And rember this: all it takes to be compromised is a single loose sequence. A fignt of misplaced mory. A string of knowledge left by a dive.
We are all born of the stories from our lives. The worst thing a Necrojack can have is a tale-filled past. You don’t want anyone to know how to hurt you…
-Interview with “Tattlekill,” Sanctus Counter-Necrojack
24-5
Battle of the Twin Flas (II)
--[White-Rab]--
The mories Kare had of her mother were coming apart at the seams. The ghosts holding them together were shattering like glass shards turned missiles, prid to seek symtrical sequences, each fragnt breaking and slicing through her mindscape.
Sharp cries of pain—physical and emotional—resonated from the Paladin.
There was only so much White-Rab could do to stop her from coming asunder.
He was, after all, fighting two fires at once—one tearing through her, and another ripping through him.
The Low Master’s attacks started out probing. Subtle. Quick jabs to map out his targets. The thod worked well for Kare but ca at the cost of ghost attrition within White-Rab. Then, his strategy shifted. As he continued peeling the Paladin sequence by sequence, he fell upon White-Rab in full, unleashing attacks from multiple vectors that carved entire swaths out of White-Rab’s mindscape.
The assaults were constant. Overwhelming. And entirely expected. The Famine of Noloth possessed nightmarish skill—traumas of unfathomable potency, but the thod he used to strike was still susceptible to disruption, and White-Rab knew how to fight a defensive war.
Severing the sequences to his own external mories, White-Rab replaced what he lost in his own mind using the sequences storied in his myriad proxies. This, in effect, ca with the cost of Nether-lag when the related mories needed to be called upon, but allowed him to bomb the affected sequences indiscriminately and shatter the Low Master’s ghosts with impunity.
Prepared and clever, the Low Master said. The thoughtstuff he bled stank of unstilled amusent. Truly, I am not the only one who carries Defiance in . But I hold his mories directly, and you are an ego shaped by his legacy. We long suspected he took a hidden acolyte. But Peace dismissed this. Our masters disregarded this. And so now you stand testant to their follies.
There were few things more demoralizing than your foe casually complinting you during a duel. It took all of White-Rab’s focus to keep the Low Master at bay, and here the fucker was, just chatting away.
I was planning to break you. To hollow you and all the others. But this display has changed . It has been too long since I have claid a genuine acolyte of my own, and what better defilent can I inflict on Defiance than the perversion of his legacy? The Hungers will be pleased. And… so am I.
Thing about the Strix, White-Rab said, destroying another patch of his mories—everything connected to Runa got nulled first. He didn’t nearly boast so much. You’re just wearing his skin, consang. The man’s dead and gone.
A beat of silence. A lull in the attack. Whimpers slipped over from Kare as she struggled to retaliate against the kraken now trying to swallow her Heaven whole.
You do not lie, the Low Master said. But it is also not the truth. I am no longer what I used to be—this criticism—what you say, it offends . It offends that I am not Defiance. For he was the best of us. And always I yearned to be as he was. Traitor or not, he was the one to make the Guilds bleed. Oh! So culled of my emotions that I have forgotten the taste of envy. The sting. But my chains are loosened. My chains are loosened, and so I do more than rely seethe. You inspire , Raldi. You and Avo both.
Fuck. Shit. Which godsdamned mory did he pull that from? Running another scan on himself, White-Rab clenched his teeth as he noticed a slight disturbance inching toward his inner mindscape, traveling along the sequences of a phantasmic.
His Auto-Seance. A splash of synaptic lightning surged as its session activated—only for the entire structure to co undone as White-Rab bombed it to ruins using his most potent trauma patterns and thoughtwave disruptions. A few ghosts slipped through the bridging session; they were probably going to hit Draus from the inside.
White-Rab winced. She was a Reg. She’d shrug it off. He hoped. He had other matters to worry about right now.
A piercing shriek ca from Kare as a line of mind-shredding explosions blossod along her inner palace. The sanctuary that was her bedroom began to crumble and tear along its middle as glitching m-data flooded out like welling blood.
Caught between keeping the Paladin together and dispatching repairs, White-Rab abandoned even more of his inner mind, retreating to hold only twenty percent of his total structure. He deactivated all other phantasmics aside from his proxy-connected Auto-Seances and Ghostjack, and began annihilating all non-essential mories.
