Godclads

Chapter 4-8 Fallen Heaven

A single angle of attack will no longer suffice for the demands of war. As our capabilities have grown, so too has the butcher’s bill widened.

Once, we spoke of things in the complexity of range, firepower, shock factor, and mobility. These concepts remain ironclad but only serve as the foundations for the maturation of war.

Beyond the physical, we must consider the phantasmal. Ghosts of the past dead bearing traumatic memories by the century. Deceptive poltergeists slip through your mind to steal operational information. All must be warded. All must be faced.

Beyond the physical, we must prepare for the impossible. By the will of Heavens, sound can be woven into wavelengths of fire. Light can be twisted into a slicing blade. A song could expose an entire area to radiation.

We live in a time of no sanctuary; no escape.

As such, everything must pivot into an attack.

-Osjon Thousand, Newly Risen Supreme Commander of the Highflame Warhost

4-8

Fallen Heaven

It didn’t take Avo much scrying with his Whisper to confirm that the bioware he came to claim was gone. Dissolved with much of his armor when he vented his Rend. Inside the block, people were weeping, their thoughtstuff spiking as fear cojoined with sorrow, voices pleading for help. The scent of blood and clashing odors choked the air, flowing through new ventilated hab-cells.

There had been other casualties during the engagement. These walls were lined with plascrete, but against gauss-propelled weapons, plascrete just didn’t do.

Like a vulture, Avo fed upon the corpses he left behind, refilling his body with nourishment, and readying his metabolism for more wounds to come. From the dead, he also claimed their blood, the Domain fusing around him in ascending plates of armor. Shame about their guns and implements. Mem-printed to their minds. Bricked upon death.

Another demonstration of Conflux’s comparative lack of professional procedure. How did they manage to survive in the face of such opposition? Was it merely Mirrorhead’s power?

A gust of wind spilled over him. Avo shook the questions out of his mind and finished his assessment. His current blood mass was paltry. Easy as his Heaven was to shape into piercing implements, his survivability was still limited. He could spin his blood fast enough to cycle a shot aside, but was still far too vulnerable against explosives.

As such, he had a choice to make. Did he make his stand in the block or should he seek a better position? The winds were sweeping hard through the district as if blown from the lungs of a titan. Outside the Gouge, the ruined husks of aerovecs squealed along the cracked roads. Debris skipped. Inside, the walls creaked and the winds howled.

The Galeslither was coming.

And Avo didn’t know what else was coming with it.

Fleeing was not an option. He wasn't going to outrun a golem, nor did he want them to just blast his capsule mid-transition through the G-Tubes. He caught sight of the local Nether during his brief jaunt out the window. Mostly pockets of thoughtstuff. Concentrations of ghosts. Wouldn’t take much for a properly equipped Syndicate with control over the sky to bombard. Nor would it be difficult for them to detect a single runner fleeing away from the other minds.

That was fine with him. After his day so far, the low growl of violence was still burning hot in the back of his mind, and he wasn’t done with the killing. But it was that small spark that belonged to Walton that made him leave the block.

The choiceless had suffered enough. Because of his foolishness, of Chambers’ idiocy, of the Scalpers’ cold cruelty.

With his Whisper cast high into the air sixty feet above, Avo scried his path forward as he moved to depart from the Gouge, leaving its battle-carved visage behind him. There were other blocks here. A few looked abandoned. He would make a stand there, perhaps. Draw them in and cut them down in close quarters, the same as he did in the block.

What he wanted to do was to force the fight subterranean, inside Layer One.

If they caught him in the open, his counters toward a ranged assault or ghost-jocked missiles would be limited, if that. That, and they could doubtlessly box him in, fire at him from all sides.

As he leaped over the moat and tore through the scrap metal barricades leading outside, Avo suddenly spotted a titanic broadcast dish dotted with puncture wounds. Right, the place he wanted to use as an insertion point into the Gouge. The one Chambers’ claimed was infested with a Fallen Heaven.

Without a moment to waste, Avo spun haemokinetic legs, his new blood-shaped constructs galloping against the pull of the grinding winds.

He was Godclad. The Scalpers were just chromed-up snuffers. Now, provided he died clean of Rend, his demise would prove a temporary setback. A boon that his foes sorely lacked. Unless they too had someone bearing a Liminal Frame. But somehow, with how Mirrorhead hid at the mention of other Godclads, Avo doubted the Syndicate boss would have set up this close against a dreaded rival.

REND CAPACITY: 2%

As he came upon the walls of the block, he fired his Celerostylus for a beat and cycled the blood around him as fast as he could.

