10-6 Gathering (Patreon)

+Alright… Can someone explain to me just what the fuck… why the fuck did we null our own? What the fuck is going on? HOW THE FUCK DID YOU HALF-STRANDS GET FUCKING CONVEX KILLED? HOW DID WE END UP NULLING EACH OTHER!+

-Mirror-Concave “debriefing” surviving members of Incubi Cell “Peregrine” and Dagger-2

10-6

Gathering

Avo expected additional hassle to follow the extraction of the twenty survivors alongside Essus.

Expected it, but found himself pleasantly mistaken.

With the presence of the Exorcists, Conflux was forced to take a more qualitative approach to their operations, eschewing the gaze-attracting mass of quantity for the more intimate provided by quality survivors.

Behind the metal sheets of the ramshackle maze came experienced gangers and two squires. All of them had armed themselves with shivs crafted from glass and rusted shards of metal, and instead of being ignorant to the nature of things as most FATELESS upon first arrival, those standing within sight of Avo’s cog-feed were seasoned to the ecosystem of the Warrens.

Conflux desired a close and bloody affair to be harvested from their minds. As Avo unlatched the few phantasmics installed in them before the Syndicate Necro went down from the mem-con, he found most of them had been sold here together from the Omnitech-dominated district of Theta-12 under the Kzvinsgad Sovereignty. Checking the DeepNav, they must’ve come from eight hundred miles away.

Seemed topside smuggling was still operational with the Exorcists choking down the gutters right now.

Entertainment found a way.

After unsequencing any “unnecessary” memories from the twenty, Avo had Chambers–half-delirious from pain and blood loss–burn a series of openings through the block’s layers leading up and out. He placed a final measure in place against any straying eyes by editing the memories of the local lobby to place instances from various vicarities “donated” by Chambers.

It would make the Crucible seem still in session for any straying eyes, long enough that none of this was to matter once the day passed.

+Essus,+ Avo said. +We need to…+ His thought trailed off as he realized what the father yearned for.

The wings. He couldn’t tear off his wings alone. Every channel of his mind wailed with the rawness of swelling trauma. The act of tearing the last vestige he had of the boy off his body would unmake his ego entirely; a self-mutilation too great to bear. Yet, he couldn’t just let them taunt him endlessly, let his son’s presence haunt him like a shroud–so too would he be eroded down to nothing.

In both cases, it was a choice of self-destruction. The only question was if he should plunge the blade down deep or whittle himself down over time.

+Not yet,+ Avo said. +Stop.+

The man shuddered. He clenched his teeth and tried to flex strength into his will. Failure greeted Avo as whatever determination evaporated before it could settle upon the seat of lingering hurt. “I need to… I cannot face him… cannot live with him over my shoulder…”

+Mind will break if you do it. Not ready. Kill Mirrorhead first. Then decide. Boy deserves to be there for that too.+

And where strength failed, hate prevailed. The spreading softness of Essus’ thoughtstuff calcified into a dome circuited with coursing loathing. Mirrorhead. The one who inflicted so much on him, who destroyed so many for reasons petty and unfathomable. “I don’t want my son to see…”

+Your son doesn’t see. He is gone. He is for them to see. He is behind you. They should know what his life cost.+

Like a wick touched by the caress of a flame, a new flame ignited in full within Essus. He needed to kill Mirrorhead. He needed to kill Mirrorhead like one thirsting in the heart of a desert needed water. Every second the Guilder wasn’t dead, Essus suffered.

“I must ask you…” the father swallowed. “To guide me… I have not the sense anymore. I have not the sense.”

They departed through the opening made by the Blockcrawler.

Walking through the gleam of a fusion-burned exit, Essus watched as Chambers tumbled out from the bottom hatch of the infiltration vehicle. The former enforcer came out yowling, thoughts raw with pure agony. Pulped arantids painted his fingers with a thick ichor, while his bodily disfigure swayed on dangling sinews.

For all the trauma that boiled within Essus, the sensation of surprise within him remained strong. “You… were not lying.”

+I don’t lie. Lying’s inefficient. Just change memories. Give him the Woundhoud.+

After Chambers ceased his whimpering about his castration, Avo charted a new path in his mind and directed him after the fleeing survivors. Gateway Thirteen was approximately eight miles away from them, currently anchored to a darkened alleyway right next to a former pseudo-ball court in the gutters.

With how things were to proceed, it mattered little even if someone decided to break from habit or schedule and come down to survey the Crucible in person. He had Mirrorhead’s ear, and all he needed was the finish designing the trap.

