+Come in. Come in. Come in. Is anyone there? Block L007 to G012 are no longer responding. Is anyone there? Is anyone—+


    [SESSION UNABLE TO BE RECEIVED; TARGET ELIMINATED; SESSION LOST]


    +This is Bloodfang designation: Carnivore. Preliminary scouting has generated results. The innermost section of the Highflame defenders are no longer reactive. Suspect they have sustained at least operational kill. Levels of harm from the anomaly nested at the center of the city suggest we establish an breachpoint and devote all resources to heavy thaumic bombardment so that we can—+


    [SESSION UNABLE TO BE RECEIVED; TARGET ELIMINATED; SESSION LOST]


    +This is….Sleeper Designation: Meanwhile… Broadcasting… ID codes. Mirror… If you are receiving this message, something has happened. My cognitive suppressants have been damaged prematurely. My original consciousness is surfacing. The district is under attack from an unknown… What are you? How are you here? How do you know that I…  Yes. Yes, these are confusing times. But if you are who you say you are, it''s good to hear a friendly voice. I think... I think I trust you. I think I have to.+


    [SESSION ESTABLISHED; ASSET SECCURED]


    -Collection of Stray Thoughtcasts Intercepted by Ignorance


    29-13


    Back to School (IV)


    —[Navigator Hidrik Athatar]—


    There were two kinds of opportunities Hidrik was familiar with. The first was the kind he created—the kind that took a lot of hard work, research, planning, plotting, scheming, and all that other goodness to set up. Right now, he was experiencing the other kind of opportunity. The kind he had nothing to do with, but was reaping the rewards all the same.


    He had no idea why he was displaced or how he and his entire Sanctus battle group ended up behind the rapidly collapsing battle lines of an equally misplaced Highflame fortress district. But Hidrik wasn''t going to miss out on a chance to shoot the gift ghoul in the mouth.


    Sustaining dive. Chronoframe. Temporal displacement. 39, 42, 33. Lag strain. Three seconds. Holding to bearing.


    He led a strike team composed of four other Chronoframes, all heavy assault builds designed for maximum firepower. They were on a guerrilla run over the most active Highflame megablocks. Loathe as he was to admit it, despite being caught completely unprepared and effectively sandwiched between a Sanctus battle group supported by a heavy contingent of Ashthroners, the Golds were putting up a hell of a fight.


    Their megablocks were armed to the teeth, and their guns just wouldn’t stop firing. To make matters worse, every structure seemed to be connected to another. Anytime they pierced too deep or almost captured one hard point, the next block over would simply trigger their neighbors'' rinsing, damning both their allies and enemies to early oblivion. Another Chronoframe strike team had been lost this way. They got too cocky, descended too far trying to capture the core, and ate shit before they could dive again.


    Hidrik wasn’t going to make the same mistake. No, instead, he was using other bits of weirdness to his advantage, like the fact that memite no longer functioned, allowing his chronokinetics to actually deal damage to the exterior of the megablock.


    Surfacing once more, they hit block G-073 just as they slipped back into the present. Suddenly, it was as if they rubberbanded the past into the future, their guns blazing, tearing through the Highflame blocks'' rail-delivered missile batteries. The Golds failed to respond in time, caught off guard by the materializing Chronoframes. Time-flung munitions cut deep, skipping through the hard outer layer of most matter and only solidifying when they were temporally halfway through an existing object. The effect was similar to using a spatial miracle to teleport an object into an existing section of matter. Displacement inflicted its own kind of harm as well.


    Gouts of fire erupted out the side of the block, and suddenly its constant barrage of nuclear warheads slowed to a trickle. Then, the first shots of retaliatory fire came. Drones launched their own missiles, a few splashing against Hidrik''s 80-meter tall Chronoframe, swimming in an arc around the megablock. He shuddered with a grunt, banking hard within the core of his temporally constructed biomechanical behemoth. At 630 kilometers per second, his morphology was designed after that of a Kingfisher. His configuration was inclined toward bombings, but his tail-mounted particle scalpel had more than enough kick to cut down pursuing strike craft.


    Narrow beams of light gathered at the tip of the whipping tendril extending from the rear of Hidrik’s Chronoframe, and his system pounded as a series of firing trajectories loaded into his cog-feed. Three beams carved through the air, slicing through the wings of a drone, while the other two jolted aside, taking evasive maneuvers. One suffered a moderate cut through its central chassis, and instead of releasing a barrage of flechettes, sparks flew out from the barrels of its gun. The third drone escaped unharmed until one of Hidrik’s wingmen sliced it out of the sky.


