Preparation.
Tempo.
Firepower.
Unpredictability.
If you''re going to be engaging in close-quarters combat within a megablock or any other constrained space, you''re gonna wanna be a tide. You''re gonna wanna sweep through sector to sector, burning through the threats like wildfire. Hesitation will kill you. So will missing your shots. So will being acquired. So will not knowing what''s ahead. And you can even do everything right and still end up snuffed. But that''s the way of the game.
I''m not here to promise that you''ll return a big glowing hero, chest full of medals. That''s not you. That''s not us. We''re regulars. We''re happy to do the killing. We''re happy to do the dying as well. But if you can keep your guns hot, your feet moving, your mind solid, and your path clear, you won''t believe how fast you can seize control over a defensible object and turn the existing infrastructure against its former inhabitants.
-Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma
29-12
Back to School (III)
[Bloodthane Agthar Blacktide]
Bloodthane Agthar Blacktide steeled himself as the fusion burner punched clean through his compromised combat skin. His cog-feed pixelated, struggling to adjust to the sight-searing brightness, and with each inhale, he felt his lungs cook, his flesh vaporizing from the inside. The pain was hard to describe, and not even a scream conveyed his agony, for the organs responsible for his very breath dissolved into balls of superheated plasma.
But a slamming force jolted him back to alertness, and an ejection prevented him from crossing over into the embrace of death. The Woundhound burrowed deep into the Bloodthane, flowing up from someplace truer than biology, consuming his incinerated lungs. The woundhound burst out from his chest, splashing through the fusion burner''s radiant plume without difficulty. It’s fur, a mottled mess of midnight gray, rippled across the creature’s body, unbothered by the flame.
Across from the Bloodthane, the last of the Highflame militiamen died without ever knowing what hit them. The Woundhound splashed into their ontology, and Agthar felt his injuries shift from the beast to another entirely. The victims simply knelt over, folding over in their suit of heavy armor like a puppet severed from strings.
The Bloodthane staggered back and coughed a few times, relieved to feel any sensation under his chest at all. Just to breathe was a sublime pleasure.
VENT! VENT! VENT!
REND CAPACITY: 98%
A body splattered against the wall next to him. Exhausted, Agthar tilted his head only to see the final remains of a technician sliding down from the surface upon which they were caked, leaving a smear of tangled viscera. A few staggered steps came from behind him, and the Bloodthane regarded his erstwhile companion.
Ravensong was thin for a Scaarthian, abnormally so. At nearly three and a half meters tall, took up most of the narrow hallway strewn with smoking mechs and mutilated corpses—was a giant even for her own clade. But a good portion of that had to do with the cybernetic torso extension that parted her midsection. She flung two bodies from the frequency blades implanted along heer shoulders, and Sanctian Past-Tense pattern chrono-kinetic rifle fired from her back in staccato bursts of three. With each shot, a ripple would pulse across the surface of reality, flechettes cast into the future to strike potential targets.
"How many injectables you got left, Blacktide?" Ravensong croaked. Her voice sounded hoarse, and she didn’t look much better than he did. Her face was riven with deep cuts, and part of her skull hung low along the side of her face like a severed flap. A tungsten spike was buried all the way through her collarbone, jutting out from her back. But despite all this, she barely looked winded. Scarthians were made of stern stuff, enough to make Agthar envious.
He might have been adopted into the culture, but those of the wounded matriarchy never allowed him to forget the truth of his heritage.
"I’m down to one Woundhound injectable. 98% Rend Cap," he answered.
She sighed. "Well, I’m out of hounds. 99 here." A bitter laugh escaped her. "Think we’re running out of rope."
"We’ll manage," Agthar replied, though he didn’t fully believe it himself. He had to make it. He made a promise. A promise to his daughter that he would come back alive. Just like all the times before.
Another tremor shook the structure they found themselves in, and a series of chittering taps sounded through the surrounding walls. Agthar didn’t know how or why he’d been brought to this place. Ravensong wasn’t a member of his cadre, just another Sphere Two Bloodthane displaced from their original position. His memories were clouded. He’d suffered partial ego damage upon waking up.
He remembered being called back into service due to recent developments happening in the Court of Truth. Apparently, there were murmurs that the Fifth Guild War was starting soon, but Agthar didn’t care about any of that. He was visiting his daughter. He had dropped her off with her mother—that sow’s weekend with his girl. They were going to visit the Deep Blue aquarium when he was on leave next time. Always next time…
He had no idea what made the girl like the ocean so much. Agthar personally hated the ocean. He hated places where he couldn’t see his enemies. He hated not knowing things. Which was why his tensions were running a little bit high right now. He had no idea how he found himself within a Highflame megablock—and a highly militarized one at that.
