THOUSANDHAND! THOUSANDHAND! TREACHEROUS LEECH! TRAITOROUS SOW! RETURN WHAT IS OURS! GIVE US BACK OUR HELIX! GIVE US BACK OUR THRONES! GIVE US BACK OUR FRA!
GIVE US BACK OUR FUTURE!
-Thoughtcast from [REDACTED VIA OFFICIAL GUILD CENSOR-EDICT] monts before Thoughtwave Suppression
10-9
Consolation
The locus’ pattern was a brittle thing of oscillating patterns. The softness inherent to the material surprised Avo when he first caressed it with a tendril of blood.
Peeling the tal free from a crashed aero, he found it smoldering a re sixty feet away from his point of egress. While studying the locus, he dug out a scoop of flesh from the mangled remains of the pilot and what tasted like their family. The was a likeness in their flavor, even charred.
Peckishness sated by his snack, he liquefied the wreckage and drew it into his mass, casting branches of tendrils out from his wrist to better cocoon the locus. He heard rumbles of distant impacts and slled the scent of his brethren scampering two hundred feet away. A soft snarl tore from his throat. He felt as if reduced, sohow; reduced to the nature of a baseline ghoul.
Netherblind, he focused on his other senses.
Sending out a call using his Echoheads, a static portrait of the Warrens slid into his senses and whispered to him rumors of destruction. Aeros were still falling. He frowned at that. Most vehicles had their own locus. By all ans, the mories and phantasmics stored within the ghosts should still function on their own, even severed from the public Nether.
As he drew the locus into the vicinity of his tamind’s halo, he ford a tactile link and interfaced with its systems. m-data booted and revealed twisted sequences and warped mories at a glance. His ward quivered lightly as he identified over a dozen m-cons festering even in shallow waters.
A clearer theory ford in his mind. The aeros were likely subverted before the Thoughtwave Detonation. Perhaps the detonation was a direct response to the crashing aeros–a mass m-con attack made to overwhelm a district or even a Sovereignty.
The pri question remained: Why?
Scrying through the locus, he heightened his reflexes and worked through its interior sequences, siphoning out cleansed ghosts no longer afflicted by whatever thought-plagues usurped its functions.
Ghosts: [441]
In the end, he was only able to restore a quarter of the active ghosts within the locus. No matter. He would take this opportunity to find others and study their condition as well. For now, all he truly needed was the structure of the locus itself.
Strands unfurled from the blood cocoon fused around the mind-imitating crystal. Through the air, they stung into the fragility of the locus’ exterior without difficulty, each drinking away at the thaumaturgic patterns comprising the object's matter.
Within the grasp of his Heaven, he felt the locus unravel.
He hadn’t yet invoked his Canon of mory to capture the structure of the locus in perpetuity as he had with tungsten, but that was in due ti. For now, a test was due.
It was ti to see if he could channel multiple patterns of matter at once.
Drawing more pieces of stray rubble and punching his haemokinetic reach into even the plascrete beneath his feet, he began to siphon matter into blood, his senses accelerating, the world slowing. More, however, was an expanse of emptiness that called to his tamind, a phantasmal gravity pulling at his thoughtstuff, his ghosts. The rivers of blood flowing out from his body now pulled him apart at the seams. Less and less did he feel the pilot to a Sangeist. More, his very being was being woven into the heights of the Woundshaper–the form of an old god remolded to his will, now alight with an ethereal shroud.
Where once his blood rely glead like a lustrous tal, a new quality layered into his towering design as the smoothness of his ichor took on crystalline facets of loci, studding the borders of his manifested crimson with faint edges.
With but a thought, he infused the structure of his own ontology with a ghost, linking with the flowing mass that was his blood. The transfer between his tamind and locus-channeling blood was near instantaneous. A phantasmal sheen sheathed spills of running crimson.
It worked. The sensation of binding his mind to what amounted to his skin, or a multi-functional limb, was uncanny. It was like feeding additional awareness from one’s mind into their own hand.
As he integrated his tamind into his Heaven more fully, he found himself capable of “shifting” the central center of his thoughts. Fascinatingly, the halo once rippling out atop his mind now expanded its broadcasted wavelengths over the jaws of his spire, just above where the caged patterns burned.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 19%
“How… peculiar,” his Woundshaper said. “The sensation is not altogether unpleasing, as if a congregation of murmuring minds was allowed to bathe within the threshold of my being. An annoyance, but they do grant greater sight. I see… I see the world, master… I see a sea sundered. Oh, the minds around us! Is this how you gaze upon the world directly?”An epiphany shuddered within his Woundshaper. Avo didn’t even know the Heaven could have one of those.
