10-10 Blood Upon Starlit Strings (Patreon)

“Tig, you… uh… You seeing this?”

“What? The Galeslither swallowing all those aeros? Yeah. Yeah, I see it. Shit. Can’t tell if it’s one of ours with the Nether all fucked.”

“Yep. Yep-yep. It’s also moving… methodically. Piloted. Last cast I got from some of our Necros said something about weird sequences in the traffic lobbies. Something was off about the mem-data sourced from junction managing loci.”

“And that Galeslither’s just plucking aeros out and flying fine.”

“Yep. Agh. Fuck it. Cut the thing out of the sky.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah. It isn’t ours. It might be Greatling’s. Might be someone else’s. But seeing as the Nether’s down and the districts are blind, who’s to say anything about who did what. Better safe than snuffed. Got your assignment, Breaker. Cut it down.”

“Synced on that, Reva. Just let me find my tune…”

-Conversation between Reva Javvers and “Tigertail,” Bloodthanes of Stormtree

10-10

Blood Upon Starlit Strings

A spear of blistering light rang loud against the thick of Avo’s blood just as he manifested his Woundshaper, and with their collision came a melodious twang.

Sound and starlight fractured out at the point of collision, each crack becoming strands of shivering bright, all tautly coiled like vast strings bound to an instrument unseen. With time lurching to a halt, Avo struck back. Constructs exploded out from him in rivers of rushing crimson. A clash followed. The metaphysics of asymmetrical domains warred, and force met force as a construct of light and sound fell against blood and matter.

LUMENLYRIST, MELODIST OF THE CLEAVING DAWN

Against the outer layer of his vessel did the world burn. The air ignited around in a blossom of flames. Yet, he found the force lacking and too limited in direction. A whip spilled free from Avo and curved up, splitting the manifestation of light through its beam-like shaft.

Pockets of sound burst from his whip’s velocity alone. The javelin that struck him stilled and shattered into a spray of fading motes, breaking before construct bearing greater force. The light and heat splashing against him faded, but the strings around him only grew.

Radiant wires spewed out like parasitic worms into the real, penetrating the tapestry of existence from every emanation of noise. Alarm spiked within Avo as the circuits of brightness formed within microfractures beneath his blood.

Each string brought the whine of a new sound made low and droning by his accelerated perception.

He was facing a Heaven. Be it connected to a golem or Godclad he couldn’t say, but the image of the strange entity vanishing over the blocks of Nu-Scarrowbur came back to him. If that was the eldritch being from where the light sang, then he saw no sign of the machinery of a golem afterward.

More importantly, the golem would have needed to remain disconnected from traffic to avoid the deleterious mem-cons plaguing the Sovereignty.

More and more, he suspected another of his like. Worse, he knew nothing of their true capabilities, and such left him in hostile waters.

He needed to break from this encounter. Re-engage on his terms, and avoid being swallowed by an ambush.

Good thing they seemed just as surprised as he was. A pause followed as no assault followed. The strings of light around, however, began to bend.

Time to leave.

Inverting the propellers on his Woundshaper, force exploded out of him as he snapped down in an uncontrolled descent. With each noise he made, each decibel generated, more luminous vines spilled over into reality, casting a trail behind him, burrowing inside him.

Snapping all the festering glints of brightness within the threshold of his own blood, he expanded his lattice and hastened his descent. Thankfully, accelerating a fall was easier than facilitating flight, and so like a missile cut from precision guidance, he plunged, gutting through the sound barrier again as brilliant seams unzipped the air behind him.

The numbers on Phys-Sim spiked. The air around him peeled, then ignited. The spire of the Woundshaper gleamed like a rod of hyper-heated tungsten veined with crystalline circuits. What few aeros impeded his path dissolved outright. Missing the hexagonal opening, he struck the edge of Layer One at a velocity that would see flesh misted and plascrete rendered dust.

His speed only continued to grow as he invoked his Canon of Haemification to liquefy all matter in his path instead smashing his way through. From a tunnel of erupting crimson, he splashed free, swimming clean from a Woundshaper-cored exit wound.

Numbers climbed in his cog-feed. His Rend rose and roared. Behind him, however, the first strum of a new melody sounded.

And the skin of existence began to tremble.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 63%

Vectoring the path of his Whisper’s perception out from his rearmost lattice, he caught full sight of the light enveloping the district behind him. Strings snapped down and the vibration flowed, each whisk of light cascading down as heat and force swelled.

Threading vibrations fused together into the shape of a blinding hammer. The air cooked. Metal melted. The excess blood Avo left behind smeared away into steam and nothingness.

And then, the world shattered in a chain of explosions.