He remembered nothing but a terrifying, terrifying oneness that wrenched his consciousness free from his body. Like his ego had been bound to all the world and all the world had been bound to him before he was falling. Falling, released back into his original sheath. And then, and then he found himself in this structure. Surrounded by Highflame assets. Fighting for his life right alongside Ravensong.
The only reason they didn’t end up dead was because there were other assets attacking High Flame as well. At least, that was what the tremors passing through the building hinted. Using their Heavens, he and Ravensong traversed the interior of the block, trying to find a means of escape. But as they shifted out from their rooms, instead of crossing over into an interconnected layout of other chambers, hallways, or whatever other architectural terms there were to describe random specific rooms, they found themselves navigating a chaotic maze filled with moving tethers and dancing wires.
It was like swimming through a nest. The room they were in had been disconnected from the rest of the block, separated like a toy brick from the structure. Moving spider-like insects surrounded the module they departed and proceeded to melt it down to slag using high-powered beams of plasma. A Rendbomb had been teleported into the area shortly thereafter, cleansing, staining the zone with entropy. Had they hesitated a moment longer, both of them would have been overloaded. Killed for good.
But that had been almost an hour ago. And now, as they skipped from module to module, fighting from room to room even as the layout and structures changed around them, Agthar felt his exhaustion creeping in. He felt his time growing short. The building was shuddering more and more; the delays between each internal Rendbomb delivery grew longer, but it wasn’t going to stop. They needed to keep going. Or die.
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Swallowing, he shot Ravensong a stare. "I got enough in me for one more jump. The internal defenses are going to zero in on us soon. We move on three."
Ravensong hesitated for a moment, her own posture sagging. "Yeah. Yeah, why not? Let’s make a fight of this, even if it is to be our end." She laughed. "One hour and sixty-four rooms cleared. Not too bad for a couple of Sphere Two Porters, huh?"
"Not too bad," Agthar agreed. But not good enough.
He needed to make it home. He needed to make it.
As the chittering noise grew louder and louder outside, Agthar knew the insectoid drones were cordoning off this section of the megablock. The tethers were probably already active, disconnecting them from their surrounding architecture to ensure easy sterilization without risk of collateral damage. Manifesting his Heaven of Space—That Under Midnight Blooms—a swell of torrid black ink sprayed free from Agthar''s body, consuming both him and Ravensong in a patch of crawling blackness.
They slipped out through the clefts of a nearby door, rushing past a legion of crawling drones to dive deep into the megablock''s organs once more.
VENT! VENT VENT!
REND CAPACITY - 99%
"I know, you piece of shit," Agthar growled internally. "Just last. Just last a minute more. Just last a minute more, damn you."
Desperation mingled with determination as he ignored the drones firing at him. There was nothing they could do, and he kept his movements erratic, slipping through the clefts, lining the various strands. The interior of the megablock was a dense weaving, constantly vibrating with electricity. He knew the rest of the structure lay beyond this forest, and he and Ravensong had spent the better part of an hour working their way down, trying to find the techno-thaum reactor powering the block.
That was the only thing they couldn’t decentralize. They could have a multi-layered defense grid. Separate the rooms within the block down to component modules. But a reactor? Power had to come from somewhere. The Rend had to be contained at someplace.
And they were close. Very close. Agthar could feel the crushing weight press against his Frame. They kept working their way down and—
An entire section of the block ceased to be. A flood of lightning that thundered with screaming trauma tore into the insides of the building. Matter shattered like fragments of broken memories, and as phantasmal fractals passed through Agthar, a flood of intrusive moments seared into him.
He was a blinded, deafened sacrifice. A girl no more than eight. They dismembered him. They captured him and his family. And now, because their goddess of fertility needed it, she and all other children of “pre-ripeness” needed to be offered. And so a crude blade bit deep into his abdomen as he screamed. Screamed as they harvested his womb—
He was a doctor. A healer. But he was not enough. Patient after patient died under his blade. No matter how much he tried. He wouldn’t be enough. Another soldier he couldn’t save. Another failure. For clan and culture. His master was right. He would never be enough. The only thing he ever did right was turning the blade on—
A flash of noise and color tore Agthar out of the memories. He caught a glimpse of the world beyond the block—of a massive writhing shape projecting a devastating stormcloud brimming with potent traumas at Agthar’s position.