He sure hoped he got those back with the next resurrection because he wasn’t even going to rember how to use a fork after this.
Desperate but decisive. Wonderful qualities. Perhaps I should have your ego be the new template for Peace. Or my reimagining of him. Our need for a snarling hound is vastly diminished with his compromise. A subtler blade is required to win this war.
You’re pushier than a Guild recruiter, White-Rab said, unable to hide his chuckle.
Well, the Low Master sighed. I am a priest.
Yeah? And I’m a freelancer. I didn’t join up with the colors, and I certainly don’t want to join your gutter cult either. Jaus, you’re bad at this pitching thing.
A hum ca from the Famine as their attacks intensified. Kare was almost unresponsive. Her Heaven was flickering—the only thing holding her together were sinews of mory. Sinews, and White-Rab himself.
Lea—leave, Kare said. I’m—
No, White-Rab replied. He can’t have you. He can’t even have Defiance. I’m taking you both back.
Ah. Hubris. The Low Master breathed. There it is. Your human weakness— White-Rab risked a thoughtwave detonation. For a second, his own thoughts vanished as a few thousand ghosts were extinguished all around him. By the ti he recovered, nearly all of his mindscape was red. The Low Master continued speaking where he left off. Makes you easy to provoke.
--[Draus]--
WARNING!
SEVERE COGNITIVE DAMAGE SUSTAINED
-> [MIND FORTRESS STABILITY] - 77%
->GHOSTS - [455]
Having a trauma go off in your mind wasn’t sothing Draus much enjoyed, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as getting headshot by a high-velocity kinetic weapon.
Stumbling as her near and long-term mories ca undone, she drifted, instinctively dissociating from herself as a person. The weapon was damaged. The damage was causing a jam. There were certain pathways and thoughts that wouldn’t flow anymore. The weapon needed to work around those.
Striding through her passage, she detonated a thoughtwave bomb within herself to ward off any Nether fuckshit and deactivated all phantasmics aside from her ward and her disruptor. In-person communication only. No passing over into the enclave either. Minimize chances of further compromise.
The weapon opened a passage into another place. The light of a brilliant city spilled through, and through the portal stood Dice, waiting patiently for further orders.
The full-chro sheathed girl took two steps forward and stopped. The triangular scanner where her head was supposed to be whirred as it shifted. “Your mind is damaged.” The weapon looked at the halo housing her mind. So it was. So she was. Ghosts whistled out from the fractures lining her accretion but her thoughtstuff remained a steady flow. “Still…” The words took her a mont to recall. Language pathways compromised. That’s fine. She could still move. Action worked. Didn’t like speaking that much anyway. “Can fight. Follow.”
To Dice’s eternal credit, she didn’t even hesitate. The kitten bounding behind her chanical legs let out a soft ow as it tried to follow her. She turned and kept it in place. “No. Stay. You can’t co. Go find Kae if I die. She’ll take care of you.” And that was all the goodbye she needed. Girl was good and pure. Good weapon. Nothing else would have survived her upbringing. She would have made a good Reg. Hells, she was a good Reg. All she lacked was the official recognition and a graduation ceremony.
Dice looked at her as they began passing through pathways, moving through different reflections as Draus led them back to the district. “What are we doing? Why aren’t you using ghosts to talk?”
“Damaged,” Draus said. “Nether’s… is fucked. Need to… get… help.” Fuckin’ words. “Targets. Good targets.”
The girl kept her perception locked to Dice as they passed through the bivouac right next to the sanctuaries. “Good targets? The Paladin?”
“Yeah. And… the other.”
“Okay,” Dice said. “I understand. Help the Paladin and the Seeker.”
“Help,” Draus repeated. They didn’t have much ti. Naeko’s palm was probably going to co down, but she needed to make sure Shotin and his niece were still standing then. The last thing she needed was for the D’Rongo Seeker fucks to snatch the VIPs out from under her. “Go fast. Kill half-strands. Get out.”
“Got it,” Dice said. “I’m going to tell the others to stay off the Nether too. Until Avo gets back.” The girl paused. “Is he okay?” Draus tried to offer a reply but she didn’t have the word. She didn’t really know either. Their conversation effectively ended after that.