They were on the cusp. The kill was so close Avo could practically imagine the quivering radiance of the Guilder’s Frame. In flesh, mind, and Soul, Jhred Greatling would belong to him, feed him, suffer him.

It was as the Guilder said: All would be made perfectly wrong.

Scouting ahead with the Whisper more than he relied on the Incog, Avo directed Chambers and Essus in their final escape.

Climbing up and out of the block was a short affair for Blockcrawler and cyborg. Sneaking from alley to alley and timing the Exorcist Specter patrols, however, took substantially longer to surmount.

Avo cast out a confirmation of the father’s extraction to Draus and ignored a spike of paranoia when she didn’t immediately respond.

He could have fully activated her session and connected to her, but he decided against it. Not before present tasks were completed.

After nearly two hours of plodding progress–along with a single instance of spending a stray assortment of encountered ghouls and the Woundhound to distract passing Specters–both Essus and Chambers arrived at the vertical slit of gateway thirteen.

Flicking a command over to the EGI Core, Avo opened the tunnel and exited from the dive. Emerging back into the real, he shook out the lingering static and blurring memories rushing through him. He remembered submerging himself in the depths of the Nether for far longer in real-time from past recollections, but never before had he sequenced through so many memories in so few dives.

Truth spoken, he would’ve likely needed to retreat and consider another plan if he faced the Incubi bereft his Heaven.

Around and within, blood twisted to his will. As the shape of the Blockcrawler and Essus staggered in, the world behind them a spill of muted neon and distant sirens, Avo sensed the blood rushing through the newcomers’ veins before anything else.

In fact, focusing on where their blood touched matter, new alchemical patterns blossomed in his mind, and where the red flowed, the speed and force connected was whispered to him.

The more he used his Heaven, the more he felt himself bleed over into his Frame, like it wasn’t just grafted to him, but interwoven.

“Be wary against it not,” the Whisper said. “It is merely the blurring between you and your domain. In time, certain to your growing power, it will be near impossible to divine where your domains begin and you end in reality.”

“Is this why my mind isn’t suffering anymore? When I see another Heaven? A piece of a god?”

The reply his Heaven gave was indirect. “Concepts do not fear each other. Ephemerals fear concepts. Ephemerals fear the absolute and the divine. But you are learning to delude yourself no longer with the frivolities of mortality. Rejoice. Apotheosis, two, is a practice and an act.”

Whatever contemplation regarding his own burgeoning ascension was interrupted by the sight of the approach of Essus.

The doorway provided by the manifestation of the tunnel was wide. Wide enough to fit the Blockcrawler with ease. As such, the exoskeletal form of the former father did not seem to tower until he finally strode within fifteen feet of Avo.

It was odd meeting the father’s shining optics eye to eye. Even more uncanny was the presence of his former sheathe hovering over the man’s shoulder, hissing and biting at something unseen. Faintly, Avo became aware of Kae’s nervousness by her surging heartbeat and the acceleration in her veins.

For seconds that drew on, Essus just stared blankly, mind numb with conflicting emotions as Chambers disembarked from the Blockcrawler. Bits regrown, Chambers chuckled under his breath as shuffled his way out, Rantula’s coat curtaining his nakedness admirably.

“Alrighty,” Chambers said. “That was… well, kinda fucked to be honest, but hey-hey, you steered me right, consang. You–” His voice trailed off. He tilted his head as he looked up at Avo, aratnid goop drooping from his messy blonde mop of hair. Squinting, Chambers resembled evermore the weasel. “I’m mean… the hells are you anyways? You some kind of… Sang-ghoul fucking–”

Avo cast out a thought. The false memories he had running in Chambers collapsed. The former enforcer yowled and suddenly, realization burst from his thoughtstuff. Realization, and a sudden spike of anger.

“Avo! You rotlick–” Chambers swallowed the outrage back down. Again, Avo was surprised at the man’s self-control. The rage was replaced by fear and obsequiousness. “You half-strand, you! I knew you would find a way to get us out of there! Really! Masterful Necrojackin’. Beautiful work. Mirrorhead didn’t even see ya comin’. Gleam-job, consang.” Chambers added a bit more vigor to his nodding. “Gleam job.”

Regarding the man as one would a particularly strange aratnid that wouldn’t die even after being run over repeatedly, Avo instead directed his attention at Essus. The father hovered, his body shivering with tension.

Cracks were forming in his thoughtstuff. Sorrow mixed with relief spilled through.

