Di-didn’t think y-your kind could be…’Clads. Am…am I hallucinating right now?" She tilted her head and narrowed her working eye. "D-do I know you from... somewhere."

Avo looked at her globule of blood. He looked up back at her. He said nothing, choosing just to shape a lance from the blood in his veins. "Does it matter?"

She closed her eye and scoffed. “T-hat’s it, huh? Just… gonna kill me. No questions.”

“Yeah,” Avo said, the boiling urge to hurt her still there, still gnawing at him. He wanted to stick his fingers into the clefts of her wounds, to use his Heaven to keep her alive for longer. Find pleasure in cruelty. He fought it. He fought it. “That’s it.”

Around him, the wind began to kick up unnaturally, swirling on concentric patterns as the air grew thicker. The Scalper grinned at Avo and lifted her throat, offering her life, but giving no surrender. “Be seein’ you real soon–”

"No." Avo thrust the lance through her left eye. She choked, face twitching into a grimace as a low death rattle sounded from her throat. Her hand jerked twice before she slumped over. Before he tore her blood free from her body, shaped it into a hammer, and pasted her skull with a violent snarl.

As her body slumped over, blood pouring, Avo listened to the building wails on the rising winds. Her words finally caught up to him.

Galeslither. Golem. Reinforcements. The beast reared itself again as a low rumble of bloodlust burned within Avo.

More prey.