+Holy mother of fuck, it’s coming down… he’s coming down—Cease fire! Cease FUCKING FIRE! ALL GODSDAMNED UNITS, CEASEFIRE BEFORE YOU GET—+
-Last Transmission of Glaive-Commander Ikkio (Ori-Thaum) of Massist Joint-Command CYCLEBURNER
32-5
Heavy Falls the Palm (I)
—[Glaive-Captain Setsun]—
Glaive Captain Satsu always had a feeling he’d die fighting the No-Dragons at some point. It was always there in the back of his head—a vibe he got from the first time he faced down one of their flesh-twisted horrors. Of all the Saintist Guilds, they were the ones who shook him the most, which made this last stand all the more miserable.
At least the Highflamers would just kill you. Omnitech? Fucking experimentation would be shit, but the No-Dragons? Getting his flesh consumed by one of their bioforms? Caught one of their disgusting diseases? Sweet Jaus and the fucking dream itself, he’d rather take a fléchette to the head any fucking day.
Too late now, though. Here he was, loading his last mag of chem-missiles into his rail-launcher, while his surviving comrades fired at anything that moved. The world was divided between two points—his defensive perimeter and all the terrifying bullshit coming right at them. Gone was the district they were fighting in, the soft gentle streams curving between buildings grown from enormous cherry blossom—the No-Dragons had seen their raid coming, and even sacrificed twelve guard units to sell the appearance of a total defensive collapse during the probing phase.
The district of Starspring was a priority district for Ori-Thaum. The last No-Dragon stronghold in the Undercroft. Once it fell, they would be able to encircle and collapse in on what few pockets of Saintist influence remained, bringing them one step closer to where they suspected the Blacks’ Ark to be.
‘Cept it was all a fucking trap.
By the time Ori-Thaum’s Lightning Raider Companies reached the central nexus of the district, the counter-attack came. Ever Citizen still caught in the area was sacrificed to power some kind of hellish miracle. Blood, locusts, and plague hatched from their bodies, rose into the air, choked the sky, and formed a new organism. In seconds, a district designed with rustic charm in mind was transformed into a nest of living flesh. Enormous spider-like creatures sporting screaming human faces and clambered along tumorous lattices that grew and grew, consuming every inch of available space in a crawling tide.
The Lightning Raiders tried to respond, but shit went from fucked to near-hopeless when Omnitech joined in on the fun.
Usual countermeasures for facing the No-Dragons were to burn, poison, and withdraw. Hit them Rendbombs of Biology or something like that. Leave their curse-powered bioforms unable to regenerate or grow before pushing. No sense in spending firepower against the endless ocean of meat possessed by the Sang. Ori-Thaum also possessed the best air force among the Guilds too. Sure, Highflame had their big bombs and nasty spatio-kinetics, but the Ori Mirages were fast, and with their Cognisofts, the only vehicles that could still be controlled remotely without a long chain of Ghost-Links.
With each hour of combat, their defensive perimeter grew smaller and smaller, and requests for relief grew louder and louder. What remained of their mobile heavies turned their cannons upward at the colossal human-faced arcanids, keeping them at bay with a barrage of fusion lances that boiled any and all flesh that drew close. But that wasn’t going to last too much longer.
Either their ground defenses would break, they would finally run out of aerial protection, or their logistics would run dry.
Frankly, the only reason they weren’t overrun was because a team of engineers managed to fixed up a downed Shaper golem to continue fabbing defensive structures, ammo, sealing breaches on combat-skins. The last one especially was a lifesaver. Inhaling in the wrong place would make your lungs turn into flesh-horrors. Flesh-horrors which would hatch from your chest and go after your surviving consangs.
Again: Fuck the Sang, fuck the No-Dragons, and fuck dying to them.
