Godclads

Chapter 2-12 Counterattack

Heavens can best be understood as metaphysical vessels for the gods. Something like a body, but also an entire plane unto itself, bridged to base-existence through Domains–forces like fire, materials like glass, or even feelings and concepts like sadness.

Something for the Heaven to emanate into reality.

Ultimately, the only true limitation is how vulgarly the Heaven bends reality, and if the Hell or Hells connected to the Heaven can drain enough Rend to ensure reality remains unruptured…

-Thaumaturgy: The Scaffolding of Reality

Ch 2. Heavens, Hells, and other Ontologics

2-12

Counterattack

It didn’t take Avo long to track Draus down via scent. The golem was still rampaging blindly, smashing through crates and crumpling stacks. Avo scoffed. A little bit of karma there. It could have tracked him via his thoughtstuff easily if it didn’t detonate the thoughtwave bomb earlier. Still, he knew the effects wouldn’t protect him for long.

Better to seize the initiative again just like they did earlier against the hunters in the silo.

Draus was scouting from the inside of a high-stacked storage unit. Clambering up from the two other units beneath it, he moved with quiet and caution, listening for the drones as they did another sweep. As he made it past the lip into the stack proper, open jaws greeted him, snapping out to claim his head.

Avo flinched back. Unnaturally pearlescent teeth froze an inch away from his face.

“No,” Draus hissed. Her woundhound whimpered and shuffled back into the darkness of the unit, letting him up. It was smaller than the one Avo had produced earlier. The wounds Draus had suffered were less severe. A floating arm, a punctured lung, and a good amount of blood swirled across its fur. It growled silently at him as if daring him to approach Draus.

Looking at the Regular, he noticed her dismembered limb had been returned to her. It was still wreathed in enhanced muscle, but he smelled the carbon fibers no longer.

“Woundhounds replace wounds,” Draus said. “Their myth don’t say nothing about metal.” She spat, as if annoyed. He would be too if one his arms was suddenly much weaker.

The thing about thaumaturgy is that it rooted itself in its own laws. Despite usurping reality, Avo knew that all gods needed some element or channel within reality to take shape; mythology to give itself a proper vessel. That’s why the Guilds imposed thought-bans on knowing the names and scriptures of gods for unlicensed personnel.

Through the other side of the storage unit, Avo realized she cut out a small vertical embrasure for her to peek out. It wasn’t particularly wide, but he guessed that was the point. She needed as small a window to functionally shoot from as she could while avoiding detection.

Out in the distance, Avo watched as the ichor-fueled golem stomped down on another container in a fit of rage. The container folded. Little Vicious roared something about cowards and her show being ruined. Nothing new there. She lashed at the mangled container beneath her with scything limbs of blood. Unactivated Wights spilled out in pulped pieces. Avo guessed those were undelivered units from the factory far below, meant to be taken up and distributed across the Warrens.

Back before this entire part of the city went under, anyway.

Shifting next to her, he spotted the drones as well. Four remaining as he had thought. Light drones that they were, they still had more than enough firepower to kill him should they sweep his head with one of their beams. Ghouls and concentrated light or fire didn’t do well. Hells, the suns could cook him if he stood out beneath the naked rays long enough.

They were circling the sky over the golem, casting their scans out across different containers in scrying sweeps. Problem was they were scanning the same area. As a group. He was lucky their pilots were idiots. They could have covered so much ground if only they scattered to different corners of the room.

“Thought you had a life to get back to?” Draus said.

“Better odds with you,” Avo said.

She fixed him with a brief glance. A quiet laugh escaped from her chest. “The Low Masters make you with a conscience or does this here merit belong to that father of yours?”

“Father,” Avo said. “Morality was hard. Didn’t work the same without phantasmic. Emotional simulator. Gave me ethics instead.” A bitterness burned inside him after saying that. “Haven’t been doing well there.”

“The ethics?” Draus asked

Avo grunted.

“Yeah. That don’t make you special.” Draus spat. “Just makes you a New Vultunite.”

A jingling sound drew his attention. Avo noticed Draus clenching her holotags in her fist, a mantra of silent names slipping from her lips. Outside, Little Vicious' outbursts grew more and more severe. Yet, with each savage exertion, the golem seemed to shrink. Avo blinked.

Was its eldritch brightness losing its luster? Seemed like it was getting smaller, its tower-like shape shrinking.

With a final mutter that ended halfway, Draus sighed and let the tag go. She had more to say. She just didn’t sound like she had the strength to say it.