The lip of Layer One, already compromised by Avo’s descent, cracked entirely as alloy chasmed and through the gaps spilled toppling structures dotted with screaming people. The true extent of the devastation was masked from Avo as the force of the shockwave tore him from a stable course.

Avo felt his form crack briefly as a few tons of mass broke from his control, the discarded aspects of his being reverting to mundane spills of blood and hissing away into nothing at all.

Behind him, the cascading blastwaves continued still, with each sound bleeding back into light and heat and force and sound again. The hexagonal portal of Layer One burst free into shredded whorls, the force and heat widening it to twice its original length. The shapes of a few blocks vanished outright. Explosions continued to chain behind him even as he plunged diagonally through the glass ceiling of what once stood as a museum of some manner, festooned atop the mass of a megablock.

Expanding his tendrils into reaching threads, pierced and burrowed into the matter around him as he fought to right his path. Therein came his folly. His wasn’t the Heaven of Forces, its portfolio was that of Matter, Blood, Biology, and Luminosity. The Canon of Haemokinesis allowed him to modify the ichor he wielded, but inertia continued to have its say. Instead of being able to root himself, he felt the shape of the museum come apart around him, plascrete, metal, and glass parting all the same before his tendrils.

More than that, his speed drove him downward yet, dragging through the upper floors of the block beneath as his weaving threads clean separations through all that was around him.

More than once, he tasted flesh and drank in new blood.

Someone was caught in the crossfire. Essence and ghosts spilled down into the jaws of his Soul, and his crystalline shell supped moments of confusion taken from minds before the consciousnesses fragmented.

THAUMIC OUTPUT - 982 THAUM/c

GHOSTS: [1041]

The FATELESS squatters in this build die without knowing what killed them. As he shot free from the structure, he cast his perception behind and saw the wounds he left. A network of lacerations lined the great tower-tipped gorge he left in his wake. It resembled the damage inflicted on a body by a fragmenting slug.

It was a miserable thing, but unable to halt your own death–to even see it coming. Such was what it meant to be FATELESS in New Vultun. To be anything less than a Godclad.

Avo wouldn’t go back.

He wouldn’t.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 79%

Combing his tendrils into six aero-sized Echohead constructs, he stretched them out to the wingspan of a near mile, Avo angled himself as best he could to slow himself. A vibration rattled his mind. Behind him, light shone free from the damage he inflicted on the block, though it seemed more diminished than it was.

Fire erupted out from cracks and crevices. Over half the building’s windows swelled with light and burst. Flames lanced out five paths. Plasteel warped.

But the block, though it did bend ever more inward afterward, remained standing yet.

A sign that his adversary couldn’t affect matter as he did.

His hooks shattered and affixed themselves in a burst of burrowing roots. Plascrete rose in lashing tides as he drew his constructed limbs tight. Embers flickered around from points of cacophony, and what once were block-bursting blasts simmered down into pop and bursts closer to cheap grenades.

Either his foe was running high on Rend, or he was beyond the vicinity of their influence. Either way, the immediacy of the threat was behind him. Pulling harder, he felt the alloyed spines of the structures he gripped bend as infrastructure parted before the grinding force of his hyper-accelerated ichor.

As he swung himself down and bled the final drips dry from his velocity, he invoked his Canon of Linger and dove free from the shed husk of his Woundshaper. Brushstrokes of light continued to follow the gargantuan hulk of solidified blood as he shifted into the Galeslither and submerged himself in the currents.

He flew blindly afterward, avoiding pockets of heat and flowing fast upon undulating scythes of displaced air.

When he managed to pull away far enough that he could feel the threat of heat triggering his hubris no longer, stitched himself back into existence from a swirling vortex, settling upon the eaves of above an unfinished G-Tube station.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 83%

REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 42%

There, in the distance, the portrait of his escape called out to him. Debris and ash continued to spew free from the disembowelment he inflicted, with structures built on the edge of Layer One coming free like intestinal ropes of plascrete instead of flesh. His initial penetration had left a critical weakness along the lip of the hexagonal threshold, and the light-infused detonation that followed denuded entire panes of silicon that once served as a backdrop to the simulated skies.

The buildings he impacted were still groaning, enormous rents looking as if a bladed hurricane had torn and shredded its way through the district while a supernova followed in its wake.

More pressingly, however, Avo found his attention pulled back by a vast arc of droning obsidian rumbling itself into existence, a construct of unlight sewn into being by reversing notes and transparent strands. String by string, the colorless markings inched below the flesh of existence and formed into a knot of snakes.