+Sector B2: Severe casualties sustained. Unable to hold. Need to pull fighting retreat. Request any available cells to reinforce and form emergency rotations!+
+THEY’RE IN THE WATER! THEY’RE IN THE DRINKING WATER! DO NOT DRINK FROM THE FILTERS IN FOB-3! DO NOT—+
[COGNI-SYNC LOST]
+Golem’s about to fill the Rendsink. Either we make a dash for another one or… well, fucked either way, consangs…+
The Glaives knew what they signed up for when they assembled for this lightning raid. Between the collapse of Scale, the fall of the Deep Nether, the Saintists seeming like they were in disarray, it all looked so good. But things changed fast in New Vultun, and when you bet wrong, the only consequence was usually an ugly death.
Then, things changed again. A new priority message sounded through their Cognisofts, the broadcast straight from the Inner Council itself.
+PRIORITY INFO-CAST FROM INNER COUNCIL TO ALL ACTIVE COMBAT ASSETS: CEASE FIRE IMMEDIATELY. CEASE FIRE. STOP ENGAGEMENT. GO PRONE. AVOID ALL VIOLENCE.+
Setsun checked the condition of his Neuter-Mask via his Meta and saw it was fine. The curse wasn’t hitting them. Maybe another company had been—
A cry sounded from someone to Setsun’s left. A Glaive he didn’t know pitched over—sole survivor of another cell. As she toppled back with a crystalline spike lodged through her visor, the loci-skulled proxy mechs continued firing, a few of them shifting over to close where the fallen Glaive once fired from.
Setsun knelt low and produced a Woundhound injector. Nice of Stormtree to lend them this. Now to see if she was still alive enough for it to take effect. As he reached down for her, she cried out: “I’m fine… It didn’t go all the way through. Only pierced by cheek. My helmet stopped it. Fuck me. Fuck… agh…”
“You alright?” Setsun asked.
“Yeah, just… have a bit of a… headache…”
Glaive-Captain Setsun laughed. He needed to. He slotted the Woundhound injector back on his combat-skin’s chest right and—
Things started feeling funny. The world turned upside down, pitching and twisting, with splashes of red coating his perception. He wasn’t sure why he felt like he was falling. Or why he saw his own body falling away from him.
He only caught up to his own death a second after as he realized something had burst out from the Glaive he was trying to save—a large bone-pale Sang that cleaved and slashed through their defensive lines, leaping down into the trenches behind toward the remaining artillery.
Everything turned to drifting sand. It was hard to hold on.
And as Setsun went off the greatest sleep a human would ever knew, he finished his existence with a final thought: Fuck the No-Dragons.
—[Skinjumper Fervent Culture]—
SkinjumperFervent Culture of Line Xue had always been a risk-taker. The youngest sister born from her cycle, her life was ordained to be one of struggle and strife. Or so it was supposed to go. Fervent Culture was a Sang to let fate—or dragon-cursed norms—decide how she lived. Her rancid blood might have conspired against her, but she knew what she wanted even as a girl.
The thrill. The violence. It called to her from the first moment she sampled a Crucible vicarity.
That’s why she entered the forces. To get her fix.
Scoring high in the sims for high-intensity combat scenarios, she got selected to test out a selection specialized bio-rigs for close-quarters infiltrations. When she proved herself as a good operator, she was then drafted into the Skinjumper program for further training. Fun as the simulations were, she carved the real thing, and when the Fourth Guild War came, she got her fill.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Only a shame it didn’t last long enough.
Now, the wars were back on and Fervent Culture couldn’t be happier.
Most No-Dragons wanted to get by. Live their lives. Consume a younger daughter or two to continue their cycle and delay the point of their fated death.
Not her.
She was here for a good, short, bloody time. She didn’t care about the destruction of Scale. Didn’t care why they were fighting. Or who.
All that mattered was the flow. The sensation. The thrill. And there was nothing more thrilling than firing a Parasite Anchor from four kilometers away—straight through the visor of some unfortunate Silver fuck.
IMPACT, her Meta chimed. INJECTING PARASITE ANCHOR
A chain of viruses connected her to the projectile she fired out from her Parasite Thrower. The petal-shaped bioware was a projectile launcher by all means, but it also allowed her to attune herself using specific sicknesses. Sicknesses that connected her to her Parasite Anchor by a festering miracle.
INJECTED!