Activating his Whisper, he reached out and felt nearsighted again. The Nether was embroiled in chaos, and as such the world seed a storm-battered miasma to phantasmally-projected perception. But even so, as he spread hair-thin tendrils of blood outward, he felt his awareness expanding, rendering sothing of a tactile lighthouse groping through a tempest.
Despite the situation, Avo couldn’t help but feel a thrill rise within him. The Nether was down and his careful preparations would be all for naught if Mirrorhead moved to act now. But there was a gleam in the dark. A diminished workaround to his limitations, if nothing else.
Bereft the sea of the near Nether, he could make a more private hive by combining the functions of the locus and his Heaven of Blood.
Branching brambles erupted out from him then with his reflexes on high. They cracked through the air and pierced through walls where sound t accelerating matter. The taphor of his being mutated from tower to tree, while the wisp-like tendrils flooding out from him served as grasping roots and ghostly circuity both.
Mantled to his blood were the natures of tungsten and corpse-crystal both; the hardness of the forr warded the latter against shattering, while the latter brimd wide, allowing ghosts to traverse through the vastness of its internal storage at the speed of thought.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 25%
Thousands of signatures revealed themselves, most answering the presence of his Heaven, the coursing blood rushing through distant arteries calling out to him. He caught sight of a few aratnid accretions, however. Sputters and brushes of thoughstuff while his influence slithered along the edges of an alleyway.
On a whim of curiosity, he spread himself into one such fleeing aratnid, mostly to see if he could manage the act. It took him three tries, the presence of the creature a blur to his mind with how mangled the Nether was, but even so, he struck true, spearing soft flesh on the third attempt.
A blade channeling tungsten and locus both slipped through the flesh of the aratnid. He felt it part against his touch, its mind dimming as the thoughstuff evaporated into nothingness within his cog-feed.
Good. This was good. He could use this to siphon more ghosts–scout through the district even with the Nether temporarily crippled.
It wasn’t the sa as diving through the Nether, but it was consolation enough.
Shifting Heavens, he ascended with a vortex of twisting wind. The Woundshaper weighed on him still, and he could feel the Rend within him boiling, waiting to be unleashed. Manifesting the Galeslither made the twin Heavens overlap as if translucent shadows drifting over one another, but strangely, they were shadows to each other, as if they occupied the sa space–the sa anchor in existence–but were parted into parallel subrealities, banishing them from the possibility of intersection.
Dashing through the urban jungle of rusted bridges, running pipes, and half-decayed quick-fabbed infrastructure, Avo rushed up along the flat walls of a half-collapsed drone dispatch station.
Switching from Woundshaper to Galeslither presented a vast diminishnt in perception and speed. Without the ability to feed his Whisper through a current in the wind, he could only storm onward with his tri-headed steed exposed, lest he further limit the reach of his sight.
Garbage and stray pieces of rubble and detritus ascended with him. Shooting past the lip of his current structure, he caught sight of small figures fleeing across distant bridges running between stacks of industrial cargo containers repurposed into FATELESS tenents, saw an aero deliberately ram into another in the distance while the holo-ads around him flickered between monts of static and fractured instances of distorted imagery.
In the distance, the skeletons of dilapidated buildings and waste-covered streets were enshadowed by odd distortions in the light. Beyond them rose the mass of the Conflux gablock, its once noise-wrapped exterior now drowned in near-silence. Mangled through its exterior was, the tarp lining its insides still offered enough obfuscation that the structure seed as if a mountain, ignorant and uncaring of the happenings around it, untouched even by this suddenly falling storm.
Avo checked his remaining ti before Draus was to open the tunnel again. Seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Ti to make this count.
Cycling back over to his Heaven of Blood, the Woundshaper shot high into the air as he spun.
Diving out of the wind and back into the form of a blood-rooted spire, his perception and reflexes exploded anew. He wasn’t quite sure how his Celerostylus’ enhancents were being conferred seeing as he was an eldritch entity made entirely of blood, but he supposed his “epheral” form was still inside him sowhere.
Regardless, heat stead the air as he constructed a dozen haemokinetic propellers out from his sides and bade them spin at maximum speed. Torrents of force blasted free behind him. He shook and jerked in the air as he shot forward, punching through the veil of sound like a dagger jerking through cloth.
His Phys-Sim flashed errors of continuation until he fused a lattice of veins over himself, offering a closed system of velocity references for the phantasmic to work out his trajectory. This wasn’t functional flight–Avo didn’t know nearly enough about aerodynamics to play the role of aerovec, but he could still accelerate.
And this Heaven let him remain fast and aware. He would leave turning or hiding to his Galeslither.
