Godclads

Chapter 3-1 Reception

The Warrens didn’t used to be a part of New Vultun. Much the same way the crust around the rim of your toilet didn’t actually start a part of your toilet.

People outside the Arks are renewable resources. Fuel, if you will. Genetic specimens to be cataloged for the breeding vats. Their minds can be mined for ghosts upon their deaths. Lesser Miracles and cheap cyber too obsolete for even the Undercroft are smuggled to the countless desperate souls in the sprawling squalor that is the Warrens.

Just an unfortunate fact of the system. The Arks were made to hold maybe 10 billion people. There are 100 billion living inside them now. Even with the inner Tier’s explosive growth, the Warrens below expand twice as fast as new refugees and immigrants flock to our sovereignties by the day.

Last estimates put them somewhere north of 300 billion. And this is with the waves of wombrash brought on by sporadic attempts at natural breeding.

The harsh fact is that not enough people died during the Godsfall.

It’s just too much weight.

-Leaked Audio Recordings of Ark Admin [Redacted]

The Sancton’s Purges Miniseries

3-1

Draus’ blood called to Avo.

Her wounds were still hot, the sweetness in her flesh taunting him with its novel flavor. He had never eaten a Regular before. The beast rattled inside his bones. Screeching, hissing at him. Begging him to indulge. Telling him that he might never get this chance again.

Avo looked at the messy soup he had made of Little Vicious after his meal. His insides felt full. He ignored the urge. The beast howled, and Avo felt satisfaction triumphing against his greedy pleasure and decided that he liked the sensation.

Three alive.

Three out of over two hundred survivors. This was three more than how most Crucibles ended.

Long abandoned, the space around him was more waste dump than living quarters. Mountains of abandoned luggage rose and fell in rolling hills. Whoever lived here fled in a hurry. Past the entrance, decayed columns stained with hap-tags stood beneath the collapsed outer shell of the building. A gouge ran through the midsection of the block, the winds and sounds of the city whistling in as if through a ravine.

Neon spilled through what naked stretch of the sky they could see. No starlight shone through the haze of light pollution brought on by an overdose of holo-ads. Cleaves of light carved along the open cracks of the block, infusing the moisture in the air with an etheric glow.

Droplets of rain slipped in from cracks and rents. They were like colored beads, each connected in the eyes of Avo as if an abacus shifting the burdens of the city’s expenses down into the Warrens.

A ripple washed out, crackling with dissolving ghosts. Avo grew aware the audience was filtering out. A few had tried to approach him, tried to come and take a closer look at the carnage. They traveled for less than a scant second before the locus they were tied to blinked out in the Nether.

The connection was cut. It was like a star going out in the dark. A silence of external thought followed. Where once he could taste a mass of minds screaming, chattering, bleeding their emotions into the Nether, now was just him, Draus, and the father.

The three unidentified approaching signatures of ward-shielded thoughtstuff notwithstanding.

Beside him, Draus was wheezing with every breath. She lacked his cellular regeneration, but whatever military-grade implants she had ensured she was a hard target to snuff. Still didn’t mean she was invincible. Far from it.

The father wept behind him, whimpering at the puddle of viscera that once was the skull of his son. Avo wanted to say something to him. No words came. The man was beyond comfort anyway. He had gone to that special place he couldn’t follow. Psychosis, Walton had explained to him. When the human mind was so inundated with trauma that something broke.

Avo wondered what it was like to suffer cruelty rather than feed from it.

They faced down a light-assault platform and survived. Barely, and not all of them. More than that, the Heaven that gave the golem its powers was now dormant inside him, its form smelted into existence by the resonance of his eldritch flame.

Among this little ragged band, only he emerged intact. Disregarding his two deaths and many prior wounds that were somehow removed after his resurrections of course. Come to think of it, when he found himself on the barge, why was he so injured? The last two times had seen him return unblemished. Not even a scratch.

Now, his Heaven wasn’t working. In the back of his mind, he could still see the flashing warning signs, the ringing klaxons telling him to “vent now.” More revelations. More questions. Walton had engrammed a message into his subconsciousness from beyond the grave, and Avo felt a headache coming on. Too much too fast.

He needed to deal with what he could first.

Draus was alive. Healing. But she was a mangled ruin compared to what she used to be. Her rasping breaths told him something was filling one of her lungs. He wasn’t sure if her nanosuites were equipped to deal with that.