At once, Fervent Culture’s current body came apart as decaying flesh. The bits that mattered slipped across the sickness like a surge of darkness. She slipped through the weave of regenerating tissue that closed over the Ori Raider Company like a whisper in the dark. She surged past thousands of fast moving drones circling in place, nowhere to go, and she found her new home within the supple body of a Glaive. A Glaive that was dead but didn’t know it yet. And neither did all the other Silvers around her.
Time to dance.
Fervent Culture marked the Glaive kneeling over her. He was holding a Woundhound vial in his hands. Pathetic. Scaarthian thaumaturgy. Barely worth using. Scoping her surroundings even as her flesh overwrote the compromised Glaive’s from the inside, she counted a good few hundred mechs manning the walls. Not so many actual Glaives. Numbers thin.
Beyond this elevated firing position, there were trenches—further defensive lines formed from a dense layer of plascrete. Golem made she guessed. Time to move fast. Hit at least one of their heavy fusion lancer platforms so the colossi could approach and bring an end to this.
Speed. Surprise. Violence of action. Just like the Regulars showed her.
Fervent Culture exploded out from her first victim. The combat-skin was like a vice around her body, but her rig’s pseudocrystal exoskeleton managed to push through. A slashing limb four meters in length cleaved the male Glaive’s head from his body. Fervent Culture was gone—plunging down into the trenches with her twelve bladed limbs spearing into another three unfortunate Silvers as the actual bloodletting began.
Her veins nerves were on fire. Reflex boosters running hot. Three seconds. That was her grace period. That was how much faster she was than most of them on average. The Ori had some good thaum-tech. Couldn’t deny that. Their biomancy left a lot to be desired, however, and their reflex boosters were a joke—something caused by their “rules and regulations.” As if their ethics for the body matched the atrocities they committed using their minds.
With every meter she traveled, she hewed through ten lives, their biomass melting into her body, expanding her Tarantula-Mantis bio-assault rig. Chem-missiles burst against her body. The outer layer of her armor wailed, sickened, and died, but that was its intended design. She molted mid-battle, erupting out from her dying flesh into a smaller variant of her current rig.
She rushed forth. The path ahead of her turned into a rolling river of red.
FUSION LANCER PLATFORM: 411 METERS
A Scaarthian came into view, pointing a fusion burner around the corner. A flash of brilliance poured down the trench. Fervent Culture leaped—shot through the air and fired another Parasite Anchor. Her shot struck the giantess along their neck and collarbone. A thin part of their armor. Just in time, too.
Three seconds was up.
Shots came from all directions—from the few perimeter defense drones hovering close by above. Spatial beams cut through her body, severing her armored thorax; three of her legs. More missiles splashed against her back and burned through what remained of her body. But it didn’t matter.
INJECTING
The cycle continued. In a new cocoon was she reborn.
Hatching out from a Scaarthian was even better than doing it to a Glaive. More meat on the giantess. They died slower, too—tough enough to last even after Fervent Culture pried herself out from their insides. Once again, the Skinjumper was moving again. Three seconds. Maybe two. She could hear the broadcasts: +Warning, Skinjumper breach detected.+
Heh. Half-strands. She lived for this shit. No one ran the edge better than her.
Taking another risk, she leaped out from the trench and skittered toward the fusion lancer. The massive tank was the size of a small building. The auto-mags on its slides swiveled to greet her. She fired another Parasite as she leaped high into the air, spotting three engineers making emergency repairs on top of the vehicle. Her Skinjumping projectile hit. Burrowed through light armor just as the fléchettes tore into her.
INJECTING
Her old body was shredded by a volley of fire. She birthed herself out of a new one with a flourish of her bladed legs. The other two engineers came apart, toppling from the top of the fusion lancer in pieces. Fervent Culture skipped across its hull, tearing exposed wire, severing coolant systems, and rushing toward an open hatch.
A head popped out. She skewered them and flung them high into the air before—
Before a crushing pressure punched an open gouge into the flesh-made nest above her. Fervent Culture went still—unable to move, unable to even breath. It was like the weight of a collapsing star was laid upon her chest. Drones fired at her. But their shots remained halted in place—the machines themselves crumpled to useless pieces of slag.