Wordlessly, Draus manifested her Heavens and Dice did the sa.
A chiric entity of war and runes expanded in a realm of glass and reflection. A chira bearing a collection of weapons, rippling with inhuman muscle, and enwreathed by a shell of radiant armor, every movent Draus made sounded like clashing steel.
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Draus folded into the Paracosmos around her. From its depth erged a knight of gleaming glass. Its bladed wings were orbited by spirals of guns as trailing ammunition packs flowed like a cape at her back. From one fractured another, and another, and another, until fifteen Replicas were massed for a charge.
“Fast,” Dice said, one last ti. “Disruptor ready. Clean charge through.”
The Regular only clanged her blade to her shield in agreent. Her Replicas did the sa.
She couldn’t do anything for the cadre in the Nether. Couldn’t help Avo or White-Rab at all with—whatever was happening. But this battle was going to be decided in the real, and a weapon was a weapon, damaged though she might be.
There was more than enough left to do her duty. There was more than enough left to fight the war. There was more than enough left to charge on forward into oblivion if that’s what it took.
As her final passage opened, they shot out into existence, taphysical forms squeezing out unnaturally from the reflection of a window across from the ruined restaurant. The battle was a haze of chaos and spatial anomalies. Repeated Rendbomb detonations choked existence with entropy, and as four desperately tried to collapse folds of space—struggling to catch the blur that was Shotin, a constantly mutating kraken was biting down on a Heaven best described as a spider spliced with a bunch of knives and a thunderstorm.
Ethereal fire overlapped with shockwaves, lashing chains, and other miracles. The blue and red of approaching sirens changed the colors of the sky. Further beyond, past even the imposing shadow of the pulsating stormtree, the clouds in the sky were changing, gathering, and collapsing inward as the vagueness of a hand began to form.
“Fast,” Draus said, one final ti, as she flung a hailstorm of glass from her wings to the accompanint of roaring ordinance.
--[Chambers]--
The Low-Fucker’s traumas and splinters slamd into Chambers constructs, but all the destruction did was make them moan.
Fucckkkkk, a large-breasted ghoul with a three-ter-long penis-vagina amalgam scread in pleasure as it began to crack. Yes, master! Hurts so good. Aghhh!
A deluge of extrely questionable fluids erged from their wounds as the Lustaway function activated again and again in this mindscape. Pretending to be a passing aero—and further masked by Ignorance’s aid—Chambers slinked across the sequences like a shadow.
This warmind shit backing him up was pretty nova, no doubt. If nothing else, being able to have templates roleplay as ghouls from the Soft Master Collection and making them charge enemy lines without regard for their own lives woke a new kink in Chambers, and he didn’t think this one was going away anyti soon.
He liked commanding. He liked wasting things. And he loved feeling that cunt Emotion’s disgust filling the Conflagrations.
Aedon Chambers, Emotion said, the echo of his voice washing across streams of mory as he shouted into the nothing. I see you are as loathso as the mories suggested. I gazed upon your past. Studied you through peripheral minds. Know that all of them find you wretched.
It was almost enough to make Chambers snigger. The fact that his plan had the Famine taphorically eating out of his ass was the nipple of cream on the boob-cake.
[Godsdammit,] Abrel groaned. [Did it really have to be you? Why did you have to be the one to fix the fucking ghoul? The Regular—the Agnos—anyone else. Is the cadre devoid of clean-minded people.]
Impossibly, Draus’ template concurred with the Greatling. [Might just be the single worst run I’ve been a part of.]
[Since he’s using your ego as a template to make these sex ghouls so hard to break?] Abrel asked.
[‘Specially so.]
[Kill yourself,] Peace seethed, fury rising to unreasonable levels as he raged inside Chambers, unable to aide his fellow Famine, forced to watch this travesty unfold. [Have you any fucking virtue, any decency, and any cocksucking worth of self at all, shatter your own mind! Cast your body into the Maw! The very fact of your existence has retroactively justified all atrocities we have committed upon your mongrel ancestors, and if they were present, they too would you should commit! Fucking! Suicide!]
A cool snort ca from Corner. [Dunno what the rest of you are so worked up about. This thing is clearly working.]