In the end, a vast trail of darkness licked an indelible wound upon the world as screams and the loudness of collapsing buildings suddenly went silent. A hive-like veil shivered over the arching pathway the blackness took from beyond Layer One all the way to where Avo discarded his blood husk.

Attentively, he studied the actions of his unseen foe, and considered the miracles displayed by the Heaven he faced.

If did originate with the sun-headed titan at Nu-Scarrowbur, then its reach was long. Perhaps not in the sense of Mirrorhead and his reflections, but for this Lumenlyrist to detonate manifestations of eldritch radiance from miles placed Avo at a severe ranged disadvantage.

It seemed capable of tracing his movements with sound, but more than that, it could chamber a chorus of falling explosions to strings of snapping light, which then cycled the process anew through the volume generated. What he was not certain of was if the explosions were an automatic process, or if the user on the other end was aware of his position, their Heaven operating in the fashion of his Echoheads.

Seeing this stroke of sound-swallowing darkness–the Hell to the Heaven, he assumed–reaching after the last known position of his Woundshaper, it was better to err with caution: He would assume a broadening awareness on the part of their Heaven for now.

But not that broad. He had managed to break from the engagement, after all, shifting back into his Galeslither after he found a spot cool enough. Furthermore, they didn;t know he was here, studying the effects of their powers, watching the Hell slowly return to transparency.

Comparatively, his Woundshaper imbued himself with an excess of speed–though the noise he made was like a perpetually running fuse of dynamite–even if it did fizzle out at the end. He withstood the initial block-erasing blasts well enough, though it hollowed him of some mass. Still, it would be wise of him to avoid direct confrontation. The Heaven didn’t seem to offer much endurance, but the damage was still close to that delivered by a mini-nuke.

After a few moments more of deliberation, Avo descended the station by vent Woundshaper’s Rend through it, carving a pathway in and out the interior of the stop shearing away another section to the tubes. After dissolving much of the architecture, he flicked a look at his timer and winced.

One minute and Fifty-one seconds. It would be close. He considered his excursion to be a half-success at best, but at least he had some idea of the severity of the situation. He needed to think. And potentially build Nether-redundant ghost circuits into the EGI Core. For now, he could interface with it via alchemized matter.

Exercising caution, he kept to the Galeslither and galloped hard for the gateway. Winds squealed as he gushed through the alleyways and reconstituted himself in his mortal form. Twelve seconds.

He needed to think. He needed to consider his approach. No movement was coming from Conflux, but from this recent skirmish, Conflux had a less than zero odds of surviving an engagement with the forces currently arrayed in Nu-Scarrowbur.

More and more, Mirrorhead’s death was writ in a substance deeper than fate itself; the divine hands of his adversaries conspired and worked, crafting a future in which they were the ones to use up his, and amongst these groping forces was Avo himself, bumping into foes unseen.

Before him, the shadows of the alley spiraled inward as a tunnel formed. As the doors flung open at the end, the first thing that greeted him was the flash of a chrome barrel. Draus took it offline from his person the moment she saw it was him.

“So,” Draus shouted, gesturing for him to enter quickly. “How’s the lay of the chaos lookin’.”

“Bright,” Avo grunted. He doubled his pace with help from his Echoheads. “Loud. At least one other Godclad on the scene. Stormtree mostly likely. Hit me miles away from Nu-Scarrowbur. More problems. Mem-cons in the traffic lanes–”

Draus placed a hand on his shoulder. “Before you go in–”

Zein flickered into existence between the two of them. She was barely at Draus nose and didn’t even reach Avo’s lower chest, yet she pushed them apart with contempt and ease. She strode past them looking uncharacteristically upset. “Come. We have much to discuss. Regular, bring the Agnos. Tell her it is fine is she cries, so long as she continues to be of use. Avo, I wish to stab and kill you at least three times. Vent one of your Hells if you have not already. My annoyance is great with you.”

Avo blinked. Draus did a double-take as Thousandhand shouldered past both of them. “The fuck did she come from.”

The better question was probably from when she arrived.

“Cease your gawking. Especially you, little dagger. You have no right to act the fool for your sins.”

Draus shot Avo a look. He made his Echoheads shrug on his behalf. “My sins?” Avo asked. He followed Zein into the nexus. “What sins? I was thinking this was all your fault. That this was part of your… ‘distraction.’”

She stopped. Then, she was right in front of him, index finger placed upon his chest as spoke up at him with narrowed eyes behind her transparent visor. “Perform this service of recollection for me, little dagger. Did you, perchance, possibly, tell the Hungers and the demented collection of personality flaws constituting your parental alternates that ‘Ninth Column sends their regards?’”

Oh. That.