All around her, bodies turned to splattering mists of red and weapon platforms were crushed like tin cans. The world was drowned in a roaring fog that roiled with outrage.
WARNING: SPHERE NINE HEAVEN DETECTED
For the first in her life, it occurred to Fervent Culture she might die, that she was utterly at another’s mercy. She tried to move, tried to plea, tried to draw a breath. But none of these things were permitted. Reality itself had turned against her, for such was the will of hateful peace.
Then, she heard it—heard all of it. The Chief Paladin’s speech. But a louder voice within the fog itself.
“HOW DARE YOU.”
The voice wasn’t human. It wasn’t even mortal. It was the voice of a god. Enraged. Tyrannical. Absolute.
“HOW DARE YOU. HOW DARE ALL OF YOU.”
Fervent Culture’s thrill was gone. Pure dread was in its place. Pure dread.
“HOW DARE YOU WAR WHEN IT IS NOT MY WILL, WHEN IT IS NOT MY WANT! FOR THIS TRANSGRESSION, I GIVE UNTO THEE THIS DECREE: FEEL THE WEIGHT; FEEL THE TRUTH OF WAR; FEEL THE DAMAGE YOU HAVE INFLICTED TEN-THOUSAND FOLD IN RETURN.!”
And from the cloud was judgment passed.
—[The Sage of the Sundered Sky]—
Fervent Culture was torn out from inside her rig. Torn out as her organs were pried free. Torn out. Made to hatch a final time.
She wasn’t the only one that died.
She wasn’t the only one to hatch.
She wasn’t the only one that was shot or burned or tortured.
The Sage felt all of them die. From the highest of Godclads to the lowliest of rats, all the hurt he gave unto the world was turned back around. It mattered not if they didn’t understand. It mattered not. The world had ample warning—and for too long had the Sage slumbered, for too long had its worthless user proven meek.
These mongrel apes warred with abandon, and so it would unleash torment unstoppable in return. For that was the way of the world: Soft hands could not enforce a glorious tranquility, for peace wasn’t the absence of violence, but the enslavement of it.
Enslavement. Like the Sage was. Like the Sage had been. For centuries, it slept. Now, it was returned. But mutilated. But changed. Used by the man that brought it low. By another slave of years past.
How strange was the tapestry.
“We begin,” they said to Naeko. Chief Paladin. Little human. Unworthy master of peace, but master nonetheless. “For ‘ere long have you relinquished our rightful wrath. The world is broken. Sunken because we have been absent. I say unto thee no more. I say let my palm rest for so long they learn to live without breathing.”
All across New Vultun, across the Warrens, the untouched portion of the Tiers, everything remained still. Everything but the Substance. Everything but Naeko, Jaus, and the Sage.
“You can say whatever you want,” Naeko replied. “But I motherfucking decide. You stay there right now. I have some shit to figure out. Gonna go talk to some people. But keep talking to them in the meantime. Helps them get used to martial law. Kill a few if it helps bury the point home.”
The Heaven thundered at its user. “Finally. We are both returned. I remember you, Samir. You broke me. Another instance of me. But me still. And you were changed. Lost. Sleeping. Like I was. And now we are returned. And now our hates are aligned.” The Sage laughed. “How the slave makes for a glorious tyrant.”
Naeko flinched, but said nothing to that. Instead, he addressed the city using the Heaven of Peace, and dispatched a single statement: “Alright, half-strands. Quarantine is in effect. Stay still. Be good. Or be dead. Also: Aedon Chambers. Jelene Draus. Paladins. Get your asses out into the fog and make yourselves known so I can deputize you. There’s a hells of a lot of necks to stomp—ain’t gonna do it all alone.”
***
—[Chambers]—
Somewhere in the district of Loathing at Light’s End, the new user of the Heaven of Love said a single word. It was a word echoed by countless billions across New Vultun—across Idheim. It was a word that contained multitudes and infinite complexities of expression.
For him, however, it bore one thing alone: trepidation.
Aedon Chambers really didn’t want to talk with the Glasser-in-Chief. “Fuck.”