REND CAPACITY: 11%

He relaxed his reflexes and vented. With more time to think, to feel his Hell flowing through him, he sensed a burning pattern of mimicked matter shining over his skull flicker as his entropic shroud came gusting free from his orifice, the blood spilling around him.

It seemed either a Heaven could be active, or a Hell. Not both at the same time. Made sense if they were to be as balanced as they felt. Guiding the entropic shroud flowing free from his body felt less like controlling a limb and more like exhaling onto something–except he could still guide said exhale long after it had left his body.

Thinking back, he wondered why he didn’t see Little Vicious vent any of her Rend. And she used her golem far more extensively than he did. Was it a thing of mass? Or something else he didn’t understand yet.

Just as the walls in front of him petaled away into dust, Avo felt it. Sensed the intruding golem before he even spotted it. With his Soul online, the world seemed divided–as if there were countless stratified layers over existence. Through his Whisper, he peered out.

Some few miles above him, through a coiling vortex of undulating currents, the triple-segmented body of the Galeslither squeezed free from the air as if a mechanical centipede leaving the cleft of a wound. But its divine fire did not burn alone. The flickering brightness hinting at two more golems shone like a trinary sun within the Galeslither, while two spear-shaped aero-barges darted out from currents of wind.

A blossom of over twenty missiles tore out into existence through the gap in the winds. Behind them, the spear-ships dove, their tips flashing the same pattern as that which shone over Avo’s head: tungsten.

REND CAPACITY: 0%

With haste, he enwreathed himself in the shell of his Heaven and pulled himself into the guts of the block.

No sign of Chambers’ so-called drone support. Not that he expected anything from the enforcer by this point. Seeing the state of Conflux’s logistics and organization, Avo had a feeling that, without Mirrorhead’s presence, the Scalpers would find plenty of trophies should they ever make a push to claim Mazza’s Junction.

Lashing himself forward on tendrils of blood, a series of building shockwaves slammed into his back, launching him further still as the barrage of missiles detonated in expanding gulfs of fire, shredding ugly wounds into the clean gulf he made using the entropic shroud.

Buffeted by a tidal wave of force, Avo felt blood rattle, spreading the kinetic flow through as a ripple while staying as hard as metal. He chuffed with pleasure. Such was why the Sangeist had proven so hard to face, its eldritch structure resistant to direct impacts.

Riding the force, Avo watched as a wall rushed toward him. He shaped his head into a drill and fired his reflexes, spinning his shell. Like a flechette dropped through wettened tissue, he punctured through the plascrete walls, his ever-malleable blood keeping his tip from ever blunting, his heightened reactions grinding through the matter ahead of him with ease.

REND CAPACITY: 18%

With each surface he burst through, a bit more inertia clung to him until finally, he sank through shattering glass and found himself tumbling out into a wide open chamber with a dormant turbine oozing ripples of half-choked fire from its cracked shell.

The exterior ghosts nesting Avo’s surface thoughts wailed at the sight of the exposed thaumic reactor. He felt his wards groan momentarily, as something chittered before spattering against his phantasmal armor.

There was a wrongness to the space around him that he couldn’t explain. Like a gaping wound had opened across the guts of reality, drowning every inch of the room's three hundred-feet expanse with spatially-twisting resonance.

It was as if the fires of Soul were coming apart and spilling the reality it bore within into the reality that was without.

WARNING: RUPTURE DETECTED

  LEAKAGE: SPHERE III FALLEN HEAVEN

INSUFFICIENT REND CAPACITY TO STABILIZE

  HELL [THIRD CIRCLE] REQUIRED

Casting two strands of blood into the wall behind him to slow his fall, Avo descended past scattered railing and spun his Whisper, splashing his awareness behind him.

There was no need.

Through the ceiling, the two gleaming spear ships plunged down into the chamber. Each was forty feet in length and extended along the midsection, with needle-like las-drones ejecting free from their docks.

Without hesitation, Avo went for them, sparing no time for respite. He counted twelve accretions of thoughtstuff–

The drones fired. His Phys-Sim wailed. He pulled himself to the side. A beam cut into his Sangeist, the heat chipping a narrow groove of his armor away and turning it to steam. Avo cast out a grapple of crimson and pulled himself close. The distance between him and the drones closed as he fired his reflexes. Time slowed. He shaped new constructs, lining their arcing vectors with the drones.

He surged, forty feet closing to nothing within a millisecond. The monowire-thin edges of his haemokinetic weapons bit through the drones, strands of blood parting alloy, glass, and silicon with equal ease. Twenty feet away, the first of the Scalpers were bursting free from their landing modules.

Cleaving out with the flow of his momentum, he directed his lashing whips out at his new prey.