“I… I am free… I…” Again, the former flat looked at his hands. They were still stained with blood. “Oh, Artad. What has become of me?” Skeletal fingers of blood-coated chromed closed into fists. He turned to stare at Avo again and his face wrinkled around the implants. Even his ability to show pain was chained; bereft of organic eyes, tears had no place to escape.

He took three trudging steps closer to Avo. No one spoke and no sound followed besides the screaming of glitching servos.

“I must confess…” Essus swallowed. The height between him and Avo were near negligible now. Both of them had changed in mind and sheathe, but where one was slaved and dimmed in spirit, the other was risen and hunger ascending. “When I first met, I envied you for your height. My wife. She… she often teased me about being so tall. I… wonder what she was have said about you.” His face darkened. “I’m glad she did not survive the journey. I’m… I’m glad–”

Essus choked. A sob broke from him as he collapsed, falling against Avo as he slid down to his knees with a resounding crash.

Briefly firing his Celerostylus, Avo only calmed his reflexes when he realized the father was clinging to him in the form of a hug and meant no violence by it.

Tearlessly, the father sobbed, and Avo stared, mind stunned with more than a note of philosophical horror rising in the corners of his awareness.

A flash of sonder sparked inside him as the pain of the father’s thoughtstuff overflowed. This was not how the world was supposed to be. Avo was made to eat people like the father, to serve as bandwidth and a trauma dump for a phantasmal civilization bound between realities in perpetual exile. An instrument to be used against New Vultun itself.

Yet, here he was: A monster comforting a man against the city as if he was the savior and the world around them was the horror.

Uncontrollably, Avo grunted a low and deep laugh. How did things become like this? How did Jaus’ vision of a future become this parody? What were they doing here?

He felt Kae moving then, her mind finally catching up to the scene unfolding before her. Turning, he watched as she mimed for him to hug Essus back. Rantula’s coat rustled and he found Chambers motioning to do the same thing a second later, mirroring Kae. There was also a questionable glint in the former enforcer’s eyes as he wiggled his eyebrows between Avo and Essus.

Whatever rash-courting filth the man was imagining, the less that was known about it the better.

Awkwardly, Avo patted the father with his claws. The man was clasped and coated in layers of armor by this point, but the fragility they emanated made caution seem proper.

“Can I have a hug too after him,” Chambers asked. He looked down and forced a quiver into his lip.

Avo glared. “Come close and I eat your eyes.”

“Fuck me, consang, a no would suffice.”

Standing from her seat at the table, Kae hummed. “I-I’ll be willing to…give… give a hug.”

Chambers spun and beamed. “Alright! I knew someone–”

A squeak came from Kae. “Oh–oh, Jaus! Where… where are your–your pants? And why… uh… why is there so much blood.”

The enforcer looked down and winced. “I was ambushed by a fuckin’ aratnid.” And he fixed Avo with a side-eye. “And the person who sold me back to Conflux didn’t include clothes. Let this be stated: Chambers is not a nudist. Chambers likes clothes. Chambers isn’t trying to start the rash.”

And just as he said that another voice crackled in the back of Avo’s mind.

+Avo. Open gate forty-five. Make it fast.+ Draus voice told him all he needed to know. He sent the order and the George Washington answered, redirecting the shadows to create a new tunnel as the previous doorway vanished and another appeared.

As the pathway opened, a single figure shrouded in fire and ash came marching through, a new gun shouldered leaned against her right shoulder while dragging a corpse in using her left hand.

Draus’ Incog was off and she was drenched in blood–none of it smelling like hers. Distant rattles of gunfire and the sound of a structure collapsing told Avo her little “scouting run” had not turned out quite as anticipated. As soon as she came through, she released her hold on the body and hissed: “Close it. Now.”

Avo obliged.

She opened her mouth but found herself rendered speechless first at the sight of Essus hugging and crying against Avo, then Kae covering her eyes, and then Chambers trying his best to hide his nakedness using his coat.

“The fuck’s this?” Draus asked. She looked Avo up and down. “What’re you, tryin’ to start the rash? Get ‘em off you.”

He grunted. “No risk. Not intimate for either. Just hurt for him.”

She shook her head. “Yeah, no don’t… Essus.” She trailed off as she realized who it was. “Hells. You got him back.”

“Didn’t get my cast?” Avo asked.

Draus shrugged and looked down at her kill. “Things were messy. I was gonna read your message after.”

He nodded, not sure if he liked where she was leading this conversation. “Well,” she nudged the body of a Scaarthian clasped in a cracked rig of what looked to be a skeletal warg with her foot. “Seems like Stormtree wants in on this party too.”