A low sigh sounded in the back of his mind. The Woundshaper was staring at him in disappointnt.
“What?”
“There will be no switching Heavens, master. Loathe as I might be to guard the integrity of the mule, recall its hubris and know our current speed is carving heat from the air itself. The winds around us are cooking. Be glad that your immaturity is passing and you no longer reside as if a node of flesh within : It would be most unpleasant to boil within your own blood.”
Avo’s mind went blank.
DOMAIN OF AIR
HUBRIS: ATTEMPTING TO DRAW AND SHAPE HYPER-HEATED AIR WILL RESULT IN THAUMIC BACKLASH
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 38%
REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 13%
Right. Yes. Mach speeds had a tendency to heat the air up. He needed to slow down before he got too fast. Keep a reasonable pace for now. He checked his Phys-Sim and slowed his propellers, keeping himself under Mach two.
The ascent that followed was an awkward one. As it turned out, when one barely knew how the forces of lift and flight worked, not even relying on a ntal physics simulator could supplant necessary knowledge. More than once he needed to shift back over into his Galeslither as an ergency, flattening his velocity down to nothingness to avoid losing control. His travel stuttered in such incrents while he shot out from the hexagonal rifts of Layer One.
It was when he finally rose into the Spine of the Warrens that he first caught sight of what might’ve caused the subversion of the aeros.
As the strands of his Woundshaper brushed over a stretch of space forrly occupied by a traffic lane, an aerovec ca sailing down toward him, its presence only revealed as it entered the periphery of his outer-lattice constructs. Spreading his crimson brambles wide, and helped by the slowness of the vehicle itself, he examined its form and found it to be in the shape of an automated delivery platform– a type akin to the one that shuttled Chambers and the techs back over Conflux headquarters.
He cleaved the aero-transport open with a tendril and started the process of its deconstruction, faintly aware of the trajectories left by other aeros passing nearby. It was odd how he could see further than he could sense in the Nether. Usually, it was the opposite way around. Nonetheless, as he dissolved the matter of the aero before it could knock him off course, he injected a tendril into its locus and found himself greeted with the sa m-cons again.
Only, the ones in this vehicle were more intact, and the -data listed the last mind the sequences interfaced with.
The traffic loci. The aeros were subverted passing through traffic. Turning his gaze upward, more flying shapes fell like a shower of alloyed stars. Yet, it did not end in one way. Beyond the flickering phase gate lining the portals forming the mouths of Layer Two, coruscating flas spewed free of falling wrecks as they trailed smoke down through holographic tides of flowing errors painting the phantasmal skies above the Spine.
It wasn’t just limited to the Spine. It went up the Warrens. And if the Throat was compromised, then Light’s End likely was as well.
Ghosts: [561]
Taking the opportunity to collect ghosts in the chaos, he drank in what he could clean from the locus and boiled the rest hollow with a trauma-pattern from his Ghostjack. Turning to the Galeslither, he caught and hunted more aerovecs, trapping them in his Yondergales to better gather desired resources.
Ti snapped back to baseline but he still managed to net himself six aeros. Similar points of subversion lingered within each one. Attacking the traffic system was a viable strategy, but it was loud. Avo remained unsure what the intent behind such a tactic was, only that the Thoughtwave Detonation was increasingly looking like an appropriate response.
Ghosts: [1032]
Checking his ti again, he found himself near the five-minute mark. Halting in place, he turned to gaze upon the districts nearby. Far fewer crashed aeros littered the streets than he expected, but a slow suspicion rose within him. Checking the m-data he claid from the m-cons, he studied the behavior patterns of the vehicles around him and ca to a realization.
They weren’t being ordered to crash, they were being repossessed for use as makeshift anti-air missiles, to knock other aeros out of the sky.
More and more, he felt this might be a case of m-con spillover. Like soone leaving a point of subversion active after they finished their dive. Sohow, such incompetence didn’t seem like Zein’s work, though the scope hinted at imnse Nether influence as well.
[WARn-123n-ERRO!!]
His cog-feed crackled. Then, a distant flash called to his attention. The winds shifting, he angled his Galeslither to see what was blinking at him from the periphery.
There, enshrouding the armored blocks of Nu-Scarrowbur, he saw the faintness of a being looking at him from beneath the threshold of light. Graced with twelve arms and a tri-hued star for a skull, he noticed the other entity for but a fleeting instant before it faded back into the light, going from a being towering over gablocks to being nowhere at all.
A mont of silence passed.
Sothing turned in Avo’s gut. The sensation of a drop took him.
Instinctively, he shifted back into his Woundshaper just as a javelin sculpted from strings of shivering radiance lanced at him from out of nowhere.
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