    +Nice shot, Tully!+ Hidrik declared, only to wince a moment later. Right. He forgot about that. Auto-Seance’s remained fucked. Trying to use it got him a bit entropy sick earlier. Last thing he needed was another trip to the grafter. The collapse of the Nether—or whatever the hell had happened—left his group fighting together based on instinct and experience. They couldn’t communicate with each other at range, saving their rising and thought-cast transmissions for when they sank across the future. Chrono displacement drive online, but a loud enough thoughtcast could still get everyone’s attention.


    +Strike group Anovar, prepare to dive!+


    Not a moment too soon. Just as they slipped across the golden currents of reality, the fabric of space shuddered before a flood of Rendbombs enveloped the airspace they once occupied. Hidrik could feel his Chronoframe shudder with the pressure of passing entropy, even as he snapped forward, hopping a full second into the future. Baseline reality turned into a hazy blur. Strings of acceleration peeled alongside him, with time itself becoming as if a temporal current. Matter unspooled into vague outlines and patterns. Things still moved, the present still was, but dislocated from the chronological progression of baseline reality, the Chronoframe strike group existed more in parallel with time rather than within its confines.


    +Strike group Anovar, status report,+ Hidrik said. A series of affirmations sounded, with only Tali reporting light structural damage to his Chronoframe’s abdomen. It should heal by the time they surfaced once more, but Hidrik had his strike group adjust their formation just in case. No sense in losing anyone when he could help it.


    +Alright, last layer of Highflame defenses breaches, consangs,+ Hidrik declared. +We’re going to make a pass over their final battle line—the one that’s been busy hammering at that hulking stretch of fallen dragon. Whatever the fuck that thing is.+


    +Are we to make a scouting run over the dragon, top?+ The thoughtcast came from the new guy—Grease. Hidrik liked them. He liked anyone who didn’t get shot down during their first sortie. Kid was doing A-okay so far.


    +Negative, Grease. We stick to target and return behind planar hardpoints after the run. Surface. Fire. Dive. Keep it simple. Don’t veer off and get snuffed. Strike group Kataanga decided they wanted to be remembered as heroes rather than see tomorrow as useful soldiers. Well, jokes on those shits—someone’s gonna be mind-fucking their Osjacks and Osjanes back home.+


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    A chorus of bitter laughter sounded thereafter. A final black reprieve before they descended again.


    DISTANCE TO DESTINATION 32 KILOMETERS


    PLOTTING ROUTE THOUGH SPATIAL ABNORMALITIES


    Hidrik bit his inner cheek as he looked through the planned run in his Metamind’s DeepNav. Jaus, this district was like an aratnid taking it raw and ugly up in the shit-chute from a nu-dog. Normally, he and the juvs would be firing from over the horizon but with most of the airspace utterly chewed to shit they needed to do this fast, ugly, and at knife range. Nothing for it, they were swinging in close for another run.


    CHRONOSHIFT REACHING OMEGA-POINT INSTABILITY


    +Countdown initiated. T-3 to surface. Stay close. Guns hot. Dive soon.+


    +Synced!+ A chorus of agreements came from his cohort and Hidrik chuckled. Best job in the world. If only he could do this without the risk of death.


    3…2…1


    TEMPORAL SURFACING ENGAGED


    The Chronoframes snapped back over into reality.


    ***


    And each of them caught a Redaction Bullet a mere second after.


    Just like how unprepared the Golds were for the Chronoframe sorties, the Sanctians didn’t know they were intruding on someone else’s hunting grounds.


    ***


    —[Jelene Draus]—


    “Sanctian Chronoframes. Five frames. Heavy assault builds. 2.01 kilometers distance from nearest reflection-junction. Temperature: Uneven; extreme. Nuke and Rendbomb in effect. Spatial displacement from surrounding ruptures. Generating Redaction Bulleets. Adjusting firing trajectories. Release payloads through liminal passages in the second threshold.”


    As the Arsenalist finished its summation, the Simulacra accommodated the demands. A new passage opened up in the second deepest layer of Draus’ Manifold Paracosmos. Shots fired from here were synced for delay, exploiting constantly bleeding over into the future.


    Moving away from her deepest level again, existence suddenly started moving again—albeit barely. Nuclear detonations swallowed entire blocks whole. Ren bombs gouged grand wounds upon the tapestry of existence. Manifested heavens hammered each other with calamitous miracles. And her, the greatest threat of all, fought and killed—a huntress unseen.


    “Firing. Firing. Firing. Firing. Firing.”


    Her Arsenalist repeated themselves with each bullet loose. With each confirmation, a tower-sized pillar of metaphysical gold sheared out through her demiplane. There was no wind resistance inside her tessellated realm so bullets left fast and hit faster.


    The Chronoframes materialized next to a crumbling building—and five shots zipped into each of them, Draus’ firing position a panel of glass within the bones of the collapsing block.


    With the vicinity cleared once more. she turned her attention to sweeping the rest of the district, on the megablock she had captured, and, most importantly, on her own Rend.


    REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA RESPLENDENT] - 88%


    VENT! VENT! VENT!


    If Draus had one complaint about her Manifold Paracosmos despite the operational and temporal superiority it granted, it was the sheer deluge of entropy it generated. Every second she spent submerged inside her deepest threshold where time barely moved, she could feel her Rend climbing higher, spiking incrementally.


    At baseline, she likely could have only spent two minutes within her innermost lair, but that was before Draus inherited the Stillborn, before she became Flame Anchor, and before her Fame grew capable of interfacing with other metaphysical constructs. As things stood, she had a few passages open at the base of a compromised megablock, and with each ripple of coruscating fire spilling out from her soul, she kept her expenditure in check, using her Simulacra’s Hell only in high-intensity situations or to help less the load.


    Steadily, her rend began to plummet, and by the time it was at fifty-nine percent, each of the Chronoframes were coming asunder in fractures of time in real-time.


    "Symmetry at work," Ignorance declared.


    "Synced on that, consang," Draus said, whistling to herself.


    Frankly, she appreciated her Redaction Bullets more than her Arsenalist’s newest Heavenly upgrades. Though her perpetual accelerator granted her plenty of firepower, few things could match the convenience of simply unmaking your enemies. No longer needing to kill the Navigators twice also did wonders for her mood.


    “Priority hostiles eliminated. Updating DeepNav. Returning to monitoring mode.” With her Arsenalist awakened, it was less like a dead weapon and more like a hyper-intelligent battle buddy. True, she still controlled its cannons and manipulated its miracles, but it possessed a thought of its own. A mind of its own that could offer strategies, recommendations, and even warnings in the heat of combat.


    Right now, as it was of a frame and thereby of a mind with Draus, it scouted through the deep nav simulation of Thronerest at a pace she simply wasn''t capable of. The Arsenalist and the Simulacra might be conscious, but Draus never assumed them to be human. The way they operated was primal, utterly single-minded toward their governing mythos.


    A series of new targets materialized.


    Her mirrors were spreading fast, vitrification creating new peepholes she used to scout the district while a hailstorm of raining glass granted her limited zone supremacy. Pulses from her metamind allowed her to scan the blocks for priority enemies, and every now and again she would feel Ignorance leaning in to help her. Isolating system operators running internal defense for the megablocks. 186 new target markers materialized in her deep nav and overlaid themselves upon her cog-feed right after.


    "Aligning trajectories. Aiming phase. Recommend—"


    "Yeah, yeah, I got it," Draus said.


    She descended back down into her internal flare where time practically stood still and painted new firing solutions from her most optimal passages. Things continued like this for a little while until all sixty-four blocks within that final 16-kilometer stretch, pincering the City Eternal, fell utterly silent.


    "Well, I’d say that''s a pretty damn good job killing today," Draus chuckled to herself.


    She hadn''t had this much fun in years. Sure, it was a little dull at times—all that prep work, no one fighting back, no tension or struggle—but throwing down against a proper enemy was just a bonus. Draus was a regular, not Zein. She had no urge to duel her enemies. She was here to kill, destroy, and be done. For all the killing Thousandhand did, she was still a wielder, and not the weapon itself.


    Too human. All too human in the end.


    "Final reconnaissance completed," the Arsenalist declared. "All blocks scoured barren of hostiles. You may proceed to the second phase."


    "Don''t mind if I do," Draus said.


    Second phase, as it was called, went something like this: when all the guns were silenced, when the immediate threats were eliminated, and no further Rendbombs hammered the surface of the dragon, Draus would load Vator into her Arsenalist and fire him out as a bullet. She left the Instrument contained within the outermost layer of her Manifold Paracosmos. To his perspective, everything was a blur, happening nigh instantaneously. The last second, he had only just stepped into her demi-plane. The next, he would be flying out as a bullet, and she would brief him on the way.


    Chronological fuckery was a beautiful thing.


    "You could have used him to clear some of the blocks," Ignorance muttered in the back of her mind. ‘We have influence over him. Don''t need to worry about trust."


    "Yeah, but I don''t like him. And honestly, he''s my ticket into Axtraxis. Our ticket into Highflame''s soft, soft underbelly. That makes him a very important vessel. We don’t gamble with those."


    A chuff of acceptance came from the Definement.


    "Do as you will. You are the soldier. I defer to your expertise."


    "Oh, so you can get humble when the time comes for it."


    Ignorance replied, a sly amusement entering his tone.


    A ring of guns materialized over Vator''s frozen form. Vectors of gold sneered along his outline, time-bending miracles expressing themselves as a form of stationary acceleration. As Draus prepared to fire him out, she opened a new passageway and painted her final firing trajectory. "It’s time to see what’s on the other side," Draus said, grinning to herself.