[Yeah, but it’s like sneaking into a gablock by crawling up the shit pipes,] one of the new Regulars muttered. [Of course, in this taphor, the crawler and the shit-pipes are one and the sa.] The others muttered a muted chorus of agreents.
Chambers just scoffed. He didn’t see what was so bad. His strategy was working. Trying to destablize and overload the cog-cap of areas using mass Lustaway raids forced the Low Masters to show their hands—er, splinters—and linked to Avo’s consciousness, he didn’t even need to risk his own ghosts to do this.
The mories around him turned from aeros racing in a thickly packed skylane to soone diving after a descending whale in the deep. Then, the water currents peeled the world around him, and suddenly he was sowhere else entirely—a piece of chocolate floating in a warm mug of coffee.
Hold, Ignorance said. Passing patrol.
The waters swirled. Two flies landed on the edge of the mug. The lip of the cup opened up to beco a Hypertube tunnel instead of a sky, and Chambers felt his head spin. How many transitions was this already? What kind of ss were the Low Masters trying to build?
Sothing coherent. Traversable. Ignorance grunted. Sophonts are pattern-based creatures. The world has consistencies and inconsistencies. Symtries. Asymtries. A good Necro might be able to navigate the chaos of a collapsing mind but won’t ever have an easy ti moving through it. Not when they have to examine and sort the incoherence of the m-data’s simulations. Personalized mories give more options.
Great, Chambers replied, watching the flies leave with suspicion. It’s like the half-strands are planning to stay.
They are, Avo replied. Trying to secure . The Conflagration was planned in advance. Easier to transport at a stalemate. Guessing they’re trying to gather enough ghosts to transfer my mind out at once. Don’t want to risk my reformation through via splinters. Delusion is gone. Keep going.
Chambers rose as a droplet from the coffee and turned into part of the ringed tracks ant to house lightrails. Don’t worry, consang. Won’t let them take you.
A beat followed. I trust you.
Three words. It was enough to make Chambers feel uncomfortable. So. Ahem. Where next. What’s the next shithole we need to bust up? Frontal charge or sneak shit?
A map of Avo’s fla-knotted mind ca alive in Chamber’s cog-feed. He found himself four hundred branches away from his final destination. Triggering attacks within random mories was diverting Emotion’s nodes. Spreading his forces out. But the sheer amount of activity surrounding the warmind of Hysteria made Chambers’ encroach slow to a crawl.
Not that far away. He didn’t have that long to set up. Using already existing mories. Slight modifications at best.
Yeah, Chambers replied. Slight is a word. How the fuck did you notice that the wall was the wrong shade of white all those sequences back?
Practice. Awareness. Experience. It’s what I would do. It’s likely what Walton would have done. A pause followed. A dull rumble of secondhand anger breached Chambers’ mind. He is taunting . Using the skin of my father to provoke . I think he would have captured entirely if I followed him through the Auto-Seance. His countering Conflagration was waiting there.
Ignorance laughed. Saved by Peace. Embarrassing.
[Don’t worry; I won’t ever let you fucking forget,] Peace added.
As Chambers approached the threshold for the last three hundred sequences before arriving down the mories containing the warmind of Hysteria, he found himself increasingly provoking random attacks without Ignorance’s recomndations. The ghoul’s subconscious warmind never told him where to hit or what to hit, and Chambers chose randomly anyway. Regardless, being able to trigger assaults from any angle within the mindscape felt pretty good—felt a bit like using his Heaven.
Which made Chambers wonder if that was by deliberate design.
Splinters passed. Pass ahead. The sequence connected to the window. Not the doorway. Go up imdiately after leaving. They have this place lined with dormant traumas.
The room they were passing through looked just like a fancy hotel. Forty-by-forty, crystal chalice glasses, nice showers, auto-chef, king-sized hover bed, a ch servant, and high-end entertainnt system. Nothing else was out of the ordinary. Considering that he was masking his presence by simulating himself as a light in the room, all the calmness did was up his paranoia.
Godsdamned was he not fit to be a Necro.
But what was he good for? What was he good for besides being a lucky weasel?
[Be glad of your luck,] Benhata the Mirror said. [If I had any, I wouldn’t be here.]
[True fucking that,] Lip agreed.