“Prayer?” Avo asked. The Guilds banned worship, but how people viewed what was worship could be very interpretive. Hard to punish someone when they just claimed the act was psychological or pure traditional. It's one of the few bans that the Guilds unofficially gave up on enforcing. Too much bureaucratic capacity was required to achieve it manually and too hard to sequence if they wanted ghosts to do it auto.

Draus smiled then, and it struck him how the age in her eyes clashed with the youth of her features. Age had been blunted by those with the merit or imps to afford the treatments. Avo had little doubt that Draus had a few of these rejuvenating measures overriding her natural biology. Still, the mind filled. Memories grew. Psychological scars could not hide. They just got thicker.

“Names of dead friends,” Draus said, “Less holy. More meaningful. You got shit to get off your chest, now’s the time. Got less than five before the fight’s back on. Good odds that one or both of us greet the Big Nothing. Can’t piss you a gold thread to hide that.”

Avo tried to think of something. Something poignant. Walton would know what to say. Unfortunately, Walton was as dead as her friends, and sentimental wasn’t how Avo would describe himself.

He stuck to dry honesty. “If you die, going to eat your eyes. Never had Reg-meat.”

Draus’ smile broke into an incredulous guffaw. Her voice sounded battle-worn, but her laugh was true. Genuine. Humor was so very hard to achieve. Walton would have been proud. Avo kept going.

“Regs swear to serve citizens,” Avo said, breaking the tension before whatever came. “Technically, am owned by Walton’s Wardcrafting LLC. I’m citizen-adjacent. Demand service.”

“You’re a weird godsdamned ghoulie, Avo, you know that?” Draus said, wiping tears of mirth from her cheeks.

Avo didn’t laugh. The snort didn’t count. “Heard a few times.” For a moment, Avo forgot to remind himself to hate her. “Got a plan?”

“Got a vague notion of one, yeah,” Draus said. She pointed to the golem. “Golem’s a hard target. Tried punching through it with the railgun. Shot bounced right off. Didn’t even make penetration. It’s got at least seventy-five tons of blood alchemized around the command module. Started with ninety.”

“Losing mass?” Avo asked.

“Yep,” Draus drawled. “Stormtree never built a Soul into these here golems. Not worth it when they could just replicate the same Messenger-grade Heaven over and over. They’re built to be cheap. Expendable. Hells, I’m figurin’ some locals must’ve pulled it out from a gutter somewhere after it got abandoned. Surprised they managed to get it working. Probably siphoned some thaums off from techno-thaumic fusion reactor that’s still working somewhere. Keepin’ it charged between fights.”

Good to know. “How long tills its dry?”

“Couple more hours is my reckoning. From my reckoning, this thing ain’t nearly vulgar enough against the real to be a power-hogger.”

So died Avo’s dreams of outlasting the thing.

“Right now,” Draus continued, “battlefield is shaped to their advantage. They got eyes in the air with those drones. Couple of them tagged me. Minimal penetration, but still opened up my skin something bad. Means they’ll rip you right up, and we don’t want that.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t.”

“Touched.”

“You don’t even know how ‘touched’ feels, ghoulie.”

“Will if I get a Morality Injector engrammed.”

She rolled her eyes. “Point is, we stick our head out, we don’t keep our heads much longer. Big Nothing’s waitin’ out there in the open. Make matters more interestin’, there are still at least two half-strands left to kill. Snuffed one on the crane. Got another after the half-strand took my arm. More precision fire came. Ended up breaking contact by stealing your trick. Punched through a few of the containers. Broke visual. Found you.”

That wasn’t good. Dealing with the drones and dealing with the golem after was one thing, but dealing with two more snipers, the drones feeding them overwatch, and an assault golem was something that required a full team to handle, not some underequipped Regular and a ghoul that couldn’t seem to die.

“Right now, here’s what I’m thinking: I drop the drones. No drones means no overwatch; makes it harder for them to track us through this maze. Turn the terrain on them. Got four flechettes left. Lost the micro-launcher with the arm. No more woundhound shots either.”

A small interface was pulsing over Draus’ railgun, its systems recommending that she replace both barrels, the battery, the locus, the trigger, and the stock. Way the gun’s integrity was lightning up, she would be lucky if it managed to even fire the four shots it had left.

“Four shots. Only good for drones. You do the 'counter-sniping.' And the golem.” But maybe that was what she wanted. She was faster between the two of them; more survivable.