Only for the turbine to shudder, space itself bubbling around it as it burst apart in a fissure of light. The fires of a broken Soul flooded the chamber. Avo’s cog-feed fizzled as his ghosts fled behind his straining wards. His Phys-Sim went offline. Around him, the minds of the Scalpers burst, their wards shattering.

Joining their ghosts in madness and pain, the enforcers screamed.

WARNING: REND CAPACITY SPIKING

REND CAPACITY - 97%

  EXTERNAL RESONANCE BLEEDING OVER

VENT! VENT! VENT!

Feeling the building thaumic mass of another Heaven flowing into him, Avo gasped as he released his hold on the Sangeist and unleashed the waste building within his First Circle. A tidal wave of annihilation flowed out from him, cleaving through Scalper and matter alike.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 52 thaum/c

Even as he vented, he felt the flow of new echoes flooding into him. One by one, the thoughtstuff of the Scalpers winked out, their Essences joined to him through the ritual of his killing. Yet, their ghosts did not answer. Instead, their broken minds dissolved into fragmenting ghosts, nulled before he could even claim them.

As the roaring eldritch radiance faded around Avo, as he vented the last gasps of the Rend within him, he found himself staring at a path of clean destruction panning an eighty-foot length through furrows and gulfs cleaved clean through the porcelain surfaces of the chamber.

Only sheared pieces and gnawed parts remained of the Scalpers and their ships. From their skin, writhing hydrapedes pushed free, the chitinous shell of the writhing insect fusing from skin, bone, and armor alike. And finally, when the eldritch creatures drank enough matter to comprise their bodies, they dove up and sank through the folds of space, their six-headed bodies skittering out of existence toward a place unseen.

Before him, the gouts of fire from the turbine crackled at him, mocking him with its laughter.

So. That was a Fallen Heaven. That was the heart of a Rupture. If the stray miracles leaking free from this block could do this, Avo could only wonder in quiet awe at how people could survive beneath the continent-blotting chasms of anomalous ruination where the old pantheons broke.

Little wonder why so many were fleeing to New Vultun and the other megacities.

But before Avo could ruminate any further at the horror he just beheld, a sudden hurricane exploded into existence from above where the spear-ships punched through.

Drawing the Sangeist over himself, Avo felt lighter than he was. Weaker. He was wielding only the blood in his veins now, the rest doubtless subsumed by the rogue miracle to create more hydrapedes.

As such, when he speared two limbs into the ground to stop himself from being pried out of the chamber, both his mass and strength were found wanting, and like a bug swallowed by a vacuum, he snapped free from the ground he was clinging to.

Spinning, he cracked against the walls, a hip dislocating with a pop. Still, he held his outer armor as best he could, his slatted cells sparking as he was pulled up along the walls until he reached the lip of the opening of the ceiling.

Like being launched free from a catapult, he spun high into the air, and for a moment, he passed by a coiling presence that ebbed brightly with fire–far more intact than that which could be detected within the broken thaumic reactor.

Pushing through turbulent clouds into the sprawling green of the megablock’s hydroponic gardens–also infested with hydrapedes writhing free from the leaves and branches of the plants–Avo watched as the Galeslither pushed through the membrane of impossibility into reality. From its sides sprayed wet mists, its cloud-like presence bringing with it two more golems–both rival Sangeists.

Even flung free into the air, Avo hissed a note of glee, feeling the semblance between the fire that burned with him and its two cousins. Across his body, his blood wailed in recognition, the Heaven screaming from within.

ERROR: HEAVEN [SANGEIST] IS---

MAKEMEWHOLE! MAKEMEWHOLE! MAKEMEWHOLE!

The voice of the dead god came alive and roared like a nuclear explosion, the last vestige of its wants and will bleeding over into Avo’s ontology. He gasped. He didn’t even know it could do that.

Yet, as he lashed a tendril of blood into walls and pulled himself atop a tree, a gushing tide of clouds washed forward, coating the Galeslither from existence as it flowed free on torrential winds.

But from its fading form fell another five Scalpers clad in heavy exo-rigs. They landed unbothered by the winds as if the Galeslither had exempted them from its pull. Through the blurring winds, their arms flashed bright with humming flames, fusion burners singing the dreaded thrums of activation.

Avo shuddered as if struck. He remembered that sound from during the Uprising. Often, it followed him to sleep at night.

Letting the two eighty-ton Sangeists push forward as vanguards from opposite angles, smashing through the overgrowth trees of the hyper-stimulated garden and pulping the ichor of stray hydrapedes, the infantry pushed down the middle, setting the gardens ablaze. Above, the Galeslither wafted, building to be a small hurricane that was pressing down.

From four angles, the Scalpers made to claim Avo's life.

And, with his Whisper cast free in the Nether, and threads of blood extending from his claw tips, he made to claim theirs first.