In retrospect, if he hadn’t…overused his new abilities, he could have stitched her insides somehow. Maybe. Even though he had an instinctive understanding of his new domain, playing with Reg biology without the proper biotech equipment or knowledge didn’t strike him as wise. Now, one of his interfaces was screaming at him, saying that his Rend was at ninety-percent capacity and screaming at him to vent.

He wondered if there was a neuro-guide he could download regarding how thaumaturgy worked in general. Or even just the functions and features of Heavens or Hells. Sequencing ghosts was one thing, but Ontologics required a lifetime to master. If only that. Still, it wasn’t exactly something he could understand on his–

Avo froze.

He stared at Draus. She was a Regular. Regulars fought for Highflame. Highflame was almost entirely Godclad for their upper social crust. Instead of being an idiot, he could just…ask her.

Reaching down, he made to pick her up and place her in the seat of the destroyed golem’s command module. He shouldn’t have been surprised at her weight–her musculature was designed to be efficient; powerful. Being overly heavy was not among those qualities. She grunted back a gasp of pain as he lifted her but did nothing more to betray her hurt. “Got questions.”

“Yeah,” Draus said, wheezing. “Makes the both of us.”

Lifting her past the jagged teeth of metal from where he tore into the command module, he placed her in the softness of the seat. A cleft of flesh from the previous occupant clung to one of the frayed edges.

Avo sniffed.

Ah. Little Vicious. Still leaving him with snacks after she was gone. What a nice host she was. He scooped it into his mouth and savored the last piece of her. Shame she didn’t have more eyes, but her over-modified biology had kept her ripe. He clicked his teeth together. “Thanks for staying supple, Vicious.”

Draus rasped a laugh. “Still a fuckin’ ghoul.”

“Never stopped being.”

The Regular looked at him. “The frame. You don’t remember getting it?”

“No.”

A beat followed. She stared at him. “They don’t just hand those out, you know. ‘Specially not to your like.”

Avo chuckled grimly. “Hm. Made history.”

“Made a target for yourself, more like. Folks find out you got what you got and you’ll find snuffers gunning for you up and down the Tiers. Every up-jumped cultist, chrome-fiend, snuffer, and Necrojack will be gunning for you to claim your frame. Got no idea how many imps you’re worth. Or how far the Guilds’ll go to have you.”

His laughter grew into a disdainful sneer. “Let them. Undying. Will just come back.”

Draus’ remaining eye narrowed. “Shit, Avo. You don’t know anything about Liminal Frames, do you?”

He shrugged. No point in lying.

“They can kill you. Will kill you if you let them. Seen it done. Hells. I helped do it a couple of times. The Heaven you got. You snatched it from the golem; got it grafted to you right after you died, am I right?”

Avo grunted.

“How much Rend’s fillin’ your tank?”

He opened his mouth and went silent. He wanted to tell her. He was afraid to tell her. As much as they relied on each other for survival, she was still a Reg, and he, a ghoul. Seeing as she knew more of his new capabilities than he did, he wondered how much it would take for her to take it from him.

Yet, his hesitation was naked. Obvious. And it took little for her to pierce through the veil of his apprehension. Draus scoffed. “Suspicious half-strand. Gonna need an Agnos to pull that kind of graft. Usually.”

Now it was Avo’s turn to narrow his eyes at her.

“Usually?” Avo asked.

“Don’t matter,” she said. “You’re a ghoul. Your ilk don’t cotton much to sanity anyhow. ‘Sideshunger. Ain’t much I can do to your ego to loosen it in my current state. Again. Rend. How much you packin’.”

Avo weighed his options and studied the face of the Regular. She hadn’t lied to him. Hadn’t really had much of a chance to lie. She had, however, come back for him earlier. Saved him when she could have run off on her own. Part of being a good Necro was being able to deconstruct memories and understand intellect as best to build the best sequence of ghosts to be used as working phantasmic.

Draus in a sense wasn’t so different from him. There was a brutal honesty to her existence. Not that she was incapable of deception, but more that she never saw the need to channel it via her tongue. She let him know what she wanted and how she felt through actions and choices, strong enough to lay her character bare and spit in another’s face.

Even Little Vicious’ torture seemed to slide away from her, like a film of oil swept away by a roaring rapid. He didn’t know if Draus was mentally unbreakable. Still, she was Reg, and they were probably psychologically as hard as adamantine.