A savage grin spread across Draus’ face. “Countin’ on it. That’s where you come in. You’re gonna flank ‘em. Take my woundhound with you a few stacks over and see where the shots are coming from. Snuff ‘em. Then, we regroup under that there crane if we’re both still alive.” She was motioning at a dangling mag-clamp. The one that he saw swaying earlier. “Got an idea ‘bout the golem.”

Avo didn’t know much about military tactics or strategies. It wasn’t his field of study; the closest he got was playing Stormjumper: Fallen Valor, and even then, he was jacking into the system to steal mem-data from other players or planting crawlers in the servers. There was wisdom in following Draus’ overall plan. She was undoubtedly his senior when it came to direct engagements.

However, he did need to recommend one specific change. “Drones,” he said. “Leave one flying for a second.”

She turned to study him, curious. “Why?”

“Force both snipers to link to it in the Nether. Make them easier to track. Or force them out if Vicious uses thoughtwave bomb again.” The public lobby was still empty. It had been a while since Little Vicious’ last detonation but no one wanted their minds to get caught in a tidal wave.

The hunters, though, might not have a choice: bad options for them either way.

A beat of silence followed. Draus stared. “Avo. Your brothers…they capable of this?”

Avo fought the urge to sigh. It was easier to wrestle down than the beast. Part of him still wanted to attack her, kill her even now. That part of him never went away. “This?”

“The thinkin’. Plannin’. Intelligence.”

It didn’t sound like she was mocking him this time. “No. No impulse control with them. All want. All desire. No long-term planning. Food above all. Pain above all. Good soldiers.”

“Good slaves,” Draus corrected with naked scorn. Whether that was for his kind or the Low Masters, he couldn’t tell. “Why’re you different?”

Avo had considered that before. Struggled with the question. Assumed one answer and left it aside for another. Some, he offered to Walton. Without the man, he would’ve been dead by now. Or a little more than a feral beast roaming the depths of these Warrens. Yet, even before, he survived when his brothers didn’t because his cowardice was greater than his desire to feed. Fear provoked a deviant choice. Or maybe it was the choice to live that fed the fear.

Ultimately, the answer, at its basest was a simple one. “Chose to be.”

“Chose to be,” Draus repeated, looking him up and down. She shook her head. “Well. For whatever it’s worth, I’m real glad you chose not to eat the boy or his pa. Real glad I didn’t kill you.”

“Also glad you didn’t kill me. Like living.” A faint twitch pulled at the edge of Avo’s lip. What was that she said to him earlier? “Hey, Draus?”

“Yeah.”

“Does this make us consangs? Can I have wards now?”

Draus sniggered. “Fuck you, rotlick.”

He had to do it.

The woundhound barked a low warning. The golem’s tantrum had reached a new pitch in intensity. In the distance, the golem drew out his sanguine mass into twin building-sized hands and smashed through another stack of five containers. +FUCKING COWARDS!+ Little Vicious screamed into the Nether. She was going mad with fury. Her tantrum was like a hurricane, lashing over every inch of the room.

With a wild swing, she cast one of the containers against the far side of the room. The plascrete wall burst apart in a shower of dust. The length of the container found itself embedded deep. The vibrations ran through the entire room.

Avo wondered if there would be anything left of him if the golem struck him. “Draus. Woundhound injector–”

“Told you: used up the last one,” Draus said. “Ain’t cheap.”

“Yeah,” Avo said. The container groaned, and slide out from the exit wound. The impact zone was larger than the area of his hab-cell in the Undercroft. His Phys-Sim clocked the toss at a hundred kilometers per hour. “Yeah.”

Draus cracked her neck. “You ready?”

Instinctively, Avo flicked a tongue over his fangs. “Ghoul. Always ready for violence.”

“Shit. Us Regs ain’t so different,” Draus said. “Happy huntin’, Avo.”

Avo shot Draus a final look before he made to leave. “Happy hunting. Draus.”

He felt her flick ownership of the woundhound over to him, the leash of her wounds inherited unto him now. Avo frowned. The dog panted at him. He didn’t even know woundhounds worked like that.

Descending down in a slow climb, Avo listened as the woundhound trailed after him. The metaphysical dog chuffed lightly when he turned to stare. They were dog-like enough–just the spiraling injuries that made up their bodies that were weird. That, and the ability to dive and move injuries across organic matter.