He pushed himself, unwilling to think about what he just experienced. There would be time for crying when—
The space ahead of him came asunder. Another two hyper-enhanced trauma-patterns unmade entire swaths of the block. How was this happening? Why was the mind shattering the real now? Why wasn’t the memite functional? All these questions vanished as chrome-hued stings snapped free, pieces of insectoid drones filled the air, and there—the reactor. Through the shattered insides of the structure, he could see the reactor spinning fast, Soulfire burning hot and bright and—
A glint of brightness jabbed at Agthar’s attention. Briefly, he saw a string turn transparent—as if it was changing over to glass. He ignored it. He was close. No time to consider random anomalies.
+Ravensong,+ he said. +I see it—+
+I feel it!+ She replied. A chorus of disbelieving laughter sounded from her mind, even as more of the block shattered into nullified shards. +We might actually—+
Then, they passed through an unseen panel of glass and suddenly ceased to be.
True death came fast in New Vultun.
Sometimes, you just don’t get to live. Not up to you.
***
Somewhere down the Undercroft, a girl waited for her father to come home. She waited as the strange substance consumed her world. She waited and wept and prayed.
Up till the point the flames took her as well.
He never came.
Not in this life.
Not in this iteration of existence.
***
[Jelene Draus]
Manifold Paracosmos was an uncanny but ultimately pretty useful cannon to have. It took Draus a little while to get used to it. Messing with chronology wasn''t the same thing as just shooting a gun, after all, but in the end, she got the hang of it pretty quick. Just a shame about how much Rend it required—still. Her new Hell destroyed matter pretty good. Matter, forces, and things.
People too, like the Bloodthanes that wandered into her thin, transparent panel. Poor shits.
Nothing they could have done.
REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA] - 64%
Triggering her Manifold Paracosmos again, Draus created five thresholds of temporal progression within her demiplane. In the deepest layer, time barely moved at all—and such was where she spent the bulk of her time. The layer after time, the world barely moved at all, a second elongated to an hour. The third layer was normal time, while the two after that came with accelerated and nigh instant time-lag madness varieties.
This combination granted her a kind of operational insulation. She planned in the deep. Fired Perpetual Acceleration rounds in the slow-mo layer, interacted with the world in the third, and kept Vator and a few other “VIPs” in the last threshold just so he couldn’t learn her capabilities.
With the Bloodthanes consumed by her Hell, she had a few more seconds to plan her operation—and bring her reflection close to the last megablock she needed to compromise. As the shard speared close to the reactor, Draus shifted back to her deepest layer, and the real outside ground to a halt.
Studying the world through her thousands of junctions, Draus watched the progression of attacks exchanged between Highflame and the Hungers, and studied the encroachment of other displaced Massists forces as well. Her Rend climbed fast the depths of her Manifold, but she was also in the perfect position to unleash an alpha strike like no other.
No one knew she was here; that they were effectively stone-still, giving her ample time to line up shot after shot using her Arsenalist and Phy-Sim. After half an hour in demiplanar time—three seconds of real-time—she aligned firing solutions on 1.2 million targets. And when she fired, she used Perpetual Acceleration each time, firing out through passages generated at different positions in her demiplane dependent on the time it took to strike each target.
Ultimately, though she fired all these rounds at different time, they would impact in perfect sync. The first of her projectiles were all loosed from deep within the second layer, but every passing moment she moved closer and closer into the shallows, until she was finally engaging in real time. And then, with the operation laid out and the board set up, the Regular conducted an act of orchestral surgery—as a single operator no less.
Eat your fucking heart out, Quail Tavers.
It was like 1.2 million perfectly placed shots happening all at once without any forewarning, without any hint or disturbance. Entire cadres died, control nodes were destroyed, Rendbomb facilities and spatial relays reduced to rubble. It was a sudden, vicious crippling that no one could have prevented. No one—unless they possessed a Domain of Chronology themselves, or something equally esoteric.
As for the surviving High Flame cadres, or the invading Bloodthanes, or any other Godclads for that matter? Well, just as the Arsenalists could fire from deep within the Manifold as a Heaven, so too did its time redaction work while it was a Hell. Draus didn’t so much battle rival Godclads as she unmade them. These shots came perfectly timed to thread through their vulnerable bodies the moment they needed to vent the instance, flashing back to their ephemeral forms.
While the rest of the district continued to rage, masses pushing along both borders of the former High Flame territory, the Highflame defenders, pincered on all sides, tried to capture the dismembered Hungers while holding their own peripheries. A 16-kilometer stretch of land simply ceased firing, ceased struggling, ceased doing anything. Around 64 blocks fell perfectly silent, dormant, as if lobotomized from the inside.
And such was only the opening salvo.