“Ninety,” Avo finally said. “Ninety percent.”

She let out a breath. “Shit.”

“Not good?”

She didn’t answer immediately, choosing to ask him another question instead. “Is it going down?”

He checked the Bloodforge interface. “No. Still stuck at ninety. Telling me to vent.”

“How many thaums is your Soul outputting per cycle?”

“Eigh–” he caught himself. At some point, it had become nine with his killing of Little Vicious. “Twenty-two.”

She groaned. “Fuckin’ figures. Looks like you got a new build, consang. Got it planted in you before it was even fueled proper. Twenty might be enough to manifest a minor Heaven maybe, but sure as shit not a Hell at the same time. Not even a First Circle.”

Too many technical details. He didn’t have the knowledge to parse through what she was telling him. “Explain in functionality. What are effects? What is danger?”

“Danger is that your Heaven is effectively unmanifested right now. Liminal Frame’s safeties are still in place, I’m guessing. Probably triggered Zero Burn, yeah?”

Avo nodded.

“Zero burn means your Liminal Frame is effectively burning as quietly as it can. Outputting just enough thaums to keep the cog-feed and feed the attached Metamind, but not nearly enough to maintain anything else.” She paused. “Enough to bring you back too, usually, but you’re not going to want to die right now.”

“Why not?”

Draus chuckled. “‘Cause then you’ll be stayin’ dead. A Rend is like a…a tear in the fabric of reality. You know how Fallen Heavens can make Ruptures that mess up continents and turn parts of the voids into Sunderwilds, yeah? Well, imagine pushing your ontology through a shredder of raw chaos. Ain’t much that emerges on the other side. Frame could revert you to an earlier instance, but it’ll have to push you through the same shredder to reinject you into existence. Do the math for what comes after.”

Suddenly, the cold breath of mortality hissed across the nape of Avo’s neck. Like a shot across the bow, fear licked at his mind again, taunting him as his brief bout of assumed immortality fled from him.

Draus grinned. “Funny. You look plenty human when you’re worried. Almost like half the Guilder juvs I had to babysit on their first walks into a Rupture.”

Avo was about to continue asking her more questions but the sound of rolling pieces of rubble and encroaching footsteps slashed a halt to their conversation.

“And there’s the muscle,” Draus said, leaning back into the cockpit. “Stay zero, Avo. My guess is that they want us alive. Would’ve just jocked a missile into this block if they wanted to see us dead.” She sighed, spent. “Probably to take us so that we can have a chat with our local Syndi-reps. Partake in some...diplomacy."

Servo-propelled footsteps added percussion to the overall ambiance within the lobby of the megablock. They were getting closer, their bulbous shadows pouring forth from between the columns of the entrance.

Rocks cracked. Glass shattered. Avo prepared.

He knew better than to run. That would just strike him from the sky. Use a drone. His wards would prevent a mem-lock until they finally managed to crack it, but he still had a heat signature, and unless they were running real gutter-level kit, he expected motion tracks.

He harbored no illusions about his chances out on the run and with his new Heaven offline he doubted his odds against them in a straight fight. What he did have were his phantasmics, few as those might have been.

He tethered a few more shivs of trauma to his Ghost-Link. Worse comes to worst, someone will learn to empathize with Little Vicious’ last minutes, whether they like it or not.

Partway through making his third shiv, they emerged, standing as titanium-clad shadows, marching between the enshadowed gulfs between the columns. Their bodies, thick with armor, aged and battle-scarred, the wear obvious even from a distance. Yet, that wasn’t what drew the bulk of Avo’s attention.

What pulled his focus were their faces–helmets, to be more accurate. Silvery glass caged their heads as if they were wearing wrapped mirrors, reflecting all that was around them. The ovular shape of their masks stood out from the rest of their war-touched kit. That was something new; crafted with extreme precision to fit each and every one of them.

Like a symbol. Or a motif.

Quiet harbingers of tension, the Syndicate muscle approached, their guns live and ready, a dozen or so micro-drones pushing forward of ahead to secure the room.

Avo’s Phy-Sim marked twelve lanes of fire lined directly at his head. And here he was, with only two shivs. It looked like he was going to have to get diplomatic. At least for now.

Avo hated being diplomatic.