Carefully, he made it past a narrow gap between two stacks and found himself crouched next to an open storage unit door. Inside, ten unactivated Wights lay in two rows, five by five. They were dressed in maid outfits, though their makeup was long faded, and faces long rotten. Along the crown of their heads, Avo saw the holoprint of Necrodyne Dynamics still flickering.

A subsidiary of Ori-Thaum, he remembered them being. The Low Masters hated them.

Three shots rang out in quick succession, followed almost instantly by three impacts. Poking his head out, Avo lined the paths with his Phys-Sim. Three red lanes greeted him. He wondered if all the Regs were as good a shot as Draus–little wonder his brothers got massacred.

The last drone accelerated toward Draus’ position, diving low as it lanced its beam, slicing into her storage unit. He waited for the thoughtwave bomb to go off. Silence. The Nether remained unharmed. Three new Ghost-Links shot out across the room. The golem reached out first–it probably relied heavily on those drones for overwatch. The links from the snipers slipped out soon after, joining Little Vicious’ phantasmal chains like two rivers flowing into a delta.

The thoughtstuff of the snipers spilled out from five stacks over, their cog-caps running their cheap Metas hot. They were positioned inside one of the containers like Draus was. Right. He remembered a shot coming at him from that direction earlier while he was fleeing atop the stacks. Surprised they hadn’t changed positions yet.

A final shot rang out from Draus. The shot struck true, shredding drone, locus, and all. The connection broke apart. A primal howl filled the room. Little Vicious raged even harder, a billowing heat washing over his mind. Avo found it delightful.

Dashing around the side of the stacks, he made to flank the snipers, doing his best to avoid visual contact. A cacophonous impact thundered through his eardrums, popping the external layer from sheer volume. He still had a few layers of hearing left, though. The Low Masters were kind enough to take protective measures to ensure his hearing.

Rounding past the path with the forklift, Avo found himself clambering up several stacks toward the snipers’ nest. A flash of pulsing gauss fire flashed out from within a hollowed container.

+Where are you? Fucking Reg! Come out! Come out and fight you sow! You fucking sow-coward-fuck!+

Little Vicious sounded a far cry now from the sweet and coquettish host of the show that she started the night as. Good. The Crucible she was hosting had already killed him once and slaughtered two hundred more already. If he got the chance, he was eating her. She made a choice. She was fair prey.

The golem she was piloting tore into the stacks that were Draus’ last known location. The Regular was probably long gone and making for the crane at full surge. Meant he needed to work faster. Get his part done.

Peeking up quietly, Avo studied the position of the snipers again. Both their guns appeared to be pointing out from the same point. No spotter between them. Two gunners. Uncommon, but these weren’t soldiers, just over-chromed muscle. The woundhound growled, hungry to leave existence and see its duty done. It had its eye on the prey as well.

“Get the bigger one,” Avo told the hound, his mind already telling it what to do. It clambered up a stack and he followed. Together, they climbed, the two snipers still firing blindly, their shots threading through countless other storage units in rhythmic crackles, unaware of the encroaching threat.

The hound got atop the snipers’ container first. Avo was just a second behind. Their combined mass made the entire stack wobble. Below, he noticed the thoughtstuff of the hunter suddenly spike in fright.

“You feel that?” One of them asked the other out loud. Even muted somewhat by the metal, Avo could hear their heartbeats, and smell their sweat. He placed his shotgun right against the top of the container. He aimed, treating the yolk-like accretion of their thoughtstuff as targets, picking the one on the right for his first kill.

His gun roared. The thin sheet of metal between him and his prey burst apart beneath a wave of hyper-accelerated alloys. His arm snapped back along with the gun. Through the gap, the woundhound squeezed in, its mass funneling into the open rent as if it was a liquid.

Again, he blinked. Draus said these dogs were standard? Never knew they could do that.

A moment after, he felt himself draw in his new harvest, sown with a spray of his gun.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 19 thaum/c

GHOSTS - [33]

Plunging a claw into the rent, Avo peeled the metal back with all his might and entered. The sniper he shot had been bifurcated down the metal, their metallic spine cord the only thing distinguishable from the mush of their remains. The other sniper–sans an arm and coughing up blood–greeted Avo before he could even land.

He made a miscalculation. He should have stayed on top and fired again.

She slammed into him like a flashing blur, pinning him against the wall. The storage unit shifted. Avo felt gravity lurch as they tilted at an angle.