Slipping out the window, Chambers found himself rising out from a furnace, loaded into the perspective of a screaming child about to be thrown in. The sudden spike of terror hamred down on him through the vicarity. But he held firm. Kept his focus and did as Avo said. He navigated his way up using his m-data, and as soon as he left the tic body in which he hid, a scything wave of perception barely missed him as he rged with a passing wave of steam.
The moisture enveloped him. Avo didn’t tell him to stop, so he kept climbing. He kept climbing until he surfaced through a narrow cluster of openings. As he squeezed his way out, he heard Avo’s warning—but it ca too late.
Chambers. Wait. Go—
The stall ca into sight as a narrow and cramped space. It was barely large enough to contain a person. With the toilet extended from the wall, there was less than no room. The door to the rest of the apartnt was closed and misted. Hovering like a droplet about to drip free of a showerhead, Chambers found himself back in his childhood ho—the cleaning unit, specifically.
There, a woman sat on the toilet seat, touching the left side of her face as she stared at the gri-coated mirror across from her. Her blonde locks were dirty. Just like Chambers. If one ignored the spread of ugly lumps dotting the left side of her face, the flowing blood gushing from her broken nose, and the mascara splotching her cheeks, they could see that she had his eyes, his nose, his chin.
She inhaled a wet, sloppy sound. In her hand was a gun. Her husband’s. Chambers’ fathers. The sa one he tried to use to kill the man. The sa gun that didn’t fire. It hung in her grip like a lead brick, but her finger was on the trigger. She knew how to use a gun. She knew to keep her finger off if she didn’t want to shoot.
But clearly she did. And as her breathing built, as—with a herculean effort—she lifted the gun with in her shaking grasp, she showed Chambers just who she was aiming at—showed the one she wanted dead.
Keep going, Ignorance said. False mories. Can’t be real. He can’t know your mother did this. Doesn’t know how she died. He’s doing this to hurt you. Trying to traumatize you from the inside. Move. Don’t stay.
Chambers heeded his words. Heeded his words imdiately. He turned and spared himself the sight. Whatever pleasure he had from deploying the Soft Master Collection was dead. He was back in his past. Back facing what the world took from him.
And he couldn’t do it.
Once again like so many tis before, Chambers turned away from his mories and pretended he was fine. That he didn’t cry when he found her when he got ho that day. That his father didn’t vent his rage and frustration on her corpse, beating her unmoving body with the buckle of his belt as he did in life. Striking her even as Chambers scread for him to stop, even as the grandparents ca in to pull him off her disfigured remains.
Her heart sold for a hundred imps. Lungs were fucked from smoking. No takers. Liver, kidneys, stomach were a package; two-forty. A squire with the ugliest eyes bought her uterus for fifty. They burned what was left in an abandoned lot twenty minutes away. They weren’t the only ones there.
The local gang charged them half of what they sold her for. His dad on the walk back after. Cried. The only ti Chambers rembered his dad crying. He cursed at Chambers when he saw the boy notice and proceeded to do the predictable thing of heading to the closest bar there—to waste the rest of imps he sold his wife’s organs for.
Sorry mom, Chambers said, whispering mostly to himself. He left fast, not wanting to stay there a mont longer.
As he passed through the door, however, he found himself in a parallel room with the sa scene unfolding.
This ti, he got to see her, see her sobbing with the barrel pressed under her chin. Got to see her squeeze the trigger. Got to hear the gun go click.
The templates were screaming for him to go. Ignorance was whispering to him in harsh tones. He didn’t hear them. He couldn’t get away. Not this ti.
Aedon Chambers could take a lot from life, but life had taken a lot from Chambers, and so there ca a ti when he had nothing left to give, and so life decided to give him sothing instead.
Pain blossod inside Chambers.
Pain as his mother dropped the gun, sobbing, laughing, hugging herself as shadows moved in the glass beyond. A short figure knocked on the glass—a boy clearly before his teenage years if judged from the height.
“Mommy? the boy asked. Mommy, are you done? I need to go pee.
As a larger shadow appeared behind the boy, her agony only intensified. She put the gun up and tried to twice more.
Click.
Click.
Crack.
Sothing inside Chambers broke. His wards shuddered from the severity of the damage. And suddenly, the surrounding mory unraveled as external traumas slamd into him from every angle.
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