24-5

Battle of the Twin Flames (II)

--[White-Rab]--

The memories Kare had of her mother were coming apart at the seams. The ghosts holding them together were shattering like glass shards turned missiles, primed to seek symmetrical sequences, each fragment 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 method worked well for Kare but came 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 bull, 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 method he used to strike was still susceptible to disruption, and White-Rab knew how to fight a defense war.

Severing the sequences to his own external memories, White-Rab replaced what he lost in his own mind using the sequences storied in his myriad proxies. This, in effect, came with the cost of Nether-lag when the related memories 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 amusement. +Truly, I am not the only one who carries Defiance in me. But I hold his memories 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 testament to their follies.+

There were few things more demoralizing than your foe casually complimenting 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 me. It has been too long since I have claimed a genuine acolyte of my own, and what better defilement 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 memories–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 me. It offends me that I am not Defiance. For he was the best of us. And I always 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 can do more than merely seeth. You inspire me, Raldi. You and Avo both.+

Fuck. Shit. Which godsdamned memory 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 come 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 pierce shriek came from Kare as a line of mind-shredding explosions blossomed along her inner palace. The sanctuary that was her bedroom began to crumble and tear along its middle as glitching mem-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 memories.

He sure hoped he got those back with the next resurrection because he wasn’t even going to remember how to use a fork after this.

+Desperately 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 came from the Famine as their attaches intensified. Kare was almost unresponsive. Her Heaven was flickering–the only thing holding her together were sinews of memory. 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 time 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 something 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 memories came 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-chrome 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 moment 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 mechanical legs let out a soft meow as it tried to follow her. She turned and kept it in place. “No. Stay. You can’t come. 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 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 time. Naeko’s palm was probably going to come 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 Kare did the same.

A chimeric entity of war and runes expanded in a realm of glass and reflection. A chimera bearing a collection of weapons, rippling with inhuman muscle, and enwreathed by a shell of radiant armor, every movement Dice made sounded like clashing steel.

Draus folded into the Paracosmos  around her. From its depth emerged 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 time. “Disruptor ready. Clean charge through.”

The Regular only clanged her blade to her shield in agreement. Her Replicas did the same.

She couldn’t do anything for the cadre in the Nether. Couldn’t help Avo or White-Rab at all–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, metaphysical 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 time, as she flung a hailstorm of glass from her wings to the accompaniment of roaring ordinance.

--[Chambers]--

The Low-Fucker’s traumas and splinters slammed into Chambers constructors, but all destruction did was make them moan.

+Fucckkkkk,+  a large-breasted ghoul with a three-meter-long penis-vagina amalgam screamed in pleasure as it began to crack. +Yes, master! Hurts so good. Aghhh!+  

A deluge of extremely questionable fluids emerged 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 slipped across the sequences like a shadow.

Having 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 didn’t think this one was going away anytime 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 memory as he shouted into the nothing. +I see you are as loathsome as the memories 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 metaphorically 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 that came in 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. [If you have any fucking virtue, any decency, and any cocksucking worth of self at all, you will shatter your own mind, and 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 be for you to commit! Fucking! Suicide!]

A cool snort came from Corner. [Don’t know what the rest of you are so worked up about. This thing is clearly working.]

[Yeah, but it’s like sneaking into a megablock by crawling up the shit pipes,]  one of the new Regulars muttered. [Of course, in this metaphor, the crawler and the shit-pipes are one and the same.] The others muttered a muted chorus of agreements.

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 memories around him turned from aeros racing in a thickly packed skylane to someone diving after a descending whale in the deep. Then, the water currents peeled the world around him, and suddenly he was somewhere 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 become a Hypertube tunnel instead of a sky, and Chambers felt his head spin. How many transitions was this already? What kind of mess were the Low Masters trying to build?

+Something coherent. Traversable.+  Ignorance grunted. +Sophonts are pattern-based creatures. The world has consistencies and inconsistencies. Symmetries. Asymmetries. A good Necro might be able to navigate the chaos of a collapsing mind but won’t ever have an easy time moving through it. Not when they have to examine and sort the incoherence of the mem-data’s simulations. Personalized memories 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. +Tryinig to secure me. The Conflagration was planned in advance. Easier to transport me 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 meant 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 flame-knotted mind came alive in Chamber’s cog-feed. He found himself four hundred branches away from his final destination. Triggering attacks within random memories were 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 memories. 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 me. Using the skin of my father to provoke me. I think he would have captured me entirely if I followed him through the Auto-Seance. His countering Conflagration was like 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 memories containing the warmind of Hysteria, he found himself increasingly provoking random attacks to Ignorance’s recommendations. 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 immediately 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 mech servant, and high-end entertainment 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 hammered 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 mem-data, and as soon as he left the memetic body in which he hid, a scything wave of perception barely missed him as he merged 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 came too late.

+Chambers. Wait. Go–+

The stall came 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 apartment was closed and misted. Hovering like a droplet about to drip free of a showerhead, Chambers found himself back in his childhood home–the cleaning unit, specifically.

There, a woman sat on the toilet seat, touching the left side of her face as she stared at the grim-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 same one he tried to use to kill the man. The same 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 memories. 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 immediately. 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 times before, Chambers turned away from his memories and pretended he was fine. That he didn’t cry when he found her when he got home 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 screamed for him to stop, even as the grandparents came 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 time Chambers remembered 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 moment longer.

As he passed through the door, however, he found himself in a parallel room with the same scene unfolding.

This time, 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 time.

Aedon Chambers could take a lot from life, but life had taken a lot from Chambers, and so there came a time when he had nothing left to give, and so life decided to give him something instead.

Pain blossomed 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 .

Something inside Chambers broke. His wards shuddered from the severity of the damage. And suddenly, the surrounding memory unraveled as external traumas slammed into him from every angle.