Half her face was denuded; caused by the spread of his shotgun. Her missing arm told him that the woundhound had got to her. The fact that her exposed skull was layered in a full inch of plasteel told Avo that her chrome must’ve cost her a fortune. Before he could react, something expanded beneath his chest, punching clean through his right pec. Avo screamed. She twisted and dragged her arm up. An implanted arm-spur had sliced him open, peeling his flesh like it was hot butter. Seizing her bouncing face-flap, he pulled. The butchered remains of her cheek snapped free between his claws. She screamed and pulled back, her spur coming free of his tissue.

He seized the momentum, unwilling to waste any more time. He rammed his shotgun into her neck, rooting her against the wall. Her eyes widened. He pulled the trigger. The roar of the gunshot within the confines of the container blew out three more layers of his eardrums. One layer left.

If he lost that one, he was going to need to wait a while before he could hear anything.

The sniper, meanwhile, looked less like a person and more like loose threads of sinew smeared along crenulated notches of metal. With a gasp of pain, he examined his wounds. She had opened him pretty badly. He could see part of his pec cut loose and lodged in the pale bone of his exposed sternum. He winced.

THAUMIC CYCLER: 20 thaum/c

GHOSTS - [34]

Suddenly, a sudden burst of force tore out of him. The bodies around him turned to motes of nothingness, while the metal of the container scattered into kaleidoscopic patterns. The weight in him had grown immense. Wide. Whispers snaked and chanted ineffable mantras from a place deeper than his bones. A flame spread out around him, sundering existence from matter, force, and space into naught but malleable concepts.

THAUMIC THRESHOLD REACHED

LIMINAL FRAME ONLINE

AVAILABLE ONTOLOGIC SLOTS - [1/2]

  HEAVENS - [0]

    HELLS - [1] - FIRST CIRCLE - DOMAIN (MATTER/ENTROPY)

      SOVEREIGNTIES - [0]

NO GRAFTS DETECTED - DEFAULTING TO ZERO-BURN

The flames around him suddenly flashed out of existence. Gravity took hold of him as he tumbled down, landing in a deep depression. He found himself face-down in a smooth crater eight feet deep into the plastcrete floor. It was as if the space around him had been shorn from existence altogether.

A loud weight pounded against the ground, tearing him from his thoughts. Another. How long was he in that crater? Golem. The golem must’ve seen the fire spilling out from him. If it had been chasing Draus, it was now after him.

Crawling out from the rent, Avo winced as the hyper-sharpened ledge he reached for cut deep into his hand. Mantling over and stumbling into a wincing run, Avo looked up and made for the crane. From the corner of his eye, he saw a looming tide of red spearing its way through the stacks. It looked smaller, why did it–

Avo felt his foot splash into something sticky, the smell coppery. Like blood. He looked down, a pool of blood extending like a crimson carpet beneath his feet, spilling out from around the corner.

Twisting, he leaped for a stack, jumping to get off the ground. A sting weight punched clean through his calf and dragged him back down. In his periphery, he could see more blood flowing in from the intersection paths ahead and behind him.

The shadow of the golem rose over him, its reflection looming like a sword head high.

+Yeah,+ Little Vicious laughed. +I learn too. Fancy that. I think your Reg friend might call this an encirclement. Told you I’d get you, ghoulie.+

From the spread of blood around him, two more tendrils shot through him, pulling him down. Avo activated his Specter and cut every phantasmic aside from it and his wards. Using all his newly obtained phantasmal mass, he cracked his armored consciousness like a lashing whip into Little Vicious’ surface thoughts.

Spots exploded through his vision. His mind screamed as exploding spikes of pain were plunged deeper into his skull. Through ringing ears, he heard Little Vicious scream, her voice hoarse as some of her thoughtstuff spewed out an already mending crack in her wards.

+FUCKING GHOUL!+ She howled, her madness amplified by the sheer trauma he struck her with.

The blood across her golem quivered, the focus of its pilot scattered.

Avo’s cog-feed drifted in broken splashes of data and screaming ghosts, blinding and deafening him as he found himself splashing down into the blood. With a whimpering groan, he pulled himself to his feet, blind instinct guiding him while his fractured mind was slowly being fused back by his Metamind.

It was deleting pieces of damaged cognition and cloning backups in their place. It will work. Mend him soon.

He just remembered that he needed to get to the crane. Crane. Draus is at crane.

Behind, Little Vicious wailed, her broken voice sobbing with laughter. +R-run, ghoulie! Run!+

Avo did as she demanded. She didn't need to tell him twice.

Whatever plan Draus had for the golem, he hoped it was a good one.